Magic Lantern Poetry, Part 1: Interview with Terry Borton of the American Magic Lantern Theater

Introduction

My pandemic has had a few magical experiences that I hope to share with you. For some reason, I became engrossed in watching a guy playing a piano for elephants on the internet. One Saturday, I watched a video on filmmaking, and as we all know, the internet is always watching and listening, and the machine suggested all things magic lantern. I came across an interesting website, and if you know me, you know I engage with the people, I still have pen pals, and send people postcards. I wrote the website, never thinking I would ever get a reply, Terry Borton replied within a few hours of sending the email.

I have noticed when meeting people, there can be an implied introduction of "what can I do for you," or more times than not, "what do you do, that you, can do for me." Terry had a genuine interest in what I was looking for. Magic also means wonderful and exciting, as in magical moments, it may sound funny, it was a pretty magical engagement with Terry. I had no idea what I was looking for and I think Terry knew exactly what I was looking for. He invited me to Magic Lantern Performance group that meets via Zoom.

I am always surprised that art has an intentional beautiful intersection of discourse. As a visual communicator, I have bought several glass magic lantern slides over the years at flea markets and antique shops. Visual images merge and overlap with the oral and printed language. Communication, art, and discourse is subtle, subjective, and objective. Visual-based communication has the ability to be aligned with individual interpretation. The use of pictures and stories elicit proposition and persuasive rhetoric. The magic lantern is a visual projector and the poet as a storyteller, is a human projector. Terry embodies everything I would imagine a magic lantern to be.

As a poet, I have always thought words are magic. Language and literacy are agreed upon systems of structured communication delivered through seeing, speech, writing, or gesture and interpreted with acquired skills of listening and reading. Understanding the features of meaning are central to psychological relationships experienced by an audience, complex characteristics of mental representations give way to meaning. Magic is also the use of illusions and special powers to make things happen, that seem impossible, by using mysterious or supernatural forces. Terry’s use of performance immediately puts me into an illusion of time travel, I am there with him, hanging on to each edge of each and every story.

After attending my first magic lantern performing group, I bought Terry's book, "Before the Movies," and have read it twice. As oral, print, and electronic media make up zones of media epistemology, basic reorganizations of power, information, and society, link media with knowledge. Psychographic information includes values, opinions, and beliefs. Para-social interactions with computers build trust in truths, just as the radio did at one time. People learn from truth, beliefs, and stories, and our new reality of para-social relationships. Narratology and visual communication have become a part of my pandemic, I am an elephant, watching someone play magical piano, speaking magical words, over the internet. It is my honor, to present to you, a magical interview, with Terry Borton, the curator of The Museum of American Magic-Lantern Shows.

 

An Interview with Terry Borton of the American Magic Lantern Theater
December 2022

Terry Borton pointing

Terry Borton is Director of The American Magic Lantern Theater, a professional theater group that re-creates 19th century magic lantern shows—the combination of projected images, live drama, and live music that led to the movies. Over the last 35 years he has given more than 1,000 shows, from Lincoln Center in New York, to the theaters, cultural centers, and historic sites of the heartland.

Edward: Was there another career before the magic lantern? Tell me about your personal history with poetry.

Terry: I started out to be an English professor, so I was interested in poetry early on. One influence in that period was Robert Frost, whom I met when I was at college and had the temerity to ask, "What is poetry?" His answer? "Felt thought." Just two words. I've never forgotten that summary, and its meaning infuses my poetry performances today. I'm always seeking the "felt," the emotive connotations of the "thought."

I did not pursue an academic career very long, but moved into education and became a teacher and curriculum developer. As a teacher in a difficult school, I quickly learned that my normal "thought-full" personality could not hold a class. Only if I connected with kids at the felt level could I reach them. So the poetry reading in my classes became pretty dramatic experiences. Once Security came dashing into class, worried about the uproar. Later I spent about 15 years as editor in chief of Weekly Reader, the national children's newspaper. There was not much poetry there, but I discovered that even with prose connecting at the emotional level was the key to success.

E: Tell me about your personal history with the magic lantern?

