A note on poetry readings and the line (WR)

At recent poetry readings I’ve noticed how each line when the poet has finished saying it is used up. There’s no on-going force running through it. No field of inertia that the line is pushing its way through. Hence the rarefied atmosphere of most poetry readings, even when the affect is strong and the language is forceful and is making reference to things that press upon us. I was making this comment to a friend when they said, What about when lines are incomplete and holding something over? But isn’t that still a completion of the line, in that case delayed, but still completing itself inside its own frame of reference?

What I want to hear, miss hearing, inside the sounded words are forces that exist outside, forces we live inside of that language smooths over with meanings but whose motion words don’t exhaust. I want to feel them there in the poetry, not referred to but felt inside the lines or blocs of language. I felt that when a bit more than twenty years ago I first heard Sean Bonney read from Poisons Their Antidotes: a real hiatus at the end of each line, poisons taken in, not merely antidotes. Not a frame of reference, but energies pulsing in London streets. Present in such a way that they affect the body without the body-image being capable of resolving them or even catching up with them. And not talk, definitely not talk. 

I have felt something similar when hearing Maggie O’Sullivan read her work. ‘Sounding as presencing’, is something she spoke about. Where what is brought into the room is the Irish potato famine, or heart-failure of someone close to her in a hospital, or the non-human life of animals, but always forces that exceed containment. I could add that these are the unformed material of politics, but that would be a long theoretical stretch and what I want to say doesn’t belong to a theory but to what I want to call unresolved forces of life which regimes of sense and visibility turn into reality.

The line that does not complete itself in itself, i.e. in its time-frame, but instead carries (inside itself) the incompleteness of the outside. ‘Maybe running out of time. / Time is frozen light / light’. That was Raworth.