City of Light

I got some great tips from commenters Peter and Greg (hi Greg!) on things to do in Brussels, but... Evie Shockley, who I met at the conference, invited me to come hear her read at the Highlander in Paris, and it's just too good an opportunity to resist. So along with fellow conferee Alanna Bondar, I'm training down to Paris tomorrow. It feels a little strange to choose to return to a city rather than check out someplace new, but I fell hard for Paris the first time I visited, and it's only an hour and fifteen minutes from here. Il faut miexu voyager a Paris, I said to myself. So if by any chance you'll also be at Evie's reading in Paris tomorrow night--I'll see you there!

A Little Less Conversation, a Little More Brussels

It's a toss-up which is harder to blog with: my iPhone or this wacky Belgian keyboard. So I'll just say for now that the conference is really excellent and is helping me clarify many of my ideas about pastoral, its relation to ecopoetics, and the cage match I've been wanting to stage between nature writing and postmodernism. Being at the conference feels like being inside a giant brain thinking hard about all th same stuff I've been preoccupied with for years. When typing gets easier (probably won!t happen before I come home) I'll share some of the notes I've taken on the panels I've attended. My own paper will be presented tomorrow morning. However, to tide you over, here are some brief observations:

- European academics are mad for PowerPoint. This can be useful, as when complex bits of text or chunks of poems need to be presented to the audience, but just as often it seems pointless or distracting.

- I'm noticing a divide between the diehard nature poets and the theory-heads, but for the most part people are amiable about it. This morning the poet Judith McCombs gave a talk prefaced by the remark that, "If you can't do theory, you tell stories." Hmm.

- People still use psychoanalytic implements (Kristeva, Lacan) to construct their arguments--why does this now strike me as quaint?

- The part of Brussels I'm in (I believe it's called the Uccle, but that probably just means "center," though as far as I can tell we're nowhere near the center) is quite dull, but there are lots of little boutiques and shops. Glanced into a butcher shop: meat seems much, much more expensive when it's priced by the kilogram.

- My French is good enough to shop with but not good enough to talk about anything remotely substantive. Quel dommage.

- Purchased a copy of <> on the theory that reading a book I know very well might help rectify this problem, or at least make it possible for me to hold cunning dialogues with les dragons.

- Differences in accent can produce surprising effects. For example, one scholar's Singaporean accent made "nature" sound like "Nietzsche." This produced such fascinating phrases as, "the escape from culture into Nietzsche."

- Jet lag doesn't affect me very much traveling westward, but we'll see the damage done when I fly home again.

That's it for now. I might try for some pictures, eventually.

A Bruxelles

Tired, buzzy, synthesizing on almost no sleep. Note to panel-goers: the phrase "in the final analysis" does not necessarily mean the speaker is anywhere near wrapping up. But I've already been exposed to some useful ideas about the intersections between ecopoetics and postmodernism.

Missing my girls. More later.

The Widow Party

If you're in the Chicago area it's not too late to catch a performance of The Widow Party, a "collaboratively written and performed melodrama, Wild West show, political thriller, pageant, and farce" and the second of four poets' theater shows being put on by Links Hall and curated by John Beer. The collaborators this time include Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson (the author more equal than others), Jennifer Karmin, Patrick Durgin, Jacob Knabb (who also had a small part in the final performance of "Humana Ante Oculos" last week), James Shea, and Lisa Janssen. As that description implies, it's a true phantasmagoria, incorporating sound effects; hilarious/disturbing videos; a showstopping conflation of Annie Oakley and Hannah Weiner into Hannie Oakley and Annie Weiner (with go-go dancing!); convincing imitations of Walter Cronkite, Louis Armstrong, and Jimmy Stewart; mind-reading; odd props (including a pistol that resembles nothing so much as the newborn Alien or the Eraserhead baby; Patrick's faultless impersonation of Britney Spears; and divers other wonders.

