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Poets Are Present: Kim Peter Kovac
Poets are Present is a poetry residency in conjunction with David Ives’s adaptation of The Metromaniacs. As part of this unique theatre/poetry exchange, the Shakespeare Theatre Company is proud to host more than 30 D.C.-area poets in the theatre’s lobby. Throughout the run, we will share with you the poems that this residency inspired our guests to write. Visit our Poets are Present page to see a list of upcoming poets.
Kim Peter Kovac is Producing Director of Kennedy Center Theater
for Young Audiences and works nationally and internationally in TYA with an emphasis on new play development and networking. He tells stories on stages as producer of new plays, and tells stories in writing with lineated poems, prose poems, creative non-fiction, flash fiction, haiku, found poetry and microfiction, with work appearing or forthcoming in print and on-line in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Red Paint Hill, Elsewhere, Frogpond, Mudlark, and Counterexample Poetics.
haiku for lip-smacking scandals, cross-dressing, dress-crossing, fantasies within realities, realities within dreams, dreams within fantasies, plays within plays playing with play, poetry and contemporary references and jokes upon wordplay upon puns so punishingly bad you can only think ‘from bad to verse’, all whipped into a lather of pastel delight that somehow nestles perfectly within the ambiance of a theater named after the master of iambic pentameter
By Kim Peter Kovac
early arrivals –
anxious metromaniacs
chill in the lobby
the couplet-wielding
playwright cooks up a trifle –
goofy and sublime
those “abstract and brief
chronicles of the time” now
speak and dream in rhyme
not designed by Puck –
brightly painted plywood forest –
midwinter day’s dream
identities switch
as quickly as costumes change –
ingenues now clowns
the couples couple,
uncouple, couple again –
courting in couplets
Kim Peter Kovac also composed a “found poem” remixed from the Asides article “Metromania Mania” by David Ives. (Click the image to enlarge. Transcribed version below).
IVES AND VOLTAIRE AT THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE
By Kim Peter Kovac
David stumbled upon
La Metromanie
and developed ravishing
couplets and comic
gold in English.
At the same time,
mad for poetry,
Voltaire publicly
named Ives
to the Academie
Francaise.
