Dear B.Poets,
There are a couple of things I don't understand.
1) I don't understand the claim to metrical complexity in a poetry which
is obviously unmeasured. Metrical = measured. It doesn't matter how
complex it gets, if it doesn't have a numericably representable measure of
some kind it's not metrical. Metre is mathematical. You can claim
rhythmic/sonic virtues and complexities of many kinds, on a kind of
gut-response level, but not metre.
2) I also don't understand how all those things concerning the creation of
poetry can all be "performance". The modern meaning of Performance is "A
public exhibition or entertainment" (OED 2b, first noted 1709). Previously
and indeed quite recently it also meant "A piece of work, a composition,"
(OED 2c 1665) and further back it meant little more than something done and
finished, an order executed, a command obeyed (OED 1 1531) Etymologically
it derives most immediately from old french parfournir (perfurnire): to
complete thoroughly, with the suggestion of response to a directive.
If you're using Performance in these archaic senses you're saying
little more than a thing done = a thing done. In the modern sense it
implies an audience, and you may well say that the act of writing is in
response to "the reader over your shoulder" and in that sense is a
metaphorized response to a spectatorship . But if writing is a performance
in any of these sense there are other things it can't be, such as a
meditation. But why shouldn't the writing of a poem be a meditation?
Personally I think the performance metaphor has been too much taken
up as a writing stance in contemporary poetry, producing a lot of involuted
and dangerously virtuosic writing, paradoxically withdrawn from actual
transmissive disciplines: the ballerina before the mirror / the endless
flexing of linguistic muscle, where the materials of the world merely
furnish the decor of a self-exercise. Recent post-Hegelian philosophy also
has suffered a lot from being conceived as a performance, I think.
I'm not talking about actual live performance here at all, which is
subject to dramatic and musical criteria quite differently, of course.
Peter Riley
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|