Click Here To Read Highway Erotica
INTRODUCTION TO
HIGHWAY EROTICA
The following is an in introduction by Hugh Fox, Michigan State University, October 1996
When you see words by Toby Lurie on a page, always keep in mind that he is a musician, chanter and painter, and that the recordings of his works are electronic variations of Nepalese-Tibetan monastic chants, always "informed" with the same mantric effects and purposes. The philosophy behind the work is that you transform the world and the rhythms of how you perceive "are" by the mystical manipulations of words.
Words here are merely a runway for a flight into meditation. They have to be read that way as you move through their permutations/variations. And there is also a certain Chagallian Jewish angle to Lurie. His work is Zen, but Zen Judaism as well as Zen Buddhism.
Listening to him in concert, words take on sacral, transformative purposes. It is all language in the service of "focusing," and "focusing," in turn, for the sake of merging with, what shall we call it, the "Oversoul?
Highway Erotica, then, is really more of a score that demands performance, than merely poems on pages. Reading becomes an internalized mind-performance, and I find that reading aloud helps, and best of all is to record the whole poem on cassette myself and then sit back and listen to it, letting it audio-visually paint/echo itself across the sky of my mind.
Contextualized within the poem, then, fulfilling "the prophecy of your
proud pudendum," becomes kabalistic sexuality -- the movement of eroticism
within the parameters of the male-female/seferoth-shekinah self-contained
Godhead.
Reviews
NEW FORMS NEW SPACES:
Toby Lurie's poetry is
actually something really new. It is oral and aural poetry for voice and ear.
When read silently it is also eye poetry - - - it does the things that concrete
poetry does and very successfully. It is semantic poetry, by analysis and
juxtaposition and repetition it brings out all the old meanings and all sorts
of new meanings from commonplace words that have become worn and frayed and
taken for granted.
-Kenneth Rexroth
THE HAIGHT STREET BLUES:
We always knew and waited for
the Poet who would come and make religious the terms of our actual woolly life,
in our own backyard; especially appropriate, Haight Street Blues, because for
better or worse Haight Street has become America's backyard for three decades.
Here is the untold, funky story of who didn't live happily ever after the
Summer of Love.
-Steve Silberman
QUARTETS:
The relationship between
poetry and music is often stated, rarely made clear. In these Quartets of
Lurie's, it's inescapable and very strong. Meant to be read aloud, they open up
even in a silent reading, to stun the reader's mind with voices sounding and
re-sounding in plotted, dizzying exchanges. Shades of Stein, MacLow, Zukofsky -
- - to which he adds his own rotating and serial measure, in the service of our
ears and mind.
-Jerome Rothenberg
Quintets:
"...with Quintets, Lurie's themes have perhaps
become more contemplative -- the puzzling yet amusing contrarieties of life;
nothing-something; understanding-not understanding; the moment-eternity; standing silent-not standing silent.
And in the 1990s Lurie has pared the multi-voiced form to a purity
; one is tempted to say the QUINT-essence of his developing art"
-Don Salper
TRIOS:
Toby Lurie focuses on
performance, on three distinct strands which interplay and juxtapose their
meanings counterpointally. Three voices are used, none of which has a constant
and predetermined character. The forms allow for the permutation and
interaction among repeated fragments, taking on new and kaleidoscopic meanings
according to their contexts.
What Lurie has done is to seize upon stones which the builder rejected and make them the cornerstones of his style. A musical parallel might be the work of the ÒminimalistÓ composers, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Arvo Part. Listening to the Trios what is striking is how natural they sound. They work.
-Dick Higgins
DUETS:
In this book as with its
predecessors, Trios, Quartets and Quintets, my principal focus is to cross that
border of separation between language and music, molding those disciplines into
a single unified form. A sentence, for me, is like a music scale with which I
can create my language compositions, availing myself of the forms of music:
fugues, canons, rondos, counterpoint and crab-fugues. (Themes played forward
and backward against each other) The publication of this book concludes my
quartet of books in this form. I continue to intrude on traditional forms of
language, and in that regard I'm looking forward to the publication of my next
book, Word-Scales, by Mellen Poetry Press, in which I will make my final
argument in defense of language as music. I will explain and demonstrate in
detail, my process of creating language-compositions by composing with
Word-Scales.
-Toby Lurie
"He seems to give us a working model for meaningful communication. We need only to read these poems aloud. Read them to and with eachother. Indeed, at points, a curious interactivity of the two voices allows us to internalize both as we speak only one. What emerges is something transcendent... The two-part point against point of Duets here expresses a more intimate, and ultimately more revealing interaction."
-from the foreword by Noah Agruss
MIRROR IMAGES:
There is, indeed, a lot of
stuff called double counterpoint, not to mention mirror images, silence and
syncopation. etc., etc., in these poems. But letÕs leave the next generation of
doctoral candidates to tease their minds over such matters. Our pleasure as
readers/performers, is to delight in the experience of reenactment and
realization, and in so doing to speak both with ourselves and to others. And that,
I suspect, is exactly what Toby Lurie would like.
-Geoffrey Sommerfield
York, England
HIROSHIMA, a Symphonic
Elegy for Spoken Voices
Weep for the mothers, weep
for the sons,
weep for the daughters, the
dying ones.
Weep for the fathers, they
don't know,
weep for humanity, weep for
the foe.
"A copy of this composition, book length, along with a videotape of a performance is housed in the Peace Memorial Museum, in Hiroshima. I delivered it there. A most painful and enlightening experience."
-Toby Lurie
WORD-SCALES:
Currently I'm composing my
poetry almost exclusively with Word-Scales. Let me define the term. A
Word-Scale is a collection of words, usually a theme in short form, which I use
in creating my poetry compositions in much the same manner that I would compose
music with a music scale. In this process there is little concern with grammar
or syntax, in fact, a purposeful effort is often made to avoid traditional
grammar, in search of fresh and unusual word linkages. So, dissonance often occurs
through this process, in much the same way that it is experienced in music. My
Word-Scales represent the distillation of the most valued principals of my
life, reduced to their simplest form.
-Toby Lurie
BOOKS:
|
Book |
Publisher |
Year |
|
New Forms New Spaces |
Journeys into Language |
1971 |
|
Measured Space |
Hors Commerce Press |
1968 |
|
Handbook on Vocal Poetry |
Journeys into Language |
1974 |
|
Mirror Images |
Celestial Arts |
1974 |
|
Word-Music |
Journeys into Language |
1977 |
|
Conversations with the Past |
Laughing Bear Press |
1977 |
|
Conversations and Constructions |
Journeys into Language |
1977 |
|
Serial Poems |
Cobbing Press |
1978 |
|
A Leaf of Voices |
Journeys into Language |
1980 |
|
The Beach at Cleone |
Applezabe Press |
1983 |
|
The Last Rondo in Paris |
Laughing Bear Press |
1983 |
|
The Haight Street Blues |
Journeys into Language |
1987 |
|
Trios |
Mellen Poetry Press |
1989 |
|
Quartets |
Mellen Poetry Press |
1990 |
|
Cliff House Poems |
Journeys into Language |
1992 |
|
Quintets |
Mellen Poetry Press |
1993</td |
|
Duets |
Mellen Poetry Press |
1996 |
|
Hiroshima |
Mellen Poetry Press |
1997 |
|
Word-Scales |
Mellen Poetry Press |
2000 |
|
Elegy |
Mellen Poetry Press |
2003 |
