Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.
My Dec. 29, 2007 journal speculation on why Curt Dempster, now deceased Founding Artistic Director of Ensemble Studio Theatre, commissioned me to write The Sequence, which dramatizes the race to decode the human genome: a race accelerated and sharpened by bio-tech entrepreneur J. Craig Venter.
“Curt wanted me to tell this story ‘cuz he recognized in Craig a kindred spirit: a kinless prickly genius who gets things done.”
8/17/07
Still chewing on this Fisherman revision. Have to get it right. Has to be remarkable. Can’t just sit there like a placeholder, prosaic and flabby. Needs to be sharp and murky, like an exchange of knives.
8/7/07 – 5:0? PM
If I do this grudge play it has to be in the spirit of Wilder. It has to seem silly and overly earnest and then cut to the bone and then throw up its hands and say, “Oh, no, no you misunderstand. Forget that last part. I really AM just silly and overly earnest.” It has to ring a bell true and then say, “Who me? What? Ring a bell? Well, yes, I guess I have. But I didn’t mean anything by it. Honest.”
I am cleared for PR take-off by my fearless producer, Leslie Law, and can now confirm that our special Seattle Celebrity guest stars for Sandbox Radio Live! 8 : Fools Rush In, one night only, this coming Monday, are . . .
. . . Nancy Pearl and Cliff Mass!
NOW will you get your tix?
I grew up in a house on Sweet Air Road just outside the tiny town of Jacksonville, Maryland.
This poem’s from around a quarter of a century ago, maybe longer: it is undated. I remember that I typed the surviving copy — and I do mean typed: it still has the little dabs of Wite Out® where I screwed up — from the handwritten original at my temp job at Northern Life Insurance, circa 1993. Suffice it to say that when I wrote this, I was still a kid, though I would have fiercely argued otherwise. (Clearly, I had a tabbing problem.)
One working definition of an adequate poem is “an improvement on silence.” I think that, at that time at least, this was.
Sweet Air
breathes alcohol blossoms
blurs pressed-flat, cut-dried memories.
Turn a corner in that house
in your mind
sick, sweet air finds you.
Follow your brother
in your dream
into the black at the bottom of the basement stairs;
Watch as he turns and you see
his face has changed—the sheeted head
of a ghost—not your brother at all.
Don’t run. Go dumb—paralyzed.
Dream again
see a man, strange and dangerous,
standing in your bedroom grinning.
Scream silent like they say abortions do.
Know that if downstairs they
could hear they’d come
warm to you.
but they can’t
so they won’t
won’t
won’t won’t
warm to you.
Listen to the one come now
(ah, you’re not dreaming)
cricking knee climbs the stairs;
It’s Mom
Dad comes more silently,
soft drunken concentration up
the carpeted steps
exploding through the door, roaring!
Lie rigidly, impossibly asleep.
It wouldn’t have saved you if you were.
Yesterday I posted smart-alecky status on Facebook about April being misunderstood as the cruelest month. In no time, my good friend Michael Doyle chimed in defending the bumbershoot-toting Hollow Man who posited the fourth month’s excessive cruelty. (If you’re not reading Doyle’s blog regularly, here’s why you should be.) The string was quickly unraveling into adjacent subjects, adjacent poets, when Doyle made one of the funnier and more insightful analogies I have ever come across. “Pound is to Eliot what Cheney was to Bush.”
It made me think of this section from an early draft of An American Book of the Dead* The Game Show†. Why was it cut? Official history blames structural redundancy: it echoed the first act’s “The Bardo of American Heroes of Violence” without advancing the second act’ action significantly. But an alternative legend purports that the bardo was actually blown away because the costume/design concept for the original L. A. production was so painful to watch unfold that the author, egged on by the actor who played Walt Whitman, simply wiped the whole shebang rather than risk having to watch something like it again.
Still, I’m proud of the “Poet’s Bardo”, and believe it sort of stands on its own as a bizarre bit of poetry geek fan fiction. (Plus, any time we can see Ezra Pound returned to his rightful gorilla cage, earned with the nastiest bits of bigoted treason, well, that’s a good time by me.)
This from Markheim, two episodes ahead.
IOPHIEL: Welcome, friends from Hell. I know it seems a little cramped, but you’re actually inside the globe. Not the globe some call “the Show”, but rather a 3-D neon map of it. It was placed on top of this building as a beacon of truth, because beneath us human beings used to work at finding out the truth and then sharing it by printing it on folded sheets of cheap paper so their fellow human beings could read and know it.
I’m sort of a truth history trivia buff, in case you couldn’t tell.
Sadly, this globe we’re in, well, it’s not really a beacon any more. The truth-tellers that used to work below, are all gone: sacked and scattered. And once again humans will have to struggle to find another way. But that’s not what we’re here about tonight. Tonight, we’re about fighting fire with fire.
Tickets are on sale now for Sandbox Radio Live! Episode 8: “Fools Rush In”. Reserve yours at Brown Paper Tickets here.
