cris - your and Alison's posting have begun to crystallise something which I
wasn't quite getting before: it's about the idea of the body, and it's about
the confusion of the idea of a welcome with the idea of a performance space.
(I also think that poetry is by no means necessarily an intellectual
exercise, as Alison maybe implied (although I apologise in advance, because
I can see as I write that that it was part of a rightly *rhetorical contrast
in which the body was posed against the intellect; as I think Alison has
said in an earlier posting, it's not so easy to separate those, and, now
that I think of it, that's what Alison is saying now!). Everything, I mean
poetry and every other phenomena, is open to intellectual scrutiny and
debate, but that does not make everything, I mean poetry and every other
phenomena, intellectual. Maybe that can get lost in some kinds of literary
criticism, since literary criticism provides not so much a gloss or an
afterword as in fact a backstory, a prequel, to the text, including
performance, to which it is bearing witness. This is just to offer a defence
of poems which work in quite different ways, for instance which make no
claim to subversion or pointed cultural critique, but work through some
techniques that are shared with a more clearly intellectual poetry. But I
see that I'm setting up nebulous oppositions even with that. Almost forget
it.)
Anyway, the body at readings. Well, hugs are fine. But they themselves are
ambiguous 'texts'. They show apparent trust between two folk, and frankly I
like them, especially if I'm participating freely in one, rather than being
hugged by someone I regard as being a bit familiar; a pre-hug moment has to
be judged, unless (intellectual poets, please leave now), you are in an
animal (?) like state where you either just hug or you don't, no
pre-cognition of aforesaid possible hug about it. The best hugs are like
quotation marks so close nothing else needs to be said, but as "The Little
Book of Hugs" and the hugs of actor-luvvies (not all actors, just
actor-luvvies) illustrate, you can have too much of a good thing, and even
hugs, especially hugs, can be commodified, and they can be a substitute for
quite other, more serious, lacks (ach, there I go, thought I was going to
avoid the serious). In a public welcome they do so publically: a hug sets
two folk apart from a group, some of who might think they want that kind of
intimacy, and networking familiarity, that a hug, they might think, denotes.
I've run out of time. Will try and come back to the idea of a performance
space as a welcome, or as something very different from a welcome, and more
to be said on the body, tattooing or otherwise. If I don't get time, cris
your idea about the *living performance, and how that is something difficult
to take in, I really like, sort of goes back to fear of / love of
ephemerality.
Richard
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