Thinking about performance and gesamtkunstwert

Since the positive feedback I received after the "Sitting Room" event on Friday I have been thinking a bit more about how to improve my poetry performance. i think the reason I got such a positive reaction is because I thought very carefully about what I was going to read out - what would be accessible to an audience that might never have heard the work before. I realised that the poems that work best are the ones that have some kind of narrative with surprising abstract imagery within this framework.

A couple of the poets read work that works well on the page but is hard to grasp when read aloud (unless you also have a copy of the poem in front of you). I think people at readings need familiar images to give them tools to navigate by - things that are ordinary, that they can relate to. Some of my poems (especially the mythical ones) work well on the page but are less accessible when read aloud, especially if you are not reading to a purely specialist poetry audience. What may work at Cafe Writers perhaps might not work as well with a more mixed audience. A reader doesn't want to scare people away from poetry with the denseness and complexity of their poems. That doesn't mean that they should dumb down their content either, just that we should think about our audience when selecting what to read rather than simply reading our personal favourites.

Today I came across the term "Gesamtkunstwert" - a work that encompasses many art forms. Wagner used the term to describe a performance that encompasses all the art forms - theatre, literature, music and the visual arts. This reminded me a little of "Sitting Room" and I wondered
how it would work if all the elements of the evening: film, poetry, music, were more connected somehow. I have also been thinking about how I might be able to incorporate images somehow into my readings. I have seen several performance poets who use power point to add imagery and text to their shows.

I have already decided that I like the use of physical gestures - for example touching the face, rubbing hands together, sniffing fingers - gestures that go with the text of course.

Hughes, Plath and that Eureka Moment

I don't think that there can be a female poet in America and the UK that hasn't been influenced, at least a little, by the work of Sylvia Plath. When I first read Ariel seventeen odd years ago I have to confess that I didn't much like it. I found her work audacious and arrogant - I suppose I judged it how many people did at the time it came out. I was affronted by the ugliness of her imagery and her seemingly casual comparisons between her own life and that of Jews in the concentration camps.

Coming back to Plath all these years later I find that I am reading her with new eyes and a much more open mind. It might be because I am older and have had more life experience. It might be because I now a mother. It might simply be that I am much better read than I was and I know a lot more about poetry. Now I find her work refreshing and inspiring. Her imagery is arresting and surprising and her sense of alienation is something I can both relate to and that I aspire to in my own work.

Ted Hughes is an altogether different kettle of fish. I first looked at Hughes work through the eyes and words of Crow in the first year of my degree course. At that time I didn't like his work at all. I found Crow to be heavy and overly masculine in both its imagery and language. I found it clunky and ugly and far beyond anything that I could relate to.

Three years later and with a lot more poetry and critical reading under my belt I find that I have somehow found my way back to Hughes. The first sparks of interest were ignited when i read the poem Do not pick up the Telephone, which was recommended to me by a tutor who saw some similarities in a poem that I had written. Next I came across the poem Wolfwatching on the Internet and I was hooked. I liked it so much that I immediately bought the book on ebay. This led me, in a round about way, back to Crow. I had been writing some semi-mythical poetry myself based on the idea of the trickster and I though that as part of my research and support work I would re-visit Crow - so back on ebay I went and bought a copy. This time I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying it and found myself wondering why I had been so closed-minded to it before.

I think that doing the BA has really opened my mind. I thought before I started that I was open to abstract and unusual imagery, but I realise now that my open-mindedness was more limited than I imagined. I had to move beyond my comfort zone and broaden and deepen my reading. I am reading poetry now that I found difficult and sometimes inaccessible when I started the course. I can only liken it to the way my taste in art developed. When I was a teenager I was attracted to the romance and bright images of the Pre-Raphaelites - I didn't really like or 'get' most abstract art. It was as if I had to move through appreciating several different art movements before abstract became the movement that I liked and related to - a kind of visual evolution.

With poetry I had to go through a similar evolutionary process. As a child I moved from nursery rhymes to nonsense rhymes and limericks, then onto humorous and epic tales and as a teenager I found myself in love with poems like Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot and Noyes's The Highwayman. These were I suppose the poetic equivalents to the Pre-Raphaelites and a little akin to the romantic novel. I still retain a fondness for them now and because of their rhyme schemes and rhythm they are particularly good poems for both memorizing and reading aloud. Next I moved on to readily accessible poems: love poems, Auden, Betjeman. And later those whose economy of words and simple but beautiful images I found arresting like Lorca and Neruda.

Since I started the BA I have read and read and read. I have been like a child let loose in a candy store. I have tasted a little of everything and found that there are some sweets that i come back to again and again. Some of it took a little while for me to warm to or to 'get' and sometimes in the first year I found it to be overwhelming or felt inadequate for not getting it. But I am so glad that I have persevered and I sometimes wonder if some of my peers who gave up poetry as being "too difficult" would have also had a eureka moment like I did if they stuck at it. The joy of suddenly connecting with something, to have evolved to the point where Simic, Popa, Hughes etc make perfect sense to you is amazing. I want to roll over and over in it like a dog in shit, rejoicing in the simple beauty, concrete detail and elements of surprise that they deliver time after time.

