In the Moment with Wilder and Wallace

Thorton Wilder received the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Our Town in 1938. I saw it last Sunday at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York and at least once before in high school but I had little memory of it. The cast, led by Helen Hunt as the Stage Manager, was extraordinary, each character so fully realized that the little black-box theater was transformed into Grover's Corners and the audience sat agape.

There is a wrenching (literally) moment at the end of the play when the Stage Manager rips a curtain back along a rod to reveal one of the most beautiful, holy came to mind, scenes I've been witness to. Minutes before, the audience is slightly aware of a cooking smell or sense of cooking, but it was hard to figure which exactly... a nearby restaurant, gearing up for an early supper crowd? And then the revelation is before us, a visual epiphany.

Emily Webb has died but asks to return to Grover's Corners for just a day, one ordinary day. This is what is behind the dark curtain and where, for the first time, she actually sees her life in the moment, in the kitchen of her home.

Mrs. Webb is frying bacon, (for real) making coffee and scrambling eggs just as she has done every morning for her family. Sunlight fills the room, the milkman stamps snow off his boots before coming through the door with his clinking bottles, the newsboy delivers the morning paper. Emily's sudden awareness to what is real and essential is in plain sight for the first time, not in her life, but in her death. A stunning moment of collective self realization decended over the audience.

The late writer, David Foster Wallace, tells a story, "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, Morning, boys, how's the water? And the two young fish swim on for bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, What the hell is water?"

Wallace says that "we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: This is water, this is water. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out. True freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

I learned today that a friend and neighbor played George Gibbs in one production where Thornton Wilder was the Stage Manager. "I just thought he was a nice old man," said Peter Walker reminiscing on his 82nd birthday.

Running after Rae Armantrout

When Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize for Versed (Wesleyan University Press, n.b. university press) I thought I'd better take a closer look at this poet's work because most of the time I don't know where she is going even as I devour each poem like a last meal. Truthfully, though, she makes my head hurt, not unlike how I feel trying to learn a foreign language, all tongue tied and brain fried.

In the April issue of Poetry Magazine, the editors wrote, "when we find ourselves puzzling over something in a poem or wondering why a particular choice was made, we can go straight to the source and put our poets on the spot..." which is exactly what they did. Thus each poem is followed by a q and a and Rae "spoke" which gave me something to really hang onto.

She begins her poem, Paragraph with:

Record breaking Thriller
dance attempt.

Poetry Magazine asks: The poem mentions Thriller and Michael Jackson (not specifically); what kind of music was in your mind -- if there was any --when composing the lines of this poem? How does music mark the passage of time for you, if it does?

R.A. replies: I seem to mention music occasionally in my poems, usually popular music. I'm interested in why certain things are popular. I also mention movies and television. "Record breaking Thriller/dance attempt" is a phrase I either read in a magazine or heard on TV --I can't remember which. The phrase struck me as somehow telling. "Record breaking" and "attempt" are actually rather sad qualifiers to the dance and the thrill. They abstract the possible experience. I think the whole poem deals with the way in which experience is mediated, the ways in which we have "para" experience.

Dan Chiasson's piece in The New Yorker (May 17th, 2010) asks, "So who is Rae Armantrout? The author, for starters, of some tantalizingly hard poems, poems that sometimes track their own difficulty:

Wrapped strands and

What passes

for messages,

what pulls itself

apart to flash,

the twinkle
or tickle
of articulation

In these lines from her poem, Passing, the play is both sonic (twinkle, articulation) and semantic (What pulls itself apart to flash? For one thing, a flasher's raincoat!). It keeps everything in motion -- never "passed," always "passing"--and replaces forms of settled identity with processes, open-ended, repeatable, of doing and undoing."

Chiasson writes, "Though the results looked radical, in a way Language poetry (a school Rae was often associated with) was oddly conservative. It put poetry, of all things, at the very center of culture. These poets suggested that, if you wanted to change the circuitry of the culture, you had to go to poetry, where the wires were. There all damage done to language by advertisers and politicians could be undone. But, lest poets become faux finishers, they wanted to keep those innards of language exposed, rather than tuck them back inside a consistent speaker whom we get to know, and come to like or to despise, as we read. Poetry shouldn't reveal the soul of a unique individual: there's no such thing as a unique individual."

This was all extremely helpful especially in toto and gave me a bit more understanding of a poet whose voice is so different from my own. Chiasson spoke for me with, "As in fly-fishing, as in illness, so in Armantrout's poems: one is on the hook."

R.J.JULIA BOOKSELLERS READING