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Magic (as performative
utterance) and the supernatural (as hauntings and presences) are never far
from the centre of Geraldine Monk's poetry. Hearing her read highlights how
much her poetry welcomes such potentialities; how many of her texts are only
fully activated in performance; and how that activation comes in a large part
from the texts' co-extensiveness with a range of registers, usages and
voicings. Her language usages can include comments about the venue, apologies
for not having assembled a clear programme of work, indecisiveness about what
to read, descriptions of how particular poems were composed, greetings to friends
in the audience, and remarks to latecomers. Monk's voicings can veer from
intimate whispers to booming full-throated shouts and cries, from broad
Lancastrian to something approaching RP, from Sitwellian articulations to
everyday speech. In a reading of her work Monk is always doing at least one
of the following: speaking, acting, speaking acts, or acting speech. Monk's
ability and willingness to communicate with an audience is inextricable from
her unique identity as a poet and performer. Her compelling performances of
her texts articulate an understanding of those texts. Monk's performances
articulate an understanding-in-process because they allow her to act as a
kind of intermediary between the rawness of her material and her audience.
There is an immediate problem with terminology here, an inconsistency between
'read', 'performance', 'usages', 'voicings', 'reading', 'speaking', 'acting',
'poet', 'performer' and 'performances'. And yet all those terms are
applicable to the many times I have heard Monk's poetry in public. There is a
further problem once we compare these experiences with others. Monk 'reading'
her work is certainly not a poetry reading in the same way as Matthew Clegg
reading from his 'Sonnets for Nobody' but neither is it a performance in the
same way as Steve McCaffery performing the first half of the Toronto
telephone directory at a speed which can only be described as 'Raworth
prestissimo'. Now my terminology has become musical because McCaffery was
using the directory as a score. But, again, this is very different from
Lawrence Upton or the late Bob Cobbing using non-linguistic marksÑe.g.
paintingsÑas scores for vocalizations. Finally, this is different again from
Upton's dance performances of shattered letter shapes. (See 'Poetry and
Dance?', his fascinating article about his solo work and Cobbing
collaborations, in The Paper, Issue 6
(April 2003)).
As a punter, I love all these things
but as a critic I become self-conscious about names. Such critical
self-consciousness is one starting point for Julia Novak's thoughtful and
thought-provoking study. Novak addresses the fact that despite the increasing
popularity of literary festivals, open mics, and poetry slams, poetry
criticism has generally failed to respond to 'live poetry'. Poetry criticism
still relies on the primacy of the printed text. In part, this is
understandable because a poetry reading or performance is, as Eric Dolphy
famously said of music, 'gone in the air'. But, at the same time, poetry's
meanings are peculiarly tied to context. A poet reading or performing their
work at a reading that is part of an academic conference on contemporary
poetry is very different to that poet reading the same work in an arts
centre, in a room over a pub or on a podcast. Indeed, I'd argue that much of
Sean Bonney's work can only properly be understood by being listened to as
one negotiates the weird demarcations, enclaves and exclusion zones of the
urban scene.
Novak's answer to this critical lack is two-fold. In the first part of the
book 'Theorising Live Poetry', she surveys the critical field. She
demonstrates poetry criticism's focus on the page and brings together what
little writing there is about poetry and performance. This includes Stephen
Vincent and Ellen Zweig's excellent The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary
Compendium of Language and Performance
(1981) and the equally compendious and important volume I co-edited with
Keith Tuma Additional Apparitions: Poetry, Performance and Site
Specificity (2002). It's good to see
that there are also numerous 'shout outs' to Peter Middleton, one of the few
critics who have argued consistently that the reading or performance is not
separate from everything else we call 'poetry'. The first part of Novak's
book also offers a definition of live poetry derived from what she calls 'the
fundamental bi-mediality of the genre of poetry Ð i.e. its potential
realisation as spoken or written word'. She goes on to argue that 'poetry's
oral mode of realisation [...] is a parallel to, rather than a mere derivative
'version' of, the written mode'. This is one of those statements that is so
obvious and feels so obviously right that one wonders why no-one came up with
it before. It allows one to be comfortable with that fact that, say, the
printed text of Maggie O'Sullivan's 'Murmur' is a work that is quite distinct
from her performance of it. Similarly, 'live poetry' allows one to stop
worrying about whether to call something a reading or a performanceÑalthough
I'd want to add a note of caution and say that it risks ignoring the
importance of context to poetry's meaning.
In the second part of the book, 'Analysing Live Poetry', Novak does two
things. She assembles a critical tool-kit drawn from linguistics and theatre
criticism as well as from more conventional literary criticism. She then goes
on to give a number of worked examples to show how such an analysis works.
This includes analysis of audio transcriptions and body communication. She
uses musical staves, emboldened text and words or parts of words above and below
the lines to show both emphasis and movement. One thing Novak is trying to
do, I think, is to give a sense of something similar to what rappers and MCs
call 'flow', although I don't recall her using that term. The book concludes
with a very useful 'how to do it' checklist for anyone wanting to analyse a
'live poetry' event.
So, this is an important intervention in an emerging critical field. It
offers a refreshing perspective on a neglected aspect of poetry and makes one
reflect on page-focused models of poetry criticism. But the book leaves me a
little dissatisfied. I think Novak focuses a little too much on what is
generally called 'performance poetry'. I was surprised to find no mention of
Caroline Bergvall or of performance writing, the genre she has done so much
to establish and theorise. Bergvall is noticeable by her absence not only
because her published texts and performances demonstrate Novak's argument
about bi-mediality so well but also because Bergvall herself has little
interest in fixed texts. 'Cropper', Goan Atom and ƒclat have been available in a number of different versions
and contexts. Indeed, a greater emphasis on what happens when experimental
poetries go 'live' would have added an interesting dimension to the book.
There is a brief, very good
discussion of Bob Cobbing but I think that the book would also have
benefitted from a sense of the performance tradition that Cobbing, Henri
Chopin and others represent and which pre-dates the 'slam' and
poet/performers like Patience Agbabi. The inclusion of Chopin and others
alongside Cobbing would have allowed for an expanded notion of text.
My other concern circulates around what might be called critical location. To
return to one of my opening examples, if I want to write about Matthew
Clegg's 'Sonnets for Nobody' as a published text, I could write about them in
terms of sonnet tradition; in terms of contemporary makers and breakers of
the sonnet like Muldoon; and in terms of the Sheffield and north British
poetry scenes. But if I want to write about their live manifestation using
Novak's checklist what am I doing? Or to put this another way, what am I
analysing the sonnets' live manifestation against except the checklist? If I
compare Clegg's reading with, say, a Geraldine Monk reading of 'Domestic
Warps' or a reading by Joolz Denby (a poet Clegg particularly admires), am I
doing anything useful? If I say, 'Clegg's public reading style is clearly
influenced by X', is that useful? Have I had a better experience or just a
different one if I've read and heard
Clegg than someone who has only done one or the other? My concern about
critical location is, however, a positive one. It seems clear that the real
implication of Novak's book is that we ought to consider writing about
contemporary poetry from a bi-medial perspective and that we may be missing
something if we don't. My questions reflect, merely, that there are, as yet,
few observable models for doing so.
© David
Kennedy 2012
Note: Readers are recommended to
visit Julia Nowak's excellent website.
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