Last week I saw a play called The Four Horsemen Project at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa. Created by Toronto’s Volcano Theatre, the play has received rave reviews both here in Ottawa and during its recent run at Factory Theatre in Toronto. I’d like to comment a bit on the play, and also point out how it connects - somewhat tangentially, but significantly - to social media.

The play is a fun, energetic and hyper-kinetic tribute to the legendary Canadian performance poetry ensemble The Four Horsemen. This was a group of 4 poets (bpnichol, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery and Rafael Barreto-Rivera) who studiously and ecstatically explored the limits of human vocal communication in a poetic context throughout the 70s and early 80s.

As someone who has also spent many years exploring the same fertile terrain as a poetic performer, the Four Horsemen were always an inspiration to me. Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to perform and record with the amazing soundsinger Paul Dutton on several occasions, and count him as a fine friend. (Hi Paul!) For what it’s worth, I also once won a poetry battle with bpnichol, but that’s a story nobody knows and I won’t recount here. Regardless, the point is that these guys were true poets - vocal angels and vocal demons, seekers, soothsayers and shit-disturbers - and as a result, despite a sudden and belated interest in their work due to this new play, they were by and large avoided and ignored, like all real poets, in their day. Basically, they scared the shit out of most people, even tho they inspired, enthralled and enraptured many others. That’s inevitably how it is with poets, the real ones anyway, til they are dead (R.I.P. bp) or disbanded.

As you may have gathered from previous posts on this blog, I believe that oral communication technologies are extremely relevant to our understanding of digital communication technologies. In other words if social media is all about ‘conversations’, then it makes sense to seek to understand the familiar dynamics of oral conversations as a means of gaining insight into new digital conversational models. More than this, I feel that the two technologies share fundamental commonalities that distinguish them from literate communication technologies, and that as a result oralists and digitalists need each other. They actively need to be allies if either hopes to fend off the predatory tactics of literate capitalists seeking to enslave the digital realm (via WIPO and copyright, via Geolocking content, via DRM, via penalties for sharing, etc.) as they have colonized oral cultures (a quick review of the legal clampdown on sampling in HipHop would be very relevant here, as would an examination of the negligible legal value of hearsay - i.e. hear-say as trumped by texts, writs, deeds, contracts, etc.).
All of this is to say that those people who push the limits of oral communication are important, they are juggernauts exploding hegemonic literate norms and positing radically new models of engagement, expression and communion. The Four Horsemen were ahead of their time, as were peers like John Giorno (another brilliant poet-friend and a wise and beautiful man) and his lower-east side poet’s posse, which included the likes of Patti Smith, David Johansen, Jayne Cortez, and his roommate, William S. Burroughs.
But it may be that their day has come, that a playful polyvocal poetics of improvisation, of dynamic digital engagement vs. static mechanical textuality, is on the horizon. It may be that the blogosphere, chat, messenger and the rest do not represent a pathologically pointless logorrhea, as some fear, but rather a liberatory linguistic lasciviousness, a collective rush to babble, to squawk, to sing - together. No longer fearing The Four Horsemen in their bardic beards, but becoming ourselves The 4 billion babblers of the networked talkalypse, making meaning, making media, making money.

We shall see.