The Hilary Tham Documentary

The first person who publicly spoke the lines of Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On was the Steiny Road Poet's dear friend Hilary Tham. Hilary's decision to participate in the first reading done on snowy February day in 1996 was something she thought about carefully. How could a Chinese Malaysian take the role of Gertrude Stein, she asked aloud. I was sure she would be a rock solid actor and she was. Just as she was a friend of deep importance to me and so it is that I visit her grave every June to celebrate her life.

This year brought new rewards when the Steiny Road Poet suggested that Perry Lindstrom meet Hilary's family and some of her poet friends at her gravesite. Perry has been talking for some years about making a film about Hilary. Kim Roberts gave him that suggestion.

The gathering included Joe Goldberg, his three daughers (Ilana, Shoshanna, Rebecca), three of his granddaughters, Hilary's youngest sister Choy and her Hong Kong-based youngest brother Chee Lung and four poets.

Thus there were poems written by Hilary read as well as poems about Hilary by Karren Alenier, Mel Belin, Judy McCombs, and Miles Moore. We also created a new work made of lines and titles drawn from Hilary's work. We made King David Memorial Garden sing with Hilary's words.





Here's a favorite poem by Hilary Tham:

MRS. WEI & ANCESTOR WORSHIP

An Englishman is visiting his mother's grave
with flowers. He sees Mrs. Wei
spreading a feast of roast chicken,
moo shu pork, noodles
before her father's grave.
"When's your father coming out
to eat that food?" he asks.
Smiling, Mrs. Wei answers,
"Same time your mother
come to smell flowers."

The Pleasures & Pains of Collaborating

Engaging in collaborative projects is not easy or necessarily fun.

It is a serious matter that not only puts on trial one’s ego, but also tests the very essence of who one is as an artist. Since her first opera project that came to successful conclusion in New York City, the Steiny Road Poet has learned a tremendous amount about risking her time and talents with other people. No matter how stressful personal relations can be during a collaborative project, one hopes for the greater good.

Here are lessons learned (or relearned) from Anne Becker’s project Pleasures of Collaboration: Poets, Dancers and Musicians at Play which culminated in a final improvisation performance on June 17, 2011, under the sponsorship of the Takoma Park Arts and Humanities Commission of Maryland.

--Improv is a fickle process.

If the first attempt to combine poetry, music, and dance creates something magical, don’t expect that to be repeated unless you hire a seasoned theater director and that director gets a new set of professional performers. Short of capturing what came to be “Jane Bowles at Camp” on video footage, what the Steiny Road Poet remembers about the first session on her piece was its simplicity. There was the poet delivering her lines, the large red and white umbrella, the dancer who engaged with the umbrella, and the two itinerant poets who traveled in and around the dancer. The itinerant poets, one dressed in an eye-catching costume with turban and shaw, made the shaw a river behind the dancer who was hidden from view by the oversized umbrella. What was seen of the dancer was minimal, though full of little sparks of mischief. The music included the sonorous flow of the cello, the insistent voice of the flute, an underlying strumming of guitar, and an occasional accent of drums.

The second attempt of what became “Jane Bowles at Camp” felt lifeless since the itinerant poets never came on stage that night and so the third attempt, where the piece was actually named, drove the Poet to change what she read. She added a lot more text, which caused one of the collaborating poets to get upset with the new information. It was a good discussion, but by opening night, the producing poet Anne Becker asked the Steiny Road Poet to go back to the original text. That was gladly done. 

The Steiny Road Poet is eager to see what was captured on film by the Takoma Park cable TV technicians, but she feels certain that the stage was overly busy with too many people on stage. Maybe this is something that could not be helped. The Steiny Road Poet has to be pleased that so many of the performers wanted to play in this piece.

--Pay attention & find out who your collaborators are.

It’s easy to get caught up in the process of creating a new piece and working with artists from various disciplines and then suddenly realize, you don’t know anything about your collaboration partners. The more you know about your partners, the easier it is to understand where they are coming from and how to negotiate what you feel is needed to make a piece a successful collaboration.

Another thing that happened to the Steiny Road Poet was she recognized that she had seen and talked with one of the musicians who perform in a new music concert that the Poet had reviewed. Also she had an impromptu collaboration with a dancer at a garden party back in the 1980s that was much along the lines of Anne Becker’s project. The odd thing was the Steiny Road Poet did not immediately recognize this person until the dancer struck a certain pose, at which point the Poet realized she a copy of a photo taken of this dancer at that garden party at the finish of that long-ago collaborative dance.

Maybe what needed to happen with the Becker Project was that a blog should have been created to provide biographical details of the performers and to post what happened at each session. The Steiny Road Poet, like other participants, did not attend every session and therefore, lost opportunity to hear all the introductions and get to know everyone.

--Go by the book. Don’t assume that collaboration partners will agree with you.

At the eleventh hour, the Steiny Road Poet made a short video (hours of work) based on early development of a piece that changed dramatically by the time it reached the public stage on June 17. The Steiny Road Poet thought the piece was fascinating and would show a potential audience member how our process worked. The poet of said piece was surprised about the early footage, but one of the dancers was upset that the Steiny Road Poet had moved forward without getting everyone’s permission to air the video on YouTube. The Steiny Road Poet, as asked, removed the video from public view.

--Do what it takes to support the leader of the project.

