As for rituals, I try not to ever say, “I can’t go out. I have to write.” When I’ve said that in the past inevitably I’ve ended up watching four hours of Forensic Files while the person I’ve said it to ends up writing their magnum opus.
– poet Jillian Weise interviewed in Bookslut
Joel Brouwer’s A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY, from the 12/06 POETRY. You can also hear him pick his seven favorite love poems , or read more of his POETRYies. I have nothing to add to it. It seems to me like a poem that cannot be improved. I can’t say the same thing about 2008 – but then, I have nothing to add to it, either. Perhaps in that respect it is perfect, in that it is complete.
A Report to an Academy
by Joel Brouwer
And so among the starry refineries
and cattail ditches of New Jersey
his bus dips from egg-white sky into shadow.
When he next looks up from Kafka a blur
of green sanatorium tile flows by
then presto, Port Authority, full daylight.
He has been cheated of the river, dawn,
a considered fingering of his long
and polished rosary of second thoughts.
Is it any wonder children are born
weeping? Out to Eighth Avenue to walk
twenty blocks home to her sleeping curve
beneath a sheet. He cracks three eggs into
a bowl and says to each, Oh you got trouble?
The yellow yolk is his, the orange is hers,
the third simply glistens, noncommittal.
Except to mention Kafka’s restlessness
before his death, his trips from spa to spa
to country house to sanatorium,
and that she’s awake now, sweet with sleep sweat,
patting her belly’s taut carapace and yes
hungry as an ape but first a kiss mister
how was your trip and what have you brought us,
and that the knowledge that dooms a marriage
is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage,
the poem has nothing further to report.
A friend reminds me that 9 is 3×3. We decide this is lucky.
It’s time
for 09.
Happy New Year, Blog.
Today and yesterday we have been snowless, or unsnowed – a heavy rain melted it all away. So when one of my friends in Los Angeles told me about driving to see the snow with her family, I was able to, with some nostalgia, remember when we did the same thing.
We’d all get into the car – my memory has the Isuzu Trooper, when it still functioned – and go up and up and up and up and up into the mountains until we arrived at the snow, usually a small patch on the ground. We’d get out, step in it, take a couple pictures, and then descend down the snail-shell spiral of the same road, back to the Valley, where it would be about 80 degrees. I think it’s key for people who live in insufferably warm places to do this, so that when your children grow up and move to Chicago, they can say, “Oh, yeah. That.”
Good times in warm climes. Another friend, recently returned from LA, reports that the hipsters there are wearing fur hats with ear flaps.
It’s so LA to drive to see the snow – if only because you need your car to do it.
I am amused by writing prompts that tell you what they’re not interested in hearing about. “Please write 500 words, not about X, but about Y.” They always make me want to write either:
a) Theory of X
b) else about something entirely other than both.
The best writing prompt is “Tell us something that will surprise us.” Or: “Tell us something interesting.” Or, better yet, “Tell me something I don’t know.”
The Parents Poem
It’s a good idea to figure what to do with parents.
One man I knew, after caring for them for years,
Led them across a busy street—two lines of traffic.
He started a lost colony for his parents.
He bought them big boots and pith helmets.
He sent his parents into battle. He dressed
Them in Austrian uniforms and gave them
Maps of Russia. No one ever saw them again.
Another man built a furnace and put his parents
Into it. He got some tincture, and tried to tran-
Substantiate his parents. It took a long time
And used a lot of heat, but there wasn’t much change.
A neighbor stored them in an empty cistern—the ladder
Is still sticking out. He took them to Kenya
And got his parents to take a walk with the elephants.
And they died all right . . . But by the end,
They knew for sure that they’d had children.
– Robert Bly, in the Fall 08 Paris Review.
This poem gets to me a bit – I almost wasn’t sure whether to put it up. The furnace, and all that. But I think if it gets under my skin this much, it must be good. It’s a good example of what a friend and I were discussing recently – how to write a poem about something depressing without writing a poem that depresses.
makes me feel like a sore victor in the Punic wars. Carthage must be de-iced.
