Serving With Schrodinger's Cat

I've been both not working on the other poem that came out of Love and War and stuck on what I have been working on. Sitting down and writing has to be the last step for me; I have to figure out a lot of things in my head before I can even get a version on paper and then i have to work and rework it on paper as well. I've become determined i am going to take a sabbatical and just go write somewhere and try to have a regimented writing program- sit down at the same time every day and write. Mostly i am interested in seeing whether this will work for me. So much of what I write gets processed in my head for so long, I am curious whether the "same time everyday" approach that so many people advocate will make me a better writer, worse writer, or just annoy me.

Anyway, Schrodinger's cat- this poem started life about a soldier who had to give DNA to see whether a body found on a military academy was his relative. I then wanted to have a poem from the dead soldier and a poem from the dead soldier's slave. Now I have completely cut out the lost relative and am focusing on the sniper pair and the multiplicity and uncertainty at the heart of the cat exercise. Below is the only part I have that i like right now-

Serving With Schrodinger's Cat

Johnson understood
what Parham meant
when he talked
about Schrodinger's cat.

It was the third day
of sniper duty.
Until they were retrieved
three days from now,
Parham would talk and talk.

Stick a cat in a box with an unstable WMD.
You can't see in the box.
Until you lift the top to check
that fucker is both alive and dead.

No one existed until they appeared in the scope.
When he gave Parham the order to shoot
he saw a target living and dying at once.

I have another verse I am working on about MRE's and how they contain all possible extras until opened. I'm not sure if it's stupid, if it belabors the point, or whether it works nicely. Back in the head until I decide.

what the dancer thinks while dancing

so this is the poem i wrote in response to working with choreo. like i said below, i wanted to explore the way dancers used language when discussing dance. i had the title from the start, although i had "a dancer" for awhile. "the" came in later, a choice i liked because of the glide of the "th" and the generality.

i also had the opening line and the next to the last line (penultimate line) straight away also. they never changed never moved. from there i made a list of lines i liked. i wanted things that were sensual, intimate, indeterminate, contradictory, unsettling. i wanted a list poem (this was mostly because of the time restriction, but i ended up liking this form a lot), i wanted a lot of vowels.

i wrote down a lot of phrases one night when i was trying to go to sleep. i would write something down, turn out the light, think of something else, turn on the light, write it down, turn off the light, almost be asleep, think of something else. i worked with the list, pairing some things, moving the order, trying to figure out what organizing principles could hold it all together. i added more to the list and i kept reorganzing.

i read part of it to a dancer at rehersal. she liked the presence of the sense appeal and suggested adding something with "breath." it was a good suggestion and i eventually came up with the "breath and its opposite" line, a line i ended up liking.

i took it to poetry group- went over well with a couple of good suggestions. i liked "solidarity" and the "abridgement/expansion" pair, but the lines were too general at that time, particularly coming after "the moan of the whale" line. I tried moving them, ending with "sky of a tree" and "moan of a whale" lines as the next to last pairing, but that threw off the movement of the poem- there was no middle peak anymore. i moved them back and rewrote the abridgement and solidarity lines as they appear now.

i feel like it captures some things that struck me about dance. it moves me that they go on stage and reveal such intimacy. i think there is no way i could be a dancer for that alone (trust me, there's a long list of reasons why i couldn't be a dancer) i love their joy at it and the trust and comraderie it fosters between them, how generous it makes them in performance, and the way they negotiate the whole process.

oddly, they haven't heard it or seen it yet (i did read it for one of them on request) as they were changing when i read it (that was its purpose) so i don't know what they think about it or if it feels accurate to them or if it comes off as pretentious or naive or what. i liked it though, for its purpose and on its own.

what the dancer thinks while dancing

the way motion the way curve

the way infinite slips into intricate slips into intimate

how under rolls to over

how ghostly leads abroad

the anticipation of forearm for fingertip

the underside of the Bridge of Sighs

how giving stiffens to stop

the way pretending leaks into actual

why no one is ever apart why everyone feels alone

the way war is always present always at war with peace

how a hip can taste like cinammon a shoulder lemon balm

why the middle can be static why what is static is not stopped

the sky of a tree the hairs of the soil

the response of toes to a hand on a stomach

the moan of the whale in an ocean pulled flat

the way a lover expands through abridgement

how solidarity marries a form to the want

the way light appears as particle light appears as wave

the way palm sits on palm and fingers rest between

the way breath contains its opposite

the way the bridge reveals motion and the river comes to still

the way a kiss can lead to a kiss can lead to a kiss

and nothing ever appears causal at all

Serving With Schrodinger's Cat: Poem #2

The other poem that i got out of working with Choreo came from Love and War not from the process of working with them. That poem is still in process and currently is titled Serving With Schrodinger's Cat.

