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EMILY DONNINI

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grEg thOMasthE aEsthEtIcs aND MOraLs Of sOuND pOEtrY

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charLOttE prODgEr psYchIc NEON ON suNsEt

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haNNah ELLuLarrOws fOr sINÉaD MccarthY

(aND sO thE sIck MIND cONtINuEs uNtIL INfINItY)

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cOrIN swOrN

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JOE LuNa “...But sparE ME as I gO”:

NOtEs tOwarD a stuDY Of archItEcturE aND OMIssION IN NIc JONEs’ trEatMENt Of chILD BaLLaD

#216

E: Thank you N: Yeah sure, uhm, I mean the

problem as you know is going to be amplitude. E: Right N: Volume of the vibrations. E: Right N: Uhm, youʼre

gonna need some kind of resonating membrane, uhm because if you just have some kind of uhm needle or stylus, as it were, E: mhmm N: any

vibration of that material is gonna need to be a rigid material. I mean the stylus in a gramophone, E: Right N: or a phonograph, or something E: Right N: is, is a rigid

material, its essentially uhm a kind of amplifying lever or uh, but it, but it is basically a lever. Itʼs something that either kind of rocks like this or or in this plane of motion but it connects to E:

the amplifying N: the membrane at the bottom of the horn, E: Right N: or it, in an electronic, you know, sort of later gramophone E: Right N: to the, you know this sort of uh electromagnetic uhm coils,

which would pick up the vibration and transmit. E: I guess my N: uhm E: my question about that is N: Yeah E: the sound thatʼs created N: mm E: is obviously coming from the stylus on on the record N: Yeah E: and uh

what Iʼve been led to understand N: Yeah E: is that a part of that making that sound is the vibrations of the record itself. N: Yes E: So if Iʼm using a solid stone surface N: Yeah E: it wonʼt make. N: No but the vibrations E: But

will it make enough vibration to N: wheew E: amplify? N: Well enough, I donʼt know the answer to that uhm, I I have no idea how to E: (laugh) N: really go about E: finding N: short of actually building something. This is probably such an unusual approach E: mhmm N: a kind of antithetical approach almost to the engineering solution, that even if you looked back at say journals of , you know, engineering societies or whatever way back to 1920ʼs or E: mhmm N: previously to that to do with your phonograph design, if they exist, and I donʼt even know if they exist to be honest, E: mhmm N: but we could check the library here so to see uhm, its not something Iʼve looked into. E: (laugh) N: (laugh) E: Thatʼs totally fine. N: Uh, but you know the stuff may be there in terms of the academic papers which are describing the engineeringʼs solutions E: mhmm N: to these problems of early gramaphone designs or, but I donʼt know if that will help you. Uhm, which is something like 1880ʼs technology you know weʼre talking. E: Right N: (laugh) I donʼt know what there, in terms of academic papers what there would E: Right N: really be on that…. Parabolic reflectors are used in uhm audio field recording, nature recording. E: mhmm N: Uhm, so you know nature recordists will use a parabolic reflector, usually a hand held parabolic reflector, uhm, with a microphone mounted at the focal point. E: mhmm N: Uhm, so if there, you know this sort of, drawings terrible forgive me, E: Donʼt worry about it. (laugh) N: you got the kind of reflector which is E: mhmm N: this shape. E: mhmm N: Then uhm, you know the focal point is is here, E: mhmm N: so if thereʼs kind of wave fronts kind of hitting the thing going this way then theyʼll reflect off the surface of the reflector here and E: and hit N: and, and then hit that and thatʼs kind of at the optimal. E: Ok N: So thereʼd be a microphone pointing inwards, in towards the reflector. E: mhmm N: So its probably something like that that youʼd need, probably a sort of big, some sort of big parabola. E: mhmm N: I would have thought E: mhmm N: with your, …how

would you do that? I donʼt know, I could be wrong about that actually. Uhhhm, let me see yeah, come on have a look uhm, curious, hmm, hmm, well thereʼs a paper there from the audio engineering society

journal, horn theory and phonograph uhm, paper describes something on horn theory uhmmm, “descriptions also give on the recent acoustic phonograph fabulous response down to 30 Hz

thanks to loading by an external exponential form that was curved rather than folded” but this, thatʼs very much theory of horns. E: Right N: Uhhhm, which are long, so I donʼt

know how that would affect your sort of bowl shape. You might not get perfectly, fidelity of reproduction, E: mhmm N: far from it, but, there would be some

sound, E: mhmm N: of a type. E: (laugh)

Fig. 2

~ Fig 2. An excerpt from the transcribed conversation of Dr. N (professor of music and technol-ogy) and Miss E (MFA student) discussing the possibilities of making a self amplifying stone record.

