The Dressing

On May 4, 2008, the Dresser ventured out to Mt Rainier, Maryland, to see Jacqueline Lawton's new play Mad Breed, commissioned, developed, and produced by Active Cultures Theatre in their Maryland Focus Initiative. The Dresser was lured by the subject matter which centers around the family of John Wilkes Booth when Booth was just turning thirteen (more on this interest later) and by the new play's able director Juanita Rockwell, who happens to be a good friend of this sassy critic (full disclosure here).

EXPLORING HISTORIC & IMAGINED TERRITORY

What the Dresser hadn't been prepared for was that Joe's Movement Emporium, the venue of the play, is only a few blocks around the corner from Thomas Stone Elementary School, where the Dresser attended part of third and all fourth grades. She hadn't been on that section of 34th Street since she was a little girl and wow, that long, hilly street of charming little bungalows looked waay smaller now versus when she walked it at ages eight and nine from Rhode Island Avenue to the school. The Dresser wonders if critics are influenced by these personal encounters on the way to review a new production. If so, the Dresser walked into Joe's feeling like she belonged in the neighborhood.

Another aspect of what the Dresser liked about this play is that it was encouraged by the Active Cultures Theatre artistic director Mary Resing to explore an historic subject that plays into the politics about how people of diverse backgrounds and cultures get along today. Mad Breed is about Maryland's racial past. The story focuses on John Wilkes' (or Wilkes as he preferred to be called) brother Edwin who falls in love with the black woman Adah Francois. The character of Francois is based on the legendary actor and poet Adah Isaacs Menken. Although Menken knew Edwin Booth as a fellow Thespian, the love story is Lawton's invention.

Still, that doesn't subtract from how unconventional the family of Wilkes was in real life and the play reflects this. Junius Brutus Booth, the renowned actor and patriarch whom we do not see on stage in Mad Breed but hear a lot about, is about to marry the mother of their ten children. (Wilkes is their ninth child.) This marriage is occurring 25 years after Junius eloped with Mary Ann Holmes to Maryland and abandoned his first wife and their only child in London. In Bel Air, MD, Junius and Mary Ann raised their brood on an organic farm, eating vegetarian meals, refusing to allow animals to be killed, and inviting their slaves to their dinner table. The Dresser hadn't known all this about the family of Lincoln's assassin and was left wondering how could such a well-raised son in a family who didn't believe in killing or slavery murder a president upholding the tenets of freedom and equality for all men?

In the middle of writing this review, the Dresser met in Annapolis with some poets who are long time pals of hers to celebrate her birthday and that of Jim Beall's. In the course of swapping stories about what each of us were doing lately, the subject of the Booth family arose. Jim Beall said, "Have you heard my story about my distant relative John Beall who was executed for being a Confederate spy?" "Well, no," said the Dresser, "tell me more." It turns out that John Wilkes Booth and John Beall were fast friends ever since they attended the hanging of the militant Abolitionist John Brown, that Booth pleaded with Lincoln to pardon his friend Beall, believed that Lincoln was going to grant that pardon and when he didn't, Booth carried out the assassination. Of course the story is more complicated than this, but this aspect of why Booth killed Lincoln has received considerable press in recent times.

WHOSE STORY IS THIS?

What Mad Breed does is raise questions about who John Wilkes Booth was and how he could be such a misfit in his family that was not like any others of that time. To be fair though, the Dresser needs to reiterate that the play centers on Edwin Booth and his deep love for a black woman playwright and actor. Furthermore, Wilkes is just turning thirteen and he is full of himself, having just joined a secret society. Oops, the Dresser is still wandering into that will-the-real-John-Wilkes-Booth-please-stand-up grind.

Without much trouble to substantiate this, one could say Mad Breed is really the story of Adah Francois. Anastasia (Stacey) Wilson cuts a commanding figure as Adah. As the play opens, the stage divides between Edwin (Danny Gavigan) and Adah who occupy separate times and places. Edwin implores Adah in a letter to come to him in his hour of need. He is about to play Shakespeare's Hamlet, a role he has long coveted, and he is beside himself given what his brother has done. Adah, who has long ago fled the United States for England, is well established and respected, something she could never hope for in the U.S. When the next scene occurs, we see Adah being booted out of the minstrel show she has been the playwright for as well as an actor. More interestingly she had been doing this as a man, but her colleague (played by Lee Liebeskind) has outed her accidentally and the show is in danger of being closed down by the authorities since women were prohibited from engaging in such activities. So Adah has to run and decides to take a train to New York. However, she has missed the last train and this is how she meets Edwin who takes her home to his father's farm, promising he will take this stranger whom he believes is a man back to the train the next day. Almost immediately the chemistry occurs between Edwin and this stranger and when he finds out she is a woman, he is forever hooked.

