Word: poeme
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Each of these poets has come to this tone in a different way. Hall's long and venerable career, beginning (as he writes in "The Old Life," the central poem of his book) "on the Advocate in nineteen forty-eight," has taken him through a range of styles. After an early phase of neat, metrical poems, and a later bout with surrealism, his poetry has more recently developed certain regular characteristics: the use of ordinary diction; an engagement with certain issues, especially family history, the difference between urban and rural life and the approach of death; and, frequently...
...Life, Hall establishes connections to these older books--the volume's first poem, "The Night of the Day," continues the story of his 1988 book The One Day, while the second, "The Thirteenth Inning," takes up the Schwitters premise. But the bulk of the book, and the bulk of what Hall read Tuesday, is the title poem, a long agglomeration of short, free-form, highly autobiographical segments. This is "confessional poetry" carried to an extreme--Hall writes exactly what has happened to him, from age 4 to last year, including precise names, dates and locations. The language is not much...
Once the spectacle of "The Hollowmen" has been duly appreciated, however, there are still some important questions to be asked. For example: why this poem, when the music and action have almost nothing to do with the text's mood and meaning? It quickly becomes clear that the spirit of "The Hollowmen" is based on a shallow, but understandable, misinterpretation of the poem, whose repetition of certain apocalyptic words and images--"broken," "death," "dream," "hollow"--can make it seem merely psychedelic, the precursor of Jim Morrison's lyrics...
...this spirit that the techno beat, weird light effects and eerie pantomime are intended; the best that can be said for it all is that it's trippy. The poem itself, by contrast, is very delicately nuanced, so much so that it can be read simultaneously as the nihilistic sequel to "The Waste Land" and as the first stirring of Eliot's Anglican religious poetry. Some of the images Eliot uses--such as the "multifoliate rose" and the quotations from liturgy--prefigure his highly devout late poems, the "Four Quartets." That's certainly not the idea that one gets from...
...other words, the show does not try to dramatize the poem, but uses the poem as one element in a collage of weirdness. A more serious problem is that mere weirdness doesn't allow much variety or development; so that this show, short as it is, can seem very long. Towards the end, as the techniques that were once startling--head-banging, repetition, shouting--became familiar, I found myself longing for something genuinely risky--a violent gesture, or a vulnerable one, anything that would seem like a payoff to all the build-up. Instead, the show's climax...