A Chorus of Ears
By Denise Riley, published by Pan Macmillan
“[I]f anything needs to ‘find its own voice’, it’s the poem — not the poet.”
In A Chorus of Ears, poet-philosopher Denise Riley argues for the opaqueness of the poet and the agency of the poem’s voice. Swerving the shotgun of trends that require bombastic persona and competitive self-promotion (small violences for poets who are not so inclined), she discusses the voice of poetry as an emergent property rather than a cleanly authored act of control.
The historic and contextual “genetics” of a writer’s style; the way that an “utterance and its idea are produced together”; and the creative accidents that occur when a need to be in charge is dropped, are all firmly defended as not only the right of those inclined to shyness, but as a necessary space in which poetry itself may speak.
In one passing comment, Riley uses the image of a gymkhana to stand in for poetic competition. “Award-winning” is a horrifying term here and, for Riley, the writers subjected to these things are the “nervy ponies” themselves. If I may be permitted to switch from a gymkhana (rule-based gaming) to a show, then we might find ourselves considering a paddock of horses and riders, where every detail of turn-out (persona), movement (musicality), obedience (meaning), and conformation (form) are assessed and graded.
The writer in this context might be inhabiting every role at turns. They are the horse, the rider, the overbearing parent and groom, the audience and rivals, the obsessively rehearsed circles at home and the 4am starts. They are the endless polishing. The only thing they aren’t is the judge, who brings their own biases: a preference for fat ponies over thin, greys over bays. God forbid someone present a chestnut mare who refuses to stand still. At these events, coercive control and conflicting aims are pretty normal. But oh, when you see the one with a simple bridle, a long rein, and a turn around the ring in a gallop where there is no fear of punishment? What a lovely sight. It is precisely what is allowed to move through bodies that moves us.
This loosened rein — the freedom to move — is how I picture Riley’s concept of “language forming ahead of you.” Letting go of illusions of authorial control does not diminish the individual’s importance to the process. The accidents of echolalia, prosody, accent and so on that Riley charts are wonderful, generative things providing perhaps a substrate for “the self-steering capacities of language, so insistent a phenomena in the writing of poems”.
Language requires the author to exist, with all their received knowledge and individual quirks. These essays — in de-centering the importance of the physicality or persona of the poet — could at times be seen to disregard the body. Yet it put me firmly in mind of how the physical functions as a conduit. How, therefore the specificities of each body are paramount, even if “the felicities of language” itself hold greater sway.
The body surprises you. We don’t necessarily know what constraints or freedoms are going to spark language into productively running away with us. Presumably, the less you think you know the better placed you are to receive language, as a writer. Riley’s “condition of listening ignorance, [an] alert not-knowing” is a state worth considering and cultivating.
Reviewed by Jenni Hampshire
