[cross-posted]
The conference title was '(the) Language & the Design of Poetry' but
despite the slightly squirmy attention drawn there to word use, topics
of verbal language per se remained (in my impression) implicit, and
there was quite an emphasis on writing in or in relation to performance
/ installation etc. There were 26 separate contributions, of which more
than a quarter discussed or included or consisted of video / slides /
electronic media. A few tiny and selective notes:-
Rob Holloway (on OHP) gave and commented on a real-time reading (not
just 'reading-aloud') of three texts, a poem and extracts by Charles
Bernstein, Allen Fisher & JH Prynne, using the sound patterns as a first
entry. Unscripted and perhaps unrehearsed this could feel slightly
painful approach ('yes, yes, get on with it', etc.) but it kept with the
reader with the words, and suggested how this clambering across the
footholds of the poem's surface rather than skimming towards some
destination might open into thematics. Given longer than 20 minutes ...
(The Fisher was a bit from 'Ring Shout', with a distinctive sonic
palindrome, the Prynne the opening of 'Biting the Air', with its highly
complex imbrication.) This talk picked up the gauntlet of Bruce
Andrews's opening paper ('Reading and Poetics'), which sought to draw
attention precisely to the reader, the 'activist', the producer, the
'arranger' (and less to the poet's/poem's intentions and procedures
etc.). I'd have liked this to develop into more of a discussion through
the weekend. Rob's session suggested a naive question: when does seeing
what the poem is doing become reading in the sense of producing meaning?
(Answer: 'After a while ...' hopefuly?)
Among other things, Andrews said that work in new media, like concrete
poetry, tended to preclude readerly activity. The reader's share was to
me strongly implict in John Cayley's paper on 'Poetics, Inscription and
Time' as explored in networked / programmable media, though he did not
(unless I missed something) choose to contest Andrews's point. In fact
(my scribbled notes suggest) he wants in a sense to transmute author and
reader as such equally into utter language ... Informed by an adherence
to Derridean post-structuralism he suggested that (if only the
technological barriers will be surmounted) these media provide an
opportunity to research? expose? the 'materiality of language' at a
level more fundamental than anything we normally understand by
'writing'. Gosh, I've probably got that wrong ... He certainly claimed
that writing can (potentially) reconfigure time. Rob (following
directly) alluded to this in relation to the backs-and-forths of his
reading: I wasn't sure that this worked as more than a figurative
analogy (while John is trying to make the figures real) but in linking
his work there with all the papers that had gone before, Rob was as ever
thinking and responding, all the time, in the moment, in the situation,
in public. To me his practice overall seems more and more admirable.
Otherwise on 'language' per se, say, there was Bill Griffiths on the
history of English and dialect, with the idea that when authorities (of
whatever kind) take control of language its life moves to the periphery
and the variation; thus poetry, if not official verse culture, *as
dialect; Peter Middleton on (among other things) poets' employment of
metaphors from science (physics, genetics) and also the adoption in
genetic of linguistic models; and the video of Caroline Bergvall's
installation piece 'Say: "Parsley", which though based on the terrible
vulnerability of the linguistic other to authority (the shibboleth) also
delicately suggested the robustness of human variation (speakers
uttering the same phrase in many different accents) threaded with her
own lovely tumbling quick-turning language play. It would be good to
draw some of the actual readings into the frame here, esp. Ulli Freer,
Dell Olsen and Gilbert Adair ... .
... but it's suddenly got very late ...
Anyway, thanks very much to Will Rowe, Stephen Mooney, Piers Hugill,
Aodhan McCardle and helpers for setting it up and making it interesting
and enjoyable. Plain chocolate digestives.
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