Paris in the Springtime or One Opera Begets Another

Part of the strategy for promoting a book involves the next big project. The idea is to keep putting your name and your work into public consciousness. The next new project primes the pump and keeps the old project afloat.

In the case of what follows The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas, the next big project is an opera. The subject of this opera concerns the writers Jane and Paul Bowles. Those who know the work of these two American ex-pats who lived in Tangier, Morocco, for a significant portion of their lives most likely consider them writers’ writers or possibly cult figures. They had an unusual marriage—both pursued same sex extra-curricular lovers. Paul Bowles who is best known for his novel The Sheltering Sky had a walk-on part in Bernardo Bertolucci’s film by the same name that was based on Bowles’ bleak magnum opus. Paul, a protégé of Aaron Copland, was also a composer who, for example, wrote incidental music for a number of plays by Tennessee Williams. Jane Bowles is best known for her novel Two Serious Ladies and her play In the Summer House that was produced on Broadway in the 1950s.

What drew me to them as subject matter for an opera was this—Paul Bowles was told by Gertrude Stein to go to Morocco (as a young man, he sought her out when he ran away to Paris) and during the summer of 1982, I traveled to Tangier for a writing program with which Paul was involved. Paul helped me with some of the poems that became part of my opera libretto Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On. It seemed logical to me to pick a subject for my next opera, which in some way would point back to my first.

In February with the help of a composer friend Stefan Weisman, I made the acquaintance of John Supko, who for five years before Paul Bowles died in 1999 was corresponding with Bowles and sending the elderly composer his (Supko’s) original musical compositions for critique. Once I showed Supko part of my work-in-progress libretto, he was immediately interested and enough so to initiate writing a grant to fund work on the project. Therefore, I decided that before the grant awards are announced, that it would make sense for me to meet this composer. To do this required going to Paris where Supko is studying Erik Satie, the subject of his doctoral dissertation at Princeton University.

Our first face-to-face meeting took place on the Ile St. Louis along the Seine at Café Le Lutetia where John suggested the French aperitif typically sipped in the hot summer months called pastis.



Although I had never tried that drink which is made from star anise (licorice flavor), the night before at a birthday party for poet Margo Berdeshevsky, one of the French writers in attendance preferred pastis to champagne. I thought if someone could turn down that wonderfully delicious champagne (and I only like champagne if it is the best), that I should give the pastis a try. John ordered and then when it arrived, he warned that that the alcohol content was quite high, so he poured in some water, as is the custom. It was quite refreshing and it was beyond me to know if the drink altered my perception of things, but there I was in Paris under clear skies and along the placid Seine drinking the drink that replaced absinthe which was banned in 1915.

After the drinks and the talk about Bowles, ideas for the opera, backgrounds, the do-you-know-so-and-so, we headed to Auberge de Jarente, a Basque restaurant where we were also meeting my husband Jim Rich. Over deliciously prepared and reasonably priced dishes like frog legs, quail, and cassoulet, we covered new ground. Nothing like changing venues and the participant mix to channel new conversation and perspectives. Later, in my stay John, Margo, and I went to a concert together.

I spent a week in Paris which included Margo Berdeshevsky’s birthday party at Cafe Louis Philippe (66 Quai de L'Hotel de Ville) where I met Marilyn Hacker, Sandra Gilbert and other poets and writers, a reading at Shakespeare & Company, visits to six art museums (the Rodin, Musée de L’Orangerie, Picasso, Musée d'Orsay, Louvre, Musée du Luxembourg, and Centre Pompidou), two concerts (an early music event featuring music from Francois I to Henry IV and experimental classical music Le Noir de L'Étoile by Gérard Grisey) and Euro-free window-shopping tours. Did I talk about The Steiny Road book? You betcha and I even handed out some of my bookmarks!

Here is the gallery of photos depicting some of my activities in Paris.

NYC Drama Book Shop now selling The Steiny Road to Operadom

As of May 9, 2008, New York City’s Drama Book Shop is selling The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas.

Contact information:

The Drama Book Shop, Inc.

250 W. 40th St.

New York, NY 10018

Tel: (212) 944-0595

Fax: (212) 730-8739
info@dramabookshop.com

The sale of the book is in conjunction with a performance by singers of Encompass New Opera Theatre and a reading/book signing of The Steiny Road. Arias from Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On will be performed. This event will happen Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 3 pm in the Arthur Seelen Theatre located on the lower level of The Drama Book Shop.

Mark your calendars now. Also you might want to check out the Drama Book Shop's blog to see what else they do.

What was especially exciting about this meeting between

Nancy Rhodes, Allen Hubby, and me on one very rainy day in New York City is that Nancy and Allen discovered they both share a deep interest in quantum mechanics. Allen has been study the subject since he was in high school. Nancy is developing an opera with composer John David Earnest called The Theory of Everything. OK, whatever leverage it takes for this event to move into place, be it quantum physics or string theory. I started working on this event in late January!



