tragic body - july cd-r

Below you can see the image from July's CD-R, tragic body, although without the text that will be superimposed.

The whole thing took longer than anticipated. The tracks I originally intended to use were recorded in full about three times, but ended up too quiet, and too passive. I then recorded a whole new set of pieces on the same theme in an intense few hours. I also approached them less as sound pieces and more as performance art with a sound element. Only one of the finished tracks from that session, 100 : 100 hasn't been used as it was too quiet.

The cover image took a couple of dozen shots to get right also. But it's done now, and will be available from that PayPal link shortly.

reading p.inman - part six - the final

The other instalments can be found at the following links:

part one

part two

part three

part four

part five

And you can buy your own copy of Ad Finitum from if p then q

Finally we reach the last part in my reading of P.Inman's Ad Finitum. I should say here that while it might have looked like I was making heavy work of reading the book I have very much enjoyed myself. The book isn't going to disappear onto a shelf and never be seen again, I will return to it, and will continue to find new things. In fact I never intended to write as much as I have, I thought that three or four small parts would be enough. On which subject, this post is around twice the length of previous posts.

Roscoe Mitchell (nonaah)

Both Roscoe Mitchell (nonaah) and 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer do something that has only previously been seen in acoma. That is restricting the words to tight geometric symmetries, or at least confining them within implied limitations. The effect is one common to poetry, that by giving primacy to the physical form, to something external to the language, attention is drawn to the language. Except here the language is unyielding, which throws you back to the form for clues. It's easy to ping-pong back and forth between the two generating a lot of movement and heat but making no progress. Which at times could be a description of these posts I guess. Both Roscoe Mitchell (nonaah) and 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer specifically reference artists with their titles. But the latter also mentions those 14 panels, somehow giving the poem an architecture, a sense of coherence that's less evident in Roscoe Mitchell (nonaah). The sparseness of this poem sends you back to the words again. The appearance of them, the sound of them takes on a lot of importance. Similarities echo through the quarters, through the pages. So amino reflects too which reflects hue which simultaneously throws us back to its appearance in sided and reflects the word into on the opposite page. Or iota echoes utter. The poem remains closed and challenging, while keeping links open to the rest of the collection.

First mention of the idea of a reading

14 panels for Lynne Dreyer

14 panels for Lynne Dreyer by virtue of its comparative density and symmetry has at least the appearance of being more closed. But some of it carries an air of familiarity. Like a lot of great art you feel like you know it already, 'everything / applesauce', 'is it one word or / none of the rest', 'the far put of it', 'tauten into words'. Then you notice permutations, 'is it one word or / none of the rest' returns as, 'is it one word or / none tan of bluff / of the rest by it'. The language is alive. From 'a. / noft. / bluff.', which opens aengus, noft reappears in, 'coaled alp / noft suit.' It's intoxicating, you make ever wilder leaps. In qua there is, 'tan frost owl', both tan and owl appear in the same panel within 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer. That's straightforward. But might n'owl in aengus be an eroded version of the same? Curiously, while both tan and owl appear earlier in the collection, frost doesn't make its first appearance until pluper. But this isn't about qua or pluper.

I haven't remarked on one of the more obvious features of this part of the book. From the beginning where every word had at least one piece of attendant punctuation we've come to Roscoe Mitchell (nonaah), which has none at all, 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer with a few, rare, full points and parentheses, and pluper and qua where full points are used to mark the space between blocks of text.

pluper

As I wrote previously pluper seems to pull in the rest of the book, break it up and subject it to transformations, then throw it back out again. But that isn't all it does. Let's start with the shape. Why is it centered? Is it another form of the symmetry of Roscoe Mitchell (nonaah) and 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer? One that this time puts the words above the shape, and won't subject them to a similar violence. That suggests the line-breaks are important. Lines range from the long,

'writing in the short sense underline furred through'

to the short,

'in'

Often there are single words, again of varying length,

'subkulakization'

or

'owl'

Sometimes there are pairs of words,

'far but

its mouth

of leak

to kelp'

or triples,

'crag church posts'

'slowness caved in'

Sometimes there are obvious auditory and visual echoes that make sense of the line breaks,

'wine minus

peninsula

in'

At other times it's less clear why certain lines should be long,

'would've coke dusk iceland

mind put to squareness

cotton of peninsula stroke'

while others are short,

'cement of cake

too skin

.

but nerve

mattered work

sputter

shone

owl'

Why for instance should this, mentioned earlier, be on two lines,

'writing in the short sense underline furred through

wool vim listen matter'

while this is on seven?,

'the hair

blackest

which beckett

wrote as

waves

of takes of

decimal'

Perhaps the reason is that it's easier to discern similarities of sound in the second when it's written this way. The similarities between blackest and beckett, or waves and takes. Successive lines begin 'which ... / wrote ... / waves', shortening from the three syllable 'which beckett', through the two syllable 'wrote as', to the single syllable of 'waves'. It enable the penultimate line to be the almost symmetrical 'of takes of'. The effect of this second passage would be much more muted if it were spread across just one or two lines. Whereas the first passage would be harder to divide satisfactorily. It's perhaps not much of an answer, but it appears to come down to Inman having a good ear.

There are other ways we can look at the poem. Let's take a single word that recurs. The word edge first appears in pluper in the third block of text on the first line,

'but crop edge made of coffee cup'

where it seems to be part of a sentence giving an instruction. It then doesn't recur until the third page, the first line of the second block of text,

'who thought up "fudged edge"'

What's important here is the rhyme of fudged with edge, and the fact that it's a difficult combination of words to say, 'fudged edge', try it. There's an even longer gap, to halfway down the the eighth page, before it appears again. This time in a form familiar from earlier,

'work but

the crop from

its edges'

We already briefly looked at that recurrence of crop in an earlier post. While we're looking at edges as a recurrence of the prior instances of edge there are other links. That formulation 'its edge' is also repeated in the poem. On this page and the one opposite alone we also have 'its mouth' and 'its gaze. There's another jump, and on the twelfth and penultimate page edge appears for the final time twice more,

'the edge noisy too about

the sea laid to rest'

and,

'some paint has scaled quiet

its lower edges that some foot'

The first time edge may be the edge of the land, the second is less clear. Perhaps the word edge has no great significance to Ad Finitum as a whole, but it is interesting tracing this, or any other word through the book. Thus in acoma ;edges;, and 'edge;but'll;', in sided 'starts with solo of edge', and in 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer 'crink / edges / error'.

I could go on but I'm going to arbitrarily draw the line here to prevent this becoming a discussion of only one poem. I'm well aware that my view of pluper as a central part of the book's scheme could be contested. I also don't want to put off confronting qua any longer.

First notes toward the reading

qua

I don't think it's any secret that this is the poem I've had most trouble with. It follows what is a long and seemingly crucial poem but doesn't appear to add much to the book itself. The arrangement on the page is perhaps slightly different from what we've seen before. The poem is held together by a central, left-justified column. Four longer lines start at the left margin, three reaching the central column, and two extending beyond. Two words start from positions to the right of the central column, one ends in line with the end of the longer line above, the other starts at the same point as three other words which continue lines begun in the central column. There are no large gaps, no ruled lines, no punctuation other than three full points between lines.

After word fragments and non-words disappeared from pluper they re-emerge here, eninsula, persp. Perhaps a function of the poem is a return to the beginning of the book. It's a short poem like ilieu (2) and aengus. Where large parts of pluper hover on the edge of sense, qua for the most part doesn't, 'tint / lava decimal / mohair / exit prose'. But if it's true that qua is return to the beginning of the book why are so few of its words drawn from the first three poems, ilieu (2), aengus and acoma? Is it to demonstrate that while there are recognisable connections between poems throughout the book there is also transformation and change, that this is not a closed system? If that's so shouldn't the poem then look outward more than it appears to?

I'm still struggling. Let's look at the words. There are some broad relationships. Geographic/geological features are one, bank, lava, eninsula [assuming it's a fragment of peninsula], bluff and beach. Although of course both bank and bluff are ambiguous. Less numerous are animals, owl, mice, and weather, snowed, frost. Again, as so often, this isn't much help. There are clusters of sounds, i, n/m and s in, 'tan frost owl / eninsula glimpse / distance' or p and b in, 'bluff / persp / peen stalin / mice beach / doppler'.

There I have to concede defeat. I'm sure there's a good reason, or a number of reasons, for qua being where it is and being the poem it is, but I can't identify them. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying it's a poor poem, or has no place in the book, it's just that I find it hard to make sense of at present.

And that's it, the end of this particular journey, apart from some comments to round off. There is more to take from the book than I've been able to cover. Don't forget, I've had my copy for less than a fortnight (twelve days I think), only had the idea for this detailed reading eight days ago on 5 July, and didn't start writing until the next day. So in a lot of ways, although even the least read poems have probably been read through around a dozen times or more, this is a kind of superficial instant snapshot of first thoughts.

Starting to write the last section

in three different places at once

A brief note about some obvious omissions. Since I wanted this to be a personal reading I have avoided even relatively basic research. I already mentioned my decision not to use literary criticism. More consciously I didn't look up information on the various names which appear in the text. Likewise the structure of 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer is described as being based on the floor plan of Mark Rothko's Houston Chapel paintings, but I did not research this any further. Unfamiliar words and place-names have gone uninvestigated, although normally I might search for information on these and on named people. Apart from keeping the reading personal I was also concerned that getting bogged down in extraneous explanation might make my analysis even less clear, and I wanted to assume the most casual of readers.

Other details not pursued were the snippets that crop up in biographical write-ups, Inman's socialism, his work with unions, his link to language poetry etc. These, along with other critical responses to his work, I felt were either not relevant, or the kind of things that would only be in the background of most reader's minds as they pick up Ad Finitum. Besides I had no desire to write a comprehensive or authoritative review of the book, and I wanted to leave readers space to engage in their own reading. I haven't even thought of these posts as constituting a review. They are, as the title has it, a reading. One reader's responses in attempting to get to grips with what I find simultaneously an enjoyable and compelling text, and a challenging and problematic one. If I had an aim in mind it was to try and persuade sceptical readers that there are rewards here, and ways of getting past what at first can look like a meaningless and sterile surface.

I'm also aware that some of you will be thinking,

Am I expected to read like that? I haven't got the time or the energy. It drains all the fun out of it. I just want to pick up a book, read it, enjoy it, then go and do something else.

Which is absolutely fine. It's how I read most of the time. This was never intended as a guide to good reading. If you tried to read every poetry book in this way you'd pretty soon get sick of either poetry or the style of reading. This is not a blueprint, and it's not a recommended reading style. Read the book as casually as you like.

Finally, what do I think of Ad Finitum now I've been through this process? Briefly, I still enjoy the book enormously, but still don't feel that I've come anywhere near understanding it or decoding all the references and associations. If anything I now find the book even richer and more enjoyable. I've become more aware of how the various poems relate to one another. I'm also much more content in my own mind that however opaque it may be there is thought and intention and feeling behind the book. It might seem strange, but although I enjoyed the book and was fascinated by it when I embarked on this I wasn't convinced I'd find much. It's a book I'd recommend for anyone, but with the caution, read it when you're ready. This isn't some mystical injunction. If you want to read the book, if it interests you, then you're ready. If you're not sure but it keeps nagging at you, then you're ready. If it holds no interest, or if what I've written makes no sense, then the chances are you're not ready. And that's not a criticism. Why bother reading a book you have no interest in? If you are ready and you want a copy then go to if p then q, only £8.

Ad Finitum is unlike anything I have ever read before. I'm looking forward to being able to read it for pleasure, without the pressure of writing about it.

reading p.inman - part five

The other instalments can be found at the following links:

part one

part two

part three

part four

part six

And you can buy your own copy of Ad Finitum from if p then q

I'd intended to complete this post a lot sooner, but it was much harder to write than I thought. Even now there are moments where I make what look like definitive statements only to retract them later. I have left them as they stand because for me they reflect the process of reading Ad Finitum. The following page from my notebook, if you can read it even in enlarged form, shows that changing my mind on the interpretation of a piece of text is less likely to lead to me altering my essay than searching for the right way to start a sentence, paragraph or argument. I hope it's reflective of the fact that there are a lot of ways I could have examined some of the poems, but chose not to, and by implication that there are many other readings of Ad Finitum than my partial attempts here. I'd also like to underline that I am not an expert, I have no particular knowledge, and that most people reading these posts may be able to make a better job of understanding the poems than I do.

I still want to look at the remaining poems, sided, situ, Roscoe Mitchell (nonaah), 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer, perhaps at pluper again as it falls in sequence, and qua. Of these qua may be in some ways the most difficult. It is a brief poem of only a page, though it has a comparable number of words to ilieu (2) and aengus. It seems awkwardly placed at the end. Exploration of this can wait until next time, for now I want to start with sided.

sided

A few themes and words run through sided. There is a theme of art and artists, Mark Rothko and Eric Dolphy (presumably) are identified by surname, the latter with a strong hint, 'dolphy solo'. That word solo occurs three times in the poem beginning with the first line,

'starts with solo of edge'

While in connection with 'dolphy' solo most probably indicates a solo instrumental passage in a piece of music it's not clear what the meaning of solo is when it appears elsewhere. In the example above, as the line that follows is,

'tiny with Arctic Sea'

then it might be reasonable to infer some solo endeavour such as sailing or crossing harsh terrain on foot. This is a very different sense of solo. A sailor or polar explorer alone is alone in a way that a jazz musician recording or performing on stage never is.

