Poetic transcribbling: Ted Berrigan & Harris Schiff’s Yo-Yo’s with Money and Beaned in Boston
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2024-01-01
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In 1977 and 1978, the poets Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff attended two baseball games, pretending to be game announcers and recording their repartee on a newly-released TCM-100 cassette tape recorder. The transcription of first game, between the Yankees and the Red Sox on September 14, 1977, was published by United Artists in 1979 as the mimeograph book Yo-Yo’s with Money. The second experiment, a May 26, 1978, Red Sox–Tigers game, was a ‘failure’, as Schiff puts it, and the audio recording was never fully transcribed. Using readings of tonal shifts in the text, an interview with Schiff, and archival material, including the Beaned in Boston tapes and Yo-Yo’s with Money’s original mimeograph title page and transcript, this essay examines Schiff and Berrigan’s self-reflexive process. I argue that the TCM-100 extends the qualities–immediacy, frequency, and ephemerality–which make the mimeograph so appealing as a production technology to writers and artists, and this moment occurs in anticipation of mimeo’s obsolescence. Furthermore, I suggest that these collaborative works can be viewed as ‘transcribbling’, a ludic form of transcription, enabled by this combination of tape recorder and mimeo.
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Anderson, S (2024). Poetic transcribbling: Ted Berrigan & Harris Schiff’s Yo-Yo’s with Money and Beaned in Boston. Textual Practice, 38(6). pp. 967–989. 10.1080/0950236X.2024.2362053 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/31447.
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Stephanie Anderson
Stephanie Anderson (she/they) is Assistant Professor of Literature & Creative Writing at Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on twentieth century poetry, small press publishing, and cultures of circulation. She is the author of three books of poetry, including If You Love Error So Love Zero (Trembling Pillow Press), as well as several chapbooks, most recently Bearings (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press 2024). She is also the editor of a book of interviews, Women in Independent Publishing (forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press in December 2024), and co-editor of All This Thinking: The Correspondence of Bernadette Mayer & Clark Coolidge (University of New Mexico Press). Her essays, poems, and interviews have recently appeared in Chicago Review, Fence Steaming, Gulf Coast, Post45, Textual Practice, Women's Studies, and elsewhere. She is finishing Dating the Poem, a study of calendrical poetics. You can read more of her work at www.octoberinapril.com.
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