Working Through Reading

Abstract

Peter Reading’s work provokes two questions about poetry; what is it and what is its role in the modern world? Perhaps the very fact that his writing poses these questions provides a positive answer to his query ‘am I art?’;1 since it is part of the job of art to raise fundamental issues. But art also has other qualities of transformation and transcendence which Reading’s work seems to lack. ‘I DO NOT’, he asserts, ‘transcend pain with poetry’ (‘On the Other Hand’, CP1, 167). We need to distinguish here between at least two traditions in British poetry, one lyrical and the other conceptual. Reading’s work partakes of both but favours the latter. In many ways, he is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot in the choice of subject matter, classical allusion and mixture of registers. The difference is that whereas Eliot believed that poetry could be a vehicle for the redemption of modernity, Reading gives it no such privileged status. It does not stand apart from other discourses but confronts, embraces and is contained by them. Hence we find in Reading, among other registers, those of geology, chemistry, physics, biology, ornithology, medicine, Latin quotations, journalese, letters from local newspapers, adverts offering country barns at knock down prices and the demotic. The effect is, to say the least, jarring but it does serve, perhaps, to negate social meaning by the elevation of form, which is normally invisible in our dominant ‘realistic’ representations. It also challenges our traditional ideas of verse as do his prose poems, collages, typographical experiments and crossings out – the latter finding an echo in Derrida’s idea that writing should always be presented under erasure.