Po(i)sed for Action: At the Intersection of Poetry and Drama, Part IV
In the realm of repetition, recursion is a 'running back,' and permutation, one way out of several possible variations on how a set of things can be arranged.
In the past three posts, I've shared and examined various actions: attempting to repeat my brother Oliver's movements before and after his suicide, trying to follow my mother's footsteps during her honeymoon in Hawaii, and the positioning of bodies, to name a few.
What I haven't yet explored is the way in which language itself can contain an action or event.
After a recent meeting with writers, someone commented on how another writer spoke using only language that had been uttered in the room. "Like she couldn't formulate her thought," I believe was the follow-up comment.
What I thought: it's pretty difficult to communicate by restricting oneself to any specified set of words or language. My mind, recalling the meticulous curation and organization of found language, as in Srikanth Reddy's Voyager.
What I also knew: the writer being commented on had recently shared several traumatic life events she was dealing with.
I recalled the early days after learning my brother had died: at random moments with strangers, friends, and colleagues, I would utter various unsolicited permutations of the statement, "My brother is dead"—a statement which felt absurd in its reality. I could not fully fathom it, and in processing the significance of its denotative content, I took the statement apart before assembling it into a new one, as if this permutation could change or alter the truth. Of course, reordering words cannot bring someone back from the dead, or undo a terrible event.
But the process of limiting one's language, of utilizing a small set of permutations is a kind of net in which to safely engage with others—especially when one feels vulnerable. I cannot speak to what exactly the writer was doing when she spoke using reformulated words of the others in the room, but I can speak to my own process of linguistic permutation: I was stuck on the fact that "My brother is dead," and could not begin to continue any of the following auxiliary statements:
I feel _____________
The last time I talked to him was _____________
My mother _____________
My father _____________
My sister _____________
He was _____________
Now I _____________
We don't know _____________
We need to _____________
* * *
Lauren Yee's play, In a Word, swerves between the present and a moment two years previous, when Tristan, the young son of the main character, Fiona, disappeared from the backseat of their car during her brief time inside a gas station convenience store. The present day finds Fiona both on the anniversary of her son's presumed kidnapping, as well as her birthday. As Fiona's husband, Guy, attempts to move her beyond this traumatic event, the two engage in recursive dialogue which permutate over the course of the play, providing the audience with details and clues about the events leading up to their son's vanishing.
Before the play begins, I found the author's note to be particularly poignant in its poetics of objects and words:
In this play, objects have a life of their own. Objects come up again whether you want them to or not. Words also come up again, and sometimes the characters realize this or not. Time is very fluid.
Too often in my own writing life and in what I witness in a creative classroom are (1) recurring objects (unintentionally or not) and (2) recurring words, which the writer sometimes realizes (or doesn't).
Throughout the play, phrases and personal items repeat, though often with a new context, or in a different arrangement. It is as though the play's characters are trying to solve a Rubrik's cube—turning the set grid of eight different colors over and over, hoping the tiles can assemble into a desired order. Instead of colored tiles, they play with words:
GUY
Go to dinner,
Clean up,
Get some rest,
And the white box will be right where you left it.
Because you know, Andy once had a girlfriend who had a kid.
She cleaned house and it helped.
FIONA
I don't want to do what the girlfriend Andy once had once did.
I don't want to do what anyone Andy once did did.
At first, the mention of Andy and his one-time girlfriend seems random, but as they reemerge throughout the play, we learn that Fiona and Guy couldn't biologically conceive, that they adopted their son from Andy's former girlfriend.
In a later scene, Guy breaks the fourth wall by addressing Fiona's incomplete narrative and use of permutations:
GUY (to us)
Fiona has a story and usually it contains the words:
(FIONA pulls out a set of words and reads them, as she was read them dozens of times before, in various orders.)
FIONA
Love
Loved
My baby
Tristan
He was a
Is a
GUY
Twenty-four months of the same words, countless permutations, rotating through her vocabulary, but always the same—
FIONA
Good kid
Who we
Miss
Every
Day after day
GUY
And the funny thing is:
There's none of the words I remember her saying while he was here.
FIONA
Blink and you
Miss him
GUY
Not a one!
FIONA
All the time
He was—
(GUY adds a word of his own.)
GUY
Difficult.
(FIONA notices GUY for the first time.)
FIONA
What?
GUY
Difficult. He was all those things, but he was difficult, too.
FIONA (faux playful)
This is my story, Guy. I'm talking. Get your own story and stop butting into mine, okay?
Guy hopes to 'unstick' his wife from her recursive, permutating loop by balancing her selective narrative with a counterpoint. Guy's addition of "difficult" as a modifier for their lost son is also a dangerous one, as if he is saying that he misses his son, but not how difficult his son was. This is an important hinge in the play—Guy advances Fiona's recursive permutation into a new permutation in which the audience soon learns that their son had a difficult temperament, "maybe has Asperger's"; Fiona resists when a school principal suggests that her son be placed into a special needs classroom.
* * *
While most of my education has focused on preparing me for a life in poetry, I find myself drawn to the dramatic form. At first, I thought the ability to choreograph actions and movements rendered the genre unique, outside the possibilities of poetry. Then I thought that it was implied act of radical empathy for the words, movements—embodiment of the lives of others. In my recent thinking on recursion and permutation of language, I'm now nearly convinced that drama's distinguishing characteristic is that it involves the engagement or tension of at least two entities (whether through acts or speech, or combination of both)—whether between characters or between solo performer and (un)acknowledged audience. A play can be read, or witnessed, or both.
But then again, so can a poem.
To be honest, I'm not sure this four-part series ever meant to establish any hard lines around poetry and drama. Rather, I had hoped to share how thinking about performance, actions, and language in drama have informed my poetry practice, which now yields multi-modal work.
In the works of others whom I discuss, I share those works where I saw my actions, thoughts, and words normalized. Through crafted spaces, I was able to experience belonging; in reality, I felt alienated, alone in my grief.
It is my hope that you will read these plays and find parts of yourselves, as I have.
I'd like to end this series with a list of prompts, which is similar to my ritual after finishing a book. The worst, I think, is inaction, inertia.
Prompts:
- What would a radical eulogy look like for yourself or another?
- In whose steps might you radically follow, might you inhabit the other? (radical empathy)
- Whom will you pose for action?
- How can you be poised for action?
- What of the archive can you (re)turn to, revise? [revise, from Latin for 'to see again']
- What happens if you run back? Again and again? (recursion)
- Recognize a pattern, rearrange the pattern, throw a wrench into the pattern. (permutation)
- In thinking of the dead body as a stamp (gyotaku), what remains, is left behind? What of your mark upon the page? What of your mark?
Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. She earned a BA in ...