Editor’s note: the following was generously provided for us by Carlee W. Taggart, a student of Joshua Corey’s at Lake Forest College, who attended the first in the series “Returning from One Place to Another: A Poet’s Theater Showcase” held at Links Hall.

Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater consisted of four pieces, the longest of which was fifteen minutes long. The point of this “collapsible” concept, as stated, is to test the limits of poetry—while not quite narrative pieces, you could still find a narrative in them.  

A preoccupation with technology and human perception of fact in an information age resonated throughout. At least, it seemed that way to me. The two pieces that exemplified these themes most obviously were “Spine” and “Pig Angels of the Americlypse”.  

“Spine” was a poem whose speakers functioned as a machine. The poets worked each other through motions in a sort of follow-up assembly line. One was first unfortunately stuck to a tall ladder until another was placed there and the first became preoccupied with picking something out of the sky (an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, it seemed), which they could almost never accomplish alone. Instead they helped each other. This could be considered a plug for the resilience of human relationships in the face of technological advancement. In the next part of this cycle, the poet was forced by another poet under a table, creating a makeshift entertainment system. One by one, the poets became a part of this technology. Meanwhile, silverware was flying or being kicked everywhere and no one seemed to be able to eat what he or she wanted. How American it all was! A tension existed between going through motions, forcing each other into these motions, not wanting to, and abiding by this prescribed form anyway. 

“Pig Angels of the Americlypse” was more or less about immigration; it was saturated with Spanish language (particularly forms of the verb “buscar”, to find). The poets, these “pig angels”, who snorted, wrote on paper on the ground, talked to themselves obsessively about the institution of marriage and listened to the hardwood floor for something they couldn’t quite hear. Meanwhile, another poet stood to the side and tried figure out how a fax machine worked—personal preoccupations in the face of technology (and in this case its sometimes-counterproductive-ness). There was lots of paper in this piece: immigration papers, faxing paper, writing feverishly on paper. Here, we saw our information society, and they, as introverted creatures, seemed not to know how to function within the very public world created by it.  

What’s sort of amazing to me about Toscano’s walking, talking installation is how perfectly it paralleled the concept and purpose of poetry in a physical form. While a blockbuster or play becomes the physical equivilent of a novel, we could call (and should call) experimental film and this collapsible poetics theater physical forms of the written poem. This performance conveyed feeling and consciousness rather than a set of concrete ideas, and necessarily so. The pieces themselves were a collection, strung together by concepts of human dilemma in the face of an increasingly uncertain American culture. Very good stuff!