A Very Big Idea: John on Foraging New Territory (with Memories of Chasen Gaver)
This post is number 4 in a series in which Catherine and John take turns reflecting and expanding on the attributes of Interdisciplinaryness practitioners, originally outlined in “A Very Big Idea: Interdisciplinaryness People, What Makes Us So?”
2. FORAGING NEW TERRITORY
In keeping with making risky messes, InterD people are inclined to forage their own territory. It appears as if the containers laid out by others are appreciated, informative, referential guideposts, but ultimately too restrictive to our processes. At the same time, in filling (or emptying) multiple containers, often simultaneously, we feel an ease in adapting existing products and ideas, partly because we can informatively borrow from anywhere.
Before Chasen Gaver I’d never heard anyone describe himself as a performance poet. The first time I saw him perform, around 1979, Chasen claimed to know of only one other person who used the title, a man he had never met who went by the name of Nicky Butane. In fact, Chasen had a poem about his search for performance poet kinship in which he’d flick on a butane cigarette lighter, hold the flame at arm’s length as if seeking something in the dark, and call out, “Nicky Butane? Nicky Butane? Nicky Butane?”
Nicky Butane might have been a missing person, but in the 1980s in Washington, DC, Chasen Gaver was easy to find. You could encounter him performing in an art space, a nightclub, a community center, or a political rally, and he would definitely be anywhere that someone was attempting to organize a Lesbian/Gay arts event, which is how I made his acquaintance. Chasen was fresh. He had a poem based in someone’s mispronunciation of Kalorama Road as “Rama Rama Road,” one proposing that Washington be renamed Dance City to fit the initials DC, and one – maybe more than one – about his adoration for Diana Ross. And he had plenty of poems about current events and human rights. An activist to the core, Chasen was involved in numerous civic action groups and had even founded a local chapter of NOW during his college days in Ohio.
Chasen’s self-invented form of performance poetry used props, costume accessories, gestures, dance moves, a tambourine, and, for one poem, a shadow puppet stage. He was aware of his forbears in “serious” poetry, but he didn’t hesitate to reveal his inspirations in the disco scene and pop culture. Before I encountered him, I’d thought of public poetry reading as an innately tedious form in which self-serious poets, usually docked behind a podium, intoned their work in a droning style intended to get the words to hover with looming significance, but which usually landed on my ear as shapeless, inexpressive, and cloyingly self-conscious. By contrast, Chasen was kinetic, musical, heartfelt, righteous, funny, and, when the material called for it, unapologetically camp. “REVOLUTION rhymes with LIBERATION,” he declared in one of his poems, and for me, it was kind of a personal liberation to witness Chasen Gaver in performance.
Part of that sense of liberation emerged from the fact that Chasen, on stage, was so true to himself and all he believed in, and part of it resided in the constant evidence that he was unfettered by anyone’s expectations of what poetry or performance were supposed to be. He not only created poems and turned them into a show, he invented his entire form, and taking it even further, invented the ways that his art functioned in the world. I can’t claim that at the time, my 20s, I seized on the example and ran with it. It is more in retrospect that I recognize what Chasen was doing in terms of the essential role of foraging new territory in the context of interdisciplinaryness. Chasen’s creation led to re-invention which led to changing the rules about what a poet could be and where a poet belonged.
I don’t know if Chasen thought of himself as an interdisciplinary artist. I don’t know if he came to performance through poetry or poetry through performance. I’m sure that he was aware of the work of the Beats and the Nuyorican Poets to heighten the performative potential of poetry, but I doubt that he was following anybody’s example. I suspect that Chasen developed his particular combination of elements because he had to.
I wish I could interview him now about his impulses and vision in foraging new artistic territory, but alas, Chasen Gaver died in 1988, one of countless artists claimed by AIDS in the first decade of the epidemic. Since then, performance poetry has proliferated as a form, and any poetry slam might field someone with a fresh vision of how poetic words and performance can come together. But even poetry slams have their rules, and with so many practitioners it’s easy to encounter work that is more imitative than vitally original. Meanwhile, page-bound poets in conventional readings continue to drone on. Chasen’s work, on the other hand, stands vivid and unique in my memory 30 years after the fact, its combination of elements startlingly innovative and yet somehow also inevitable.
It was an art of unique synthesis. Chasen published chapbooks, but his poetry in print gained life because you could imagine him performing it, because you understood its sense of rhythm and cadence from hearing how it put it over on stage. He might have channeled his performing talents to something else, maybe a cabaret act or stand-up comedy, but I doubt anything but his brand of performance poetry would have had the force to reveal the essential originality of Chasen’s viewpoint, embody his fierce and impish character quite so well, or be so damn entertaining. The poetry had to have the performance and the performance had to have the poetry, and both disciplines were transformed from your expectations by virtue of the encounter.
