Back in 2005, I launched the International Text Festival in Bury, Manchester. It's aim was to question, curate, display, distribute, around the question of the state of language practice across artforms. To be frank, it was greeted with a degree of incomprehension, maybe because the difference fields of practice were not used to being presented in such a way. In what was a form of madness, I ended up curating a festival that lasted 9 months and featured nearly 20 exhibitions and performances. By the end of the first festival, I think both me and the audience were burned out. I'll share the reasons why I programmed the subsequently Text Festivals in 2009, 2011 and 2014, in a later post. Because producing the festivals was a mammoth undertaking, I didn't really take the time to think about or share my experiences or its implications, or, more importantly what would have come after 2014. Over the next few months I plan to revisit the Festival's importance and conclude that with a series of essays of what comes next.
Having posited that there might be some cross-artform commonalities, as the curator, it seemed incumbent on me to offer some theoretical basis for the question. And so the first Text was accompanied by something of a manifesto - TEXT. Locating the Text Festival’s first
‘statement’ in a formal lineage, it took its structure from John Cage’s 1937
THE FUTURE OF MUSIC: CREDO
T E X T
“Me? I don’t
read books!” Irnerio says.
“What do you
read, then?”
“Nothing. I’ve
become so accomplished to not reading that I don’t even read what appears
before my eyes. It’s not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the
rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in
fronts of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not
to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to
look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely,
until they disappear.”
From: If in a Winter’s Night a Traveller –
Italo Calvino
CONVENTIONAL LANGUAGE IS ABOUT ITS
SUBJECT
conventional? What did Ian Hamilton
Finlay mean by conventional? Veronica Forrest-Thompson, (how different poetry
would have been if you had not been killed in 1974) wrote:
“it is easy to treat poetry as if it
were engaged in the language game of giving information and thus to assume that
what is important about a poem is what it tells us about the external world.
The meaning of the poem is extended into the world … Such an approach falsifies
our experience of poems, reduces the distinctiveness of poetry, and neglects
many of the components of poetic language, but it is an intellectually less
taxing approach which triumphs for that reason…”
The reference to a language-game coming,
of course, from the influential philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein:
“Poetry is a language game not primarily concerned with the transmission of
information.” Wittgenstein identified the totality of propositions as language.
Language is the sum set of all subaltern sets operating across landscapes in
which descriptive facility and functionality is synonymous with their fabric – the
fabric of the (language) act synonymous with its content. Synonymous but
not the same.
Charles Bernstein writes: “Content never
equals meaning.” How does this square with the view that poetic (or scientific)
language is different from conventional language – if conventional language is
about its content, but any language act is synonymous. American poet Lyn Hejinian
answers:
Reality remains identical to itself in
Form
But not sum
AND
WITH THE UBIQUITY OF (COMMERICAL) TYPOGRAPHY,
in every moment of your waking life you
can see a text – this page. Look up from this page – in any glance in any
direction you will see another text. You are immersed in text. You describe
your experience to yourself in language and every aspect of your visual field
is labelled, text-overlaid
THE OMNIPRESENCE OF A PLENARY UNIFORMIST
LANGUAGE IN THE PUBLIC
and through a hierarchy of mediations,
the private
DOMAIN HAS ENMESHED THE TEXT INTO THE
“EFFICIENT” AND “TRANSPARENT” – PRINCIPLES OF GRAPHIC DESIGN/LANGUAGE
commercial design has absorbed the craft
and inspiration of modernist graphic innovations, while
UNIFIED AS THE VISUAL HEGEMONY OF
PACKAGING, IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY.
“Thus how do we read what is meant precisely
to be read? That is given for no other purpose, and without distraction (even
those distractions which we often take as the stigmata of “reading” but are
really those of entertainment, those of good fog)”, wrote Bruce Andrews.
To Veronica Forrest-Thompson’s
observation that there would be no point in writing poetry unless poetry were
different from everyday language, it should be added that poetry similarly has
no point if it is the same as advertising language.
THE AURAL DEBRIS OF FURNITURE MUSIC
BURYING CONSCIOUSNESS IN ORGANISED MARKETING NOISE IS THE SHARED
(unacknowledged)
FATE FOR TEXT.
