[Reader-list] a "sclerosis between the verbal and non verbal arts"?

[Vivek Narayanan]

...and (why) is "the prejudice of much art towards poetry... inherently 
passeistic"?

Caroline Bergvall (very interesting poet) writing on a recent "poetry 
marathon" at the Serpentine Gallery. From "Harriet", the poetry 
foundation blog:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/10/poetry-marathon-at-the-serpentine-gallery-london/#more-5946 


Poetry Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London

Poetry contributor Caroline Bergvall attended the 50-some poet, 36-hour 
poetry marathon at the Serpentine Gallery in London on October 17–18. 
Her dispatch follows:

I’m writing in from London where I’ve recently been part of a highly 
ambitious poetry event. The internationally reputed Serpentine Gallery 
in Hyde Park has for the past 4 years been hosting a mad type of event, 
an annual 36 hours live event, a more or less non-stop art marathon of 
presentations. This year they decided to create it as a Poetry Marathon. 
Some 50 poets were slated to take part, each reading for approx. 15 
mins—a decent time given the chain of readings and the expected strained 
attention span.

The event has been summarized in great detail online, complete with 
program notes, introductory remarks by the curator and high-end cultural 
entrepreneur Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as pics and comments on many of 
the readers. Although amazing, I have to admit the event has left me 
thoughtful…

The decision to dedicate a whole weekend to contemporary poetry within a 
public art setting was immediately exciting to me. Inevitably, linking 
poetry to the visual arts or, rather, to its institutions, brings poets 
and poetry into a more public, less specialized sphere (one might wish 
to discuss the meaning of the term “public” since so many arts and 
poetry events are corporately funded) than that provided for by 
dedicated poetry environments. Certainly, events organized within 
museums or galleries are attended well beyond what one might usually 
expect from a poetry reading in a literary venue. I could tally 
audiences from similar events in NYC, as I’ve been involved in some of 
these in recent times, such as MoMA’s Modern Poet series (initially 
created by Frank O’Hara), Dia’s commissioning of poets for some of their 
events programming, the NY Art Book Fair at PS1 with its many readings 
and talks, even the recent Whitney one-off extravaganza of poetry as 
entertainment, to name but a few that you may be familiar with.

The array of historic art shows, notably around Concrete, Dada, and 
Futurist movements or those from more recent Environmental or Concept 
Arts, where the strict line between textual and visual exploration 
blissfully dissipates are another important linkage between artistic 
modalities. Poetic explorations of language can here be experienced in 
their interaction with different presentational and investigative forms; 
and be witnessed and discussed by a whole range of audiences otherwise 
often not involved in poetry. In an epoch so overly dedicated to the 
visual arts, where urban family outings can also take place in the malls 
and cafés of our large museums, the presence of poetic works at the very 
heart of art shows is a reminder of poetry’s and of treated language’s 
role in shaping the larger artistic developments we’re inheriting from 
the 20th century. Poets’ impact on the development of interdisciplinary 
arts provides a crucial, if often largely ignored, contribution to 
subsequent art or literary histories. It is this connecting line between 
the visual and the textual and literary arts that is at entry favored by 
the Serpentine event.

The Poetry Marathon used the idea of “poetry” very loosely, nearly 
archaically. It is more to do with doing and making (language) than with 
applying the stricter and formal bounds of any art form per se. Indeed 
the remit for “poetry” this weekend is “performances from leading poets, 
writers, artists, philosophers, scholars, and musicians.” As such it is 
an umbrella term, a reminder that everybody writes, sometimes. However, 
in the context of a highly secluded British poetry culture, perhaps 
they’ve taken the idea one step too far.

