Keith Tuma-Cork Festival

Cork Festival of International Poetry June 2003

This account of the June 2003 Cork Festival of International Poetry was first written for UK Poetry, the private listserv discussion-group that I host with Nate Dorward. When I wrote and sent the note, members of the list were discussing Total Writing London 2003 and Keston Sutherland’s suggestion that poets who fancy themselves part of an alternative scene begin to represent themselves as a “front.” This is not the place to summarize that discussion, except to say that I might at the moment of writing have imagined that Sutherland was arguing for something that critics once, when the term still had a meaningful and living referent, called an avant-garde formation. I now know that he had something different in mind. My note meant to offer a partial description of the ethos and events of the Cork festival because it was obvious to me in reading the accounts of TWL that the two events were very different. I didn’t (and don’t) mean to suggest by this account that Cork was somehow better or more useful or anything of the kind. Indeed as part of a group now helping to plan future festivals in Cork I know that discussion concerning ways to expand and improve the festival are ongoing. I have left the note that appeared on the listserv mostly intact, with only a few revisions and additions offered to improve the prose a little, identify some of the names I mention, and flesh out a few observations.

Not having made it to London I am left to process TWL via the discourse of this list. I think that discourse might be wheeled out the door of this closed shop toward some other, potentially open venue, perhaps by collecting it on the website Chris set up. I'd like to hear more about the audience for the performances, for one thing, as there's no use talking "fronts" unless we know who or what we're fronting. Keston [Sutherland] is keen to promote discourse that openly acknowledges collective and collaborative purpose while Chris [Goode] is concerned to push the event beyond the coterie trapeze act that most on this list know only too well. How do those two agendas relate? How can they be made to relate?

Certainly Cork by this point is well-oiled, one of its chief functions convivial and in that way collaborative. With Trevor's house and the simultaneously frenetic and purposeful Trevor [Joyce] himself as chief Corker it is potlatch as the perfected routine of alien and native dwarfs, a minor but endlessly fascinating scene out of Donald Barthelme's Snow White perhaps--I'm remembering vats of beer—the performances and readings gifts to one another and all, understood by all to be no more important than conversation around table or the decision to march down the hill to fetch six or seven bags of chips to help everybody chase the Guinness and gin. Because of its continuity with past festivals, and because most of the regulars have connections with one another and with one another's ongoing work that have been densely woven over time--even while most also have other activities reaching out elsewhere into separate projects and other worlds--there can be a little of the sense of "Now it's time to interrupt the party just long enough to do my bit" or "You know what kind of thing I'm going to do but do if you wish have a look at what I'm up to lately anyway." That feeling of participating in a workshop of adepts and friends is not at all unwelcome, as it helps buck one up for the more mundane and depressing realities that inevitably follow our dispersal. Moreover, the core or coterie is remarkable in Cork for never excluding folks, for welcoming all--or nearly all. In the three years I've been to the festival-conference I can remember only two people being booted beyond the circle, and one of them had to put his fist through a window to make that happen. At the first Cork festival I attended, Fanny Howe told me how rare it was to find so little competition between the poets attending. That spirit remains.

In a little roundtable that Alex [Davis] was kind enough to ask me to lead at the end of the festival I tried to raise the "What is to be done?" question that I think Keston is also raising, but the discussion got stuck on another, earlier question concerning what is to be done about the Cork festival. (One thing is that it will be limited to two more years.) They aren't unrelated questions, and both bring us near to that word Keston repeats several times--"public." If a kind of solidarity already exists "in practice," the kind of acknowledgment that Keston seems to want, with its welcome provision of space for disagreement within practice and discourse, might do well to admit the degree to which whatever we are doing remains altogether off most maps. The poetic Left? But every poet I know whether writing sonnets about horsefeathers or crushing beer cans into syllabics was against this last—this lasting--war and it seems to have made not one whit of difference, nor does it seem that it was really expected to make a difference. In the discussion at Trevor's that followed the roundtable--the real performances were there, as we played the Irish version of the dozens--I rehearsed a few of the propositions one hears about "What is to be done?" in USA circles these days. There is the line promoted by Richard Rorty and other liberals of his generation: the intellectual Left has to work to rebuild some of its long ago severed connections with working class politics. Tom Raworth's answer to that was simply "Thailand"--much of the working class has been efficiently moved off-shore. Then there is the proposition that I am told by a reliable source was advanced by Lauren Berlant at the University of Chicago powwow of academics misreported by the NY Times a few months ago--that lacking alternatives the intellectual Left had better try somehow to engage the Right, which I took to mean that it had better begin to find some kind of ground where the Right can be engaged. Perhaps she meant that we have been a little too shocked and awed by our own demonology and thus have been playing (and losing) the Right's own game where a more patient and point-by-point critique is required. I don't know--I wasn't there. I’m sure the transcriptions of that conference if not Cork’s will be published soon. As I think I said during the roundtable, I am not even sure what the most important questions are now for me. But I do know that the poetic Left has not demonstrated itself able to reach even--say--Lauren Berlant, using her as an example of the intellectuals poets should be in dialogue with. Currently the poetic Left is at best a kind of free radical within the bloodstream of a Left intelligentsia. Together with reaching across art-forms for practices and discourses of meaningful and self-conscious solidarity among artists, there might be an effort to build or strengthen links between artists and Left academics and intellectuals. These seem to me frayed or nonexistent at the moment. Whether the kind of acknowledgment that I think Keston imagines might contribute to this is anybody's guess.

