An idea in search of light
I’m working on a piece for a new anthology set to come out mid-2012. It’s called In Their Own Voicesand will be edited by Helen Ivory and George Szirtes. Fifty or so authors will each talk about their “poetics”. I’m having trouble working out what that means. I understand that “poetics” refers to discourse around the theory of poetry (thank you wikipedia), but every attempt I’ve made to apply the term to my work seems false. So I’ve been concentrating on the tension between my self-identification as a writer and my tendency to perform rather than publish. In doing so, I’ve been reading lots of fascinating essays and article, including a piece by Peter Middleton called “The Contemporary Poetry Reading.” It was written in 1998, so a lot has changed since then, but I love that he begins with a description of a reader on stage and then this:
“This ritual is an ordinary poetry reading of the kind that has become widespread in the past forty years, and is therefore so familiar to most readers of contemporary poetry that its strangeness requires an alienating description to be visible at all. Listeners and poets have had almost nothing to say about this phenomenon despite its importance for financing and fostering their careers, assisting the distribution of their poetry, and even shaping its very forms.” (p.262)
There’s a lot to be said for writing about performance as opposed to published material. For one, the rules are different. There’s no point talking about the usual parts of poetry – metre, rhyme, structure etc – because they’re superseded by the fact that I’m ON STAGE, usually doing something strange with my hands, as I try to make the next thirty minutes as enjoyable as possible. I’m trying to work out a way of talking about the gestures and intonations that almost all poets from a certain scene will use. This pieceby Mairead Byrne is a very funny comparison between the FUN of stand-up comedy and the ANGUISH of poetry readings.However, taking the piss out of poetry is par for the course, and although I find such self deprecating humour useful for understanding the conventions / mechanics / affectations of being a poetry-reading-type-person, I think many of the conclusions people come to about poetry in performance are wrong. Just because we use a mocking tone to talk about ourselves doesn’t mean we must necessarily conclude that what we do is rubbish or lacking. (Most) poets know this, but I wonder about critics and audience members. Specifically, I wonder about people who come up to me afterwards and say that they wish they could read the piece about X, because they need the words in front of them to understand / savour it better. I have never felt this way after a reading – even if I then buy the person’s book. I wonder if other people who are regulars at poetry events find that they can follow the poet, remember the good lines, guess at the form and structure, recognise clever uses of vocabulary and so on without having to see the text. And do other people find that they go to a reading not to see someone once, but to find poets they’d like to see over and over again? This talk of attending a poetry reading and hearing something once isn’t a true reflection of how poetry readings work, nor the reason some people might enjoy them.
Anyway, I thought the above video “An Idea in Search of Light” was apt for a number of reasons. First, the fact that I am trying to see my own ideas more clearly. Second, I like the theme of wonder. Third, I am mining ubuweb for all it’s worth – even if the house killed SOPA, you can bet there are people who’d like to see it destroyed.
