SOME SCATTERED THOUGHTS ON H. MASUD TAJ’S RECENT RECITATION
H. Masud Taj’s poem “Magritte’s Dream” closes with a meditation on the enigmatic lure of an object in Magritte’s painting which resists interpretive penetration, “a suitcase/ that you dare not open.”
This strikes me as to some degree a good analogy for the task I found myself faced with in trying to articulate some response to Taj’s recent performance (on Sat April 5th, in a ‘special edition’ of the AB Series held at the University of Ottawa) - a response I felt compelled to attempt, simply because Taj left (not for the first time) such a powerful impression on me.
I have been, for over 72 hours now, at a loss in terms of how to describe my reaction to Taj’s poetic presentation. Not least of all because the effect of listening to/watching Taj embody these poems, vocally, gesturally, whole-bodily, is something which is difficult to explain to those who have never experienced Taj’s recitations in action (and in action, unforgettably enacted, they inarguably are - Amanda Earl’s term of choice was “mesmerizing,” and it is an apt one.)
In addition to this, Taj’s very approach to poetry (or poetry’s approach to us through Taj) renders the language I’m habitually inclined to rely on inadmissible, or at least misleading. Since he is an oral poet whose poems are composed entirely in his head, and then recited directly from same, to describe Taj as giving a “reading” is in and of itself already inaccurate; nothing is being read at all.
Performed, then? Looking at the brief advert I’d thrown together for email invitations to the event, Taj laughingly commented that he does not “perform” his poetry. Rather, the poems perform through him. Coming from any other poet I’ve met, it would be hard not to take this as pedantry. Coming from Taj, however, it is simply a plain and cheerful statement of fact. Taj is politely insistent, and entirely consistent, in his attribution of agency not to himself, but to the poems, which he experiences as events, as entities, in their own right. Similarly, one cannot accurately say that Taj “writes” his poems (although he will occasionally inscribe them, using his elegant and inventive calligraphic hand). Instead, they enter his mind, solidifying definitively in a brief span of time, and then emerge from his mouth, energized by his gestures (which I’m tempted to call theatrical, although again I open a door to confusion, since Taj is no actor; he neither rehearses nor memorizes, but gives expression to what is already there, awaiting an occasion to be shared, so that these gestures are not theatrical in the sense of ‘staged,’ but natural extensions of the life of the poem, as it moves through its metabolic cycle of active recitation).
So you see my difficulty, as a textually-habituated ‘bookish’ guy, in coming to terms with (and to the right terms for) Taj’s work. Nevertheless!
Taj began his segment of the reading by requesting that the event’s curator (yt) and the other poets join the audience as a group, clearing space at the front of the room so that he could move about freely.
The audience seemed slightly bewildered and bemused by this change (raised eyebrows, exchanged looks, chuckles and mutters) which Taj laughingly identified as his“performance” portion of the evening (which I took to mean that his performance was pushing furniture about, whereas the poems’ performance would occur next, which it decidedly did.)
For 45 minutes, the poems unfolded, interwoven with Taj’s insightful anecdotes about their moments of genesis and the verbal, conceptual and pictorial threads that interconnect them. Taj’s peripatetic and energized delivery incarnated the rapid movements and tremendous range of the poems themselves. If, as Charles Olson insisted half a century ago, a poem is in fact of means of transferring energy from where the poet found it to the reader (oops!audience), then Taj’s unwavering declarations and striking expressions are a conductive medium indeed.
What’s more, my pleasure at the presentation was increased by the sense of excitement that surged from not knowing, and knowing that Taj himself did not know, which turn the recitation would take next, as the moment of one poem opened the possibility of the next, redefining the sense of the phrase “free style” so beloved of spoken word/slam artists.
The Deleuzian distinction between the rhizome and the tree is perhaps helpful, here, in appreciating the free-play that informs Taj’s presentations. Unlike the tree, whose branches emerge from a central trunk in a linear fashion suggestive of a vertical hierarchy, Taj’s recitations unfold rhizomatically, like the structure of an anthill or a patch of grass on a fertile hillside, as one phrase or image spontaneously reveals its relation to another, drawing on a subtle logic internal to each poem itself, a de-centered process on which Taj commented, taking the reader with him through the space in which the poems arose. This, for me, was one of the most remarkable elements of Taj’s presentation of the poems: I had throughout the sense that I was being taken on an imaginative trip through the exotic (and yet sometimes strangely familiar) landscape in which the poems occurred.
While I’d been fortunate enough to experience many of these poems performed before, I found that, due to this ever-expanding web of associations and Taj’s shared insights into the intimate relations between poems, and between the poems and his own philosophical and architectural meditations, I heard each poem afresh and for the first time. Like the “chrysanthemums” that began the recitation, opening into the sky, each poem opened itself, as well as the poems preceding and following it, to the audience in an ever-shifting array of colour, form, and concept. This emphasis on relation rendered the poems even more powerful, since as “Yellow” reminds the audience, “Light would not be as yellow / if shadows were not as black.”
These verbalized traces of relation allowed the audience to approach each poem from multiple viewpoints. In this respect, each poem revealed itself as being like the “dragonfly” (a poem understandably admired by Edward Said) with which Taj concluded his recitation: “My head/ is a conference of eyes / I hold too many points of view.”
Faced with poems (and a poet) that contain such multitudes, the major difficulty facing an audience is: Whoah. How do I hold on to such a complex, high-energy structure?
My own answer is that I couldn’t (can’t?). I found myself just sitting back, slightly tingly, and smiling, a single node on a circuit, as the energy of those poems passed through me, and out the other side. This may also help to account for the fact that (lacking Taj’s Herculean recall) I found myself dumbfounded in trying to articulate my reaction, strong as it was. Based on the reactions I heard from various (odd and awed) friends after the event, I was not alone in this respect.
