Exquisite Attention

Even in our media- and celebrity-besotted world, the fact that an actor writes poetry is not without interest. While so much literature, and especially poetry, derives from workers in the academy, the appearance of a book from one who might be considered an outsider is certainly to be welcomed.

Actor/poets acted and wrote long before the present academic factories produced the present cohort. We know, of course, of the marvelous group of actor/poets who lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and while in the eighteenth there seemed to be a decline in the number and capacity of these double-duty artists, nevertheless Christopher Smart and Charlotte Lennox, for example, wrote and published poetry and had stints as actors. David Garrick, of course, acted and had a stint as a poet. Surely there are actor/poets today, but where are their books? Brando? And I would think Steve Martin might have poems—he does have novels. Woody Allen? Is Tim Burton an actor as well as a filmmaker? He has poems (in both French and English). James Mason? Victor Borge was known to write poetry. Chris Rock? Miranda July? And there must be a good group of performers of greater or lesser note who write poetry, but where are their books?

Grace Zabriskie, actress and artist, has a book, modestly entitled, Poems, and it is lovely. It is lovely, I think, because it is so well observed. She sees and reports, and it is hardly ever reportage. Into this sharpness of focus, there is braided an imagination that only verifies the testimony of the eye, and that engenders a large and varied range of feelings to which this reader can only nod in assent. Zabriskie, the actress, knows well how to summon those details out of life's experiences that go to compose both a role and a poem. This understanding, most obviously, has led, over many years, to a very long list of credits with some of our leading directors. And it is the notion of "many years" that vaults the pages of this present work. Memory is summoned, and a biography is retrieved. The very first poem, short and almost an epigraph, evokes the passage of time and the need "to put prints in the dust." In a later page, affixed like a highway sign at the far margin, one reads "MEMORY SAVES," a notion that might be the motto for the book.

Most actors' lives are hard. They are, especially, when living beyond or beneath the level where media gossip surfaces, simply ordinary workers with imagination often, as extraordinary as their ambition. They are, for the most part, free-lancers, part timers in search of a living that might display that imagination on giant screens or stages, before vast audiences. That imagination and desire for size and scope is quickly apparent in this volume's remarkable second poem: "The Castle Builds Herself." That castle narrates itself, speaks of its creation ex nihilo. A thing of mortar and lath, it recounts its own biography in which it enfolds childhood fantasies into a family history, tells of the emergence of personality to the point that this self-creation recognizes that in the process of self-creation, of self-objectivization, an art has been made. That art considers both the personality of this castle/author, as well as the text that this "author" has made. The poem is a paean to imagination as well as to the cost that growth entails. Further, this interesting and complex allegory is seen as proceeding in the past and so partakes of the notion of memory that vaults the majority of its pages.

There is a photograph of the author at the end of the volume, a "head shot" of a very beautiful woman, perhaps in her early sixties. The brow is noble and swept back, the cheekbones classically high, wonderful large eyes that seem to see everything, but it is the mouth, lips pressed together, that one must interpret. Is it an incipient welcoming smile or a pause perhaps waiting...