Different British Voices: Poetry, Locality, Plurality
12-14 September 1997
Brno, the Czech Republic
Report by Ken Edwards
Fifty-two participants were listed for this two-and-a-half-day seminar -
hailing from the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, France,
Croatia, Albania, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary. The seminar was held at the
Hotel Santon, overlooking a lake just outside Brno, under the auspices of
Masaryk University, Brno, and the British Council in the Czech Republic.
The distinguished Czech poet Miroslav Holub gave the opening talk on the
Friday evening, and read from his poetry in English and Czech. Dr Holub
caused some controversy with his opening remarks, asserting that (a)
British poetry had proceeded unchanged for many decades whereas Czech
poetry had undergone what he termed a "paradigm shift" in the 1960s, and
possibly again more recently; and (b) regional differences as suggested by
the title of the seminar did not exist in Czech poetry. It's fair to say
there was some disagreement with each of these assertions, though not
everybody disagreed with both, and presumably some disagreed with neither.
At any rate, they provided food for discussion.
Food of a more tangible sort followed, along with wine and Czech beer,
which all helped to get the weekend off to a lively start.
On Saturday morning at nine o'clock participants assembled to hear Maggie
O'Sullivan read her poetry, accompanied by her Czech translator, Jana
Mesarosova, who supplied versions of several of Maggie's poems from In the
House of the Shaman. By consent, this was an extremely difficult task -
Maggie's work involves neologisms, compound words and nonsense words in a
complex weaving of sound. I think many participants were staggered by the
impact of Maggie's performance, having never encountered anything like it
before. She followed the Shaman poems with some more recent work, drawing
on her Irish heritage.
Tony Baker followed this hour-long session with a reading of his own work,
some of which, again, was translated into Czech. (I'm sorry to say I forgot
to make a note of the names of the other translators.) Highlights of Tony's
reading were a recent, long sequence entitled "Binding Affinities" and his
own astonishingly fluid English translation of Blaise Cendrars' "Prose du
Transsiberien et de la petite Jeanne de France".
After a coffee-break (mostly spent waiting for the coffee to turn up) it
was Richard Caddel's turn to read his poetry. He ranged widely throughout
his published work, reading mostly short pieces. Ric was instrumental in
organising this seminar, and, in keeping with its theme, his is a voice
that is distinctly rooted in the North of England, yet refuses to succumb
to the Little Englandism of so much contemporary poetry in this country.
Lunch followed, non-vegetarians among us being introduced to the delights
of Czech pork and dumplings.
It's a tribute to the enthusiasm of the poets and participants that, after
three solid hours of poetry followed by a substantial lunch, they returned
to the fray in the afternoon with renewed vigour. On the agenda were four
discussion groups arranged in parallel groups of two. These were: (A)
Environmental/spatial issues (keynote speaker Tony Baker); (B)
Internationality/world influence (Lee Harwood); (C) Locality and region
(Richard Caddel); and (D) Performance (Maggie O'Sullivan).
I chaired the group A session. We had to compete with the excited sounds of
an endurance race on the lake outside the window. Tony Baker started us off
describing how his work as a musician and ecologist fed into his poetry. A
musician alters the perception of space by various means, including
repetition and by voicing chords in different ways; similarly, as a poet he
works with the space of the page to alter the pace and disposition of the
language.
Tony described the environment as something completely embracing, to which
we continually adjust. The notion that the environment is an inexhaustible
"other" is no longer acceptable; he quoted Ric Caddel: "there is no away to
sling things to". The page can be seen as an environment, and so too is the
culture and language within which we exist. He talked about one of his
passions, mushrooms, which continually adjust their behaviour in a survival
struggle. One of the Albanian delegates commented that "poets are like
mushrooms; they have to invent in order to survive".
Questions debated included: can poetry help to change people's way of
thinking about the environment? what is primary, listening to the sound of
poetry or reading it on the page? if the poet adopts an open approach,
allowing leeway for interpretation to the reader, can there be such a thing
as misreading a poem?
There was discussion about inter-language work: writing in a language not
one's own, one delegate said, could be liberating; listening to poetry in
another language, another suggested, was pleasurable, "listening without
responsibility". Tony concluded by observing that children enjoy the sound
of words, but as they get older they lose this gift and start to worry
about meanings.
I was also present at the group D session after the break. Chaired by
Matthew Sweney, an American based in Olomouc and working at the Votobia
publishing house, it was kicked off by a fifteen-minute presentation from
Maggie O'Sullivan on aspects of her own performance work, highlighting the
materiality of language; dancing on the tongue and on the page; receiving
and acting upon; mishearing; giving voice to the voiceless; text as
weaving; exploration; letting language find ways of meaning through
herself.
In his report on this session the following morning, Matthew described the
performance of a spider in the middle of the space as we talked (we were
arranged in a semi-circle). I thought I had been the only one to observe
this.
We talked about street poetry and rap, about digital and
computer-interactive forms, about the Anglo-Saxon beat. A police siren was
heard outside. Towards the end of the discussion, one of our Albanian
friends talked about how Homer had been allowed under the old communist
regime in his country but Virgil had been banned; as a consequence, three
rival translations of the Aeneid were now vying for position in the
Albanian bestseller lists. A Hungarian delegate countered by describing the
relevance of Shelley's "Ozymandias" to present-day Hungary, where a statue
commemorating the glories of socialist production had been destroyed by a
drunken crowd, leaving only the feet.
In the sessions at which I wasn't present, Lee Harwood (B) talked about
poetry and art as a form of collage and interchange, and warned against the
dangers of national stereotyping. In (C) Richard Caddel spoke of locality
and region as important in his own development and cited William Carlos
Williams, Olson, Niedecker and Bunting as models of outward-looking poems
who had made the local their ground. (I gathered these details from the
closing plenary on the Sunday.)
On Sunday morning, before the plenary, the last of the four billed British
poets, Lee Harwood, read for about 45-50 minutes. Of the dozen or so pieces
he read, only one ("Monster Masks") was translated into Czech (read by Petr
Mikes, of the publisher Votobia, standing in for the translator, who did
not attend). Most were recent poems. Lee's is a quiet, gentle voice, and he
was the perfect choice to wrap up the proceedings. His "Fifty Sticks for
Joseph Cornell" reminded me of similarly restrained yet open English work
in other media: the landscape art of Richard Long or the music of Howard
Skempton.
Following closing remarks by Ric and by Don Sparling, the main organiser of
the seminar, the event concluded with a discussion on questions of
translation, in which a number of participants who had not yet given voice
made cogent points. I found it remarkable how fluent and confident in
English were the participants from Eastern and Central Europe.
Books were bought (some mysteriously disappeared), leaflets taken up,
photographs snapped, e-mail and snail-mail addresses exchanged, thanks
given. I don't think many of the participants had heard British poetry
quite like this before; had Dr Holub managed to stay, he might perhaps have
revised his views on paradigm shifts.
The British poets, joined by your reporter, went on to Prague, where they
gave a successful performance on the Monday night in the cafe adjacent to
the American Globe Bookstore, to a small audience of ex-pats, tourists and
Czechs.
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