Great Writing Stirs the Whole Body

My literary mentor was June Jordan, the most dynamic reader of poetry I’ve ever heard. June was a poet, essayist, opera librettist, and political activist. Listening to June recite her work was a physical experience—I laughed, I fought back tears, I literally got goose bumps of excitement.

June Jordan (1936–2002)

I think the Greek philosopher Aristotle was referring to a similar feeling in his Poetics when he talked about catharsis, the sensation that the audience experiences in watching a tragedy in the theater. The word catharsis comes from the ancient Greek verb kathairein, meaning to purge or to purify or to cleanse. When we experience deep tragedy on stage or in a movie, our entire body feels wrung out, cleansed—but in an uplifting way.

Interestingly, the word catarrh in English, meaning a cold with phlegm, derives from exactly the same Greek verb. I still remember when I read the tragic ending of Ernest Hemingway’s antiwar novel A Farewell to Arms as a teenager, I spontaneously burst into tears, and I had to blow my nose many times. It was a direct physical sensation.

Great literature can also evoke laughter, which is very much a physical sensation. There is certainly something cathartic about humor, the way it releases what’s bottled up in us. Maybe laughter is the way that we let go of grief. I remember as a young man attending my grandfather’s funeral. After the ceremony at the gravesite, the family drove in several cars to my uncle and aunt’s house for a reception. This is going to be the saddest event of my life, I thought. What actually happened is that family members told one funny story after another about my grandfather—in between the tears. The humor helped us all to feel close again to my grandfather and to recover from the loss. The same is true in literature—laughter is a way for the body to release the grief locked in our bones and tissues.

You could say that the reader also feels erotic literature in the body. That’s certainly another type of physical response to writing. Reading Pablo Neruda’s poem “Barcarole,” is an erotic experience for me, for example. But just because a poem is arousing doesn’t necessarily make it great writing.

This points up an interesting aspect of all writing that affects the body—feeling literature in the body is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for great writing. It also has to be well crafted and use language in a way that artfully transfers meaning. But there’s no mistaking the best literature, because we feel it in our whole body.


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

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 Be an American Writer, Part 3: U.S. Expatriate Writers (continued)

The roster of U.S. expatriate writers is a distinguished one. It includes Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes. In the 1920s and 30s, almost the entire U.S. literary world decamped to Paris and the French Riviera, where F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and many others spent a good part of those decades. Of course, part of their interest in the urbane, sophistication of Europe might have had to do with the fact that one could drink alcohol legally there, which was not true in the U.S after the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1920, the beginning of the Prohibition era. Another reason behind the expatriate lifestyle may have been the fact that it was much cheaper to live as an artist in Europe than in the U.S. in the 1920s.

Djuna Barnes

One interesting undercurrent in expatriate writing is the high percentage of gays and lesbians among the authors who left the U.S. Western Europe has long been ahead of our country in its embrace, or at least tolerance, of gay and lesbian lifestyles, and of LGB subject matter in literature. A majority of the expatriate writers I’ve mentioned have been gay or lesbian or bisexual, including Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Natalie Barney, and Henry James.

Even though the U.S. has become somewhat more sophisticated, the expatriate strain in American writing continues to this day. The author David Sedaris is a contemporary expatriate writer. Sedaris, who is openly gay, has purchased and renovated a cottage in Sussex in the U.K. and often writes critically of American naiveté, comparing it unfavorably with English and continental sophistication. All of this might start to sound familiar to those who read my last blog, which discussed Henry James.  

David Sedaris

Here’s David Sedaris’s critique of the attire of American travelers, from his essay “Standing By,” which appeared in The New Yorker, and which you can hear him read in his audiobook, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls:

“…everywhere I go, someone in an eight-dollar T-shirt is whipping out a cell phone and delivering the fine print of his or her delay. One can’t help but listen in, but then my focus shifts and I find myself staring. I should be used to the way Americans dress when travelling, yet still it manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge, saying, ‘Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles!’”

I’m always reminded when I take an airplane about how we Americans look when we travel. To be frank, it’s often not a pretty sight. Compared to U.S. citizens, Europeans and other nationalities are much better dressed and show much more respect for others in the way they present themselves, both in airports and in general. That European savoir faire is hard to find in the United States, and it’s not just a question of wardrobe. It’s also an outlook on life, an appreciation of beauty and elegance. I think the hunger for those qualities is part of the motivation of the expatriate American writer.

How to Be an American Writer

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2—Henry James and the Expatriates

Part 4:  Populists and Walt Whitman

Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

Part 6: Populist Writers: The Beat Generation, Women Fiction Writers, and African American Writers

Part 7: Internal Exiles

Part 8: Satirists and Critics

Part 9: Conclusion

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