Approximate transcript of An introduction to the reading by Gilbert ...

Approximate transcript of An introduction to the reading by Gilbert Adair on 10th June 1997 [including the launch of Surface Bursts (Mainstream) and Jizz Rim fifth outtake (Writers Forum)] ______________________________ Tonight I was going to say, again, what I HAD said. I was going to speak of Gilbert's commitment to his work but that is apparent as soon as you read or hear it. In any case, being committed to something doesn't mean you are any good at it. Often the greatest skill, in anything, is knowing when to let go. I was going to speak of Gilbert's uncompromising approach to getting-it-right in his poetry, his tenacious determination to find the best words and syntactical shapes, to build the right form; not so much for what he has to say but, perhaps, in order to find out what he has to say; so that form and content are neither easily made nor easily separable. Lack of compromise doesn't necessarily make commitment any more palatable to the audience or indeed the poet or appropriate to the poetry. To try to make the point I had thus failed to make, I might have referred to his slowness, though there are many slower, in composition. Slowness is a virtue that too few recognise; and getting-it-right, whatever it is, doesn't need to be done slowly. Indeed, all of these observations could be taken as insults in some brains. But that is what I was going to say; and then I realised I had said all that before anyway, a repeat failure proposing to praise achievement. My intended approach was the opposite of what I was praising, something good enough for an intro perhaps, a few indisputable statements to which no one could object, especially when I had the chair of the meeting, the opposite of the meticulous adventurousness I find in Gilbert's poetry. Therefore, I sat down at my desk to say something more, something else, hopefully something a little new. This is it, and, because it tries to be new, I am having to read it from a script.

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Gilbert Adair refuses to entertain although he is entertaining. His texts do not conform to what is held to be well-presented. Let's pause there with that. The clear shapely letter sequences, left to right across the pages, tops down to bottoms, justified, indented or what have you, are printers' inventions, not the poets'; and columns and rows and pages are abstractions. There is a lot to be said for standardised clear text, especially in timetables and such documents; but it will help to keep us free if we remember that only some of us are tidy writers and orderly builders and that the usually unchallenged idea of how good literature should be presented has been constructed by those who deal in it just as surely as, say, our ideas of a desirable kitchen have been constructed partially by companies which sell kitchen furniture, plumbing, home extensions and the like. We are responding primarily to marketed products all the time rather than engaging in a social process of technological innovation as we may be led to believe. The marketing people's ideas aren't inherently bad, but it is a standardising process that they manage which makes no exceptions, always takes prisoners and presents the phenomenal appear unproblematic, and so presents it as consistent and continuous. But it ain't necessarily so. Until recently it was quite difficult for the individual writer to achieve high quality booklike repro of their work. Nowadays, it is possible; and Gilbert Adair produces texts which, even on publication, deny the purpose and efficacy of doing, for the sake of it, what is possible and no more. That he does so is not for one reason alone and it does not have a one-to-one meaning that can be stated so that we may move on. Its reasons hold us. They, the reasons at which I guess, will be to do with, amongst other things, availability of the necessary technology, constraints of time, a desire to show the process of composition, an awareness that the process may not have finished - an assorted tangle of reasons to do with what he is doing. His is recursive book-making when so much is merely iterative. Intentionally or not, the appearance of the published texts slows us up and forces us to engage, with him, after the event, in his poetic deliberation. And during the reenacting event of reading, a new enactment because of the possibility of error - which, in such a context as Gilbert's writing creates, will be less an error and more a development and possible enrichment - and the probability of new stresses, new pauses, new decisions about what if anything to skip; this is a performance, a completion of the

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process started at Gilbert's notional desk, on its many occasions, and a beginning perhaps of our reception of the books. But, because he reads relatively little, it may be that these texts are read only the once ever - all those possibilities and new always with no correct, finished meaning. This is the only life there is... There is, too, the learning - in the books and required of the reader, not the formulaic reference which can be looked up in a mythological dictionary or book of heraldry, but organic copying, stealing, blending, recycling, the same lives and literatures recurring, but changing - the same basic starting points and subjects for art there have ever been; it is an art aware of where art has come from without nostalgia in the historical process in which each generation becomes progressively unrecognisable to its forebears - the upward compatibility of human natures which, like the software humans try to make, gets nowhere and yet moves; but - you might as well live. And if we are to live we might as well live all we can, as we were advised by one whose notional spirit will be with us tonight. Before I finish, I need to be sure that my point is made well. I have admitted that much of what I have said could be taken to prove the opposite of the case I wish to make. And that is because I have paid little attention to Gilbert's wit, where all this attention to detail and controlled passion fuses. Often his wit and humour is so fully fused with in filling his texts - rather than the poems with jokes to which his work is in no small part a reaction - that it is not easy to demonstrate by brief quotation. Instead, I am going to remind you of or tell you of for the first time a rather splendid piece of publishing under the Writers Forum aegis; it is called Frog Boks. It comes complete with a frog, pages in different formats, on different papers, texts of different styles, jump cuts, openings out rather than closings off; and it is funny; and it is demanding; it is not entertaining; and it entertains; and it entertains many various ideas. It is in the most constructive sense - silly, meaning, originally, happy. I have said too much and I have said nothing at all. That will do for this year. The exemplary, if it has a metaexistence, is various; you are about to hear and see one kind of the exemplary. Lawrence Upton

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