If the Rodrigo Toscano pieces I took part in last weekend were Beckettian in their spareness and painful humor, The Widow Party is like a rock musical co-written by Brecht and Joyce. Filled with disturbing images of violence (mostly sound images), it obviously wishes to challenge the audience and implicate us in the piece's mashed-up war-discourse (there's a character-persona called "You," an aspiring film director). Yet I didn't feel much in the way of an alienation effect; I was instead supremely entertained by the sheer verve of the language and the nutty energy of the poets. We even get to dance at the end! I went home from Friday's performance wondering about the place of pleasure in this sort of theater. Certainly Johannes and Joyelle didn't seem disappointed when I told them how much I'd enjoyed it, but I wonder if the information the play seems to want to transmit about the violence of our spectatorhood doesn't require a more didactic hand. On the other hand, no preacher is more likely to find him or herself addressing the choir than a poet, much less a troupe of poets putting on a show--and punishing the audience doesn't strike me as viable or even particularly ethical nowadays. What does it say, though, that I found the mad world of The Widow Party so familiar, even homey? Maybe that's the poison in the pill.

Today I and assorted other profs froze our tuches off while decorating Lake Forest College's 130th commencement. Tomorrow Emily, Sadie, and I set off for Ithaca; and Tuesday, I fly to Brussels for the Poetic Ecologies conference. Blogging may be even more sporadic than usual for a while.

Am I a sap for anything that's been, a sieve for anyone, for feeling tremendously excited about Obama's having cinched the Democratic nomination? Then a sap, a sieve I must be.

Collapsible Poetics Diary, part 3

"The Makings," by Rodrigo Toscano, Links Hall, Sunday May 4, 2008

Thursday, May 2

Tonight we meet at 6 PM for what's meant to be merely a technical rehearsal. Rodrigo says he's never been in such a professional theater environment before; at first, he's leery of over-rehearsing the pieces (avoiding "product), but we end up doing a full-dress rehearsal so that our lovely stage manager Rachel can get all of the lighting ducks in a row. It's remarkable to run through all four pieces in succession; I'm only in two of them so I get to watch the others work as they do "Spine" and "Humana Ante Oculos." I'm getting more comfortable with the physicality of "Pig Angels of the Americlypse," in which I play the piggiest of the eponymous angels. It will be odd when someone I already know comes to one of these things to watch me writhing on the floor. Two of my old college buddies, a lawyer and an archeologist, are planning to come to Saturday's performance to see the Vogon poetry. I wonder what they'll make of it--is this the kind of thing I want people at my college reunion to know about? It's like playing D&D in public, the more so for Melissa, who has to wear a cape for "Humana" and jokes that she stopped doing this around the same time she stopped rolling 18-sided dice. Of course there's no such thing, but I refrain from inflicting my geekly expertise on her.

It actually takes much less time just to run through things than I'd expected, and since Rodrigo doesn't need me for two of the pieces, I get to leave early again. Browsing at the used bookstore across the street for a few minutes before driving home, I find the old paperback edition of Frank O'Hara's Selected Poems, Kenneth Koch's On the Edge, and Tom Mandel's To the Cognoscenti. Not a bad night.

Friday, May 3

Opening night! We arrive two hours early to hurry up and wait and sweat a bit in the intense humidity, which cracks into tremendous rain about an hour before "curtain." Everyone's nervous but me: for some reason, I feel completely calm about barking "Puercos!" and snorting in front of a roomful of strangers. The fact that I'm not the author, that I'm just a player in Rodrigo's game, feels tremendously liberating. Vanity only comes in to the fact that when I looked at the video I made of yesterday's rehearsal, I saw that not tucking my shirt in would reveal rather more of my pig's tail than I'm comfortable with. So for this evening it's safely stowed.

