Writers & Readers Week 2008

Writers & Readers Week 2008 – notes and responses

 

Re-occurring themes across events:

1. Creating from the unconscious, on the edge of sense and non-sense, intuitive but crafted.
2. Creating as a conversation with your peers and literary / art history.
3. Art being evidence, verification of things you witness but going beyond that to a point where another truth is possible.
4. The evils of war and writing as a vehicle of protest.
5. The role of the writer to question, observe and trust the reader.

As the heading indicates I would call the following notes and responses, rather than a review. Hopefully you’ll get something out of them if you missed the sessions. There are notes on 5 more sessions to come. Cheers!

 

Secrets & Lies

I think Patrick McGrath summed up a lot about this session when he said something like: There is no “Unspeakable” if there was we wouldn’t be sitting here having this panel discussion. The most amusing part of the session was Lydia Wevers telling an audience of mostly blue rinses that she’d just been reading about fist-f$%king.

Wevers asked if they worried about encouraging people to do bad things when they write about people doing bad things. Chris Tsiolkas discussed how it took him seven years to write and then get the courage to publish his novel about anti-Semitism because of this, but in the end, as Mayra Montero said, “You’ve got to get it out”. The panelists as with most writers all felt compelled to write about their terrible subjects.

Tsiolkas talked about writers needing to confront their own taboos, fears and hates. Indeed McGrath posited that the most powerful fiction emerges from the areas of writers minds that are most taboo and cause the most anxiety for them.

One of Patrick McGrath’s re-occurring themes is (and indeed all three wrote about) children encountering taboo subjects, who is telling the truth and how children’s experience can be distorted over time. False memories fray as evidence from the world can ultimately unravel them and even destroy identity. We often need transform our childhood in order to live comfortably with our present / future. Children are frequently the victims as adults flail around in the world but writers can’t or shouldn’t take a moral position.

I have difficulties with these opinions but perhaps what they are trying to say (I hope) is that in fiction you can write more powerfully by presenting something without judgement, to trust the reader to make their own judgement. You can’t create a rapist by talking about rape or a lesbian by writing lesbian erotica. It would have been interesting to hear what someone like Adrienne Rich would have said about the place of politics in fiction. In hind sight James Meek summed it up when he said:”The observation is the writer’s; the judgment is the reader’s”.

 

Poetry Machine: Paul Muldoon

Paul and Bill were relaxed, clever and charming together. Bill said something like “Great poems are texts in conversation with other poems”, a theme that seems to be running through the week so far. Paul talked about asking “Is this verified?” Things that you witness on your own – it did happen! You can write about true stories that happened but they aren’t necessarily just like the poem. Poems go beyond the verified to another zone, where another truth is possible.

Paul talked of how the poem is “out there and the poet summons it in”. The less control you have of that the better – subconscious / preconscious. If the poem is too obvious to the poet it will be too obvious to the reader. Something needs to happen during the reading process. Poetic Chemistry – putting things together and seeing how they react, poetic physics – can the structure be sustainable under pressure?

There are two common ideas about poetry:

1. It’s a construct in the world

2. It’s a thing found in the world

Somewhere in the middle is a metaphor for poetry.

Paul discussed how usually form comes after the first draft, that the poem determines the form and you need to be able to recognise that it might take the form of a Sestina or Sonnet etc. The paradox with tight forms such as Sestina is that it seems predetermined on one hand, yet you have no idea how it’s going to turn out in the end. There’s a surprise at each point. When you give yourself over to a codified form of ignorance, humility, it’s not really a constraint and you end up where you didn’t expect.

 

Art & Text

I guess no piece of art, visual or textual can exist in isolation. Art history / the literary canon are behind them, peers are beside them. Artists and writers can’t create good work without being part of a bigger context. They need to be a reader / viewer as well as creator.

This panel discussed interaction versus synthesis. Paula Green started by saying she was “allergic” to the word “Text”. She discussed how language to her means something fluid to be interpreted, whereas “Text” signifies something set, to be analysed. Leigh Davis felt strongly about incorporating text into his work and moving towards a synthesis, a new medium; whereas Green emphatically said there can be no co-incidence only traffic of ideas, conversation. Interesting John Reynolds had the least to say but his work was in some was the most poetic combination of art and text. The way he stole snippets of phrases wrote the on art blocks them shuffled them around to create new meanings, poetic chemistry as Paul Muldoon would say. In that sense he works in a similar way to many poets but his page is a gallery wall.

Green discussed the importance of music or sound and this led to a throw away comment by one of the panellists about autism and artists need to be a bit autistic, which I took offence to. I hate that there is a trendy idea that it’s cool to be a bit autistic, it totally takes away from the reality of how difficult it is to live with. It’s like saying jazz musicians need to be a bit black. It would have been more interesting to discuss synaesthesia.

 

It’s Not Wishful Thinking: CK Stead

Carl Stead is not the grumpy old man he’s been made out to be, he was lovely in conversation with Elizabeth Alley. The main points I took from their conversation were:

Poetry is primarily an aural construct, a musical composition almost. Stead talked of his mother trying to teach him piano as a child and having no skill at it but having a wonderful ear for music, which translated well to poetry.

Stead, as Muldoon had, discussed how the poet is not in control. “Poetry is a welcome visitor but you never know when it will arrive or how long it will stay”.

