Eleventh International Festival of Sound Poetry poster and catalog cover
The broadside (approx. 24¾″×8″) lists the 29 participants including Four Horsemen (Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, bpNichol).
The eleventh installment of the International Festival of Sound Poetry took place at Toronto’s Innis College and St. Lawrence Centre Town Hall from 14 to 21 October 1978. Glenn Goluska exclusively used Hans Eduard Meier’s Syntax for the poster and catalog cover.
From Boo-Hooray:
Originally held at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm in 1968, the festival initially focused on the technical manipulation of sound through means such as tape superimposition and vocal synthesizing. As sound poetry progressed through the 1970s, it began foregrounding the corporeality of utterance, and the the festival in turn shifted toward live performance. Steve McCaffery, in his contribution to the eleventh festival’s catalogue, notes, “The trend towards live performance has been maintained and, perhaps the most singular feature of this North American debut, the prominence given to collective and group performance: the simultaneous work of Jackson Mac Low, the multi-voice pieces of Jerome Rothenberg, the two British groups Konkrete Canticle and JGJGJGJG … all mark an exciting expansion with in that contradictory, indefinable, violently diversified and exhilaratingly intermedia language art we (hesitate to) describe as sound poetry.”
Cover of the catalog (5½″×8½″) edited by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol and published by Underwhich Editions in 1,500 copies
