Poetry-meets-music mash-ups: An interview with Len Sousa.

I first encountered Len Sousa‘s poetic mashups surfing for poetry recordings on The Pirate Bay. I had this idea or imagined that somebody posted whole chunks of ubu.com‘s vast archives of readings online, and I’d be able to save time downloading things piecemeal.

Instead, I ended up in one of my usual search-and-download flaneur-vortices, and came across a torrent called “Poetry Meets Music (Mixes/Mash-Ups) [2005].” I listened to mashups of Lisa Jarnot and Beck, Bill Knott and The Beatles, Czeslaw Milosz and New Order, William Carlos Williams and Pixies, and I knew I had to cyber-meet its creator, Len Sousa. He graduated from Emerson in 2005 and writes in every genre there is. I sent him some questions a couple weeks back and here are his answers. He sent me links to video clips, which I assume he put together himself as well. (If you’re not a torrenter, that’s fine: Sousa also hosts the files on his own personal site here.)

What influences your mashups? Are you a DJ or sound artist outside this project?

I’m a writer and a poet with an interest in music. And since poetry began as an oral art, I think the combination is a natural one. I taught myself how to use audio editing software in high school when all my friends were in bands, and it’s been a hobby of mine to tinker with audio recordings ever since.

One of the earliest influences for the mashups was probably the album “Pools Of Mercury” by Jim Carroll. I was always a fan of his work, and in my first year of college, I studied with the poet Lisa Jarnot. She gave me a copy of Carroll’s album and I loved it. I think it must have been in the back of my mind when I made my first mix a year or so later. A friend of mine had a college radio show and he’d invite me to co-host it with him from time to time. It was on from something like midnight to two in the morning so he’d let me bring whatever music I wanted to play on the air.

This is Len Sousa. I think. It's from his website.

I started creating these mix CDs, and at the start of some of the songs, I’d insert a piece of dialogue from a movie or a snippet of a poetry reading I liked just to make the broadcast more interesting. One day, I had a song with a long instrumental opening so I put a Jim Carroll reading over it just to see how it sounded. As the Carroll clip ended, the lyrics came in and that’s when I realized that mixing these two art forms could lead to some interesting combinations. That was sometime in 2002 or 2003. I didn’t have a name for it at the time so I just called it a mix.

Later on, people starting making song mashups and I figured that was the closest comparison to what I was doing with poetry and music.

Interesting. People have been putting the odd dialogue piece over ambient music or poems in mixtapes for decades now, but your project seems to keep the poem up front, unedited, paced the way it was recorded, and the music is in a duet with the poem. Were there or are there any criteria for which poet you mashed/matched with the music artist?

I’d find the poem first, and the only rule I had was that I wanted to use a recording of the poet reading his or her own work. Then I’d look for something that had the right length and pace to work in a song mix. It also had to be a good reading. Some poets recite their work in a very flat, monotone fashion, and it can put a listener to sleep. But someone like Allen Ginsberg can read a grocery list–he actually kinda does in “A Supermarket In California”–and make it sound interesting.

After I had the poem, I’d try to find a song that had the same tone. So if it was a poem by O’Hara, I’d go for something that had that frenetic pace his work has. Then I’d look at the lyrics and see if they complemented or even contradicted what the poet was saying just to make the mix that much more interesting.

Sylvia Plath and Doris Day have this strange call-and-response going on in that mix that I liked a lot. Other times, I’d find the perfect piece of music, by someone like Moby or Philip Glass, and it wouldn’t have any lyrics at all, then it was a matter of editing the poem around the beats in the most effective way.

Oh, so of course, so you do in fact put some edits in the poetry recordings. That I didn’t pick up any at first is a testament to your good work. My wife used to be a music editor in movies and one of her last job was her masterpiece, which was Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam. In the scene where Adrian Brody’s character is playing along to The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly,” I said to her that this particular scene must have been an easy paycheck–I didn’t hear any edits. “There’s been about 17 edits so far,” she said, correcting me. That put me in my place! Any surprises pairing these people up?

All the time. Before I start a mix, I’ll have a general sense of how a poem and a song will work together; but it’s only when I’m actually combining the two that I have the opportunity to play with the structure of both the poem and the song and that’s where most of the surprises occur.

For instance, O’Hara’s work tends to have this tip-of-the-tongue, stream-of-consciousness style and you have to find where to break it up in order to work it into the song you’re using. That’s where the mixing gets the most creative. Figuring out where to insert pauses and breaks either in the reading or in the music and how long they should be. “The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell is a five-line poem, but I mixed it with Moby’s “God Moving Over The Face Of The Waters” which is a 7-minute track. That obviously took a lot of editing to get it to the 2:30 track I wound up with in the end.

What are your general thoughts on poets reading or performing with music? There’s a whole spectrum of opinions on this, I’ve found.

I don’t think there’s much point in having a poet read his or her work while someone strums incidentally on a guitar in the background. But if you can integrate poetry with music into a single performance then I think you have the potential to do something unique. That’s why in most of my mixes the poems and lyrics share equal footing. I don’t want one to outshine the other but complement it instead. It’d be great to see poets performing on stage with musicians in this way.

In the end, the whole point of these mixes is to have people who’ve never heard of Randall Jarrell or Frank O’Hara or Czeslaw Milosz hear their work presented in a way they might respond to more readily than on the printed page or in a dry reading. I’ve also found it’s a great way to memorize these poems. It’s like remembering the lyrics to a song. Some teachers have contacted me over the years since I first started sharing these mixes and told me they’ve actually used them in their classes and found their students really respond to them. It doesn’t get much better than that.

I plan on using them in my classroom, for sure. Your project makes me think of other possible pairings. Do you have any other dream pairings? Other recordings?
For me, the poem is the most important part of any mix I make because I’m approaching it as a writer rather than as a musician. So any dream pairing would come from finding a recording of a poem that I really loved. One project I’m working on at the moment is of James Tate reading “The Lost Pilot” backed by a Radiohead track. Finding the Tate recording existed was a nice surprise.

I’d also like to work on T.S. Eliot’s recording of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” but I haven’t found the right music for it. I think trying to mix a long-form poem like Ginsberg’s “Howl” or John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror” would be an interesting challenge. I’m not sure if a full recording exists of Ashbery’s poem, now that I think of it.