Second Evening of Poets Theater at Small Press Traffic

Friday Night January 22nd
(from the program)

ACT ONE

Interview
written & directed by cassandra smith

Henry Haberdash.....Matthew Timmons
Jackson Pollock.....David Buuck
Frank O'Hara.....Brandon Brown

The Gay Way
by Joe Brainard (1972)
directed by Sara Larsen

Bob....Ted Rees
Dick....Evan Kennedy
Censors....Cassie Smith & Sara Larsen

The Corpse
by Russell Atkins (1954)
directed by Kevin Killian

Widow....Cliff Hengst
Hired Men....Scott Hewicker and Wayne Smith
Inspector....Craig Goodman


I* N* T* E* R* M* I* S* S* I* O* N*

ACT TWO

Monkey Talk
by Tonya Foster
directed by Taylor Brady

Rafique Franfs (as Queen Kong & Sojourner Williams)
Taylor Brady (as Carl Denham & Agent Jack Driscoll)
Michael Cross (as the MC)

Join our distinguished panelists, literary scholar Sojourner Williams and FBI Agent Jack Driscoll, as we consider authenticity and the performance of blackness in the relationship between poet and cultural icon Queen Kong, publisher and socialite Carl Denham, and the all-seeing eye of state power.

Song #3
by Bruce Andrews (1973)
performed by David Brazil & Erika Staiti

The Origins of Old Son
by Robert Duncan (1955)
adapted & directed by David Brazil

Old Son....Brandon Brown
Medusa....Erin Morrill
Grandma....Sara Larsen
Bird Doll....Michael Cross

After dinner, comes civilization.

Poets Theater 2010 was curated by David Buuck, C.S. Giscombe, and Lauren Shufran.


SPT'second night of Poets Theater 2010 was entirely different from its first. In part a celebration of Patrick Durgin's The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945-1985, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil, the night's festivities offered several plays from the anthology: Russell Atkins's "The Corpse," Robert Duncan's "The Origin of Old Son," Joe Brainard's "The Gay Way," and Bruce Andrew's "Song #3." The evening also featured two new plays, Tonya Foster's "Monkey Talk" and cassandra smith's "Interview."

Several of these plays included multimedia stagings. smith's "Interview" featured photographs of David Buuck eerily inhabiting the form of Jackson Pollock and Brandon Brown as Frank O'Hara. Pollock remained mute throughout, while most of the lines belonged to the garrulous Henry Haberdash who queried Pollack about his painting and the relationship of one drop to another. After each one-way dialogue, Haberdash blurted out, "Thanks, Jack, I feel great!"

Foster's "Monkey Talk" included excerpts from videotaped interviews with southern good-ole white boy Carl Denham and Queen Kong whose authenticity as a black southern woman was interrogated by Denham and Agent Driscoll. Onstage, Sojourner Williams and Agent Driscoll commented on this documentary "evidence," discussed Kong's essay "Seems" (Seams?) in a battle of interpretation. The play exposes the perilous and powerful valences of location and perspective, exploring how they undergird racism on the one hand, and enable resistances on the other. Some of the lines I jotted down:

"Blackness requires one to see from multiple perspectives" says Williams.

"If Eve had been a black woman, she might have made the same choices, but at least she would have seen where the snake was coming from."

"I wasn't willing to be the exceptional other."

"Maybe I just saw others, behind the other."


"The Gay Way" is a short little play that was staged by Larsen. The scene is a "New York City "Village" bedroom of the mid-fifties." Here is Brainard's text:

[The curtain rises....two young men (BOB and DICK) are in bed together, asleep. Arm n arm, their bodies covered fro the waists down with a white sheet. Morning sunlight is streaming through the window as BOB begins to stir.]

BOB: (Yawning): I guess I'd better be getting up.

[As BOB begins to pull back the sheet the curtain quickly drops [Larsen used a transparent sheet] because, you see, male nudity was not allowed on stage in the mid-Fifties. And homosexual themes were heavily frowned upon.

As the indignant audience storms out of the theater shouting "God damned pansies!" and "We want our money back!" the play continues behind the curtain as DICK gets out of bed and joins BOB on the floor for some very wild love making (use your imagination here) much to the amusement of the stage hands who, you see, are the real audience.]

***********

SOME NOTES ON THE GAY WAY

Unfortunately, only a limited number of 'seats" will be available due to union laws pertaining to a "fixed" number of stage hands allowed on stage per performance.

The author has nothing against a male and female production so long as a homosexual "audience" is used and the title be changed, appropriately, to "The Straight Way."

Should your production be raided, the author recommends that you try to accept the raid as "part of the play."

