an ongoing series by Thomas E. Kennedy and Walter Cummins  



LOVE & ILLUSION
IN RESIDENTIAL LAS VEGAS:
AN EXPLORATION OF A POETIC LIFE

Essay by Heather Lang

And if anything ever starts making sense, or starts to get boring, David Byrne will shine a light turning everything into a bicycle built for ten, so that you’ll have to choose your nine favorite friends to ride off with, into the fog.
            —from Micah Ling’s poem, “Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense”

Recently I fell in love with the Head of Lighting/Special Effects for a Cirque du Soleil show and moved to Las Vegas. Yes. I admit it. I moved for a man: a unique and kind-hearted man who is a dear friend of a best friend. Throughout his career, he’s worked with internationally renowned illusionists, such as Siegfried and Roy, and the planet’s largest theatrical producers, Cirque, along with other larger-than-life performers and artists.


Pinhole camera photograph by Michael Cassera

      Because of his profession, M knows the secrets behind magic. But, he’s quite humble about his accomplishments and knowledge; he doesn’t call it magic. Modestly, M says that these feats are illusions. I can’t bring myself to agree.
To me, the term illusion implies deceit, that the magic isn’t real. But, it is real.
      I don’t, however, want to devolve into semantics. Especially on the topics of magic and love. A love that, as silly as this might sound, just last week brought me to tears of joy as I sat on the kitchen floor somewhere between the countertop that hosts the coffee maker and the drawer containing the bamboo utensils. Curtains of theatrical fog billowed all around me. M had recreated a miniature fog machine, just for me, and in my favorite color, blue. Why? Well, because of love. And because of magic, of course.
      Regarding what is real within theatre, within the book The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and Speculations on the Art of Theater, Robert Edmond Jones writes of two ways of saying the same thing:

The first is prose. The second is poetry. Both of them are true. But […] the poetic way is somehow deeper and higher and truer and more universal. In this sense we may fairly speak of the art of stage designing as poetic, in that it seeks to give expression to the essential quality of a play rather than to its outward characteristics.
      These contemplations bring me to another love: poetry. My friend, Kahle Alford, my colleague at The Literary Review, put it well when she said that, when it comes to poetry, we look for certain poems, and certain poems look for us.
The first book to arrive at my new home in Las Vegas was an advanced review copy of Micah Ling’s Flashes of Life (Hobart Handbooks, 2015), which is ordered like an LP. It even has a Side A and a Side B, and within this poetry collection, I found myself most drawn to the piece “Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense.” The opening: “David Byrne is
magic. Not, like figuratively: really.” I immediately thought of M, and his career, and our new life together. And, I thought of last week’s visit to The Beat Coffeehouse & Records on Freemont Street in Vegas, a road that also hosts a forty-foot-long flame-throwing mantis. Moreover, I thought about magic. I wanted to understand why I loved this poem. What was the magic?


      Not unlike lighting or effect queues, which are purposefully positioned, Ling’s nontraditional use of commas paces the poem for effect. For example, Ling writes, “He knows card tricks and makes bunnies disappear, and reappear.” The rules of comma use, the handouts that I give to my English Composition students, would argue against this comma. However, it’s perfect. It gives us that one breath, that suspenseful pause before the rabbits reappear.
      Alternately and quite musically, Ling’s sentences unravel at other times at her artistic discretion. She writes: “He walks on nails and coals and across water like they’re all cool valleys of grass” (versus “He walks on nails, on coals, and across water like they’re all cool valleys of grass”). The lack of pauses and confinement, which commas would impose, allow these feats to feel larger, more sprawling, more grandiose.
      Perhaps the most important aspect of magic is that it must seem real. We must believe it. Ling opens her poem: “David Byrne is magic. Not, like figuratively: really.” Undoubtedly, Ling’s voice is colloquial, right down to the word “like,” which is sectioned off by commas. And, the sentence fragment is conversational. The poem feels real. It is genuine. This everyday language anchors something which otherwise would have been too ethereal, too surreal, to be tangible, to be accessible. Because of Ling’s diction and syntax, however, the strange contents of the poem can be normalized with us, can be made palatable.
      Moreover, Ling eases us into the seemingly impossible, things that we wouldn’t believe without first seeing with our own eyes. Throughout the poem, we move from magic tricks we’ve seen or heard of since childhood, like card tricks and walking on coals to, near the end, learning that Byrne will “rig the pipes to play music out of the showerhead” and “ask the furnace to keep a beat.” Doesn’t this sound like something that only the Blue Man Group could pull off? If Ling had started her poem with the less expected, such as the “weird Jello” that “we’re all bouncing around in,” these distinct and important moments would have been, well, more difficult to swallow.
      The word weird itself becomes normalized through repetition and variations:

If you’re feeling weird, you might as well face this fact: we’re all weirder than the next, for sure. We’re all bouncing around in weird Jello, bumping up against other versions of weird, just hoping to be tapped out of a top hat like that, like snap. David Byrne was kicked out of choir as a child because he was the weirdest of all.
      We become accustomed to the weird. We acclimate to it. In a way, we learn. We learn that, for example, David Byrnes tends to “flip everything around” (ie. “putting furniture on the ceiling”).
      This being said, magic isn’t easy. Nor is poetry. Neither is love. In our lives, it seems that everything is constantly changing. Ling writes:
And if anything ever starts making sense, or starts to get boring, David Byrne will shine a light turning everything into a bicycle built for ten, so that you’ll have to choose your nine favorite friends to ride off with, into the fog.
      And, so, if we want to make magic, real magic, perhaps Ling’s poem is a reminder that we must always be evolving, as lighting technicians, as poets, as musicians, as lovers, as people, and sometimes this means recreating theatrical fog within our own kitchens. Regardless, there’s nothing solitary about magic. Perhaps, we can’t do it for ourselves. But we can do it for each other. Our colleagues. Our audience. Our nine best friends. And, our lovers.

Heather Lang’s poetry has been published by or is forthcoming in Pleiades, december, Jelly Bucket, The Normal School online, and Whiskey Island among other publications. She serves as Associate Poetry Editor / Online Managing Editor for The Literary Review, as Co-Editor for Petite Hound Press, and as an adjunct professor. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her chapbook manuscript was named a semifinalist in the 2014 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook competition, her poetry has been twice nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and she was awarded the Murphy Writing of Stockton University Scholarship for their Spain 2015 program. Heather will serve as an AWP16 moderator/panelist.

Works Cited:

Jones, R. E. (1941). The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and speculations on       the art of the theatre. New York, NY: Theatre Arts Books.
Ling, M. (2015). Flashes of Life. Ann Arbor, MI: Hobart Handbooks.


                                                    [copyright 2015, Heather Lang]