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Connecting the Dots |
Someone recently told me it’s all about connecting the dots. Kinda wish they’d told me that sooner.
When I was 12, my grandmother bought me a blank book. I used it to write about fights with my mother and boys I liked. About four years later, Ed Amrhein, the director of Levels, a youth center I had made my creative home, passed away of a heart attack at age 35.
I wrote my first poem.
In 12th grade, my English teacher was Alan Block, the cool teacher, and the hottest one in the school. He wore pink Ralph Lauren Oxford shirts, painters’ pants and Bass bucks. He had a beard and somehow strode the line between preppie and hippie. Everyone wanted in his class, especially the girls. We were the AP English class, so he was all ours.
He made us all buy black and white composition notebooks. We were to write in them, keep journals. I had been keeping a journal forever and I continued to do so. In the stiff, black and white bound book for class I wrote stilted thoughts about Doctorow and Lessing and Lawrence. He chastised us, and me in particular with the cloying phrase “you’re not THINKING . . . ” Thinking stretched out and out and out like the time between college applications and acceptance letters, between 2nd semester senior and graduation, between summer at the beach and freshman orientation. It would be much longer before I was able to grok that what he was trying to do was get us to think on the page instead of inside our brains. I’m not sure that can be taught; it’s a process that arrives after continued practice.
Through my years dancing, acting, and film making, I was never without a book to write in. I sat in the Whitney Museum on my 2nd and 3rd trips to the Jonathan Borofsky exhibit writing and writing my thoughts, and still have my handwritten transcription of the words from his work, “What is Dragging Me?” Oddly, I would later reencounter the original on the wall of a Beverly Hills pawn shop. (For those who think they don’t know Borofsky’s work, one of his most famous pieces is the “Ballerina Clown” which sits atop the building at Rose and Main in Venice.) I kept writing in a journal through Columbia, NYU, evolving into short stories and screenplays for my short films.
Poetry never crossed my radar. I read some of it, but I devoured books of fiction and non-fiction wholesale – in fact, I worked at a publishing house where I got all the free books I could carry; poetry was scarce among them, despite a healthy back list. One of my favorite books was Martha Graham’s autobiography, Blood Memory. It was edited by Jacqueline Onassis and is one of the most beautiful books ever printed. We used to joke back then that the surest way to end up in the obits was to write your autobiography for Doubleday. In a very short span of time, we ever-so-slightly posthumously published Martha Graham’s, Bill Graham’s and I think Joe Papp had just been signed when he passed. I know if I’m ever ready to go, I can just start writing my memoirs for Doubleday! ; )
Dancers believe strongly in muscle memory – the way the muscles, with practice, begin to know the movements without the mind harnessing them. In her autobiography, Martha Graham goes even further back into what she calls “blood memory.” Blood memory goes through DNA back to the reaches of time, allowing us to access our entire history in creating art, as long as the vessel is clear. For an artist, it is a rich and deep read.
In 2001, I was working on the Silver Lake Film Festival. I started having these ridiculously long phone calls about festival stuff with one of the other staffers, and then we’d keep going. He’d read to me from his screenplay and then ask what I’d written. I’d demur, saying I hadn’t really written anything, just some journal stuff. I’d read him snippets of things and he’d be encouraging. Then I started to read him these other things; I don’t know what they were. Sort of short pieces. He liked them and told me that I should read them out. I thought he was nuts – who’d want to hear this stuff? He laughed.
Around the same time, my high school friends and I were involved in planning a memorial for Ed Amrhein. His daughter was now a freshman in college and we wanted to return to her some of his legacy. In order to come up with some written contributions, I decided to look through my old journals as a starting place. What I found as I read shocked me. Every few pages in my journals was something that very much resembled a poem. Years and years of them. Most of them untouched, unread, and unrevised. Almost all of them I could not recall having written, as if they had just come through me – as if they came from my blood memory.
Looking at these long-forgotten pieces was liberating. Since I couldn’t recall writing them, I looked at them without investment. As expected, some of them were awful, some decent, but some were actually good. I read some of these to my friend, and he encouraged me further. I was still skeptical, but now the poems kept coming. Somewhat mercilessly. The relentlessness of creativity on a roll is always embodied for me by the moment in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams when Martin Scorsese, playing Vincent Van Gogh, stands in a field comparing what’s going on in his mind to a locomotive as he continues to paint furiously. Every artist craves and dreads that experience, I think.
