New forms

“Look!” Bill said, pointing at the page. “In your head, there’s sexual tension there… . They’re flirting, Jack. You can’t play with that if you’re not going to use it. Remember Chekhov and the shotgun?”

“Fuck those rules. Who made that rule?”

“Chekhov.”

“Who said that things had to have a certain structure? How about new forms? Plays with guns over the mantelpiece and they never go off. Storms where no one learns anything. Poems that don’t begin.”

“People already did all that. The modernists and everything. No one stayed in the theater. People left.”

“They stayed,” I said. “I’d stay.”

From John Cotter’s Under the Small Lights