The most conventional means of making
public some poetry research is to write an article in an academic journal or a
chapter in an edited book. Sometimes the book may be focussed on poetry
research from a specific area; the journal almost always publishes vastly more
on prose than on poetry. Both can sometimes be so slack with their interest in
poetry than quoted lines of verse lose their correct layout somewhere in the
process. If you’re lucky, you get to waste an entire day re-inserting line
breaks into quotations in a final proof; if you’re unlucky, the final proof
gets ransacked after the final author check and the article is published with
the verse run on as prose, making a nonsense of your analysis. The semi-live
spoken predecessor of both these written forms is usually the 25- to 30-minute
conference paper.
Radio is a different way of publishing. I
went to give a presentation to the BBC and they gave each academic speaker a
4-minute slot. What can anyone say in 4 minutes? Out went any nodding to
sources, any evidencing of points, any discussion as such. Instead I chose two big
loose ideas and two mini examples and that was my four minutes spent. In the
event of making the programme that I had effectively been pitching that day, I got
to record over 90 minutes of spoken comments. No script, nothing like a
conference paper, no scaffolding, no poetry quotations; it was strangely
different to any other way I’ve made public my poetry research in the past. The
outcome will be cut together some time in the autumn by the editor to make a
30-minute programme and until then I’ll wait uncertainly to see what emerges. A
bit of fun or a viable means of publishing? Who knows!
