‘Vocalised (public)’ is the longest
of the sections, perhaps in recognition that the poetry reading (one poet: one
poem) is the common form page-based poetry performance takes. As John Hall says,
in an almost Apollonian vision of this,
Y writes a page
that becomes a book
when he performs
that writing the words are on the page, which he has written, are in the form
of the performance, inform it and are transformed in it[,] (Hall 2013: 28)
all of which is acknowledged in
Monk’s more Dionysian poetics, where the informing and transforming is both wilder
and embodied in wilder language. ‘Public and
pubic are too close for typographical
comfort,’ the poem opens (after the repeated head note), though it is the
vocalisation of this common (and embarrassing) misreading that is
discomforting: ‘Spoken so pointed it
should be spiked with a double ‘k’.’ Curiously Monk describes this transformation
instead of effecting it and transforming the word ‘spoken’ into ‘spikken’. The
voice is spiked, the language is as physical as the poet:
The
bodied poet
broke
on the back of phonemes
and
puns with heart-reach
or
slightings
Puns (and this poetics abounds with
them) either are affective or effective (as jousting insults). A variety of poetry
reading venues, from utilitarian ‘Bright/college rooms’ to quaint and twee
‘Upon-/a-time shops’, snap their way across the line-breaks, until we arrive at
an italicised phrase which appears twice in this section: ‘Poet as an Exhibition’. Two phrases lie behind this locution: the
neutral title ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, as in the Mussorgsky rhapsody, and
the complaint (to children or egregious adults) that they are ‘making an
exhibition of themselves’. [i] This
is precisely what a poet does in performance – makes an exhibition – in
revealing
origin:
gender-age race
species height
weight dentistry
speech defluct
stam r twitch [,]
all features in their socially
obvious obscenity, the performer utterly vulnerable. ‘Mean-time exposure’ shows
meanness could be the cruel response to a ‘stam r’ for example. This emphatically
is not rendered as a gendered apprehension here, but another female poet,
Denise Riley, also describes the exhibitionism of the poetry reading, noting
how ‘it ushers in a theatrical self with a vengeance, the performing I bringing
her accidents of voice and costume and mannerisms to flesh out a starved text,
married and reconstituted with it in fullness before the eyes, like wartime
powdered egg soaked in water.’ (quoted in Hall 2013: 73) However, Monk counters
this theatricality with a measured presence as
a performer, which means that ‘Body mass is conduit’ not just socially-judged
‘weight’. The point of this poetics embodied in a poem is that neither it, nor
the ‘poem’ being evoked into imaginary performance by the text, is ‘starved’,
in Riley’s formulation. ‘Max somatic dynamics’ are even rendered as an exciting
list poem without fear of metaphorical powdered egg or performative nuptials,
metaphors which separate text from performance:
Body limited in overdrive:
upright/
uptaut/ double-bent/ kathakalic.
Voice exitings:
inc(h)ants/
warbles/ sprechgesang/ gutturals.
Nerves:
edgling
up arterials of interior weather maps.
Humours:
four
and growing. Corporeal compass points.
Text-gesturals:
Rhythm.
Ythmm. Timing. Timbre.
The Happening-stance:
The
preposterously loud death-thud of the
fledging
against the bedroom window.
This last image seems a violent alternative
to the ‘birds and clouds and bits of paper flying through the sky’ of
Levertov’s happenstance listing of occurrences that evoke and then enter the
poem, but the process is the same, the outer limit of a poetic compositional
process. The list begins with the body mass of the performer-poet and her
gestures and energy. The form of the list acts to order levels of performativity
and at each level we are offered performance choices. The voice, or kind of
voice, is a matter of some choice, not an ‘accident’ as Riley insists. The
performer can choose between canting and chanting or opt for the formal
technique of ‘sprechgesang’, which lies between speech and song. Somatic neural
pathways through corporeal humours, metaphors that combine the scientific and
the pre-scientific, share a directional and territorial sense of discovery (with
maps and compasses). The ‘text-gesturals’ perfectly enact the echoic
progression from the formal properties of ‘Rhythm. Ythmm. Timing’ to ‘Timbre’, sonic
shading that unites form and content, in the contextually powerful ‘Ythmm’, and
concludes on a gentle roll of the poetic tongue: ‘Timbre’. [ii]
[i] The
opposite notion of being ‘inhibited’ seems equally objectionable.
[ii] The monologue is the poetic form most alive to
capturing a single voice on the page, usually through some approximation of
speech. ‘Responding to a poem being recited involves performing the particular
performance of it that I am hearing.’ (Attridge 2004: 86) This fact requires
further theoretical work.
