The SoundEye Poetry Festival, Cork, 11 July 2009--Part 2 of 2

Saturday night's reading at the Eason Hill Community Centre I'd been looking forward to since I knew I'd be attending: Peter Manson, Maggie O'Sullivan, and Tom Raworth. Some years ago I heard Raworth read at Birkbeck College to a packed, hot classroom--and I hung on his every word; but I'd never had the opportunity to hear Manson or O'Sullivan. 

Manson began with a booming rendition of a page of Adjunct, just republished by Barque. The mix of voices and registers impressed and overwhelmed. Next, at an easier pace, Manson read a new prose poem, "My Funeral," which is a single long paragraph giving intricate instructions for the speaker's funeral, to hilarious effect. One great moment was when Manson read, "Put the polished section of Madagascan ammonite I always carry with me into my left-hand front trouser pocket," and then, from the same pocket, drew out the ammonite to show the audience. The hilarity grew as the poem progressed to its unexpected, outlandish conclusion. I'm looking forward to sharing the piece with my Sudden Prose students next year. 

Manson concluded with a draft of a new long poem titled "The Baffle Stage" and with the delightful epigraph from The Fall's lead singer Mark E. Smith, "The fantastic is in league against me." The piece's relentless momentum and range of language give rise to a distinctive, analytical, intelligent contemporary sensibility. Here are a few passages I especially liked; nb, they don't appear continuously in the poem. Thanks to Manson for giving me his reading script, from which I've been able to confirm these are correct and their line breaks.

idiot guarantees of a back-story

no palindrome / but now you're worried

immersive dimplings of the carapace

pneumatic faith

the poem was acquiring language

 Maggie O'Sullivan began her reading with selections from Red Shifts and Waterfalls (both from Etruscan), which together constitute her project, her/story:eye. Her voice lent a musicality to the poems that enhanced their lyricism beautifully. Here are some choice lines (though there may be errors, sorry):

dead shine rook shrill

many a cascade

askew creased it it the echo

thousand feather

sometimes she cries        sometimes she is again

the song-flooded walls the saturated of red

easel wink marine ecstasy

The second part of the reading focused on two apparently uncollected poems, one using words from John Clare and one titled (I believe) "Jugular Parting Wild Horses." These lines are from the former work:

power hardens roughest wave

brokenly tremble how the land is returned

Tom Raworth informed us that he'd be reading 20 new short poems and "a page of old prose," the latter referring to his Equipage pamphlet, There Are Few People Who Put On Any Clothes (starring it). I enjoyed the reading, but found it too fast for my taste. Here are some choice passages:

supple mental flirtation may be behind you

inflexible in acknowledgment of doubt

the placebo send the placebo

wistful anger

80% prefer chips to poetry

bodies on the street I can't be everywhere

history portrayed by life-size working models

looks like we've got brain matter

I am the projection of my reflections

Afterwards we went to Trevor Joyce's home for conversation into the night. Part of what made SoundEye such a good experience was the camaraderie. I drifted from one conversation to another, everyone I spoke to engaged and friendly, no pretentiousness or preciousness.

Tom Raworth, Swantje Lichtenstein, yours truly, and Luke Roberts 

at Trevor Joyce's after the reading

Bring on SoundEye 2010!

Thanks to Tony Frazer for the photo

The SoundEye Poetry Festival, Cork, 11 July 2009--Part 1 of 2

The first event I attended on Saturday was a show of sound poetry at St Fin Barre's Cathedral (great for the acoustics) with three performers, Christine Wertheim (Aus/US), Jerome Rothenberg (US), and Jaap Blonk (NI). Wertheim's sound poems worked through the use of different character voices, frequent sonic repetition, with pure sound (as opposed to words) only employed occasionally. The poems tended to circle back to their beginnings with little semantic content but a suggested emotional trajectory. 

Rothenberg began with sound poems by other writers, including Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters. In the first work, a short Dadaist piece, Rothenberg used a long piece of neon plastic tubing to create a high-pitched whirring sound when he spun it overhead. Between the device and his declamatory delivery, his performance was, for me, reminiscent of Ginsberg. 

Rothenberg's final piece was his own "translation"; here is his account of it: "In '17 Horse-Sons of Frank Mitchell'--from traditional sources in Navajo--I engaged for a number of years in what I was calling 'total translation,' going beyond the semantic level of the words to try to find equivalents for the non-lexical vocables in Navajo song & even one step further, for the music--the melodies--by which the words & sounds were carried. The resultant pieces when performed, for single voice or with multiple chanters/performers, created a new sound poetry both faithful to & totally divergent from its original source. The relation to soundings in our own time & place is also worth noting." In performance the "horse-songs" were nuanced and engaging.