I've never read any of Russell Atkins work. What a mistake! The syntax and diction of "The Corpse" written in 1954 is almost Elizabethan. The play opens with a woman coming to a burial ground to see the body of her lover, Larenuf. Over the course of the play, the audience discovers that this a recurring event. The woman is aided by two hired men who ritually unearth the dead man's coffin. The play is humorous with Cliff Hengst as the grief-stricken widow and the perplexed but money hungry hired men; it is also punctured by lush and strangely moving meditations on recognition, identity, passion. Here's a little tidbit from the beginning.

Widow:
Larenuf. Of course you would be thus.
Bravely waiting on the worse

Second Hired Man:
He seems only a little changed, Lady.

Widow:
Ah, Larenuf, you lie here passed merely nowhere.
The head, the lips, familiar there.

I wished you "other worlds" knowing you were here.

I say again--it is hard not to say--ashes or gone all;
Dead, were you suddenly unrecognizable;
Had you been jaded, unsympathetic or old,

I would have bowed off as they resignedly
Through the heath'd faint perfumed array.
{more to HIRED MEN]
Kissable he is. Yet he is from kissing far.
The moons of this eyelids extinguished are.
A blur comes there. The face cakes more.

There is not the same, though same the setting.
Of his Sahara'd cheek, some sordid etching.

Now this place moved upon, keeping has of his lifelike hand.
And all ends.
[to HIRED MEN]
Leave me a moment, will you?

Andrews' "Song #3" was staged as an aggressive/passionate ping-pong match of sorts as Erika Staiti and David Brazil traded pitches across the stage with David hurling all the lines with love in them--Love Nest, Pagan Love Song, Love in the afternoon, The Man I Love, I Live to Love, Easy to Love, etc.,--and Erika volleying back with--Massacre, Thunder Afloat, The Hypnotic Eye, Cannibal Girls, Hands of a Strangler, etc. Light-hearted music as the backdrop.

"The Origins of Old Son," Duncan's play, was somewhat modified by David Brazil to include a bit about Charles Olson (played by Brandon Brown) and Janis Joplin (Sara Larsen) having a date, with an appearance from the be-caped Robert Duncan himself (Kevin Killian)who claims he brings his "tyrannical intelligence and his black cape" and then immobilizes Olson. Before Olson is put out, Olson/Brandon gets to spout "all that matters is the thing. the thing that is the thing" and "I'm here to represent poetry. If you want to talk about actuality....actuality it falls like a doom upon us all!" The play then mushroomed into Duncan's script with Sara Larsen's lovely southern accent and Erin Morrill's impressive Medusa. Mouths got bloody and in the end the cast plus some audience members shut down this part of the night with dancing on the stage.

The collection of plays from the second evening provided a rich banquet---bits from different periods and poets--some alive, others dead; some East and some West Coast writers. At the same time, there was a great deal of crossover among the directors and casts for many of these plays. The universe of players was small. This made for an interesting tension--widely different and disparate texts performed by a small band of players. As I write this, oddly, I'm suddenly reminded of my visit last summer to Frederick Church's Persian Hudson River Valley mansion, called Olana. The parlor included a landing that served as a stage, complete with curtains, upon which, our docent told us, the family and guests performed tableaux vivants for one another. Poets Theater reminds me a bit of that 19th century form of entertainment though the tableaux were silent while poets theater is usually garrulity itself!

Kevin and David's introduction to the Kenning Anthology provides a very useful historical and formal contextualization of poets theater. Here's how they frame poets theater at the close of the intro:

Though there's no rigid definition of poets theater, one way to try to articulate its shape through time is to try and catch it performing its social function. These plays occupy a charged social space between the disputed territories of performativity, theatricality, and the textual. In trying to think of a general principle that might connect all three, and to define "the social function" of poets theater, we were led to think about the social function of Greek theater in the classical age. Theater, as a public, indeed civic, event, was that instrument via which the body of the citizens could see and experience itself, and most particularly its deepest conflicts and crises. In tragedy, this takes the form of explorations of kinship, law, justice, right, piety and so on. In Old Comedy, whose only extant exemplar is Aristophanes, the citizens of the polis can see satirized both individuals (Aristophanes mocks Socrates by name in The Clouds, just as poets theater might satirize some literary buffoon in a roman à clef mode) and types. There's also plenty of space for word play, in-jokes, throwaway topical references, and so on.