They hold the house for a few minutes to give folks more time to make their way through the rain, but it's still a sparseish crowd (more than a dozen, fewere than twenty) that awaits when we finally gather on the stage. John introduces the pieces: I haven't heard this before and it's rather instructive to think of what we're doing as a Zukofskyan "test of poetry." While John reads his intro Fred, Melissa, and I stand at three corners of the performance space; I've decided to stand holding my script with my arms at my sides, resisting the temptation to put a hand on a hip or worse, put my hands in my pockets. Not that Rodrigo really calls upon us to be "actors," but I still want to avoid distracting bodily movements or to shrink myself, which is sometimes my instinct when regarded. So I stand there, shoulders back, hands at sides, feeling rather like Jean-Luc Picard on the deck of the Enterprise.

The lights go down, John moves into the fourth corner, and the first piece begins. I only have a few lines to muck up in this one; mercifully, none are mucked. My wrist having more or less healed, I'm able to help set up the stage for "Spine" after delivering the faux-Shakespearean line that concludes "The Makings." Then John and I get to sit and watch "Spine"; again, the actor's ethic I've absorbed from somewhere has me holding my body still (though not rigid), watching the show and resisting the temptation to look at the audience to see their reactions. There are a couple of muffled laughs in response to "Spine," which has a number of funny-uncomfortable moments, but for the most part the audience is silent.

Time for "Pig Angels." The three of us kneel on the floor in a row for a long moment, like samurai preparing to commit seppuku. This was hard for my thirty-seven year-old body at first, but after a week's rehearsal it almost feels comfortable. Then Fred leans over and hits the floor and Melissa and I follow suit. "And these puercos sin destino... que?" I don't know if my Spanish pronunciation has truly improved, but it seems to satisfy Rodrigo--he had advised me to utter the "ques" in the spirit of a New York kvetch, which is something deep in my blood. It's funny how some pieces of direction click and others don't: a director just has to keep trying different approaches until he or she has been understood. It's far more intense to actually perform the piece as opposed to merely rehearsing it: I break into a sweat midway through and when the four of us have collapsed on the floor after a particularly physical moment, we're all breathing hard. Catching onto my cues and hitting each line feels a lot like surfing must feel: you're in the grip of a tremendous force and you have to bend and sway with it or you'll be crushed. And then before I know it my moment's over, the lights go dark, and I again retire to the folding chairs in the corner with John to watch the final piece, "Humana Ante Oculos."

The last piece is followed by a longish film of another of Rodrigo's poem-plays, "Cordoned." I'm glad just to sit and rest and not be the object of anyone's attention; it's a strange effect, having the back wall effectively open outward into a new performance space, with other players (I recognize my Ithaca running buddy David Brazil in the cast). And then it's time to stand and bow, which we do awkwardly and gratefully. We've survived.

Saturday, May 3

After the show last night I checked my messages to learn that Richard Greenfield was unexpectedly in town: his flight had been canceled due to the awful weather. So I got to hang out with him until the wee hours at home, and in the morning he met Sadie Gray. You can see what a natural he is with kids. I'm pleased to announce, by the way, that Richard's haunting and necessary second book, Tracer, has been accepted by Omnidawn and they're working overtime to bring it out early next year. He gave me some very good, very challenging advice on changes to make to my Severance Songs manuscript, which has been languishing for a while now. In some ways that advice amounts to making the "I" stronger in the poems, and also to performing--his word--the tension between the book's clevernesses and the more painful, heartfelt material. Or as I put it to Emily talking about it later, "I have to let them see what I'm hiding." In a way, he's asking me to be more Romantic and more postmodern, and to let go of what you might call my high modernist (not to say fascist) tendencies to exert minute moment-by-moment control over what readers can and can't interpret.

