A while back Zay put out a call for a New Lyricism. He said:
And it has to be poetry.
It has to be poetry.
It has to take part in the New Lyricism.
What’s on the page has to dance on the page.
The idea of lyricism and dance being connected is an important one when thinking about matters of aesthetics. In writing, the distinction between prose and poem is clear. When something is prosaic(in a descriptive not derogatory way) we immediately know what is meant. It is perhaps more literal. There is a plain blankness to the work. It may well be beautiful, but its beauty lies in a descriptive rather than imaginative world.
In painting this distinction between prosaic and poetic can be seen in the differences between Ingres and Rothko. Now I understand that any duality I set up here is merely for the sake of argument and in fact there is a poetic quality in the prose and a prosaic quality in the poetry, but my point has to do with orientation in the world. It is an aesthetic physics of Being. These are the forces exerted in an ongoing creative ontological quest. This orientation is important. Beyond important it is the crux of the aesthetic pursuit.
Dance and dance lighting is the most obvious example of poetry in theatre. I have heard numerous people from varying backgrounds say something to the effect of ‘dance is to theatre what poetry is to prose.’ And indeed it is poetry in time and space. It is the physical embodiment of the poetic spirit. But in a way that is not the best test of the poetic orientation. After all, one can write a prosaic sonnet. Can one write a poetic essay? Yes. And there is a clear test of the poetic orientation.
In lighting dance, everyone’s poetic side comes out. In lighting Brecht or Ibsen it is not so clearly defined. One thing I love about minimalism is that it affords one the opportunity to do poetic works like this. The minimal and terse visual language of this kind of work is fantastic and is very different than the minimalism of dance.
A sonnet and an essay share few if any similarities in formal structure, while a poetic orientation holds a logical undercurrent in everything it touches. The New Lyricism is not so much new as it is a revaluation of the poetic in literature. And this is an important and necessary resistance to the prosaic world of popular culture. Escapist entertainment is nearly always prosaic as it need merely describe another world. It is a closed system to a large degree. Poetry is dangerous. It is an open system. It sketches a world and calls out the imagination to fill in the rest.
The imagination is the most powerful weapon available to us in resisting the encroaching power of totalizing spectacular culture. Even while the spectacle will recouperate everything into its mass production of thought and experience, it cannot absorb the imagination. It cannot absorb the imagination so long as we, as individuals and as a culture, still hold within us the capacity to use the imagination. Art is a game of ontological terrorism against the dark forces of mass culture. It is an insurgency structured around fourth generation media. It understands that poetry is the most dangerous weapon against consumer culture. Possibility embodied in time and space.
