John Cage famously produced music is really not, I think by people in the music world not considered primarily a poet. He's interested in aleatory music as well as writing and he had a lot to say in general about this. And he went and spoke at campuses, the concert halls, all his career about this. And now, let's take a look at some of those things. About his mesostics, he had a lot to say but one of the things he said that's so striking is that mesostics help me out of sentimentality. I have something to do, a puzzle to solve, in taking the next step in my work the exploration of non-intention. I don't solve the puzzle that the mesostic spring presents, instead I write or find a source text, such as Howell, which is then used as an oracle. I ask it what word shall I use for this letter and what one for that, for the next, etc. This frees me from memory, taste, likes, dislikes. Emily say anything about any of that, either how mesostic helps amount of sentimentality or how it frees him from memory, taste, likes and dislikes, how could that possibly be? And do you have to be very zen to go with this? >> I think that [CROSSTALK] >> Can you be just a regular folk person, Emily? >> Probably, yeah. This procedure, we see writing as self expression, as every word put down as a creative act. But this procedure somehow manages to allow us to escape from that, to actually, focusing on things that seem sort of artificial and removed from that process. He really does escape taste in ways that other writing might never be able to. >> Interesting. Anybody else on this? Allie? >> Well, if you kind of consolidate all of those things, I think ego is maybe the overarching word or one of them. And there's a great quote, I'm not sure from who but, about how this type of poetry is a way of escaping the ego. >> Mm-hm. May well been Caged who said that. >> Yeah, it might have been Cage. And I think that's liberating in a sense because then instead of it becoming about the poet or about the writer. You know what people say I want to be a writer but they never write. It becomes about the poetry itself, and the poetry of, I don't want to say things given, because there is a system to mesostics, but things that we let escape our control to a certain extent. >> There are so many things I want to say in response to that, great. I mean I can still remember a couple of them. One, the escaping or the suppression of the voice of the singularity of self expression which is something that the poets of chapter 9.1. The language poets, a little later actually than Cage and MacLow started to do their thing and also concurrent, this was a very important thing for them to do. I also wanted to anticipate in a few minutes how we will sort of ask what it was like for you to become poets by being freed from the expectations that poets do a certain kind of thing. And then last thing, I'm glad I remembered all three things. The last thing your wonderful comment made me think of is Cage really does and MacLow too, they as well. They want us to learn and shift our attention so that we begin to hear things that already out there in the ambiance. So, famously, Cage's 4'33", which is a silent piece of piano playing or not playing. If you're in the concert hall, what do hear when you, has anybody attended a performance of it? >> There was a YouTube video. >> You saw a YouTube video, what? That's kind of hard, but if the sound is good, what do you hear? >> You hear a lot of coughing. [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] >> People cough when they're nervous. You hear chair scrapings of old people leaving in disgust. And what else do you hear? You hear the air handling of the concert hall. You might even hear if it's the spring time there are always bugs in a concert hall. You might hear some buzzing, you might hear a little zapping of a mosquito that got too close to the big, powerful lights that light up the stage. And if you listen, you will hear. And that's one of the other things but now, poets like Tom Lin, who we're not studying in this course, have taken this to mean that the language and the chapter 9.3 poets as well, Kenneth Goldsmith and others. Take this to mean that the language is already out there, there's so much language out there. You don't really have to do much to get access to it. You have to have some kind of nonintentional intent. So terrific, anybody else want to say something about helping him out of sentimentality? What do we mean by that, Molly? He's helped out of sentimentality. >> Well, the constraint sort of forces him to use the words that are already there. >> What does sentiment have to do with this? It's okay to punt on this question. Sentiment, you majored in English, sentiment has a, sentimentality and sentimentalism and sentiment have big, strong