[Mary Reid Kelley: "You Make Me Iliad"]
[You]
[Make]
[Me]
[Iliad]
Stamped Monday,
the Doctor’s bill of health--
Unless the Hippocratic Oaf himself
left a blemish on my record, I'm clean.
Good line!
Iʼll put that in the second scene,
along the fortress ramparts.
Herr Lieutenant, Mach Schnell,
you only have 10 minutes?
Your flesh is not of interest.
I audition characters to boost my composition.
The verse needs local flavor to be edible,
and as a tragic female, you are most credible.
I've always been very interested in the history of women--
what women are doing, what the circumstances of their lives are,
how law and politics make women's lives what they are historically.
When I started researching "You Make Me Iliad,"
I had looked at what women were doing
at different points in the first World War--
like a nurse,
a factory worker--
and then I knew I wanted to do a prostitute--
a sex worker--
but the information is so scarce.
When I was trying to construct the narrative of this woman,
at first, I was trying to make it more about her
and imagining what would happen to her.
But I felt like I didn't want to fictionalize something
that was so completely lost to history.
And so rather than doing that,
I put her in these bookends of these male characters
that provide what information we do have about these women,
and that was the medical officer and the soldiers that visited them
and wrote about them
and let us know that they were there at all.
I learned the Classics at my Father's Knee.
[hymen karate fest!]
He put verses in my mouth,
which I’d mangle.
[fret thy namesake!]
A forgetful, and a frigid prodigy,
[my frank aesthete!]
unable to express my Sturm and Drangle...
--Trauma, as experienced by women,
is often cut off quite deliberately from artistic expression or artistic experience.
[I'll take my six percent saline solution,]
[and flush away the Species most invasive,]
--Many men who did all kinds of work during the first World War
would have written poetry--
they would have written a memoir.
Women just didn't have those kinds of opportunities
to process what had happened to them,
so they couldn't put the trauma anywhere other than
into the deep dark recess of history.
In terms of what my role is in it,
it's almost the only way that you can reconstitute that experience that is so lost
is through art, is through imagination.
Do you recall my home?
It was en route.
Your army sacked it as I bawled my eyes out--
quite helplessly--but in this setting
I'm Alpha Female, and I'm Alpha Betting
That you can author, but can’t spell, disaster.
You're slow to learn, which makes the clean up faster.