-----Original Message-----
From: Trevor Joyce <
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To:
Lawrence Upton <
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Cc:
British & Irish poets <
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Date:
03 January 2004 18:31
Subject: Re: Niedecker review
Dear
Trevor
I'll do that in reverse order
>I suspect that may be
either stupid or incomprehensible, but I leave
>you to voice the question
as you will.
no!
Do readers of Chinese, say,
interpret
>visual texts in ways which are shared by them but different
from
>readers from alphabetic traditions?
I have no idea
I
don't know if anyone is doing that
Yang Lian came to see me and Cobbing
in the mid 90s - we had 45 mins but got
carried away and did 75 and YL seemed
very enthusiastic - among the many
things he said was that he had never come
across work like that
I looked for visual work in Greek, thinking I might
be able to cope with
seeing what they did with their alphabet - the hubris of
a man who once
bought a bottle of water with a phrase book
All I found
was work not intended for performance and based on the Roman
alphabet and not
very interesting
I suspect there's a wealth of material I have
missed
Prigov said of a set of questions about Russian practice I threw
at him "It
is the same", but I have my doubts
There are similar works
by a great number of Russian poets; but only
similar... I think that though
neither Cobbing nor I have/had any great theory,
there are some assumptions
made which would not be shared... But then your
question was somewhat
different
I can't answer it, but the role of the alphabet is
interesting
Re Dutton, on the occasions when I have improvised with him,
there has been
no trouble at all; but Paul is much more likely to compose
in sound from sound and to make
visuals to look at
The
reading that I do is straight out of Cobbing and in relation to that
Paul is
more like Dufrene and Chopin in making a piece that exists in sound
Peter
Finch works that way, reading from the text, and I would expect there
to be
similarities, yes; but not necessarily every time
A lot of the time that
one is reading a text with no words and no letters
one is finding them...
Very rarely is there actually no word or letter
there, but it can
happen
I just, over the last few days, made such a set of texts... put it
in the
drawer to see if it grows into anything
More generally recently
I have found myself going back to letter shapes
slightly in the style of
Jeremy Adler and / or Sean O'Huigin 25 - 30 years
ago
I'm going to
be performing that stuff soon, including an improv with the
musician
Caroline Kraabel and I'm looking forward to that very much
Ive also been
going off into brushwork poems for dancers which can also be
voiced - and
there one would find difference just because of the difference
of voice and
bodies
I've perfomred some of Cobbing's pieces solo recently and that's very odd -
one needs different gestures, different breaths; and it's very odd getting into
that state of body