In memoriam: Paul Dutton

Biography and Introduction to his Work from Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton

I’m sharing this here in memory of Paul who died in the early morning of Tuesday, May 27th.

This is from Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton, which I had the great honour of working with Paul on. It’s available in libraries and bookstores. I encourage you to check out all of Paul’s fantastic work collected in this book as well as all the other great work. His website is a great resource https://pduttonpoetry.wordpress.com/

I wish that there were some small errors in the following text so that Paul could call me up and correct me. I know I’m going to sorely miss those calls—as well as all the other kinds of calls (loving, funny, anecdotal, discursive, argumentative, compassionate, fulminating, supportive) from my friend.

Biographical Note

“His poems are extraordinary—full of puns, paradoxes, language probes . . . juicy and reflective oral-theatrics . . . an incontestably great innovator.”

—Henri Chopin, Poésie Sonore Internationale



Writer and oral sound artist Paul Dutton was born in Toronto on December 29, 1943. His formal education, with a focus on music and languages, concluded with second-year university, after which he continued to study informally. In the mid 60s he embarked on a literary and performance career, acting in amateur theatre, placing his poetry in literary magazines, and singing traditional British folk music in coffee houses. In 1970, after briefly exploring solo sound poetry, Dutton joined with bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera to form the poetry performance group The Four Horsemen, whose reputation spread swiftly throughout Canada and beyond. Appealing to audiences in literature, music, and theatre, the quartet acquired legendary status in the course of its eighteen-year lifespan. It continues to be influential today. Indeed, The Four Horsemen Project, a 2007 theatre production based on The Four Horsemen’s individual and group works, won four Doras (Toronto theatre awards).

During his time with The Four Horsemen, Dutton continued his career as a writer and solo performer, in tandem with work in the book publishing industry as a copyeditor, copywriter, and promotions manager. He left the publishing industry in 1986 to devote his energies full time to literature and music, while continuing with some freelance copyediting and writing-for-hire. In 1989, he joined the free-improvisation band CCMC, which has evolved to a quartet comprising Dutton (soundsinging and harmonica), Michael Snow (piano and synthesizer), John Oswald (alto sax), and John Kamevaar (percussion and electronics).

Paul Dutton has published six books of poetry and a novel, and his poetry, short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in a multitude of magazines, literary journals, and anthologies, nationally and internationally. In addition to his print publications he has released many recordings of his poetry and music in solo and ensemble contexts, and he has toured throughout Canada and across the U.S., Europe, and South America, appearing at literary and music festivals, in concert halls, galleries, theatres, clubs, universities, and high schools, on radio, TV, film, and the Web. He is considered among the world’s leading exponents of sound poetry and oral sound art. He continues to live in Toronto, giving local, national, and international literary performances, working on new poetry, fiction, and essays, and performing solo and collaborative free improvisational music in concert and on recordings.

Introduction

Toronto writer Paul Dutton is a surprising, witty, sensitive and inventive explorer of language and of the human, and over the last 45 years, he has created a body of significant written work: collections of text-based and visual poetry, short fiction, essays, criticism, and a novel. In some ways, however, these diverse and important writings have been overshadowed by his contributions to the iconic sound poetry group, The Four Horseman, and by his acclaimed solo sound performances. By gathering a representative selection of some of his most significant and characteristic written poetry, ranging from his first published “professional” poem, written c. 1967, to a generous gathering of new work, which has not previously appeared in book form, the goal of Sonosyntactics is to both celebrate and bring more attention to this inspiring work.



Why Sonosyntactics?



Sonosyntactics: sono as in sound, syntac as in syntax, tactics as in tactics, and syn as in “united; acting or considered together” (Oxford Dictionary of English), but also, syn as in synthesis: to combine a number of elements to create a new thing.

