Avoiding the Deadly Undertow

Yesterday, the Steiny Road Poet received an email from composer John Supko who has been germinating an opera project with the Poet. His message read, how about changing the name of the work from the storytellers of Tangier (actually Raconteurs in Tangier) to an actual story title by Paul Bowles. Paul and Jane Bowles are the focus of this work. While the question from the composer wasn’t put to the Poet in exactly that way, she is now thinking after a walk along the Potomac River this is how the conversation has evolved.

One of the things that the Poet liked about this suggestion is how intimate the composer is with the literary side of Paul Bowles. For those who don’t know PB, he was both a writer of words (fiction and poetry) and music. More importantly, John’s suggestion took the Poet outside of the box she had created for herself. While she was OK with Raconteurs in Tangier, she knew deep down that it wasn’t the most evocative title because while raconteur is a word used in English, it’s not familiar to most people.

“How Many Midnights,” the story title that John is suggesting, comes from Paul’s collection The Delicate Prey. In “How Many Midnights,” the main character June (surely modeled after Jane Bowles) is engaged to be married to a very private man named Van. For some period of time, she has been focused nightly (midnight) out her bedroom window on where he lives. She is much younger than Van and she still lives with her parents. Finally, Van makes the ultimate sacrifice and gives her a key to his apartment. The trouble is the first night she goes there by herself, he never comes home from his book store. The story deals with privacy, the threat of suicide, and abandonment. Paul Bowles was the master of suggestion.

While the libretto the Steiny Road Poet wrote never mentions midnight, there is a suggestion that midnight could be the timeframe during which the anchoring characters Paul and Jane's Moroccan lover Cherifa are rehashing Jane's life. (She has already died when these two unlikely smoking partners get together.) So now the quandary is whether to insert the phrase how many midnights somewhere in the libretto. The Poet is thinking, why make the audience for this opera work so hard on how the title connects, especially if they are unfamiliar with this particular story by Bowles. The gift of its connection to PB's short story should stand out of the way and only go to the Paul Bowles aficionado.

So that’s it on a Labor Day weekend from the Steiny Road Poet who went for a walk along the C & O canal and learned today about an enticing dam across the Potomac River that kayakers might like to run. Well, the only rapids this Poet will run deal with the creative process. How wonderful to have a creative partner who can set the Poet free without sending her into a deadly undertow.

Deep Plunge into Making of Americans

So where has the Steiny Road Poet been lately?

Mostly with her nose in a book this summer. She read Karen Leick's Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity and then she took the big plunge -- she began reading The Making of Americans up at Toad Hall in New Hampshire. Currently she is over 700 pages deep and that's pretty close to the end of this 900 page plus novel by Gertrude Stein.


Here are some images from Toad Hall.

The Hungry Monster that is Opera

“Opera is an omnivore and can eat everyone alive.” Anne Bogart at VOX 2009

At VOX 2009, I had the pleasure of hearing George Steel, the new general director of New York City Opera, moderate a panel of prestigious artists involved with the making of new operas on May 2, 2009. Steele, who seems to be embracing new American opera with culinary gusto (he said he had just consumed Elise Kirke’s wonderful reference book American Opera), started the discussion with the preternatural question, What is opera?








Who were the panelists? Let’s start there.

Mark Adamo is composer librettist of Little Women and Lysistrata.

Eve Beglarian, characterized as post minimalist composer. Her work has been performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and others. She approaches music from all timeframes and styles and is considered in your face, outrageous, and intellectual.

Anne Bogart is an award-winning dramatic director who made her debut directing opera through the work of composer Deborah Drattell.

Carlisle Floyd is composer librettist of many operas including Susannah, Of Mice and Men, and Cold Sassy Tree.

Nico Muhly, known as a wunderkind composer (he was born in 1981), he is working under commission from the Metropolitan Opera on his first operatic project with Craig Lucas.

Quotable lines from this panel discussion:

“Performing arts is about changing time.” Anne Bogart

(I agree and think that is why any artist pursues his work – to get some control over the speed at which our lives go by and to help our audience experience what is happening right at this moment.)

“We listen faster (in opera).” Mark Adamo

(The operatic experience brings life into warp speed so that we can experience the full compliment of activities from birth to death. Yet the performance of opera can make time slow down so we can take in a whole life time.)

