Thanks, Eileen. I think you’re absolutely right. In mulling this subject, I think I’ve committed an error I seem to make quite often: over-conceptualizing and under-executing. Instead of pondering some grand theory of what a poetic drama might look like, I should focus on writing some, and then seeing what they do look like.

I’m obliged to you for the reality check. Yes, it is that simple.
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I find that hard to believe.

Also, being provacative doesn’t necessarily mean you have anything insightful or interesting to say.
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How do you follow the lead of Ibsen? That’s realism, not verse.

‘Mother, give me the sun’ is poetic, but Ibsen will always be thought of as a playwright; poets can’t claim him.

Shakespeare, however, is a poet, and is the elephant in this room because he’s verse and he’s wildly popular–no one else comes close. S. was such a genius that it’s not certain whether he’s dramatic (and successful) *because* of his verse, or in *spite* of his verse. The link between verse and drama seems to be the key question here.”

I got two responses to the comment. The first would be, and directed to all poetry critics, stop telling verse what it should be. Ya’ll almost always, damn near always, get it wrong

Second response. There are those who feed on Shakespeare because his language puts a barrier between them and the raw of experience, the majority of Shakespeare readers. And there are those who draw on, lean on, the existential truths his dramatic poetry expressed. I figure all the great dramatic poets since him have drawn on the latter.

I guess for some poetry should seduce. I guess for others poetry’s purpose is to reveal.

Terreson
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How do you follow the lead of Ibsen? That’s realism, not verse.

“Mother, give me the sun” is poetic, but Ibsen will always be thought of as a playwright; poets can’t claim him.

Shakespeare, however, is a poet, and is the elephant in this room because he’s verse and he’s wildly popular–no one else comes close. S. was such a genius that it’s not certain whether he’s dramatic (and successful) *because* of his verse, or in *spite* of his verse. The link between verse and drama seems to be the key question here.

Thomas
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That’d be nice.

I think The West Wing is the closest we have come to a verse television show. All the dialogue was written in iambicpentameter. (or was it just iambic?)
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I’ve been following the discussion not sure if I have anything worth adding to it, which may likely still be the case. Just to be clear on the definitions employed by poetic drama what is meant strictly is verse drama, right? Or dramatic poetry written in verse, usually, but not always, rendered in blank verse form. I believe Brouwer’s point is to ask why more poets do not work in verse drama. And not a few contributors have pointed out examples of poets today still working in verse drama, again usually in blank verse form. So far so good.

This may be too much of the long view for the discussion but I too have been thinking about the question, whatever happened to the verse drama, for a couple of decades now. The answer I’ve come to, tentatively, is that the shapes of things morph through time. Through time shape-forms change and for a variety of reasons. This is as true geologically as it is true biologically, culturally and socially. In the case of verse drama the reasons for the morphing could be environmental, cultural, and especially linguistic.

Were I inclined today, this moment, to commit myself to dramatic poetry I would not follow the lead of Shakespeare, Yeats, or Eliot, all of whom worked mostly in blank verse. Instead I would follow the lead of Ibsen, O’Neil, Albee, Osborne, even and maybe especially the lead of Artaud. My reasoning is this: when it comes to impact the latter group is far more effective, far more affecting. As much as I may love the language Shakespeare employed it remains that he placed language between character and the dramatic moment. And it ran interference, drawing more attention to itself, less attention to either character or moment.

So what I am thinking tonight is this: if verse drama has been superceded by other forms of dramatic language, and it has, it is because a different sort of language has proved more effective, more affecting. Somebody upthread mentioned the poetic drama of Lorca. He might just have been the first when it comes to the grounding of verse drama in word impact.

Terreson
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Sheesh. Long day at Stonecoast, time to get some sleep…

zzzzzzzzzzz
AF
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(I got spoiled by being able to edit my comments on my own threads!)
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Hieronymo’s mad againe.

What can ail thee, knight at arms,
Alone and palely loitering?

Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.

He did not like my verses,
So he’ll always get my curses.

G’nite, Gary.
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Hee hee. Hilarious.

Woof!
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Thanks for your interesting reply.

I have a certain sympathy for the formalists.

I don’t think poetry EVER requires line-breaks to BE poetry.