Sound poetry is performed poetry in which the sonic and material features of spoken language are fore-grounded at the expense of con-ventional semantic sense. It is a twentieth century phenomenon which cites precedence in primeval habits of spontaneous oral and bodily expression. Some sound poets thus like to insist that they are partici-pating in an immemorial expressive tradition rather than a late 20th century art movement. The deliberateness with which primeval expres-sion must be approximated in a mechanised, electrified century sug-gests otherwise to me, for the same reason that cavemen wouldn’t have handed round their own spearheads as interesting cultural artefacts.

Within the twentieth century, sound poetry’s closest ancestors are the World War One era phonic collages produced by Dadaists like Haus-mann, Schwitters and Tzara. Steve McCaffery, in an essay called ‘From Phonic to Sonic’1, says that the later movement can be distinguished partly by an increased emphasis on the use of tape recorders to alter the pitch, rhythm, timbre, speed, and overlay of phonetic material, and also by the fact that their early 20th century forebears tended to stop at the syllable as the smallest possible unit of sound into which language could be smashed: syllables, moreover, saturated with the dia-lectical and lexical tics of national tongues. By the 1960s, sound poets were breaking up the sonic substance of human speech into the mi-nutest possible temporal particles, isolated, then violated from every angle, through the distorting effects of magnetic tape, and latterly, all manner of pedals, loopers, and computerised effects. Henri Cho-pin’s micro-phonetic “granules” represent the most consummate early realisation of this design - though poets like Bob Cobbing and Ernst Jandl achieved similar affects “unplugged”.2 Since then, sound po-etry has climbed even higher into the non-semantic rafters of speech; while most first-generation sound poems, like Henri Chopin’s Sol Air, worked from written scores, more recent exponents like Phil Minton or Dylan Nyoukis, who in the last couple of decades, certainly in the UK, have increasingly come from musical rather than poetic back-grounds, have developed more exclusively spontaneous performance methods. What sound poetry of the 60s shared in common with early20th century “phonic” poetry was a desire, entertained either as an allegorical possibility or an urgent practical task, to strip the polluting traces of subjective semantic inference from the poetic voice. This was often rooted in the sense that these smears of selfhood were microcosms of the broader cultural character that had ordained various kinds of military misadventure and bloodshed on an exponentially massive scale for several decades. Most Dadaist sound poets were reacting at some level to the First World War. There is an interesting unwritten article on how many sound poets of the 50s and 60s – Henri Chopin, Sten

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Hansen, Bob Cobbing, Edwin Morgan – had lived through the Second.

It’s the terms on which sound poetry can justify its existence, both aes-thetically and morally, that I’m initially interested in considering here.

To some extent, for all the politically and philosophically suggestive gloss-ing of its methods, sound poetry was a response to events within a closed-off world of poetic production: a reaction to a perceived deficiency in the scope of “mainstream” poetry in the developed West circa 1960 -- though the movement really took off in Britain and North America in the 70s.

The sound poets’ implications were twofold: firstly, that poets had ne-glected the sonority of the human voice as a tool of unmediated poetic expression, in favour of written texts containing semantically plotted epiphanies-in vitro, designed to be activated by solitary readerly encoun-ters with serried columns of graphemes; secondly, that poets had satu-rated their perceptual world with the ideas borne out of these rows and ranks of writing -- all statements and negations, yesses and nos -- to such an extent that the supposed revelations unfurled between the top left and bottom right of the page were in reality no more than buried ideas dug up, the poet’s own cognitive secretions, discharged onto the surface of the world and then scooped out from it as if they were self-generated, primordial truths. In other words, by replacing speech with writing, po-etry had replaced the pre-rational, material truth, or maybe actuality, of vocal utterance with the self-referential pseudo-truths of grammar and lexicon. By this logic, the value of sound poetry’s re-introduction of the material substance of speech lay not only in liberating language’s sonic dimensions -- its flesh and bone – but in thereby leaving poets and their listeners in no doubt that what was being uttered was a material sub-stance: a product of its time and space, rather than a sign for an idea or thing impervious to their influence: God, human nature, or whatever else.

The world at large could still use arguments about language like these, but when they’re just fired backwards at the artistic community they grew out of, they seem more vulnerable to criticism. After all, most de-cent poets have thought about language for a bit. They know roughly what it is and how it works; that it can be self-serving and mendacious. Most interesting poets work with and through the material qualities of their language (the way words look and sound) to advance its semantic sense, rather than trying to quash those dimensions. Any old line of Ge-rard Manley Hopkins is enough proof that language isn’t plunged into an auditory vacuum the moment it’s written down in sentences. The idea of a straight choice between sonic and semantic expression is actu-ally a fairly silly one, which makes linguistic rationality into a bogeyman rather than crediting their co-extensive nature. In this case, sound poetry might stand accused of both conjuring a convenient aesthetic opponent out of thin air to justify its place in the art world (which is just mercantile

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or fatheaded) and also of being less sensitive to the relationship between sound and sense than the art-forms it critiqued, drastically limiting the possibilities of its own expression by turning words into the enemy. Maybe it also put too much faith in unmediated sound as a feasible or profound idea. Besides the annoying messianic persona you tend to develop if you think you have found the hidden secret of artistic cre-ation, if you strip away every level of inter-reference and appeal to sensory habit from what you’re doing –everything which says “this is art, and it’s conventional and generic” – what you are left with is not pure art but no art: just the world as it was before you did anything.

