Proficiency
Matt is a guitarist and knows well and practices the folk tradition. A song of the homeless, accompanied by Matt’s “proficient” guitar-playing, elegant and nuanced, seems to Phil to turn the song—an expression of otherness in experience and language—into a familiar, too perfect, artistic event; Matt’s guitar cushions and mutes rather than reveals precarity and unique value. The British poet and painter Allen Fisher promotes the “imperfect fit” in poetry where the form and expression slightly jar the expected but with the result that the observer is no longer “bored” but “stimulated.” In the case of A Book of Hours, the social conditions of the makers as well as their intentions are revealed. So Phil asks Matt to accompany instead on the piano where Matt is less proficient; the undersong becomes cruder, more “archaic,” less consoling than the guitar, and disclosing discomfort in the lines: “I have even been forgot / by the gold cog of the clock.”
Valued proficiency, on the other hand, arises unexpectedly from unpredictable sources, in A’s talented guitar-playing or the brilliance of a street-homeless person, appearing one day and then disappearing, who could finger-click electrifying rhythms.
ABOVE: Kris practicing folk traditions
Photograph by Lois Blackburn
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