POETRY IN PERFORMANCE:

INTERTEXTUALITY, INTRA-TEXTUALITY, POECLECTICS

This paper builds on a presentation given by the author at the NAWE Conference on Re-Writing, 25 November 2000 at Oxford Brookes University, where the main ideas were aired. A more complete treatment ensued at the 3^rd Research Colloquium: “The Politics of Presence: Re-Reading the Writing Subject in ‘Live’ and Electronic Performance, Theatre and Film Poetry”; held at the Research Centre for Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Oxford Brookes University, 2-3 April 2001.

© Mario Petrucci, 2000 / 2001.

Abstract

From fable to historical fact, Intertextuality has been for me - as for many contemporary writers - a potent driving force behind my creativity, an ongoing interest running deeper than the pleasures and subversions of, say, pastiche, parody or travesty. I present here an eclectic conception of writing which I term ‘Poeclectics’. Coined at first to reflect certain types of diversification among British poets on the page, I now see it has parallel applications for ‘performative’ works, as well as into and beyond other textual genres. Poeclectics is a re-orientation towards Re-Writing that re-emphasises the conventional re-visitation of literature’s more recognisable ‘voices’; but it can also quarry, in innovative ways, various elements of the experimental/ avant-garde, so as to encompass a variety of other processes and disciplines - anything from geology to mutagenics. Here, I position the term relative to several authors who observe similar patterns of development in British poetry since the Movement. In addition, I negotiate the positive (and negative) roles for Poeclectics as praxis - not only towards page-work but also as a support and spur for site-specific (‘situational’) writing and public commissions, modes of writing I describe as ‘performance poems without a performer’. Finally, this paper provides a timely context for the introduction of ‘Intra-textuality’; and I explore some senses in which text may be said to demonstrate Intra-textual qualities.

Introduction.

My original goal for this paper was simple: to illustrate the various routes by which Intertextuality has informed my work, particularly in performance. Here, ‘Intertextuality’ represents all the usual means through which literary texts are understood to inter-relate: that is, through pastiche, parody, allusion, reference, direct/indirect quotation, etc., along with other (more subtle?) techniques such as structural parallelism, rhythmic/tonal similarity, and the like. Also, I mean by ‘text’ principally the written/spoken varieties. Such Intertextuality is probably as old as text itself; but I feel I have been witnessing for some time - as well as expressing myself - a shift in emphasis and approach across a growing sector of ‘mainstream’ British poiesis, reflected by changes in the types of poem presented in workshops, performances, web-pages and books. The initiating (and highly-personalised) theme for this treatise therefore quickly shunted forward into my more general and on-going interest in a phenomenon I have termed ‘Poeclectics’ [1]. The last thirty years of British poetry are already well documented, so my main task will be to tie together a set of perspectives and views to justify my neologism (and its contribution to terminological proliferation) whilst retaining from my recent NAWE presentation [2] an emphasis on actual performance texts (my own) as a means of practical illustration. In true Poeclectic style then, I shall be more discursive than catalogic or exhaustive; there is only sufficient space here for case studies of a few pertinent Poeclectic modes. I must also dispel, without delay, any sense that my seemingly glib evocations throughout this paper of terms such as ‘Modernism’, ‘Post-Modernism’, ‘the avant-garde’ and ‘mainstream’ means that I intend these to be taken up as monolithic, checklist-type concepts boasting geographical or chronological book-ends. In a paper which attempts to launch a raft of nuances it may seem perverse to slip so; but there is only so much one can do, and the usual restraints of space force me to call on the tacit understanding that wherever such terms are used without development, my comparisons and statements either root themselves in the bibliographic context at that point or else are silhouetted against a more general drift of background reading.

I. POECLECTICS - an Overview.

Poeclectics, put briefly, is not a wholesale movement as such; more a discernible trend and willingness among poets to utilise more freely, and in a conspicuous manner, a variety of texts, styles, voices, registers and forms, usually resulting in an opening up of imaginative range and flamboyance. It incorporates all kinds of influences from literature but also embraces - as does the avant-garde - many other types of stimulus, pattern and prompt as a means of generating experimental texts. These may include arbitrary/ programmatic cues and constraints from outside literature (such as weather charts and algebraic formulae). Poeclectics thus combines a powerful sense of ‘making’ (Greek: poiesis) with a desire and facility to work inventively with a variety of sources and processes (‘eclectics’: from the Greek eklegein, to choose out, select). The term is new, but clearly many of its practices are not. Pastiche, role play, ventriloquism, dramatic monologue - these methods, and many others, fall within its scope. But Poeclectics occurs wherever poets adopt a particular position, style, method or voice - or invent one - to suit the purpose at hand, rather than being concerned primarily about any unifying principle of ‘voice’, or perhaps even of intention, throughout their body of work (though I must stress that a sense of the author’s presence or voice is not thereby necessarily extinguished). Poeclectics is therefore characterised by its emphasis on discrete poems and how they generate particular formal, emotional and aesthetic effects. One might usefully weigh, for example, Jo Shapcott and Carol Ann Duffy (particularly her more recent poems) on one hand against AE Housman, Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath on the other, to begin to get a feel for what I mean. I could also cite my own work, in which the cross-over from science into the arts constitutes a key, and recognisably Poeclectic, feature.