Then came the pièce de résistance, Jaap Blonk, who gave an impressive selection of the range of his work. He began with a new translation of one of his Dutch sound poems into English, "Sound," a work of intelligent, jubilant play, a look of delight recurring on Blonk's expressive face. He followed this with a "phonetic etude" to the letter R, a continuous performance of its range of possible sounds or pronunciations. I couldn't help but smile and laugh in the pleasure and play of Blonk's inventiveness; he has a magisterial vocal flexibility that is impossible to imagine without hearing it for yourself.

Blonk's next three pieces were in an invented language he calls the language of the Underlands--a parallel, he says, to the language of the Netherlands, incorporating Dutch accents, dialects, and suggestions of particular social situations. Perhaps the most delightful was "The Underlands Drinking Song," during which Blonk stumbled this way and that down the centre aisle in the course of his performance; I was sorry when it came to an end. 

The sixth piece was another English translation, "Let's Go Out." As with the drinking song, the performance was not just of Blonk's face and vocal cords but his whole body. There were some lyrically inventive phrases and lines in the piece, including "ravenhorn," "thunder mole," "mist guide," and "was this quiet or was it just misquiet." The final two pieces were Hugo Ball's sound poem, "Lament for the Dead" (1916), and a "Dutch bebop tune," "Oblibumbop" (I'm guessing at the spelling!). If he hadn't ended by wandering off, making the end of the piece uncertain and thus dissipating the last of its energy, I'd have been on my feet in the applause. I can't imagine how it could have been any better: a perfect performance. 

Photo by Tony Frazer. Thanks too to Wurm im Apfel's Kit Fryatt and Dylan Harris for making the recording of Jaap Blonk's performance at their series in Dublin several days prior to Blonk's appearance in Cork.

The SoundEye Poetry Festival, Cork, 9-10 July 2009

I spent the weekend at the SoundEye poetry festival in Cork and, having had a marvelous time, thought I'd review a few of its events here. For those of you unfamiliar with the festival, it's devoted to alternative poetries without advocating a single school, as the founder Trevor Joyce's history explains, and it's been running since 1997. 

I flew in on Thursday afternoon, missing the first day and a half of events but making it to the evening event, the SoundEye Cabaret, including poets, performance art, music, etc. Early on, a couple of individual performances were disappointingly poor (fortunately I don't know the criminals by name), but the quality picked up as the programme progressed. My favourite performance would have to be a performance art/poetry piece by the young Sam Forsyte, formerly of Cork and now resident in Frankfurt. Apparently it was videotaped, so as soon as I have a clip or a link, I'll post it here. I also enjoyed the performance group Boiled String, whose three readers performed John Goodby's cut up of Dylan Thomas's work as well as a Lynette Roberts poem, with a double bassist plucking away in the background. 

On Friday afternoon Kevin Perryman (Ire/Ger), publisher, translator, and poet, Michael Smith (Ire), poet and translator, Swantje Lichtenstein (Ger), poet, and Stephen Rodefer (US), poet and translator, read. Perryman's work bordered on and at times transgressed into a sentimentality reminiscent of southwest American spiritual poetry, with such lines as "the rain won't talk to the mountain" and "never again to hold your hand." Michael Smith divided his time between his translations from Spanish, beginning with several excellent poems by Vallejo, and his own work. He seemed more confident with the translations, as when he read his own poems he sped up to the point of losing some of the nuanced interpretive tones that marked his earlier reading. 

Swantje Lichtenstein proved a revelation. Assuming I can trust the translations, Lichtenstein is a compelling and original poet; I dearly hope a book of her work in English will appear soon. Rodefer ended the set with brusque, vigorous poems that vividly mixed registers, moving deftly amid hackneyed expressions, abstractions, images, etc. with frequent semantic and sonic wordplay. 

That night at Meade's Bar there was a packed open mic, with Mairead Byrne as an ideal emcee. Delights included Kit Fryatt's passionate performance of the original and her translation of an Anglo Saxon work, "Wulf": "It was easy to sunder / what was never together"; and what was the name of the piece Peter Manson delivered so commandingly? 

(Tomorrow I'll continue with reviews of some of Saturday's events.)