> But the obsessively
>cloistered act can be a most moving performance with far-reaching
>consequences as Emily Dickinson's work might yet prove.
Yes indeed -
but for all my happy instinct for throwing everything in a bucket and
mixing it all up, I begin to be worried that performance itself loses its
distinction. The notion of performance applied to writing focusses the
temporality and evanescence of both the making and perceiving of a work,
but then erases perhaps certain other material qualities. Isn't
performance about relationship - between text and performer, text and
audience, audience and performer, and as suggested here, perhaps self and
self, but I think that begins to stretch it bit... Muriel Rukeyser has a
marvellous passage about these relationships somewhere in _The Life Of
Poetry_, but she is speaking of theatre.
"Everything is performance" is as useless as "everything is poetry".
Perhaps a notion of orality might be more useful in applied to written
poetry, the mnemonic ghost in the inner ear, imperatives of the act of
speaking, traces of (literal) presence. But here I betray my preferences
towards text as notation of aural/tactile qualities over text as sacred
visual object.
Best
Alison
Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Literary Arts Magazine
PO Box 186
NEWPORT VIC 3015
Masthead online: http://www.masthead.com.au
Home page: http:www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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