Your Favorite 15-Seconds
Your Favorite 15-Seconds
A poetry collection by Leigh Chadwick, a chapbook anthology of mini-plays.
Your Favorite Poet, by Leigh Chadwick, Malarkey Books, 2022
“When did the world get so scary?” the poem asks, and asks again, and then again in Chadwick’s collection of catastrophes. Your Favorite Poet distends with the modern horror of being a modern personparent, counting and accounting for the hellstorm of failures we enact upon ourselves, our children, our spouses and lovers, our states, country, culture. Like guns. And more guns. And even more guns. ([Redacted] Texas.) Which is to say, this book is a delightful read. Political and social critique, paired with the psychogenic psychedelics of Chadwick’s anti-glamor take on life within the nuclear family unit, mix in a heady rush of perishable, toxic comedy. Everything is destabilized, decaying, and brimming with vivacious existence. Half-lifes abound. The series of poems titled “Foreplay” made me horny and sad. Snarkily self-aware, the poems in this collection spend a goodly amount of time acknowledging they are poems in a collection of poems, a fact we crash into in the title of the collection’s first poem, titled, “The First Poem in Your Favorite Poet, a Collection of Poetry Written by Leigh Chadwick and Published by Malarkey Books in July of 2022.” This self-reflexivity culminates in the section “Brief Excerpts from Leigh Chadwick Is Your Favorite Poet: An Unauthorized Biography, Written and Edited by Leigh Chadwick,” in which the poet in third-person examines the poet as perishable good, the poet as fertile vessel, the poem and poet intertwined, one and the same, death and creation collapsed and suspended, a photograph of decomposition, monogamous through pure promiscuity. To the very end pushing us past the expected boundaries of a poetry collection’s architecture, in the post-credit “Encore!...” Chadwick the poet casts a wistful spell toward the reader, that they might wish to read more words penned by this fantasticated bard. This reader would like to.
15-Second Plays, curated by The Debate Society, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012
Lately I’ve been thinking again about The Five Obstructions, the 2003 film from Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. Based around Leth’s classic short film The Perfect Human, the premise of TFO has von Trier challenging Leth to remake The Perfect Human in five different ways, each time using a different obstruction (obstacle) placed upon the production by von Trier. Remake the film in Cuba; remake the film as a cartoon; etc. With the notion of the obstruction stewing inside me, the title of this chap-anthology immediately caught my eye. 15-second plays. What a great obstruction. What would these plays look like? Sound like? After all, how much can really happen in 15-seconds? Quite a bit, it turns out. Or almost nothing at all. This temporal obstruction serves as a fantastic highlight for the flexibility of the theater. Mini-monologues, absurdist dialogue, mise en scenes, musical notation, slices of overheard conversation, comedy, tragedy, the range of these pieces astounds. My favorites are the ones that disrupt the already disruptive obstruction, such as Lisa D’Amour’s “New Rochelle (A 15-Second Play With a Frame Around It), which uses the synaptic infinitude of the mind to stretch and warp the set unit of time into something that annihilates the bordering frame; or Kirk Lynn’s “Monolog,” which, without stage directions, reads in its entirety, “Feel this . . . / The real surface of the earth is different,” a play that might last for three seconds or an unknowable ever-extending amount of time. A koan of spilled vastness. In all of these works, brevity equals intensity. They are reminiscent of Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Plays 365 Days, or Kenneth Koch’s short works for the theater. Spasms of performance, finished almost before they have time to exist. What is 15-seconds? Nearly nothing. Or a lifetime.