There is this press junket gesture we’ve come to expect from our most fabulously talented artists. Think of the decorated director, shoved into a broom closet for Blu-ray discs, forced to offer up a selection of his favorite films like archaeological evidence of a superior inner life. Think of the pop star gliding sock-footed across the pale oak floors of her abode, showing off the high-pile rug hand-knotted from the recycled sails of a decommissioned research vessel, the walk-in closet whose atmospheric calibration rivals that of the Svalbard Seed Vault, a room named after a feeling instead of a function, the scented candle, amphora-bodied and faintly pagan, sourced from an island micronation whose name you've never heard said out loud. Implicit in these rituals is a conception of creative talent as less a visitation than something hypertrophied into existence by the high-protein inputs its possessor permits himself. Today's working artists are drafted into compulsory service as human recommendation engines, a grueling second shift as sublimity-sniffing service dogs, sommeliers of what to watch next.
How rotten, then, that I expected Poetry Says it Better: Poems to Help You Wake Up—actress Ellen Burstyn’s annotated anthology of seventy-some works of verse—to be some sort of syllabus, a catalogue of unimpeachable aesthetic judgments delivered from on high. It is, it turns out, something far more interesting, wacky, and actually idiosyncratic than that. The experience of reading it is like sitting with a supremely interesting elder relative while she flips through a photo album, the pictures merely the inciting stimuli for freewheeling flights of memory, association, and actionable advice.
Twelfth-century koans rub shoulders with poems as contemporary as Kaveh Akbar's. Works canonized within an inch of their lives sit alongside those composed by her close personal friends, poems that can otherwise only be encountered in print-on-demand volumes whose covers seem to memorialize a fiercely sincere half-hour war gently waged against Microsoft Paint. Hindrances, blessings, passionate romances that sent her flying for a while before plopping her down somewhere strange—each left its mark on the actress. The book is, most fascinatingly, a scattered account of how her life's dents and detours made her primed to receive the wisdom of a certain work.
Interviews with actors, especially as they pertain to their “craft,” often operate on the same frequency as talk about energy healing, or “chakras”—earnest and abstract, their persuasive power rising or falling according to the amount of incense already burning in your brain. Between twenty-five years as Co-President of the Actors Studio and a stint co-hosting Inside the Actors Studio—a show that produced over two hundred episodes of exactly this kind of conversation—there is already more of Ellen Burstyn talking about acting than any one person could consume. Anyway, we had poetry to discuss, this volume representing the first formal, focused declaration of her nine-decade love for the artform. This, therefore, seemed like the thing to honor.
Still, I snuck in one film question. In Alain Resnais’s Providence (1977), Burstyn plays the daughter-in-law of a dying writer who, drunk and alone, mentally composes what may be his final novel, populated by grotesque, fatally cunning caricatures of his own family. In the book, Burstyn's reflections sometimes return to her stepfather—whose hostility, she speculates, sprang from having cast a small child as a competitor for her mother's love—and I wanted to know if the film had touched any of that. In response, Burstyn produced a delightful non-answer. “There have been many, many, many movies since then. One of the great things about having made so many is that maybe you don’t have to remember them all.”
Here, as in the book, its more injurious material is apt to be glanced at and moved past without much fuss. Paraphrasing Frost, she writes, “the great artist has a lover’s quarrel with the world.” Ellen Burstyn and the world, by now, have slumped down together onto the sidewalk of the steamy street they'd been skirmishing on, shared a cigarette in the rain, and set off in their separate directions, feeling lighter than before.
—Karim Kazemi
Karim Kazemi: The very first words of the preface to Poetry Says it Better are “this is not a political book.” It made my ears perk up and set the terms for how I read everything after, alert to anything that might be considered political. Like when someone is in therapy and they ultra-confidently bracket some story with the assertion of what it ISN’T about, almost always what they mean is that in some way, in fact, it is. To what extent was that a directive you had aimed at yourself—some kind of separation you were going to try to hold yourself to?
Ellen Burstyn: That’s very, very perceptive. In this particular period we’re living in right now, it’s very hard not to be political. Ours is a dramatic time, and I find myself wanting to talk about that a lot. But that wasn’t the intention of the book. The book was literally inspired by the story I tell about my personal trainer, Wendy, who, I was dismayed to discover, knew nothing about poetry.
KK: One of the first poems you highlight is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Daphne.” In your reflection, you imagine the speaker throwing that last line—“to heel, Apollo!”—saucily, over her shoulder. Reading that, I thought: oh my god, she's blocking the scene in her head. The poem that Wendy finally connected with was one by your close friend Rayne O’Brien—about a homeless woman asleep in a doorway, and the poet gifting her, in secret, this whole history as a silver-clad warrior who led armies over the Alps. You speculate Wendy connected to it because of the warrior woman. Did you feel compelled to share poetry with someone whose intelligence, like yours, is so physical?