Anyway, it's here something close to the spirit of poets theater proper obtrudes. If instead of the instrument of self-reflection of the polis we think of this theater as the instrument for self-reflection of the coterie we might throw some light on what it has meant in our period. David Buuck's 2007 "Some Remarks on Poets Theater," written for a San Francisco festival of contemporary work, defines the genre in terms of what he calls counter-professionalism, anti-illusionism, rigorous amateurism. The very conditions of coterie production, often enough involving impromptu performance spaces, improvised props, and zero budget, call forth a style of theater whose disorderly elements bring to mind the topsy-turvy "world turned upside down" that Mikhail Bahktin characterizes in his writings on Rabelais as the carnivalesque.

Obliged, then, to arrive at a conclusion about the genre of poets theater, we might claim that its disorderly hybridity is its genre--that it is, perhaps, a genre in the process of formation, emerging out of the destabilization of sorts of prior forms, social as well as literary. In other words, new scenes of production and new social formations equal new genres. And this is one of them--perhaps, despite its apparently minor character, a crucial one (xiii-xiv).

Dear Readers, I can only urge you to: Go buy this anthology. A must have! Find it here at SPD. Here's an interview with Kevin about the anthology.

Poets Theater at Small Press Traffic

Small Press Traffic started its New Season with a smorgasbord of Poets Theater Friday Night, January 15, 2010

Here's what the program says about each:

ACT ONE

The Impertinents
by Rodney Koeneke
directed by Lauren Shufran
cast: David Brazile, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Zack Tuck, Lindsey Boldt.

Restoration comedy goes modern American, wherein rakes turn playa and double entendre gets more barefaced-and rolls up as SMS on your celly.

Turn on the Heat, by A.A. Fair
by Dodie Bellamy
directed by Keven Killian
cast (in order of appearance)

Marian Dunton........Lindsey Boldt
Evaline Harris.......Karla Milosevich
"Amelia Rose Sellar".....Anne McGuire
Vivain Carter....Mari Collings
Dream Women......All of the above plus Michelle Rollman
Mrs. Eldgridge....Tanya Hollis
Strip-tease Dancer....Stephen Boyer
Dora.....Norma Cole
Carmen.....Margaret Tedesco
Frieda Tarbing.....Jocelyn Saidenberg
Flo Danzer....Anne McGuire

A.A. Fair's Turn on the Heat, written in 1940, is a hard boiled private eye novel narrated by little tough guy Donald Lam; in this dramatic version Donald, the narrator, is kept offstage and the women he meets address the plot and the audience entirely in the second person.

You're Not My Father (Part One)
by Paul Slocum
part two to be performed & recorded on Januarty 24th in the CCA Writing Center

*****I N T E R M I S S I O N*****

ACT TWO

Praise to the Swiss Federation
by Gabriel Gudding
directed & performed by Michael Cross,et al.

The Event
written & directed by Brent Cunningham
cast: selected from the audience by raffle process

Bidgood Opening--Life on Mars
written & directed by Stephen Boyer
cast: Brittany Murphy, Kevin Killian, Ariel Goldberg, Charity Coleman, West Seegmiller, and Stephen Boyer

Poets Theater 2010 was curated by David Buuck, C.S. Giscombe, and Lauren Shufran.



The evening was all about performativity and bringing the audience into the plays. The atmosphere was carnivalesque with actors launching into the audience, soliciting them for assistance--from reading to acting to the deliberate ringing of cell phones and alarms. David Buuck, standing at the podium on stage, began by introducing the evening's events. It soon became clear that David's remarks were recorded, complete with pauses, sighs and so on, and that he was there on stage mouthing the words, mopping his brow, shifting his weight from one leg to another while the prerecorded intro continued along. Clearly marking the intro as part of the evening's performances, Buuck ate a banana while the speech continued, and then tossed the peel on stage.

In "The Impertinents," Jocelyn Saidenberg's manservant character remarked upon and clambered over the unexpected banana peel. "The Impertinents" proved to be a linguistic treat as the characters--"A," "B," "C," and "D" passed language around like a hot potato. Some of the gems from this piece included, "It is not the journey, it is the restoration," "a dog comes back to its kennel like a tween to texting," "I'm as sexless as a Mormon fellowship," 'How should B be?" "Be impertinent!"

"Turn on the Heat" might be called The Women. As the program notes explain, Bellamy subtracted the male narrator from a hard boiled detective novel and set the glittering cast of women loose, making this their narrative. I've just been rereading Teresa De Lauretis's "Desire in Language and so it was fun to see Bellamy enact her own version of De Lauretis's claim that certain kinds of "myth and narrative rest on a specific assumption about sexual difference"(113). De Lauretis writes, "Medusa and the Sphinx, like the other ancient monsters, have survived inscribed in hero narratives, in someone else's story, not their own; so they are figures or markers of positions--places and topoi--through which the hero and his story move to their destination and to accomplish meaning" (109). So, it was great fun to see this cast of amazingly talented women turn this narrative into multiple narratives, all their own. The heat was indeed turned on and up.

