How to Be an American Writer, Part 6: Populist Writers: the Beat Generation, Women Fiction Writers, and African American Writers

To continue the thread of the last two blogs, which talked about populist writers Walt Whitman and Thornton Wilder, I’m going to discuss other groups of American writers who I’m viewing as gathered under the populist umbrella.

A populist writer is not just one who writes about the United States, but a writer who believes that American life is a source of good, knowledge, and redemption. That’s why I’m not including in this particular post excellent writers such as Jane Smiley or Jane Hamilton, for instance. I think their view of American society is more pessimistic than the populists. I’ll talk about their writing in an upcoming blog.

Among other populist writers, we could add the playwright Arthur Miller, who dealt with ordinary Americans in some of his plays. Miller raised the lives of working people to the level of tragedy, a genre of literature that was formerly the domain of kings. I’m thinking in particular of his plays Death of a Salesman and A View from the Bridge—the latter play I analyzed in a blog earlier this year.

I’d also include as populists some of the writers of the Beat Generation, especially Jack Kerouac for On the Road, a book about discovering the hidden beauty of freeway America and the heartland.

I’d include many African American writers as populists, since a number of these authors are also champions of everyday Americans. I’m thinking of fiction writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, for example; and poets Langston Hughes, June Jordan, and Sekou Sundiata. Ishmael Reed I'm saving for the blog on satirists—I see his sensibility differently.

The explosion of women’s fiction in the U.S. in the last several decades often has a populist impulse, finding extraordinary truths in the lives of people often considered ordinary. Some examples would be the writing of Ann Beattie, Elizabeth Berg, Sandra Cisneros, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Patchett, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, Amy Tan, and Anne Tyler. Those authors focus on the intimate moments of American life that lead to large epiphanies. 

Ann Patchett

There are some male fiction writers who think along similar lines, such as Raymond Carver, definitely a detective searching for the small moments in American households that resonate deeply.

What’s interesting about the literary populism that has come out of the last several decades is that it’s not always an affirmation of all of American life. It’s sometimes an affirmation of a particular slice of American life, a slice often defined by the author’s race, ethnicity, national origin, class, gender, sexuality, etc. It’s a populism with an edge, a populism that overlaps with the critical approaches to American life that I’m going to discuss in the blogs that follow.

How to Be an American Writer

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2—Henry James and the Expatriates

Part 3: U.S. Expatriate Writers (continued)

Part 4:  Populists and Walt Whitman

Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

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

Thoughts on Literary Fame

Fame. It’s as irrelevant to good writing as sunny weather. Or is it the gold ring we’re all reaching for?

I was moved to write about fame because I’ve been listening during my commute to a collection of poetry on CDs called The Spoken Arts Treasury. This compendium of the writings and voices of 100 leading poets in the United States was released only 45 years ago, but I was shocked by how many of the poets who were considered necessary writers in 1969 are unknown today. I don’t mean that I’ve only read a couple of their poems. I mean that I had never even heard the names of a good portion of the poets in that collection.

The Greek goddess Pheme, source of the word "fame"

Maybe even more surprising is the fact that a collection released in 1969 did not include many of the poets of the U.S.A. whom we now consider to be some of the leading voices of the mid-twentieth century, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg (too radical for that time), June Jordan, Adrienne Rich (who had already published her first Selected Poems in 1967), Anne Sexton, or May Swenson. In just 45 years, we have dramatically changed our sense of who the important U.S. poets of that time were. Many writers included in The Spoken Arts Treasury do continue to find readers: Elizabeth Bishop, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, etc. But it seems almost arbitrary which poets were included in this anthology.

The word “fame” comes from the name of the Roman goddess Fama, which in turn comes from a Greek word that just means “talk.” That in turn, is related to Old Church Slavonic bajati, but you already knew that. Hey, Zack, what is your point? The point is that fame is just talk, it’s not hard evidence of truth or quality.

Just because a writer is known today, or unknown today, does not mean that her or his reputation will remain that way. In fact, it’s almost a guarantee that tastes and readers will change, and that writers whose work speaks to a particular time and/or readership will vary in popularity, or maybe find new readers in a different time or place. We should not be intimidated by a writer’s reputation and feel we have to like that person’s work. On the other hand, we should appreciate writers who are not well known, but whose work we genuinely enjoy. In other words, trust your taste and your reaction to a work of literature, not the writer’s reputation.