Words and language are another theme. The words dictionary and syllable appear, syllable three times, like solo. Sea, ocean and shoreline can be linked together, as can various words relating to colour, blanch, color, whitecaps, color again. The predominant colour is evidently white. We can carry on doing this for a long time, and perhaps this should raise a question. I will return to this.

For much of sided the language is relatively stable. Recognisable words form almost understandable sentence fragments,

'technique can

only no one'

'decimal light of wolf'

But then on the third and fourth pages (of a total ten) there are incomplete words, (ipsis., obl., and elp., all of which come with a full point. From here the sentences are fewer and more fragmentary. Single words are more common, many eroded to only a fraction. Others may never have been words you could recognise, gluss, plem, vum. This gradual dissolution even affects words that haven't otherwise been altered. In context they begin to look like stubs. For example at the bottom of the seventh page we find 'bug / hue / vum'. Both bug and hue are perfectly acceptable, normal words, yet here in proximity to vum and similar non-words they're made strange. As the words fall apart so the themes I thought I could detect disappear. They may after all have been nothing more than lists of words.

situ

This disarticulation of language and theme continues with situ. Words from sided are scattered like debris, prairie, whitecap, sea. The themes though have been lost. There may be something about birds, aviary, 'a bird in / flight', but it doesn't go anywhere. Theme is the wrong word. It suggests strands of ides that can be unpicked, that will reveal something about the work, perhaps even about the author's intent. The themes here aren't like that. They're more like threads of association periodically emerging. They may even be phantoms like the apparent puns that surface from time to time, the brain finding patterns. Since there is no narrative, no development or exposition, no characters to grasp, unrelated words are connected into themes. What does it even mean to say, as I have, that 'words and language are another theme'? At most it amounts to odd words. So final poem qua includes the word prose, first poem ilieu (2) includes the words book and literature, and the word syllable recurs in sided. Even with other words elsewhere in the collection this doesn't amount to much. I think we have to reject the idea of there being themes that will give us any clues about the book.

That just leaves the words, and perhaps also their spatial arrangement on the page. I wrote previously that n.even, n.else, sided and situ 'are the last poems to really introduce any novel ideas'. I knew perfectly well when I wrote that that there were possible objections to my interpretation. Principally that the quartering in Roscoe Mitchell (nonaah) isn't seen elsewhere. It's true that there is no previous quartering, but the page has been divided both horizontally and vertically in ways that introduce ambiguity about the order in which the words should be read on previous occasions. Horizontal lines are there from the beginning and reach their most ambiguous during sided,

As previously seen sided also introduces a vertical division,

situ though is the first poem to include a vertical dividing line,

This is obviously different from Roscoe Mitchell (nonaah),

but for me the novelty here is more in a slightly different configuration of elements that have already been used.

I want to return to that scan of situ in which the vertical line is introduced. It helps to illustrate both a danger of focussing closely on small aspects of the text, and one of the rewards. First the danger. If you look to the left of the line, then running upwards the last letters of each word against the line spell the word 'taint'. This I am sure is accidental, but it would be easy to imbue it with significance, to look for other 'hidden messages'. But looking at this then drew my attention to the right of the line, which reads, 'ion / on / or / ori / ur' What's immediately striking is that with the exception of ori these are all words, although strictly speaking in everyday English ur is most usually a prefix. It's clear that on is contained within ion, and or within ori, and that there is only a single letter's difference between on and or, and between or and ur. I don't believe it's possible to imply anything more from this. The words just look and sound similar, and that's probably enough.

Incidentally, apologies for the mass of scans, I simply haven't figured out how to achieve the appropriate formatting using blogger.

reading p.inman - part four

I'm now fairly clear that after this post there will be two more in the Reading P.Inman series, making a total of six in all. That may be subject to change, but I think the remainder of what I have to say can be achieved in that space.

The other instalments can be found at the following links:

part one

part two

part three

part five

part six

And you can buy your own copy of Ad Finitum from if p then q

As I suggested in the previous post I have carried out my own recommended exercise of readingAd Finitum without thinking or attempting to interpret. I have done this four times, twice quietly and twice aloud. I was not wholly successful on any occasion in resisting thought, but I did try to stop it wherever it happened. I should observe here that the experience of reading aloud is different from reading quietly. Reading quietly it's easier to pass through sections where there's an ambiguity about how words are pronounced or what order they should be read in than it is reading aloud. Reading quietly you don't have to make those decisions and the text remains relatively open. Reading aloud you have to decide whether eakages;, from acoma, is eek-ages as in leakages or ache-ages as in breakages. You have to decide whether the following from sided,

should be read as,

'a / state of / turn of / syllable in / consist / to what / crunch / extent does'

or as,

'a / turn of / consist / crunch / state of / syllable in / to what / extent does'

Having to settle these ambiguities makes reading aloud a more conscious process than reading quietly.

The advantage of reading aloud is that you have less time to think. The demand to keep going and keep a relatively measured pace means there is less temptation to re-read sections, or flick forwards and backwards to compare passages. It's easier while reading quietly to stop reading and to start thinking about what you've read. What you're able to do more easily though is make the poem part of a broader experience. You can open yourself to all the sounds around you, so they have as much weight as the words on the page. This potentially makes the process a lot richer, and a lot closer to the experience of genuinely sitting doing nothing. I felt it was also easier to take the words away from being words, and to take them as visual phenomena with no necessity to signify anything. Although of course for any literate person that's actually impossible.

As I said I never truly accomplished a reading without thought, but I think I came as close as I can. So what was the experience like? In some ways it wasn't very different from reading the book and consciously, deliberately thinking about what I'm reading. Words, individually and in combination still tripped me up and stopped or slowed my reading. Echoes or phantoms of other words or phrases appeared, and I found I was testing other readings that might be made. But when I was able to ignore that the effect was striking. I have already spoken about how the book gives you the impression of being non-linear, and of words and word-fragments, and ways of arranging the text, recurring at different points. This became much more apparent in these readings. Since I was naturally paying less attention to the 'meaning' then patterns of repetition became more obvious. And for me the centre of the book shifted. Previously I wrote that I saw the three poems n.even, n.else, sided and situ as the pivot point. To an extent that's still true. They are the last poems to really introduce any novel ideas. The poems before are a sharp introduction to the methods of the book and a direct challenge to the reader. The poems that follow revisit, rearrange, and in some senses almost domesticate those early challenges. But what became more important was the penultimate poem, pluper.

pluper

pluper on this reading is a phenomenal achievement, and in some ways echoes the reader's experience. It draws in words and themes from the rest of the book, and subjects them to intense, energetic transformations. Even its own permutations are subject to examination. Just as the reader interrogates the book and tries out different readings, so pluper interrogates the book, offering potential readings, glimpses of themes, and hinting at poems that could be in the book but that probably haven't been written. This last point is important, Ad Finitum doesn't collapse in to a stable point in pluper. The poem is not a summary or a conclusion. pluper instead draws the rest of the collection in only to throw open new lines of enquiry, new possibilities for poems through its examination of the text. An example is probably necessary,

.

her basis shape

anchorite

nightfall lymphs

all that is the case dust on coffee

some silo toward topic

paint meters that all the time goes on

lake of grammar maroons

ecimal straightens

.

This extract from pluper features not only st twice, familiar from ilieu (2), but in maroon completes aroon. from the end of the same poem. I'd argue that rather than st. having been drawn to pluper it's more likely that this element has been scattered by a simultaneous explosion outward from this poem to an earlier stage. lymphs and maroons (again) come from acoma, leak, straightens and shape are all drawn from n.even, n.else. sided provides ecimal (from decimal), 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer includes maroon, decimal and coffee, while straightened and decimal also appear later in qua. Some of the rest is drawn from elsewhere in pluper, her, lake and paint. Other elements appear to be novel.

As I said, it is not just words but also themes that are subject to this turmoil. Water, usually the oceans, more specifically it seems the Atlantic and the North Sea, appear frequently. There are what could be references to the process of print and design, 'crop edge', 'a color / print', and 'the crop from / its edges'. Except couldn't that crop equally well be a cereal or vegetable crop? The poem still refuses to explain and the links between the Atlantic, writing and print, Stalinism, the weather, music and others remain obscure. But for me at least, all these connections were made by trying to read the book unconsciously. Now, having glimpsed a possible structure, I can return to my reading of the text in the next post.

But finally for today a quick word about a major omission in these posts. I have not made reference to, or any explicit use of literary theory. This is not because I feel it's unnecessary or wouldn't help, in a lot of ways it's something I'm quite ashamed of. While I'm happy with what I have written, I haven't made use of some very useful tools. The reason is simply this, I haven't read any literary theory for a long time, and I'm no longer familiar with a lot of basic concepts, or with current thinking. And for the purpose of this reading I simply don't have the time or inclination to catch up. I did study literary theory as part of my first degree which finished twelve years ago, so I have a passing familiarity with Marxist, Feminist, and Post-Colonial readings, but I always found Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction difficult to get to grips with beyond a crude precis. Ideally if I had more time and more current texts to hand then I would attempt to apply some of their techniques here. Sadly, or arguably happily for those of you who don't enjoy literary theory, I won't be doing that.

reading p.inman - part three

Since this is going to be a long post I thought I'd break it up with a couple of images, and it's only fair to explain what they are and why they're here. They are two consecutive pages from the notebook in which I'm writing these posts first. Now generally I don't plan blog posts in longhand, but since this is going to extend to around five posts, and since I'm trying to go into a lot of detail I wanted the extra security of notes. I've chosen the two pages to illustrate that this isn't a straightforward process. The first of the pages came after nearly 3 pages had been written today. The section in square brackets marked with an asterisk is something that really should have been written first - and in what follows does come first. The second page simply illustrates a lot of erasures, rephrasings, and uncertainty over paragraph breaks. They are meant to reflect my own uncertainty about Ad Finitum, which is one of the subjects of today's post.

The other instalments can be found at the following links:

part one

part two

part four

part five

part six

And you can buy your own copy of Ad Finitum from if p then q

In the discussion of aengus in the second of these posts I failed to mention an important aspect of my reading of both the poem and the book. It was this, that there are potential puns in the poems, which may be intentional or may just be imagined. That is, they may be the product of the reader searching for patterns, for anything familiar or recognisable. The two examples I had in mind were neapl., which I speculated could be read as a mispronunciation of nipple, and 'anisette. / pages.', which even more improbably I thought could be read as 'Annie set pages'. Because I was aware that these apparent puns are more or less phantoms, and because I was embarrassed at potentially looking silly I left the examples out. Partly justifying it to myself by arguing that it might be confusing for readers.

Almost immediately I regretted the decision. This exercise isn't about me, and it's not about making me look good. My aim is to draw attention to what I think is a fantastic book. Not to provide an authoritative set of statements about it, not to attempt to explain the poems, and certainly not to substitute for reading the book. Rather I want to show people the process of one ordinary reader, with no special insight, coming to grips with Ad Finitum in an honest way. The hope being that my questions, mistakes and anxieties would reflect those of other readers. That it might perhaps give others confidence in their reading, and help demonstrate that it's legitimate, normal, even desirable to struggle with a book. That it's better to acknowledge that struggle than pretend otherwise. And finally to argue that I see reading as an active, ongoing process, not a static absorbing of information. For all these reasons it felt dishonest, selfish and unfair not to reflect what was an important part of my reading.

n.even, n.else

n.even, n.else is close to being the physical centre of Ad Finitum the book, and is one of the longer poems, though shorter than acoma. The spatial arrangement of words on the page is closer to that seen in ilieu (2) or aengus previously in the book, than to 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer or pluper later on. Some words return, for instance lace. appeared in aengus as laced., and in acoma as shoelace. Later, in situ it will appear as lacy, and lace, in Roscoe Mitchell (nonaah) as lace, and in 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer and pluper. In another book this might not be noticeable or significant, here it is. Other words in n.even, n.else that return more than once in Ad Finitum are ink., leak., and thumb. Several recur within the poem itself. This may be one of the reasons why I've taken n.even, n.else to be, along with sided and situ which follow, a kind of pivot point in the collection. They gather elements from, and link together, the earlier and later parts of the book.

But again, and consistently so far in my reading, I haven't really given you any sense of what it's like reading the poetry. This is important, the poetry is why I've chosen to write these posts. I would hope that for anyone who might be reading, the poetry is why you've chosen to read this. It's time then to put the theorising aside and look at the book as something you will actually pick up and read, and enjoy. So, it's a winter evening and you're sat in a chair while it rains outside. Or it's summer and you're on holiday under the shade of a tree. Or... well, you get the idea. You pick up the book and start reading. After a while someone asks you what you're reading, so you tell them. It's poetry, it's called Ad Finitum, it's by an American writer called P.Inman. Shockingly our imaginary questioner hasn't read the book, and knows nothing about P.Inman. They ask you what the book's like. You decide not to be facetious and try to give an honest answer. What do you say? What do you say that will make them want to read the book? This is after all one of the things I'm trying to achieve with these posts. Now clearly, since you might be reading the book while sat on a bus to work, or since you might want to impress your inquisitor, you can't really launch into several thousand words of confused exposition. You have to summarise briefly, clearly, and you hope interestingly, why you're reading the book, what you enjoy about it, and why they should give it a try.

