 |
 |
An introduction to the reading by Aaron Williamson on 1st July ______________________________ Somewhere and recently I overheard a conversation in the bookshop on the South Bank. One said to the other "Yes, Aaron Williamson, you know, the deaf poet." My first thought was that it is rather sad that their first attempt at a point of reference should be Aaron's deafness, a personal attribute, rather than the challenging nature of the work he makes or his, in my experience, amiable personality - those attributes with which he participates in our community. It is not a new approach to poetic classification nor is it particularly unkind; it's just a way that we operate as a species when our brains aren't working. One has heard John Heath-Stubbs referred to as "the blind poet". My second thought was that it is quite surprising that the stranger spoken to did not immediately exclaim "Deaf poet!?" with a string of cartoon exclamation and interrogation marks. The rest of this short dull conversation demonstrated that only one of them had heard of Aaron, but the other's brain remained in idle despite what she had been told. Even those who do not greatly value the public reading of poetry retain a conceptual sense of the sounds of the poem, in its assonance and rhythm for example, and the dialogue of each poem's pattern of sounds with the formal and colloquial spoken languages. Aaron's poetry forces upon us, if we are sentient, the need to consider the assumptions that we are encouraged to make about the nature of poetry and the nature of the practice of poetry. It challenges too some implicit assumptions about human community where the aural has its hegemony as a means of primary communication: much public communication assumes that we can hear and in conversation we frequently speak to each other without face to face contact. Communication with the deaf relies upon the visual and so emphasises it; and thus it foregrounds the visual elements in hearing communication. Aaron's work challenges many assumptions about what poetry is and how it works, in the same way that the majority of poets performing at Sub Voicive Poetry challenge those assumptions. But he takes the challenge further than many take it - the text on the page is only the beginning. The poet's part in the making of these poems is only completed in performance, where his utterance and his gesture are central, with a multiplicity of meanings to be derived from the word and syntax play and unexpected juxtapositions. The audience must sometimes strive to follow the utterance, a reversal of the day to day experience of those without hearing. Thus, Aaron's performance concretely manifests the questioning of how far we really understand each other, what it is for one person to speak to another, how much is actually passed over from I to Thou, and how much is just passed over and how much is filled in by the brain of the receiver as it does with data from all the senses. Aaron's performance also emphases the importance of hearing the poet perform their own poetry by standing on its head, and boxing the ears of, the ethos of ac-tors giving definitive performances. Lawrence Upton / Sub Voicive Poetry %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%