The process of collaboration is hard and made more so when the workshop period is at night when people are tired. Therefore, when thorny things happen, like someone losing patience with the process, misunderstanding what someone has said, unable to express him/herself clearly, it is vitally important that things do not get out of control. It is probably a good idea to ensure that every collaboration project includes some seasoned veterans who are levelheaded. What everyone should want is to see the project come to successful fruition. This cannot happen if any of the partners, including the leader, are not allowed to vent in a controlled situation. By “controlled situation,” the Steiny Road Poet means that no one should be allowed to leave the workshop space mad. The Steiny Road Poet knows that an angry exit causes many partners to lose face.

Finally, everyone should be asked to sign an agreement that lays out the scope of the project and the ground rules. The agreement should also contain a release that allows for photographs and videos to be taken which would promote the final performance. Any such products should be sent to the project leader for review and approval. This would also include images being use on blogs. Those who aren’t comfortable with this advance permission probably should not participate in the project.

Other Remarks

The Steiny Road Poet enjoyed the process and experienced wonder or amazement more than fun. She finds these kind of projects educational but not necessarily recreational. Would she do it again? Probably, yes. She has the utmost respect for Anne Becker and thinks she is an outstanding creative leader.

Photo by: Joshua Prentice

Looking for the Real Thing

How does a writer bring a character in her work alive?

The Steiny Road Poet brings this question up because she realizes that it is not enough to say, as she said in her previous post on Found Poems, that to create new poems about such an artist as Paul Bowles, she does more research.

The obvious research is to become intimate with an autobiography, biographies, letters of one’s interest. Less obvious is to read the books that influenced your subject. Therefore, the Steiny Road Poet is reading Andre Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters) and its companion journal because Bowles read Le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs on his trans-Atlantic crossing when he ran away from college in 1929 to Paris. Le Journal tells how Gide wrote his 1925 novel that was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1947. What excites the S. R. Poet is that she sees Gide’s complex story about sex-in-all-sorts-of-categories illuminating Bowles’ hard-to-understand sexual identity.

What remains to be realized is whether the Poet’s research will yield a worthy poem.

Watch out for Found Poems!

Just a few words on found poems.

Do not ever use source material that is under copyright unless you know the author and have a good relationship with that person.

Recently the Steiny Road Poet spent several months trying to find out who held the copyright to the letters of Paul Bowles as published in In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. It turns out, the copyright was granted by Bowles to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. It took a couple of months for the copyright contact at the publishing house to get around to reviewing the request and when the Poet got her letter of permission, it said, “We have no objection to your use of the material listed above in your unpublished manuscript, on condition that the material is printed without alteration…”

Are you laughing out loud? If not, maybe a definition of found poetry is needed.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines found poetry:

“Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and/or lines (and consequently meaning), or by altering the text by additions and/or deletions. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the original.”

So how does one remedy this situation because clearly the permission the Steiny Road Poet got was completely useless? She sits down and does a whole lot more research. Then she replaces the eight found poems with brand new poems. So far there are four!

A Word or Two on What I Saw But Didn't Write About

While the Steiny Road Poet has not really emerged from her winter funk, she is feeling burdened by plays and films she saw in recent months that she made no comment on. Here is her top down list.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs by monologist Mike Daisey





Daisey is an amazing performer whose face can tell any story. The Poet is into Apple computer products as he is and she gets his shtick about Apple using cheap Chinese labor to line the pocketbooks of Apple's Steve Jobs and company. Because she has been to China recently and she has been reading the modern accounts of Chinese workers, she says Daisey didn't really give that story as much umph as he needed to. Does he really think American audiences can't handle what deprivations those Chinese workers suffer? And why didn't he suggest bringing the work back home to the States? Still, if you have the time and the money,  the Poet says don't miss Daisey at DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre. The Poet saw him in The Last Cargo Cult and she thinks he knows what he is talking about but most of all he is an outstanding performer.







Photograph 51

Anna Ziegler's Photograph 51 explores the unrewarded life of British geneticist Rosalind Franklin. This play at DC's Theater J is a story that will appeal to feminists and anyone who believes in ethical workplace practice. The Poet doesn't believe Republicans will sympathize with the protagonist in this male dominated cast where mostly what the men want from Rosie or Ms. Franklin (they refuse to call her Dr. Franklin which is what she prefers) is her sexual favors since it was much easier to steal her painstaking work that led to Nobel Prizes for others. In real life Franklin perished from cancer and her so-called colleagues got the Nobel after she died. Nobel Prizes only go to the living. The Poet thinks Ziegler is quite inventive with how she keeps the audience engaged in a play with many talking heads.




Probably you will have to wait for the DVD appearance of  the Korean film Poetry directed by Lee Chang-dong and starring the long absent, but formerly well know star, Yoon Jeong-hee but keep this at the top of your list. The Steiny Road Poet saw the film when it opened in NYC and with a Korean scholar who explained the joke scene and how many of the performers are local people and not professional actors. Even so, the film hardly needs the extra gloss. It's a story about a grandmother raising a teenage boy who gets into very serious trouble with his friends and how she if forced to handle this.





Other Films (good for Friday night entertainment):


The Lincoln Lawyer -- The Poet loved this street-smart bad-ass lawyer played by Matthew McConaughey who shares a daughter with a district attorney Marisa Tomei.


Limitless -- Who doesn't want to be the smartest person possible? This movie starring Bradley Cooper with a more secondary role by Robert de Niro shows the pitfalls of finding the magic smart pill.