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
>
>
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