Writing Beggar at the Sty
SHAYNE SIMAHK
Abstract
This report presents the findings of a highly experimental writing piece that
took place over a period of roughly three and a half weeks. The project itself is a
project in found poetry which analyzes and re imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby on a page-by page basis, rather than as a whole, although in the
end the poems all do connect quite well and tell a story. An even more important story, however, may be the story of the reader. This project does not only
attempt to analyze the text, but also to analyze the reader’s role in the text.
The seemingly short time period allotted to finish the project could actually be
considered quite appropriate considering the goals of my project. Since I aimed
to do a re-reading of the novel in a fresh way, it makes sense to have done so in a
few weeks—the same amount of time a typical high school class would have to
read the book and discuss it in a classroom setting. In the end, I do feel that the
project was a success, and that it did exactly what I intended it to do: force the
typical reader to do an atypical reading.
Introduction
For my final project, I proposed a project in found poetry that reevaluates
and revisits a classic novel. I have been studying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The
Great Gatsby with my eleventh grade classes, and it has also been my favorite
book since I was in high school. Ultimately, my goal was to recreate an enthusiasm and a “new” reading by essentially rewriting the book. There is a worksheet in the very front of a binder that sits perched on the far bookshelf in my
classroom. It is a worksheet that I use on the first day of school. At the top, the
following words are written: “As a writer I am…” The rest is up to the students
to fill in. Over the years I have gotten myriad responses, from “a turtle,” and
“a soaring kite,” to “apathetic.” It is actually an extremely difficult question
to answer. Every year, I do this worksheet alongside my classes, and I always
find that I am writing different responses each year, sometimes for each class.
Sometimes I too am a turtle, sometimes a soaring kite; and though I’m never
apathetic, sometimes I am feeling negative about writing. In writing this experimental project that attempts to re-write The Great Gatsby in found poetry form, I
have learned a lot about who I am as a writer. As I struggled through some pages
and soared through others, I realized that I have spent a very long time in the
past ten years looking at these 180 pages of words, but that there was so much
I had never seen. Having become acquainted with several experimental authors
over the course of these five weeks, I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to play
with, and a lot of inspiration.
What I hoped to achieve through this project was an alternate view of a
commonly read book. When I started the project, I hoped to alter my process
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to see if that would also alter the meanings I had previously found in the text.
For myself in particular, I have been looking at the same words, phrases, and
sentences for years, and have always sort of looked at them in the same way.
Though I may have found some new metaphors or bits of imagery that I hadn’t
seen previously, the book had been somewhat the same for me for many years.
By looking at each page individually, it forces the reader to interact with individual words just as much as the storyline.
Procedures
The Great Gatsby is comprised of 180 pages of text. I want to combine
two central ideas in order to create my experimental project. 1) Found poetry:
I want to create one short found poem for each page of the book, using only
words found on that page. Each poem should reflect the mood, tone, or action
that is taking place within that page. 2) Perspective: The poems are told either
through the eyes of one of the characters or about one of the characters. As
such, each character has a designated font that hopefully the reader of my piece
will remember and connect from scene to scene. The fonts are very purposefully
chosen to reflect the personality of each character. I wanted each character to
have a recognizable voice; recognizable both in appearance and in tone. It is not
my intention to retell a plot through poetry, rather to create readable images
through the reader’s eyes.
In terms of the types of poetry I create, I have remained open to whatever
happens to inspire me on each page. I experimented with some concrete poetry,
some haikus, some anagrams, and other types of poetry as I proceeded from
page to page. Ultimately, I wanted to create one poem per page as a way of recreating the novel itself. In creating this, I viewed myself as a sort of “Situationist,”
and Kenneth Goldsmith might say that I found a way to detourne the novel. Even
the title itself was detourned, Beggar at the Sty being an obvious anagram for The
Great Gatsby. When it comes to detournement, it is necessary for the reader of
the new piece to have some familiarity with the old piece in order for the project
to have its full impact. I find this to be true with my project as well. It is most
readable to those who have also read The Great Gatsby. This was my intention.
As I proceeded with this project, each page was a new source of inspiration.
Often in order to figure out what type of poem I wanted to create, I would hone
in on a word that stood out to me. Sometimes I would notice which character
was most prevalent and write my poetry with that person in mind. If I could not
discern which character was most prevalent, or if I had particularly strong emotions to a page, the character was me. As the reader/writer of this piece, I also
considered myself a character in a sense, and I have also been given my own
font. Though it wasn’t my original goal for this project, I found myself intrigued
by the role of the reader and how large or small that role could be. I wanted to
reexamine the reading process, but I was unaware of how much I would involve
myself in the text. There were so many times that I would feel an urge to put
myself (my personal font or voice) into a page, only to stop myself, telling myself
things like, “this is Daisy’s page.”
