Before it all degenerates into whose tone was more defensive than whose,
can I take Peter's lead and go back to what he *said* in this important
post:

On Mon, 8 Feb 1999, Peter Riley wrote:
> 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...

- Hmm... I'm interested in this, in the fear of losing control as a
participant in a performance. The "seductive beauty" argument is one to
which all forms of enactment of the text must be prey: it would be
possible also to imagine fine letterpress or typograpgy and good book
design which had exactly the same carry-you-away authority, or a
well-turned piece of writing which takes you where you didn't want to be
no matter how slowly you try to read it, or even a logic-flow which has
its own inscrutible but potentially dubious power. There can be no
guarantees, in any of these things: you join at own risk, the only real
immunity is to stay home and not engage. I'd hate to see this argument
taken to the point where a dire reader - one of those
heads-into-the-books-and-mumble people we've all had to sit through -
could defend themselves: ah, I was anxious not to induce very strong but
possible false enotional responses in y'all, can I have my cheque now?

> Anyone who'se seen film or even just heard recordings of Hitler's rally
> speeches knows that as performances they are absolutely brilliant.

- and I'm wary about bringing Hitler's performing skills into it as an
example. I certainly have no direct experience of his gigs - in film and
recording they seem ridiculous to me (as do Pound's broadcasts, which I'm
sure were a huge waste of money from Musso's point of view) but I know
that he wowed them in his day. I also know that this success was based on
a good deal of other methods, other factors, (control, information slant,
enforcement amongst them) than - uh - "mere performance". I'd suggest that
the rise of the 3rd Reich does not offer an appropriate parallel with
contemporary performance practice...

> 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,

- I wonder who said this. No-one on this list, that I can recall. *To me*
the act of dropping into an existing form could suggest closure if it
relied on "mere" acceptance of said form - but it would be quite possible,
indeed we've seen it done, to use an existing form as a basis, and work
against the tensions it offers/creates. That doesn't seem narrow of mind
at all.

> 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.

- I welcome this, not least because it justifies my practice of playing
bach at half speed or slower... it suggests to me the crucial interaction
of writing and performance, the impossibility of "preferring" one over
t'other. Happily.

> 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 ...

- ? I'm mystified by this. I can only think of individual takes on the
open/incomplete thang, and can't really see my way to abstracting a
generalisation such as this out of these hard-won individual responses. I
guess I'd feel happier with an example?

  I can't think at present
> where I have seen it except everywhere.

- oh.

> 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.

- I dunno. I don't know Rouen at all, but if I take the most unified,
through-composed all-of-a-piece English cathedral, Salisbury, I have to
say I find it a bit sterile, less satisfactory than the ones which have
evolved more. Is the building of the Galilee Chapel in Durham (random, ok,
semi-random example) really an example of the earlier "complete" form
being "interfered with"? That term would seem to prejudge the ongoing
process in a way I'd find hard to accept from what I see on the ground.

- looking forward to the relaunching of this list as the British n Irish
Poets n Cathedrals list...

RC




%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%