>Dave, THE OVERHEARD immediately evokes precedents for me going back at
least as far as Henry James' "habit" of listening to conversations when he
was dining out, a number of which became "germs" for his fiction. Barry<
Indeedy deed, Barry. I recall too Shavian notions of Elizabethan/Jacobean
playwrights running around London scribbling down street-talk or the alleged
genesis of the lower-class dip in The Waste Land (i.e. Valerie Eliot's
overhearing of how the servants talked) I think too Swift did something
deliberate on those lines.
But what really interested me about the Speech Project was the difficulty of
finding a stable aesthetic for it, I found I could make opportunistic raids,
which maybe worked in one poem or two, but that couldn't be carried over to
the next necessarily.
But maybe the Overheard has possibilities of metaphoric extension. It
certainly invokes notions of social complexity (and simplicity) which have
potential.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
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