Po(i)sed for Action: At the Intersection of Poetry and Drama, Part II
I recently returned from a literary festival where I had the luck of hearing Ilya Kaminsky read from Deaf Republic for the second time this year. He projected the poems onto the theater’s stage—on account of his Russian accent, he explained at the beginning of his reading. To hear Kaminsky read is also to read his work alongside the same lines, to witness his performance and embodiment of the poetry, narrative, and drama. It’s a one-man show, though previously I’d not have called any poetry reading a solo performance.
In fact, I was taken aback last month when a colleague told me how much she appreciated my performance at my poetry reading for the university’s creative writing series. I thanked her, but in my head, I balked. Was my reading and between-poem chatter all part of one whole performance? Did I perform grief over my brother Oliver’s suicide in front of the audience?
Well, in a sense, yes. I presented my work by reading, sharing images, and a video piece, describing both my grief process as well as my creative making process, to offer some context for the audience. But my aim was not to entertain (one possible facet to the definition of ‘perform’). The etymological and first definition of perform is to carry out, accomplish, or fulfill, from Old French for to ‘furnish, provide through, to completion.’ Yes, a writer-maker reading her work is a live furnishing of her work to the audience. I do not believe that I (or Kaminsky) strove to entertain.
Entertain, traced back to Latin for ‘to hold among’—okay, I can get with that origin of the word. It was my intent to hold the attention of those watching and listening to me—as part of a group of individuals gathered in one space, for that moment in time.
* * *
Whether I or other poets explicitly acknowledge it or not, to read in public is also to offer a performance of the work. In Deaf Republic, there is a dramatis personae, just as in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio, there is a cast of characters, or “Owners of This Olio.” It is a pleasure to read these first pages of the two poetry collections because the descriptions are lyrical, their images slow to fade from my mind.
From“Dramatis Personae”:
Puppets—hang on doors and porches of the families of the arrested, except for one puppet lying on the cement: a middle-aged woman wearing a child like a broken arm, her mouth filling with snow.
From “Introduction or Cast or Owners of This Olio”:
Wildfire, or Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907)
Her mother Objibwe, her father Maroon. Her chisel a language, each stone a new moon-bright canvas of Grecian marble waiting to spell out whose tale dwells inside its tomb—and how she’ll strike them into our sight. Expatriate artist at age 20—escaped Yankee art markets to be free in Greece selling statuary for up to 50 Gs.
The function of a cast is yes, to inform readers of each character’s noteworthy identifying traits—to set the stage, so to speak. To employ simile is to evoke an image, and thus, an emotional tone for the Puppets. Jess provides genealogical information in parallel grammatical structure, employing a metaphor to provide a linguistic resonance for Lewis’s artistic gifts. To read these casts is to accept the amuse bouche of the poet: our appetites primed for the full courses to follow.
While the blurred boundary of poetry-drama is by no means new, it is nonetheless remarkable to me that these poetry collections employ a sustained dramatic structure. As I read, I am also watching the scenes unfold in my mind’s theater.
Only recently (it’s never too late) did I learn the term ‘closet drama,’ or a play meant to be read but not performed. What does that mean, my mind reacted, then: Oh but of course! A brief un-comprehensive list of poets who wrote closet drama: Milton, Byron, Browning, Yeats, Merrill . . . Are poems not also closet dramas for readers’ little theater minds? Constructed emotional-intellectual experiences liberated from the constraints of physics as well as the limitations of all that goes into a theater production.
So, to explicitly employ the formal structure of a play as a book of poems is to say to the reader: what you see is indeed a stage, and here are the players. They have been each carefully fashioned and serve a purpose in the overall drama.
* * *
In the last post, I shared that my brother Oliver sliced his image out of the family photographs which hung in the hallway of our childhood home, where he lived until his suicide two years later.
Going back home for Oliver’s funeral, and afterwards—also meant a willful embarking on a journey of reconciling with our shared familial past. During one visit, when I found dust-coated DV and VHS tapes that our father had recorded during our childhood, I rushed to digitize what they held. No one had viewed them since they were made decades ago. I even discovered my parents’ wedding and honeymoon footage.
When I received the digitized videos, I was both joyful and mournful to see my brother alive on his first birthday, and later, as a young boy. There was an unexpected video shot by my brother—his narration, his curated sights—I don’t think anyone aside from Oliver knew this document existed. Like finding a diary with only one day’s worth of entries.
His wedding aside, my father was the chief cinematographer for all the other videos. He captured birthdays and extended family gatherings, but also everyday moments at home as well: his children riding bikes and trikes, playing in the weeds, his wife napping.
