Working with Director David Ford on Colette Uncensored

Over a period of several years I worked with the amazing actor Lorri Holt on the script of a one-woman show called Colette Uncensored, about the life of the French writer Colette. The play premiered at The Marsh theater in Berkeley, California, with Lorri in the title role.

Lorri Holt as Colette

Lorri and I worked on the script extensively with the director David Ford. I feel as if I learned more about writing in those rehearsals where the three of us took the script apart and put it back together than I learned in most of the rest of my career as a writer, thanks in great part to two wonderful collaborators.

An Accidental Play

The play originated almost by accident. I had always wanted to translate a book by the great French writer Colette that had never appeared before in English. Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, 1873–1954) is the author of the works of fiction that the movies Gigi and Cheri are based on, as well as fifty other books and plays.

When I sat myself down more than ten years ago and actually looked through Colette: An Annotated Primary & Secondary Bibliography, I realized that every single full-length book by Colette had already appeared in English translation.

That was extremely disappointing. Years later, though, I went back to that bibliography and read more carefully. I started to match the shorter works of Colette with their English translations and discovered that many of her short stories and her magazine and newspaper articles had not been translated into English.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, I spent a month in a villa in France that used to belong to Picasso, and then his lover and model Dora Maar, reading through all the untranslated short works of Colette. I found 200 pages of wonderful short works by Colette that had never been translated into English—a dream come true! I created a rough translation, but wasn’t satisfied that I had done justice to these stylish works, with their many nuances of meaning and their numerous references to French art and drama.

Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island

I contacted Renée Morel, a friend in San Francisco who is absolutely bilingual in French and English. Renée is a walking encyclopedia of French culture and history. She also loves Colette’s writing. After some discussion, Renée and I agreed to finish the translation together, and out of this collaboration came Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island and OtherPreviously Untranslated Gems by Colette, published by State University of New York Press.

When Shipwrecked first appeared in October 2014, Renée and I asked the actor Lorri Holt to do several readings in bookstores in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lorri, who never does anything halfway, bought a wig to turn her straight blond hair into Colette’s brunette perm, dressed in period clothes from the 1920s, and read all the passages from the book with a polished French accent.

Wait a Second—How Did the Kennedy Center Get into This?

Lorri’s creation of the character of Colette was so engaging that audience members at the bookstore readings suggested we turn the project into a one-woman show about the author’s life. At the same time, Lorri mentioned to me that the Kennedy Center in Washington DC was about to stage a revival of the musical Gigi, based on a novella by Colette. The next day, just out of curiosity, I called the Kennedy Center. “How would you like a staged reading of a play about the author of Gigi to coincide with the revival?” To my amazement, the Kennedy Center agreed. There was only one problem: the play didn’t exist. Lorri and I had to come up with a script in the space of a couple of months.

It was incredibly exciting to travel to the Kennedy Center for the first staged reading of our script in February 2015. Not only did they give us the red-carpet treatment—the space where the reading took place actually had red carpets!

The version of our play that Lorri performed as a one-woman show that evening was very much a work in progress. Lorri read beautifully that night, but the script was not yet theater. Pieces from the book were loosely stitched together with passages of exposition where the character of Colette recites her life story. In a couple of places, we had Lorri take on the voice and gestures of another character and speak a dialogue with herself. 

On to The Marsh

That was the state of the script when Stephanie Weisman, founder and executive/artistic director of The Marsh theater in San Francisco, invited us for a one-night trial performance of the play in October 2015 as part of their Marsh Rising series. We were extremely lucky that Stephanie paired us with their director-in-residence extraordinaire, David Ford. David has collaborated with many of the leading solo performers in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Geoff Hoyle, Charlie Varon, and Marga Gomez. San Francisco media have labeled David “the dean of solo performance.”

Director David Ford

Since David’s reputation had preceded him, I was somewhat intimidated when Lorri and I met with him for our first rehearsal/script workshop in the small theater upstairs in The Marsh’s San Francisco home. Lorri, with her innate stage presence, immediately placed herself in a chair at center stage. I sat in the front row, facing her. David chose to sit all the way in the back of the theater—not that it’s a big theater. But his presence there behind me, more felt than seen during Lorri’s reading of that early draft of the script, was somewhat scary.