EB: That’s very good. I like that. Yeah, that’s probably true.
KK: Is this always where your brain goes when you read poems, thinking about the delivery of it? Thinking about what the speaker’s doing with their body?
EB: That’s very possible. I’ll have to think about that and see if I always do it. I don’t know if I always do it. I certainly don’t do it with the poems that I don’t relate to, right? But I think there is something to be said about my habit of understanding through the body. I think I take in information that way.
KK: You also splice in Millay’s “Renascence,” in which the speaker becomes the universe, becomes infinity, feels all the world’s suffering at once. Does a poem about something so transcendent appeal to you because it would be hard to act out?
EB: No. It was a transformative experience, for me, to witness what the voice in that poem goes through—getting enlightened, getting ready to have a wider embrace of life. I was about twenty when I first stumbled onto it, working as a model at a department store in Detroit, two years out of my mother's house. It was the first time I’d read a poem about a spiritually transformative experience. Oh, this is good poetry. I don’t come from a literary family at all—everything came from luck, from stumbling over things. It was never handed to me.
KK: I often end up interviewing artists from your generation, and most of them are women, and there are often some similarities in the childhoods they describe: volatile father figures, catching strays from their mothers’ sexual paranoia. Reading your book, it dawned on me that maybe this isn’t specific to their families of origin, that maybe this is just what it was like to be a girl born in the 1930s, coming into early adulthood in that postwar period. People my age, we can’t even begin to wrap our heads around how abysmally stifling that time was. You write about your mother, how she would buy a chair from a department store on loan—
EB: Actually, two of them. Two chairs.
KK: —and hide them in the attic, keep your dad away until she’d paid them off. You say that if she were alive today, she would have been a hedge fund manager. It made me think of your note on “Daphne”—why do you follow me? / any moment I can be / nothing but a laurel tree—this quip about how many modern-day nymphs might wish they could morph into a laurel tree in order to ward off their employers’ unwanted advances. These two observations feel disparate, but side by side they paint a pretty complete political picture: on the one hand, for women, some things have opened up; on the other, some things haven’t budged. Do you think that poetry—your way of finding a foothold in words—helped you navigate times when people wielded power over you in ways that were cruel or unfair?
EB: I need to think about that. Okay. I don’t know. I just heard this voice, just now, in my head—it’s telling me to tell you about a specific event in my life. Once, I was doing acting—I was doing playtime, with kids. This was in the poor sections of Los Angeles, and I was doing a little acting game with this little girl, this little Black girl. I put a nail polish bottle in her hands behind her back and asked her to tell me what it said on the bottle, feeling absolutely sure that she would know that it was a bottle and that it was nail polish. I was thinking: there’s no other kind of bottle so small! But she couldn’t do it. She said, “My mind doesn’t go that far,” and I kept saying, “Are you sure? Squeeze it! Squeeze it to be sure!” I was trying to encourage her, and every time she would say, “My mind doesn't go that far.” Finally, her sister—the sister was a couple of years older—came up to me and whispered: she means she can’t read.
It was such a chilling experience. To think that this child had not been exposed to reading! Now, why did that come up just now when you asked me that question? I guess it's because I was feeling: “My mind doesn’t go that far.” I think this voice in my head was telling me, in a way, that this was my answer to you.
KK: I love that. Even though she couldn’t read, that’s such a spooky and accurate way of evoking—
EB: Her limitation. It was worthy of a poem, actually, because it’s a metaphor.
KK: I watched one interview with you in which you recount your early experiences with Lee Strasberg. In an introductory class, he gave the instruction to re-enact drinking the cup of coffee everyone had had that morning. He stalks the room, and when it’s your turn to be picked apart, he looks you over and says: “You don't have to RIDE that cup.” That's so brutal—but you relay it as supporting evidence for his genius. He was addressing something in you that you didn’t know was there. That you had to be perfect. That particular instruction is so cryptic, so abstract—only someone wired to think in barely-tethered-to-reality metaphors could make sense of it. An actress friend of mine told me that David Lynch once told Laura Dern her performance needed “more wind.” Not everybody would be able to receive that and metabolize it into a different kind of performance.
