beautiful snapshot Chris, thanks for that.  what about publications.  did the workshop do any publishing or did folks bring their latest to spread around?  & it also seems to me in the fix of this larger discussion, that WF workshops steered clear of alot of the workshop conventions that make them so suspect.

~mIEKAL

On Aug 17, 2009, at 7:47 PM, cris cheek wrote:

hi miekal, well this is my xp from the mid to l8 1970s. it changed over the years driven by different waves of participants. here's a bit of fluff on the WF workshop at that time (Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Lawrence Upton, Jeremy Adler, PC Fencott, Sean O'Huigin, Ulli Freer, Paige Mitchell, Pierre Joris?, Maggie O'Sullivan, Alaric Sumner . . . help i don't want to get into attempting a comprehensive list and either include nor exclude for portrait purposes . . . that kind of lot though, maybe Eric Mottram . . . Geraldine . . . ?? i know was around but not in London so less frequently . . . Robert Sheppard, Adrian Clarke . . . Gilbert Adair . . . it was a fun crowd)

Writing was frequently (although far from always) read by more than voice, two or three voices (or more), reading in close interaction, with syncopation, with overlapping stresses, with partial erasure, foreground and background scripting, staccato narrative assemblages and dialogistic interjection. The workshop sat more or less in a circle. Texts were sometimes arraigned across the floor or cascading from the ceiling or fluttering loose in the hand. Listening with attentive vision was at a premium. Spatial placement of sound became an area of investigation and spatiality of paginated notations, both placement of pages in the room and spatialisation of writings on the page, were consequent. Some quite extraordinary musicians attended from time to time. There were international visitors too. Bill Bissett, Jerome Rothenberg come to mind. Interruption and distraction of both the scripted and the unscripted were qualities considered delicious rather than screened out; I referred at that time to such displacements and noise in a performance of writing as exquisite interference. Consequently attention was full on and wide open. In workshop presentations a dynamic interchange ‘between’ improvisation and composition often presented itself. The potential live performance of a piece of writing often gave rise to consecutive versions in which two or three different possibilities were offered. In other words the same poem might be tried in a number of different ways, either during one workshop or in consecutive workshops. Writings were thereby explored through out-loud readings as being subjects for revision, a direct result of having been aired. A performance of writing, in the majority of these cases intended to be in conversation with the possibilities for the poem, was an occasion of a moment. One occurring ‘between’ the body of giver and the body of receiver, belonging to neither one nor the other, a signal, even secretion, of mobilised liminal exchange. Also ‘between’ the writing on the page and the writing off the page, projected through the bodies of its temporary operators as sonic orientation and propulsive gesture.

This workshop, which had the qualities of a research group, was a seedbed for emergent collaborations; indeed collaboration was encouraged by dint of the enquiries conducted as already mentioned. Many of its participants helped each other to contest the boundaries of their poems. The workshop would be held in an upstairs room of a public house; in a meeting house; in a private house; in a theater workshop space . . . Bob would usually start things off by simply asking who wanted to go first. I never witnessed much by way of detailed feedback neither for nor against a poem. There would simply be the acknowledgment by those there that something had been put into the pot.

just a snapshot

xx

cris