So, sonosyntactics: the tactical play of sound combined with syntax to create something new. It perfectly describes Paul Dutton’s poetry: sound, syntax, and inventive play. Like the portmanteau title of an earlier book of Dutton’s work, Aurealities, sonosyntactics is a neologism that evokes his willingness to (re)invent and stretch language and to listen for new possibilities. As he says in an interview, “the poem [is] something beyond myself, something other than a vehicle for my own thoughts and feelings, more a means of exploration and discovery” (Sutherland).

Indeed, Dutton often uses sound relations to create language structures that form semantic patterns and allude to meaning. He aims for the sweet spot between sound and grammar, between sound and meaning. “Thinking” is a good illustration of this:



Language shapes thought, not thought language. And language shapes thought not thought to be language-shapes. Thought not thought to be language shapes language, shapes thought, shapes shapes.

The paradoxical front-to-backward propositions beautifully demonstrate the hand-in-gloveliness not only of the rich and complex interrelation between language and thought, but between the organization of sound and meaning.

This is characteristic Dutton: an unfolding of a text through the “logic” of language play. Puns, paradoxes, ambiguity, and sound relations. Language games that delight in the intricate weaving of thought and language, sound and emotion, sound and sense. We think through language. We think through sound. Language thinks through sound.

In other poems, different musical elements may be more central. Dutton (124) writes that he composed “Jazz Musician,” not just to be about jazz, but effectively to be jazz, conjuring the music equally with rhythms and sounds as with images and verbal content, a fusion of subject and form.



Listen, for example, to the highly piquant syncopations that open “Kit Talk”:



mutter to tight head stutter at stick-tip pepper past rim-pulled skin held taut. got a little. got a lot. got a metal-splash sizzle as excess is, as is a zero’s eyes assessing assizes. put. put put. put. pause.



In the first sentence, rhythmic play is created by the syncopated patterning of consonants—like the tip of a stick on a snare drum—t’s, p’s and roll-like r’s—and the paradiddles of the rhymes between “mutter,” “stutter,” and “pepper.” There is musical attention to phrase length. For example, the curt coiled rhythmic motifs of the second and third sentences, which burst into the elaboration of the fourth sentence.

Indeed, music, and specifically jazz, has been a perennial inspiration for Dutton: its rhythmic vitality, its inventive improvisation, its sensuality, and how the language of jazz and improvisation often evokes or explicitly refer to love and sexuality. And jazz employs those paralinguistic sounds often left out of the lexicon of the musical mainstream: gasps, sighs, growls, grunts, breathing, and what jazz musicians term swallowed or ghosted notes.

“T’ Her” riffs off the rhythm, elisions (e.g., the ghosted or swallowed ’n’, w’z, and s’z) and the forms of informal speech to create something approaching a kind of spoken scat singing, while referring to Thelonius Monk’s iconic composition “Round Midnight”:



’bout 12 ’clock

’n ’ ’round, I guess, oh,

you

’bout midnight I w’z

12 ’r so ’n ’ I w’z lookin’ ’round ’n’

’bout midnight I s’z

’tsabout 12 I s’z



Hear What’s Not Here

It should be no surprise that music and sound are an important aspect of Paul Dutton’s writing, for although Sonosyntactics is a rich collection of diverse work, it represents only a small part of Paul Dutton’s total creative output. In addition to a brilliant and controversial novel, Several Women Dancing, his oeuvre includes an extensive and ongoing performance practice as a vocal performer of improvised music and sound poetry (or “soundsinging” as he terms it in musical contexts) and includes his work with The Four Horsemen from 1970 to 1988, and as part of the improvisation ensemble CCMC beginning in 1989 and continuing until the present. Dutton performs internationally as a solo vocal performer and has released and appeared on several CDs. These CDs of live or recorded sound, unfortunately can’t be heard in these pages; they are, however, listed in the bibliography.

Sonosyntactics does represent some poetry that exists in versions that involve soundsinging and improvisation. Indeed, in this collection, the poems include performance notes, which, while beguiling explicative performances in themselves—for example, the mesmerizing specifics of “Mercure”—also give some insight into the realization of these works as oral performances that integrate improvisation. These poems and their notes exist between performance instructions, notation (in the sense of a written description of an aural experience), material for realization, and a kind of creative prompt.