The highy diverse presence (live or remote) of poets/writers/performers, 
such as John Giorno, John Ashbery, Geoffrey Hill, Eileen Myles, Etel 
Adnan, Gerhard Rühm, Jacques Roubaud, Don Paterson, Alasdair Gray, Nick 
Laird, Sean Bonney, Kenny Goldsmith, Charlie Dark, Michael Horovitz, 
Vito Acconci or myself was promising. Here we had an internationalist 
(if Anglo slanted) event. A closer look revealed that only a very small 
handful of poets from the many (established and less established) scenes 
of Britain were represented. The gender and ethnicity count among these 
was also troublingly unequal, where this is in fact the one thing the 
Brit Po establishment has represented quite systematically, even at the 
expense of other, more formally pertinent values. This struck me as the 
clearest sign of the scission between visual arts and poetic practice in 
Britain. Indeed, to suggest that official poetry in the UK is 
increasingly associated with heritage art is a clear exaggeration (a 
recent survey found that many Londoners have no idea who John Donne is). 
Nevertheless, in a country where the sheer word “poetry” sends a shiver 
down many Brits’ backs and where the artist Tracey Emin, who opened the 
weekend, publishes her endlessly pre-teen poetry in GQ magazine, an 
aspect of the event did need to provide both a closer look at British 
literary poetry and a slightly more stringent definition of the 
operative term itself.

Furthermore, although a number of the chosen artists are known for 
dealing with writing and language pertinently and intrinsically as part 
of their artwork (Susan Hiller, Tacita Dean, Sean Landers, Jimmie 
Durham, Jonas Mekas, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster), it was something of a 
disappointment to see so many of them react with undisguised anxiety at 
that same word, “poetry.” Otherwise lucid, articulate artists found 
themselves in the throes of open self loathing, “I don’t know poetry,” 
“I dont know what to read,” choosing to calm the audience by reading 
from known values such as Eliot, Ted Hughes, Lorca, and Hamburger’s 
Celan, rather than tracing their own engagement with writing as part of 
the event. Here, poetry itself was treated as a historical, in the sense 
of acquired, decorative, rather than productive, mode of functioning.

What happened? Tim Griffin, poet and editor of Artforum, said in his 
opening remarks that poetic investigation might provide a needed grammar 
for the arts in a period of crisis. This insightful point was echoed by 
Eileen Myles, who reminded us that a number of poets in the late-20th 
and early-21st centuries have certainly at times sought out arts 
environments for a wider, looser, more open renewal of their forms and 
modes, but that it was now time for the visual arts seeking out writing 
and literature to query their more profound questions about writing. How 
and why might they be courting poets and poetry, how and why might they 
wish to including reading and writing as part of their practices, and 
more pointedly, what were poets doing at the Serpentine?

So what’s the problem? Here again, it seems to me that the event 
confirmed that the debates between art and poetry remain superficial and 
usually kept on a back foot, or at arm’s length. Apart from artists or 
writers who specifically develop ways of working across these 
disciplines or modes, the cultural status quo is still very much, and in 
an often unexamined way, one of irreconcilable historic and formal 
differences between the literary and visual arts. The mood was certainly 
very different a year ago when the Serpentine hosted a large 
retrospective by the filmmaker, painter, and poet, Derek Jarman.

The prejudice of much art towards poetry is that it is inherently 
passeistic when not informed by artistic modes. The question of writings 
by artists is that writing is an instrumentalized, functional activity. 
This ignores the fact that the whole question of applied (or writerly) 
language is also that of histories of language and of literary and 
semiotic applications. All this forms a specific skills base that is 
indeed pertinent to the demagogic and mediatized rhetorics of our times.

The reluctance of the artists present to engage with poetic material and 
the absence of more British poets effectively created the feeling that 
the pink elephant in this open-air enclosure was language itself. Or 
rather, a fear of language, a fear about not controlling a knowledge of 
language that demands its conscious, careful, and studied semiotic and 
semantic manipulations across a whole range of environments. The fact 
that poetic and literary cultures in Britain are still resolutely 
separate from other artforms, unless dealing with theatrical 
performance, certainly plays an important part in generating this sort 
of sclerosis between verbal and non-verbal arts.

—Caroline Bergvall, October 26, 2009

* “Recently discovered letters from Philip Larkin to Monica Jones 
disclose that the poet became so obsessed with the hit television show 
Baywatch that he considered writing to the producers and offering his 
services as their new leading man.” —From the 2009 Serpentine Gallery 
Poetry Marathon program