There’s one video, for which I’ve seen the photographic accompaniment in one of our family albums—we are wearing our camera-best (my mother insisted we dress up for pictures around the house on weekends—my father was exempt since he was behind the camera), eating birthday cake in the living room, a room reserved for formally receiving guests and the altar to Buddha. The video is the same as the photograph, except it’s 10 minutes long. We chew cake, my father feeding Oliver, who is still considered a baby. The rest of us don’t make eye contact. When my mother speaks, it is to criticize how someone is eating, or how I am wearing my dress with an odd t-shirt underneath. Hers is a constant critical eye, the camera’s an un-discerning one rolling for 10 minutes from the tripod. A video portrait of the family.
As with many old photographs, I do not recall this day, or distinguish it from the others during that time. What I remember are the intense emotions of my girlhood, feeling scared and wanting to protect my siblings from our mother. When I watch myself in 1993 eating cake, it is like watching a young Vietnamese American girl eating cake; I do not recognize her as me, but know that she is me, that I was her, and in that moment, I realize that who I thought I was at that age is very different from who is eating cake onscreen. I’m seeing myself as I was then, for the first time, and it doesn’t align with my memory of who I was.
Funny how a watching a home video forces one to rewrite a memory.
* * *
Of the videos, the only other time the camera catches glimpses of my mother’s cruelty is on a weekend spent getting our portraits taken around the house by my father. Here, my mother has carefully dressed each of us, moving our bodies into position for the photograph. I’m not sure why my father has set the video camera on a tripod as he manually focuses his still camera lens on our posed bodies, but I’m grateful for this documentation of family documenting.
My mother jerks my body into an unmarked spot and I’m never smiling. My sister stands, waiting her turn for placement, scratching her nose. Only Oliver is running onscreen, then offscreen; he runs because he has not yet learned the consequences of disobedience. He runs because he is newly two years old, and because he can.
* * *
In Young Jean Lee’s play, Straight White Men, the cast of characters lists four male names, then Person in Charge 1 and Person in Charge 2, followed by some notes. These are the pages preceding Act One.
In these “Notes,” Lee instructs that Person in Charge 1 and 2 “should be played by gender-nonconforming performers (preferably of color)” and is open to the casting of a “cisgender performer who represents an especially marginalized group in your community (for example, Torres Strait Islander people in Australia),” and that “[i]n no case should actors be cast to perform identities other than their own.”
When Act One opens, it becomes apparent that the Persons in Charge are ushers during the “pre-show.” That is, the play begins once audience members enter the theater where “[l]oud hip-hop with sexually explicit lyrics by female rapper plays during the pre-show. It’s loud enough that people have to shout over it to be heard. The rumble of the bass makes the audience’s seat vibrate.”
As the audience members find their seats, they can see a typical American family room during Christmas-time. Person in Charge 1 and 2 are to listen for audience complaints about the music, offer earplugs, and “explain that it’s part of the show and [that the music] will end when the play starts”—but of course, the play has already begun. Once everyone is seated, Person in Charge 1 gives a curtain speech introducing their colleague and both of their pronouns (“they” and “them”), with grammatical examples on how to use they/them pronouns.
Following this, Person in Charge 1 addresses the loud music:
Before we begin the show, we would like to acknowledge that our pre-show music may have made some of you uncomfortable. And normally when you pay money, you can expect to feel comfortable. We are well aware that it can be upsetting when people create an environment that doesn’t take your needs into account.
As for those of you who liked or didn’t mind the music, please know that we deliberately set up our pre-show to cater to your experience. We wanted to make sure you’d feel welcome in this theater. Congratulations on your moment of privilege.
From here on out, everything will proceed as one might expect. All of the characters will be straight white men . . .
As I have not yet been able to see this play performed, the little theater of my mind is delighting in Lee’s subversion. The pre-show is the beginning of the show! The ushers have exciting outfits and are actors/characters!
After the curtain speech, Person in Charge 1 and 2 exit the stage, but then reenter, leading in two of the straight white male characters, carefully positioning each man, “posing him like an action figure,” according to his spot in the family room. Only here does Lee share identifying traits to these characters, in the italics alongside descriptions of the couch and lighting directions. The straight white men are not characters like Person in Charge 1 or 2—the men are objects, props. After the posing of men, the lights darken and the play continues and ends as any other play (the Persons in Charge do not return, except during transitions between acts, where they oversee the men’s costume changes and position them for the next act). A play within a play, and in my mind’s theater: a diorama.
What I return to as I reread this play over and over, is the first paragraph in the opening “Notes” section:
The pre-show music, curtain speech, and transition are an important part of this play. They should create a sense that the show is under the control of people who are not straight white men. Despite this framing, the play should be performed sincerely and without irony.