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For this project, I drew inspiration from several sources, most notably
authors Raymond Queneau, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Adam Thirlwell. I was
also inspired by Ken Goldsmith’s chapter, “Language as Material,” which gave me
the idea to attempt some concrete poems. His chapter, “Why Appropriation?”
also provoked some thought about repurposing this book and how I was going
to make it my own. I suppose my biggest inspiration for this project is Foer. His
book Tree of Codes turns an older book, The Street of Crocodiles, into something
completely different. The first was a short story by Bruno Schultz, about his
boyhood and his very strange father. However, Foer’s creation somehow ended
up painting a vivid picture of a mother whom was almost entirely absent in the
original story.
I find Foer’s work particularly inspiring due to the sheer difficulty of the
project. To be able to form your own story, to have a known work take on an
unknown form, is an intriguing concept. After seeing how Foer was able to take
The Street of Crocodiles and come up with a completely different, and in some
ways opposite story; I knew I wanted to try to do something similar. I loved the
idea of taking an original text, one that I respected greatly as Foer did Schultz’s
story, and turning it into my own creation. Although my idea was much different
than Foer’s, I think the heart of it is the same: creation by omission.
Results and Discussion
Overall, I am happy with my results. Though I had initially felt that I would be
able to complete the project without any trouble, I did realize in the last week of
the project, that I probably would have needed two more weeks if I wanted this to
really be perfect. However, this is how I always feel about the book when I teach it,
so maybe that makes sense. Even though I have weeks, I never quite feel finished;
I never quite feel that I have gotten into every part of the book that I want to. If I
had another few weeks would I still feel the same way? It is quite possible.
The project was more difficult than I had anticipated. There were times when
the writer’s block was immense, and I simply could not think of one more poem
to write. Other times, I wrote an entire poem and then realized I had missed
something important. Then I would have to start that page all over again. In the
end, there are some pieces that I think would benefit from future reworking and
revising, but where I feel the project truly succeeded was in the reader response
portion. I decided from the beginning that the reader would play a large role in
my project. I began by including some Editor’s Notes, but before long I found that
the reader crept into some poems as well. Some of the editor’s notes ended up
being my favorite pieces, as it was an inviting challenge to convey my personal
feelings and reactions using the limited words at my disposal. Overall I think they
end up as some of the best pieces in the project, though most of them do not
read as poetry.
In terms of form, I tried to vary the poems in order to achieve a variety of
moods and emotions. Moreover, I felt that if I just wrote a bunch of found free
verse poems, the work would be rather boring and not very challenging for me.
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If my goal was to create a new and more difficult reading for myself, I felt that I
had to branch out and try some techniques that would make me uncomfortable,
that would at times be difficult, and would be time consuming. Some of these
works were unsuccessful. I struggled to create a completely rhyming poem on
page 15, and I was not totally happy with the way it turned out. As a result, I
decided to name that poem “Hey, at Least It Rhymes” in the table of contents.
Of course, when I created something I wasn’t happy with I tried to edit and fix
it until I was satisfied, but for some of the poems I could just never get them
exactly where I wanted them. Once again, I was confronted with the experience
of a difficult reading. Being forced to look at the page from the perspective of
creation rather than just observation posed new and foreign challenges. I’m sure
some of my students will struggle when they read this book for the first time,
as I probably did too fifteen years ago when I first read it. The drive to devise a
creative and read-worthy product fueled my process, as frustrating as it sometimes was. The end result was always an important consideration, but so was the
process of reading and experimentation.
I did several experiments using only pronouns and their related verbs (7,
18, 48, and 124). One page that really turned out to be visually beautiful was a
page in which I used primarily the punctuation on the page, and left only the
words “Let’s interrupt harshly” (123). It reveals how many words people use in
an average conversation, but so often we are all just waiting until someone else
is done speaking so that we can make our next point.
Many characters’ voices made themselves heard through my writing. I
found it simple to describe the gruff and arrogant Tom Buchanan, the vapid and
delicate Daisy Buchanan, the careless Jordan Baker, the impotent and ineffective
Nick Carraway, and the fatally hopeful Jay Gatsby. Gatsby turned out to be the
only character who had two fonts assigned to him. I felt his character is so twosided: Jay Gatsby vs. James Gatz, the hopeful idealist vs. the corrupt criminal.
With all of the other characters being such static creatures, I felt two fonts were
necessary to capture his dual personalities. Does this alter the original text?
Perhaps not. I think this is just my way of revealing these two sides of Gatsby to
my readers. It’s as though I am standing in front of my classroom full of students
and pointing out the two sides of his character, showing my students something
that they might not have noticed. Though it is not my goal to instruct with this
piece, I think that my perspective on the characters shines through and may
offer something insightful.