EB: That experience was the experience of being seen for the first time. And once you’re really seen for the first time—having lived however many years not being seen—that’s a completely transformative experience. That’s why he was a genius. That’s what he could do. He knew how to say what he wanted to say. He knew how to make it land. He perceived who he was talking to—which is its own kind of poetry. If “riding the cup” made sense to me, if “wind” was what Laura Dern could receive—it’s not because we are geniuses. It was, in this case, the genius of the speakers. They saw exactly who they were speaking to, and how to be heard. That takes a particular kind of talent—though “talent” isn’t quite the right word. “Ability” is better.
Communication is such an amazing thing. I want to show you a picture. Just a minute. [She holds up a photograph.] I have this picture on the wall above my desk—actually, I have it in two places in my house. What’s happening here is that a scientist in the jungle has gone into a body of water to test it to see if it was poisonous. A gorilla from the wilderness saw him and offered him his hand, telling him that yes, it was poisonous. Two different worlds recognizing each other and finding a way to communicate. I think that must have happened as we developed out of the ape world into the human world. Before language was invented, there were all kinds of sounds and expressions with hands, grunts—and out of that came language, and then that gets developed into poetry. To me, that’s one of the more moving and beautiful realizations of who we are, where we’ve been, where we’ve come. That communication, to me—I don’t even know how to describe it, but it makes me weep. Oh my God, what a path human beings have taken!
KK: I’m sure it’s the perfect thing to have wherever you’re writing.
EB: Yes, that’s where it is. It’s a good totem.
KK: You wrote a memoir, right? I didn’t know that while I was reading this—I loved discovering that this wasn’t just a memoir by other means. Did having written a memoir make writing this book possible, or make the process of it different?
EB: One of the things I learned from writing the memoir is that every time I came to a story and thought, “Oh god, I can’t write that,” another voice would say, “If you’re going to tell your story, tell your story.” So I put it all in. And I went too far. There’s no need to be that honest. I didn’t need to tell everything, which I did. I get on the elevator in my building and some other tenant says, “I’m reading your memoir”—and I want to die. My neighbors don’t need to know about my abortion, you know? So with this book, it’s honest, but I’ve also had the experience of being embarrassed by being too honest. It’s a little more careful. That said, one day I was at the farmers' market and a woman approached me with tears in her eyes and said, “Thank you for writing your book.” And I knew then that she’d had some of the same experiences I wrote about, the ones I was ashamed I’d included. So then I felt better about it.
KK: Watching your films, I kept thinking about what gets written for women right now—how they tend toward depictions of desperation, vengefulness, derangement, extremity. What I kept noticing watching your films is how well you do something else, which is embodying a woman so ordinary, someone you come to care about because she seems so real. The book has its own version of this. When you write about your time in the Hollywood Hills, you stop to clarify: while this place-name may convey images of moviemaking glamour, Tinseltown, really it is just a neighborhood in Los Angeles, with streets lined with nice middle-class homes. In this book, you’re not positioning yourself as someone with a rareified, hard-to-come-by relationship to poetry. You’re saying: I have this, and so can you. What’s at stake for you in that?
EB: I don't think “ordinary” is a word I would use for myself, or for you, or for anybody for that matter—what is “ordinary?” I don't know. “True” is more like it. True, true, true. If I’m going to write, I want to write what’s true for me, to tell the truth of my reality. Clarifying my living conditions in Hollywood is just a way of saying, don’t get fancy pictures about that. I was living in an unremarkable apartment, what you would call a “duplex.” That's important to me to point out.
KK: Right around when I got this assignment, my boyfriend played a concert at the Shrine in LA—this cathedral of a room, all red velvet and gold, where they held the Oscars multiple times over the years. I wandered around the backstage—this maze of rinky-dink, fluorescent-lit corridors, like back hallways in a middle school or a budget ski resort. And then suddenly you’re looking out at this legendary room from the stage. Your book has that same quality—you keep pulling back the curtain on the glamour and showing the perfectly normal place underneath. But I wanted to ask about something else you return to several times: this other meaning of “true” or “truth.” Wasn’t it something about Aramaic—where “good” and “bad” translate as “ripe” and “unripe”? Can you say more about what that did for you, rethinking good and bad that way?
EB: Because it’s in the words of Jesus—and the Aramaic gets translated into Hebrew, the Hebrew into Greek, and everything else gets translated from the Greek. The ripe and unripe got lost long ago. And it’s such an important differentiation. Good and bad—you go to heaven or hell. But unripe? There’s room for growth. And ripe means it’s something to eat. Nourishment. That’s worth paying attention to. That’s a big difference to me.
KK: You narrate the experience of moving back to New York City—from a big house in the country to an apartment—and how that compression of space forced a reckoning: what do you actually keep? And elsewhere in the book you describe the agony of choosing which poems to select and which to leave out. Do you think that experience of having to recalibrate everything down to the essential somehow girded you for this task?
