Author Archives: weinberg

poetry

no mascara, no evidence

Friday poem:

Makeup

My mother does not trust
women without it.
What are they not hiding?
Renders the dead living

and the living more alive.
Everything I say sets
the clouds off blubbering
like they knew the pretty dead.

True, no mascara, no evidence.
Blue sky, blank face. Blank face,
a faithful liar, false bottom.
Sorrow, a rabbit harbored in the head.

The skin, a silly one-act, concurs.
At the carnival, each child’s cheek becomes
a rainbow. God, grant me a brighter myself.
Each breath, a game called Live Forever.

I am small. Don’t ask me to reconcile
one shadow with another. I admit—
paint the dead pink, it does not make
them sunrise. Paint the living blue,

it does not make them sky, or sea,
a berry, clapboard house, or dead.
God, leave us our costumes,
don’t blow in our noses,

strip us to the underside of skin.
Even the earth claims color
once a year, dressed in red leaves
as the trees play Grieving.

– Dora Malech (who visited Maryland last week, and came to class)

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poetry

Take that, Vatican II

What do we talk about when we talk about poetry? Punctuation conventions. Last night, at the Great Emdash Colloquium Synod of 2010, otherwise known as the proofreading party, the following resolutions were approved:

1) Two hyphens does not equal one emdash. (Sigh.)
2) The use of spaces before and after emdashes is a matter of style*.

If you have other resolutions to submit to the council, please do so at this time.

*over substance.

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Uncategorized

Wise is lightweight

Thursday poem:

Against A Dark Field

Hate makes my head light.
Hate rides its particulars, styled
after fireflies, after envy. Our bed rises
on its liquid. I hate the heavy

body known, by rights,
as mine. The window’s colony of wild
ideas, appointed, hovers. Wise
is lightweight. Undercover

I withdraw from us and turn
into pure fuel. You blacken with sleep. I green with burn.

–Heather McHugh, from her book Dangers, also collected in Hinge & Sign. There’s more info on her at the first link, which is the Academy of American Poets, but her website is, happily, spondee.com.

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poetry, the chorus

hello, out there

I was recently reminded of the fact that I possess a blog by one of my students. It has been a long time since I’ve written in it.

So.2. Since I last wrote here, the chorus group has met two more times, to work on some Shakespeare and some Yeats. I have been really consumed with this, to the extent that I’ve forgotten about almost everything else.*

All three meetings, so far, have tested me and the methods I have in ways that I really need. I hadn’t realized to what extent my chorus techniques were becoming didactic from primarily teaching in student contexts. Working with adult actors and musicians feels like such a luxury. I have missed it. I have missed it in the way that you miss things in French, where the missed thing is the subject and you are the object.

With this group of people, there is nothing to teach, nothing to be communicated — there is only the chance to explore a largely unexplored region of performance, and I am learning from their work. It’s amazing.

We are doing things that I haven’t tried in years, if ever, including doubling voices on top of other voices with digital recorders, and using simultaneous pieces of different texts. I am back in an environment where my word on a subject is not the final word. That’s a good thing. I have even done something which I haven’t done since Clytemnestra/Cassandra (if there is anyone reading this besides Z who remembers that, I will give you a prize): participated in the vocal realizations of the choruses myself. That is to say, sung.

I have dreamed of being able to work on choruses once a week for a long time. (This is a revised dream from the original dream, which would have been working on them every day, all day and all night.) It is startling to me how long I’ve waited to make this happen, and how I probably wouldn’t have made it happen, at all, if not for the particular environment of Hopkins and Baltimore, for the Single Carrot actors I know, for the friends from poetry classes.

I have lots of interesting sound files that I would like to put up, but that probably won’t happen until after finals are completed. I do, however, hope to create some kind of Internet presence for them that will allow me to post them more regularly. Maybe a subpage of this site, or another site. Or a Myspace.

At any rate, I’m very grateful to the collaborators who have made this possible.

* Oh, and — the “half-thesis” or first-year portfolio for the MFA is due to the faculty tomorrow. Needless to say, that’s about all there is to talk about right now.

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music, poetry, the chorus

so,

Good meeting on Saturday. Choruses (poems) spoken, music played. I have notes from it. I was going to put them up here as a rehearsal report of sorts. Good intentions. But we’re going to meet again next week. I am looking forward to this project generating sound files, to having something that can be played to explain itself.

Apart from that, a lot of discussion about whether a flawed interpretation of a great text matters — whether the text’s greatness transcends the interpretation. It does, I suppose. It must.

Also heard M. Doty read at the BMA. He mentioned a sense of discomfort whenever he hears his poems set to music. I can see why. Of what he read, I didn’t hear any with a choral component. But there are many poems with that sort of public and dramatic structure — many, many poems — that are suitable.

Also, would he not be as uncomfortable if the poem was not “set” to music? Not pinned, as it were, to the notes? If the principle of improvisation were present? I am preaching to my own choir. Obviously, I think that would be different.

