‘Allowing One’s Metaphors to Mix’: Performances and Perspectives at the Peter Manson Symposium

Conference Report for the Peter Manson Symposium, organised by Ellen Dillon, Tom Betteridge, Colin Herd and Nicky Melville, which consisted of an informal evening of performances, and a day of panels and discussions in response to Manson's work. This report accompanies our special issue of articles based on the proceedings.


Friday 27 th October
The first day began as an informal evening event at Pollok Ex-Servicemen's Club, in Glasgow's South Side. Amid twinkling lights, and the familiar tinkle of change being exchanged for pints at the bar, a variety of performers channelled the Manson spirit in their poetic or sonic delivery. In between performances, the room was filled with the Lynchian vowel stammers of recorded Manson poems, alongside music curated by Vicky Langan-who provided a playlist including the suitably haunted moans and shivers of Arthur Russell's star-bright cello. Readings were interspersed with breaks for lively discussion and the purchase of Zarf Editions pamphlets (including Manson's Factitious Airs), or acquisition of free cacti that Manson cultivated especially from seed in the months leading up to the symposium, and brought along with an air of ritual.
After a warm introduction from conveners Tom Betteridge and Ellen Dillon, Jow Lindsay Walton was first to take the stage. Walton's surreal, form-leaping piecewritten specifically for the night -was read deftly from a laptop balanced in one palm.
He delivered punchy lines with typically Mansonian humour, the likes of 'those who can't/tenure' drawing a good chuckle from a room of academics, fans and other poets.
With a background that spans editorial roles to experimental writing and science fiction, Walton's reading was sharp, glitzy and culturally engaged, chiming with the dizzying politics of the contemporary: 'Why must we ever repent in the tents/Where Russell Brand repaints his taint?'. With a kind of shoulder-shaking, Joycean scatology, Walton went for pithy, often ironic climaxes and estranged imagery that lops off logic in a surreal grammar of the body: 'pissing in a violin my arms fell off'.
Walton's performance was seamlessly followed by nick-e melville, who delivered his Sad Press pamphlet ABBODIES in its entirety: a sublime and streetwise channelling of ABBA through references to Nigel Farage, subway suicide announcements and Oor Wullie. Using ABBA's European identity as a springboard to reflect on Britain's recent tide of nationalism, Melville made irresistible connections between politics and pop culture, bringing everything from The Great British Bake-Off to I'm a Celebrity… into the equation. The result was a form of disorientated longing: that rare and graceful fusion of the experimental and vernacular which glisters with amusing and/or alarming childhood anecdotes, reflections on death and timely puns on Brexit.
Ellen Dillon read aloud Jane Goldman's poem, 'L'Après-midi d'une fan du Pierre L'Hommefils (après Mallarmpodelaire)', in her absence-a picnic of modernist references written in response to Peter Manson's English in Mallarmé. Tom Betteridge then read Goldman's homage to 'Sourdough Mutation', 'for peter mallarmanson', a typically sparky, disarming affair, by way of references to Kurt Schwitter's Ursonate.
This was followed by a captivating reading from John Hall, who presented a curated selection of poems from his previous works with Peter Manson in mind, one of which, 'Still Learning to Read' is available in the latest Hix Eros. The pieces chosen-'Song', 'Mouthpiece' and 'I'm on the Train' amongst others-probed issues at the heart of Manson's own writing: presence and absence in language, and the fluidity, materiality, and desire that live at its crux. Taking a softer though no less engaging approach to delivery, and peppering his reading with references to J. H. Prynne and Emily Dickinson, Hall's work stood as an ekphrastic commentary on the process of reading itself, channelling its industrious energy through autobiographical 'rumours of delirium'. There was a sense that these poems were about moving towards the possibility of reading Peter Manson as much as they were about Peter Manson himself, or indeed his poetry. Language became autonomous material to physically inspect: 'speech like stone', 'verbs that unsettle'; a quiet climax of intensity, as Manson-rich lines like 'refractory airs of fake facticity' bloomed for the audience.
Sarah Hayden introduced her piece-a faux presentation, part narrative poem, part essayistic exposition on constraint-as the afterimage of giving a ' disastrously bad lecture' on Manson's work. Her performance was thrillingly disorientating, existing in a positively anxious state of constant interruption and resumption, marked by fake endings and guttural pauses. Hayden both performed the piece and narrated her own performance, being simultaneously within and without her own delivery, positing language as a necessary compromise between fluidity of experience and staticity of form. There was a sense of employing fugue as a verbal possibility, writing within constraint and from this space of difference collapsing into expression. We were reminded, somewhat, of Iain Morrison's 'Art Talk Notes', a process of non-linear transcription in which poetry is generated within the space of resistance-a lecture or artist talk-combining free association with collaborative procedure and personal reflection. You can read 'A Lecture (2)' in the latest Hix Eros for a sense of how this works on the page. Hayden considered how form and constraint are 'liquid magnets' producing off-kilter content. As Hayden warns, 'witness the perils of allowing one's metaphors to mix'.