My interest in Robert Jenkins's story was, at first, about his refusal to serve, defection as a commentary on war. I thought that is what the poem would be about and it was called for a little while Those Who Don't. I was still interested in this idea and interested in the personal aspects of war. How absurd it does or doesn't feel to participate, how one distances or embraces that absurdity.

Then I heard a brief bit on NPR about a body they found at a military academy and how they attempted to identify it, thought it had clearly been there for a century at least. I thought about a soldier who was trying to leave his past only to have it follow him, to be DNA tested to see if it was his relative. I wanted to make it a 3 part poem- the soldier now, the soldier lost, and a slave who left the soldier lost. I wrote the 1st part, took it to poetry group and it didn't work. Too narrative, I didn't know what the poem was about, it was too confusing.

I worked on it again and by the end, the soldier was a spotter listening to his sniper talking about Schrodinger's cat exercise. Took it back to group- the DNA section was too much. I wanted it to keep the past/present shrinkage feel but it was distracting. The power of the poem was in the sniper pair now and their discussion of simultaneity and how they each understood it in relation to war. So now I am working on a version that focuses on that.

Which doesn't sound like a dance poem,but is. It was seeing Jenkins's story translated into movement that made me consider how his story was about loneliness and love, how much of the military demands a doubleness, a knowing and not knowing, a seeing but not acknowledging and what happens (as it did for Jenkins) when that doubleness gets called out or what happens when it is allowed to continue (this poem).

I'll post copies of both of these soon.

Tanya

Melting Gnomes; Performance, Movement, and Language

I was interested that I also got actual poems from working with Choreo. I thought going in Love and War would probably be unable to stand on its own as a poem and that has been true. I'm fine with that and don't feel capable of producing a piece that could be written collaboratively with a group of dancers and exist free from that movement. Right now,that's asking too much of me and the text.

But I have produced 2 poems that came directly from working with Choreo. One, what the dancer thinks while dancing, came from our latest performance at Duke. We needed poems for transition times in-between the dances, so the poets wrote pieces that came out of their working with Choreo. I had been planning on writing this piece anyway, so it was nice to have the deadline and assignment.

I was fascinated by the way the dancers talked about their pieces; dance seems to lack notation to preserve performances (this also makes me fascinated about the intersections of dance and film- i'll get to that later) or even give it a way to be tracked. So instead, there is a lot of use of language to keep phrases in memory and to indicate them. (in fact, it's sort of fascinating that a string of dance movements is called a phrase.)

The dancers kept referring to "clumpy puppies" "melting gnomes" "throwing hoboes" and other linguistic markers of place and movement. I was taken by how effective it was; i wasn't dancing but i would know where they were going to start on the stage, what came next.

However, it never helped me know where to start in the text. So say at rehersal, we would work on the transition between the 3rd and 4th sections. We might start at "melting gnomes." The dancers would know where they should be, I would know generally where we were in the whole movement, but I couldn't note the corresponding place to start in the text. Eventually I started noting on my text where certain movements occured , but usually by the dancer instead of the phrase title ("sarah across blanche" for instance).

This led me to wonder how this whole piece would work differently if Love and War was a spoken word or performance piece. I'm very influenced by the spoken word and performance poets; some of my poems have both performance and written versions, some poems started life on the page and transitioned into spoken word, (although never the other way around), and even in poems that only live on the page, I'm usually very aware of sound and rhythm above any other organizational methods. When I perform these pieces from memory, movement is one way I "remember" where I am in the piece and can trigger memory for the next section. If I ever get lost in a piece or feel my mind start to wander, I can usually look at what my hands are doing (although sometimes its walking or a different gesture) and get focused again.

All of that is a very long intro for a poem i won't post until tomorrow, but the intersections of language and movement were the direct inspiration for the poem.

Wrap Up and Begin Again

So a couple of notes to transition to the next focus for this space.

June Performance- These 2 performances went well in the Durham School of the Arts spaces. Nice turnout, good audience, and it felt like a good ending to the rehearsals. I was sad I wasn't going to be working with the dancers again- it had been a really positive creative exercise and personally, it had just been nice sharing space with them. (it had been kind of a tough spring.) Very nicely they asked me to serve as their outside choreographer in the spring of '08, using Love and War as the starting point. I'm excited.

As a writer, I really enjoyed the collaborative nature of the effort and watching text and movement translate back and forth. That translation was probably the most interesting thing overall, the fluidity between the two languages wasn't something I had expected and I'm excited to see how else that type of translation can be pushed. I like to do translation exercises (poem in a language other than English, poem in an alphabet like Cyrillic, a series of photos, a train schedule, etc.) for writing classes but seldom use them in my own writing. I loved that this wasn't just a one-way exchange but continued back and forth between the 2 languages. I'm also going to work on a project helping a dancer write a poem, a kind of mirror image of them helping me choreograph a dance.

So as part of both of those projects, I'm going to start keeping this blog again, first to catch up on some parts of the process, then to note what's happening as it does. Being able to look back on this has been helpful, so I'll try it for a bit more.