Spontaneity, Wit, Improvisation, and Automatic Writing: How to Write Better Than Your Conscious Mind

When a person is about to say something funny during a conversation, they start to speak without forming an idea of what words to use. A witty comment usually begins with only a vague impulse that the moment and the context are ripe for humor. This is an intuitive feeling, and it’s the act of launching into the conversation that helps the speaker to form the specific words that make people laugh.

Similarly, when a jazz musician is about to start a solo, I don’t think that person has a clear idea what they are going to play. It’s just a willingness to jump in and get into the groove the band has set in motion that provides the impulse for that riff.

Automatic writing is also like that. Writers in the surrealist movement in the early 1920s invented automatic writing—André Breton described the process this way in his “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924):

Portraits of André Breton by Man Ray

Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.

In other words, write faster than you can edit with your rational mind, and the results will outpace anything you thought you could create.

The surrealist group practicing automatic writing in the 1920s

The human mind is far more brilliant than our conscious mind. One of the challenges of writing is to let go of our thoughts so that we can actually think with our deeper psyche. Not with the reptilian brain, but with the brain powered by what Federico García Lorca described as the duende, the mischievous sprite that rises from the raw energy of the Earth.

Of course, this dynamic often applies more to poetry than to prose. Fiction and nonfiction writers have to plan, outline, create structure. But poetry thrives on this sort of spontaneous fabrication, taking flight from a platform that is itself already airborne. Or, to paraphrase André Breton, “Trust in the inexhaustible fountain of whispers.”

I don’t mean to suggest that all spontaneous writing is great. Some of it can be downright foolish. But I would say that spontaneity is the source of much of the best and most unexpected writing.

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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

Picking the Right Work for a Literary Translation

One part of the art of the literary translator that is rarely talked about is the hunt for the right work to translate. For most translators, extensive research and digging goes into selecting poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or drama to translate. It’s not unusual for a translator to read forty poems by a particular writer just to find one that s/he wants to translate. A translator might also read multiple biographies of an author to discover which novel or play by that writer to translate.

But where do you begin? Finding the right work to translate is like being a detective on a case with few leads. You have to look at everything about a writer to see if anything is slightly out of place, searching for something that stands out. Sometimes you have to interview people who know the literature of a particular language, probing for ideas that might work for you.

I was researching the poet French surrealist André Breton when I came across this description almost six hundred pages into Mark Polizzotti’s definitive biography of the poet:

“Far more consequential was Breton’s meeting in 1954 with the twenty-six-year-old poet Joyce Mansour.…it was other aspects of her personality—the dark, frenzied eroticism that emerged in her poetry; her unconventional public behavior—that had most drawn Breton. Soon after she joined the Surrealist group, a legend sprang up that Joyce lived exclusively on oysters, hot water, and cigars…”

Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, pp. 589­–590.

André Breton and Joyce Mansour, 1959

That reference intrigued me. A woman poet in a literary movement known mostly for male writers, and she came along decades after the surrealists had made their initial splash in the 1920s.

I starting looking for Joyce Mansour’s Oeuvres complètes, her complete works. It wasn’t an easy book to track down in the United States—the least expensive copy is currently selling for $463 used on amazon.com. Interlibrary loan is often a good way to obtain a hard-to-find book of this sort.

When I did find the book, I realized that there were many gems among Joyce Mansour’s poems. I looked quickly through the 600 pages in her complete works—not reading every page, just skimming at first, searching for a style and themes in her work that spoke to me.

Joyce Mansour (1928–1986)

Once I settled on several of her poems that I liked, I started to do rough drafts, looking for poems that would work in English. Sometimes that’s not the same as a writer’s best efforts. There are factors that make a piece of literature work in another language, and factors that have the opposite result. Writing that brilliantly uses local dialect, for example, may not be as effective in translation, since there is often no equivalent in the target language for that particular style of speech.

I was also conscious that some of Mansour’s work had already been translated into English, and I was prospecting for poems that had either not been translated, or where the translation stopped short of conveying the “dark, frenzied eroticism” that Polizzotti described.

