With Polyphony, I hope to directly address the questions surrounding narrative and dramatic poetry. Have the novel and short story replaced the narrative poem? Is there a niche that narrative poetry uniquely fills? Is verse drama the quaint exercise of a bygone tradition? Could narrative and dramatic poetry reach a wider audience than lyric poetry?The magazine ceased publication in 2005, but the issues are archived and well worth reading.
John Surowiecki is the inaugural recipient of the Verse Drama Prize of $10,000, honoring a living poet who has written a previously unpublished, outstanding original verse drama in English. In addition to the cash prize, the winning manuscript will be presented as a staged reading in New York and Chicago in 2008. The Verse Drama Prize brings renewed attention to an under-recognized area of poetry and encourages poets to work in a new genre, thereby bringing fresh life to the art.Read more here.
THEATRE-goers in Penang were recently treated to Anike, a verse drama by Wong Phui Nam. Closely based on Antigone, the ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles, Anike presented no small challenge to Cape Poetics, a group of amateur actors.Read the full review here.
Though carrying out their roles with dedication, the two main actors - Jayaram Menon (playing king Maniaka of a fictional pre-Islamic Nusantara state) and May Kung (playing Anike who defies him) - managed to convey the emotional underlying subtexts while maintaining the lyrical sound patterns.
Indeed, the subtext and lyricism are closely interconnected in Wong's first play.
A sceptic might wonder whether Maxwell isn't trudging up a cul-de- sac. His drama, like that of his hero Auden, may be dwarfed by his verse. Maxwell argues he's a better playwright than Auden, that he has been improving rapidly, and no one has noticed because the poetry and theatre scenes are indifferent to each other.
"I started writing plays almost as an academic exercise," he explains. "I began with a vast number of characters because I had lots of actor friends in my home town. We put on performances in my parents' garden. I took Shakespeare as my model and made the same mistakes as the Victorians and the Romantics. All my characters were equally articulate. The search now is to render a contemporary sound, however inarticulate, within a verse framework."
