Russian Poet German Lukomnikov

German Lukomnikov in Moscow in 2009

TEXT CORRECTED

the fabulous discomfort and humor of this video gets me. also the weird retro look of it in spite of the obvious technical aspects, projection, etc. but that low contrast in black and white which feels like pre-color television somehow.

but what i want to attend to is the sound of this piece/recording.

there seems to be a cut (@ 1:37). & there are surely "parts" with edges more or less discernible. what i don't know is what it is called (is it "only sound" or is it somehow "Azor's Paw only sound") … hard for me to guess.

what really zaps me about this recording is the first section of wordless (and not even word-suggestive) vocal sounds and then the end. the first section has all these small vocalizations which in large part i would think could be used with words and not stand out all that much - well, maybe that crooning whine at 1:18 or the last thing before the cut this sort of yes/no feeling thing that becomes like the squeak of a spring - but many of the other sounds are not that unusual in spoken discourse, though we tend to ignore them when recounting what was said (we might call that retrospective semanticism and think of it as a bias). "here is an idea i can steal" i said to myself and i did (but will anyone be able to see where or how - the evidence is already out there). so that would be section one of this piece as i hear/parse it.

but then after the cut - in section two - things are more word-based for some time and don't have quite the same impact on me, though they begin to drift in looser and looser, more pitch-arc'd ways toward section three. in this section tho his utterances seem to echo hesitancies, uncertainties… at one point around 3 minutes this sing-songy repetition emerges - which again, i think that i at least do and suspect others do too; taking a word or phrase and chanting it somehow with however much or little melody. anyway...

… by 3:40 or so the transition seems to have been clear to a third section (this edge is much blurrier, or maybe it is a gradual build and not an edge at all). everything gets further from anything like conventional "word-space" and Lukominikov works with particles and the sounds between those of language and "mouth noises" and…

i'm always unhappy, i feel interrupted and annoyed when it ends. and yet, perhaps, relieved as well, as it takes a certain attention which i am not using when just sitting here, or having a conversation with someone, etc. and such attention is not endless, though here i feel more than able to give it.

there is also the twinned terms i opened with - humor and discomfort. the "how would i introduce this to so&so" thought experiment, where so&so is your great aunt lou or your assistant manager boss guy or whomever you picture as a tough sell for anything this self-consciously engaged in not playing the communication game while being nonetheless ludic, or maybe ruminative, or maybe something else (where ludic gets calls narcissism, and ruminative labelled pretentious and the whole non-communicative is just something that can't be fit into their universe). imagining playing that game with this video and whoever it is that i imagine gets at the discomfort somewhat. Lukomnikov seems quite comfortable with silences without a need to fill all the space tightly or to demonstrate a physical skill with language making (that is a bad way of saying this, but I am thinking of Christian Bök as a contrast, Bök clearly has amazing mouth-based chops aka skills, etc - as here in this performance at the Whitney, but let's get back to Lukomnikov

the text below the video as found on youtube
Герман Лукомников на фестивале "Лапа Азора only sound" 
  seems to say
Herman Lukomnikov at the "Azor's Paw only sound" ..but the G-translation of his name seems more common, though i did see "Guerman" to make it a bit more complex.

I got curious. There is no wikipedia page for him. There are some other videos of him reading, which I'll come back to below, but I was hoping for more info. Some googling got me a few bits.

1st I looked at this report sent to poet Maria Damon and housed at the EPC, with just a short mention of Lukomnikov, but it struck me as amusing. The author of this is Masha Zavialova, in the midst of her longer report on The Russian Poetry Festival Oct. 17-19, 1998, St. Petersburg she mentions Lukominokov;

Bonifatsii (German Lukomnikov) - a charming person and performance artist read some of his short and extremely witty (for us who live here) poems. One of them: "Why don't I fly?" (several times with different modulations of voice but very romantically) And suddenly in a matter-of-fact and slightly offended tone "Why don't I fly? I fly."

This made me more curious… and next I read this;

Potty About Poetry

25 August 2000

By Anna Arutunyan The Moscow Times

How can one characterize the poetry of German Lukomnikov, who attributes much of his poetry to his alter ego, Boniface? Similarities exist between Lukomnikov’s work and the kind of absurd children’s rhyme established by writers like Daniil Kharms and Kornei Chukovsky —poets who play with short stanzas and diminutive puns in their verse — but Lukomnikov, who often uses obscenities, is by no means a writer of children’s poems.

Lukomnikov (or Boniface) — Lukomnikov insists they are two different people — writes with an innocence and honesty that is so regularly masked among his contemporaries by cynicism and irony. He makes fun of his background and plays with words, but maintains an air of a barely discovered underground poet writing among friends in his attic.