But haven’t Intertextual techniques like this been around at least since The Decameron? Isn’t Poeclectics just an extension of Modernism or Post-Modernism? And in what sense is Poeclectics distinct from the avant-garde, itself a loose term representing a vast body of (often under-acknowledged) writing and performance reaching back into the very heart of the last century? Well, considerable overlap does exist between the techniques of Poeclectics and of these ‘movements’; but I have found all literary terms, in some way or other, either too skewed or too loaded to describe accurately the developments and possibilities I am attempting to identify. In fact, Poeclectics is helpfully discussed via this very resistance to established categorisations, and precisely because its techniques do not fall uniformly and satisfactorily into any one ‘school’ or its associated identity or ‘tradition’. Of course, many writers and works, too, fail ‘to fall uniformly and satisfactorily’ into such movements; but in Poeclectics the tendency is endemic. It is hardly revolutionary, however, to argue that the eclecticism of Poeclectics is more expansive than in ‘Modernism’, or that its experimental-pluralist disposition transcends ‘Post-Modernism’ or ‘Post-Structuralism’, simply on the basis that those isms usually remain tied to a set of particular historical-literary associations in ways that Poeclectics either does not, or does less stringently. Nevertheless, Poeclectics does suggest a constantly-expanding set of activities more universal and recurrent than in any historically-sited movement. Post-Modernism and Post-Structuralism must always refer backwards to a historical ‘Structuralism’ or ‘Modernism’, while the avant-garde (etymologically at least) faces forwards. Poeclectics resists any particular temporal associations by looking forwards, backwards, and all around, for what it needs. In describing some recent British poetry in Poeclectic terms, then, I am not citing a brand new movement but a clear shift in the prominence and character of an ever-growing set of practices - practices which span a number of existing critical annotations.

Poeclectics has other, subtle distinguishing marks. To begin with, its eclecticism avoids the monologic drive of Modernism, whose fragmentary approach may be every bit as diverse as that of Poeclectics but whose complexity still aspires to a unified and ‘mimetic’ world-view. High Modernism deploys juxtaposed passages “strikingly divergent in register, rhythm, imagery and context” but ordered according to “an implicit metaphorical or narrative structure” (Robinson [3]) - as exemplified by, say, the hetero/poly-glossia of Joyce’s Ulysses. So, Poeclectics generates something more akin to a mosaic of coherences than a coherent mosaic. Moreover, in place of Modernism’s ‘Make It New’, Poeclectics puts (strictly speaking) a mere ‘Make It’. And Poeclectics is not wary of the poetic subject in quite the same manner as much of Post-Modernism. I venture that the Poeclectic author-self strives for largesse rather than the ludic, for heterogeneity-through-pluralism over pluralism-as-negation. Gregson’s note on the “residual respect” for the real in even the most Post-Modern of British writers ([4] p.5) lends weight to this, and I will discuss Poeclectic notions of the self in more detail later.

It happens, too, that Poeclectic approaches can open up issues surrounding the current state of critical-creative discourse (or is it ‘dys-course’?). This may occur, for example, when the Poeclectic reworking of ideas and texts constitutes their critique, as in some forms of ‘Re-Writing’ [5]. Re-Writing and Poeclectics further overlap, in that both may invoke conscious compositional modes activated through more-or-less standard text-based Modernist/ Post-Modernist techniques; but Poeclectics (like the avant-garde) will more naturally explore non-literary as well as non-textual adaptations derived from almost any conceptual or textual origin. There are signs that Poeclectics has shown fresh vigour in plumbing these possibilities (which, for me, are now important characteristics of the term) and poems in these various veins continue to bleed through into the mainstream. But I need to be plain here in stating that I see Poeclectics as much more than a description for observable developments of this kind in the practice of (Re-)Writing: the term also encompasses incipient and potential methodologies and writing modes (along with their new frames of reference) whose trajectories breach the documented boundaries.

Given the strong genetic likenesses between Poeclectics and Re-Writing, one will need reassurance that Poeclectics is not just Re-Writing in some light theoretical disguise. This is not difficult to supply. The common pedagogic manifestation of Re-Writing is to consciously initiate processes of writing-intervention around an explicit ‘source text’ as part of critical/creative analysis within a course; Poeclectics tends (in my experience) to originate from a set of motivations that are pre-existent to, and co-existent with, composition and which (at least to some degree) subconsciously seek an appropriate outlet mode. Poeclectics is therefore distinct from Re-Writing interpreted as an associative study/criticism conducted through the portal of an ‘initialising’ text, though on occasions Poeclectics may likewise critically address and rework a given source. Neither is Poeclectics synonymous with what might be termed the ‘microscopic’ definition of Re-Writing as the ubiquitous Intertextuality inherent in all new works. This conception of Re-Writing as simply ‘what happens whenever we write’ constitutes a diffuse, backgrounded input to language. It is something like language’s atomic structure, and any illustrating examples will tend to lead us back to the construction of language-as-universally-used. Poeclectics casts a sharper light than this. It tends to resolve clearer forms, shapes and qualities within its created texts. It concerns, intimately, the diversity, plurality, inventiveness and experimentation which occur within an individual’s body of work. While the notion of Re-Writing as the very core of writing is undoubtedly compelling, it does little to illuminate the particular facets one may find in a Poeclectic author’s poems. Poeclectic writers may still exude recognisable aromas, but they continue to stress the ‘occasional’ at a fundamental yet ‘macroscopic’ level by focussing on the poem at hand (its specific content, form and context). This latter set of distinctions, by the way, also explains why Poeclectics locks into the ‘performative’ in a deeper sense than most stylised performance verse-forms, through its anti-stylistic priority to make each poem or project fulfil a specific individual purpose and mode of expression.

