Introduction
As part of my research for the
essay on ‘collaboration’ (which I have been writing slowly, via the method of accreting
posts on the subject, the same method I used to amass much, but not all, of The
Meaning of Form, and which I realise now is less ergonomic than it was in
the case of the book, see here: https:/rt-sheppard-meaning-of-form-in_19.html/robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/09/robe)
I read the volume which is the subject of the following review. I’d seen the author
read from it in Amsterdam in 2011 and thought it an excellent project. (See
here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2011/05/amsterdam.html.)
I hadn’t intended to review it, but an editor of a reputable journal
of innovative poetry (whose blushes I will spare) suggested that I review it
for that journal. I leapt forth – the lockdown was in its first grip of terror
and it seemed a valid distraction from the rising death toll – and began reviewing
the book, working chapter by chapter. The editor then emailed to tell me not to
bother reviewing the book because it had already been reviewed! My brakes
screeched – like the those of ambulances outside houses in the surrounding
streets: this piece was written in the back yard, listening to those vehicles’
sirens – and I stopped. I did enquire of another journal if they were
interested, but I heard nothing back. That journal is in a country with a government
more stupid than ours in its response to the Coronavirus, so I’m not surprised I
didn’t hear back. The irony of my preoccupation with collaboration and performance
during the solitary lockdown period was not lost on me.
What I offer here is three
quarters of that review (which I think is pretty good) and I hope Juha will appreciate
it. The book isn’t about collaboration but anybody following this strand will
have seen that I quote from it a couple of times, and it is worth emphasising that
there is
a collaborative
aspect to all four of the performances treated. It is an important book. You
will see that it literally ends
at a point where I make a transition to the final work to be considered. I will
let you read it so far as it goes, after which I shall comment on the projected
missing paragraphs and present some loose writings I had prepared for the
conclusion.
(For
more on ‘The British Poetry Revival’, see 1. The British Poetry Revival and here).
Events and
Effects
Review of Juha Virtanen, Poetry and Performance During the
British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect
(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
It is customary, in
discussions of innovative poetry, to make reference to poetry readings and
performances as modes of ‘publication’ (if we take that term literally, as in:
to make public). It is commonly agreed that the poetry reading is one of the
sustaining provisional institutions of the innovative poetry world. Too many
accounts of contemporary poetry turn swiftly from the phenomenon to the
solidity (and safety) of the fixed printed version of the text in order to
evidence substantive points about it. Its performance, or performances, seem
too complex to chart, and are more easily thought of as one of the contexts of
the text’s existence or transmission. To my mind, too many readings are mere
book launches, so that the oral performance of a text becomes its own trailer
rather than a (different) event in its own right, with specific and observable
effects.
Juha
Virtanen, in his short but incisive volume, wants to flip this around, so far
as he’s able (as an non-attendee at four selected poetry performances during
the years customarily assigned to the British Poetry Revival) to account for,
relate the details
of, and analyse the effects
of, these events. (The book refers to itself as Event and Effect;
a number of volumes in the excellent ‘Modern and Contemporary Poetry and
Poetics’ series, ably edited by Rachel Blau du Plessis, have reversed title and
subtitle, so that Virtanen’s focussed title now appears as the subtitle, as
though it were an afterthought, in favour of the much less elegant but easily
e-searchable Poetry and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980, blazing with keywords. If more people find this
book, and its separate chapters, which are also available electronically, via
this contrivance, then I am pleased, though I am better pleased to possess the
neat paperback.)
What happens if one analyses works
which are postmodern to such an extent that they already ‘have the characters
of an event’, as Virtanen says, quoting Lyotard? [1]
At worst, one has an unstable event produced from an unstable text that
amplifies those complex effects mentioned above. Such poems are already
‘event-like artworks’.[2]
One has to negotiate, Virtanen says, the ‘parallels … between the analysis of
“radically incomplete and unfinishable” innovative poetry’, whose poetics he
outlines deftly in his introduction, ‘and seemingly “non-graspable” performance
events’, which are his main concern.[3]
This calls for a methodology, and
Virtanen skips over both Deleuze (though he uses the rhizome as a useful
analogy for this network of dynamic relationships) and Badiou (who has
theorised eventness in detail, but who is not engaged with), to find both a
model and an exemplar in the work of A.N. Whitehead, and he recalls it at
strategic points in the book. Whitehead meditates upon Cleopatra’s Needle in
its post-Imperial position on the Thames Embankment; he considers this
undeniable object in terms of its event-like aspects: it changes as it
is examined, and re-examined, temporally, spatially, psychologically,
phenomenologically. The one thing it isn’t, under this fluxing scrutiny, is
stable; it is inter-connected and fluid, formed, though unfinished, through
intersubjective multiplicity. It is, though this term is not used, forever forming.
