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