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John Welch


THE VOICE-PERFORMER

seen on the side of a building
It was a building in Heidelberg – we were waiting for a bus to take us to the airport – and it read, in English:

‘Printing: the art of turning paper into emotions’

Is printed in ink that won’t come off on your hands –
Writing that blackened the mirror searching for change

And in winter sunshine, dustless afternoon clouds,
The voice-performer’s light-filled skeleton


flyposted

TO CLEAR THE BUSH OF YOUR GARDEN PHONE . . . This notice, plain black print on a white sheet of paper, was flyposted all ovder the place. Strictly speaking of course it’s not grammatically incorrect. Compare ‘To clear your head of this nonsense phone . . .’ You want to get the nonsense out of your head, not your head out of the nonsense. Or do you? In what is written here the garden is in the bush, not the bush in the garden. Is the garden latent in the bush? But I need to lift my head up out of this ‘nonsense’ – which is this dreaming. I lift my head out of it when I wake.

Text: preservation of the body by other means?


the visiting speaker

It’s a sort of far-sighted gleam, a distant possibility it seems to offer. He’s standing there now by the fireplace, expounding, his back to you and suddenly he too is seized with that excitement and here it is all around you, a library of unopened books.

‘Time after time’ I said, ‘when the others went out I’d stay at home to get on with my writing.’ So is it something that makes a shape to remember us by? You’ll find you have carried on for long that it’s too late to turn back, but there might be some point in acknowledging the sheer effrontery of its claim, the way you keep on returning to it.

And so it was the visiting speaker stood up and said: ‘I have come here to talk to you about the remains of our ceremonies, the million forms of enlightenment today, a host of scattered reflections, and there’s the way that sometimes it all seems to mean. Ah yes, meaning, the shadow that falls across the page obscuring the purity of its language and, like death, is it edging closer all the time? Was learning their language just a way of being nice to them? In any case it will have to end and maybe sooner than you think, this sense you say you have of being trapped. Was anything actually holding you here? Maybe you would be glad to be rid of it so that you can come downstairs, before it is too late, and join the rest of us in our careful meals.’


after the conference

Too much sitting through poetry readings; the people are perfectly nice, but the poems aren't really any good, and I end up feeling grudging, ungrateful, sour. After the conference I am in a mood of manic alienation. Bursting with nothing to say, my silence grows dense.

Is it like those mobile phone conversations you overhear on the bus. You hear one half and have to imagine the other half. The other day I was on a bus in Hackney and a man was
talking on and on, very loudly, enumerating sexual exploits… Bit by bit it became obvious that there was no on at the other end.

When there are lots of readings, one after the other, it’s a conference. In some cultures a virtue has been made of being sparing of language. Could anyone who uses as many words as here be said to be 'questioning language', as these people claim to be doing? All these people forcing their voices onto you. 'Hold your tongue'. 'No, you hold my tongue'. We walk round holding our mirrors at a careful angle to one another. Is being nice to people's poems a way of being nice to people? Sorry – I have no money to buy your book. How could you possibly want anything I have?

Poet holding it just in front of your face – get in the mirror and settle down in there. Climb in among the glass shards of light-petals.

Is being nice to people's poems a way of being nice to people? I have no money to buy your book. It all falls into ruins being said.

All these people forcing their voices onto you. 'Hold your tongue'. 'No, you hold my tongue'.
The unremitting quality of all this is tiring. People are looking nervously over the shoulders of people they’re talking to. Who’s that coming in now?

Pass-the-parcel? But how could you possibly want anything I have? Only if I wrap it up, if I conceal it in the wrapping, to that you can't really take the wrapping off. You can't separate it from the wrapping – the wrapping is the writing.

I put the words in my pocket and I turned back home

an event

Here are poets at play – happy with the uselessness of words? Is the activity the point, not the final product? So you don’t read the work as a narrative on the page, you look at it . . . You register it as ‘an interesting thing to have done.’

That performance poet describing an event, a public event, an intervention – the way she talked it was the doing of it, the fact they had brought it off, that appeared to be the point, especially as it involved setting something up in a public space. So these things are interventions in the everyday course of events, interruptions – is that the point, and the content more or less irrelevant?


‘thought is in the mouth’
Tristan Tzara

The reading, tongue and its sacrament. The poets performed and then at the end the enormous ox tongue one of them had prepared and brought along was peeled and eaten, like communion. ‘Giving tongue’ – what hounds do when hunting? The gross oral / the abstractness of language brought together in a performance. Held up in front of the audience, it’s like a stone, something petrified, petrifaction of language? Silenced, all we can do is devour it.


making meaning

A sequence I called ‘Its Radiance’ and I had a line at the beginning as a sort of epigraph, or subtitle even: Something that does not know us: but that we are known by

The opening section was:

Its radiance
sent part of you to sleep.
You woke beside this other.
Separately each breathes. Light rises, falls.

Hydrangea near the sea-shore’s speckled pink.
Sunlight and wind comb the tamarisk over the rock
Whose turning edge will lift us into time —

A piece broke off and weathered.
We’re in the gap that opens out,
Blood-berries, on a white sky.

The reader makes the meaning; meaning is not some 'essence of meaning' to be taken out of the text like a pill out of a bottle. We talk about making love. In the same way, meaning is something that has to be made. The reader makes the meaning, but it is only meaning-ful, that is filled with meaning, at the point where that meaning is in some sense shared... perhaps one could say when it is reflected in another person?

It's not about another person, but the space between, the transformed space of being separately together with someone, existing at peace. But it's fragile. The words are desired and distrusted. The words are both a distancing and distortion but also the only way of making real. Something fragile but also immensely part of geological, diurnal and momentary time - 'Sunlight... A piece broke off and weathered' using 'broke' and 'weathered' as equal. We are dwarfed but everything is precious. And in the end, being human, we need the words.

‘The words got there first / making it ready'.




Note: ‘thought is in the mouth’ – the performance featured among others Holly Pester and James Wilkes.

Copyright © John Welch, 2010