the other room 6 a review

There was a disappointingly small audience at The Other Room on Wednesday. Although the positive aspect of this that now that I know a number of people who regularly attend I was able to at least recognise and speak to people if not remember their name. I also came into the main body of the front of the pub where the reading actually takes place to sit at a table with other people. I bought a copy of the two halves of aRb by Joy As Tiresome Vandalism and the much more recent backyard poems by Richard Barrett. As well as picking up a free untitled piece incorporating images from Patricia Farrell. All of these will be reviewed at some point shortly.

Richard Barrett didn't appear entirely comfortable initially but that was probably due in part to a subdued response from the unusually small audience. His first set was perhaps unfocused. Although far from the wink wink crowd pleasing stand-up  kind of poetry you'll find at the average open mic or poetry slam some of the poems lost focus by appearing to ingratiate themselves with the audience. That sounds more harsh than intended. What I mean is a tendency to either acknowledge an audience or consciously signal the poem's identity as a created object. As mentioned I will review Richard's backyard poems soon and recommend that you contact him for a copy while he still has some. A feature of many of the poems as text is typography and layout that announces the poem as poem as distinct from prose or more functional text. This is not a bad thing but I think when the whole process of a poem announcing itself as a poem, setting its terms and then continuing to the conclusion is repeated several times it breaks up the momentum of a reading. The poems in the first set which are featured in backyard poems are often more complex than they appear, mixing the personal with political and or philosophical ideas, as well as a concentration on poetry and language. Which brings us back to a focus on the stuff of poetry, the poem as a created system.

Richard's second set was more obviously confident perhaps helped by dispensing with the mic which had caused problems particularly for Lucy Harvest Clarke. I also feel that in reading from the rushes which is extracted on his blog he was able to maintain momentum by not having to constantly stop and start. Even if it's illusory there is a sense that the poem is more confident in its own existence and so more able to get on with the job of being even if I am not certain exactly what the poem is about in the broadest sense. I suppose the negative side of the tendency described earlier of the shorter poems to announce themselves and set their terms is that it can suggest a distrust of the reader. A belief that the reader has to be guided in their interpretation. Whereas the rushes allows the reader find their own way. The reader is trusted. The audience was probably a little more drunk to be honest and had also heard Lucy Harvest Clarke and Patricia Farrell read.

Lucy Harvest Clarke also appeared less than comfortable for much of her first set. In her case this was in large part due to problems with the mic which appeared to be cutting out either because she was moving out of range or because there genuinely were problems with the signal. I am far less familiar with her poetry and so my comments will necessarily be more impressionistic. While my impression of Richard's poetry is that it deals with the nature of poetry and the world of ideas I feel a greater sense of the body in Lucy's poetry. Her poems created stronger and more physically present images than Richard's while any themes were less obvious. I recognised places people and situations. To an extent I felt placed within the poem. Perhaps this is because they didn't conspicuously distance the audience although of course it makes it more of a challenge for you to obtain a perspective. If I wanted to be critical I would say that if she had slowed down a little and been less conscious of the audience then she might have appeared to have greater control of her material. What I mean is she seemed to have to stop for breath occasionally and it wasn't always clear whether silences were wholly intended or accidental. But this is very much casting around for something to be critical about and is not at all unusual in even very experienced readers.

As with Richard Lucy was much more relaxed in the second set she did. I have a less distinct memory of the second set although I am aware that she also read a single long piece. I was very aware of London as a participant within the poem and again of physical realities underpinning ideas relationships and place. Something that I said on the night was that when I read someone's work I then prefer to see them perform to get a fuller idea of the work. And when I see them perform I prefer to then read the work either again or for the first time. If I had a sense of shame I'd be ashamed to admit that my reading of poetry on the page is usually a much more grudging brief and superficial than my engagement with performance. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I will be going back to Lucy's poems as text to try and get that sense of perspective. What I would like to say is that although I am more familiar with Richard's work and found Patricia Farrell's performance the most confident and experienced I found Lucy's performance the most engaging. In the same way that experience was represented through the physical she embodied or enacted the poems as much performed them. Both of these things, the way the poems were written and the way they were performed are closer to the way I experience art and the world. Which is why I was probably more engaged by her work.

Patricia Farrell was by far the most confident and experienced performer. Her poems struck me as the most finished in the sense of each being a discrete object and easily apprehended as a whole. As I remember I've previously observed that often the readers at The Other Room are complementary. That was again the case this time with Patricia Farrell being something of halfway point between Richard and Lucy. By which I mean her poems are both rooted in physical presence and reality while clearly exploring ideas and concepts. Incidentally I don't wish to misrepresent Richard's work by contrasting it constantly with the physical grounding of Lucy and Patricia's work. His poems don't exist in a separate realm of ideas. They do possess physical aspects but for me written language is the strongest physical presence in his poems. I am of course simplifying and caricaturing each poet's work for clarity and to explain my reactions to them.

As I write I'm reading some of Patricia's work to remind myself of what she read, I'm also listening to to a Philoctetes Center Roundtable on the translator. These two things coincide significantly because the economy of much of Patricia's work, the unfamiliarity of some of the terminology used and the occasionally unusual phrasing gives her work the sense of something translated from another language. This needn't be a geographically originated language but could be a specialised technical language. I wrote earlier that her performance was the most confident of the three and actually deliberately avoided saying hers was the most competent a couple of times simply because by implication it suggests lack of competence on that part of Richard and Lucy. But for all that greater experience and ease I found her performance less engaging than Lucy's and somehow more distant. This was a shame insofar as it made her poems less easy to engage with.

After the reading a large group of us went off to the Deaf Institute which is the most recently opened Trof and a bit poncey and awkward for my tastes although I had a great time. You know one of these days I'm going to manage to write a review that actually tells you something useful about the poets and poems. But being a lazy dilettante who'll avoid reading poetry if I can I don't expect it to be any time soon.

Richard covers the reading here, although I think he's a little too harsh on himself. I realised after writing the review that once again I didn't make it absolutely clear that I really enjoyed the reading, and thought all the readers were strong in complementary ways. Patricia Farrell was the most experienced and confident performer with the most contained and complete pieces. Lucy Harvest Clarke was for me the most engaging poet of the evening despite having the most rough edges in her performance. Richard Barrett had a poem in the rushes that has stuck in my memory longer than anything else that evening. Apologies for the lack of links originally but it was getting very late and I did have to get up for work. Invariably there will probably be another update and more links over the next couple of days. Watch this space. More importantly get down to the next Other Room.

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