Dear Peter,

You certainly shouldn't judge on 'small summaries' - as someone who was 
actually there (and gave a paper, incidentally) I didn't get any of the feel 
of 'purposive grimness' in the 'men's' papers, nor was there a huge gulf 
between the genders as you seem to imply - certainly not if the immediate 
reaction of those present is anything to go by.

Such impressionistic assumptions, made on the basis of some very partial 
accounts of what went on, really aren't helpful at all. For instance, while 
I greatly enjoyed Mairead's paper, there seems to me that there was a huge 
problem in her conceptualisation of what she does as 'talk' poetry - after 
all, she doesn't actually improvise the pieces as talk, and they don't sound 
like speech (which she also admits). Although I didn't get the chance, I 
wanted to ask, what exactly does qualify these pieces as 'talk' poetry - is 
it the implied relation of speech to the intimately experienced, the 
subjective, the anecdotal, and if so, how does she make a distinction 
between hers and other varieties of poetry that are written to be performed, 
or have some relation to speech?

Furthermore, although 'pleasure' and 'enjoyment' may have been the subject 
of Andrea's paper, it bore absolutely no relation to the chatty, anecdotal 
style of Mairead's talk. Andrea's was a concerted effort at elaborating the 
nature of enjoyment, and a language with which to describe it, from within 
(and obliquely to) current aesthetic theory. It may not have been grim, but 
it was certainly purposive, and necessarily made assumptions about what is 
interesting in poetry (how could it not?). I don't wish to make any value 
judgement on the basis of these differences (they were both very good 
papers), but only to show that it would be wrong to liken them on the basis 
of superficial similarities (which, in fact, weren't there anyway).

The papers will all appear - Plymouth University Press itself will be 
publishing a volume in due course I understand.

