In the winter of 1974 I wrote a series of poems based in brief sketches of my girlfriend's studio/apartment at night, a series of love poems based on her surroundings. Later, I added several others so that the poems moved back and forth between the rooms at night and the rooms in daylight. Later, I added some poems to friends, and then took both them and the day poems out of the series, making it a set of nocturnes once more. In another session, I added some poems as nocturnal mirrors of passages in Olivier Messiaen's Quator por le fin du temps, following, in part, the images in Messiaen's annotations. (In the mid 60s, when I was a student, I listened to Quator on a New Year's Day, partly because I had a hangover and wanted to hear something peaceful. The sense of peace in the face of time and dire circumstances [Messiaen's Quator was written in a Nazi concentration camp] seemed an appropriate way to start the year.) In addition to clarifying some of the sound qualities of the poem, this brought a serene eschatology into a few of the poems. A lot had gone into this series of a dozen brief poems after this revision, but something about the set didn't work right, so I put it aside again.

In the early 70s, I began fooling around with book forms, the first primarily made up of things found in a print shop where I worked, and then in my own basement shop. By the middle of the decade, I was making all sorts of books out of unusual materials or employing unusual techniques. I made books out of hair, out of cinder blocks, out of money, out of offset plates, out of bars of soap, out of cigar boxes, out of mirrors, etc. Several other people were working along similar lines at that time, but some had a different attitude toward the process. I think we all shared the same giddy enthusiasm, but I didn't see most of my books as anything but propositions. I didn't like the way some were being falsified by art market commoditification, or used as a means of hiding lack of skill, or the way they took as basic assumption - shared with the perception of other forms of visual poetry - that this was an easy art. My feeling came in part from the sense that the significance of most of the works in this area was minimal, if they had any significance at all beyond invention. This was only a faint drift in the 70s, not yet the deluge of the 90s.

In the process of trying things, I found that I could make acoustic books, books that could be played as musical interments. By 1976, I saw the potential for making true books out of propositions of this sort. One of the first that seemed successful was a book to use in performances of Jackson Mac Low's Stanzas for Iris Lezak. I made the pages for this book out of wooden two by fours that produced sounds simply by clapping the pages together. The performance instructions for Stanzas called for sounds of varying loudness, which could be accomplished by the force with which the pages were clapped. After the first binding, I took the book apart and bound each page into the spine with different amounts of space between the pages so I could get slightly different timbers by clapping different pairs of pages or groups of pages, and could further vary this by slipping a piece of cloth or metal between the pages during performance. The texts, written, stamped, and painted on the pages of the book came from Stanzas and from a work of my own that followed similar systematic chance procedures as those used by Jackson in writing Stanzas. The book was made during rehearsals for performances of Stanzas, and the book's acoustic properties (and to some extent the talismanic possibilities of the texts) were more important to me than the book's appearance.

Putting the pieces of cloth between pages naturally suggested covering pages with cloth to produce a different volume and a different type of sound. The sound properties of the first tests I made with felt covered pages suggested the sequence of nocturnes I'd started several years before. I began playing with a model to see if I could work out a means of performing the poems with the book as accompaniment, and this worked fairly well with the patterns of lines and stanzas in the poems, though it required some adjustments. It then functioned well within poems, but not as a complete work. Although the series was meant to be sonically simple, the voice and clapping were too uniform and monotonous.

Listening to recordings of Japanese Gagaku Dance ceremonies and Noh Plays for other projects suggested what I needed. If the clapping and voice was augmented by decisive claps from the book I'd made for Stanzas for Iris Lezak, at the end of longer units, the performance took on a completely different character. The girlfriend whose presence informed the first poems became the assistant who clapped the accompanying book in performance.

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I made quite a few acoustic books, simple to elaborate, for my own use and for use by other performance artists between then and 1984. I then ceased making them for a period of about five years. I had ceased performing my own work at the end of the 70s, though I continued performing in other artists' work until 1983, when I ceased all public performance. By 1988, I had new ideas I wanted to try out. Among other things, I wanted to make books meant for private instead of public performance, books that could be performed contemplatively in a study or living room or garden.

In one of his anthologies, Jerry Rothenberg set up a passage from the Psalms as a performance score:

make a joyful noise
let the sea roar
and all that fills it
the world
and they that dwell therein
let the floods clap their hands
let the hills be joyful together

My first impression of this suggested something very loud - the sea, after all, is said to roar in it. But by 1988 a completely different set of sounds suggested itself. I had made some exceedingly loud books, such as one for The Four Horsemen performance group that could make windows rattle when played at full volume, and I could have figured out a way to roar even louder, but that seemed inappropriate to this text. The poem may include the roar of the ocean and of all creatures on the land, but this poem does not roar. Its celebration of the world seems a contemplative rememberance of sounds rather than a recreation of them. Even the sea's roar seems more like its echo in a seashell than the racket it makes to someone in a boat in a storm. It suggested a great variety of sounds, a sort of acoustic compendium, subdued to a gentle clapping of hands - perhaps hands with bells on them - hands playing a stringed instrument, hands playing a small tambourine. For the sonics of this book, I decided to try to get all the sounds I could manage into a book that could be played without much difficulty or skill - a book to approach as an exploration of acoustic possibilities as well as one that could make music. To achieve this, I built the book with resonating chambers, sympathetic vibrating strings, and chambers for objects that could rattle, ring, or make hushed rasping sounds - all depending on how the book was played. The book makes five distinctly separable types of sounds, with many possible combinations.

