> most of the skills I'd
> use reading Ira wd manifestly be wasted on Sime, as a
canopener in a
> bottle shop.
Ric, I liked your prescription of Frank Sinatra image
very much, and appreciate very much the time you do spend
on my work. I am drawn, though, to *want* to make a reader
into a canopener in a bottle shop: my collages, for example,
aren't an attempt to rescue words from their "prisons"
in narrative or old text or bad text (in this ongoing piece
I only pick authors I once read with discovery, so
it is both celebrating and moving on); it's more an attempt
to look at harmony, counterpoint, the page as stave,
reading for example SA vertically; especially reading SA
or anyone for the higher self, the better work, blunted
by safety, capitalism, growing traumas etc. My Ph.D work
took on Roman Jakobson's theory that grammar is the salve
of the aphasic because it disciplines the fragmenting
mind. I argued that music, the text's music, or canvas
does; that an inept (opp of adept) might dismiss an
"aphasic" for being un-complex, when in fact missing
the complexity of the musical or spatial or gestural
structure using the words, against them, around them
like some acting, and so on. The grammars. The arts.
I also argued that there can be profound aphasia in
those "good" with language, that one kind of grammar
blocks them; if there is block, then there is something
better behind, blocked. In SA too. But like you I
choose what to devote time to.
Keston, you ask:
And is there really as much
> > difference between Ira and > Simon A as there is between
chalk and
> > cheese?
One of my problems of appearing on this map is that it's
a poetry one. I really think of what I do as aimed at a
music audience, at tapping the potentialities of a gig
audience, of a listener to pop lyrics, in which there can
be greater poetry, excess, complexity than in much SA
or Glyn Maxwell or whatever. By which I refer to the total
word in context, not vocabulary, but the word in voice
in which "I love you" is fresh each time. I suspect Cris
might say the same of his audience. People give more to
words in music, as they do perhaps to words in readings,
they wait, with a recording they might even listen again.
Mellifluous - pouring honey in to allow the medicine entry.
I think of my work as having a better chance of reaching
people, improving relations for aphasics, oppressed others,
sexual abuse survivors, & c, via music audiences than via
poetry venues. I fear the Sinatra type gig atmosphere, as
I said to Stuart, of having to confront, and of people
feeling ok to talk; yet you can get an atmosphere of
quiet and attention, say in a folk music setting, in a
setting that allows talk but it is sacrificed to you if
you are giving something in return for it, that
isn't the stuffy silence of the concert hall, and there
you can get something moving. I don't think Hughes or
Heaney or SA will ever get
a) that kind of audience
b) - more importantly - a complexity of brain wave
and body consciousness response, as I think cris or I
or others might in that music venue. H & H & SA
give you a tickle, and try to give you solidity, comfort;
they don't make you feel beautifully alone and facing
the richness and cost of life's richness. The venue is
my map.
Ira
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