POETRY/THEATRE MASTER CLASS WITH GLYN MAXWELL

This workshop is designed for Poets to learn

certain crafts and perspectives from Theatre.

I’ve been running these workshops at the Poetry School for several years, bringing in high-level directors and theatre-makers to guide the poets. The days are illuminating, exciting, challenging, and extremely good fun!

There are two essential reasons for the design of the workshop, one is aesthetic, the other practical.

How it works

Each poet is required to submit in advance one (or two, if the group is small and more time available) poem of less than thirty lines. If there are six poets in the group, the Leader (myself or another theatre-maker) will read these six poems in advance, and bring on the day a concept of how the poem might be performed by the group.

The Leader will guide the group towards this performance. Ideally there will be a set of performances at the end of the morning session, and another at the end of the day. The poet who wrote the poem does not take part in the performance, but works alongside the Leader in its rehearsal. The Leader has the final say on every aspect of the performance.

Practical Value

I call this Poets ought to get out more. A cute way of saying that poets tend to work in two dimensions, ink and page, or sound and silence, whereas theatre brings in space and distance. The more serious point is that poets have the absolute last word on their work. In this game, the poet is obliged to defer to the Leader, as well as hearing the input of the other poets in the group. This is extremely good for the poet. Not just because they may end up working in theatre – or TV, film, dance, opera etc – and should experience the joy of working-together, but because if they believe in their work, they should learn how to entrust it to others. They will not always be there to explain or contextualize what they write!

The performance, under the guidance of the Leader, can take any form the Leader devises, but it must not be a straight reading. It has to make use of all the poets in the group (except the one who wrote the poem) but beyond that proviso, there can be chorus, unison, movement, tableau, echo, song – absolutely anything at all, as long as the performance is recognizably rendering the poem. The poet who wrote it can’t stop it happening, but they should at least enjoy the process...

Many poets are not natural performers – or may be somewhat terrified of the notion – but all levels of confidence can be accommodated in this structure. No one will have to do anything they really don’t want to!

Aesthetic Value

My deeply-held conviction about good poetry is that it should be creaturely. It should be memorable like an encounter with a creature – human or otherwise – a good poem should grip your arm like the Ancient Mariner telling the poor Wedding-Guest There was a ship and holding his attention so that time seems to stop.

The good poem breathes like a living thing. It has a coherence of tone and voice, as if calling to us from a certain time and place. All poems that survive possess this quality. This workshop, devised by a Leader with their own sensibility, assisted by and refracted through other voices, allows the poem to go into the light and breathe, be encountered, be remembered.

Conclusion

Needless to say, the day is hugely enjoyable and a communal, bonding experience. For me and, it would seem, a great number of my poetry students, it’s always a highlight of the year. Poetry and Theatre have not been close enough for a while, and it’s high time they hung out!

Glyn’s Teaching CV

As a graduate I studied Poetry and Theatre with Derek Walcott at BU. As a professor I’ve taught poetry (alongside theatre) at Amherst, Columbia, Princeton, NYU and the New School, as well as in the UK, and have taught theatre (alongside poetry) at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.