on poetic drama
My task this week is a return to the play script I began in November, whose subject matter and more is drawn from a chapbook series I wrote two decades ago. Revisiting archer avenue has been wild, even thought I love these poems and feel like they came at a time when my work was evolving quite quickly. Initially, I managed to draft what felt like a decent few acts, but on rereading, much like the fiction I occasionally try to write, it felt rather boring and ho hum compared to the poems I was working on in the interstices. I've spent the last few weeks reading and researching poetic drama (not necessarily verse drama, but feel I may be getting close to integrating the poetic and the dramatic with an eye toward performance. The result is a mix of portions of the original chap blended with dialogue and action sequences that I think may work well (or it may be a starling disaster, we shall see.)
The ordinary language feels flat sometimes when you are trained, as a poet, to be highly specific and imagistic. To create something out of nothing on the page. With drama, the dialogue becomes speech yielded amidst a barrage of other elements that make up the stage. The movement and performance of the actors who are the mouthpieces. The sets, the lights, the logistics of mounting any production (moving props and sets and setting a mood.) Luckily, my previous theater experience makes it easy to juggle these things, but then again, its the language I am struggling with most. The ordinariness of it.
Still, I am trying, and while every bone in my body may want to abandon the project and just go write new poems (I was briefly sidetracked by the swine daughter poems.) Still, in my reading I have come across some articles to mull over like this one from the The Poetry Foundation. Plus a few words from one of the poets who I feel was most influential on my development as a writer, and who also delved into writing for the stage and page.--good old T.S Eliot with a couple good pieces of advice:
"For I start with the assumption that if poetry is merely a decoration, an added embellishment, if it merely gives people of literary tastes the pleasure of listening to poetry at the same time that they are witnessing a play, then it is superfluous. It must justify itself dramatically, and not merely be fine poetry shaped into a dramatic form. From this it follows that no play should be written in verse for which prose is dramatically adequate."
and
"By the people who do not like poetry, I mean those who cannot sit down with a book of poetry and enjoy reading it: these people also, when they go to a play in verse, should be affected by the poetry. And these are the audiences whom the writer of such a play ought to keep in mind."
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