But is there a name for the work of the virtual pair of Lukomnikov and Boniface, who write and illustrate their own works? Dirty limericks, perhaps, or childish farce? Or maybe it is something like those art-scene hooligans with a cult following, the Mitki, who create humorous illustrations with companion rhymes.

Associated with beer and hippies and enjoying a large following, the Mitki have managed to seep into the mainstream, but the same cannot be said of Lukomnikov, whose poetry is not only still marginal, but too varied to be characterized. His paintings can be childlike, with inscriptions of meaningless puns like "Kitayets kita yest" — which can mean either "the Chinaman is a whale" or "the Chinaman eats a whale" — which appears under a painting of an Asian-looking boy eating a fish.

Other works are earnest communications with an evidently strong lyrical background that reveal the vulnerability of a poet interacting with the world around him: "If only someone knew how I fear people! /How strange that worldwide neighborhood seems to me/ Of glaring monsters. I am becoming childlike/ As if in a sea of ugly swans (O kto by znal, kak ya boyus’ lyudei! / Kak diko mne vsemirnoye sosedstvo / Glazastykh chudishch. Ya vpadayu v detstvo, / Kak budto v more gadkikh lebedei.)

In this way, Lukomnikov hovers somewhere between poet, comedian and artist. The man who has characterized himself as a "poet, a human being of the male sex, and an inhabitant of Earth and the solar system," Lukomnikov plays out an exchange with his persistent alias, Boniface, on stage. If determining to what extent their poetry (and personalities) differ is of any interest to you, don’t pass up the opportunity to see their odd duet this week. 

German Lukomnikov reads his Poetry of the Season at 8 p.m. on Thursday at the Project O.G.I club, located at 8/12 Potapovsky Pereulok, Building 2 (enter through the courtyard). Metro Chistye Prudy. Tel. 927-5609. For more information, write ogi@mail.ru

i don't know enough about contemporary Russian poetry to say squat about this, though i do have a book by Daniil Kharms. i also like hearing about this group the Mitki discussed here and would be interested to know more of them, but back to the thread….

this gives me lots to think about. i cannot tell from watching or listening when Boniface is involved and when he isn't - so sadly, that whole intrigue will remain opaque, but this article generally charges up my curiosity. and this poem is surely one that would work for me;

If only someone knew how I fear people! 

How strange that worldwide neighborhood seems to me

Of glaring monsters. I am becoming childlike

As if in a sea of ugly swans

… but i should mention that i also dropped the original language text given for this poem in the article above into google translator as well and, being set to "detect language" is did not mark this as russian but Slovak and it could translate less than half of it. so is Lukomnikov not Russian at all?

There are several more videos on youtube. I'll leave their viewing up to you…

German Lukomnikov shows a younger Lukomnikov (1998) and while i am lost with the language, this one holds my attention quite well. i'll not go through why and how and so forth, but there is much humor and sound stuff here. enjoyable. also nice that he "flies" away at the end.

German Lukomnikov  rather more annoying video with noisy camera and crowd noise. Lukomnikov is doing some emphatic sound stuff at the end with what i assume are words and fragments tho.

POET GUERMAN LUKOMNIKOV is a small group setting and he is doing more sentency or phrasal stuff with odd slanted repetitions. lots of folks laugh.

Герман Лукомников в Булгаковском this is in the same venue as the previous one, and is yet more chanted and looping though using (i assume) phrases and sentences. again, a good bit of laughing.

Lukomnikov.divx  this too sounds more playfully semantic, rather than pushing hard toward sound. i'd love to hear from anyone who knows the language.

Velikiy Poet Lukomnikov is yet another venue with a big crowd (poetry standards) he is a bit hard to hear in spite of the amplification at moments and there are crowd noises and responses. Luko seems busy with these tightening and loosening patterns imposed on long string of text. big cheers at the end.

it seems that i also found his livejournal account where i stole that picture with the finger puppets. but scanning through it a bit i found some paintings as well...

Illustration of a poem (by German Lukomnikov) by Dmitry Shirokov (painter)

anyway, i like what i've found and hope to hear more of German Lukomnikov

Self-Discipline for [improv] Sound Poetry

We're them void guys

We're them pose guys

Lean each with each

With weed full head.  Alas!

At the close of my last post I mentioned wanting to concoct a similar plan for re-engaging my monophonic improv sound poetry. If the emitter plans I discussed are an attempt to get some discipline back into my improv practice for "proper" lexical words. What might I do in parallel to that for my improv sound poetry?

First a few limits which might be arbitrary from some POVs but that are important to me, or perhaps to my sense of what sort of sound poetry I have made and desire to make.

