Love this thread comparing and contrasting poetry and drama, so I’ll add a bit and hope to hear more of your thoughts, Roger.
Simple poetry/drama similarities are their words’ Feel (like tastes and textures in one’s mouth) and their Sound (a music we can count and measure).
Then a couple differences came to me, riffed off what you wrote (though, reasonably, you may wonder how I got there from your words): poetry’s more sight-dependent than drama. Now . . . someone somewhere who reads that Should say, “DUH, of course”--- OF COURSE poetry, like any unperform-intended genre, needs strong visual stuff. Mite this be the “body” Alison mentions??
And aiming at another obvious difference between poems and plays: try to bring back an actor’s words, re-feel or re-sound them, play with them, argue with them. Unless you’ve memorized the words, you cannot. In what ways does that demand that plays differ from poems? And how do these two differences raise the variables of performed poetry’s successes or failures? If you wish to wade there, Roger, great---my emo-brain’s urging me toward a bowl of “Tom and Jerry’s” ice cream! Yippy!
Chirs,
Judy
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