Behind the Sound

In high winter, Manhattan’s Riverside Drive and 95th Street takes on an edge-of-the-earth quality. Here, a couple of crosstown blocks from the Upper West Side’s bustling center of brunch places and brownstones, freezing wind barrels up from the Hudson River. I find refuge two blocks south, next to a statue of Joan of Arc riding horseback, raising a sword in the air.

I have arrived early to meet W. Bliem Kern, legendary sound poet; or, as his business card reads, “The Reverend William Bliem Kern, Jr., Ordained Interfaith Minister, Spiritual Counselor, Tarot Master, and Astrologer.”

Almost 30 years ago in a Philadelphia bookshop, I’d picked up Meditations, Kern’s 1973 collection of concrete and visual poetry. It came in a box. On the cover, a wild-haired man stared straight into the lens. As a fellow wild-haired man, a 19-year-old college sophomore, I couldn’t help but look back into the man’s eyes and see some part of myself. Inside the box were a book and a cassette.

Nothing, certainly not the canon-heavy classes I took at Rutgers-Camden, prepared me for what I heard when I popped the Meditations cassette into a player. Over the course of two 19-minute sides, Kern chanted, moaned, and bleated. At some points he sounded like he was stuttering, at others speaking in tongues. It took me at least 10 listens just to wrap my head around the idea that this was, in fact, poetry, and not some maniac testing out a microphone.

In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge distinguishes between imagination and fancy—poetic imagination on the one hand and mental abandon on the other. Kern put me on Team Fancy all the way, equal parts mental abandon and barbaric yawp. As the years went on, Meditations took on talismanic qualities in the personal canon of recordings that I thought made up my own sensibility. I snuck snippets into mix tapes for friends between R.E.M. and Public Enemy, and slipped Meditations into people’s stereos to find fellow sound-poetry nerds.

Meditations is wall-to-wall crazy wisdom. In “vulcan,” one of my favorites, a continuous band of text appears alongside the poem. Other pages wouldn’t be out of place hung on a gallery wall. Still others, such as “ipits,” resemble musical scores. 

 

Click images for larger versions.

Then, in 2007 during a move, I lost my copy. It sent me into a panic: I had played clips to my classes to show them that poems could consist of sounds as well as words. Meditations had become a sound-poetry holy grail. After a couple of dead ends on AbeBooks and Amazon, I finally found a replacement: from an Italian dealer on eBay for way too much money.

I took the book and cassette to work, where a friend, poet-scholar Michael Peters, best known as a member of the band Poem Rocket, spotted it on my desk. He did a double take.

“Is this … W. Bliem Kern’s Meditations?” Peters whispered.

“Why yes,” I said. I handed him the box. He cradled Meditations like a newborn.

“I’ve never seen this,” he said. “I’ve never heard this.”

This was the kind of approval collector-types like me long for all their lives. Peters had rubbed shoulders with heavy hitters such as Petr Kotik, Dick Higgins, and Jackson Mac Low; hearing him rave about Kern was like encountering Meditations again for the first time. As he paged through the postscript by Bernard Heidsieck, a French grandfather of modern sound poetry and member of the Fluxus movement, he talked about his own encounters with Kern: first in Aural Literature Criticism, a “crazy little anthology” edited by Richard Kostelanetz, another friend of Peters’, then in various other anthologies.

“His poems are like a codebook,” he said. “The visual aspects, the clusters and spacing, how he would fall into more traditional text.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. Somehow, searching for a replacement copy of Meditations opened something up in me. For the first time in the nearly three decades since I had been listening to Meditations, I found myself wondering: who was the man behind it?

I turned to Kenneth Goldsmith. A few Kern sound-poetry recordings existed on Ubu.com, Goldsmith’s mammoth repository of avant-garde sound pieces. But he knew nothing about Kern’s work or life. “It’s just something contextually interesting,” he wrote in an email.

Then, suddenly, there was W. Bliem Kern, right under my digital nose.

I finally stumbled upon his own website, BliemKern.com. It is a hot mess of 1990s web-design throwback, complete with black background, multiple typefaces, and navigation links that take up whole screens. On the home page, a thumbnail of Meditations appears next to recent images of the present-day Reverend Kern with a curly gray mustache. There’s a familiar flare in his eyes.

The digital equivalent of a cave wall, BliemKern.com has, by my count, more than 20 other pages. In one, Kern outlines his astrological services; in another, he explains the “3 poisons” of “desirous attachment, hatred, and ignorance.” A page called “DEATH” is dedicated to the late actor and friend David Carradine. There are several pages of “professional referrals,” including recommendations for the late Jungian analyst Armin Wanner and former Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. Quotes from Buddha, W.C. Fields, and yogi poet Jetsun Milarepa fill out the pages.

Oh, and Kern also lists his phone number, which I called one day last winter.

“You have Meditations? Where’d you get your copy?” Kern asked, surprised I had even heard of the book, let alone bought one. “I’ve got a couple in my brother’s barn in a truck. They be rare, man.”

He says a Columbia professor had called him recently about Meditations. “I don’t know what’s stirring it up, but it’s all coming up now.”

A few weeks later, we meet. He brings me in from the wind and welcomes me inside his small apartment. There’s barely enough room to walk. His website’s terrestrial counterpart, Kern’s efficiency is filled to the ceiling with grottos and trinkets. On a shelf sit photos of his teachers: Govindu Sri Rama Murti and Kulapati E. Krishnamacharya, masters of Hindu astrology, and Kadam Morten Clausen, Buddhist teacher in the New Kadampa tradition.

