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Five Pages of Verse

By on July 2, 2024 in Animals, Art, Poetry, Writing

Yesterday my friend Kristin and I completed our submission for an Orange County grant that would enable us to commission and perform a song cycle based on my poems. The idea excites me.

Also yesterday, I submitted five pages of verse, as required, to the North Carolina Poetry Society, which offers a weeklong residency at Weymouth (the Weymouth Center for Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines). I’ve stayed there before a few times while working on plays, and I found those weeks productive and pleasant.

Along with the tedious grant application I gave them a few poems, including “Dinosaurs in the Yard”:

Dinosaurs will come and go if you treat them right.
Mornings, I wake to their boasts:
“Look at me! Look at me now!” chirks the chickadee
while a catbird practices twelve-tone scales.
A cardinal robed like a pope 
(his reach exceeding his grasp)
locates the birdbath: “Bella! Bella!”  
The junco, with her courtesan’s eye,
trills one ironic note like a busted gamba.

Ten thousand throats in a saurian welter
that Plato would love, though your ear 
rewrites their ropy chants in a tongue
repurposed for those born in beds, 
not nests–those apt to die like swans, 

singing. 

“Limitation frees creativity.”

By on April 17, 2012 in Art, Writing

One of my favorite “theater books” is William Ball’s A Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing (1984), which is so stuffed with wisdom that on my first read I found myself underlining half or more of every page until I gave up and scribbled inside the cover, “Read every year.” His deeply informed advice includes a section on choosing a central metaphor for a play, usually a painting or photo that in turn affects colors, textures, timing, light, context. I thought about this a lot in my few primitive attempts to direct scenes, including a 10-minute pastiche from The Whistler back in January 2011, in which I relied on a Lucas Cranach oil painting of Adam and Eve. One of Ball’s points is that choosing the right limitations (or having them chosen for you) moves a project forward, gives it flavor, nuance, inventiveness. And that without limitations, whether the mask of a centuries-old painting or a thing so pedestrian as a budget, we artists will dawdle indefinitely.

I thought about his observation that limitation frees creativity last weekend after receiving a call from my Cincinnati co-producer of The Whistler, Carol Brammer of the Clifton Performance Theatre. The actors had convened on a Thursday night for a first full table reading, and had agreed that the script as presented was untenable. Not too surprising for a new, un-workshopped play, but a disagreeable conclusion to hear if you’re the playwright. Once my ego recovered, I was thrilled to realize that I had just heard specific, useable advice: eight people with decades of combined theatrical experience had actually read my play so closely and sympathetically that they could advise me on just where to insert the scalpel. Conveniently, the advice came in notes from a ten-minute phone call so it wasn’t so exhaustive or so specific that the constraints it imposed were irritating. Instead they liberated me: to cut several scenes from a two-hour and fifteen minute juggernaut; to simplify music cues; and to rewrite an ending that has troubled every reader of the piece since its inception. And precisely because I have lived with my six characters and their narrative for three long years, I was able to do it in a single weekend. I sacrificed some of the play’s charm but none of its beauty.

Dystopias I

By on December 28, 2011 in Art

I’ve been thinking about Bob Trotman, a sophisticated, self-taught artist whom I met this year.  Over the holidays I visited his sculpture Vertigoat the North Carolina Museum of Art: a larger-than-life guy in a business suit falls through space as if the bottom had dropped out; he looks surprised, terrified, and monumental. It’s the “monumental” that gets me, like the institutionalization of existential crisis. The falling figure is forever frozen in time like the characters on Keats’ Grecian urn, and while cheap analogies come readily to mind, I don’t want to settle too quickly on an interpretation that reads this work as an expression of the “Occupy Whatever” movement, vague political malaise, or even the larger Zeitgeist. It’s more like a local expression of a recurrent aspect of the human condition.

Trotman's "Vertigo"

When you stand underneath the falling man you can’t help but flinch, wondering just how strong those cables are–that block of wood must weigh a good 2,000 pounds, I figure–and you too could be crushed by gravitas.  Did this guy jump from a bridge without even loosening his tie first?  Was he pushed from an airplane?  Or did the floor simply disappear under him?  The sculpture’s title should make me think of comparisons to the Hitchcock movie, but instead my thoughts quickly flicker to another monumental sculptural form before which I stood open-mouthed on my last trip to London: Sir Jacob Epstein’s Jacob and the Angel at the Tate Modern, an unlikely alabaster performance that has been regarded as an allegory of Britain’s struggle in WWII, or of the Jews during the Holocaust.

Literally, it is just what it says: at the end of the wrestling match, though Jacob’s thighbone has been dislocated he refuses to give up, and the angel clutches him, sustains him perhaps against his will. The two become as one, their embrace almost a rescue, almost erotic. “Let me go,” cries the angel, “for the day breaketh.” And Jacob, beaten, persists: “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”  It is a terrifying moment.

These two sculptures have no obvious connection:  one Biblical,  the other secular; one a fugue, the other a solo; one affirmative, one hinting at our darkest fear. Yet they touch me in the same place. I think I will have more to say about this.