But sound poetry does not need to justify itself on these terms. It could easily start out with a less grandiose proposal like “sound poetry is an art-form for people who like poetry and music, and like their music to be a bit like poetry, and their poetry a bit like music” Sound poetry is for people who feel happier making textural rather than syntactical as-sociations between chunks of speech, perhaps simply because of the shapes of their brains: people who when they were kids didn’t have favourite stories but favourite songs or phrases. When I was about six I used to spend whole days walking round with single phrases from books running through my head on loop. The one that comes to mind now is “scalesome flailsome tail”, from Kipling’s Just So Stories:

Then the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake uncoiled himself very quickly from the rock, and spanked the Elephant’s Child with his scalesome, flailsome tail.

I would recite the end of that line over and over again in my head, in so doing rendering it something in-between an external percep-tual object to be played with, and an extended bodily habit. I might have had a pictorial image associated with the phrase in my mind, a flailing streak of fire, spine and gristle, but I think its more likely that my pleasure in the phrase had to do with the purely sonic distinc-tions between its three stressed beats – the “sc”, “fl” and “t” of “scale” “flail” and “tail” - highlighted against their common convergence in “ail”; also the rhythm generated by the shifting fronts of the first two words - “scale” and “tail” - against the self-effacing repetition of “some”, and then the sense of rhythmic and modular closure in the single beat of the third word: ‘tail’. Say it like this: dumda dumda dum (rest), Scalesome flailsome tail (rest) Scalesome flailsome tail (rest) Scale-some flailsome tail (Etc). At one level sound poetry is just grown ups doing the same thing: making poems which stress the musical dimen-sion of speech at the expense of the semantic dimension, just because they like it, not because they think it’s aesthetically or morally better.

But that’s not all. The argument I want to offer in support of sound poetry as a moral rather than just recreational undertaking is rooted in

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the idea that just because you don’t know how to fix language doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with it. As I began by saying, whether as an allegorical exercise or practical undertaking, most sound poets were interested in the idea of a world without the chimerical truths of se-mantic grammar and syntax, which seems, after all, to be a world of speciously justified punishment, reward and physical aggression. This would be a world where subjective moral sentiments were not mistak-en for divine prophecies, and bloodthirsty acts were not carried out to impose solipsistic neuroses on external reality. I don’t know how many Americans think God speaks in English, but it might still be enough to make clear that the world hasn’t yet outgrown the need for that point to be made. Sound poets wanted people to be able to speak in a language of genuine truthfulness. Let’s suppose this was not the cover for a liter-ary/artistic in-fight but a genuine sentiment. The trouble was not this desire itself, but the fact that they declared themselves to have achieved it. For example, the tactic Bob Cobbing used to try to effect this aim – at least as he explained it in some of his writing on his own work, which often belied the more subtle and complex relationship with language which the work itself reveals – was to strip away every level of semantic and phonetic habit from the voice to reveal the untrammelled, benevo-lent expression of the human spirit. Perhaps this is a sort of a romantic idea, sort of Rousseauian. The trouble is the point at which anyone claims to have reached this state is the point at which they start making the most blinkered subjective assertions. In mistaking a new subjective expression for an objective one, sound poets make the same mistake of which they accuse the lackies of grammar. Ian Hamilton Finlay, an anomalous figure within 1960s concrete poetry, is partly making this point in a piece from The Third Reich Revisited in which an imaginary neo-classical Nazi totem pole is inscribed with a ‘barbaric semi-abstract ‘concrete’ poem – reminiscent of the ‘sound poems’ of the 1960s’ as a symbol of cultural power hollowly justified. (Finlay’s complex relation-ship with Nazi aesthetics, however, manifests itself in an affixed asser-tion that his poem’s composition out of German military abbreviations generates a Nazi cultural cipher of more depth than the ‘virtually mean-ingless neo-primitive ‘Aztec’ (etc.) cast concrete totem-like structures in the new towns of Britain in the post-war period’. This suggests a more nuanced critique - both of Jandl-esque wailing and fascist classicism.)

This is not an argument against sound poetry, or against poetry with progressive, even utopian aims, which are probably the only aims worth having – although there is undoubtedly a tradition of work in Britain which grows definitively away from “avant-garde” concrete and sound methods via such inductive explorations and critiques, of which Fin-lay, the Tarasque Press poets and Thomas A. Clark are good examples. It’s rather an argument against thinking you’ve achieved them, thereby reducing a desire which should generate a perennial process of disin-tegration and recapitulation of all the different grammars of thought,

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to pragmatic self-justification for the sake of a coherent “oeuvre”. The message to imbibe might be to keep on trying to get language right, whilst in another chamber of your brain pre-emptively assuming this is impossible: not as a metaphysical sub-position for all time, but as a re-sponse to the world as we now find it. Maybe this is a religious position, maybe it’s a political one. It strikes me as a humane one at any rate. “Try again, fail again, fail better”, as Nick Clegg said. Or Dustin Hoffman.