I think my answer would be something like,

It's partly about language, about words. It's about how they have a beauty of their own. You know when you gather pebbles off the beach or out of a river and they're gorgeous when they're wet? It's kind of like that. He's found a way of gathering unconnected words and keeping that shine. You can play with the words, roll them about. Even if you don't understand what something means it's just nice to look at them, and to hold, and to listen to the words.

This is why I don't get laid.

My speculative explanation hints at potentially fruitful approach to Ad Finitum. But it's an approach that has dangers. This is to approach the text as something inherently meaningless. Instead of reading the book in an interrogative way, instead of trying to extract meaning from every tiny aspect, treat the words as something else. Imagine you're staring at clouds, or listening to waves on a beach. This may be difficult. You may not often take time out to do nothing. You may even have lost the skill you almost certainly had as a child to absorb your attention in little things. I would recommend that you go off now and spend an hour doing nothing. Not writing or drawing, not talking on the phone, not reading, not cooking. Not even thinking. If you find yourself thinking switch your attention away from the thought. The only acceptable actions are to look and to listen. Just look at what's around you, what passes you by. Listen to all the sounds you can hear. Try not to filter things out. It can be quite overwhelming and alarming, but give it a go.

Today I walked out to Chorlton Water Park and did exactly that. I found a dead tree in tall grass out of sight of any road and sat on it for an hour. Nothing happened. There was a lot of bird song on all sides and some underlying traffic noise to the left. Occasional patches of light passed over trees and grass. Clouds moved slowly. A heron made an extraordinary twisting flight up from trees and then back into other trees. Flies, spiders and beetles walked on me. The dead tree I sat on shook as small birds hopped on the the branches. A clicking, almost insect-like birdsong in the grass moved closer to my seat from the right. Grasses nodded and rocked in wind.

Nothing happened. Or at least there was no meaning to any of the things that happened. I resisted my own attempts to give them meaning. But in spite of the lack of meaning, in spite of nothing happening, I enjoyed myself. The experience was enough. This, I think, may be a useful way to read Ad Finitum. To abandon reading strategies, to allow the poems to happen.

There is a danger to this. Reading in this way could be used to excuse all sorts of bilge, to ignore any number of shortcomings in a writer. I'd suggest it's only ever to be used cautiously if other approaches don't work. How it works with Ad Finitum is something I'll cover next time.

street cutlery 13

Just found the tweet relating to these two pieces of street cutlery, which I knew were found on the same day. It was June 27, a week ago last Saturday. This spoon was found much later the fork. It wasn't quite where Chorlton Road crosses Stretford Road, but a little further along Chorlton Road on the way to Whalley Range. It was shining in either the gutter of a side street, or a vehicle entrance to a building, I can't quite remember. Compared to the usual street cutlery it's barely marked.

street cutlery 12

Before I get back to my journey into P.Inman's Ad Finitum here are a couple of bits of street cutlery to catch up on. This fork was found at the corner of Great Ducie Street and Trinity Way a week or so ago. Curiously given the condition it wasn't actually in the road. Instead someone had lifted it out of the road and laid it on a wall.

This is one of the most beautiful pieces of street cutlery I've seen . You could use it as the basis for a fabric design.

reading p.inman - part two

The other instalments can be found at the following links:

part one

part three

part four

part five

part six

And you can buy your own copy of Ad Finitum from if p then q

Perhaps I'm taking this all a little too seriously? Doesn't pleasure feature somewhere? One of the reasons I'm spending so much time on this book is that I enjoy it. There's a playfulness in the word fragments, in the placing of elements, even in the frustration of sense. And surely it's false to presume that difficulty should exclude enjoyment or vice versa. No one would argue that Finnegans Wake, for instance, is an easy book to read. But at the same time there's clearly a lot of pleasure to be taken from it. Let's move on quickly, since the two books are very different, and it won't help to suggest otherwise.

aegnus

The second poem, aegnus, is another short piece. It's simultaneously shorter and longer than ilieu (2). It extends over four pages rather than two, but contains only twenty words as opposed to twenty-eight in ilieu (2). Although as you might expect those 'words' include a range of apparent fragments, among them more or less recognisable items like a., n'owl., and ief. But the poetry really isn't about counting words. Better just to read them.

It's probably clear that I have absolutely no idea what I'm reading. Words echo other words, n'owl. and vowel. for example, but there's nothing recognisable to get hold of. Even some of the words or word fragments are unfamiliar, such as neapl.

Early on during the MA course in Creative Writing I'm currently embarked on we were offered a couple of ways to approach challenging texts. The most useful, which may be familiar, was a set of questions such as who is speaking?, when do the events take place? etc. But when the first page of a poem reads:

a.

noft.

bluff.

________

pith.

n'owl.

in its entirety I think it's pretty safe to ignore the checklist. All we have are the appearance and the sound of the words. To an extent there is meaning, but only insofar as we know various meanings for bluff. and pith. We don't have sufficient information to say which meaning it is, or what the other words do to it. Whatever any given word signifies becomes of secondary importance to what it looks like or how it sounds. Which is where pleasure comes in.

acoma

acoma is longer, more densely packed, and due to its length deploys more varied shapes on the page than the previous poems. The punctuation has changed too, semi-colons have replaced the full points. Or perhaps they haven't, perhaps they're just acting as semi-colons, it's hard to say. The parentheses have spread, and like the full points previously and the semi-colons now are misbehaving. The first bracket closes parentheses that were never opened in the first place, later parentheses open that never close.

By comparison the words are polite, orderly. They are arranged in neat rectangular groupings. There are large numbers of recognisable words, mention;, showing;), still;, and others. Old friends like st (this time unpunctuated), and whiten return. Some words have even, in spite of the efforts of parentheses and semi-colons, assembled themselves into what look like fragments of sentences, '(walked;in;but', or 'where;did;it;'. This is almost disappointing in context, so what look like fragments of nonsense are welcome, a return to impenetrability. So we have, 'cakeness;in(shoelace'. But even this is dangerously close to the sort of thing you might be able to read elsewhere.

So what's going on? Are there events, or ideas, or characters here that we can identify with? Might there even be a message? Well, no. There are names of people, places and products, braque;, Utah, victrola and so forth. They just haven't quite managed to cohere into anything conventionally 'meaningful' yet. On a strictly sequential reading of Ad Finitum sense does appear to slowly accumulate in the poems. Almost as though words and punctuation carried along on a stream catch and stick, and through the course of the book gather other words, building a kind of word dam. It's a hopeless analogy, but an illustration of what I mean comes toward the end of the book, in pluper,

'old people's weather on an island

the whole sky out of typed blanks'

But I'm not sure if this is an accurate way of reading Ad Finitum. You might equally plausibly say that these near sentences close to the end represent a withdrawal of possibilities.

Actually I don't believe that either reading is correct. I think that different approaches to writing and presenting the poetry occur and recur throughout the book. So the strategies of ilieu (2) at the beginning seem to repeat in sided toward the middle. The near sentences of pluper at the end echo near sentences elsewhere, from acoma onwards. The neat groupings of words in acoma return in 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer later on. Horizontal lines appear regularly within the text. Almost every alignment of text other than left justified is tried out. Rather than the book moving from one state to another, as intuitive as that seems, I think it switches between different approaches as appropriate.

marina abramović presents...

Although I missed Jeremy Deller's Procession yesterday, I did get to see Marina Abramović Presents... at the Whitworth Gallery. As you'd expect from four hours of performance from over a dozen artists in a variety of spaces there were longueurs. In fact I'm inclined to agree with the thrust of one of the things Marina Abramović said during her introduction, that longueurs should be accepted as part of the experience, and that an artist who never fails is evidently not really trying - and therefore perhaps never really succeeds.

It's tricky to review an event like this. If I give exhaustive descriptions of performances then it might be possible to take that as in some way a substitute for the actual experience, which of course it isn't. If I give only brief outline details then I run the risk of selling the artist short. If I compare one artist to another, or even use some sort of marking system, then I suggest that certain artists are directly comparable. With an event like this that's palpable nonsense, and in any case only serves to obscure the cumulative effect of the artists, the spaces, the duration. So inevitably I'll approach this in my usual haphazard impressionistic manner. I'll talk about those artists who particularly stood out for me, I'll try to explain why I think I didn't get as much from certain other artists, and I'll talk about the event as a whole.

To begin at the beginning, the first hour of the event is described in the accompanying programme (above) as The Drill. This is an introduction to the idea of a durational work, and involves some exercises of the sort that you might routinely use as an actor, part of the aim of which is presumably to make you as an audience member more at ease with entering the spaces where performances are happening. It's the kind of thing you suspect Abramović can do in her sleep, but already begins to raise questions. Since the audience have been kept outside until the exact time stated, have then been dressed in white lab coats, and sent into the first space to wait it's apparent that the performance has begun. But this doesn't seem like a performance... except maybe that's the point.

That done the audience are walked very slowly out of the first room and set loose in the building. The first performance you come across is Terence Koh, formerly known as asianpunkboy. The space is large and dark, in the light that comes from the outside he kneels wearing a minidress and tights, facing the outside. I have to say I didn't spend a huge amount of time watching this performance, so I can't really make any observations about it. Across the three hours he does move slowly in a very confined area. In a sense this is not a performance you can simply wander past, as I did, but if you devote the energy and attention to the performance it deserves then you won't have the time to devote to others. A question that arises here is applicable to a number of other performances - namely how far is the action planned, and how far is it improvised?

An interesting aspect of the event, although one I suspect Abramović might disapprove of, is observing the behaviour of yourself and other in the space. For instance, on initial arrival in the first space, most people were playing nervously with the cuffs of their lab coats. Curiously no one uses the portable canvas seats piled against the wall until instructed to do so. Once we enter the rest of the building sudden sounds often attract large groups of people to new areas. And of course, although the aim of the lab coats is apparently to render everyone the same, people take no time in personalising the way they wear their coat.

The immediately adjoining large space, and the next piece that the majority of people move on to is where Nikhil Chopra is. His performance is in character, or possibly more than one character, although the programme says he 'takes on the mantle of Yog Raj Chitrakar, a character he bases on his grandfather'. He moves around the space creating a large and changing charcoal drawing on the floor and walls. The slow transformation of the space is fascinating to return to. The charcoal lines on the walls are really quite beautiful.

I next saw Amanda Coogan, the first performance I didn't really get anything from. She waits on the staircase for some time, before leaping - attempting to fly - onto a soft mound below with a cry. In fact her vocalisations were more interesting to me than the performance itself, especially a very masculine sounding growl she made close to the end. There were a variety of references, whether conscious or otherwise, to art of the past. The act of leaping recalled the famous 1960 photomontage of Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, which purports to show the artist leaping from the first floor of a building. The painted mound and the shepherd's crook used to support her while waiting on the stairs brought to mind the Rococo fantasias of Fragonard and others. I'm not sure why it didn't work for me, to an extent I think I expected that a durational piece would be more truly durational and perhaps less a repetition of a relatively short sequence of action. But even as I write that I'm aware that some of the pieces I liked were repetitions. In fact there seemed to be two main approaches to filling the three hours. One was to execute an action that lasted for the duration of the event. On the whole these were the pieces that impressed me most. The other approach was to carry out a short sequence of actions that repeated, or to draw from a small palette of actions in no evident sequence.

Alastair MacLennan was the oldest of the artists participating, with only a couple of exceptions the others were under forty. Surprisingly I hadn't encountered his work previously. His performance/installation was the first that really made me want to go back to it, but which I felt I couldn't get a handle on. I don't want to describe the installation because I don't think it will help. It felt immediately like a Samuel Beckett play converted into an installation and durational performance. If you go be aware that it involves pigs heads, ears, a trotter, and a couple of mackerel, and was already beginning to get a little pungent by what was only the third day. I think what was so compelling about what the programme says MacLennan describes as an actuation was that it felt coherent. Like Beckett the set-up may appear absurd, unnatural, even arbitrary, and yet it also feels entirely natural. I think a large part of that has to do with the artist himself. Not just the selection and arrangement of elements, but the concentration and energy in his performance. He apparently does nothing, merely sits in a chair, hands on his knees, one with a glove on and holding some shredded paper. A boot is tied to his head and there is a stack of photos between his feet. If you think that sounds easy then you should try it for three hours, and make it seem natural. He is a very powerful presence within the room. For me this is one of the highlights.

Moving on, Yingmei Duan performs a piece called Naked. She moves slowly around the room, naked, touching herself, deliberately moving toward people within the space. She never makes contact as far as I could tell, but people often move away from her nonetheless. I'm not entirely sure how successful this is as a piece, but that may have more to do with me, and the fact that I didn't spend a great deal of time within the space.

