Poets on the Radio
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Poets on the Radio
Montage over music:
Pejk Malinowski
Having been an aspiring musician as a kid, I found that also I could compose in radio, like it was a form of composition. Using music with voices, or just voice and environmental sounds in themselves, layering those in 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 tracks and creating what was like creating a form of music.
Ross Sutherland
Yeah, that excites me in terms of what you can do with audio. You can do the whole kind of split screen, like seeing two worlds at the same time kind of stuff that you can do really easily in cinema, but you also get the novelistic, like internal monologue voice that comes with fiction.
Sean Cole
Oh, I loved it. Yeah, no, I loved it immediately. I loved all the machines. I loved the excuse to talk to people. I really wanted to be on the radio, like I really wanted to be on the radio. And I just sort of had my eye on that prize.
Music ends.
Dennis
Okay, listen. I need you to hear this.
Under Milk Wood
To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
Under Milk Wood continues filtered under the narration.
Dennis
This is the narrator of one of the most famous radio plays ever. It’s Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, in its 1984 BBC production.
Now, narrators in radio plays usually provide us with context. They are there to fill in the blanks, cover big time gaps and help us frame the story. Is this that, though? Is this the work of a narrator?
Under Milk Wood
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood.
Dennis
Sure, this narrator is introducing us to the world, setting up some of the characters and the basic plot. But this is extra, right? The language and how it sounds is just as important as (if not more important than) what is being said.
Under Milk Wood
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
Dennis
This goes on for about five minutes before we finally get to a scene. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love this stuff. But what is going on here?
Under Milk Wood
Listen. Time passes. Come closer now. Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. (…) Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers. The movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big sea of their dreams. From where you are, you can hear their dreams.
Hard stop.
Dennis
What is going on here, of course, is that Dylan Thomas was first and foremost a poet.
Sean Cole
I feel like writing a poem is the craziest thing to do. Like, no one is asking you to do it. It’s not, you know… It’s like…It’s just… There’s no real reason other than you have to and you’re trying to… You’re just trying to call out into the universe and say, is anyone else there? And maybe making some radio stories is similar.
Dennis
This is Sean Cole. If you’ve listened to This American Life more than once, you’ve probably heard his name. Or maybe even his voice, sitting in for Ira Glass. As far as radio producers go, he’s pretty famous. What you might also know, but probably not, is that he is a poet.
Sean Cole
Poetry is a combination of painting and music.
Dennis
So, in 1936, a mere 13 years after the first German radio broadcast, the German writer, art and film theorist, Rudolf Arnheim, wrote that, quote,
“…poets should emphatically be brought into the wireless studio, because it is much more conceivable that they should be able to adapt verbal work to the limits of the world of space, sound and music.”
End quote. I don’t know more about the man than this quote. I don’t even know if the other stuff he wrote about radio was any good. If he expanded on this idea or not. In the end, if he turned out to be a Nazi…
No, I’m kidding. I know if he turned out a Nazi. Of course, I checked that. Three months before the Nazis came to power, Rudolf Arnheim wrote an essay about Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler’s mustaches. So, apparently, his friends advised him to flee the country, which he did, and he started teaching in the United States.
But other than that, I know very little about the man. I just quote these words, like, a lot, because, well, I’m a poet. And I’m a radio producer. And I feel like Arnheim’s statement somehow legitimizes me. Like, it gives me bonus credentials. It turns me into someone people should listen to when it comes to radio.
Also I’ve always just felt like the quote made sense. Like, intuitively, I feel like I produce radio as a poet.
Sean Cole
I think it does make me a better sound editor. Because I’m paying attention to the sounds of things in a different way. I’ll be cutting something. I’ll cut it, or I’ll write a thing or whatever. And it’s just like, I’m doing it, like… Kind of purely for the sound of it and the symmetry of it and how satisfying that is to me. And I feel like if it’s satisfying to me, it’s going to be satisfying to other people. Like, I’ll be able to convey that satisfaction somehow just by the making of it.