The tension of this play revolves around this forbidden white-black relationship for numerous reasons. Edwin's sister Asia (Amanda Thickpenny) has a frivolous friend named Blanche (Kristen Egermeier) who has marked Edwin for marriage though he knows nothing about this. Asia, although being pursued by Edwin's friend John Sleeper Clarke (also played by Lee Liebeskind), takes an immediate romantic liking to the stranger and, of course, is upset to find out that he is a she. Wilkes is vindictively angry with Edwin for falling for a "darkey" and later he apologizes for that disparaging label, but only because Asia insists and because Wilkes at heart is a gentleman doing what is politic. What redeems Adah for everyone is that she creates a minstrel show entertainment for the wedding of the senior Booths but then in seeing it rehearsed realizes she is disparaging "Negroes" and herself.

Here the Dresser will pause to say that the stick-in-memory minstrel show performance reminded the Dresser of Spike Lee's film Bamboozled and was not surprised to see later in the program notes that Lee's film was one of the resources that inspired Mad Breed.

Continue reading "Mad Breed: A View of a Teenaged John Wilkes Booth" »

The Dresser hesitates to say any musical group could sound like angels (after all, doesn't one have to be dead to know this sound?) but because she now has a rudimentary understanding of baroque versus standard tuning thanks to her friend Janet Peachey, the Dresser will venture into deep waters to make this assertion.

PERFECT PITCH BAROQUE

On May 2, 2008, American Opera Theater, currently in residence at Georgetown University, presented the first fully staged North American production of David and Jonathas by Marc-Antoine Charpentier with libretto by Père François Bretonneau. The work, originally interwoven with a spoken drama in Latin entitled Saul by Père Etienne Chamillard and first performed in 1688 for the Jesuit Le College Louis-le-grand in Paris, tells the Biblical love story between David (slayer of Goliath and Bathsheba wife-stealer) and Jonathan, son of King Saul of Israel.

The driving force behind American Opera Theater, originally named Ignoti Dei Opera, is Timothy Nelson who is the AOT artistic director. Nelson's production cuts out the spoken drama to provide a sung-through work that is enlivened by appealing tableau vivant staging and semi-dance/body movement styling and heavenly musical interludes on period instruments.

Now, back to this deep-water assertion about the music of angels. Janet's theory, which she explained to me mathematically (starting with Pythagoras' two-to-one tuning theory that involves octaves), boils down to this: modern tuning is slightly flat, but eventually that flatness is compensated for in Pythagoras' math. [NOTE: See Janet Peachey's comment below. While modern tuning is slightly flat, baroque tuning adheres to what might be heard as pure intervals versus the modern tuning which offers tempered intervals of tone.] Baroque tuning achieves a perfection of sound by avoiding certain keys and therefore sounds more harmonious than standard tuning. However, music created by baroque "perfect pitch" tuning is much more limited than music played with the standard "relative pitch" tuning.

In addition to this specialized tuning, set on the key of A at 415 cycles per second (we talked to baroque violinist Andrew Fouts who confirmed this lower pitch tuning versus the A440 tuning used in most modern concert tunings), the 230-seat Gonda Theatre in the Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown University provided an intimacy that made the Dresser and her friend feel bathed in the music in a way that was energizing and what the Dresser would call healing. This was especially apparent at the end of the opera when the full chorus, divided in half, sang from both sides at the back of the auditorium.

SINGING TRANCENDING GENDER

To take one's breath away (even as it was restored by the perfect-pitch tuning and acoustically satisfying Gonda Theatre) was the singing of countertenor Brian Cummings as David and soprano Rebecca Duren as Jonathas. Nelson has emphasized the sensual and sexual side of this story, which may not have had this gay relationship interpretation when Charpentier and Bretonneau presented this piece for the Parisian Jesuits. Dare the Dresser mention that in Charpentier's day, countertenor roles were usually roles for castrati, which probably put another slant on male relationships that we don't think about today. For the Dresser as she watched the barefooted cast, the figures of Cummings (boyish, slim, and tall) and Duren (childishly androgynous and petite) in combination with their high-pitched voices provided a sexual sublimeness that transcended gender. In short, the Dresser didn't care if these were two male characters or a mix of male and females actors playing males. The love story moved above the who's-who body orientation.

