In this essay, I explore how experiencing another art form informs me as a writer and reader of poetry. If you like what you read here, you’ll love the interdisciplinary workshops I am offering in conjunction with the Crocker Art Museum this fall. Head over to Workshops to learn more and enroll!
I found myself in Las Vegas in early June, at a four day annual conference for my day job (I manage international marketing for UC Davis School of Law). While I love the desert, Vegas isn’t exactly my idea of a good time—huge crowds, hot nights outside and freezing, over-air-conditioned 24/7 inside… I was a little bummed about the location, until I found out that the traditional conference field trip (they take all 600 or so of us on a field trip for one of the evenings) was going to be (drumroll)…Cirque du Soleil’s O at the Bellagio. I was thrilled! I had never seen a Cirque show and had wanted to for years.
The big night came, and we boarded charter bus after charter bus and they ferried us down to the Strip and into the sea of people crowding the Thursday night sidewalks. I bought myself an iced water and some peanut M&Ms and followed my associate dean and her nostalgia-inducingly fragrant popcorn into the theatre and found our seats, which turned out to be pretty much right in the center. Nice! It was shaping up to be a good evening.
My dean and I chatted about the show (she hadn’t seen a Cirque show before, either, and was looking forward to it) and munched our snacks and watched our watches tick down to seven o’clock. A few minutes before show time, while the final audience members still searched out there seats and quiet chatter filled the room, I saw a few people with rather loud outfits—big stripes, bright colors—moving in the aisles. It’s Vegas, I thought at first. People wear whatever here, I’m sure.
I continued chatting with my dean while watching the room. The men and women with the boldly-patterned outfits now had objects in their hands…flowers…a shiny metal ball…and I realized then the show had already begun. They’d brought in the clowns. Even as I continued my conversation, I was already laughing.
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While I’d hoped for a relaxing evening enjoying a show without words (yes, I’d thought, just what I need this summer, something to entertain me while my analytical and creative brain rests), I immediately found myself watching myself watch the show. It’s a thing I do—watch myself watch things—as I am interested in the movements of the mind and the nature of attention. I tried to set the habit aside, but I couldn’t. It’s not that the show was so great. I mean, it was good, don’t get me wrong. Not quite as thrilling as I’d hoped, but quite good. What kept me interested in watching my watching was the truly expert ways the show’s creators engaged, manipulated and rewarded my attention.
Which naturally made me think of writing poetry.
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Engaging Attention (I): Theatre
Before the clowns first arrive, there is the theatre itself, designed to resemble a 14th-century European opera house, already signaling that an evening of sensuousness and surprise awaits through its deployment of rich, dark-colored materials and low lighting, overall, with architectural accents that lift the eyes both upward toward the decorated ceiling and downward toward the broad stage and the blood red curtains that shield it.
It would be easy to pass by the theatre in this consideration of Cirque-as-craft-revelator, but it’s actually vital that we pause here.
When we create a poem, we create a space in which things happen. Things happen in the mind of the poet as she writes, and in the mind of the reader as she reads. These happenings are not identical, yet they are inextricably connected through the material of the language in the context of the space the poet makes for it.
What, then, is the poem’s theatre? It is the page on which the words are inscribed; the object (chapbook, full-length book, literary journal, anthology, etc.) of which that page is a part; and the place (the organization, and also, the website/online bookstore/physical bookstore/conference book table/etc.) that houses that book.
But poems are tricky, because they aren’t only words on the page. Poems are also, are—I would argue—most importantly, the song of their words unfolding over time in the mind’s ear, either through live performance or the performance the reader gives inside herself when she sits quietly with the poem. The poem’s theatre, then, is also the place in which the writer performs it live for others, and also—both fundamentally and ultimately—the body itself, through the physical ear and through the mind’s ear.
This line of thinking offers us useful attention-related craft questions to consider as we write: What kind of theatres should the poet make, or seek, for a given poem? How might the poet take greater advantage of the theatre of live performance for a poem? And how might the poet take greater advantage of all the body brings to a poem when the body hears it, i.e. how might the poet take greater advantage of the poem’s inherent physicality, to engage, sustain and reward attention?
