Interview with Playwright, Composer and Poet Elizabeth Swados. (Part 1)

Interview with Playwright, Composer and Poet Elizabeth Swados. ( Part 1)

Recently Mark Pawlak of the Hanging Loose Press sent me a copy of Elizabeth Swados's new poetry collection: "The One and Only Human Galaxy." I decided to interview Swados along with her publishers Pawlak and Dick Lourie on a special edition of my TV show "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Elizabeth Swados is best known for her Broadway smash hit "Runaways". She is a Tony-nominated playwright, and composer. Some of her plays include the Obie-Award winning "Trilogy" starring Meryl Streep at the New York Shakespeare Theatre, and "Groundhog" that was optioned as a film by Milos Forman. Her work has been performed on Broadway, Off Broadway, Carnegie Hall, and all over the world. She is a professor at New York University, and won the New York Public Library Award for her book "My Depression."

Other wars include the Guggenheim Fellowship, Ford Grant, Helen Hays Award, Pen Citation and many others.

Her first book of poetry has been released by the venerable Hanging Loose Press "The One And Only Human Galazy" that deals with the great escape artist Harry Houdini.

Doug Holder: Houdini was a great escape artist...Aren't you one... as a creature of the theatre and a poet?

Elizabeth Swados: Absolutely. A big theme was how to get out of various aspects of my life: getting away from people in the theatre, or people trying to Svengali me...getting away from my own dark issues. The issue of escape is very, very, prevalent in my life. I am a survivor of many difficult situations. And I also believe we all try to escape from some kind of relationship, or habits. Everybody tries to escape the things that haunt us.

DH: You say you are a survivor. Of what?

EZ: In my family there was a great deal of mental illness. My mother killed herself, and my brother killed himself. My whole family has a genetic, white rapid river of destruction. This is also very creative. You have to escape to the good things, in order to escape the bad things. There is a whole theme of madness that one can make very dramatic and romantic. But that's not true. It is very painful and very inhibiting. You get imprisoned in relationships with people who are troubled. It is a question of balancing of escaping of what's so binding, yet living one's life in a joyous and giving way.

DH: A friend showed me an article that stated Scizophrenics and artists share a similar gene.

EZ: I'm not surprised. My brother and I shared, many, many things. He taught me how to draw cartoons and he taught me about poetry. He unfortunately did not get the gene to balance the voices...the voices took him over.

DH: ( Question directed to Mark Pawlak--Hanging Loose Press) How did you come across Elizabeth's work? Hanging Loose is a difficult egg to crack, what did you see in Elizabeth's work?

MP: In general we look for work that is adventurous., verbally challenging and exciting. I think that is very vital. We want work that has something to say. A prose piece was the first piece we published by Elizabeth in our magazine "Hanging Loose" titled"Waving." The magazine is based in Brooklyn, NY. New York is largely the locus of our sensibilities. One of our editors, Bob Hershon, lives in Brooklyn, and his house is the address for our press. His kitchen table is where his manuscripts get edited. Bob also runs a reading series at the Brooklyn Public Library. Shortly after he recieved work from Elizabeth we invited her to read in the series. Shortly after that she came forward with her manuscript.

EZ:Yeah. I just said could you take a look at it. I hadn't been sending poetry out for very long. I had been writing my entire life but I kept it to myself. And then about four years I thought, " Well, maybe it is time to have some other people read it.

If The Delta Was The Sea by Dick Lourie

If The Delta Was The Sea

by Dick Lourie

Hanging Loose Press, $18

Brooklyn, NY

Copyright © 2009 by Dick Lourie

ISBN 978-1-934909-02-7



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



Let me preface this review by saying I have never been a big fan of Dick Lourie’s poetry. There were some poems in Ghost Writer (Hanging Loose Press) that I liked a lot and some that I just liked. The totality was mostly unsatisfying.



Now Lourie has a new volume of poetry which, for me, would have been much better as a memoir or even a non-fiction travel piece. Yet as poetry, it provides insight into things few of us know about: the blues, the Mississippi Delta and Dick Lourie’s thoughts and experiences. Of particular interest is Lourie’s “eastern liberalism” which reflects his deep felt feelings for minorities and women.



For example in “Three Recent Trips To The Golden Past: East Village, Clarksdale, Athens” Lourie reminds the reader of what the “old south” was like as well as his humanitarian views about slaves and women:



“in Athens I walked through the Agora

where the ancients shopped gossiped argued sent

slaves on errands and male citizens met

for democratic decision making”



However, he also has keen sense of what it was to be Native American, particularly Chicksaw, and since that particular tribe were in the Delta and Memphis areas, back in the 1950s the Chicago White Sox had a minor league team in Memphis called the Chicksaws, Chicks for short. But rather than digress with my trivia here is more of Lourie who has explained how the Chicksaw were treated and what kind of reward they received. It comes from his poem “Rights”:



“...after the

Chicksaw wrote this to Andrew Jackson

in 1831 they were moved west –

in Mississippi the white pioneers

thrived with black slaves cleared swamps planted cotton”



or take this piece from “Dear Manager” in which Lourie discovers all is not what it appears to be:



after lunch with Andy Carr at the Rest

Haven my wife and I joke that there are

some topics we must manage to avoid

discussing with Andy his politics

being conservative and quite far from

our left end of the spectrum but then it

occurs to me that (as so often in

Clarksdale) the joke is on me...”



To find out what the joke on him is, you might want to read this poem.



Overall, I wish this were a prose travel piece, then it would have a wider circulation and provided non-poetry readers with some education they could probably use because as purveyor of Delta blues and Delta history, Lourie provides a good read.

*Zvi Sesling is the editor of the Muddy River Poetry Review