Paradise Now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music In 1969
The living.
Compromise of the living.
We are not like the heroic dead.
Graceless, scrofulous
with scrupulosity,
I saw our desire to mirror ourselves….
Lo! We are proud performers in a little
rock and shrub enclosed circle.
We have the dignity of the rays of the sun,
the step of the expectation of the onlooker —
What if our dance is a prance?
Join us.
Note:
Responding to a query from the editor of The Deronda Review, Esther Cameron, regarding the French definite article “Le” in the title, I wrote back to her that “Le” refers to The Living Theatre, a radical theater troupe formed in New York City in the ’60s by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the premise of which was that the play (and your part on the play) began as soon as you entered the building or the space where the performance was to be held. Extend this aesthetic further out, and we are all actors in the play of life.
[See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Living_Theatre] I attended a performance of Paradise Now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music In 1969. Of course, the subject of the poem is not The Living Theatre, as such, but rather the attempt to form community in the sixties and the pitfalls that we as pioneers encountered.