I hope I have gone at least some distance towards demonstrating that the twins of Poeclectics and Re-Writing are not, after all, identical. This is as good a place as any to further distinguish between Poeclectics and its next-nearest living relative - the avant-garde. These both incorporate diverse practices, and in certain respects the Poeclectic writer may seem little more than a particular type of avant-garde practitioner who selects, devises or dabbles in ‘performance’ techniques which avant-garde writers have been developing at least since the 1960s. But it is no accident that the avant-garde bears a singularly martial title, one which still reflects accurately a revolutionary drive in its manner of exploration and innovation, and taken ‘on average’ Poeclectics may not be nearly as radical as the avant-garde. Poeclectic poets do draw on a wide range of discourses, and may even work loose some new strands of writing; but there is less sense of any overtly subversive ‘common cause’ between them, even in terms of innovation, plurality and diversity per se. By the same token, the individual avant-garde writer does not necessarily seek contact across a variety and range of creative-critical discourses in quite the ways a Poeclectic writer will: the latter is far more likely to include conventional methods and styles (sans irony) alongside poems dealing with (say) language-as-medium or hypertext. Even though the radical political agendas of its early origins may have shifted, generally, towards a transformative exploratory aesthetic, the avant-garde remains relatively ‘specialist’ compared with Poeclectics in that it is still recognisably experimental, oppositional, peripheral, clued-in, leading-edge, front-line and will embrace profound political motivation (in its broadest sense). Its collective focus is on ‘the not yet devised’. Poeclectics (= ‘making’ and ‘selecting’) incorporates the old, the new, the not yet devised, the already devised, the ad hoc. In brief: although most of the techniques of Poeclectics may not be considered exactly ground-breaking, the term itself (when used as a descriptive or conceptual tool) carries in its wake a set of valid (though subtle) theoretical distinctions which allow it to sail free of mere historical or terminological tautology.

Time for concrete examples. JH Prynne was described in a recent Bloodaxe catalogue as “Britain’s leading late Modernist poet”. The confidence of that pigeon-holing irritates; but one can argue that Prynne, across his books, uses a largely recognisable set of registers and creates thereby a distinctive linguistic presence (in spite of the Bloodaxe write-up by Rod Mengham which flags up his experimentalism and how he “has carefully denied himself the comfort of an avant-garde house-style”). It follows that Prynne’s approach is not nearly as Poeclectic as (say) Jo Shapcott’s, whose recent collection ‘My Life Asleep’ (Oxford Poets) allows confessional poems and lyrical translations of Rilke to rub shoulders with monologues from a talking quark, Mrs Noah, a hedgehog and a rhinoceros. It would not have seemed incongruous in Shapcott’s book to have found some highly experimental pieces also mixed in. A key point here is that the manner-isms of Poeclectics are distinct from those of (say) ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing, because although the latter may permit many voices and themes to speak it nevertheless remains coherently/ incoherently (and recognisably) stream-of-consciousness. The juxtaposition of voices, styles and traditions in Poeclectics is a ‘quantised’ heterogeneity, where each poetic project occupies its own ‘quantum level’, whether it be completely traditional or entirely novel. Of course, the Poeclectic writer still may be identifiable behind and through the work, but not via the same stylistic routes as a Prynne or Muldoon.

II. POECLECTICS and the Dialogic: Making Voices?

So far, I have outlined a new emphasis in Britain on the voice of the poem over that of the poet, noted personally over two decades across collections and in competition entries, collaborative projects and commissioned works. There is critical corroboration for the tangibility of such a shift, reflected more popularly by the considerable weight attributed in recent years (in publicity and on dust jackets) to a poet’s diversity, or ‘range’ [6]. Parallel conceptions include Ian Gregson’s ‘Dialogue and Estrangement’, in which post-Movement poets have deployed “stylistic mélange” ([4] p.4). A single quote from Gregson will suffice as endorsement that the type of developments I describe under the umbrella of Poeclectics constitute more than a literary glitch or passing trend:

‘What characterises the generations after Larkin is a growing refusal to allow one stylistic idiom to dominate - modernist and realist techniques jostle with each other in their work, producing a greater open-endedness than in the poetry of the Movement, a sense of a plurality of voices… ’ ([4] p.4).

Bakhtin (as Gregson himself points out) has already catalogued similar (though more patent) developments in the novel, away from mimesis and towards polyphony [7], and differentiates between ‘monologic’ texts (which impose some unity of style and vision) and ‘dialogic’ texts (where different styles and voices enter into discourse between one another and the culture at large). Bakhtin also coins the term ‘novelisation’ to describe how the multiple voices and perspectives in novels are taken up by poets ([4] p.7). One might lean upon these existing ideas and propose that Poeclectics represents - at least in part - a recent increase in migration from mainstream British poetry into more evident and experimental dialogic territory: a limited surge having, perhaps, some equivalence to (and historical precedence in) novelisation but possessing the distinguishable characteristics presented in my opening section. But this begs a question, or two. Given, then, the overlap between Poeclectics and Bakhtin’s/ Gregson’s models, have I simply been observing - like Gregson - the maturation of a new phase of novelisation in British poetry? In other words, is the Poeclectic term redundant?

Well, there is no doubt that novelisation runs quite close to my description of a distinctively multi-vocal presence in the British poetic mainstream, and Gregson’s account of the dialogic does resonate well with Poeclectics as I understand it via my own engagement with, and analysis of, the contemporary British scene:

‘The importance of the dialogic lies in its emphasis (as opposed to the single voice of traditional lyric poetry) on the interrelation and interaction of voices. There is a postmodernist element in this in the way it opposes the privileging of any one voice but there is an anti-postmodernist element also in the way it dwells on the felt authenticity of each voice, and in the political urgency of its championing of, as it were, the under-voices…’ ([4] p.6).