This notion of performance as that which permits the reader's full entry into one's poetic carries through to the evening's performance. The weather is again lousy, but the cast's spirits are high: the stakes seem lower than they were on the first night, while at the same time our confidence in our ability to get through the evening is heightened. Rodrigo has also decided to ditch the film at the end, a wise move that somehow adds to the holiday atmosphere. When we get out there the performance is much tighter than the previous evening's, and to my mind much funnier--yet nobody laughs! I thought, for example, that the moment in "Pig Angels" in which John and I do some improv was pretty tight:



When we talk about this afterward, Rodrigo says that the pieces' relations to current events can change the quality of tension with which the audience receives them. For example, "Pig Angels" had a much more intense effect during the time of the big immigration-rights demonstrations a couple of years ago. Rodrigo's not after laughs per se, but the laughs he does want are painful laughs, Beckett-laughs.

My Vassar friends Alex Elsberg (the lawyer) and Josh Wright (the archaeologist) go out afterwards. Josh has just come from a conference at UChicago and says that the experience of the plays was oddly consistent with attending academic panels: twenty minutes of words and signs being put into some sort of context, again and again. I tell Josh that the D&D-like game that he ran for us back in college was responsible for my engagement with experimental poetry: the immensely complex narratives he immersed us in, in which we often had a soldier's eye view of conflicts on an at-least Napoleonic scale, increased my tolerance for mystery, and made me more able to plunge ahead and take risks in spite of an incomplete or misleading map of the territory. This perhaps puts me in danger of committing the classic blunder of marching on Moscow, or in agreeing to take part in performances that will lead me who knows where; but I'm still grateful to him for deepening my powers of negative capability.

Sunday, May 4

On the evening of the last show folks are nervous again. Melissa's anxiety about the cape has returned, in spite of her having totally reinvented the way she uses it in the space the previous evening. Fred relates that his four year-old son told him after last night's performance that, "I liked it when you said 'The moon, the moon,' Daddy. But I didn't like it when you said, 'The sun, the sun.'" We're all exhausted, but I'm sad that this little community is about to break up. Melissa worries that closing nights are as bad as opening nights--not that our opening night was bad, but we all agree that Saturday was a high we're unlikely to hit a second time. Nonetheless, poetic theater's faux duress takes hold and I'm as pleased or more pleased with the last show as I was the previous one (though for some reason there are many more El trains passing, and I learn later that my video camera died after twenty minutes).

This is the smallest audience yet, but one of the most appreciative, thanks in large part to the presence of Johannes Goransson and Joyelle McSweeney, who are the poets on deck for next week's performance. Joyelle laughs at all the funny bits and claps after every piece, which buoys our morale and carries us through this last long strange trip. In spite of this, fatigue makes itself felt: I blow one of my cues (John reads a line in Spanish, then English; I didn't wait for the English) and after the show we're all pretty beat. Still, it's my last chance to be part of the troupe, so I join Rodrigo and the others for a late dinner at Rodan in Wicker Park. Rodrigo's very complimentary toward each of us and seems very pleased with how things have gone--apparently our performances have changed some of the ways he'll treat these pieces in the book, Collapsible Poetics Theater, that won the National Poetry Series this year and will be brought out by Fence Books next year.

At ten PM I return to the bourgeois land of husband-and-father-and-professorhood, leaving my theatrical avant-garde days behind. But what I learned about performance and the possibilities of introducing the body--the real body, the whole thing--into poetic ways of moving and knowing will stay with me for a long time.



Excerpt from "Spine"

Stand By Me

Collapsible Poetics Diary, part 2

Wednesday, April 30

Wrist very painful this morning from flipping and flopping on it in bed; nevertheless, I'm convinced it's only strained. From the Lake Forest train station I stop in at Walgreens and pay $8 for a black elastic brace for my wrist with "ACE" on the side in red letters. Pretty tough:


Spent the day meeting with students and pondering the reading list for my fall "Modern Poetry" seminar. I end up choosing to focus on American poetry and place an order with the bookstore for the following titles:

- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems
- William Carlos Williams, Imaginations
- Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
- Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
- Ezra Pound, Personae
- Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
- Allen Ginsberg, Howl
- Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems
- Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems
- John Ashbery, A Worldly Country
- Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary
- Gabriel Gudding, Rhode Island Notebook

