Cat Licked the Garlic (1992) was my first published book. Public appearances
prior to that were more in the vein of film or video screenings, gallery
exhibits, performances of pieces with and without video installation, and,
very often together with Jackson Mac Low, performance poetry and sound poetry.
I first met Lary Bremner, the publisher of the Toronto-based Tsunami Editions, in New York when Bruce Andrews had a reception for him. There I saw, laid out on a table, the array of Tsunami books, one more beautiful than the other. A few days later, when Lary came to visit us, I showed him the work I was doing and he offered to publish Cat Licked the Garlic.
Cat is a compilation of multilingual poems, often combined with digitized video stills made of myself, of Jackson, and of the views from my window. The four-language poem "Ami Minden" is superimposed over various images, which turn the poem into an image to look at, a text to read, or something to use as a score. A year earlier, Brad Morrow, editor of Conjunctions, had selected several pages of the poem for the music issue of the magazine. The performance guidelines, as I described them in that issue are:
These scores are computer-mediated collages in which images are superimposed over the four-language poem "Ami Minden." (The languages are English, French, German and Hungarian.) They are to be interpreted by a soloist, or any number of readers, as follows:
Sentences, parts of sentences, and words that are printed over white, are to be read normally, using a normal tone of voice.
Sentences, etc., printed over gray, but still legible, are to be whispered—audibly. Different shades of gray indicate degrees of loudness. The darker the gray under the letters, the softer the whisper should be.
Black areas are to be interpreted as silences lasting as long as the words obliterated by them. Each performer should decide for herself what those words may be.
A year later, for a more elaborate performance work, Among Men, in which the musical notes are partly obliterated by reproductions of artworks, I provided very similar guidelines for the musicians. (More about Among Men on pages 268_271.)
The poem "Ami Minden" also became a 7-minute videotape that was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1993, as part of the exhibit "Between Word and Image," a show curated by Barbara London, Sally Berger, and Terese Svoboda. I produced the tape by plugging my VCR into my computer and simply recording my work with various graphics programs in real time.
It may be worth mentioning that the self-portraits in Cat were made a few years before the work was published, when I lived on the Bowery in a loft that had once been a flophouse. I used a still camera and a mirror to make these self-portraits, in hopes of finally seeing myself the way another person would. Of course, this is an impossible task because, for one thing, the camera sees with only one eye, not two, and besides, what another person sees is unimaginable and unknowable.
In Cat, I took these self-portraits and joined them with current (circa 1986) portraits I had made of Jackson, using a very early technology for capturing video images, maybe the first one in the public domain—a video camera and a video capture box hooked up to my then computer, an Atari ST. The video camera had been lent to me by my friend and electronic composer and inventor David Behrman. Trumpeter and fellow bricoleur George Lewis, lent me his capture box. We all worked on Ataris back then. David and George were working on a project experimenting with such equipment when I borrowed the setup to create a library of digitized pictures for later use. Somehow, by the time I got around to returning it, they had both moved on to other projects and upgraded their equipment. I still have these antiques in a drawer and dare not throw them away, for some superstitious reason I don't understand.
By combining an earlier self-portrait with a current portrait of Jackson, I created an idealized, even impossible couple: two people sitting side by side outside time. This anachronism allowed me to present our togetherness without actually exposing it. Thus, besides protecting our privacy, our own particular reality, I was able to create an imaginary one, which in turn became equally real in its own right.
Cat Licked the Garlic does not provide any translations or explanations. The reader is left to fend for herself. (Later, in Mayg-shem Fish, I resorted to footnotes at the bottom of each page. It was not until Uxudo, that I began using facing pages dedicated entirely to transliterations, translations, and transformations of visual material.)