It's perhaps a good time to confess that although I like performance art I am generally resistant to participation and attention when I'm not in a defined role as a performer. Where I might be asked to interact in even a quite passive way with a performer I become quite uncomfortable. Again while I have no problem with nudity it can feel, and probably rightly, intrusive and discomforting for a viewer. With Yingmei Duan's piece that's a large part of the meaning of it, but within some of the other performances it feels like a bit of a cliche. For someone who's performed poetry for around ten years, and frequently stripped down to my pants it's possibly a little strange to feel this way, but I never claimed to be consistent.

Ivan Civic performs Back to Sarajevo... after 10 years... A video made on his return to Sarajevo after ten years exile is projected on the wall. Within the frame of the image, fixed into, and projecting from the wall are metal rods which act as hand and footholds, allowing Civic to enter the image and move within it, while remaining separate from it. So far as I can tell he doesn't touch the ground during the performance, which is an impressive feat of concentration and physical control. A couple of parallels with work of the past, which I'm sure may be entirely accidental, came to mind. The quality of the video, and the appearance of Civic himself, especially in the film, brought to mind the films of Derek Jarman. The physical aspect of climbing for three hours made me think of Matthew Barney's work, especially Ottoshaft, as part of which he scaled parts of the performance space to block them. And yet the work has a strength and presence of its own. For me it emphasises how special and precious the normality of the people in the film, and by extension of the people around us every day, actually is. I felt like the piece is more about the people and the place than it is about the artist. For those reasons perhaps the Jarman comparison isn't far-fetched at all. I spent a lot of time at this piece.

Kira O'Reilly's is perhaps the clearest example of a single action spread across three hours. She falls extremely slowly down a large stone staircase. She is naked, but it makes sense, and although it might seem gruelling I suspect it's both more comfortable and safer than doing it clothed. Here, strangely, the physical control required is more immediately apparent than in Ivan Civic's performance. She manages to be both graceful and ungainly, the whole performance like a slow-motion dance. While this is a performance you can easily watch in its entirety I don't think it suffers from only the occasional visit. O'Reilly's performance is also the first that I feel is genuinely specific to that space. It must be to do with the limitations of the staircase, Nico Vascellari's performance in the staircase at the opposite side of the main entrance also seems to respond to the space, but I'll come to that soon.

This raises a question I have about the whole event. I can understand a performance occupying any space, but there's something a little deadening about a gallery space stripped of all art and made over exclusively to performances. Especially where access to the event is so regulated. I think I wanted something more confronting and less like going to a gallery.

Upstairs Melati Suryodarmo was represented by her sheet of glass and notices telling us that due to visa problems, or something similar, she was currently stuck in Germany. I hope she manages to reach the Whitworth soon, and that when she does someone will be able to comment on her performance.

I really didn't make anything of Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich's performance. I only got tame echoes of Beckett's Not I, of Herman Nitsch and Paul Neagu, and even of David Bowie's unloved 90's concept album Outside, but nothing to hold on to. Perhaps I needed to be a more active participant. The whole thing left me cold. Please let me know if you think I've got it wrong though, I'm happy to have alternate views on any of the artists.

Happily Jamie Isenstein is nearby for a static, yet compelling performance in which she forms part of a pile of animal skin rugs on top of a manufactured carpet. That's it. She doesn't noticeably move although it must be bloody hot under there.

The final performance/installation upstairs from Fabio Balducci and Marie Cool didn't quite work for me. But unlike Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich there are things here I liked, and I'm able to identify at least one of the aspects that didn't work. The space has a number of sculptures, mainly involving paper and string. These I like, and they're not dissimilar to some of the sculptural pieces the Whitworth have in the same space previously. There must be something in the shape and location of the space that dictates what will work there. What I was less convinced by are the actions that Marie Cool carries out. I find choreographed, unnatural movements don't especially interest me. And for some reason I can't quite identify, the performance, other than the sculptural elements, doesn't actually feel like it's responding to the space.

Downstairs again in the stairwell on the other side of the main entrance from Kira O'Reilly is Nico Vascellari. His is one of the simpler performances but I found it one of the most compelling. With a loud room tone emanating from speakers somewhere in the space he sits at the very bottom of the stairs pounding one large rock with another large rock. The sound is curiously metallic. Vascellari keeps the rhythms simple, and ensures there is a lot of space around the sounds. He isn't constantly pummelling with the stones. Its quite a feat of endurance to remain in the space with the volume and percussive impact of the noise but Icould have happily remained in there most of the afternoon. Perhaps because of its simplicity the performance is both specific to that space, and truly durational - I'd class it as one of the pieces where a single action is carried out across the three hours, although I appreciate others might disagree.

And that was all, I thought, until I realised that I hadn't visited one more space. In the gallery next to Alastair MacLennan, Eunhye Hwang was performing another piece utilising sound. She sometimes stands, sometimes sits or lies on the floor with radios tuned to static in her hands on the floor under or around her. Then by simple movements interfering with the signal alters the sound of the static. At times she will involve members of the audience. Perhaps it is the use of sound, perhaps the relative simplicity of materials, but this is another performance I greatly enjoyed and could have spent a lot of time with.

In the end while the four hours felt like a long time, it didn't feel anything like four hours long. But a childhood being bored in church and inventing imaginary architecture with the shadows in the roof vault while adults sung hymns at a funereal pace was probably good preparation in retrospect. And despite my misgivings about the space, and the whole concept of performance art taking on the role of more conventional art by default of being the only thing occupying that space, I still think it's an event that you should visit, and should ensure you experience in its entirety.

reading p.inman - part one

Be prepared for the possibility that I will get many things horribly, hilariously wrong. The motivation for this post and the others that will follow, although I'm not currently sure how many that will be, is that I'm simultaneously enjoying and finding it hard to come to an understanding of P.Inman's work. Therefore I've decided to document my thoughts on reading Ad Finitum - which at present I have done in full twice, and will do several times more in the course of these posts. The intention is to write about each poem individually, and see whether I am able to summarise anything useful by the time I reach the last poem. But I will not offer a minute analysis of every poem in the order in which they appear in the book, rather I will start by looking at a poem, and will then shift back and forward through the book. The exception is this first post, which will spend a lot of time examining the first poem in the book, ilieu (2), for reasons that I will make clear.

As this is a dynamic ongoing process I am interested in your comments. Not so much about what individual poems are 'about', or about whether you really like or dislike the posts as they emerge. What interests me more are any reading strategies that you think may be effective, that you apply to texts, or indeed that you may have used with this very book. Where I would be interested in 'meaning' or whether you like/dislike the posts is where you think I may be getting things horribly, hilariously wrong, and don't want to see me chasing off into the distance after something that isn't there.

If you'd like to follow my reading alongside the actual text of Ad Finitum then you can follow this link to the books page of if p then q and order a copy there. In fact even if you can't be bothered with my ramblings I'd suggest you go and buy a copy anyway.

ilieu (2)

Let's start with the title. Is ilieu a fragment of another word? Is it perhaps milieu, or is it a foreign word that unlike milieu has yet to be adopted by English? At a stretch, and there will be a lot of stretching in these posts, it might be a pun or wordplay on Iliad. Admittedly unlikely but perhaps worth keeping in mind. The other part of the title, (2), suggests there might be an original ilieu that I haven't read. Already the questions have begun and understanding is withheld for a little. Not letting the title detain us too long we turn over to the poem.

The first word, or part of a word, is st., including the full point. There is no indication as to whether this is the beginning of a word, or the end of a word, or perhaps an abbreviation/contraction - saint, street. The full point is significant, it doesn't seem to be just a stop. The book is full of full points and other punctuation used in unconventional ways. Almost every word in ilieu (2) is followed by a full point so we have to think about how they should be approached. Do they represent punctuation, breath, a caesura, or some more personal symbol indicating how the poem should be read? Or are they merely there to make the reader slow down. Or perhaps they show that something is missing, that part of a word or sentence has been cut off by by the full point. Perhaps the abbreviated words, the punctuation, are a form of shorthand.

Let's try to move on. The next word is august., again with the full point. Are we to read this as august, or perhaps as something else, augustine possibly? St. Augustine is a tempting reading of st. august. even though it means that the full point represents something different each time. But I don't think that it's possible to close down the meaning to a single possibility in this way. I think part of the reason for the apparent opacity is to keep open the range of meanings available to the reader. In this sense the full points might be seen as points at which the possibilities of the poem open up. Each suggests a number of readings of the word to which it's attached, and a number of ways for that word to relate to the words around it.

Finally on the first line of the poem we have ice'pl., once more including the full point. But what is more interesting, or a least more novel at this stage is the apostrophe. What purpose does it serve? Conventionally it can show possession (Peter's book), omission (Peter's a writer), or be used to close a quote (Peter said, 'August'). If we look at only the conventional uses then neither possession nor quotation is likely. Omission is possible, but the poems read as though they are full of omissions. We've already examined the possibility that full points might represent omissions. Is it possible that different punctuation marks will be used for the same purpose? If so, why? Is it part of a visual scheme for the poem? Or the punctuation may come from some more personal, idiosyncratic place. Let's look then at 'pl. or possibly just pl. Is it the abbreviation for plural? If so, why is the apostrophe there, and what is the relationship to ice?

I'm taking a long time over the early stages of the of the book to reflect the experience of reading Inman, and to introduce ideas that will recur and slowly develop through the reading process - at least I hope they'll develop. I also want to capture some sense of the fascination I feel, to indicate why I'm choosing to read a book that seems so resistant to reading. I want to demonstrate the attraction of the writing, the radical possibilities that it opens up, and the trust which it places in the reader. At the same time I also have to acknowledge that people find it extremely off-putting. An intelligent (I'd say a lot smarter than me) and by no means conservative friend who is also an artist showed an absolute distaste for the book. 'It's just maths', was one comment. They believed that the work was simply the result of sterile generative processes, and could see nothing of any human interest in it. I disagreed, but even having read the book twice, and some sections far more than that, and having spent time writing the notes from which this post is drawn I still couldn't say exactly why I think that opinion is wrong.

Another question that exercised me immediately on opening the book is how do you edit a work like this? Is it by feeling? Now certainly James Davies has a far longer experience of linguistically innovative writing than I do, and in particular of P.Inman's writing since that's what we're discussing. But other than (possibly) an instant answer what would be the purpose of asking James Davies, P.Inman himself, or any of his other editors, what they understand by particular aspects of the work? What's on the page is what's intended to be read, we have to start and finish there.

So to return to the text and worry again at that recalcitrant st. It recurs a few times within the two short pages of the poem - in august., in last, whitenst., and as st. again. Is this deliberate, accidental or something not quite either? Does the meaning of st., if there is a meaning, change? Is that part of the point? That written language is a limited number of combinations of a limited number of symbols, representing a limited number of sounds, arranged into 'words' that represent ideas and objects (to grossly simplify matters). So st. can be many things, saint or street, or the beginning (static), part of the middle (blister), or the end (list) of a word. Some, any or all of these at once. But going back to an earlier part of this paragraph, that whitenst., what is it? Is it an archaism (thou whitenst)? It doesn't seem very likely. Is the st. or perhaps just the t. an interloper, something added to the word to create confusion. Maybe there should be a gap in the word, whiten st.? Perhaps it's wordplay, a mispronunciation of 'witnessed'. And of course the sound of 'essed' is effectively identical at the end of a word if not in isolation to the sound of 'st'. Not that replacing st. with essed throughout would make the poem or the book any clearer.

Again, let's try to move on. It's unlikely we'll ever reach an answer by that sort of speculation. I suspect it may be the equivalent of trying to drive a car though soft sand by revving the engine in high gear, you're only likely to kick up dust and get your wheels stuck. It may instead be more fruitful to read one or more poems in their entirety a few times and see what emerges from that process. Where poems are presented as limited blocks of text on a page it makes more sense to read the whole a few times. The whole may shed light on the parts, and certain of the parts may shed light on the whole. That said, a couple of simple exercises that I have found to work in the past on challenging writing, which can radically affect and improve my understanding of a piece, haven't really worked in this case. One is to copy out a poem or piece of text. Here the only noticeable change was to become more acutely aware of the spatial arrangement of the poem and of relationships between parts of the poem that are not strictly linear. The other is to read the poem or piece of text aloud, but there are immediate and obvious questions. Do you pause? Where do you pause, for how long? How are unfamiliar elements pronounced? What account do I take of punctuation marks and parentheses? How quickly should words follow one another? Where there seems to be a pun or some wordplay is that real or imagined, should I draw attention to it?

Of course many (or most, or all) of these questions are questions that we have to resolve while reading any text. Most texts, however, follow a predictable set of rules in a relatively consistent manner. Here those rules are thrown into question, which could of course be part of the intention.

