Great come-back post from Chris, definately a number 3 response,
sleeves rolled and grappling with the wrongs of "evocation":
On 16 Feb 00 12:11:58 GMT, Chris wrote:
>I have no interest in painting pictures, recording speech, bottling scents in
>my work, or owning experiences or finishing poems forever. It's all part of
>the same concern. There's no point in my saying 'this is as it is' about
>anything because it's so partial as to be literally negligible...
But is this evocation really what "place" is about at best? I can see
some of the "mush Irish poets" Billy refers to slotting nicely into
the scent-bottling industry for sure - and see the point of the Alan
Bennett bit - but I can't see Allen Fisher's "Place" (to cite one
which I too was surprised not to've seen cited earlier) taken up by
the Lunnen tourist board as a piece of "this is as it is". That, it
seems to me, uses its materials and locations as a pushing-off-from
point for its arguments, and I'd hope that as such it's an altogether
different proposition.
When I spoke, for instance, of Geraldine Monk's use of her Blackburn
speech patterns, I hope it was evident that I wasn't saying, by 'eck
Geraldine luv, that's right *authentic* or wharrever, any more than
I'd claim my "Fantasia" "evoked" those luverly North-Kent marshes: I
was trying to suggest that she actively used this point-of-origin as a
device for strengthening the structures of her work (from
_LaTormenta_):
Heat that feb ice. Spell melt.
T'wild frozen waters in that
ittered sky pelt downd
sunless pitch
jagged -- it pricks the
soft cheeky brains. Afeard minds.
To say that "Southrons would maul the music" of such a passage is to
miss the point - all I'm saying is that once you have it "placed"
properly the vowel and consonant structure becomes much tighter. Using
the local, then, as something to push off from. To me, anyway.
Hence too my reference to Gilbert White, surely the apostle of "place"
writing: to read his rigid examination of that small patch of turf as
a simple picture postcard of it is to misunderstand his entire reason
for writing - his reaching out, his searching for correspondences and
news from elsewhere, correlation. Selbourne provided his method, his
materials, but his purpose was something beyond that. "Selbourne is
what I think with"...
And here, to follow Chris's lead, is one of mine - a "place" poem, for
sure, from the threaplands of my _Border Ballads_ - but not intended
as a stabilised piece of picture-painting in any sense, and never
going to be taken up by the Northumbrian Tourist Board...:
silk tie
What we could buy -
child in the treetops
_ashtree and garden fork_
brittle shell falling from
that high brightness
_redshank and wrack_
As if turned by wind's edge
lapping fallible banker
_bond and silk hankie_
in trade night against
silence stone standing
_ashtree and garden fork_
_starlight and tides_
RC
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