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Engaging Attention (II): Stage
The stage and sets for O are stunning (don’t worry, no one paid me to say that). The centerpiece is the 1.5-million gallon pool, which supports water routines such as synchronized swimming and also acts as a landing net for some aerial performances. The stage also supports ground acts: the pool is covered over from time to time during the show with a hard cover, sometimes flooded with an inch or so of water to create a huge mirror, while at other times the water is drained away to reveal a non-reflective hard surface.
The designers and choreographers take the idea of using all three dimensions of the stage space to extremes. Metal grids at the sixty-foot ceiling level are integrated into the performance (think high divers) and also serve as anchor points for a variety of apparatuses (trapezes, bateau, lyra, etc.). Performers and sets use the full depth and breadth of the stage area. Within the pool itself, platforms lift and lower to create little islands or change the pool’s shape or size, and various barges traverse the water through the show. Set elements also double as safety equipment for the performers. In the bateau scene, for example, gauzy layers of gray material framing the stage are also, I realized as the scene unfolded, safety nets. During the same scene, one performer missed a catch and his flyer bailed into the pool, swam to the poolside, and using choreographed movements, sat down in a practiced way at the pool’s edge for the rest of the scene and watched the bateau—using his attention to direct mine away from him and toward the continuing performance.
According to the show’s website, all of the 150 technicians and 80 cast members have scuba certification, and 14 technicians work underwater during every performance.
What, you may be wondering, does any of this have to do with the craft of poetry?
Let’s work backward. First, for every performer we see above the water, two technicians work unseen to run the show. Consider what this ratio might teach us about writing: What if we said that for every word the reader sees on the page, at least two more words (denotations, connotations, extra words edited out in revision…) hover close by, unseen yet undergirding the poem’s structure. How would that invite us to think about our writing, and our revising, differently? What if, through revision, we strove to multiply potential meanings (in a way that magnifies/interconnects, not merely confuses) while at the same time disciplining ourselves to cut the actual word count of the poem down by two-thirds? Some intriguing challenges begin to offer themselves: How, when attention is condensed by two-thirds, do we work to sustain it? And how can we do better in hiding the technical trappings of our poems behind fewer words? Because, of course, seeing the safety equipment spoils the circus-poem’s illusions.
Now, let’s think of the poem as the stage. What elements could the poet use to take full advantage of all three dimensions—height, breadth, depth? In the circus, different apparatuses are used by performers to turn themselves upside down, sideways, to spin, to fly…what apparatuses could the poem use to turn ideas upside down, sideways, to spin them, to launch them into flight? And connected to that, what tools could the poem use to provide cleverly integrated or obscured “safety nets” to support its most challenging, risk-taking moments?
And lastly: How can we use the concept of staging in the poem itself in a dramatic way? In O, pool becomes hard stage becomes pool again. What approaches might we use to create a stage for our poem and then deliberately, dramatically, change the terms of that stage? In other words, how might we “pull the rug out” from under the poem’s feet, or drop the poem through a trap door, and then slip the rug back under it again, or lift the poem back up through the trap—and what could doing that offer to the poem that traditional “staging” might not?
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Manipulating Attention (I): Comets (Butlers)
The show’s creators call them the Comets, but that doesn’t make any sense to me (except for their visual appearance during one specific routine). Let us call them the Butlers.
I dub them the Butlers because they functionally serve the show, the characters and the audience. They wear red tuxedo coats with broad tails and very historical-looking footwear, evoking the style of the late eighteenth-century. Their wigs are short and pale blond, evoking those iconic white-haired wigs. They all are costumed identically, including their face paint.
The Butlers help the show to begin in earnest; they are the ones who pull back the thick red curtains. As the show unfolds, they accompany characters as they enter or exit, perform choreographed assistance with scene changes that occur throughout the show, and do routines on silks as part of the weather that occurs in certain scenes. They are always either directly present or somehow alluded to or implied.
They are the Greek chorus.