In fact, what I found in Mansour’s poetry was somewhat different—eroticism, yes, but permeated with compassion, wisdom, and honesty about intimacy. It was those qualities in Mansour’s writing that I wanted to try to recreate in English. I was seeking poems by Mansour that touched me personally, and there certainly were several where I hoped that I could add something by translating them in my own way.

That is also part of the translator’s quest. What is it that you as a translator have to contribute that is unique to you? You want a project where the work of another writer matches up with your own sensibility in a way that gives you insight into how that author should sound in your own language. Ultimately, you are looking to become a vehicle to convey that writer’s personal style and subject matter to readers of your own language.

Here’s a poem by Joyce Mansour that I translated, to give you a flavor of her writing:

            Joyce Mansour

“Do you still know the sweet scent of plantain trees…”

Do you still know the sweet scent of plantain trees

Familiar things can seem so strange when someone leaves

Food can seem so sad

A bed so insipid

And cats

Do you remember the cats that screeched their claws

That yowled on the roof when your tongue ransacked me

And that arched their backs when you dug your nails into me

They vibrated when I yielded

I don’t know how to love anymore

Those painful bubbles of delirium have dried on my lips

I’ve thrown away my mask of leaves

A rose bush agonizes under the bed

I can’t wiggle my hips anymore in the midst of all this rubble

And the cats have fled the roof

translation © 2019 by Zack Rogow 

Another post on how to choose the right work for a translation project, focused on George Sand.

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 Long Does It Take to Finish a Piece of Writing?

It could take a few minutes to finish a work of literature, and it could take a few decades. It depends in part on your method of composition, and the texture of the text you’re weaving. (Both text and texture come from the Latin verb texere, to weave.) It also depends on how prepared you are to embark on the project you’ve selected.

One method of composition that the writer finishes rapidly is automatic writing, a technique invented by André Breton and the French surrealists.

 

Members of the surrealist group in Paris. André Breton is third from the left.

In automatic writing, the author dreams onto the page, allowing the subconscious to dictate to the hand. The writer deliberately attempts to write faster than s/he can think, letting the deepest parts of the mind create a spontaneous cascade of images:

And as a

Little girl

Caught in a bellows of sparkles

You jump rope

Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of Asia

Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway

I caress everything that was you

In everything that’s yet to be you

André Breton, “I dream I see you endlessly superimposed upon yourself,” from The Air of the Water, in Earthlight, translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow

In this poem, Breton creates a dreamlike collage of his beloved at various moments in her life, layering each sequence on the next. To generate an image such as “You jump rope/Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of Asia/Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway,” no amount of editing or rewriting is of use. Only the first-take, last-take method of writing, where the author doesn’t stanch the mind’s spring of creativity, is effective. Scholars have gone over Breton’s drafts and found that he edited very little. Ben Jonson famously said of the legend that Shakespeare never blotted a line of his scripts, “Would he had blotted a thousand!” Maybe Breton should have edited his writings more. But when the spontaneous method of composition works, it produces a unique and loose weave of language, an amazing texture that a more laborious method usually can’t reproduce. This is the few-minutes version of finishing a poem.

But there are other types of writing that require a much more time-consuming process. James Joyce reportedly took 17 years to write Finnegans Wake, and there is a story that he was still making edits until the publisher’s messenger snatched the overdue manuscript out of his hands. Elizabeth Bishop’s book The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 is all of 287 pages, meaning she only produced an average of one page of poetry every two months. 

Elizabeth Bishop

Certain types of writing just can’t be done quickly, because the texture of language requires a very tight weave that can only be accomplished with many drafts, and much revision:

The big fish tubs are completely lined

with layers of beautiful herring scales

and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

Bishop’s exquisite description of the Favrile surfaces of the wheelbarrows does not seem like a momentary inspiration, but rather a meticulous accumulation of precise details combined with le mot juste, a carefully chosen phrase such as “plastered” or “coats of mail.” That’s the kind of writing that takes many drafts.

