Vocal Neighborhoods: A Walk through the Post-Sound Poetry Landscape

CD COMPANION Vocal Neighborhoods: A Walk through the Post-Sound Poetry Landscape Washington Square Church, New York City, 14 April 1980. A rotund and stately Adriano Spatola strolls out onto the performance space with a large glass ofwhisky and ice in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. He steps up to a microphone on a stand, mumbles something in very broken English , takes a puff from his cigarette and a sip from the glass, and then very loudly intones a homage to F.T. Marinetti. The poem contains only two words-aviation aviateur-and is declaimed in an onomatopoetic fashion reminiscent of the Italian Futurist poetry of 1909. The poem is a World War I dogfight. The two words chase, attack and spit at each other amid long ascending and descending spirals of phonetic flights, intense semi-articulated sputterings and tonguewrenching vocal gymnastics. As Spatola begins another poem, his two brothers come up beside him and whirl long flexible plastic tubes above their heads. The tubes make a strange whistling sound to accompany the poem. More poems and homages are performed. Each are introduced in an English so strange that it is more of a parody of an explanation than any kind of aid. Florence Lambert appears from a side door. She is wearing long robes and has squeaky toys tied to her feet. As she moves it is apparent that she has other squeakers attached to various parts of her body: under her arms, elbows, knees, thighs, etc. Spatola and his two brothers prod at her with microphones . They follow her around the stage like paparazzi chasing a new Hollywood starlet, attempting to catch and amplify every sound she makes as she moves quickly past them. Spatola's brother, F. Tiziano, performs his hommage Ii Al Capone: he meticulously fills a little metal box ofItalian origin with nuts and bolts from a paper bag. The process takes some time, after which Tiziano snaps the metal lid to the box shut. He holds the box against a microphone, then rapidly shakes it to produce a sudden burst of simulated machinegun fire. He then takes a bow for his "poem." From the time Spatola first stepped out onto the floor, a man wearing a portable video tape recorder and camera has been flitting around the performers like a fly. The cameraman constantly moves around the whole space, filming Spatola at all angles and distances-from far away to extremely close-up-with a style that would have made Fellini envious. He is constantly getting in the way of the performers . At one moment Spatola says something to the effect that the guy is a nuisance. The filming continues, however. One wonders if there is any tape in the video recorder. For his finale, Spatola starts tapping a microphone against his chest and well-developed stomach. He seeks out certain resonant spaces within his body the same way a housewife taps a melon to see if it is ripe. The taps increase in intensity. Those in the front rows of the audience, generally with lessendowed bellies, begin to squirm uncomfortably in their chairs. The walls of the hundred-year-old church begin to rattle as Spatola pounds harder. He starts to hit his stomach with the microphone as if it were a big bass drum and maintains the intensity for several minutes. The corporeal sound reverberates in our ears for a long time after the performance has ended. So went one of the more consummate performances at the 12th International Festival of Sound Poetry. It was the last year that this festival was produced, and marked 1980 as a co 19941SAST Larry Wendt watershed year for the vocal art form that emphasized the sonic actuality of language as a substance in space rather than just an abstraction of semantic significance. Those individuals with the resources and the initiative to sanction such gatherings could no longer agree with other members of the sound poetry community upon what should be included or excluded . The community could no longer pool the economic resources needed to put together such an inclusive event, and slowly drifted apart. By 1980, the term sound poet...