Oplæsningslæsning

Noget af det sværeste er at skrive om oplæsninger - litteraturforsker og digter Martin Glaz Serup gør et bravt og klogt forsøg i en lille artikel på engelsk, "The Poetry Reading", der kan læses via dette link. Martin læser oplæsninger af Vanessa Place og (med nærmest virtuos grundighed) Jacques Roubaud og selvfølgelig Pia "Onkel Hector" Juul:

"Being present in the same room as the reader during the reading allows various other extra-textual markers to affect  understanding of the poem, including the poet’s body, age, gender, way of moving,

way of talking, way of dressing, and the entire impression they make and their attittude. It can be something as simple as a sweeping gesture with the hand, as in Pia Juul’s (at least locally) well-known poem from Sagde jeg, siger jeg [I said, I’m saying (1999) about Uncle Hector, who always did that. Like that. You can’t see how Unc Hector does it when reading the book, but when Juul herself reads the poem aloud a sort of expectant tension always arises around this ‘Like that’. I have both seen her show what Uncle Hector does with his hand, and I have seen her, almost demonstratively, refrain. This tension about the anticipated gesture, which will perhaps never occur, itself constitutes a performative element, which entails that the reading and the author’s physical presence add somethin to the poem not found on the print page; part of the text’s intensity shifts from the printed page, from the text, out into the room, where it creates a presence, a trembling, a bodily rooted liveness,

which also creates a connotative caesura in the poem."