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7 - Field Recording as Writing: John Berger, Peter Gizzi and Juliana Spahr
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- By Redell Olsen
- Edited by Stephen Benson, University of East Anglia, Will Montgomery, Royal Holloway, University of London
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- Book:
- Writing the Field Recording
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 11 November 2020
- Print publication:
- 14 March 2018, pp 169-188
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Summary
What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message? What secret is yielded – hence also made public – when we listen to a voice, an instrument, or a sound just for itself?
Jean-Luc Nancy, ListeningBerger's ‘Field’
The implicit problem and the potential of Jean-Luc Nancy's call to ‘capture or surprise’ the ‘sound just for itself’ resonate together in Berger's 1971 essay ‘Field’. The apparently fixed boundaries between auditor and field, between past and present apprehensions, become disturbed. Berger's essay stages the perceptual agency of encounter, the event of environment not as backdrop but as participatory exploration. What Berger records in writing is the field as itself in proprioceptive fusion with the listener and, by extension, the reader. Listening, seeing, reading and writing are presented as near-simultaneous manifestations of this reciprocal meeting between context and perceiver.
Berger's essay shares obvious affinities with the work of a number of sound artists for whom the specific locality is an integral element of the recording. This environmental encounter opens correspondences with the concerns of two contemporary poets whose work engages with both literal and conceptual ‘fields’ in terms of the physical, social, cultural, political and linguistic environments that we inhabit. Peter Gizzi and Juliana Spahr have, in different ways, approached the field recording as writing through a series of explorative associations of subjectivity and attention involving an attunement of the senses through listening, seeing and remembering. The resulting poems proliferate the temporality of the field recording beyond a single duration in a continuous present.
Berger's essay opens with a conception of environment that finds expression in relation to a domestic and even subjective landscape of memory. His experience of the field is as much about a return to a series of past sensory impressions as it is to a locatable present encounter. There is a ‘shelf of a field’, the walls are ‘papered with blue sky’, and there is also a ‘curtain of printed trees’. This field is the space of earliest identity formation and it is at once visual, linguistic and sonic: a lullaby of landscape where ‘repeated lines of words and music are the paths’ (p. 31).
3 - Postmodern poetry in Britain
- from Part I - Contexts
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- By Redell Olsen
- Edited by Neil Corcoran, University of Liverpool
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry
- Published online:
- 28 January 2008
- Print publication:
- 13 December 2007, pp 42-56
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Summary
If the era of 'postmodernity' is increasingly seen as 'a socio-economic mode that has intensified and surpassed modernity itself' then poetry produced under this new 'socio-economic mode' might rightly be dismissed as another form of 'postmodern' candyfloss neatly packaged for our quick or therapeutic consumption. On the other hand perhaps poets, often relatively uninvested in the capital of a culture industry, which is currently terming itself in its latest guise as 'postmodern', are one of the few cultural producers left who can afford to be sceptical of the current era and of the claims of culture itself. Paradoxically, this means that poetry has the potential to be the most 'postmodern' and the most 'anti-postmodern' of the arts. Anthologies of the period reflect the unease with which contemporary poets and critics have embraced and subsequently distanced themselves from such an elastic term. Although there is some overlap between poets represented in anthologies of British poetry since 1980, what is most striking is the divergence between them that marks an important and decisive split in post-war poetry in Britain. Poets from both groupings have been termed 'postmodern'.
There are clearly a number of definitions of the 'postmodern' in operation here. The first is linked to the branding, dilution (under the guise of accessibility) and commodification of intellectual and creative activity which have become key features of the 'postmodern' era. The second relates to the formal and conceptual features of 'postmodernism' as it has developed in relation to other disciplines such as architecture and the visual arts. The editors of The New Poetry (1993) describe their selection as emphasising 'accessibillity, democracy and responsiveness, humour and seriousness'.