We are met with a litany of sweat, jellyfish, buckets, disco; Hayden wittily channelled the perspectives of those observing her lecture: 'she's rhyming like a fever now'. Amid such playful linguistic meta-games-the lecture staged as poem and vice versa-various surprising and sensuous images arose. There's a Steinian quality to Hayden's self-engagement, that pointed suggestion that ' a sentence, then, might be a single blood vessel', or 'punctuation as wormhole'. Indeed, it's easy to slip down the cavernous passages of Hayden's lines, as she delivers her work defined by difference, repetition, imbrication. Highlighting the performative artifice even more, her words were uncannily accented by the authentic transactional punctuations of the bar next door, with its low-level laughter and jingles of glasses, as the surroundings seemed to mimic her register of choice-a bouquet of academic formulations obsessively interrupted by a frustrated 'FUCK'. With its self-deprecating, sharp expression, Hayden's was perhaps poetry for the pub as much as for the academy.
Hayden's reading was energetically followed by Mendoza, under the persona of 'Linus Slug: Insect Librarian'. Their work was intensely physical, every word measured according to its internal movement, its plosive possibility. There were bird sounds on the empty tidal array of a beach, a setting of territories and nonhuman voices 'pierced and starved with cold'; a sense of spaciousness collapsing in the odd and fragmentary. Mendoza's voice oscillated between soft viscosity and snarling, sharp and visceral. There was a definite hunger, a lingering on boundaries. They articulated an abrasive landscape, hostile to its dwellers and visitors, and yet one which contained certain places of shelter. While rich in sounded variation, this is poetry you crave to see crawling all over a page, making its strange, oozing trajectories in that excessive, Mansonian manner of gaps piling up against words, or words making mounds upon space. Occasionally alliteratively guttural, sometimes sounding like a maritime wildlife glossary, Mendoza's poetry appropriately relaid Manson's interest in things nonhuman-a theme picked up later in the symposium, especially with Samantha Walton's talk.
Nat Raha's poetry was delivered in dialogue with Mendoza's, offering stuttering bullets of sound against Mendoza's more tentative, soft and spiralling discourse.
Raha slowly unfurled fragments and clauses, her work (both soothing and alarming) sometimes sounding like somebody hacked the Shipping Forecast. There was a dramatisation of corporeal unravelling, a 'gullet constricted' as it strains at the words that can't quite come out. Botanical imagery threatens to flourish amidst these ' delicate pieces of scream', a politics held precisely in its stuttering discourse, its emphasis on silence as much as on sound. Words accumulated, sticky and dense, presenting a gross assault on morality, as interior anatomical imagery regurgitated sheer life in the visceral air. Raha deftly scattered into a trash heap the nasty detritus of our culture: those scorned politicians, fascists and rape apologists whose identities are annihilated in her awkward, physical choreography of voice. There was trauma there, but also a kind of re-enacted fury, that insistent repetition recalling Samuel Beckett's Not I.
After a break, the evening closed with a performance from the apparently ungooglable 'Food People', who delivered a musical-text piece titled 'Sourdough Mutation Mutation'. Food People comprise the motley poets, Lila Matusmoto, Greg Thomas and Matthew Hamblin, and their discography includes a tape called 'Animal Work' from Beartown Records and recent CDR, vetch, available via Chocolate Monk.
As Manson's own work crosses the medial platforms of sound, image, structure and sense, it was appropriate that his sprawling sequence, 'Sourdough Mutation', found itself happily in the hands of a musical collective. With violin, loops, shruti box, guitar, alongside visuals from Matt Wright, Food People experimented in the complicated, highly-niche art of converting vowel sounds to audio. Taking Manson's eclectic original and slowing it to half-speed, Food People performed some colourcoded grammatical alchemy to translate the audio samples to musical notes, the enunciation of Manson's poem providing a guide for rhythm, speed and note length.
More improvisational live elements, including drones and palindromic guitar/violin riffs, evoked an immersive pool of esoteric, musical perplexity, drawing us into and out of distraction, pondering the space between image/text/sound. The score that emerged carried its traces of process, unfolding tonal clusters in orbit around a major chord, exacting a latent melodic quality. What seemed to the untrained ear/eye a cut-up of musical and literary score soon blossomed as something far more complex, its haunting twangs and resonant air emphasising the tactility of Manson's fragments, strung as they are with an air of infinitude. Temporarily, the room is held in suspense, hypnotised by the contrapuntal tension between meaning and sense: a cacophonous landscape of intricate sound, organised around Manson's gorgeously orchestrated chaos.

