Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual

Introduction: Opening the Door to Transdisciplinary, Multimodal Communication

1 An Urging and an Invitation (r.s.v.p.) Word up, dear reader: open the door to transdisciplinary, multimodal communication as widely as you can. This book and the website you will find if you look and listen beyond this volume’s pages to http://drc.usask.ca/projects/ oral invite you to move away from what stl’atl’imx poetscholartheorist1 Peter Cole, in Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing: Coming Home to the Village, calls the “dysauditory linguistic space” (102) created by “visuocentricity” (111). Book and website issue this invitation while cherishing the gifts of sight and reading , as, indeed, Cole does, in balanced relationship with the other senses. The urgings here are to participate in a levelling of the established hierarchy of written over oral, and to make sense of experience in new ways by joining in a sensory rebalancing in perceiving and responding to the world, including the discursive spaces of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual. The rebalancing requires you to ignore any signs that suggest “listenaries” (101) need not apply; to avoid “zeroing in on the eye and its orbit/uary” (Cole 111); and to open the multisensory channels of perception with which humans are endowed. If you reckon with Cole that “there’s been a whole lot of seeing going on,” that “maybe we could use some of those other senses the creator gave us”to shake up the sensory hierarchy of Western tradition, and that “you got to use all your givens including your hunches” (101), maybe you can even develop a little “trickster rap port” (87). Then you might sense upon entry into the conversations of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond a movement toward a more fully embodied knowing, a knowing that issues from attending to the complete sensorium and thus pleasures the knower with a knowing that doesn’t forget to have fun.Yes, and all this we urge even though our work/play in this project inevitably falls short of the articulated ideal. Introduction OPENING THE DOOR TO TRANSDISCIPLINARY, MULTIMODAL COMMUNICATION Susan Gingell, with Wendy Roy 2 Introduction We might be guided, too, by Euro-Canadian poetcritictheoristcomicsartist bpNichol. His playful essaying into the territory of Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysics (a realm beyond the metaphysical) results in “The ’Pata of Letter Feet, or, the English Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” in which Nichol formulates the kin(a)esthetic interrelatedness of the three elements of the present book’s main title, listening, writing, and looking, in combination with the element of the oral from its subtitle. Nichol’s essay maintains that it is “at the interface between the eye, the ear and the mouth that we suddenly see/hear the real ’pata of poetic feet” (Meanwhile 354). He calls the kind of writing at this interface notation, describing it as “the conscious act of noting things down for the voice.” Such writing entails “instructing the eye on the movement of the tongue for the pleasure of the ear.” We have here, then, writing directed by and to the listening ear, the speaking mouth (and tongue), and the looking/seeing eye. A precursor text to the present book in featuring the oral, written, and visual in its title, Marshall McLuhan and Victor Papanek’s Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations, includes the same elements as Nichol’s formulation but to quite different effect. The book emblematizes the chief argument of the work by presenting the image of a human face with an ear below the eyes and above the mouth. The fixity of this grotesque emblem suggests an unnatural reordering, and, more particularly, that the triumph of the visual over the auditory, of literacy over orality, has produced gross distortions in our understanding of and relationship to the world. By contrast, Nichol’s articulation effects an integrative, aesthetic movement, a kin(a)esthesis. Nichol is first and foremost a poet, and so brings his understanding of notation to his criteria for good poetry. He recognizes the genre as an embodied , multiplex, and interactive co-creation of the poet and one whom we might, by expanding on and adapting Simon Ortiz’s concept of the listenerreader (151), call a listenerreaderkin(a)esthete. The expansion is necessary to do full justice to Nichol’s take on good poetry, because he says such poetry “gets the writer’s tongue in your ear, breathes into it, & makes the whole body squirm with the pleasure of it” (354). On...