The Drama Student by Autumn Royal
Giramondo, 2023
Ghost Nets by Barbara Temperton
WA Poets Publishing, 2022
Like reverse-engineering a sausage, articulating grief is an impossible task. Autumn Royal’s debut poetry collection The Drama Student (2023) resists this urge for clarity. Instead, she writes towards grief’s inability to be expressed or written, how language scrapes against grief’s edges, a continuation of her practice’s focus on elegy and mourning traditions. Divided into a two-scene act with an interlude and encore (cheekily prefaced with the poem ‘Causing a scene’ (1)) this collection literally and figuratively sets the stage for grief as performance.
In The Crying Book (2019), Heather Christle writes about how emotional tears have higher protein content than reflex tears, making them stickier, allowing others plenty of time to see them running down our faces. A theory for this: how we feel is meant to be seen by others. The Drama Student is an experiment in making grief as visible as possible; mourning is an attempt to translate from interior feeling to exterior gesture. The word ‘attempt’ is important here — spoken or written grief can deeply fail at conveying the reality of the experience (as anyone who has lost someone can attest). Royal echoes this in ‘Raising a subject’—”I’ve flattened myself to fit through scripted / doorways and babbled away my dimensions” (5).
Royal writes about the tensions of these conflicting desires to express and conceal in the poem ‘Versing about no body’: “Do I cover up my tracks or expose the wounds?” (21). The entire collection is perforated with em-dashes (a nod to Emily Dickinson, a historical observer of the hysterical), evoking both the direction line of a track or the cut of a wound. This cutting open of language occurs throughout the collection with Royal’s repetitive and obsessive use of the em-dash. These syntactical cuts carve away the poems’ façades, fragmenting the many gestures towards performance, while building a velocity that carries the reader through to the end.
The speaker’s desire to express grief seeps through but never makes it out whole. In her poems, props, too, are subject to breakage, burning, and smashing. Images of water spilling, nails pressed into a palm, a jar smashed against brick show the inadequacy of language as a container for grief. In the poem ‘O, this thing,’ “O” as anaphora is repeated so many times it loses meaning, puncturing the poem like a gasp, a yawning orifice, or moans (54). Royal deftly embodies the physicality of this absence in her poetry — the form itself becomes a set of props for performing grief.
Performance, however, is not without risk. The mourning woman has often been a problematic image, her grief viewed as self-indulgent, as if a person in pain seeking attention doesn’t deserve attention. Royal’s subversive use of acting and the stage as analogues of grief, however, challenges the mourning woman’s troubling inheritance. Internalised pain is metabolised into theatre, the attention is changed, charged. The reader, the poetic ‘you’ addressed throughout the collection, becomes an attentive audience. The emotion, hysteria, and feeling in an actor’s performance can become iconic, often rewarded with applause and encores. After all, there’s a reason why the Marissa-Cooper-freaking-out-throwing-chair-into-pool video has 6.2 million views on Tiktok. Grief is primal, but what happens when it is translated to performance, an artform where an audience is innate? Through performance as metaphor, it feels like Royal twists a common expectation of grief poetry, that its value lies in how raw, honest, authentic it is. The use of the persona in The Drama Student is not to obfuscate or present an artificial version of grief but to act instead as vessel for emotional release. After all, the actor gives up their own identity to an audience, channelling a story not their own.
‘Poesy’ starts with the epigraph:
’When people speak out in favor of a life of madness, they mean the cute, nice madness, not the disgusting or dangerous kind. The disgusting and dangerous kind is prioritised in language but not in life.’— Aase Berg (53)
The speaker in this poem is a “cornice”, decorative and “disenchanted”, lacking agency (53). Strapped into a hospital bed, a hug is questioned, feedback tumbles into a void — these images of care are soured. Throughout the poem, the speaker marks and marks and marks until this act reaches semantic satiation, a phenomenon where repetition of a word or phrase drains its meaning. Similarly, these duties curdle and lose all meaning. “I promised to be static” contradicts the staccato repetition of “I mark,” charging the poem with dynamism (53). There is a truth to this negation—anyone who has lost a loved one knows about ‘going through the motions’ and how everyday life loses its meaning in the wake of loss. How does one find meaning in this absence?