That “felt authenticity of each voice” is wonderfully succinct as a first description of my own Poeclectic instinct. But there are also significant shades of difference here. For Gregson, whenever recent British poetry “has evoked the postmodernist impossibility of speaking in a privileged voice it has tended, not to celebrate it as Ashbery’s poems do, but to fret over it and struggle against it” ([4] p.5). His linking of ‘Dialogue’ to the poets’ political agenda also defines a particular purview:

‘… stylistic ‘mélange’… is not mere eclecticism - it reflects a genuine concern to oppose single-minded visions of experience with a self-conscious emphasis on diversity and mutability. Much of the impetus for this is political, and arises from… cultural polyphony.’ ([4] p.5).

This, together with his ‘political urgency…championing’ point, demonstrates Gregson’s success in crystallising out a number of essential facets of the contemporary scene - however, he does not quite describe Poeclectics in its ever-expanding entirety. Certainly, Poeclectics can provide the building blocks for such politicisations of literature, but it is not uniquely (or predominantly) defined by them or by what certain writers have so far achieved with its techniques. Many Poeclectic experiments, for instance, are spurred through commissions, sheer curiosity, or delight. By incarnating ‘poiesis’ as well as ‘eclectics’, Poeclectics promotes those activities and motivations not necessarily or dominantly political, but also driven by an aesthetic sense of what may be desirable or appealing simply in ‘the making’ of poems. It can move freely in and between politics, genres and disciplines, suggesting dynamic new forms of hybridised praxis - as in my own transformations of folk lore, myths, word-processing phenomena, laboratory techniques and scientific processes into performance poems; but it can also run, at times, against any radical political re-orientation by celebrating the traditional (transmuted or otherwise).

Furthermore, Gregson’s excellent case-by-case account of ‘Dialogue and Estrangement’ must remain (like this paper!) in the tradition of literary criticism that reflects upon and attempts to understand what has already happened. Where Poeclectics passes beyond this - and beyond Bakhtin’s typologies, including novelisation - is that it can be more than a post-hoc descriptive term: it also delineates a potential re-orientation towards, and a set of possibilities in, writing/criticism even for those who have not yet adopted Poeclectics to any significant extent (and regardless of political motivation or cultural origin). While Gregson and Bakhtin describe new movements in literature, Poeclectics goes on to encompass the diverse templates (whether known, documented, or yet to come) through which all such movements may at times be expressed. It is precisely this focus on potential (as well as completed) praxis, together with the emphasis on ‘occasionality’ (the single poem or small group of poems under composition), which gives Poeclectics its distinct flavour. The propensity might be expected to lead to a more anthology-based literature, one which begins to seek ‘great poems’ over ‘great poets’. There has been some evidence for this in Britain [8], with the editors of the influential anthology Emergency Kit decisively stating: “This is a poem-oriented book” [9]. Poeclectic occasionality also comes powerfully into play for site-specific commissions (not colonised as yet by the avant-garde, whose work in this genre is not widely accepted) and for poetry off the page (much explored by the avant-garde, but little discussed by Gregson). This site-specific manifestation of Poeclectics is becoming increasingly important and is dealt with later.

III. POECLECTICS and its Deep Causes: Re-Making the Self through Otherness?

Where Gregson’s ‘dialogic’ does sound a distinctly common chord with Poeclectics is in the engagement of the writer with ‘otherness’:

‘What is involved in this insistence on polyphony, however, is not mere pluralism. It is not a question of the bland tolerance of difference but of a profound sense that the self has no meaning except in interrelation with others, and that the lived experience of the self can only be expressed through determined efforts to evoke the otherness with which the self continually interacts.’ ([4] p.7)

This quote alone might convince me that Poeclectics and the dialogic were founded, after all, on identical stone, were it not for that heavy accent on ‘except’ and ‘only’. Poeclectics does not insist on Either-Or. Still, the two perspectives fall almost into step again when Gregson notes that for writers like Carol Ann Duffy “the emphasis is on the dialogic rather than the dialectic, on the juxtaposition of worlds rather than the refining of a single world” ([4] p.8). Indeed, Poeclectics may well be a manifestation of poets trying to represent and further expand a growing consciousness of self/non-self by enlarging their work into mosaics comprising collage, polyphony and bricolage, where they can “accommodate more of the self because it is more sensitive to otherness” [10]. Perhaps the closest Poeclectics gets, then, to a characterising theory is that its diversity and pluralism may serve simultaneously: (a) the desire to investigate the tangents of self; and (b) to register deep uncertainties/insecurities regarding canon-making and the validity of any given authorial position. These tangents and uncertainties, as we have seen, can cut ‘dialogically’ into any historical material but will also certainly ride history’s leading edge. As new types of knowledge are popularised and reproduced, Poeclectics is likely to seize upon their special relevance to the contemporary self and facilitate their uptake into poetic consciousness, analogously with Bakhtin’s novelisation. Science and the media are current input areas which immediately and emphatically spring to mind.