In writing these poems I have discovered certain characters that I never paid
much mind to in the past, particularly the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim. The pages
in which we see this character are from 69-72. Wolfsheim brought out in Nick a
racist and antisemitic quality to which I had never previously paid all that much
attention. I had noticed him point out Wolfshiem’s nose and nostrils in my prior
readings of the text, but never before had I seen them so blatantly. Page 69 is
full of racist moments, from Nick observing the African-American “bucks” in a
car next to him, to five separate remarks about Wolfsheim’s Jewish nose. Clearly
this stood out, and Nick’s racist comments became the focus of that page’s
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poem. Otherwise, Nick in poetry turned out almost exactly like Nick in the novel.
Very much a third party observer, he still reflects on himself and how everything
makes him feel, which led to a lot of personal poetry.
I found that sometimes the pages in which Nick focused a lot on himself
turned into poems that arose out of my perspective as a reader. It was interesting to see how much I bonded with Nick in this process, which was something I
hadn’t noticed before. Previously, I had never connected with Nick, tending to
favor the more exciting and interesting characters. I wonder how much this relationship with Nick was impacted by the fact that he is “writing” the story of his
summer with these characters in the same way that I am writing my experience
with the story and with the characters. I was able to connect with the narrator
on a deeper level because in my own way I was narrating my book of poems. We
were both outsiders, trying to find our way in.
Another aspect of this novel that I had never noticed (at least not to such
an extent), was the way the women differ from the men in every possibly way.
From their mannerisms to the words they say, they are portrayed as beautiful
villains. Page nine for example, is a poem meant to be read from the bottom up,
the opposite way that one would normally read a poem. This was intentional,
because this poem is about Jordan Baker. Jordan is in many ways a typical 1920’s
female: free, independent, single, and not afraid to show it. However, she represents a movement in the 1920’s that was completely in opposition to how women
were viewed previously. Because she represents that shift in ideals, Nick is not
ready for that kind of love (or maybe he is just a homosexual, but we’ll get to that
later). If the reader starts to accidentally read the poem from the top, you find
that exactly halfway through, there is a phrase that prevents the poem from
making any sense: “...mouth, passionate bright lovely sad and and down follows
up”. That is where (hopefully) readers will realize their mistake and start over
from the bottom, where the line will now read: “...exhibition of stunned tribute
follows up and down, sad and lovely bright passionate mouth.” This poem in
particular is Jordan’s seductive love poem. It is somewhat aimed at Nick, but
perhaps at anyone who will listen, and anyone who will love her.
Daisy of course, is a character who is undeniably obsessed with herself and
her life, and although a part of her wishes she could love Gatsby, she’s simply
too selfish. There is a great juxtaposition between Daisy’s grace and elegance
and her careless and thoughtless ways. One way this is portrayed in the novel is
through her harmonious and beautiful voice that is almost contradicted by the
terrible things that she says and does. All of Daisy’s poems have a softness to
them that I simply couldn’t get away from, even though I somewhat wanted to.
Unintentionally, almost all of Daisy’s poems were romantic or ethereal in nature.
Even though I wished to reveal how negative her character actually is, I think I
only succeeded in one poem, on page 17. In this poem, the subject matter is her
daughter, whom she obviously neglects and defers to the nanny. I was able to
successfully deploy words like “smirk” and “scorn” to reveal how she truly feels
about her life as a rich, bored housewife.
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Surprisingly, some of the most interesting poems I wrote came out of the
characters Myrtle and George Wilson. I assigned both of them the same font,
since they are essentially the same in one important way: they are both living in
poverty, trapped in a lifestyle they don’t want. The biggest difference between
them is that Myrtle attempts to escape that life through her affair with Tom
Buchanan, ultimately becoming like one of the rich careless characters in the
novel without the actual becoming rich. One of my favorite poems in the book
is on page 32. It deals with class issues, and Myrle’s desperate attempts to seem
wealthy while putting down those who are in her actual social class. The phrases
are scattered across the page, almost overlapping each other, and you can see
how Myrtle’s words interact with Nick’s descriptions of her. Also very revealing
are the poems that “take place” in the valley of ashes. Fitzgerald’s obvious nod
to the differences between the classes, this setting made some great opportunities to write descriptively. Even short free-verse poems like the one on page 23
really capture the setting and the feeling.
A major question I had to deal with as I wrote was how I was going to characterize Gatsby’s persona in my poems. I struggled with this because he suffers
from dual personalities: at times the loving forlorn man of Daisy’s youth, at other
times a hardened jaded bootlegger whose end-justifies-the-means attitude got
him into trouble. I decided that he had to be read differently than the other
characters, which is why I chose to portray him in two fonts: One, a romantic
hand-written cursive font that captured his sentimental romantic side; the
other, a comic “superhero” bold font that captured his willingness to do anything and go to any lengths to get what he wanted and needed. Some poems
contain both fonts, because he is both people. Page 49, a study in pronouns, is a
great example of that. Gatsby is never fully able to become the true hero of the
novel, the man he has been trying to become his whole life. I really wanted to
reveal that part of his character by making his poems very two-sided.
