Poetry and Performance: Listening to a Multi-Vocal Canada
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0Poetry and Performance: Listening to a Multi-Vocal Canada by Katherine Marikaan McLeod A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto © Copyright by Katherine Marikaan McLeod (2010) ii Poetry and Performance: Listening to a Multi-Vocal Canada Doctor of Philosophy (2010) Katherine Marikaan McLeod Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto 1Abstract Performances of poetry constitute significant cultural and literary events that challenge the representational limits and possibilities of transposing written words into live and recorded media. However, there has not been a comprehensive study of Canadian poetry that focuses specifically on performance. This dissertation undertakes a theorizing of performance that foregrounds mediation, audience, and presence (both readerly and writerly). The complex methodology combines theoretical approaches to reading (Linda Hutcheon on adaptation, Wolfgang Iser on the reader, and Roland Barthes on the materiality of writing) with poetics as theorized by Canadian poets (namely bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Jan Zwicky, Robert Bringhurst) in order to argue that performances of poetry are responsive exchanges between performers and audiences. Importantly, the dissertation argues that performances of poetry call for a re-evaluation of reading as listening, thereby altering the interaction between audience and performance from passive to participatory. Arranged in four chapters, the dissertation examines a range of Canadian poets and performances: The Four Horsemen (Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, and bpNichol), dance adaptations of Michael Ondaatje’s poems, George Elliott Clarke’s poetic libretti, and Robert Bringhurst’s polyphonic poetry. Following the Introduction’s iii outlining of the term performance, Chapter One examines processes of recording and adapting avant-garde sound poetry, specifically in the sound and written poetry of Nichol and McCaffery. Chapter Two theorizes adaptation as a responsive reading practice in the context of dance adaptations of Ondaatje’s writing (Bruce McDonald’s Elimination Dance and Veronica Tennant’s Shadow Pleasures). In Chapter Three, Clarke’s jazz opera Québécité, with libretto by Clarke and music composed by D.D. Jackson, foregrounds a central argument of this dissertation: that multi-vocal poetics can, in fact, reconfigure multicultural politics. Chapter Four turns to polyphony as a textual representation of multi-vocality in the poetry of Robert Bringhurst. Through a close-listening to a musical poem by Jan Zwicky, the Conclusion points towards new critical directions in listening to Canadian poetry. Only in understanding how cultural and political performances are recorded, enacted and received both on and off the page can we listen, critically and actively, to our multi-voiced Canadian soundscapes. iv Acknowledgements For my family. Ron, Heather and Zack, I thank you for everything. This is for you, and for all of my dear friends in the east and west. Our conversations, in person and across distances, have surrounded and supported the written words. Always there has been a desire to write of music, dance, and literature that began to cohere one morning in Remi Vicente’s I.B. Theory of Knowledge class. More concrete ideas for this project were generated through readings and discussions in Kevin McNeilly’s 2004 graduate seminars at the University of British Columbia, which directly inspired my MA thesis that then became the foundation of this dissertation. From those formative years at UBC, I also thank Paul Yachnin, Pamela Dalziel and Sherrill Grace for their encouragement and mentorship. Heading east, I sincerely thank the professors of The English Department at The University of Toronto who have guided these ideas toward their present forms. Sam Solecki, thank you again and again for the perfect balance of an intellectual challenge and a creative space for me to forge my own path and for your careful editorial eye in the writing of the dance. George Elliott Clarke, thank you for the music in the words since, in many ways, “lushly, a dewed light falls” began it all. Linda Hutcheon, Rosemary Sullivan, Timothy Yu, Colin Hill and Nicholas Bradley, thank you for your thoughtful suggestions, conversations, and collaborations over these past five years. This dissertation has been generously funded by The University of Toronto Fellowship, The Department of English, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program. An excerpt from Chapter Three has been published in Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 42.1 (Spring 2009): 133-150. v Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter One Dance the Poem Out Loud: Re-Reading The Four Horsemen 56 Chapter Two A Poem and its Echo: Michael Ondaatje and Dance Adaptations 101 Chapter Three “Oui, let’s scat”: Singing the Poetic Libretti of George Elliott Clarke 160 Chapter Four “This water is music”: Polyphony in the Poetry of Robert Bringhurst 203 Conclusion 248 Appendix 262 Works Consulted 267 vi List of Appendices 1. “Frame 4” (Love: a Book of Remembrances) by bpNichol. 