Barry MacSweeney at Sub Voicive 10th July 1998

Barry MacSweeney read to a surprisingly small audience.

The gig was on an odd day for SVP, Friday, and had been announced late.
Also, I discovered that Centre for English Studies at Senate House were
presenting a reading by Bob Perelman at the same time; so there may have
been a split audience. Nevertheless, I think there were those who just
couldn't be bothered.

Someone told me with commendable honesty that they felt they had had enough
of Barry, having seen him last autumn at the launch of Clive Bush's Out of
dissent and a year or so before when he read with Peter Manson.

Which is a pity... because Barry did a blinder. He read well and what he
read was, for me, stunning: his Postcards from Hitler, launched that night,
and his current work-in-progress, Mary Bell sonnets

The work is technically accomplished and risky... Odd word that. I mean it
as a sense of the honesty I referred to in my rough intro, reprinted below;
the reader / auditor is left to make up its own mind about the material,
material which is presented in such a way that the reaction to the work
becomes a mode of crisis. It makes you profitably uncomfortable. If you
engage with it, it leaves you naked: what do you think? Why? How? Explain
yourself!

Regarding his recent previous books Pearl / Book of Demons... I have some
trouble with Book of Demons. Sometimes I like it very much, sometimes not;
but I get a lot out of that engagement - there is a lot in the book... Pearl
I have more trouble with, much more. Though there is some superb writing in
it, I find the whole slips too far towards the sentimental for me... But
Demons persuaded me that there is important work to come from Barry even if
Demons does not "last". This new work is the first of it.

I don't know how anyone will be judged in the great poet / minor poet lists
of the future. It doesn't bother me very much. What will be, will be. I do
know that Barry MacSweeney is an important poet to us now, challenging us
with vibrant poetry over three decades. If you didn't hear him read this
work this time, try to see him elsewhere. Get the book. L2.50 plus postage
from Writers Forum - payable to New River Project.

Sub Voicive Poetry takes a break now to get back breath and lick its
financial wounds. It starts again on 22 9 98 with Robert Sheppard and Keston
Sutherland.

Details will be mailed and emailed nearer the time.

Hopefully, if SVP is to continue, more people will turn up to that season.


Lawrence Upton

Approximate text of
an introduction to Barry MacSweeney's Sub Voicive Poetry reading on 10th
July 1998

This isn't a very long introduction, nor has it been very carefully
prepared. As you can see, I am reading from hand-written notes, some of
which are only an hour or so old. However, I do think it is important to
have an introduction if only to guide those who might be inclined to comment
from a basis of ignorance, as happened the last time when an insulting
review of the Caddel / Harwood reading was posted...

The first thing and the main thing to say of Barry MacSweeney is that he is
a major poet. I don't say he is a great poet; I don't think much of the
term. I am happier with "major" which I use to indicate the effect of what
he is doing in the here and now rather than worrying about his place in the
pantheon.

I am referring to his consistently interesting and challenging work over a
long period, sometimes to relatively widespread acclaim, often known to
relatively few. He has produced an enormous amount of work. If I just quote
Our mutual scarlet boulevard, 1971
Odes, 1978
Ranter, 1985
and Book of demons, 1997
you will see the range and longevity of his achievement.

Within those "relatively few" who have consistently followed his work, he
has a wide constituency.

I picked up the following from a quick search of the world wide web.

[one] of the great figures...
   Andrew Duncan / AE 11

MacSweeney can arrive at superb texture in his poetry; but, paradoxically,
his best work is the emotional narrative Ranter. He is most typically good
when writing about Sparty Lea.
   Douglas Clark

I am not quite sure what "superb texture" is, but never mind.

Then there is this gem:
a stocky slight man with horn rimmed spectacles and a voice as cosy as a
Northern snug
   Mike Plumbley

Even his own publishers - of Book of Demons - doesn't seem to want to talk
about his poetry, concentrating in their blurb largely on autobiographical
detail, especially his alcoholism. They do, however, quote, briefly, Iain
Sinclair, whose comment on MacSweeney's work, "grace under pressure", is, I
think, near the mark.

Of course, his work has been assessed in detail, especially by Clive Bush,
but such assessments take up space and so they don't happen often, with glib
and irrelevant information being published in lieu.

Peter Manson's reviews in the magazine Object Permanence were remarkable in
that he managed to say something pertinent in a couple of sentences. Of
Barry
MacSweeney, he wrote:
MacSweeney is one of those poets whose work becomes richer and more coherent
the more of it you read.

He goes on to discuss, briefly, MacSweeney's long lines which, though long,
are not prose and will disappoint the many who do not really like poetry.

MacSweeney is a craftsperson, a dedicated one, working with and in his own
non-London English; but he never plays the "regional poet" game. His poetry
is remade language which is, for all its lyricism, shaped by
internationalist and modernist commitments.

And his poetry is unequivocally politically committed. Notice I don't say
"unashamedly" because I have never known why one should be ashamed; it is
equivocation which is the problem. His political commitment is useful - he
gives coherence and voices to sensibilities which are dissenting,
disobedient, questioning.

He is an honest poet, a risky pursuit given that the route to
self-advancement in any profession and definitely in his professions,
journalism and poetry, is one of brown-nosing, diplomatic silence and the
static of loquacious content-free chatter.

The world is happy with a flow of polemical writing providing that flow is
subject to editorial and fashion stopcocks; MacSweeney is too feisty to be
easily assimilable.
Narrowed minds will find plenty of material in his life and work with which
to fabricate another stock portrait of the self-destructive poet; but such a
portrait would be unconvincing and inadequate to tell us anything useful.

Barry MacSweeney includes much personal response in his work, risking
sentimentality thereby; but he makes the resistance to and on the back of
that risk part of the poetry's subject and process. The lack of cluttered
personal detail in much of the work makes it unpalatable to those for whom
poetry should hold up a diary to the fly-on-the-wall videocam.

He is his own person, still developing because, like all good poets, he is
still learning. It is a pleasure to welcome him tonight to launch his latest
publication, Postcards from Hitler.

Lawrence Upton





%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%