Like the schoolteacher who doesn’t crack a smile till Christmas, David sat through the first read-through without chuckling at a single joke in the script. Even the most moving sections produced no reaction. When Lorri was done, there was silence. To fill the gap, I raved about her reading. David remained stone-faced.

“Episodic”

Lorri and I waited that day to hear David’s reaction to the script we had poured so much of ourselves into. Finally David looked up from his ever-present iPad, where he is constantly taking notes and sending emails, and peered at us through his round, T.S. Eliot glasses. “Well,” he finally said, “it’s episodic.”

Neither Lorri nor I knew what to make of this cryptic utterance. “That’s not good,” David added, aware that we were not understanding his comment. He explained that the story lacked a unifying theme and an arc. “I think the arc might be personal freedom,” he suggested, with his characteristic critical acumen.

Now, I knew all about story arcs, but somehow it’s very easy to lose track of that basic component of plot when you start with material that has its own logic and integrity, such as the chronology of a real person’s life. How can you tamper with facts and stay true to the story?

After that rehearsal, Lorri and I had many discussions on possible motifs that recurred in the script. The more we talked the more we became convinced that David’s intuitive suggestion of personal freedom was the unifying theme—Colette had moved away from the little town in Burgundy where she grew up in search of more choices, she had left more than one life partner in pursuit of that quest, she had explored her bisexuality, she had eschewed the traditional roles of woman and mother, and she had resisted the Nazis’ deportation of her third husband (a Jew). So we reworked the script with the author’s pursuit of personal freedom as the bridge among the episodes, staying true to fact, but inventing scenes that fit with the historical record. The theme  of personal freedom felt extremely familiar to both me and Lorri, since we came of age during the freewheeling 1960s. But the script was still far from done.

Cut, Cut, Cut

The more we worked with David, the more he insisted we cut the script to the bare bones. We were chopping so much that Lorri consulted Geoff Hoyle, who had also worked with David. Geoff reassured Lorri, joking that the director’s name should be David “We Don’t Need That” Ford. We certainly heard those words from David over and over, till we learned the knack of what we could cut ourselves.

Not that our script was overly long, but the excess exposition didn’t leave room for what was alive in the story to emerge. You have to prune the dead leaves before the plant will grow new ones.

Much of the most vital material in the script was the dialogue where Lorri played different characters interacting with one another. Once we made the cuts, other characters began to appear. The more characters we added, the more Lorri rose to the challenge and created new gestures, voices, and personalities for important figures in Colette’s life, from her utopian socialist, bossy mother; to her sophisticated player of a second husband, the Baron Henry de Jouvenel; to her gangly stepson/lover; to the author’s angry and estranged grown daughter.  

Trust the Actor

David made me see that an actor like Lorri could do much of the heavy lifting merely by saying one word with the right intonation. For instance, at the point where Colette’s marriage to the Baron Henry de Jouvenel is breaking up, I had written a rather long explanation where the character of Colette tries to connect an advice column that she wrote with the author’s own crumbling marriage.

“Just say one word: Henry,” David suggested. “The audience will understand.” And they did, thanks to Lorri’s skill at making that word represent an entire period in the author’s life.

From PG to Uncensored

Part of the play’s unusual origin was that it began at the Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center, a free venue where the public is welcome. For the reading in DC, Lorri and I had to agree to produce a version of Colette’s life that would be appropriate for all ages. But much of the author’s life is not very suitable for young people, including her multiple affairs, her various divorces, and her complicated intimate relationship with her own stepson.

Not only that, there was the issue of Colette’s questionable activity during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. Colette’s husband at the time was Jewish, and he was nearly deported to a death camp, but her personal intervention with the German ambassador’s wife spared him. Colette also continued to publish during the occupation, unlike some writers who went underground and joined the resistance, or fled the country.

In leaving out ethically ambiguous or risqué episodes in the original PG version of the play, we had cut out much of the story’s complexity and interest.

