On Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 3:33 pm by Cynthia Haven Powell, euripides, Robert Hass, Sergei Eisenstein “Instead of being embarrassed by it, why not celebrate it?” Pay It Forward was a “terrible, terrible film,” he said - yet he recalled crying while watching it. He discussed the “doubt and mystery of one’s own aesthetics” and “finding note of authenticity within the detritus of society.” “When you’re being completely camp, you’re not completely aware of it,” he said. As I left, he was responding to a student who asked him about the distinction between art, popular culture, and camp in his work. Alas, some other deadlines had consumed my evening, so I couldn’t attend, but I was able to catch a few minutes of today’s colloquium. The photo comes to me courtesy of Ken Fields, who sent it to me after after Powell’s reading. He’s working on another, which he read from last night. His most recent book, Chronic (2009) received the Kingsley Tufts Award and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Powell’s first three books - Tea (1998), Lunch (2000), and Cocktails (2004) - have been considered a trilogy for the AIDS pandemic. “You have to be willing to be the scenery and the antagonist as well.” He quoted Robert Hass saying “a good poem contains its opposite.”
“The poet needs something else that balances the drama,” he said.
It’s emotional equivalent is anger coming to a boil.” He recalled a portion of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin that shows, in the first shot, meat full of maggots, in another shot men looking through the entryway at the chef, and in the third shot, a bubbling caudron, to show the meat “is being cooked for consumption of sailors who are angry. Powell recalled that Sergei Eisenstein learned while editing and cutting his films that he needed to use first person, second person, and third person - something Euripides accomplished with a chorus. Early on, he said, “I conceived of myself as a budding playwright.” He told a noon gathering at Stanford today that he “has some sense of pride” in getting a “D” in his collegiate playwriting class - “but I may have gotten an ‘F,'” he admitted ruefully.Īt that time, he was into “absurdist drama” - “plays where people sat around and talked about nothing - and talked about how nothing nothing was.” The feedback: his plays lacked conflict. Powell: Career as playwright nipped in the bud (Photo: Ken Fields)
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