A middle-aged white male writes:
As one of the audience for Spencer Selby/Wystan Curnow last week (which
wasn't THAT small - I can remember a SVP reading attended only by erstwhile
host Gilbert Adair, a friend of the poet and myself) I just thought I'd
remedy an obvious omission in the foregoing exchanges and say how enjoyable
the reading was.
Spencer, from the US West Coast, read a sequence of recent poems randomised
against a sequence of slides of graphics (projected heroically by Mr Upton)
exhibiting parallel techniques of collage & juxtaposition of register - I
found myself "reading" the poems through the slides, making arbitrary
connections in my head as the two sequences slid against each other.
Wystan, from New Zealand, read what I thought was a hilarious text in which
the lingo of cowboy comics was transformed into a strange, hieratic, formal
language complete with gestures to indicate emphasis; followed by a
sequence of brilliant linguistic fragments from the most unpromising and
courageous choice of "occasion", a treatment for cancer. I hope I do not
misrepresent too much, not having any of the printed texts to hand and
going only on the first impressions of a reading.
I'm a long-standing SubVoicive Poetry devotee. I don't go to every reading
but I try and attend as many as possible because there's always a good
chance of hearing something interesting. I wish on this occasion Lawrence
hadn't made so much of the fact that the audience was smaller than for
Joris/Rothenberg (which WAS a magnificent reading, by the way). So what?
Spencer and Wystan are not such big "names" and the reading was on a
Thursday not the normal Tuesday - yet there were enough people there to
make it enough of an event.
My only personal regret was that, in hurrying away at the end, I neglected
to go up to Wystan (who I don't know) and tell him how much I enjoyed his
reading - reinforcing by this omission perhaps what some people perceive as
"unfriendliness" on occasions such as these.
I endorse what Cris Cheek has said about the gender politics of publishing
and performing poetry. Despite the perennially unreconstructed Jeff
Nuttall's recent ravings, and Clive Bush's appalling choice of words in his
book on five English male poets, the situation is slowly changing - thanks
to the efforts of Lucy Beerman, Karlien van den Beukel, Cris and Sianed
themselves, Maggie O'Sullivan, Wendy Mulford and others.
And hello Alaric Sumner - please don't shut up!
Ken
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