[This discussion was by email, during 2002.]
 

LU: Can you tell me when, roughly, and where you first came across Alaric Sumner; and what you remember of him from those times?

cc: It would have been sometime in mid 1977. I say this because he came into the 'printroom' at what was then The Poetry Society in Earls Court Square and basically (well it never was much more developed than basically - arguably) I taught him how to print. It might be that he came along to one or other of the workshops such as the then Tuesday Experimental Workshop at which many of us were playing with multiple voice texts, improvised vocalising / talking/ gestural / calligraphic choreographies and the like (in a generous space foreshadowed and continued to this day by Bob Cobbing ^[1]).

It might be that I met him at a reading there and we got chatting and then one invitation led to another. I honestly don't remember a specific moment when I can say that Alaric arrived for me. But he was certainly around by that time of the turning of the year, 1978. The first publications he produced in the printshop date from early 1978 - January in the case of his first issue of words worth magazine (1:1); and his own first issue Songs of Nonsense and Experiment also dates from that year. I do remember having a conversation in which I advised him to come up with a name for his press. He chose Zimmer Zimmer.
 

He was highly energetic and enthusiastic - almost at times too fizzing in his enthusiasms. Sometimes his joys were almost too much to take and all I could do by way of response was to laugh (not at him but with his earnest zanyness). He was very likeable, and hungry for contacts and exchanges. He was part of an emergent triangle (not in a sexual way) with two other equally infectiously-enthusiastic younger poet-publishers, the others being Peter King (Tapocketa Press) and Richard Tabor (Lobby Press).
 

It was, to put it mildly, a creative whirlpool around Earls Court Square at that time, as well you'll remember. Somewhat of a rollercoaster in terms of comings and goings, poets passing through every day, exhibitions and book launches and readings, and nights in the bar and in the bar next door. Alaric and Richard and Peter were just 3 who seemed like newbies, although in fact I was about the same age as them, or younger in Alaric's case. 

Alaric and I got along pretty well then. He wanted work for his mag and I did a couple of book cover designs (one of which he used for Herbert Burke's piece on Soweto ^[2]).

I had a sense of Alaric leading a pretty wild life on the east London drag circuit, although I knew no details. He was moving in a similar set to Neil Bartlett, getting dragged up and riding the busses. I imagine him trying to put the two communities together in his head. I don't think that The Poetry Society was quite ready for it, although nobody would have batted an eyelid, of course; and the queens of the night would have found words worth curious reading I suspect. Wonderful juxtaposition of lifestyles and pursuits actually!

Alaric certainly came to the workshop in 1978 (if he didn't earlier). You probably have a better memory than I do for some of this time.

LU: Yes and no. I was in Kingston-on-Thames a lot, from the autumn of 1976, so I missed much; and I get muddled about when things I was part of actually happened relative to each other... In 1978, you and I were making stacks of work together, at my place and yours and at West Square ^[3]; and I have no way to relate that to memories of Alaric.

I often talked with him at length after the Kings Readings ^[4]. Everything seemed to be discussed at once, with Alaric spotting shaky assumptions and undermining them! It may be that those talks were not as many as I think, just memorable.

Broadly, at least, I think you have it right; but I believe he may have been around quite a bit earlier, at the workshop. I do remember that grouping of people who seemed "new" to us, rather than new to the world. And lots that they did was extremely interesting, though it was often following other vectors than ours

It seems to me that he was around for a while after all of that; and then he vanished from my point of view.

Did he disappear for you? And when did you meet up with him again?

cc: Yes, there was that curious sense and a nonsense, in having only been making work for about two years and already wondering where the next generation was; and then feeling that 'it' was amongst us without our fully realising 'it'.

I like this expression of others, Alaric inclusive, following 'vectors' other than those on which we were, also in differing ways, pursuant in respect of that. It's not always easy to recognise distinction when it's close and partly seemingly walking in one's shadow. In fact the shadow is but an illusion one casts for false comfort.