traditions in literature. >> Right, right. It's Shakespeare, it's sonnets, it's all the old white men of the renaissance. >> Well, I think you're painting with a broader brush than you need to. Let's be a little fairer to Shakespeare. Let's take the, there's an era of the 18th century novel, the sentimental novel, in which the characters are, Amaris do you know something about this? The characters are so full of sentiment that, go ahead, tell us. >> I mean, it's traditionally supposed to be a feminine genre. That was when women wrote novels, they were called sentimental, or romance novels. >> So the novel of sentiment flourishes in the 19th century. In the 18th century there's a book by a man named Mackenzie, I believe, called The Man of Feeling, in which sentiment becomes so overwhelming the literary mode. And I think what Cage is doing is he's taking the ego out, and trying to create an unsentimental, I guess, look, an unsentimental look at Howell. Howell is so full of sentiment. I think Margery Perlov would say, you know, that one of the problems with Howell is that, in addition to being so wonderfully air clearing and radical, certainly in terms of content. It's also full of sentiment, which could mean positionality, opinion, politics. Cage is very political, but he does it by evacuating sentimentality. Okay, so, some of you or all of you used Matthew McCabe's Mesostomatic which is just a little computer program. It's really simple computer programming he tells me, and you tried it and you become poets, right? Dumb saint of the mind. Jack you're a genius all the time. Jack Kerouac comes back. It's babble flow. So, Max you did one, I want you to read what you did. But tells us, I'm not, I'm less interested in what you did than what it felt like, actually felt! I want to get back to sentimentality at the level of the constraint, not at the level of product. Go Max, what'd you do? >> I took Robert Frost's Mending Wall, and I used- >> Uh-oh, do you have an attitude toward Mending Wall? >> I, it was a bit of a playful jab in Frost's direction. [LAUGH] >> What were you hoping, even prior to picking it, you took a source text you were hoping you'd get Howellized. You were hoping that something like what Cage did to Howell would happen, let's face it. Admit it. >> Yes, I wanted their, well I did use the phrase tennis net as my seed, text there is funny. As my seed phrase to extract words out of- >> Where did you come up with, read it. Read it the way Frost would read it. >> [LAUGH] >> Something there is that doesn't love a wall. I'm not bad at that. >> [LAUGH] >> Frost, mending it and in is stone on they rabbit. Out, please. Spring mending time there I sit between keep go to. >> What do we do in response to that? Don't we [NOISE], am I the only one snapping my fingers in this class today? >> I love all the prepositions. >> See, you made it into a Stein poem. >> I did. >> [LAUGH] >> You chapter two-ized chapter five, okay. >> And chapter nine. >> Enough of that, tell me about what it was like sitting there at home making a poem, thanks to Matthew McCabe. >> It was a lot of fun. It definitely, absolutely, and I think that McCabe's programs makes what. Well, I think Cage enjoyed what he did, but the Cageian method of going through is very tedious. It's work and you have to sit down. >> Work, it's rigorous. There's no- >> Takes hours and hours and hours, but the McCabe program's great. Because you can just keep on generating them [LAUGH] over and over, and seeing- >> Who wrote that poem, that poem you read us? >> Well, that's hard to say. >> But say it. Did you, what did you, give me verb for what you did. >> John Cage route, it may be. [LAUGH] >> Give us some verbs. You what it? >> I chose the source text and the scene text. You're evasive here. >> Is there some intention in mind with that. >> Did you produce it? Did you make it? Did you construct it? Did you? You don't want any of those, okay, what did Frost do? >> Frost wrote it. Or at least we would, okay. >> [CROSSTALK] [LAUGH] >> These are fundamental questions. This course is about asking fundamental questions about writing, about self, about the writer. Okay. Who else do we have in there, what did Cage do? Ooh, interesting, what did Cage do? >> I think he enabled it. >> He enabled it, for sure. >> Yeah. >> What did Matthew McCabe do? And this is the most important thing. >> He simplified. >> [LAUGH] >> Green simplified the process, what's his relationship to the, I mean, he should probably own it, because the little script he wrote is probably proprietary. Okay, what did we just do? We just pried loose something that throughout the earlier periods, before the rise of modernism, just never got pried loose. Edwin Markham wrote the poem about Lincoln, it's Markham's Lincoln. It's not Lincoln's