UbuWeb’s site is an enormous archive of the visual, aural, and written avant-garde created by Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996. An academy-trained sculptor who turned to poetry after ten years in the professional art world of New York, he describes UbuWeb as “a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. All materials on UbuWeb [are . . .] made available for noncommercial and educational use only. ” His desire to archive began after his own creative investigation into Concrete Poetry; he found books and other literary sources for concrete poetry that had been out of print for years, scanned them and put them up onto a website. As the technology improved, Goldsmith offered more–audio files, flash media, and then streaming video.
When UbuWeb began archiving this material, it didn’t ask permission from authors. Goldsmith attempted to embody the internet’s early utopian desires–free access to information. To this end, he continues to archive as much as possible, and only removes material when authors request it to be removed. (He does, however, maintain a “Hall of Shame” for authors who are more interested in making money over sharing their work). UbuWeb has no advertisements and makes no money from the “texts” it shares, and the site maintains a policy of not publishing current, in-print texts without the author’s permission, instead focusing on out-of-print materials such as book and magazines, or hard-to-obtain materials, such as the avant-garde films.
What brought me to UbuWeb was a search for the term “Ethnopoetics,” a movement that refers to non-Western poetry by indigenous groups of people, and also poetry that applies and reflects such influences. I’ve been long-intrigued by Ethnopoetics because of its connection to oral histories, anthropology and performance. My first click led me to “Ethnopoetics: Soundings” where I spent time listening to Ca Dao, Vietnamese folk poems. Listening to the files in Vietnamese on UbuWeb, I was struck by the musicality of the verses– particularly the sounding of long and short vowels. The audio file was hypnotic, and when translator John Balaban offers explanation later in his own Mp3 file and reads his translations, the echo of the Vietnamese music is still there, along with the echo of Pagoda bells and faint gunfire that was heard when the Vietnamese sang their poems in the recordings.
A National Endowment for the Humanities grant that Balaban received in 1971 and 1972 funded this project. He decided to go to the Vietnamese countryside during the Vietnam War to preserve Vietnamese culture, and describes how he carried his tape recorder and asked people to share their favorite poems from this thousand year-old tradition of songs and ballads. Balaban translates these poems for listeners (and readers), and notes that he was the first person to record Da Cao in written Vietnamese.
This project has since led him to translate numerous books of Vietnamese poetry–and in 2001 the poems of Ho Xuan Huong, a concubine from the 18th century whose work and political leanings could be characterized as feminist by the contemporary reader. Ho Xuan Huong’s work was written in the “language of the people”, an almost-dead Vietnamese language that sparked Balaban’s interest in preserving it so that Vietnamese literature from the 18th century and prior would not be lost.
This was only one small link from UbuWeb’s Ethnopoetics page. Returning to the site after my Balaban diversion, I noted links for Ethnopoetics visuals, poems and discourses, which include images from the Chippewa and Ojibwe “song pictures.” There is much archived material on UbuWeb. In this brief series of blog posts, I hope to bring you a little bit of my journey into UbuWeb-World, and I encourage you to start your own and to share what you find.