Like Decorations in a Cemetery

(The children will be crying...Freshness is no more...Encore un instant...Everything ticks like a clock)

An eccentric recitation of Wallace Stevens' 50-stanza poem on mortality. The original title refers to the Negro Cemeteries in the American South where poverty necessitated marking graves with sea shells, broken pottery, empty bottles...whatever could be spared. Like these decorations, Stevens stanzas are humble, beautiful, impoverished, and necessary embellishments on the fact of mortality.

The performance: a solitary woman in mourning clothes strikes a goblet with a rusty spoon and casts dice to begin a solitary tea party. She empties a red toolbox of dirt, and constructs a table-top grave. As the poem is spoken/sounded/sung, various hand-made and found objects are unpacked from the toolbox, serving as noise-makers before becoming "decorations" on the miniature grave. The final image is of the grave.

Words: Wallace Stevens
Performance: Laylage Courie

At the Bowery Poetry Project, 2006.