I Can't Believe It's Not Shakespeare

This is a guest post by Michael Swellander, the founder and editor of Pinecones: a Podcast of Young Poets, which features interviews and readings from poets young and old. At the moment, he is studying in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Besides being an editor and a student, he is a poet and musician. He is from San Antonio, TX.

Lately, in a particularly active corner of the poetry blogosphere, much of the discussion has been about “schools of poetry,” and whether or not one may really say “poetry” anymore without a hyphen in front of it. Does one make Flarfist or Conceptualist poetry? Is one poet a member of some as-yet-unclassified department of the School of Quietude, or does he or she fit somewhere among the post-avants? Is what he or she does even poetry? What is poetry?

One of the most beneficial things to come out of this discussion is poets who have said that they just write “poetry” without an affiliation to any school or tradition are put in a position where they (we) need to second-guess ourselves. The binary of School of Quietude and post-avantism that Silliman’s set up is most helpful in that it challenges poets who have taken poetry as a given for as long as we can remember to reexamine, from an almost atomic level,  just what it is we’re doing. Even if, in the end, we are unable to identify with a group of other poets to our complete satisfaction, it’s worth the work to try to find out who we are, and why we are the way we are. Story continued below…

While these discussions continue over what is what in poetry, an area that I think gets much less attention right now is poetry’s relationship to other arts. There is talk of poetry communities, but not nearly as much of collaboration. The topic that’s most important for this post is not so much poetry’s current identity crisis, but poetry (or poetries) as an art(s) among arts, and, in this case, among and compared to playwriting and theater.

There have been many writers who were equally good poets as they were playwrights, and, in the last hundred years, plenty of good poets who were mediocre if not boring playwrights. There are also poets taking plays in verse to new places. Poets, I think, are partly interested in plays because the play is a form a poet may more easily co-opt than, say, a novel, because of an already longstanding tradition of verse plays. One is also forced (most of the time) to write for other people’s voices. A poet may also be interested in plays because it is a chance to hear other people read, perform, and interpret his or her work, and, even cooler, to sit with his or her readers in an audience and merge with it. It’s wild to imagine.

What’s most interesting, however, in thinking about a play written in verse, or any play, for that matter, is the process of collaboration that brings it to the stage, a process that does not exist in most poetry communities. In an interview I conducted with a poet, he said that one of the most essential things for a poet is “solitude.” This is of course true about most writing. Solitude, I think, is what will get a piece started, and a group of artists will help to complete it in some way or another: either through workshops, small notes, big notes… What I think goes unmatched in the theater community, though, is the amount of work put into a text and performance by people who are not playwrights and who are, essentially, not writers. When a playwright finishes a draft at home, it is less than half complete. Through the work process of preparing for a performance, the author disappears, and the company takes over. I don’t know of groups making poetry in quite this way, maybe because preparation for a reading or publication is much different than preparation for performance. Performance poetry probably goes through a different revision process than other forms, but I still don’t know if it incorporates the skills of people from as broad a range of disciplines as the production of a play does. Most of a poet’s group collaboration  happens with other poets (or, at least, other writers), while, in theater, a non-writer could have just as much influence upon the performance text as the initial author, or whosever name is on the title page.

There’s a cool book detailing some of the work Robert Creeley did with painters, photographers, and sculptors and city planners. What is so cool about the work showcased in this book is that it is an example of a poet trying to write in a way where the poem cannot properly exist without other people’s work and participation. No poem ever can, really, but that’s not always so clear.

I realize I’ve written all about what poets can learn from playwrights other artists, and not at all about what other artists can learn from poets. Maybe if people working in other arts would question their identities as much as poets are doing right now, the borders of all the arts would blur a little more and make collaboration feel more natural between them. Maybe we all already are and are about to start work on something really good.

P.S. For another example of a living poet working in theater, check out The Compromise by John Ashbery.