Friday 13 July 2012

I Was a Poet, but I Did Not Know It

When my children were little, I earned money, while staying at home, by being a transcriber. Little did I know that those women of my acquaintance who, having made the decision to not stay at home with their children but to continue instead with their glittering careers (composed mainly of long afternoons in stuffy offices trying not to fall asleep as their colleagues droned through dull meetings) and consequently looked down their immaculately made-up noses at me (no, no, it didn't rankle at all, I'm not in the slightest bit bitter, hem hem) were utterly wrong in assuming that transcribing was a menial task.

It turns out that, as a transcriber, I could have been a contender - in the poetic world at least. There is in fact, according to the 10 May 2012 (note, not 1 April, as you may assume by the time you've read the rest of this post) issue of the London Review of Books, a man called Kenneth Goldsmith who publishes poetry - or rather 'poetry' - that consists of transcriptions of radio broadcasts.

He has, for example, created a work called Traffic, which is his transcription of an entire day of traffic reports from New York. He has 'created' another called Sports which - you guessed it - is a transcription of the radio commentary of a sports event  (a baseball game, as it happens, but I imagine it could have been taken from cricket or golf or even synchronised swimming and still produced a pretty similar result). He has also 'created' Weather - by now, I need not go into details; I assume it's pretty simple to work out the content of that one.

Goldsmith, with what I have to admit is an admirable level of honesty, describes what he does as 'uncreative writing'. He also happily admits that his books are 'impossible to read straight through. In fact', he goes on, 'every time I have to proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly.' He claims that 'writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance'. If he is so concerned about textual abundance, I can't help wondering, why has he chosen to add to the problem with works such as Day, a retyping of one issue of the New York Times, and Soliloquy, a transcription of every word that he, the 'poet' Goldsmith, spoke for a week.

Unfortunately, Goldsmith is not an isolated prankster. There's a whole lot of these con-artists - sorry, I mean 'neo-modernists' - out there it seems. Another prominent figure in uncreative writing circles (where being unoriginal is the most highly prized quality, I assume) is a person called Tan Lin, who reckons, 'It would be nice to create works of literature that didn't have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats' (which makes you wonder what definition of 'literature' he is working from) and states that 'Today no poem should be written to be read and the best form of poetry would make all our feelings disappear the moment we were having them.'

My response may be absurdly blinkered but I can't help it. It can be summed up in just one word and that word is 'Why?' Why would what Lin describes be the best form of poetry? Why are transcriptions of newspapers or traffic reports worth any of our attention (except when we want to know the news or to find out whether the road home is navigable)?

If you have nothing to say, don't bother. Transcribing stuff is not a substitute for creating content. No-one has an obligation to write - there are already plenty of books in the world and keen readers are diminishing in number. On the other hand, if we are going to redefine poetry then I'm going to start a new school that is not about putting things down on paper at all. My poems aren't going to be written in any way - quite the reverse. A sequence of poems will be a sequence of hours in which I sit quietly reading. From now on, each time I finish reading a book, I'm going to call the whole process of having read it 'a poem'. And when I've created a hundred 'poems' - or maybe several hundred - I'll be expecting a Queen's Medal or even, perhaps a Nobel Prize.


7 comments:

  1. I'm with you. I'm all for finding beauty and worth in the mundane, but art is supposed to comment on life in some way, isn't it?

    Oh, I forgot to mention, I'll be releasing a film next week. It is a continuous shot of me reading for two hours and fifteen minutes. I call it: "Me, Reading." (In the middle, I do get up and go into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, but the camera stays on my chair.)

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    1. So we never find out whether you use teabags or loose tea? I suppose we'll have to wait for the sequel.

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    2. The sequel is called "Me, Making Tea." All your questions will be answered.It's is kind of a "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" to my first film. The camera stays on the teapot while I read in the other room for an hour. At one point, I walk in, fill the pot and put it on the stove and walk out. Camera stays on pot; pot whistles. I come in and make the tea and walk out. Camera stays on the pot while I read for another hour.

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    3. I hope the camera never swings towards you, even while you are making the tea and, as much as humanly possible, doesn't even allow a glimpse of your hand as it lifts the kettle. And I hope you use loose tea, not bags

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  2. Once I was flicking channels in the wee hours (as you do) and came across something called "Big Brother Up Late" or similar, and it featured the entire BB household in comatose state. It may surprise you to know I went searching for other entertainment, but during an ad break in some ghastly movie 30 minutes later, I flicked back to BB Up Late to find that no-one had moved a muscle.

    I think Chris will be hard put to top that, considering his burst of activity getting up from the chair.

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    1. Denis -- I suppose I will have to put a screenplay in my will along with orders for my sons to make my last and greatest film: "Me, Dead." It will be a trilogy. Each film will be three hours of the grass atop my grave. It will be a still shot, so the grass doesn't even grow.

      I've allowed this to get astoundingly silly. My apologies.

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    2. I don't think it sounds silly at all, (stifles guffaws)

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