A view from the west

Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) is renowned as a teacher, pioneer of electronics in music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher, and proponent of compositional linguistics. Over the course of a dedicated career, his uncompromising work carved out its own patch in the territory of American experimentalism.

Lingua Press, 1976

James Kirtland Randall (1929 - ) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1934 to 1947, and subsequently attended Columbia University (B.A., 1955), Harvard (M.A., 1956) and Princeton (M.F.A., 1958). He studied piano with Leonard Shure and composition with Herbert Elwell, Thad Jones, Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. From 1958 to 1991 he taught at Princeton, where he was professor of music. He was a founding member of the American Society of University Composers and has written articles on composing and music theory for several journals, notably Perspectives of New Music (some of these were collected in the monograph Compose Yourself: A Manual for the Young (Open Space, 1995)). He also collaborated with Benjamin Boretz on the book Being About Music: Textworks 1960-2003 (Open Space, 2003).

From the early 1960s into the 1970s, Randall engaged principally in computer synthesis of sound and, with Godfrey Winham, developed facilities for this at Princeton University. His tape compositions were generated by the MUSIC IV B program, a version of MUSIC IV introduced at Princeton. He designed his own software "instruments," which enabled him to specify every aspect of every sound and structure developments within single notes in ways that reflect principles of development used in whole compositions as, for example in Lyric Variations for Violin and Computer (1966-1968).

In 1980 he turned his attention to improvised musical performance and began a series of explorations of spontaneous group performance, or "real-time co-creation," involving many kinds of musicians and other artists (painters, dancers) as well. The ongoing efforts, preserved on hundreds of sound recordings and videotapes (under the project name Inter/Play), document the emergence of idiosyncratic group styles and performing conventions. Randall is himself a regular participant in these performances. In 1990, Randall, along with Elaine Barkin and Benjamin Boretz, started the publications series Open Space.

Eight or more performers and instructors. Score.

Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) is renowned as a teacher, pioneer of electronics in music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher, and proponent of compositional linguistics. Over the course of a dedicated career, his uncompromising work carved out its own patch in the territory of American experimentalism.

Lingua Press, 1976

A composition for one actor and tape, or two actors. Score. 1970

A collection collecting of generative grammars.

An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting.  

In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting’s long-standing associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion’s relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions? 

Soong uncovers forgetting’s influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting’s shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality—and that such malleability is part of forgetting’s nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.

The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers blends the narratives of the travelog and the coming of age novel. It is written by a young Indian woman whose travels take her between homes in two countries, India and England, and through parts of the United States. These short pieces reveal new ways of belonging in the world and possibilities for an art grounded in a localized cosmopolitan culture.

Bhanu Kapil has written three full-length prose/poetry works, THE VERTICAL INTERROGATION OF STRANGERS (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), INCUBATION: A SPACE FOR MONSTERS (Leon Works, 2006), and HUMANIMAL [A PROJECT FOR FUTURE CHILDREN] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009). Born in the UK to Indian parents, Bhanu lives in Colorado, where she teaches in The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. 

Published 2001

Nhã Thuyên’s đừng giấu cơn điên / don’t hide the madness contains eight poems excerpted from the forthcoming book vị nước (taste of water). To read this work is to be wrenched out of oneself and into the opening and closing world of language: a world in equal parts vegetal, liquid, human, stone, at once bordered river and open sea, enclosed maze and open field; a labyrinth, but a labyrinth of the utmost clarity; a rising or collapsing building made of words that’s not a ‘dwelling’ so much as a refusal to dwell, which is its loneliness and bereftness and consolation and strength, all at once. “Steps here pulled forth by some line of poetry out of time”, such work “fabricate[s] a bed out of sea, build[s] a house out of tremendous immensity”. It’s the result of a lifelong investigation of the Vietnamese language, deep, joyous, scrupulous and sometimes painful; of a lifelong investigation of the whole deep field of history and time as it’s lived deep within the person and in the field beyond the personal that poetic language affords us. This is a realm, not of simple freedom, but of the struggle for the fullest record and the fullest measure towards which a poet can strive. Don’t hide the madness. Don’t be at peace. [D.G.]

NHÃ THUYÊN secludedly anchors herself to Hà Nội, Việt Nam and totters between languages. She has authored several books in Vietnamese and/or in English translations, including viết (writing) (2008), rìa vực (edge of the abyss) (2011), từ thở, những người lạ (words breathe, creatures of elsewhere) (2015), and bất\ \tuẫn: những hiện diện [tự-] vắng trong thơ Việt (un\ \martyred: [self-] vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry) (2019). Her next book of poetry vị nước (taste of water) is waiting to see the moon. She has been unearthing her notebooks and rubbing her words in Berlin as a 2023 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellow, and learning to quietly speak up with care.

KAITLIN REES is a translator, editor, and public school teacher based in New York City. She translates from the Vietnamese of Nhã Thuyên, with whom she co-founded AJAR, the small bilingual journal-press that organizes an occasional poetry festival. Her translations include moon fevers (Tilted Axis, 2019), words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (Vagabond Press, 2016), and the forthcoming book of poetry taste of water.

The poet, the unknown being… a loony, a dreamer, a hermit. The poet writes poetry… but really, what is poetry? Arts, politics, mere amusement?

This little book is an insight into the mindset of someone who just can’t help but to be a poet. It is a manifesto for the freedom of thought and expression, an essential source of motivation and inspiration for readers and writers alike.

Anisur Rahman (b.1978) made his poetic debut in 2003. As a journalist, translator and playwright he has further contemplated the poetic mind. Born in Bangladesh, he writes in both Bengali and English, but nowadays lives exiled in Sweden.

Work/Anti-work issue with writing by Nat Raha /. lisa minerva luxx /Ghayath Almadhoun, trans. Catherine Cobham / Jacqui Germain / Jazra Khaleed, trans. Peter Constantine / Finn Finneran / Cait O’Kane / Rebecca Kosick / Lara Durback Skye /Lotta Thießen / William Rowe / Danny Hayward / Rona Lorimer / Zoe Beloff / Jike Ayou, trans. Yě Yě / Miguel de Vallester, trans. Erasmo Pantoja / Lucas Martínez / ko ko thett / Hung Q. Tu / Raymond de Borja / etaïnn zwer, trans. Ilan A.L.S. Erikson Weisbrod / Annie Raab on Taylor Portela / Rachael Guynn Wilson on Lyn Hejinian / Will Rowe on Danny Hayward / Chloe Watlington on Joshua Clover.