I only hope I have the opportunity to experience Taj perform at length again, so I can take another shot at that electric ineffable.
S.M.
This strikes me as to some degree a good analogy for the task I found myself faced with in trying to articulate some response to Taj’s recent performance (on Sat April 5th, in a ‘special edition’ of the AB Series held at the University of Ottawa) - a response I felt compelled to attempt, simply because Taj left (not for the first time) such a powerful impression on me.
I have been, for over 72 hours now, at a loss in terms of how to describe my reaction to Taj’s poetic presentation. Not least of all because the effect of listening to/watching Taj embody these poems, vocally, gesturally, whole-bodily, is something which is difficult to explain to those who have never experienced Taj’s recitations in action (and in action, unforgettably enacted, they inarguably are - Amanda Earl’s term of choice was “mesmerizing,” and it is an apt one.)
In addition to this, Taj’s very approach to poetry (or poetry’s approach to us through Taj) renders the language I’m habitually inclined to rely on inadmissible, or at least misleading. Since he is an oral poet whose poems are composed entirely in his head, and then recited directly from same, to describe Taj as giving a “reading” is in and of itself already inaccurate; nothing is being read at all.
Performed, then? Looking at the brief advert I’d thrown together for email invitations to the event, Taj laughingly commented that he does not “perform” his poetry. Rather, the poems perform through him. Coming from any other poet I’ve met, it would be hard not to take this as pedantry. Coming from Taj, however, it is simply a plain and cheerful statement of fact. Taj is politely insistent, and entirely consistent, in his attribution of agency not to himself, but to the poems, which he experiences as events, as entities, in their own right. Similarly, one cannot accurately say that Taj “writes” his poems (although he will occasionally inscribe them, using his elegant and inventive calligraphic hand). Instead, they enter his mind, solidifying definitively in a brief span of time, and then emerge from his mouth, energized by his gestures (which I’m tempted to call theatrical, although again I open a door to confusion, since Taj is no actor; he neither rehearses nor memorizes, but gives expression to what is already there, awaiting an occasion to be shared, so that these gestures are not theatrical in the sense of ‘staged,’ but natural extensions of the life of the poem, as it moves through its metabolic cycle of active recitation).
So you see my difficulty, as a textually-habituated ‘bookish’ guy, in coming to terms with (and to the right terms for) Taj’s work. Nevertheless!
Taj began his segment of the reading by requesting that the event’s curator (yt) and the other poets join the audience as a group, clearing space at the front of the room so that he could move about freely.
The audience seemed slightly bewildered and bemused by this change (raised eyebrows, exchanged looks, chuckles and mutters) which Taj laughingly identified as his“performance” portion of the evening (which I took to mean that his performance was pushing furniture about, whereas the poems’ performance would occur next, which it decidedly did.)
For 45 minutes, the poems unfolded, interwoven with Taj’s insightful anecdotes about their moments of genesis and the verbal, conceptual and pictorial threads that interconnect them. Taj’s peripatetic and energized delivery incarnated the rapid movements and tremendous range of the poems themselves. If, as Charles Olson insisted half a century ago, a poem is in fact of means of transferring energy from where the poet found it to the reader (oops!audience), then Taj’s unwavering declarations and striking expressions are a conductive medium indeed.
What’s more, my pleasure at the presentation was increased by the sense of excitement that surged from not knowing, and knowing that Taj himself did not know, which turn the recitation would take next, as the moment of one poem opened the possibility of the next, redefining the sense of the phrase “free style” so beloved of spoken word/slam artists.
The Deleuzian distinction between the rhizome and the tree is perhaps helpful, here, in appreciating the free-play that informs Taj’s presentations. Unlike the tree, whose branches emerge from a central trunk in a linear fashion suggestive of a vertical hierarchy, Taj’s recitations unfold rhizomatically, like the structure of an anthill or a patch of grass on a fertile hillside, as one phrase or image spontaneously reveals its relation to another, drawing on a subtle logic internal to each poem itself, a de-centered process on which Taj commented, taking the reader with him through the space in which the poems arose. This, for me, was one of the most remarkable elements of Taj’s presentation of the poems: I had throughout the sense that I was being taken on an imaginative trip through the exotic (and yet sometimes strangely familiar) landscape in which the poems occurred.
While I’d been fortunate enough to experience many of these poems performed before, I found that, due to this ever-expanding web of associations and Taj’s shared insights into the intimate relations between poems, and between the poems and his own philosophical and architectural meditations, I heard each poem afresh and for the first time. Like the “chrysanthemums” that began the recitation, opening into the sky, each poem opened itself, as well as the poems preceding and following it, to the audience in an ever-shifting array of colour, form, and concept. This emphasis on relation rendered the poems even more powerful, since as “Yellow” reminds the audience, “Light would not be as yellow / if shadows were not as black.”
These verbalized traces of relation allowed the audience to approach each poem from multiple viewpoints. In this respect, each poem revealed itself as being like the “dragonfly” (a poem understandably admired by Edward Said) with which Taj concluded his recitation: “My head/ is a conference of eyes / I hold too many points of view.”
Faced with poems (and a poet) that contain such multitudes, the major difficulty facing an audience is: Whoah. How do I hold on to such a complex, high-energy structure?
My own answer is that I couldn’t (can’t?). I found myself just sitting back, slightly tingly, and smiling, a single node on a circuit, as the energy of those poems passed through me, and out the other side. This may also help to account for the fact that (lacking Taj’s Herculean recall) I found myself dumbfounded in trying to articulate my reaction, strong as it was. Based on the reactions I heard from various (odd and awed) friends after the event, I was not alone in this respect.
I only hope I have the opportunity to experience Taj perform at length again, so I can take another shot at that electric ineffable.
S.M.