Some lines from "Turn on the Heat": Carmen: "I was a chiseler. You could never trust me. I was too greedy. It was like dope. I wanted to chisel."

"Praise to the Swiss Federation" was directed and performed by Michael Cross and included lots of planned and improvised audience participation. Cross read a piece on time, its keeping and interruptions. Rings and alarms punctuated and diverted Michael's reading as he scrambled to locate the impertinent devices, including his own.

Brent Cunningham sent paper airplanes into the audience and encouraged eager actors to catch one. Thus, a cast was assembled for Cunnigham's own "The Event." The Event began with Cunningham walking on stage and then placing himself face-down on the floor where he peered into a space and exclaimed, "Wow." He was joined by several others, also exclaiming upon the event they "witnessed," encouraging others, "you've got to see this." One person peered into a space on the back wall; the last person on stage put up his sweatshirt hood, gave a pull on its strings, and the hood swallowed his head. He too was wowed. This reminds me of what it is like to watch in-flight movies--one is simultaneously alone and in a public, peopled space--responding to a spectacle, not necessarily the same one (is it ever?) that your neighbor is responding to. All our technological devices--ipods, phones, laptops, etc--make it ever so much more so.

Cunningham also staged "The Immortal Grove," a piece not included on the program and one that staged and explored "failure" or "error." A pair of actors walked hand-and-hand talking, moving finally beyond the auditorium itself, only to be followed by director --Cunningham-- who took the stage and "apologized" for the apparent "mistaken" journey by the actors. Another set of actors appeared on stage, having the same conversation, remaining on stage longer, and then they too drifted out of the auditorium.

Stephen Boyer's "Bidgood Opening" concluded the evening, taking us on a trip to Mars, complete with silvery sheets of paper, toys, and strap on dildos. The finale of this piece was a voluble assault on the audience--"Get Out! Get the Fuck Out!"

A raucous evening, much laughter, and a decided turn toward performativity moving beyond the stage, lines of flight out into the audience.

A Selection of "Faiku" from Linda Russo

What better way to begin 2010 than with some Steinian gems from Linda Russo. Linda calls these compressed investigations "faiku." About them she writes,

These little poems go with anything, and they're fun to make.
I usually write 5-6 with the same title in one sitting.
Like piecework with language - slightly different details,
sublty formal variation: fortune-cookie, aphorism, fake haiku, etc.

Enjoy, and perhaps, then, try some yourself.


comparative competitiveness

will you make up for my feelings of inferiority?
forming a curve and crossfertilizing freely


comparative competitiveness

we breed men
we respond to this breed of men with ceremonies


evacuation evermore

take refuge and answer directly
dissipate directly, like vapor
sugar-adding rituals and sea water


improvable inadequateness

falsely or unjustly located inside
in a position of power


lose ground love

the carrot is a remedy
warm-blooded, juicy
attracting respect and
living in the dreamy indolence of revolution

lose ground love

puzzled by affection, baseball, picking variously covered petals
bearing this fruit


o object

to propel as if by basic decoration
is a kind of progress


o object

use a connective cake carelessly
you will observe it is not binding




Linda Russo is the author of Mirth (Chax Press, 2007) and o going out (Potes & Poets, 1999). Her essay “Precious, Rare, and Mundane” serves as preface to Joanne Kyger’s About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 2007). A graduate of the Poetics Program, at SUNY Buffalo, she lives and teaches in Pullman, Washington.


If you'd like to find more of Linda's work online, here are some links to some of her poetry and scholarly work.

Linda on Joanne Kyger in Jacket Magazine HERE

See Jacket Magazine for a selection of 8 poems from Russo's book Mirth.

Click HERE for Linda's "Writing Within: Notes on Ecopoetics as Spatial Practice" in the journal HOW2

Venerable are Letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

As one year ends and another begins, there are letters to consider, lives to examine, the uses of time about which to inquire. In Jacob's Room Virginia Woolf does this magnificently. The technology of letter writing has changed radically; are emails and tweets and blog entries forms of letter writing? are all letter forms equal? Woolf plumbs ontology via the letter. There's so much to dwell upon here. What an interesting entrée into the next year.

Let us consider letters--how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalized by the postmark--for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to realize how soon deeds sever and become alien. Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table. Still, there are letters that merely say how dinner's at seven; others ordering coal; making appointments. The hand in them is scarcely perceptible, let alone the voice or the scowl. Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter comes always the miracle seems repeated--speech attempted. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.

