West's controversial thesis is that there was in fact a Homer (although West calls him "P," for poet) and that this poet actually wrote down a "primal text" of the Iliad, revising it over many years.
"Call It Sleep" functions almost like the Torah, an ur-text from another age, while "Mercy of a Rude Stream" is like the Talmud, a series of commentaries and revisions that enforce the authority of that primal text even as they transform it.
Galing's primal, near-incantatory text captures the simple wonder of a boy's love for a horse.
So the idea of this primal eruption of text is certainly there in the story, but then to publish something Stevenson really had to work it through to make it into that final version".
The concrete poets here, including big names such as Henri Chopin and Dom Sylvester Houedard as well as Gomringer, have reduced texts to an almost primal minimalism.
In one of the early creation myths related in the Rigveda, India's oldest text, purusha is also the primal man from whose body the universe was created.
Is it odd or inevitable that this central national text — dealing as it does with our primal topics of slavery and race — has practically disappeared as drama?
In recent years, Racine, Chekhov, O'Neill, and Miller, a series of dead white males embalmed by academia, have had their most sacred and studied texts turned by the Group's director, Elizabeth LeCompte, into rigorous, primal messes that have shifted our perception of what constitutes a well-made play — indeed, what constitutes theatre.
YES, there are still a few inhibiting social settings where people must forgo that primal urge to pull out a cellphone and send a quick text message or two.
Mr. Hoff's adroit use of the playing space, J. David Brimmer's balletic fight direction, Keith Parham's atmospheric lighting and Dan Lipton's galvanizing live music — from psychedelic guitars to primal bongos — combine to summon a raw emotional power that's less consistent in the text.
