Description
Maria Bacardi’s company, OddFellows Playhouse, commissioned Mr. Steele to write the following pages of poetry for the 2007 Longhouse Gala in honor of Yoko Ono. The gala celebrated the founder, Jack Lenor Larsen’s, 80th year, and Longhouse Reserve’s 15th anniversary. Yoko Ono was presented a medal for her efforts at promoting peace.
The poems were written over a two week period by Mr. Steele on retreat at the Surf Hotel in Block Island, RI. The end result was three separate works of poetry, represented here: “The 12 Alchemists,” “Four Narratives,” and “Your Wait in Gold.”
At Oddfellows’ request, these poems were written to be performed by both children and adults. The original concept was that “The 12 Alchemists” were represented by 12 separate orators reciting the poems, accompanied by dancers interpreting the words. These performers were placed in strategic locations around the Longhouse grounds to entertain guests. “Your Wait in Gold” was orated and performed by the same dancers on Ono’s life-size white chessboard sculpture, “Play it by Trust,” also located on the Longhouse Reserve’s grounds.
Due to time constraints, only “Your Wait in Gold” was performed (see photograph printed on the back jacket of this book).
The theme for each poem was “alchemy” and loosely inspired by the traditional Japanese “Tanka” form.
Note from the Preface:
"... I had just finished writing for ten consecutive days at the Surf Hotel on Block Island, the outcome of which was over three-hundred Tanka-inspired poems. Most of the work was on the topic of alchemy, or the obscure idea of transmuting a substance or an experience “into gold.” The poems focused heavily on twelve alchemists, historical or fictional, that I knew very little of beforehand. The format (Tanka) and the alchemists were assigned to me by the company commissioning the work, Oddfellows Playhouse. It was a daunting task for any number of reasons, but I especially didn’t want to presume that I knew anything about “alchemy,” let alone have the authority to accurately parlay the the lives or inspirations of those attributed to such miracles of magic, science and discovery. And even achieving that for each of the twelve, there was the equally daunting task of having the poems accessible to both children and adults, as I was told they would be performed by members of Oddfellows Playhouse at the Longhouse Reserve gala in Long Island, NY. That said, I learned that upon writing for each alchemist, there were word choices that became clear by intuition. In a roundabout way, I was experiencing a kind of alchemy, or magic, through the act of writing about their lives and drawing inspiration from them to compose the work.
My desire is that you experience some of this magic in reading these poems, and that they convey a trace of the magnificence of their contributions, in both the physical application of science and the more esoteric territory of metaphysics."
- Kevin McWha Steele