Every mark on paper an acoustic signal

By David Grubbs

I’ve taught collaborative art-making with graduate students for two decades, and much of what I’ve learned has never struck me as broadly generalizable. My preferred approach to writing about working collaboratively has been to start with a close descrip­tion of individual projects and the dynamics of collaborative relationships. The question is less What can I say? and more Where should I begin? Through an inductive process, I imagine writing my way into a better understanding of the subject.

What prepared me to teach collaboration? (Who said that I was even prepared to teach collaboration?) From an early age, there was playing in bands and then reconsidering the model of the band. Performing music in improvised settings, often with fleeting combinations of players. Working with visual artists under the umbrella of a music group—quasi music-group, or music group plus something else—and then working with artists outside of predominantly musical contexts to create sound compositions for sculpture, installation, video, and more. Toggling between but also combining—working to hybridize—spaces of performance and exhibition. Teaming up with writer friends, with a predilection for poets, to create recordings and performances.

I frequently have the sense that no matter how long I wind up working with a given individual, we’re pursu­ing the consequences of a first conver­sation—we follow threads and develop themes that have been present from the start. At least I find myself wanting to believe this. Perhaps it’s from a conviction that much is contained within a single conversation and that its interpretations are subsequently hashed out over months, years, or decades of collaborative work. The intensity accorded to preliminary conversations or, as a musician, first opportunities to perform together, nominates even seemingly incidental details, sensations—everything that burns into memory, everything that’s rehearsed such that it becomes memory—as shared repertoire.

When I first met Susan Howe, we had been tasked with creating performance works based on her poetry, and she was kind enough to make the trek to my apartment in Brooklyn. A basic question at that first meeting: “Why add music or sound to Susan’s work, which is already sonic?”

In that conversation, we talked about how we might realize a perfor­mance that could be something other than a poetry reading with musical accompaniment. About avoiding a clear demarcation of foreground and background, of music or sound composition cast in what’s understood to be a supporting role. We found ourselves listing memorable disap­pointments with the sonic dimension of poetry readings, one category of which sees writers put their heads down and plow through texts, their eagerness to be finished apparent to all. I recalled one reading that had been recommended to me because of the centrality of music to the poet’s practice. At the event I marveled at the flatness and sameness and rapidity of the delivery—the narrow range of its aural effects—and realized that the writer’s work had been recommended not because of the musicality of its language or the potential for that to be instantiated in a reading, but rather because of the way that it thematizes music history and references structural conceits from music composition. A profound disjunction.

I likened listening to that reading to J.G. Ballard’s short story “Manhole 69,” which involves a scientific study in which an experimental surgical procedure enables its subjects to overcome sleep. The scientist responsible for the study imagines that the test subjects who no longer need to sleep will eventually settle upon a slower, steadier, healthier tempo compared to the rest of us who barrel through our days and collapse nightly with ex­haustion. He imagines and excuses in advance the judgments of these future humans upon the needlessly frantic lives of those who haven’t yet received his brainchild upgrade. Of course, in Ballardesque style, the people who stop sleeping none too gradually lose their minds and die. When attending readings, I have felt like one of the test subjects in “Manhole 69,” at least in the honeymoon period before things start to go terribly wrong. What’s the rush? Everything seems too fast, too compressed. The playback is pitched at the wrong speed. The tempo could be halved, quartered; it could be free to slacken or tighten at will, to get a kick out of navigating extremes.

Susan’s and my conversation turned to experiences we’d had in which, as a listener, one felt alive to an art of sound that wouldn’t necessarily best be described with reference to music. When speaking of relations among language and sound, Susan’s inclination was to add to the equation the visual appearance of writing so that, instead of hinging exclusively on the categories of poetry and music, the discussion soon pivoted around sound, text, and image.

The first examples Susan named as having meaningfully occupied this nexus were the sculptor Carl Andre’s poems and Agnes Martin’s paintings that incorporate a single word of text. I noted that the question I’d asked about works that function—works that succeed—through a multiplicity of effects, including the sonic elicited examples from Susan that need not be sounded, and indeed would more conventionally be described as silent. The example she alighted upon that seemed the most apropos of our task was a reading by John Cage that Susan had seen at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project’s annual New Year’s Day Marathon on January 1, 1976. Cage read excerpts from Mureau—a mesostic work based on the journals of Henry David Thoreau—to an extraordinary hush in the midst of what throughout the day had been an intermittently carnivalesque atmosphere. Cage’s reading made a profound impression on her—in its nuance, in its alien musicality, in what it asked of its audience, and in how its audience responded with an attentive­ness to every word, and even beneath the level of the word, with Cage’s vocalizations of isolated vowels and consonant clusters, and the at-times-lengthy silences between utterances. As a performance it was both impos­sible and unnecessary to classify as music or literature or theater. Susan didn’t hesitate to describe it as one of the finest readings she had ever seen. Or heard.

