Keston's post is really interesting, but I should respond to John
Cayley's and others. The "practical example" in the current debate on
"public poetry readings" is the organisational work of Nicholas Johnson.
An open assessment of the means through which he has achieved what you,
and others, regard as considerable success is a valid part of the
debating process. That you should construe discussion centred around the
"example" as personal and trivial attacks on Johnson by "over-delicate
sensibilities" (I suppose you mean me to be one of them) does not
recognise that the underlying issue is identifying the exemplariness in
Johnson's work.
Is it being a skilled operator in poetry "marketing"? Is it being able
to place financial responsibilities onto others? Is it meeting
target projections in public funding proposals for sale and audience
figures? Is it being a good executive of government arts policy, which
Labour seems to have taken over without question from their predecessors?
Onto little local difficulties. I asked Nicholas Johnson, whom I met for
the first time yesterday, about the omission of rempress's involvement
with the tour, and as he is not on e-mail, I will convey his
response. He said he had not been explicitly told to acknowledge rempress
on his publicity leaflets and would have done so if he had been told. The
leaflets arrived late because tour details not been finalised until the
last minute. Each venue had paid fees and expenses, whilst the public
funding had been used for publicity. Besides which, the public funding had
been awarded for two tours, but it had been mostly already spent on the first.
Nothing particularly exemplary about that management.
Now, my own observation that evening (the readings were great by the way)
was that Johnson's exemplariness was the way he really looked after
the poets, in this case, Barry MacSweeney and Bill Griffiths. It was not
just making sure that things were as they liked them to be, but managing
to create a cheerful tour spirit, and a sense of purpose: he has
the poets' best interest at heart, indeed, most protectively so as one
could glean from Lawrence's post. Perhaps this is what Alaric meant about
wanting to discuss "issues" and not "personalities", because the point
about Johnson's work as an example, is that its exemplariness is
inextricable from the individual, rather than from interesting theories on
readings.
I thought Keston's post did have some interesting theories on readings.
But I will stick my overdelicate sensibility in the sin bin for a while,
because posts which address questions of personal accountability,
are evidently not recognised as valid in a discussion. Mea culpa.
db
Karlien
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