1) Young Girl Wanda by Oodgeroo Noonuccal
2) The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
3) This Floating World by Libby Hart
4) Fever 103 by Sylvia Plath
5) Macbeth by William Shakespeare
6) You Want me White by Alfonsina Storni
7) I like your body by e. e. cummings
8) Monkey’s Mask by Dorothy Porter
9) Gently by Yosano Akiko
PASSION
The spark of excitement for this collaboration was the theme. Passion. Then an array of rolling factors, a festival director that was keen for performance, a closet lover of poetry in Kamahl, a composer who had wanted to work in Byron and with Kamahl and a need by the ensemble to connect with someone who knew poetry and could bring a female sensuality to the piece. There was also the key that this work was to be produced in a festival, an area where much of my work theatrically has taken place. Festivals are playgrounds for producers and those interested in blurring artistic boundaries.
JOHN TRANTER, "DISTANT VOICES"
After reading John Tranter's excellent DCA (Distant Voice, 2009, UOW) last night and continuing to go deeper into it today I have questions to ask about how I can possibly write about my creative process without looking at the "theatre" that I have created. Tanter's exegesis talks about his influences over a rich, ground breaking career that spans decades. he references himself in the third person and his body of work enables him to do this. I am not at all at this stage in my career, nor is there a legacy such as his to talk of. In reading this DCA a few things became clear that i need to discuss with my supervisor.
QUESTIONS FOR SUPERVISOR
1. Do I need to use one overarching theoretical position, or can I look to Tranter's more biographical/literary influence model?
2. At what stage is it really possible to write "about" the creative project without pre-empting and shaping it?
3. Can I look at a structure that in essence has three parts and focus on a "part" that for now maybe looks at influences such as Porter or Carson and my previous relationships to interpretation of their work.
4. How separate is Teresa Bell, as creator of CB, to the work that precedes and is happening around it? Is the purity of this project the core and the rest a distraction?
5. A constant within my creative work has been a strong need to combine forms and spaces. Is this not what I am doing in CB? And yet is there something in my very bower bird style of following the loose thread of an idea that I need to talk about and not be simply confined in this E to creative writing. Partic if part of the interest, as it is in Tranter's DCA anyway, is the creator and their process.
THE CROSSBREED
The chosen works of The Monkey's Mask and The Beauty of the Husband for the performance for Byron, and indeed the Award Winning adaptation I created with Gavin Blatchford of Libby Hart's song-line This Floating World are all examples of generic mixture of verse, novel and narrative. Porter call's her breakthrough verse novel a lesbian detective story, Carson has created "a fictional essay in 29 tangos" and Hart a songline.
The need for stipulating that a novel must be made up of prose is slipping away fast as Catherine Addison points out in the conclusion of her summary on "The Verse Novel as Genre: Contradiction or Hybrid?"
(Style: Vol 43, No 4, Winter 2009).
"So fast is this crossbred genre growing at the present time that it may soon become the norm to compose novels wholly or partially in verse."
Or as Libby Hart writes in the first poem in her songline (Five Islands Press, 2011)
"There is really only one ocean,
only one body of water.
No need for that human blather to label all things."
DREAM WORK
The obsession to label and group that is driven from theorists as well as marketing and funding channels for the arts often stifles the artistic in the creation process for one needs to define what they are producing before it is produced and i believe this is not the way many work, certainly not the way I work.
“It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I am writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.” (Paris Review Int pg 110)
William Gibson writes his book from the first sentence in an optimal state of a “lucid dream.”
Dorothy Porter talks of the supernatural potency of channeling power of writing and how her “poetry knew more about me than I consciously knew about myself. It knew my secret self, its history and its likely future.” (On Passion, p7)
I am aware that a lot of these musings sound like cop outs or distractions from finding a way of harnessing what it is I am wanting to say within the E. Dorothy Porter's long term partner and fellow writer talks about this need even within the creative work itself of getting over the "blackberries" in order to find the heart of what you want to say. In talking about Porter she says
"I think it is the way that most writers work, but then there were times that she went straight for the heart, and she would look in wonderment...I mean she would say, "Have I actually got this first time?" And sometimes she actually did....so full of the promise when the work is going so well but always the threat of you losing it. And I think a lot of artists actually feel this."
The poem that Goldsmith is referencing is Porter's Blackberries which ends
"I hold in my hand
the greedy, bleeding
pen
that has always
gorged itself."
SUMMARY; THE NEED FOR AN ANCHOR
Going back to my key reading for today, Tranter's DCA E, I am drawn towards the third part of his E, titled "Dream-Work" where Tranter outlined the three poets who have most influenced his work; Arthur Rimbaud, 'Ern Malley' and John Ashbery. I feel that this "part"of the E (as opposed to the other two, the first being on the Creative Project itself, the second on his 40 year career) is the one I feel like investigating in my own E. At this stage I have identified a key influences that I wish to examine Dorothy Porter, the connections in my working life to her as a person, a teacher and as Tranter outlines about Ashbery for him at this start of his "Distant Voices", an anchor.
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