There is one thing that I'd add, which was his and certainly Richard's, maybe Peter's, interest in exploiting colour printing in respect of poetic texts. It's something that is current now and they were quickly onto the possibilities of that.

Good question though on the continuity - discontinuity of face-to-face and otherwise (arse about face or back to back) front.

Well I remember seeing him off and on through until 1980 at which point I myself largely fell away from poetry in particular and got more involved with spatial choreography and live writing (although I didn't call it that at that time).

In the interim, the common meeting grounds around Earls Court had become witless and barren. I did have some printing exchanges with him but then even those opportunities fell into domestic space - we all each had our separate machines. I DO remember having occasions to hear of Alaric's 'adventures', but the occasions were mostly fleeting. We had some paper correspondence and there were phone conversations. I can't say with any accuracy how frequent these were, but my memory suggests that they were sporadic. Every now and again he'd turn up at a SubVoicive^[5] reading and we'd chat with the same ferocity. But I can't give details. I knew that he'd had a severe shake-up; and knew something, but not what I know now, of the details of that ^[6].

I was aware that he'd moved to Cornwall and been hit hard in terms of confidence; but we didn't really start to meet up again until some time around 1994-5 at which time we had chats on the phone whilst he was studying in Leeds.

Unfortunately I never got to see the Royal Court production [of Voices (for 9)] - a genuine regret.

This is where it gets weird perhaps because at least some of the conversations that we had were tinged with a sense of his insecurity about his practice. He wanted to make some kind of re-entry into orbits of poetic communities around contemporary practice; but I thought that was a low ambition and urged him to create new networks. It sounds silly but it was important to him that people whose work he valued also valued his work and said so to him; and I used to deliberately withdraw from such provocations by joshing him and saying just get on with it kind of things, which of course fed his paranoia. He spent time soliciting responses; and I was deliberately coy about giving them to him straight. He wanted to be 'accepted'; and, in some dodgy translation of the Groucho Marx dictum on clubs, I couldn't imagine how any praise from myself could possibly be of use to anybody, let alone him. So we played this odd cat and mouse game for the next few years as he got up to full speed as a practitioner again. Not that I ever thought he'd stopped, just that he'd withdrawn (much as I have myself at present although for differing reasons).

Sometimes I'd try to open up ways of talking about what he was doing, some aspects of which I knew I could give him positive feedback on (I don't at any time really take well or think it productive time to give negative feedback, so I tend to speak when there's an energy there I can buzz into).

I was much less interested in the work broadly delving into irreducible interiorities drawn in relation to Artaud, for example.

LU: I recognise a lot of that, cris; and I'd like to go into it. I will often say little immediately about a piece of work, whoever wrote it, especially if it has surprised me. Alaric's work often surprised me; and he assumed I didn't think much of it because I hadn't enthused demonstrably.

He went further and didn't tell me about some things if he thought I wouldn't like them! Conversation in colourwas one such. It's one of the pieces that he'd been working on for years, completely changing its form sometimes. The latest version was a stage play performed twice in May 1996. Did you see it? I'm keen to get accounts of it.

And there was error studies and Portraits (for dancer, voices and tape) with Shallal Dance Co. That was in April 1996. It interests me greatly because of the imaginative leap he made there. It was, in his words, a collision of two works: error studies, which was brand new, and Portraits, which was unfinished after twenty years.

It seems that as soon as he wrote error studies, the idea came to him, almost as it was realised, to rework Portraits by interleaving the two texts and performing them with dance

cc: I'm afraid it's 'no' on the first account. However, I did witness Error Studies and Portraits at the first Performance Writing Symposium down at Dartington (Studio 1) in 1996. It was a highly charged event, for several reasons. Alaric had suffered a painful, even ignominious, I thought, entry into the teaching staff at Dartington, having others offered the job in preference to him and then having them pull out and finally being taken on. He became the preferential candidate by a process of default meets needs must.