Dennis
This, I think, is exactly what is happening in Under Milkwood. Dylan Thomas was having fun, creating something that was satisfying to him. And that translates into the poetry of the narration. Caring about how something is said, not only about what is said. It’s not the same as forgetting the subject of it. But it’s also not being held hostage by it.
Ross Sutherland
A good poem tries to escape its own subject matter and my skills as a poet, it is that idea of escaping your own subject matter. I think it’s about having a perceivable door. Like, you know the way into a poem. You know where the front door is. It’s going to take you inside. But then, after that, it’s about this process of self-discovery. And kind of charting that through. And so you hopefully end somewhere completely different. For me, that’s what poetry means. And that’s the philosophy that I try to take into any other work of art.
Dennis
This is Ross Sutherland. He’s a poet and the creator of the amazing podcast Imaginary Advice.
Ross Sutherland
Imaginary Advice is a podcast built on digressions. So often, digressions do get added in. After a first draft. After a first draft of recording. And I kind of do allow myself to pursue other ends and stuff.
FX: Alexandeplatz, few seconds then filtered.
Dennis
I recently played this sound to a room full of radioproducers. Journalists, mostly. We were exploring what kind of knowledge can be unlocked if you focus on sound. The sound artist and thinker Salomé Voegelin, across her books, makes the case for sound holding a particular way of knowing. Whereas visual research requires distance, creating an detachment that feels like objectivity and gives us a false sense of stability. Sound is wobbly, fuzzy and full of doubt. We have to be in it to experience, there is no distance. She writes that the image sums up, but sound adds up. Sight makes us feel like we can grab stuff (which leads to all kinds of colonial thinking), but listening is always relational.
Anyway… one of the methods she uses to unlock the knowledge that is held in sound is through what she calls textual phonography: recording everyday sounds in words, freely associating.
Another sound artist and researcher, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, has a similar practice. Here’s how he describes it in an interview with Cathy Lane:
One of my current personal projects is called ‘doors of nothingness’; it’s about the thought processes that sound can trigger. I’m not only interested in recording but also in the field which makes things possible. I’m actually writing a lot, not on sound, or describing sound, but also the trigge-red thoughts that come out or stem from a particular audi-tory situation, such as a toilet, a train, sitting inside a café, a demolition site, or just in my office. (…)
Field recording in text. More and more I find sound not as a material but rather as a philosophical state.
Sound like a door of nothingness, where you enter and then see where it takes you. Sounds a lot like what Sutherland was saying about poetry.
FX: Alexanderplatz returns, then fades.
And now back to this room full of radio producers. When I played this to them, I asked them to write. And even though this sound is largely a field recording, something that exists out there in the external world, this sound took them all inside of themselves. Some were taken into memories, some into their future selve, some explored their darker sides. None of them tried to grab the sound. Instead, it grabbed them.
Ross Sutherland
There’s lots to be gained from kind of writing into the dark, really. And just like following a thread. And seeing where that thread takes you. Whether that’s by playing a series of word games. Or some other writing constraint. As a way of guiding you to somewhere new. And I think that’s been the practice that… Where things really clicked for me as a poet. Yeah, and it did turn into poetry… I mean, still into a kind of form of self-expression. But I think it was something closer to like personal divination. You know, you look into the fire and you’re just going to see what shapes are in there. And I very much like the idea of starting off with quite a kind of chaotic field. And then slowly drafting back from that until I found something that was significant inside it. Rather than how I was writing in my twenties. Which was to start off with something very simple which I meant and knew was true. And then just like endlessly complicate it. By adding extra like layers of like language and kind of words. Yeah, I think… Yeah, I much prefer the other way of moving backwards from sort of… From noise towards signal.
