Showing posts with label William Shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Shakespeare. Show all posts

Friday, September 19, 2014

"Chekhov's Pistol," by Hans Ostrom

In this play I play
the role of William Shakespeare,
who is inside one of his sonnets on stage.
"I" stand in the glass cube (the sonnet),
on the walls

of which the words from the sonnet
appear. "I" shout the words
in random order. "I" strike
the words, curse, and stomp.

Someone pretending to care
comes and lets me out of the
cube. "I" introduce myself
as Bill S., an actor-playwright.
"Hi, Bill!" everyone shouts.
The set shifts.

I'm pushed under a kitchen
table: yep, an American play.
I fall asleep and snore and am
kicked by actors who are
drawing on their experience,
expressing truth, blah blah.

The American playwright
is in the audience, and under
orders from his management,
he acts like he's drunk,
bellicose, and talented.

No longer "I," "I" get out
from under the table and "kill"
all the characters with
a Renaissance sword--
revenge and all that shit.

Now Chekhov comes on stage
with a pistol and shoots me dead.
Dude, it is very cool. The actor's
from Sweden.

hans ostrom 2014

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Shakespeare in Seattle


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A production of Shakespeare's MacBeth--actually it's Shakespeare's play as revised by the Bard's self-proclaimed son--will run from June 12 through June 27th at the Magnuson Park Theater in Seattle. For information about this unusual production, please follow the link:

http://macbeth.dramatech.net/about.htm


The castle pictured is in Scotland, not the Pacific Northwest, in case you wondering.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

For Rose-Gardeners


Is there a flower that humans have been more obsessed by than the rose? Maybe the cherry-blossom; and, indeed, the rose-obsession may be more Western--Greco-Roman/Euro-American--than Eastern. And it's a bit ironic that the rose itself is a bush, a shrub, and of course the cherry is a tree.

Lilies, orchids, daffodils, and poppies have all drawn their share of attention. But especially in Western religious and poetic traditions, the rose seems to have it all going on. Bill the Bard, Robert Burns, Bill Blake, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, and even George Eliot (in a wee poem) have famously weighed in on the rose. Rose-poems must number in the millions.

To those who grow roses--or, more accurately, assist roses in their growth--the rose tends to discard its several cultural symbols and starts to represent work, a battleground (chiefly person v. fungus and person v. aphid), a vegetative entity with diva-like whims but also astonishing resilience, and unrequited love. Yes, rose-gardeners fall in love with their roses, in many cases. It's not a pretty sight. That's when the whole thorn v. blossom mythology kicks in.

I had a 20-year fling with roses. Mulching, pruning, spraying (I stuck to organic sprays like neem oil, and a mild, non-detergent soapy spray does just fine with aphids), weeding, staring. A lot of staring. And sighing--in frustration. Fertilizing (I liked organic fertilizers). There is, of course, the illusion that it's all worth it--such as when you pick what really looks like the perfect rose--a blossom, say, from a Mister Lincoln--and the color & perfume really do almost make you swoon, and then you show it to someone else, and they almost swoon. From different objective distances, however, one may raise all sorts of objections to the time and energy spent on roses, to the Rose Industry (floral shops, rose "breeders," garden shops), and to the culture's rose-fetish.

Oddly enough, the most amazing roses I've seen are wild ones growing in a pasture in the Sierra Nevada. They basically turn into huts--an igloo of vines. Once one of our neighbors read about how much Vitamin C was in rose hips--those knots that grow after the petals have fallen--and she began to brew and drink rose-hip tea. Apparently the wild rose-hips had something else in them, however, because she got a little loopy and had to give up the tea. Jonesing for rose-hips. Wow.

Solid tips I picked up over the years: in the Pacific Northwest, prune roses on or near President's day; prune roses into a kind of bowl-shape, and attempt to eliminate the branches on the inside (roses seem to need some space "inside" to ventilate themselves; don't over-fertilize (I know: but what does that mean?) ; checking for aphids is actually more important than waging war on them (when you see them, spray a mild solution of Ivory soap on them; also, ladybugs really do like to dine on aphids).

In the imaginary court of gardening, roses and I reached an amicable rose-divorce. When I stroll past an impressive rose garden, I am most intrigued--and then fatigued, as I imagine all that work, the constant attention.

I did exceptionally well with two kinds of roses, both venerable--Queen Elizabeth and Mister Lincoln, one pink and the other red. I did okay with Peace roses, too, and I had pretty good luck with yellow roses--Sun Sprite was one I liked. A rose called Oklahoma did not do well in the Pacific Northwest, at least for me (and I'm a rank amateur), but that one had my favorite rose-aroma. Roses by other names didn't smell as sweet, nyuk, nyuk.

