Delivered
with ambulation.
Mutability.
Paraphenalia.
Movement, process and material
objects are three components of this interdisciplinary art, the poet only part
of the ‘exhibition’ now. Monk’s description,
characteristically in this poetics piece, offers negative aspects as well as
positive ones. Space and place are the parameters of performance. The
distinction begins benignly enough, with a formal splitting of the word ‘inhabit’
that brings forth combinations of habilitation and habituation in the word.
To
perform is to in habit space.
Performance
is aggressive occupation of
place.
Convoluvulaceous. Territorial laundering.
Whereas space is easily occupied by
performance, as a generalised environment, place (say, a named location with
its histories and stories ) demands ‘occupation’, which is annexation rather
than habitation, an opposition perhaps exemplified by thinking of space as a
horizontal leaking outwards and place as vertical, digging itself into one
location. ‘Perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far,’
suggests the geographer Doreen Massey in for
space, with a sense of multiple occupation and unfinish which matches
Monk’s inhabited sense of ‘mutability’, although Massey rejects the opposition of
space place which nevertheless still offers Monk a useful binary to draw out
the clinging (‘Convoluvulaceous’) sense of territorial appropriation that some
performance seems to demand, making its territorial mark, or ‘scent spraying’
as she puts it in animalistic terms that relates it more to the verticality of
place. (Massey 2005: 9) As John Hall
writes, in defining ‘site’ (as in ‘site-specific’, another word to describe
this work), that ‘some writers respond to site in strictly formal terms –
responding, for example, to the shape, colour and light of an internal or
external space;’ he contrasts this spatial sense with that of those who
‘respond to sites as places already full of social or cultural associations’. (Hall 2013: 159) Without wanting to sound
too reductive, we could say that space is formal; place is full of content, and
thus contestable, conflictual, and necessitating ‘Equipping body with armoury’,
in Monk’s words.
Frances Presley notes of this poem
that ‘costume is a profound necessity’ (Presley 2007: 140). Unlike Denise
Riley’s poetry reading where dress is ‘accidental’, this performance provides
the unlikely combination of, choices between,
Feather
boa.
Redriding
hooded habit.
Dietrich
slink-
acrylic
shocking-pinkoid bucket
which take us from fairy-tale to
Weimer cabaret, via ‘Poundstretcher gadgets’ and ‘other strategies’ involving different
‘Paraphenalia’.[i] All add
to the effect summarised in the first of these closing lines of the poem:
The ritualistic delineation of
space.
Chantcasters.
spell
spelleps lleps
Scent spraying. Carnal. Nails
upalert.
(Keratin overshoot is ard but dead but vital)
Toes in perpetual isometric
desperation
clinging for balance:
a body hanging by its feet.
.t.t.t.t.t.
.t.
This heavily defamiliarised passage
almost describes a ritual. ‘Chantcasters’,
a word from the headnote (but also a title of some Monk texts in their own
right) resonates with repetition to that account of the genesis of a poem, but
links with the oddly quasi-anagrammic, quasi-palindromic ‘spell spelleps lleps’
that follows. This is a ‘voca-visu’ fragmentation of language, where only
‘spell’ has a meaning (and not a fixed one; it is a word with four major
meanings, four etymologies). By synaesthetic effect this chantcasting (is this
a witch’s spell from the voices of the Pendle Witches?) transforms into the
ritual territorialisation of ‘Scent spraying’. As ever, the poem draws
utterance (or here action in space) back to the body, bluntly announced with
the unattached adjective ‘Carnal.’ The focus is almost exclusively on the human
feet, with the violent image of ‘a body hanging by its feet’, a posture at once
tense and painful, but presumably part of a performance in space, with the toes
hanging on and polished hard with keratin. ‘(Keratin overshoot is ard but dead but vital)’ uses
bold type to visually accentuate vocal stress patterns: the hard nails are
technically dead but vital to the process of ‘clinging for balance’. Feet
themselves (and the word ‘feet’ in ‘voca-visu’ doubleness) disappear into the
iterative ‘.t.t.t.t.t.’, one for each toe. Attridge argues that ‘the greater
the number of repetitions, the more obvious their anti-closural effect; a
single repetition can be read as an emphatic and final reiteration,’ but Monk
seems to both adhere to this ‘rule’ and break it. The repetitions hang to the
final ‘.t.’, a kind of
acrobatic-alphabetic finale, as though it were a single repetition, the hanging
body of closure, perhaps a corpse. (Attridge 2013: 43)
[i] I am assuming that these miscellaneous objects have been
used by Monk or observed in others’ performances. ‘Other placements demand
other strategies,’ she says, the word ‘placement’ suggesting commissioned work.
How ‘junk shop bayonets’ were used I am not sure, but the surprising
‘double-decker buses’ refers to Monk’s ‘Hidden Cities’, ‘part of a series of
“alternative” bus tours around 5 English Cities’. (Monk 2001: 117). The text of
Monk’s tour around Manchester,
‘Hidden Cities’, appears in Monk 2001: 61-70.