Another reason that a work of literature may need a long time to complete is that we often come up with ideas before we have the skill and knowledge to realize them. More than once, I’ve had the experience of rereading a poem I published decades before, and seeing that I had had a genuine impulse behind the poem, but I hadn’t gotten it right. The diction or the imagery or the ending weren’t quite what the original idea was pleading for. With more years of experience, I was able to revise a poem that I thought was complete, but really needed one or two more drafts.

So, how long does it take to finish a piece of writing? That’s a bit like asking how long it takes to fall in love. It might happen with a moment’s encounter, or it might be decades in the making.

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

Writers and Collaboration, Part 3: Writers Working Together—Breton’s Earthlight

In the first two blogs in this series, I’ve talked about collaborations where an artist, such as an illustrator or composer, interprets the work of a writer. I’ve also discussed projects where a writer repurposes text already written, for instance, turning a poem into a children’s picture book.

In this post I’m going to talk about two or more writers working together to create a new work. One area where I’ve done this quite a bit is literary translation.

The first book that I translated was a collaboration with writer/translator Bill Zavatsky. 

It’s a funny story how this collaboration began. In the late 1970s, I was a young poet just starting out, living in New York City. Bill Zavatsky was a relatively established writer—two books of Bill’s poems were in print and he was the publisher of two literary magazines, Sun, and Roy Rogers. The latter was a wild child of Sun for special projects such as the memorable 100-page issue devoted entirely to one-line poems.

I was a totally unknown writer (mostly I still am!), living in a fifth-floor walkup in the East Village with a bathtub in the kitchen. At the time, I was going out with another poet, a woman named Susan, who was taking a creative writing workshop with Bill Zavatsky at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. I was translating early poems by the French surrealist, André Breton, because I loved them, and because I wanted to hear what Breton’s unbridled stream of consciousness sounded like in American English.

Susan knew that Bill had an interest in Breton and she urged me to send a few of my translations to Bill for publication in his magazine, Sun. I did. Months went by. I heard nothing.

Then in the summer of 1977, Susan and I crashed a publication party at the Gotham Book Mart on West 47^th Street, ironically in the heart of the diamond district where Hassidic jewelers sold stones for engagement rings. I think the book being launched that day was John Ashbery’s poetry collection Houseboat Days. I knew almost no one at the party (certainly not John Ashbery!) There were a few familiar faces, as anonymous as mine, but Susan spotted Bill Zavatsky in the crowd. I was too shy to talk to him—after all, Bill actually was chatting with John Ashbery. Susan literally pushed me to approach Bill about my Breton translations.

I did talk with Bill, and to my amazement, the reason he hadn’t gotten back to me about my translations was not because he hated them, but because he had been extremely busy. Bill suggested that since he was also translating poems from the same period in Breton’s work, we should collaborate on translating a book of Breton’s poetry.

A lesson here for less established poets—you may have more to bring to a collaboration than you think. Although Bill was a widely published poet, editor, and translator, he had not studied French for as many years as I had or spent as much time in France. I did have something to bring to the mix. We also had a similar vision of creating a version of Breton informed by the language of the Beat Generation and the New York School writers who had been influenced by the surrealists. (Read Breton’s poem “Free Union” and then Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and you’ll see what I mean.)

Bill and I set about to translate roughly two hundred pages of Breton’s collection Earthlight (Clair de terre), including many of the surrealist’s best poems. For me, the collaboration was an apprenticeship. Bill was the older and more experienced poet and he brought a wealth of knowledge about the practice of translation that I learned a great deal from. He was also more widely read. 

Bill Zavatsky

But for Bill, I think it was useful to have someone on the team who had a firm grounding in French grammar, vocabulary, and culture, and could say, “Breton is probably referring to the town of Pont-à-Mousson because most of the manhole covers in Paris are made in that town and are stamped with that name.”

Collaborations between writers are not symmetrical. If every writer brought the same set of skills, we wouldn’t need to collaborate. Different writers bring different knowledge to the mix. On the other hand, there has to be some common ground for the writers to compromise and enjoy one another’s work.

Bill and I worked on the translation of Breton’s Earthlight off and on for seventeen years. Through many vicissitudes, we always kept our vision for the book in sight. When Earthlight finally appeared in print for the first time in 1994, it won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Award, which at that time was the annual prize for the best translation into English.

I’m excited to announce that our translation of Earthlight by André Breton has just been re-released by Black Widow Press. The new edition not only includes the French text en face for the first time, it has an updated introduction and notes that Bill contributed, incorporating the latest scholarship from France on Breton and his sources.

I’m delighted to see the book finally published as Bill and I had first imagined it forty years ago. This edition is bilingual with extensive notes to provide background on Breton’s encyclopedic interest in the occult, politics, botany, zoology, art, and history, and the way they infused his wild and passionate poetry.

My collaboration with Bill Zavatsky not only led to the publication of Earthlight, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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

Why It's So Difficult to Write about Dreams

Many great works of literature have been inspired by dreams, or dream-like visions. Two of my favorites are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” and Gabriela Mistral’s “The Flower of Air,” (“La Flor de aire”) just to name a couple. There are great poems and works of prose that recount dreams, but in general, for me, most pieces of creative writing based closely on actual dreams fail to recreate the magic that the vision had for the writer. Why?

Self-portrait collage by André Breton

I’ll give you an example. A couple of nights ago I went to sleep with the thought on my mind that I wanted to write something about dreams. I had a long and often interrupted dream that I kept returning to, a dream that concerned writing. There was a phrase that I and the other characters in the dream kept repeating: “Kicking the wall so hard, the paint falls.” I remember someone, maybe me, actually kicking a door in the dream, and chips of red paint breaking off of it. This phrase and action were supposed to summarize in a nutshell all the great teachings of an important literary figure, someone who was my mentor in the dream.

Well, I don’t think you’ll be surprised that when I woke up, that phrase turned out not to be as profound or as earth shattering as it seemed in my dream. In fact, it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. It has something to do with anger—the kicking—and anger as a force for change, or at least for damaging the status quo.

The difficulty in conveying the depth and urgency of a dream to a reader is that the dream seems to supply its own highly charged message and saturated color. When the dreamer recounts the action and tries to depict that aura for a reader, it rarely has quite the same profundity or significance. It’s like having a conversation where one person has the light behind them, and sees the other person in all dimensions and in full color, while the other person is looking into the light, and sees only a vague outline of the person they are talking to. The dreamer sees the dream clearly, with all its perspective and vibrancy, while the reader only sees a silhouette and is irritated at having to try to make out all the obscure details.

There are times when dreams can be the basis of good literature, but this sometimes works best when the writer is aware that dreams are notoriously unreliable in their claims of depth. I’m thinking, for instance, of the surrealist André Breton’s prose poems entitled “Five Dreams” from his book Earthlight, which I co-translated with Bill Zavatsky. Even though Breton was one of the first writers to offer a blow-by-blow description of his dreams as literature, he seemed to know intuitively that dreams were by nature best recounted with a grain of salt. Here’s an excerpt from the fourth of his “Five Dreams”:

“A part of my morning had been spent conjugating a new tense of the verb to be—because a new tense of the verb to be had just been invented. In the course of the afternoon I had written an article that, as far as I can remember, I found shallow but fairly brilliant. A little later I went back to work on a novel I was writing. This last enterprise had led me to do some research in my library. This soon led to the discovery of a work in octavo, composed of several volumes, that I didn’t know I owned. I opened one of them at random. The book claimed to be a philosophical treatise, but in one section, instead of Logic or Ethics, the heading read: Enigmatic. The text completely escapes me, I have only the memory of illustrations invariably rep­resenting an eccle­siastical or mythological character in the middle of an immense waxed room that looked like the Apollo Gallery [in the Versailles Palace].”

Breton is recounting a dream that almost has the quality of a revelation: he discovers a new tense of the verb to be and a mysterious lost treatise on philosophy. But he still is not willing to make any claim of profundity for his revelations—he finds his own article “shallow but fairly brilliant.” And the new volume of philosophy is called, fittingly, Enigmatic, and offers not universal pronouncements but only strange illustrations. The truths we come upon in dreams may be lightning bolts, Breton seems to be saying, but appreciate the irony and humor in the reality that the more they claim to be extremely profound, the more they give us mostly puzzles.
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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