Feeling stuck in my screen writing, I decided to take a directing workshop with Judith Weston. Returning to the more physical crafts of acting and dance have always been good ways for me to overcome any kind of block. While I sat in the class, out came another one of these pesky poems. It was clear I was not going to be writing the great American screenplay anytime soon, but I was assembling a screenplay’s weight in poetry.
One night, hanging out with some actors and crew while we were on location for a shoot, I asked if I could say this poem. I had somehow memorized it. In a motel room at 4:00 in the morning, I started to spit for the very first time. As I spoke, I saw these people whose craft I respected sitting in rapt attention. Behind me, sounds of a guitar picked up by Danny Peck to accompany me. As I finished my poem, he serenaded us with what would become my favorite of his songs, “She Can Only Fly.” The night felt serendipitous and something had moved in me that wouldn’t be going back.
A mere four months of deliberating later, I finally found the courage to go to my first open mic. I had started looking around to see where people might actually go to hear this stuff, and being indolent, chose the Midnight Special for my debut, since it was walking distance from my house. I went one Friday, hid in the back and listened. Every reader was terrible. Everyone. Hallelujah! This was the place for me. I went back the next week.
I signed up and sat between two ladies who hadn’t been there before. We cheered each other on as reader after reader was called. Unfortunately, they were all good. Some of them were great. This was terrible. Where were all the people from the week before? How could I go up?
But go up I did, and I read two poems off the page; “Richard Tee” and ”Pounding Ancient Skins.” I was so nervous, my lips were shaking. I didn’t know lips could shake. And I didn’t know that with that one five minute terrifying act, I had crossed the border into a different world and a new community. I was quickly indoctrinated into all aspects of the L.A. scene, started to find venues that felt more like home, and realized that I’d been writing spoken word pieces without even knowing that spoken word really existed. I could hear in my words early influences like Laurie Anderson, Ann Magnuson, even Judy Tenuta and of course Joni Mitchell, but how did I fit in so easily to this spoken word thing?
Three years before I first got up at the Midnight Special, on 1/24/98 I wrote:
“They make me wanna rhyme, wanna create the rhythms in my head.”
“They” were the actors in SLAM, a movie I had just seen in its Sundance premiere. My first Sundance; my first real experience with spoken word. The whole time and place felt magical – like a winter wonderland film camp! In Park City, I was awed as I saw Saul Williams, Sonja Sohn, and Liza Jesse Peterson walking down Main Street. I am, of course still awed by them all, but who they were and what they did were so foreign to me that January; the thought of me doing that was as real to me as the idea of me changing species mid-incarnation.
At the time I thought I wanted to make a “movie” like SLAM. Spitting like that – I mean, I didn’t even know what spitting was – did not enter my brain. Yet reading through my Sundance journal seven years later, I can see that rhyme is what I did. I just kept writing and writing, and I guess, wrote my first flow. I’m not much of an MC, but some of my pieces are essentially flows.
I must’ve written about ten pages straight; in these pages I find seeds for all the themes I have been working with since I started doing poetry, some things I’m still learning, but apparently already knew then; an early precursor to my poem “Earthy Fabulous People” and a line I’m sure I must’ve copped from Steve Connell, except…I didn’t know him then!
“I want a vision like an arrow that pierces the mind into a thousand questions.”
Or maybe I just copped it from Saul Williams, though it would seem I wrote it. Think I might steal it from myself.
All I can say now is I wish I’d connected the dots sooner. I wish I’d had a name for what I was doing so I could go out and find other people who were doing it. But maybe that’s wrong. Evolution is what it is. I hope I can say I’ve become my own singular voice and perhaps, in part, that is due to working unconsciously in isolation for so long before making the scene. At least now I have words for what I do and the words to do it.
Related links:
www.judithweston.org
http://www.greatnecklibrary.org/levels/home.html
http://www.borofsky.com/
http://institute.sundance.org/jsps/site.jsp?resource=pag_ex_home
http://silverlakefilmfestival.org/
http://www.dannypeck.com/
http://www.dannypeck.com/pages/lyrics/fly.html
Blood Memory:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385265034/102-3117740-8330541?v=glance
Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00007G1ZC/102-3117740-8330541?v=glance
SLAM:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139615/combined
copyright 2005
E.
Amato |
