Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey read to a "small but appreciative"
audience at Colpitts on Friday evening. The venue (Alington House,
Durham) is a moderately stark community room with a faint bible class
feeling not inappropriate to the poets concerned, with little
tealights on the tables and a single anglepoise light which the poets
each managed in someway to incorporate in their acts.Talk was talked,
books were sold, drink was drunk, but I'm here to report on the
reading.

Halsey read first (this was decided by a coin process beforehand)
wearing a dark suit, snappy black'n'white tie and velvet waistcoat,
hair shorn to a state of submission and the general air of a recently
retired international footballer (I'm reporting appearance because it
was an integral part of performance): confident, in control, enjoying
it. He read four pieces, with brief introductions, and usually
applause after them: a new Venice poem (the pair had just been to
Venice); his part of the four-way collaboration on the Dance of Death
(reported some time ago on this list); Alien Proforma (a text from the
Roswell incident) and a new sequence Coherent Light. There was a sense
of working-his-way-in in this sequence, with the Venice poem being a
good introduction to his collage-and-trope practice, and Coherent
Light the most complex (to listen to). Alien Proforma is a dense
piece, full of shifting language and association, which Halsey read in
a fairly prosey, bbc voice - it reminded me of some of Sinclair's
early pieces, but perhaps that was just the conspiracy theory. For me
the hi-light - the poem which showed all Halsey's performance skills
off - was the dance of death poem: itself a complex interweaving of
materials on those two closely linked themes, death and the
book-trade... into it at times come snatches of his other
collaborators - I could pick out David Annwn and Kelvin Corcoran, I'm
sure Selerie was in there somewhere. In performing the piece Halsey
veers from bbc-formal to a range of different voices and dynamics,
moving round in front of the table and light so that his shadow, arm
raised, is huge on the opposite wall at the point where death takes
all the vowels; stepping up closer to the audience and retiring, at
times dead-pan funny, at others moving and intense, raising his voice
and trailing it away again, and sometimes making little riffs out of
bits of the text. His reading brings out the language-shifts, the
words linkages which hold the piece together, so the whole is rather
like an etymological gospel performance, with the audience hanging on
every sound as he turns the book round and round in his hands
(typographically, this is Halsey's nod towards Howe's "Eikon
Basilike").

After the interval Monk read - huddled close up to the anglepoise,
which glinted on her black-and-gold cardigan, her hair and her
glasses, so that the strong light on the page uplit her face during
the reading. It's hard kick-starting any audience, and this one showed
signs of being pooped by the first half - so she talked her way into
it, introducing the poems chattily, almost making light of them, with
her intros nearly always fading off into "but anyway - let's get on
with it..." What followed in each case was a complete voiceshift, the
poems being performed in a rich, singing voice which moved easily
through the rhymes and echoes, the little assonances and recognitions
of her poetry. It's inevitable in some way to compare reader 2 with
reader 1, and I found myself doing that here: where Halsey accentuated
the linguistic play in his texts, Monk, without sacrificing that,
celebrated the physical aspects of the language, elongating some of
the vowel-play for emphasis, and accentuating some of the consonants'
snap and cut - her full Lancashire accent is an essential feature of
this process. Much of the time she read quite slowly and quietly, so
that it seemed quite a subdued performance at first - but beautifully
paced, so that "tutti" passages really impacted, and the whole (in
spite of an interruption) built to a great climax.

She read three poems/groups: first her set around north and south
(South Bound : Facing North; Elegy in an Unmarked Southern County Pub
etc) - often low-voiced, slow, deliberate weavings; then her
"pre-Venice" poem (prefaced by much lamenting about being married to a
poet, how they struggled for who got the best lines etc.) - again a
"talking-into", a gradual circular approach to Venice which built
magically to its conclusion - or was in the process of doing so when
the fire alarm went off. Monk's recovery and re-launch of the final
stage of this piece was - for me - unforgettable - not just
professional, a reconstruction of the shape and and on-the-spot
development of momentum. The final piece was an outtake from the
central section of Interregnum. The book itself relates to the trial
of the Pendle witches; this section, "Palimpsestus", is built round
horror-story memories of Monk's own catholic education. Here her
performance began to build on the musical structures of the earlier
pices towards something more melodramatic, as she started to cast
herself adrift from that damned light - so that her audience was, once
again, drawn with her into the piece, towards the grand finale with
her striding up and down shouting/singing:

taa taa taffa-teffy
taa taa taa-a...

Great evening. You should've been there. In accordance with northern
custom, no tapes were made. Miss it and you miss it. That's live music
for you.

RC


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