The irony here is that free-versers are the real ‘formalists,’ for they place such importance on the formal arrangements of a poem on the page, whereas the formalists don’t care what shape the poem on the page is so long as it strikes the strings of the mind with the harmony of poetry.

My turning Woodman’s prose into a ‘Creeley poem’ would seem to find me at odds with my philosophy; why didn’t I simply exclaim, “Christopher, that’s poetry!” Why did I feel compelled (perversely?) to ‘show’ that it was poetry by line-breaking it?

Herein lies the rub. Arrangement on the page is not the key to poetry–it is simply a polite aid to the *reader* of poetry; the moderns turned this nicety, this gallantry, into *law.*

Hello and a handshake might be a nicety, or, in certain cultures, or with certain people, it might be a ‘law.’ So this is all very complex…

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, or emptied some dull opiate to the drains…

Johnny, do you realize what you’ve done???

At dusk the dark moths flutter like folding coins. They have come to buy the oaks at the per leaf price. At dawn the phones are ringing in the woods. Woodpeckers. It is money. Do I want some.

Donald, do you realize what you’ve done???

Well, of course they realized what they had done. Just as Woodman realized what he had done.

What I resent is the idea that the Moderns were doing anything significantly different than the Romantics. I resent the idea that Creeley was being consciously different from Keats for some significant cultural reason, or that Creeley is some kind of necessary historical advance. No. Poets write little poems because they feel like writing little poems, or because they happened to read a manifesto by someone who said, simply because they felt like it, and for no important reason, “It’s time to write little poems!”

I have seen examples where Creeley was more prolix in his poems. My aim was not to create an exact Creeley poem–whatever that is.

The subject of this thread, ‘the possibility of poetic drama,’ involves the same sort of questions. What IS poetry? How much does poetry depend on certain contexts?

Thomas
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“This is true my son.”

“And this is why my brother is named Soaring Eagle?”

“Yes, my son.”

“And why my sister is named Running Deer?”

“Yes, my son, but…

why do you ask, Two Dogs Fucking?”.
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Creeley is one of my favorite poets, as he is of several Harrieteers, but you don’t have to like him to recognize that as a stylistic parody of his work, the aforementioned is a failure so dramatically off that it simply confirms widely held suspicions about the inability of the person in question to read well.

Xmas Poem: Bolinas

All around
the snow
don’t fall.

Come Christmas
we’ll get high
and go find it.
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I wrote a 12 page summary of a dialogue between us 18 months ago, and was so pleased with it I submitted it to APR. Of course I’ve had at least a dozen rejections there over the years, always with that nice little hand-written note from David Bonano. This time I was sure David would say yes but still didn’t–I guess our political baggage was still just a bit too much.

I dearly hope I’ll get it published somewhere some day, it’s a treasure. And then you’ll know who Thomas Brady really is—or Monday Love, at least, his name on that precious dialogue I called Fee Fii Foetry. I mean, what you’ve missed!

Let him go, John, let him do his stuff. Some need it even if we don’t!

Christopher
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To be specific, your piece isn’t even a Creeleyesque poem. You didn’t catch his tone or method. It’s just Christopher’s prose broken into lines. Creeley would have omitted more, charged the syntax with offhand dysjunction, linebreaks working towards a melody against meaning. I open For Love at random:

After that, silence, silence.
On the floor, the hands
find quiet, the mouth goes lax.
Oh! Look forward to get back.

Oh wisdom to find fault with
what is after all a plan.

And, as I say, Creeley is not exactly — as we’d put it south of the border — a saint of my devotion. I think For Love is incandescent, but he got lax as he got older and let the calculating adulation of the langpo movement carry him.

I’d rather give you a poet you haven’t heard of: Donald Schenker (1930-1993). Schenker is invisible except to certain deep-rooted friends in Northern California who treasure his work, because after a lifetime of practicing his chops, he only caught fire when he was given a terminal diagnosis at age 55. Don lived eight more years, writing fiercely. Here he is:

Money

At dusk the dark moths
flutter like folding coins.
They have come to buy the oaks
at the per leaf price.

At dawn the phones are ringing
in the woods. Woodpeckers.
It is money.
Do I want some.
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What you have to realize is that Tom is trying to establish a whole new history for us, he’ s trying to rebuild all our building blocks from scratch. That’s why he’s so repetitious, simply because we don’t have in our intellectual assumptions any of the building blocks he needs to start rebuilding. He has to bring all his baggage with him every single post, the whole kit and kaboodle right from the start—because we don’t know anything, and what we do know is all contaminated and badly scrambled up.

