Have to say that Motion certainly did admit all, & say what he was
about. So, the only question is, How good is the result?
It's 'found,' all right, but as a collage, as some kind of modernist
'take', in which the 'cinematic' cutting actually does something
extra, beyond what the original quotes did in Shephard's book? To me
it doesn't seem like Motion added much...
Doug
On 9-Nov-09, at 12:14 AM, Max Richards wrote:
> An Equal Voice
> In this 'found poem' for Remembrance Day, Andrew Motion stitches
> together the
> words of several generations of shellshocked soldiers from the first
> world war
> to the present
>
> Andrew Motion
> guardian.co.uk, Saturday 7 November 2009
>
> Doctors, historians and other experts have documented the effects of
> shellshock
> – thanks to them, we know that the term covers a multitude of
> ailments, and is
> the result of far more than just shells going off. But, as Ben
> Shephard wrote in
> his history of medical psychiatry, the people who have suffered from
> it have
> often been too ill to speak. They have been left out of the record.
> I wanted to
> hear from them. This is a "found" poem, a stitching together of the
> voices of
> shellshocked people. Their words have been taken from a variety of
> sources, from
> the first world war to the present, and are presented in the poem in
> roughly
> chronological order. There's a fragment of Siegfried Sassoon in
> there, but most
> are from unknown soldiers. Together, they give a sense of moving
> through time to
> establish what is horribly recurrent about this affliction. It is a
> poem by
> them, orchestrated by me.
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
Good taste is as tiring as good company.
Francis Picabia
|