Considering Burroughs

By esme_design -

As I heard the voice of William S. Burroughs, with its deep timbre and its authoritative pronouncements, I thought of the work of a Mexican-American poet who refers to borders as places of power: the border between city and desert, between family and individual, between words and images. In the three sound files that I listened to, “Bradley The Buyer”, “Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin Hear Us Through A Hole In The Air”, and “Inflexible Authority” from ubu.com, Burroughs too was exploring different types of borderlands. Perhaps all poets do this, but the methods Burroughs used in cutting up and interweaving texts seem to find a back door into the consciousness, and to test the boundaries of cogency and confusion, the meaning versus the sound of words and the experiential nature of reality. For me the sounds become a kind of drone or buzz, like a mantra, which allows word associations to freely surface from their mysterious place of origin.

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