The poem-score “Coffee Break” was written for The Four Horsemen. This sound score, intended to be realized by four performers, employs some of the same punning sound-play-as-a-connective that exists in Dutton’s purely textual written work (e.g., “cream” becomes “scream”). Sound and content, process and verbal relations are one. A similar transformation based on closely related sounds can be seen in “Mercure” and, with much more elaboration, in “Jazzstory,” which mines the letters of the names and functions of the jazz instruments included in the first line to derive subsequent jazz “choruses.” So, for example, “bass line drums support trumpet speaks guitar / is” becomes



strum peaks pet line

pumps out a gut art



In “The Eighth Sea,” the name of the warship “The Chippewa” is gradually transmuted



pewa shippewar shippewa shippewar shippewa shippewarship a warship a warship a warship / a warship, yer worship



and then further varied



a warshippewa shi pawash e pawash e pawash e pawash e pawatchya . . . pawa ta pawa ta pawa ta pawa ter pawa ter pawa ter pawa ter pawa ter pawa ther pawa ther pawa ther pawa ther pawa



to engage with issues of naming, First Nations’ languages, colonialism, power (cf. “pawa”) and the environmental degradation of the Great Lakes (and note how "water" is evident in "pawa ter.")



Minimalism and Process

This type of observable transformation recalls the processes of minimalist music. Composer Steve Reich writes in his manifesto, “Music as a Gradual Process,” “I am interested in perceptible processes,” (9) and though Dutton’s work is much more organic than the completely controlled and gradual processes that Reich argues for, there is something akin to minimalist music in the presence of repetition as a key technique, and in the focussed attention on a few permutating elements and the processes of their permutation or variation.

For example, in “Solitude,” the process whereby words are derived from the repeated word ‘solitude’ is clearly apparent:



solitudesolitudesolitudesolitude

solitudesolitudesolitudesolitude

solitudesolitudesolitudesolitude

solitudesolitudesolitudesolitude



The unity of form, process, and content—the sonosyntactics—recalls Reich (9) again:



Material may suggest what sort of process it should be run through (content suggests form), and processes may suggest what sort of material should be run through them (form suggests content).

The exploration of the symbiotic possibilities of material and form in poems such as “Census” recalls bpNichol’s The Martyology in its often witty and self-reflective discovery of content through a process of unfolding possibilities inherent in the elements of language itself:



ten senses

sense tenses

sentences



And in this poem, sense does indeed tense and use the senses in a census of the senses. Sound and meaning are at play in the puns of the piece. It is natural that this recalls bpNichol, for in addition to being Dutton’s friend and collaborator (notably in The Four Horsemen), Nichol was a significant influence and mentor, something about which Dutton has frequently and generously written.

Of course, for other analogues, one could also look to the later works of Samuel Beckett and, especially, the exuberant, paradoxical and witty permutational brio of Gertrude Stein. Steinian-tending buttons are pushed in many of the prose poems of the newer work, including “Thinking,” quoted above, as well as much earlier work including “His Eyes, Her Eyes”:



as eyes are her eyes are as her eyes in his eyes

and his eyes are as his eyes in her eyes

his eyes are his eyes in her eyes or in his

as her eyes are her eyes in his eyes or in hers



Dutton’s work includes many such texts which engage with traditions of love poetry and song and with expressions or exclamations of love, desire and praise for the beauty of the beloved: “i got a letter from my baby. . . this is the sweetest letter that i have ever seen,” (song lyrics qhoted in The Plastic Typewriter) or the innumerable emotional entanglements and switchbacks of The Book of Numbers:

I don’t know what’s happening to me says four

who wants nothing

more than love

nothing loving four

more than four loves himself



In the code-switching montage of “Uncle Rebus Clean-Song,” Dutton further explores his abiding interest in the received language conventions of desire, and particularly the highly stylized language of pornography:



jarred with the adding machine she nimbly ran her fingers over his cock rising under her expert touch in the quiet office she had thought would be deserted, the bartender surly as he wiped off the counter-top and asked for the millionth time that day, what’ll it be



The text engages with a variety of anacoluthon where each sentence veers off in an unexpected direction by recontextualizing linking phrases to make the sentence swerve toward a different narrative convention. For example, above quotation, “she nimbly ran her finger over” applies both to the adding machine and the penis.

