Tom Leonard Speaks From His Own Ontology

Tom Leonard, he of Theory: A Critique fame, was our guest seminarian this evening. His seminar was entitled Displacement and Collocation. It is prefaced with this quote from Nietzsche: "Since Copernicus man is rolling from the centre towards x".

Underneath, adherring to the left-hand margins which he so abhors, he writes:

"some ideas to explore regarding the title's components:

as fragmentation
as (cubist) assemblage to a whole
as polyphony of the discrete, as distinct from a colonising single narrative
as literature's role in cubism, expressionism, surrealism and other non literary isms.
as interplay of binaries
as abstract music, statement and fugue

what is being displaced?"

In his wandering, conflicted, self-flagellating way, Tom talked about the use of space on the page, assemblage, "cubist holograms", found objects, orgasmic climaxes (lack thereof) and the precipitatious context. "Or whatever that means".

Whilst any mention of TS Eliot these days starts me a-yawnin', when he meandered onto the sound poetry of Bob Cobbing and his own experiments in the 1970s, recording primitive howls and layers of the Book of Job and Kierkegaard onto tapes whilst his 3- and 5-year-old kids played around him, he was fascinating and inspiring.

Prior to my seminar, he'd held his anti-theory lecture which my friends Claire and Graham found ill-informed and fuzzy. In my seminar he gave hints to why it went down so badly. He is constitutionally unable to accept the lecture form's inherent privileging of a "colonising narrative", he said, and that whenever he lectures he feels that there should be a speaker in each corner of the room, each putting out different ideas. He talked about his sound poem "My Name Is Tom" in which he broke up the sentence into its syllables, its single letters, its constituent sounds. He created a self portrait out of a single, simple sentence.

By allowing a "polyphony of the discrete", voices that can be heard but that are not necessarily privileged over one-another, Tom Leonard is trying to avoid a "universal self" that writes the poem. He is dealing with ideas surrounding the interplay between the personal and the universal, and the limits of those terms.