Well, I found this:
"Theater - through the actor's technique, his art in which the living organism strives for higher motives - provides an opportunity for what could be called integration, the discarding of masks, the revealing of the real substance: a totality of physical and mental reactions. This opportunity must be treated in a disciplined manner, with a full awareness of the responsibilities it involves. Here we can see the theatre's therapeutic function for people in our present day civilization. It is true that the actor accomplishes this act, but he can only do so through an encounter with the spectator - intimately, visibly, not hiding behind a cameraman, wardrobe mistress, stage designer or make-up girl - in direct confrontation with him, and somehow " instead of" him. The actor's act - discarding half measures, revealing, opening up, emerging from himself as opposed to closing up - is an invitation to the spectator. This act could be compared to an act of the most deeply rooted,
genuine love between two human beings - this is just a comparison since we can only refer to this "emergence from oneself" through analogy. This act, paradoxical and borderline, we call a total act. In our opinion it epitomizes the actor's deepest calling. From 'Towards a Poor Theatre' by Grotowski[1]"
And if you think of poetry as an invitation to a reader and an encounter with the reader and understand poetry as not hiding behind ideology and as revealing and opening up something that manages to be there in spite of all the powers that want to suppress that then I think his idea of theater fits with my idea of poetry, He's just a lot more articulate and intelligent than I am..
MC Ward <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Where does Gratowsky (sp?) fit in?
Candice
--- joe green wrote:
> "This is excellently put. The solution, in
> political poetry, is
> Brechtian "alienation": objectivity, or what appears
> to
> be objectivity, where the reader expects pathos."
>
>
>
> Or pathos where the reader expects alienation and
> the usual effects.
>
> The point is that a good poem is what remains after
> encountering or
> ignoring or transcending all systems that exist to
> prevent its existence.
> As Eliot said, the poem is judged by every other
> poem out there.
> It can be a unique instance only because it
> encounters the uniqueness
> of everything else. That also means it can, more or
> less do exactly what
> another good poem does and in the same way if it is
> true that it can do
> so because the other poems exist in the same mode
> of overcoming – that
> those instances have not been exhausted. At a
> certain point a “sentimental”
> poem can be a real poem – overcoming ironies and so
> on – but only if all
> that resists it is somehow overcome.
>
>
>
> The poetry of sincerity is exhausted just because
> its opposite is never
> really encountered. The poetry of alienation has
> more going for it
> since alienation implies something that is seen as
> necessary to
> overcome. And there are emotions that are not
> banal – grief.
> But how to overcome just the usual utterance?
> Poetry that doesn’t want to encounter emotion and
> instead
> to claim that it exists in some abstract mode--such
> as
> LangPo does—and still wants to make a pretension to
> significance
> and meaning utterly baffles me. Why should I care
> when I could
> be reading King Lear?
>
> I love Ulysses and Finnegans Wake just because the
> more
> I read and discover the more I see to discover.
> I’m delighted with a “difficult” text but only if
> there is something there
> – not banal utterance tricked up a la mode.
>
> I love scholarship and have spent many days
> bellycrawling
> through libraries to, for example, discover if
> Shakespeare
> could have known what was meant by a “Republic” in
> the
> sense it was understood just 100 years later etc
> etc but nothing
> is more pointless than the classification and
> placing
> of poets in schools. Wordsworth, for example, a
> poet sincere.
> Matt Arnold reading him for beauty and rest.
>
>
> But you read his great poems and discover that
> a central trope is nothingness, desolation,
> impossibility of knowing,
> vacancy etc coupled with the great insistence that
> all of this can
> be overcome. This insistence continually betrayed.
> No closure. Not conscious irony but a real poet
> encountering
> the opposite of what he wants to mean and even doing
> so never really
> seeing that in his own poems.
>
>
>
> Look at the Ascent of the Alps..Book 6 of the
> Prelude.
>
> Wordsworth anticipates ascending to the top.
> Ah, that’s where the Sublime is!.
> And …then:
>
>
> "That from the torrent's further brink held forth
> Conspicuous invitation to ascend
> A lofty mountain. After brief delay
> Crossing the unbridged stream, that road we took,
> And clomb with eagerness, till anxious fears
> Intruded, for we failed to overtake
> Our comrades gone before. By fortunate chance,
> While every moment added doubt to doubt,
> A peasant met us, from whose mouth we learned
> That to the spot which had perplexed us first
> Wemust descend, and there should find the road,
> Which in the stony channel of the stream
> Lay a few steps, and then along its banks;
> And, that our future course, all plain to sight,
> Was downwards, with the current of that stream.
> Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
> For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
> We questioned him again, and yet again;
> But every word that from the peasant's lips
> Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
> Ended in this,--'that we had crossed the Alps'.
>
>
> Ha! So what do you do? He never noticed that he
> was at the top—missed the Sublime. Admits this….
>
> And then this attempt at recovery!
>
>
>
> Imagination--here the Power so called
> Through sad incompetence of human speech,
> That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
> Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
> At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
> Halted without an effort to break through;
> But to my conscious soul I now can say--
> "I recognise thy glory:" in such strength
> Of usurpation, when the light of sense …
>
>
> Lost, lonely, abyss, usurpation all words that again
> and again betray what he wants to assert.
>
> Then he descends and makes another recovery:
>
>
> The melancholy slackening that ensued
> Upon those tidings by the peasant given
> Was soon dislodged. Downwards we hurried fast,
> And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
> Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
> Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
> And with them did we journey several hours
> At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
> Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
> The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
> And in the narrow rent at every turn
> Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
> The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
> The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
> Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
> As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
> And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
> The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
> Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light--
> Were all like workings of one mind, the features
> Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
> Characters of the great Apocalypse,
> The types and symbols of Eternity,
> Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
> Whoa! He really needed that! And on and
> on – revisions of the revisions…always wanting that
> Eternity…language always undercutting it… but
> something new emerges.
>
> The Right Stuff.
>
>
>
>
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