Boycotting the Usual Function of Words: An Interview about the Poetic Play with Reed Bye

conducted by Elizabeth Guthrie

EG: How would you describe the history of your immersion in the poetry scene in the U.S.?

RB: I feel I was the lucky beneficiary of direct exposure to the poetry, poetics, and teaching of a number of writers and teachers in a community (Boulder CO and Naropa University) that became something of a nexus within postmodern U.S. poetic activity.

EG: You’ve cited Gertrude Stein as a primary influence on what are sometimes called poets or poetic plays, dialogue-based writings that aren’t necessarily written for performance or dramatic presentation but as a way of working with dialogic exchange as a compositional strategy in itself.

RB: Yes, early twentieth-century modernist writers had taken up conventions of the dramatic play—basically that of characters speaking to each other within a developing dramatic situation—and “played” with it in ways so that identities and relations between characters became less a focus than open-ended play among linguistic and literary conventions and styles. Such hybridizing play may contain little if any traditional dramatic development and readers may experience only sporadic moments of correlation between style and thematic meaning. Gertrude Stein’s plays are unique in this mode because of their attention to the tonal element of speech at the expense of semantic coherence; it is mainly in intonation patterns that lines of “meaning” are conveyed. At least that’s how I hear it. And one can find a unique kind of wisdom and enjoyment in it.

EG: In your book, Join the Planets, there is a verse play called “Bony-Handed.” Does this work  reflect this description of Stein’s poetic play?

RB: Yes, to some extent. I wanted to try to write under the influence of such vocal-based attention without succumbing to the pull toward thematic build-up. It’s a choice to try to just inhabit the words as they come up, boycotting their usual function as “pointers” to external life-matters that then take over the aim of the discourse. This attention to the words themselves opens a more momentary relationship between the text and the one reading it. Stein compared this to the way a frog hops, never the same way twice. She spoke of the “liveliness” in this kind of verbal engagement. One feels the qualities and activities of words, phrases, sentences in spontaneous, evanescent presences and relations. As a reader you might feel glimpses of larger periods of meaning but then you’re brought back to these immediate qualities and open conditions. So one possible area for poetic play-making is in this kind of close attention to phonological, pre-semantic aspects of language where one’s “sense” of the work comes in short-lived ear-tuned vectors.

EG: What distinguishes the poetic play from poets theater?

RB: A poetic play comes from the inspiration of an individual and poet’s theater from the inspiration of a few people deciding to actually produce a play. Plays may be written by anyone, anywhere, not necessarily intended for public presentation. They are textual performances. Poets theater develops when a group of people feel a mutual interest in presenting one of these texts in a community. And when they are performed, some of the more introverted aspects of a poetic play may take on interesting or provocative social implications. A good example in the U.S. is the poets theater that developed in the San Francicso-Berkeley area from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Various iterations of poets theater occurred there until one could speak of a collectively inspired community tradition. There’s a very fine anthology called The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945-1985, edited by two poets who were part of that Bay Area scene, Kevin Killian and David Brazil. It includes a very good introduction by them that gives a thorough history of major movements within US poets theater.

EG: What possibilities for poets theater do you see at this time?

RB: I don’t have any clear sense. Collective inspiration is obviously necessary to produce a poets theater and the inspiration will depend on local factors of personality, spirit, energy, place, and time. I think there will inevitably be some attunement to the contemporary societal environment and a mirroring of it through a hybrid of forms and expressions.

EG: I can see that the medium of poets theater may be called to evolve. Associatively, how do you see the poetic play taking shape? Where do you see it going amongst other textual and otherwise artistic forms and social and artistic movements in its hybridity?

RB: There are always many possibilities for experiment with poetic plays. They might use language subliminally or incorporate discourse from other idioms in overtly or dimly ambiguous and ironized ways. The composition might invite lists of hardware store items, bits of song lyrics, advertising slogans, rhetorical postures, etc. The “characters” in verbal exchange might be aspects of consciousness, inanimate objects, abstracted emotional states, mythic archetypes, etc. Killian and Brazil define the genre of poets theater as that of “disorderly hybridity.”

The essence of both poetic plays and theater, I would say, is happenstance without an interpretive frame. You simply experience it. Hopefully you enjoy it. Good luck figuring it out. Since the turn of the new century, we’ve entered a world with many new possibilities for remotely performed theater. This may inspire new methods of composing and utilizing sound and image in the composition of poetic plays. Since community is now not so much a geographical matter as a technological one, perhaps poets theater will find a new efflorescence in online communities.