When I read a poem in public, Doug, I put my skin into it. It can be
repeated but it's never quite the same thereafter. I can appreciate what
you're saying about sound poems, I can find them quite fun to hear, but
poems that are fully semantically, morally, rhythmically engaged, all at the
same time, are a bugger to repeat. I can possibly re-do them in totally
different environments, like other countries, because then I forget I ever
read them in the first place.
All the Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 10:45 AM
Subject: Re: "This 'performative' poem"
David, when you say: 'I always notice with my own poems, as a rule of
thumb, that I can do one performance only, and after that it becomes
mechanical. The moment is gone.' it doesn't ring true to me in my readings.
So this is a personal thing perhaps, for all of us? I find, perhaps from my
experience in sound poems, where, as in a jazz performance, every time is
new in one small way or another. Performance, in this case, even of the
written poems, alters partly due to something else you mentioned that can't
travel, the ambience, which includes the audience & its participation in
the event.
Most of our sound poems (mine & Stephen Scobie's and my co-written pieces
for Re: Sounding) are 'texts' but they are also only beginnings, like
heads for jazz improvs. So a record of some kind or other will help, a tape
or whatever, but I confess we shy from that because we know each
performance is different.
So that's sound poetry, but the written poems are, for me, 'scored' (in the
sense Charles Olson had) to help anyone read them aloud, as close as
possible to what the author hoped for.
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
the heart in its cage stands up
desiring fine instruments
Michele Leggott