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
How to Be an American Writer

Why Are Certain Writers Popular in Other Countries?

I remember when I first started traveling abroad, if French people realized I was an American interested in books, they wanted to tell me how much they admired and enjoyed the novels of Chester Himes. “Chester who?” I would ask. Well, it may be that Chester Himes is a writer we should all know more about—he was an African American mystery writer of the 1950s and 60s, totally unknown to me or any of my acquaintances. In France, he was one of the most famous American novelists. It’s true, Himes wrote about race relations at a time when few were taking on that subject: “All that tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the streets as gas fumes. Every time I stepped outside I saw a challenge I had to accept or ignore.” (from If He Hollers Let Him Go). But even if Himes deserves a closer look, he’s no Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston. So why was Himes so popular in France?

Chester Himes

French readers also all seem to know authors of the Beat Generation, especially Jack Kerouac. But very few are aware of most of the terrific poets and novelists in the U.S. since the Beats.

Similarly, readers in the U.S.A. and all over the world are fascinated with Gabriel García Márquez. Márquez is one of my favorite novelists, too—Love in the Time of Cholera is right near the top of my all-time list. But there are other equally deserving classics in El Boom, the wave of magical realist writers, books that don’t seem to attract as large a following—novels such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral and Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango; or Julio Cortázar’s stellar collection of short stories, All Fires the Fire. I believe that their reputations will equal Márquez’s novels in the long run.

Haruki Murakami, also a big favorite of mine, has millions of readers worldwide. But other Japanese authors such as Kenzaburo Oe, who, unlike Murakami, has actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature; or the poet Yosano Akiko, author of 50,000 tanka poems, are relatively unknown outside their own countries.

Why do certain writers attract readers in other countries, and others do not? Some of it may have to do with having a connection to a particular country. Chester Himes, for instance, moved to France in the 1950s, and he had the advantage of being able to publicize his books on the ground in that country. Jack Kerouac’s ancestors came from Brittany (the name “Kerouac” is like “Smith” in the Celtic region of Northwestern France), but I don’t think that’s the key to his success in the land of Sartre and de Beauvoir. There is something about Kerouac’s spirit of adventure and vitality that says “American” with a capital “A” to people in other countries, similar to the way that cowboys and gangsters do.

Haruki Murakami is immersed in the popular culture of the U.S. and Western Europe, even naming one of his novels after a Beatles song, “Norwegian Wood.” That might explain part of why readers in the West find his work so accessible, even though his books are mostly set in Japan, and even though his novels often shades into fantasy, which only a small minority of English-language novels do. But why is Murakami one of the ten top-selling foreign authors in Mainland China? True, he’s a terrific writer, funny, thought-provoking, moving, willing to take on the status quo and business as usual. Well, O.K., I think I just explained his global popularity to my own satisfaction. 

Haruki Murakami

It does seem to me that certain writers just translate better into other cultures, maybe because they play off the stereotype that we have of those cultures in a complex way. Love in the Time of Cholera is about a passionate, Latin lover, but Márquez takes that stereotype and inflates it so much it explodes into thousands of fragments, into meandering sentences that each has a life of its own. Kerouac’s On the Road takes place in the wide-open spaces of North America where the cowboys toted six-shooters and the buffalo roamed, but his bebop descriptions of the West in the 1950s create a new American myth that seems more applicable to our time. Haruki Murakami's characters refuse the image of the Japanese “salaryman” and stay-at-home woman and become instead existential heroes who buck the system, almost in spite of themselves. It’s these new turns on the old national and regional clichés that make these books accessible but still eye-opening for cultures outside the ones that give rise to them.

_________________________________

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

The Dramatic Monologue, Part 3: Writing Your Own

If you’ve never tried writing a dramatic monologue, or you’d like to try again, what character should you pick? Maybe you already know whose voice you’d like to use. In that case, go for it!