To end on a slight tangent, I want to talk about two contemporary artistic projects, one based in Edinburgh the other in Glasgow, which work in different ways with the legacy of sound poetry whilst seeming to hold the above drives in the correct balance. The first is the Edinburgh based mu-sic group Usurper. For some years, the mainstay of members Ali Robert-son and Malcy Duff ’s performances has been quiet, finely textured non-linguistic vocal performance complemented by a fabric of intricately accented noises created by amplifying non-musical household objects (this second element of their work is perhaps visually stimulating above all else). However, in recent performances, this has increasingly been combined with a form of introspective pantomime, whereby a series of semi-improvised conversations on the progress of a set throw its motives and results into sardonic relief. One recent performance in Edinburgh featured Robertson gazing up from a table of miked up knives and books, to see Duff trying to talk through a mouthful of tape spools. Roberston viciously mutters “look at yourself ”, inciting a muffled murmur of pro-test. These performances are funny. They also bring much needed self-awareness into a mode of performance perennially in danger of being swallowed up in obscurantist proselytising on the ecstasy of free vocal expression – at one level, it is all a ridiculous failure – while for the most part not overly distorting reactions to passages of uninterrupted sound.

Usurper’s connection to a musical rather than poetic community speaks volumes about the avenues through which sound poetry’s tech-niques have been adopted in the last decade or so in Britain - Henri Chopin’s last performance in the UK was not at a poetry reading but at Dylan Nyoukis’s Colour Out of Space music festival. Still, I want to end by talking briefly about the most recent work of a Glasgow based poet, Peter Manson, a figure with tangential links to the liter-ary end of sound poetry through his involvement with Bob Cob-bing’s Writers Forum Group in the 1990s. Manson has been work-ing for the last year or so on a series of minute phrases presented together in large slews called Sourdough Mutations. Their interest liesin running several channels of cognitive association into each other via a single stream of writing which combines auditory, visual and semantic patterning to generate language at once allusively systema-tised and cognitively recalcitrant. These works are partly influenced, Manson says, by the “reversible” poems of the first generation British concrete poet Dom Sylvester Houédard: phrases which would read

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the same backwards and forwards, or mirrored, whilst also function-ing as pithy epistemological epithets.3 Some work as palindromes, like “drawn inward”, others through reverse symmetry, like this one:

In Houédard’s work, the visual symmetry and semantic transpar-ency together allegorise a sort of transcendental syntax, in which vi-sual and linguistic meaning would be synchronised in a consummate transmission of meaning. Manson’s work appropriates these utopian de-signs on language, but problematises them by scattering his visual and auditory motifs across lines which simultaneously approach fragmented descriptions, assertions and instructions. In other words, their different levels of sensory meaning confuse rather than complement each other:4

torn rain from alpine

hen and pineal chicks

tell all for laughter

press for allele

and livethrough

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These phrases are awash with auditory and visual ripples. The two syl-lables of “alpine” are swapped to create “pineal”, a trick repeated in less exact form when “tell all” is reconstituted as “allele”. Elsewhere, Houédard’s “deussnap” gets a lurid update as “sway hams”. Though Manson states that ideally one of these a’s would be an “e” to complete the reverse symmetrical effect, the point is surely that the system doesn’t have full control over the material. Language is attempted to be revivi-fied by a series of alternative patterns of significance, but these patterns themselves are frail, partial, and only fragmentarily applied. That’s why “sway hams” doesn’t mean as much to read as “deussnap”. Its also why “pineal” not only doesn’t get a partner word which shares its lofty conno-tations of Cartesian mind-body theory, but isn’t even placed next to the one it does get, instead jammed into the middle of the apparently random phrase “hen and chicks” - but it may not be random: chickens and eggs; minds and bodies; self-budding plants and third eyes. The phrases con-stantly throw up then shoot down new patterns of feasible cognitive syn-chronicity. The ambitions for language on display here are at once lofty and cynical; optimistic and pessimistic; utopian and bathetic. It is poetry, like all the best poetry, which is trying and failing to speak the truth.

Notes

1 “From Phonic to Sonic: the emergence of the audio -poem” in Sound Effects: Acoustical technologies in Modern & Postmodern Writing, ed. Adalaide Morris, University of North Carolina Press, pp. 149-168.

2 Larry Wendt writes well on the technical side of things, particularly in relation to the 1970s. See Larry Wendt, ‘Sound Poetry: I. His-tory of Electro-Acoustic Approaches II. Connections to Advanced Electronic Technologies’, in Leonardo, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1985), pp. 11-23.