Royal responds to this question through ‘Soliloquy’, a poem that pursues multiplicity while also challenging the societal containment of grief to specific spaces and timeframes (59-63). With the feeling of a choir, quotes from other writers and artists thread throughout a long, unbroken block of text. This poem grapples with grief’s inarticulability by turning to others instead. Royal gestures to this by quoting folklorist Patricia Lysaght, “lamentation has been a central element of the culture of women in most societies,” situating this collection in a long lineage of lament (60). When reading this manuscript for the first time, I was (pleasantly) surprised to see my ‘orectic poem’ alongside the work of many other poets and artists. Writer and guerrilla theorist Neema Githere’s framework of rigorous citation comes to mind here as Royal acknowledges all the lamenters and mourners that have come before her (and grieve alongside her). The constant imagery of spillage and wateriness in this collection refer to grief’s innate leakiness, how it cannot be held. Royal refuses grief’s relegation to funerals and other socially acceptable spaces to mourn. Instead, she recognises grief’s tradition as a means to connect, share, and express together.
When Princess Diana died, it triggered mourning sickness, a phenomenon of mass, shared grief—maybe her death created a space where the public could channel their own personal grief as a collective, rather than in solitude. In Grief Lessons: Four Plays (2008), Anne Carson writes (as a translation of Greek poet and scholar Euripides’ plays): “Who knows what will happen if I’m alone with my grief” (86). It feels like Royal is writing against this loneliness, her citational approach reframing the soliloquy’s solitary and interior nature into one of dialogue and kinship: “in the end what she did not express shone through me like a sunset” (59). This “practice of beckoning and attuned listening, a practice of linkage,” coined by audio researcher Lu Lin, exists not only within the poem but also beckons outside of it, calling to the reader through the poetic use of ‘you’ (On Deep Breaths and Friends Forever: Im/materiality and Mis/communication in Happy Angels Revisited, 1). It’s funny how writing about this citational methodology has become in turn, heavily citational. As Chelsea Hart writes in Petal (2021):
You might think you are one unit enclosed but loss will show you that your edges were always a joint effort. // (‘Moss,’ 27)
Hart builds on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work on moss. In Kimmerer’s research, she writes about moss as an example of mutual support. Water is held best by the moss as a whole, nourishing the whole colony rather than one individual shoot. The making of a person is a group effort, and the loss of a person is a group loss.
In ‘Soliloquy’, Royal considers that maybe it’s not just grief, but also its inexactitude that can be expressed together, maybe “there are many ways to make a cut” (59). ‘Soliloquy’ is the final poem in The Drama Student and feels like it exists over one ragged breath, oscillating through different performances of mourning, moving from earnestness to hysteria (arcing back to reflections on madness in ‘Poesy’). A brick falls from the roof, a tooth is pulled; there is screaming, bad breath, smashing pans. “[L]amb,” “my paws,” and “gallop” nod to the bestial realm (60). And, in fact, animal references rear their tiny heads throughout the collection, a substitute for when human expression is so very lacking. “Hair-matted” and “howl[ing],” the poem gallops toward its end, a deadpoint¬ where it is free for a brief second, all hooves off the ground, fitting for an encore (60).
The poem concludes: “With curtains half drawn and howls of unnatural formation, while I am indebted to this scene, in full mesh I will gallop (63)”. Mesh, full of holes, allows leaks through its many fine loops. Breakage can also be whole. Unbroken and saturating the page, ‘Soliloquy’ and indeed, the whole collection, is loud and unrelenting in its demand for a stage, an audience, a spotlight.
