Hyper-Conductivity: Poetry as Fragment and Fractal
by Derick Varn

This weekend I was at Georgia Tech's theatre production of Electricity. It was a jarring mixture of monologue acting mixed with random images and strange electronic music that was somehow based on Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Although it would give many innocent theatre-goers a brain hemorrhage, I found it exciting. Sometimes my masochistic whims for the innovative art overtake my common sense... and I am glad they do.

Two things struck me about Dr. Matthew Causey's production: it took a familiar narrative then twisted it into something new and it used the feel of the events more so than the coherence of the narratives to portray Causey's point. Like a good David Lynch film, it was more about the subject than the object. Despite how much a brain screw is involved, it's the fragments in vision linked together warping like a fractal into one whole picture that makes that approach effective.

Theatre and poetry have always been closely related. From the ancient Greeks to modern times, poets and script-writers were seen as the hedonists with a vision. Theatre has been far more conductive to innovation lately, it has embraced the changes and fragments far better than poetry.

It seems that a lot of poets are too caught up in forcing empathy. Theatre and music still juxtapose and challenge us to view life in a different, slightly more fragmented way. Life is like that: the coherence is not obvious and it challenges us to move on. Chaos Theory is based off of this. Poetry needs to take lessons from theatre: stop caring about coherence and start caring about subject.

I rather like my writings to induce massive internal bleeding. It's good for the reader and the writer assuming they both live through it.

Derick Varn is a poet and longstanding contributor to Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.