“Find the Darkest Hour”

Here, David Ford’s insight also proved invaluable. When he heard our revised script, he still was not satisfied. “You’re going to have to show us Colette’s darkest hour,” David insisted in his paradoxically soft-spoken manner. We had gotten close to that by including the moment where the Gestapo arrested her husband. But we had skirted the depth of her despair, both during her husband’s internment, and during the five-year Nazi occupation of France. We had also avoided dealing with her complex affair with her teenage stepson, and her conflicts with her grown daughter.

It was only when we found Colette’s bleakest moment, during the air raids in the midst of World War II, that the play was able to rise to her later triumph, and the ending surfaced.

David’s ideas, often delivered in crisp, Zen riddles, were crucial in helping us create a finished script that Lorri turned into a five-month run at The Marsh theater in San Francisco, to great critical acclaim, as well as runs in London; Indonesia; and Portland, Oregon. The play was translated into Catalan and performed in Catalonia by the actor Anna Cabeza. Translations into Italian and French are in progress.

In the end, Lorri, David, and I had great fun working together on the play. I hope you get to see it!

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Preaching to the Choir—Is It Always Wrong?

One of the most frequent criticisms I hear of political writing is that it involves “preaching to the choir”—in other words, telling an audience of people who agree with you what they already know. At first glance, this seems like a terrible idea. After all, what possible good could come of trying to convince the people who are on your side? But I think the question of the audience for political writing is actually more complex.

There are reasons to repeat to those already convinced the principles that many of us believe. Why? One reason is as a reminder—“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” to quote the U.S. Declaration of Independence—but the details of those truths are often obscure.

For example, most thoughtful people may be in favor of “equal protection of the laws,” as mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But not everyone may remember that this entails equal treatment by the police on the streets.

A poem that deals with this issue is “In Two Seconds” by Mark Doty, sparked by an incident where a police officer shot and killed the twelve-year-old African-American youth Tamir Rice when he was playing with a toy gun in a playground in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 2014. (I am indebted to Anne Caston, my colleague in the low-residency MFA at University of Alaska Anchorage, for introducing me to this poem.)

Tamir Rice, 2002–2014

Mark Doty’s poem bewails and protests the officer’s taking only two seconds to assess the situation before shooting and killing the young man. On a larger scale, this poem is a plea for the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement—Doty implicitly calls for an end to racial profiling and to police violence against unarmed black citizens.

I hope that this poem has convinced many readers who were not previously opposed to police violence against unarmed blacks. Without any cynicism, though, I would bet that the vast majority of readers who look for or find this poem already agree with Mark Doty’s ideas on this subject. And yet this poem feels far from pointless to me. For one thing, Mark Doty is reminding us, using the example of the egregious death of Tamir Rice, of the urgency of preventing police killings of African-Americans. There is a way in which hearing or reading this poem permits us to experience more fully the roots of our beliefs. The poem also fills in details about the general idea of equal protection, and inspires us to rededicate ourselves to the campaign to end police violence against unarmed citizens, a situation that persists despite the close attention focused on it.

There are very good reasons to preach to the choir, so long as the writer avoids using cliché language or situations. In his poem, Mark Doty never resorts to often-heard phrases such as “racist," “police brutality,” or “innocent.” He sketches this particular story clearly and with emotion, making real to the reader the life of this boy, with his “comic books, pocket knife, bell from a lost cat’s collar.” Ultimately, Doty calls Tamir Rice, in what is to me the most transcendent moment in the poem, “beloved of time.” The poet gives us the individual and allows the reader to draw the larger conclusions, an approach far more engaging than a recitation of statistics.

If preaching to the choir were pointless, we would only sing our national anthem once and never repeat it. But each time we sing a national anthem, or a folksong such as Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” or we read or listen to a poem such as “In Two Seconds,” we reaffirm our ideals and goals. Writing about political subjects may often involve preaching to the choir, but that’s what a minister does every single Sunday.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Can You Teach Someone to Be a Writer?

