Last night I was at a benefit for PS 122, which is mainly a dance-based institution, and two of the emcees were moving people on and off the stage as Martha Graham and Isaac Mizrahi. The Martha was particularly good and the performer (Richard Move) had obviously studied the grand dame and had her every witticism down and he especially worked her silences well, which often occurred one beat before she left the stage having delivered some exquisite remark. She would look at us and smile and the audience would roar. The audience was delighted on several counts. They loved having Martha Graham back with them. They loved getting the Martha Graham jokes and gestures and they liked seeing how Richard Move took what Martha Graham would’ve done to do what she would do now if she were here. So it was comforting, it was validating and it was ironic which I think is exactly what appropriation is all about. Do we have copies in poetry, do we have drag. I mean when a poet dies we all stand up and read their work and it’s always interesting to see who does a good version of Creeley or Ruykeser or whoever and who can’t sound like anything but themself or mangles the poem beyond belief and who really interestingly reinterprets the work. Nobody but a filmmaker it seems would ever take on poet drag from another century like what Hal Hartley did in Henry Fool – a kind of handsome romantic with a warbling voice gazes off into the near distance while talking to the other characters in the film. Henry, the poet character seemed torn out of or stuck onto the surface of the film whereas everyone else seemed embedded. The fake poet character created a perception of depth. I would think poetry readings would be more interesting if we either stopped doing introductions altogether and simply had the poet just begin – as if we trusted the poems themselves instead of their constructed reputations. Or if naturalism isn’t possible then what if we had William Carlos Williams or Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks get up and tell us what they think of our poetry culture today. Get up for a laugh and move us from moment to moment in the evening as if we were alive and they were dead for a change. What if the poetry world were so real we could engage in travesty or parody of ourselves. Not to be cheesy but because our seriousness is such a given that it must ritually be punctured and questioned and massaged affectionately by us who are so fervently in the club. In the political realm they would call it a roast.
In order to put on the drag of a dead poet you need a dead poet who in life already seemed to putting on drag. Graham was so theatrical, so was Andy Warhol and Louise Nevelson. Any poets with fright wigs like Warhol’s or mink eyelashes like Nevelson’s? No, but how about Anne Sexton? I remember a portrait of her in a ball gown.
Oh I think you could do Auden drag or O’Hara drag, and certainly Yeats. And Plath and Emily Dickinson. I think you could do Dante. And you know the poets don’t have to be dead. If you open to the living there’s lots of costumery – fright wigs are easy. Suits and scarves are more fun. Moderate dresses?
For Auden you would dress up as a cigarette.
The is the perfect opportunity to draw attention to the work of Cin Salach.
And I think Eileen Myles should be the director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.
But would she dress up as Harriet???
Harriet and her stable: TS Eliot, Pound, HD. Fluid.
I will if she won’t. Hell, I’d dress up as H.D.
Also, when I was in college some dude dressed up as Sylvia Plath. But it was bad drag, you know, frat boy in apron with a wooden spoon and “Stasis in darkness” pinned to his chest.
Inevitably, I’d have to come as Amy Lowell.
I’d come as Eileen Myles. Or as Don dressed as Amy Lowell. Or as Thomas Brady dressed as Edna Millay dressed as Kent Johnson dressed as a wooden spoon.
Dina Martina as Paul Muldoon? Or vice versa? Or just Dina Martina as poet-in-residence?
Travis, you’d have to come as Rimbaud.
But as the post-poetry, well-armed Rimbaud.
I love Dina Martina as Paul Muldoon. Charles Bernstein loves Dina Martina but would Dina love to do Charles?
I do a Yeats drag–practiced it quite a bit in Ireland this winter. Also I’ve been known to do Millay, though best after a drink.