Starcrusher Night: Cambridge, 09.03.13

This was again at the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio in the Faculty of English in the University of Cambridge, ok, so, an 'institutional' or 'academic' space, but thru its temporary inhabitants granted some extended drunken spirit. After an endless projection of a lo-fi(lm) the less of which said the better (save that J. Hardingham’s Klaus Kinski is a fine Klaus Kinski_), interval spillage spilled over into wine-table chatter sprinkling the edges of the opening drones of one O. Evans, down with the flu but freshly haircut & armed w/didgeridoo, kaoss pad & assorted other implements electronic & acoustic. His 20 minute set, billed as 'noise', began proper with a reading of the night's wall-tacked schedule, announcements of multiple intervals drawing an incredulous 'oh my god' from a certain attendant Poet of High Repute; preceding between the advertised noise and the more luxuriant melancholia of pre-recorded loops, Evans' set went on to incorporate treated blarts from a (non-indigenous) patterned didgeridoo and an in-progress set of homophonic translations of the work of Henri Michaux, said by their translator to concern the relation between drugs and the state. No hippie nostalgia here, then, that refusal carried

over (after one of the aforementioned intervals) by the decidedly anti-hippie Sean Bonney, for whom, as his 'Letter on Harmony and Crisis' makes clear, any indulgence in a past history of supposed radical art must be questioned as recuperated nostalgia (“Old films, old music: abstractions, commodities[...]Old songs made an integral part of the phrase velocity of the entire culture”) even as such past history must be simultaneously clung to for the possibility it offers of continuing resistance in this here ("the circulation of these songs does contain within itself the possibility of interruptions"). For the past couple of years now, Bonney's writing has taken a turn towards prose - as he said of the series of 'letters' from which he read, of which that concerning Harmony and Crisis is one, “these are not poems” (tho' at the time he had first started writing them, caught off-guard by this unanticipated formal turn, he was describing them as ‘prose poems’). Instead, one might read them as something like communiqués, bulletins, reports from some kind of front-line in which the speaker - described by Bonney as a 'fictional character' but in many ways obviously identified with the poet himself - hangs around in his East London flat or wanders the supermarket meditating on, among things, the riots of August 2012, the growing rhetoric stacked up by the U.K. gov't against the unemployed, and the history of oppression woven into Cecil Taylor's 'Unit Structures', in which each note is said to form part of a "a kind of chain gang, a kind of musical analysis of bourgeois history as a network of cultural and economic unfreedom." This would seem of a piece with the bulletin-type quality of Bonney’s poetry over the past few years, a quality exacerbated or perhaps in some way produced by their first appearances at his blog, abandoned buildings. "like getting a telephone call from the barricades, the Paris Commune.” Yet it seems that the move from poetry to prose is not a simple transition to ‘the bulletin’ or somesuch: indeed, one might, it seems, say things with more directness in a poem, which indicates something both about how little poetry is taken to matter nowadays (hence the fact that censorship controversies occur over hip-hop records or rock lyrics rather than ‘poems’ per se: a case such as the prosecution’s use of Amiri Baraka’s poem ‘Black People!’ in court is pretty much unthinkable now), and about relative levels of censorship with regard to differing forms. This is what Josef Kaplan is getting at, in however deliberately controversy-courting and politically bull-headed a manner (verging on some kind of anarchistic nihilism), when he makes a statement like this: “Poetry itself doesn’t do shit. Which is why you can have things happen in poetry that would be horrifying or terrible if conceived of in spheres outside of poetry. Which is honestly the best part about poetry.” And OK, without having to entirely agree or disagree with that (it seems to verge on the sort of justifications used by repellent neo-Fascists like Peter Sotos), you can see how lines of Bonney’s like “slaughter the Fascist BNP” or “if you meet a Tory in the street, cut his throat”, would mean something entirely different in one of the Letters than they do in the poems. I think. I may be wrong. But there’s no easy trajectory here, whereby both poetry and prose can be taken as allowing a political discourse that it is more direct than the other; and Bonney seems to have felt the change in registers or formal structures as something of a crisis in itself, at one stage wondering in public if he was even a poet anymore.

The acuteness of this privileging of poetry over prose as knowledge-repository, for the kind of thinking in form that it allows might seem to those perhaps not as (emotionally, intellectually) invested as Bonney in the world of poetry as an over-reaction – why should working in prose be a betrayal, or an incapacitation of certain strains of thought? And yet it is a dilemma that we might see enacted in the work of the writer on whom Bonney has recently finished writing his Ph.D, Amiri Baraka: the sense that, to write a political poem, one must nearly destroy the qualities that make the poem a ‘poem’, that the content of that poem moves beyond the form(s) in which it originally appeared so that the poet suddenly finds themselves spinning out lines of what are, essentially, lineated prose. In Baraka’s case, this takes an extreme in his first collection of Marxist-Leninist poetry, ‘Hard Facts’, tho’ at the same time there is an increased emphasis on the poem as ‘score’ for reading, as oral repository rather than as object fixed by eye-reading – even as this rhetorical register might just as well be said to echo the political speech as the ‘poem’ itself (“Malcolm the artist. Touré the artist. Nyerere the artist. Karenga the artist” writes Baraka in an earlier, Black Nationalist essay in which he ends up claiming, Situationist-style, that “THE LARGEST WORK OF ART IS THE WORLD ITSELF”). In Baraka’s more recent work, which has barely received any critical discussion, something of a rapprochement is enacted between a self-consciously ‘poetic’ form and an attempt at dialectical thought, often centred around puns in a manner more than a little reminiscent of the esoteric-playful signifying practices of Sun Ra or Rammellzee’s coded alphabets. Indeed, an essay such as ‘The Blues Aesthetic and the Black Aesthetic’, collected in the recent book of essays on music, ‘Digging’, shares very similar territory to the poem ‘The Book of Life’, excerpts of which are included in Aldon Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s anthology of African-American poetry, ‘Every Goodbye Aint’ Gone’: the same puns occurring in both works, the notion that rhythm and the entirety of life itself is a dialectical process being one that is presented, accessed or reached as much through the afore-mentioned puns as it is through logical argumentation. One might argue that this process is itself anti-historical, given that the suggestive connections Baraka draws are based on double-meanings that only work when one considers, for example, an ancient Egyptian word as an English one ('Isis' becoming 'Is/Is') – it is hardly a philological or etymologically-sound approach, a tracing of the actual history embedded in language. Yet perhaps this is not the point – the work exists half-way between actual, fully-thought theory and a scattering of suggestive and playful notes, hinting at lines of thought without quite pinning them down with exactitude. Certainly, to posit that the rhythms of African-American music embody the materialist dialectic, as opposed to the stale old Adornian dismissal of jazz or the Left’s continued miring in Bragg-Seeger folksong-sterilisations/ aspic-encasements, is a step forward, even if it risks over-generalisation and a reliance on a-priori concepts; and the re-writing of Islam, within the poem ‘Allah Mean Everything,’ as an assault on capitalism, the suppression of women, and the monetary system, assumes political relevance within current Islamophobic trends.

