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From: "John Wilkinson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Robert Adamson
Date: Thu, Apr 29, 1999, 8:54 am


Well, just to start at the beginning - I wasn't claiming any authority but
responding quite specifically to a request on the list from Peter Riley for
information on what others who attended CCCP thought. And forgive me but I
thought my tone was anything but papal and was unmistakably a rapid-response
e-mail expression of a clearly personal opinion rather than a critical work.
Self-satisfied no, unless any such expression of opinion is self-satisfied.

Second, the reference to George Barker was to his bardic reading style as
the follow-up e underlined. For Adamson, for all the repeated references by
the writer to his links and sympathies with San Francisco and Language
writing, what I heard - not having the benefit of prior acquaintance - was
the parading of a poetic attitude whereby all material was subsumed to the
figure of the poet suffering for his vocation. If I'd thought a little
longer I'd have suggested Philip O'Connor as more akin. The natural world of
herons and fish sounded like ducks on the wall of the Adamson psyche.

The White Abyss, which is the poem in the CCCP programme, reads on the page
as a much former and more detached entity than it sounded at the reading,
since its formal structure becomes more apparent. Nevertheless, in this poem
of radical doubt and fear of extinction, the first person pronoun remains
absolutely in the driving seat, disposing hell, death, St Augustine and
Mallarme.

There is a literary style in mental health circles called 'survivors poetry'
and this poem is a good example. In reading 'survivors poetry' I remind
myself that a harlequin, fractured or dislodged sense of self can be a great
privilege, and that many must engage in a struggle for both a personal and a
social sense of self. The marks of this in the poem, however, tend to be
erased with the use of the poem as an instrument for self-assertion, a
reiterated I am. In much self-assertive poetry claim is laid to a particular
social identity, and it has its value in recommitting listeners and readers
to a social identity they share.

Adamson's reading sounded like an assertion in a vacuum. John Kinsella has
back-channeled on Adamson's political importance: < Robert Adamson's 1988
poem was almost the only public rebuttal of the whole Bicentennial scam by a
non-indigenous writer published in Australia.> His commitment to the rights
of indigenous peoples is a clear position, but one which in the context
seemed decorative. For me as a first-time listener - if I can say that again
- his commitment to an exhausted poetic manner which I think could only have
been sustained in his determined isolation, and which his bardic style of
delivery made more monotonous than the texts might be (hence my suggestion
that the reading demeaned the text), subsumed to the interests of
self-assertion the poems' political and environmental concern.

I think it might have been inferred to that I don't see the problem of the
reference of the poem to the presence in reading as unique to Adamson at
all. I'm conscious that my praise for Andrea Brady made a positive virtue
out of the relationship, but a poetic practice in which the self is
problematically distributed can be - and was - invested with a tension in
its compact with breath which I found far more rewarding.

But others may answer Peter's call for personal responses very differently.
I can conceive how the embarrassment I felt might in some circumstances
reflect on the unexamined conventions of a particular event. Keston has
e-mailed on Bob Walker's reading in just these terms. For me though
Adamson's style was too readily-placed and assigned in literary-historical
terms to propose anything very interesting about the conventions of CCCP.
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>From: [log in to unmask]
>To: "Anthony Lawrence" <[log in to unmask]>, "John Wilkinson"
<[log in to unmask]>, "British Poets" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Robert Adamson
>Date: Thu, Apr 29, 1999, 8:24 am
>

> I was at that reading and have found the level of discussion childish and
> self-satisfied. Anthony's points are good ones. I've backchannelled a few
> questions and am curious to see what answers emerge - if any. The
> "authority" behind these recent CCCP postings says everything about
> alternative canons - the embarrassment, I'm afraid, is not to be found in
> Robert Adamson's reading but the limited range of some of the audience.
> Best,
> JK
>


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