“The operatic story is ruled by the emotional content of the music.” Carlisle Floyd

(The music helps clarify and deepen a story.)

“In opera, the story has to be the right size.” Nico Muhly

(Everything in the arts is a question of balance.)

“Don’t worry about whether it is an opera. Anyone asking doesn’t matter.” Nico Muhly

(There is a lot of debate about what constitute an opera. Muhly’s advice to a question from the VOX audience was if the creators say the work is an opera, it is an opera.)

According to Floyd, the libretto contributes 60% to the success of an opera. He also said you would think that the playwright is the artist best suited for writing opera libretti but he thinks that poets can better adapt themselves to the job.

Because I am weighing the idea of creating a new libretto based on the same source text for existing music, the panel seemed a timely bit of counsel. I will add that Carlisle Floyd was skeptical that one could effectively rework the music to good effect because he feels the libretto provides the inspiration. Another Steiny Road challenge for me.

High Noon at the Library of Congress

National Poetry Month has begun with a lot of fanfare for the Steiny Road Poet. First was the WOM-PO reading at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Next, April 7 was the 15th Anniversary Reunion Reading of Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress. I was one of 27 poets to read. It should have been 28 – Greg McBride I saw you last night at Café Muse and Judy McCombs did a shout out to you to come to the mic if you were hiding behind the celebration cake. I hope all is well with you.

Beginning with Nan Fry who was the first Poetry at Noon reader, the quick succession of readers to the mic was quite a survey of styles and subject matter. Nearly everyone knew each other and so there was an energetic exchange of greetings and news. A hearty thank you to poet Patricia Gray who started and continues to run this important program in our Nation’s Capital. And by the way, George Bilgere was right to expect the President—Barack and Michelle Obama should be invited to EVERY reading on the LOC schedule.

Here is the list of readers:
Karren Alenier
Nancy Arbuthnot
Cliff Bernier
George Bilgere
Jody Bolz
Kenny Carroll
Grace Cavalieri
John Clarke
Nan Fry
David Gewanter
Barbara Goldberg
Patricia Gray
Erich Hintze
Reuben Jackson
Hiram Larew
Lyn Lyfshin
David McAleavy
Greg McBride
Judith McCombs
Miles Moore
Yvette Moreno
Jean Nordhaus
Linda Pastan
Heddy Reid
Kim Roberts
Marty Sanchez Lowery
Rosemary Winslow
Kathi Wolfe
Edwin Zimmerman

Letters to the World: Meet the WOMPOnies

On April 5, 2009, the National Museum of Women in the Arts hosted a celebration reading of Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv edited by Moira Richards, Rosemary Starace, and Lesley Wheeler. The 452-page anthology nicknamed the WOMPOlogy contains poems from 258 women and one man. Yes, the WOMen's POetry Listserv allows men as long as they talk about women in poetry or women's poetry.

The creation of the book, with a preface by Annie Finch—the founder of the WOM-PO and an introduction by D'Arcy Randall, is a study in an unusual collaboration. The egalitarian process took much longer than anyone predicted but everyone agreed the results were worth the wait. In my experience with creating anthologies (I have edited two: Whose Woods These are, I was the sole editor, and Winners: A Retrospective of the Washington Prize, I was co-editor with Hilary Tham and Miles David Moore), they always take longer than you originally plan.

While there are poets from five countries represented in the anthology, the gathering in DC brought WOMPOnies from such American states as California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, DC, and the greater DC area of Maryland and Virginia. On a beautiful spring day during the peak of blossoming cherry trees and its annual festival, the NMWA auditorium was respectably occupied and the audience attentive. After all, the the National Museum of Women in the Arts is a prestigious space and place for women's voices to be heard.

The featured readers included Rosemary Starace, Lesley Wheeler, Kim Roberts, Julie Enzer, and Rosemary Winslow. Eleven other WOMPOnies read from the anthology including some like me who joined the WOMPO listserv after the call for Letters to the World had ended. The event was a grand opportunity to meet women poets, put faces to names known on the WOM-PO listserv, and display our books along side the new anthology.

The bottom line is buy the book and join the WOM-PO listserv now. You will not find a warmer and more welcoming community anywhere in our world. I love the blend of cyber and real world contact. Wherever I go, I make a point to meet WOMPOnies.