3 Many of these are collected together in Dom Sylvester Houédard, Begin Again: A Book of Reflec-tions and Reversals (Brampton: LYC Press, 1975)

4 Peter Manson, excerpt from Sourdough Mutations, unpublished

Images

Sol Air is from Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: a Worldview, Blooming-ton, Indian University Press 1968.

The Finlay piece is ‘Hitler’s Column’ from The Third Reich Revisited, reproduced from Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer, by Yves Abrioux, Reaktion, London, 1992.

‘Deussnap’ reproduced from Haydn Murphy, ‘Dom Sylvester Houe-dard’, from Edinburgh Review 89 (Spring 1993)

Extracts from Peter Manson’s Sourdough Mutations will be published in the next edition of Dancehall.

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Dear Peter,

It’s on and off rainy here and I thought of you this afternoon. In the damp I wandered around some galleries and one of the works I saw brought to mind our conversation of the other night. I think you were saying that since, historically, the canonical forms of art strove for mimesis depictions were, traditionally, art by defini-tion. Hence, Modernism’s break with the past led to an attempt to throw off a history of depiction through anti depiction. I remem-ber you mentioned that it was language-based conceptual art that supplanted an object or image with a text explaining why this text is valid as art thereby demonstrating that the depictive image or object is replaceable by a statement and thus rendered superfluous.

It was the Michael Stumpf show at Sorcha Dallas that brought these things back to me. The show has a wonderful humor and gritty sensual glamour. Perhaps most emblematic of this was a mural in purple spray paint with a fuchsia haze, which made a polluted horizon along the base of an otherwise pristine gal-lery wall, a sort of vandal’s sunset. But the work that reminded me of our conversation was a huge black pendant hanging from the ceiling redolent of a corpse from a butcher’s meat locker, a jumble of letters making up: WHEN WE SLOW DOWN.

You said that Jeff Wall explained post-conceptual work as art that returns to the image or object knowing that there is a work of art that is without form and legislates the conditions un-der which all works are now made. But the Stumpf work re-minded me that this disallows the materiality of the word.

The key to Wall’s statement is that there are works of art with-out material form and that these are text-based work. But this is predicated on a particular relation to the word. One that Blan-chot would term an informational model of language. Here, the word’s materiality (its texture, cadence, colour) is discarded foran idea of the pure transference of meaning, language is seen solelyas a carrier of information as a means to explanation. Words are used as disposable husks and their func-tion is only to stand as a representative for something else.

What is it that makes me so suspicious of this desire to make things immaterial, let things dissolve, pretending that in the ideal there is no waste to dispose of, no slime, no material to decay? Why does it make me think of the capitalist who conveniently turns their back on the waste they leave behind? What is it that disturbs me about the idea that information can be unburdened of its conduit?

I wonder too about whether these text-based conceptual works affect-ed literary practices. The poet Kenneth Goldsmith describes concep-tual writing’s concerns as manifesting the tensions between materiality and concept.1 On the materiality side, traditional notions of meaning, emotion, metaphor and image become subservient to the raw physi-cality of language and I suppose an example of this is sound poetry. On the conceptual side the issue became the use of machines to drive the production of a poem such that it reflects various modes and struc-tures of printed text rather than the subjective position of the author.

Here the physicality of language is most closely related to the body that speaks. Reflecting this with a return to sculptural form we might look at a statement by the artist Trisha Donnelly who explained:

“I was sixteen and came to understand the object nature of [speech]. If you have words and they are said, then they are said and they stay in the environment like a load of mass.”

Stumpf ’s WHEN WE SLOW DOWN brought to mind these various aspects of the materiality of words. Rendered in steel and bronze the words’ physical presence is palpable in the space, and so we are reminded of our own corporeal nature. For when we slow down absolutely we pass out of language and into death.

Yours affectionately

B.

1 Goldsmith, Kenneth, ‘Conceptual Poetics’, A Week of Blogs for the Poetry Foundation (picked up once from Dundee Contemporary Arts)

The following are working notes towards an on-going study of architecture and omis-sion in Nic Jones’ treatment of Child Ballad #216, The Mother’s Malison, or, Clyde’s Water. The Child Ballads are accessible online at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/, likewise Christie’s Traditional Ballad Airs at http://www.celtscot.ed.ac.uk/ballad.htm. Jones’ textual choices follow most closely Child’s C-text and the ballad as printed in Christie’s (p.251), with some important omissions. The recording referred to can be heard on the Topic release “Game, Set, Match” (TSCD566), track 6. An Appendix to the article, below, presents the first 3 stanzas of the song for ease of reference.

JOE LuNa“...But sparE ME as I gO”:

NOtEs tOwarD a stuDY Of archItEcturE aND OMIssION IN NIc JONEs’ trEatMENt Of chILD

BaLLaD #216

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The effect of tragedy never depended on epic suspense, on a fascinat-ing uncertainty as to what is to happen now and afterwards: but rather on the great rhetorical-lyric scenes in which the passion and dialectic of the chief hero swelled to a broad and mighty stream.

– Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Make me a wreck as I come back and spare me as I’m going

1. structurE & stYLE

These lines appear as the pivotal point in the narrative of the Scot-tish ballad Clyde Water, as sung by the late second-wave revivalist folk-singer Nic Jones on his 2006 album of live tape recordings from the early 1980s, Game, Set, Match. The general situation of the bal-lad is described on the Fresno Traditional Ballad Index as follows:

“Willie wishes to visit his lover. His mother bids him stay, and curses him to drown in Clyde if he goes. Willie, trusting in his horse, goes anyway, but his lover’s mother bids him away. Return-ing, he drowns in the Clyde; his lover drowns as she seeks him”.1

The summary serves as a skeletal depiction of numerous and some-times disparate variations of the ballad known variously as The Drowned Lovers, The Mother’s Malison, or Clyde’s Water (Child #216, Roud #91), and locates the arc of the story in a combination of domestic tragedy and supernatural fatalism. In practically every transcription of the song contained in the ballad collections by Child, Bronson and Christie (the “usual sources” for British folk-song revivalists to which Jones refers in the liner notes to Game, Set, Match) some variant on this principle hinge, wreck, wrack or prey is presented: the protagonist William address-es the River Clyde as he approaches it on horseback, on his way to his lover’s bower, at once accepting and acknowledging his fate whilst

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implicitly challenging it by continuing on his journey. It is the emotional crux of the ballad and the most interesting site for the convergence of ballad structure, both in the “architectonic” schema proposed by Da-vid Buchan in his groundbreaking 1972 study The Ballad and the Folk, and what could be termed ballad principle or contingency. Amongst the varying collected texts of the song, the earliest of which dates from 1800, one of the most striking variables is the extent of William’s awareness of his own and others’ (his mother and his lover’s mother’s) actions, and, more interestingly, in the case of Make me a wreck…, of his own place in the self-constituting structural framework of the song that impels the protagonists towards mutual tragedy. By thus articulating his destiny in the course of the ballad’s dialogue, William speaks in a meta-language which transcends the narrative, dialogic code of the folk song’s composi-tion, reflecting on the forces that are themselves constitutive of “fate” in the ballad universe. It is this moment of self-reflexive clarity, which is simultaneously the most emphatic depiction of the mute determinism buried deep in the ballad psyche, that is a constituting dialectic of many, if not all, of the so-called “tragic ballads” in the British corpus.

The River Clyde itself is not, of course, the actual and pernicious agent of harm that will cause Willie to drown – it is merely the blank and pre-scient site of his destruction as prophesised and thus caused by the malison that his mother has inflicted upon him in the early stanzas of the song. This malison of the earlier titles of the ballad, archaic and obsolete for “curse” or “malediction”, is a word over-brimming with esoteric cultural significance regarding the schema of ballad composition. Such a curse is usually applied as a framing device, which, by its being either fulfilled or broken, sets the narrative trajectory for the ballad’s content and provides a dramatic boundary-situation against which the hero and/or heroine struggle. The closely related weird, also now largely obscure/archaic in anything other than its quotidian sense, encompasses at its semantically widest “That which is destined or fated to happen to a particular per-son…what one will do or suffer; one’s appointed lot or fortune, destiny” as well as the “fate” or “destiny” itself which is the wider “agency by which events are predetermined”.2 A malison could therefore be defined as the negatively directed articulation of fate against a particular agent - a mali-son or curse is not simply an hysterical condemnation, but a deliberate appeal to the fate that frames and determines the scope of individual life.

Curses, weirds and ineluctable fate are common currency in old Eng-lish and Scottish folk song, but are rarely, if ever, deployed indiscrim-inately; part of the structural composition of the ballads, as Buchan has shown, rests on these framing devices which arrange and spatially orient the singer’s narrative material in order to highlight site-specific “binary, trinary, and annular patternings” to produce remarkably com-plex and coherent finished oral performances.3 The Mother’s Malison as title, and more importantly the mother’s malison as the cursing