I’ve heard so many people say, “You can’t teach someone to be a writer.” What do those words mean, exactly? Do they mean you’re born with talent and drive and it’s determined by larger forces that you will either be a writer or not? Or do they mean that your upbringing and ingrained personality are conducive to writing well, or they are not?

Either way, there is a hint of predestination about this idea that bothers me. Haven’t we all had teachers who inspired and influenced us? Would any writer succeed without a mentor or mentors, and a community of peers?

True, you cannot implant literary talent in a person who does not have it, as if giving someone a donated kidney. But, as the writer Ishmael Reed has said, “Talent is widespread.” The difference between someone who wants to be a writer, and someone who becomes a writer, is often encouragement, mentoring, and a supportive community.

What sort of mentoring helps a person develop into a strong writer? One thing I try to do as a teacher of creative writing is to help students recognize when they have tapped a rich vein. Often newer writers will hit on a lively idea without even realizing that it could be the basis of an entire book. Pointing out those opportunities so students can recognize them for themselves is one important thing a mentor can give newer writers. Along with that, students can learn how to spot cliché language or situations in their writing, and how to dig deeper to transcend those. 

Validation is also extremely valuable. I remember so well the very first meeting I had with June Jordan, who was the advisor for both my undergraduate and graduate creative writing theses—coincidentally, at two different universities. I first met with June in her office in the Department of African American Studies at Yale University. Her office was in a fussy, imitation Gothic building, an odd match for June, with her revolutionary, iconoclastic views. 

June asked me to read out loud the poem I had written that week. She listened with that skeptical twitch she sometimes had in her right eye. It was a poem about an imaginary lamppost. It’s not a poem I’m proud of today, but June heard something she liked in it, and she was smiling broadly by the end of the poem. She said you to me, “You’ve got something. Don’t let anyone ever talk you out of it.” Well, I’m not sure that poem really had anything—I’d never publish it now, and I don’t believe I still have a copy of it. And I’m sure June said that to many, many students over her long and illustrious teaching career. But June’s validation of my desire to be a writer has stayed with me since that day, even though June is no longer with us.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

How to Keep Track of Your Writing Submissions

One type of housekeeping that every writer has to do is to keep track of submissions. This task has become slightly easier since the advent of Submittable, a software that many literary magazines use to handle submissions. Submittable was founded in 2010 by a filmmaker, a musician, and a novelist who wanted to democratize the submissions process.

Once you have an account in Submittable, you can go to the SUBMISSIONS menu and view several different sub-menus, including ALL, ACTIVE, ACCEPTED, DECLINED, and WITHDRAWN. I do find it useful to check my Submittable account periodically to remind myself about what work I’ve sent out and to view results.

The problem is, not every magazine uses Submittable. Many have their own submission interface, and some still only consider hard copy submissions. Submittable alone will not enable you to keep track of the manuscripts you send to magazines or publishers.

All the writers I know have some form of personal database to keep track of their submissions. This is particularly true for poets, who have many individual titles and may submit numerous poems in various combinations to different magazines at the same time.

I find it fascinating that every writer I asked has invented his or her own system for keeping track of submissions. Writers use a variety of software, from Word to Excel to FileMaker Pro, and a range of different notation systems.

I noticed that certain fields are common denominators in all these databases: title, name of magazine or press submitted to, date submitted, and decision (accepted or rejected).

Some writers have their own codes to make the fields easily searchable. The poet Robert Thomas told me he uses a table in Word with these abbreviations in the left-hand column: “X means it’s submitted somewhere, blank means it’s not, and ! means it’s been accepted. If I sort by that first narrow column I can see at a glance what’s out and what’s not.” Interestingly, Robert includes poems in his database that he has not yet submitted, so he can consider those poems when he’s ready to send to a magazine.

