Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? “Sable” is a long poem written in the voice of Phillis Wheatley.
Click on the below link to read about Phillis Wheatley
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/phillis-wheatley
In 1995 I taught a class in American Literature of the Colonial Period at Northeastern Illinois University. It had been some time since I had initially studied this period in American literature, and after text after Puritan text, respite with Benjamin Franklin, then a plunge back into Puritanism with Johnathan Edwards, we came at the end of the course to representative 18th-century colonial/American poets, and for the first time I can remember I read Phillis Wheatley. Her work was not taught when I was an undergraduate. I was intrigued and wanted to know more about her, but other than basic facts about her life, there seemed little to go on. At some point I decided that to get to know her, I would have to write her story myself, and I equally realized that she would have to tell her story herself. So I channeled her voice in my poem. I think Toni Morrison said somewhere that if you are not reading what you want to read, write it yourself. That’s what I did
Click on the below link to read about the Colonial Period
https://www.encyclopedia.com/law/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/colonial-period-0
Click on the below link to read about Benjamin Franklin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
Click on the below link to read about the Puritanism Period.
https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/puritanism
Click on the link below to read about the 18th Century Colonial/American Poets.
https://www.thefamouspeople.com/18th-century-poets.php
Click on the link below to visit Toni Morrison’s website
https://www.tonimorrisonfilm.com/
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail.
I worked on this poem on and off for quite a few years. I had a very busy teaching schedule and was engaged in many other projects and activities all along. One place where I wrote a lot of it is the cafeteria on the top floor of the DePaul Center in Chicago, where I would eat lunch and have time to spare between classes I was teaching at DePaul and Columbia College Chicago.
What month and year did you start writing this poem?
For year, I would say 1996. It reached something near a final form after 2001.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? I am including part of an early draft as well as part of a galley proof from the completed poem showing the beginning of the poem. As I worked on it, first I decided that I would try to write it as a dramatic piece in Wheatley’s voice, as only she could relate her own experience. Working in something close to the strictures of her era, I began writing in blank verse and got about 10 pages before I grew dissatisfied with the direction it was going. Blank verse was too reminiscent of the 17th century and inappropriate for Wheatley’s voice, but the Augustan style strictures of her era (rhymed iambic pentameter couplets in the style of Pope) seemed too confining. It occurred to me that Wheatley might in some ways be a pre-Romantic considering her few autobiographical references, support of the American revolution, and concern with imagination. This led me to develop a six-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhyming ABBCAC. For some reason this pattern clicked, allowing me to take the step (which Wheatley herself probably would not have taken, seeing it as inappropriate) of having a poetic shape that allowed her to write her “autobiography.” The form gave order to the endeavor. I took a lot of liberty daring to assume her voice. She was probably in her early thirties when she died, so it is possible that had she lived, she might have experimented more with different forms.
Click on the link below to read about BLANK VERSE poetry
https://www.thoughtco.com/blank-verse-poetry-4171243
Click on the link below to read about the history of AUGUSTAN STYLE STRUCTURES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustan_literature
Click on the link below to read about IAMBIC PENTAMETER
https://penandthepad.com/rhymed-iambic-pentameter-called-21549.html
Click on the link below to read about Alexander Pope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pope
Click on the link below to read about the American Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? Mostly I wanted readers to appreciate the triumphant and tragic facts of Wheatley’s life. Wheatley’s accomplishments are all the more striking given the circumstances of her life, though of course we would know nothing about her if it were not for those circumstances. Caught in the slave trade as a child, she was bought in Boston by the Wheatley family, but was treated well by the family. Her precocious abilities with language and obvious intelligence led to her being educated alongside her white “sisters” and ultimately to the publication of a book of her poems in England, but her success as a writer and her manumission in some ways contributed to her downfall, as without the support of the Wheatley family she had to struggle to survive in a basically racist society during a time of war (the American revolution). She struggled for some years but became sick and died before she could publish a second book. Wheatley’s accomplishments are all the more impressive given the values of the society she lived in.
Click on the link below to purchase THE COMPLETE WRITINGS BY PHILLIS WHESTLEY
I wanted to examine how tightly interwoven racist, sexist, and classist attitudes can be in the ideological weavings of a social milieu, as for instance in the understandings of racial difference that derive from Biblical accounts such as those relating to the sons of Noah, and the justifications of racial superiority that stem from such beliefs. As I wrote the poem, though, other intentions started emerging, as if Wheatley’s voice were taking over. These concerns involved such issues as the relative value of Reason vs. Revelation that was important to Wheatley herself. In other words, I started slipping into the issues she would have been concerned with.
Click on the link below to read about Noah and his sons.
https://www.gotquestions.org/sons-of-Noah.html
Click on below link to read about Reason vs. Revelation
While I was working on parts of the poem Bush’s election and the Twin Tower attacks occurred, and the discourse Christian right was stirred up by these horrific events, linking into the rhetoric of revelation that Wheatley at times dealt with, and reflecting the chaotic sense of social upheaval that I imagined Wheatley’ experienced as she lived through the American Revolution.
Click on below link to read about the September 11 attacks.
https://www.britannica.com/event/September-11-attacks/The-September-11-commission-and-its-findings
Click on link below to read about the Church’s Response to 9/11
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3118577/
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? One part that I found myself close to was the passage describing Wheatley’s “test” by representatives of the august Bostonian elite (all white males of course) to determine whether she was actually capable of writing the works she did write, given that she was young, black, female, and a slave. I tried to write this passage in a way that would convey the smoldering sense of irony and even stifled outrage she might have felt at being questioned as to whether she actually had the capacity to write what she had written. To me this was a high moment in the poem, as indeed it probably was a pivotal point in Wheatley’s life, since “passing the exam” allowed her to gain the attestations that were crucial to the publication of her one and only book, though even with the approval of the Bostonian elite she could not find an American publisher, and her work was finally published in England, and only through the largesse of a British patroness.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? This poem first appeared in Seattle Review. It is forthcoming in my poetry collection Sable and Selected Poems, currently in press and to be issued, probably this year, by Shanti Arts. http://www.shantiarts.co/landing_books.html
Originally from southern California, Allan Johnston earned his M.A. in Creative Writing and his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis. His poems have appeared in over sixty journals, including Poetry, Poetry East, Rattle, and Rhino. He has published three full-length poetry collections (Tasks of Survival, 1996; In a Window, 2018; Sable and Selected Poems, forthcoming) and three chapbooks (Northport, 2010; Departures, 2013; Contingencies, 2015), and received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, Pushcart Prize nomination (2009 and 2016), and First Prize in Poetry in the Outrider Press Literary Anthology competition (2010), as well as placing as a finalist or honorable mention in competitions sponsored by New Letters, Roberts Writing Awards, and Salute to the Arts, among others. His translations and co-translations of poems from the French and German have appeared in Ezra, Metamorphosis, and Transference. He teaches writing and literature at Columbia College and DePaul University in Chicago. He reads or has read for Word River, r.kv.r.y, and the Illinois Emerging Poets competition, and is co-editor of JPSE: Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education. His scholarly articles have appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, College Literature, and several other journals.
Most of the BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html