It’s interesting to read a piece in the form of a written
work with the understanding that it is or was intended to be performed. For
instance, the following line has a poetic repetition which, standing alone,
could impress a crowd: “there’s a miniature bagel, in the hand of a miniature
husband, reading his miniature New York Times”. But the fact that it had been
constructed alongside a film scene makes it more confusing, especially the fact
that we, the reader, do not know which scene it is relating to. Could it be a
CEO in the coffee shop on the bottom level of his building? Perhaps Young chose
an average scene and decided to mix things up by dubbing everything
“miniature”. It could be that two young sisters were playing in the toyroom
with their dolls, one of which was a man in a suit sitting at the kitchen
table. The secret possibility of this project is enhanced by the limits and
opacity of a printed page.
A beauty of the page is not knowing who the
speaker is, or will be. I picture multiple readers, alternating lines or
paragraphs (stanzas?), but at the same time I can hear it in one voice. It’s a
plethora of possibility! There is a She, a Her, an I, a We, an Us, a You. Were
the entire book riddled with “I” as the narrator, I should consider it a fluid
lyric. But the We’s and Us’s bring in faceless characters, sometimes named but
mostly not. I like the we, personally, because as a reader I feel enveloped in
the description like Young is telling me a memory to induce my own; I can feel
myself sitting in the church basement, I can hear the poetry being read to me
and my surrounding audience.
The photographs obviously mixed up the genre here, but they added some kind of definition to the instances being portrayed. I never would have anticipated images among the pages of
confusion, though the piece is titled Picture Palace; and when I saw them it was illuminating of the circumstance. The facial
expressions, paired with the tagging lines, gave me an interesting view of the
words I had previously read. “to not recognize someone” is paired with a
sideways, confused glance. Lips parted, the name tries to force its way out of
a mouth and a tongue encourages it within. Why do we look to the side when
thinking? Eyes on a diagonal route help lose focus of the physical and revert
to our mentality?
