“Follow the instructions”: Materialities of voice in Participation Poetry and Early Meditation Recordings
Résumé
In recent years, guided meditation recordings have become an increasingly popular tool in the ever-expanding arsenal of wellness routines marketed as an antidote to the materialism of Western culture. Yet primitive instances of such recordings date as far back as the 1950s and 1960s, branching from a then-fledgling market of instructional LPs offering crash courses in every field from ballroom dances to ventriloquism. Explicitly performative, and availing themselves of the assertive properties of the acousmatic voice, those early meditation records promised to turn their voiced instructions into supposedly transformational physical responses. In my talk, I discuss those cultural artifacts in relation to the “participation” poetry of John Giorno, a poet whose use of borrowed language and manipulation of sound recording technologies explore the same interaction of voice and materiality and question the locus of reference and action of the poem through its ambiguous instructional content.