But further discussion of this really does get us way off point, and the details of Baraka’s poetry/prose dialectic(?) perhaps don’t apply so much to Bonney, whose poetic style, as much as it is fed by the same African-American musics that Baraka champions, cannot operate out of that same cultural or racial community, emerges from a different situation and a different tradition, originally (just as, in the 1960s and 70s, European Free Improvisation emerges from Free Jazz but takes it in a different direction). And Bonney’s prose, if we’re calling it that, is very different from the sloganeering aspects of Baraka’s most dogmatically MLM poetry: rather than preaching from a pulpit and attempting to create a black-working class revolutionary alliance through sheer rhetorical force, Bonney’s speaker, the letter-writer caught between requests for money and patronage from his relatively well-off, employed friend, and contempt for that friend’s bourgeois conformity, is acutely aware of the poet’s own implication within a recuperation of discourses and, above all, the peculiar economic status of the poet, the scholar, or the artist in general within capitalism, both critiquing and feeding off the system. Certainly, the poems of ‘The Commons’ in particular are acutely aware of the problematic status of what Bonney elsewhere calls “legitimate ruins like the letter I”, i.e. the fabled lyric I, rescued from Language Poetry’s complicit dismissal-disguise and re-asserted as a kind of collective I/eye borrowing from folk song, thieving its sources like the cuckoo bird – but, in assuming a seemingly much more stable subject-position, within the prose letters or, as Bonney suggests, ‘short fictions’, of the recent works, different conventions are played with. {{One might draw parallels with the return of an almost joyfully-over-emphasized ‘I’ as the seeing subject of J.H. Prynne’s most recent poem, ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ – the visionary seer of medieval dream poetry periodically asserting “I saw” – yet, in Prynne’s case, this very return of what had been, according to many ‘critical’ accounts of his late work, in any case, banished and removed, may in fact be an attempted means of extinguishing subjectivity once and for all.}} If Bonney’s letters play with conventions of, I don’t know, the epistolary novel, collections of letters from Benjamin, Olson, Rosa Luxembourg, whomever, they are also a means of heightening the relation between addressor and addressee that the poems, in their spasmodic creation of enraged community, particular in performance, are less explicitly concerned with, assuming a shared register, for ‘us’ and against ‘them’. That rhetoric certainly continues through here (the description of bourgeois ‘understanding’ as the bullet in the brain that ends the life of the Headmaster in Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If’), but with an acute sense of complication, of the urge to lunge forward in rhetorical-overstatement but of the gap that this lunge raises between theory and practice; of the dependence of the letter-writer on the very system his entire writing project is predicated on destroying; or the containment into commodity from not only of human lives and labour but of the artistic ‘products’ often simplistically supposed removed from that cycle. (Bonney’s comments on the recuperation of Cecil Taylor’s ‘Unit Structures’ into (shelf-)units(albums) or over-priced Royal Festival Hall tickets echo the dilemma described acutely in Iain Anderson’s article ‘Jazz Outside the Marketplace’, whereby the attempted economic self-organisation and resistant dissonances of 1960s free jazz were steadily incorporated into university professorships, Guggenheim grants, support from the Rockerfeller foundation, removed from the black communities for which they claimed to speak and, in many cases, reduced to another ‘high art’ commodity.)

This simultaneous turn to a foregrounded subjectivity, however loosely identified with the author’s own person (parallels with Baraka again, his semi-autobiographical practices in ‘The System of Dante’s Hell’, ‘Tales’ or ‘Six Persons’ through to ‘Tales of the Out & Gone’), and the self-critical positioning of that subject as distinctly non-heroic, trapped within the obscure mathematical or scientific systems that Bonney outlines as the workings of capital (“the intense surges of radio emissions we’re trapped inside. Cyclones and anticyclones” // “the base astrological geometry of th[e] supermarket […] revealed as simplistic, fanatic and rectilinear”) might be characterised as part of the ‘turn’ from poetry to prose, even as this narrative is complicated by the fact that Bonney still occasionally writes lineated poems and that such discourses of the trapped are present both in ‘working notes’ and poems that have appeared on his blog. Perhaps, then, the letters are a synthesis of these working notes and poems, filtered through the foregrounded subject-character as new stylistic amalgam that is more than ever concerned with “the problem [of] how to make whatever it is that is trapped in aesthetics, idealism and in history learn to speak,” but that has decided to do so through an examination of methods, life-minutiae and habits rather than some more ‘elevated’ form of exhortatory utterance. "It's difficult to talk about poems in these circumstances."

That summation, tho', still implies a chronologically over-simplistic description of the move 'away' from poetry towards a more discursive style as a reaction to a particular political situation, a growing dissatisfaction with the constant gap between the purported heroic potential of king-killing poetic utterance and the actual indifference various fugitive publications and scenes might provoke in the actual sphere of political action. True, there have been discussions of a return to the distribution of oppositional poetry thru, say, handing out broadsides on street corners, printing multiple leaflets of poems to hand out on marches as displacement of the usual SWP factional-evangelical pamphleteering; there have been readings at occupations. And these various measures have never seemed to go quite far enough, or to fulfill their objectives even when 'implemented'. Bonney:

"Yeh, I turned up and did readings in the student occupations and, frankly, I’d have been better off just drinking. It felt stupid to stand up, after someone had been doing a talk on what to do if you got nicked, or whatever, to stand up and read poetry. I can’t kid myself otherwise. I can’t delude myself that my poetry had somehow been “tested” because they kinda liked it."

Similarly, Kent Johnson's suggestion to the UKPoetry List run from Miami University that the supposed thriving underground of British radical poets should all join the SWP also falls flat, (particularly given the rape-apology scandal now engulfing the party), even as its provocation towards political organisation remains pertinent. But while this might all have to do with poetic or prosaic form, it might equally not. Still, it's worth considering here the use of prose sections in Keston Sutherland’s recent work, forthcoming in the ‘Odes to TL61P’ - in particular ‘The Clearance of Trafalgar Square’ - even if Sutherland describes these as simply (or not simply!) an extra-long verse line; or, similarly, Justin Katko / Jow Lindsay’s ‘Trigger Warning’ -- both examples written as reactions to specific political events which seem to invoke a particular stylistic register that, while full of exclamation, invective, invocation, lends itself to the prose line rather than to shorter ‘poetic’ lineations (even as both Katko and Sutherland have also been recently and simultaneously working with much more ‘old-fashioned’ forms of poetic affect that strike an equally surprising register). Perhaps J.H. Prynne’s ‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ also (in sharp contrast to the monosyllabic clippings of ‘Streak ~ Willing ~ Entourage ~ Artesian’).