They discussed Carl’s stroke and his recovery. He could write but not read after the stroke, which as you can imagine was very strange for him. It took about 10 weeks to heal the bruise on his brain and begin reading again. During that time he wrote poems but couldn’t read them until weeks later, he described it as being like writing in the dark.

 

 

The Camera is a Small Room

Perhaps because photographers are not writers, this panel of four esteemed photographers was not, on the whole, very eloquent. Marti Freedlander only really had one thing to say – that her work was deeply intuitive.
Anne Noble appeared to have put the most thought into the topic (finding similarities between poetry and photography among other things) and spoke about how poetry and photography are both condensed forms of art but present expanded views of the world. Noble said that they are both, in some ways, list making activities that order observations in interesting ways. It is the transformation of objects in art that creates “the marvellous”. Reconfiguring the world as a series of images, photos are a visual metaphor.
Laurence Aberhart discussed the camera as merely a tool, that its what you do with it that counts. He talked about developing a language over time. He agreed with Anne, saying that as poetry condenses language, so the photographer condenses visual imagery of a greater world. He went on to say (and I disagree) that where photography and poetry differ is that with photography you rely on intuition, you surprise yourself while controlling the accidental. However this comes very close to how several writers discuss the writing process.
Ans Westra did not say a lot but made an interesting comment about how, in such a quick changing world, photos are proof of event. Which made me think about how Paul Muldoon spoke of poems being verification but going beyond to a new truth.

 

Online with George Monbiot

Monbiot was a very inspirational and motivational speaker, even when preaching to the converted. He quoted a lot of interesting facts which I duly noted down however his most important points were:

1. Stop flying
2. Vote Green
3. Protest

The path to the solution for climate change needs to come primarily from national and international sources. Domestic and individual responses are important but we need to have global responses led by governments. Individuals need to demand change from their governments. Monbiot lamented that we appear to be more interested with excessive consumption than exercising out democratic rights. No political challenge can be met by shopping! He decried the repressive laws that have been rushed through post 9/11. Many worse atrocities have taken place but this was used to pass laws in the UK that mean any kind of protest can be declared illegal by police (think of the recent dawn raids in New Zealand). This is coupled with a wealth of misinformation being spread, primarily on the internet by “astro-turf” (rather than grass root) groups being funded by multi-national corporations with financial interests.

The primary thing we can do to bring about change is to get political, now.

 

Don’t Mention the War

What a panel of literary giants: Ian McEwan, Uwe Timm and Ck Stead. They spoke about guilt associated with things done or not done during war and about how war can define generations of men (and women). Another thread was how the post-war generation moved away from authority towards themselves. This was interesting in the light of the previous session with George Monbiot as he had spoken about the need to move away from our obsession with the self to thinking and protesting as a mass, a community.
The most striking part of the session was Uwe Timm saying that at the end of WWII conventions and regulations had been set in place because the consensus was that there must never be another war. Of course the irony of that was not lost, especially in the next war session about the true cost of the Iraq war.

 

Beautiful Thinking: Christian Bök

Avant-garde poet Christian Bök provided some light relief between the war sessions, one description of his performance could be channelling alien voices. Bök read in such a fast, animated way (think Dr Seuss on speed) that even poems that contained actual words were rendered indecipherable although musical – intentional and ironic, I’m sure. The problem with this is that nuance was lost, but it is a clever way to make people read your poetry. His modest plans for encoding a poem in the DNA of bacteria that can withstand nuclear war are hilarious but serious. The brilliant thing about Bök is that he was totally different from any other writer attending, his ideas refreshingly grandiose, his performance ear-splitting but startling in a good way. If you’re curious try online audio here or something for readable Eunoia is the work for which he is most famous. Eunoia is a lipogram that uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters.

 

 

The Costs of Iraq

Listening to George Monbiot, the panel discussion – Don’t Mention the War and The Costs of Iraq in close succession got me wondering why we aren’t all protesting. What will it take for us to get to our feet? Probably starvation.
Stiglitz said during the session that he didn’t think Bush started the war over oil but rather due to an oedipal complex. However Stiglitz has been criticized for not acknowledging the role of multinational corporations in conflicts. It would have been interesting to George Monbiot in on this discussion as well. The question was asked “Can George Bush be tried as a war criminal?” Although the USA have broken the Geneva convention and the war against Iraq is illegal none of the panel members believed he would be tried, although they thought he should be. This was one of the liveliest and most passionate discussions of the week and ended on massive applause. By the way the financial cost to date is 3 Trillion Us dollars, hmmmm.

 

The Prize in Modern Letters

David Beach won the prize for his first book, Abandoned Novel, which - despite its title – is a collection of sonnets. I’m very pleased that a poet won the prize, although I had been rooting for Michele Amas. I’m not familiar with David’s work but the pieces he read on the night were humorous and thoughtful. More on his book here.

Congratulations David!

 

 

 

The Messenger: Mayra Montero

Montero is one of those writers I may not have gone to hear if I hadn’t got a concession pass and as always these are the writers that turn out to be a pleasant surprise. Although often labelled (against her wishes) as an “erotic” writer she merely bring aspects of the sensual into all her writing. Mortality and death is a constant in her work, which is worthy of making her one of the top South American writers. The Caribbean literary tradition has strong links to music and this is inherent in her work. She spoke about escaping the repressiveness of Cuba in the 1960’s, using humour to satirise and censorship. In this was her work cleverly fitted in with the rest of the programme in an unexpected (for me at least) way.