It became a protracted process in which I know he never felt anything other than kind of begrudgingly employed (at least for a while). He badly wanted the post and yet never, until almost in his last six months, did he feel as if he'd been chosen on merit but rather by default.

Showing error studies and Portaits was, in a way, the big chance to introduce his work into not only the Dartington but the Performance Writing context. One sub-text of that gathering lay with the broad remit of the politics of identity. I can't off hand remember the order of events but basically Alaric's piece was one of three shown in the showcase space, the other two being by Su Andi and Ronnie Fraser-Monro respectively.

Alaric and Shallal Dance Co. gave a polished performance and I don't mean that in a disparaging sense. It was good and I thought it was good and told him so at the time but I didn't 'like' it and told him what follows at that time too. I'll say a little more and that distinction between ‘good’ and ‘like’ might become clearer.

The 'text' is terrific and embodies its own critiques. The interweaving of the error studies and the Portraits does 'work', and powerfully. He uses the juxtaposition (a very Dartington term) to lever open arguments between plain speech and accessible story-telling and character study and then more immersively poetic linguistic play, hybrid slippages and the dictates of ludic cadence. I'm not going to get into a full-blown appreciation here (although we could do). It was the presentation of the text and the inter-relation of the disciplinary components that I had problems with.

In saying which I've already hinted at the trouble I had. It was staged as a three-ring circus with the dancer in one area, the singer in another and Alaric in yet another. Well, there was a fourth area being his treated voice projected through the sound system. The trouble I had, and this is typically me, is that the discretion between these elements was left intact. The dancer would dance, (pause) the singer would sing (pause), the speaker would speak, and it brought a stilted nature to the work. Having just written which, I was becoming aware as I was whilst writing it, that was partly his point too - typically Alaric! He was paradoxical in liking to play with murky, mucky, awkward, unsavoury (one of his favourite words in my experience) materials (he liked to rib the dominant consensus on what was acceptable fare) but treat them in clean and precise ways. His articulation was too mannered towards BBC pronunciation for my ear; but then one could clearly hear him saying things that would be likely to offend more than merely the ear of his listeners.

That, what struck me as fussiness, of articulation (which could produce wonderfully complex sonorities but which did get up my nose as it felt class, nay classically, inflected) carried through into his insistent separation of what could have been mobilised as more interdisciplinary elements. In many ways, his approach to interdisciplinarity was to reinforce the anxiety of blurring through specialist boundaries by allowing discrete elements to have their own space and time. It was the opposite of carnival. But he is consistent in respect of this in that he also, as you know, almost until the end, when he did that extraordinary glimpse of a breakthrough 'reading' with you in Totnes ^[7]. He wouldn't 'improvise'. He was, in particular, worried by improvising with the incidentals and the non-verbal aspects of language and communication. So, he would have been extremely concerned about how to 'notate' the blurring of boundaries between artforms. Where we might well wade in, he feared to tread; and it produced a block in the work for me that interests me, but which I have been unable to overcome. Right at what we now know to be the last, he was certainly addressing this concertedly.

This awkwardness was also represented imho in his choice of collaborators; and it was only again later on, with Jo Hyde and yourself, that I felt his work beginning to finally cohere in a way which gave me greater pleasure and his collaborations a significantly enhanced sense of integration. In fact, his earlier work was more invested in that sense of a writer who sub-contracts others to work with him, whereas in the end his was genuinely beginning to co-devise. I'm sure that you could cast more light on that. You know I always had this feeling that the collaborators he had for this piece and for Unspeakable Rooms were made in an earlier period of his theatrical interests and almost more related to having been expected to present clearly assessable work for MA purposes; whereas once those shackles were cast aside and he'd got more into the swim of new networks around those in the orbit of Performance Writing and digital technologies, he began to loosen up. But that's poorly put.