But as I suggested, it does begin to look more sensible to read through several poems at a time, then reread as often as seems necessary. Even if understanding doesn't immediately emerge there is at least the comfort of familiar words and fragments recurring - st, pl, whiten, ice, and others that don't appear first until later - neap and agnes for instance. Later in the book the poems fill out a little, they even start to resemble poems constructed out of recognisable sentences. It is as though the book rather than the individual poem is the unit we should look at if we want to reach an understanding. So for instance elements of pluper or qua at the end of the book may be illuminated by ilieu (2) or aengus at the beginning which may in turn open up sided or situ in the middle of the book. Which itself raises a question of why I assume a non-linear reading. Why not assume that an understanding might be cumulative? Again I'm not sure and could be wrong, but it seems from my experience that the book makes a certain sense read this way. That you do flick forward and back from any given poem, drawing clues from various locations in the text.

Notwithstanding that I haven't got past the first poem's title and opening line there will be more of this shortly. Future posts will proceed a lot more quickly, my main aim here was to set out initial thoughts, questions and reactions to contextualise what follows, and to give some impression of the ways I've approached the text. Watch this space for the next instalment.

The other instalments can be found at the following links:

part two

part three

part four

part five

part six

And you can buy your own copy of Ad Finitum from if p then q

richard barrett, pig fervour - a review

Two starting points:

First, one of my misgivings about Flarf is the element of novelty. I'll expand on this in a moment. There is no Flarf in Pig Fervour. Flarf represents a kind of novelty, but one that I think may have a strictly limited lifespan. It's a reaction to novel and ephemeral phenomena of the present that I suspect will seem quaint in quite a short time. Inherently it has a tendency to be a fairly superficial engagement with the present, and is every bit as embarrassing as a teacher or parent trying to use teen slang. Why raise this? Because Richard's poems are embedded in the present (through links to the past and to specific places) and with an eye for those things which might affect us in the future. These poems don't need to dress themselves up as an imagined future because they know that any future will be both stranger and more banal than anything Flarf can hint at.

Second, in my own poem north I wrote 'we understood / the water / jesus / walked on was / shallow / narrow / a stream with rocks in it.' Now excusing any weaknesses in the writing the point of the sentence is clear, we read the world through our specific geographic and temporal context. That doesn't mean it has be foregrounded, or that we're all condemned to writing versions of Seamus Heaney's Digging. It doesn't even mean that we have to write about ourselves. All it means is that the poet and their work is inevitably the product of a specific time and specific places.

Both these starting points are in fact the same starting point slightly differently expressed. But for me they represent perhaps the major unifying thread in Pig Fervour. Richard Barrett's second short collection of 2009, available from The Arthur Shilling Press, Pig Fervour strikes me as a slightly less unified collection than backyard poems (from Richard's own Knives, Forks and Spoons Press). As such less tangible aspects of the work like its periodic return to a particular geography and its embedding in the present become more obvious. Although in individual poems these aspects may be less marked than they were in the earlier book. Another result of this lack of unity is that I don't think there is much here to stand up against the rushes, Richard's long poem that will appear in the Autumn edition of Parameter magazine.

Pig Fervour is still a collection well worth adding to your shelves though. The first poem, the good fortune of being happy in yr work, for my money justifies the (very low) price of admission alone. Among shifting times, locations and voices a picture emerges of estrangement from experience. We become aware of how events are filtered through media, and provided with narrative structures borrowed from fiction 'Orgreave in reverse / ... / This VHS age clashes'. All that remains is recent history made remote, the language of tv 'OB / VT', and the goldfish-memory ironising distance that results, 'dancing with gusto to / the Blow Monkeys'. When there is no such thing as society, only individuals, when we see our lives through another's frame, how is it possible to be authentic? For me there is nothing as dense and rich as this in the rest of the collection.

april fools day, this year comes close but its gathering of fragments seems less like resistance or an attempt to re-frame what's given than it does a capitulation, a failure of energy. While curiously the otherwise apparently more conservative and reflective Don't Use Facebook In The Station / Don't Use Facebook At Home. and the parlour game become more radical. They find spaces that appear not to have been colonised by media, or that at least have been re-colonised by individuals and small groups whose terms of reference are set by themselves:

'We knew we were cool.

Yet come September I

couldn't / to learn what's written

is hard taken back.'

Don't Use Facebook etc.

As in the rushes, the media, the news in particular, is a participant throughout. And while the collection is not reflective/confessional or conventionally personal, the poet by re-framing the news, by re-colonising the spaces it has occupied is equally a participant. This makes the collection political, and in combination with the rushes makes me excited about where Richard Barrett might go next. It feels somewhat transitional, as though he's experimenting with different approaches. The results of these experiments, where he emerges after this period of transition, will be interesting to see.

In conclusion, expect to finish this booklet with the vague sense that you've perhaps missed something, maybe even without any lasting impression. But be prepared for specific words, sentences, parts of poems to return to you at unexpected moments. Be prepared when you re-read the book for certain sections to be suddenly very well-established in your head, even while you could swear you never read other sections before. It's not perhaps the best work Richard's had published this year but as a snapshot of a particular moment in his development it may turn out to be the most significant.

new poem & where i'm at

It's a good time for me to take a fortnight's holiday as I need the time to get a solid block of recording done, not to mention some writing, editing, and working out where I take my work next. Especially with regard to my text poetry.

I recently completed the long poem I wrote in instalments here on the blog called north. I re-ordered some of the sections, cut quite a lot out, added some linking parts, and generally tried to ensure there was some sort of underpinning scheme. Reading it again I'm reasonably happy with it but were I to start it again today it would be completely different.

As it happens I'm currently working on two other very long text poetry projects, both currently untitled. The first is a piece pulled together from my tweets to date (with a few removed) amounting to something more than 1200. There actually remains a lot of work to do on this. The first job is to get them sorted into the proper chronological order. My initial thought was to try and use them in this order with additional text helping to impose a structure on the text. But having read through what will be the last two pages in their proper order it's clear anything like that is going to be unreadable. It may even be that taken out of their proper context as intermittent messages mixed in with other information the tweets are worthless and can't be used cumulatively in this way. This is something I will have to experiment with - I have a few structural ideas I'd like to try out once I have the originating text in order.

What was slightly disturbing reading even just two pages of accumulated tweets (from a total of 21) in conjunction with north and with the second long ongoing text poetry project is how conservative they are. This really shouldn't be very surprising. Aside from flurries of experimentation in 1996, 2001 and 2004 my poetry - partly through lack of knowledge of linguistically innovative alternatives - has mainly been confessional/personal. Even if influenced more by film and music than by other poetry. It was only at the beginning of 2008 that I even became aware of the existence of non-mainstream alternatives. Even then my own experiments were only within visual poetry and sound poetry.

Through most of 2008 my text poetry remained rooted in more traditional models. Although I was no longer writing about myself, except where I was making things up, I was consciously playing roles and taking on characters. And those characters were still derived from the more conventional of the musics I listen to - Bob Dylan, Mark E Smith etc. From the middle of 2008 until Spring 2009 I took a conscious break from text poetry. The tweets were originally intended to be a way of getting back into the habit of writing, and a way of imposing rules on myself to prevent the language from becoming too highly coloured or too directive of the reader's response. Within that context I remain happy with north but the reason it would be different now is that as it stands the poem could be read as merely descriptive, or as lyric, or urban pastoral, or even inaccurately as biographical. There is an even greater danger of my tweets being read in this way. I would like to achieve more with my work.

The second ongoing text poetry project to which I've referred a couple of times is another currently untitled sequence for the final semester of my MA. The semester doesn't begin until October but the more material I have in place, and the more time I have to edit the work the better. At present there are five poems complete, although they all need varying degrees of editing. Perhaps the one with which I'm happiest is the second in the series. It comes closest to representing where I would like my text poetry to be at the moment, albeit still more conventional than I'm happy with. It's called variable.

variable

Second in an ongoing, currently untitled sequence

characterised by. rail down only one side of the bridge. heavy cloud. signal processing. fourier transform in this instance, used to change visual signals into audio signals. can be explained asymmetric a quick note. moire patterns. a takeaway coffee cup between train rails. notebook sketched map giving directions. a smell of smoke. sunny. four metre drop to shallow water. acoustic to electric transducer. cardioid polar pattern. caustics from bottled water on snack bar table waiting for friends off the train. dead pigeon coated in oil. stratus. falling slowly. characterised by. umbrella. horses refusing to walk onto a footbridge over the mersey, railings, metal lattice work overhead. seed heads of grasses still green and reflective. microcassette recorder. book sale outside student union, shoe heels pulled back to pavement by a line of tar. hebrew, russian, chinese. cloud broken to cumulus. corvids. a list of names and topic headers. opening this morning another. sap from ivy causes welts up both forearms after half a day cutting it back. humidity. no shower so wash standing at the sink with a face cloth. it's very rare to see more than seven seagulls on top of these streetlights. dermatological cream.

the other room 9 - review

Due to poor planning of my calendar I was in Alsager for a work conference for P.Inman's reading at the Bury Text Festival on Tuesday. But I was able to get to The Other Room yesterday to see P.Inman and Tina Darragh read so the story has a happy ending.

There was a large audience there - I'm told not the largest, but the venue felt pretty full. It was hot and humid, especially indoors, and light both outside and inside right through the reading. Apart from just generally enjoying summer more I like the ambience it adds to readings at The Old Abbey Inn. Being away from the main road you get less traffic noise and rather more bird song - something P.Inman commented on during his set. From where I was sat I could also see some bushes that doves were eating from - mostly you couldn't see the doves, just the bushes shaking as though someone was pulling a string tied to the branch.

I was most familiar with P.Inman's work, having seen pieces published by if p the q, and heard readings online. Unfortunately I hadn't had time to check out the material The Other Room linked to by either him or by Tina Darragh. I understand that Ad Finitum is the first full collection published in the UK from either author, which says a lot about mainstream British poetry publishing over the last 30 years. I finally bought a copy of Ad Finitum yesterday (along with Robert Sheppard's Far Language - which I'm sure will be an important primer for me for some time to come), and today printed the text of Tina's rather older on the corner to off the corner.

Tina read first, and didn't have to contend for too long with the notoriously unreliable Other Room PA. In a change to usual policy the speaker was next to the reader to avoid the usual problem of the radio mic being blocked and the sound intermittently cutting out. And to begin with it worked but after only a couple of sentences the mic cut out in a definitive manner that suggested it wasn't going to work again any time soon - or at least until the batteries were replaced. That obstacle out of the way she was free to get on with the reading.

Early on during her reading it occurred to me that one of the things I like about experimental practices in poetry and other art is that the vocabularies and modes of reception are not fixed. To me this means that you approach even the most difficult works in a way that seems closer to learning a language than to reading or listening to something more culturally familiar. I may be utterly wrong - but I'll explain and if you disagree let me know. A large part of how I react to a culturally familiar piece of work is social. My friends, family, education, and surrounding culture provide cues as to how I approach a play or a gig for instance. A large part of that is external - it has to do with how I dress, how I hold myself, the kind of people I know - with the work itself being almost secondary. I come to the work from outside, and it may take me a long time to realise that although I dearly love the friends I go to the gig with, and although I enjoy the experience and understand all the references in the songs, that I actually think the band kind of suck and wouldn't miss them if I never heard them again. This is not to deny that more experimental events have a social component to them, but rather that the social component has less of a role in determining how I react to a piece of work, and is in any case already more a matter of choice.

With The Other Room readings I find myself in a place where I'm not already familiar with the vocbulary, and where I don't have fixed modes of reception in place. Like a child learning a language - or like an adult in a country where I don't speak the language - at each reading I have to orient myself within the reader's vocabulary. I have to look for clues to begin to construct my own meaning. The process feels much more active and participatory as well as more challenging.

The early pieces Tina read made some explicit and some not so explicit references to Allen Fisher's work, specifically Place which is one of the books I'm currently reading, and finding easier to get to grips with than Leans for some reason. There did seem to be similarities of approach with Allen Fisher, at least so far as I understand Place, and with some of the methods that I've tried out in my recent writing. Looking at words not only as meaning or as sound, but as clusters of meaning, of etymological history and relationship to other words, as isolated phonemes, and as both visual and auditory elements of larger patterns - but without getting bogged down in unecessary detail or losing sight of what the whole piece is. Some or all of which may be entirely invented. Richard Barrett said that he saw similarities in Sean Bonney's work, but I haven't read enough of his poems in a sustained enough fashion to be able to expand on that - although I'm sure Richard will. While intangible I felt there were also elements of tone that echoed some of what I have read in Ron Silliman's The Alphabet so far. I think a combination of distance and apparent intimacy with the author's thoughts, a seamless movement from reflection to broad political, linguistic, philosophical concerns, to what appears to be personal.

Ethical concerns - with reference to Peter Singer and the responsibilities of being human, both in relation to animals and toward other humans - figured largely. As did matters of language and history. All of which are inherently political. Language in part was dealt with as a physical and auditory presence in itself, as a texture of sounds, of something derived from breath and the particular ways we manipulate that using the organs of speech. There were a range of non-linguistic vocal sounds deployed through the reading - as a sound poet I would have been interested to see how they were notated on the page. Sometimes they seemed to represent the failure of sense, at other times a surfeit of meaning overwhelming the author's capacity to articulate it, at other times again to represent a simple physical block to articulation. The poems were deceptively simple, sometimes appearing to deploy a plain, unpoetic, even bland, quotidian language. But then the sentence might wrench in a different direction, or make a scholarly reference, or through cumulative repetition and variation begin to make a complex point about language and thought perhaps. But as I've said, the poetry didn't consciously present itself as difficult.