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the chorus

Dear World,

You,
if you are a musician, an actor, or a singer,
in Baltimore, Maryland,
or like speaking poetry,
are invited to an
extremely informal
free-and-open-to-the-planet
Choral Speaking workshop: exploring the speaking of Greek choruses, and other similar poetic texts. With live, improvised music,
with the possibility of forming an eventual working group
to continue exploring this stuff,
but with no obligation to do so.

Come and say some words, and play some music. The word “Grotowski” will be mentioned.

Saturday at 1 PM
3033 Guilford Avenue
Contact: Dara Weinberg, daraweinbergATgmail.com.

PS. Marsupials? Really?

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Baltimore, poetry, quotes

Let us go back to snow

Yesterday, walking home, white flowers over a tree I last remembered covered in white snow. It’s a good enough reason for Richard Hugo’s snow poem, which I didn’t know in the time of the last blizzard. It’s April, it’s warm, students in sundresses.

SNOW POEM

To write a snow poem you must ignore the snow
falling outside your window.

You must think snow, the word as a snotty owl
high on the telephone pole

glowering down and your forehead damp with fear
under the glare

of the owl who now is mating. On rare days
we remember the toy

owl we buried under the compost heap,
white sky passing above, warm chirp

of wren and the avenging hawk.
That was summer. Let us go back

to snow and forget that damn fool lecture
I gave last winter.

Well, then: here is your window.
The storm outside. Outside, the dead dove drifting.

– Richard Hugo

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Lydia, poetry, quotes

as if to mock

my mockery of his statements about lyrics being better off simpler, some of Sondheim’s simplest lyrics have been haunting my head for the past few days. Particularly those from “Ever After.” Happy now and happy hence / And happy ever after!

I have been auditing an undergraduate music theory course this semester, and if I can bring myself to dispel the mystery, I will eventually know why that one particular chord change is so good. I think it will only make me like it more to know what he is doing.

But chords aside, we’re here to talk about lyrics, right? I have been thinking of INTO THE WOODS for poetic purposes, wanting to write about it, and this is the song that says the most to me at the moment. Here is the last stanza, narrative aside, when the poet sums up, when the poem expands, when the lyrics inflate to their most “statemental.” And I cannot, at present, wish them more complicated. It’s a great song. Risks vulnerability, risks sentimentality, probably achieves both. But it’s a great song.

Herewith, last stanza of I KNOW THINGS NOW (from Into The Woods)

[…]

And I know things now,
Many valuable things,
That I hadn’t known before:
Do not put your faith
In a cape and a hood,
They will not protect you
The way that they should.
And take extra care with strangers,
Even flowers have their dangers.
And though scary is exciting,
Nice is different than good.

Now I know:
Don’t be scared.
Granny is right,
Just be prepared.
Isn’t it nice to know a lot!

And a little bit –
not…

– Stephen Sondheim

Whatever else I may or may not have done, I have lived while he is still living. Sondheim is alive, somewhere. In New York. I could get on a bus and be there in four hours, right? I feel so strongly about his work that it reminds me of Matthew’s play, the speech where Androcles says that he rejoices in Syntyche’s existence regardless of what else may happen for him. I am glad to have been alive in an age of theater he helped make. When I think of it that way, I ought never to complain about theater again. Ever.

You say honestly. Rest you merry. Or, as the Germans would say, “noch ein mal,” which means, one more time. Better luck tomorrow, RRH. See you then. Gentlemen: let us repair to The Coal Hole in the Strand.

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books, quotes

the poets had drunk too much

“The guest list had chiefly comprised their most prestigious writers in the main categories, a ploy which had added to the general atmosphere of inadvertence and fractionized unease: the poets had drunk too much and had become lachrymose or amorous as their natures dictated; the novelists had herded together in a corner like recalcitrant dogs commanded not to bite; the academics, ignoring their hosts and fellow guests, had argued volubly among themselves…
[…]
It had almost been a relief when a formidable female novelist, vigorously corseted in a florid cretonne two-piece which made her look like a walking sofa, had borne him off to pull out a crumple of parking tickets from her voluminous handbag and angrily demand what he was proposing to do about them.”

– P.D. James, Devices and Desires

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music, theater

there are giants in the sky

The two readings of BWBS have now both happened. Amazing how two shows makes a run. We got to have both the opening-night and the closing-night energies, out of just two events. Some audience members at the talkback last night said some nice things about the juxtaposition of words and music, and how verse takes to music and vice versa, that made me feel that our work was worth it. A well deserved something-like-a-break coming up?

…Little more than a glance
Is enough to show
You just how small you are.
– Sondheim, “There Are Giants In The Sky,” INTO THE WOODS

When I think of it, which is always — okay. When I do more than think of it, I would like to write something about the Sondheim quote that gets requoted everywhere, the one that says that words when set to music must necessarily be simpler so they can be understood. I don’t entirely agree with it.

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