My First Play & Some Pictures (1999)

Vespers #2: With Winnie the Pooh!

Superstrings [Line Drawing] (1999)

  
               Untitled #1

Fade up on someone sleeping in a bed. A voice:

                        alone
       (pause)
                        perhaps alone
       (pause)
                        although
       (pause)
                        not entirely
       (pause)
                        at times
       (pause)
                        without
       (pause)
                        although
       (pause)
                        memory
       (pause)
                        if nothing else
       (pause)
                        for company
       (pause)
                        when absent
       (pause)
                        questioning
       (pause)
                        if memory
       (pause)
                        remains so
       (pause)
                        if remembered
       (pause)
                        remains
       (pause)
                        what happened
       (pause)
                        if time
       (pause)
                        passing
       (pause)
                        in absence
       (pause)
                        will alter
       (pause)
                        what it is
       (pause)
                        remembered
       (pause)
                        if time
       (pause)
                        remains
       (pause)
                        like memory
       (pause)
                        forgotten
       (pause)
                        or simply
       (pause)
                        left alone
       (pause)
                        without words
       (pause)
                        without touch
       (pause)
                        just gone
       (pause)
                        at times
       (pause)
                        remain
       (pause)
                        alone
 
       Fade out.
  

More poem than play, this piece wasn’t necessarily written for performance, though it takes the form of a monologue. As with my other early poems, it is very obviously influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett, and in particular his late-period miniatures and ‘fizzles’.

My interest in Beckett began a couple of years earlier, when I was lucky enough to see his short one-woman play Rockaby (1980), performed by Rosemary Pountney—renowned Beckett scholar and actress—who toured it around New Zealand in 1997. I had no idea what to expect, having never read Beckett, and was utterly blown away. The performance was sublime. The writing terse and yet tender, emotionally repressed yet deeply expressive. And the quietness. So much silence (but as John Cage reminds us, silence is an abstraction: chairs creaking, people shuffling, suppressing coughs, everything moving) and emptiness (likewise, an emptiness overflowing with fullness).

Okay that’s it for this time. If anyone’s feeling chatty, I’d love to hear about your formative influences in the comments. Who inspired you to first make a poem? To write the way you do? Besides Beckett, Winnie the Pooh also had a profound effect on me; and to be clear, I don’t mean ‘Winnie the Pooh’, the book, but Edward Bear himself, esteemed poet. Come to think of it, there are a lot of similarities between E.B. and Beckett—minimalist structuring, constant repetition, and the exhaustion of language, freed from conventional “sense” making. Both also owe a clear debt to the nursery rhymes and nonsense verse of poets like Edward Lear . . .

  
             From 'What Is The Word'
                Samuel Beckett (1988)

       folly—
       folly for to—
       for to—
       what is the word—
       folly from all this—
       all this—
       folly from all this—
       given—
   

 
              'Wordless Song'
                   Edward Bear (1926)

            Tra-la-la, tra-la-la,
            Tra-la-la, tra-la-la,
       Rum-tum-tiddle-um-tum.
            Tiddle-iddle, tiddle-iddle,
            Tiddle-iddle, tiddle-iddle,
       Rum-tum-tum-tiddle-um.
 

Superstrings [Line Drawings] (1999)

Vespers

Poems by Dick Whyte, and other miscellanea. Explore the archive . . .