Quite early on and I'm sure unconscious by both parties Tina's reading was entirely in time with the movements of someone fanning themself as they listened. It drew attention to the quality of the reading and made that part of the reading at least a larger site-specific event. One in which the heat of the venue, the response of the audience, and the poet each impacted on the other in physically apparent ways. It often strikes me that it would be interesting to see poets or other artists more responsive to the environments in which they perform. This was a distilled example of that. Another later moment came when P.Inman commented on the sound of a dove from outside.

After the break, during which everyone went outside to cool down a little, P.Inman read - mainly from his recent if p then q published collection Ad Finitum. As James Davies observed in his introduction right at the beginning of the evening the work of both poets has a strong visual presence and identity on the page. With Peter's work that presence is minimal, often symmetrical, and making use of the page space. From the work I had read I was expecting work that was highly fragmentary, and from which it might be difficult to extract even enough sense to construct my own meaning. It does not look like any of the minimalist works that I've seen, for instance, it is something distinctly different. To an extent the reading confirmed something that I thought from seeing the work on the page, that it looks like the result of progressive distillation. Not just of particular poems, but across a writing career, a refinement of technique to an alchemical process. It is as though a large set of ideas have been gathered, and the words used to express them subjected to powerful forces until all that remains are the most resistant, most important, most usefully suggestive words, or parts of words. I had the image in mind of pebbles.

What I hadn't expected was how fluid the reading would be, how much like poetry it would actually sound. There was obviously a utilisation of space and silence (something I still have to learn how to apply in my sound work) but while it shared this with the appearance of the poems, it wasn't as though the form of the poems interfered with the reading. What is less apparent on the page is a temporal (or on the page spatial) element whereby a word, or part of a word, or possibly even non-word suddenly seems to link to another word (or part word etc.) earlier on, and alters dramatically or subtly your understanding of that previous word. I still find it hard to construct sense - or at least a reductive description of what is described, what the poem 'means', how the different parts of the poem relate to one another - from the poems. What I did find were strands of meaning surfacing, ideas being alluded to and then dropping from view while another appeared.

The most persistant comparison I found is one that is both misleading and quite accurate. I was frequently put in mind of Samuel Beckett. Not so much for the subject matter or for the way things are expressed as for the sense that the language has been distilled down to only the most essential elements.

I was impressed by how distinct the poetic strategies of the two writers are, and how unforbidding their presentation and poems actually are. Not that the poems are simple or easy - I think that should be clear - but that there are no artificial barriers created to keep the reader away. Both were friendly and open, and clearly passionate about what they do. I will certainly read more of each, and in future may well include commentary on what I've read.

Yet again it was a stimulating, challenging and thoroughly enjoyable evening. Especially as it's begun to dawn on me just how many significant linguistically innovative poets attend The Other Room on a regular basis. The readings have begun to establish a significance for themselves that I don't think will be immediately apparent - although already they seem to have helped galvanise writers into action. To start with the relatively insignificant I have embarked on an accelerated process of catching up on 20 years of reading, as well as been emboldened to think it might be worthwhile releasing CD-Rs of my sound poetry. I'm sure Richard Barrett would acknowledge some influence on his launching of his knives, forks and spoons press. And I'm certain that we're not the only people to have been affected in this way. However long The Other Room continues for it will have a legacy far beyond just a few nice evenings out.

pig fervour - have you ordered yours yet?

Richard Barrett's Pig Fervour now available. Click on the image below to order your copy from The Arthur Shilling Press. Also take a look at Arthur Shilling supremo H J Godwin's blog Celery Lanes.

Some sketchy thoughts on yesterday's Poets And... in Bolton coming soon. Tom Jenks of The Other Room and Parameter read, Richard didn't. I did something that involved banging bits of metal together.

tarkovsy's andrei rublev

Firstly of course no one needs another review of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. But as you might expect a few thoughts arose from watching it yesterday which I'd like to see if can develop.

I realised watching Andrei Rublev that all Tarkovsky's films need to be watched more than once to begin to make sense of them. Yes, after a single viewing you'll be able to give a plot summary, a run-down of many of the scenes, and an impression of some of the themes of the film. But the films have much more to offer than this, and it won't become apparent how much until you watch for the second time. Among the many filmmakers/artists working in film whose work I often return to this is unique. Which is not to say that those filmmakers/artists produce work that's easily apprehended or unsophisticated. And I certainly don't want to suggest that they're inferior in any way. I just want to suggest that Tarkovsky makes films that deliberately withhold explanation. And interpretation, which is why as an atheist I never feel preached at or forced into spiritual/religious interpretations of events.

To add a little detail - here's an idea that only came through a chance connection having watched Sandrine Bonnaire's Her Name Is Sabine the day before. In this documentary there is a difficult scene to watch where the director shows her sister footage of a visit they made to New York together, some years before Sabine entered an institution after her behaviour had deteriorated. Sabine, now barely recognisable as the same person, begins to cry. This is one of the most affecting scenes in the film, and one I've thought about quite a lot. Although we have seen the footage of the New York trip previously we don't see it now, we simply see Sabine's response.

This reminded me of one of the more emotional scenes in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. When Timothy Treadwell, the subject of the film, was attacked by a bear, his partner turned on the camera before going to help him, but left the lens cap in place. The audio of the subsequent killing of both Treadwell and his partner formed part of the investigation into the deaths, and was then released to one of Treadwell's friend's. She plays the tape to Herzog, through headphones, so that neither she nor we hear the tape. We also only see Herzog from behind, and although we can see him shaking our response is formed by Treadwell's friend's reaction to Herzog's response. He very quickly asks her to stop playing the tape, and tells her that she must never listen to the tape and should destroy it to remove the possibility. Now with both of these scenes our emotional response is dependent on the reaction of another person, and not on the stimulus provoking the original reaction. As we have no real access to the inner life of any of the people on screen our reaction is therefore in part generated by us as viewers, by our ability to empathise with other people.

It's probably not coincidental that these two films are documentaries. The reactions of the people involved are not mediated through actors, and probably more importantly our reactions as viewers are reactions to what we believe to be 'true' as opposed to the way we might react to fiction. I think there is something here relevant to cinematic fiction though. This is that there is no need to fill in all the detail for the viewer. We don't need to be shown what Sabine is watching at the same time as she does, and we don't need to be told what she is thinking. She may in fact be crying for reasons quite different from what we project onto her, what's important is her reaction. Likewise we certainly don't need to hear what's on the tape that Werner Herzog listens to. This withholding of information also allows us to engage with the film by filling in the gaps.

My point being that one of Tarkovsky's strengths is that he trusts the viewer and trusts himself enough to withhold information from us. This means much more than not including exposition. His characters talk a lot about matters that concern them, but they don't spend a lot of time giving us spurious justifications or backstories to justify their behaviour and motives. This to me is one of the more deadening aspects of conventional cinematic narrative, that every action has to have a motive provided for it, and that every emotion has to be underlined. In Tarkovsky people behave much more like real people - we don't know their motives and they don't attempt to explain them in simplified psychological abstracts like 'trauma' or 'closure'.

Another realisation was how deliberately artificial Tarkovsky's films are. There are a lot of fairly static scenes where characters talk to one another while stood in fairly unnatural groupings, and may from time to time move to set up another fairly unnatural grouping. For the most part it's not something that I ever notice, although for some reason I find it very apparent and very grating in Sacrifice. I have no explanation why this should be. I can however think of a couple of reasons why Tarkovsky may have found such a static and artifical way of staging characters necessary. Firstly the dialogue tends to be unnatural and philosophical, and combining it with naturalistic movements would probably jar very badly with the audience. Secondly the space inhabited by the characters and the objects within that space to name only two elements are every bit as important as the characters. To have the actors moving about in a more obviously naturalistic way would again draw attention to the characters and away from other elements of the film.

There may be more to say about Andrei Rublev soon.

section of untitled poem

I haven't posted anything here for a little while. This fragment is not part of the pieces I'm currently woring on for my MA dissertation equivalent. Nor is it part of what I'm planning with my twitter feed. What I suspect is that it might be one of a few linking threads I'll use to bring north together, when I finally have a chance to work on it.

libidnal.
not the direc-
tion you
think. threat.
sun.
steel door.
photographs of
feet photograph your
shadow photograph
reflections.
moss. rusted burnt
-out car.
turn. unused
land is not unused.
tension between
frame and the space
outside.
fear. fucking. walk. narrative is a way to contain threat.
outside.
dirt
on, in
fingertips. window with
dried cement
drip.
grit
on tongue.
light casts stains.

shameless brag

I haven't written much about my MA course here, mainly because it's not all that interesting to other people. But having just seen the intermediate transcript of last semester's grade I'm feeling quite pleased.

Without going into specific numbers, and with the proviso that the grade still has to be approved by the School Board, it's a better mark than I feared and puts me on target for a pass (possibly with Distinction) if the standard of my creative work holds up for the dissertation equivalent, which I've already started work on.

This will be a collection of poems, about the length of an average new collection, and a critical commentary if I remember rightly (I'll have to check my handbook at home). I'm confident I can manage this.

In fact the curious thing about the MA is that although I just about managed to get a 2.2 for my BA and felt like I was pushing myself a lot of the time, the MA hasn't really felt like work at all. Of course I didn't start my MA until 9 years after I finished my BA, and the MA is more dependent on what you bring to it with a less rigid curriculum, but even so.

The next news you'll have on this is likely to be February next year when I'm able to tell you whether or not I actually complete the course successfully.

knives, forks and spoons press

Not enough linguistically innovative poetry action in Manchester for you? Then say hello to Richard Barrett's exciting new venture. Hot on the heels of his backyard poems (look out for Pig Fervour coming through Arthur Shilling Press soon) his knives, forks and spoons press is now a proper publisher. To prove it the first book will be * by Tom Jenks - details here. Cause for celebration I'd say.

latest text festival reading

The performances by Judy Kendall, Sarah Tremlett, Nick Thurston and Jesse Glass at the Text Festival on Friday last week were interesting if mixed. Each of the poets reading read twice, with the exception of Sarah Tremlett who screened a single film. I knew nothing about any of the artists beforehand.

To start with the negatives, there was nothing especially engaging or unusual about the poetry which Judy Kendall performed. It was fairly standard personal descriptive/emotional poetry that wouldn't scare your average mainstream poetry reader. An impression that wasn't helped by the kind of conventional sing-song poetic reading style you might hear by any reasonably proficient reader. This is unfortunate, but probably a result of her having to stand up and read in front of an audience. Her visual text poem in the Text 2 anthology, and her visual work here http://extra.shu.ac.uk/proof/ or in collaboration with Steven Earnshaw here http://teaching.shu.ac.uk/ds/sle/earnshaw/gallery/ show a great deal more inventiveness and interest in technology and experimentation than was apparent from the reading. Whether a concurrent visual presentation, a different performance style, or a different choice of poems and a delivery with less explanation in it might have helped is difficult to say. A missed opportunity.

Nick Thurston read a variety of pieces that shared a methodology of reconfiguring, modifying and concentrating existing texts. There may have been more but I'll describe the three that I can remember. One was an extract from Samuel Beckett's Watt which replaced the names of shoes with the word 'noun', and other occasional words with 'adverb' and 'pronoun', in order to highlight the structure used by Beckett. Less concentrated and protracted were extracts from publically available readings of Andrew Motion in which he introduced various poems by talking at length about their genesis and personal basis, as a kind of critique of this kind of method of writing. Not that the personal has no place in poetry, but that a form which concentrates language should do more than just turn anecdote into chopped-up prose. Finally he read a series of quotations from Kafka drawn from a critical essay. I understand that this had at least one visual iteration, which I would like to see. As a performed piece it was too long by quite some distance, and it's a shame he chose to finish with it. This was an interesting take on the kind of poetics and conceptual poetics practiced by Kenneth Goldsmith in particular, and was rigorous, engaging and funny.

Sarah Tremlett presented a film which combined slowed down, colour-shifted images with a slowed down sound track that sometimes appeared not to relate to the images on screen, and a slowly scrolling text at the bottom which once or twice appeared to coincide with the soundtrack. I enjoyed the piece. It raised questions - why was the colour shifted, and why was it shifted in the way it was - for instance, but for me these didn't get in the way. More obtrusive was the fact that the distortions were reminiscent of Chris Morris's Jam (or its remix Jaaaaam) though never quite as unsettling. But the tight framing of a space that might be in any part of any UK city without ever defining or locating that space, and the randomness of the movements of people within that frame gave the piece a character of its own. The duration of the film, the audio-visual distortions, the lack of contextual clues or narrative in the text meant that the viewer was constantly trying to assemble a meaning or narrative, and was aware of doing so, even while aware that there was no obvious structure of that kind. Whether there was a theoretical structure of another kind is not clear, but was a possibility that necessarily arose. To this extent at least the piece was 'about' the reaction of the viewer, and how we assemble meaning.