Robert Thomas

The writer Jeanne Wagner uses an ingenious color-coding system in her database to indicate whether a poem has been accepted or not: “I keep track of all my submissions on Excel. It’s very simple. The first column is the name of the journal or prize, 2nd the name of the poem(s) the 3rd the date submitted, 4th the result—award amount or publication. In the space to the right, I occasionally make a note, i.e., ‘editorial comment received,’ ‘accepts pre-published,’ ‘don’t resubmit.’ I highlight the positive results in red (publication or award), the rejections in blue, and the withdrawals and non-responses in green. The accepted poems are underlined. I don’t send in a query about my submission until it is well past (at least a month) the date for response listed in the journal’s guidelines.”

Jeanne Wagner

The poet Kendall Dunkelberg has his own method: “I have a system, developed in the 1980s first on Apple’s Hypercard and migrated eventually to SuperCard, that keeps track of submissions, magazines, and grants. It runs reports and even helps me manage readings and book sales." Kendall has written a blog that explains his system in greater detail.

Kendall Dunkelberg

The poet Melissa Stein works with a different software: “I’ve been using an old Filemaker Pro version forever. I’m surprised it still functions. I usually do simultaneous submissions. I generally email magazines immediately when something is accepted.”

Melissa Stein

Each of the poets I queried had his or her own method. It turns out my own method is a lot more obsessive than the other poets I asked.

I use a Word table with all the columns that the other poets mentioned, but I also have a column labeled Previous title. I often change the title of a poem or manuscript during the period I’m submitting it, and I want to be sure that I find all the previous submissions if I have to notify an editor that a simultaneous submission has been accepted elsewhere.

I have another column called Reminder Sent. Two or three times a year I go back over my Word table and look for submissions where the magazine has not responded. I usually wait at least four months before sending a reminder to a literary magazine. The reminder I send is a very brief email just giving the names of all the poems I submitted, the date I submitted them, and a quick note saying that I hope they will let me know soon if they would like to publish any of the poems. In my Word table I enter the date when I send an email reminder to a publication I haven’t heard from, so I don’t repeat reminders.

I also have a column called Address, email, or online submission manager to keep track of how and where I actually submitted the work. If I know which editor I sent the poems to, I include her or his name in that column. I find it reassuring to attach a name to my submission—it makes me feel a more personal connection to the journal. But I also include the name so that any correspondence goes to an individual, not just to an inbox.

When I get a response from a magazine or publisher, I always make a note whenever the response invites me to submit work again, and if there was a personal note, similar to Jeanne Wagner’s database. Maybe once a year I look for those entries and resubmit to one or two of them, starting my cover letter by saying that the magazine invited me to resubmit last time.

I also have a column for the announced publication date of an accepted poem, and a column for the date when it is actually published. Sometimes works are accepted and not published when expected, or ever. I like to keep tabs on that so I can find out if and why a publication is delayed. In an extreme situation, I will resubmit the work if the magazine ceases publication. That can happen, unfortunately.

There is an online submissions tracking system that you can pay for called Duotrope®. Duotrope costs $50 a year, and in addition to providing a way to track your submissions, the website offers a search feature to find publishers, an index of listings, and a calendar of upcoming deadlines. Personally, I don’t think this is a service a writer needs to pay for, but if you can afford it, this seems like a reasonable solution as well. 

Whatever method you use, make sure that it’s easy to find previous submissions, especially if you submit work simultaneously. An important part of a writer’s housekeeping is to notify editors when work is accepted elsewhere, so that publications don’t spend time evaluating a submission that is no longer available.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Types of Literary Rebellion, Part 2: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman

I used to think that Walt Whitman was the good guy of late nineteenth century U.S. poetry, and that Emily Dickinson was irrelevant. In what way did I think she was irrelevant? Irrelevant to the political, spiritual, and social revolutions that were churning at that time. 

Whitman, on the other hand, earned his living partly as an orator, making fiery speeches against slavery and in favor of populist American democracy. Emily Dickinson sat in a room in her father’s comfortable house in the little town of Amherst, Massachusetts and had almost nothing little to say publicly about the political storms of that period. To me, they seemed like polar opposites. Well, not exactly polar. Dickinson seemed like a frozen pond, and Whitman like a jungle during a sunshower.