This leads onto Virtanen’s marvellous, central observation upon which the
book is constructed:
Applied
to a poetry performance, this formulation suggests that the various audience
responses can be understood as being simultaneously both unique to a particular
member of that audience as well as connected to the event’s collective
experience as a whole. On this understanding, the poetry performance is
characterized by a kind of ‘cacophonous collectivity’ where the event is both
singular (we all witness the same proceedings) and plural (we all form distinct
responses to it) ... Both the performing poet and the audience author
the event, and this intersubjective ‘authorship’ means that the narratives of
such events are multiple.’[4]
It
is odd that he uses the example of a single poet reading here, because he is
clearly aware that the range of possible performances stretches from the
monotext delivered in a monotone through to the kinds of multi-voice and
multi-media performance he introduces us to by the book’s conclusion. He is
probably keeping the issue simple at this stage. He promises the reader
assaults upon the authority of a single poet in his model of collective authorship
that fuses poet, performer and audience. His references to the extended and
expanded techniques of Caroline Bergvall, Bob Cobbing and cris cheek leave us
in no doubt of the applications of his arguments beyond the four previously ‘unexamined
… events’ he has selected.[5]
Despite this theoretical underpinning, his approach is both ‘archaeological’
and ‘archival’, and he wisely announces that his analyses will take the
specificity of each event in its own, unique terms.[6]
Virtanen has his work cut out for
him choosing as his first occasion, the June 1965 Poetry Incarnation at the
Albert Hall, organised by a committee with Allen Ginsberg as the cultural
centre, a mass event much mythologised by commentators, ranging from Michael
Horovitz to Iain Sinclair (though with participants like Barry Miles trying to
offer his best factual accounts). To call it a ‘site of manifold ambivalences’
is probably an understatement’.[7]
I have never been quite sure who read (or didn’t), and when. Some named
performers seem distinctly un-countercultural (as Ginsberg noted.) The short film
of the evening, Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion, is necessarily highly
selective as documentary evidence. Who were the seven thousand people who
endured eight hours of poetry? The ‘carnivalesque performances’ may have advanced
‘a temporary sense of liberation’, and they may have been a boost for the
British Poetry Revival, and it is treated as such in Horovitz’ Children of
Albion anthology (1969), and even in Jeff Nuttall’s less utopian cultural
history, Bomb Culture (1968), but it did not feature many of the writers
we now recognise as its major poets. In this sense, the analogy that Virtanen
draws with the star-studded 1955 Beat reading in Six Gallery is incomplete,
although he makes much of the physical spaces of both environments, pointing
out how the Albert Hall operates as a détourned post-Imperial space, and
he uses both Situationism and de Certeau’s analysis of micro-political spaces
deftly. Of course, Ginsberg’s presence was central to both events. Despite what
he calls the ‘multifarious facets of the Incarnation’, Virtanen focuses upon
Ginsberg’s performance, which, while not his best – he was drunk and parts of
the crowd were hostile – he points to the effects of both ‘the presence of the
author-poet as well as the cacophonous collectivity of a multiplicity’.[8]
Ginsberg read two poems of his own,
the mantric ‘The Change’ (published by Cobbing’s Writers Forum), to which a woman
danced while Ginsberg chanted, but this is judged a failure, due to the poet’s
aggravated mood, and ‘Who Be Kind To’, which Virtanen figures as a success. He
outlines the balance between the poem’s negativity regarding the Vietnam War and
the poet’s recent positive immersion in Liverpool’s sub-culture; Ginsberg
‘performs within a terrain that is organized by establishment culture, and
seeks to create surprises in the cracks of its proprietary powers’.[9]
If so, this seems a sombre and limited victory compared to the consciousness-raising
hopes for the evening, though Virtanen then re-models the event as one in which
the intersubjective attention of the audience, in dialogic co-authorship,
moulded their responses, both during and beyond the evening, to the poet’s own
enraged tenderness.
