creates an intriguing combination of forcefulness and distance. Or you can
work with two microphones (and a stereo sound system), and move from
one to the other as performance poet Amanda Stewart habitually does.
These are only a few possibilities, but playing the microphone can make a
huge impact on your overall performance, and should be viewed as an
important part of your creative work.
CONCLUSION
Different modes of working, such as performance, are very important,
because they produce new challenges and can push your work in unex-
pected directions. The creation of a talk poem, or an intermedia piece, will
inevitably create surprises in your writing, because you work with lan-
guage in ways which are more oral, theatrical or intermedia. The
stimulation of performance may also bring changes to your page-based
work. For example, when you next write for the page, you could find your-
self producing multi-voiced texts, playing with speech patterns, or
emphasising the sounds of the words more strongly. In other words you
might find yourself adapting performance strategies to the page.
Performance is central to the aims of this book as a whole, because it
encourages you to be a chameleon in your writing and embrace different
forms of projection and different identities. Similarly, intermedia work
encourages you to mix sound, word and image, just as we cross-dressed
genre in Chapter 9. In this chapter we have also started to explore the
power of technology to take our work in completely new directions, and
this will be addressed much further in Chapter 11.
WORKS ON THE WRITING EXPERIMENT WEBSITE
Charles Amirkhanian, Church Car, Version 2.
Charles Amirkhanian, Dot Bunch.
Christian Bok, ‘Motorised Razors’ and ‘Mushroom Clouds’ from The
Cyborg Opera.
David Knoebel, How I Heard It.
Taylor Mali, Undivided Attention.
Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, Poet Without Language (extract).
Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, the writer, the performer, the program, the
madwoman.
Amanda Stewart,. romance (1981).
Scott Woods, Elevator Dreams.
Tongues, talk and technologies 233