Lincoln, it's not my Lincoln. But then when you get to, you take Emily Dickinson and Susan Howard is able to say, my, this is my Emily Dickinson. And what she means is not mine, mine, mine all mine. What she means is that Dickinson is available to me, Anna, what were you going to say? >> Well, then I just wonder what Max's role in all of this. Because granted without McCabe's program, without Frost's original text, without Cage's idea, without McCabe's program, we still don't have what Max wrote because he picked the phrase, Tennyson. >> I'll just say that Max is impoverished and less happy because if he didn't have access. And I'd also say last night when he did this he was the happy genius this household, okay. Allie, quickly, you wrote you used Walt to write to Emily. You used, Ann Maris did it. Can you read it for us? >> Sure. What I did was I took tell the truth or tell it slant and since we've been putting Dickinson and Whitman in the dialogue like that would be funny to run Whitman's name down the spine. >> Okay because what did produce? >> With explanation dazzle, tell with the blind truth, infirm as lightning. So the irony here that I thought was that it feels like Emily's words have turned on herself. And Whitman's message actually comes out because we know that he served privileged explanation and detail in listing. And sort of a direct, and this by happy coincidence makes near perfect grammatical sense. Whereas Emily preferred in Success and Circuit Lies to circle around her emotional center with abstraction. So taking- >> So how does the Success and Circuit Lies poem become an oracle? What is predicted? >> Well, maybe that was the circuit through which we were able to extract. >> I love it. One thing it does is it allows the dialogue between Dickinson and Whitman to continue within one text. A skeptic would say Emily has just proved her own interpretation Max went looking for the Frost he wants to find, yet there is a sense of vernacular quality to it. Like I took this away from Ian and wound up affirming something that I think. Okay, now let's switch to some other Cageianisms. I'll read them, and you respond, ready? We'll do this real quickly. Which is more musical? A truck passing by a factory, or a truck passing by a music school? What's the answer to the question? Molly? Answer the question, as if you had too, you probably don't have to but we'll pretend you do. >> A truck passing by a music school. >> And why? >> Because there's ambient music coming out of the school and- >> Well, there's actually intentional music coming out of the school, and ambient is driving by. >> Okay. >> Yeah, that's cool so what happens to the music school? The fussy old grumpy who was our grumpy guy in this class? Grumpy Uncle Joe? Grumpy Uncle Joe is now a music teacher at the Dalton School, and what does he do when the truck goes by? >> Shakes his fist. >> He shakes his fist and he closes the window because the Mozart that they're playing has messed up. What is Cage advocating? >> He's advocating truck. >> He's advocating the truck, keep going. >> I think Cage shifts the emphasis from creation, right, Max was talking about how the pressure of creation was lifted off of him. And it shifts it onto interpretation. So really it's a trick question, because it's just whichever one you listen more attentively to is the musical piece. >> And of course, it's a trick question in the sense they both do. But just to go along, I really like this spirit of Molly's attempt here to say yes, the music school because what it does is it begins in a way putting the urinal in a museum changes everything around it. The Mona Lisa gets changed by the urinal. I mean, I never looked at that smile the same way once I realized that's a urinal next to it. I'm being funny, there's no urinal next to the Mona Lisa, nobody's laughing at that but what Molly's saying is that music can be changed. The truck changes music. All right, a couple more quickly. The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful, is why do I think it's not beautiful? And very shortly, you discover that there is no reason. Anne Maris? >> I think it's sort of the same thing before. We were trying to see beauty in vernacular language. Which throughout this entire course, it seems to be a theme of seeing beauty in the everyday and what surrounds us. And it's just a matter of appreciating it in its light that takes it out of the hierarchizing that socialization has in present those sins. >> So it really takes to the limit the original impulse of early modernism, which is that anything can be the subject matter for poetry. So it could be as naturalistic as The Sea Rose, It could also be a piece of green glass. It can be something you find that turns into something beautiful. And really, this continues