There's one final aspect of this performance that I should mention, because we talked about it quite a bit; and it deeply upset him. Now I don't know the proper details here, so excuse important elisions. Alaric did tell me, but I have forgotten the disability that Richard Tabor's child has. But Richard made a special effort to attend the performance; and indeed I was looking forward to meeting up with him too after all these years. He did come and he left in a fury before the end. That was the end of Alaric and Richard's long friendship and working / co-publishing partnerships. Richard took grave offence at the depictions of and discourses mobilised around disability in the piece. In fact Richard felt that Alaric had utterly torn their friendship in Portrait Thirteen.

LU: Things there that I didn't know, quite a lot that rings true.... and nothing that doesn't ring true.

I'm grateful for the account of error studies and Portraits. That is the first description of it I have read. (I think you'll find that the treated voice was that of Rory McDermott.) Studying the typescripts of the texts, I had imagined - assumed - an integrated performance space. I wish there were some pictures of it!

You are right to point to Alaric's articulation / pronunciation in performance as being a problem. I never came entirely to terms with it myself, and nor did he! It was fully functional, at times. I wonder if you remember his performance at SVP in 1995? He used the - to use your word - fussiness to help build personae.

And I wonder if you remember, what shall we call her?, the artist sometimes called Lilian Ward, who read with me every now and then some years ago. She was an affected reader; but a text written with that in mind could make use of her voice's oddities: in my Outputs, for instance, that we did together at RASP in 1986.

I can imagine Alaric's enunciation working well with the Portraits, I'm thinking of that series, separate from error studies, read as conventionally performed poems. There could be a forensic quality to his search for precision which worked usefully, I think, also in Aberrations and in some of Waves on Porthmeor Beach.

Other times, I thought he was struggling to find an uttering voice between that formal voice and conversational voice. In LETTERS for dear AUGUSTINE, he didn't seem quite to have got it right, not when I heard him read it.

I wonder to what degree the problem arose from his early acting training.

Always it was good to listen to; he was a poet very much concerned with the sound of what he wrote; but sometimes the actual sound was somewhat at odds with other aspects of the piece.

Interestingly, I have been told about his efforts to find a co-actor for Conversation in Colour who wouldn't act too much! Hence my interest in finding people who have seen Conversation in Colour.

We had many discussions over Domestic Ambient Noise ^[8]. He struggled critically for years with that as if it were a snark and albatross combined, and he frequently interrogated me or flew kites for me with regard to the process by which a text-on-paper became multivoice sound and gesture. That would lead to discussion of the nature of improvisation, and of performance. Sooner or later he would talk about his own performance approach. He had thought of only writing for other performers in the future; but, by March 2000, he wanted us - him and me plus another to be agreed - to go on the road with a programme of his Bucking Curtains, my Stone Head and our collaborative work.

I think that DAN performances and the electro-acoustic products of Jo Hyde and John Drever demonstrated for him how plastic voice could be. He knew that, of course, but he didn't always physically believe it.

The texts that he wrote for Text out of image (sandra blow) imply the possibility of quite a gutsy reading. There's a recording of him performing with John Drever but I haven't heard it properly yet so I can't say much. There's also a recording of the last reading he did which I have been trying to get hold of for two years.

His response to his lack of self-belief and consequent apprehension was rehearsal; and he was horrified, prior to that last gig in Totnes, when we launched Bucking Curtains with a joint performance, that the last thing I wanted to do was rehearse. I'd talk about it, agree cues and so on. I'd sit in the performance space. I'd sound check. But I wouldn't rehearse something intended for improvisation. And we faced each other down with relentless amiability for over a day.

When I first performed Nekyia with Jo Hyde and Steve Halfyard, this was after Alaric's death of course, I found my way into it by trying to think how Alaric would sound reading it... But I also found that it wasn't a strong guide. He was loosening up! And the timings of Nekyia, which, in part, reflected his reading, demonstrated that loosening, I believe.