It is dark on the snow outside. I’m about to light the Hankuah candles.
Imaginary Readers, May your Holidays be filled with more Style than Substance, and more Eggnog than Equanimity. And thank you for reading.
Love from Chicago,
S.O.S.
Terry Teachout, one of my favorite drama critics, and author of the influential theater weblog About Last Night, has weighed in on LCT’s choosing director Bart Sher to direct August Wilson’s JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE. He writes, in the WSJ on Dec 20th:
Sometimes nontraditional casting works, sometimes it doesn’t, and there are no hard-and-fast rules that are universally applicable. That’s the nature of theater: It’s an empirical art form whose rules are made up from scratch each time a group of actors comes together to put on a show. But as for the alleged institutional racism of Lincoln Center Theater, I don’t buy it for a second. My guess is that Bartlett Sher will do at least as well by “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” as he would by “The Iceman Cometh” — and if he doesn’t, I doubt that it’ll be because he’s white.
I don’t doubt that this is true, at least in the respect of Sher’s excellence. He is an extraordinary director. Unfortunately, I still wish Wilson’s wishes about having black directors direct his work were being respected.
I stand by the principle that copyright is not a good thing for playwrights, and that directors and producing institutions should have greater freedom in their productions. Now, here are the consequences of that principle. I have argued elsewhere against respecting playwrights’ wishes when it comes to all sorts of things – casting, edits, stage directions, even the text. It seems to me that the sooner that living playwrights become dead-and-uncopyrighted playwrights, the better for their plays. But Wilson is not long dead, and this conscious disregarding of his adamant preference simply doesn’t feel respectful. It’s too soon, and the American theater landscape still has far, far, far too few opportunities for directors of color. (Don’t even get me started on women directors…)
No matter how you look at it, by choosing Sher to direct this play, Lincoln Center is going against August Wilson’s explicit wishes, or what they were in his lifetime. That startles me, and I have trouble believing it’s true. On the other hand, to be fair, LCT and Sher have the approval of Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero, in this choice. (Via BroadwayWorld.)
The remarkably small amount of outcry over this director casting means only one thing – August Wilson’s popular plays, which are frequently performed all over this country and the world, are going to be directed by more and more white directors from now on. Why? Because more directors are white, and more producers are white, and more successful, well-known directors are white. The easiest casting choice, when a white producer chooses a director, is – another white director. I have seen this proved over and over again in practice in the field.
Now that LCT has done this, anyone can. Where one of the country’s most prominent theaters leads, the smaller institutions will follow. This, more than anything, is what I wish wasn’t true, because there are many great black directors in this country who made their careers on August Wilson when they weren’t getting hired for Shakespeare and Chekhov.
Ultimately, this turn of events means that another avenue for black directors to advance in American theater has been narrowed.
Here’s another interesting article: Brendan Kiley’s take on the whole thing, in THE STRANGER’s SLOG blog.
If one has faith in Wilson’s work and theater audiences, one expects Beijing directors to be working with his scripts in 2687. So whey-faced Sher directing him is only a baby step in what will be Wilson’s long, universal legacy.
Kiley goes on to quote actor James Williams and agree with him that the most disturbing thing about LCT’s choice is “not the whiteness of Sher, but the blinding whiteness that surrounds him”: in other words, the fault is with what Williams calls “the dominant culture,” white culture, not with LCT and Sher in particular.
I suppose that’s true, but if the particular is not to be held as an example of the culture, then everyone can always blame the culture as opposed to themselves.
(Addendum: I was not aware of one fact mentioned in the Teachout article, which was that Gordon Davidson had recently directed Wilson’s JITNEY for the Kennedy Center staged reading festival of Wilson’s work earlier this year. )
Dara Weinberg 