The Dresser should also pause here to note that she has been swept up before in the heavenly sound of baroque opera such as hearing Ann Hoyt sing Venus in John Blow's Venus and Adonis with the Rebel Baroque Orchestra, but at that time she didn't have the benefit of Janet Peachey's tutorial about what makes baroque music, especially that music played by period instruments, so appealing. As it turns out, the Dresser engaged in conversation last night with John Moran, a Rebel viola da gamba musician, who attended David and Jonathas, to not only witness this fine production but to also hear his wife violinist Risa Browder. The world of early and baroque music is an awesome but small community.

MORE NOTABLES

Craig Lemming as the Philistine general Joabel delivered a notable singing and acting performance. Joabel's hatred against Saul, which David did not share, was palpably felt by Lemming's performance. Lemming as Joabel vented this hatred to David, practically spitting his venom. Particularly pleasing was the pastoral scene that turned love to violent capture and enslavement. The Petit Choeur of Bonnie McNaughton, Matthew Heil, Kristen Dubenion-Smith (she also gave an outstanding delivery of La Pythonisse, the witch of Endor who in the Prologue forecasts Saul's demise and the death of his son Jonathas) was led in the pastoral scene by Emily Noel and Colin Levin (he also played the menacing Ombre de Samuel--the ghost of Samuel, the Biblical storyteller responsible for the story of David and Jonathas). [NOTE: Correction was made here about who led the pastoral scene.] The Dresser also loved the Petit Choeur's skillful fight/dance scene done with red flags.

Continue reading "The Angelic Voices of David and Jonathas" »

In the Chinese Year of the Rat, Scena Theatre has premiered on April 14, 2008, Otho Eskin's adaptation of Albert Camus' most popular novel The Plague. While the Dresser does not wish to negate the generally shared idea that the plague-ridden rats of Scena's current offering in their Nouvelle Vague 20th Anniversary Season are horrifically bad, she will say that a Rat Year is a time of hard work and renewal and that this play adaptation speaks admirably to both hard work and renewal.

How so?

RATS AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

Before the Dresser can talk about what the playwright and co-directors Elle Wilhite (Ms. Wilhite is also an actor and she played Inez in Scena's recent production of No Exit) and Robert McNamara have done to develop this work for the stage, some background information is necessary. Despite the agreement among fans of Camus that La Peste (The Plague) is his most accessible novel, this existential classic about the Algerian town of Oran under lockdown after a plethora rats turn up dead everywhere and then people start dying offers multiple interpretations.

Kim Curtis (Monsieur Othon), Karen O'Conell, Michael Vitaly Sazonaov (Dr. Rieux)





It is a grim allegory about the human condition--who's morally good or bad, who's physically weak or strong, who's civically helpful or destructive. In keeping with the time during which Camus wrote this work (World War II and the German occupation), the novel, published in 1947, has been read as a metaphorical statement of the French resistance to the Nazi occupation. On top of these layers, which seem straightforward by comparison, is the philosophic edge of the absurd dealing with things over which we have no control (death and pestilence, for example).

And two more things about the location of this story and the characters. Camus' Oran is a town where nothing happens, nothing grows like trees or flowers. Just a dusty town where "even love is banal." This is important to know because how people change under the siege of bubonic plague is what Camus was interested in studying. Also and unlike most small theater productions, there are fourteen actors in the cast and some play multiple roles.

Considering the complexity of the work and its large role call of characters, this is not what the Dresser would call an easy novel to adapt to the stage.

So how has the adaptation been done?

OF RAT SYMPHONY AND COFFIN BALLET

Eskin has boiled the five-part novel (about 320 pages) down to an intermission-less one-and-half hour play. The Dresser believes the strategy of no intermission essential to building the tension of the play adaptation. The playwright has also reassigned some of the didactic dialogue from Doctor Rieux, who is the narrator of the story, to Jean Tarrou, a philosophic outsider who seems in many respects to mirror Albert Camus. As directors, Wilhite and McNamara have created what McNamara calls a "corps de ballet" having the cast effect stylized movements backed up by a sound track that McNamara calls the "rat symphony."
The cast interacts with telephone-booth-sized cubes. Does everyone know what a telephone booth looks like since the cell phone has rendered these edifices unnecessary? Segments of the cast climb into these cubes while others move the occupied structures around. Designed and built by set designer Leon Weibers, the cubes look like display cabinets or Sleeping Beauty's glass casket upended. Without the constant repositioning of the cubes filled with the stop action players (think of mannequins in a department store window), the Dresser thinks this play would not offer enough emotional variety to keep the audience engaged.

Why?

