My tend sees errant, Vulnerable Chanceways: Maggie O'Sullivan's 'House of Reptiles' and recent American Poetics

Though my reference to this practice of colouring the text has its currency in recent Welsh culture, we can trace this fascination with the performance of poetry through an extensive bardic literary tradition with its emphasis on the lyric as oral transmission. Within current Welsh language poetic performance there is a resolute insistence that the poem must not only be rehearsed extensively beforehand but also learnt by rote. Here mnemonics comes into a creative play with the modalities of voice; highlighting specific resonances that may have remained concealed in the original text. But the audience of this performance is faced with a certain paradox and one that I hope may allow us a way into investigating Maggie O’Sullivan’s poetry. The ‘colouring’ of the text in a Welsh language performance emphasises the immediacy of expression. Yet as an audience we are also made aware that the ‘spontaneity’ of the performance is also heavily mediated, rehearsed, if not instructed.