In 1916 Eric Satie performed his work
‘musique d’ameublement’, literally furniture music; music heard but not
listened to. It was the first ever muzak; Satie foreseeing the time when
our lives would be filled with unheeded music. While ignoring this contemporary
sound track most of the time, we are conscious that it is there, neutered,
affecting our moods, altering our behaviour. This musical accompaniment is a
new phenomenon – less than one hundred years old; in a same period of time,
text has become furniture text, text seen but not read – logos, signs,
advertisements, labels – affecting our moods, altering our behaviour,
constructing our experience of reality, changing our attitudes in an assumption
of universal literacy and ‘the fallacy of unmediated expression’
RESTRICTING THE DEFINITION OF LITERACY
Bruce Andrews: “Objective assumptions,
which ground meaning in reference to the world outside and which relate
self-evidence of objects to the practical tasks of learning to read, provided
only one scenario” – what Charles Bernstein calls the tyranny of the familiar –
a manufactured consensus of models of competence “a coercive organization of
grammar, rhetoric, technical format, & ideological symbols”: “It is the
terrorist function of forms (and of institutions deriving from these forms) to
maintain the illusions of transparency and reality and to disguise the forms
that maintain reality.” – Henri Lefebvre
Literacy is
a social construction and is significant
in determining, and being determined by, the prevailing social order.
Literacy is
a relative construct and is in practice
context dependent. Global definitions therefore are both elusive and
unattainable.
TO CONSENSUALISED STANDARD PUBLIC
ORGANISATION, LANGUAGE IS CO-OPTED TO APPROVED CENTRAL MEANINGS
“Everything in our age conspires to turn
the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official,
working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him
the whole of the truth,” noted George Orwell in The Prevention of Literature or
as Guy Debord observed it as the “sprint between independent artists and the
police to test and develop the use of new techniques of conditioning” or after
20 years of national arts policy, the arts are mobilized to
- Develop a Stronger Community Spirit;
- Improve Transport and the Environment;
- Create a Better Future for All
Generations;
- Make our communities Safer and
Healthier;
- Achieve Social Inclusion:
- Develop a Competitive and Diverse Local
Economy;
Hence the need for the Official Verse
Culture
AND DECANTED THROUGH A HIERARCHY OF
MEDIATIONS TO ALLOW ONLY POETRY EXPRESSIONS OF EXEMPLARY PERSONAL NARRATIVES.
the (pre)dominant ‘poetic’ factor of
poetry is embedded in self-reflexivity, the first person, the voice of the
poet, sharing an epiphanous moment, his or her narrow emotional life or simply
a wry anecdote. As the British rhyme-writer Sophie Hannah would have it: the
best thing about being a poet is “being able to get a relatively civilized
revenge on anyone who treats you really nastily – and plenty of people do! – by
writing something cutting about them” …
…an intellectually less taxing approach
which triumphs for that reason…
“The production of ignorance that is
enforced by restraints on complexity of thought, political, social and aesthetic
content; and form” according to Charles Bernstein.
In this Official Verse Culture, “The
world is found to be meaningful, but not for and to itself; it is meaningful
because perceiving it makes the poet special; the poet plunders the world for
its perceptual, spiritual treasure and becomes worthy (and worth more) on that
basis” – Lyn Hejinian.
It will be as if Modernism never
happened, this representational/narrative art (with its concomitant fallacy of
unmediated expression) with patron saints celebrated for their advertisement
rhymes as much for their lyricism.
O the Lyric
held as axiomatic, itself a vocal
heritage of language drawn from poetry’s archaic roots as the story-telling
accompaniment to rhythmic tunes, pre-modern and therefore strictly tonal.
Despite Robert Grenier’s seminal 1971
declaration I HATE SPEECH;
Despite even Adorno’s question of the
implication of the Holocaust, the British Lyric Tradition, its margins of
landscape and voice, renews itself in dismal paddling further into its
backwater to privilege dialect and regionalism – ‘authentic’ Northern voices
(or more recently rural southern voices) instead of the dynamic experimental
uncertainty of Bob Cobbing and the Writer’s Forum or the need to animate a
millennial Modernism in dialogue with international Concrete Poetry, LANGUAGE
or OULIPO,
But it is an intellectually less taxing
approach which triumphs for that reason…
The practice of text art in public space
stems from conceptual art’s critique of the materiality and economics of the
art object, and liberation of possibilities for unmediated public distribution.
