Print This PostPrologue
I’m in the middle of rehearsals for a new theatre piece for which I’ve written both the script and music. For me, rehearsals have always been a time of exciting discovery and profound disappointment. This time is no different. No matter how I try to impart the music in my head, be it written on the page or modeled in my voice or on the piano, I’ve got to accept all that’s inevitably lost in the process—all that won’t make it from my imagination and into the ensemble’s performance.
Publishing a poem is similarly fraught, isn’t it? Poets have intentions as they write. And I’ve got to believe that even the most hermetic or self-assured poet, alike, wants to communicate something specific, has intentions, whatever they might be. Readers will likely recognize some of those intentions but it’s unlikely that those intentions will bear upon the reader in the same way. A poem I intend as a meditation on an age-old civil war might have in it something to suggest to a reader that the poem is primarily about the imperfections of love. Works of art and literature are vessels people fill with their own concerns.
This October, I’ve offered up four poems. And I asked that the poets read them (or have them read) on video. I hope you’ll double your pleasure interacting with their work by listening to the poems being read aloud in a voice other than the one in your head. Quite frankly, the commingling is sure to be exciting and, if not disappointing, a disruption. But I have no idea if the disruption began when the poet started writing the poem or when you encountered it.
Tiny Fires
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Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and educator based in Oakland, CA. Suzara’s mission is to create, and help others create, art that builds community, fosters healing, and provokes important questions through spoken word, theater and movement. Her debut full-length poetry book, SOUVENIR, is forthcoming in 2014. Suzara’s poems have been published in two chapbooks, including one nominated for the California Book Award; and journals and anthologies such as Kartika Review, Lantern Review, and Walang Hiya (Without Shame): literature taking risks towards liberatory practice (Arkipelago Books 2009). She has been invited as a featured poet and arts educator at schools, universities and arts venues nationally, including Mt. Holyoke College, Portland State University, Stanford University, and UC Santa Cruz. Her first play, Pagbabalik (Return) was twice the recipient of the Zellerbach Arts Fund and was featured at several Bay Area festivals. Her current play in progress, A History of the Body, has been awarded the East Bay Community Fund Matching Commission, the Oakland Cultural Funding Program grant, National Endowment for the Arts grant, and Zellerbach Arts Fund. She recently collaborated as a writer and performer with Amara Tabor-Smith’s Deep Waters Dance Theater for the Creative Work Fund recipient Our Daily Bread and was a member of Kreatibo, a queer Pin@y arts collective, whose 2004 play was selected for Curve Magazine’s Best Lesbian Theater Award. Suzara has a Mills College M.F.A. and teaches Creative Writing and English at Bay Area colleges, currently, she is a lecturer at Cal State University Monterey in the Creative Writing and Social Action Program. Suzara has been a Hedgebrook Resident Artist, an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts Playwriting Program, and has been a part of PlayGround at Berkeley Repertory Theater’s Writer’s Pool for the 2012-2013 and current season.