As you can see, it's a list heavy on the modernist classics that shifts gears rather awkwardly at midcentury and winds up with three recent books. I'm already rethinking some of them: the Pound that matters to me is more the Cantos Pound than the translations/Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Pound, so I might just throw the Selected Cantos at them or even Sieburth's edition of the Pisan Cantos, which has excellent notes. Black modernists are perhaps underrepresented--I'd love to teach Tolson's Harlem Gallery. Wondering too if they oughtnt to read Plath's Ariel, which must be one of the most influential books ever written. And I'm obviously infatuated with Gabe's Rhode Island Notebook and see it as a kind of quixotic recasting of the Poundian epic impulse--but it's very long, possibly too long to give to students at the end of the semester, even if I selected excerpts for them.

When I arrive at Links Hall for the 8 PM rehearsal (having miraculously found a parking space on the same block in spite of the Cubs game), the others have already put in a lot of work: Fred, Melissa, and Rodrigo have been rehearsing the pieces I don't appear in in a grimy space on Ravenswood Ave. I go across the street to get coffee with Melissa, who reveals that this kind of performance pushes her out of her comfort zone, "but that's probably a good thing." My own sense of comfort may evaporate once I'm snorting and writhing in front of a live audience, but for now it's sustained by the fact that I am merely Rodrigo's instrument--these are not my words, though they are my gestures, my pronunciations.

Rodrigo expresses concern when he sees my wrist brace and orders me to lay off of moving heavy things for the time being, but it's really feeling much better after a day's partial immobilization. Tonight is largely a technical rehearsal, with Rodrigo and Rachel going over the placement of lights while the rest of us take our positions and only murmur our lines so as to provide cues. Acting is boring: there's a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, innumerable stray moments in which you might go to the bathroom or check your voicemail, but mustn't engage in sustained distraction because your director might call upon you at any moment. Still, it's fun to be part of something larger than yourself, even if it's only a little bit larger. Though there's been little opportunity for the five of us to get to know each other as people, a certain camaraderie has taken hold. We all want this to succeed, though it's not yet clear to me what success for a poet's theater will look like. Rodrigo's not chasing laughs, though there are a lot of funny bits in his pieces. Nor do we want that "poetry sigh" that characterizes the humid atmosphere of most poetry readings.

The best part of the evening comes when John and I get to sit and watch a full run-through of "Spine," a piece in which neither of us appear. The hard work Melissa and Fred have put in shows, and they take command of the space and their roles very convincingly. Fred especially has a kind of edgy charisma when he's on stage: the audience's eyes will follow him. Rodrigo is the third player; I can never forget that he's the author and director, and wonder if the audience will feel the same way. I won't say much about the piece itself except that it seems to be a kind of allegory of labor and the experience of alienation from the fruits of one's labor. It would be fascinating to follow these poetic threads into Rodrigo's other work, which is of course similarly preoccupied with labor in the economic sphere.

Rodrigo lets me go a bit early after we've got the lighting down for "Pig Angels of the Americlypse," the longest piece in which I have a part. Tomorrow's the long dress rehearsal, starting at 6 PM and ending who knows when. I get home in time to say goodnight to Emily and Sadie, then ice my wrist for a bit. I feel that I'm on the mend.

Collapsible Poetics Diary

Monday, April 28

Weekend in Maryland visiting with Sadie's maternal grandparents, flew back from Washington and arrived at O'Hare around 3:30. (Sadie was golden on the plane and I got to read a good chunk of Gabe Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook, fortuitously and startlingly found while browsing at the Barnes & Noble in downtown Bethesda. More about that in another post.) Homeward, get groceries, drop off Emily and Sadie, and, without having left any time to grab dinner, drive into the city in search of Links Hall, which turns out to be a stone's throw from Wrigley Field. I'm the last to arrive; my collaborators Fred Sasaki, Melissa Severin, John Beer (who's responsible for this whole Poets' Theater business), and dramaturg (poeturg?) Rodrigo Toscano are already upstairs in the shambling old building and moving around the performance space, which looks like a dance studio with bleachers at one end and no mirror or barre. The El goes by pretty regularly outside the row of windows facing east. Quick introductions and then Rodrigo's showing us some video of previous productions of the plays we'll be performing.

