Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)

ISTVÁN D. RÁCZ Memory, Writing, Politics: the Poetry of Peter Reading

Memory, Writing, Politics: the Poetry of Peter Reading 11 is so coherent. If one reads Reading as he himself wants us to (that is, as a cohesive whole), a less successful poem also casts its shadow on the other texts. Nevertheless, the duality of following and making rales is an organizing principle in his poetry, which makes it not only coherent but also intellectually exciting. The implied poet can be identified as somebody entering the realm of literature from the outside, but also as a very open person full of fresh ideas. This is why he tries his hand at the most difficult rhythmic patterns, and also why he sets up strict formal rules for himself. He explores convention both as something that can be followed and as something inevitably accidental. Apart from the texts mentioned above, further examples of self-made rules are the volumes 5x5x5x5x5 (1983) and C (1984). The title of the latter is ambiguous: it is both the Roman numeral for 100 (the volume consists of a hundred texts, each of a hundred words) and the abbreviation of cancer. As Neil Corcoran has written, these volumes are narratives woven around "a single central preoccupation" (254). This is also true for those later volumes in which reflection and contrast as organising principles are even more important than in the earlier ones: Ukulele Music (1985) and Perduta Gente (1989). Ibrgetting and Seeing through Texts Ukulele Music consists of fictitious letters and texts written in classic Greek meter. The former are supposed to have been written by a cleaning woman called Viv; these are messages spelt and composed awkwardly, left on the piano for the employer. Viv appears as a tragicomic figure, since her communication goes one way: there are no answers to her messages, at least at the level of narration. On the extradiegetic level, however, we can read the texts written in Greek meter as replies to Viv's letters. If we make the hypothesis that the employer is the implied poet himself (and this is the most obvious explanation for his omniscience and the possession of the letters), then each poem is a reflection on Viv's messages and the newspaper articles that are related to her family. Two-way communication is replaced by endless dissemination and the media itself as a subject matter. To put it more concretely, Viv's letters are the imitation of a primary experience; consequently, the whole volume is about the relationship between experience and literature. This is the 'preoccupation' that Corcoran has written about. The next few stanzas are a good demonstration of the complexity of this relationship: What is to one class of minds and perceptions exaggeration, is to another plain truth (Dickens remarks in a brief