In any case, whether or not the Letters’ generic indeterminacy (maybe not the right word) occurs as a specific formal reaction to political crisis, said indeterminacy (wrong word, Cageian), does indeed render them hard to pin down in a manner very much congruent with certain strands of politically-aware ‘artistic’ writing. As much of Bonney's work over the past 10 years has done, they include appropriated slogans, quotations and phrases from a wide variety of communist writers and African-American politicians and artists, Marx on surplus value jostling up alongside Eldridge Cleaver ("all else is suffering and madness at the hands of the pigs") in a style certainly departing from (as in beginning, but also diverging or being suspicious of) certain Situationist tenets -- re-appropriation, the use of arcane vocabularies as a kind of underground cell of resistant language - the alternative tradition Bonney earlier identified in Blake, Bob Cobbing and Abiezer Coppe, and which increasingly comes manifested in an African-American tradition of Amiri Baraka, Cleaver and Cecil Taylor, or the radical kernel at the heart of the work of Arthur Rimbaud, 'translations' of whose work draw parallels between its engagement with the Paris Commune and various protest movements in the UK. This appropriative practice was figured primarily through music in Bonney's major sequence 'The Commons', which he has described as a 'modern folk song', taking its cue from the re-ordering of collective folk fragments described, for instance, in Greil Marcus' treatment of 'The Cuckoo Bird' in his book 'Invisible Republic': here, the sonnet form ("this thing has fourteen lines / as in picket lines" Bonney writes in a later poem) collided with black American music of (roughly) the 1930s to 1970s, Adorno, B-movie zombie register of a kind found more obliquely in the work of Bonney's partner Frances Kruk, current political discourse, and a debate on the nature of the lyric 'I', in a highly wired, jerky, spasmodic series of short lines characterised by a jammed-up connectivity that terms borrowed from other disciplines like 'montage' or 'collage' would not do well to define, a sense of simultaneous foregrounded breakage and forced elision, where the song of the cuckoo becomes the song of Betty Davis (‘he was a big freak’) or the sound of a gun-shot ("the cuckoo is a / BANG"), the disruption of pastoral idyll by urban energy and the suppressed underclass that allows the aristocratic fantasy of the healing power of the countryside its arcadian shadiness (shades as in spectres, of course). And while the Letters are often about music (and specifically the notion of harmony as cover for a system of social order(ing) that covers and masks injustice – see here in particular the discussion of the Pythagoreian antichthon in an article called ‘Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City’ that can be found here), in contrast to 'The Commons' their affect is of a different kind that can’t really be called ‘musical’ (as even ‘The Commons’ itself wasn’t, really, so much, given that the term is so often banded around in vague broad-brushing of a general area that might be better identified as ‘has strong emotional/rhythmic qualities in performance that produce similar convulsions as listening to certain kinds of music’).

But, OK, here’s what I’m getting at – with the change in the style of writing, so a change in the style of reading, of the style of reading that the style of writing demands (because, after all, poets don’t necessarily write what they write as a guide to how they might read it; they might write it and then have to find ways to read it – this is something you hear people say a lot, e.g. “I haven’t really found a way to read this poem yet,” and so on.) So, Bonney’s reading itself, in Cambridge, began quietly – as he notes, the Letters are not really meant to be read out loud, in a way that it was immediately obvious the poems of ‘The Commons’ were, as he launched into them with foot-jerking intensity. But, and not to valourize the following as some sort of sense of (the appearance of) suffering-artist-intensity as lending a particular kind of privileged vatic ‘truth’ to utterance (somewhat akin to what Anthony Braxton calls “the sweating-brow syndrome,” in which the more sweat a jazz musician dispenses, the more ‘authentic’ they are deemed to be, with all the problematic racial stereotypes that implies), that sense that the poem or the thing you are reading, because recent, because wrestling with formal dilemma and thus all cracked and imperfect and wrong, is wrenchingly awkward and painful to read, almost embarrassing, is something that has resulted in some of the most powerful readings I’ve seen in recent years. Say, for example, Justin Katko’s rendition of his own afore-mentioned poem about the 2011 riots, ‘Trigger Warning’, at about this point last year: in which Katko sat in a chair and appeared distrustful of the very rhetorical vehemence and shouting intensity that his reading eventually moved into and that the poem itself fully and completely inhabits and provokes. Certainly, or partially, anyhow, in Bonney's reading, that quality of nervousness mixed with the occasional vehemence of the work read out went some way towards approximating or paralleling the mixed stylistic and theoretical register of those works themselves, the desire and necessity to strongly speak undercut and yet somehow reinforced by the self-questioning webs of implication that that poet’s voice implied. I’m not saying that this frisson of difficulty and strain should be applauded as an end in itself, but that its evidence that poetry might still be thought (as in, it might still be a form for thinking) gives some sort of hope, even as there are not ever easy answers here.

Lisa Jeschke’s reading style is almost the opposite of this, avoiding emotive effect for something that is certainly not ‘neutral’ but that comes to a very different place than, say, Bonney or Katko. The recently-written piece she read on the night emerged from a dissatisfaction with the form of her own recent work – almost an opposite trajectory to that of Bonney, in fact, in that her own previous pieces (collected in ‘Materials 1’) often consist of large undifferentiated blocks of prose which she would have described as ‘poems’, but which she has come to view, following recent discussions & symposia, as, in terms of, formal categorisation, something of a cop-out, an inattention to poetic form as poetic form. Hence this new piece, each line exactly seven syllables in length, often relying on deliberately clanging and obvious rhyme, as a kind of parodic return to rhyme that questions its own affect but that cannot quite be described as simple ‘irony’ or ‘parody’ (interesting parallels here, again to Katko: the first poem of his ‘Songs for One Occasion’, with its “ocean grave”s and waves). Also some play on English-German translation, reversed verb forms: references here less (as in previous works) to (a) personal ‘life experiences’ (meeting a drunk man in a park; burying a childhood friend under a pile of earth; &c.) or (b) critico-theoretical-theatrical debate-terminologies, more to - what? A change in voice, anyhow, “neutral chide,” some sort of unplaceable bite.