As for the trapeze acts in Cork, I am in agreement with Nate [Dorward] about their quality. I had to miss Maurice [Scully], Geoff [Squires], and Fergal [Gaynor] but will say just a word or two about a few of the other readings and performances, with an emphasis on paratextual elements or my impression of them.

Randolph [Healy] read sitting off to the side on the edge of the stage, and his delivery of his poems differed from what I remember from readings in other years and also seemed to have little to do with his deadpan stand-up demonstration of pamphlet sewing the following day. I want to say that the reading was more probing and self-questioning, melancholy even, and no doubt this had a lot to do not only with Randolph’s choice of material but also with his positioning—this sitting on the edge of the stage so that he was not looking directly at the audience but rather angled slightly toward a wall of the theater, his posture relaxed as he quietly read from the book held out in front of him. In other readings I have witnessed by Randolph as well as on the Mouthpuller CD I have been impressed by Randolph’s understated wit [cf. “The Republic of Ireland”] as well as by the insertion of strategic silences [the end of Scales], by his timing here or his sardonic delivery elsewhere. On this weekend, however, all of the deadpan and his other modes seemed to be reserved for a faux-pedagogical shtick where Randolph, accompanied by Susan [Schultz], discussed small-press publishing, his own Wild Honey Press and her Tinfish. The reading itself was something else--quieter, as-if-overheard, projecting more anguished interiors. It is difficult not to imagine that matters such as the lighting in the room, the small size of the audience, the familiarity of Randolph with those in the audience and his knowledge that they had heard him read on other occasions, and not least the condition of the world beyond the theater, had a lot to do with this reading, with this mode of delivery.

In his report Nate mentioned that Tom Raworth cut a path through Catacoustics with the precision one expects from him, but he neglected to mention that Tom kicked off his reading with his poem answering Peter Porter's Forward Prize winning poem. Bill Howe had burned Mr. Porter in effigy over Trevor's table the night before the festival started, so this choice of text was appropriate. Solidarity begins with “a kill list,” as we were jokingly calling the list of dangerous morons we were compiling, headed by Porter and others who despite public notices [in Private Eye for instance] appear to be happy to perpetuate the cronyism that characterizes the awarding of major prizes in Britain. Yes, I know, shades of René Girard! But even those of us on the margins, I suppose, should be allowed a little scapegoating, and this was after all a party, the list, the effigy, and its torching more spontaneous farce than prepared and sanctioned ritual. Of course there is also the fact that beyond his behaving like a tyrant on his Inch Beach of cultural power, and his energetic pouring out of sub-Juvenalian chatter like corn flakes, Mr. Porter had also just appeared at the Dublin festival the previous weekend, where Trevor and Tom Raworth and Maurice Scully had also read. As usual, he hadn’t bothered so much as to show up at that reading. So there was bad Porter on the brain even before the napkin-puppet went up in flames.

I'd met Susan [Schultz] at other conferences and knew and respected her work as poet, critic, and editor, but it was a pleasure to learn more about her unpretentious devotion to craft and communities of craft in Cork. I did have the feeling that the rest of us must have appeared a roomful of baboons to her when she arrived at Trevor’s after a long flight. Just as the big event at last year’s festival was the breaking of the window by a besotted and angry mainstream critic, the big event this year was Susan experiencing some fool knocking on her door in the middle of the night and announcing himself as the Taliban. Welcome to Ireland! It’s wonderful to be an American abroad these days! Anyway, I was struck by the sincerity of Susan's work, how it is free of the default ironies that characterize so much experimental American practice. To be funny and political without a shade of sarcasm seems impossible for many. I've been trying to get a handle on this work since the conference, reading Susan’s fine prose poems in Memory Cards & Adoption Papers.