To celebrate, I met poet Susan Brennan at Bryant Park Grill for dinner and afterward she showed me the Jo Davidson sculpture of Gertrude Stein which I never realized was in this square! I took this unexpected visitation as a sign from Gertrude herself!

In the Time of the Mighty Dogwood

Because I haven't had enough veg time and I seem to be on edge about everything,


I decided to take some time out from promoting my Steiny Road book to visit with friends who invited me to participate in their Edna St. Vincent Millay project. The idea for Dan Vera

and Michael Gushue of Vrzhu Press is to shoot poets in the same iconic pose that Edna Millay struck in the low hanging branches of a magnolia tree. For Dan, the piece de resistance is a dogwood tree across from the entrance of the Franciscan Monastery in Washington DC.

When I arrived, Dan was sitting on a campstool under the tree and looking very much like a French artist one might find painting in the Bois de Bologne. Pretty soon we were joined by Michael and his daughter Nora.
Dan came prepared with photos of Edna in that pose of blossoms. Nora found a caterpillar so Edna's photo got explored by the multi-legged creature.



They plan another shoot Saturday May 3 from 11 am to 1 pm. This time Kim Roberts will assist Dan. Be there or be square was the message I heard when I left.

Meeting Women Power Brokers

Years ago, getting a new book into a bookstore was what all new authors obsessed over. In the Seventies, my friends and colleagues in the poetry community placed their books in favorite bookstores, usually the independents, by merely walking in and leaving a copy of their book on a prominent shelf where browsers were likely to see it. It was a tactic extrapolated from guerrilla theater. Imagine the surprise at the register, if a customer decided this leave-it-on-the-shelf-and-run book was what the buyer wanted.

WHERE DO PEOPLE MEET NOW?

Today, people are spending their reading time with TV, computers, and cell phones. They are buying books online if they buy them at all. Yet people are hungry for meaning in their lives and for community. So as an author, I am trying to reach out to other venues, besides bookstores, where people might congregate and also be interested in books.

EXECUTIVE WOMEN SUPPORTING THE ARTS

Lately, dear friends in my swing dance community have taken me to some high-powered gatherings of executive women. On March 4, 2008, the Business and Professional Women’s Council of the National Museum of Women in the Arts presented Gloria Story Dittus with the 2008 Enterprising Woman of Washington award. My stalwart dance friend Victoria Porter invited me to the award ceremony held in the grand foyer of this grand museum of which I also happen to be a founding member. Here’s where you are invited to ask, “How come you haven’t sat down with the program director at this museum to discuss your book?” I’ll park that answer with my book trailer project and just say, I am not going to forget about this.

Gloria Dittus is one of those extraordinary women who knows how to make things happen and if I’m lucky and smart enough, maybe I can go beyond the handshake of congratulations I extended to her relative to her newly acquired award and her life accomplishments.
Left to right: Wilhelmina Cole Holladay NMWA Executive Committee Chair of the Board; Gloria Dittus; Susan Fisher Sterling, NMWA Director

Right now I am working on a lead given to me by a woman I met at this award ceremony regarding marketing my book to the Washington National Opera. This particular woman directed a gala for WNO and she suggested I speak with a woman in the WNO development office. So now I am following through on a ricocheting path between the WNO publicity and development offices. It might be a series of rabbit holes that yield no immediate benefits, but certainly people in that organization are getting familiar with my book because it promotes their general director Placido Domingo and their young artist program as well as giving accolades for the world premiere of Scott Wheeler’s opera Democracy: An American Comedy.

BACK TO THE HALLS OF GOVERNMENT

In December 2007, my dance friend Kate Perry took me to the annual tea of Executive Women in Government where I met many movers and shakers from the halls of Federal government. (Yes, I did reinforce who I was when I was introduced to various people by handing them my bookmark.) Federal government was the world I left when I got an early out from the U.S. Department of Agriculture so I could pursue my writing career full time. (After all, I was an undercover poet for those decades that I worked on public programs related to energy, labor, justice, and food.) At the EWG tea where 130 people were honoring the Newton Marasco Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing environmental education (this group gives an annual book award for authors who write about environmental stewardship for children and young adults), I was invited to be a speaker at
the EWG March 2008 Summit and Training Conference: Women’s Vision by Marylouise Uhlig, a supreme networker and the chairperson for this training conference.


I arrived on March 12 at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (right across Lafayette Park from the White House) for the Women’s Vision conference on the heels of Michelle Rhee.