Ian Heames following, reciting the second half of ‘Array One’, of which I’ve written at length here, and a new poem, 'Orca Plaintiffs', which seems to continue that poem’s mix of computer-game and poetic register (“my opponent believes that the universe is made of fire”) shot through with the discourses of techno-capitalism. And Tomas Weber, whose ‘Another Word From Me Out of Uniform’ has just appeared from Tipped Press, and whose running-on of different register-phrases is, again, very different from all of the above: if Heames’ poetry is clipped aphorism, sequential thought, cross-referencing, Jeschke’s concerned with (various) form(s) as restriction, Bonney’s again with form and voice and the political, Weber’s seems in some way unforced, even distinctly pleasurable: Biggie Smalls meets F.R. Leavis but not in any music-journo Metaphyiscal Poets mash up bastardisation (this from 'Ausculation': “and I will never rhyme / like party and bullshit” […] “it wasn’t really / Leavis who said the way / the British do war is still true / to English mannerism and so I love you forever / & always or was it”). Yet in the recent long(ish) poem, ‘Performing for the Troops’, the run-on joins that make much of his work so pleasurable are deliberately not soldered, the links not fashioned, so that there is something brutal to it, even as it gets a hearty audience laugh (“Who’s that fuck? / Shut up, fuck”). It's hard to write about because it resists the more broadly theoretical frameworks into which one might place the other poets, and that might make it seem more ‘insubstantial’ or something; certainly, earlier work had a strain of lyricism to it that still perhaps functions a little (traces of American pastoralism tho’ by no means unconscious of imperial complicity) - the poet actually wanting their heart to be a plane, I can’t remember the exact reference – but here lyric most often moves into exchanges of selves as collections of clothes or children or radio stations or youtube videos that aren’t so much lang-po playful or even, in the vein of O’Hara’s ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, self-critically-camp-playful (partly because Weber isn’t American and so the register is different, even if American culture as filtered over to the UK and in summer travels is very much present), but poised more obliquely between laughter and something more sinister, even disturbing, as in those lines quoted above, the subject not allowed voice, mocked in authority-figure mimicry -- shut "that fuck" up, “wants to be / some speaking thing.”

That combination of poets constituting quite a long reading, intense continuance, so interval spills over, again: music set-up, second noise set, O. Evans again kaoss padd’d, this time w/added Minton/Patton-esque screaming and even at one point a trace of school melodica; Gregor Forbes’ industrially-reverb’d Pure Data factorials, some other PA’d laptop & pickup-to-practice-amp feedback’d human, but I think it all merged into one blart of sound in which individual contribution was less important than general sonic mass (though perhaps a little more ‘improvy’ than Japanoisy?). It had started to fucking snow outside & bits of it had melted and were dropping off people’s hair. I think Nas replaced Bad Brains as interval music @ this point, then in fact the longest section of the evening, Nat Raha and Verity Spott the final poets of the night. Raha read, among other things, poems for Sonic Youth to the accompaniment of vintage cassette recorder as lo-fi voice-multitracking, youth against fascism – “it’s the song I hate” – the words themselves not really decipherable, the effect more akin maybe to something that might have come out of the choral-voice experiments of 1970s NYC (Hannah Weiner, Jackson MacLow &c.) and the more unexpected for that. The poems without tape that started things off were from Raha's new collection, ‘mute exterior intimate’ - where exterior might be buildings, might be faces, bodies in spatial negotiation, indie or shoegaze leakings thru with seagulls into critiques of neo-liberalism, memorials for victims of transphobia, the spectral presences of Mayakovsky and love, the “doctrine of bliss and suffocation.” Spott’s was the longest reading of the night at maybe over half-an-hour, certainly the most intense, and not only in terms of sheer length, veering between grotesque-choke sound poetry, @ one point even throwing the pamphlet read from down on the floor and repeatedly punching it. The audience laughed a lot, and this seemed right, but, like a lot of the laughter that punctuates readings like this, it came back rebounding on itself because the work itself is hardly comfortable, is scatological, grotesque and highly sexual - infant sexuality too, a long joke about fucking poets turning into a dialogue between two children centering around the many implications of the activity implied in the familiar insult ‘motherfucker.’ Kind of traumatizing, really, but (and) for sure visceral in a way that, say, the noise set before even really wasn’t, and hard to process in that way because less precise than, say, Heames or Jeschke, throwing itself all over the place with words and words and words in often uncomfortable excess. Spott herself describes it as “digusting and ungainly”, which it is in parts, deliberately and distinctly so.

And that kind of intensity necessitates another interval, and then Business Lunch make their debut with a three-song set, absent singers and last-minute rehearsals shaping, at this stage into the evening, into something fitting right in place, some noise keyboard too over the bass & guitar riffs in the more extended last piece. Shudder and jump // "got the swing" // more rock music at readings, yes? Jeremy Hardingham closes the evening with a-cappella songs and some karaoke to Die Toten Hosen which is hardly karaoke as ‘we’ know it. He reads a poem about the killing of a bird with an oar and then sings it, closes with a tender ‘goodnight’. There’s again a lot of laughter here, but I think that to laugh in this way would be to take the songs @ a face value that does a disservice to their non-naïve non-irony: many parts were, you know, moving. Tho’ the “fist full of piss / apostrophic bliss” barnstormer, well, yeh. It's been in my head for days. At one point Hardingham sang literally with a silver spoon in his mouth, but again, that was hardly boringly symbolic even as the joke-resonances of it being symbolic were of course not discounted. The room heaved. It was still snowing outside. (The equivalent event last year was called ‘Spring Decoys’. There are daffodils outside the English Faculty. The area around Grange Road in which the faculty and the University Library are situated is ghost-empty at night, darkness on the edge of town. 'Cambridge', as much as this university-sphere-cocoon constitutes it, is so far from the real world, whatever world might be made inside black boxes. Why not throw an egg out of a moving white van outside one of the gated colleges, built to be thus gated, enclosed? But these big one-off events might be made to move into something else even if no one from the ‘town’ was ever going to come down to the university bowels, the City of Dis. By which I mean, maybe there will be some sense of a series extending somewhere (viz. http://starcrushernites.tumblr.com/.) Onward christian soldiers.

promômo

materials: lisa jeschke david grundy jeremy hardingham lucy beynon david stent patrick farmer george osborne danny hayward mattin staff laura kilbride. magazine & cd. there will be future publications from individual authors, and future magazines.
material-s.blogspot.com

also: 'contingencies' (ed. luke mcmullan / sophie seita): mcmullan, seita, grundy, jeschke, rowan evans. email contingencypress@gmail.com

Spring Decoys: Cambridge, 17.03.12

A decoy is usually a person, device or event meant as a distraction, to conceal what an individual or a group might be looking for.