If you don’t know, or you’re looking for ideas, consider choosing a character you’ve always wanted to be. I wrote a dramatic monologue the voice of the great African American singer/dancer/entertainer Josephine Baker because I admire her tremendously. I also love the setting of her early success—Paris in the 1920s. I wanted to know what she might sound like talking to a friend in private about her very public life, so I just made up their conversation, based on research.

Another reason to choose a persona might be an individual whose life illustrates a particular point. A good example of this is June Jordan’s “Unemployment Monologue.” The poem is in the voice of a young Black male who might be standing on a street corner, talking to someone from a more privileged background. The speaker is called by different tags, from Herbie Jr. to “Ashamah Kazaam,” a name somewhere between an Islamic given name and a superhero punch. We get a sense that this young man is creative and smart, but going nowhere in a society that has no use for him. He boldly challenges the person he addresses—an interesting stance for a dramatic monologue.

Another reason for picking a character for a dramatic monologue might be to choose someone so different from you that it creates a challenge to put yourself in that person’s shoes. The difference could be gender, age, class, historical time period, race, sexual orientation, religion, politics, geographic location, physical abilities, etc. Make sure you are not falling into stereotypes about a group, and that you are creating a character with the complexity that you hope others see in you. If you write about someone from a group not your own, consider showing that person not just at his or her lowest point. Without ignoring the adversity your persona has to encounter, allow that individual at least a moment of triumph or connection.

One other consideration with a dramatic monologue: who is the speaker addressing? Is it a generalized audience, or an individual the speaker knows? If it’s a specific person, that can create more depth and/or drama. In Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son,” for instance, the fact that this speaker is a mother talking to her child makes it much more moving. In June Jordan’s “Unemployment Monologue,” the young man addressing a person of relative privilege sets up a dynamic tension. In a sense, even a monologue is a dialogue of sorts, since it is addressed to another or to others.

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 posts on 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

The Dramatic Monologue: Part 1, Roots

            A dramatic monologue is a short piece of writing, often a poem, spoken by a persona who is not the author. The speaker can be a fictional character, a real person now alive, or a historical personage.
                        The most famous examples of dramatic monologue come from the work of the English poet Robert Browning, including “Andrea del Sarto,” spoken in the voice of that great Renaisance painter as he looks back on his life. It was in this poem that Browning wrote some of his most widely quoted lines:

                                    Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
                                                Or what’s a heaven for?

Browning’s other famous dramatic monologue is “My Last Duchess,” a murder mystery written in heroic couplets.

The dramatic monologue reached a peak in the work of Edgar Lee Masters, who wrote Spoon River Anthology, a collection of 244 pieces in the voices of various characters speaking from the grave. Together the poems create a surprisingly contemporary exposé of small-town life, broaching such taboo subjects as frustrated passions, abortion, and the lasting effects of war on veterans. Masters originally serialized the monologues in a newspaper and published them in a best-selling book. He never lived to see their performance as a successful play—his book was not adapted for the stage until after his death. 
             Many of my favorite dramatic monologues are by African American poets. Black American writers kept the form vital for many decades, while White American writers were absorbed in autobiographical confessional poetry. There are so many terrific dramatic monologues by African American poets, spanning the last century: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Party,” Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Pool Players,” June Jordan’s “From The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones” and “Unemployment Monologue,” Ntozake Shange’s play for colored girls… (written entirely in dramatic monologues), and Sekou Sundiata’s “Space” from his play The Circle Unbroken Is a Hard Bop. If you visit the website of Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, you can hear a wonderful reading of Dunbar's "The Party."
               The Academy Award-winning actress Alfre Woodard recites a dramatic monologue from for colored girls… in this video from the original PBS version of Ntozake's Shange's play. This video has another fantastic monologue from Shange's now classic play, starting about the 6:00 mark.
                The late, great Sekou Sundiata used to recite his amazing monologue "Space," which almost single-handedly created the spoken word movement. “But that's another bop,” to quote Sekou. I once asked him how he got his name, and he told me, “Sekou Sundiata is my nom de guerre.”
                More on the dramatic monologue in my next blogs, including the advantages and disadvantages of the form, and suggestions for how to get started writing one of your own.

The Dramatic Monologue, Part 2: Pros and Cons

____________________________________________

Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

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