Saturday 28 th October
Taking place in University Gardens at the University of Glasgow, the second day began with the most exhilarating and meaty of keynotes, 'A Plenary Talk' by Robin Purves Walton draws a lineage for Adjunct's trash aesthetic from the Dadaists, who recycled the streets for repurposed art. Since Manson unifies apparently disparate elements in ways which foreground form and materiality, the reader is prompted to notice previously unseen operations of our material enmeshment or interrelatedness.
Language, in a sense, is treated as matter itself: the debris of culture and physical experience, the off-slew of our mammalian identity within ecosystems of vibrant matter, the distorting space-times of what Morton calls hyperobjects. Indeed, Walton's attention to similarities between Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter and Adjunct was particularly productive in revealing the text's role as an assemblage, or an 'undigester register' of 'recycled detritus', rather than mere transparent communicative medium.
The interpellative strategies of Adjunct make us aware that we are all part of this active reconstitution of language and matter, a chiasmic impulse of repurposed text in which the self's agency is minimised in the sheer scale of material debris.
Borrowing a sentence from Irene Gammel and John Wrighton, Walton reminded us that 'within the ecology of recycling and sustainability, language itself is a cultural litter to be recycled and renewed, while culture as a rich compost for poetry is subject to the ecological laws of decomposition and recomposition'. Walton also astutely pointed out that the idea of culture as a ' compost' becomes not only challenging to the fragmentation so central to modernist aesthetics, but also problematic for more postmodern assertions of language's intertextuality, manifest in techniques such as collage and pastiche, by necessarily implying barriers between subject and nature, and suspending naturalisation. Insofar as it wears the traces of its essence of material accumulation on its sleeve, tentative labels for Adjunct could then be 'posthumanist', or even ' compostist'. techniques of collage and montage, drawing such elements into the talk's own critical intervention within a famous disagreement between Adorno and Benjamin as to surrealism's political and poetic potential. The focus on adjunctification-the process by which a thing is added to something else as a supplementary rather than essential part-allowed Robinson to explore Adjunct's resistance to 'sense', playing instead on the dynamics of cultural familiarity, parataxis and modulation, making aesthetic parallels with montage and raising questions about surrealism's antiorganic impulse. The reader approaches Adjunct as a sequence, but distrusts the order of such sequence: the paratactical conjunctions are never truly paratactical; there seems to be a strangely unified logic to the whole, but it is not that of coherence.
While Adorno claims that surrealism never loses sight of its materialism, statically employing montage and thus uncritically accepting bourgeois materialist ideology, perspectives. Manson's responsiveness to the papers and openness to critical discussion throughout the day allowed several strands of readerly interest to become apparent: from the significance of his work, formally and thematically, within the context of the Anthropocene; to the question of Scottishness and anti-canonicity.
After absorbing so many thoughts and responses to Manson's oeuvre, it was a real treat to conclude the two-day event with Manson himself giving a generous reading of career-spanning poems: beginning with selections from For the Good of Liars, Between Cup and Lip and Factitious Airs, and concluding with a twenty-minute section from Adjunct: an undigest. Among fading October light and emptying glasses of wine, Manson filled the heart of Glasgow University Gardens with his meditative, careful delivery, taking side-turns for surprise and allowing the linguistic cornucopia to speak for itself with magnetic intonation. Some of the highlights included 'Familiars', dedicated to Maggie Graham in the audience, and 'Canzon-(for singing), after Calvacanti', dedicated to organiser Ellen Dillon who has published critical work on the poem's approach to lightness. The audience was electrified to see the critical sequence finally and intriguingly looped: from poems to criticism, to the poems again.
The feedback loops bared by the symposium clearly indicate a thriving critical and creative community firmly rooted around the critical depth and formal variety Manson's work. Organisers Ellen Dillon, Tom Betteridge, Colin Herd and Nicky Melville more than did justice to the eclectic, mind-altering capacities of Manson's poetry, supplementing the traditional academic conference-or in this case, a rather lively and convivial version of it-with the inspiring exuberance of a reading night.
The cleverly curated array of innovative and enthusiastic responses offered across the weekend, by performers and critical presenters alike, truly captured the playful experimentalism of Manson's work. The rooms of the symposium acted like an echo chamber for all the literary dichotomies that Peter Manson's writing stands for: