Say Citizen 3rd May
An improvised performance considering the individual, the community and the society, hopes, desires, dreams and responsibilities. If we are the arbiters of our own presence in the midst of others then what do we stand for and why and how and where and when
This physicality, I would argue, is the condition of knowing, not the discrete, separate, knowledge, but as a condition of duration, ‘continuous’. It is within that condition that the performer operates during the improvisation
This, the decision making process, is also the shape and shaping of the poem/performance. Olson writes in ‘Projective Verse’,
‘It is the LINE (..) that gets as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control, that it is right here, in the line, that the shaping takes place, each moment of the going.’(Olson 1966, 19)
The poet as a material of the performance, as ‘folded in’ to it, is subject to it as well as an active decision making force within it, exerts effects and suffers effects.
