PennSound Daily

[S]ound is movement. It interests me that the words "momentary" and "moments" come from the same Latin: "moveo, to move. Every statement exists in time and vanishes in time, like in alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy's famous statement about music: "When you hear music, after it's over it's gone in the air, you can never capture it again." That has gradually become more of a positive value to me, because one of the great things about the moment is that if you were there in that moment, you received that moment and there's an intensity to a moment that can never be gone back to that is somehow more memorable. Like they used to say, "Was you there, Charlie?" 

Kerouac said, "Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time." And I can’t resist putting next to that my favorite statement by Maurice Blanchot: "One can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing." And that’s not a paradox.

"Old Angel Midnight" is only the beginning of a lifelong work in multilingual sound, representing the haddalada-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight no matter where I live or what I'm doing, in Mexico, Morocco, New York, India or Pakistan, in Spanish, French, Aztec, Gaelic, Keltic, Kurd or Dravidian, the sounds of people yakking and of myself yakking among, ending finally in great intuitions of the sounds of tongues throughout the entire universe in all directions in and out forever. And it is the only book I've ever written in which I allow myself the right to say anything I want, absolutely and positively anything, since that's what you hear coming in that window... God in his Infinity wouldn't have had a world otherwise — Amen."

Born 1953 in Oklahoma, grew up in NYC suburb (of Connecticut) and a few years in the Midwest. My father sold carpet and made a science of non-communication. Seven brothers and sisters, most of them difficult. Learned about modernist poetry and how to read same when a house painter came down off his ladder one afternoon and explicated a Wallace Stevens poem in the anthology I was reading, circa age 14. Studied European history at Penn State. Wrote poetry beginning late teens. Active in radical politics. The most interesting person I’ve met was a threadbare and anonymous gentleman who one afternoon in the late 80s appeared to give me an impromptu, room-by-room tour of the Art Institute of Chicago, then the architectural treasures of the Loop, full of ingenious explanations and insights, before vanishing around a corner. I believe this was Louis Sullivan’s ghost. Recently I stopped watching television.