Keston,

another brief stirring take on concensus and context.

A context we find ourselves in is of a shift in the balance of means of
communication accredited with 'where it's at'. Poets need to address this
issue in their work.

How long does something have to have been happening before it can be taken
by antecedents as a tradition? What do posters here consider to be their
tradition (s)?

For example, the outrage at Bob Dylan going electric at Newport, the rage
of opinion around his subsequent tour in this country. I've spent some of
this summer at various festivals (playing with Garam Masala) that have
brought these arguments into full conteporary focus and i feel they have
some bearing on this list. At the 'Beyond the Border' festival in south
Wales (St Donats) the storytelling revival was struggling with where to go
next. Briefly, there are self-confessed purist storytellers who eschew
ideas of 'originality' (without being blind to issues of continual and tiny
piracies and source-collages) in favour of placing their emphases onto
cunning of retelling what has already been told, but making it tell anew.
There are also those who are 'writing' their own stories (yes I know some
of these terms are loose here, the post would be inordinately lengthy if
they weren't and i hope you'll fly with them a while for the gist of the
overall positions) and telling their own stories. There are those who want
no emphasis on the presence of the storyteller, as little interference as
possible between listener and story. They would have no visual or sonic
gags (although in presenting storytellers from Egypt and Kyrgyzstan, who
sang their stories, and Bangladesh or who were working from storyboards or
almost banner comic books or who were using cross-dressing and street
musicians integral to their art the cover was blown and the question raised
to a fresh level of begging - no poor joke intended). There are
storytellers weho eschew anything that might be considered to be theatrical
or pulling in directions of multi-media performance. There are those who
are beginning to explore the possibilites of using such technologies in
their work and are drawing larger audiences and who are in receipt of
jealousy from the 'purist' wing. And so forth.

Now we sidestepped to the Sidmouth Folk Festival (where one was ill-dressed
in the streets without a box holding an instrument under one's arm). Every
available perch packed with sessioning musicians, every pub, every inch of
the seafront promenade, walls in car parks, gradens all whirling away with
step dancers and callers and reelers and jiggers. That's aside from the
'programme', packed with folk musicians on a similar cusp. Some not wanting
to think about how they look on stage (the jeans an the t-shirt i was
wearing in the filed will do), some not wanting to learn how to use
microphones properly or to think about sound production from the desk and
sound projection aspects, some wanting to be in the tunes they know and can
pass on in the sessions, cosy 'round the camp fire. Yet, some were
grappling with those issues (cultural groups from 'abroad' were in costume
and were making inventive use of contemporary technology.

What i'm getting at is how such lines of sensibility and argument can be
seen to be in play here, in respect of writing poetry now at the turn of
the twenty-first century. Keston, you ask about context, I would translate
some of these concerns into the context we are part of.

begging the question

love and love
cris




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