top thanks to andy jackson for roping me in to the stanza preview thing last night.
despite being just up the road, the fact there’s an art college has just kind of passed me by. every so often we’ll see that duncan of jordanstone has its degree show on but, unlike edinburgh, shamefully i’ve never set foot in the place. edinburgh, which has a lovely big exhibition space right at the front of it, is a big staired and wide corridored affair, a place that, at festival time, is almost free of students. indeed, aside from festival visits, i’ve only been there once for an episode of quite fabulous drunken-ness.
not so, duncan’s. from the outside the building i was in is quite…of its time but it just goes to prove that it’s not what’s on the outside that counts (if i was designing an artschool i’d start at hundertwasser and work forward but hey ho, that’s just me). once i was in it was a warren of workspaces and lockers (i love those artschool big wooden lockers) and all i wanted to do was get in there and poke about rather than do what i was there for. that old adage about education being wasted on the young while not true has its moments as you wanser about and wonder just what it would be like if you had twenty fours hours of freedom in such a place.
and then the stanza crew – andy, tim eleanor et al. i blow hot and cold with stanza mainly, i think, because i’m always comparing it retrospectively. once i’m there of course it’s always a good year and, even if i’m not seeing much, there’s always people i know, places to go. the same this year as eleanor was doing her intro – i was reminded just how fabulous a thing stanza is. this year there’s seems a greater diversity of things, not less and it’s great to see creative scotland being involved in support.
but back to the art college thing. i met folk who were working at the college and students who were studying there. we blethered about all manner of things to do with words, imagery, collaboration, integration. watchwords for me! as when i was doing the poetry classes in the high school i was struck by how motivated everyone was. fair enough i’ll allow for circumstances in both cases and accept that working in education must have its moments but, by and large, my experiences with education types and the people studying, have been wholly uplifting. which, given the stark contrast with where i work, is a bit sad.
however, that wasn’t what i was talking about last night. it struck me that one of things poetryland has been really into recently has been science. while that’s not a bad thing there does, for me, seem to be a tendency to equivocation (particularly by the poetry people)in terms of its representative function that, having a foot firmly in both camps, seems a bit tenuous at times. poetry is not science no matter how much it wants to be or how much science itself can be poetry.
art on the other hand. poetry absolutely is art and vice versa and yet, despite all the science/poetry collaboration shenanigans going on and a rich but, in my opinion, fairly narrowly defined discussion around ekphrasis, there seems precious little between the (other) arts and poetry. of course this could be massive ignorance on my part! take videopoetry for example. much as it’s grand to see (and better to take part in) i find it disappointing that too often, even if the images are lovely, all videopoetry seems to be is someone reading while pictures flash by ( a criticism i’m not alone in but see here for evidence i may be wrong). coming from that time in the nineties when remixing music might mean sampling just the tiniest bit of the original track and running with it. i remember the sense of freedom and opportunity the first time i heard something and it sounded nothing remotely like the original.
something similar, i think, needs to happen with regard to poetry and its re-presentation. the word is not sacred, the work of the poet not sacrosanct – if everything can be poetry then we can make anything out of poetry. (coincidentally i was looking at a website the other days in which words are baked and eaten – at stanza it appears there will be a similar baking input!) one of the reasons i like translation so much as it’s a method of getting you inside the poet’s (and translator’s) head and right into the poem itself. it seems to me that by collaborating with artists in other fields not only can we do this but get beyond that point and into the language and the word itself.
so that was kind of the thing i found myself thinking and talking about last night. and while the above might sound a wee bit like a manifesto towards the making of more things i like (and, i say, what would be wrong with that!?) there was also that aspect, esp if you live in a wee town that, while the internet is all fair and good, actual face to face contact with real people just can’t be beat. what a joy there is in going and seeing something and coming away with your mind brimming with ideas. that, i think, is exactly the sort of function we should allow our educational institutions to have…