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element in the early stages of the narrative, whether named as such in the song itself (as it is in recordings of the song by Ewan MacColl and Martin Carthy) or not (as with Jones’ treatment) is thus both ref-erential moniker and a portent of the tragic structure of the ballad’s content. It yokes together narrative material and cultural, socio-mythic information, familiar to ballad audiences, that Make me a wreck… then both reiterates and responds to - the couplet acknowledges the harm to come whilst appealing passionately against it. The effect is heightened in Jones’ rendition in contradistinction to either MacColl or Carthy’s treat-ments by the omission of certain verses dealing with William’s off-hand refusal of offerings made by his mother in an attempt to keep him at home. Nothing is refused or heeded by the son in Jones’ version, and his reaction to the cursing therefore seems all the more childish and bellig-erent; the juxtaposition of his utterance at the river bank is couched in a reflective, gut-churning profundity not approached by other, fuller ren-ditions of the song, and his lament given gravity by leaving out the crude appeal to rational argument suggested by the verses dealing with a feud.4 The particular dialectical sense of agency encapsulated in the Make me a wreck… lines is rendered all the more pertinent by its location in Jones’ arrangement. Three sets of stanzaic frames of 6/10/6 quatrains inter-spersed with instrumental sections constitute a typical tripartite formula, and the lines in question taper down into the first such interlude after the 6th verse (or 3rd if thinking, as Jones does, at least musically, in 8-line stanzas), bounding the first third of the narrative movement to stand in parallel relation to the last 6 (or 3) stanzas, during which William’s lover Margaret goes through a narratively antithetical experience of rev-elation, departure, and reflexive loss that mirrors William’s experience of self-determinism overcome by sheer determinism. It is important to note that, although it is helpful to use Buchan’s investigations into ballad structure to analyse the texts from which Jones drew his material, what Buchan and other folk-song scholars study are the “source” singers from which ballad collectors took down words and music to be preserved for posterity. Their subject is the “oral performance”, whereas the revivalist performance is characterized primarily by a curatorial approach unavail-able to the source singers, who learnt songs through oral transmission. It is perhaps anachronistic to attempt an analysis of Jones’ rendition of the song that cites “framed triads” or “balances within balances” as important structural components – and yet his version of Clyde Water, as with other redactions from the standard source texts in his repertoire, displays a particularly acute sense of these relationships to effective bal-lad poetry. One of the most compelling aspects of the revivalist style was precisely this ability to re-produce structural concern as style, acknowl-edging a distance from an imagined authenticity by paying homage to necessity and aesthetics with the aggrandized and far more ornate sense of aesthetics necessary to establish a career in folk music in the 1970s.

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2. hIstOrY & cONtraDIctION

The song of the lover is at once the lover’s other lover. The substitute is to-tal and cannot be compromised, say, with the other lover. The other lover is not composed of the same desires as the lover, whose song, whether his or another’s, is the other in rapid oscillation between presence in the mind of the lover and absence in the traditional sense. The song and the other lover are never coeval, but displace each other and cancel each other. The song Clyde Water destabilises the neat dichotomy between oral and literary composition of which Buchan and other folk-song scholars are so fond – Make me a wreck as I come back / but spare me as I go has a liter-ary history far longer than the collected British folk song tradition, and through literary routes found its way into the canon of popular song that Francis J. Child moulded and which has since shaped all interpretations of British and Scottish folk balladry. The biography of the couplet itself is remarkable. Child, in his ubiquitous English and Scottish Popular Ballads, cites a mid-seventeenth century English broadside bearing the title of the Greek legend, Tragedy of Hero & Leander as the immediate source for the lines, the text of which can be found in a number of digitized ballad collections. Child goes on to say that “the original is Martial’s [‘]Parcite dum propero, mergite cum redeo[’]”, Leander’s desperate apostrophe to the Hellespont’s menacing surges as he swims out to reach his lover for the last time.5 The introductory text to the ballad in John Collier’s 1847 Book of Roxburghe Ballads credits Christopher Marlowe with popularising the Greek myth in his unfinished Hero & Leander of 1598: “Everybody”, asserts Collier, “will recognize the translation of Martial’s well-known epigram at the close of the second stanza” (here, as in a number of the variations of the song, the line is “Make me your wrack as I come back” and not the “wreck” that it later became).6

Child, in his notes appended to The Mothers Malison, or, Clyde’s Water, comments that “The conceit does not overwell suit a popular ballad”, presumably because the corrupted broadside influence, filtered down through the centuries from Martial’s epigrammatic eloquence, does not to his mind cohere with the oral-poetical tradition from which the ballads (should) spring.7 But it is the transcription of ancient Greek tragedy into the local and contingent ballad form through the lens of Jones’s strident, curatorial methodology that secures the sentiment all too suitably in the song’s structural dialectic. William has got his moth-er’s malison and knows that he must drown in the Clyde – the impos-sibility of his love’s fulfilment is at once both his cursed fate and that which impels him to take to his horse and seek out his lover’s bower in the first place. The very doubt (cf. the third line of the song, be-low) that is the originary impetus for the ballad’s narrative and struc-tural irony is also the impacted self-knowledge of failure that drives

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William to live as best he might, as within the laws of the ballad uni-verse he must, before the night comes on. Jones’ treatment of this partic-ular facet of Clyde Water’s historical patchwork of narrative influence is therefore couched in the same humane contradiction in which the song itself is drenched; his placement of the Make me a wreck… cou-plet as the framing element and crux of the first stanzaic unit serves to both unite the structural elements clearly under a banner of a reso-lute pathos (over-burdened by an overwrought tragic sensibility which it cannot sustain) as well as obscure the subjective agency of the in-dividual actors, leaving us thus emotionally localised but lacking the precise co-ordinates of blame, themselves abstracted out to the banks of the ballad’s historical mytho-functionalism. This is a lot like life.