Additionally, “Uncle Rebus” explores homolinguistic translation, creating a secondary punning reading out of the sounds of the text:



never rest to pop a cat a petal ’cause you’d rather kill a man, Jerome, i paw pa, tomb eerie, spawn dead



Some of the words that can be discerned among the sounds include the mountains Popocatépetl (“pop a cat a petal”) and Kilimanjaro (“kill a man, Jerome”), and the phrases, “to Mary” (“tomb eerie”) and “[h]e responded” (“eerie spawn dead”).

The series or sequence, Visionary Portraits, represented here by the second poem, “Visionary Portrait 2,” addresses desire in a manner quite distinct from Dutton’s other work. The first two poems, Dutton writes “are very specific, personal, lyrical, familial kinds of things” (Sutherland) and demonstrate great psychological depth and an almost archetypic intensity in their dreamlike representation of the psychic reality of desire and familial relationships. In “Visionary Portrait 2,” repetition and variation are present in a spiraling development and are used as a formal principle to embody circling around an obsession, an impulse, or an emotional exploration or investigation.



holding their breasts

their hands are my hands

holding their breasts

their breasts are strangers

holding my hands

their breasts are my breasts

held by their hands

on my body

as their hands move

This spiralling represents the unfolding of a state of mind, a cubistic portrait of a psychically resonant scene, a scene recollected in the memory: not a nude descending a staircase, but the many redoubling self-reflective reflections of the mirror-gazing narrator, the inside and outside of the mind merging as in the infinite leminscate of a Moebius Strip.

The Additives series (like the “Parentheses” sequence) is another kind of investigation into the mechanics of language. This series (four poems of which appear here, including "Mercure") plays with parenthetical additions. The effect is like lifting the hood and tinkering with the engine of language to revealing hidden connections between words; the result: a haiku-like sense of aptness. Dutton explores variations of this technique in a few other series here, including the series beginnning with "Pact with the Devil,” and “Parentheses.”

“Bluebell” from Partial Additives creates a beautiful pun between peal and petal, revealing the blue ‘bell’ that is hiding in plain sight in the name of the flower, and in the process, riffing off the familiar Basho haiku that relates flowers to the sound of a temple bell.



pe(t)al



The noisy Xeroxed page presentations (created by Bob Cobbing) only add to the sense of language as tangible and concrete material.



The Song Sings Its Own Name



Beginning with his early poems, Dutton’s poems are aware of their own poemicity, their formal expectations, and the tradition from which they come.



where shall I keep this poem

with light poems

minimal insight poems

major insight poems

successful poems

failed poems

(“January 25 or 26, 12:30”)



or:

This story has no narrative line. The end. It does, however, have an epilogue.”
(“Short Story”)



Indeed, in the sonnet sequence, “So’nets,” the form of the traditional Shakespearean sonnet acts as a "sound net." (The word “So’n” sounds as the French son, i.e. sound.) It serves as a structuring device for verbal and aural play: the "net" captures or is a grid for the sounds.

The prosody (the organization of metrical feet—here, non-traditional lines of iambic tetrameter—and the stanza structure—three quatrains followed by a closing couplet) And of course, the sounds themselves are drawn in various ways from the word, "sonnet." The So’nets further demonstrate an important principle in Dutton’s work: form, both local and structural, is content—and vice versa.

“Second Poem for Maurits Escher” explores not only M.C. Escher’s visual paradoxes, but also the paradoxical play between the ‘background’ of a word’s sounds and objectness and a word’s ‘foreground’ meaning: “background foreground background foreground.”