1. Echoing something Mark wrote in the SOUND node for the anthology, I do not want it to move over into "song" however loosely construed that might be. In that interview with Christian Bök mentioned in the last post, he has a lot of things to say about sound poetry and I'd like to post about some of that in time, but he references "vocal percussionists" and "beatboxers" such as Dokata and Rahzel… & both have impressive skills or so my web-hunting quickly revealed. Rahzel is clearly pursuing music and Dokata is as well, if in a rather different vein (unlike Rahzel he does not sing, but mimics the music itself). Yet both are also very beat-dependent in a way that I have no immediate interest in. Sound poetry for me is not music and it is not song either.
2. While I will often enough abandon the tenor of "everyday speech" I do not want that abandonment to be the sole focus or what ensures that I am in fact doing "sound poetry." My everyday voice and careful pronunciation will remain a default whenever possible (that is, at any time some other impulse does not directly negate these things). This is not to defend against a charge of doing the police in different voices, nor is it a valorization of my everyday ("natural") voice, just a starting point: the voice I have.
3. I'm not against electronic manipulation of the voice, but in terms of a disciplined practice I prefer to see how far I can go with voice alone before I use effects of any sort. As the local Atlanta scene already has ample evidence, simply using delay and so forth on one's voice while doing poetry is too easily a crutch for doing really bad poems. (If you do not get that reference, count yourself lucky.)

Next, I suppose that I need a distinction between the Hypothetically Lexical and the Generally Unlexical… even if the boundary will be blurred much of the time. What then will these two terms mean for me? Well, whatever they describe, that is all they will be - descriptions - they're not meant to carry conceptual weight (the range of noises that might come out of our mouths could be described in many other ways I'm sure).

Hypothetically Lexical [HL] - here I have in mind things like Joyce's "thunder words" and all that I mean by the 'lexical' here is that they are renderable as words no matter how aberrant. Thus I might say something like "frusstoiklej" - one can look at this and say something with a reasonable degree of phonetic loyalty to this rendering with basis English expectations regarding pronunciation. These sorts of words can be, like "frusstoiklej," completely neologistic and having no clear meaning-bearing particles, or they might have parts which are meaningful but break that in their unified form. As an example of that latter situation, consider "omnithrummage" - 'omni' and 'thrum' and the suffix '-age' all have meaning effects or are meaningful in and of themselves, but as a conjoined word they are not especially meaningful without a bit of wildly ungrounded interpretive work. This then is what I mean by Hypothetically Lexical.

Generally Nonlexical [GN] - here I am thinking of vocal sounds of all sorts, even if some might be potentially rendered as "words" the vast majority cannot be. Things which we would describe as growls or hums or squawks or… however one describes such things. Mimicry, of non-human sounds of whatever sort would be included here.

What might I then do with HL or GN that could be pursued in a disciplined fashion that might result in greater variety and impact in my monophonic improvised sound poetry? Much of what follows I have already been doing, but in a more haphazard, now & then, fashion which I'm trying here to make more deliberate (with the proviso that improv can only take so much deliberation and must always depend on the haphazard - upon chance and spontaneous impulse).

impressively complicated looking, isn't it?

Hypothetically Lexical

Morpheme or word stem study is one option & need not be limited to English & if it isn't obvious there is no need to know the meanings associated (it might even be counter productive in some respects). Much of what follow are 'practice modalities' for improv but not improv themselves.

Computer-based language processing using things like Travesty can produce some very un-English "words" and sometimes these have no unambiguous translation to utterance. But, not every such new word is un-utterable, and if one steps out of English-derived pronunciation rules, opting rather for Sanskrit/Nepali or German for example some will have a less ambiguous pronunciation.

Non-English pronunciation protocols can also be applied productively across language barriers, consider the German or Sanskrit way that one would attempt to utter words like "lynchpin", "motor", "eucalyptus" or "siphon."

Accent study would be another way to think about some of the above. There are a number of books like Paul Meier's Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen (includes 12 CDs) which covers "Afrikaans (South Africa), American Deep South (Mississippi/Georgia/Alabama), American Southern (Kentucky/Tennessee), Australian, Cockney, Downeast New England, French, General American, German, Hampshire, Indian, Irish, Italian, Liverpool, New York, Northern Ireland, Russian, Scottish, South Boston, Spanish (Castilian & Colonial), Standard British English (Received Pronunciation), Welsh, Yiddish, and Yorkshire." & thinking about what such a book offers one can then imagine working through different accents while dealing with the stems or morphemes mentioned above: Castilian to Russian to Deep Southern.

Mimicry of others, though risky and potentially prone to complaint on PC grounds is another option for HL, thus gay voice, gendered voice, possibly "racial" voice (to the extent that such things can be distinguished from accent). & certainly I have met many people whose distinctive way of speaking I can to some extent imitate.

probably for the best that you can't read this...  

call it a token of my systematic imaginary

Generally Nonlexical

One might start with a sort of "whole earth phonological survey" (another lovely impossibility). My study in German and Sanskrit/Nepali both had repeated drills on phonology, but were one able to practice such things for other additional languages, this might help provide a base of sounds to then work over more intensely (this notion is perhaps relevant to HL as well, but I'm trying to pull it into the GN territory).

