Kenneth Goldsmith and Joan La Barbara
73 Poems
Brooklyn, USA: Permanent Press, 1993
[102] pp., 15 x 21 cm., paperback
Edition of 1000 signed and numbered copies
Kenneth Goldsmith’s third publication, 73 Poems, takes its title from the posthumous 1963 e.e. cummings book of the same name [see below], despite there being seventy-nine poems in the volume.
Goldsmith had produced a suite of drawings in the early nineties and a small publisher approached him with the idea of turning them into a book. He was enamoured with the cummings title at the time due to "its use of visual language—similar to but so different from concrete poetry.”
John Cage - who died the year prior to the release of this book - had previously set two of cummings’s poems to music, one of which Joan La Barbara performed on her album Singing Through: John Cage. Goldsmith had been listening to the record while making the drawings so when the publisher suggested an aural component La Barbara seemed the natural choice.
"We contacted Joan, and she fell in love with the project,” Goldsmith recounted later. "While she’s primarily known as an interpreter, she’s also a wonderful composer, and this was a chance for her to compose an epic work for her voice. I passed off full-scale reproductions of the drawings to her, and she set to work, emerging with a stunning interpretation of my poems. I couldn’t have been more delighted with the result. I had no input whatsoever into her music, so it wasn’t so much of a collaboration
as it was her interpretation of my works, which is the only way I feel comfortable working with someone else.”
The tracks on the accompanying CD range from ten seconds in length to 2:04, with only six surpassing the one-minute mark.
The trade edition is signed and numbered by both artists, and a deluxe version includes three 22 x 30-inch lithographs in an edition of forty-five, which retailed for $1500 at the time. The collection is dedicated to Cage.
Listen to the 45 second 64th untitled track on youtube, here.
"New-music mavens need not blush at failing to recognize Kenneth Goldsmith's name. Goldsmith is a visual artist who employs text (and to a lesser degree letters and numbers) as primary image. From Braque to Ed Ruscha, numbers, letters, and words have become by now commonplace. As to raw materials, in the event numerals and the alphabet, John Ashbery, Public Enemy, and Hallmark's rhymed-greeting hacks share in a common source toward, qualitatively, wildly disparate ends, or so one likes to think-call it elitist chutzpah.
The insert reproduces six of the seventy-nine poem-drawings serving as La Barbara's texts. As to the overage, Goldsmith, who immersed himself in the project so thoroughly as to lose count, opted for the wisdom of "Waste not, want not. " That's one story. The other, provided by permanent Press's Ellen Salpeter: In order to keep to the plan, the use of the foreground of one poem-drawing as background of another (with several exceptions), the project requires seventy-nine drawings. I take the claim on faith. Someone, somewhere, will explain a disparity better than 1. May Goldsmith's art so flourish that exegeses become the thing. The repros of the first and last poem-drawings reveal words arranged vertically, top to bottom, against offset word-shadows. Number 79 reads "BROTHER / LOVER / MOTHER / OTHER / SMOTHER / ANOTHER / UNDERCOVER," and number 1, "CRUDELY / LEWDLY / NUDELY / RUDELY / SCREWED ME / SHREWDLY," its background the text of 79, with 79's background I's forward lines. Isn't that delightfully clear? Don't thank me, it's part of the job. As these insert examples suggest, some of the poem-drawings fairly glow with sexuality, as do some of La Barbara's interpretations. Others engage in relative abstraction, as in 44's triangulated zeros, front and back, and 25's lone letter 1.
[...]
I've little doubt that the listener will be perfectly satisfied to hear La Barbara's vocalizations without the book, as stand-alone aural events. That said, for my own public and private needs, I judge the book necessary to a discovery of riches. La Barbara is simply brilliant! A personal favorite, number 45, a comically unpromising arrangement of zeros and ones, sounds like an incantation at the far end of a Tibetan nightmare. I don't exaggerate, nor do I select a particularly outstanding track-everything here is really quite remarkable. This one goes on the Want List.”
- Mike Silverton, Fanfare, Sept / Oct 1994