that. It's also a break in that it's a radical version of the question. All right, finally, let me quote some of what John Cage said in an interview, as he was preparing to perform Empty Words. Now in Empty Words, first he omits sentences, Then he omits phrases, then he omits words, and he's left with only syllables and letters, and the last part of the empty words has nothing but letters and sound. So he's moving from semantically readable and understandable, communicative, watch out the bus is coming kind of denotative language, all the way down to the music of language to its sounds. But then he says, or prior to that, he says, what was interesting to me was making English less understandable because when it's understandable, well, people control one another and poetry disappears. So, syntax which is what makes things understandable is the army, is the arrangement of the army. So what we're doing when we make language un-understandable is we're demilitarizing it so that we can do our living. It's a transition from language to music. It's bewildering at first, but it's extremely pleasurable as time goes on, and that's what I'm up to. This is a radical statement and its very Utopian. But I wonder if I would invite you finally here at the end of our discussion of Cage to comment on it. Emily, you seem skeptical, maybe let's come back to you. [LAUGH] Let's go back to you. Let's start with someone who's maybe less skeptical. Dave? >> I think he's commenting on the construct, is a silent construct. The control that is sort of under the surface that we don't realize that language, that syntax is formulaic. It's controlled. It's like a controlled narrative. >> We've naturalized it. >> And we don't even realize that we're under that control. And what he's trying to do is expose it and allow it just to be open to interpretation. Good, before we turn to Emily, one more. >> Well, also, I feel like the best writing is very, no, okay. What is seen as the best writing very often is coercive writing, writing that moves you. >> Because it's naturalized all of its hidden structures sort of how reading in my Emily Dickinson, who polices questions of grammar. >> So then, kind of taking, kind of semantic meaning away from that emphasizes. I really like when he says it's turning it into music. Because there's also this sense that, actually, there's also meaning in sound. >> There is meaning in sound. Emily, before I wrap up? >> I think to say the syntax is militaristic and the instrument of repression is kind of cheap and reductive. It's also the instrument of what's happening now, which is a beautiful thing. It's the instrument of lots of other beauty-making, sense-making, the previous poets in this course. >> It is certainly radical, it's certainly extreme. It's a metaphor and it's quite Utopian. I think it's Utopian quality is what we admire. Shifting attention, the way we read. We've been talking about this all course, but it's a good moment to look back on John Field Bishop, who's the trickiest and silliest of the poets. Who wrote a poem, which if read a different way, says, fuck you half-ass, and basically undermines the traditional way that you read the poem. And there are those of us who read and read, and read, left to right, line by line, top to bottom, and can't get it. I don't know who is slow in this group, but I'm not going to point them out. Because partly you're committed to the kind of naturalization of reading methods, and you're not even sure who's policing questions of reading. But then, when you discover the acrostic, it really has a relationship to today's discussion. The acrostic, you realize that another message, and that is being said here, and that it undermines the naturalized language that was, and that's a trick thing. It's silly. And you wouldn't ever give it to a seventh grader but going back to the middle school, if you could come up with an acrostic that delivered a different undercutting message other than an obscene one. You would give it to them and they would notice it. They would notice it, the fourth graders would notice it sooner than the seventh graders. And the seventh graders would know to sit sooner than the college students. And the college students would notice it sooner than the 45-year-olds. I'm not sure what happens after 45, and you start noticing it again, but my point obviously is that we have been socialized to read a certain way, and that we never shift our attention, in John Cage. And Jackson Mac Low and the people who follow in this allegory mode are seeking to shift our attention away from things that are already given. To things that are underneath, that are unconscious, that are sub-textual, or that we're already there as in power, but we just didn't notice it. It's time for us to start noticing it.
