Ian Hatcher Interviewed at Rain Taxi: 'It seems obvious now that I'm a sound poet'

"Resides in the borderlands" is a good way to place Ian Hatcher, who writes and performs poems, expands on the limits of digital and print literature, and is often to be found traveling from European sound festival to old-fashioned performance residency. We're thrilled to find an interview with this busy, brilliant creature, now up at Rain Taxi.

"I met Ian when our work was exhibited side by side at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Hong Kong this past May," says Steven Wingate. "When I saw him read from Prosthesis, I knew this was a young writer whose career I had to start tracking." An excerpt from their conversation:

SW: Seeing you in performance, it was impossible for me to avoid thinking about the the tradition of sound poetry—particularly the late Canadian poet bpNichol, who in the 1980s was integral not only to sound poetry but to computer poetry. What is your relationship with that tradition? What parts of it do you embrace, and in what ways do you consciously depart from or query it?

IH: I came to the way I write by following a path through music and code and performance art, and not by way of sound poetry as such; to be honest I was mostly unaware of that history until recently. Though it seems obvious now that I'm a sound poet. I love bpNichol's work. Sound poetry, as a tradition, involves a heightened treatment of language as dynamic textural (not just textual) material, and of embodiment and extremity, and all those things are important to me.

One way I think I diverge from that tradition is the way my work is pretty narrowly conceptually focused. The vocal rhythms and textures in my work are designed to evoke digitization in relation to the body, and I use only my live voice to produce them, without effects pedals or any other processing. I've been working lately on switching registers very smoothly, so I can deliver a line in, say, a warm, faintly Southern colloquial accent, and an instant later sound like a speech synthesizer from 1999. Or crossfade those two voices gradually over a stanza, or bend a line so that just a few words have traces of synthetic affect.

For me the writing itself, the text, is the primary element. The rhythms are ultimately in service of semantics, even when I go into noisy territory. I like the wild dynamics of the Four Horsemen, but tend to have a hard time with sound poetry that focuses on texture and timbre to the exclusion of understandability. I do listen to a lot of vocalists who use extended techniques in explicitly musical contexts, though: Meredith Monk, Theo Bleckmann, Pamela Z, Joan La Barbara, Yoko Ono, Sidsel Endresen. Endresen especially was a huge influence on me. What she can do with glottal stops is just amazing.

All that said, I spend a lot of time making crazy sounds in my apartment, trills and stutterings, which probably sound like more traditional sound poetry than what I do on stage. But I usually think of that as research. Or technique, like playing scales.

Read the full interview at Rain Taxi.