When I first read the play, I read it aloud with my fiancé and another couple (we were both interracial couples) in front of our campfire on the Olympic Peninsula. None of us could sincerely read our character’s lines without irony. The straight white male characters are three sons and their aging patriarch. Just about all of them, at all times, are awful to each other. Toxic masculinity scrolls across the stage of my mind’s theater.
I was confused when I felt empathy for the men by the end of the play. I had wanted condemn them and their actions, but found myself sympathizing with the struggles and anguish of Matt in particular, the middle-aged, upper-middle-class son who is the primary caregiver to their elderly father. Hadn’t Lee wanted to make middle-aged, upper-middle-class audience members uncomfortable with the loud music direction during the pre-show? Because she doesn’t care about their needs? I felt a rousing empowerment when reading about the Person in Charge characters, but what did it mean that I felt compassion for the white men whom they positioned on the stage?
* * *
Lee’s use of framing, of having the Persons in Charge move the white men into place approaches a kind of poetics. It is wordless, but in these actions and movements, hegemonic dynamics are reversed. With Straight White Men, Lee has written a story revolving around the most prominent member of our society: straight white men. But there are two levels of construction: Lee, a Korean American, who composed a play with gender-nonconforming performers who pose the white male action figures on the actual physical stage.
Throughout my K-12 education, I had been asked to read stories of straight white men and their families. Without being asked (who even thought to ask?), I translated these white stories in my mind’s theater so I could emotionally transport myself. I could see myself in the angsty, depressive teen of Holden Caulfield, but Holden Caulfield likely wouldn’t have seen himself in me—a Vietnamese American daughter struggling to protect her siblings from her former-refugee parents at home, while at school she struggled to field questions like, “Why is your nose so flat?”
At home, my mother placed clothespins over the bridge of our noses because she believed our doing so would give us “whiter” noses.
* * *
Straight White Men asks of me a radical empathy, which really should just be empathy without any modifiers, but in our current politically and socially divided times, many of us have been reserving empathy for members of our side. It is emotionally expensive to do otherwise.
But isn’t our side that of the whole human race, of earthlings? I don’t want to empathize with my Trump-supporting neighbors out here in East Tennessee, but I love how we all wave to each other when driving down the dirt road we live on, how we are warm, friendly, and chat easily at every encounter.
The night before I watched Ilya Kaminsky read at the literary festival, I sat on the dock beneath a popular oyster bar with my friend, writer Xuan Juliana Wang. Two early-twenty-something women were drunkenly having a conversation just above us. We glared at them until they noticed, then I forced my face to be a little friendlier.
“Are you guys from here?” they asked. We were polite, shared that we were in town as writers to read at the local literary festival. They got excited. “What are your books about?”
I began to describe Wang’s recently published collection of stories, Home Remedies, as concisely as I could. “Juliana’s book follows different Chinese millennials . . .” I began.
“Wait,” one of the women stopped me, “Could we relate to this?” she asked.
“Why wouldn’t you?” I asked in response.
“Because you said Chinese and we’re not Chinese,” she replied.
Juliana chimed in, “Millennial, you could relate to Millennials, right?”
“Yea, but we’re not Chinese.”
* * *
I believe that Young Jean Lee, the first Asian American woman to have a show on Broadway, could precisely envision her theater audience. The key is in the double framing of Straight White Men. Would straight white folks, or even early twenty-somethings from Virginia Beach willingly attend and relate to a play revolving around Asian American daughters and their elderly mother?
In closing, I’d like to offer two personal attempts at empathy, what I’m calling radical empathy, or empathy for someone you wouldn’t normally put yourself in the shoes of. These videos are neither poetry nor drama, but I think they are both, and something else entirely.
I studied my parents’ honeymoon in Hawaii from the home videos I digitized, sourced the outfits my mother wore, and collaborated with my fiancé, who shot the video. We drove around Oahu, retracing my parents’ steps.
Deja (Khoi) from Diana Khoi Nguyen on Vimeo.
When I first watched my parents in Hawaii, I found myself seeing my mother as my double (we look alike), of feeling compassion for these two semi-strangers who would go on to do terrible things to each other, and to their children—and of course, there’s the dramatic irony of knowing what their youngest, Oliver, will do to himself years later.
There’s much I cannot talk with my mother about, but wearing her outfits, moving as she moved, allowed me communicate with her asynchronously, wordlessly. It has been instrumental in my reconciliation of the past.
Green Note (Home Is the Dress I Wear) from Diana Khoi Nguyen on Vimeo.
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. She earned a BA in ...