Whatever might be adaptable from vocal percussionists or beatboxers which does not move toward song or music is certainly open for the taking (assuming I have the skills).

No nifty name for this but let's just call it vocal-storming for now (on the model of brain-storming),.. basically just trying to make unique and repeatable vocal sounds (fun if you're in the mood) and then to name them or record them or something for further use.

Cataloging and practice of non-lexicals that are common in everyday speech ("shhh" for 'be quiet' etc) is something I have done before to a small and not terribly systematic extent. Presumably this could be extended.

result of an image search with "non lexical" I think

Other Possibilities (applicable to either, depending and paralinguistic in each case)

Pitch; deep voice to high (trying perhaps to make this sound as 'natural' as possible).

Timber is surely imitable to a degree - rough, raspy, creaky, whispery, smooth, hard, whimpering, etc.

Pace or tempo is surely a possibility, though much constrained by my ability to control it. If I had all the words ready in my head (or in Tzara's hat) I could surely include pacing as a variable, but when they come from the fleshy aether of my head…

Tone leads toward acting perhaps, but cataloging the various emotional tones that can be applied provides more options (& some overlap with timber).

Breath manipulations (like speaking during an inhale, coughing words, panting words, etc).

Body manipulations (altering the 'normal' positioning and movement or flexibility of the tongue, face, lips, etc as a way of generating new vocal sounds)

Performance & Poetry

I'm a bit thin on the content just now…

I've been meaning to settle down with Laclau for a few days, and I have a serious academic need to do so. But my time is taken up writing for, reading within and collaborating on a series of poetics essays which will be included in the APG anthology that is currently in the works. 

Today my task is to think the role of performance within the group's history. I am aided by having text written about this topic by various poets in the group, but assembling these into an essay still imposes many challenges - interpretive, aesthetic, etc…

I will share this one small portion of my draft (it will be vetted by the group and may change significantly) concerning the established history of performance in relation to poetry.

• Always Historicize!   It isn’t that we didn’t know some history about this, some of us did. We knew that poetry was once very verbal (Greeks, Troubadours, pre-columbian Americans, many African cultures, etc); but within the euro-culture that we still to some extent live & work within (and within many other urban cultures across the world) poetry had been reduced to a "page" phenomenon centuries or millennia ago. Perhaps bardolotry goes too far;  but it’s true that Shakespeare and his contemporaries did remarkable poetry, intending it for stage performance. But theater, like narrative, turns away from (not just verse) but poetry itself, during the 18th century—at least in European culture and its outposts. Maybe it is due to Parry & Lord’s influence that the history of performed poetry lays such heavy stress on memorization. Whatever the case, that isn’t something we wanted to explore. Memorization is not the whole story of course and there are both exceptions to that conception (more of oral poetries than performed poetry) as well as occasional revivals of orality and performance in relation to poetry as with slam and rap and what gets called ‘performance poetry’ more generally in our time. But again the frequent memorization (though there is freestyle rap and much else) as well as the preponderance of heavily cadenced rhyme and relatively traditional verse structures underlying most of those contemporary manifestations didn’t offer much to suit our poetic desires. The Beat approach with a poet reading with sax or bongos, while not unappealing as an idea, faltered often on the poetry itself which, paradoxically, unlike that of Stein or Pound somehow, seemed very remote from our moment (a beat poet circa the year 2000 reminds us of that moment in the Woodstock movie when Sha-Na-Na take the stage). And while there were those doing performance in interesting ways among the Language folks (and still are), Grenier’s famous “I HATE SPEECH” and other poetic operating principles in that loose collection of poets effectively bracketed speech-based performance as a central generative focus (as much as we like a lot of LangPo very much, it is nearly as page-bound on whole as the more traditional verse it posed an alternative to). The history that meant the most to us performatively speaking was scattered and somewhat singular, DADA, Mac Low, Antin, Cage and a few others being the most pertinent but still providing only suggestive examples, and significantly, ones that often we could only read about (The Four Horsemen providing a notable counter-example much closer to some of our impulses). 
• Our sense of poetry history demands a retelling, one that sees the centrality of performance as sometimes more and other times less prominent, but never absent. Performance is crucial to poetry -- we know and feel this every Wednesday. Orality and performance are not simply something poets did back before they could shuck off that burden by writing their poems down. Performance has to be seen as one key dimension of poetry’s growth and reconfiguration of itself, its audience and its world. The reduction of poetry to “the page” diminishes it and stifles that growth. Poetry can be great on the page, this is indisputable. It’s just that that’s not all it is, or all it should be. And as we’ve discovered, that which cannot be done on the page can sometimes be done on the stage.