The news keeps getting worse. First there are the dead rats, then people start dying and no one wants to admit a plague is happening much less do anything to counteract it. Soon the officials wake up and the town is gated so no one can leave and no one else can enter. The town's preacher says the plague was brought on by the sins of the town and later after a child dies an agonizing death, the preacher recants and says this is a test of faith. A criminal who otherwise would have been arrested is now free to operate a service for people who want to leave the quarantined town. The only ray of hope is that Dr. Rieux's colleague Dr. Castel will find a serum to counteract the epidemic and that Joseph Grand, a quirky friend of Dr. Rieux's, will make progress and finish his novel.

Samantha Merrick and Joe Lewis (Joseph Grand)

When the story ends, the plague has ended, but Dr. Rieux knows and says that plague just goes into hiding.

Continue reading "Camus' The Plague as Coffin Ballet" »

Opera Alterna, a spanking new opera company, opened Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas on March 28, 2008, as it's first production. Using the intimate Callan Theatre of Catholic University of America's Hartke Theatre building, this professional opera theater company is presenting young talent predominately associated with CUA, but also Maryland Opera Studio of the University of Maryland. The goal of Artistic Director Jay D. Brock
is to "bring provocative and intimate opera to new audiences." Bravo, shouts the Dresser.

LINING UP FOR OPERA

Imagine her delight, laced with a little frisson of fear, when she arrived at the Callan to see a line of people, some of whom were being told to wait because they were not sure there were enough seats for everyone. Yes, indeed this theater is intimate--only 60 seats. The Dresser is sure that among her readership who attend operas by small companies that all will agree that a respectable showing is twenty-five to thirty people.

To sum up quickly, the story of Dido and Aeneas follows these events. Aeneas arrives in Carthage and courts Dido. She falls for him, but he abandons her to fulfill his destiny in Italy. Heartbroken, she commits suicide. Purcell modeled his opera on John Blow's masque (also called a semi-opera) Venus and Adonis.

What's different about Brock's approach to opera is that he comes from a theater background. That was apparent in how the cast moved and communicated with each other and from what vantage point the players performed. While Purcell's opera has dance numbers, opera aficionados expect Dido and Aeneas to be a static work in which the singers stand and sing but do not do much moving.

UPPING THE EMOTIONAL RESPONSE

Perhaps some of the standard audience expectation regarding this first English opera that premiered in 1689 has to do with Nahum Tate's libretto for Dido and Aeneas. Tate based his libretto on Book Four of Virgil's The Aeneid. Critics complain that Tate and Purcell concentrated too much on making the libretto short and thereby lost important emotional content by the main characters. The key scene from Brock's production that will forever be etched in the Dresser's memory is Dido (as sung by Sarah Phillipa) chasing Aeneas (Michael Weinberg) with her suicide knife.

Talk about up close and personal. The Dresser scooted to the edge of her seat as Phillipa-cum-Dido breezed by as she backed Weinberg-cum-Aeneas into the black curtains at one end of the staging area. For a split second, the Dresser believed an intervention was needed against a diva out of control. What played oddly against the Dresser's adrenalin rush was seeing Dido "slash" her wrist and from her wrist fell a ribbon of red paper representing blood. So in that succession of actions, the audience experienced real-time danger (Dido threatening to knife Aeneas in the gut) and theatrical bloodletting that smacked of another era, maybe as old as the opera itself.

Other theatrically inventive scenes included the "shadow puppet" lovemaking of Dido and Aeneas (the couple interact behind a curtain with back-lighting making them appear as shadows on the curtains) and the witches' dance auguring trouble for the lovers. Brock placed a circle on the floor not far from the feet of audience members including the Dresser. The witches annotated the magic circle by chalking it with various symbols. The lead witch used a stick to inscribe the circumference of the circle and to beat an incantation alive. The witches were wild and primal in bare feet. What the Dresser understands is that while Blow's Venus and Adonis had gods manipulating their fate, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas had witches and that witches are an English preference over gods.

Continue reading "The Intimacy of Dido & Aeneas" »

Because this is the sixth post on the Split This Rock Poetry Festival, the Dresser imagines that her readership, especially those who are infrequent to the Dressing, might be thinking that the Dresser has devolved into rant and ranting, albeit poetic rant. Yes, the Dresser is now into rant. Having run the gantlet of social action teachings of This Rock, the Dresser is prepared now to discuss rant in a way she never imagined and that is because she attended the March 22, 2008, panel discussion on "Poetry, Politics, and the Rant" moderated by Jose Gouveia

with Alicia Ostriker, Martin Espada, and Colorado T. Sky.

