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“This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.”
–Harry Partch
I.
a gist (of origin) to say born Oaklandia on 6.24.01
later
child of deserts
“the dying gasps of the old West”
til in Tucson
Benson (three hundred people and eleven saloons)
& @ Albuquerque
in nights, long freight trains passing
antiphonal then
steam whistle 60 miles yonder
small garden : Phoenix : rising, then falling
books in Mandarin(parents who lost their missionary zeal)
trips to Kansas City & musical studies & jobs as porters
but at 14, he knew that it was SOUND
II.
what early music?
hymns
Chinese lullabies
Yaqui Indian puberty rituals
Hebrew chants
Edison cylinder records
Okie songs
(working the vineyards)
took a trashing from proper musical lessons in Los Angeles but
no
deep
&
abiding
tie
mother struck dead by a streetcar
father dead a couple of yrs
age 20 / alone from there on and ever
this young metropolis and trips to Philharmonic hall
triumphant love
a roll/hay roll with
lost
Ramon Novarro
(murdered by two hustlers four decades later)
always a love for the body
III.
with parts
p-a-r-t-c-h
study : history of tone
fifty-three tone system proposed by the Chinese in the first century
by Nicolas Mercator in the 17th
– microtonal mishaps in the west –
as if to say
just-intonational scales
then to New Orleans and New York and London and Malta
a return to
Li Po verse
on adapted viola
where do you live?
off a city street
and ten thousand houses among drooping willows
1930-1947 singing Biblical passages, hitch-hiker transcripts.
Why all the trouble?
MUSIC
“a language in itself”
IV.
Greek &
Noh
drama,
Japanese
kabuki
Mummer’s
plays
CREATION
dramas containing music, dance, mime, shouting, whistling, and slapstick
so early (to have known) so late (to have been discovered to have known)
V.
back from San Joaquin
(keeping music in hobo bundle)
at Big Sur
coast work camp
met Jean Varda
an understanding, as if to say we’re in synchrony
synchromy
for painters
always loving, loving, loving, loving
(men)
VI. BITTER MUSIC (DEPRESSION ERA SUITE)
– alpha –
convict camps, coast of magnificent
descend-
ings
CALI
down
black mountain to coast(line)
every starry
whiten
ed
ridge
clasp
coast road
in moves north
and east
return south to
– beta –
warm (to) sleeping bag
Pablo’s soup in hand
willowed sands
river’side
entihillion stars
“Why wander?”
gone away for-ever
in the eternity of infinity
& thumb my nose at tomorrow
– gamma –
Slate’s hot springs
long since
dead
an ownership a Bright Angel leads to the baths
on board to Big Creek (wink, wink)
evening campfire, San Simon
at Cone Peak
– delta –
at Ojai dry leaved pepper tree body
riddled white snaked water
in the blackness
an inky o-high oak
a beauty of hands stroke
VII.
August beach, ocean breath
Mount Diablo
sinking beneath the horizon
stay & move
to pass peak
with men
food and flops and “well-made chaps”
yes yes
all this
brazen talk
by creeks and woodsheds and more along side the highway
VIII.
to make:
“U.S. Highball,” hobo trip with music
going East mister? (plucked)
Freeze another night tonight
Stay out of Denver
It moves back and forth
Is that blanket big enough for two?
Chicago, Chicago, Chicago
end at Sparks division yards
IX.
in red-
wood
groves of
euca-
lypt
after several durations at Ithaca and Madison
for isolation, interview
founded his instrument workshop
“a philosophical man seduced into carpentry”
river camper
woodworker
“an acoustical ardor and a conceptual fervor”
tuning: total gambit of dissonance and consonance
X.
Orchestra at Gualala:
a. zymo-xyl
“exercise in hither and thither aesthesia”
with kettletop, oak block, on hubcap, wine and booze bottles
b. Gourd Tree Gong
twelve bells (exotic fruit) on eucalypt bar
& piece of aircraft bomber
c. Mazda Marimba
god of light sounds like the percolations of a coffee pot
d. Spoils of Wars
seven brass artillery casings hanging here “instead of
shredding young men’s bodies on the battle field”
e. Cloud-Chamber Bowls
chemical-solution jars from the university’s radiation lab
XI.
activation of investigation and interventions with Yeats
and enticement
HP: “I have read his prefaces—I love his prefaces, incidentally.”
