More Night Expression

So I have just come from a show, experimental theater as it were, (probably not just, this will be edited tomorrow, but just as in just now), and an afterward experience where I can say that in my life I have never felt less theatrical. But that is neither here nor anywhere for this piece of mental-masturbation or whatever we choose to call this blog. So I saw three short shows: "Comfort Food" by Chana Porter, "Big Red Drum Set" by Veronique Jeanmarie, and "Kammerspiel!" by Johnny Cigar. This is not a theater review, so don't worry. What it is is a questioning. I stand by what I said about theater/poetry in my last post. The theater is, as Seneca and so many others have said, is about exegesis. So is poetry, but poetry has become exegesis for the poet alone, it is broader effects and perhaps affects on its readership, but the intense, immediate emotion one experiences in the live performance is purely affect, the implications are effect.

This is perhaps what poetry lacks. The modernist move to an affectless verse led to some wonderful work, but it also led to a new tradition of boring, emotionally distant work. The vision of the reader of the poem is purely conceptual, whereas the vision of viewer of a play or theatrical presentation is as close to tangible as conceptualization gets. Now, this could easily lead me down two divergent paths of shameless traditionalist ranting, both of which I must tread slightly to light the way of my true course, my true west as it were. I am speaking of prosody and concreteness (in the sense of visual poetry, not concrete images). Now, prosody still maintains itself, even in the most "experimental" of poems. Each poem finds it's music, it's rythm, whether it be the "breath" method, the blank verse, or internal only to match content. Concrete poetry, inversely, denies prosody. It is the meeting of vision and language, sort of shunning and embracing de Saussure's sound/image concept simultaneously.

I suppose what I'm doing is creating the metaphor that the blank page for the author is the empty stage for the playwright. Or Play Write. Both need actors (words), light (layout) and music/sound for success. Well...Sam Beckett may disagree in the case of the playwright. I'm sure there are many who disagree, and I can think of many examples to counter my point. However, those examples exist in the past, and I am concerned with the present of poetry. The presence of poetry. It is audacious of poets to even begin to believe that words alone present the stripped down soul of communication, but yet this is a belief that is ever-present in our field. Bah! Fie! and Fuck You! I say.

I have a friend, K, who has such a strong poetry in performance that I regularly think of the work and am frozen. Frozen by the possibility that I will never find the energy in "poetic" language and construction to achieve what she does on stage. Obviously this is a fear based on broken syllogisms, but still, they present my point rather well. I fear that poetry has grown so far from what I love, in the overall sense, the popular and wide-read journals present us with gibberish: well-crafted but fearful of emotion, smart but not intelligent. I'm sure there are a wide range of reasons that populist poetry has faltered, why the greats remain in the minds of the poets but not the general public, but none is more apparent than this: Poetry is boring.

What the contemporary consumer of media is interested in is being spoken to, not at. I'd venture to say that even somebody who inspires a great sense of disinterest in me, Billy Collins, recognizes this. The whole group of these populist writers that adorn the pages of Poetry (Chicago) and every other buzz journal knows this. The problem is, they write for the concerns of themselves, to protect themselves and wallow in the prize-mania and nepatistic universe of praise and mild fortune that their particular brand of word-play creates. They are so protected that they have no emotion at all, for fear of the sentimental maybe, or maybe because they believe that craft weighs more than feeling or pure-thought. I believe it's the second one.

I must organize my what next thoughts, this should be a ride.