Skip to main content

Six Silk Purses

Fortner Anderson (pictured here in the throes of performance in Montreal) has long been one of my favourite performance poets - or as we in Quebec, Canada like to say - spoken word artists.

To my mind, Anderson gets everything right about spoken word, and discards all the pitfalls and pranks that are the practice's tempting ills - that is, his voice is subtle, melodious and full-registered, here threatening, now soft, then smoothly unctuous (then anxious), again enraged, giving voice to the gamut of emotional possibilities of human uttered expression; and, his writing, that is, the words he gives vented voice to, are daring, informed by a canny sense of the history of 20th century performative work (from Dada on down), and thoughtfully engaged with the political and social issues of our age - all this, without, as I said, dwelling in cheap camp, crass humour, or shock for its own sake. In short, Fortner Anderson is one of the most mature, impressive, and alarming of North America's poets who perform their words, and his long serious career has now exposed his craft and art over many decades. For this reason, I have several times anthologized his writing and work, and hope to again.

So: all this to say, it was good to finally get my hands on a copy of his latest CD, from Wired On Words, Montreal's indispensable poetry label, run by the hard-working poet Ian Ferrier, himself no spoken word slouch. This one's called Six Silk Purses (link below) and it is a good idea: Anderson has given six composers of soundscapes / music to do what they will with pre-recorded versions of his poems - the result - a thrilling investigation of how words and musics / noise / sound can be taped, mixed, looped, produced and finally meshed together to create a greater masterwork, a soundartpiece.

This avant-garde practice is one I myself explored with composer Tom Walsh, something of a pioneer in this field, and it is very heartening to see Montreal continuing to further deepen this worthwhile way of making poetry a part of media, and vice versa. I'll wrote more when I have listened to the CD a few more times. I'll also feature Anderson some coming Friday. In the meantime, anyone interested in innovative spoken word / poetry recording must own this.

http://www.fortneranderson.com/html/recordings/ssp.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?
3 comments
Read more

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".
1 comment
Read more

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise
1 comment
Read more