I write "plays" and it seems like the right word insofar as we'll be at play; also there are scripts and lines for us to read, along with very precise stage directions. But it quickly becomes apparent that a wide gap yawns between poets' theater and regular-type theater, at least as Rodrigo envisions it. First off, there's zero interest in illusionism, which is why for almost all of the pieces we'll be holding and reading from scripts (though there is one piece dynamic enough that it requires the players to memorize lines--thankfully, I'm not in that one). Rodrigo says he wants the labor to be transparent--"This is not a product" he says, more than once. Another point is that although we each play distinct parts, there are no characters per se, nor does the primary dynamic of each piece--what generates its tension and energy--derive from conflict between characters. (This violates the first rule of drama that I always teach to students: that each character must palpably want something, and the desires of the characters inevitably conflict.) The tension rather derives partly from the good-old-fashioned Brechtian alienation effect
--most of the pieces feature some sort of confrontation with the audience, while deliberately withholding the ordinary theatrical satisfactions of plot or realistic dialogue--but also from the players' own struggle with the language. There's a fair bit of Spanish in the longest piece I'm performing in, which I've never studied--nevertheless, Spanish I must speak. Still, it remains theater: we are bodies moving in space, saying lines, handling props, interacting with each other and an as-yet imaginary audience.

After we watch the videos we get right to running through the long piece that features John, Melissa, Fred, and myself. And there we all are, first kneeling, then squatting, then lying, then actually writhing on the floor, performing the intricate movements in Rodrigo's script. I'm nearly middle-aged, I think to myself as I sprawl there, pretending to stab little creatures on the floor with a pencil. But there's actually little time for self-consciousness: Rodrigo is a professional, he's done this before, he knows exactly what he wants and he has specific instructions and pointers for each of us. And I'm surprised to discover fewer inhibitions than I might have expected from myself. It's liberating to come out from behind the podium, but it also helps that I'm just a player, an interpreter of Rodrigo's work and not my own. I'm a collaborator, in every sense of that word, but not the author. Plus you can't take on a role that asks you to snort like a pig (you'll just have to see it to see what I mean) and worry too much about your dignity. I also haven't eaten anything since a sandwich at the Washington airport hours and hours ago, so I'm a little lightheaded.

We go at it pretty hard until well after the official stopping time; then Rodrigo "releases" me since I'm only in one long and one short piece; the others remain behind to work on two other pieces that I'm not in. I didn't request this, but it's good sense on John and Rodrigo's part, knowing as they do that I have a new baby and job responsibilities this week. In fact, somehow between now (9 PM) and the drive home and tomorrow, I have to prepare for the final workshop of my final poetry writing class, which happens at 9:30 AM tomorrow. So that's going to be two days of rehearsal preceded by frenzied and intense activity. The rest of the week will hopefully be a bit smoother.

Tuesday, April 29

The last day of classes at Lake Forest goes well, and I'm genuinely sorry to see this batch of students go: they're a terrific bunch. The poetry class workshop is always fun; I had been a little more concerned about the final meeting of my senior seminar, which I'd billed as a mini-symposium on creative writing, plus treats (I bring Twinkies, which prove to be literally inedible; one of my students brought homemade brownies and peanut-butter cookies and wins the implicit contest). This could have been a shapeless mess, but it's actually energizing: we discuss such questions as what creative writing is for and why should one bother with certain kinds of writing when film and TV and video games do a much better job of rendering what are essentially nineteenth-century realistic narratives. I don't know if I really persuade anyone that they should aspire to write more like Dodie Bellamy than Sarah Paretsky, but I may be the last voice they hear for a long time that isn't a wholly owned subsidiary of the market.

