Susan Howe / David Grubbs. Performance Retrospective

About

Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and three of literary criticism, Susan Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. Her recent collection of poems, That This (New Directions), received the 2011 Bollingen Prize. David Grubbs has released twelve solo albums and is the author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press). Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and he has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and Loren Connors, among many others.

Grubbs and Howe were brought together when the Fondation Cartier in Paris proposed a collaborative performance in 2003. Grubbs had been a dedicated reader of Howe’s for more than a decade, and the opportunity to work with Howe’s poetry and her voice immediately intrigued. The pair has since created four full-length works that they have presented widely in the US and Europe. Four CD releases have appeared on Drag City’s Blue Chopsticks imprint, and their long out-of-print 2004 first album, Thiefth, was released for the first time on LP by ISSUE Project Room’s Distributed Objects label in September 2015.

Tuesday, December 1:
Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007)
Frolic Architecture (2009)

Wednesday, December 2:
WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER (2013)
Moderated discussion with Susan Howe and David Grubbs

Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point the title poem from Howe’s celebrated 2007 book. The Labadists were a utopian quietist sect that moved from the Netherlands to Maryland in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. All that was to remain of it was a tree—still found in Maryland—known as the labadie poplar. Souls of the Labadie Tract presents a sound world of buzzing reeds and electronics in which individual poems appear with the regularity of grave markers. Grubbs’s chosen instruments for this piece include two species of khaen (Laotian mouth organs) that at signal moments fluoresce into a full ensemble.

Frolic Architecture drops the listener into a piece that germinates wildly from this most multiple and heterogeneous of Howe's collage poems. For long stretches, it is nearly impossible to separate Howe's real-time performance of her fragment-strewn text from Grubbs's further deformations, scatterings, and layerings. These aberrant vocalizations are placed in a landscape in which individual pitches pulse autonomously within thick chords: gravel and cicadas duet. Frolic Architecture is the most radical and abstract of Grubbs's and Howe's performance works.

Their most recent collaboration, WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER, originates from new text collages and prose poems by Howe referencing Tom Tit Tot, Childe Roland, Paul Thek, W.B.Yeats, and so on. In WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER, these texts are blended with the resonant sounds of Grubbs’s composition for piano and field recordings made in the near silence of off-hours in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.