This liberating dialogue between reader and writer, a continually evolving
context of process and actuality, has been denied by the backwater cultural
constriction of the poet to the page, the reading, or the advertisement copy.
Meanwhile, Culture driven by massive global forces, History re-started, Science
and the Image move on. The marginal language of song? Poetry? It’s irrelevant.
“Me? I don’t read.” Let them sell their Past of anthologies for Christmas,
birthdays, funerals, and the next war…
THE QUESTION OF FORM IS OUR ONLY
CONSTANT CONNECTION WITH THE PAST. ALTHOUGH THE GREAT FORMS OF THE PAST WERE
THE SONNET
The history of poetry over-written with
all the drama and import of a nursery rhyme forgets in the fourth century A.D.,
Optatianus Porfyrius published a permutational poem called Carmen XXV. With
words fixed in its fifth column, words in other columns can be arbitrarily
shuffled with each other, creating a fixed form poem with words shuffling to
1.62 billion possible permutations of the text.
By the Renaissance (1561), Julius Caesar
Scaliger was able to establish word permutation poems (Proteus Verse) as one of
the canonical poetical forms of the 17th Century.
Trace the real Past from there to here.
On to 1961: the French writer Raymond
Queneau, published ‘Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes’, which is constructed of
ten basic sonnets, sliced into 14 strips, one per line of sonnet text. By
flipping the strips to left or right, the reader obtains a combination of lines
making up a sonnet. Every one of the possible sonnets is structurally perfect
and makes perfect sense but the incremental arithmetic is such that it would
not be possible to read all the possible variations in one lifetime.
(As William Carlos Williams wrote: “All
sonnets mean the same thing.”)
OR FREE VERSE,
In contemporary verse, how many ‘poems’
can stand the prose test of removal of their arbitrary line breaks or the mock
portentous hush of the poet’s reading?
“Should humanity lie back and be
satisfied to watch new thoughts make ancient verses? We don’t believe that it
should.” – Francois Le Lionnais.
The key modernist project is the
question of the nature of the medium. This is the terrain that the 2005 Text
Festival in Bury seeks to examine: what are the innovations and devices that
characterise the tradition of poetic innovation and what is their relationship
to contemporary visual text art practice? “Valorizing form has its limits”,
there is a danger in focusing on the means at the expense of the meaning, a
catalogue of devices and methodologies, but in engaging with the debate about
the future of text and poetry it should be productive to examine the tools
currently available.
And so what if it’s not? Remember you
don’t read poetry.
TEXT, THE FUTURE
“To construct room for further efforts”
– Bob Perelman,
WILL DIALECTICALLY RISE FROM A GLASS
BEAD GAME OF
“a way of reconstituting language
by unpacking the toolbox” applying to performative writing sound, text,
digital, environmental and performance.
PARATAXIS,
is simply the juxtaposition of two
elements or clauses without a conjunction. One sentence is placed next to
another which has no obvious relevance. This practice is most familiar in the
Haiku tradition which frequently uses the enigmatic effect to generate the
deeper meaning in a poem. Making the sentence the basic unit of composition as
opposed to traditional Western poetry’s focus on the line, poets and artists
using text, thus require the reader’s participation in the sense-making
process.
The paratactic tension achieved in
poetry is mirrored in contemporary text art practice which frequently
juxtaposes a sentence unit as paratactic to its location; the meaning of
a text located in a public space resonates in the collage of the words with
their location. Lawrence Weiner’s WATER MADE IT WET had toured mainly gallery-based
locations until finding its home on the Cricket Path Bridge in Radcliffe; the
economic accuracy of its textual intervention creates a paratactic dialogue
unifying the experience of the bridge in the landscape “the decision as to the
condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.”