Things Not Worth Keeping (or TNWK) presented a video of ongoing performance and book projects accompanied by a reading, Kirsten [Lavers] and cris [cheek] seeming to move back and forth between fragments describing the making and unmaking of their ongoing project entitled The Books and a narrative suggested or generated by (or imagined beside) the books. One of the projects saw them weaving film, and the camera moving across this tapestry of film was one motif, and then they'd be on to giving us a bit of Nurse Trash when she appeared, at other times positioning text more obliquely to what we were seeing, perhaps aware that in the sensory competition between filmic and spoken text the latter was to be a little submerged. At several moments when the film images shifted to the hands writing on paper that make up the Operation Enduring Freedom performance Kirsten and cris, assisted by cues from the audience, turned and faced the film in silence. The synchronizing of reading and film was impressive. The mosaic terrain of the text(s)--the books and after-books and etc. as filmed-- loomed above the commentary, which approached it but fixed it irregularly.

I can't remember a thing about Three Little Heretics except that the nine Porky Pig finger-puppets were a little extreme, I thought, and the snorkeling. I am told there's a book that explains it all. [Okay, one addition might be called for here. This was a slightly disingenuous gesture at humility, and I will venture a few belated observations, risking the epithets self-description deserves. Three Little Heretics is the name for an ongoing collaboration by cris cheek, William R. Howe, and the author of this note. Thus far we have produced one 64-page book of text and images, Critical Path: Into the Bush, which includes prose, dialogue, and inset verse in a variety of shapes and forms. The book’s genre is, more or less, travelogue. There is also a second, shorter book that is complete in manuscript and entitled Critical Path: Squelch, one fragment of which has appeared as part of the Poems for Lord Hutton anthology at the nthposition website. A third, as yet untitled text is underway. Critical Path: Into the Bush (the subtitle is “Report to the Council”) is more or less about the transition between pre- and post-September 11 culture, and in the overlays and revisions its composition involved indeed lived that transition as well as thematizing it. Squelch is about the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath. The Three Little Heretics project in a larger sense might be described as an effort to write through the Bush administration, and the specifically occasional nature of most of its material has presented more than a few problems having to do with the tonal wobble that events in the real world can present as they read themselves back onto text. The project was always intended for performance as well as for textual versionings, and the ongoing, live and site-specific versioning that performance allows would seem to present a possible solution for some of the well-known problems of occasional writing, whether those writings are satirical (as these partly are) or not. For example, I recently performed some of the material from Squelch for a local Ohio audience. Knowing that my collaborators would not be around to help me, I used one section of that text and added to and adapted it so that it could be read by a computer voice via my laptop and the surround sound speakers in the concrete bunker lecture auditorium where this was to take place. Meanwhile a digital projector showed on a large screen my scrolling of a new text written for the occasion to accompany the Heretics text as read by the computer. One of the purposes I imagined for the new text (it had several) was to take into account a tangible sadness, desperation, and exhaustion characterizing the sentiments of this more or less representative audience of politically moderate or liberal students and faculty as anger at the invasion had recently been not so much abated as transformed by the feelings of helplessness attending daily reports of explosions in Iraq and deaths of soldiers. Squelch is, in my reading of it, considerably angrier and less satirical than Into the Bush, and I thought that for this occasion at least I needed to complicate that tone by acknowledging what I took to be this more recent sadness and helplessness. I know this local audience very well by this point, having lived and taught here for many years, and I think the performance was successful, however one measures that. One never really knows, of course, and there will be no single or uniform response. I mention all of this as a longwinded way of saying that it seemed to me that the performance of some of this same material by the three of us in Cork was received in a very different manner, and not only because the three-voiced live presentation and mix of materials (mostly but not entirely Squelch), as well as the venue and audience were very different. What differed the most, what mattered the most, was context in the sense of context-in-time. Without wanting to speak for cris and Bill, I certainly was surprised that the response in the theater at Cork was what it appeared to be. I had the sense that we had had carried abroad to Ireland our anger and left all traces of wit and satire behind at customs—nothing but the anger was heard, despite Bill’s slowmotion choking laugh at the end. Toy sampling microphones used to repeat and distort phrases generated no laughter. Seriousness altogether ruled the room, or a sense that here was something happening that nobody knew what to do with, how to respond to, or even—or so it seemed—how to name. What had just happened? The sense I want to convey here is not only that the audience didn’t react as we had expected it to, though I think that was part of it, or that we thought we failed or flopped —surely not that we stunned or even impressed anybody—but rather that we performed something without knowing very well in advance what the response would be and ended up knowing little more afterwards. It was as if we had performed under water and the fish weren’t talking. Of course we had some feedback. Susan Schultz commented that the material seemed American; Tom Raworth said that this was not heresy but an act of belief. Maggie O’Sullivan said she loved listening to the three voices and wanted it to go on a lot longer [it is as long as this administration]. She was away with the admixture of politics and harmonics. Kirsten told cris that she had been wondering how she'd feel about what might have been anticipated as a wave of testosterone breaking on the beach head but had had enjoyed the show as pith, not too long and driven by a playful and provocative curiosity with immediate news saturation and a lack of obvious contexts in which to air such views. Something along those lines. She’d been pleasantly surprised at the sincerity of our collaborative bonding. I owe cris cheek the latter two of those reports—reception is all over the place in more ways than one. Even when you think you know the audience, there is not only tonal wobble to be concerned with but also waft of discourse. ]

