If I had to explain to someone who doesn’t like poetry how line breaks work in post-endrhyme America, I might just point to the music of Robert Ashley. I recently picked up Ashley’s 1994 opera Foreign Experiences, and I’m seriously wondering why no one has mentioned this guy to me before.
The music is minimalistic, to say the least. Performers sing long sections in unison, rarely deviating from a single note. The rhythms of the music, which mimic and exaggerate (or undercut and screw with) the rhythms of human speech, are the real challenge, both for singers and listeners.
The plot goes something like this: A composer gets a university job in California and, shortly thereafter, loses his family and his mind. Never leaving his apartment, he hallucinates himself into an epic journey through the American southwest. The recording is 76 minutes, but it covers a lot of ground: the book is longer than many volumes of poetry.
It’s impossible to excerpt this thing in a way that’s very useful, but humor me:
Try to sell a publisher the idea of a book
Called Famous Premonitions, and he would say,
That’s a title like I Pissed in the Ocean.
Big deal and nobody buys the book.
The guy that married Bobby Fisher’s sister
Taught me this. Talk about fertile women:
She taught Bobby Fisher how to play chess,
So, she probably taught the guy this idea.
So, it’s probably hers, but never mind.
The idea is that if we are to trust mathematics,
Which is among the best we have as an alternative
To thought, we have to trust it, even when it
Comes up with something that requires thought.
To wit, mathematics says that both sides of
The equation have to equate, that’s the answer.
We are taught by mathematics that an Event (!)
Has to have something out in front in the same
Shape as the consequences. So, you can read it,
The Event (!), in either way. The problem is that
Since we had to give up thinking as too
Time consuming and haven’t yet got hold
Of the short cuts (e.g., Time
Savers In Thought) the confirmation of the
Fact that the equation works always mostly
Comes in another language, and languages don’t
Always match. For instance, since the proof is
Mathematical, which is not spoken, the
Confirmation, say it’s anecdotal, which is
Always spoken, takes too long, so we
Don’t believe it, don’t take headlines like
Boy Knew His Grandmother Was About to Die!
Seriously. I think I said that right.
In a section like this, it’s the enjambed lines in which the line breaks actually take more weight than the end-stopped lines. And no matter how quickly the lines are delivered, those breaks are still present (even when they don’t match breaks in the music).
Ashley has said elsewhere that English is more about consonants, and French and Italian more about vowels, and that therefore, English-language opera should be faster in order to use the language to its full capacity. I wonder if the same could be said of English-language poetry.
Ubu has some work of Ashley’s, including a fantastic series of interviews entitled Music with Roots in the Aether. In each episode is a one-hour conversation between Ashley and another musician, plus a one-hour exhibition of that musician’s work. Subjects include Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, and Ashley himself.