Eight-Track is composed of eight tracks (or series) plus two bonus tracks, each of which explores one of the various meanings of the word "track," such as a musical track, a physical path, the marks left by a person or animal, speech tracking, animal and human tracking, and systems of surveillance. The title nods to the obsolete technology of the 8-track tape, popularized in the 1960s and 1970s, as the series use some aspects of the 8-track metaphorically and formally, such as sound degradation, low- vs. high-fidelity, wow and flutter (slow or rapid pitch fluctuation of a signal in recorded sound), and the splice and loop. (The book's arrangement, design, and size may also echo certain aspects of the actual 8-track object.) Eight-Track asks what these concepts can mean poetically and politically, on the page and beyond the page, engaging with ideas of language as trace and sound, language as surveillance and resistance, notions of insertion, rearrangement, and variant, and dialoguing between various political, linguistic, and genre boundaries. The book is polyphonic in voice and form: some of the series are long poems, while others are hybrids of poetry and other genres, including black-and-white photography, drawing/illustration, audio transcription, radio drama, audio art (available online), echoes of other systems of discourse (philosophy, gloss, theatre, travelogue, translation), and beyond the book, multimedia performances of some of the series. Eight-Track considers questions such as: How can a trace be sonically and visually embodied? What do our systems of surveillance reveal about ourselves? How does language oppress? How does it resist? Can the poem act as a tracking camera or system? What are the ethics of animal and human tracking? The work is also interested in how the human voice, sometimes through technological intervention, can directly affect and alter materials, and how these materials can in turn alter the human voice.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 11/26/2019
ISBN: 9781772012385
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 7.70h x 6.00w x 0.50d