As quoted in the Wikipedia article on the same: The chorus “is a homogeneous, non-individualised group of performers, who comment with a collective voice on the dramatic action.” Further into to article, historian H. D. F. Kitto is quoted as arguing “that the word ‘chorus’ gives us hints about its function in the plays of ancient Greece: The Greek verb choreuo, ‘I am a member of the chorus,’ has the sense ‘I am dancing.’ The word ode means not something recited or declaimed, but ‘a song.’ The orchestra, in which a chorus had its being, is literally a ‘dancing floor.’” From this, says Wikipedia’s collective voice, “it can be inferred that the chorus danced and sang poetry.”
What ideas does my experience of O’s Butlers, in combination with their ur-form, the Greek chorus, offer to me as a poet? First, I am reminded that good poems manipulate the reader’s attention through strong transitions from one gesture to the next. In the poem, the Butlers exist in the forms of syntax and line, and their relation; in the form of the stanza or the verse paragraph and its relation to stanzas/verses paragraphs that precede and follow, visual arrangement on the page (a.k.a. relation to negative space) and so forth. By strong transition I don’t necessarily mean hard, but rather, well-executed such that the reader can make the poem’s leaps—however precipitous—and make it to the other side well enough to keep going.
The Butlers also remind me that unity is built from and through multiplicity: A unified entity “contains multitudes” as Walt Whitman famously wrote about himself (think: unison or unanimous), and/or is singular only when in relation to a multiplicity (look up unilateral to see what I mean). When I apply these musings (couldn’t resist the reference here—MUSEings!) to poetic practice, I see that the fully developed poem is a resonant unity comprised of multiplying multiplicities; for example, multiple words (as sound forms, as denotations, as connotations) and nested structures (word inside syntax inside line inside stanza/verse paragraph inside [sometimes] section inside poem inside [sometimes] book/journal/anthology) coexist and intermingle and interact in real time within the poem, just as the Butlers do on stage. Their complex and layered choreography moves the circus-poem forward in time.
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Manipulating Attention (II): Repetition with Variation
I used the word gesture above, and this is a concept that the Butlers also enlarge for me. No characters speak in any recognizable language in O, but many of the individual characters mime or suggest emotions or narrative (e.g. language) through their gestures. The muteness becomes further complicated in the case of the Butlers, whose intrinsically homogeneous nature, which the choreographers enact in their highly structured unison movements, makes it seem as if they are bereft even of a physical mode of individual identity expression…
…at first. As the show unfolded, their very identicalness, their repetitiveness, began to frame for me how they are in fact not all the same. As they executed choreography, I watched myself become sensitized to their variations: of position within the performance space, of expression of the same maneuver, of facial shape and carriage (even from my distance in the tier, and even in spite of their identical face makeup). Soon, the minutest differentiation in their behavior became a site stirring with possibility—because sometimes, their minute differences do lead to surprises: A change in their routine, the entry of a new character, a change of scene, an explosion of rain or the rise of the moon. What first presented as something monolithic and predictable, unworthy of my notice, became yet another source of intrigue for my voracious—yet fickle—attention (a strategy poetry can use to wonderful effect).
Another way the O deploys repetition with variation is in the intermezzo clowns. These two simple-souled characters punctuate the moody, dramatic look and feel of the main thread of the show with their classic enormous shoes, red noses, sweetly droopy face paint, and frazzled wigs. These are the clowns I mentioned earlier, who open the show discreetly from within the audience. As clowns do, they rely on mimetic gestures and physical humor to navigate to their way through the show. Yet what I find most charming (and I mean that word in its transcendent sense, and not as a dirty word) is the way they communicate. Similar to the Muppets character Beaker, these two clowns communicate in a language of pure sounds, and only two different sounds, in fact.
As I watched the show, I watched myself discover their language, a triumph of repetition with variation: The phonic structure of the two sounds strictly repeats, from intermezzo act to intermezzo act, but the tonal expression of the two-sound pattern begins to evolve, and it is through its continuous evolution that the humor deepens and builds. I watched myself begin to anticipate—to desire—the next utterance, knowing I would be surprised by its new emotional direction and touched by its new layer of emotional nuance.