To tell you the truth, I’m not really interested in most of the things that Tom says. I’m too old to change, and just scroll down to Gary. But I know he’s right to hammer on like I do on my old blue-grass guitar, the jumbo Gibson which I play here in Chiang Mai and love so much. Every note I play is exactly the same each time, exactly the same position and timing—like Tom, and if I get it right at last that makes it great at last!

Christopher
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My ‘obsession’ as you put it, is what we talk about when we talk about poetry, if you hadn’t noticed:

“Pound, of course, was never satisfied with what these magazines achieved, feeling that Harriet Monroe was consorting with vulgar company in printing the populist poets (Sandburg, Lindsay, Masters, et al.)”

–H.T. Kirby-Smith, “The Origins of Free Verse”

John, with all due respect, I believe you are ‘obsessed’ with YOUR personal disagreement with me, since by reducing me to ‘Brooks v. Poe,’ YOU ignore my thoughts on Millay, Eliot v. Shelley, Modernism v. Populism, Monroe v. Pound, and the list goes on, a list consisting of highly pertinent and highly significant aspects of poetry, connecting with all sorts of questions in all kinds of ways. for instance, the question, ‘does progress just happen, or is it entangled with personal ambition?’ You reducing my comment which I just made to Christopher re: Creeley and his fishing experience with his son, etc etc to ‘Brooks v. Poe’ shows YOUR ‘obsession’ in operation.

I’m happy to have you disagree with me (to my face or behind my back) on any issue under the sun: the Fugitives, free verse, Eliot, Romanticism, Plato, Aristotle, Women’s poetry, Flarf, Bishop, New Criticism, Shelley, Rothenberg, Silliman, Woodman, but I don’t see how you can do that particularly well if you insist on indulging your own reductive obsession. You are unable to counter my comment to Christopher re: Creeley except with an insult: “tin ear.” Where I come from, the person who is reduced to insult, LOSES.

Reductiveness is a common and powerful rhetorical strategy, and we all do it in discussing all sorts of topics, and often the witty do it–it’s part of their arsenal of tricks–so I suppose your view of me is a perfectly ordinary response; but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

If you can’t speak to me, or about me, without insult, I kind of wish you’d simply ignore me. But ultimately, for the sake of my own curiosity, and for the sake of truth in general, I do want you to do anything you wish.

Thomas
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Only if you think that literary history makes something great, which it does but only momentarily. In the light of history “At A Station in the Metro” is just a minor footnote on our momentary needs and momentarily dependant tastes.

Which is always Tom’s point, and why I tolerate his excesses. He’s a Jeremiah calling out from light years hence. He drives me up the wall, destroying all my pressed violets, crumpling up my lip-stick stained handkerchiefs and despoiling all the most private certainties I share with no one. I hate him for what he does to me everyday, and that’s why I love him!

Can’t you see that? Who else is like him?

Christopher
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Did you know I’m under an interdiction? Did you know I can’t post anything wthout waiting for 4 or 5 hours for permission?

I’m sure this won’t pass the censors, but if it does you’ll know where I’m at.

Christopher
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Your sweet and lyrical posts are not threatening. What pissed me off was Brady’s obsessive wrenching every thread into the only thing he can talk about, so that over and over Bishop, Jeffers, whatever, all became Warren & Brooks vs. Poe. Your adulatory comments on his behalf have indeed raised my suspicions that you are all the same guy: fellow sock-puppets, or more generously, heteronyms. What a field day the various selves of Pessoa would have on this board! On the Internet nobody knows you’re an Andalusian Dog. In any case, the Management seems to have set healthy limits.

I like your fish story. Brady’s recasting into a straw-man Creeley says more about his own tin ear than it does about its intended target.
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But I’m sure you’ll agree I’m entitled to another small turn after such an attack.

I love the poems you post, John Oliver Simon, magnificent translations of poetry from a world of passion and magic inaccessible to me in Asia. Indeed, I always feel very annoyed when Thomas Brady does a send up of one of them, but then whatever you think I’m not my brother’s keeper.

And your little children—how they sing, John. How they raise the spirits!