Virtanen is not blind to the gender
imbalance at the heart of the British Poetry Revival, and at the Incarnation in
particular. Things were not very different at the second Cambridge Poetry
Festival of 1977, although there were fewer people in attendance, since this
event catered for the more specialised audience (many of them writers) of the
Cambridge nexus. Virtanen’s focus is the first public reading by the young and
unknown Denise Riley, one of the few women to read, in the company of her
co-author and associate, Wendy Mulford. If the poetry of the Women’s Liberation
Movement may be characterised as ‘political committed poems of experience’,
then Riley and Mulford’s were political committed poems of theory, which
included feminist theory, but also political, post-structuralist and poetic
theory (though the tenets of the last, poetics, are not discussed here).[10]
Riley is also the anti-Ginsberg, not presenting herself in performance and
publication (although the long interview appended to the chapters manifests
Riley only to witness her testimony: ‘I was so sick with fear and horror and
loathing of having to stand up and make an exhibition of myself.’)[11]
Not surprisingly, her early work deconstructs gender markers, but liberation
seems always freighted with inherited guilt, since those markers – particularly
the ‘I’ of lyric poetry, but also the performative body – cannot be theorised
away, despite the urge to do so.
The opening of the reading was an
attention focussing Hwæt! With Mulford, with whom she had collaborated
on a book of unassigned poems, carrying the unforgettable title Marxism for
Infants (a famous sneer of Orwell’s), she chanted the overheard phrase, ‘Am
I, she asked, going to make feminist scrambled eggs’, which mirrors the
questioning of pronouns in the feminist statement then read, and in the
subsequent poems themselves. With reference to Judith Butler’s theories of
gender performativity, Virtanen traces this process: ‘If Riley’s poems in Marxism
for Infants and elsewhere resist the lyric “I” as a singular heroic
persona, her performance continues to transgress the social foundations and
conventions that produce these singularizations.’[12]
It is the social that is engaged with in the rest of the analysis, from
the accidental intrusion of a vacuum cleaner as Riley reads a poem about
women’s labour, through to the audience in discussion, rejecting Riley’s generous
reading of one of Mulford’s poems. Although Virtanan is at pains to present the
two readings analysed so far as equally co-authored with the audience, I find
it odd that he does not contemplate the effects of this Q and A following the
reading; does this academic convention diminish the power of performance? To
me, it is also interesting how many of the traits of Riley’s later work were
present, not just in the (freshly) published work, but in Virtanen’s rich
presentation of its performance, since social performance is so often her
theme: the paradoxical self-consciousness of not knowing from what particles the
(female) self might be assembled.
Paradoxically, a little-known text
by a well-known figure of the British Poetry Revival, Eric Mottram (indeed, as
a critic, he popularised the term, and identified the dynamics of performance
at the heart of its practice) plays an important role in Virtanen’s argument.
Mottram’s Pollock Record of around 1978 is a script consisting of ‘
“three big sheets with all kinds of materials on them, with black lines around
them”; during the event, the three collaborators would “read one selection one
after another”, and the proceedings were brought to an end when one of them
“reread one of the sections” that had already been uttered.’ [13]
An image of one of the pages of the more recently published text might have
been useful here. Virtanen charts Mottram’s shifting beliefs about performance:
he emphasised the presence of the poet but also the instability of the
indeterminate script for performance (though this need not be a contradiction).
The unifying principle of these ‘materials’ is American action painter Jackson
Pollock, ‘a totemic figure’,[14] we
are told, to whom the script pays a kind of multi-voiced ventriloquial homage,
by mustering quotations from Pollock and from other related sources, put into
relation by the presence of Mottram; it ‘attempts to incorporate Pollock within
a wider constellation of materials’.[15]
Virtanen’s spatial metaphor is exact to the visual disposition of the text. But
in tracing some personal contexts (not least of all the events at the Poetry
Society in the mid-1970s) this text is a deeply personal one (with its stated commitment
to experimentation).
