Comic Power: A Performance

Abstract

Comic Power:A Performance Suzanne Juhasz (bio) and Cristanne Miller (bio) Suzanne: Welcome to "Comic Power: A Performance." Today you are invited to attend a special workshop performance of two of Dickinson's poems, Johnson's Number 700, "You've seen balloons set—Haven't You?" and Number 505, "I would not paint—a picture—." What goes on when a reader encounters a poem; what dialogues ensue between audience and actor, when the poem is understood as a performance? Why should a poem function as performance, and how is gender implicated, nay created, in such an event? What gender is thereby constructed? All these questions and more will be raised as you witness this exciting dramatization, in which two erstwhile Dickinson scholars transform themselves before your very eyes into actor and audience, speaker and reader. Today's dramatization is an offshoot of our 1993 volume, Comic Power in Emily Dickinson, in which we, along with our co-author Martha Nell Smith, argue that Emily Dickinson was a comic author of note, using her poetry to perform her critique and disruption of cultural conventions. Comedy, we observe, demands an audience in order to happen: a joke isn't funny if nobody laughs. More broadly, we suggest that poetry is always performance, in that words on a page require the reader to perform them—hear them, realize them, give them life and significance. But if the reader is a performer, so, too, is the poet, whose poem is a script that enables her own voice, or consciousness, or identity to be enacted. Both poet and reader are performers, participating jointly in the production that is the poem. Especially in the case of Dickinson, whose writing deliberately leaves gaps and outrageous ambiguities which the reader alone can flesh out; whose personal reticence is counterpointed by 1700 such scripts, venues for going public. [End Page 85] Dickinson is, of course, our premier woman poet, a point which we also assert forcibly in Comic Power, building on the work of two generations of feminist critics. What has performance to do with gender? Everything, as recent cultural critics such as Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber have argued. Social constructionism has taught us that identity should be understood as neither essential nor fixed. Gender comes into being—is constructed and assumed—by means of how we look, what we do (how we don't look, what we don't do) in the context of our cultural living. For Emily Dickinson, the poem became an especially viable place for hypothesizing and constructing a gendered identity. Whereas in everyday life she utilized much of the conventional gender paraphernalia appropriate to a nice (white middle class heterosexual) girl—the flowers, the cakes, the white dress, in her writing she played more fast and loose with the forms and acts that might designate "woman," when "woman" is part and parcel of "poet." In the act[ing] of the poem it is possible to construct a gendered identity that unsettles and contradicts conventional gender arrangements so much that we might even want to think of it as another gender: woman / poet. Today you will see these performances enacted. Performing Poem 700, Cristanne Miller will talk as the reader who is interpreting a poem, as the speaker of the poem, and as the poet, Dickinson, incarnated in the poem. Suzanne Juhasz as audience will react, the first stage of any reading experience. Then Cris (in a privileged moment hithertofore only privately experienced) will respond to the responses—answering the questions, offering observations of her own. This same encounter will be dramatized again, with Suzanne performing Number 505 to Cris as audience. We invite you to experience the processes of transformation through which poems arouse readers, readers vitalize poems, and poems construct poets. Cris performs poem: You've seen Balloons set—Hav'nt You?So stately they ascend—It is as Swans—discarded You,For Duties Diamond— Their Liquid feet so softly outUpon a Sea of Blonde—They spurn the Air, as 'twere too meanFor Creatures so renowned— Their Ribbons just beyond the eye—They struggle—some—for Breath—And yet the Crowd applaud, below—They would not encore—Death— [End Page...