Haven't got time to reply properly and who wants it anyway? But
What I meant by "mere performance" was performance as such, not guaranteed
or grounded... SO,
What I meant by we need protection against performance or guarantors ... is
that performance is a very powerful thing. It has the ability to elicit
very strong emotional responses and can persuade like nothing else can. It
can just pick you up and take you where it likes. No matter how wise or
hardened you may be you are powerless against it because it is a process
which encompasses you in its own time-process and you are not able during
it to question it (except when it lapses) --- not able to remove yourself
from it and weigh it against what you know. Thus it's such a powerful tool
for, for instance, cementing a community. But unless it's pure music/image
it also entails concepts. So when you speak of a "good performance" that
could be a double-edged weapon. Anyone who'se seen film or even just heard
recordings of Hitler's rally speeches knows that as performances they are
absolutely brilliant.
So I feel we need some guarantor that what is transmitted by performance is
good, which pure performance as such can't give us, or we need some
protection from the full strength of performance. I don't know what form
these things would take, whether built into the performance or extraneous.
It reminds me of Derek Bailey once saying to me that Song is a very strong
and powerful thing -- you can't fight it, he said. So he chose to operate
in a musical mode totally distinct from all song materials in music. But
poetry is maybe always in some sense a performance, you wouldn't be
interested in poetry if you wanted to avoid performance, and it needs its
own guarantors built into it, I guess.
What I've been trying to do about Open poetry is just to seek
clarification. The problem that besets me with it is the assumption that an
authorial attitude of openness of mind which is obviously a worthy thing
translates easily or mechanically into an openness transmitted through the
poem as a virtue, by such means as deconstructing the syntax or "opening"
the form. So that for instance the use of a "closed" form like sonnet
would necessarily imply narrowness of mind or would in some way delimit or
impose upon the reader response, because I dont' think it does, and
complete sentences even less so. Precisely because writing is a medium you
take in your own time-span and your own tone, not the author's, and so have
immense possibilities of choice at every moment of the performance.
And there is an attitude Around among innovative poets which favours the
incomplete thing in a way which I can only see as an inability to achieve
the parental pact or control galloping resentment against something called
"authority" (I think Chris Emery is saying something like this or even more
serious, in a much more sophisticated way) .... . I can't think at present
where I have seen it except everywhere.
But like those English cathedrals for instance which are all incomplete,
you wouldn't would you, actually value them for that reason, because they
have unfinished parts or have been interfered with over the centuries...
So that if you stood in front of one which actually was complete, like (I
think) Rouen, you'd go away and say that one's no good it's not unfinished.
There is in fact a complete one in Cambridge and it's stunning, it's a
building which could change your life, absolutely formally finished to the
last detail, and the condition achieved is perfection, which no incomplete
thing can hope to.
I guess everyone's right about those words (deconstruction, erasure etc)
having different technical meanings of a more positive tenor. Though I
think it's undeniable that the impulse because a vast amount of current
"art" is institutionalised as a negative in the way I suggested. Those
terms get around a lot and a thing like poetry is not containable within
a technical lexis, it's open to anyone, so if you keep on saying
"deconstruction" sooner or later a lot of people are going to think you
mean deconstruction. I once had a terrific row with Andrew Duncan who said
I wasn't allowed to use the word "closure" meaning the closing of
something, because the structuralists had defined it in a special way. I
suggested he went round changing signs saying ROAD CLOSURE to ROAD
UNOPENNESS.
/PR
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|