Though I shouldn’t have been surprised! Because this is exactly the way music uses repetition with variation. Perhaps you’ll recognize this famous work based on a motif of only two pitches, in a figure of only four notes, repeated and varied over and over. The same words O’s press kit uses to describe the clowns describe this piece well: “With simple, poetic gestures they convey the many complexities of life,” and I would put the emphasis here on simple. Keep it simple, I could say to my poet-self—and then keep going, seeking, exploring into the lush multiplicities always-already present in that simple, elegant initial unity.
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Rewarding Attention (I): Association, Reverie and Dream
As is typical of Cirque du Soleil shows, O is heavy on drama while being lean on narrative. Or, I should say, received narrative. Instead of interpreting and performing a story, I think O’s intent is to stimulate memories, associations, and fantasies in the imaginations of its audience, such that as we watch—as we attend—we begin to tell ourselves unique stories, and these become overlaid on the performances we are witnessing and fuse into a greater-than-the-some-of-its-parts, subtly yet utterly collaborative aesthetic expression.
Or anyway, this is the kind of experience I watched myself have as I watched O, and this is the kind of opportunity I want my poems to offer their readers, too.
In addition, O contains lots of mirrorings. There are mirrorings among bodies: of cadres of performers (Butlers to Zebras to Sailors); of members of these individual cadres performing choreography in which people mirror each other; of pairs of performers intertwining themselves to create bilaterally symmetrical images. Many surfaces within the performance space also “mirror,” with the water’s surface being the most obvious of these; there is also the “mirroring” of fire and water in several cts. For me, these mirrorings suggest duality (Federico García Lorca’s aesthetic concept of the duende comes to mind here), multiplicities, and also an urge to look at oneself—to look inward. Late in the show, an actual, enormous round mirror descends from the ceiling level and hovers over the stage, rewarding the audience for attending through these mirrorings by manifesting the material object of the metaphor with surprising drama (a move I would like to steal in my poems). It reflects action on the stage and, I wonder, perhaps some of the audience members themselves.
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Rewarding Attention (II): Breaking the Fourth Wall (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT)
Our discussion of the giant mirror, above, is a breaking of the fourth wall if audience members can see themselves in it—suddenly, those who see themselves in it become truly part of the show, co-performers, and co-creators in a second way. It is a thrilling moment.
But wait, there’s more!
As the show begins, so does it end: by involving the audience. As the clock ticks down, one of the characters on stage turns to the audience and gestures about selecting a volunteer. A spotlight begins to sweep around and across the audience, settling itself on an awkward man in a dark suit, from the orchestra lower right, trying to lower himself back into his seat without incident after getting from the bar the glass of beer in his hand. He is embarrassed and sheepish. He gestures the performers who have come to escort him to go away, but they plead and plead and he agrees to play along and is brought up on stage. The performers try to teach him what they want him to do, and he’s positively terrible at it…but by then it’s too late, they’ve got him climbing up a tall, tall ladder that is lifting off the stage and toward the ceiling—and soon he disappears into the machinery up there.
Of course, his cover’s blown: He’s no innocent audience member, but a plant! The Bellagio would never take on the liability of welcoming a true audience member on stage. We know it for sure when he performs one of the finale high dives, one of the highest of the high.
But we love him anyway, because he rewards our attention: He is, in fact, the materialization of our greatest fantasy, here at the end of the show, which is that we might somehow transcend our flabby, cubicle-deformed bodies and ascend to the heavens with him, and leap out into the unknown. Through him, in return for our labors of attention, we are made a bit more free before the curtain falls. Our attention, sharply focused for these many minutes, blooms as it takes in all the emotional and psychological distance it has traveled and synthesizes these into a new whole, a new understanding. My favorite poems hide such surprises in their endings.
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THE END
All of these reflections may help me write better poetry, if I can rise to their challenges. They definitely will help me become a better reader of poetry, a more receptive and collaborative member of poetry’s attentive audience.