After class it's time for the annual Senior/Faculty Cocktail Party, which is surprisingly fun. The kids are all dressed up and bursting with pride at their accomplishments, rubbing elbows with faculty in a familial way. I sip a little wine and felt sentimental about my first year as a prof for a while, but soon I have to shake myself loose and shake a few hands before hopping in my car and driving home to Evanston for an hour or so of dinner and family time. Sadie bouncing in my lap while Emily puts dinner together; at one point she opens her mouth and lets out a long, long, catlike yowl, then blinks at us in surprise as if to say, "Who said that?"

Back in the car: rehearsal starts at 8 tonight so there's little traffic, but then I slam into a cacophony of cabs, cops, and Cubs fans: there's a game tonight. I call Rodrigo on my cell and tell him I'll be a bit late, but it sounds like he's just arriving himself. Round and round in widening concentric circles until I find a spot three blocks south on Belmont; not too shabby. Arrive at the hall and meet Rachel Damon, the lighting designer and stage manager: the first part of the evening will be devoted to blocking each piece and figuring out what to light and where. Fred's later than me and when he comes in he tells us why: some asshole slipped into the perfect parking space he'd found just outside the hall. We debate for a moment the respective merits of kicking the guy's ass versus keying his car; the latter option is rejected as being too passive-aggressive. I argue that karma will surely visit an appropriate doom on the jerk. Meanwhile Rodrigo is constantly in motion. He seems to be a little disappointed when Rachel tells him that, because it's a white room, even one light will basically illuminate everything, making it impossible to do much with deep shadows; but he quickly recovers. Improvisation is a big part of poets' theater, after all.

Tonight I'm noticing a couple of things. One is how readily we submit to Rodrigo's direction: you would think getting a bunch of poets who don't really know each other to work closely together like this would be like herding cats, but we all immediately and instinctively bow to his benevolent dictatorship (a dictatorship, in a sense, of the proletariat, given Rodrigo's day job as a labor organizer). He knows exactly what he wants and he's willing to work harder than anyone else to get it: these are prerequisites, I think, for anyone who wants to take on the daunting task of performance, much less directing. He's not shy about making us work, either: "I'm going to work you guys to death," he says with no discernible irony. But he doesn't need to browbeat us: we do it willingly. There's a kind of soldier's comradeship that carries us through; maybe that explains why theater folk are called "troupers." So although my joints are aching from yesterday, and I eventually sprain my left wrist rather badly when I do a clumsy job of moving a table, I don't even think of complaining. The show must go on.

The other thing I'm starting to notice is the nature of poets' theater itself and how fundamentally paratactic it is compared with more traditional theater. Most plays organize the stage space, the actors' movements, the dialogue, and the relationships of the characters hypotactically: if it's done right we are never confused about who's married to whom, or why the count launches into a soliloquy, or whether that chair downstage is supposed to be just a chair or a seat on the subway. Every element is relatable to every other element, and this is a big part of what enables the audience's suspension of disbelief. Poets' theater, on the other hand, bears the same relation to a regular play as verse does to prose, or lyric to narrative: mere simultaneity of being and acting is all that's provided to cement the relationships of players, space, props, and audience. The language is important, but not as central as you might expect: it's just one element in a group of visual and spatial elements. It's their arrangement that is "poetic" and that will evoke, I hope, thoughts and feelings in the audience not easily arrived at through conventional narrative means.

Another hour or so crawling on the floor and bellowing in Spanish: Rodrigo seems pleased with our performance overall, and he's even more pleased with our rendering of a shorter piece that will launch the evening; he says we're setting the template for it. Without actually coming out and saying how badly I'm mangling the Spanish language, he tells me not to worry, because my struggle with the language is part of the piece--translation and the crossing of borders is one of its major themes. So when it's time, at 10:30, to pack up and go home, I'm feeling pretty good about our two-nights progress, in spite of my throbbing wrist.