I also chose to characterize Gatsby’s parties. They are larger than life, taking
on a life of their own. As such, I wanted to designate a very large and overwhelming emotion to the parties themselves. I used concrete poetry to create a poem
that looks like a roller coaster on page 41, in order to correspond with the phrase,
“they [the partygoers] conducted themselves according to the rules associated
with an amusement park” (Fitzgerald 53). Of course the parties themselves were
completely for show. They were Gatsby’s attempt at impressing the love of his
life, and he rarely even attended them. For this reason, I felt I had to separate
Gatsby from his parties. They weren’t actually representative of who he truly was.
Perhaps the most important character in my piece is the reader: myself.
Initially, I wasn’t sure how, or even if, I was going to incorporate myself as the
reader into the piece. It started off with the Editor’s Notes, a series of meta-textual confessions about the process of creating this piece. As with most readers
though, I couldn’t keep myself out of the story for long, and when I felt a strong
personal response to a certain page, whether it be a connection to character
or to a vivid description of setting, often I would create a poem based on my
perspective, feelings, and thoughts. The editor’s notes are some of my favorite
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parts of this writing piece. I was amazed at how I was able to capture the frustrations and successes of creating this work, simply by using the words I was able to
find on the pages. In total, I wrote ten of these editor’s notes, the last being on
the very last page of the book.
My goal with the notes was not to editorialize Fitzgerald’s piece, but my
own. I wanted the editor’s notes to have a metacognitive tone, and I wanted to
examine what I was doing with my poems as I was working through the process.
Since I do view both reading and writing as processes, I felt that these notes
added immensely to my project. I wasn’t trying merely to write poems about The
Great Gatsby, I was looking to experience the text anew, while also making my
own literary contribution.
The last page of the book was a controversial one for me. I knew the last
poem would be from my perspective, not wanting to give the privilege to any
other character from the book, although the obvious choice would have been
Nick. The final editor’s note deals with the process, the “scrawling and erasing.”
I write about how I sat and thought about all of these characters and their
actions, the symbols and settings. When I got to the end however, I didn’t know
what to do. This is where the controversy arose for me. I simply could not bring
myself to change the last two lines of the book, for two reasons: One, I have
always loved these lines and it simply felt wrong to change them. No matter
how hard I tried I couldn’t come up with anything that I felt could better end my
book. Two, I felt that those lines truly related to what I was trying to accomplish.
Through this ambitious project, I attempt to “run faster, stretch out [my] arms
farther,” constantly pushing and trying and working towards...something. But
in the end, I’m still doing the same old thing. I’m still reading a book that I’ve
read a hundred times. I’m still finding myself analyzing and characterizing, and
though this process did pose a challenge and make me look at the book much
differently, I’m still stuck on The Great Gatsby. I’m still “borne back ceaselessly
into the past” (Fitzgerald 180).
Conclusion
Given that I couldn’t bring myself to change the last few lines of the book,
one might wonder if I actually accomplished my task. In the end, I do believe
that I achieved my goal. I re-read the novel The Great Gatsby in an entirely new
light. My project is readable as a collection of poems, it is readable as a character
analysis, but most of all, it is readable. The poems differ in form enough to keep
the reader interested, and the continuity of the character fonts and character
traits allow the work to maintain structure. In the end, I am proud of the experiment and its results. For me, this project was not only about the product, but
about the process. In essence, I wrote my own version of the book. It contains
my own views of the characters, my own opinions; and if you read closely, you
can really see that there are moments in which I am talking to myself about the
book. When I teach my high school students how to read and annotate a text,
we use the term “talk to the page.” This project was my way of talking to the
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page, and I was surprised to find out just how much I had to say, and how much
the page had to say back.
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Works Cited
Alchemy and Ice. “Brass Cogs and Gear Mix.” Image. 2014. Accessed June 20,
2014. Web.
Amazon.com. “New York City Window Poster.” Image. 2014. Accessed June 23,
2014. Web.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.
Print.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Trees of Code. London: Visual Editions, 2010. Print.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Language as Material.” Uncreative Writing. New York: New
Directions, 2010. 34-62. Print.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Why Appropriation” Uncreative Writing. New York: New
Directions, 2010. 109-124. Print.
Skemer, Don. Digitalization of The Great Gatsby Autograph Manuscript and Galleys.
May 13, 2013. Accessed June 27, 2014. Web.
Thirlwell, Adam. Kapow!. London: Visual Editions, 2012. Print.
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