I am a filthy little beauty-thief. I have been for years. Keep your treasures from me! I will eat your artworks! I will plunder your memory-files for shiny objects to bring back to my lair! Yarrrrrr!!
...<ahem>.
The whole idea for this play came from a xeroxed page someone gave me years ago--it seemed to be an encyclopedia entry, about an old account of people seeing a ship in the *air,* moving as if the sky were the sea. I wrote a poem based on it, and gave it to this person in return (I am a sucker for an artistic dialogue). Eventually, I started turning the poem into a play.
There are scenes in this play and my previous one-act inspired by this guy, whose works I found in a gallery in Nashville. This one, for instance:
There are other beats ripped straight from Rilke (though, really, anyone who creates anything lovely ought to be ripping from Rilke. One gal's opinion). Most often, his Book of Hours and Uncollected Poems.
My friend Brian told me a story about finding a mailbox full of notebooks on a secluded beach. I duly appropriated it.
Another friend told me tales of a largely chair-bound childhood, due to fierce asthma. Boom, a character was born.
Have you ever read Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being? There are scenes where the author steps out from behind his story t tell you the exact moment in his own life when a character was born....
Writing, for me, is something like crazy-quilting. Gathering gorgeous & funky bits and sewing 'em all together. Come to think of it, that's how I would describe my job as an actor, too. Patchwork. The whole wide world around ya is a treasure trove.
Yarrrr!!!
"One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest." - T.S. Eliot, from this: http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw11.html (I found it here: http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borrow-great-poets-steal/).
ReplyDeleteI'm honored to be stolen from. It's only fair! I argue that art is unashamed synthesis. Our perception of reality is the synthesis of information provided by our senses, so why shouldn't the art we create be a synthesis of the same plus information provided by the art we experience?