Nico Medina and Billy Merrell, 2007
An Invisible Play in Verse (Not Commercially Published)
Description: A radio play in verse, The Proposals consists of more than a hundred linked sonnets and tells the imagined tale of a “Poet” and “Lover” who wake one morning to find themselves transported onto a stage. Their bedroom and entire apartment have been inexplicably transported to a public venue–including prop versions of all of their possessions–and an audience begins to fill the seats. When the couple realizes they are both speaking in iambic pentameter, the Lover panics, wanting to escape, while the Poet takes it as a sign. He spends the bulk of the narrative trying unsuccessfully to propose to his beloved.
Background
This project began in 2005 when the poet Timothy Donnelly, advisor for my Masters thesis Columbia University, recommended I attempt a crown of sonnets. He pointed out that I enjoy several modes of writing that could all be combined: specifically, writing autobiographically while writing in form–aided by the use of crossed out text convey clarifying revision.
The initial crown consisted of ten sonnets, but quickly doubled and tripled in size over the coming weeks. What followed was an outpouring of work that became my MFA thesis. I completed a draft in 2006, but after graduation, the true subject and compulsive impulse of the project became clear: I wanted to propose to my longtime boyfriend.
On April 1, 2007, I asked Nico to marry me by performing the final proposal monologue I had been writing for weeks prior. He said yes, and we exchanged vows in the yard of his childhood home in Winter Park, Florida, on October 18, 2008. Two years later we had a legal ceremony in Washington, DC.
While the final manuscript of the work will not be released for a wider audience, individual sonnets have been published online and in print:
- The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) — [appears as the entry "Sonnet"]
- Slice Magazine, Issue 7 — [appears as "Note Pulled from an Invisible Play" on page 21]
- Several Sonnets posted online 2005-2007
What’s with the Birds?
One point of interest in the play is that birds come to roost among the couple’s possessions, nesting in cupboards and following the poet at inconvenient times. In the draft manuscript of the play the birds are described as scarlet tanagers, but ever since a flock of monk parakeets ate our wedding figs, having found the fig tree in the yard of our Green-Wood Heights apartment in South Slope, Brooklyn, I have thought of them as the birds in the play. The horribly Photoshopped image above shows two similar birds in one of the many nests built into the spires of the gate of Green-Wood’s historic cemetery.
What do you mean “Not Commercially Published,” Billy?
I did bind one hardback edition for Nico. It’s pretty cool. I’ll have to show you sometime.