WBY: “A California musician called a few days ago and is coming
again tomorrow. He is working on the relation between words and
music…. He speaks to this instrument.”
HP: “The minute I brought out my viola and sang, Yeats just loved it.
He’s not one for theory.”
the taking of Oedipus an opera written.
happily written here, the land of no there there.
XII.
compelled by kithara
Partch built a great lyre of 72 strings.
Orpheus’s lyre had three stings.
Timotheus (446-357 BC), who dared to expand the scale on the Kithara by
adding four strings to the eight approved of by Pythagoras was driven out of
Sparta forever.
“These days, when someone does something different, they ignore him to death.”
XIII.
intoned dialogue god, then help us assemble
by way of chorus
Oh— Oh— Oh— Ah— Ah— Ah—
in way of supplicant’s branches
with such cries of sorrow
good news of lights, curtains
suffering in homeless sea, thunder, lightning, lost to
as “death himself is dead”
Tiresias, presented by spokesman,
regales Creon
anger of mattering, basest of men,
a filling
this rage
against
evidence of
proof?
a tumult of iron, prophets forgotten
Oh- Oh- Lo- Oh- Lo- Oh-
where is Bold Oedipus?
(quick sketches by Lebrun, Baskin, Kolwitz)
appointed end, free from pain
XIV.
euphoric
aside
warehouse
descending
narrow
stairway
in scene six from 1956
baroque leaps
“Anyone can dream of bringing control to a Sausalito love affair.”
but only the witch can accomplish it.
XV.
back from Urbana:
Ancient Chorus in “Revelation in the Courthouse Park”
this palace
alights to be seen by
piccolo
transient
(Dionysus, Pentheus, Agave, Cadmus,
Tiresias, Guard, Herdsmen, and Chorus)
Greek melodrama arrived in
rural Illinois
kithara & instruments
here, on the seventh day,
petals
fell on
Petaluma
in voiceless score
XVI.
west Los Angeles boulevard:
chromelodean, counts six 2/1 harmonium
collapsed
a monophony: the might of the HUMAN e-a-r
the breeze as perceived by Marin Mersenne, on the throat.
equivocation of the klang
in components of tone
in ratios,
cycles
in intervals,
immediacy
in frequencies
systems
in procedures,
limits
tasks to Pasadena Museum
All to be tasked by “Delusions’ Fury,” chance dramas on stage.
HP: I would choose to be anonymous.
Who cares who wrote it?
Who cares what the name was?
XVII.
The Dreamer that Remains
Viet’s time
soul’s chance, five decades apart, was Stephen Pouliot
“turn left on Orpheus Drive, left on Sunset”
in this small town
Pacific, a sexy beach
where, to find
Peace
Love
stairway’s chant
volcanic Harry: looking down, laughing
Etruscan touchstone
XVIII.
how to see him, on film, all too late
kimono purple
Partch sees
a loss of rose petal jam
a harmonic convergence
in this study for loving (underwritten by Betty Freeman):
in red/yellow/pale blue tank tops & jeans
a set of constructions to hold beautiful boys
in floating atmosphere of white
at San Diego State
“tongue must couple with the cavity or there’s no resonant tone. yes, this is sexy.”
XIX.
and with Lou Harrison
stackside, found each other in the SF public library
clearing house for books, for s-x years
to speak to each other.
mentorship. of generosity. and. of knowing.
teased about inflexibility of his “systems”
hosted in redwood park
XX.
1974: back again: Genesis of Music springs from the Dreamers creation.
“Note: the widely current practice of using the word note to indicate amusical sound, or pitch, is not followed in this work.”
final interview after interview, lost road, the sign ever propped before
generation of youth
LISTEN TO THAT
pied piper
red-lamped night
shaded Socrates
looking out, a letter to the world, in this enclosure.
“I went outside. I’m still going outside.”
Stephen Motika is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman (2009) and the author of the poetry chapbooks Arrival and At Mono (2007) and In the Madrones (2011). His first book, Western Practice, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2012. Recent work has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Eleven Eleven, The Boog City Reader 4, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. A 2010-2011 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident, he is the program director at Poets House and the publisher of Nightboat Books.
