"One can read a play to oneself but one
cannot perform a multi-voiced poem by oneself. It requires co-operation /
collaboration."

Not true, cris. I have a recording of, of all people, TS Eliot performing
'Sweeney Agonistes' where he most certainly does convey different voices
while at the same time conveying a 'voice'. I'm sure the late Alec Guinness
wouldn't have agreed with your statement, or Peter Sellars. While I'm told,
though I haven't witnessed it myself, that the odd Peter Reading is superb
at conveying other voices in performance.

I have no problem with your pushing collaboration, all human social activity
depends on that after all, where I am ill-at-ease is the apparent tendency
to disavow individual voice, it sounds like another middle-class tactic for
shutting people up, I'm afraid.
And I'm certainly uncomfortable about valorising people writing in each
other's names, I think we've had enough of that thank you, it destroys
trust, that very basic necessity for all human contact.

Best

Dave



David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "cris cheek" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2002 12:03 PM
Subject: Re: authorships


Hi Liz,

this is an attempt to begin to talk about experiences of collaborative
writing. Mine began in 1975 on first hearing polyphonic poems, written and
performed by more than one voice. I know that I heard poems for two voices
and three voices at that time and that I also wrote texts for more than one
voice  -  usually for two or three. I was exploring a range of ideas driven
largely by the sounding of poems and I was really excited by apprehending
more than one voice through what I felt to be the same time.

I wonder how many others might have been spurred at that time to step into
these multi-voiced waters. Because that begins to short-circuit many of
these discussions about 'voice' and authenticity and places poetry into the
world of events which exist only in the memory of those who 'perform' them
or who witness their being sounded. Because the soundings require more than
one person it becomes a shared event that cannot be replicated in private on
one's own and that interests me. One can read a play to oneself but one
cannot perform a multi-voiced poem by oneself. It requires co-operation /
collaboration.

This led me to some early collaborations. One went under the name of
Chencott and Feek, being between myself and PC Fencott. It was somewhat
tentative in terms of being co-authored. We did live work together and
published 3 'books'. Most of the 'pieces' were authored by either one and
then crashed into each other through performance and publication structures.
Some pieces were co-authored but my memory is of us making interventions /
commentaries into and upon each other's texts. We worked quite a bit with
'found' materials and often combined handwriting and the typewritten. It's
certainly hard to tell now who wrote exactly what. I'm not suggesting any of
these aspects of collaborative writing, indeed nor collaborative writing
itself, as being of value. I just find the questions that are raised thereby
worth engaging with.

I use the term book above somewhat advisedly as the third was a collection
of oddly inter-folded prints in a plastic bag:) The idea had been to present
10 books of increasingly challenging formats but Chencott and Feek mutated
into a trio with Lawrence Upton as 'jgjgjgjgjgjgjgj . . . . .(as long as you
can say it that's our name)'.

It goes without saying that much of what 'jgjgjgjgj . . .    ' made was
based around 3 voices. Some 'pieces' were written 'individually' and some
'collectively', some were written 'through' live events and some presented
as texts for live treatments. One of the inspirations at that time was to be
'live' rather than studio-based. We did include some early dictaphone
cassette loops (samples) inside our textualities and everything from the
lyric poem to the palimpsest of teenage graffiti carved into the wooden rail
of a bridge over a stream to Fluxus-style event structures collided into our
emergent writing procedures.

This trio was occasionally expanded into a quartet, even quintet. It was
certainly blokeish and my blokeish collaborations continued into a series of
collaborations with Lawrence Upton, one of which was another trio with EE
Vonna-Michel called Bang Crash Wallop. The latter made work on the borders
of electro-acoustic music in conversation with the Firesign Theatre and what
Negativland later developed for radio in San Francisco. BCW also used
printing equipment as a site of intervention. We made exquisitely messy
books and often improvised directly on the press during the process of
printing. This was a mixture of duplicator and offset lithography in the
main.

Once or twice Lawrence and I wrote using each other's name. Often we would
write together at the same table, standing up and moving around, moving
texts, cutting and pasting, editing and erasing and reordering and adding
commentaries. We also published several booklets such as 'In That Same Vane'
and 'Is Television The Moving'. A large and ambitious project still
unfinished called 'Graphical Ballast' required a lot of colour (as i recall,
one of the reasons why it never appeared) and seemed to be in conversation
with comics. We were intrigued by subtle shifts in perception between us and
our gentle conversations around these differences form the basis of the
writing.

It seems, rereading one or two sections from 'Is Television The Moving'
(1978) for example that we were keen to let the seams show. What's evident
is the presence of more than one editing sensibility, more than one
sensibility in respect of enjambment and closure. I get a strong sense of
'place' and of interaction residued in the writing. Somewhere between a play
and a poetic essay and a series of instruction for a catalogue of events
perhaps. I don't suppose that Lawrence will much mind my quoting one or two
extracts here. It strikes me as still quite subtle, or did i mean supple:


'have you got something I

 can cut the head off with? just

 writing's not enough. (he eats)

 that's better (he sits) he

 breathes (he bites) he

 crunches and as he laughs

 he says I think someone's

 altered the contrast (car passes)

 garret. can't we turn that

                 into garret?

 something about garrotte seems to be a bit

                                   off beam



                 page two. woof. warped

 laughter. let's get a good bit

 of conversation from the outside



                 they're walking

 their dog but they're too far

 away. no! no. it's all been cut

 out.





                  I hate to be left out

                  or putting sachets through

                  letter boxes next week.





                                   dog standing in front of woman

                                   standing in front of a door

                                   with man approaching





                  it's       not       easy













                                   that's       better



                   car passes. going east. I think

 he's having real trouble starting.

                   but it could have been

 a woman. car passes

                   on the further road faster

 than the first but also going

                   east. it's hard to tell

 when the contrast's broken.

                   Two cars, both on the

 further road  ,  go west.





 boom!   berthing the ship



 less than that on the sea

 you want to point to hang

 select the appropriate drop

 she carried this case

 up over a grassy mound

 left or right arm facing

 there are some rotten men aroound





 above water      floriate





 colour, brown        senses and figures



 to my sounds, better, still

 comfortable



 sticking a wet finger

 up from my fingers

 to my toes to go



 we're going to get a

       very odd stereo

 effect



_______________


just some early thoughts

love and love
cris