Life Stories - Families: Women and Children > Comments > "Review of Life Stories - Families: Women and Children First"
Piece Comment
Commenter Profile
- Jonathan Goldstein
- Username: Goldstein
- Location: Montreal, Canada
- Joined PRX: Jan 05, 2004
Piece Information
- "Life Stories - Families: Women and Children"
- Summary: Three stories of young women - Concerning Breakfast, The Trapeze Artist, Alone Like a Stone. One hour of a five-hour series of first-person portraits.
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Review of Life Stories - Families: Women and Children First
Jonathan Goldstein
Posted on February 15, 2004 at 04:22 PM
With “Trapeze” the set-up is so cinematic: a father talks to his daughter who is hanging upside down on a trapeze. It’s an arresting image offered to us through sound and language—language that renders a moment to us without belaboring its poeticness. It is casual, everyday even, but there is something here that exists in all good poetry—something that moves us while defying summation. It’s about father-daughter love, it’s about two people seeing the world in diametrical opposition, it’s about loving your children while all the while knowing they can fly away into the dangerous unknown at any time. The writing is so pretty and the production makes it feel very real and intimate.
What is poetry, at essence, if not a record of human beings relationship with stuff. Three hundred years ago Basho wrote about putting his feet against a cold stone wall on a hot summer day and how nice it felt. Once he’d written his haiku, did he want a piece of that wall as a keepsake? Margy Rochlin explores the seeming contradiction of why some stuff in our lives has value while other stuff ceases to have value. It’s a story about making stuff matter by simply deciding that it does, the energy that it takes to do so, and whether that energy is always worth it.