T: As a child I grew up with my father's magic lantern shows, using a lantern and slides passed down from my great-grandfather. Some of the pictures were animated comedy—a snoring man swallowing a rat—what small boy could resist? As an adult I began collecting glass lantern slides, and then had the opportunity to purchase a large collection of the slides of magic-lantern artist Joseph Boggs Beale. Beale created more than 2,000 master lantern images, which were then photographically made into multiple glass slides. Millions saw his work projected. Almost single-handedly Beale created American screen entertainment for the generation before the movies. Beale illustrated many "Parlor Poems," so-called because performing these short story poems in the parlor was a common family entertainment. Only two of them are well known today—"The Night Before Christmas” and "The Raven"—but almost all of them still work well as performance pieces. Altogether, Beale dramatized 28 of these poems, totaling over 200 slides, or about 10% of his entire output. (For a good anthology see Michael Turner's Parlour Poetry. I've listed those poems Beale illustrated in the note.)1

slide from The Night Before Christmas

E: Why did you become a magic lanternist?

T: When I left Weekly Reader and publishing, I decided that rather than go to another publishing company, I'd try something that no one else was doing, or was likely to do—bring magic lantern shows back to the public stage. I had a terrible time at first getting past my shy nature, but gradually I learned to love performing. Eventually our little theater company had a repertoire of 10 shows, with Parlor Poems (and longer poems like "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha") a central element of most of them.

E: Who were the biggest influences on your performances?

T: Making 19th century poetry accessible, meaningful, "felt" to modern audiences was the central challenge of these magic lantern shows. To meet that challenge I turned back to my early academic training in "New Criticism," which taught that to understand literature you needed to look carefully at each word. What did the word actually mean, what were its emotional connotations? If I could find those undercurrents, I could make the poem come alive.

E. Can you give me an example?

T: Take "The Raven." The raven's "Nevermore" is obviously the key word of the poem. Performers are faced with a choice. Does it sound like a raven's croak? Does it sound like a human voice, more or less the same each time? (That's the way most performers play it.) Or does it sound as the narrator hears it and understands it, with changing connotations and meanings that drive his increasing madness—from being amused at it at first, to "shrieking" defiance at it, to, at the end, adopting the raven's word as his own, in his own voice.

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
        Shall be lifted—nevermore!

slide from The Raven

I've chosen this last approach—to concentrate on how the narrator hears and understands "Nevermore"—but in performance, those felt connotations must be suggested with the changing intonations of just one word. For me at least, the changes are subtle, too subtle to define clearly with "thought-out" interpretations.

So I turn to another mentor, a magician, who told me what an old vaudevillian master clown once told him: "If you’re going up on stage, you have to be willing to drop your pants." He meant (I think) that you have to be willing to go all out. So that's what I do. I don't think it. I drop the clothing of caution and convention and throw myself into the poem, accompanied by Beethoven's Sonata, Opus 10, No. 3 on the piano. I hope that when I come to those "Nevermores" in my narration, I'll feel the intonation that carries Poe's meaning, that my feelings will fill my voice, and that my voice will carry the audience into Poe's world.

As Roethke says in "The Waking":

I learn by going where I have to go
We think by feeling. What is there to know?

1 Following are the Parlor Poems that Beale illustrated. The number following the title indicates the number of his illustrations for that set. The asterisk indicates that we perform that poem in our shows.

Annie and Willie's Prayer (6); Barbara Freitchie (1)*; Blue and The Gray (1)*; The Bridge (4); The Brook (10)*; Casabianca (6)*; The Courtin' (6)*; Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight (10)*; Darius Green and His Flying Machine (8)*; Drake's Ode to the American Flag (6); How Persimmon's Took Ca hob der Baby (4); Independence Bell (6)*; John Gilpin' Ride (20); John Maynard (10)*; A Leap for Life (6); Little Breeches (8)*; Maud Muller (6)*; Nellie's Prayer (12); Paul Revere's Ride (8); The Pied Piper (8)*; The Raven (12)*; Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man (7); Sheridan's Ride (6)*; The Spectre Pig (8)*; Thanatopsis (12); The Village Blacksmith (6); Visit of St. Nicholas (7)*; Wreck of the Hesperus (9)*.

 

Part 2: Magic lantern and poem by Edward Murray

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