Mary Reid Kelley: "You Make Me Iliad" | Art21 "Extended Play"

[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.