'Spring Decoys' was a festival, I guess you'd say, that happened in Cambridge over four nights the previous week: this year's version of the Miscellanous (theatre?) Festivals which Jeremy Hardingham has been curating in the Judith E Wilson Drama Studio for the past few years and which have seen some extraordinary collisions and collections of poets and performers and musicians, extending often from seven in the evening till three in the morning – energies of productive chaos and some sort of social sense derangement, energies which you can take within you as tinderbox or as constellated spark which can't ever be fully translated outside that place's seal (even when you're inside that very place, that drama studio, again, for some other event), but which yet you do take, you do carry, in readiness for expected or unexpected re-prompting, re-flaring. The come-down is what's worse, and the chronicling or cataloguing of what did occur schematically is a part of that, but how else to make a sense of it beyond that it was, merely, a good one-night last stand?

So, yes, the Decoys were, then, drawing on this spirit of Miscellaneous Festivals past, the difference this time I suppose being that 'performance' and 'poetry' each had their slots on different nights (Wednesday's event in particular, involving Ollie Evans and Ian Burrows and Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon and Irum Fazal and Jeremy Hardingham, deserves a write-up which I haven't given it). Though the poetry event was far from a simple 'poetry reading', Justin Katko (that night's curator) maintaining, throughout the evening, an improvised noise jam (some keyboards / some max msps / some recorders and some kazoos / some record players / some melodicas / some korg monotrons) which played thru the intervals and even under and into some of the readings (most notably under Jonathan Redhorse's rhythmic and droll prose delivery and, at that stage of quiet spaced-out drifting concentration that inevitably sets in at the end of such a long and varied evening, under Samantha Walton's reading, accompanied with artless tenderness by Jow Lindsay on Jandekian plugged-in piano). At various stages, too, Jeremy Hardingham enacted extended or momentary solo performances which seemed both to work alongside and against those readings whose sonic and physical space they shared. Indeed, the evening was visually dominated by a construction he'd rigged up along the centre of the room (the audience placed around the walls' square) -- a row of large envelopes bundled into bag-shapes, filled with pieces of paper confetti (stage-snow, I guess), and dangled from the ceiling on ropes and electric cables, large pieces of squared paper taped underneath, to the black box's floor. Occasionally, he would perform a sudden act of what one might either term vandalistic outburst or creative opening up (evacuation?), unravelling, revealing what lay inside the initial formulaic blankness of the envelope scrunches, ripping and dropping fire exit signs, hammering white-painted wood constructions, crawling and contorting and eating paper snow and white dust.

But that I've written on his performances at this length doesn't mean that they dominated proceedings: there were 18 readers in total, one turning up on the night and asking to do something – which he did – the others mixed between Cambridge locals (who got five minutes each) and invited poets from out of town (who got fifteen): Marianne Morris, Sean Bonney, Ed Luker, Joe Luna, Jow Lindsay (tonight, as 'Sofia Stres'), Jonathan Redhorse, Frances Kruk, Danny Hayward, Samantha Walton and Jefferson Toal the visitors; Ryan Dobran, Neil Pattison, Tomas Weber, Caitlin Doherty, Connie Scozzaro, Luke Roberts, [Blank] the 'Cambridge poets'. As line-up this doesn't look 'established', though poets such as Bonney, I guess, count as 'big names' within the ridiculous but hopeful smallness of this 'underground’/ as it is: yet, yes, it looks like a young scene, and a varied scene, no 'Brighton' school or 'Cambridge' school, no Prynne vs Sutherland vs London debates, but an invigorated and ironized and heartfelt, often rebarbative, but in the end in some provisional way really collective, 'scene' (not even that word, which is too fixed, perhaps, though I don't mean to imply that 'anything goes'). Now this seems something like the line Chris Goode lays down in his introduction to the 'Better than Language' anthology, with the additional overlap (outside a book) of performance -- the poets' noise ensemble, the presence of theatre makers (themselves often poets or deeply invested in poetry) such as J. Hardingham, O. Evans, L. Jeschke, L. Beynon, whether performing or in the audience. In all of this the ramshackle (conversational adjunct, private whispers and jokes, interval spilling (wine as well), the passed bottle of whiskey, bar zero, the endless negotiations with the english faculty's electronic locking system) existing alongside the purposiveness and intensity of thought and critique of the poetry itself, which was, in the end, why we were there.

To go through the readings one by one, oddly, perhaps. Marianne Morris' set, its early placing and non-combative (tho' not lazily or easily won) gentleness, its quiet emotional and moral resolve, as she read fragments, literally at times, small scraps of ripped paper with the words written there; this method of reading, presenting work in progress and in working method, offering it up outside the category of the 'finished', is a risky move and one whose results could vary -- but having seen Morris read twice now, on two succeeding Saturdays (previously at the 'Women Poets Against DSK' event organized to follow the traumatic protest against the shameful platform given to D. Strauss-Kahn at the Cambridge Union), it is a method which in those moments has perhaps said, despite my initial reservations, or done, or made us or I feel, more than the overt aggressive hammering rack/ratch-ets which too are necessary and kin to it, and into whose anger too it spills: and this was a quieter reading, certainly, than the first: and the poem dedicated to Mary Stillman, tho' I can't quote its substance back as I'd like to, was really, yes, beautiful in its non-naïve directness and wish. Ryan Dobran's poem with its wit, hanging out in an alley with Michael McClure. And the release of laughter in that, the first now enabled in the audience. Neil Pattison, one of the highlights of the evening, I thought, reading his new and very different work, which is bright colours and Delicate Steve and Skeletor (these poems were addressed to Skeletor) and his reading, shunning the microphone, pacing and looking up at those for whom the poem was shared, and looking up to show that this did mean something in poetry and in life, and it did. And Sean Bonney, all prose, the letters he's been writing for the past six months or so asking themselves about poetry's efficacy, and the prose poem as form, or discovering what formal hybrid between, in any case making in that an argument which we do need to hear and hear even if at moments there might be the flare-ups or disagreements that any such strength or force of conviction-polemic might engender.

The first interval.

Ed Luker, reading much the same set, I think, as that delivered at the Foule Readings last term, last year: again in that internet jargon'd, ironized register which maybe is a 'Brighton' thing in some way - Joe Luna's reading later doing it too, tho' differently; Tomas Weber, the wax wiped off in time, his hours of labour invested the previous week in the making of the four-page poem he read on the night, proceeding as it did oddly on that mixture of allusion and joke (the twenty different nationalities that made their appearances, the fleeting characters disappearing in the space of a line or a word, the strange role and negotiation played by semi-private methods of text generation, the Santorum song/ the ‘Kill Blinton’ laughter points). I've tried to write about his work in a report on a previous reading and didn't really get anywhere; and so here; somehow it still resists me in that way, even tho' it doesn't feel resistant in a closed or harsh way – it is not 'friendly', such an awful word, or easy, but somehow still open to what is brought to (bear on) it.