Emily Dickinson

Then I read Richard Sewell’s The Life of Emily Dickinson. It’s entirely my fault that it took me so long to find this book, since I actually took a Shakespeare class with Professor Sewell when I was an undergraduate at Yale at the same time he was writing his biography of Dickinson. But I didn’t follow Sewell’s work after I finished the final paper for that class. I only read his book on Dickinson when I reluctantly prepared to teach her writing in an American poetry survey class about thirty years later.  

In his biography, Sewell reveals what a complex and interesting response the poet had to her time. He describes how Dickinson was more or less driven out of Mount Holyoke College (then called Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) because she was part of the group of students considered “hopeless” by the fundamentalists of the Second Great Awakening, which was then hurricaning through New England.

And when I read Dickinson’s poetry in that light, I started to see that she was profoundly rebellious as well:

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church –

I keep it, staying at Home –

With a Bobolink for a Chorister –

And an Orchard, for a Dome –

What more eloquent statement could there be of the individual’s right to communicate directly with the Spirit, and to see the divine directly in nature? And how similar to Whitman’s “The bull and the bug never worshipp'd half enough,” in “Song of Myself.”

Around this time I also read Adrienne Rich’s remarkable essay on Dickinson, “Vesuvius at Home.” Rich makes a convincing case that Dickinson understood the explosive nature of her rebellion, and that that Dickinson deliberately kept close to her home to protect the revelation of her poetry and her ideas. “I have a notion that genius knows itself;” writes Rich, “that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed. It was, moreover, no hermetic retreat, but a seclusion which included a wide range of people, of reading and correspondence.”

I think Rich is right that Dickinson’s reticence to share her poetry was not the withdrawal of a dry school marm but a savvy choice. Emily Dickinson's father was the local congressman. Dickinson had the shelter of his home as a writer’s retreat—so long as her work didn’t embarrass or disgrace her father and the family. Dickinson’s best choice for publishing and preserving her revolutionary poems was to turn them into a sort of time capsule. That way her poems could be read, understood, and appreciated in a future century—which they are.

Rich does not put much emphasis, though, on Dickinson’s love poems. Yes, Dickinson wrote love poems, and they can be quite sexy:

Is it too late to touch you, Dear?

We this moment knew—

Love Marine and Love terrene—

Love celestial too—

If Whitman had known that poem, I wonder if he would he have seen the parallel with one of his most sensual poems, “I Sing the Body Electric,” where he says, “If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.”

Walt Whitman

I just wish that Emily could have met Walt, and they could have sat down together in a café in Brooklyn. I imagine that she would order Darjeeling tea and a lingonberry scone, and he would order coffee and pour some of a flask into the steaming cup. I think that if they could have bridged the enormous cultural gap between small town New England and the alleyways of Brooklyn where kids played deafening ballgames, Walt and Emily would have realized that they were both rebels in their own ways, and had more in common than they had differences. 

_________________________________

Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Types of Literary Rebellion, Part 1

When I first began studying literature seriously in college in the early 1970s, I was drawn to the most openly rebellious voices. I loved the Beat Generation, the Surrealists, D.H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and the poets of the Black Arts Movement like my undergraduate mentor June Jordan. I still love them.

William Blake

During the period when I was a student, the New Left was at its peak. It was also the era when the movements against the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement flourished in the United States. The doctrine of many revolutionaries at that time was that anything less than total revolt was irrelevant and self-defeating: “Ceux qui font des révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau.”—“Those who make revolutions halfway have only dug their own graves.” I first encountered those words of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, the French revolutionary from the period of the Terror, when Jean-Luc Godard quoted them in a movie. Godard was my artistic idol at the time. That quote embodied much of what my friends and I were thinking then about politics and art.

But the New Left, with its stir fry of Maoism, Trotskyism, and anarchism, never came close to becoming a majority movement in the United States. Maybe that’s because the U.S. is generally allergic to isms. I came to realize that it was those who make revolutions all the way who only dig their own graves.

But what does all this have to do with literature? Well, the writers who openly declared themselves in revolt against the artistic and political establishment were clearly rebels to my adolescent or post-adolescent mind. Those were the writers whose stances I admired when I began my own literary attempts.

