so what now?

There'll have to be a few photos soon, there's been a couple of long text entries lately including this one, and two further parts of the Derek Jarman piece to come.

Although I haven't been working at my sound poem for very long, already a number of questions are starting to arise. But first it's probably best to get the observations that prompted the questions out of the way:

1. The work is evolving quickly. It has been through several distinct stages already. The present stage is by far the longest lasting in term of the number of pieces produced. First came noise, and layering sounds so they eventually became thick and congested and loud. Then I learned to incorporate quieter passages, and more dynamic elements, building the layers more slowly, and relying more on drones. Thirdly I reduced the drones and started to make the pieces more rhythmic, and was happier to incorporate words. Recently I've started using a skeletal base of irregular looped beats with a layer of vocal sounds looped on top, over which other beats, vocal noises, words, and sounds are skipped.
2. Although I set out to do something that was neither poetry nor music, the work has started creeping closer and closer to music, despite my manifest lack of musical ability. Although it's not the drones I expected pushing this but the beats. Perhaps given my musical tastes, which often favour the highly rhythmic and beat-driven, this shouldn't be a surprise.
3. In the same way that I 'went through' Bob Dylan and The Fall (to borrow Dylan's phrase from No Direction Home), I now find I'm starting to go through David Thomas Broughton and Keiji Haino, in terms of trying to figure out what they're doing and how they do it. Of course with them both being genuinely excellent musicians, this will take a very long time since I'm not a musician in any sense.
4. I have been carrying a lot of rhythm around with me, tapping, scratching and muttering at every opportunity.
5. I also made my first 'musical' realisation last week. This was listening to one of my pieces and realising that beats which I'd thought were just beats were in fact uncertain and indefinite. They were not wildly out of time or tentative, they were just uncertain and indefinite. I'd never realised that was possible. Out of time or tentative I could have understood, but otherwise I thought a beat was just a beat. It went further. I already knew that I knew nothing about music - it was a vast bulk of mountains hidden behind mist. This realisation was a break in the mist revealing just how enormous and far away those mountains actually are.

So it is these observations accumulating over a few weeks that have prompted a mass of questions. Although the cluster of questions I ask first were present right from the start:

1. Is meaning necessary to poetry? If it is necessary, how can I encode that meaning in abstract sound? More urgently for me, since I tried unsuccessfully to be a committed poet in the vein of Shelley, Tony Harrison, Adrian Mitchell etc., how can I reconcile my conscience and beliefs with the fact that my sound work is an almost wholly abstract and aesthetic experience? If I provide titles and/or themes will I be too directive of audience response or restrictive of my expressive palette? I suspect the question of reconciling my beliefs with the aesthetic demands of my work is going to be an unresolvable conflict.
2. While I really don't care if my sound work is regarded as poetry or not, it's potentially more tricky to negotiate territory between performed poetry, sound poetry, music and sound art. I definitively want to avoid the first, and honestly lack the skills to execute the last two with anything approaching competence. And yet I find myself drifting into this territory without intending to. So what is it that I'm actually doing?
   
3. Following on from this, if I'm not using words, and if other people can do more effectively and skillfully the things I find myself doing, then what's the point of my trying? It is worrying to hear records I haven't listened to for some time from which I seem to have lifted techniques. Nurse With Wound, Sunroof!, David Thomas Broughton, Keiji Haino, and Pere Ubu have all given me a shock or two lately. I'm sure there are more to come.
4. If I'm changing so quickly, and making fairly basic discoveries along the way, how can I have any confidence that the work I'm producing has any value at all?

I have no ready answers to most of these questions, other than one or two in the initial cluster. My hope is that by continuing to produce work I can start to find answers to these questions, and of course uncover further questions along the way. But I really ought to examine my initial thoughts.

1. I don't believe meaning is essential to poetry any more than it is to any artform. It is however more difficult to be abstract within linguistic forms than within visual arts and music. Sound poetry to an extent circumvents this. As already observed I don't think there is a reconciliation possible between where my work drives me, and my desire to be a more politically and socially committed artist. I suspect providing titles and themes is too directive. This links back to the question of meaning, it's possible to be too literal, too representational, to artificially restrict your work from going to the places it wants to. Maybe in this there's an answer of sorts to the question of commitment - it will only be capable of being expressed through the work, if the work has organically reached a place where that expression is possible.
2. What it is I'm doing, is of course sound poetry, is the trite answer. The slightly more detailed trite answer is that my sound poetry is in the early stages of it's development, and will veer in all sorts of directions, especially early on, as I attempt to develop a vocabulary. Performed poetry, music and sound art are the most obvious of the (plainly malleable and porous) borders that I'll need to push against to find out how far I can go.
3. My view on this is that if I don't try then I'm never going to achieve anything, and that however much I seem to be leaning on the efforts of other people, as long as I become aware of the fact, and as long as I incorporate and develop these techniques, then the process is still productive.
4. The simple answer to this for anyone who isn't me is that it doesn't matter, they don't have to listen to anything I produce. For myself, I can only judge it so far as anyone can judge their own work immediately after the fact. The more rapidly I fall out with my work at this stage the better as far as I'm concerned.

All of which is inconclusive and provisional, as ever. None of these answers are final or wholly convincing to me, and I think it's a condition of life that we hold irreconcilable views about many things at any given time. I had arguments with a philosophy tutor about this during my first degree. I argued that you could hold irreconcilable views - for instance you could be a pacifist and believe violence to be wrong, and at the same time use violence to resolve problems. He argued that this was not possible. I'm not sure now whether it was a simple denial like this, or one of the more nuanced arguments: such as there being a difference between beliefs and actions, or only being able to engage with one thing (violence or non-violence) at any one time. My personal opinion is that there can be conflicts between beliefs and beliefs, and between actions and actions. I don't think that only being able to engage with one thing at a time alters the fundamental fact that two irreconcilable views are held. But this is some way from where we began.

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