University of Arizona Poetry Center

The Mix

Appropriation is an increasingly important element in the arts, as it can be in criticism. In a digital world, appropriation is known as sampling, and the inter-animation of language art with still and moving images, sounds, and theory and commentary is called mixing.

Paul D Miller AKA DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, calls sampling and mixing “Rhythm science”: “Rhythm science is not about ‘transparency of intent’. Rhythm science is a forensic investigation of sound as a vector of a coded language that goes from the physical to the informational and back again. Rhythm science. Rhyme time. Rough trade. Sound. . . . Sound is a product of many different editing environments, an end result of an interface architecture that twists and turns in sequences overlaid with slogans, statistics, vectors, labels, and grids” (Rhythm Science, 4-5).

“Music is always a metaphor. It’s an open signifier, an invisible, utterly malleable material. It’s not fixed or cast in stone. Rhythm science uses an endless recontextualizing as a core compositional structure, and some of this generation’s most important artists continually remind us there are innumerable ways to arrange the mix” (20-21).

“For the most part, creativity rests in how you recontextualize the previous expression of others, a place where there is no such thing as ‘an immaculate perception’” (33).

Spooky samples from Emerson’s essay, “Quotation and Originality”: “‘It is as difficult to appropriate the thought of others as it is to invent’” (68).

Conceptual poetry and its avant-garde traditions need to be put into an expanded field that includes media studies, performance studies, and translation studies. Beyond this, it needs to be brought into conversation with two other contemporary art forms with which it shares so much: 1) sampling and mixing, as pioneered by hip hop, and 2) video games and other forms of online, distributed living. In a sense, hip hop and video games can be seen as new forms of publication—as publishers—in which the subversive discoveries of conceptual poetry can be broadcast to the largest possible audience.

Sampling and mixing have a huge pedagogical potential: as a teacher, one can adopt these means to present audio, slide, and video material in the classroom in ways that are immensely appealing to young people. At another level, it’s helpful to note that the great works of assemblage during the modern period, like Pound’s Cantos and Schwitters’ collages, were mixes of sampled material—drawing students’ attention, in the case of Pound, to the artfulness of his sampling (“luminous details”) and to the pulsating rhythms of his mix. Likewise, by asking students to perform their own sampling and mixing, one can empower them to think about the media at their disposal as the means for a far-reaching conceptual art. With respect to video games, Johanna Drucker has argued that their nature as distributed tools for investigation by role-playing agents makes them prime candidates for the kind of archival mining that will produce knowledge and perspectives in the future: this sort of knowledge needs to be inflected by the subversive perceptual ethos of conceptualism.

Call for a Conceptual Criticism

This is a call for a literary criticism that looks at poetry in relation to the other arts of its time, one that sees poetry not only responding to other arts but also taking a partnering and sometimes a leading role in the artistic scene of a particular time and place.

In some sites, like fifties and sixties New York and California there is direct collaboration. In others, there is a participation in and a working out of a shared aesthetics.

During the postwar period, it was still common for poets to write not only path-breaking works of poetics (which continues) but also to write important art, film, dance, theater, and music criticism. Likewise, practitioners of these other arts also wrote cutting-edge theory and criticism for their own art forms and for other art forms—especially as the arts began an ever-increasing fusion, beginning in postwar movements like Semina Culture and Happenings and continuing in conceptualism, minimalism, punk, performance art, video art, hip hop, and digital sampling.

One of the impediments to aesthetic cross-fertilization has been the academicizing of criticism, which substitutes a certain kind of conceptual clarity and rigor for a more generous recognition of creative participation by practitioners in the arts. In visual art, for example, the exciting writing of the first fifteen or twenty years of Art Forum was done by artists themselves and, to a lesser extent, by poets. With the ascendance of a journal like October, the art historians take over. They have an interest in legitimating certain new art movements within the norms of art history, not in nurturing the cross-fertilization among the arts, which is what practitioners want. The same academicizing occurred in the shift from an emphasis on poetics in poetry journals in the seventies, such asCaterpillar, Io, The World, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Montemora, and This, to the instant hegemony of poststructuralism. It was a blessing and a curse. One of the negative consequences was that poetry was understood solely with reference to language and discourse; its life-sustaining relationships to the other arts of the times vanished from view.

Stephen Fredman