Transcripts

NANCY FUSHAN: Marisha Chamberlain decided to write "Snow in the Virgin Islands" when she happened upon an old packet of letters marking her own correspondence with a prisoner many years ago. The memories and feelings evoked by the rediscovery prompted the poet to create a new work. According to Chamberlain, the material begged for a dramatic presentation. But as a poet, she had some initial hesitancy about writing for the theater.

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: In the company of playwrights, when we discuss things, they're interested in what works on stage. And that's legitimate, of course. But we don't talk often about music in words. One of the things that a poet is concerned with is precision in language. Finding a word that may be used in a different kind of a syntax will really say something freshly. Well, you can't always put that kind of a line in someone's mouth in a play.

I think of playwrights as being much more sociable people, who are interested in taking the situations that they've seen around them and playacting them out. And that's, it's a very playful form. And in some ways, it's easier to be around that, the theater and, and playwrights, and actors, than it is to be around poets because there's more of a sense of-- I've found anyway, recently-- more of a sense of play and a sense of a gregarious ongoingness of life, as opposed to trying to make the ultimate statement.

NANCY FUSHAN: Dealing with a contemporary relationship between a White feminist and Black inmate, Chamberlain realized early on that a verse play capitalizing on her poetic style would not work.

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: The etymology of the word verse is to return, there's a sense of return, and of completion in the music of a poem. And this play, this work, as I was working on it, wasn't interested in that kind of music or that kind of circular thing. It was there is more of a sense of a chemical reaction almost, where one force was going to work against another force. You put the two together, and there was going to be an explosion of some kind. And that's a play.

NANCY FUSHAN: Yet the script does, in part, resonate with what Chamberlain terms the music of language.

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: Some of the speeches that I've given them are like prose poems. There's not a strong sense of rhyme. And there's more of a paragraph feeling about it. But it's a poem.

NANCY FUSHAN: Do you think that that links directly to the source of the play, which happened to be letters?

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: Oh, sure. Yeah. Because the source of the play was words, as opposed to a situation. And that's very different from coming across a group of papers and hearing the words start forming themselves into voices, which is how this play began.

NANCY FUSHAN: And while the poetry has affected her theater, the sense of theater has had an impact on Chamberlain's poetry.

MARISHA CHAMBERLAIN: I guess it's reinforced a conviction that I already held, which is that a poem has to work on a dramatic level too. There are a lot of poems that don't go anywhere. You have the sense that the poet is just talking the subject matter along. And those are not particularly memorable poems.

And it seems as though the poem has to be functioning on a dramatic emotional level. There has to be a sense of a revelation change, that kind of component, if the poem is going to live. So if anything, I've gotten a little wilder in the poems that I'm writing.

NANCY FUSHAN: Marisha Chamberlain says that she now has the best of both worlds and wants to continue creating works in the realm of poetry and theater. And in both areas, she intends to explore the interaction of different voices, the communication and ties between disparate aspects of life. I'm Nancy Fushan.