Now, working poets may well want to ‘accommodate more of the self’ but they also need accommodation! It is worthwhile taking a momentary detour here to inspect the contemporary relationship of creative self to self-support. In this, Poeclectics may both serve and reflect recent funding patterns for poetry in Britain, drawing at least some of its energy - negative as well as positive - from the growing variety and quantity of financial packages now available for poets to work in public, community and semi-commercial situations. Freelance poets find themselves increasingly involved ‘off-the-page’: in teaching and academic environments; in schools and school assemblies; in institutions and voluntary agencies; in collaboration with musicians and the visual/ plastic arts; as cultural ‘caption-makers’ for public monuments and at civic locations; in community centres, parks and forests; on public transport; in response to folk narratives, artefacts in museums, commercial products and commemorative scenarios; on oil-rigs and in fish-and-chip shops. The list swells annually. My ‘Multi-caption’ poems at several of the Imperial War Museum’s sites, and Sue Hubbard’s immense IMAX poem in the Waterloo underpass, are two cases in point. And I know I am not alone in having written and taught in many of the above-mentioned situations. Then there is the powerful and ubiquitous input to Poeclectic practice through the burgeoning of the creative writing business [1] (both within and without academe) where professional writers frequently lead with Re-Writing techniques possessing a distinctively Poeclectic impulse (as in the ‘Try (re)writing this in the voice of…’ type of workshop exercise). Do these activities signal the emergence of a more fluid and commercial Poeclectic self which seeks greater communal (or market) contact? Perhaps so. Whether generative or responsive, these financial incentives certainly do sharpen the kinds of focus on occasionality and praxis which Poeclectics is well suited to deliver. What is more, the ad hoc socio-educational contexts into which such work is often launched encourages what appears to be the inherent preference in Poeclectics to experiment in ways that retain accessibility and a kind of self-sufficient coherence within each poem (a core feature of Poeclectics I shall shortly attempt to explain).

Returning to the dialogic aspects of poetic selfhood, it is also tempting to link Poeclectics with the “detachment of the self from the poetry” ([11] p.239) which David Kennedy associates with post-Movement writing in the wake of The New Poetry, where “any cultural origin or position is available and equally valid” ([11] p.20). Kennedy goes on to say that

‘… many poets have chosen to question the relationship between authenticity and artifice… by locating - or asking the reader to locate - the voice of an individual poem on a sliding scale between the apparent self of the poet and an explicit character or persona’ ([11] p.261).

This link-up becomes doubly convincing if one posits that a resonant condition has indeed evolved between the funding imperatives behind cultural provision (with their associated culturo-capitalist values) and a wider social thrust towards the questioning of personal identity. Such speculation aside, there is still a real Poeclectic flavour to Kennedy’s assertion; particularly in that phrase “the voice of an individual poem” which highlights how, in Poeclectics, the Intertextual tends to play along to a poem-by-poem pulse. He invokes Peter Reading as a poet whose “identity of ‘I’ has always been various and is certain to be different in any two successive poems” ([11] p.145). Kennedy reveals further Poeclectic tendencies in poetics by first referring to Gregson’s citation of Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay and Glyn Maxwell as examples of poets who display narrative uptake across a range of characters and who lend “high priority to the mimicry of a colloquial and vividly contemporary voice” (Gregson, quoted in [11] p.144) and then, crucially, modulating Gregson’s observation by claiming that the “narrators and protagonists [in the poems] are not ambiguous or questionable in the same way that those of Fenton, Motion or Morrison are” and “leave us in no doubt about the identity of their speakers” ([11] p.144/5). This forms a large part of what I meant earlier by the ‘self-sufficient coherence within each poem’ which Poeclectics tends to generate.

Kennedy’s astute observation serves to further estrange Poeclectics from most Post-Modern conceptions of self. Although the kinds of ‘ventriloquisms’ Kennedy points to certainly do not characterise the entire Poeclectic regime, they do illustrate how this central strand of Poeclectics - unlike much of Post-Modernism - “seeks subjects other than its own fictionalising” ([11] p.149) and attempts to preserve what Craig Raine calls “unity of impression” (quoted in Gregson, [4] p.17). Yes, Post-Modernism and Poeclectics both undermine any residual Romantic notion of the poet as identifiable with a single lyrical persona; but they do so in subtly different ways. A serviceable analogy of how the two diverge in this respect can be found in radio: Poeclectics is a little like the author being able to tune in to, and select, a great many discrete ‘voice channels’, while Post-Modernism entails hearing cross-talk across a number of channels all at once. In this sense, and indulging in gross generalisations, Kay et al are Poeclectic in a way that Fenton et al are not. Their conceptions of self and otherness are recognisably different, even though all these writers deploy otherness as a potential site for creative reconstruction.

One should also note here that Gregson’s dialogic represents “a promiscuous mingling of materials, an enjoyment of hybrid forms and images, a conflating of voices and perspectives” but “has tended to call upon linguistic ready-mades, upon pre-existent forms, and mingled them” ([4] p.10). It is this double-barrelled ‘mingling’ which evokes the frequently non-uniform style within the individual ‘Post-Modern’ poem, and Gregson’s point concerning the dominance of ‘ready-mades’ is exactly where the dialogic (as he describes it) leaves off and Poeclectics (in its full and experimental variety) can move on. Poeclectics may therefore contribute to the ‘rapprochement’ Gregson seeks between the hackneyed idioms of the dialogic and the exciting invention displayed by such writers as Roy Fisher and Edwin Morgan. As a bonus: when Ken Edwards comments that in Post-Modernism “all the personal pronouns are at risk”, thus explaining why the English Literary establishment retreated into an irony from which “the use of personae and dramatic monologues… is one way out” [12], one might reply that Poeclectics could actually be the recent expression of that ‘one way’.