THE SKID MARKS

Let's get basic before getting bombastic. In the world of poetry, what is rant?

Martin Espada said usually rant is a "put down--as in, oh, that's a rant." Then Espada added a string of descriptors: polemic, rhetoric, didactic, and the ultimate current day insult (if you are a poet) sentimental. To add more wallop to this punch, he said the rant was about "avoidance of content." Continuing, he said the tone of the rant is angry and barely controlled; sometimes it is out of control. Espada's definition of rant (maybe his definition is a rant) includes: strong rhythm, musical qualities, direct and open expression, explicit language, urgency, sometimes lacking a message, sometimes a call to action, sometimes a poem of persuasion.

In her opening remarks, Alicia Ostriker said, "political poets are often accused of preaching to the choir, but that I try to keep in mind what Blake says: 'When I tell any Truth, it is not to convince those who do not know it but to encourage those who do.' All of us tend to fall into discouragement and need all the help we can get to stay hopeful." Ostriker emphasized that the rant is not an exchange of ideas. The rant is a way to find community and overcome loneliness.

Colorado Sky said, "Rants are pathetic. They have to be." He maintained nevertheless that a rant, a form of emotional poetry, must have an ethical foundation. From the "furnace of emotion comes the anvil of the moment."

Sky pointed to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Here are the first three stanzas of section 1 of Whitman's seminal poem that changed the landscape of American poetry.

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, 
And what I assume you shall assume, 
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, 
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their 
parents the same, 
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, 
Hoping to cease not till death.

Sky's challenge to the rant writer is "What kind of skid mark are you going to leave on the way out?" After all, he said, "It is not who you are but what you do that will be remembered." Sky also spoke about rants containing objection and affirmation. Here the Dresser began thinking about call and response used in an evangelistic church that goes something like this.

The Preacher: You are all sinners. The Congregation: Amen.
The Preacher: You disrespect your father. The Congregation: Amen.
The Preacher: You patronize your mother. The Congregation: Amen.
The Preacher: Now is the time to confess your sins. The Congregation: Hallelujah!

Is this an exchange of ideas? No, but it is way to find community as Ostriker suggested.

FREE DEATH AND HAIKUS

Sky also said he likes when a rant sneaks up on you, such that you don't know the poem is a rant until you are well along in reading it. He referred to William Blake and "Transverse City," a rock song by Warren Zevon. Here are the first two stanzas of Zevon's offbeat song.

Told my little Pollyanna
there's a place for you and me
we'll go down to Transverse City
life is cheap and death is free

Past the condensation silos
past the all-night trauma stand
we'll be there before tomorrow
Pollyanna, take my hand.

He said not all rants are loud and that they can be subtle. Even short. To prove his point, he offered his haiku.

History repeats
Itself. It has to
because people
don't listen.

RANTS OF HELL AND CURSE

Espada said political poets are subversives and it is their job to subvert language. He said Pablo Neruda does this in his poem "General Franco in Hell." Espada said this poem is grounded in images and all five senses. The poem is dreamlike and immediate and it avoids the pitfall of vagueness and generalities (the characteristics of a poorly written rant). Here's the first stanza of that potent and ranting poem.

Evil one, neither fire nor hot vinegar
in a nest of volcanic witches, nor devouring ice,
nor the putrid turtle that barking and weeping
with the voice of dead woman scratches your belly
seeking a wedding ring and the toy of a slaughtered child,
will be for you anything but a dark demolished door.

Read the poem in full (the English translation is by Richard Schaaf) set with images on the blog Stregoneria.

Continue reading "Split This Rock--On Rant" »

In case this is the first Split this Rock post that you, Dear Reader, are dipping into, the Dresser will assert her excitement and wonder about the holistic menu of choices that included sessions on yoga, disability lit, social action theater, teaching poetry in prisons, peer writing workshops, archiving poetic history, poetry that works through crisis whether it be domestic, international, natural disasters, medical, war. Split This Rock Poetry Festival programs reached out to a broad-spectrum adult audience with special programs for children at various age levels.

In this post, the Dresser will look at Kim Robert's walking tour "The 'Harlem' Renaissance in Washington;" the panel discussion by Grace Cavalieri, Brian De Shazor, and Jennifer King on preserving poetic history; a partial glimpse at Francesco Levato's film festival selections, and photos from various readings.

