Hi Kent
I read the interview with interest. I still have the same questions:
they may be prompted in part by my own personal culture, which for a
start is outside America (though we have plenty of poets who "have
laptop, will travel", as Kate Fagan says sardonically...) and
secondly is partly placed outside poetry, in worlds of theatre and
contemporary music, in which my involvements have been collaborative.
Who "authors" a performance? The performers? The composer? The
person who wrote the words? The audience itself? And how much does
it matter to the terms of the making of the work? My experience of
positive collaborations is that it doesn't matter at all; in bad
collaborations, ones that fall apart in conflict because the
collaborators can't overcome their contradictory desires, it does.
Nonetheless, the positive collaborations in which I've been involved
seemed to be so because each person was clear about his or her role -
one writes, one composes, one performs, one directs &c. This perhaps
arbitrary drawing of boundaries seems to permit mutual osmoses and
influencing, and where these boundaries don't exist, everything tends
to fall apart in confusion. Which is to say, some conception of self,
however illusory, seems to be necessary for making anything, even
where it's not clear whether any particular person bears primary
responsibility for Authorship.
Thinking also of Borges' poems about the Other who writes, who is not
the self in any case. Borges' writing of his work, his literal
provenance as Author, is hardly contested, but within the work itself
are all sorts of contestations of any stable self behind the writing.
I guess my major question is that heteronymity, as I take it from the
interview, is still predicated on Name. Whether a name is fictional
or written on a real birth certificate, doesn't it still confer a
legitimacy you seek to destabilise in its reliance on alternative or
fictional authorships? Ie, it is still within the paradigm of
Authorship, which to my mind (and I think, yours) is largely a
Romantic mirage anyway? Why isn't anonymity a more liberating
alternative? Because, as the Ern Malley hoax here showed, the Name,
of whatever kind, can create a kind of parodic celebrity or notoriety
which can be as imprisoning to the actual people behind it as any
other kind.
Just curious -
Best
Alison
>"Hoaxes and Heteronymity," an interview conducted with me by Bill
>Freind, is newly available at The North American Centre for
>Interdisciplinary Poetics. One of the nice features of this site, run
>by the Canadian poet Steve McCaffery, is that it provides
>opportunity for commentary on posted articles. Lots of interesting
>material there by poets from Canada, U.S., France, England, and
>elsewhere:
>
>http://www.poetics.yorku.ca/
>
>KJ
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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