I'm not sure how happy he had been writing for others. I think he did feel ownership of Rory McDermott's production of The Unspeakable Rooms, and that he got something out of studying such an inexplicable reaction, in the same way that he was fascinated by the process of being repulsed and resisting being repulsed by what repulsed him (there's an unpublished essay on that) and by hatred / aggression directed at him.

He learned from all of that and was becoming increasingly assertive and confident.

Your quite right, too, about Richard Tabor's reaction to error studies and portraits.

Changing the subject slightly, I was struck by his commitment to teaching. He really put himself out for students and believed in teaching, this starting at a time when I felt myself burnt out by it.

Can you speak of him as a teacher?

cc: The issue of Alaric's teaching is very interesting as his confidence as a teacher grew symbiotically with his renewing confidence as a practitioner.

We need to get behind the screen of the mythical romantic thrown up by Nicholas Johnson's newspaper obituary. That image of Alaric lugging a bulging shopping trolley around the Dartington campus reminds me too much of Stanley Spencer with his pram in Cookham. That did happen for convenience from time to time though, since the walks between sessions there are lengthy enough and it is sufficiently rainy on that hill as to mean that his tartan trolley was a useful solution to the problems of how to get a number of reference books from session to session and keep them dry.

I did some co-teaching and co-assessing with him but the person who probably knows more about this than anybody else is Brigid Mc Leer who shared an office with him for several years and grappled with his evaluations on an ongoing basis.

It's certainly true to say that Alaric found teaching a struggle early on but then Dartington is particularly culpable in not being very good at all at recognising and valuing and rewarding its staff. As with many such an educational institution it tends to have a vampiric relation to its staff, suck 'em dry and spit 'em out. Staff planning tends to be expedient, planned for the short rather than the longer term. But there are particular circumstances that seriously scarred core staff there at the turn of the nineties and that's a whole other subject. I know that Alaric was buoyed by his final year and preparing to move on (he was talking of wanting to live in New York in our late conversations).

He mellowed as a teacher through experience. His harsh aesthetic imperatives became more responsive to student needs. However, he never held back from taking up awkward and provocative positions. His big challenge was that there were no answers, only more questions. He relished ribbing easy opinions and often shocked students but did so with a wicked glint in his eye. I remember one instance in which he described a piece of work, during a feedback session, as "shit!" which he quickly followed with a lip-smacking gesture and "mmmmmm!." The look that ricocheted around the student body at this sort of combinatory response was always a delight to witness. Sometimes there was a kind of we can screen that out as being just typically aberrational Alaric and sometimes he could induce genuine disbelief, even gawping mouths.

We often played a version of good cop bad cop in such sessions, taking it in turns to tease preferences and opinions and vocabularies and links.

He was an assiduous teacher who was always 'there' for the students. He often set up extra sessions to show videos for example that there wasn't time for in the allotted sessions. I remember he was particularly keen on the work of Jo Spence. But then he was keen on any work that foregrounded the human body. Queer theory was very strongly integrated into all discussions at that time, being of importance to all of the core teaching staff.

Alaric could argue fiercely on occasions when he felt particularly strongly about a piece of work. He would kind of worry at the course criteria, contest them, as any good teacher should often do. Assessing was never an easy procedure but one invested with intense critical acuity. He proved himself an increasingly empowering moderator.

LU: I too am unhappy about the national newspaper obituary, as you know. I concentrated, in my public objection, on the word "zany"; but it's the tone of  the whole thing really which offended me. You said "zany" yourself earlier! and who am I to say you're wrong.

Brigid is having her say, her own interview, but I wanted to hear your take on this too. We all see a part only of anyone and the part is a mixture of what the person chooses to show us; what they inadvertently show us; what we think we have seen; and what we are able to see. I hope to try to get a little way beyond that by putting similar questions to many people...

