 |
 |
On 13 Jan 2000, Chris Goode wrote: > To ramble on: it is quite vertiginous to come saucy into a community of people > on whose work I was weaned - in conscious and careful relation to which > oeuvres my own practice has developed - and find, perhaps not unexpectedly > upon reflection, that many of them consider out-loud reading to be not (as I > do) a fertile and challenging extension of an act of poetry, but instead > believe it to be distinct from, and possibly inimical to, the stuff of the > poem. Chris, I'm with you here especially on the fertile and challenging bit, & think on this list many are. & quite willing to continue talking about it, on fridge magnets or any medium you like. I think there've been two different threads here which are worth teasing apart: (a) why doesn't Prynne read his poems in public (which thread I hope has just about played out) and (b) what happens when we, any of us who choose to follow the fertile n difficult path, do that same thing? I'd say, with cris: > People shouldn't read to get some small reumeneration for their work if > they don't feel that such versions are an alive part of their work. So much of my experience of various poetry series convinces me that this still goes on, depresses me absolutely. I've yarned before at length about the sad person who _introduced the reading_ by saying their work was best read in silence, from the page, and then proved the point... It's so easy to say why poetry readings doesn't work... (wrong motives, shuffly audience, poor acoustic, badly prepared poet...) and very right that we should question their rationale - I'm still reeling from the decision of cris cheek, one of the most professional and committed performers around, not to do more readings as such, tho I can see how he gets there. And yet... when poetry readings/performances/whatever work, they work brilliantly, and I hope everyone on this list can refer back in their memories to occasions when they've learned more from the sounded articulation of the work than they'd ever do from staring at the page. That, I think, is why I still keep on with it/them, and there's no way I'd accept any arts council guidelines for them. I'm aware that the message I thought I'd sent to the list replying to Chris's first (and which he quoted in his reply) got sent by mistake just to him - there wasn't any deep reason for this, other than dropping the fridge magnet, and too much has happened since for anyone to feel they've missed something. RC %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%