Notes on a Poetry Gig Without Remembering a Single Word of Poetry:
Guillotine #6, 18 June 2019 - Montenegrofisher; Emma Bennett; Ulli Freer
Why do bad readers recite their poetry? To give a true interpretation? Because no one else will? Why might we feel short-changed if an admirer read it instead, giving up the text to misreadings and delinquencies? I attended a poignant-gruesome last reading by John James last year where it was in doubt if his terminal illness would allow him to complete the reading. I don't think anyone would have swapped his deathly whisper for a stand-in reader, even as an act of charity.
The poet-impresario latterly known as mjb has sought a strong performative identity for the Guillotine reading series (feeding directly into the Gang Press pamphlets he produces). I'm aware line-ups can be a happenstance of who's available, but Guillotine 6 was a highwater mark in programming and performance.
I still await a duff gig by Luna Montenegro and Adrian Fisher, so unfairly magnetic, so apt to play with shamanic kitsch, or load their excruciatingly measured deliveries with single banal words. And they started in arch tones that could have left their sequence, entertaining as it was, merely clever. They could have relied on their punctuations of musical, physical slapstick to carry them through. But they carry off their baroque performances because they are fine poets who have chosen to write/work in a deeply collaborative way, where the operations and affects of language and cognition are set rudely against the non-verbal, the chthonic, the ridiculous. They may well see themselves as circus tightrope walkers, bouncing a sagging line between bathos and poetry.
Emma Bennett wrote her dissertation on something-or-other and stand-up comedy. I'm guessing she's tried her hand at it: her delivery deadpan, modest, clipped, and brought to bear on a sequence of birdsong poems. Analyzing the lifts and falls and gurglings of various songbirds, she has reimagined it as speech, allowing melody to direct her to poetic utterance. The lines most often take the form of demotic filler and repetitions - (I can't remember the words but imagine her saying, It's like -- it's like -- it's like that wotsit, that wotsit, yeah that -- wot?). It's an elegant conceit full of poetic interest, and one that cannot work as well on the page as it does in performance. She has a fine singing voice to nail the pitches. If she were to get someone to notate the melodies it would work at least as well as Messiaen. She did another performative piece, with a story about her loading her furniture on stage as an installation, which I'd wager shows her stand-up style, but I can't remember much about it.
Ulli Freer was launching his Gang Press pamphlet 'Untitled' and began his reading with an invocation of sorts -- raising a large quasi-hieratic-cum-ethnic scroll, pressed the button to some music off, and gave us a minute of his spindly boogying bum. I think it was an icebreaker for himself. Thereafter he read the chapbook seemingly in one breath, his body ratcheting and voice collapsing, in a tour-de-force recital; each squeezing out of the projective lines galvanizing the body to another herky-jerky assault. By the time his voice, flogged to the ragged edge, had heaved up the last rhythm, the audience was as exhausted as him. I can't remember a word he said.
So what was I left with when I went home? -- a vague memory of confirmation bias? As much as we are able to concentrate on a concatenation of words, we are more likely to be following sonic pattern or the poet's personality. Perhaps our attendance is a performative act, paying our dues as members of the poetic tribe in a gift exchange economy (the books, the gigs, the reviews, even -- dare I say it -- the teaching jobs). I have a memory that some of what I was hearing was good poetry. I'm convinced of the memory.
I have sympathy for quieter poetries, that are not 'performance writing' as David Buuck describes it, that seek their effects in unprogrammatic prosody. But these texts are given perfunctory voicing. People would think I was being provocative when I would rail that such readings had little to do with the poem. You might just as well get a computer software to read it out.
Hardly a person in contemporary writing believes in a crude philosophy of 'correspondence', with signifiers standing in for real objects out there. Why do poets behave as though their performative mumble represents the page, backed up by an author-ity? So much hot air expended on the autonomous workings of language, a proxy site for disobedience and undermining of the master-text, while all the time we are complicit in the illusion of the authentic.
But enough of this mental chatter. Here I stamp my connoisseurship's approval on this blurry evening, convinced as I am of my own taste. I can't muster any evidence to support this judgement (like a line, or a phrase), but I'm sure you've had this experience yourself.
Khaled Hakim has returned to innovative poetry after almost two decades away. In the 1990’s he published sparingly and performed semi-improvisatory routines. Letters from the Takeaway was published by Shearsman this year. The Book of Naseeb is slated for publication in May 2020 with Penned in the Margins. The performative work The Routines: 1983-2000 is due out late 2020 with Contraband.
khaledhakim.weebly.com/poetics