I try to match the voice of Kern, now 73, with the one on the Meditations tape, when he was 32. He is, it turns out, a man of many voices, equal parts Mel Blanc, Lord Buckley, and Buddhist teacher-counselor, with the slightest residue of a Philadelphian lilt, an accent we share. He spent his early childhood in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, after which his family moved to suburban Fort Washington. After graduating from college in 1967, he moved to New York City, where he found work as an art director for various publishing houses. At night he took classes at The New School, among them a poetry workshop with N.H. Pritchard, an avant-garde poet and member of the Umbra school of African-American writers. Kern experimented with a pair of self-correcting Selectric typewriters, turning the roller as he typed, mashing text together. He began to repeat and chant words and sounds as he typed.

“I learned a lot from Norman,” Kern said, referring to Pritchard. “He used to make up elaborate lists of interesting books—Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Sappho. If there was any far-out book, he would have it on the list.”

Pritchard introduced Kern to the downtown poetry scene. It was the early ’70s, and arts funding flowed freely from private and public sources. With grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, Kern started a poetry series at Super Nova, an arts space on West Broadway in Soho.

“I gave poets $50 for a reading,” he said. “No one was giving people that kind of money.” He rattles off some of the poets who read: Jackson Mac Low, downtown fabulist Spencer Holst, Allen Plantz, Daniela Gioseffi, and Ishmael Reed.

Kern taught his own classes at Super Nova, “sound-poetry workshops” where students banged pipes together, chanted, and wrote poems. “They were these big, long 20-foot pipes, electrical conduit pipes. And I would bang on those things and the whole loft would be vibrating.”

It was around this time that he met C.W. “Bill” Truesdale, publisher of New Rivers Press. “Bill lived in this building, in the back,” Kern said. “He came to one of my poetry readings and he was so taken by me, and said he wanted to publish my book.”

Kern designed the book himself, and Meditations—full title meditationsmeditationsmeditations: selected poems 1964–1973—was published in a run of 760 copies, 500 in boxes with cassettes. Meditations won an Art Directors Club of New York award for book design, and garnered a rave in Library Journal, which called it one of the best titles from a small press in 1973 and “the most fascinating oral experience of the year.”

“Kern’s texts are written to be performed,” Richard Kostelanetz wrote in the introduction to his 1980 anthology Text-Sound Texts, which included Kern’s work. “Whereas most text-sound artists want to create autonomous linguistic structures, Kern’s avowed purpose is the communication of personal feeling.”

Kern himself put it another way. “I am exploring the oral world of nonlinear phenomena, the inner speech, the dialogues with myself as a child before I learned the signs and symbols of our language,” he wrote in his ars poetica, “Sound Poetry.”

Kern’s activities in the ’70s and early ’80s suggested a writer on his way. There was a reading at the 1972 Avant Garde Festival in Shea Stadium with Bernadette Mayer, John Giorno, and Hannah Weiner, followed two years later by an appearance on CBS’s Camera Three. He performed in the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then temples in Sudan and Egypt. His “Sound Poetry” was included in Claims for Poetry, an anthology of poets on the state of the art, edited by Donald Hall. (“Hall was really nice to me, really cool,” Kern says.)

Then, Kern suffered a succession of losses in the ’80s and ’90s, including the death of his parents and his close friend Allen Katzman, killed in a car crash. “I had had enough of death,” he says. “I just dropped out after that. Didn’t write much.”

Kern has lived in the same building on the Upper West Side for more than 40 years, and left the poetry world around the time I discovered him in the ’80s. More and more, his interests have turned to meditation, the occult, astrology, healing crystals. Under his loft bed are hundreds of VHS tapes of Satellite Psychic, a cable show he says he hosted in the early 1990s. They all need to be digitized, he says, before he dies and they’re thrown away.

Bliem Kern in his home.

That afternoon, we drank tea. He prefers to stand—a recent hernia operation makes sitting difficult. On his desk was a wooden bowl with several sets of dice, one with 12 sides and symbols, which he uses for his clients’ readings.

As we talked, a Hans Zimmer movie soundtrack played from his laptop. The music swelled into a fury as he told me about Meditations. New Rivers Press had boxes of them that they’d wanted to give him. For a hundred bucks. He didn’t take them up on it. “Like a dope,” he said.

He clearly misses poetry. A couple of years ago, friends of Kern’s at his Buddhist society threw a party for his 70th birthday party. “I whipped out my poems,” Kern said, and “I blew them out of the water. I’ve belonged to that society for 20 years. They didn’t know anything about my past. They couldn’t believe it. I read all kinds of wacked-out stuff. Jesus, it was fun.” For a moment, I catch a glimpse of the younger Kern, the ambitious poet who banged on vacuum pipes and demanded to be heard.

Asked directly, Kern is ambivalent about returning to poetry. “I saw a friend the other day and we were talking about getting active again, and he said, ‘Well, there’s the open mic at Saint Mark’s.’ I’m not going to Saint Mark’s to do an open mic! I used to run these things, and you want me to go to an open mic?”

“A lot of people went apeshit back in the day. I think I must have slept with the wrong woman and got in trouble with some power brokers in Europe and they squeezed me out of the scene.”

I wasn’t sure if he was kidding. But that was true for a lot of what Kern said; I had entered his world, governed by his own quirky rules. We looked out his window on Riverside Drive, and I asked him to perform some poems. I stood in front of him, headphones on, holding a microphone near his face. His voice entered my head, and it took all my will not to smile. A couple of minutes later, we both walked outside into the cold. He hailed me a cab on Broadway, and I gave the Reverend Kern a hug good-bye.

When I got home, he called me up to see if I made it back okay. It was the day before a big snow. He had looked out the window. “I just realized I can’t see New Jersey,” he said. “The wind is going sideways, sideways, sideways, sideways.”

 

Listen to W. Bliem Kern read “vulcan" from Meditations: