Poetry across platforms: Tim Kahl on audio poems

Recently I picked up and read Jay-Z’s Decoded with the hope that all would be revealed to me about hip-hop as an aesthetic, as a way of life, etc. I hoped it would help explain the obsession it breeds in some. I was disappointed by the book. The uneven scrawl of his lyrics were too similar to my City College students who struggle to sort out their ideas. Certainly it hadn’t dampened my suspicion that currently there is a veneration of what I like to call American Thugism.

Then I heard him on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and I realized that Jay-Z’s genius isn’t in his lyrics (nor anything else that he says for that matter, as he moves in and out of his disingenuous statements), but it lies in his genius for marketing. He understands like so many who have emerged in the broader public eye that one’s marketing and distribution plan is what matters. He excels in moving across marketing platforms. Having fully won the hearts and minds of those on the streets, he was aiming at a different public radio-listening audience, and for all I could make out, he was winning them over (except for a curmudgeon like me). He was moving into the realm of “the book” because he realized that there was a possible market which might be interested in what he has to say about Generation Hip-Hop. He understood the potential for overlap and ambitiously sought to move in on that literary turf. He has sold a lot of books. Currently it’s in the top 50 in sales at Amazon. May he be remembered as one of the great marketers of our age.

However, it beguiles me why poets have ceded this cross-platform approach to musicians. Musicians have understood the power of video as it corresponds to music. Some have even branched out to feature-length films. But poets generally reside in their domain of words and rarely venture out to incorporate other forms of media into their work. Sure there have been a handful who have created trailers for their books. A smattering of magazines are even starting to follow the lead of Fishouse and “publish” poems as .mp3s. The vast majority of these are the poets reading their poems in rather somber expressionless voices. As someone who has hosted a reading series at The Sacramento Poetry Center for the last four years, I can attest firsthand to how such voices encourage their audiences to seek a state of polite indifference.

It is surprising to me how few poets seek to make an audio recording of their poems with nothing more than white noise in the background. Surely, poets could be more imaginative than that. Surely, they could come up with more cross-platform savvy. This is especially confounding when so many poets are inspired by music, even use it as the launching point for their poems as I did with Cello Suite [7:21] that was published in Los Angeles Review 9. I worked backwards to the text from the music. I felt I had been writing too many happy and funny poems about my kids growing up and their misadventures, so I thought about the piece of music that automatically brings me to a more somber and contemplative space. I listened to Lynn Harrell’s 1985 recording of the Bach Cello Suites, which I bought when it first came out and have periodically listened to for 25 years. It’s not the most famous recording of the Cello Suites, but for me it is one of the most haunting. I lived with that music for several days in order to evoke a mood of angst and disappointment with the world and myself.

Of course, there are copyright issues to be concerned about when loading things up on the web. I put together the sound file so that I could read the poem live at readings with my iPod hooked into a Fender practice amp and have the Lynn Harrell recording work its magic on an audience. However, there is nothing preventing poets from creating soundtracks for their poems using live or digital instruments. Forrest Gander has created mini-scores for his “Ligature” poems. In one case it is a simple and artful rearrangement of a few guitar loops in Garage Band and some clarinet voicings over the top. However, it is very effective. It is not all that difficult to become a composer in the digital age.

But if creating music out of thin air is not for you, then there are other possibilities. One of the great misgivings I have about hip-hop is that it seems to sample mostly from old R&B recordings, primarily to usurp the beat in those recordings. However, there is a vast array of materials that could be usurped and sampled, some of it in the public domain. I like to visit thrift stores and find old instrumental albums from the 50’s and 60’s (especially folk and big band), digitize the recordings, apply filters to them and then work out accompaniment on top of them. Many of these serve as great backgrounds for poems. Going further than that, one can find the sheet music for obscure popular songs from the 1920’s or folk songs that can be gently reworked via recording software and made more contemporary. On an iPod these kinds of .mp3s travel well to all kinds of reading venues.

Coming Distractions: is a reworking of a brief folk song that appears on “Mein Berchtesgadener Land” by Alfons Bauer (the famed Bavarian zither player), a record from, I’m guessing, the early 60s. The name of the song is called “Tanz auf der Alm” (Dance at the Mountain Cabin). I have placed some filters on the original music to make it sound more like circus music and provided some fat synth bass lines and other voicings on top.
Schlummerlied: “Schlummerlied” by Friedrich Kücken (1810-1882) is a song I found in a song book at the thrift store entitled The Abridged Academy Songbook [copyright 1898] (which was apparently a textbook at Oswego State Normal and Training School). It translates from German as “Slumber Song,” a lullaby. My wife, Kristina, plays the piano part, and I have filled in with various voicings like upright bass and jazz kit.
Untitled Orchestral score: a short orchestral score with strings, clarinet and horns.

Then again, there are many poets who come to poetry and love poetry mainly because it resists the temptations of media empire. For these people, poetry is meant to be embedded in the local life and world of the place where the poet lives. This is a powerful argument. It is the main reason I have resisted using a cell phone all these years. Many poets seem to be thoroughly content to know their contemporaries in their immediate region and let it go at that. Occasionally they wander into their cohorts from other regions at a national conference or two every now and then. Their poems evoke the minutiae of lived life in a way that resists commodification. Poems are not always doctored like film scripts to garner the greatest response. They are rawer, truer, and this is the kind of power they aspire to, not any kind of power that can be attained by triangulating the public square.

However, for those who wish to venture out into the brave new air waves that populate the fiber optic lines, the call to cross platforms should be taken seriously. I’m tired of ceding ground to musicians, many of whom consistently pen cryptic passages that can only be referred to charitably as addled. A lot of poets understand music a lot better than musicians understand writing, and I have yet to hear a human voice that isn’t compatible with some kind of musical instrument. They seem to be made for each other. However, the greatest selling point I can offer for trying out your new in-home recording studio is a practical one: a music library takes up a lot less space.

Tim Kahl is the author of Possessing Yourself (Word Tech, 2009). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup and the poetry video blog Linebreak Studios. He is also editor of Bald Trickster Press and is the vice president of The Sacramento Poetry Center, where he hosts and coordinates a reading series. He currently teaches at The University of the Pacific.