I recognise the growing satisfaction with Dartington in tandem with a growing dissatisfaction; and going to New York semi-permanently as a renewal of some kind... I am not sure "renewal" is the right word. A way out? (He once said to me: "There's the gay scene there. But you wouldn't understand." or something like that)

You've answered so fully throughout that I find my remaining stock of questions is almost redundant... But there is one thing. I want to worry away a little at Alaric's drive to collaborate... He was, of course, studying collaboration, latterly; but that's part of something else.

Is it just that theatre and music were always important to him, genres where people must come together to make the final product? Or was there something else? The magazine was co-edited from the first. The press published other people - self-publishing Waves on Porthmeor Beach does not appear to have been his first choice.

I see a simultaneous sociability and solitariness in him, complementary rather than contradictory; I see great generosity and need. And maybe a way of coping with sometime lack of confidence. What do you think?

And I wonder if he ever asked you to collaborate with him. Did he? And what did you say and why?

cc: Well the question concerning collaboration is a big one and I can only try to teeter out some responses based upon perhaps poorly remembered conversational exchanges.

It is difficult to say with any accuracy why he chose to co-edit and to collaborate. We never did do any work together, although his editorial cajoling bordered on collaboration. Actually we had just agreed to meet up for some conversations with a view to making something from the later exchanges but that's all in the wind. It would have been that summer following his death, so opportunity missed. He seemed pretty fascinated by what things not worth keeping ^[9] were up to as his extraordinary contribution to the Millennium Collection shows.

I'd say that he chose to co-edit because he knew that his closest interests benefited from interchange with other, interdisciplinary, points of view. In this he was a classic interdisciplinarian with all of the anxieties that might be thought to bring. He sought to mediate the boundaries of collaborations through extensive dialogue. I know that he'd talk the hind legs off of music with John Drever and Jo Hyde for example. I think his approach to collaboration went further than the oft fallback sub-contractual model. It wasn't simply a demarcation of specialisms brought into conversation. Therefore I sense that his drive to collaborate was strategic. He wanted to get his work 'out' 'there' and by working with others he gained access to those audiences and peer relays enjoyed by others. By the way the suggestion here is not a scheming sense of leeching onto others but of taking sharable risks. This had the effect not only of enhancing the reach of his work but also of getting the widest feedback and responses to it. Always hungry for feedback Alaric's work was a call, an expression of desire and longing. His work was a place where he came out philosophically and aesthetically as well as sexually.

I'm not aware of his having opened his actual texts to collaboration though. He was certainly opening to increasingly varied editorial input and to performative manipulation / transformation / interpretation but he still held to the idea of his contribution still being clearly figured as 'his' inside the work - even if it was sometimes in reception of heavy treatment. Notwithstanding that he could take the risks and pleasures of testing his practice in respect of others from theatre and dance and music and video.

He was coming out, again, into what he perceived as a critical heat of contemporary practice. He wanted to expose himself to that heat (sorry and sorry for saying so:)) and he was at the same time incredibly nervous in the moments of so doing. I've heard reports of his being almost frozen with a mixture of nerves and excitement at conferences during his last year or two when he began to extend his network through giving more academic papers.

So, I am jumping around as I consider your question but that's the nature of the conversations I remember having with him too. We've joked together before about the possibility that he'd have collaborated with almost anyone. I don't know that that's true. It was a way as I say of testing his practice and of furthering dialogue with his peers. I'd be keen to hear of any experiences you had of co-authorship with him in that respect as I sense that you were in the thick or on the verge of that.

LU: He wouldn't, of course, have collaborated with anyone... That was a joke; but it's a joke we've both uttered and the humour of the remark for us suggests there is something in it; but that's no more than the unexpectedness of someone making quite so many collaborations in such a short time. He was actually quite cautious and deliberate in his invitations.

I'll happily tell you about my experience of working with him. This has become more of a discussion than an interview anyway. While I am thinking about that, may I ask you to clarify what you meant when you said: "his editorial cajoling bordered on collaboration."