Much as Susan could point to the 1976 St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading as a signal moment in her relation to sound and performance, I was able to point to a reading of hers that for me prompted a similar kind of admiration and reconsideration of an artistic practice that I thought I knew well. In 1993, Susan came to the University of Chicago to read from her then-recent book The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. The Birth-mark is Susan’s second published volume of literary criticism, coming after the influential My Emily Dickinson, a work of feminist criticism that lays out the history of male editors’ decisions in preparing versions of Dickinson’s poetry for publication. It’s a work that inaugurated a reappraisal of Dickinson’s art through the close study of her manuscripts, but also one that testifies to Howe’s ardor for im­mersing herself in archival materials, a passion and a commitment that inflects the breadth of her writing.

The main thing I recalled about her reading from The Birth-mark was my disbelieving ears. What was I hearing with her abrupt darting into and out of poetry? Readers of The Birth-mark encounter numerous such unantici­pated junctures, various hidden seams, but the experience differs in kind between reading and listening. Here’s an example from the chapter titled “Submarginalia”:

Many out-of-the-way volumes, especially books about the Puritan Revolution in England, and books by and about Puritans in seventeenth-century New England are my darling studies, and I used them while I was writing these essays

scattered by the fratricidal Enlightenment

she turns the tables without rejecting Abraham Isaac Jacob. That kind of adoration. The time is autumn morning evening. To collect an error in the shelter of theory send disciples soon.

In some ways, I find this to be Susan’s poetry at its most potent, most jarring—when it emerges from otherwise clear and transparent prose, when it suddenly flares up. In its printed form we see the line break that marks the abandonment of a para­graph in mid-sentence; the resulting isolated phrase then enjambs with a paragraph of a heightened, poetic language from which punctuation has largely disappeared. A different sort of transmission breaks into the channel.

Surprising though this kind of interruption may be when encoun­tered on the page, I experienced it as more disruptive and strange in Susan’s reading. The eyes can see trouble up ahead, can take in at a glance when a paragraph lacks a final period, and can in a flash make meaning of un­expected capitalization or a decision to eliminate punctuation. In the above excerpt, the switch from the first to the third person makes more sense to the eye than to the ear as the lower-case “she” that follows the isolated phrase “scattered by the fratricidal Enlightenment” appears as if collaged from a different source; to the listener at Susan’s reading, the shift is more inexplicable. These distinctive transitions suggest a threshold. But rather than a decisive crossing over or change in state—not the transition to the underworld in Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus, in which Orpheus dons rubber gloves before plunging his hands through a mirror (gloves to protect actor Jean Marais’s hands when dipping them into a tub of mercury)—these threshold experiences are those of crossing but also quickly re-crossing, entering and hastily exiting, hesitating, hovering, twisting, flitting. These unexpected stylistic shifts in Susan’s reading from The Birth-mark appeared without preamble; in her presentation there was no warning, no disclaimers about hybridity—just the text and her extraordinary delivery. Every time she shifted from the more straightforward critical prose into language of a greater intensity, language undergoing a rapid change in pressure, I found myself attending closely to the language—experiencing the pleasure of so doing—and never taking for granted its function. These transitions never calcified into a technique. Years later, at our first meeting, Susan modestly accepted the compliment.

The final example that Susan brought up in this conversation had to do with a remark that appeared in one of Joseph Beuys’s lectures. Three years after this preliminary meeting in Brooklyn, at a point by which we had created the performance works Thiefth (comprising Thorow and Melville’s Marginalia) and Souls of the Labadie Tract, Susan and I gave a talk together at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in which she referenced this same statement from Beuys. Thankfully, there’s an audio recording of the presentation, so I can quote from it—this mysterious statement from Beuys I’ve heard Susan refer to several times but that I don’t believe has appeared in her published writings. Addressing the impact on her work of the sonic potential of writing, she offered:

I just have to say that I’ve done a lot of work with manuscripts. Emily Dickinson, particularly, and I think her late manuscripts should be shown as drawings. . . . Beuys said one of the most wonderful things in one of his lectures that I always say now when I’m trying to persuade people about manuscripts. He said that “every mark on paper is an acoustic signal.” That is something I truly believe. Every piece of a letter, every shape of a letter, every word, how words are placed on the page, the minute you put a mark on a page, it’s acoustic.

Then she paused. It was a long pause. She gave the listeners time to reflect on the many things that could be understood by this curious formulation: “Every mark on paper is an acoustic signal.” What does it mean? Does it mean that any conceivable mark is capable of being translated into sound? Does it mean that each mark awaits translation into its unique, determinate sound? Should the emphasis in this particular quotation—“every mark on paper is an acoustic signal”—be the suggestion that encoded within visual imagery is the experience of duration? Even though we’ve discussed it on multiple occasions, I’m not sure how best to boil down what this phrase means to Susan, beyond expressing a commitment to both the visual and aural registers of mark-making.

At the lecture in Chicago, it was with this statement—a return to one of the details that resonated most strongly for me from our first meeting—that Susan concluded the introduction to her work. In the long pause that followed, like everyone else in the room she also seemed to be weighing its many possible meanings. It was an especially rich silence.

Image: Scott Webb. Courtesy Unsplash

This essay was published in the 2024-25 issue of the Berlin Journal.