Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Light and Vibrations

Visual Artists and Auditory Artists (Light and Vibrations)

I am not a visual artist.. I love great visual art be it painting, schulpture or photography. I have taken watercolor courses just to see the extent of my talents and disappointingly there were not strongly in evidence. Actually they were not even weakly in evidence. I have the passion for visual art but not the talent.

On the other hand my artistic gift, such as it is, centers on sound. I have never been trained in music but I love it and I have been writing poetry most of my life. I believe that like the visual artist who can “turn an edge” the beat and resonance of a writer’s style is the difference between good writers and great writers. I can see glimmers of it in expository writing in short stories, in poems and certainly in the dramas I struggle to teach.

I have a friend who has dropped out of WDC who wrote romance novels that were published by a legitimate press. I did a review of one of her novels and commented that certain parts of her work seemed to be lacking in resonance. She asked me what “resonance” was. I suggested she take a poetry class here and her response was that she did not enjoy poetry and avoided it whenever possible. Yet she was not without talent as a poet as evidenced by parts of her writing that flowed along better than others. It seemed to me that she had never taken the time to acquire the technical skills that would have allowed her to showcase the talent she has in a more poetic sort of way. Clearly she got away with the shortcoming because she got her novels published but she was a good writer and I lamented her weakness in this area.

My daughters could have been great writers. Life led them down different paths and they had many interests and responsibilities that took them in other directions. When they were younger I got them to learn some of Shake spheres famous soliloquies like Hotspurs, and Macbeth’s and Hamlets. They have an actress’s memory and sucked up the lines like a sponge. They can still recite them. If you don’t know what resonance really is then read some of these monologues and you will hear the master at work.

Resonance is more important in some forms of writing than others but since drama is a synthesis of exposition and poetry it really explodes in a stage play. The screen play with the special effects has temporarily pushed the staged drama into the background but it will never supplant it altogether because of the way it treats resonance.

In my blog yesterday I talked about technicians and artists. The biggest struggle I face as a teacher of playwriting is the poetic aspects of using the English language. The challenge is so daunting I avoid it. How do you teach someone to be poetic in the way they write exposition? Karen, my boss and mentor at New Horizons is a poet and she must chuckle at my attempts to explain the nuances of resonance, because I suppose she struggles with it all the time in her poetry classes. The problem is particularly acute in monologues which when well written are more like a song than a picture. This was so obvious to Shakespeare he probably didn’t give it a second thought but to writers today it represents a huge void of understanding. The idea of seriously trying to combining the effects of the vibrations and the light is not something that gets a strong treatment any longer. We have the poets and the novelists and only occasionally does the distinct art of the two senses come together.

Shakesphere brought them together and when he did the effect was electrifying. Even though the language is becoming more and more archaic the genius of what he wrote still continues to shine and resonate. One of my favorite sayings is by Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer. He stated something that gives hope to us all.

“Those too are excellent, who know the best when they see it.”