If you think about this and how you can also do this with sound… it feels like we’re not always using sound to its full potential. A lot of time in radio, sound is used to illustrate or emphasize the words we hear. Somebody talks about a boat, we hear a fog horn. Somebody cries, a piano comes in. That kind of stuff. Adding layers.
Sean Cole
The thing that I always think though about the difference between poetry and radio journalism. Or any kind of journalism. Is that journalism is a translation of madness. And poetry is a transcription of madness.
Dennis
This is Sean Cole again. And this might be an aside. But I think it’s important. I have nowhere else for it to go but here.
Sean Cole
I think that we turn to journalists for them to make sense of something of lived experience. And we also turn to poets kind of for that same reason but in a very different way. You know. I mean I feel like. People consume journalism so that it will organize. So to inform them and then to like organize that information.
And then people read poems, I think, for like a related reason of like this is what it’s like to be a human being on the planet earth and I’m glad that somebody else is also having this experience. But there’s another reason that I discovered recently why people read poems. And it’s for the same reason that they do drugs.
FX: Ambient music.
And it’s to expand your consciousness and the rigid bounds of reality that you’re having to live within every day. It’s to blur those lines and realize another way of thinking of a thing. Again it’s like I didn’t you you could do that, I didn’t know you could think that way, I didn’t know you could say that thing.
I think I’m looking for that all the time.
And yeah, everybody is insane. And it’s exciting to see the ways in which other people are insane.
You know Ginsberg said “don’t hide the madness” all that kind of thing. Don’t hide the madness.
I mean I think that’s just, genuinely… generally good advice.
Dennis
The madness exists. Not only inside of ourselves, but out there.
FX: Alexanderplatz.
Sound can lead us to it. What if radio can also become a transcription of madness?
A door, where you enter and then see where it takes you.
FX: Alexanderplatz fades into street sounds, filter sweeps away, street sounds continue.
The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote that there is “a meeting place between all the kinds of imagination. Poetry can provide that meeting place.” I think radio can do the same.
Ross Sutherland
I suppose that stuff may be… Well, one way I describe Imaginary Advice is I say, Well, it’s all about storytelling. But the building blocks in which I try to do that storytelling are quite varied.
There’s anecdotage and a lyric essay. A dramatic monologue or a poem. And on a good episode. On an episode where I feel like I’m sort of challenging myself. It’s usually at least two of those building blocks in conversation with each other.
Dennis
Whenever I quote Arnheim. I inevitably get asked what makes me a poet on the radio.
And I always give the same example. I like to record outside a studio situation, preferably outside of buildings as well. The recordings somehow feel more real and alive to me than the studio recordings do. As if anything can happen at any moment. And once I was interviewing someone who had a hard time coming up with the word ‘flood’.
She was wracking her brain for it. Which in the audio translated to silence. Or well. Ambient noise. Then a car passed. It was loud on the tape. Very, very loud.
FX: A car passes.
And then immediately after the car passed, she said flood. And I could have easily cut that car out. Like I could have now. But I kept it in. Because it was in conversation with… well the conversation.
FX: Street sounds fade into ambient music.
In his essay Diaries and Detritus published in Reality Radio, Joe Richman writes:
How do you bring the audience into the story and let them experience it for themselves? The key lies in the poetry of the everyday. A cough in the courtroom, a soft knock on a prison wall, a teenager’s prayer as she looks in the mirror. The stuff on the edges.
There’s poetry in escaping the dry interview, in finding a cough, a car that sounds like a flood. The stuff on the edges, which if we follow Voegelin, actually has no edges itself.
Ross Sutherland
So much great poetry is about playing with words. And then some amazing piece of serendipity happens. And you’re just like oh my gosh. And if I use that. Then that also clicks with this thing I said earlier
And that that kind of thrill is something that’s really present in the writing and isn’t necessarily always easy to feel in. Would you just have the poem written on the page.
FX: Ambient changes.
I feel exactly the same way about the collage, sort of. Like working with textures. And kind of finding meaning in bits of tape. To the point now where I don’t think I can go back to a more linear way of working.