LOOKING FOR LANGSTON

At 9 am in the morning, about 20 people assembled at the corner of 14th and U Streets Northwest
to go on a fourteen-stop tour of Kim Roberts' "'Harlem' Renaissance in Washington." Poet and poetry entrepreneur Kim Roberts has developed a series of DC walking tours and is a sought after resource guide. For example, the DC Humanities asked Roberts to develop a Zora Neale Hurston walking tour to coincide with the 2007 Big Read, a nationwide reading project promoting in 2007 Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Many of the stops along the Hurston tour coincide with the Harlem Renaissance in DC tour. The Dresser will not attempt to recreate the tour here, but rather will provide some photos with a bit of text to give you the flavor of what was seen and heard. One book to put on your reading list to help you understand the importance of the artists who lived and worked in DC, before they went to New York and became associated with the Harlem Renaissance is Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro.

The Dresser was excited to learn that The Saturday Nighters Club, a literary salon hosted by poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, happened at 1461 S Street NW. (See the blue building pictured below.) This is the street that the Dresser worked out page layout details of many Word Works books with book design artist Janice Olson who once lived at 1404 S. Poets who came to Johnson's house included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, May Miller Sullivan, Jesse Redmon Fauset.

Fauset who rented a house at 1812 13th Street Northwest, was a teacher of French and Latin at M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School), and subsequently, the literary editor of The Crisis, the NAACP magazine. Fauset, known for her coming-of-age novel Plum Bun and touted as the most prolific woman writer of the Harlem Renaissance, served as a mentor to many of the other Harlem Renaissance writers.

The Whitelaw Hotel at 13th and T Streets Northwest was DC's only first-class hotel and apartment house for African American visitors and residents for many years. Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Joe Louis are among those icons who stayed or lived in this building.

Other stops on the tour that excited the Dresser were the Richard Bruce Nugent House--Nugent was the first person to publish African American gay fiction; Duke Ellington's house where he was raised and started his first two bands; the Thurgood Marshall Center for Service and Heritage--the old 12th St Y, former residence of Langston Hughes, and Split This Rock venue (Crip Poetry was held inside this building); and the True Reformer's Hall (12th & U Streets NW)--site of Duke Ellington's first paid, professional gig.

Two of three pianos in the Shaw Heritage Room of Thurgood Marshall Center

The Dresser dips her hat low to Kim Roberts for another Split This Rock hurrah to the body (and mind). The Dresser who spends way too much time at her computer keyboard loved talking about poets in a stroll around the streets of DC!

INTO THE ARCHIVAL BOXES: RADIO & UNIVERSITY

Grace Cavalieri organized the panel "Vaulting History" that brought together archivists Brian De Shazor, Director of Pacifica Radio Programs, and Jennifer King of George Washington University's Special Collections.

Cavalieri, who was a founding staff of WPFW-FM in Washington, DC and who created and continues to produce "The Poet and the Poem,"
radio shows that are now hosted from the Library of Congress but for over twenty years aired on WPFW-FM, has been instrumental in encouraging poets to become part of the Washington Writer's Archive in the GWU Special Collections by donating their journals, books, and memorabilia to this expanding collection. The Dresser notes here that poet and GWU professor David McAleavey was instrumental in establishing the GWU Washington Writer's Archive in 1986.

Cavalieri deferred to poet and statesman Archibald MacLeish to understand the early relationship between radio and poetry. MacLeish said, "Poetry is an art without audience while radio is an audience without art." King at GWU has the entire series of Cavalieri's "The Poet and the Poem" which began in 1976 and they are available to the public. Cavalieri's recordings range from little known local poets who called into the radio program while it was on the air to internationally known poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka.

De Shazor, who works from the founding Pacifica Radio offices in North Hollywood, California, brought segments from his show "From the Vault" that highlighted historic recordings made at KPFA-FM. Pacifica archives contain rare recordings from such people as Coretta King speaking after her husband the Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated. Audience members were invited to search the Pacifica archives online.

POETRY IN MOTION: MEETING THE UNEXPECTED

The Dresser tends not to be a night owl. She was born early in the morning and her biorhythms tend toward sun-is-up-get-up. However, she met Francesco Levato just after the walking tour with Kim Roberts and he said he was about to attend his first Split This Rock event, that he had been delayed by snow in leaving Chicago where he is Executive Director of The Poetry Center of Chicago. Therefore, the Dresser decided if he took all that trouble to get to DC to show some of his films and films by other people that she should make a reasonable effort to attend that event. And besides, after she heard Dennis Brutus talk about being in prison splitting rocks, she was all keyed up anyway so she and a bunch of poets took the subway back to the Langston Room at Busboys and Poets.

