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.
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.
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