Joe,

You wrote a whole post to me with out once taunting my johnson. Thank you. I
feel like we're friends again!

Yes, I agree with what you say. But it's not very hard to agree with it. In
this idea of poets "playing themselves", I'm talking about something beyond
Grandma's tablecloth poets-- I'm talkiing about, pretty much, the whole
Self-Recycling Theatre Festival of Poetry.

This is how I see it: The "avant-gardists," who theorize about the "self"
and deploy Brechtian-type "V-effect" devices (as they are most lately
beginning to say, see Andrews, etc.) in their compositions, are no less
"playing themselves" than, say, Robert Bly or (to be more up to date) Jorie
Graham play themselves as "Actor-Poet": The performances are differently
choreographed, of course, but, at their conclusions, the actors meet with
the congratulating (or contemptuous) audience in the foyer.

And, lo, what is that on the foyer walls? Why, look, it's the actor's
photograph, the photo among the others of the company, the photograph (this
is part of the conceit, to remind you where you are) of the one who had just
been acting in the one-person play, only here sans the stage make-up. The
actor and the milling audience delight or bristle in each other's presence,
united by the shared and psychically comforting knowledge that what just
transpired in the punctiliously-lit room was merely a fabricatio, a hoax, of
sorts, the discrete and light-focused actor on stage "playing herself," with
well-practiced forms and modulations of "expression"-- expressions so wildly
ranging, in some cases, why, the audience begins to wonder if the actor has
a "Self"! Imagine...

But thank God, the official company photograph is there to return us to the
"real": Ron Silliman, Henry Gould, Candice Ward, Joseph Duemer, Alison
Croggon, Douglas Barbour, Kent Johnson when he writes fishing poems, and
etc, etc. ad infinitum., quite competent actors playing themselves, all,
caught within an ideological drama very much outside their "poet-selves", an
uncountably manifold-act extavaganza, inflected differently in each show at
each Broadway, each Off-Broadway, or each community theater venue, a drama
whose script is fractal and written beyond them, them who act out and
pretend they are not acting, or pretend they are only pretending that they
are not acting, it doesn't matter, even if a double-negative gets confused,
they are actors, always-already playing themselves, and their framed photos
are smiling or else earnest in the (as I said) foyer of the theater, built,
I forgot to say, with mostly anonymous patron money, directly or indirectly
disbursed by the State.

By the way, remember that I brought up Pessoa (no one responded, but par for
the course with that guy with the johnson): Here was a poet, Joe, who
understood theater in the deepest possible sense: What he understood, in a
kind of Hegelian intuitional rush, I'd say, is that Real Poetry is the real
life synthesis (yes, the Situationists were provisionally onto something,
even if the French CP betrayed in '68 and everyone forgot) that the
antithesis of staged and institutional Author Function drama/theatre makes
possible. Poetry (that poetry which moves into its real and unmediated
nature outside the circumscribed legality of hoaxed identities) is the one
art that can take the Spirit of Theater from the fabricated, from the
compromised and faked productional premise that poetry presently entertains,
to the absolute Real, turning poetry inside out, into a Real object, like a
Klein bottle, as I said of Gould's tentative rhymes, that "real" laws cannot
touch.

Save this post, Joe.

Kent




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