Maybe it’s not that I don’t think I can do it. It’s just that like I just don’t think it’s as much fun. And won’t produce as good work.
Pejk Malinovski
I’m so grateful to have this other medium to work in. If I was only a poet. I would have probably killed myself by now.
No I’m so grateful I can go to this other place.
Dennis
This is Pejk Malinosvki. Who besides being a poet is also. You’ve guessed it. A radio producer.
Pejk Malinovski
There’s more money there also than in poetry. You know. Even though there’s no money. Or there’s very little money. There’s still more money than there was in poetry. So.
Dennis
So Pejk’s stories are among my favorites. Like the first one I ever heard was on a town in Texas called Poetry. Here’s the beginning of that piece.
Poetry, Texas
(Montage of voices) A little girl went crying. Poor Trey. Poor Trey. She had lost her dog. And someone thought she was saying poetry. And thought it was so cute they named it.
Even on the weather on the news. If there’s a storm. You know they. They call it poor Trey.
(Singing) We’ve got stars. We’ve got time.
(Montage of voices) We were kind of known as the Poetry Boys. There’s about six or seven of us. And we all hung together. And still today.
Poetry’s getting old. They’re starting to die off.
It’s difficult to know where poetry starts and where poetry stops now. Back in the day it was well defined.
(Pejk Malinovski) I found poetry on Google. I came across a picture of a water tower with the word poetry on it. Poetry, Texas. I’m a third generation poet. My grandfather was a poet. My mother is a poet.
And I’ve also published books of poetry in my native language Danish. I’ve been surrounded by poetry since childhood. And so the temptation to go to Poetry and meet the people there was too great to resist. It’s real. And it’s a metaphor.
Dennis
You could say this about most of Pejk’s pieces. They’re both real and metaphor. They’re both documentary and poem.
Pejk Malinovski
And it’s a philosophy of art I guess. It’s just about how you frame things. That’s what makes it art. It’s about how you frame something. How do you look at something. You can take an object or an image or something from one place and put it into another place. And then you have created art. Or you’ve created poetry.
It’s not really news I guess. It’s… Because that’s what Duchamp did over a hundred years ago. But I still think in a way that’s still a shocking revelation to a lot of people.
Who think that poetry has to come from inner turmoil and very romantic ideas of a suffering soul that bleeds their heart out.
But actually just like looking carefully at things. And then picking up something and bringing it back to somebody else and showing them can be a poem.
Dennis
Pejk likes to use other people’s voices. Both in his poetry and in his radio work.
Pejk Malinovski
I’m also extremely tired of myself. Like of my voice. Like I feel like that’s also what propelled me into conceptual poetry and found poetry, was this aversion towards my own voice. Like that I just get bored with myself very quickly. And I find other people’s voices more interesting. And ways of speaking more interesting than this idea of creating an original poetic language. Like some poets do. You know. Like they make up words and they create a certain diction or inflection. They sort of hijack language for themselves. I’m much more interested in the commonality of language and how we all share it. How it’s sort of like a work in flux. That we’re all creating together.
Pushing the question of what poetry can be. What is poetry? And how far can you take it out in that sort of conceptual and artistic practice, basically? Because that kind of taps into documentary work also… Like Duchamp’s Pissoir – that’s a conceptual real life intervention. It’s a ready made. So I see, in a way, language or stories in the same way as ready mades. Or as existing material that I compose with. That I’m sort of writing with people’s voices or stories. Both in my radio work and in my poetry.
Dennis
So maybe, well at the very least when it comes to Pike’s work, there is no sense in distinguishing between poetry and radio.
If, like Arnheim, we believe radio to be this “world of space, sound and music”: and furthermore, like Rukeyser, we need a meeting-place for all kinds of imagination, then it is maybe just a philosophy of art, an attitude to fold those two spaces into one. Have a multitude of voices in them.
There is a door right there.
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