Ellen Adair : part five

How does a poem begin?

A poem begins with a thought with interesting words to it. The nature of their interest can be that the words feel so appropriate: that their sound encapsulates what they describe. It can be that they’re interesting because they sound beautiful, but that’s not necessary. Maybe they’re interesting because they are appropriately ugly, or appropriately distant. Maybe they’re interesting just because they’re not words you’d hear every day, but still: they came up in that thought, fitting what they describe so aptly that they can’t be ignored. 

If I follow the train of the thought, images bloom, and more words assign themselves. Sometimes I have a sense of where a poem will take me, sometimes I don’t. That’s what’s fun about poetry, versus narrative, where I’m usually steering. The form that the poem takes reveals itself. Even if I realize: this poem is a sonnet that will need to be completely restructured. I don’t usually begin by having that information.

Ellen Adair : part four

How important is music to poetry?

To me, it’s crucial to my enjoyment. I feel that poems are meant to be heard aloud, and that the sound of a poem should deepen its meaning. The words chosen are ideally an onomatopoeia for what they describe. But I think most words are, naturally. Their sound is complementary to what they mean. I’ve often likened the meaning of a word to its body and its sound to its soul: related, but different.

So, generally I enjoy poems that employ rhythm--or meter, which is only one kind of rhythm--or rhyme, or other kinds of interwoven musicality. In my own writing, I frequently favor the use of resonance more than outright rhyme, which can feel so on-the-nose in my struggle to be a twenty-first-century human. Resonance, to me, is ending lines with words that pick up some of the sounds of its companion. Or it’s picking up rhymes not on line endings. Assonance is always my favorite; alliteration can feel like a club, sometimes, but assonance is both more musical and less intrusive. (And I couldn’t help but use it there.) And rhythm, the patter of words together, even if they’re not metrical, is key. 

Ellen Adair : part three

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

My answer here is no more “cool” than my answer about Shakespeare, but it’s William Butler Yeats. I’ve got twin tattoos, and one is a line of Shakespeare, and one is a line of Yeats, so these Williams: they’re my boys. Yeats is particularly excellent for me, and my own weaknesses, because his language has force and fullness, but clarity. I struggle with a floodgate of words, many of them bordering on the archaic (it’s that Shakespeare, yo), but for me, Yeats is like drinking a glass of clear, cold water. 

Though others of his poems may mean more to me personally—my tattoo is from “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”—I remain convinced that I have read no better poem in the English language than “The Second Coming.” The punch of those words! Mere anarchy, slow thighs, the shadows of the indignant desert birds, vexed to nightmare, slouches. The central image is so clear, it pierces you, and the language he uses to describe it perfectly evokes, in sound, what he describes. The difference between “the blood-dimmed tide” and “the ceremony of innocence:” it’s like Shakespeare, that way. I remember years ago reading, and I can’t recall where, that Yeats liked his writing best when he came away from it feeling that it there was something cold in it, but passionate—I could be stealing his phrase from “The Fisherman.” Though I can’t recall the exact phrase and I can’t put my finger on it now, when I read it, it resonated with me, because I have a sensation that I would describe similarly. 

Ellen Adair : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

My first engagement with poetry was with Shakespeare, but not in school. I must have seen my first Shakespeare play before I could read anything, much less Shakespeare. I know I’d seen a few live productions by the time that my parents took me to see the Kenneth Branagh’s film of Henry V, which I think was when I was in first grade. I loved it so much, I made them take me back five times. O for a Muse of Fire! There’s such excellent poetry in that play. 

And actually, I was performing in Shakespearean plays before Shakespeare was part of my grade-school curriculum, too, before it could get stodgy and desk-bound. And years before I read other kinds of poetry. I remember roundly hating Percy Shelley when we read his poetry in seventh grade, which, with great dramatic irony, I would end up loving so much as a young adult that I wrote my college thesis on both Shelley and Keats. But I think that this very nearly lifelong sense of poetry as a thing to be spoken, as part of a three-dimensional, red-blooded conversation, is incredibly important to me. And that it can be full, and musical, and muscular. The very most important thing about either poetry or prose, to me, is that the action of the language fits the action that’s being described, rather than one style blanketing the detached and the passionate, the complex and the simple, alike. That’s what Shakespeare does, and I think it set a pattern for me desiring that out of language.

Ellen Adair : part one

Ellen Adair is an actor, and her Pushcart-nominated book Curtain Speech, published by Pen & Anvil press, is a collection of poems about the theatre. Her poems have also appeared in Clarion, Cypher, Oddball Magazine, and The Charles River Journal. As an actor, she has had recurring roles on shows such as The Sinner, Homeland, Bull, Billions, The Slap and Veep, along with dozens of other television and film appearances, and stage productions Off-Broadway, regionally, and touring the country. She also writes for The Turf Sports, is a guest analyst on MLB Network, and has a podcast with her husband called Take Me In to The Ballgame. They live in Queens, with their dog, Mabel.

Photo credit: Ambe J. Williams.

What are you working on?

I’m currently bending most of my energy towards a novel, although it is a novel that has poetry in it. The poetry partly helps with some exposition, though we do meet the poet, even if we don’t recognize her as such in the moment, and it serves the plot at the very end.

As for that plot, my one line summary is that it’s about a god who has a mid-life crisis—the tension for an immortal in that phrase fully intended. I haven’t been able to come to more-expanded but still-succinct elevator pitch for it, but essentially, my protagonist is frustrated with the current structure for communication between gods and mortals. The arrangement was restructured thousands of years ago, but he doesn’t think it’s necessarily led to the greater enlightenment that was intended. So: he thinks about what he might be able to do. But under the structure of the gods’ universe, he doesn’t have as many options as one might expect, given that is he is, well, a god.

I’m also working on a couple of different TV series, but there’s no passing them off as anything but prose.