Virtanen goes so far as to say, ‘Pollock
Record is an arena where Mottram attempts to actively work with with Pollock
as a mutual collaborator’.[16]
The word ‘attempts’ alerts us that Pollock is not a collaborator like Mulford
was for Riley, because he has no agency in the piece. However, ‘this
interaction seemingly occurs via fusing the painter’s technique with the
performance of the poem’, in ways consonant with Mottram’s most inspiring
essay, Towards Design in Poetry (republished by Veer/Writers Forum in
2004).[17]
As Mottram says, there were two live collaborators to assist in performance,
Allen Fisher and Bill Griffiths. The unrecorded performance was indeterminate
in structure and vocally dynamic (I’m not sure this fully ‘fuses’ Pollock’s
action painting technique) but it was less so in terms of duration. Mottram
spoke afterwards of the expectant tension of performance but after twenty
minutes, Griffiths repeated some material and the performance (according to its
one rigid rule) ceased. ‘It WAS a mistake,’ Mottram insisted; ‘He wanted to
keep going much longer.’ [18]
I have my doubts (though I cannot prove them). Griffiths was a seasoned
performer and improviser, with Bob Cobbing and others, and he would have known
exactly the point to stop the performance, particularly if he felt it had
yielded whatever complexity was possible and/or if the performance was
beginning to lack energy. As Fisher says of Mottram (in the second of the long
interviews included in this book), ‘His experimentation was kind of reserved.’ [19]
Allen Fisher, on the other hand,
had no such reservations. His practice since the 1970s intersects many
projects, several artforms, in publications and performances…
That’s
as far as I’d got, when I opened the fated email. This is a shame because
Virtanen goes on to consider Allen Fisher’s Blood Bone Brain, a
multiply-conceived piece of work which has always mystified me, partly because
I have in my possession (and have for about 45 years) the programme for one of
the performances (which I didn't attend), which listed performers and the groups of 39 instances
(photos, jars, objects, recordings, texts, etc) that comprise much of the work.
I was pleased also to see that this work becomes central to some of the
discussions in the new Allen Fisher Companion (mostly written before
Virtanen published his study; see here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-essay-included-in-new.html).
Anyone interested in Fisher’s work will find both of these books useful for
recovering some of the conceptual schemes and frameworks Fisher utilises (and I
know that I have paid them too little heed, preferring to concentrate on his
two major textual projects, as I do in my contribution to the Companion).
I
know that in my review I wasn’t going to be able to fully engage with one of
Virtanen’s terms, ‘event’. I pasted in the following from an earlier post on
this blog (see here and,
more recently, here) that
attempted to summarise Derek Attridge’s sense of the 'singularity of literature', particularly with respect to our aesthetic
engagement with it as an act-event: art is both something that happens to us
and something we do. It seemed that this formulation might answer the question of the participation
of the audience to show what a limited (but fundamental) part its members have
to play in the creation of the event as a whole. The passage is:
In The Singularity [of
Literature] he [Attridge] insists upon the fact that genuine
literary engagement (that is when one is reading non-instrumentally) is both an
event that occurs and an action that the reader does, that is both
passive and active. ‘The coming-into-being of the work of art is, I’ve been
arguing,’ Attridge argues, ‘both an act and an event: it’s
something the artist does … and something that happens to the artist’. (220)
Creation and reception are similar: ‘I use the term “act-event” in order to
capture the strange duality of this process in which active and passive are not
clearly separable – whether we’re talking about the work or the person
responding to it. In this way, the work is remade each time it is read’. (247) …
Reading is a ‘willed passivity’. (2)
I also seem, at some point of
the drafting of this review, to have offered myself a conclusion that combined what I had
read in Virtanen with the general literary focus of Attridge which I now use habitually.
(I guess, it occurs to me now, that, as a critic, I am an Attridgean, should
there be such a thing.)
Conclusion:
The
‘text’ of the total performance is a multi-systemic act-event that only the
reader as witness can put together. Juha Virtanen’s Poetry
and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect
presents his ‘conception of performances as events of intersubjective
authorship and cacophonous collectivity’. (p. 21) This occurs at exactly the
point where the reception of the literary work as an act-event (in Derek
Attridge’s terms) opens the whole thing out to a multiplicity of
intersubjective assemblages, a co-creation of many minds beyond the two
performers.
All posts in the collaboration strand may be
accessed via links at the end of the first post, a hubpost, as I call it, here:
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html
Only one more post to go.
[1] Juha
Virtanen, Poetry
and Performance During the British Poetry Revival 1960-1980: Event and Effect (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017),
p. 15.
[13] Virtanen, partly
quoting Mottram, p. 85. I would like to thank Adrian Clarke for forwarding me jpegs of the published version of Pollock Record.
