Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Technique: Dialogue: Saying
- 1 The Movement Poets and the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s
- 2 The British Poetry Revival 1960–1978
- 3 Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- 4 Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- 5 The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- 6 Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–2000
- 7 What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- 8 Creative Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer during the 1980s and 1990s
- 9 The Ballet of the Speech Organs: The Poetry of Bob Cobbing 1965–2000
- 10 Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Technique: Dialogue: Saying
- 1 The Movement Poets and the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s
- 2 The British Poetry Revival 1960–1978
- 3 Starting to Make the World: The Poetry of Roy Fisher in the 1960s and 1970s
- 4 Keeping the Doors Open: the Poetry of Lee Harwood in the 1960s and 1970s
- 5 The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s
- 6 Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–2000
- 7 What Was To One Side or Not Real: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991
- 8 Creative Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer during the 1980s and 1990s
- 9 The Ballet of the Speech Organs: The Poetry of Bob Cobbing 1965–2000
- 10 Be come, Be spoke, Be eared: The Poetics of Transformation and Embodied Utterance in the work of Maggie O'Sullivan during the 1980s and 1990s
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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:
For those of us who have attended any of her readings, these pages summon Maggie – never one to function as the institution ‘author’, rather a figure ‘lost in the midst of a text’ – whose striking if not conventionally beautiful dark Irish features are transformed, transfused with beauty as she reads unhurriedly letting the measured syllables relate to establish rhythms in an appropriate time.
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.
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- Information
- The Poetry of SayingBritish Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000, pp. 233 - 250Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2005