I’m not sure how I came to realize that there were actually many ways to express rebellion, dissent, and innovative ideas in literature, some of them bravely open, and some more subtle.

Maybe it was by reading the work of feminist writers, who often didn’t stand on a soapbox and declare their political viewpoints, writers such as Virginia Woolf. The slogan of the feminist writers of the 1980s, “The personal is political,” leant itself to a more nuanced aesthetic. If even the small moments in life have larger social significance, then a writer doesn’t have to scribble a manifesto to make a strong point. Understanding what is political in a poem by Sharon Olds isn’t like understanding the ideas of Mayakovsky or Amiri Baraka, where the writer is clearly waving a red flag.

Learning what is revolutionary about the more subtle rebels has been a lifelong study for me. In the next couple of blogs, I’ll talk about a couple of the writers where the social change implications of their work have only become clearer to me as I’ve read more.

Types of Literary Rebellion, Part 2: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Writing a Fictional Plot Based on a True Story: Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge

I recently read Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. I enjoyed the play, and was about to put the volume back on my bookshelf when I noticed that the author had written an introduction. I’m usually not much for introductions. Cut to the chase, skip the previews—I want to get to the plot as soon as possible. But Arthur Miller’s preface fascinated me.

Miller tells how he came upon the idea for A View from the Bridge, a tragedy about a longshoreman named Eddie Carbone that takes place in the working class neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn:

I had known the story of A View from the Bridge for a long time. A water-front worker who had known Eddie’s prototype told it to me. I had never thought to make a play of it because it was too complete, there was nothing I could add. And then a time came when its very completeness became appealing. It suddenly seemed to me that I ought to deliver it onto the stage as fact…

Miller describes how he tried in the original Broadway production to create exactly the story that the dockworker had told him—no frills, just the unfolding of the final calamity. 

Ben Shawn's poster for the 1965 revival of A View from the Bridge

I think most writers would respond similarly to hearing a great story, seemingly ready made. Why tamper with something so good, so perfect? In the first New York production of A View from the Bridge, Miller followed that logic. The stage was stripped of scenery, a minimal cast of actors wore little makeup. The result was not a success.

The play came into its own when it was revived a year later in London. Oddly, this happened despite, or maybe because, the naturalism possible in New York could not be achieved in the Shakespearean milieu of the U.K. stage. As Miller puts it, “the British actors could not reproduce the Brooklyn argot and had to create one that was never heard on heaven or earth.”

Removed from the roots of the original story, Miller had more freedom to elaborate on it, to develop the characters. He particularly fleshed out the role of Beatrice, Eddie Carbone’s wife. One of the most poignant aspects of the revised script is that Beatrice attempts in vain to deflect Eddie’s overly possessive behavior toward Catherine, his attractive, adopted niece. It is that tragic flaw in Eddie that leads to his downfall. With the new additions to the script, the London version was a hit, running for two years and going on to an extended run in Paris.

In the U.K. production, Miller did the first thing a writer has to do in transforming a true story—he falsified it. In writing fiction from real life, a writer has to mold it, to make it bend into a tale that works from standpoint of the audience/reader.

But Miller didn’t stop there. When a writer adapts a story that s/he hears, the temptation is lift it directly and not to meddle with it, like a fragile diorama. Miller recounts the moment when he decided to make this story into a play: “It existed apart from me and seemed not to express anything within me.” But that was the impulse that produced the failed version. Toward the end of the play’s run on Broadway, Miller realized his personal and emotional stake in the characters:

It was only during the latter part of its run in New York that, while watching a performance one afternoon, I saw my own involvement in this story. Quite suddenly the play seemed to be “mine” and not merely a story I had heard. The revisions subsequently made were in part the result of that new awareness.

Even though A View from the Bridge is about the family of an immigrant longshoreman Miller never knew, the playwright had to claim all the emotions of the story as his own before he could write them compellingly. There had to be some reason that he chose that particular tale, and he eventually discovered what it was. It’s like waking from a dream—once we realize that all the characters are all aspects of ourselves, the story starts to come into focus.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry