MICHAEL SOHN

I had originallyand loosely based the spatiality of the poem on the structure of
Guillaume de Machaut’s (1300?-1377) motets. Three distinct voices make up
a motet. The first is the tenor: a melody taken from another source and which the
composer often alters. This voice forms the “base” of the polyphony. On top of
the tenor the composer scaffolds two (sometimes three) other voices/texts. Here,
the text in large type running across the bottom of each page constitutes the tenor,
and the words above it roughly and inconsistently break up into the two other
voices. Each page works as a unit, but the poem and its voices move through time.
I have taken the tenor for this poem — and the other French — from Stéphane
Mallarmé’s (1842-98) La Dernière Mode(The Latest Fashion), a family-oriented
fashion magazine he wrote essentially on his own in 1874. The tenor translates
as: “Let us be nearly insignificant, vague, null.” The other French phrases read:
“completely”, “(this queen for someone)”, “guipure” (a kind of lace where the
motifs are separated by large gaps), “the frame of a mirror where you recognize
yourself.”

To that original “score”, I have added the blocks of text that appear on each page.
These blocks are or are not, are and are not, part of the motet. The poem is there-
fore neither single nor double, neither, once folded and sewn into this book,
original nor revised. It is, they are, simply neither, which is to say other, if not or.
The blocks on the 3rdpage are my translation of passages from Mallarmé’s “La
Musique et les Lettres” (1894) and “Le Mystère et les Lettres” (Divagations,
1897). In La Dernière Mode, Mallarmé describes language as “composed just
like a marvelous work of embroidery or of lace: not one thread of the idea which
is lost, this one hidden, but in order to reappear united a little further on to that
one there; all are assembled in a drawing, complex or simple, ideal, and that
memory forever retains, no! the instinct of harmony that, old or young, one has
in oneself.”