Have you ever gone to a poetry reading and sat there all night, nervous as all get-up, unable to engage your motor skills in the simple act of walking over to the organiser and saying, ‘Put my name down for that open mike’?
What was it that intimidated you? Did you feel as if’no-one was interested in your work? Did you try and talk to anyone? Did you choose instead to remain passive, and hope that nobody stole your seat while you went to the bar for more beer?
Or did you put your name down after all, getting up to read aloud the poem that’d been driving you mad for weeks, finally setting it free to the accompaniment of rain-drops of applause, hardly deafening, but applause nevertheless?
There is no applause on a page.
As soon as you step off a page, you leave a community. Conversely, as soon as you step off a stage, you join one. Maybe someone did talk to you at that reading after all. Someone who read out a great poem early on, who seemed like a nice person. Maybe you got drunk together, bawled your words at each other for no reason save the exhilaration of expression. Maybe you’ll come back next week with a better poem, the one you just made up in the toilets—who cares?
A stage is a theatrical page, where one person stencils over another’s words, seeking to reconstruct a context, propel a feeling, silence a critic, publish instantly. Members of this community are sometimes drunk, they read voraciously and appreciate good writing, but their medium of choice is audiovisual, and all the subtleties of language it is capable of conveying.
Look around you for a moment—where are you standing as you read this piece? Are you in a bookshop, in that dim corner dedicated to journals and poetry collections? Where is everyone else? As soon as you put this book down, you will leave a discourse, which will continue nevertheless, and remember you, for the way you creased the page.
A dog-eared page in a bookshop could simply be graffiti left behind by an anarchist performance poet.
Have you noticed how many of the analogues, metaphors and conventions of traditional writing practice—from bookmarks and mailboxes to drafts have been carried over to the paradigm of the Internet? Why is this so? Unlike a screen, a page is not a virtual space. Its meaning is pre-composed, subject only to transient alterations (dog-ears, annotations, coffee stains). The page can very easily be viewed as a symbol for the dissemination of knowledge through hierarchies of power.
Conversely, in an Internet environment, a multitude of voices contribute agreement, anger, criticism and humour. Admittedly, the Internet assumes another kind of power—the resources and education that enable a person to access the Internet in the first place. Yet the number of people using email and the Internet is growing all the time, if we believe the hype. The same cannot be said for the canon of literature, that exclusive club with which we are all so banally familiar.
I once sent an email to the author of a poem I had read in an Internet journal, saying that the poem had made my day. The poet replied almost immediately and thanked me, as he was unaware that the poem in question had even been accepted for publication, let alone marked up in a foreign language (HTML) and downloaded, by me, via a computer screen halfway around the world. I had to laugh. What a strange place to visit!
As soon as I turn off this screen at which I am writing, I am forced to renegotiate another community in the physical world. This community has little or no truck with the virtual world, rightly regards e-commerce as the latest incarnation of an ATM and understandably enjoys the tactile experience of reading a book, even if it is a chapbook, of which there may be only twenty numbered copies in existence (making it, ironically, virtually non-existent).
My point is that technologies such as the microphone and the copper wire are just that—technologies. They allow for certain kinds of interaction between people that were not possible previously. They have all changed our society.
Are you still reading, you in the bookshop? That staff member is beginning to look suspiciously in your direction. To buy or not to buy? Have you made your decision yet? Don’t worry, there’s plenty of time.
And the Fitzroy library is still just around the corner.
This essay first appeared in Meanjin (60/2, 2001) as part of a special feature, facilitated by Peter Minter, on poetic modalities in media other than ‘hard text’. The issue also included a spoken-word CD, entitled Enhancer (curated by Michael Farrell), which included recordings of two of my poems: ‘The Sprawl’ and ‘Ken’.