'POLLINATION' a performance along J.H. Prynne’s poem TO POLLEN

Bruno Guastalla – voice & electronics
Dominic Lash – double bass
20 September 2024 7:30pm
Common Ground 37-38 Little Clarendon Street
Oxford, OX1 2HU
£10 / £8

J.H. Prynne’s poem TO POLLEN was written c. 2006.
It is an extraordinary text on many levels; it has for us a strong resonance with current events. It was written in the aftermath of the Iraq war, as the knowledge about Abu Ghraib filtered through.
The performance consists of a voicing/vocalizing of the whole text, from the remarkable French translation by Abigail Lang.
The performance is a real-time collaboration between Bruno Guastalla (using multiple delays for the voice) and the exceptionally inventive double bassist Dominic Lash.
The text – both the English original and the French translation- will be projected one stanza at a time as the performance unfolds, via an overhead projector.

With thanks to Paul Medley
(technical support / documentation)
and Alex Chesters at Common Ground.

Spoonhunt record label (CD / download)

http://dominiclash.blogspot.co.uk/

below an extract of a review of ‘To Pollen’ by Jennifer Cooke:

J. H. Prynne’s latest sequence of poetry, To Pollen (Barque Press, 2006), consists of twenty-one thirteen-line poems, each one placed centrally upon the page, each one a visual and linguistic tablet: a drug, medicinal or dangerous; an echo of ancient recording devices, originally mnemonic; also the carrier of the first epic poem, Gilgamesh. And it is with Gilgamesh which Prynne begins; specifically, with a few beautiful, elegiac lines from one of the smaller fragments of tablet, reportedly found in the Old Babylonian city of Sippar (now Tell Abu Habbah), 16 miles outside of Baghdad. Thus does To Pollen inscribe its signals: it is a poem at the other end of a poetic lineage which still deals with hubris, death, leadership and the nature of mourning and loss; it is also concerned with the contemporary context in which these issues are most critical, the Middle East, and in particular the war in Iraq. When Prynne gave a rare reading at Sussex University in December 2006, he chose ‘Refuse Collection’, written in response to the Iraq war and published with other poems directly addressing the conflict in Keston Sutherland’s Iraquid. It was the writing of this poem that Prynne claimed as the impetus behind the conception of To Pollen. While not epic in any traditional sense, To Pollen certainly journeys. Events in Iraq have global consequences so the poem-sequence disperses itself allusively all over the place: from a family picnic on what could be Gaza beach, ending in explosion; to Forest Gate, London, site of the unlawful shooting of an innocent Muslim by British Police; from Doha, just outside of which is the large US military airbase where planes take off to bomb Afghanistan and Iraq; to invoking, through the slippage of ‘twin steps’ (p. 13), the Word Trade Center Towers, symbolic ‘beginning’ of the destruction for most of the West’s media and its political apologists. (…)