Poetry Foundation

Myself: The Exclusive Interview!

Each of us contains multitudes, but, as we all know, the multitudes can be pretty dull. Thank heavens, then, for Myself, who arrives on the scene via By Myself, a sort of Everybody’s autobiography by the poets D.A. Powell and David Trinidad.

It begins:

To put it in two words: disaster struck.  I was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, a little town of northern Alabama.  I was never coddled, or liked, or understood by my family.  My mother’s child-bearing had been dangerously botched by a fashionable doctor in New Orleans, and forever after she stood in fear of going through it again, and so I was an only child . . .

Everybody’s autobiography, maybe, but clearly not just anybody’s.  The book is composed of lines lifted from assorted memoirs—astute readers of the above passage may recognize the voices of Tennessee Williams, Helen Keller, and Ethel Waters, among others—and the resultant life story is an uncanny core sample of the surreal life of the celebrity class.  It is also more than just a memoir.  It is prose poetry in the collagist tradition of Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath and Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, but with the bon vivant spirit of Diana Vreeland’s D.V.

Recently, poet and journalist Michael Brodeur found himself talking with Myself (or, Powell and Trinidad expertly channeling the book’s multitudinous character). Brodeur asked Myself about some of what the autobiography’s turbulent arc wasn’t able to cover—or conjure.  In By Myself’s spirit, these questions have been asked before (follow the links to find out where), but the answers are Myself all over.

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There is such a strong, almost spoken voice to your stories.  It feels like you are sitting there telling me the story.  How did you discover this voice?

My grandmother was the storyteller of the family, a woman whose memory seemed to stretch far back into antiquity.  She would often perform the roles as she told our family saga, changing voices, postures, even donning wigs.  It was the perfect training for my later work as a radio go-go dancer, and I was often conscious of channeling her energetic spoken style through my interviews and later film work.  It made perfect sense for me to copy her.

09.22.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)