The New Sentence (coined by Ron Silliman) is significant
because its formal properties place it at the centre of a number of
non-narrative techniques driving a political as well as poetic challenge to the
accepted structures in contemporary poetry. In paratactic writing the
autonomous meaning of a sentence is heightened, questioned, and changed by the
degree of separation or connection that the reader perceives with regard to the
surrounding sentences.
INTERTEXTUALITY,
more recently the curatorial theorist
Nicolas Bourriaud coining the phrase ‘postproduction’ from TV film and music
editing/recording/channel-flicking for the ever-increasing practice of creating
artworks (of all types) from pre-existing works, artists and writers
interpreting, reproducing, appropriating cultural products into new works.
Intertextuality posits that a text does
not exist as a self-sufficient whole, hermetically sealed. The writer is reader
of texts before s/he is a creator of texts, and therefore the act of writing –
text or poem – is inevitably shot through with references, quotations and
influences of every kind. Moreover the reader reads the text immersed in texts.
A text is available only through some process of reading; what is produced at
the moment of reading is due to the cross-fertilisation of the packaged textual
material by all the texts the reader brings to it. Reader embody texts. The
reader is surrounded by texts, advertising, signs, exits, numbers on doors,
names on shirts, your watch, every where you look, every text you read is
intermingled with the text world in which you are embedded. Texts are reading
you. Quotation containing quotations embedded in quotations – it’s staring you
in the face.
Carolyn Thompson’s recent work explores
this relationship between text creator and text with works that generate a new
text from an ‘original’ other, drawing on an implicit subtext or principle
supplying the constructive rule. “After Easton Ellis” consists of 384 sheets of
paper cut to the size of leaves of the Picador publication of American
Psycho. Consumerism is a dominant theme in the novel, so Thompson’s
appropriation reduces the original to a new work leaving only the hundreds of
brand names in their original arrangement. Similarly, in “Winston and Julia: A
Love Story”, Thompson eliminates much of the original text from George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four leaving only the passages featuring the love of
Winston and Julia and thus creates a new intense textual work of operatic
passion.
MATERIALITY,
Text as a material, has a long history
that can be traced back to ideogrammatic languages of ancient civilisations.
Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism and Cubism all made use of text
materially. Since the Sixties, the principal manifestations of text as material
build on the discoveries of Concrete Poetry (the first truly international
poetry movement) and Conceptual Art. Although intended to be critical, Veronica
Forrest-Thomson’s observation that Concrete Poetry carried discontinuity with
ordinary language to its limits by seeking a point where language ceases to be
language and becomes simply material, visual or aural, for making patterns is
accurate, only missing Eugen Gomringer’s conclusion that: “The purpose of
reduced language is not the reduction of language itself but the achievement of
greater flexibility and freedom of communication (with its inherent need for
rules and regulations.)”
Since Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the
‘ready-made’ in 1909, Conceptual Art has developed approaches involving
installation, ready-mades, documentation and words “where the concept,
proposition or investigation is presented in the form of language.” Sol LeWitt
wrote in his Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969) “Ideas can be works of
art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All
ideas need not be made physical.” One of the leading figures of the late 20th
Century art, Lawrence Weiner famously wrote:
(1) THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE PIECE.
(2) THE PIECE MAY BE FABRICATED.
(3) THE PIECE NEED NOT BE BUILT.
Each being equal and consistent with the
intent of the artist,
the decision as to the condition rests
with the receiver upon the occasion of
receivership.
Despite 40 years of conceptual art
practice, the material of language as a visual arts medium continues to
challenge traditional notions of art as object, narrative or representation. It
is a challenge that the poetry mainstream continues to fail to meet.
“Reading as a particular reading, an
enactment, a co-production” (Bruce Andrews) may best be applied to Hester
Reeve’s remarkable work Being and Time. The artist adopts reading,
writing and thinking and re-presentation of them as modes of ‘Being’. Reeve
sitting at a desk for nine weeks, reading and transcribing by hand Heidegger’s Being
and Time, presenting the work of art as a ‘passport to a conceptual
kingdom,’ as an embodied processual effort as well as a concrete/material
object to be viewed in the gallery.