I suspect in all of this that the Poeclectic ‘multi-voicing’ of poems relies much more on a Bakhtinian/ orchestrating author than it does on a Barthesian / Post-structuralistically dead one - at least in terms of praxis. Not so much the ‘death of the author’ then, as the re-birth of the auteur. One often has a sense in Poeclectics of the author selecting and framing, in that “what pretends to be a single voice in the poem is at least two” ([4] p.97). Which is not the same as Bakhtin’s ‘carnivalesque’, a mode that “brings together, unifies, weds and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the significant, the wise with the stupid” (quoted in [4] p.10). This, once again, seems to define a particular set of approaches and types of outcome outside of which one can Poeclectically stand. It seems fitting, therefore, to end this section by summarising how Poeclectics can be related (in sweeping terms) to Bakhtin’s ideas. I present David Lodge’s simplified model for the progression of the novel [13], and show how it may be extrapolated into the current Poeclectic terrain. Note that Diegesis indicates ‘telling’, or the use of the author’s voice(s); and Mimesis denotes ‘showing’, the manipulation of various characters’ voices. Superficial and limited though it is, and fraught with the danger of presenting Poeclectics falsely as a clearly-defined ‘movement’, this table may nevertheless provide, for some practitioners, a useful initial glimpse of the Poeclectic landscape.

Poeclectics: a proposed extension to Lodge’s progression of literature.

Classic Realism: Diegesis dovetailed with Mimesis

Modernism(s): Diegesis sub-ordinated to Mimesis

Post-Modernism(s): Diegesis foregrounded against Mimesis

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Poeclectics: Diegesis as or through Mimesis

IV. INTERTEXTUALITY & POECLECTICS: Relationships, Definitions, Examples.

CREEL SILO. "THE WHEELSMITH'S DAUGHTER'S SON (AND OTHER POEMS)"

Silo has no ordinary background. He has been a weightlessness consultant for NASA, a forensics expert on carpets, and a hotel porter. He now designs jigsaws for under sevens. Perhaps that's why The Wheelsmith's Daughter's Son (and Other Poems) is so adept at creating a language of fragments, interstices, cracks and interfaces, where shards of everyday life are collated into a larger view of the world and of intergalactic space travel. The Wheelsmith's Daughter's Son (and Other Poems) is a poetry of the heart, the gut, the mind. This is a deep-pile of a book, where we are invited to fuse the senses, the intellect and sex. Silo plants one leg in classicism and the other in futurism, meaning he can do remarkable things with the present. In The Wheelsmith's Daughter's Son (and Other Poems) poetry is a body - a very big body, with rippling thighs and a Zimmer frame. In it you'll meet the high-wire contortionist who rode shotgun for Nixon, two lovers making out in a large bowl of Spaghetti al Vongole and Persephone on a bike (literally). There's a child's misfired attempt to origami the Brooklyn skyline, and the epiphany of a pristine Sunday Sport found immaculately folded on a seat in the Underground. But in the end, The Wheelsmith's Daughter's Son (and Other Poems) is the story of a wheelsmith, his daughter and her son.

I have so far held back from any detailed discussion of the relationships between Intertextuality and Poeclectics because I wished to present all the arguments together, in a single section, illustrating them with performance pieces taken from a range of contexts that provide concrete examples of Poeclectic practice. My first sample (above) is a short extract from a spoof review - now published (and paid for!). It is not poetry, I know; but I opened with it partly to subvert my own definitions, partly because it does ‘perform’, and mostly because it is a Poeclectic lambaste of Poeclectics-gone-wrong, targeting those blurbs which mindlessly and smugly equate diversity to quality. Stylistic parody - or, for that matter, the absorption of actual text - in Poeclectics is of course a familiar mode of textual assimilation. Overt forms of Intertextuality such as this have been referred to as ‘weak’, with more subtle methods termed ‘strong’ [14]. This theoretical perspective seems to me counter-intuitive [15], particularly for a poetry practitioner. I shall therefore use my own (more transparent) terms ‘Explicit’ and ‘Implicit’, respectively.

For me, Explicit Intertextuality has a centripetal tendency because a small group of dominant associations usually constitute the hub of its discourse and are difficult to escape. Centripetal texts often possess iconic/ totemic references and values; they build or depend upon consensus, and are easily converted into national or ‘heritage’ goods. Implicit work, though, may be termed centrifugal because it tends to fling language out into fresh processes and potential meanings [16]. Centrifugal methods are disposed to the generation of reader-oriented texts; they offer more nodes of conflict with the dominant culture, can possess unstable linguistic encodings, or plumb textual possibilities originating outside text. It is central to my own conception of Implicit Poeclectics that it includes various centrifugal trajectories through these darker regions of Intertextuality. I mean by this that a Poeclectic attitude can support ways into writing which outdo the recycling or hybridisation of well-known Intertextual techniques, however sophisticated those techniques may be. An example is my on-going experimentation with new types of ‘translation’: not between languages, but from one discipline into another.

‘Mutations’ was generated by such a route. I give this example early on because of its effectiveness in illustrating, perhaps, one of the more exciting and experimental Poeclectic modes. I applied the few simple laws of genetic transmutation to the syllables and letters of a line of familiar (ie ‘Explicitly’-appropriated) verse, and obtained the poem. A centrifugal tactic like this might be expected to throw up the unexpected - but it is, quite frankly, astonishing to arrive at that point in the poem which drives one irresistibly to speak in Scots (try reading it out loud!). Audiences love to hear texts unfold under the influence of a bizarre law: they follow, chuckling, the ridiculous ‘mutations’ all the way to that sinister punch. Whenever I perform the poem I assist the effect by asking them to imagine me fooling around with the text in Ouija-like fashion, at 2am, lit only by the faint glow of my PC.

