Oral Pleasures – A Memoir
By John Sobol

NOTE: This was written in 2001 after I finished writing my book Digitopia Blues - Race, Technology and the American Voice, which I had been working on since 1989. It was to have been an afterword to that book but I cut it out. So I'm publishing it now.


Most writers seem to like being writers. Many clearly love it. But not me. I find it distressing. Not that I don’t like writing. I do. I love the act of writing, the challenge of constructing meaning and beauty with words. But being a writer – as a profession, as an identity – well, I’ve been a musician and I’ve been a writer and I much prefer being a musician.

For years I played in bands of every stripe: blues bands, reggae bands, big bands, highlife bands, funk bands, rock’n’roll bands, eccentric indie bands, cover bands, dixieland bands, fusion bands, bebop bands, free jazz bands, sax quartets, busking bands, weird performance art bands and others I can't remember. Montreal was a great place to grow up music-wise and I started playing sax regularly in night clubs at the age of 15. It was a blast. And I was writing poetry too. Writing poetry, not speaking it. It took me a while to make the connection but by my early 20s I was finally asking: why is music so fun and poetry so boring? Why is it that when I devote my creative energy to music, people dance and sweat and laugh, but when I devote my creative energy to poetry, absolutely nothing seems to happen? Once in a while an obscure magazine put out by someone I’ve never met publishes one of my poems and nobody I know reads it. But that’s it. My experience of poetry was no experience at all. Compared to music, poetry felt embalmed, disembodied, and pointless. And yet, I was falling in love with language and was determined to taste the vitality of music in poetry. So, at last, in the mid-80s, I rebelled. I started giving voice to my poetry in public.

I soon discovered that I liked being a vocalist, that working as a performance poet opened all kinds of creative doors. Amazingly, people were getting to know my poems, and apparently liking them, including people whom I knew had no interest in poetry whatsoever. And I was growing more playful, joking around onstage, loosening up, wandering into the audience, turning into a showman. I formed the John Sobol Poetry Band and released a CD, Blue History. I recorded it live, determined to capture something of the energy of live art, and put it out on my own label, Word of Mouth. (We managed to put out a bunch of other CDs too, all featuring vocalists. One was a compilation of contemporary jazz songs, called Songposts, featuring original tunes and performances by Sheila Jordan, Steve Lacy, Jay Clayton, Jeanne Lee, Kate Hammett-Vaughn, Anne LeBaron, my sister Corry Sobol and others. Another was a double-CD featuring the radio work of brilliant performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña.)

But my poetry – and my performance skills – needed work and I knew it. I made a fool of myself many times over. The problem was that although I searched high and low I could find very few performance poets to study, to learn from. I checked out the beat recordings, hiphop, John Giorno and his New York pals, the Four Horsemen and Ron Mann’s Poetry in Motion film, but there seemed little else out there. Locally (still in Montreal) I met up with a few inspiring poets who were active as performers, notably Fortner Anderson, Clifford Duffy and Norman Nawrocki of Rhythm Activism. And there were a few adventurous Quebecois poets as well, like Joanne Lafleur and Genevieve Letarte, who were working as performers. And yet, despite this modest scene I felt that there was a great deal more to learn.

That need – to educate myself about oral poetry – led me to The Banff Centre for the Arts, where in 1992 I was given the green light to create a residency for performance poets. I spent 18 months laying the groundwork and finally in April 1994, over 45 oral poets arrived in Banff for Action Poetry ’94. The idea was to bring together oral poets from different traditions and cultures to share their art and knowledge with each other, and it worked beautifully. We welcomed performance artists, native elders, rappers, dub poets, spoken word artists, punk poets, sound poets, storytellers, pomo poets, and many more. During that fertile April every resident poet had the opportunity to work with our terrific house band, had access to state-of-the-art audio recording facilities and had their own rehearsal studio. Every poet gave a workshop and performed in our funky club. Those evenings were ecstatic, not least because at intermission we could slip outside to watch the northern lights explode above the Rocky Mountains, but also because of the exceptionally high quality of the poems being delivered inside.

One outcome of my stay in Banff was an invitation from Bob Holman to bring a Canadian team down to San Francisco to participate in the 1993 National Poetry Slam. It sounded like fun, so I invited two new poet-friends, Alex Ferguson and Kedrick James to join me, and off we went. Although they were the same age and had grown up within blocks of each other in Vancouver, Kedrick and Alex had never met until they took the train down the coast to San Francisco, where I joined them. In San Francisco the three of us discovered a profound kinship. We quickly gelled as a unit, memorizing our poems overnight and creating instant polyvocal arrangements. We added some wacky choreography and had loads of fun. But when we performed for the assembled slam multitudes we were rapidly booted from the competition. They didn’t like us. Which – as it turned out – was fine, because we didn’t like them. Or their trite, self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing poetry. We put out an instant broadside titled Like Lambs to the Slammer and disappeared to hang out with rabble-rousing hierophant Jack Hirschman. The upshot, however, was that our trio, which we christened AWOL Love Vibe in honour of our visit to Haight Ashbury, soon became the focal point of my creative endeavours and would remain so for 5 years.

