CA. Other Poets and Works

12. Paul Goodman (1911-72). Stop-Light: 5 Dance Poems and an Essay on the Noh. Harrington Park, N.J.: 5x8 Press, 1941.

	The ‘movement of drama’ in the nô is not ‘the working out of will’, but rather ‘a coming to awareness’. Image of Goodman: .

Goodman’s provocative opening essay, ‘The Drama of Awareness’, establishes the thesis that the ‘deepest distinction’ between the nô and European drama is that the former ‘imitates a State, of the soul or nature’, while the latter imitates ‘an Action’. Thus the ‘movement of drama’ in the nô is not ‘the working out of will’, but rather ‘a coming to awareness’. In his ‘dance poems’ that follow, Goodman explains, he has ‘tried to borrow from’ the nô the ‘technique for producing this effect in a play’. DUSK, THE BIRTHDAY, THE THREE DISCIPLINES, THE CYCLIST, and THE STOP LIGHT are set in identified locations in modern-day New Jersey and New York, but each includes the dramatis personae of the nô, a recognisable waki and shite (see BL207), and a chorus, and each works toward a central lyrical passage accompanied by the dance of the shite. By adopting these conventions, the dramatised intervention of a shite into the consciousness of a waki, Goodman succeeds in locating the ‘movement of [the] drama’ in states of awareness rather than in ‘the working out of will’. This in itself is a notable achievement. If the poems fail as drama it is because the nature of the ‘awakening’ or ‘revelation’ of the waki is not clearly established. Goodman’s attempt to enliven English verse with particular nô conventions, however, remains among the more compelling and knowledgeable in the record. See also A25.