Renga + - Reality Street 4pack #4
Guy Barker, Elizabeth James, Christine Kennedy, Peter Manson
Reality Street Editions, 4 Howard Court, Peckham Rye, London SE15 3PH
[£5, 58pg. Pub.2002 ISBN 1-874400-19-9]
I cannot believe it is six years since the first Reality Street 4pack, ‘Sleight of Hand’, which contained the work of Miles Champion, Helen Kidd, Scott Thurston and Harriet Tarlo. It is also hard to believe that this is only the 4th and it looks as though it is the last. Is this an editorial decision or an economic one? Come on Ken, you can’t stop now, you haven’t published one with me in it yet! The 4packs have each contained the work of four ‘linguistically innovative’ poets who had not yet had a publication of their own and whom the editor considered to be worthy of a wider audience. This present one (lovely red) seems on the slim side to me. It contains a collaboration between Elizabeth James and Peter Manson (2 Renga), a site specific text from an installation by Sheffield based artist Christine Kennedy (The White Lady’s Casket) and a lyrical sequence by Guy Barker.
On first reading, the two Renga by James and Manson are very difficult; their density induces a kind of phrasal blindness. This is partly down to the nature of the Renga exercise itself and the habitual dislocation methods of the two writers but it is also down to the fact that each Renga actually takes time to get going. Once they do get going though, and once you have adjusted yourself to the speed of thought and can move unrestricted with the energy, the pieces sparkle with a horizontal thinking gone mad. Quite brilliant! I cannot detect the border between the two poets’ input but being more familiar with Peter Manson’s work with its high degree of black humour I was aware that at times I was laughing more than at others: “…Irrelevant bingo pseuds / claim a synaesthetic experience of number / leads to their having too many children / for comfort and support officers surfeit / on barely-solid eggs, reaping the consequence as / joyless blinding with only fatal exceptions / and I sometimes feel like that too”. The poets’ field of ‘play’ here is in a larger unit than the word but ‘play’, in the positive Barthian sense, is exactly what this is – not stream of consciousness or idea development. It is more a form of continuously disqualifying commentary but a commentary nonetheless and a hard satirical one at that. These are two very funny poems, two perverse capers that are the literary equivalent of the scariest ride at Alton Towers.
In contrast I found Christine Kennedy’s ‘The White Lady’s Casket’ uneventful and dry though there was a time during my second reading of it, when I had thoroughly taken on board the systematics of the piece, when I could sympathise with its agenda. The problem is that following that I was indifferent to it again. I think this is down to my own critical reception of so much installation work – my debates with cris cheek on the British Poets list hint at where I am coming from regarding this but I have never fully explained it even to myself. It has something to do with the static, iconic quality of this highly self-conscious ‘art’; it is like an altar, a restricted sacred elevated space which we can look at but not experience or interact with because its formulaic adventure remains enclosed in its own loop. There is always something ‘lawful’ about it in its programmed channelling so that its ‘message’ gets locked within its subject/object totality and cannot be changed – in other words it is an extreme type of artist-centred art but whose ideology states that it is the opposite, spectator-centred. That is why I do not trust it. This is unfair to unload upon Christine Kennedy, after all this is one piece by one artist working within what is now a fairly established genre/model, but it is considered by the editor to be original and important enough to publish in this present form so I have little choice but to try to articulate honestly what I feel about it.
Christine Kennedy took the information sheet for the Bishops’ House in Sheffield and used cut-up procedures to recast the text so we get this, for example:
Mrs. is one other commonly omitted
The House ground the living with substantial chambers
Curtains over what were of one time to them
The House of misconception
etc.
She then wrote all the lines in archaic script on bits of parchment paper and tucked them into various corners of the house itself so that visitors could discover them and read them in situ. It all seems very cosy, provincial even, despite her subsequent explanation about the political motivation behind the project. As she says, “The narrative of the Bishops’ House information sheet is recognisable as a very familiar and reactionary form of history, telling us of property, its composition, acquisition, consolidation and inheritance. It is a story told of a few named men, although there are many others of this house who are invisibly present in its history.” but this is not magically reversed by her derangement of the text, it is simply unmagically reversed in the directness of her statement above – the ‘art’ part is just a conceptual protrudence that can only function as whimsy. That this is then extracted from situ and printed as conventional poetry lines extracts the whimsy but deposits on the page something that lies between the brittle and the boring. Others will probably disagree so don’t mind me Christine Kennedy - and say hello to David for me.
Guy Barker’s section here, ‘Hero and Leander’, is too small (seven poems) but I responded to them immediately: pleasurable abdication to the syntax of myth executed with a resonant and de-luxe prerogative. I enjoyed these poems immensely and found myself returning to them again and again in such a way that it reminded me of playing a pop single over and over - the sequence has a liberal vibrancy that I have yet to exhaust. Maybe on another day I could wax intellectual about them but for the moment I just want to recommend Guy Barker unreservedly. I won’t even quote but just give you the titles which in themselves give a flavour of the delightful tenor of the poems: icon and animal, eyes met, steals to the tower, the purple riband, hellespont, die buchse der Pandora, aquarium.
© Tim Allen