{"id":386,"date":"2020-07-20T08:36:48","date_gmt":"2020-07-20T06:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/?p=386"},"modified":"2020-07-27T16:31:03","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T14:31:03","slug":"choosing-our-roles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/?p=386","title":{"rendered":"Choosing Our Roles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Albus McInerney edits a literary magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

Marianne, I feel, may have gone a little too far \u2013 and I lay at least some of the blame at Kim\u2019s door.<\/p>\n

Marianne has always been a maverick. In the mid-1980s, she was behind the infamous series of \u201creadings without words\u201d at the University of Montpellier. A decade later, she went even further, with her ground-breaking (literally) haiku installation, embedding lines of poetry in the foundations of multi-storey carparks \u2013 written in concrete and buried in buildings, these wistful meditations on the seasons of experience will never actually be read.<\/p>\n

Now, Marianne has composed a drama in iambic pentameters, that she wants us to make the centrepiece of the on line On Lines global poetry fest.<\/p>\n

And her verse drama isn\u2019t a paean to ethereal things, it\u2019s a murder mystery \u2013 a Poirot-esque whodunnit. It is so bizarrely pushing at the envelope of the accepted form that when she first outlined her proposal I thought she was pulling my leg \u2013 except that Marianne is not at all given to leg-pulling.<\/p>\n

Of course, the pandemic has led to a welcome a surge in \u2018creativity of necessity\u2019. In the poetry world, virtual readings, like premiership matches played to empty stadiums, have created a new way of enjoying traditional pursuits. The great technological and ecological re-set that we hope will accompany the return from lockdown to the new normal will be matched by similar recalibrations of existing practice in other walks of life \u2013 but I draw the line at Marianne\u2019s pentameters: verse drama is, well, it\u2019s perversely pass\u00e9. Even if we all go green, post-pandemic, we are not going to go pre-electric.<\/p>\n

I blame Kim because several weeks ago she shared with us the heartening news that a Hollywood film studio has paid her a substantial sum of money for an option on her long narrative poem about the journey made by her grandparents to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Kim\u2019s unlikely commercial good fortune has rather upended the normally sober disposition of our poetry coterie. It may well be the case that some of us (I mean Marianne) have contracted a fit of the Hollywood vapours as a result of Kim\u2019s soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture glimpse of global recognition.<\/p>\n

\u2018You\u2019ve written the whole thing?\u2019 Dimitri asked.<\/p>\n

\u2018Almost.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018And there are parts for how many voices?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Five,\u2019 Marianne said. \u2018Two female and three male.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018You have five actors in mind?\u2019 I asked.<\/p>\n

\u2018Albus,\u2019 Patrice chimed in from Hongkong. \u2018It\u2019s as though the piece were specially made for us!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018But we\u2019re not a theatre group!\u2019 I said. \u2018We are poets, not actors!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018There was a time,\u2019 Dimitri said, \u2018when this distinction was not generally recognized.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018By the ancient Greeks, for example,\u2019 Marianne said.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve noticed a thawing \u2013 I might even say a disconcerting<\/em> thawing \u2013 in the hitherto somewhat frosty relationship between Marianne and Dimitri.<\/p>\n

\u2018And the poets of the later Kamakura,\u2019 Kim added, in my view not entirely helpfully, \u2018often wrote with performance in mind \u2013 to be seen and heard rather than simply read. The poets themselves were regularly among the performers.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Marianne,\u2019 I asked, \u2018did you really have the On Lines board in mind when you created the piece?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Albus,\u2019 Marianne said, with the gravitas that comes most naturally to her when she is expressing a view that she believes is securely based in academic rigour, \u2018not only is this group well-suited to the task, it\u2019s dynamic is exquisitely reflected in the substance<\/em> of the work. Imagining us within the parameters of a verse drama is not only plausible, it\u2019s natural. We are on different continents but we speak as though there were no physical distance between us. We are <\/em>the drama.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Bravo!\u2019 Patrice said. I could feel the project taking flight as my enraptured colleagues pondered new artistic vistas.<\/p>\n

\u2018And the subject?\u2019 I asked Marianne.<\/p>\n

\u2018A small troupe of travelling players consider fundamental philosophical questions as they move through the world, until a dispute arises that pits the group against their leader.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018And you have already allocated the parts?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Oh,\u2019 Marianne said, \u2018I think they have allocated themselves.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Albus McInerney edits a literary magazine. Marianne, I feel, may have gone a little too far \u2013 and I lay at least some of the blame at Kim\u2019s door. Marianne has always been a maverick. In the mid-1980s, she was behind the infamous series of \u201creadings without words\u201d at the University of Montpellier. A decade […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":374,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[52,49,51,50],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/cropped-banner-K1-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":394,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions\/394"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}