Autobiographical Poems

Within my collection of fictional autobiographical poems I have tried to create, through use of language and imagery, a sense of alienation and displacement. I wanted to subtly show how the sense of being an outsider that the narrator feels as an adult is echoed in her experiences as a child growing up on a small town housing estate, and that this in turn is echoed in the experience of her family as a whole. Although these poems are not directly autobiographical they do naturally have definite echoes of my own experiences within them. I would hope that I am not as unsettled and alienated as the character in the poems but I have experienced some of those feelings at different times in my life. I was also bought up on a small town housing estate and can trace a sense of displacement and alienation through my own family’s experience. It may have begun with my mother’s grandparent’s move from Southern Ireland but for me it really began with my parent’s move from London to Thetford in the nineteen sixties. My mother was from Ealing and my father was from Acton – both busy centres with a lot going on. They had both been brought up in London. In 1969 they moved to Thetford due to availability of work and housing. They were part of the first wave of what was known locally as “London overspill”. Thetford couldn’t have been more different from London. It was a small rural market town surrounded by pine forest. They had moved themselves away from everything they knew and all their friends and family. It must have been a hard time for them, they did not know a single person in Norfolk and although my father had his job, my mother was isolated at home with a small child. They did not have a car or a phone and had little money for travelling home to visit relatives. There was only one busy road in Thetford – the A11 and that gave the impression of passing the town by, especially when in 1970 the route was diverted from passing through the town centre.

As a bright child who was often bored in school I spent a lot of time gazing out of the classroom window daydreaming about who might be inside the colourful cars and lorries and where they might be going. Cars held an extra mystery for most of the Redcastle Furze kids because in the early 1970s very few families actually owned one. The only person in my family who owned a car was my dad’s mother who would come and visit us once or twice a year. On the day of her visit my sister and I would wait all day by the tall landing window vying for first sight of her yellow mini as it rounded the bend. We lived on the main road in and out of the estate but there was little traffic – maybe five or six cars a day.

There must have been some sense of animosity or alienation between the incoming Londoners and the native Thetfordians, which my parents might have noticed – but as a child I was blissfully unaware of such things. I was however acutely aware of my own sense of “otherness” which partly stemmed from the fact that though essentially working class my parents were fairly intellectual. The house was filled with: books, music, craft objects and the walls were colourful and covered in large French posters. My mother was large and to cover this she wore floor length homemade dresses (a source of acute embarrassment to me as a teenager). They also enjoyed a fairly active social life – they were involved with CND, Thetford Against Missiles, a local arts centre and gallery and later on ran a folk club. This may all sound fairly exciting and idyllic but it was coupled with a precarious and volatile relationship.

Dylan Thomas said that when he first came to love poetry as a child that it was the sound of the words that he came to love first and the meaning was only secondary. For me it was the opposite - I loved the places that the nursery rhymes and poems took me to. I wanted to be that pedlar man driving his gypsy caravan through the countryside or dancing round a fire at night in the woods with the raggle taggle gypsies. I didn't neccessarily need my poems to have a narrative but I did need them to have something that drew me in and allowed me to dream myself out of my ordinary life and into some mysterious other world inside the poem.

The Magic of Existence

"It is not 'how' things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists."
(Wittgenstein)

Similarly poetry doesn't seek to describe 'how' things are but the magic of their very existence. One way of doing this is ostranenie (остранение) or defamiliarizaation - the poet seek to show us something ordinary or mundane in a new way - an example of this is the poem "Fork" by Charles Simic:

Fork

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

Simic believes that "The labor of poetry is is finding ways through language to point to what cannot be put into words." (Simic, Charles, Wonderful Words, Silent Truth - Essays on Poetry and a Memoir, University of Michigan Press, 1990). I like this analogy, when I read a poem I like it to take me by surprise, to turn reality on it's head for a moment.

Simplicity

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

(Hans Hoffman)

When Hoffman said this he was talking about painting but I think that this quote equally applies to poetry. Good poetry is all about eliminating the unnecessary words and creating space (like Hoffman's light) for the ideas to breathe and grow in. The words are like colours in a painting if you pile to many on or crowd them too close together they become muddied and lose some of their beauty.

Cliche in Autobiography

I have been reading On The Edge by Richard Hammond as background research for my dissertation (which is an investigation of celebrity autobiography and the misery memoir). Hammond is a famous British television personality - most famous for shows like Top Gear and Brainiac, Science Abuse but also for the near fatal car crash and subsequent brain injury that he sustained whilst filming. I chose to read Hammond's autobiography because like many others I have developed a soft spot for him - I was endeared by his quirky, humorous and down to earth presenting style and the fact that he comes across as being reasonably intelligent. I was, however utterly disappointed by his book. It seemed to me that he hadn't given anything much of himself in the work, his writing seemed to consist of one cliche after another. I became heartily sick of hearing how grateful he was to his family and how lucky he is to have recovered. whilst I am not doubting his sincerity or trying to diminish his gratitude, I was however left with the feeling of having just read a glorified thankyou card rather than an autobiography. Hammond is very vague about his childhood and gives little away about what he was really like before his accident.

It seems that a lot of writing these days - especially autobiography relies very heavily on cliche - I wonder if it is a form of laziness - publishers want to get the books out quickly whilst the market is ripe - so they don't take the time to really work on them in the way that a novelist or biographer might. Or is it that it is too easy to get published these days? Celebrities don't become famous for their writing skills - so should we expect them to be able to write to the same high standard as a novellist or biographer? Or has the "Dumbing Down" (to use a cliche) occured as some would have us believe, in response to public demand. Do the readers of today prefer a more conversational, less literary writing style?