Hi George, Doug, all
By no means sick of hearing from you, George - It's got me thinking, this
difference between play and poem, since one of my obsessions (obviously, for
anyone who knows me) is their deep relatedness. I suppose a huge part of the
poetic in plays and theatre is gesture and body (literally, I mean), which
is so implicated in the language, and in the structures of speaking - the
idea of language as action itself, the knowledge that something will be said
in time and so must be graspable in time - which hardly eschews complexity
(thinking of Heiner Muller here, say) - but does spin it in subtly different
directions from poetry. Whereas in poems, the language carries the whole can
- although of course there are many kinds of poetry, so I'm generalising
wildly and unwisely. I know I want to pack a density and a quality of torque
or spin into language in poems in ways which wouldn't necessarily work in
theatrical language. But of course there are no border lines - at the same
time, the implication of the body in poems is crucial to me. (I can really
here only speak of my own practice of reading and writing) and that
dimension of orality...the differences seem to me to be clear, but, like
much to do with writing, almost impossible to define in any precise way.
All the best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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