AWOL Love Vibe was the most exciting creative ensemble I’ve ever worked with. Alex Ferguson is a professional actor, dancer and playwright as well as a poet and he brought to the group a hilariously provocative sense of humour, a willingness to take wild performative risks and a highly developed kinetic artistry. He also contributed his obsession with bodily metaphors and the nomenclature of human innards. Kedrick James brought his profound knowledge of poetic essentials, his unyielding creative spirit and his trickster’s instincts, along with his now-demolished but once radiant Atomic House of Poetry.

As a trio we worked feverishly on our oral chops. We performed wherever we could: in schools, on streetcorners, at ferry terminals, on subways, in theatres, in clubs, in art galleries, on radio, on TV, with musicians, with DJs, with dancers, with videographers, in food courts. We never used texts in performance, although we did at times in rehearsal. But soon even that stopped. In 1995 we retreated to a Czech monastery and took a Vow of Orality, whereby we refused to read or write anything for a month. Instead we learned to memorize. We learned to improvise. We discovered a poetry of play, a poetry of the moment, of place, of the body, of sound. We discovered a poetry of duration and evanescence. We severed our words from our egos and let our poetic imaginations create without concern for the outcome. We spouted endless hours of nonsense. We made moments of magic. And when our month was up we found ourselves in Prague, where we celebrated with pints of Guinness at the James Joyce Pub. Pulling a dusty copy of Finnegan’s Wake off the shelf we prepared to break our vow and taste, for the first time in a month, the fruit of literacy. I cracked open the vast tome and read two lines at random:

The singer’s song failed due to a deficiency of mnemotechnic
He filled the void with periphrastic versions

We blinked. He was talking about us.

AWOL Love Vibe not only improvised with sound, as sound poets do, but we improvised with words. Whole performances, hour long sets and longer delivered entirely ex tempore. And we discovered that one could become very good at improvising poetry. That it was a discipline like any other, which improved with practice. We went on national TV and radio and delivered polyvocal wordpoems made up entirely on the spot. We devised a wide range of poetic ‘games’ with which to engage audiences in our process. Indeed it became clear that the process was far more exciting than the product. That, in fact, since we rarely documented our performances, there was no product. Our poetry was entirely experiential, worked for in the moment, sweated over and sweated out of the minds and hearts of our audiences, constructed explicitly of the smells and ideas and sounds and activities and trees which surrounded – not just us – but our listeners, who understood themselves to be part of the creative process, who felt enmeshed in a moving poetic experience. It was risky and rewarding. It was captivating and inspired. At last, I felt, poetry was as thrilling, as public, as transformative, as playing sax in any rocking band had ever been.

In 1997 we published a book called AWOL Love Vibe’s Exstatic Almanac – A Book of Daze. It contained 365 improvised poems, which we riffed over three exhausting days, and it came with a CD too, titled Verbomotorhead. But that was the end of the group, at least for now. It was my fault. I moved to Toronto, 5,000 km from Vancouver. We’ve done a few gigs since but it’s tough to overcome that vast distance. And yet, if anyone out there wants to book us we can still put on an amazing show.

But the point is – to return to my original reason for launching into this lengthy memoir – that I now know myself to be two very different people depending on whether I am living as an oralist or as a literate. Improvising poems in public made me highly sensitive to my emotional surroundings, and constantly exposed my own feelings. It made humor a given, like breathing, as it also did the flouting of social taboos such as intimacy with strangers, or public expressions of humility and passion. As an oralist I was willing to engage anybody in an open-ended dialogue at any time, to create an instant bond, to truly meet, and it was fantastically invigorating. But in the past couple of years, during which time I’ve been a writer, I’ve seen that playful open-ness atrophy and close. It’s been painful. And frankly, I’m sick of it. Having recently spent long months deeply engaged with literacy, I feel nervous. I can’t stand the thought of my anonymous readers. I’d much rather meet you in person, hear what you have to say, look you in the eye, listen, dialogue. This bookish process leaves no room for play, improvisation, revision, for the vital give-and-take which is the essence of everyday life when I’m sharing myself in the moment and not just my displaying my chiselled words. I laugh more when I’m living as an oralist. And I like laughing. And my wife definitely likes me more when I laugh. And so, I say goodbye, and good riddance to being a writer in spirit. Not with shame or animosity, but with relief. At last I can put down my pen and pick myself up again. At last I’m free to be me. And although I’m out of practice, I’m determined to reclaim that playful exuberance. It’s just a matter of letting go and putting faith in the moment. It’s really just a matter of saying hello.