Aural Aggravation

Mortality Tables – 1st November 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Spoken word is hard. I know. I’ve done it. I’ve been terrible at it. I’ve witnessed countless others be terrible at it, too. Spoken word is even harder as a prose writer. It’s just so difficult to hold an audience’s attention. This is why spoken word events seem to favour poetry: whether they rhyme or not, poems tend to focus on rhythm and to be brief, rarely longer than aa couple of minutes. And a lot of poets manage to memorise their pieces for performance, and poets who ‘read’ tend to be looked down upon in certain circles. It’s rather harder to memorise and recite a three-page slab of prose, and face buries in pages makes performing and engaging altogether harder. But worst of all, people simply don’t seem to possess the attention span.

Reading prose is hard. A segment of a story may not really work outside if its intended context, and a short story that only takes three minutes to read isn’t going to have much substance.

There’s a huge disconnect here: people listen to audiobooks but struggle with spoken word or anything that isn’t a renowned author or a celebrity voicing an accessible, pot-driven narrative.

William Burroughs told Philippe Mikriammos in an interview in 1984 that ‘many poets are simply lazy prose writers.’ He qualified this by explaining, ‘I can take a page of descriptive prose and break it into lines, as I’ve done in Exterminator!, and then you’ve got a poem.’

It’s true.

Chop your sentences down to phrases.

Cut your phrases down,

Down to their component parts,

Capitalise each line

– unless you’re e e cummings –

And lo,

You have a poem.

Burroughs had the advantage of recording his spoken word pieces and performing segments from his books in the 60s, 70s, 80s, when the medium was still comparatively fresh, and people had attention spans greater than goldfish, and had the additional benefits of a remarkable flair for reading and a truly unique voice. Here in the 2020s, it can be hard to attract – and maintain – any kind of attention with an audience. As I say, I know: I’ve done it, and I’ve been terrible at it. I’ve also been alright at it. I’ve driven people from the room, and considered it an achievement, because it’s infinitely better to have an impact of that nature than for audience members to fall asleep, or worse, forget the performance. The challenge for any spoken-word performer, be it in a live setting or in a studio, is how to grab, and maintain, the attention of any audience.

Here, Andrew Brenza reads from his book pod (ghosTTruth, 2023) with accompaniment from sound artist and electronic instrument restorer alka (Vince Clarke’s VeryRecords). Instrumental augmentation is the most obvious and immediate way of grabbing the attention. It transforms a spoken word work into a multimedia project, for a start, and moreover, the moment ‘music’ is involved, a whole new audience – which likely has no interest in spoken word – opens up.

His voice processed with a metallic flanged edge and epic reverb, and against an ominous organ droning ambient hum, Brenza becomes commanding, not to mention eerie in his delivery. This is the fine line all spoken word performers must tread, of course, but here it is felt acutely: The delivery can often overrun the work; style overtakes concept and content.

I find myself drawn into the delivery of pod – the sounds, the delivery. But engrossed in these, the content slips to become secondary, in a way. But perhaps that’s ok. ‘Intermission Meander’ provides a bleapsome interlude, and the narrative segments are vignettes, segmented scenes which are centred around image and concept rather than linear narrative, events, or characters. In this context, this release works. It is not an audiobook, but an audio accompaniment to a book. It’s difficult to absorb, but a successful project.

AA