SPATIALISATION,
relates closely to the use of language as a material,
foregrounding the transition of the language object into (actual or virtual)
three-dimensions; described by Charles Bernstein as words freed of the tyranny of horizontality. Max Bense
observed: “the three-dimensional language object is the carrier of a
specifically concrete aesthetic message.” The spatialization of a text generates
a tension between the particular of the text mark/act and the generality of its
space, organized spatially, highlighting non-linguistic ground, breaking down
the meaning-bearing elements of language into graphic signs.
The spatialization of language is a
frequent operation in text art installation, with words fracturing across a
location. “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is
always something to see, something to hear” – John Cage.
Word-text-space, actually, virtually or
metaphorically, spatialized can be conjugated in such a way that their positions
imply ‘verbs’ in the spaces (silences) between them. This invisible grammar can
be read within and between categories. The linguistics of interval, position
and duration are usually closed off by line rules and structures and
dimensional limits, but “placement as a grammatical concept can be extended to
any abstraction…to a degree we may speak of meaning as a system of
permutations, as a mathematics of placement…” – Sigmund Bode.
To read/hear a spatialized text
constitutes a test for the reader, constructing readings based on the order
that the senses collide with the words, offering alternate readings, multiple
readings, generating meanings from the vocabulary of placement. Place and Time
and Duration – qualities of poetry. The modern scientific understanding of the
non-linearity of space and time is mirrored in text-in-space/time
experimentation and it’s the most familiar form of spatialization in digital
text and film animation.
RESTRICTED LANGUAGES
First glyph; the syllabary,
Then letters.
Louis Zukofsky – ‘A’
Language operates with rules (of
grammar, syntax, spelling), poetry adds further rules such as counting
syllables, rhythmic beats or lines. A constraint is an axiom of a text and
invented poetic rules become central to poetic cultures. Shakespeare working within
the rigid constraints of the sonnet nevertheless produced some of the most
original, inspired, and long-appreciated poetry known to the world. As Queneau
points out “the poet has always been dependent at least on elementary
arithmetic. If he wants to an alexandrine, he must be able to count up to 12;
for a sonnet, up to fourteen, and for a sonnet in alexandrines up to 168.” The
arbitrariness of one form over another – the established culture’s endorsement
– has over the last fifty years been directly challenged for ethical, political
and artistic reasons. The artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century
reinvented poetic forms on occasion assuming the notion of arbitrariness
adopting a poetics of indeterminacy and chance. Tristan Tzara created Dada
poetry by cutting out the words of a newspaper article, shuffling them in a bag
and writing them down in the accidental order they had been pulled out. Despite
the anti-art gesture, Tzara’s strategy to select, break up and permute a group
of words can be traced back to the 16th Century and Julius Caesar
Scaliger. All pre-20th Century permutation peoms shuffle a fixed set
of data directly inscribed into them. However, moving on from Tzara’s
innovation, in the sixties, John Cage and Jackson Mac Low engaged directly with
the arbitrary, generating a number of poetic (and musical) works with
process/random decisions related to source text selection and ordering using I
Ching chance operations.
The most systematic and determined
exploration of new poetic rule forms has been the primarily French phenomenon
OULIPO (the Ouvrir de Litterature Potentielle – the Workshop of Potential
Literature). The already mentioned “sonnet machine” of Queneau is perhaps the
best known of an enigmatic OULIPO Workshop he founded in 1960 with
mathematician – Francois de Lionnais. Aside from the element of creative fun went
a sincere interest in exploring implications and possibilities for new language
processing literature. What happens to language under the constraints of
structural formulae and how far can it be driven before reaching limits of
intelligibility? This might sound similar to Surrealist, Concrete and
particularly Dadaist ideas, but Dada aimed to break down the rules, OULIPO’s
focus was in creating new ones – famously proclaimed: ‘a text written according
to a constraint describes the constrain.’ It
generated numerous new (often deliberately simple) forms rather than
necessarily new literature, such as S+7 which consists in taking a text and
replacing each substantive with the seventh following it in a dictionary (N+7
replaces the nouns) or the lipogram (a rediscovery from as early as the Sixth
Century) in which the writer excludes one or several letters of the alphabet.