Best, Piers


>We don't often hear  about 'pleasure' in the echoing halls these days, nor
>about the Irish island transport systems in connection with American 
>poetry.
>Andrea's and Mairead's papers sounded bright and at-ease constructs, free 
>of
>the purposive grimness which dominates a lot of poetical comment and yet
>exactly aimed at the questions of  public language.  I hope it will be
>possible to see them in full some time.
>
>I shouldn't judge on small summaries, but most of the papers given by men
>seemed to suffer from massive assumptions as to what's interesting in 
>poetry
>and why, and certainly not much in the way of pleasure or island-cruising.
>An overload of usefulness, to borrow Andrea's term.
>
>PR
>
>PS. What's this 'Rodefer hand-out'?
>
>
>
>
>From: MARK LEAHY <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: MARK LEAHY <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 17:16:38 +0100
>We don't usually get to hear much about "pleasure" in the echoing halls
>these days
>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Poetry & Public Language
>
>
>
>
>Some notes
>
>
>
>Will Rowe on Barry MacSweeney: looking at MacSweeney's use of public
>language of advertising, the fashion industry and journalism ­ "full
>spectrum domination" -- to comment on the political and social context at
>the time; naming as an act, a "primal baptism" where the name may stick 
>­the
>"stickiness" of language ­ we will "command our meaning", we who name, and
>who fetishise that named entity. The specialised language of a sector, the
>language of high fashion, constructs a web over the sexuality beneath in a
>"theatre of appearance".
>
>
>
>Andrea Brady read through earlier work by Tom Raworth to question our sense
>of pleasure in reading. Pleasure as a possible outcome of reading without
>this leading to a utilitarian model, "uselessness is useful as a potlatch".
>Matters of time, of speed, of speed of reading, delivery, improvisation and
>the pleasure in contingency ­ "grinning gap" ­ and a sense of a
>participatory reading, where the reader is implicated rather than external
>to the text.
>
>
>
>Mairead Byrne gave a talk poem performance on talk poetry and talked about
>not talking about David Antin, and the troubles of travelling between the
>islands of Ireland and the UK, crossing borders, mixing genres, and an
>admonition to "protect your sources". A funny and serious and seriously
>funny presentation. Ian Davidson followed coded language through the poems
>of Frank O'Hara in particular chasing after "blue" in its many guises. Kit
>Fryatt spoke about the British-Irish poets e-list, and how it has developed
>over its lifetime, with different listmasters and a shift in purpose.
>
>
>
>Scott Thurston gave a paper on Ira Lightman's work at which I took hardly
>any notes because he had one of Lightman's e-poetry pieces projected behind
>him (a powerpoint slideshow of a developmental work that mixed layers of
>number-generated building-block sequences with short letter sequences
>gleaned from a found newspaper report that underlay them) and then played a
>recording of Lightman from BBC Radio 3's The Verb with Ian MacMillan asking
>Lightman to perform one of his double / twin poems ­ (a translation of
>Baudelaire's La Musique which Lightman delivered in a Terry Thomas 
>listening
>to Strindberg voice and an Edith Evans listening to Beethoven voice
>alternating each left and right hand line) and so I was distracted from
>Scott's comments on Lightman's use of multiple voices, multiplicity of
>meaning, and a writing / speaking into a concentric series of public
>contexts.
>
>
>
>Robert Hampson began by taking us through Tony Lopez's False Memory, and
>ended up in the scary world of Charles Leadbeater and DEMOS and the
>construction of a particular language around the cultural industries, the
>voluntary sector provision of public services, and the shaping of 
>government
>policy on education and the arts.
>
>
>
>Peter Middleton gave a paper that engaged with ideas of scepticism;
>scepticism as a useful or positive stance in relation to the language of
>governments and hegemonic structures. A radical scepticism that researches
>the evidence for a statement, that may present evidence of failure, failure
>of meaning, failure of/in belief. Reading work by Barrett Watten and Lyn
>Hejinian he used the term "cluster poems" as a model of a poetry that can
>detonate a multiplicity of smaller explosions in the fabric of public
>meaning, a circulatory ballistics generating a positive questioning, in the
>face of a popular suspicion generating only fear.
>
>
>
>Allen Fisher speaking to the title, "confidence in lack" wove together a
>language of physics and poetics, drawing into the same sentences matters of
>coherence and decoherence, "squeezed light sources", making room for
>unsolvability, discontinuity and error ­ a confidence in lack of knowledge,
>an engagement with complex structures with and including error. Fisher 
>asked
>us to board a "logic bus" for a trip that called at Plato, Eric Havelock,
>Charles Olson, Julia Kristeva (on Hannah Arendt), Turing, and Keats
>(Negative Capability) among other stops en route. A tightrope walk that
>teetered with risk, and took on that risk as a point for decision making.
>
>
>
>Lyn Hejinian read into and through a short poem by Barrett Watten, 'Mode Z'
>from 1 ­ 10; a 12 line whirligig or toy windmill ­ that zig zags, that
>answers "A" (Zukofsky). She followed a "sad note", a sense of unavoidable
>sadness, but one that does not succumb to designation, and in her reading
>off 'Mode Z' she digressed through Wordsworth (The Prelude) George Oppen 
>(Of
>Being Numerous) Paul Riceour, Guy Debord, and other works by Watten.
>Hejinian touched on a poetics of affect, a recognition of possibility (as
>opposed to an acceptance of the version of the word offered by hegemonic
>capitalism ­ "this is all there is, or might be"). A curiosity is proposed
>in the writing, in the reading, that recognises inequity, that senses 
>wrong,
>but works on in acknowledgement of this ­ "start writing autobiography".
>
>
>
>Barrett Watten in his talk also read through his work, including another
>poem from 1 ­ 10, 'Radio'. 'Radio' had one of its beginnings in Lee
>Harwood's translations of Tzara. This reading became a point of departure
>for a model of the poem as object, that did not reduce the poem to the
>'concrete universal' of Wimsatt. Continuing through other of his works,
>including 'Object Status', a piece made in response to a postcard request
>from Tom Raworth, Watten examined the work of the poet-critic. "what is a
>poet critic?". Moving through 'thought experiments' and the work of Stein 
>in
>'composition as explanation' to Williams' Paterson which is the site of a
>recent writing through by Watten. The hybrid object that is the
>poem-criticism (or critical poem) reads what is given, becoming a thing in
>the world, and a means by which to engage with this world.
>
>