Notes

1 http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/BalladSearch.html, 07/09/10.

2 OED online, accessed 07/09/10.

3 Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk, (Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1972), p.104.

4 The Duncan MS, as reproduced in Bronson, for example, has Willie reply O, a’ your cocks/hens/sheep/flocks I value not a pin to his mother’s entreaties before she eventually curses him. Child’s A-text has Willie refuse a comfortable bed. Jones incorporates none of these spats, lending his William a kind of pathetic na-ivety, safe in the company of his strong, expensive horse, until the point at which he reaches Clyde’s edge. The omission of the feuding verses also makes this opening stanzaic unit of the bal-lad structurally concomitant with the closing one – see below.

5 Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Folklore Press,

1956), p.186. Martial’s Latin is translated as “Spare me while I hasten / o’erwhelm me when I return” in the Loeb Classi-cal Library’s Martial (vol. 1, books I-V) at the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/stream/martialepigrams01martiala/martialepigrams01martiala_djvu.txt ), accessed 28/09/10.

6 Collier, A Book of Roxburgh Ballads (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1847), p.227. Everybody, that is, who is reading the Roxburgh Ballads as a literary prospectus of traditional broadsides, for presumably none of the source singers who gave variations on this line knew their Latin epigrammatists, or needed to, in order to produce an “authentic” sounding rendition. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, presents the couplet as part of the Symptomes of Love, and precedes the quotation with “Leander to his Hero, when he besought the sea waves to let him go quietly to his love, and kill him comming backe”, imparting another spoke of emotional affect to the lines, this time directed not back or inwardly towards fate or de-terminism, but out towards Hero/Fair Margaret. The Mother, the river, and the Lover, are all complicit – Leander/Willie merely the site of actual lived necessity. Perhaps the throbbing misogyny here is ingrained and historical. Also pertinent is Burton’s commentary on the lines: “’Tis the common humour of them all, to contemne death, to wish for death, to confront death”. Burton, The Anatomy of Melan-choly, vol. III, eds. Faulkner, Kiessling & Blair (Oxford, 1994), p.174.

7 Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, p.186.24

Appendix:

Transcription of the first 6 (3) verses of Clyde Water, as sung by Nic Jones on TSCD566, track 6.

Willie sits in his stable door & he’s combing his coal-black steedHe’s doubting on Fair Margaret’s love

& his heart began to bleed.Give corn unto my horse, Mother

Meat to my man JohnAnd I’ll away to fair Margaret’s bower

Before the night comes on.

O stay at home with me dear Willie O stay at home with me

Or in the deepest part of Clyde Water Then you shall drownèd be.

O the good horse that I ride upon Cost me thrice thirty pounds

I’ll put trust in his swift feet To take me safe and sound.

He’s ridden o’er high high hill And down yon dowie den

And the rushing in the Clyde Water Would’ve feared five-hundred men.

O roaring Clyde you roar so loud Your streams are wondrous strong

Make me a wreck as I come back And spare me as I’m going.

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cONtrIButOrs

EMILY DONNINI

Emily Donnini (born 1984, USA) is an artist currently working and living in Glasgow. Emily’s practice explores the room for fluctuation within the study of understanding through its simultaneous relationship to antiquity and contemporary methodology and technology. By working with information containers such as Internet search engine statistics, phonetics of languages, and the fringes of sound technology a disruption of proximities and distances emerges.

http://www.axisweb.org/mastars/emilydonnini

haNNah ELLuL

Hannah Ellul is an artist living in Glasgow, Scotland. She is also one third of Helhesten, one third of Psykick Dancehall Recordings and one half of team Dancehall.

grEg thOMas

Greg Thomas lives in Edinburgh, makes poems (sometimes), music (with Ben Knight and Hannah Ellul in Helhesten and very occasionally on his own) and is completing a PhD on Concrete Poetry in Britain from 1960-1980 at Edinburgh University, in conjunction with the Scottish Poetry Library.

gregcharlesthomas@hotmail.co.ukhttp://gregthomaspoetry.blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/wearehelhesten

charLOttE prODgEr

Charlotte Prodger recently graduated from Glasgow’s MFA which included a 4-month exchange at Calarts, LA.

She makes 16mm films, takes pictures, writes short stories and plays in the music collective Muscles of Joy.

http://www.gsamfa.com/2010/charlotte_prodger.php

JOE LuNa

Joe Luna is a poet and ethnomusicologist living and studying in Brighton, UK. His blog of testy fragments, gamelan rhetoric and remote healing vid-eos can be found at www.fallopianyoutube.blogspot.com.

cOrIN swOrN Corin Sworn is a visual artist living in Vancouver, Canada and Glasgow, Scotland.

psYkIckDaNcEhaLLrEcOrDINgs.cOM