Continue reading "Split This Rock--The Historical & the Moving" »

The final activity of Split This Rock Poetry Festival was a silent march from George Washington University's Marvin Center to LaFayette Park across from the White House so that poets could contribute twelve-word-maximum lines of poetry to a collaborative collage poem called a Cento.






The youngest poet who unabashedly delivered his line into the mic from the arms of his mother was five years old. His poet mom said he created his line of poetry himself.

An unrelated poet coming many poets after the child poet delivered this line, "I dream of a child who will ask, 'Mother, what was war?'"

Dennis Brutus stood with the crowd listening intently. Later, in a filmed interview he said he hoped to see poets influencing others with emotional responses to the war.


































Here are images from that closing Split This Rock ceremony.

The Split This Rock Poetry Festival has been an experience of the body.

For the Dresser, what made this conference coalesce to a degree that no other activity, however vibrant, sensitive and mind-expanding, was hearing South African poet Dennis Brutus speak.

Brutus, who won the Langston Hughes Award in 1987 and was the first non-African American to receive that award, brought home what the Split This Rock Festival title means in its most brutal human experience.
Brutus did this by describing his years on Robben Island where he was imprisoned along with Nelson Mandela. In this maximum-security prison, he was forced to split rocks until the rocks became gravel. His hands became a mass of blisters on top of blisters but he said he was spared the harder work of digging out rocks from the limestone quarry (Mandela was not) because Brutus who had been shot by South African secret police had suffered a "through and through wound" and was not strong enough for the quarry work.

From the podium, Brutus suggested that what Americans need to do is rise above the certainty of the proverbial "Death and Taxes" credo that we live by. How? By not paying our taxes to fund the war in Iraq. He urged Americans to not be complicit in supporting atrocities done in the name of all Americans. The Dresser who is native of the Washington, DC area doubts that most of us are strong enough to quarry the rocks of political activism that would involve going to prison because we will not support this unjust war. However, what Brutus has said has moved the Dresser, who believes in universal truths, peace and social justice, to go down to the White House today and join Sarah Browning to express poetically a protest against the five years of American involvement in an unjust war waged against the people of Iraq.

What Sarah Browning and her army of volunteers has achieved with Split This Rock is monumental on all levels. Not only did the Festival provide a platform of learning and ways to engage in social action, but it was also the best administered program that the Dresser has ever take part in. No one lost a beat. Some people may not have been able to show up for key speaking appointments and activities might not have happened right on time, but there was always a plan b and plan c to fill in the gaps. Participants like the Dresser were much appreciative that events didn't always start on time because it allowed stragglers to get there without missing anything or prompt ones to talk to the participants waiting who themselves were as interesting as the featured speakers. Hats off to Sarah (author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden) who was awarded a bottle of whiskey and bouquet of flowers at the Saturday night reading.

[Stay tuned for a larger report on Split this Rock that will include reviews of Kim Robert's walking tour "The 'Harlem' Renaissance in Washington;" the panel discussion by Jose Gouveia, Martin Espada, Alicia Ostriker, and Colorado T. Sky on "Poetry, Politics, and the Rant;" the panel discussion by Grace Cavalieri, Brian De Shazor, and Jennifer King on preserving poetic history; and a partial glimpse at Francesco Levato's film festival selections.]

Like any conference worth the time it takes to be there and participate in, Split This Rock Poetry Festival had more activities scheduled for each time period than one could attend. The Dresser made her selections based on what she will call "otherness." Although otherness is not easily defined, the Dresser will say that her choice of otherness relates to what is not typically a standard track for a poetry conference that usually would concentrate on activities for the mind and intellect. For the three workshop periods of March 21, the Dresser chose "Yogic Path to Poetry and Conscious Action," "Crip Poetry: A Culture of Disability, Justice and Art," and "Outcry for Justice--The Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti for the 21st Century." Each of these sessions involved the body, including exercise, so called physical fitness, and acting.

YOGA AND POETRY

Poets belong to the fringe--American poets are outsiders looking in, both in at themselves and in on a culture that does not value their writerly talents. In "Yogic Path to Poetry and Conscious Action," Jeff Davis asked, "What are poets for in a destitute time and what does yoga have to do with this?"

Since 1972, the Dresser has been practicing either Hatha or Anusara Yoga and has discovered through this workshop that yoga has always been her frame for writing poetry. Jeff Davis made her see the intersections between yoga and poetry, something she was not consciously aware of. Here are some of the ideas and comments made by the three yogi poets.

