Carla Harryman, "Notes on Poets Theater" (2012)

In this essay, Carla Harryman reflects on the history, aesthetics, and collaborative dimensions of "Poets Theater," a genre that merges experimental writing and performance. Drawing on her experiences as both participant and theorist, Harryman considers how Poets Theater reshapes the relationship between language, action, and community.

As Harryman reflects on Poets Theater: "Calling attention to materials as a means of pointing to what is left out of a given scenario is one of the key features of language centered writing of that period and one of the primary concerns of Poets Theater . I wanted to make this aspect of the writing central to performance. The performer would be conceived as an instrument of the writing; the writing performed would in a sense become a character, or occupy space in a sculptural or emphatic manner. The displacement of language away from the body of the performer and onto the total scene of performance is what would lead me later to identify performers as 'performing objects,' a term that conventionally is reserved for puppets and props. In this scenario, both language and the performer are featured as materials of the total performance event."

Harryman's discussion and elaboration of the principles and tactics of Poets Theater serves as a contextualizing coordinate for the reading of Memory Play, deepening our understanding of the process and theory intrinsic to its writing and creation.

Evening Will Come, where this essay first appeared, was an online monthly journal of poetics, publishing from 2011 to 2020 and hosted on the The Volta, a now-defunct online multimedia site of poetry, criticism, poetics, video, conversations, and interviews, edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Sasha Hawkins.