Rhee is the Chancellor of DC Public Schools who is daring to shake up the worst public school system in our country in order to establish significant improvements. I have been following the news about her actions with great interest because anything having to do with young people concerns me. The young are the future of this city, country, planet and they are why I carry torches for poetry and opera. So I was thrilled in this quiet moment at the registration table (everyone else had arrived much earlier) to shake the hand of Michelle Rhee, a rabble-rouser of the first degree. What she said in her speech to a conference of over 200 women is I don’t care if no one likes me—the children of Washington, DC need a better school system and I am going to make that happen.

Also on the speakers roster was Elaine Kamarck, author of The End of Government . . . As We Know It: Making Public Policy Work; former Marine Courtney Lynch, co-author of Leading From The Front: No-Excuse Leadership Tactics for Women; Mary E. Peters, Secretary of Transportation; Michealene Cristini Risley, co-author of This Is Not The Life I Ordered" 50 Ways to Keep Your Head Above Water When Life Keeps Dragging You Down; EWG President Lynn Scarlett, Department of Interior Deputy Secretary; and political forecaster Amy Walter, editor in chief of The Hotline, the National Journal Group's online briefing on politics and policies. Everyone who came to conference was given a bag of books from some of these speakers.

WHAT ABOUT THE FLIPPY LADY?

Right now I’m reading Leading From The Front and thinking Wow! I never thought a military officer could ever get my attention and have a message of importance that would speak to me. I’m not saying if I could relive my life that I would join the Marines, an organization I heard about constantly from one of my favorite uncles, but I am inspired by what Courtney Lynch has accomplished as the result of her Marine Corps training. The only thing I regret about this bag of books was that not one of mine was keeping company in this impressive collection. Were the EWG volunteers afraid to ask me for copies of one of my books, thinking I would turn them down or did they think a whole book of poetry was a little too subversive for this group? While it is true I could not afford to give away The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas, I do have other books that I can donate to a worthy cause.

This leads me to: what was the poet’s role in this conference? I’m not entirely sure, but I think the purpose of me speaking was to provide a moment of inspiration, a moment to acknowledge the creative impulse in every woman sitting in that lively audience. So I delivered my Diana, the huntress poem that is part of my opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On.

DIANA AU COURANT

She was a flippy lady—
a real sixer in a deck
of nines. She knew
the handle from the muzzle,

the click of the cock
from the squeeze 

of the trigger.

She listened--

an authentic spoon tuner
in a forest of forks.

Her ear was better 

than a metal detector. 

Sharpened and juicier

than a blowgun, her mouth

tasted the purple plum. 

In short she had more

life in her than the entire

city of New York.

Then I read “Looking for Divine Transportation.”


After the reading, one woman I spoke with recited the lines of this poem to express how much she enjoyed hearing it. As a thank you gift from EWG, I received Women Artists: Works from the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Talk about traveling in interconnected circles!

At the end of the day, I don’t know whom I have touched in a way that will move that person to remember what I said, much less make her or him take action to obtain a copy of any of my books. My business, the business of poetry, is akin to building stalactites. Yes, I’m exhilarated to speak to hundreds of people all at the same time at a conference where everyone seems to be on the same page and listening intently (and I am grateful to get such invitations), but I know it is one-on-one contact that makes the difference. Building those mineral deposits from the ceilings of limestone caves comes one drop of water at a time.

Thanks to Jeuli Barton, Kate Perry, EWG and the National Museum of Women in the Arts for photos seen in this post.

Our Town: A Steiny Road Way Station

Question: What could be better than meeting people who share your interests and therefore might be happy to know about your book? Answer: Going to a conference that deals with your subject matter AND meeting some of the people who are in your book!

The week of February 25 through March 2, 2008, Catholic University of America hosted “Wilder and Wilder (Thornton, that is…).” The conference, or festival as the university gurus labeled this set of events, focused on Wilder’s Our Town—the drama, film, musical premieres, and, most important to me, the opera written by Ned Rorem and J. D. (Sandy) McClatchy.

FIRST A SING-ALONG

Monday February 25, I heard Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder’s nephew, speak. I was lucky actually, I got to this panel a little late and a professor Lincoln Konkle was comparing Our Town, the play, to Our Town, the opera. Quite an in-depth paper on the subject, which I found interesting, but I suspect the 100 students sitting in the audience thought was utterly boring. Goodness, why do academics always read their papers instead of engaging the audience with bits of their paper and lots of eye contact to see who is yawning and maybe questions to shake the sequestered herd awake or at least keep their fingers off the keypads of their cell phones? Tappan, on the other hand, was a live wire. He got everyone singing “Love and Marriage.” The song was in the television musical of Our Town with Frank Sinatra. How many of those kids actually knew who Frankie was? Well, Tappan asked and there were some. He also showed some posters depicting the U.S. stamp minted in Thornton’s honor and a new book in translation from Germany. He poked some fun at both.

