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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

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