Jesse Glass was the highlight of the evening for me. I have to confess that it took me a while to adjust to his accent and rhythms of speech, as well as the fact that he was relatively quiet in the first half. Once I attuned to his voice the poetry was dense and with a misleading ease and simplicity. As usual given these provisos and the fact that I'm unfamiliar with his work my review is going to be impressionistic. At a superficial level the language might seem intensified, a kind of sub-species of that poetic diction which states that everything has to be heightened. But this is misleading. There are a number of words with dense clusters of associations - the sort of language I mostly try to avoid - and many less familiar, exotic seeming words. The imagery again could be taken as simply surreal - either in the sense of consciously trying to emulate the unconscious while leaning heavily on psychology and sexuality, or in the sense of consciously 'random' juxtapositions of elements. Once more this is misleading - the imagery is more interesting and less tedious than that. There is sex (occasionally what appears to be machismo), there is arresting imagery that doesn't reveal its meaning immediately, but it's either plainly stated (in the case of sex) or descriptive of a visual or auditory or other stimulus. Without looking at the texts the poems appear to be structured rather than thrown together, and I suspect there is an element of research in all of them.

I would be interested to hear a recording of the reading (and I understand one was taken), and to read the text of the poems - especially those from the first half before I'd properly tuned-in. The poems in the second half were interesting too, apparently based on the texts that John Dee and Edward Kelley claimed were dictated by angels in Enochian language. While reading these his rhythm and voice were on fine form, and combined with the language to make a simultaneously antique and contemporary poetry, with at least a trace of Captain Beefheart. There were a lot of echoes without the work ever being derivative. What it was about I'm not certain - life as competition and collaboration, the ways we make sense of the world, the utility of art, how affectional bonds are also marked by resistance and aggression. At least that's what I got.

Overall the evening was varied and highlighted different approaches to text from the visual through the auditory to the actually text-based. There were elements that I was not fond of or which lingered a little too long, but the evening added to the experience of the festival rather than detracting in any way. I suggest that you look up work by all the participants. Unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to attend the P.Inman reading in the Gallery at 12:30pm on Tuesday 30 June (which I think is free to attend). I could take the day off work except that I've already agreed to attend a work-related conference in Alsager on 30 June and 1 July. Luckily I believe I'll be able to make the reading with Tina Darragh at The Other Room on 1 July. I understand that both P.Inman and Tina Darragh will also be reading the following day (Thursday 2 July) at the Openned event in London if you can't be arsed to travel to the northwest.

lucio capece

The latest in the Salford Concerts Series at Islington Mill was a solo performance from Lucio Capece. The turnout was really disappointing with probably a dozen people there. If you weren't there - and statistically you probably weren't - you missed a fantastic evening.

The instruments used were not especially exotic, and the techniques not especially showy. But the resulting sounds were amazing.

I don't want to give a minute description of what happened in what order because there's not much that's more pointless than a written description of a piece of sound art. However, I will discuss the techniques used and the sounds made, and hope that it's enlightening. In addition there are a couple of areas I want to touch on. I previously mentioned that I distrust claims that music and sound art describe physical spaces. This is still the case, but with a slight modification inspired by this performance which I'll explore. Also the role of quietness and slow development of themes.

First the kit used. His set up was pretty minimal by some standards. He had a tiny saxophone, a bass saxophone, a variety of cardboard tubes, some mutes, a couple of balls/marbles, a plastic (?) disc, a violin bow, a ring modulator, some filters and a sruti box. The pieces he played sounded as though they were composed rather than improvised, and the text on the flyer suggested as much, while also confirming that they were part of the same sequence.

One of the things which most impressed me at the time, and which has remained with me very strongly across the days since, was Lucio Capece's use of breath. Both blowing through the saxophones while deliberately not playing a note so that all you heard was the breath, and the fact that he appeared to be utilising circular breathing (which I've been trying intermittently to master with limited success for a while now). To use such a basic, quiet and apparently unmusical sound as a major texture - as the first texture - of a piece shows a great deal of confidence. That confidence probably comes from skill and control. This was a very controlled performance without being uptight or mechanical. Breath and the physicality of noise, of the instrument, of the artist were crucial throughout.

So far as I can recall the saxophones were only played with the cardboard tubes in place in the mouth of the instrument, usually with a mute on top, but sometimes not. The plastic disc mentioned earlier was placed over a tube at one point and held in place with one finger to give a tapping sound. At other times round hollow containers were placed over the instrument mouth and balls/marbles rolled round the edge to create another sound, either in conjunction with the breath or not. Although I said that the techniques weren't especially flashy they were obviously impressive feats of dexterity and control - imagine holding a small saxophone with one hand and using that hand and knee to rock the container over the mouth of instrument, sending the marble spinning round, while holding the container in place with the other hand, and using circular breathing for a prolonged period. Other techniques used included bowing the mutes and parts of the saxophone.

Although audible the ring modulator and whatever filters were used were not intrusive and acted as though they were merely extensions of the sound being created. In fact most of the time you could forget they were there. Instead the sound appeared wholly untransformed. But that aside the techniques used sometimes seemed to be analogue methods of achieving effects that might normally require an array of pedals. For instance the ball/marble rolling is a sound that I would probably create live on a loop and then leave playing to allow me to move onto something else. Usually it was exactly that, a durational dedication to making a particular loop live for as long as it was needed rather than relying on a more predictable but ultimately less organic or responsive recorded loop. Obviously this approach heightened the sense of physicality and control already mentioned several times.

I indicated earlier that I would discuss quietness and the slow development of themes. The entire work was relatively quiet, and each piece assembled itself only slowly. It might start with merely the sound of breath through a saxophone with no notes present. Then there would be a silence. Then as if starting again there would be breath. This breath might also end, or a slight variation might be added, a brief tone for instance. Often, even as the evening progressed, a sound might seem to be accidental only to resolve itself as intentional as it emerged again with additional elements. There seemed to be no sense of hurry, no concern to move on immediately to the next element once one element had been introduced. Without wishing to make comparisons, or introduce too much of a personal note, this is something that I am finding hard in my live performances of especially semi-improvised work. My timing and control is not yet such that I can take the time I would like, or operate at a lower volume. These concerns were already on my mind, and as some of the techniques - breath and bowing - are things I've dabbled with, the evening was a really useful study for me.

The flyer suggested that the piece was composed in response to Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (which I have yet to see). And at times I found myself thinking that the sounds could almost be descriptive, or part of a soundtrack. And yet as I've previously said I have serious doubts about so literal a reading of music or sound art. But the sounds were never quite descriptive - breath was never wind or water rushing through pipes, pattering was never leaves blowing or rain falling. It was more that the sounds had a non-musical, furtive and yet physcal nature that suggested a world beyond the instruments being played. I'm not quite sure what I'm reaching for here - it was not so simple as the sounds being descriptive or even metaphorical, more that they were textures that would fit into a location or a sequence of images of a location and somehow enhance it. This is something I need to think some more about.

It's a real shame that more people didn't make the effort to attend. If you're one of them I believe the Salford Concerts are back some time in the autumn after a brief hiatus, but as soon as I know more I'll let you know. Make sure you go if you get the chance.

other room 8 + other things

Videos of the brilliant Alex Davies and the legendary Allen Fisher can be found here on The Other Room blog for those of you that weren't there. There's also video of me for those of you who like that sort of thing.

Don't forget tomorrow Friday 12 June at 7:30pm at Bury Art Gallery an evening of experimental poetry and sound with Jesse Glass, Nick Thurston, Sarah Tremlett and Judy Kendall as part of the Text Festival. Free admission.

And two readings imminent at The Other Room according to if p then q. On Wednesday 1 July it's the one you should already know about - P.Inman and Tina Darragh, and on Wednesday 5 August to get The Other Room back to its usual slot Sean Bonney, Frances Kruk and Steve Willey will be reading. The Other Room three months in a row - now that's what I call summer.

Not only that, but in case you want to see him twice or can't make one of the readings, P.Inman also reads the day before The Other Room on Tuesday 30 June at the Text Festival.

why no politics?

Anyone who's read much from the first couple of years of santiago's dead wasp, and even more those who have known me since I lived in Cardiff may wonder what has happened to the politics. There used to be quite a significant number of political poems and periodic commentary on various issues. In the case of poetry for once the answer is simple, I wasn't very good at it. The best that could be said for my explicitly political poems is that they were 'felt' and 'energetic' - unfortunately they were also often shit. As for commentary on specific issues, like most things that's a little more complicated.

But before that, what's prompted this reflection is obviously the election of Nick Griffin to the European Parliament. Well Nick, I didn't vote for you, you don't fucking talk for me and you never will. It seems like the BNP never met a problem that couldn't be blamed on immigration.

The last paragraph represents exactly one of the reasons why I write less about politics than I used to and less than I would like. After the final sentence I attempted four different ways of continuing. The first idea was to refer to Britain's, and the northwest's, radical tradition. I would have mentioned unions, Tom Paine, republicanism, chartism, the Peterloo massacre - essentially a random tumble of bits and pieces. The second idea was to talk about the self-evident stupidity of BNP policies, and how absurd it is to claim not to be racist when the repatriation of immigrants is one of your aims. The third idea was to talk about the dubious history of Andrew Brons in particular, who got a seat in Yorkshire and Humber. The fourth and final idea was to talk about the sort of ideals I was brought up with, which were ideals of tolerance, equality and respect for others. But for all of these I would have had to do a minimal amount of fact-checking at the very least, and I'm not writing journalism, it's merely an opinion piece. Now you could say that laziness is a poor excuse for not broaching the subject, but I'd rather people read properly informed debate rather than my half-formed musings. But it is clear I haven't been especially explicit about my principles recently, that is a problem, and I will correct it shortly.

This is not the only reason why I write less about politics than I have done in the past. The other reasons are a distaste for party political/ideological affiliations, and my background and character which mean I have never really been part of a group of people aligned along primarily political lines.

To take the last first I grew up shy, bullied through most of middle and high school, in a small village a long way from even a small city like Lancaster. There were not a lot of opportunities to make affiliation with others, and I was anyway distrustful of groups. Even when I later started to communicate with others it was mainly by post. Public transport was so poor it was a major organisational feat to get to somewhere like Bradford. Having not much money and no great confidence in places where I didn't know anyone, it was not something I did frequently. Not having much one to one contact with others, not engaging in much political debate or activity meant I had little confidence in my own beliefs. This still has effects today, it's still extremely difficult for me to go anywhere on my own, especially where a lot of the people there already know one another.

The first point about my distaste for party political/ideological affiliations is perhaps easier to understand. I find that both party affiliations, and adherence to any specific ideology can build-in an inflexibility of attitude. For this reason I've always resisted getting too deeply into study of any particular -ism. The nearest I came was a period of studying anarchism and exchanging letters with anarchist groups. But I very quickly found that some anarchists were unrealistic about their ability to bring about what they wanted, and had no historical sense of what the potential pitfalls might be if a revolution were to happen. Other anarchists were more realistic but held views I found utterly objectionable. Faced with Class War and other similar anarchists advocating community justice made me realise how much I value a system of law and order that respects the rights of the accused as well as victims and the wider community.

But I have strong convictions. I am republican, I am opposed to the death penalty, I am opposed to violence of all kinds, I believe in equality for all, I feel that we need both stronger links to Europe and the rest of the world, and a greater localisation of democracy. I feel immigration to be a beneficial thing, I believe that both government and the legal system should be secular, and more. It often concerns me that I don't make this clear enough frequently enough, and that it seems to be almost invisible from my poetry.

go to these

Salford Concerts Series 3 - 10 June

Text Festival - 12 June & 30 June

Friday 12 June
Jesse Glass, Sarah Tremlett & Judy Kendall at Bury Art Gallery

Tuesday 30 June
P.Inman

The Other Room - 1 July

buy whisper online

For those of you who have yet to buy either of the delightful items below - June's collection of toe-tapping sound poetry for lovers, Whisper, or the handmade collection of the first six months' worth of CD-Rs, you can now do so from the comfort of your own office. Just use the PayPal button over on the right. Whisper costs a mere £3 and the six-month collection a paltry £10.

Whisper

The first 6 months' CD-Rs

the other room 8

The nights at The Other Room feel like they're getting shorter all the time. Last night felt like half an hour at most. Partly that's because I was performing, but I'll let other people write about that in more detail if they feel the inclination. My notes will be even more sketchy than usual since the whole event is quite blurry. Also getting shorter are the intervals between events, at least for this month. The next event will be July 1 when P.Inman and Tina Darragh will be reading. I mean do they spoil you or what? Anyway before you stumble through my impressionistic reading I'd suggest you look at Richard Barrett's far more coherent account here.

Due to heavy promotion by Tom and James, and probably also due to the Allen Fisher effect, I'm told last night was one of the busiest so far with just over forty people in attendance. It was great that a number of them were faces I hadn't seen there before. I arrived pretty early because I had a lot of kit to set up and ensure was working, as well as CD-Rs for the bookstall. I didn't notice if there was anything from Alex Davies there, I don't think so. There were a number of Allen Fisher's books available. I already have Leans and although I could have happily bought everything else he had there I restricted myself to Place. Also available, and also highly recommended are the Text Festival tie-in if p then q poster pack, the latest Parameter (with Jamie Birch's excellent Eight I Am's), and the anthology for the first year of The Other Room. Late addition, I read from Richard Barrett's account that P.Inman's Ad Finitum from if p the q was on sale, I'm quite annoyed with myself as I've been meaning to buy it for ages. Amazingly despite everything else that was on display I sold a few copies of the first six month CD-R set.

