{"id":110891,"date":"2017-05-15T17:02:41","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T21:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110891"},"modified":"2017-05-15T18:02:58","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T22:02:58","slug":"wax-poetic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/15\/wax-poetic\/","title":{"rendered":"Wax Poetic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fonograf Editions brings poets to vinyl.<\/em><\/p>\n

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To read Eileen Myles in print is, of course, to read a poet who\u2019s very much alive, whose aliveness seems to jump off the page. And yet to hear Myles reading their poems on vinyl\u2014the static and silence between poems, between lines, their voice quickly swallowed by the studio walls\u2014is a ghostly, lonely experience, like reading a trunk of old letters from the recently deceased. An ethereal dissonance lingers between the intimacy of the material and the distance of its creator.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe name for it is really great: acousmatic sound,\u201d Myles told me. \u201cThe notion of sound taken away from the signifier, which was a new thing when we first started making sound recordings. I think we forget how radical it is to have human speech taken away from the human body.\u201d<\/p>\n

We were discussing Aloha\/irish trees<\/a>, <\/em>a collection of their poems, new and old, released last May by the vinyl-only poetry press Fonograf Editions<\/a>\u2014a nod, Myles said, to a musical tradition of bootleg recordings. In true iconoclastic fashion, they refused to edit the album, to submit it to the glossy\u00a0production process that marks most professional recordings. In fact, they had already recorded the poems in a studio at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics before Fonograf approached them; they didn\u2019t know they were cutting an album at all. \u201cIt was like having your picture taken when you weren\u2019t posing,\u201d Myles says. Reading their poem \u201cSorry\u201d on the first track, they trip on the line \u201clet me hold your shoulders back so you look arrogant and beautiful\u201d\u2014restart, trip again, sigh, and mumble, \u201cFuck, this is so hard.\u201d They finish, but not well. \u201cI think I\u2019m just gonna read that one again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The recording captures everything: the mulligans, the false starts, the mispronunciations, the pages dropping to the floor, the sips of water. The last track on the album is nothing more than trees creaking in the wind, recorded on Myles\u2019s phone during an outing with friends in Ireland\u2019s Wicklow Mountains. \u201cI\u2019m gonna catch up,\u201d Myles says, just before the player stops. \u201cI have to pee.\u201d In a word, it\u2019s sloppy\u2014with purpose.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time I heard a poet whose work I liked, I would be deeply disappointed and appalled by their voice,\u201d Myles said, referring to their limited exposure to spoken-word records. \u201cGertrude Stein would sound like Margaret Rutherford in Groucho Marx movies. It was always about class. Everything you hated about poetry would be there in those recordings. The caste of poetry being firmly defended by shaky, tremulous, high-toned voices.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ironically, those same tremulous voices inspired the launch of Fonograf Editions. It was founded by the poet Jeff Alessandrelli, who, having graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with his Ph.D. in 2013, planned to move back to Portland, where he\u2019d completed his M.A. years before. He began the laborious task of packing up the hundreds of vinyl records he\u2019d accrued since he first began collecting as a sophomore in high school. His library included a raft of albums from Caedmon Records, the first label to publish spoken word with an album by T. S. Eliot in 1952. Today, Caedmon is considered the seed of the audiobook industry. Alessandrelli\u2019s collection included recordings by Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost, among others. Caedmon continues to publish spoken word as an audio imprint of HarperCollins, but its vinyl days are long gone. Which meant that Alessandrelli, who freely admits fetishizing the physical object\u2014\u201cit\u2019s not really the sound as much as the sensation of putting it on\u201d\u2014saw an opening.<\/p>\n

As he drove to Portland, he couldn\u2019t ditch the idea. When he\u2019d settled in, he bounced the idea off his friends, among them the poet Zachary Schomburg, a fellow Nebraska alumnus now running Octopus Books, a small Portland-based poetry press. They\u2019d all had similar ideas in the past, they told him, but never the time, and certainly not the cash. Alessandrelli didn\u2019t have the cash, either\u2014until his grandmother passed away, leaving him a nest egg just plush enough to kick-start Fonograf Editions and pick up where Caedmon left off. Weary to embark on the venture alone\u2014though it has since become effectively a solo project\u2014he launched the press in 2015 as a tentacle of Octopus Books.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a moneymaker, no,\u201d he told me of Fonograf. \u201cIt\u2019s a niche product for what\u2019s already a niche art form: poetry.\u201d Alessandrelli regards the label as \u201can act of community.\u201d He and his friends sat around the Cardinal Club and other bars, brainstorming how it all might work, scratching out a list of poets they\u2019d love to record: Dorothea Lasky, Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery \u2026 and Myles, whom Alessandrelli admired so much he\u2019d previously published a poem titled \u201cUnderstanding Eileen Myles,\u201d stood at the very top of the list. In March 2015, he got in touch with Myles, who, despite having never considered recording an album, signed on immediately. How would they avoid propagating the tremulous tones of the poetry caste? By not changing a thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think my whole poetry life and my whole reading career is <\/em>that, is creating a space in poetry for a comfortable apprehension of the human speaking voice, you know?\u201d Myles said. \u201cWhich is multiclass and multiracial and multigender. So I\u2019ve been there a long time.\u201d There\u2019s something more personal about Aloha\/irish trees<\/em>, as if they\u2019re reading just for you, or maybe for themself. It\u2019s more intimate than a live reading or a live recording\u2014something more akin to eavesdropping.<\/p>\n