Poetry Intention Statement
Scripted
The turn of a page
and a click of a switch.
That makes all the difference.
I flick off the lights for the final time
and shroud the theater in darkness.
Costumes swing softly on racks rolled away backstage.
Props placed in boxes, sorted through one last time.
Dressing room counters wiped of stains of red lipstick and pale rose blush.
Subtle sounds travel through the halls, the click of lights turning off all over backstage
And the quiet chatter of the last few stragglers kicked out of the theater.
I see the closing of highlighted, well loved, written over and over and over and over and over again scripts.
The end, the end, they close for the final time.
Just like when we first opened them,
words now drilled into our heads
that were once so fresh and new and clean of grey graphite smudges.
Finding the first line for the first time.
The turn of a page.
Intention Statement
In “Scripted”, I am exploring the feeling of depressed nostalgia through completing a task. The narrator is me, and I was responding to the concept statement by finding a time where the end of something causes me to reminisce in all the good times once had at the beginning of something, which defines the nostalgia. I used these emotions to describe the end of something that lasted a long time, which came forth in the completion of a task. The poem describes a show that took around three months to create, from the first cold read to the final tech rehearsal. My perspective is more about the task because as a stage manager, I have a job to do, which is to call the show and run lights. My attitude towards completing that job at the end of the last show is a mix of happiness, sadness, and nostalgia, though in this poem the sadness and nostalgia seeped through more than the happiness. The sadness and quietness of everything being put away, of lights being turned off, combined with the slight shift in tone that brings in the nostalgia of the first day of getting a script and reading it without knowing what adventure will entail, that is the basis of my poem. The attitude change happens because after seeing everything end,I always look back on my script that is folded and covered in scribbles and sticky notes, and remember when I first fell in love with characters and lines and lighting cues, when the script was clean and the papers still crisp.
Poetic language and devices are always harder for me in poems that aren’t spoken word. I write spoken word poems almost like a rap, with constant repetition and alliteration, rhyming and assonance. But written poems always trap me as I want to write them in more of a prose and not care about all the fancy poetic terms. However, I tried to incorporate them into this poem while still staying authentic to my voice. The first line and the last line are an example of repetition, which I used to tie up the poem more neatly. In the first stanza, I used end-stops to let each sentence sit and almost echo on the page, rather than have the reader move quickly to the next line. I broke the stanzas to emulate this also, and to separate my ideas a little more. I used alliteration with “swing softly” “racks rolled” and “props placed” to make the poem sound smoother. I used imagery in the next stanza more with pale rose blush and lipstick in the dressing room, as the dressing rooms are always very bright with costumes and makeup. This also functions as a metaphor of wiping away the last remains of the show, of people being there. I also used imagery to describe the scripts, to contrast them between the messy ones and clean ones. Finally, I used repetition in “over and over and over again” to really hit home how many times we write and erase and scribble all over our scripts, and how well loved and used they really are.