What editorial cajoling is that? I don't understand.

cc: Alaric had a way of trying to get more and more from me. He almost commissioned me to provide extras. He'd demand more and more work and say he was going to publish ALL of it with that wry smile; and then he'd ask me to write notes to accompany something or performance instructions or some such.

He'd make a case for the necessity of such materials.

That's what I meant by cajoling. Maybe it gives the wrong impression. He was very persistent at least in his requests. He'd make them the number one priority to be addressed.

He did it in respect of the PAJ issue and the Riding the Meridian materials and the unpublished words worth. I made a lot of versions of pieces just for him that probably went into the skip in the Totnes clearout.

You must have had some similar exchange?

LU: Blimey. I understand now; but I have found no trace of all that work of yours. The Totnes skip is the best theory.

I had similar experiences, yes, although Alaric's abiding interest in later years was in publishing bits of my Stone Head.

In the text-sound section of Riding the Meridian, the range of my things included there is largely his doing. In fact, he wanted more! I didn't mind that though because he was relatively specific and pushed me in directions I was quite happy to be pushed in. I did a lot more than was published.

I only gave him some of it. He had created a situation in which I could experiment, knowing that, if I was happy with the result, he would look at it very favourably. As a result, I put paid to a lot of daft ideas that had nothing going for them.

The recording of my Game on a line was made in his kitchen. I was going down to Cornwall when he was saying he wanted a recording, so we met up at his home. He brought a DAT recorder from Devon, and we made the recording there and then. It was one take. I recall that impressed him. I don't mean that he held me in high esteem for it; just that he took note that I liked to do it once and no more, if I could. It was a way of trying to get things right which seems to have been quite different to his.

And there was ongoing conversation as proto collaboration. Every now and then, as I am working on his texts, I think I see considerable exchanges of ideas in the content and or the technique. It's difficult to know. We'd both spent a fair part of our lives trying to describe the sea and trying to write poetry about music and painting. It is more likely that the common interests were there and that's why we talked... & I think we both said unexpected, outrageous, unsupportable things to each other, to find what kind of error report it generated in the other.

Regarding our actual writing collaboration, I've been looking to see if I have any record of it. Some of my emails are digitally corrupted though they may be backed up. I can remember all we need, I think.

One problem is that anything substantial I might have had is only going to be what remains inadvertently anyway. In those days, I had very limited hard disk space and nothing more sophisticated in the way of backup than HD floppy disks. So when we finished that project and agreed to cannibalise our individual contributions, I seem to have cleaned off Alaric's files, because they were his and no longer in any sense mine; and then I threw away what had become earlier versions of quite different poems.

Alaric, of course, had greater IT resources, although he too seems to have thrown away my texts in this case.

That's another thing about that lack of "cajoling", by the way; and that's that I would quite frequently send him copies of what I was writing... Sometimes, when I am going through his papers, a great chunk of my own work falls out! So he usually had a batch of my current work.

I have this note from him, accompanying an 11 line poem of his, which seems to be dated 8 September 1996:

"It's just an idea. Or it is just a copy of an idea. Doing a DAN in verbals. If you like the idea, presumably you transform this six times and send it me. I then choose one of those to transform? If you agree, should we restrict ourselves to 11 lines (always or usually?) or have no limit? We could do it by email. Be seeing you. Alaric"

I should say that, because Alaric was so excited by Domestic Ambient Noise, Bob and I gave him the first 50 DANs, when there were about 50, in return for a review.

Where would it be published? he wanted to know. That's not the problem, I said. The problem is finding someone who can write about it. Congratulations.

He was unsure that he could do it well; and supposing, he asked, Bob and I didn't like what he wrote?

He wrote the first draft fairly quickly. I know that because I recall reading a copy, sitting on a bench in Helston while I waited for a bus south to Cadgwith, where I then was; that was some years ago.

But he never finished that review. He kept working at it, trying to incorporate responses to new aspects of DAN as we extended it!

One of the things he was going to do, and never did get time to do, was to sit down and go through the whole 300.

There were many conversations which came out of his studies of DAN - about the nature of collaboration, the nature of improvisation, the games that one may play in performance etc. And of course it also resulted in the interview he conducted with me and Cobbing in Riding the Meridian.

That background created a partial context for our writing collaboration. There were other models for procedure; and we could have invented our own as Cobbing and I invented that. But there and then, the DAN procedure was as good as any approach; and I don't think we were ready for the kind of collaboration which may involve destroying some of what the other has made.

It seems to me that the 11 line poem did not kick start a full collaboration. I remember a false start before we really got under weigh. That fits in with my surprise today when I saw the date of September 1996.

I remember him wanting a title for the project and me saying 'Call it blancmange for all I care"; and, for a while, it was called Blancmange. Then it was called Falling custard, my influence again I fear; and then a variety of daft names and combinations of names. He called the folder on his own Mac "Blancmange and fall".

I hope, eventually, to be clearer about some or all of this, certainly in terms of the chronology. Up to now, I have left these questions to be answered later and concentrated largely on his own solo texts ^[10].

Once it was running, the collaboration was very exciting, though there were quite long silences. Some of the shifts of image and content were extraordinary. I recall throwing an image of male / female violence to him - not just violence but complicity in that violence, collaboration with it; and it was quite odd, as I recall, to see elements of it come back, transformed by Alaric, though I cannot be specific because I haven't got the verses in front of me. In one of mine, there was a rhetorical device where male genitals become a punching fist, and Alaric gave that a slant I found hard to process. I'm not speaking euphemistically; I just can't remember clearly; but I know that the overtones hindered rather than helped me. I told him that; and he asked what I thought it was like for him to get poetry laden with heterosexual preoccupations, assumptions and preferences. At some point, a bunch of marines ran into the writing and I wondered where they'd come from; but Alaric had let them in.

I don't think that either of us - I'll let that stand for reading, but I'll change it. I don't think that I was writing particularly well then, in terms of producing texts which could be isolated and treated as separate made things. But that didn't matter.

I had assumed that we would publish the texts, as DAN had been published. Alaric demurred. And that was fine. However, I have found several cover designs in his computer files; so he was thinking about it...

That first exchange went through about 5 generations and then someone let it go. I think that was me. After a while, we started up again. It seems to me that it worked better the second time, whatever one means by worked better. We had a clearer but not clear idea of what we were doing. It is from that period that I eventually found material in what I had written that I wanted to keep and rework when we abandoned the collaboration.

We were limited somewhat by what could be done via plain text - that's how it seemed then - and we discussed visual extension and articulation, but never did do it. Both of us were fitting in the collaboration with other things.

In March 2000, after the Month of Sundays gig, we were talking about meeting for extended periods and making collaborative work for performance - which, of course, did not happen.
 

Footnotes

1) Bob Cobbing died in September 2002, but his workshops continue

2) Bibliographical information cannot yet be supplied. Sumner's copy has not survived and the book is not listed by the British Library.

3) West Square, named after its address, was an electro-acoustic music studio where both Upton and cheek made tape pieces and prepared tapes for use in live performance in the late 70s

4) A series at Kings College London, organised by Eric Mottram and others

5) This was a series founded and chaired by Gilbert Adair which still continues, now called Sub Voicive Poetry. A link to the svp website can be found in the links page of this feature

6) Sumner tells the story of this "shake up" in things we can do without, 2000, edited by Cheek & Lavers

7) The promise of an audio recording has proved illusory. Either it was never made or it has been lost. If it has been lost, perhaps it will turn up one day; but it has been impossible to be clear. The actual performance that cris cheek refers to was the launch performance at the end of February 2000 of Bucking Curtains as a two voice piece by Alaric Sumner and Lawrence Upton

8) Domestic Ambient Noise is a 300 pamphlet writing collaboration by Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton published by Writers Forum. There is an article by cris cheek at bepc which deals largely with DAN

9) A project by cris cheek and kirsten lavers