Well, slightly more awake today, and I might as well say from the
outset I'm talking through the top of my head (perhaps my hat, if I
had one).  One step on cris and we'd be talking spells and magic - my
daughter has been getting into white witchery lately with her friends
and I'm intrigued by the basic attractions of en-chant-ment.  But
this is not quite what I mean.

I agree with you that "performance" of some kind inheres in the acts
of reading and writing, and that this creates slippages.  It's not so
simple as "closure" as opposed to something else ("openness"?)  To
take a formally "closed" poem, say, George Herbert, whose work I
enjoy hugely - those ingenious rhymes and subtle music - when I read
his work, firstly I am hearing the poem in my head, it is not a
"silent" reading psychically speaking.  Each word is "as if" read
aloud.  This makes the experience of reading it a _temporal_
experience, just as a performance is.  That reading vanishes into the
past and becomes memory, part of my lived experience.  And I bring to
the moment of reading all my own lived experience, bodily experience,
which responds to the rhythms and sonic textures of the poem, and the
effect (in my own subjectivity anyway) ripples through my
consciousness, in ways which are both obvious and also difficult to
trace.  So different readings of the poems create different
experiences: it is simply not the same experience for me to read
George Herbert say in 1989 and then in 2002.  I am bringing different
things to that instant of meeting with the poem.  And that moment
can, and for me at certain crucial times has been, transformative -
there is a thing art can do which literally changes your perceptions,
for good, so you never see things the same way again.

I really think it a mistake to focus exclusively on the poem as a
linguistic _object_.  Of course I can't resist bringing theatre in.
I was intrigued to read in a study recently done on young people's
actual (as opposed to perceived) reading habits that Shakespeare
figured in two places on their top ten of texts they really enjoyed
reading (Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet).  Reading Shakespeare now is
clearly a different experience than it was in the 1500s, even though
it is (basically) the same text.  But that work can still appeal to
children in the 21st century .  This suggests to me that these
particular patterns of words are capable of creating profound
resonances in a very wide variety of minds, which suggests a certain
"openness" in the reading (and writing) of it.  But in that
"openness", however crudely put here, is I think the secret of
Shakespeare's enduring popularity.  His texts are pure poetry, but
they are most certainly performative.

Not sure this makes any sense, I won't go on any more as I have
things to do, and I haven't even touched ritual -

Best

Alison



At 6:48 PM +0100 21/6/02, cris cheek wrote:
>i'm sure you won't expect much more from me, but i am loathed to take the
>'ritual' route. Naming a ship, as in Austin's example there in that quote
>has ritual for sure in its solemn ceremony. So too the taking of marriage
>vows. These are explicit performances. Whilst in the big porous boundaries
>of definition we might claim that all utterances have a ritual quality of
>performance, that's just too vague and boggy for me.
>
>But yes the idea is pertinent to poetry, highly. Maybe I should ask whether
>all transformations have a ritual character.? You might persuade me.
--

"The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
                                        Albert Camus

Alison Croggon
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