From Jeff Davis,
--Poetry and yoga are the practice of the art of living, which involves the intention to live consciously.
--Yoga is a mode of activism. The Dresser may be extrapolating a bit large but she believes that Davis is also applying this to poetry. Certainly Poets Against the War as a collective is encouraging activist or politically charged poetry.
--Yoga is about expansion and Davis said without getting around to explaining this that yoga alters consciousness. The Dresser assumes that Davis was speaking about awareness and what yogis typically call mindfulness. If a poet works deeply in understanding the mysteries that surround us all, then poetry expands the poet's understanding of the world and probably becomes more aware.
--Change arises from intention and not coercion. Here the Dresser understands one must choose to change and this is related to how we approach living. For the Dresser, living mindfully involves the pursuit of poetry, which constantly explores change and adjustments.

From Kazim Ali
--We are disconnected from our bodies.
--We need to find peace in the body.

From Susan Brennan
--Having a body is difficult and heartbreaking.
--Life is constantly putting us in one difficult position after another.
--Are we willing to fight for imagination?
--In the life of a poet, I liked to be alone but in a yoga community I learned to share the experience of searching for higher truths with others. This experience is called satsang. Split This Rock is a satsang. If you create satsang, you create a living organism.
--Poetry is the honey of divinity.

CRIP POETRY

After the Dresser became a bonafide mother (as opposed to the third parent in her natal family because she was the oldest of six children), she developed the belief that things must have a place in one's household such that she could walk around her house with her eyes closed and find anything she needs. Perhaps deep down, the Dresser believes one day she will not be able to see.

Disability culture is coming into its own. Kathi Wolfe

said people who have disabilities need to "claim our space where our voices have not been heard. We need to stare back at those who stare at us." Wolfe also said it was time to neutralize epithets against those with disabilities, such that lesbians and gays now use the word queer and Wolfe uses the word crip. However, Wolfe also said that it was time to raise awareness about insensitive use of metaphors bandied about by writers who have no disabilities. For example, she, as a person with low vision, was tired of hearing about her "world of darkness."

Stephen Kuusisto, who learned braille at the age of 39 because his mother refused to acknowledge his blindness, said he does not believe in disability poetry.
He tells his students, "dare to be angry and put that anger on the page." What Kuusisto is angry about involves politicians appropriating stories of disability for their own political ends. For example, recently president Bush spoke about the soldier William Gibson who despite having his leg blown off in Iraq, asked to go back to the front and continue his career. Simplistically Bush stated that with people like that, the enemy can never win. In a post to Planet of the Blind (It's Not as Dark as You Think), Kuusisto said "If disability can be used as a heroic metaphor for overcoming or fighting the odds, does it follow that "not talking" about the majority of disability experiences faced by our soldiers means their stories are insufficiently symbolic?"

Continue reading "Split This Rock--In the Trenches March 21, 2008" »

The Dresser is reporting from the front--The Split This Rock Poetry Festival.

Poet Sarah Browning with the support of the DC Poets Against the War, Institute for Policy Studies, Busboys and Poets, and Sol & Soul has pulled out all the stops to bring poetry in protest against the war in Iraq to Washington, DC. This is the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq and Browning intends to make it meaningful beyond those who typically come out to protest.

Where did Browning get the name of the Festival? From the poem "Big Buddy" by Langston Hughes:

Don't you hear this hammer ring?
I'm gonna split this rock
And split it wide!
When I split this rock,
Stand by my side.
- Langston Hughes

The Dresser attended the 2nd event of the first day and this was a reading featuring: Martin Espada, E. Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye and Alix Olson.

Highlights from the reading:

From Sarah Browning: "We come together to give hope. Ethelbert Miller said, "not with our dirges but our jubilees.'" Absent from the conference due to illness are Sam Hamill and Sharon Olds.

Adrienne Rich sent a new poem entitled "Emergency Clinic" that was read by festival organizer Melissa Tuckey.

From Martin Espada who wondered about a chair standing next to the speaker's podium: "This chair is for the person who should be here to hear the truth--Dick Cheney's chair!"

From Ethelbert Miller: "The sickness of war surrounds us. Do we want to be well in 2008? Let us proclaim the wellness of peace!"

From Naomi Shihab Nye: two poems that packed big wallops--Letters our Pres won't be sending and a poem about an old Muslim woman who spoke no English who got stranded in an airport and broke down in a crying fit. Nye came to her rescue and pretty soon everyone at that gate was eating the old woman's cookies. Why can't the world be like this all the time? Nye asked.

From Alix Olson, performance poet--a breaking up with my country poem.

A view of the Split This Rock Audience including poet Alicia Ostriker.