Doug,
And there are those poets who read their own poetry terribly. Pinter
spent ten years acting before he wrote his first play, so reads his own
work, poetry or prose, extremely well. Eliot, for another example, not
so much.
Best,
George
Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Alison
>
> this is very interesting, & I end to agree. I think it interesting
> then that those who have seen the Pinter speech remarked on his own
> subtlety of performance of his own text (clearly mostly prose).
>
> I just wanted to add something brought u[ before, about how a poem
> works differently than does drama, yet is rooted in the body. How
> actors so often get a poem wrong, because they 'perform' it as if it
> were a dramatic text, when in fact it tends to be much subtler
> (quieter?). Of course, there is 'spoken word' which seems, quite often
> to me, to be more tuned to performance than to language.
>
> Doug
> On 9-Dec-05, at 12:48 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>>
> Douglas Barbour
> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
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>
> Christopher Dewdney
>
>
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George Hunka
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