Martin Corless-Smith and Peter Finch read to a small but appreciative
audience in Durham on Friday evening, for a joint Colpitts Poetry /
Basil Bunting Poetry Centre reading. As it was part of this year's
Bunting Birthday Celebrations, the event was introduced by me,
restating the importance which both poets place on their work as
sounded performance, and quoting the nice line from Charles Bernstein
about poetry being divisible into just two sorts, sound poetry, and
unsound poetry. Then I sat down, and in accordance with local custom
the lights were dimmed. Poetry in Durham is becoming unlit poetry,
whatever else.

Martin read first, stooping to get his book under the anglepoise. He
read backwards through his work, Merlin-style, starting with parts of
The Garden: A Theophany (Spectacular Books 1998), sections from his
Worcestershire Mass, and them back into Of Piscator (Univ. of Georgia
1997), to finish with his earliest (surviving) published poem, To
Absent Minister. He took a bit of time to get up to full steam,
probably because of the lousy introduction he'd had, but once there he
generated some fine tensions on the air, his rhymes and sound-patterns
drawing a path through the work. His style is quite fast,
undemonstrative, with little variation of intonation, and offered few
toe-holds for would-be easy listeners: in reading some of the
Dialogues from Of Piscator the only way in which a change of speaker
was announced was by a raising of his hand. Looking round the audience
you could see folk warming to his performance as he got into full gear
(little or no introduction, one poem leading almost directly to the
next) so that they were carried towards a quite hi-tension conclusion:

mother mary sister anne
are we blind
did we dine

A great tree is down
its under hangs a hundred up
rip pocked a great root ripped
its dripping atoms bloodied to the satellite
oof oof it is certain

A cleverly-paced performance which led people into the work and was
nicely paced.

Peter Finch, after the interval, wasn't having any of this
dipped-lights nonsense, he wanted to be free to stride, move etc. A
strong, clear voice, that'd make a reading of the phonebook sound
strong and convincing (did I ever tell you that when I was in
Lithuania there was a young performance poet who did indeed read the
Vilnius phonebook in a fine dramatic style, in a voice not unlike
PF's). There wasn't so much of his "sound" poetry or performance
poetry in evidence, but he started with "Blodeuwedd Translated" (from
Antibodies, Stride, 1997) which is as fine a piece of its kind as you
could wish, and well rendered. Then, because Peter Hodgkiss had turned
up with a stack of copies of "Make" (Galloping Dog Press 1990) he read
some pieces from that, and generally roved freely through his wide
range of modes of writing and styles of reading. His final piece - a
cutup from a Mills&Boon romance - was prefaced with a great
performance - the "re-making of the text" by ripping up a copy,
dividing it into bits and shuffling it...

Two widely differing performing styles, each making the poems work in
the air in their own way. Then we went for a curry.

Next Colpitts reading: John Kinsella, Friday March 12th.

RC


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