This points to a major concern in Dutton’s work: when do words (or elements of language) refer to something outside of themselves and when are they things-in-themselves? When are they signifiers and when are they “post-semiotic” (to use The Four Horsemen collaborators Nichol and McCaffery’s term)(Nichol, 35) where “language points to the thick skin of its own materiality” (Stewart, 1).

Dutton’s interest in the sign as the made mark, in the materiality of the sign

as a physical thing is apparent in his visual poetry. “Mondriaan Boogie Woogie” and “The Plastic Typewriter” not only delight in the sign but in the materiality of the machine which makes the sign (the typewriter) and the physicality of mark-making, exploring the elements of language and the paralanguage of the sign (smears, spatters, and other inky noise.) The poem is what is typed, but is also the typing itself. And the typewriter.

Both “Mondriaan Boogie Woogie,” and “The Plastic Typewriter,” play with the rhythm and dance—the physicality—of language, whether invoking Mondriaan’s beloved boogie-woogie, or flamenco and blues. In “The Plastic Typewriter,” in addition to traditional typed texts, carbon paper and his fingers, Dutton disassembled a typewriter and used the M, A, L, and G hammers, freed from their usual vertical and horizontal alignment, to create the word Malaga, the Spanish province where, he had read, flamenco had originated. (Sutherland) Additionally, there are texts which evoke blues or other popular song, for example, “why don’t you write me darling,/send me a letter” (which, of course, puns on the meaning of the word ‘letter.’)

A final aspect of Paul Dutton’s poetry to discuss is his use of appropriated or quoted text. As, he ironically writes in “Else,” “someone else’s words/always say what I want.” Certain of Dutton’s poems evoke other texts or styles (e.g. “Uncle Rebus Clean-Song,” or “Plastic Typewriter,”) but other poems employ direct appropriations of language from other sources either reconfigured or contextualized: “Note from Schwitters,” (a line from Kurt Schwitters), “Reminiscence,” (drawn from captions in an illustration in a book by Oliver Sacks), the last eight poems in the Aurealities section (which originate in the solutions to cryptic crossword puzzles), or “She” (poems taken from received email spam). These poems do raise the question: Isn’t all poetry language from another source? That’s how we know it is language. And doesn’t all poetry insist on this understanding: that what we are reading is—if only by virtue of its context and organization—in some way, language?

For Paul Dutton, poetry, is:



a very broad multisensory enterprise that incorporates the purely visual and sonic aspects of language, as well as the conventionally verbal—the intelligible, unintelligible, the intellectual, the emotional, all of these things at play. (Sutherland)



In Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton, he demonstrates that he is a profoundly aware writer, finely attuned to the possibilities of poetry. His poetry is not constructed of only of abstract Platonic forms but of the phenomenological material world. Which is to say that he is a profoundly present writer. Sonosyntactics, then: attuned to both the body (sound and the sensory) as well as to syntax (language, sense, intelligence and emotion.)

And Paul Dutton: a soundsinger of singing, sound, and the song.



—Gary Barwin

Photo: Jesse Pajuaar



Works Cited



Dutton, Paul. “The Speech–Music Continuum.” Listening up, writing down, and looking beyond: interfaces of the oral, written, and visual. Eds. Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. 123-136. Print.



Nichol, bp and Steve McCaffery. “Research Report 1: Translation.” Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992. Print.

Reich, Steve. "Music as a Gradual Process (1968)" Writings about Music, 1965–2000.

Ed. Paul Hillier. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 9–11. Print.

Stewart, Christine and Ted Byrne. “Reading McCaffery: A discussion of Seven Pages Missing, Vol. 1” The Poetic Front, Vol 1, No 1 (2008): 1-23. Web. 25 May 2014



Sutherland, W. Mark. “‘A sound bursts out of me’: An interview with Paul Dutton.” Jacket2 (2014): n. pag. Web. 25 May 2014.