Divine Muses IX

On National Poetry Day, last Friday night, I attended a reading by 6 NZ poets in the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland city. This was a popular event - around 60 people attended - and in the black foyer the poets reading under a spotlight rose to the occasion.

As a regular event organised by Siobhan Harvey, this was MC'd by Penny Summervale and Rosetta Allen. The theme of this reading was autobiography in poetry, which prompted comments from the poets and the choice of poems.

Readings began with John Pule, who read several poems in a shy but entertaining fashion, including a moving one for his father -  "the rising saliva of misfortune."

Sue Fitchett was next, and quoted Milosz, saying "we do not witness our poetry, our poetry witnesses us." She was a confident performer, using concrete gestures as though laying her words down on the paper as she spoke. She commented on her poems as bones in a lot of white space, so that the reader is prompted to see what is not there, not remembered or non-existant. As she read her sequences, each poem growing smaller, each surviving word became potent.

Iain Sharp was entertaining, possibly the audience's favourite of the evening, with his dry self-poking humour and expressive voice. He began with "The Iain Sharp Poem", commenting that a review by Lauris Edmond saying that his favourite subject was himself is true. Further poems were also entertainingly read, included this line "it's all crap anyway, he cackles, & scratches his protuberant gut."

Siobhan Harvey read next. She said that a newspaper had called her a Confessional poet, and that she would embrace that mantle & move on. She read several recent poems about her son, which had many striking lines, such as "his brain is fluent with storm / his tongue is slick with blue-bladed invective." Siobhan finished with her self-described motif poem, "Waiata tangi for Cris & Cru."

Riemke Ensing was a witty performer, clearly prepared for the evening, and gave a personal, open performance of several memorial poems, including for Charles Brasch ("certainly there's more to life than words & pounds of fudge to keep you satisfied") and her brother ("this almost impossible promise of spring"). Riemke commented that she had almost given up writing, but as a reader of her work, I hope that she will find that even though "conditions of writing could not have been more dangerous", this is when the truest and most alive work can happen.

The final reader was Harry Ricketts. Harry commented that the idea of autobiography in poetry began with the Romantics, quoting a critic that "Wordsworth liked to confess to virtue, Byron liked to confess to vice". His casual, energetic, even fidgety reading of several poems springing from a book in a secondhand bookstore, two paintings, and experiences with his son, showed that autobiography could be, as he mentioned, a spring to the creation of a poem, and not necessarily the content.

At the end of the evening, the results for the 2012 Emerging Poets Poetry Competition (Auckland University Press & Divine Muses IX) were announced, with first prize going to Elizabeth Welsh, and second prize to Alana Bruce. The judge's report by Anna Hodge can be read here.

Review : The Pathos of Space

NZ poets Jan Kemp and Siobhan Harvey have recently completed a project to improve the selection of NZ poets on the UK poetry archive, and this was celebrated with a launch in Auckland. I reviewed the launch and readings for POTROAST.

What good are the arts?

Learn a poem by heart, and you have it forever.

Comments on and quotes from John Carey's "What Good Are the Arts?", a 2005 book mentioned in my previous post.

What is a work of art?
Carey begins with a very interesting chapter how how we define a work of art and gives his own definition - that is "A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person." Here his balloon-pricking is hilarious - what things cannot be works of art? Excrement, perhaps? Empty space? An unmade bed? Unfortunately not, according to the activities of artists and acceptance by museums and galleries.

My favourite story was Aaron Barschak, who was charged with criminal damage for splashing red paint on a work of art in an art gallery, the gallery walls and the artists in 2003. His defence was that he was creating his own artwork, just as the artists had done by using etchings by Goya, and that he "intended to enter his work for the Turner Prize".

Other interesting points - "high art" vs "low art" as "what I feel (in response to high art) is more important, special & interesting than what you feel (in response to low art)." But the point Carey hammers in all the way through the book is that we can't know what other people feel, only guess. Sometimes, in some ways, that guess is pretty good. But it's never complete because we can't literally feel what they feel, only what we imagine they might feel based on what we know about them. Relativity is all. Which makes his focus on literature in the second half of the book very interesting, though he admits it's a personal bias in just this way, to prefer one kind of art over another.

Debunking some pro-art arguments
Art as religion : "Artists, as Jacques Barzun has observed, are popularly credited with the divine powers formerly attributed to religious figures. They are expected to be 'demanding' and obscure, like ancient oracles. They are always 'ahead of their time' like Biblical prophets."

Art in the community, not imposed on them but part of all our lives. Art as a part of the usual tasks we do - decorating our homes, for example, tatooing, and other times when by making something special we are creating : "Arts research needs to change direction, to look outwards, and - following the example of Laski and Bourdieu - investigate the audience not the texts."

Literature & self-criticism
"Literature is not just the only art that can criticize itself, it is the only art, I would argue, that can criticize anything, because it is the only art capable of reasoning."

You could argue that self-criticism is present in an ironic installation piece taking the piss out of an artistic theory. Carey says : "Pieces of music can parody other pieces, and paintings can caricature paintings. But this does not amount to a total rejection of music or painting. Literature, however, can totally reject literature, and in this it shows itself more powerful and self-aware than any other art." And goes on to name a number of pieces in literature that reject writing and reading. That the coherent argument against something can only be present in literature (or words borrowed by opera and film). Music is empty of meaning, consisting of sensations that may or may not be interpreted similarly by different listeners.

Literature & indistinctness
The vital element in literature, indistinctness, which forces the reader to use their imagination and effectively create the story in their heads. As in Blake's Sick Rose:

O rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

What or who is the worm, why is it invisible, and since a worm does not fly in the night, what does it mean? Carey argues that this indistinct imagery forces us to create the story for ourselves, to a greater or lesser extent. Most interesting here is that he traces the flowering of indistinctness in literature to Shakespeare.