Competing with Kathy
Book festivals will always be poor relations to gatherings of film and music lovers. It takes about ninety minutes to watch a film, and half an hour or so to see a band, but books can't be consumed at such speed. Where film buffs and music fans use their festivals to watch movies and sing along to bands, gatherings of bibliophiles are necessarily dominated by talk about books.
Authors are accustomed to working in the cluttered solitude of their studies, and to expressing themselves through a pen or a keyboard, but at a book festival they are forced onto a stage, handed a mike, and asked to become, for an hour or so at a time, raconteurs, comics, and lecturers. Because some of the best scribblers are indifferent talkers, and some wretched writers do a good stand-up act or give a good lecture, festivals tend to offer a somewhat distorted picture of the literary world.When it offered its readers a guide to 'must-see sessions' of the Readers and Writers Festival last week, the New Zealand Herald predicted that the 'firecracker wit and brash personality' of Kathy Lette would make her appearance memorable. The Herald neglected to mention that Lette's new novel The Boy who Fell to Earth has underwhelmed many reviewers. The Independent's Nicholas Tucker, for instance, considers the book little more than a 'succession of scabrous one-liners'.
Reservations about Lette's work are not new. In 2008 the deathless sentence 'Sebastian's erect member was so big I mistook it for some sort of monument in the centre of a town' earned her book To Love, Honour & Betray (Till Divorce Us Do Part) a nomination for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Lette has had so many bad reviews over the years that she wrote a 'Review of reviewers', where she complained about critics who have the temerity to hold her to literary standards. In a revealing passage near the end of her self-defence, Lette suggested that a successful literary career has to involve 'the honing of cheerfulness to chatshow perfection'.
Lette's penchant for one-liners and disdain for subtlety may make her books unpopular with critics, but they help make her a star of the book festival circuit. In the same sort of way, many other awful writers become festival favourites. There is the occasional writer who can excel on the page and on the stage - Roddy Doyle, another star attraction at the Auckland festival, is an example - but these creatures are few and far between.
On Sunday morning I was a guest at the Readers and Writers Festival event called Poetry Pleasures, where a series of 'published poets' read from their work, and members of the audience were able to jump up and perform their own material.
It is easy to see why poetry readings are part of many book festivals. Because poems tend to be relatively short compared to other types of literary production, they can be performed within the confines of a book festival session. An audience doesn't have to hear poets talk about their work - they can, seemingly, be given the work itself.
I'm not sure, though, whether a poem is as easy to consume as festival organisers might think. A poem might take as long to read as a typical pop song, but it is made, or should be made, of denser, more recalcitrant, stuff than the offerings of Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga.
I've always liked Anthony Burgess' definition of poetry as 'the maximum exploitation of words'. In works of non-fiction, language tends to be subordinated to facts, and in novels plot or character are often of paramount importance; in poetry, though, the materiality of words - their complex history, their many shades of meaning and infinite associations, their shape and their sound - is both honoured and exploited. For many non-fiction writers and for more than a few novelists, language is a clear pane of glass through which we gaze at facts and events; for poets - good poets, anyway - it is something like the strata of the earth, layered by time and encrusted with recondite significances and antique treasures. In an era when digital technology, tabloid newspapers, corporate nomenclature, soundbite-centred politics, and television infotainment disguised as news are all helping dumb down language and restrict the scope of our thoughts, poetry can have a heady, subversive quality, not despite but because of the demands that it makes on readers.
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