Editorial

from: Editorial: The Music Issue

 “The sound of poetry is that without which it is not poetry at all.”

                                               Basil Bunting (1982)

As Basil Bunting’s remark to film-maker Peter Bell in the 1982 Channel 4 documentary An Introduction To The Work Of A Poet suggests, the relationship of poetry to music is both deep-rooted and inescapable, and that we also talk about the rhythms in a novelist’s prose, the counterpoint of dialogue in a screenplay, suggests an acknowledgement that words, whatever the form or genre, enact their own musical performance as we read them. This element of text as performance is highlighted  further when the written words are spoken aloud, and the genre of ‘spoken word’ performance takes flight from precisely that close connection between word and sound, the act of reading and the experience of hearing: in the works of any good writer, the two will seem almost wholly inseparable…

In many ways this issue already blurs the distinction between music itself and the act of spoken performance, between the music taken as a subject by so many of the authors we’ve included and a broader sense of lyrical content and musical patterning in writings that have no obvious musical subject. If Richard Skinner’s extract from his novel set in the afterlife of Erik Satie draws rhythmically on that composer’s characteristic style, and the poems of Charles Bennett, David Troupes and Fawzia Kane invoke songs, elsewhere we find that John Stuart’s poems take nature as their subject, but frame the observations in traditional lyric terms, with the musical aspects of the writing latent in the formal properties of his lines, while Chris Jones and Knute Skinner explore the kinds of subjects – imprisonment and romantic memory – that have formed the bread and butter of songwriters down the ages.

In this issue, we’ve tried to include material that operates across the kinds of productively blurred hinterlands where a written poem skirts the form of a song, where a prose story enters a kind of musical state, and where sound becomes one of the key properties of words on paper. Chris Sparkes’ tale of itinerant musicians plays with the rhythms of its narrative voice, Jonathan Taylor’s story enacts the role of music in both shaping relationships and evoking recollections of the past, while Neil Campbell’s ‘The Light On Ocean Avenue’ explores the mythologies that music wraps around our lives and relationships, as his narrator reluctantly begins the process of leaving behind the world mythologised by Hank Williams’ and Bruce Springsteen’s songs of hard luck and trouble.

Striking a similar note, some of the poems of Julie Lumsden and Sarah Hymas take place against a background of teenage rebellion and True Crime, Gregory Warren Wilson undertakes an epic dismantling of the clichés of the romantic lyric in ‘Another Predictable Moonrise Poem’ and both Eireann Lorsung and Alyson Stoneman approach the poem as a text for performance, though come at the idea from opposite angles, Lorsung’s music scored in the language of the lyric form, Stoneman’s created with the guitar melodies of her regular accompanist Milk in mind. Jeanette Leech’s look at the work of two British folk songwriters, Sharron Kraus and Alasdair Roberts, traces the outlines of one of these approaches, Ruth O’Callaghan’s conversation with the American poet-translator Marilyn Hacker another.

The two come together where the poem leaves the page and enters the world of recorded performance directly, and in some ways our centrepiece this issue is a discussion of 17 recordings made between 1952 and 1984, each in its own way a step in a long process of transfusion between page and performance. It’s by no means comprehensive – we’ve omitted many fascinating recordings from the 1960s and 70s, when everything from séances to sales pitches, medical lectures to instructions in hypnotism, witchcraft and love-making made it to vinyl, alongside hundreds of children‘s stories, and such appealing curios as Vincent Price reading the poems of Edgar Allen Poe, and chosen to end the story with the replacement of the LP record by the CD audio-book in the early 1990s. This is merely a way of drawing manageable borders around a potentially infinite subject.

That the story does continue – if anything with greater energy than ever – is in little doubt. Neil Astley’s decision to issue certain Bloodaxe titles with audio and film versions of their printed texts included in the cover price, is only one example: this was done recently with Basil Bunting’s Briggflats, an edition that includes the published text, Bunting’s seminal 1978 audio recording and Peter Bell’s 1982 Channel 4 documentary about the poet, in which many of the poem’s settings and inspirations are made visible. This was taken further still in the 2008 anthology In Person: 30 Poets, a publication in which every single poem included is also represented on one of two DVDs, packed with performances by authors from both sides of the page/stage divide, as filmed reading their own works in a variety of locations by Pamela Robertson-Pearce.

As the cost of the technology to achieve this kind of hybrid continues to decrease, and is supplemented by the possibilities of bringing text, film and audio together online – a development that has enabled contemporary archives such as Alex Pryce’s PoetCasting to grow at an exponential rate – it will no doubt become ever more commonplace to experience writing as both text and audio-visual performance. Ian Duhig once remarked, after discussing the role of memory, song and sound in his own and others’ poems, that “a poem might be something that came out of a light shade from time to time, that you’d look at, not in a book, just in the air, somehow” and it seems that the means – economically and technologically – to realise Duhig’s wistfully expressed notion may be coming to pass sooner than we think… 

from: Editorial: The Art Issue

In his introduction to a gathering of short stories written by visual artists, The Alpine Fantasy Of Victor B (Serpent’s Tail, 2006), George Szirtes notes that a long tradition exists of artists creating poems and fictions, with William Blake, Michelangelo, David Jones, Paul Klee and Leonora Carrington all having straddled the divide. Yet Szirtes also suggests that the recent embrace of art by theory has driven a wedge between visual culture and its own literary traditions, and offers an explanation of how the divide came about in the modern era: “A copy of a book is just a copy…the words transferable from one sheet of paper to another”, Szirtes notes, going on to add that works of fine art have more invested in what Walter Benjamin called the ‘aura’ of the unique, original work. Visual artists, says Szirtes, often fear “the charge of mere ‘illustration’: illustration being considered a minor, somewhat corrupt art”.

Yet in severing its ties to literary culture, much visual art has altered not the fact that it illustrates, but only the body of work it illustrates. Where Victorian artists took widespread sustenance from Arthurian legend, The Arabian Nights and the works of Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott, our own contemporaries are trained to consider concerns with myth, poetry and narrative as somehow less pure than the production of illustrations for the theories of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, or whoever it might be, artists and critics alike often remaining oddly blind to the ironies of a situation where blunt renderings of bullet points from works of institutional critique and political philosophy are considered more sophisticated than, say, Christopher Le Brun’s series of semi-abstract paintings based on Robert Browning’s Childe Rowland To The Dark Tower Came.

In truth, though, the theoretical dominance of the visual arts has always been less secure than recent discussions among both supporters and detractors of theoretical approaches might suggest, and for a major figure like Louise Bourgeois, her cryptic writings and personal history seem inseparable from her sculpture and installations, the meaning of her works rooted in a deep subjectivity. It’s not wholly surprising that Bourgeois should have become such an exemplary figure in recent times, since her roots in the Surrealist currents of the interwar years also connect her to a sensibility where the literary, visual and political were given equal weight as tools for the excavation of reality and experience, and in which the writings of Benjamin Peret, Andre Breton and Louis Aragon were as – if not more – important than the (now) better-known paintings of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and Joan Miro.

Indeed, any perusal of the history of twentieth century art reveals close connections between artists and writers, whether Guillaume Apollinaire’s role in shaping the modernist sensibility of Cubism, the manifestos and poetry of such Italian Futurists and British Vorticists as Paolo Buzzi and Percy Wyndham Lewis, or the German Expressionist and Russian Constructivist writings of Georg Trakl and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Dada produced Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Tristan Tzara, while Negritude and the Harlem Renaissance saw poets such as Aime Cesaire and Langston Hughes keeping close company with artists like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence. If the post-war years saw both art and writing become more fractured, as the various disciplines seemed to splinter into discrete academic specialisms, the impression of a separation in the aftermath of 1945 is not fully supported by the evidence. It’s certainly arguable that the plethora of cross-fertilisations that characterised the pre-war years was not continued at the same level as before, but, even so, examples abound of writers and artists swapping hats, and drawing sustenance from each-other’s activities…

…There’s certainly a powerful strain of poetic fiction in the art of Cornelia Parker, and in this issue’s interview – conducted on the eve of her Never Endings exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in the autumn of 2007 – she elaborates on some of the myriad influences on her work, while another artist featured here, Ellen Bell, draws on crafts, conceptual art and concrete poetry in a manner that echoes the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay in the pieces created for her Hard Words exhibition at London’s Air Gallery in 2008. With Nottingham painter Mik Godley’s use of painting to explore his family’s roots in his ongoing Considering Silesia project, and Simon Withers’ occasionally Pythonesque micro-narratives, the artists featured in this issue use very different approaches to obtain effects that are united in being ‘literary’ in the broadest sense. Errol Lloyd takes things even further in No Place To Hide, bringing a singular fictional creation to life, and offering his own take on another creator’s vision in a playful tussle between the real Lloyd, the fictional V.R. Da Firenze, and the late E.A. Markham that has something of the head-spinning complexity of a Charlie Kaufman script.

For the writers’ part, some respond to works of art directly, some use artists as characters and others offer everyday incidents catalysed and shaped by art. Mark Czanik’s The Secret explores a relationship shaped by a cache of stolen comic books, Mel Fawcett tells the story of a builder turned unusually focused painter in The Gift, Tim Love enters the mind of an Egon Schiele-obsessed voyeur in Muses and the protagonist of Michael Law’s Street-Walker executes a protest that seems as much a step into the realms of performance art as a personal transformation. Barbara Cumber imagines herself into the mindset of Richard Dadd in her poem ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’, Fawzia Kane looks at Arshile Gorky, Robert Vas Dias offers an update of cubism at 32,000 feet, Rory Waterman presents a series of poetic snapshots from the Faroe Islands and Cherry Smyth draws inspiration from the Musée D’Art Brut, Lausanne, founded by Jean Dubuffet…