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Miniature Drama
By Doug Talley

Whenever I read a good poet for the first time, I ache. 

No doubt, I should explain myself before I am accused of hyperbole. By “good,” I mean a poet who manages to cut a path through the world’s mass of literary tradition to truly original work. By “ache,” I mean the jumble of emotions spawned simultaneously by love, admiration, longing, and envy. 

This peculiar sensation works itself to the marrow of my bone, and if I am truly converted by a poet, I find myself wishing I were him or her and that the book I had just read were my own. I am so wholly won over that I think, for the moment, there is no better way to live or to think or to even breathe the air of our common humanity, except to do so according to the poet’s own pattern. 

I do not mean to exaggerate.  I do not want to corrupt what should be the rigor of literary criticism with a lazy, imperfect observation. However, there is great exhilaration in surrendering so fully to the consciousness of another’s native genius that we would almost lose our identity.  At the same time, there is an equal resistance to such submission, because we would not relinquish, even for a second, that which is most precious to each of us — our own uniqueness for another’s.  We would find our own way to original work and not be seduced by others. Hence, in the presence of a good poet I ache. 

This past summer I was introduced to the poetry of a young writer, Javen Tanner. His chapbook entitled Curses for your Sake was recently published by the Mormon Artists Group, a loose consortium of some fifty artists who live in New York City and are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

Members of the group are a motley assortment of writers, photographers, painters, choreographers, composers, filmmakers, architects and other enthusiasts. Tanner’s chapbook was the consortium’s eighth publication. 

Upon reading Curses, I succumbed to the old familiar ache and felt a touch of fever.  Tanner is a fine poet, and what is more, he has found his own path to unique and original work. His poems are for the most part short, lyrical free-verse pieces, and in this quality alone they might not be distinguishable from the great mass of homogeneous “drawing-room” poems so common in contemporary literary journals and writers’ workshops. 

I am deliberately pejorative in my use of the word “drawing-room.” An academic uniformity infects much of modern American poetry, as though every poet were circulating the same stale crust of verse one to another.  What is worse, there is a kind of self-imposed tyranny among the academic community that demands only one kind of poem and will not tolerate anything that strays from the norm.  The appalling lack of religious poetry in contemporary literary journals is a good case in point.

Tanner’s work breaks from the commonplace — not so much because it is religious, although in very subtle essentials it is, but because it is highly dramatic. Unlike much of modern American verse, his are not quiet meditations for private whispering behind the closed doors of a study. Rather, his work abounds with the liveliness of good theatre, as though the poem were set for the stage as drama in miniature. It is probably not critical to know that Tanner is a professional actor and director in order to appreciate his poems, but knowledge of this fact helps explain their intriguing dramatic flair. 

Experience on stage has no doubt informed Tanner’s approach to his work. He majored in English and theatre at Brigham Young University, later received a Master’s degree in Dramatic Arts from The Old Globe in San Diego, and has worked as the Associate Artistic Director of Handcart Ensemble, a New York theatre company specializing in verse drama. With the Handcart Ensemble he helped produce Two Yeats Plays and was last working on a production of The Burial at Thebes, an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone by the poet Seamus Heaney. Most recently, he directed a production of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. 

As anyone knows who has ever read the script of a play and then seen it performed, a great deal of what is communicated on stage will be conveyed by gesture, nuance, space and timing. Even a long silence on stage can be pregnant with meaning. What particularly intrigues me about Tanner’s poetry is that he has worked these non-verbal elements of theatre into the very fabric of his verse. 

Characters are introduced quickly, as though they suddenly walked on stage. Dialogue between these characters is laconic, yet capable of great leaps from one insight to the next. The effect created is rife with chasms of moment and space, like an austere Elizabethan or Greek stage with minimal trappings or ornamentation, where we are forced to use imagination to envision the story. 

We feel as though we are plunged into the heart of an unfolding drama and must necessarily ride along with the ensuing action to its inevitable climax.

Reprinted here with permission are several of Tanner’s poems, the first of which is the opening poem of the chapbook entitled “Eden” – a good example of this theatre in miniature. This poem modernizes the world’s oldest story into a lively, little drama, thus actually melding three genres into one. 

The initial setting is a dinner party. Quickly the reader is swept into the elements of good theatre with action, dialogue and even a kind of soliloquy.  The dramatic tone is enhanced with enchanting leaps of time and space, as though the poem were moving rapidly from scene to scene in a play:

Eden

Not satisfaction,
but its proxies,
guests, food, chatter.

And then she was at my side.
She said, “Meet me in the garden.”
I took this to mean,

Come with me
and we will be buried in water,
fire, nomenclature, earth.

I waited for her, distracted —
the laughter from the house,
the ruinous clatter of dishes,

the air sick with warm sugar.
She appeared
under the heavy shadow


of a peach tree.
She said, “You’ve come.”
I took this to mean,


I will multiply your sorrow,
spread serpents at your heels,
| spit curses for your sake.

I could smell the fruit
hidden in her hands,
forbidden and necessary.

A door opened.
A voice called my name:
once, twice, gone.


She split the peach,
licked nectar
from her fingers,

and said, “Here, taste.”
I took this to mean,
Here is my heart,


delicious and desirable.
See how it beats and bleeds,
how it breaks to heal itself.

The poem says so much with so little, both in its movement from one scene to the next and in its movement from the woman’s dialogue to the narrator’s asides. Though compressed into a few brief lines, the situation is fully realized and in final effect it satisfies like an evening’s worth of drama. 

The technique struck me as original and compelling, and I wished that I had thought of it myself.  In concept and execution the poem is seasoned and astute, layered with sharp, pungent detail. A poet simply does not arrive at this level of conciseness and vividness without talent and practice.

