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? This poem, “The Great Escape,” is the final poem in a fifty-five poem sequence about Harry Houdini.
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In the first months of 2022, a friend sent me a book review of Houdini: The Elusive American, by Adam Begley, who had also written a biography of John Updike that I admired.
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The review, written by Jerry Z. Muller (BELOW) in the Jewish Review of Books, made me want to read the biography, and reading the biography made me want to write Houdini’s life story in his voice.
Click on the below link to read Jerry Z. Muller’s review on The Elusive American
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/american-jewry/11980/an-entrepreneurial-american/#
I began this project in April, 2022, and I wrote the first draft of “The Great Escape” at the end of June. I’d mapped out the project, of course, always adding and subtracting and modifying the planned sequence.
Another book I consulted was John F. Kasson’s Houdini, Tarzan. And the Perfect Man, subtitled, The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America.
Click on the below link to purchase Houdini, Tarzan. And the Perfect Man, subtitled, The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America by John F. Kassonfrom Amazon.
While I was still working on the project, my friend Diane Frank (BELOW), publisher and editor at Blue Light Press in San Francisco, expressed an interest in seeing the final manuscript. This, of course, added to my inspiration and effort, lit a fire under me. The working title of the manuscript was Alternative Facts, which seemed to me to capture the elusive Houdini, who always changed his story to meet his needs, but in the end that sounded too political, an echo of Kelly Anne Conway, the Trump advisor, and after consulting several people, including Diane, we settled on A Magician Among the Spirits, which also happens to be the title of a book Houdini himself wrote.
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Click on the below link to visit the Blue Light Press website.
Click on the below link to purchase A MAGICIAN AMONG THE SPIRITS by Harry Houdini from Amazon.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. It was early summer in Baltimore, where I live, the temperature around 90 degrees and muggy. I was sitting at my computer composing the first draft of the poem. Some of the poems in the project I wrote out long hand in a notebook. Others I wrote on my cellphone or the computer and ultimately copied them into the file of the manuscript. (The file was called “Alternative Facts.”)
I’ve attached a screenshot of the draft I mailed to myself. It is in the voice of Harry Houdini himself, but as it takes place after his death, a reader suggested I put the poem into the voice of his wife.
One of the themes, after all, is Houdini’s skepticism about “Spiritualism,” the idea that our dead can speak to us from “the other side,” a stunt that mediums of the day performed to hoodwink the grieving.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of these people who endorsed “Spiritualism,” though Houdini knew it was all a hoax, because he’d performed the same tricks. They had a famous public disagreement about this. So to have Houdini “speaking from the grave,” as it were, would cause some confusion, and the final two poems in the book are now in his wife Bess’s voice. The previous sixty-three are in Harry’s.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? The email I sent myself is dated June 30, 2022. As I say, I’d been making plans all along for what poems should be included, but I wrote this poem on that day, June 30. Later I would revise it so that it appears now in its current form.
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? As you can see from a comparison of the original and the ultimate draft, the version in Bess’s voice has more detail, including mention of another plot point, Houdini’s brief affair with the widow of Jack London. “Harry” didn’t know if Bess knew about this, and this clears up the mystery: she did. Also, we get Bess’s reactions unfiltered through Harry.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? As the final poem in the sequence about the mysterious escape artist, I wanted there to be a sense of conclusion but still an aura of mystery about him. The final three lines, originally in Harry’s voice and now in Bess’s – “Every escape is a success story, no? / Now you see me, / now you don’t.” – hopefully convey this.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? As the final poem in the sequence about the mysterious escape artist, I wanted there to be a sense of conclusion but still an aura of mystery about him. The final three lines, originally in Harry’s voice and now in Bess’s – “Every escape is a success story, no? / Now you see me, / now you don’t.” – hopefully convey this.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? Since this is in Bess’s voice, the most emotional lines have to be when she tells about discovering her husband’s letter – “Sweetheart, when you read this, I shall be dead” – and indeed she says it put a lump in her throat to read those words. I wanted to give a sense of their enduring love. Harry was devoted to her and she to him.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? This poem is a part of the collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, published in December 2022. It has not been published otherwise, though several of the poems in the collection have.
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