Saying that what Mike Daisey does isn’t theatre is not equivalent to saying that what Jackson Pollock painted isn’t art. Rather, it’s equivalent to saying what Jackson Pollock painted isn’t photography. I make this argument in greater detail in my essay, “The Solo Show: A Risk Averse Artistic Administrator’s Best Friend” which is, beyond a reasonable doubt, what Omar Willey refers to in his withering list of “nonsense” and “childish territorialism” nestled within his hot-off-the-virtual presses criticism of Culturebot’s recent evening Everyone’s a Critic. Omar’s essay is worth the read despite the red herrings and half-thrown gauntlets. Just as— I like to think— my essay on one-person shows is also worth a glance, despite its putative shortcomings.
Easily one of the three smartest people I know, Omar Willey is a mensch’s mensch. His contributions as the founding publisher of The Seattle Star are profound, and his thinking on how criticism can make Seattle theatre better is vital to the conversation, no matter how proudly he praises his own prolixity and opacity. (Trust me: it’s quite not as bad as he hopes.) If, however, Omar were always right, I would be compelled to worship him as a fearsome god, instead of treasuring him, as I do, for the dear friend he is.
Calling all Meat Fans of Markheim!
Here’s the link to the latest episode podcast. And in keeping with tradition, I am posting the script below the fold, ‘cuz I know how you just love to follow along, right?
I’ve been following threads lately, deeper into the labyrinth. Googling one of my favorite lines ever — “And I said let grief be a falling leaf” — from the Van Morrison song “Raglan Road”, I learned that the lyrics were originally a poem by Patrick Kavanagh. I immediately surfed over to SPL’s site and ordered his collected works, published in 1963. Once it arrived, I began reading selections randomly. Then I knuckled down and polished off all 21 pages of his early magnum opus, “The Great Hunger” which Kavanagh cannily disavows in the volume’s introduction as a “kinetic vulgarity… not fully born.” Truth be told, it stands as an eye-peelingly, soul-splittingly stark masterpiece.
Being obscure, and growing obscurer, allows an artist a wonderful freedom: a privilege I like to think I share with Kavanagh. Of course such freedom can exact a nasty price if one is not careful. My cultural cousin wasted a good portion of his forties crawling into bottles and sucking down smokes. After losing a lung to cancer, he finally sobered up somewhat, and began again versifying in beautiful earnest.
I have my friends, my public and they are waiting
For me to come again as their one and only bard
With a new statement that will repay all their waitment
While I was hitting the bottle hard.
It was in that later period that he wrote the following, which felt just like Marley’s ghost shaking chains at me when I first read it.
Having Confessed
Having confessed he feels
That he should go down on his knees and pray
For forgiveness for his pride, for having
Dared to view his soul from the outside.
Lie at the heart of emotion, time
Has its own work to do. We must not anticipate
Or awaken for a moment. God cannot catch us
Unless we stay in the unconscious room
Of our hearts. We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.
We must not touch the immortal material
We must not daydream to-morrow’s judgement—
God must be allowed to surprise us.
We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation. Let us lie down again
Deep in anonymous humility and God
May find us worthy material for His hand.
Note the shifts in point of view from third person singular to second person ambiguous to first person plural. A glancing critic might attribute this creep to sloppiness, and I won’t argue that it is conscious in any calculated way. What I will posit is that it is a profound tracing of the progressive Catholic perspective: he -> you-> we.
Savor the apparently willful ambivalence of certain lines “God cannot catch us…”. Would it be a good or bad thing if he did?
“We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.”
This line captures perfectly and emphatically the junction of belief and practice where I made my own transfer from happy Catholicism to diligent Zen. And just because I served divorce papers on my Irish faith doesn’t mean I don’t still sit down for coffee or something stronger with it every now and again.
“God must be allowed to surprise us.”
God as dramatist; we as audience, willingly suspending our disbelief. Sure, if you are clever, you might get ahead of God, but why try? Stay in the moment. There are things here for you to apprehend that you are still not looking/listening/being deeply enough to experience. The world is riddled with Easter eggs hidden in the damnedest places.
“We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation.”
The poet chooses his styling carefully here, “Lucifer” instead of “Satan”. Ours is not the already fallen angel’s sin of malevolence, but rather the still righteous pride of the Son of the Morning, the First in Heaven. This is not the pride of “I am better than ______” but that which says, “I understand” when in fact we do not.
This last sentence sounds a lot like a classic ending to a homily given by any conservative pastor of any parish you could name. And perhaps that’s the point. Kavanagh’s opened this poem’s bid by rejecting the Church’s holy sacrament of Penance. Additionally, anyone who knows enough to read Kavanagh probably already has some sense of his long-standing struggle with Roman Catholicism and all the damage it has done to his country and culture. So he does not feel the need to leave us with anything but the truth, even if that should overlay neatly onto some pious platitude. He’s already asked you to dig deeper, think harder, “go down on knees”. If you cannot or will not do so, he’ll give you the truth anyway, for whatever it’s worth to you.
American appreciation of Irish poets is a lot like our relationship to leprechauns. We folksify the original darkling threat until it is fit for nothing but cartoon greeting cards. (Of course, we have done similarly to our own great writers. Witness the humiliating post-mortem neutering of the delightfully nasty atheist/pacifist/animal rights activist Mark Twain.) Clever American literati love to love James Joyce above all other Irish poets because he’s nifty and Continental. Ain’t nothing nifty about Kavanagh. Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound expatriated, while Kavanagh, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams stayed put. And that, as faux folksy Robert Frost liked to say, “… made all the difference.”