Ellen Burstyn’s Inner Library
The actress Ellen Burstyn has what she calls an “inner library” of poetry that she has memorized in the course of her long life. “I’m ninety-three now, so I probably have less in my head than I used to when it comes to poems,” she said the other day. “But some have been there for years. Decades.” Burstyn was in her Upper West Side apartment, which was festooned with books, plants, crystals, orbs, and statues of Shiva and Buddha and Guanyin (“the goddess of compassion,” she noted). Meditative music piped in through the sound system. “I was getting a massage, so it’s left over,” she explained.
She wore green slacks, a green turtleneck, and a green cardigan (“I do like green”), with chunky metallic necklaces. In her writing room, lined with shelves of Mary Oliver and Rumi—her Oscar, for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” was across the hall—she showed off the desk where she wrote her new book, “Poetry Says It Better,” in which she revisits her life story through verses she has loved. “I like what metaphors set off in your mind,” she said. “I like what poetry plays with.”
She settled into a wicker chair in the living room, beneath a wooden mermaid that she got in Mexico. Her cavapoo, Kerri, sat regally on a divan. The first poem that spoke to Burstyn, she recalled, was William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus,” which she read in high school, in Detroit. “ ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul’—that awakened an understanding in me that life was not always going to be the way it was.” At school, she was head cheerleader, but her home life was arduous. “My mother married a man who hated her two children,” she said. “I was being punished a lot physically.” She wrote her own poem and gave it to a boy in her class. “He said, ‘Just because your name is Edna’—which was my original name—‘doesn’t mean you have to copy her style.’ I said, ‘Who?’ ” That’s how she discovered Edna St. Vincent Millay. “It was like she was my voice,” she said, and rattled off Millay’s sonnet “Love Is Not All.”
At nineteen, Burstyn married her first husband, a poet and car salesman (“In Detroit, everybody’s involved with cars”), who introduced her to Baudelaire. “When I read Baudelaire now, I go, Boy, he’s really dark!” she said. By twenty-four, she was modelling in New York and decided to become an actress. “I went around saying, ‘I’m going to do a Broadway play this fall. Do you know how I can get an audition?’ ” It worked: she made her Broadway début in 1957, in the comedy “Fair Game.” Her determination put her in mind of the poem “For Longing,” by John O’Donohue: “May you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire.”
Some years later, in Hollywood, she was acting in the Debbie Reynolds flick “Goodbye Charlie.” “I said, ‘This is it. This is the big time. Next I’ll be playing Debbie Reynolds’s part!’ And this voice in my head said, I don’t want it,” she recalled. Through Shelley Winters, she met the acting teacher Lee Strasberg and studied with him. “I did a scene for him, and he said, ‘I don’t know, dear. You either laugh or you cry. If you would laugh and cry at the same time, then we’d see something.’ ” She found herself doing just that in her breakout film, “The Last Picture Show.” This reminded her of what the poet Wisława Szymborska wrote about the soul: “Joy and sorrow / aren’t two different feelings for it.”
Burstyn starred in “Alice” in 1974, alongside Kris Kristofferson, who insisted that he couldn’t act or sing. “What is it you do?” she remembered asking him. “I am a poet,” he answered. In her book, she included a sampling of his lyrics. (“He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.”) Did any poems remind her of starring in “The Exorcist”? Not quite, she said, but the film does open with the Muslim call to prayer. In the seventies, inspired by an etching of a chanting muezzin in her copy of “The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,” she began travelling the Middle East. In Iran, she visited the Tomb of Hafez. “People come reading Hafez’s poetry,” she said, recalling a path lined with roses “about at nose height, so as you’re walking you’re sniffing a different rose each step.”
In 1995, she was in “How to Make an American Quilt”; her co-star Maya Angelou would recite poems for her. “The makeup department threw up their hands, because I had to be completely re-made up after lunch every day from crying in Maya’s trailer,” Burstyn recalled. “So then I snuck in and brought Q-tips.” She leaned back in her chair and mimed holding the cotton tips to her eyes. “I would lay down in her trailer with Q-tips and go, ‘O.K., hit me!’ ” ♦