Filed by Lance at 12:04 am under General, Love, Shameless Plugs, The Arts

It’s been really cool working with Chicago Dramatists the past two months. The best theater jobs have great benefits, and unlike other jobs, this one didn’t come with dental coverage or a 401(k), but I’ve gotten to meet at least 5 young playwrights without even trying, which is awesome. I was talking with one who’s also a William Carlos Williams fan, and telling her about The Meaning of Anthology. She brought up a question that I’ve tried to dodge or at least take my mind off of for a long time:

“Are you going to write it?”

One of my favorite things to do is to give a non-dramatic story to actors. The plot already exists, so actors don’t have to worry about both acting and inventing an arresting story, but the moment to moment isn’t set in stone, so what happens is necessarily organic and personal.

I’ve been struggling with this model for The Meaning of Anthology for a while. I writhe and squirm against the idea of “Lance wrote this.” No, I’m just here to help the actors tell this guy’s story, which he himself wrote down in more than a few places. But how do you take the entire life of a complicated man who spent it up to his elbows in amniotic fluid and his forgiving, tough-as-nails wife, and boil them down into a theatrical event with a coherent arc and action? How do I take the relationship that he and his wife shared, and focus it without turning it into an essay or a boring “and then this happened, isn’t that heavy?” show and tell? I want an organic, actor-centric process, but the lives of two people are too vast to apply my old tricks. There’s no rehearsal time (read: money) to just work and improv and work on this like I used to do with short stories and masks and puppets (they were short stories, after all), but form should follow function: WCW always believed that the thing itself — raw, ugly, and pure — was enough to be a poem.

That’s my answer.

Doc Williams loved flowers, from very early in his life:

“To touch a tree, to climb it especially, but just to know the flowers was all I wanted.”

-from The Autobiography

I was looking up the “language” of flowers, the Victorian ideas ascribed to every flower because, apparently, during the Victorian era, you couldn’t just tell a woman that you’re hopelessly in love with her, and that your love is bound to be unrequited. That’s improper. You had to send her a bouquet of yellow tulips and daffodils. Throw in a few helenium blossoms to represent your tears for good measure.

WCW wrote a long poem late in his life called Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, after he had been hospitalized for depression, had a heart attack or two, and was beginning to wonder if he didn’t deserve the love of his wife, Flossie, who stood by him through all of his infidelities… and everything else. Any guess what an Asphodel means? Flossie accepted the Pulitzer on WCW’s behalf only months after his death, and managed the publishing of his poems (some of which were about him stepping out with other women) until her death in 1976.

Asphodel expresses that “my regrets follow you to the grave.” Perfect.

It occurred to me as I was thinking about William Carlos Williams’ distrust of academics, surprise of (and delight in) their acceptance of his work, and his late collage style, that everything that’s going to be effective in making this an organic, “form follows function” piece has already been written, or at least expressed. One of Doc Williams’ most enduring poems is this one:

“This is Just to Say”

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

And then I read the Wikipedia article on it:

Written as though it were a note left on a refrigerator, Williams’ poem appears to the reader like a piece of found poetry. Metrically, the poem exhibits no regularity of stress or of syllable count. Except for lines two and five (each an iamb) and lines eight and nine (each an amphibrach), no two lines have the same metrical form. The consonance of the letters “Th” in lines two, three, and four, as well the consonance of the letter “F” in lines eight and nine, and the letter “S” in lines eleven and twelve give rise to a natural rhythm when the poem is read aloud. A conspicuous lack of punctuation contributes to the poem’s tonal ambiguity. While the second stanza begins with a conjunction, implying a connection to the first stanza, the third stanza is separated from the first two by the capitalized “Forgive.” [...] Visually speaking, the three little quatrains look alike; they have roughly the same physical shape. It is typography rather than any kind of phonemic recurrence that provides directions for the speaking voice (or for the eye that reads the lines silently). Additionally, this typographical structure influences any subsequent interpretation on the part of the reader.

There’s no better way to emphasize WCW’s beliefs about poetry and his mistrust of academics, even when they praised him and invited him to lecture, than seeing him scribbling a note to Flossie before dawn, his marriage in trouble, late for an appointment, ravenously hungry like he always was, apologizing to his wife for taking something of value from her, as with his repeated and blatant sexual thefts, creating something of lasting beauty and meaning out of a few refrigerated plums, and having some academic simultaneously blathering on about “typography rather than any kind of phonemic recurrence.” His earlier “imagistic” focus always juxtaposed different things, and morphed to
sudden
scenic
jumps
by the time he wrote Asphodel, which gave way to full-out collage for Paterson, his epic.

WCW made a lot out of “found” poems, like “This is Just to Say” and if form follows function, I can take what I know about WCW and Flossie, “find” the possibilities for collage and juxtaposition, and flesh out the story and arc I want to tell with real texts by him, by critics, by friends, by biographers, and give the actors something concrete — raw, ugly, and pure — to chew on, and let’s see if that isn’t enough to be a theater event.

As Doc said in Book I of Paterson, “–Say it, no ideas but in things–”!