I was surprised in talking with Maggie [O’Sullivan] after her reading to hear that she has never taken up an instrument or practiced music or singing, for one might argue that there is no poet writing or performing today who is more the " singer." I thought I caught her at one point perhaps unconsciously beginning to make a few subtle small hand gestures that looked like a spontaneous self-conducting, a time-keeping, and was reminded ever so slightly of the much more self-conscious and dramatic self-conducting that Robert Duncan did late in his life while reading. As performance styles go, I prefer the more muted if no less physical mode of the bardic that Maggie has to offer though I have spent time since the conference contemplating similarities between these two poets, so different in many ways and yet arguably similar in their insistence on the roots of song and poetry in charm and riddling.

Mairead Byrne, Mark Mendoza, Billy Mills and Catherine Walsh were among others I heard and enjoyed in Cork but I don’t have much energy to add to what cris and Nate have already said about their readings. Catherine and Billy did something new for them, reading together and going back and forth between fragments of their various texts and translations as if in call-and-response, though the as if might be the crucial point. Catherine read sitting on the stage and Billy standing. One point one might have taken from the performance is the degree to which the work of these two poets interacts in shared domestic spaces, and the work of these two does have much in common, but I had the equal sense of solitary meditation or soliloquy and found myself wishing that the dynamics more or less unconsciously hinted at by their positioning on stage might be interrogated or reversed in the presentation of their performing bodies as well as in the texts being read, where the sense of simultaneous but not shared meditation already suggested an oddly powerful combination of intimacy and solitary desire. Mark Mendoza deserves notice for unpretentiously holding his own in front of an audience mostly older than and new to him and Mairead Byrne for a sharp, eclectic set of poems, but this report is getting long, and I can't comment on everything, much less remember it. One highlight among other readings was Trevor's, which included workings of Irish and Chinese materials and a batch of his new “matrix” poems. After the reading I remarked to Randolph how different Trevor's new poems seemed to me. This difference interested me because I had recently written something about what one might not expect to find in a Trevor Joyce poem, Trevor’s response to which being the poem cited below. Randolph said that he found Trevor's practice noteworthy for its continuing ability to absorb new content. So I'll end this note by quoting one of those new poems for folks on the list to peruse at their leisure. If I am leaking a little more enthusiasm than usual in this account of the festival, I hope that it was because it deserved it. In the end who is to say whether it's easiest or hardest to impress friends. It might be worth a shot at reading at a few enemies for a change! Or at least more folks like the bearded man at the concluding roundtable who had a box for all of us and a plea for more local and low-cal poetry. It did seem that apart from a few people like him--he was pleasant enough and clearly interested--who showed up later in the festival and the welcome presence of Tony Frazer and Jim Mays and a few others, that's mostly what this festival involved--friends reading to friends, aware of a history of collective purpose if not prepared to belabor it or to agree about plotting ways to advance it. That's both a virtue and something to think about in the future.

Anyway, here's one of Trevor 's matrix poems read at the festival, the one which is in part his answer to my boorish remark in the essay. As Nate said in one his intros--Nate was the real hero of this festival for his ongoing editing and publishing work, which binds the participants in this festival in other ways--"Enjoy":

In order
to succeed
a boy
should have a
taste
for drawing

ties
with wild
designs
unrestrained
by thumb-
tacks,

and thereby
put by
for a secure
old age
a tidy
sum,

for he might yet
have to pit
a warrant
'gainst a blackjack,
drag
his doll

with teats
hitched,
not as the fastidious
permit,
but heaved
in fullest view

by a snurting,
as if some crack
ensemble
had outrageously
let
fly

against all
refined
precedent
when we would have
some prudence
hinder her.

"Rear
exit and begone,
my own
exhibitionistic pet!
Let's catch
the track

will lead us
to our train
of state,
then venerably
process."
"A chorus

we must have
to free ourselves
of drills
and drawbacks,
trials
and tribulations."

Experience
will seize
the way.
Don't fix
what ain't yet broke.
You've heard it's true

that by a snifting
clack
the air
is expelled
from the
pickle-pot.

One ought to have at least one text in reports like this one, even if its point is to suggest how much beyond the text enters into these events. As for the Cork festival—Trevor’s poem says pretty much everything else one needs to know about it.

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last updated December 17, 2003

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