Life would split asunder without them. 'Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is gay; the Russian dancers...' These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe. And yet, and yet...when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us--drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over. 'Try to penetrate,' for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps--who knows?--we might talk by the way.

Well, people have tried. Byron wrote letters. So did Cowper. For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communications of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses round a bright red cave), and addressed themselves to the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart. Were it possible! But words have been used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the street. The words we seek hang close to the tree. We come at dawn and find them sweet beneath the leaf (90-91).

Emily Dickinson: "A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend." written to Thomas Wentworth Higginson June 1869 (L33)

The Practice of Art

Poinsettias in Watercolor by Flora (Clay's Mom)
Acton, Massachusetts 2008 & 2009

Waldrop on Oppen: the Distrust of Language

Saturday, December 12, 2009 Rosmarie Waldrop delivered the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University's George Oppen Memorial Lecture held at the Unitarian Center in San Francisco.

Despite the fact that is was a dark and stormy night, Poetry Center Director Steve Dickison and Elise Ficarra had to dig up extra chairs because the room at the Unitarian Center was packed to capacity with eager audience members. Waldrop's talk--Words, There are Words--pulled from Oppen's Daybooks, Letters, and Poems, made excursions into Agamben, Heidegger, Blanchot, Stein, Rilke, St. John of the Cross, and then returned to Oppen. Some of the poems Waldrop rested upon included "Parousia," "To Make Much," and particularly, "Psalm."

Psalm

Veritas sequitur...

 In the small beauty of the forest
 The wild deer bedding down --
 That they are there!


       Their eyes
 Effortless, the soft lips
 Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
 Tear at the grass


       The roots of it
 Dangle from their mouths
 Scattering earth in the strange woods.
 They who are there.


       Their paths
 Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
 Hang in the distances
 Of sun


       The small nouns
 Crying faith
 In this in which the wild deer
 Startle, and stare out.

Waldrop's talk included a nuanced reading of the myriad and disparate ways Oppen wrestles with the vexing problems and possibilities of language and the relationship of words to experience, being, and perception. In Daybook IV, Oppen writes: "relevant thought begins with the distrust of language" (181). Does language enact a kind of separation--"with the word we see from outside" or are words also a mode of being? In Of Being Numerous, thinking and writing seem to be one. Do things exist because the word exists? Must we keep singing to keep the world existing? Waldrop's talk was expansive and my notes on it are, well, notational. Here are some of the lines jotted down in my notebook:

Oppen's valuation of thought over words.

Pregnant with the holy word will come the virgin walking down the road if you take her in (See Poems of St. John of the Cross)

all that was to be thought comes down the road.

words are a mode of being
words come down the road

See the poem "To Make Much" from Primitive

right word and music of the poem

the fatal rock that is the world

Oppen's struggle with everyday speech and the struggle for the "right" word

Things don't know their name

words bring things/beings into linguistic "being" out of the material

Drawing attention to Oppen's use of rhyme in "there," "there," "stare," Waldrop's reading of the poem "Psalm" closed with the observation that the indented first lines of each stanza--

Their eyes

The roots of it

Their paths

The small nouns

--enact Aquinas's proposition that truth follows the existence of things.

Waldrop's talk performed a rich reading of Oppen that wasn't focused on producing a radically new reading of his preoccupations but rather stopped and luxuriated in the work's complexities and ambiguities.

You might want to check out Jacket Magazine's Special Section on Oppen. Thomas Devaney edited this and you can find it HERE. Stephen Cope's article also includes a discussion of "Psalm."

A Selection of Work from Emily Abendroth

Emily Abendroth's work gives the mouth and mind a workout. Hers is a poetry that puts language through its paces, puncturing the prosaic and splitting the crags. Language knows itself as shutter and flash. Lavish luster, agitated froths.

Two from Toward Eadward Forward

The Prickly Fix of the Hoary Puccoon

Emily Abendroth currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where she co-curates the Moles not Molar Reading Series with fellow poet Justin Audia. Recent work of hers can be found or is forthcoming in Digital Artifact, Encyclopedia, How2, Pocket Myths, Horseless Review, Eco-poetics, and Cut & Paint.Her chapbook, Toward Eadward Forward was published by Horse less Press last year and a lengthy excerpt from her book-length work in progress "Muzzle Blast Dander" can be found in Refuge/Refugee (Volume 3 of the Chain Link book series). She is currently and ever-so-slowly piecing her way through some writings and thinking on solitary confinement practices in U.S. prisons.