The second interval.

One of Jow Lidnsay's hilarious extended screeds, governmental names checked and over-balanced in multiplying satirical venom, those moments when he could be heard over the raucous racket(eering) noise which he'd requested from the 'house band' (so many miles here from Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, it's not real). Joe Luna
’s poetry thru internet and irony defeating its own sudden lunges at utopic total universalism, seen as the only ground for ethical hope, head-spinningly, then spun back to the mirror or the filter, the window or the screen thru which passing data and role-play, tv shows jammed up on prynne, the unwitty circus, the plastic or pixellated selves thrown back at us thru which negotiating our real self, if that can be ever whole or non-complicitly separated (not yet), is the burden, placed, here, on and in and thru language.

The third interval.

Caitlin Doherty's first pamphlet has just appeared in a beautifully semi-wonky hand-made edition of 100 from Foule Press, and moves with incredibly dextrous assurance for a first publication thru registers from a page of sound poetry (read tonight) to choric dialogue which translated quite brilliantly into a collective performed realization at a Foule Reading last year: tonight was quieter, solo, newer work, I think, continuing the obsession with satellites that's translating into some really interesting riffs on technology – this is work that is really going places and should be kept on with for sure. Connie Scozzaro, reading just two poems, a shortness and a sharpness and a roughness; Jonathan Redhorse, about whom I know very little, tho' there are some engaging and really interesting pieces of his fiction that are internet searchable, with a sharp and smooth delivery I've already in part discussed or mentioned;

The fourth interval. No: these become blurred, I think the programme was departed from a little as things went on (probably eleven o clock at least by now). In any case, Frances Kruk, another prose work, the audience's flicking from Kruk to Hardingham's performing (as, again, I've mentioned) – I'd have liked to hear it better, because now I'm finding that I can't summon up incisive comment as I'd have liked (such slippings are inevitable, I guess; and in any case I wasn't sure I was going to write this up - to do so seems a little expected or boring, perhaps, now?); then, the fourth interval. Audience sliding around now, divisions between interval noise and reading less clear-cut: so, suddenly, Danny Hayward was reading, a long work, and as one would expect a politically incisive scalpel on the particular issues he'd chosen thus to excavate, excoriate; and Luke Roberts, for the second time that day, after the first reading in a long time, from the (excellent) 'False Flags' and a new work written in December -- that longer reading given at the Runneymede Literary Festival in London, this second five minutes only, a single poem only, again from 'False Flags', with its background preamble, Bobby Fischer and Kasparov, the poem if I remember correctly, and on looking thru the book, being 'The Sonar Deal';

The fith(?) interval (?!):

One other reader; then to end it Jefferson Toal, whose work is really prized in these parts by those few who know it, and which should, on the evidence presented of it tonight, be prized outside, and known by more than a few. The noise back up and the tidying up and finishing the alcohol and eventually at after 2AM everyone going outside, that entire dark dream.

ONE STAR LAUNCH // CAMBRIDGE, 25th FEBRUARY 2012

So, the launch for Luke McMullan and Sophie Seita’s finally-released magazine, 1* I guess we can call it, or alternatively pdpdpdpdpd: it’s from Contingency Press, its format is A4, and it’s got poems, got prose, got interviews real and fictive, got drawings (designs?,; got here at last after some time in the preparation. As readings go, I’d hesitate to call this a ‘reading’ as such (in the sense that term takes on as a kind of coded, public social experience). Because it was more like this: there’s this party going on and then can we all move next-door; so it’s just, what, ten people in a room, maybe a few more, and some of them standing up or leaning on tables and reading: poems mostly, one prose piece which in delivery, in fact, felt divided or enunciated at least cadentially, as if there were some line-breaks we couldn’t see as we read along. This (by Jonas Tinius) was about quotation, in part – about synaesthesia, as a whole – but, following Deleuze and Guattari’s multiplicity-(non-)programme lead, also about gathering in, or scattering, diversities of sources and putting them in a kind of non-hierarchical dialogue with each other, argumentation as experimentation, testing out the waters. A passage from Nabokov in which synaesthesia links to childhood providing the refrain (de- or re-territorialization, D & G style), and amidst the D & G and Barthes and Serres the pleasant unobtrusiveness of a little throw-away sound play from Tom Waits about sleepy male whores, I think. At times the piece felt like it wasn’t really about synaesthesia at all; rather, synaesthesia serving as a trope for a kind of multiplicity or inter-disciplinarity which the magazine itself encourages.

Lisa Jeschke actually read first: three short poems which I’ve heard her deliver several times previously, brief and rigorous. OK. So I realized upon being asked to write up this event and the magazine that I’d written something on Jeschke’s work a month or so ago, but not done anything with it. And as it’s been lying on my hard drive in inactivity since then, let’s just shoehorn it in here for now. It’s about restraint and excess. Also talks about some work by Jeremy Hardingham, who wasn’t there at the launch, and Lucy Beynon, who was, so it both connects and moves away from the matter at hand, the review of the event. Bear with it, tho’, it’s only a paragraph.

restraint & excess in the work of jeremy hardingham, lisa jeschke, lucy beynon

from a poem by jeschke: "this rests upon restraint. // austerity measures." consider here: restraint both as a method of performance, a necessary paring-back or what jeremy hardingham might call 'evacuation', and as something associated with an ascetism demanded of us by those in power whose lives are anything but ascetic, their non-asceticism, their excess and extravagance in fact allowed by our enforced asceticism ("austerity measures" - 'cutting back', 'saving the pennies', 'adding an extra notch to the belt'). as such, it might be taken as a negative CONstraint, upon desire and excess, the latter as a revolt beyond the allowed or allowable, a shout in the face of the hypocritic enforcement of austerity. to what extent does self-imposed limitation – something very much present in the work of hardingham, jeschke and beynon – force an artistically rewarding tension between stricture and slippage, leaving minute space for negotiation, variation and invention within a set of apparently narrow, but often in practice, quite wide parameters? we might counter-balance this with the excess seen as a virtue in a particular kind of performance art - the vienna actionists and their caressed/tormented swans, the live action painting extravaganzas of georges matthieu, yves klein's objectifying nudey-paint-rolling 'anthropometries', nudity and meat and the writhing body as a kind of anti-technological animality, a primitivist assault – by contrast, moments of the shocking, or the perverse, assertions of wilful oddity here have their force precisely by not being the be all and end all, prolonged into endless orgiastic background noise, a kind of anti-ambient music with the same ultimate effect. consider, more in line with a restrained or cramped excess, yoko ono's apparently – and, indeed, truly – excessive vocal works – the prolonged sing-scream in which that performance pitch is maintained not as the rock star's flamboyant animal roar – roger waters, even iggy pop – but as something more constrained, sustained, a narrow confine forcing sustained discomfort, rather than allowing iggy's or waters' quick orgasmic release. also to consider: whether art which works within these restraints – the often conceptual scores of the wandelweiser group, john cage's number pieces, hardingham's recent theatrical works (which work specifically with an element of temporal restraint) – in some way also work with the manner in which we are constrained –socially, politically, economically, emotionally – in the forms of everyday life, in terms of allowed movement or speech or spatial existence – forcing similar restraint to be felt rather than simply unconsciously absorbed and acted within, and, paradoxically, opening up a space beyond that, a counter-restraint which is at once terrible, sad, tragic etc (if you like), and liberatingly imaginative (it's not the word i want, but it'll have to do), you yourself setting the terms of your own constraint, setting your own parameters within a space that you circumscribe, a magic circle in which excess plays with and against what would curb it and exacerbate it, in which limit is tested, enforced, and even, for the briefest moment, broken through.