Imaging the book followed the sound patterns: I used bright colored grounds and painted the texts in near-compliments, so that each would interact brightly and vibrantly with the others, but not produce a harsh appearance.

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For me, as I assume for many others, performance art had roots in the political protest activities of the 1960s. Although I made no acoustic books in the 60s, I had quite a bit of experience with them when I returned to poetry at the end of the 80s. In some respects, activist books form a better counterpart to contemplative books such as MAKE A JOYFUL NOISE than books meant solely for use in a strictly aesthetic context.

The first of these was something of a joke on me, perhaps. I constructed OIL WAR EXORCISM with metal letters that could make a racket when clapped hard and also make a sound something like an insect being crushed when the letters were more slowly rolled onto each other. I made this book for use in anti-war activities that didn't happen. Instead of serving a utilitarian function, it became nothing more than a show piece. But in the late 80s-earlyy 90s, I set up and propagated anti-nuclear events as part of the International Shadows Project. This included ever-changing exhibitions of anti-nuclear art in galleries, theaters, concert halls, stores, and other sites, and sometimes included performance art and demonstrations. I made IT'S YOUR WORLD for these events.

The sonic base for this book was the wooden tocsin, a loud but dead sound used by many cultures with different instruments (bells to mallets to drums) to send out a warning signal - most often to call people together against a common enemy when they were too occupied with other things to notice the danger in any other way. The similarity of the name to the word "toxin" had additional significance for me.

The visual dimensions of the book used familiar icons. I made a facsimile of the familiar NASA image of the earth seen from space, the bright blue and white disk alone in the darkness, across the outer edges of the pages. At the bottom I painted the simple text "IT'S YOUR WORLD . . ." The icons in each opening of pages were painted from photos of nuclear detonation, red mushroom clouds, making other kinds of circles in another kind of darkness. In its phanopoeic mode, opening the book literally showed the earth being torn apart by explosions. Slamming the pages together not only produced the basic sound, but acted as a visual negation or rejection of nuclear atrocities. When seen closed, the book showed the luminous disk, but kept latent within it the image of the destruction of the friendly, shining surface of the earth, the malignancy that could deaden the surface of the sphere. A tocsin's dead sound functioned as an omen as well as a warning.

As far as I know, no one before me made books to use as musical instruments. I'm saying that in part because I suspect that by saying it something will come to my attention that proves the statement wrong. I'm also saying it because even if other people have made musical books, in my own terms making these books has been pure invention, something that came to me on the most basic existential level as creation ex nihilo.

One of my first acoustic books began with quiet, delicate love poems that lead by their own logic through visions of peace and bliss, exploring many different types of music along the way. The second grew through a changing understanding of the nature of celebration of life and spirit in the world. The last responds to ultimate evil, which I have had to live with, avoid, and confront throughout my life. During World War II, my father was an army chaplain and my mother an army nurse anesthetist. The war threw them together on a train from Munich to Rome after they had witnessed what seemed the most harrowing extremes of depravity and perversion, including giving primary care to the survivors of the concentration camp at Dachau. Between the time they met and the time I was born, evil proved it had the potential to go further, that it could put the means of destroying races and even humanity in the hands of any lunatic generals backed by enough wealth to produce nuclear bombs. As with virtually any anti-nuclear activity or work of art, this book is a totally adamant affirmation of life, affirmation made without flinching in the face of the most viscious and stupid perversion humanity has ever created, and this affirmation must in some sense be the base of any form of joy in this period of history.

The history of books, poetry, and all arts has followed strange paths, as has human evolution. In the later moments of that human evolution, books have played an integral part in the process of changing us and the world. A favorite practice of visual poets is speculating on the origins of visual poetry, which is as much as to say the origin of book art. My sense of this is that the first texts our prehuman ancestors learned to read were the constelations of the night sky and the tracks of birds and animals. Perhaps a memory or an intuition of this comes through in the Chinese story that writing originated in the conjunction of bird tracks and the light of a star. The main contenders for the first books fashioned by human hands seem to be petroglyphs, scarification, and tattooing - and these, too, could have prehuman origins. Weaving and other textile making created early forms of writing. Whatever the case, changes and inventions have worked through the essence of the books that have evolved along with us. Many forms persist - people still read bird and animal tracks and watch the cycle of constellations and planets as they move through the sky. Presumably books will continue to evolve along with us, even though they will morph into forms we cannot now imagine. The process is part of what makes us human. And when the human world ends, people will probably still be touching the origins of books, no matter how they have changed, as they make the last one.