Beyond matters of technique, however, I am intrigued by the poem’s modest contribution to the rich tradition of dramatic poetry. One could perhaps begin with Shakespeare and the perfection of drama in blank verse, but we do not normally think of his plays as poems.  And yet, toward the end of his career Shakespeare pared the elements of theatre down to their concise essentials, as in The Tempest, and every time I read that play I feel engaged as though by a single poem. 

Robert Browning pared theatrical elements even further in the dramatic monologue, poems such as “My Last Duchess” and “Fra Lippo Lippi,” in which a single actor in a dramatic setting conveys the essence of an entire play. William Butler Yeats added to this tradition of miniature theatre with such verse plays as Purgatory, in which two characters, an old man and a boy, for the space of about eight pages recite a family history in lyrical verse in front of their ruined homestead. 

Evident in all the examples of dramatic poetry cited above is the element of compression, pressing the quintessence of entire lives into a single moment, as one might squeeze juice from several oranges.

Even though it is dressed as a lyric, Tanner’s poem “Eden” feels more like dramatic poetry, where setting, dialogue, and even stage direction are all compressed into the poem.  It is doubtful whether the theatrical in poetry can be pared down any further and still remain dramatic. Deceptively modest in design and scope, this poem is still ambitious and skilled enough to make a very real and original contribution to the tradition of dramatic poetry. Variations of this same technique appear in other poems of the chapbook, such as “I Imagine My Parents as Characters in Chekhov” and in the following:

Fish
for Ben

Remember the fish?
fanning at the gills,
slapping mud and stones?

You were afraid —
what were you, six?
You begged me,


“Kick it back in.”
I took mercy and crushed
its head with my heel.


Remember the rush?
the shame? What was I, nine?
I slit the belly and said,

“Clean out the guts.”
You refused, so I grabbed
your hand and said,

“This is how you do it.”
Your small fingers slipped
on blood and bone,


turned out a grasshopper leg,
a chipped die,
and a clutch of eggs.


You were frightened
by the gathering flies,
their relentlessness,


diving at the entrails,
coating the crooked mouth
as if to keep it from saying,

You, too, will suffer.
Remember how you wept?
how your weeping

angered me?
how the more we cleaned,
the filthier we became?

It is regretful that Curses is only a chapbook and that there are not more poems. The poet with a talent for distilling down to essentials is perhaps indifferent to volume and no doubt rightfully so. To such a poet, the variety of our human condition does not demand a multitude, but an essence. A handful of poems will suffice to define what it means to be human, because that handful will strike at the very heart of the matter. There may be an infinite variety of joys and sorrows, successes and defeats, lives and deaths, but they seem invariably summed up in a single human notion — that of irony, that there “must needs be... an opposition in all things” that cycles back and forth from health to sickness and from pleasure to pain. 

Tanner is particularly adept at exploring that variation of irony defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the “contradictory or ill-timed outcome of events as if in mockery [or in question] of the fitness of things.” Such contradictory outcome is aptly exemplified in the lines above — how a heart “breaks to heal itself” and how in gutting a fish, “the more we cleaned / the filthier we became.”

Much more could be said about Tanner’s poetry. I will end with the poem entitled “Yorick,” an allusion to one of the rich moments of English theatre when Hamlet at a graveyard handles the skull of Yorick, a court jester who had once been a favorite of Hamlet’s childhood and was now no more than blanched bone. 

Tanner draws on that scene from Shakespeare for his own vivid setting placed at a Native American burial ground. As Hamlet pondered the skull of Yorick, the narrator of this poem ponders the skull of a deceased hunter.  In the brief lines that follow, Mr. Tanner has created another poignant moment of unforgettable irony, one that causes me to ache with admiration every time I read:

Yorick

A cold spell
for my desecration
slipped upward from your grave.


Some ceremony attended you:
pinyon bead, arrowhead,
broken pottery and bone —

only your empty sockets
saw that this was all vanity.
Your epitaph faded

on the wall above you:
a fleeing antelope, meaning
hunger, flesh, struggle;

a weeping god, meaning
wisdom, purity, loneliness;
three handprints, open and empty,

meaning gone, gone, gone.
My civility was lost
in the subtle shock of history.

Wild again, I felt mortality
everywhere: the scratch
of sagebrush, the desolation

of cattle fences, the low swoop
of the red-tailed hawk.
I grabbed your skull

and asked, “Is it fast?
Is it too fast?
Did you even know

you had lived?
“Shhh,” you answered,
as sand fell through your teeth.

The other poems of Curses for Your Sake are equally fine.  Readers can obtain a copy by going to the following link: http://www.mormonartistsgroup.com/mag/Curses/index.html.

 


© 2006 Meridian Magazine.  All Rights Reserved.

 
About the Editor:

Doug Talley graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University in 1976. Upon graduation he spent the summer in the Grand Tetons looking for God, which led him on a hitch-hiking spree to Salt Lake City. He joined the Church and thereafter served in the Italy, Rome Mission from 1978 to 1980. After his mission he enrolled in the University of Akron School of Law. He graduated in 1984 and has "fiddled at the law" ever since, currently as the CEO of Millennial Assurance Services, Inc. He has published one book of poetry, The Angel Voice of Irony, a sonnet sequence about his conversion. A second book of poetry, April in October, is planned for publication in 2003. His poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Midwest Poetry Review, Piedmont Literary Review, Hellas, and other journals. He and his wife and seven children live in Akron, Ohio, where he has served in every ward calling from scoutmaster to bishop.

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