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Counting Each Step of the Sun
CD & book.
(Malmö: Edition, 2009)
ISBN: 978-91-977853-1-0.
Release date: Autumn 2009.
This volume explores the diverse set of intersections between the voice of or in a text, the voice during actual reading, vocalization and subvocalization processes, and the recorded voice. We are looking specifically to include contributions that in some way problematize, displace and deconstruct any easy set of identifications and distinctions between these different vocal realms as well as those which seek to render possible mutations, hybridizations, points of indiscernability and crossovers between them.
The title of the proposed volume derives from an autobiographical story recounted by Allen Ginsberg in a BBC interview with Jeremy Andrews. Spending time in a friend’s New York apartment, Ginsberg tells Andrews how he experienced an aural hallucination in which William Blake recited his poem 'Ah! Sunflower' to him in a voice much like Ginsberg’s own yet distinctly different, emanating from his sternum. Ginsberg proceeds to recite the poem himself - 'Ah! Sunflower, weary of time, who countest the steps of the sun, seeking after that sweet golden clime, where the travelers journey is done, where the youth pined away with desire, and the pale virgin shrouded in snow, arise from their graves and aspire, where my sunflower wishes to go.' - bringing to mind his 1969 recording of the poem, performed accompanied by a small harmonium on top of the sound of which Ginsberg and others half recites, half sings Blake's poem.
Although this present volume does not engage specifically with the work of Allen Ginsberg, nor that of William Blake, it does draw upon the interplay between voices in this story - that is, the interplay between the voice of or in Blake’s text, the peculiar voices in Ginsberg’s subvocalization-cum-aural hallucination, the voice of Ginsberg reading, the voice we find on the recording of Ginsberg singing, and the voice of Ginsberg recounting his story. On the basis of such interplay, we have been gathering contributions from poets, sound poets, musicians and artists whose current and/or past work we feel have in some way engaged with or intervened in this general field. Contributors have been encouraged to think and work with similar intersections and interstitial spaces in their own poetics, and/or in the work of others, producing text and sound pieces/collages using editing and remixing processes that in some way destabilize, displace and render uncertain any easy and comfortable distinction between these different vocal realms.
This volume collects the contributions we received and includes the work of Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Johannes Heldén, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lars-Gunnar Bodin and Danny Snelson.
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