The most famous example is the novel La Disparation by George Perec in
which there are no ‘e’s. More recently in what might be called a post-OULIPO
development in the Canadian poet, Christian Bök’s book Eunoia is made up
of 5 chapters each one limited to words containing each vowel in turn.
Critically, how does a poem (paratactic,
intertextual, material, spatial or constrained) answer the charge that it is
simply a package of language games, no more poetic than a puzzle, or even plain
nonsense? Charles Bernstein’s defence of poetry challenges the claim that the
officially-approved use of language is actually ‘transparent’:
Indeed you say that
nonsense shed leds on its “antithesis”
sense-making: but teally the antithsisi
of these poems you call nonselnse is not
sense-making itself but perhps, in some
cases, the simulation of sense-making:
decitfullness, manifulation, the
media-isation of language, etc.
The poetic function is manifested when
an utterance is ordered additionally in a way which cannot be justified by the
usual requirements of linguistic communication. Each being equal and consistent
with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests upon the
occasion of receivership. Lyn Hejinian has identified the graduation or
duration of enlightenment to increased insight, what she has called ‘delayed
coherence’. The answer to Simon Armitage’s question “Is the effort to decode
them greater than the final reward?”
Is yes
With Wittgenstein’s assertion that
language itself is a game, the privileging of an ‘accepted form’ (an
intellectually less taxing approach which triumphs for that reason) over the
struggle for meaning through language is exposed as value-driven and ideologically
based.
IN THE FACE OF THE PARADOX OF LANGUAGE’S
MILITARISATION
“War, it will be seen, accomplishes the
necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way.
In principle it would be quite simple to waste the
surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes
and filling them up again, or even producing vast quantities of goods and then
setting first to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the
emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not
the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are
kept steadily at work,” said George Orwell
One leading spokesman for the Project
for the American Century, former CIA Director James Woolsey, unabashedly
declared in 2004, “we are already fighting World War III.” The reconstruction
contracts have been granted. To the Empire of Freedom you are either with us or
you are against us.
“Perhaps not what Beckett was thinking
when he wrote, “Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain
circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is
being most efficiently misused” in the war on abstract nouns.
“Instead of making art I filled out this
form” (using the sentence as the unit of composition).
AND DE-MILITARISATION,
“Poetry must involve more than the
filling out of forms – the exercise of formalities; it requires an invention of
form.” – Lyn Hejinian
Syntax, like government, can only be
obeyed.
It is therefore of no use except when
you
have something particular to command
such as: Go buy me a bunch of carrots.
- John Cage
INVENTION OF NEW LANGUAGE FORMS,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote: everything
signifies everything; concatenate this with Wittgenstein’s “The word ‘is’
figures as the copula, as a sign for identity, and as an expression for
existence; we speak of something, but also of something’s happening. (In the
proposition, ‘Green is green’ – where the first word is the proper name of a
person and the last an adjective – these words do not merely have different
meanings: they are different symbols.)” and Donald Rumsfeld can add the comment
that the five groups opposing U.S. forces in Iraq – identified as looters,
criminals, remnants of Saddam Hussein’s government, foreign terrorists and
Iran-backed Shiites – “are all slightly different in why they are there and
what they are doing…That doesn’t make it anything like a guerrilla war or an
organized resistance. It makes it like five different things going on in which
the groups are functioning more like terrorists.” A reporter quoted the
Pentagon’s own definition of guerrilla war – “military and paramilitary
operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular ground
indigenous forces” – and told Rumsfeld that it “Seems to fit a lot of what’s
going on in Iraq.”
To which Rumsfeld replied: “It really
doesn’t.”
All norms of other kinds of discourse
are changed when absorbed by a poem, and that syntax in conjunction with
convention is the agent of this change:
measure the degree of disorder in their
system
it is a matter of common experience
disorder will tend to increase if things
are left to themselves
Order can create order out of disorder
but cleaves
expenditure
effort or energy
so decreases the amount of order
Woe for our unhappy town!
Woe for thee, O lands that nurse thy
little babes!
LANGUAGE AS A MATERIAL AND FIELD OF ENQUIRY
“Poetry must involve more than the
filling out of forms – the exercise of formalities; it requires an invention
of form.” Lyn Hejinian.