STEIN ON WILDER

During the question and answer period, I got Tappan to talk a little about Gertrude Stein’s influence on his uncle. He said there were many influences but provided only this example. The minister who marries Emily and George makes these comments ending on the word interesting, which Tappan said, was a nod to Stein who used that word often. Like Stein, Tappan said, Wilder was not being ironic, just matter of fact. Shall we believe that?

“I’ve married two hundred couples in my day. Do I believe in it? I don’t know. I suppose I do. M marries N. Millions of them. The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday afternoon drives in the Ford—the first rheumatism—the grandchildren—the second rheumatism—the deathbed—the reading of the will—Once in a thousand times it’s interesting.”

MEETING AN AMERICAN OPERA GURU

Also during the Q and A’s, I realized that a woman asking a question was Elise Kirk who wrote American Opera, a book I consulted in writing about what is American opera, an important chapter in my book.


After the panel discussion, she asked me how I defined American opera (of course there is no answer except the one about holding a passport from the United States) and then she turned our conversation to Lori Laitman and The Scarlet Letter, Laitman’s new opera with poet David Mason. Small world since my article on opera origins that includes an interview with Laitman will be published March on Scene4 Magazine.

OUR TOWN CHEVY CHASE

I also spoke to Tappan Wilder, who turns out to be a fellow Chevy Chaser. I used the bookmark I made when I was in New York recently to introduce myself. I got a chance to ask the moderator professor Grayson Wagstaff if I could offer some of my bookmarks at various events during the week. He thought it was OK as long as I was low key about this. Of course what this meant was that I needed to make more of them.

COLLECTOR EDITION BOOKMARKS

Nothing can be as easy as the original idea. My husband Jim said I really needed an image on the bookmark and some lines to guide the eye. He wanted to help but he’s wrapped up these days with graduate studies so I asked my artist friend Janice Olson to help me. I had the concept and some public domain images but I lacked the skill to use InDesign, the software that most pros use these days for page layout projects. Here’s what Janice did. Well, I had some of the bookmarks produced in color on shiny white card stock and many more produced in black ink on colored paper. I spent my first book royalty check in making these babies. (Helas, $50 doesn’t go very far but maybe the bookmarks will have legs. Jim said I should sign the back of these bookmarks. Not until someone asks is my position on that.)




WERE NED ROREM’S EARS BURNING?

Last night, I went back to Catholic University to hear Sandy McClatchy speak with Tappan Wilder about how the Our Town opera came about.
Each had a different version, which didn’t surprise me since Ned Rorem also has his own version. Ned Rorem was suppose to be on this panel, but he called and said he wasn’t feeling up to it and besides the Julliard School of Music would be mounting a production soon. Composer Maurice Saylor, a Catholic University insider, wondered aloud to Janet Peachey (she’s a composer and part-time professor at CUA) and me why Rorem had to throw in that comment about Julliard. “He’s like that,” I said, “besides, he’s not that young though you can’t tell that by what he says.”

McClatchy got his digs in on Rorem too from the stage. Of course they were tempered by McClatchy's great praise for Rorem’s ability to set poetry and know what good poetry is. “I think composers are lazy,” said McClatchy a couple of times. Rorem wanted Our Town written in one act but agreed to make it two after McClatchy insisted. In the world premiere rehearsals, the creative team suddenly realized that the Indiana audience (Our Town premiered at Indiana University) would not be comfortable sitting through a 90-minute first act.” Luckily, McClatchy explained, breaking the first act into two parts required little of Rorem. The break was there all along.

POCKET OPERA ON BROTHER FIRE AND MORE

After the panel discussion, six new musical works based on three-minute plays by Thornton Wilder and written by CUA students or staff were premiered.


Michael Oberhauser’s operatic version of Wilder’s Brother Fire was superb! Shh! Don’t tell him that. It might break his concentration—Oberhauser loves to write opera he said when I spoke with him after the performance. He thanked me for my compliments, but I assured him I was not flattering him and I gave him my bookmark so he would know I was more than a casual listener. By the way, Tappan Wilder said Brother Fire, written by Uncle Thornton in 1916 is his earliest work in print. The story involves St. Francis of Assisi getting too intimate with a campfire being tended by a young pyromaniac girl and her mother. The play is pure poetry and it also inspired incidental music from another CUA student who together with director Jason Burke produced an entirely different view of this work. Hats also off to John Diomede for the impressive tonal music that worked well with the text of Brother Fire.

My point here is that a conference like Wilder and Wilder offered me a lot of opportunity to meet people who might appreciate what I have done with The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas. If a few of those I talked with buy my book, they will note I have interviewed Ned Rorem, J. D. McClatchy, and one of their prominent professors Andrew Simpson.

They will also see that I discuss the subject what is American opera and hold up Elise Kirk’s book American Opera as a seminal reference. Our Town, the opera and the play, threads through my book. The point is my book is the story they are living.