Gustave Morin

Two Canadian poets who often find themselves in various controversies in their native country will flee to the United States Thursday, October 26, for the second fall installment of Just Buffalo’s Small Press Poetry Series at Rust Belt Books. Both Gustave Morin and Daniel f Bradley are best known as concrete poets (poets who draw attention to the physicality of language, bordering on the graphic) who have their most recent works released by BookThug (Morin’s The ETC BBQ and Bradley’s A Boy’s First Book of Chlamydia: Poems 1996-2002). They talked with Artvoice in preparation for their reading here.

Artvoice: How does your concrete work inform your presentation of poems in a reading setting?

Gustave Morin: Wanting to use this huge, growing body of work “in readings,” 10 years ago I began presenting slideshows that specifically showcased the concrete, and I found it was quite simple to read “unrelated” poems in tandem. Out of that, other, perhaps more dynamic formats have evolved (use of popcorn machines, helium balloons, microwave ovens, pyrotechnics, etc.) but the slides have been one of the constants in terms the presentation of my concrete poetry. I try to find and then “shoehorn” equivalencies between various written texts and various visual texts, presenting both simultaneously. (Though not all of my readings are slideshows. I make decisions about how I will present each “reading” and very consciously attempt different things each time I “make an appearance” in the hope that I will perhaps eventually develop a reputation for this sort of unpredictable dynamism…)

What I think I am after is the creation of an experience for an audience that transcends the typical “here’s my book, and these are the poems I am going to read” type of reading. Since there is no money in this sort of “art writing,” and since I don’t have another “career,” I’ve opted to see the stage as a place where its perhaps possible to make money for this work. So far it hasn’t worked, but one day it might? That’s been “the strategy.”

Daniel f Bradley

Daniel f Bradley: A real basic point of why I love reading in public is that once I realized that when I was reading I was only making sounds pushing out of my mouth, my body and that generally these people here were in a situation where they (to a certain point) were prisoners of my sounds that I could and really should read/say/sound anything I want. Now, how this works into my visual stuff is I have done a lot of collage, and collage is a basic element of everything I do, so now at this point in my life as a guy who puts things in an arrangement I try to get as many levels and images out of my mouth in sound as possible. I try to move fast putting limited effort in explaining what I am about to say and try to present the whole thing from the beginning to the end as hunks and chunks of language that the listener can fade in and out of. (Actually John Barlow [who read in the spring installment of this series] said once to me that he expected people to fly in and out of his words so he’d try to build in a rhythm in the pieces so that people could float out of an image and drift back only to be hit out of the park again (a baseball image for you, USA boy). Now I’m not much of a sound poet sound chunk breaker so I have different tools to play with. I did grow up with the punk years of the early ’80s so I do try to go fast and go hard and if I’m making the corners okay (hitting the right words and getting the pronunciation out) I sometimes enjoy the view I get from the stage of all these people sitting very quietly kinda perplexed (sometimes I see mouths open) at what words are being shot at them—I live for small joys.

Gustave Morin and Daniel f Bradley “read” on Thursday, October 26, 7pm, at Rust Belt Books (202 Allen Street).