MUTATIONS

Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep

Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep

Littler Bo-Peep hes lost her shep

Littler Boy-Pep hees lost der shep

Littler Boy, Peep ees lost yer ship

Littler Boy, Peep his lust fer seep

Litter Boy, Keep h lust fer sheep

Titter Boy, lest ah keep yer wheep

Titter Boy, mah Keepe yoer heep

Sitter Boy, dah km Reepe yor heep

Sister Toy, deh Reape, kom n yor dheep

Titter Toy, de Reape komt ni yor sheep

Witter Boy - de Beaper kontim yor sheepe

Bitter Boy - de Reaper kom in yor sleepe.

Most readers will quickly recognise the massive potential here for the introduction, into mainstream poetry, of

novel cross-disciplinary fertilisations in writing discourse. This is, granted, hardly headline news to the avant-garde. But, as outlined earlier, Poeclectics is not just about the re-use, re-invention and extension of weird or provocative compositional processes; it is also very much to do with a canny (and often limited) tailoring of Re-Writing techniques to a context-specific, practical situation - as the next poem demonstrates.

‘I Am’ was written for Whitgift School in Croydon. Commissions really focus the mind - especially where children and young adults are involved. I know, too well, that wrenching terror of the empty public space - far blanker than any sheet - which awaits your as-yet-unwritten text. Poeclectics can come to the rescue in such cases by providing a priming structure or formative idea. This situation demanded, I felt, rhythmic power (hence the poem’s form) and I was sufficiently conversant with staff and pupils to know I could stir up the Lower Sixth with an uncompromising message for our time’s pervasive (invasive) infatuation with economics. More than that, in writing poems like ‘Mutations’ and ‘I Am’ I am expressing my resistance to performance as merely high-octane humour, transparent entertainment or a cavalry-charge of the ego. The Poeclectic input to performance can be wry, dramatic, moving, unsettling. For example, the rhythmic insistence of ‘I Am’ may appear, at first, slightly heavy-handed; but the Intertextual Poeclectic factor behind it is quite delicate and, ultimately, disturbing. (For those still unsure of the ‘Implicit’ input here, think of a nursery rhyme about a church and its steeple. Listen out for the amplified echoes of its rhythm.)

I AM

I am the locker-room handshake and snigger

I am the banker cooking the figures

I am the Emperor, never the boy

I am the whisper guiding the trigger

I am the pollster, the doctor of spin

who dresses the President, puts on his grin

I am the Hollywood-sounding Rob Roy

I am the group who can’t even sing

I am the Minister’s immaculate hairstyle

I am the Tyrant in comfortable exile

I am the Vivaldi beep on your mobile

You are the inch - and I am the mile

I am the logo on every jersey

and also the model past it at thirty

I am the right without obligation

I am the blood-stained allegation

I am the nursery’s barbed-wire fence

I am sensation but never the sense

I am the very best form of defence

I am the pence added to pence

I am the ego that’s simply galactic

I am the sex that must be fantastic

I’m in the poet writing an ad

I am the credit pressed out of plastic

I am the nation drowning in beer

The performance-enhancing chip in your ear

I am the planet’s last Hamadryad

I am the death-bell no one will hear.

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Note: Hamadryad - the spirit which lives in,

and dies with, a tree. Also, a king cobra.

Of course, the mere fact that Implicit characteristics within a Poeclectic piece were consciously engineered by the author does not mean their presence is necessarily made more patent to the reader/listener. In Shrapnel and Sheets [17] for instance, the sequence ‘Sheets’ ghosts some rhythmically-related lines of Italian folksong and lullaby. Some Italian air is, I feel, breathed into the English, where it combines with the off-pentameters (11-syllabled lines) to create a sense of haunting uncertainty. In the same collection, the poem ‘Top Our Road, Bottom Our Road’ adapts and ‘futurises’ the tone of a poor, yet motivated, African boy I knew as a child. Subtle Poeclectic acquisitions such as these may not signal themselves immediately to the reader. However, they do extend a writer’s opportunities beyond mere appropriation, or elaboration upon, subject-based content. What is more, intuitive experimentation in such areas can be wonderfully liberating.

Moving along the Poeclectic spectrum, more ‘Explicit’ experiments might involve, say, a tactic of inversion applied to platitudes or common sayings. Such methods can slip a mite too easily into facile humour; but ‘Reflections’ (below) manages to reverse the logic of cliché to distinctly non-comic effect. Another, familiar case of Explicit Intertextuality, and one highlighted by the Kennedy quote earlier, is the Re-Writing of, and around, well-established narratives and characters. Carol Ann Duffy has used the approach famously in her ‘Mrs…’ poems [18]. Frequent source-texts for this kind of work will include myth, children’s stories, fable and historical events. Hand-in-hand with it go those techniques which generate fresh narratives through the re-creation of a cultural character whose story is known only in a very limited or derived fashion [19]. These variations on the theme further underscore a powerful facet of Poeclectics: to invent new personalities for our times, capable of carrying archetypal or mythic weight. Indeed, the re-appropriation, hybridisation and re-invention of characters and their stories is one of the principal Poeclectic tools in current use. Which is hardly surprising. Our hunger for narrative is probably as old as language itself - in fact, our need for stories may constitute the original reason for text, its very ‘DNA’. Poeclectic narratives can open up fertile creative (and perhaps political) spaces for the writer; they can also transcend, at least in principle, performance as an endless narration of the performer’s ego.

