This is a bit rough - it was conceived in a few minutes and typed out
rapidly at one go and then changed on the tube to London where I read it. I
read it a bit roughly too becaused I my writing is poor and my glasses need
updating. Gilbert said it was _uncanny_ but I don't think he was being
<IR>ironic</IR>. I was going to make copies but I have great difficulty
printing anything at the moment - and then it seemed best anyway to put it
on the list. NB This version is as near as I can get to what I said - based
on memory and what I had written over the typescript already. Originally
the idea was to demonstrate Frog Boks but I did not have it with me!
======================================
INTRODUCTION TO THE READING BY GILBERT ADAIR ON 10th JUNE 1997 [including
launch of Surface Bursts (Mainstream) and Jizz Rim fifth outtake(Writers
Forum)]

Tonight I was going to say, again, what I HAD said. I was going to speak of
Gilbert's commitment to his work but that is apparent as soon as you read
or hear it. In any case, being committed to something doesn't mean you are
any good at it. Often the greatest skill, in anything, is knowing when to
let go.
I was going to speak of Gilbert's uncompromising approach to
getting-it-right in his poetry, his tenacious determination to find the
best words and syntactical shapes, to build the right form; not so much for
what he has to say but, perhaps, in order to FIND OUT what he has to say;
so that form and content are neither easily made nor easily separable.
Lack of compromise doesn't necessarily make commitment any more palatable
to the audience or indeed the poet or appropriate to the poetry.
To try to make the point I had thus failed to make, I might have referred
to his slowness, though there are many slower, in composition. Slowness is
a virtue that too few recognise; and getting-it-right, whatever it is,
doesn't need to be done slowly.
Indeed, all of these observations could be taken as insults in some brains.
But that is what I was going to say; and then I realised I had said all
that before anyway, a repeat failure proposing to praise achievement.
My intended approach was the opposite of what I was praising, something
good enough for an intro perhaps, a few indisputable statements to which no
one could object, especially when I had the chair of the meeting, the
opposite of the meticulous adventurousness I find in Gilbert's poetry.
Therefore, I sat down at my desk to say something more, something else,
hopefully something a little new. This is it, and, because it tries to be
new, I am having to read it from a script.
Gilbert Adair refuses to entertain although he is entertaining. His texts
do not conform to what is held to be well-presented. Let's pause there with
that.
The clear shapely letter sequences, left to right across the pages, tops
down to bottoms, justified, indented or what have you, are printers'
inventions, not the poets'; and columns and rows and pages are
abstractions. There is a lot to be said for standardised clear text,
especially in timetables and such documents; but it will help to keep us
free if we remember that only some of us are tidy writers and orderly
builders and that the usually unchallenged idea of how good literature
should be presented has been constructed by those who deal in it just as
surely as, say, our ideas of a desirable kitchen have been constructed
partially by companies which sell kitchen furniture, plumbing, home
extensions and the like. We are responding primarily to marketed products
all the time rather than engaging in a social process of technological
innovation as we may be led to believe. The marketing people's ideas aren't
inherently bad, but it is a standardising process that they manage which
makes no exceptions, always takes prisoners and presents the phenomenal
appear unproblematic, and so presents it as consistent and continuous. But
it ain't necessarily so.
Until recently it was quite difficult for the individual writer to achieve
high quality booklike repro of their work. Nowadays, it is possible; and
Gilbert Adair produces texts which, even on publication, deny the purpose
and efficacy of doing, for the sake of it, what is possible and no more.
That he does so is not for one reason alone and it does not have a
one-to-one meaning that can be stated so that we may move on. Its reasons
hold us. They, the reasons at which I guess, will be to do with, inter
alia, availability of the necessary technology, constraints of time, a
desire to show the process of composition, an awareness that the process
may not have finished - an assorted tangle of reasons to do with what he is
doing. His is recursive book-making when so much is merely iterative.
Intentionally or not, the appearance of the published texts slows us up and
forces us to engage, with him, after the event, in his poetic deliberation.
And during the re-enacting event of reading, a new enactment because of the
possibility of error - which, in such a context as Gilbert's writing
creates, will be less an error and more a development and possible
enrichment - and the probability of new stresses, new pauses, new decisions
about what if anything to skip; this is a performance, a completion of the
process started at Gilbert's notional desk, on its many occasions, and a
beginning perhaps of our reception of the books. But, because he reads
relatively little, it may be that these texts are read only the once ever -
all those possibilities and new always with no correct, finished meaning.
This is the only life there is...
There is, too, the learning - in the books and required of the reader, not
the formulaic reference which can be looked up in a mythological dictionary
or book of heraldry, but organic copyings, stealings, blendings, recycling,
the same lives and literatures recurring, but changing - the same basic
starting points and subjects for art there have ever been; it is an art
aware of where art has come from without nostalgia in the historical
process in which each generation becomes progressively unrecognisable to
its forebears - the upward compatibility of human natures which, like the
software humans try to make, gets nowhere and yet moves; but - you might as
well live. And if we are to live we might as well live all we can, as we
were advised by one whose notional spirit will be with us tonight.
Before I finish, I need to be sure that my point is made well. I have
admitted that much of what I have said could be taken to prove the opposite
to the case I wish to make. And that is because I have paid little
attention to Gilbert's wit, where all this attention to detail and
controlled passion fuses. Often his wit and humour is so fully fused with
in filling his texts - rather than the poems with jokes to which his work
is in no small part a reaction - that it is not easy to demonstrate by
brief quotation.
Instead, I am going to remind you of or tell you of for the first time a
rather splendid piece of publishing under the Writers Forum aegis; it is
called Frog Boks. It comes complete with a frog, pages in different
formats, on different papers, texts of different styles, jump cuts,
openings out rather than closings off; and it is funny; and it is
demanding; it is not entertaining; and it entertains; and it entertains
many various ideas. It is in the most constructive sense - silly, meaning,
originally, happy.
I have said too much and I have said nothing at all. That will do for this
year. The exemplary, if it has a meta-existence, is various; you are about
to hear and see one kind of the exemplary.

Lawrence Upton





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