But to business. Alex Davies kicked off the night in great style. I'd heard a reading of Londonstone, and I think I may have seen video of him reading elsewhere, probably on the Openned site. He had a really interesting approach to his reading which involved him opening with extracts selected from various texts by other people, as he put it to get his voice in the room. I take this as meaning both helping the audience attune to his voice and style of reading as well as to the content, themes, etc of his work, and helping him to find his place within the space. Both Alex and Allen read without the microphone, and as far as could tell were able to be heard throughout the venue without needing to raise their voices too much. Alex read from Londonstone. As usual when I don't have a written text to compare to or refer back to I'd have difficulty telling you what it was about. One of my initial impressions was that it was quite broken-up, short phrases and sections that might be unrelated. Beyond that I got impressions of the city, of life in the city, of vocabulary drawn from a range of sources, and of movement and change. I was reminded in perhaps a superficial way of Lucy Harvest Clarke's work - except that crudely I'd call hers photographic while Alex's strikes me as linguistic - which is a description in each case not a judgement.

I really wish I'd kept notes now, it's not very useful to tell you that I was completely concentrated on what Alex read, and that I enjoyed it, if I can't give you any impression of what the work was actually like. Part of that may also be down to performing. Although I don't get nervous before I perform I do get a significant adrenalin rush and find it really difficult to concentrate on things beforehand - and sometimes after. Anyway, apologies to Alex, I'll listen to some performances online and see if I can't come up with a more focused response shortly.

I was next and have only a shaky sense of what happened. The first piece, dryer, went very smoothly, although a lot louder than I anticipated. The second piece, born perfect, was scrappy from my perspective - the volume was all wrong and started to feedback almost straight away. For a piece that was supposed to be relatively quiet and slowly developing this was a problem. Rather than start over and draw attention to the problem I set one of the cassettes playing and killed the loop, cleared it and restarted that way without breaking the piece up. I was then able to quickly go back and add in the elements I needed with only a small flare of feedback in the loop. I'd also broken the glass I brought to bow, and the beer glass I had was only able to muster a faint scraping. It's an interesting thing about performing live that compared to rehearsals and to recording I always end up much more ferocious and confrontational than I intend. Anyway, from my perspective it was camera-shake impressions of people, a lot of feedback and noise throughout, and seemed to be over in five minutes. I'm told it was actually about fifteen.

Thankfully for everyone there was a break next and we were able to get a drink and sit and stand outside for 20 minutes or so. Although I had to spend some time packing my stuff. By this time I felt like it wasn't long after 7:30 but I think it was closer to 8:20. Like I say the whole evening seemed to compress down to a fraction of the time it actually took.

Back from the break we were on to the main attraction, Allen Fisher. He read in two sections. The first half consisted of pieces from Gravity, I think mainly drawn from Leans [buy it, it's great, and you'll be supporting Salt]. The second was from a new series called Proposals, some of which has been published in new booklet Birds. His reading style appeared more confident than Alex's, and I thought was clearer and smoother than the short bits of video I'd seen previously. His work is incredibly dense and takes in areas of mathematics and science that I have trouble understanding, even on the page through repeated readings I have difficulty forging an understanding and a coherent response so apologies to Allen if my account of his reading is less than clear... as if he's ever going to read this.

The first half gave me a stronger sense of dialogue, or at least of the presence of other people, and an interaction between them than I'd gathered from reading the works on the page. I'll have to go back through Leans in the light of the reading and see what comes out. There was also a sense of place, of human interaction with the environment - the built environment primarily but not exclusively. Again I was aware of paying close attention. During the second half when he read from Proposals I found myself closing my eyes in order to concentrate better on the words. The reading seemed even more fluid and the words were amazing. Although the selection was from Birds and indeed featured birds in the poems I got a sense of poems written from the point of view of being in transit. Whether in a car, bus or train - and there are specific references to rails. Direct human presences were fewer, but there was no less humanity about the poems. Early on there was a section that stuck in my mind, and extract of which is, 'until a swan opens his wings in my head / and I take a deep breath'. Now it's a little misleading to pull out just that section because the poems are about so much more than just clever phrases. I'd suggest you go here to see why. Apart from putting the phrase in context you can see how well-constructed the writing is. Every line, every word contributes something to the poem, meaning that when I extract something from the poem I take something away from the extract presented. Realistically the two lines quoted require the lines before in order for you to see how they arise naturally from what has already been said, and they require the lines afterwards for you to see how the argument develops from there. This is one of the reasons why I said several times (and in a comment on Richard's review) that one day I'd like to be able to write that well. Something similar was articulated by other people at the reading.

Once again hearing work read provided me with another way of looking at poems and poets I was already partly familiar with, and opened the work out slightly more. Now I recently heard a J H Prynne lecture online in which he talked about reasons why he doesn't like to read his own work, and why he doesn't feel that hearing an author read is necessarily helpful to understanding a piece of work. I'll try to find the link and post it here at some stage. I can see his point, and I think I agree that there is the possibility of the author getting in the way of the text. But I think it is helpful to hear someone read the words, so long as you're aware that the reading is not a definitive statement on the text, if only because it puts the words into a another physical state and allows you to approach them with a different set of considerations from those called into play when reading on the page. For instance, it's harder to properly appreciate sonic effects from written text. One of the invaluable opportunities afforded by The Other Room is that of shifting from written text to spoken word and back to written text in order to see words on the page from a greater number of angles. Being able to weigh the different emphases that the different iterations offer and negotiate a finer understanding from that process.

the first 6 months in one bag

Available specially for The Other Room are packs holding the whole first six months of CD-Rs in my year long monthly programme of sound poetry releases. They come in a variety of colours and are very limited.

The front, above - and the rear, below.

whisper on sale tomorrow

On sale for the first time tomorrow at The Other Room will be Whisper, June's CD-R. It will be available through PayPal from Thursday all being well.

The front cover (above) was previewed before I added the title. The rear sleeve, unfolded for readability, is below. There are three tracks - silo, just short of 10 minutes, waterpark, just over 25 minutes, and concrete pipe, just under 16 minutes.

don't forget - the other room wed 3 june

The Other Room 8 with Allen Fisher, Alex Davies and me takes place Wednesday 3 June from 7pm.

Get yourself down to The Old Abbey Inn on Manchester Science Park. It's going to be a lot more fun than whatever else you you might have been planning to do.

street cutlery 11

Found a couple of days ago near my work.

further to cultural funding

A couple of days ago I posted some initial thoughts on the way that cultural activities are funded prompted by the realisation that Salt Publishing, Vertigo film magazine and The Philoctetes Center for the Creative Imagination are all facing financial difficulties. My thoughts were very preliminary because I genuinely don't know how funding is best arranged for cultural endeavours, especially those of a minority interest. On the one hand it's clear that without generous patronage certain works may never be produced, or may take a very long time to reach the public. On the other hand there are obvious questions around what gets funded, by whom, what is demanded in return, and what is then excluded. While not immune from these problems, in the internet age poets are very shielded in comparison to film-makers or actors for instance. Poets can easily hold down a job or two and publish online. If you want to make even a moderately budgeted film it requires a significant investment of people, time, and money.

Apart from the questions that I raised, which I'll recap shortly, I had a bit of a debate with Richard Barrett who disagreed with me on some points, and who raised some interesting questions of his own. The debate mainly centred around what value we place on artists and art, how we assign that value, and whether subsidy has any place in all this. I hope he'll correct me if I have this wrong, but you can check the comments for yourself here, Richard's questions were:

1. Isn't it the consumer of cultural work who gives it value?

2. Or does art have an intrinsic value/purpose?

3. Does art/do artists occupy a separate realm from other people?

4. If other cultural endeavours are not subsidised why should art be any different?

5. He also suggested that it might be better for artists to focus on forming their own non-market networks.

After I responded by saying that I thought many of the channels through which poetry is mediated to people are not necessarily in the interests of poetry as a vital creative form, that it wasn't historically markets that were the primary decider of what gets published, and that I also didn't see any value in protecting poetry as a speical case Richard made some further points:

6. He argued that the kind of anthologies I'd attacked could have a valuable role in introducing new readers to poetry and encouraging exploration beyond the boundaries of the poetics represented by the anthologies.

7. He was also clear that he thinks there is a place for poetry that I might not want to read. And of course there is, and should be.

I still have a number of questions on this subject, and I am still interested in contributions to the discussion. Like anyone on any subject I have a number of directly contradictory opinions on a range of subjects, and I'd like to know what other people think. Some of this debate is quite close to some of the areas I intend to cover in a long essay coming soon about my relationship to poetry. In it I intend to talk about how I started to read poetry, how I came to write poetry, my frustrations with what gets published, my search for alternatives, and my ongoing attempts to understand what I read, and to place myself in some sort of context. So this discussion will also help clarify my thinking for that as well as rehearse some arguments you'll see crop up there.

I mentioned earlier that I'd recap the questions I raised in the initial post. So far as I can clarify my own thinking these were:

i. Is there any value in funding cultural organisations that can't fund themselves through markets?

ii. If such funding is available, what should that funding be, and how should it be managed? To be more specific, should it be short, medium or long term? Should it be aimed at specific products/outcomes, or should it be seen as a way of funding individuals/groups/communities in specific areas for a set amount and period of time with no prescribed goal? There are many more questions that could be asked - and I'm under no illusion that these are very long running arguments.

iii. What is the consequence of a lot of art being freely or very cheaply available?

iv. Specifically what then are the impacts on artists, and their ability to produce new work? It's easier to spend years writing a novel and to make it available online than it is to produce a play for instance.

It's arguable the debate got a little side-tracked next in my distaste for art used as therapy. In that case it's about to get sidetracked again. The arguments are what value art in this context has. This is a little tricky because I don't believe that art has an intrinsic value - it only comes from the consumer of a piece of art. Therefore you could say that if someone thinks it helps, or it makes them feel better that this represents real value. To borrow a phrase, I think you'll find it's more complicated than that. To help clarify why I think that, here is the next set of questions that came out.

v. Perhaps the question to begin with is what is art for?

vi. Followed by what is the purpose of therapy?

The reason I asked these questions is not that I don't believe non-specialists have a place in art, I think they have to have an important role in art, but more that I think there's a potential for sloppy thought and confusion that could potentially harm art, and more importantly, people. Obviously I need to explain this more clearly. I think we can all agree that most art is mainly enjoyed by non-specialists - either people who don't make art, or who work in a different area of the arts. I don't think it's especially contentious to say that it's desirable and normal for people to make their own art with no intention of taking it to the market/showing it to other people/attempting to make great masterpieces etc. It's probably equally uncontroversial to say that some people can find the act of making, and/or consuming art therapuetic. But crucially the ways we use art vary from person to person, and the reasons I write poetry may be different from the reasons I read poetry. Those again may be different from the reasons I take photographs, and from the reasons why I go to galleries.

Now to an extent by publishing books, by having gigs, by displaying art in galleries etc you're placing some limitations on the way that art is used. But these limitations are nothing like the specific limitations inherent in using art as a therapy. At the most basic you have an intended goal for the interaction - to enhance or perhaps even improve a person's mental (and possibly physical) wellbeing. This goal may have no relation to the various reasons why a particular individual has previously engaged with art. But for the moment let's assume that people engaged in art therapy are there because they choose to be, and have reasonable expectations of what it involves.

I have already made an assumption about the purpose of therapy in suggesting that the goal may be 'to enhance or perhaps even improve a person's mental (and possibly physical) wellbeing'. Now although this is a crude, layperson's simplification of therapy, let's assume that it has some validity. It seems likely that the art created in art therapy is probably a different art from the art that a person may produce for their own pleasure, which is different again from the art that is commercially available. It is not unreasonable to see the potential for a conflict of interests between the person leading the creative sessions and any therapuetic goal. Or between the person leading the creative sessions and the people attending them. Or between the people attending the creative sessions and any therapeutic goal. And so on. I don't think this is necessarily harmful, or that it's damaging to art broadly in any way, but at the very least it can make measuring the outcomes and the success of projects difficult.

More of a danger is the risk I mentioned of opening the door to all sorts of charlatans.

I'll return and complete this post shortly. I will expand on my 'charlatans' claim. There are also questions not mentioned so far that I may add to:

a. Who pays for art?

b. Might the answer to this question affect the content and form of what is produced?

c. Is it useful for anyone to lump all 'cultural products' together? For instance, should sport and dance have to compete for the same money?

In the meantime, please let me have your thoughts. Especially let me know if you think the debate is irrelevant, missing important questions, or factually wrong.

happy birthday to me

Santiago's dead wasp is five years old today.

I'm celebrating by having a cinnamon and raisin bagel and by not blogging.

Oh.