It Takes More Than One Book to Make a Writer

There’s a great line in the classic Hollywood movie Shanghai Express where a man says to Marlene Dietrich, who is playing the role of Shanghai Lily: “I see you’ve changed your name since we last met. Did you get married?” To which Dietrich replies in her breathy German accent, “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.” Well, it takes more than one book to make a writer.

Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express 

The first time we write a book, we’re often just fumbling around, trying to find our unique calling as an artist. Everything is new to us: themes, characters, style, approach, diction. Often the first book, even if it takes years to write, is just practice, a dress rehearsal for another project. And, sorry to say, that can be true of the second or third or fourth book as well.

It may take the better part of a lifetime to really figure out what your project is, and how to realize that project.

Then how do you know if you really can be a writer, if you spend years on different books and none of them works out quite the way you had hoped? Well, even a book that you consider has fallen short of your expectations might have passages that show your true abilities as a writer. That page, that stanza, that paragraph, that chapter, that character—if you can figure out what you did right there, and get yourself into the state of mind you were in when you wrote that, you can possibly sustain that higher level of work for a longer stretch, even an entire book.

In order to do that, though, you’ve got to be willing to listen to criticism, hear the truth about your work, and implement it in your writing. And not just the praise of your friends who love you and can't see your work objectively. You have to get that objective feedback, because on your own, it’s extremely difficult to identify the strongest elements in your work. The difference between talent and a writer who consistently turns out quality work is the ability to take criticism seriously, and to learn from it. It’s OK to make mistakes, as long as you don’t keep repeating them.

I know it’s tempting to give up after a book or two if the end product isn’t as good as what you’d imagined when you first got the inspiration. It’s so much easier to take up throwing pots, or hip-hop dancing, or playing the didgeridoo. When you first start a new art, you learn so much, so fast. It’s thrilling. You feel as if you’re making enormous progress. But then the hard work sets in—learning from your mistakes, revising, polishing. No art is easy.

It may be that you are better suited to pottery or hip-hop dance. Didgeridoo, or didgeridon’t, either way it’s cool. If that is the art that energizes you, more power to you. But if your dream is really to be a writer, don’t give up after one book, or after two or three. You don’t get to be Shanghai Lily overnight.

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Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Zack’s recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s 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

Praise and Lament, Part 3: Lament as Protest—Sekou Sundiata's "Blink Your Eyes"

In this blog I’d like to talk about the side of lament that overlaps with protest. I’m going to focus on the poem “Blink Your Eyes” by Sekou Sundiata. You can see a video of Sekou Sundiata performing the poem here.

Sekou Sundiata more or less invented the style of reciting that became one of the staples of the poetry slam: a sort of fast-talking, musical delivery where the poet memorizes and performs the poem on stage, saying the words as quickly as possible. Sekou was not only the originator of this form, he was one of the most accomplished practitioners of it. He didn’t just rush through a poem, though. He sped up and slowed down his delivery based on the meaning of the words, and used the microphone in creative ways to achieve certain effects.

Sekou Sundiata (1948–2007)

Sekou Sundiata was born in New York City in 1948 and grew up in housing projects in Harlem. He preferred to record his poems rather than publish them. Sekou often performed with a back-up band. All his life he dealt with serious health issues, ranging from cancer to a kidney transplant to breaking his neck in a car accident. He died in 2007 at the age of 58, a terrible loss for poetry.

Sekou Sundiata wrote “Blink Your Eyes” in the mid-1990s, but the topic is all-too current today—an African American male is stopped by a police officer with no grounds. The poem is strongly resonant in the wake of the police shootings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati; William Chapman in Portsmouth, Virginia; Akai Gurley in Brooklyn—tragically, the list goes on and on.

The diction and tone of Sekou’s poem are different from pure lamentation. “Blink Your Eyes” is also a protest. The mood is angry, expressing outrage at racial profiling by police officers. Inherent in possibly all lamentation is a note of protest against the way things are. A lament doesn’t have to be a call to action, though. But a lament is a call of some kind, even if it’s just a call to mourn. When does a work of literature become more of a protest and less of a lament? To me, lament focuses on the sense of loss, while protest underlines the urgency to remedy the situation that is creating the loss.

In “Blink Your Eyes,” Sekou uses rhyme, cadence, and techniques of poetry that in other contexts might seem corny, but here they add to the soul of the poem and provide important emphasis.

There is a marked difference between how he recites the poem and how it appears on the page. To see the text of the poem, view this webpage. Sekou doesn’t recite the words in the same order they appear on the page. He repeats words that aren’t repeated on the page. Why? There is a strong element of improvisation in his performance technique, an element drawn from jazz. The written text of a poem for Sekou Sundiata was like a chart for a musician—a guide to performing but not a hardened rule about how each note was meant to be played.

At times in the poem Sekou Sundiata barely seems to pause to take a breath. He used a technique called circular breathing. Australian aborigines developed this method to play sustained notes on the didgeridoo. Sekou studied circular breathing and created a similar technique to recite long sequences of poetry without stopping. He also knew how to pause at the right moment, though, to put weight on the meaning of a particular phrase, for instance, the ironic line, “Somebody had to stop you.”

There’s a beautiful video interview with Sekou Sundiata done by E. Ethelbert Miller that you can watch here where Sekou talks about his influences from Amiri Baraka to the black church, performance and poetry, writing and political activism, and combining poetry and music. One of the most profound moments in the interview is when Sekou Sundiata discusses how to know when a poem is finished, referencing a John Coltrane solo. 

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

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