A poem, then, for rose-gardeners (I think it's in iambic tetrameter):

For Rose-Gardeners

To one who cares for roses, rose
Refers to the whole plant; the flow-
Ers are a kind of coda. To one
Who cares, the tale is in the soil,
Which should be dark and rich and loose.
It should be mulched, and it should breathe,
Perhaps give off a faint bouquet
Of chocolate. The tale proceeds
In pulpy roots of rose, and in
The branches which shoot up so fast
The green-and-purplish growth can seem
A little other-worldly. Leaves
Have much to say as well. They should
Be waxy and deep green but are
Impressionable, go black or brown
Or yellow from the merest wink
Of fungus. Thorns amaze--ornate
Medieval armor for a plant. If
The flowers come and keep coming,
Then one who cares for roses has
Assisted earth and plant to tell
The story well and now may stare,
May bend to sniff perfume or clip
In twilight of a long ritual--
The caring for the whole rose plant.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Sonnet Play-By-PLay


So I write sonnets more or less as aerobic poetic exercises and only rarely expect them to turn out as successful poems, and then from that very limited set, I might try to publish one. I think the main thing with sonnets and other traditional forms is knowing why you're writing them. Also, it's good, I think, to see yourself as participating in a long genre-tradition and exploring the tension between adhering to conventions and disrupting them, perfecting your engagement with a mode and improvising upon the mode.

With the following sonnet, a mere exercise, I decided to provide a play by play, line by line, just to show what sort of difficulty the form puts a poet it.

Sonnet: Hometown Paper

[the title/subject: so this is a fairly conventional Modernist move--take the love-poem form of the sonnet and use it to talk about something unrelated to love and otherwise unlyrical]

And shall it disappear, the local paper--

[The "And" is there to jump-start the iambic with an unstressed syllable, and I've presented myself a problem by asking a question; also, I've chose a two-syllable end-word and what's called a feminine rhyme; I've chosen to go with iambic pentameter, the conventional meter]

The hometown's daily, weekly digested

[More hot water--another two-syllable end word, meaning I have to think of rhymes now for both paper and digested]

Familiar fare of nearby news and safer

[So I went with a half-rhyme with paper--which I think worked out okay, but then I caused more problems by introducing a conceit--the newspaper or news as food--hard to continue, and likely to tempt me into a mixed metaphor]

Palatable small snacks, time-tested,

[I love putting multisyllabic words in an iambic line; it really speeds things up. "Time-tested" is a cliche--so I had to pay the price for "digested"; I'm depending on a pronunciation of palatable that stresses the second syllable]

Reliable desserts of gossip, sports,

[So now I'm stuck in that food-conceit, but at least I'm hanging with the subject]

Cooked up by ones who know the local fears?

[Still wearing out that conceit, making the editors cooks--I do like "local fears," however, and it may let me out of the conceit--we'll see; and I've finally sewed up the question--started in line 1!]

Already, so it seems, rags of all sorts

[Sports/sorts: basic rhyme; a shift of subject--papers going out of business--but by using "rags," I may have attached myself to another conceit]

Have been attached to quilts (one hears)

[So I decided to take "rags" literally; as rags are made into quilts, "rags" (newspapers) are attached to figurative quilts of . . . what?]

That make up media conglomerates,

[Conglomerates are quilts. Hmmm. But what will rhyme with conglomerates?! Oy.]

While others simply went, were buried with

[Still stuck on the rag-conceit, now treating rags more as clothes]

Their owner-editors. Moreover, what's

[So I rhymed "moreover, what's" with "conglomerate"--that's fun; some small newspapers perish when their old editors die]

The fate of reading? Yes, like Faith and Myth,]

[I rhymed Myth with With--amusing; more importantly, I'm experiencing what many sonnet-writers experience--the sudden, panicky realization that the poem's about to end; one gets lost in the meter, rhyming, conceits, and so on. Then: OMG! Only 14 lines, and I've written a dozen already--and I need to end with a couplet--and finish the poem! I mean, it's not cliff-diving, but it does create a virtual adrenaline rush, for nerds]

Our Literacy is ultra-local now--

[Now I leap to a Big Point--linking local papers to larger issues of literacy; the couplet is an opportunity to do this; I've played it safe in terms of rhyming by using "now"--lots of options]

Locked to a screen mere inches from the brow.

[Like the Shakemeister General, except not really, I've gone for a wicked little irony. In the age of the Internet, we feel we're superior to printed local, hickish papers, but then here we are peering at our various little personal screens, which in one sense are more insular, even solipcistic, than the local rag, or so I argue.

So there you have it--a not very good sonnet, but a great aerobic poetic workout, getting some work on rhyme, meter, conceits, getting out of trouble, having fun. And play by play, just like sports! Such a deal. Or, as John Madden would say, "And, boom, he finishes the couplet!" Maybe Madden will make a Sonnet Video Game. Uh, maybe not.