I am in full agreement with cris on this strand.
I've been looking for a way forward in my own work and, UK wise, I've been
looking *towards* the high period of activity in the 1970s. The Spring 1971
issue of the Poetry Review was guest edited by Liverpool Poet, Adrian Henri.
Many expected names in the Review but it still conveys an expectation of
change. Even Henri's editorial note seems to indicate this: "poetry is as
often on the back of LP sleeves as it is between hard-covers these days."
Reflecting Henri's painting background, he included 'A Humument' by Tom
Phillips. To quote Phillips: "'A Humument' is a treated work. A Victorian
novel ( 'A Human Document,' by W H Mallock, 1892) has been taken page by
page and altered, adapted and metamorphosed; its text has been excavated for
new ambiguities of character and new ironies and paradoxes of utterance."
That word "utterance" here is important to me, though Phillips' work carried
a painterly aesthetic into a cut-up textual reworking.
Just seven years later, Paula Claire used a similar technique in 'Codestones
of Venice.' Yet it was quite different from Phillips' piece. Her cut-up
reworking of Ruskin's 'Stones of Venice,' 1851, was for an exhibition/event
which brought together "88 women experimentalists from all over the world"
in Venice. She later wrote of her work, that it employed "a basic linear
text interspersed with major group refrains; improvisations on fragmented
language; sketches of key images in the surroundings; and direct
improvisations during the performance."
While 'Codestones' exists as a text, it is a record of utterance - of live
collaboration, a mesh of different art forms and ideas. While acknowledging
that the book is central to poetry, it is not the cornerstone - not the
'codestone' of poetry.
Best wishes, Rupert
PS - Tim, I'm halfway through Mathiesson's 'The Achievement of T. S. Eliot.'
No gain without pain. Or should that be love without love?
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