So Lisa Jeschke read, and Jonas Tinius read, and Sophie Seita read, a new poem, untitled, about ten minutes in total to read, I guess, an exploration of a kind of structural boredom, in part, repetition and expectancy, managing to avoid the knowingly ironic smugness the approach potentially engenders through its own sense of its possible, and actual, deliberate banality; conscious too that it might just be ‘playing around’ – but a necessary play, I think, like Jeschke’s, in fact, looking at those conventions round readings, their righteousnesses, their slashings of irony and anger and intimacy, going outside all those things and instead, multi-lingually and calmly, going through a set of procedures in which formality is highlighted, anticipated, parodied, carried on with, followed through. “Skip another line

Break” and there is play with sound, the repeated line on the first page maybe even intended to trip up a too-smooth enunciation of its regularity, as a kind of re-assertion of error or risk amongst what, now I think of it, actually acts as a kind of error or risk in itself – the risk of boredom, the apparent appearance of CD-‘skip’, a hop and a jump or feet shuffling on the ground in a pulse that can’t quite remain as ‘soothing’ as it proclaims itself to be for the hardness of its cutting k’s and popping p’s, the ping-pong pop too, in the reading, of the played audacity click-track, loping plosives off tongue maybe twisting or re-iterating, re-iterating what, actually getting going, riffing on that notion of (not) getting started – as in Cole Porter, right – deferral and a kind of battle of wills, poised anyway in intended uncertainty inside a laughter that turns – where? on the reader or listener themselves, causing them to smile at being in on the joke, or maybe to smile at not being in on it, seeing how far that could go – and that’s then thrown back in the real or imagined critical extract that follows the slight twitch or breakdown that signals the end of that first page of skipping line-breaks, when ‘skip’ does a kind of stutter – ‘skip k’: “The one thing that interested me about the poem was that it was not yet there.” But of course it is there and now is there in another list, figures of twelve, an impossibility of cataloguing, that catalogue resulting in a series of samenesses wrenched from diversity, maybe, tho’ I’m not sure I know what the various things that follow the twelves are doing with each other. Well, they’re funny – yet then we get caught, again, just now that we were settling in, caught on the final line: “The one who performs these every day will not be poor in a thousand births.” Which for some reason disturbs, a little, whether it’s the (gendered) pain involved in the thousand births, or the impossibility of material poverty being averted through plays on names and multi-lingual puns and steps in Rome or piano keys – which is, then, about an artistic impotency, and saying that is not in itself a highly original thing to do, maybe, but we all do harp on or batter against that constraint, right, and it’s not polemical(?) as I thus make it out to be, no? And then the lit-crit voice again, “The one thing that interested me about the poem was that it was short,” which anticipates and draws into itself, as did its predecessor, the criticism (a) that the poem is (in- or un-)distinguished just by its regular and soothing rhythm, and (b) (by saying the opposite of what it means) that the poem is actually too long, self-indulgently so. Now I am going to speed up, tho’ the next page in fact is the densest so far (I’m reading thru the PDF retrospectively, so maybe this is a reading of the written text rather than of the read text, last night, for which, apologies –and, yes, that tension or embarrassment(?) about the potentially perceived frivolity or patience-trying of the text is key to its delivery and smooth crackle as performed poem, which is what the end, I think it is or wants so to be). The next page is (very briefly) about views and, again, banalities, suburban settings and windows and curtains and plays with sound, the line about nothing being seen outside television as drawing in or together the theme of mediation, the line on “vowelling our way out of or into without any form of dogmatism” seemingly an accurate description, but of course not, and the poem acknowledging that rejection of dogma, or that ‘purely’ formal approach, as itself a kind of dogma or stricture, and the sentences descending into self-parodying nonsense of assonantal or spiffily poly-syllabic (and self-describing) words: “text terminates in reference and reverence to one of the greatest terminologators of” – before again the repeated stuckness skips – “please take some time with this line”, how to read that unchanging right-hand column against the little insistences of the left-hand column. This refrain is actually the opposite of that found on the first page: whereas at that first the line negates itself by causing skipping or skimming, flicking through until things properly begin, here, the injunction is to dwell on a line which is nonetheless no more full than the one we were earlier instructed to ‘skip’. And the lit-crit coming back, now explicitly identified with “the [common?] reader”, speaking you back at yourself, and at itself – like, you know that running together “lines” and “lions” and “lie-ins” is banal and maybe there’s a pleasure in it, but what can it lead to except platitudes: “Lots of words sound like / other words.” And questioning then whether an admittedly pleasurable sound play can be ethical, or whether it is in some sense just superficial surface to a real ethics that gets done in what’s said rather than how it’s said, some imaginative ‘grace’ against the necessary authenticity and ‘grounded-ness’ of ‘gravity’(?). “There is no reason why this should be so / apart from habitual / steadiness.” And then give up. “This poem doesn’t interest me at all.” Now I feel that here I should be breaking through to saying something really cohesive and conclusive about what the poem does, but I will just stop there, you’ve probably all had enough.

Luke McMullan read. And explicitly this reading was trying to tell us something, to do theory-enactment in a poem, the title, from Adorno, “Art is the negative knowledge of the actual world”: ‘Negative Knowledge’, the poem, to grapple with that one we’re all going tête-à-tête with, that ‘I’ of yours whose illusion of ‘free’ and private subjectivity prevents genuine solidarity and out-boxing thought (“the speechless obliteration of difference”). Space is crucial here (as is surface – “our enneper love”): spacing on the page, and spacing in terms of the Occupy movement, which Luke mentioned, and which re(con-)figures relational body-position and occupation, yes, of space defined explicitly as non-private, as against a kind of false individuum of gaping rapacious maws: “the perimeter of the subject / the diameter maintained in the private jaw.”

