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[Keston asked me to post this to FSC, so that it could be "winkle-picked by readers unfamiliar with Andrea's work."]
Andrea Brady gave a reading of work from Vacation of a Lifetime and Cold Calling last night at Queens' College, Cambridge. There was a discussion afterward initiated by Ian Patterson that was one of the most engaging and luminous I've heard in such formal circumstances for a good while. I'll try here to sketch out some of the positions that were defined in dialogue, without attaching the hamper-lock of attributing them to the people who most identified with them or who offered them up for debate.
1. Andrea's work was described as having changed quite substantially between the later pieces in Vacation (such as 'Post Festen e', on which Robin Purves offered some thoughts at the poetry summit) and the new poems in Cold Calling. The difference is manifold. Most obviously, the earlier poems attempt a form of direct political criticism supported by research data and satirised reportage that the later poems do not attempt. Both sets of work were said to be contradictory in the schedules they set up for accommodating and impeding interpretion by turns; and this contradictoriness was said to be a defining feature of the work, leaving the reader sometimes "at home" in a locution and sometimes baffled in the attempt to get there. This point was not extended into a characterisation of the experience of poems as wholes, but was intended as a description of the channel-switching between locutions at the level of individual sentences or groups of sentences. That is, the argument did not propose a synthetic view of the poems as -finally- both inviting and refusing, but only indicated that such a pattern runs across the lines during the act of reading from one to the next; but the synthetic argument was perhaps implicit. This makes for a different experience in reading Vacation than it does in reading CC, since the footholds offered by data-selection and converted newsprint in Vacation become immediately the most obvious points of accommodation (provided we know SUVs are and what Dean and Deluca sells, etc.), whereas the points of accommodation in CC are more often intuitable rather than recognised.
2. Andrea herself suggested that CC is a book of "failures." She said that the poems are limited or even vitiated by their occasional character, which she takes to be essentially negative, in the sense that it amounts implicitly to the proscription of a more extended (possibly a more historical?) form of writing, a form less tied to and closed in by source-moments of private feeling. Against this it was objected that CC was in fact the more seriously political of the two books, for the reasons I'll try to lay out in (3). Andrea views the book as a kind of transition into a more sustained single project: her new and unfinished work of poetic retrieval and conversion of the Gilgamesh epic and other historical material into a long polemical piece addressing the recent wars in the Middle East. The negative term "occasional" seems to connote an absence of -research-; it was not discussed whether the latter is a necessary precondition for avoiding the former, but this seemed more or less implicit in Andrea's account of her own practice.
3. Vacation was criticised for being an ethnology of other people's behaviour from the perspective of a necessarily superior poetic critique. It was suggested that such an ethnology could at best only be of secondary political significance, and at worst amounted to a kind of celebration of inaction. The admission of complicity in that behaviour by the author throughout the book was not judged to be a way out of this problem or proof against the accusation of self-imputed superiority; rather it was suggested that the authorial voice was set up to be an example or paradigm of complicity in order preemptively to subvert the accusation itself. CC was said on the contrary to be a powerfully political text, partly because it avoids that circuit of the author who escapes complicity by virtue of electing to be its paradigm; but also because (and this was not made altogether clear) it approaches a kind of political critique without manifest political content, which was proposed as an ideal limit of what poetry can do when it tries to be polemical. Against this idea it was objected that "realism" in the sense specified by Lukacs would be abandoned entirely at that ideal limit. That is, the attempt to make an accurate and anticipatory picture of social contradictions might need to involve the kinds of data and even the kinds of ethnology said to exist in Vacation, no matter what the risks; and that a poetry from which all that had been expurgated in favour of implication of some kind would be an abdication as well as a refusal.
4. It was suggested that moments of particular criticism in Vacation, for example the polemic against the death penalty, tended to converge into a general critique only at the expense of seeming ironic; that is to say, the individual moments of criticism are not ironic but they take on an unintended irony as soon as their synthesis becomes apparent. This is the subordination of the particular to the general in a specific sense: through being incorporated into a more total polemic (against capitalism), individual moments of polemic (against events in capitalist society) are made to look like irony. This word "irony" was picked up and reused in various ways and in service of various points, without being specified. The original point was perhaps that irony conduces to make contradiction more palatable, by a kind of implicit insistence on the consensus that we all know how bad everything is and how little we can do about it. Irony in this sense is not radical but on the contrary conservative; it makes a show of destabilising language with the result that the most obdurate contradictions are kept out of it. This led to some discussion of more confrontational strategies in poetry that would deprive the reader of the satisfaction of an ironic consensus. The idea of such a strategy was questioned in turn from two perspectives, the historical and the moral. It was asked whether, after a century of art-confrontation, we could really expect any art to be confrontational in an unironic manner. It was also suggested that the ironic voice was more humble and attractive, and that it sought out a kind of amity with the reader that a more confrontational strategy could refuse only at the risk of seeming petulant or merely abrasive. This led to some talk about partial degradation of language (e.g. the satirical or withering detournement of journalese) versus its total degradation, or the attempt at least to produce the latter. It was suggested at this point that irony is in every case defensive of middle class attitudes and interests, and that totally degraded language could at least never be used to that end. What this total degaradation might look or sound like was not discussed, so that the antinomy remained strictly theoretical; but some real possibilities for future practice did seem to be at stake. Barry MacSweeney was mentioned as someone who tried to push his work toward total degradation. This raised the question, which was not uttered and certainly not answered, whether the kind of life necessary to produce totally degraded work might not itself need to be pretty degraded. That isn't an insult to Barry but a recognition of the real difficulties he suffered throughout his life. Which means also that "degradation" in this sense is not (of course) the failure to be pristine but the violent renunciation of the idea that anyone with half a brain and at least that much of a heart could ever even dream that they should be so.
Posted by Brian Stefans at February 5, 2004 11:14 AM | TrackBack