MUST BE THE RESPONSE TO THE CHALLENGE OF
CHANGING EXPERIENCE.
Paratactic, intertextual, material,
spatialized, and process-rule-constricted
INNOVATION IS THE NEGATION OF THE GIVEN –
The absence of this negation, the
hegemony of the given, is the real reason for the lack of public interest in
poetry – it’s not the marketing but the product that is at fault.
THE CONTINUITY OF DISCOVERY BEYOND THE
COLONIZED
“a kind of reservation for good savages
who (without realizing it) make modern society, with the rapid increase in its
technological powers and the forced expansion of its market, work,” Guy Debord.
AND THE FUTURE OF TEXTUALITY
The failure of poetry will be the
failure of poets to challenge Poetry and the forces which would have it fail.
The way forward is not thru the basement door as Bruce Andrews observed, but in
the direct challenge to the dead weight of British (and American) poetic
conservativism,
WILL REST NOT WITH THE GATEKEEPERS,
Controlling access and distribution,
academic and social discourse, (“education teaches us to read as children, and
for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they
fling in front of us”), a curriculum that teaches poetry’s irrelevance, that
language can only be used in approved and prize-winning ways, “to divert the
taste for the new, which has in our era become a threat to it, into certain
debased forms of novelty, which are entirely harmless and muddled” – Guy Debord
BUT AS IT ALWAYS HAS,
Despite the history of appropriation and
forgetting, a consistently powerful counter-hegemonic stream has historically
played a central role in most of Art Movements of the twentieth century set out
to reinvent and challenge the language of expression. Future, Dada, Surrealism,
Fluxus, Conceptualism, were all, first and foremost, literary/language
movements and as Ron Silliman has persuasively demonstrated, historically it is
the banality of the Establishment poets that fades into obscurity. The future
of textual work will in the future be as ignored as every other previous future
has until it is the past
WITH THE RESTLESS, THE INVESTIGATORS OF
LANGUAGE,
Ron Silliman writes: “all practitioners
of post-avant writing have had to confront such questions of form, content,
coherency, implication, context, responsibility and any other number of
qualities of the poem from scratch. On average, they have had to work much
harder and far more thoughtfully than their counterparts on the far side of the
genre in almost anything they have written. & when they don’t do their
homework, it shows immediately. There may be self-delusion, but there is no
hiding allowed for post-avant poets.”
Crowd horror at the gait of a mistake
There are local degrees of freedom
Classes of excitations
To believe the heroes’ recipe.
“In a passionate age, the crowd would
cheer his courage and tremble
As he tried to reach it. But in the age
without passion, people would agree that it was unreasonable to venture out so
far,
And think each other clever
For figuring this out
Admire ourselves.
The possibility of ‘fresh’ perception,
the ability of the TEXT to outflank perception and make the receiver experience
the object in question as if for the first time. The recipe for the New itself
then cannot be new, “The concept of defamiliarization was not invented by the
Russian Formalists; Romantic writers like Goethe and Wordsworth to Proust had
discussed the power of particular linguistic forms to create ‘strangeness’”
(Marjorie Perloff); Ezra Pound’s call for poets to ‘Make it new’ is still the
imperative.
WHO DISCLOSE AND CONSTRUCT EXPERIENCE
The non-linearity of much so-called
disjunctive poetry, itself a point of contact with everyday experiences; Text
must be made by all – but text defined as enquiry, as seeking new understanding
in how language works, how reality is constructed, how life is lived, and
changed
AND MEANINGS
“The language of poetry is a language of
inquiry, not the language of a genre. It is that language in which a writer (or
a reader) both perceives and is conscious of the perception. Poetry, therefore,
takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience.”
IN THE SUBSTANTIAL AMBIGUITY OF LANGUAGE
In April 2006, after the end of the first Text Festival, I installed Vertigo, the first exhibition of my own works, in the Sleeper Gallery in Edinburgh. This began my practice of installation writing in which I created site-specific poetic texts responding to the gallery space and/or its location. Thus each of my shows was accompanied by a publication. Vertigo the book had a print run of 50 - as far as I know they sold. By way of anniversary, I include a short extract here: 