REFLECTIONS

Bees will sting like a razor

The air will be clear as glass

A nut, tough as a tax-form

Hills as old as hats

Trees will be sturdy as girders

Hares, scheme-brained;

A feather as light as helium

Coal will be almost as black

as a space-time singularity.

Pie will be easy as numbers

Clockwork regular as citizens

And the button, that big red button

as bright as a child.

V. INTRA-TEXTUALITY and the TEXTUAL CONTINUUM.

At this juncture, and as a productive diversion from Poeclectics, I wish to introduce the notion of ‘Intra-textuality’ [20]. It is a term for which there seems to be a real need in current Critical Theory and one that relates vigorously to the long-standing debate concerning the deep objective-subjective structures of texts. Now, Poeclectics and Intra-textuality may well be related, in that whenever I make an attempt to exploit or excavate Intra-textual effects I often feel I have moved very much into Poeclectic territory. But Intra-textuality is not about Poeclectics in its ‘Explicit’ assimilations of texts, or through Rob Pope’s “Implied Intertextuality” [14]; nor is it the sophisticated Re-Writing of texts according to exterior (ie imposed) styles, tones or registers. It sits, rather, somewhere among the diffuse sets of ways of thinking about and using text which are not in any clear way ‘Intertextual’.

One such ‘non-Intertextual’ manifestation occurs when the phonemes, words and phrases of a chosen piece of text (that is, of its substance [21]) are re-organised so as to generate a variety of profound and subtle outcomes. This is the workshop exercise we all know - where one cuts up a text in order to internally rearrange it or to draw the bits at random from a bag so as to make a new text: the ‘cut-up poem’. Dénouements may include dislocation, productive solecism, peculiar forms of parataxis and polysyndeton-asyndeton, or glints of surrealism or onomatopoeic mood. It is uncanny that violent textual rearrangements such as this (even random ones) still do not give complete non-sense. Why is that? In fact, the cut-up poem is an excellent place from which to begin our interrogation of Inter- versus Intra-textuality. One might ask, for instance, whether the outcomes of cut-ups are simply generated within the re-formed text by the reader? Were they ‘planted’ there in the first place by the re-writer (raising a query over the true ‘randomness’ of the process)? That is, can one trace the effects back (at least in principle, if not in practice) to the reader’s/re-writer’s own linguistic/ semiotic/ semantic/ sub-textual expectations, patterns and codes, so that all the effects become ‘Intertextual’, in its broadest sense?

Patently, the answer must include a ‘yes’ somewhere - but only up to a point. I cannot see how one can rule out the possibility that various patternings of uttered sound or visual signal may exist (with their semiotic constituents) whose effects upon us are difficult to pin down by any Intertextual route. And some outcomes originate outside the text/content altogether, through (for instance) the mobilisation of the medium (its substance): by fragmenting the paper upon which the text rides, cut-ups generate new textual events that would not occur to the eye through conventional Intertextual reference between sheets of paper. Text-fragments can end up inverted, overlapping, or synchronous (two or more scraps pulled from the bag together). These sonic and material effects have little to do with Intertextuality as defined in the introduction to this paper (and as commonly construed). They can be re-interpreted, rather, as a rich and important feature of Intra-textuality.

Some may claim, at this point, that the above questions have been disingenuous. That is to say, my differentiation between Inter- and Intra-textuality can be taken as already understood, or as little more than a matter of definition:

‘Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be located…’ Roland Barthes [22].

In other words, authors such as Barthes and Julia Kristeva would probably see Intra-textuality (as I have outlined it so far) as nothing more than a set of highly Implicit (‘anonymous’) Intertextualities. However, if such Intertextualities are, by their nature, virtually untraceable then there can be no useful means of distinguishing between them, or between the streams of their consequent effects; nor can one test in any meaningful way to what relative degree such effects are generated through (for instance) some obscure Intertextual content as opposed to (say) responses generated within the pleasure-centres of the brain by certain combinations of sound or typographic forms. In these types of textual and sub-textual space I find the term ‘Intertext’ unhelpful, and close to oxymoronic. When origins and sources become attenuated to the point of extinction, have we not defined some kind of boundary beyond which ‘Inter’ no longer sensibly applies? In saying ‘boundary’ here I am not claiming that the transitions from Intertextuality to Intra-textuality are characterised by membranes rather than capillaries - this, I just do not know. What I am relatively sure about is that in using Intra- rather than Inter- in describing such spaces one avoids the implied or overt assumption that these regions can be colonised completely (or dismissed) simply by extending Intertextuality into them in a vague quasi-structuralist way. As any empiricist will tell you: just because many attributes of a text turn out to be traceable to other texts, this does not constitute in itself a proof that everything about the text must be. And in designing Barthes-like definitions of Intertext to exclude or eliminate this challenge, all one creates (for me) is an argument having a suspiciously round shape.

I cannot go any more deeply into whether or not Intra-textuality is a red herring, or build here a more detailed case against the assumption that texts are, a priori, completely ‘Intertextual’; I simply propose that adopting an Intra-textual contrast to Intertextuality may prove useful, and that ‘the Intertextuality of all text’ is a hypothesis deserving of scrutiny, particularly at the fundamental levels of textual generation and pre-textual motivation. It certainly does no harm to revisit constantly, from various angles, this Intra-textual ‘dark matter’ of our linguistic universe. I suggest, as one such angle, that the terminology be refined by placing Explicit Intertextuality and Intra-textuality at the extremes of a continuum, or spectrum, of ‘textuality’ (with Implicit Intertextuality sandwiched between) [23].

Intra-textuality