I did, in the Magritte Poems, use a response to the verse,
printed at the back of the poems, giving it a second "voice."
In The Code Poems almost all (and I think all the ones published)
were a statement and answer between 2 voices, people or ships. Two
or three people read the poems aloud in performance. Sometimes I read
both parts myself as in the movie "Any Chance of War" and
in a non-performance reading situation. The idea of 2 "voices"
is natural to The Code Poems as the code was developed for
communication between vessels or between mariners lost at sea and
a ship.
So the idea of using more than one "voice" or separate
"voices" pre-dates the Clairvoyant Journal 1974.
To clear up the matter of the three voices in this book, printed in
regular type, CAPITALS or italics: at that time — Jan.-June
74 — I saw words in a wide variety of sizes, script and printed,
on my own forehead (the large capital words on my forehead began in
a retreat in June 1973 (Unpublished Journals, 1973)), and on other
people, forehead included, and on every other imaginable surface or
non-surface; the wall, the typewriter, the paper I was typing on,
people's clothes, the air, and even words strung out in the air from
the light pull (a favorite place), anywhere.
I bought a new electric typewriter in January 74 and said quite clearly,
perhaps aloud, to the words (I talked to them as if they were separate
from me, as indeed the part of my mind they came from is not known
to me) I have this new typewriter and can only type lower case, capitals
or underlines (somehow I forgot, ignored or couldn't cope with in
the speed I was seeing things, a fourth voice, underlined capitals)
so you will have to settle yourself into three different prints. Thereafter
I typed the large printed words I saw in CAPITALS, the words that
appeared on the typewriter or the paper I was typing on in underlines
(italics) and wrote the part of the journal that was unseen, my own
words, in regular upper and lower case.
It turned out that the regular upper and lower case words described
what I was doing, the CAPITALS gave me orders, and the underlines
or italics made comments. This is not 100% true, but mostly so.
The description of the voices is an integral part of the sentence
discussion, as with three or even 2 operating there was scarcely chance
to complete the phrase or sentence.
The situation of the voices, and the interruption and overlay, is
quite clear if you hear the tape made by New Wilderness Audiographics
wherein Sharon Mattlin is a wonderful CAPITALS and bosses me around
endlessly. Peggy De Coursey read the italics for March and Regina
Beck for April. Unprinted is a tape with Rochelle Kraut reading italics
for May and myself alone reading the June Retreat. Peggy and Regina
both sound as if they were scolding me. We worked it so that the voices
came fast after each other, occasionally speaking in unison and overlapping,
and occasionally one of us would ad-lib a comment.
I want to add it was an enormous amount of fun, through hard work
requiring a lot of rehearsals to prepare for the tape. Performances
were a little freer, requiring less perfection. These readers and
others put up with endless work and no or little monetary reward.
Sharon used to get a bowl of cereal but she sounded funny in rehearsal
and Peggy got fare to Brooklyn.
Since then all my books are written for one voice, though dis-continued
and interrupted, and I have the lonesome pleasure of reading them
all by myself.