2. Final pages from Evoba: The Investigations Meditations 1976-78 by Steve McCaffery. 3. Image of Murakoshi dancing “Cycle #22” (“The Four Horsemen Project”). 4. Opening scene of Trudeau’s Act II. 5. Discography for Clarke’s Lush Dreams, Blue Exile. 6. Images from the performance of Québécité by Magda Wojtyra. 7. Image from the New Dance Horizon’s performance of Ursa Major. vii Listen: this music is all about water — Robert Bringhurst “The Blue Roofs of Japan” (Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music) Introduction This dissertation begins not here on this page, but during a reading at the Vancouver International Writers Festival (2001) when Michael Ondaatje closed The Cinnamon Peeler, looked out into the audience, and said that he would respond to questions. Although Q&A sessions are common postludes to performances, there was one question that made this exchange particularly memorable: what career would you have chosen if you were not a writer? Ondaatje replied that he would have been a jazz musician. It was, in this moment, that another audience member, myself, heard an elaborate map of intersections that would lead to the argument of this dissertation: that performances of poetry require a critical approach that takes into account their multiple layers of performance and the ways in which these layers challenge our conceptions of the writing/listening/performing body as live or recorded. A reader reading a poem aloud exemplifies the extent to which multiple layers of performance co-exist because there is performance in both the textual rendering of the poem and in the reader’s utterance of it. The act of reading has engaged many critics across disciplines, but this dissertation takes on a new approach to reading by framing it within a postmodern soundscape of Canadian poetry and performance. Within this context, the dissertation asks how we are to critically understand the reading out loud of a poem when it is read by a spoken-word artist, a dancer, a musician, or a singer — a crucial problematizing of adaptation that has not yet been addressed in Canadian poetry. The wider implications of re-evaluating poetry in performance concern how we read poetry and how we engage with interdisciplinary works. In the case of Canadian poetry, this leads to the question of how we hear poetic voices as 2 performing textual or embodied identifications as Canadian. By investigating these issues in relation to specific Canadian poets (The Four Horsemen, Michael Ondaatje, George Elliott Clarke and Robert Bringhurst) and performances of their poems in a range of media (spoken-word, film, dance, and music), I argue for a re-conceptualizing of the interaction between and among reader/performer and listener/audience as one of active participation. The impact of this argument bears not only upon literary and cultural studies (within which performance must be theorized as an analytical tool through which to approach both the textual poem and a performance of it), but also upon the practices through which we listen and respond to the multi-voiced soundscapes of Canada. This argument can be traced back to Ondaatje’s public reading because the event constituted a reading and a listening, or what Charles Bernstein calls a “public tuning” (3). Our presence as audience members enabled this tuning to be public and, in the case of a Q&A session, our presence was audible. What does it mean for presence to be audible? This question informs each chapter’s attention to sound and audibility while reminding us of the audience as a political body. In Ashok Mathur and Smaro Kamboureli’s conversation in Open Letter (in a special-issue that revisits the poetry reading as “public tuning”), Kamboureli focuses on the economics of readings (for writers, publishers, and readers) and their ability to construct the reading public vis-à-vis the nation-state. For Kamboureli, the questions of who is reading and why are essential for understanding the politics of a poetry reading as “public tuning.” In a Q&A session, the monolithic “public” 3 breaks apart into individuals asking questions and voicing their responses. We can ask questions, such as the one asked of Ondaatje that elicited a response of jazz musician, which leads me to another reason why this dissertation’s argument can be traced back to Ondaatje’s reading. The call-and-response dynamics of a Q&A session model the dialogic interplay that I argue must be taken into account when analyzing any performance of a writer’s work, whether a reading of a poem or an adaptation of a poem. Although the Q&A session exemplifies a call-and-response exchange between performer and audience, this sort of exchange happens all the time in critical responses and adaptive responses. Whether or not both interlocutors are listening to each other is another matter altogether.