Love Letters in the Sound

A poetry reading or performance by Maggie O'Sullivan can baffle or delight, baffle and delight. The steady stream of words, delivered with careful attention to their rhythmic weight, to their alliterative connections, seemingly at the expense of their meanings, can be a difficult experience to relate to, for those not used to it. In ‘A Love Letter’, Adrian Clarke becomes Roland Barthes’ blissful reader, finding himself desired by a text from her 1993 Reality Street book, In the House of the Shaman. He explains:

This poetry demands a greater dialogue with, response from, its readers than most. The reader or listener has to be prepared for a structure that is largely organized by sound and has to pay attention to the particular and peculiar lineation, spacing and punctuation on the page. A connection between the powerful sonic features and a revitalized semantics is negotiated through her preference for the portmanteau word and the pun. Neologism is so complete that at times we are offered a controlled experiment in language change. O'Sullivan changes the endings of words and changes their case, something which takes centuries in ‘natural’ language: ‘missingly’; ‘yonderly’; ‘gived’. She invents new lexical items, some fairly simple, ‘twindom’ to suggest a doubled domain, but others approach the polysemenous Joycean pun: ‘superates’; ‘reversionary’. New compounds surprise: ‘Sylla/ bled’ takes a word apart, and emphasizes utterance as suffering, sliced on enjambement, uniquely connected to breathing.