CONTACT WITH POETS

have seen all three of the festivals, but for me, the Text Festivals are in
dialogue with each other. I have found it interesting this time round how a
number of poets have written about how it has taken a direction or a position
in relation to poetry. The Festival isn’t about poetry; it’s not a poetry
festival. The festival is always to do with a question. So with the first
exhibition of the first festival (also my first highlight), I asked myself: how
to curate a show that juxtaposes contemporary poetry with visual (language)
art? By its aesthetic location, the festival often operates in fields in
which recipients (to use Lawrence Weiner’s term) may not come equipped
with the knowledge and histories of particular art-forms. As Art Monthly
magazine observed, I have an “intrepid resistance to interpretation”, and
in exhibitions of text I don’t see how you can use interpretive texts without
clunking over the works. So then I have the question of what curatorial
strategy can contextualize the question for a gallery visitor? In the first
show, I created therefore a large bookcase that blocked views into the
gallery—you had to face it and go round it to get in. I called this “The
Canon” and featured all the books you would need to get all the messages
in the show—ha! Audiences aren’t asked to work hard enough nowadays.
And into the show itself: again, is there curatorial conceit that can represent
this coming together of forms? Taking a form from Concrete Poetry,
I came up with a display constellation. This was working very nicely but
there was still something missing. Although the festival has announced
submission deadlines, if the curatorial concept demands it, I will keep
accepting proposals and looking for works right up to the last minute. In
this case, I didn’t know what was missing, just that it needed something. It
came in the form of a performance artist, Hester Reeve (HRH.the) who
proposed to spend the 9 weeks of the first show sitting in the gallery reading
and simultaneously writing Heidegger’s “Being and Time.”
In the second Festival, although a lot of people rated the Bury
Poems readings with Tony Lopez, Carol Watts and Phil Davenport, my
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