EB: I suppose it’s just letting go. Learning how to let go is an essential lesson in life. What we hang onto is usually nothing all that great. It’s a lot of regret, usually. Oh, I wish I had this. Oh, I wish I could have done that. But at least I stop myself. At least I have learned to stop myself. I tell myself to let go, because there are so many poems you love, and every one you choose means leaving a whole bunch out. Knowing how to let go is a very important thing.
KK: Throughout the book you often make mention of your involvement in what you call “spiritual communities”—just in passing, never really explained. What was going on in your life when you found that sort of spirituality? What was going on in the world, in your work?
EB: It started with reading Gurdjieff. Do you know Gurdjieff? You’d probably really like him. He was a Sufi, and he's the one that got me interested in Sufism. My first contact with a Sufi was a very funny story. I was walking on the street with a friend and there was somebody walking toward us, and my friend and this other guy thought they recognized each other. We stopped while they tried to figure out how they knew each other. And then they figured that they didn’t know each other. So we started to say goodbye. But in the meantime, that guy had noticed the book I was reading—I think it was Gurdjieff, or it could have been a Sufi book, I’m not sure. He asked me if I was enjoying the book. I said yes. He asked me if I had a teacher. I said no, I’m looking for one. He said: so am I. And we decided to exchange phone numbers. Whoever found a Sufi teacher first would call the other.
He called me one day while I was up on a ladder painting my kitchen ceiling. He said there’s a Sufi teacher in town, giving a talk today at three o’clock. I got down the ladder, drove an hour to somebody’s house, and heard this British guy talk. That was the beginning of my involvement with the Sufis. He introduced me to Pir Vilayat Khan, who was head of the order, and I climbed the Alps to go to Sufi camp and meet Pir Vilayat. I was involved with the Sufis until Pir Vilayat died. No one, no one, no one comes close. No. I have a very large Sufi library. I read a lot, but I'm not involved with a group. I haven’t been since Pir Vilayat.
KK: I want to ask you about freedom—about freeing yourself from something that was hampering you, and about helping other people be more free. You include this Hafiz poem called “Dropping Keys” which goes: the small man builds cages for everyone he knows / while the sage who has to duck his head when the moon is low / keeps dropping keys all night long / for the beautiful rowdy prisoners. In putting this book together, do you ever feel like you’re the sage dropping keys?
EB: My ego would like to own that. Therefore, I don’t trust it. But if there’s any possibility that in writing a book about poetry I can help even one person escape their limited ways of thinking—that would please me. You realize that this poem is all metaphors, right? One metaphor after another, stacked.
KK: There’s this Portia Nelson poem you selected—“Autobiography in Five Short Chapters”—which is one long extended metaphor: the speaker laments how she falls down the same hole in the ground over and over until she finally learns to walk down another street. You relate it to giving up smoking. It struck me because it’s been so long since I’ve seen something like smoking framed as a habit, something you can just learn to route around. There’s this tendency in people my age—I’m probably guilty of it too—to overattribute things to addiction. A friend told me recently that he felt addicted to doing things in secret, and I thought: or you just have a habit of doing things in secret. What is it about you, do you think, that made you able to know—in this and other instances—the difference?
EB: I don't think I can answer that. What I can say is that I had to track it down. Really examine it. And what I found was that the craving had nothing to do with my lungs—it was in my hands. The reaching, the lighting, blowing out the match. Once I saw that, the solution was obvious. I started bringing coloring books to lunch. Hollywood lunches, mind you. People were amused—startled, even—to have a dining companion who just kept on talking as she scribbled.
KK: You write about “Annabel Lee”—Poe's poem about the death of the woman he loved, who was also his cousin, which maybe meant he loved her double—and your appraisal of it contains a sentence that made me freak out, it’s so good, this tautology that isn’t: “it is sad, but it is also beautifully sad.” Elsewhere, you insert a poem you wrote at fifteen—the kind of poem that everyone who is a little bit sensitive writes at fifteen—and then, with a certain ruthlessness, declare of it: “a howl of pain does not a good poem make.” What does grief have to go through to become beautiful instead of just agonizing?
EB: It’s like music. There’s a part in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto—I think it’s the third movement—where the music goes up and then comes down. And Horowitz, in his recording, does it in a way where it’s going up and you’re not sure it’s going to come down—and then, suddenly, it does. No other pianist does it that way. Only Horowitz. It’s the holding back of the resolution; you think he’s not going to do it, and then he does. It’s about what an artist wrests from their materials that’s specifically theirs, something they’ve gleaned and understood more deeply than anyone else from the same reality who knows how many others have touched.