So why can’t you see who I am too, with my old voice like a child’s? Why are you so threatened?

And why can’t you, of all people, deal with my metaphors? The “cow pat” one which so beautifully illiustrated the ambiguities of Robinson Jeffers, for example, or my “hammer” that softened some blows on the same thread? Why are you so angry at my poetry?

I talked quite a lot about something on the Robinson Jeffers’ thread, having one Faith. An individual human being is so lucky to grow up in one Faith, I said, and be fulfilled within a single tradition. Nothing could bring greater happiness than that. Yet the unexamined life is not worth living, I also said, and nothing brings greater unhappiness than smashing the tribe and its idols.

Have you read all that poetry and not yet realized that?

And yes, I did recieve one of those letters, indeed from the same officer who mocked my “cowpatty hammers” on the Keep the Spot Sore thread. And yes, Harriet does have to do some hard thinking.

And yes I am Thomas Brady, I confess I am. Indeed, I’m utterly exhausted at the stunt and that’s why I’m getting rid of this old guy sock-puppet. I mean, can you imagine what it takes to keep Christopher Woodman up day by day, and at the same time keep Desmond Swords convincing?

Christopher
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Also, I feel like some of the work of more sound- and performance-oriented poets (like Tracie Morris, etc) is theatre of some sort…but that might just be me.

For my own part, I am working on a creative thesis that involves audio sampling, soundscapes and poetic monologues, to be performed live using synthesizers, performers and so on…

(As a side note, I’m quite surprised that no one has brought up Helen Adam’s “San Francisco’s Burning” yet. I am acquainted now with Warner Jepson, who wrote the original score for the play- a score that Adam hated- and he scored dozens of plays, ballets and operas in his heyday.)
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Bedbound’s set “is a large box in the centre of the stage made out of plaster board. Suddenly the wall facing the audience crashes to the ground. A light comes up on a small childs bed inside the box. It is heavily stained and grubby. On one end of the bed is a young woman. She is the DAUGHTER. Her back is twisted and we see she is obviously crippled. On the other end of the bed facing her is her DAD. He is a large fifty year old man. His suit is crumpled and soiled.”

You can judge the poeticalness of the script for yourself at the link. Though the Accentual-Stress Enforcement Bureau might attempt to prosecute as a verse-criminal any who their expert team of quantum linguists considered guilty of contravening ASEB legislation – a case for the fifteen syllable lines below being in the ballpark of Verse, could be defended – i think.

The story ios revealed through the two protaganists monologuizing on the bed and so we have only the language to hold us. I was lucky, I saw the Cambridge University Footlight’s version at the 2004 National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough on the N Yorkshire coast; starring Cressida Trew and Khalid Abdulla, who two years later played a terrorist in the oscar winning 9/11 movie United 93, and the following starred in the 2007 Oscar nominated Kite Runner.

Abdalla is one of the finest actors I know. His parents are Egyptian and when i first saw him in Bedbound, it took a minute before i realised his real accent wasn’t Irish, which is all but impossible for a non-native to mimic. Many 20 million dollar a movie actors biggest turkeys are those in which they have failed to convincingly act in an Irish accent. Most locals without experience or training could play these parts more succesfully than De Niro and Cruise.

But as we know from Yeats, a minute is a long time in Irish affairs, and by the time I realised Abdalla wasn’t really Irish, it didn’t matter as the language and his vehicle of performance rendering it to flight. This is page three. I would strongly urge you read the opening to see how original this play is.

“And head down I work and work and work and work!!
And my body like some slick machine and my brain
keen and fast!! I rise up the stairs from the storeroom.
I feel its blackness on my back leave as I step onto
The sales floor. And all color returns as the beautiful
cabinets and couches stretch out in front of me on the blue
baize. I watch the salesmen at their work. I look
at their easy manner and stand as they chat ‘comfort’
with the customers. Like royalty thei look or something.
Their hands barely touching the fine fabrics and polished
tables as they waltz around the store to a music inside
their heads. I take out my other notebook marked ‘Salesman’
and jot it all down. I watch the yes of the customers
oohhhing and ahhing as the salesman lays out the superlatives, spinning out the patter that crackles in the air.”

What do you think? Is it verse? Do we need a poetry compliance team to check and tell us ye or nea?
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