Some other person read. And at the end, Ian Heames read. And as when I saw him read at a more public occasion, back in November, he read from memory, so we could say he spoke, or recited, rather than ‘read’, just sitting in a corner and I was thinking /

how far could a delivery impart something that a poem itself, when encountered on the page at least, did not necessarily contain?

I was thinking this in part because of reports of the Lyric and Polis conference at Falmouth where Denise Riley’s reading reduced much of the audience to tears, and the prose section in Douglas Oliver’s ‘An Island That Is All The World’ where he talks about doing a reading of the Diagram Poems in which he also so moved his, different, audience – having explicitly decided beforehand to concentrate on prosody only, on the musical articulation and regulation of utterance, of syllable length and of breath – and in so doing, taking himself out of the poem and out of himself as subjective ‘deliverer’ of that poem; as it seems Denise Riley may also have done. Those tears are a strong emotional reaction that seems to come from somewhere originating in the formal, as that shades over into affect. Though of course ‘thematically’ it is to do with the loss of a child that both poems enact (Riley’s ‘A Part Song’ is her first work for several years, and the result of a sense of poetry’s inadequacy in the face of actual loss, the memorialisation of the dead that always poetry has self-consciously done in spite of the awareness of the inadequacy of its own rhetorical over-statement), it is to do also with taking oneself out formally, the latter something that might at best be hard to really catalogue or chart, and at worst, impossible or undesirable and even mendacious so to do.

I say all this, maybe, as preamble, and because I’ve been thinking about it this past week, and I realise this is already too long (“The one thing that interested me about the review was that it was short”), which is itself a kind of verbal-diarrheic over-compensation for not having anything to say and saying it, so, On: When Ian Heames read his voice had a tremble to it which no doubt came from the sheer effort of actually remembering these poems, which are not simple poems in the slightest, and delivering them with clarity and fidelity, and the intensity of just someone sitting on a sofa in what is a domestically-scaled setting, and where do you look, everyone quiet breath, at their feet perhaps, I didn’t look up myself, and you could laugh, even, when there were jokes and smile with recognition at bits you’ve heard like that line about having three browser windows open and eating the guts of an alarm, which does so many things with the mechanised and the work-place and the sci-fi element that runs all the way through and alarm as ironised or made bathetic even as it’s registered, thus reduced of any efficacy at all: which is all to say, it was intense, moving, even – lines that in the text one might skim or not be as struck by here take on a terrible force: “Time penalties cannot hurt her”, “Thank you for not shooting You are my favourite ones”, “The orchestra wells up with the last / ice cap,” “Dealing with the loss / like merchandise,” “Love is the derangement of leisure time.”[1] (The sequence, of five short poems, hasn’t been published beyond photocopies here and there, will take a while to come out, is dedicated to Jeff Keen: ‘Banners over Terminal Highway’, you’ll check it when it appears I’m sure.)

I was going to combine this review of the reading with a review of the magazine itself, and I’ve run out of time and space and energy, so there’s a lot I’ve missed out: the interview with Birte Endrejat; Thom Donovan’s piece; Yates Norton’s piece; Eben Wood’s piece, &c. You can get it all, tho’, from pdpdpdpdpd.wordpress.com. Click.

Another line-break.

Out.

[1] Ian points out that this last line is borrowed from a poem by Danny Hayward.

Unfolding King Lear: A Model Performance

Jeremy Hardingham, Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio ('the black box'), Faculty of English, Cambridge. 14th November 2008.

Rarely can I say that I have felt such impact from a piece of theatre. Hardingham rips out lines and phrases from Shakespeare’s play, adds in his own, puns desperately and viciously and fixatedly on like-sounding words, seemingly an act of mutilation comparable to the eye-gouged Gloucester’s agony. It all takes place in the ‘black box’ of the Judith E. Wilson drama studio, buried away beneath the Cambridge English Faculty. This Friday, afternoon the audience is small; just two rows of chairs, brought forward right to the front of the ‘stage’. The floor is covered in tarpaulin (black, of course), while a table is laden with miscellaneous props (though ‘props’ is the wrong word to use – Hardingham made them feel just as much actors in the drama as himself), and an audio system is used to produce various sound effects and fragments of music. Black-suited musician Jonathan Styles sits on a high stool, his face hidden by his copy of the script, his sung/ guttural-soft whisper emerging eerily and unexpectedly at various points. A diagram hidden away in the wall depicts the structure of the vocal cords. Hardingham himself moves with difficulty in the cluttered space, ceding an element of control as he appears to blunder round, tripping and stumbling – his use of the props is improvised, and there is a real element of danger. When he hammers a nail into his sleeve, or clambers on a chair while attached by a rope to the ceiling high above, things could easily go wrong. There is too much writing about ‘brave’ performances, but if that adjective can have any meaning in terms of a piece of theatre, it is here.

Another over-used word, but I truly felt shattered, just as Hardingham seemed to simultaneously shatter and coalesce into figures/ personas/ disembodied/ screaming ghosts articulating pain as abstract - yet intensely felt and physical. Physicality rather than any ‘transcendent’ aestheticization, the aesthetic as truly relevant to the body and its horror and desperation for glimpses of hope (hearing the sea - or thinking that one does so). All this added to by Styles' voice and clarinet as the disembodied absence of Hardingham’s enactments.

The piece begins mute, Hardingham’s mouth black-taped over, the persona of the sad-clown-king acknowledging the applause he has created for himself through the audio system, bowing to the silent and still audience. It ends mute as well, all the spoken enactment the impossibility of communication communicating itself, Beckett’s paradox. And that is true communication, no shit being shovelled and your being forced to swallow, not that travestied communion. Visual sonics, sonic visuals: his costume’s layers were gradually divested as the performance went on, though he always carried around his neck a wooden board on which he occasionally chalked a tally of the Acts, and against which a pair of scissors on a string clanked with what came to seem like the knolling of a funeral bell.

The awful series of catastrophes that end the play retained the original Shakespearian language almost complete; horror upon horror. But it was already past that stage of ‘what fresh hell is this?’, stretched out on the rack for longer than can be born. Longing for release, knowing that it will come and that longing will seem petty, selfish, unengaged. Disengage.

It was a harrowing enough experience to be an audience member, but what it must have taken from the performer, what he gave to it is truly inspiring. Ingesting salt and what appeared to be putty, smearing and clambering, spitting out shards of Shakespeare, shards of a broken bottle once more shattering, bleeding underfoot but carrying on. It may be hard to look at 'Lear' the same way again.