naked movie poetry

How's that for a quick lunch-hour title?*

Poetry and the movies seems to be a whole discipline - an article by Kathleen Rooney in the new Contemporary Poetry Review cites yet another article - which is news to me, as I guess I have little interest in how movies treat poetry. We all saw Four Weddings and a Funeral; and if the use of two poems in a Toni Collette/Cameron Diaz sister-comedy called In Her Shoes was "cheap," well, it was a chick flick! You don't expect it to suddenly get deep just because someone's reciting ee cummings. (Quite.) And, for example, Sylvia comes off boringly in her eponymous biopic. Quel surprise. (This seems unfair, by the way; it's an interesting piece, and Rooney describes a couple of films I'd now like to see.)

I do know, though, that poets like their movies. This is far more interesting to me. I've always wished I knew how to make a movie; I often dream in movies. Once I had a particularly scary dream about a girl lying in a brook - a movie of a girl lying in a brook - and the same few seconds of footage kept rewinding and playing again, over and over. There are points that can only be made visually, and this is the signal lack - in our visual age - in poetry, and the lack that poets seek to make up for by using cinematic technique.

My friend Simon Barraclough's first collection will be out from Salt (natch) in the spring, titled Los Alamos Mon Amour. My second collection (not jumping the gun, here) is already in the pipeline with the title Movie Victim.** John Stammers' poem "Closure" (from his second book, Stolen Love Behaviour) used a jump-cut narrative technique, using its ironic distancing of the reader to brilliant effect, with a punch at the end.**

Must the use of movies in poems be ironic? Of course not, pace Frank O'Hara; but here's what Stammers has to say - not specifically about movies, but his work is so saturated with them that it still applies:

"'If there's a way in which I'm new,' says Stammers, 'it's in trying to use irony like a lamp, which helps illuminate romantic motifs for the modern sensibility. 'Noirish' isn't such a bad word… the holy grail is to do both at once, so it is irony, but not an undermining irony. So it's also romantic. That's the art.'"

But I have yet to find a way of imitating in words the affect (n.b., "a" deliberate) of the shadows in Casablanca, say, or the colour-saturated surprise of Munchkinland. It's a project...

I wonder if I might be able at some point to do something with this gem, quoted from Rooney:

"Allen Ginsberg mingled poetry with striptease during a notorious reading in 1956, in a Hollywood boarding house that doubled as the offices of the literary journal Coastlines. As John Arthur Maynard has it in his book Venice West, weary of Ginsberg’s world-weary verse, “a friend of one of the Coastlines editors stood up to challenge him. Why, he wanted to know, must Ginsberg write about filth and ugliness. Why must he write about the slums? ‘Isn’t it enough that we have them?’ The two men proceeded to argue about nakedness—naked confessions, naked beauty, and ‘naked values’—until Ginsberg, furious, decided to define his terms” by stripping completely naked, tossing various articles of clothing—jacket, shirt, boxers, pants!—to a crowd that included Stuart Perkoff, Gregory Corso, and Anaïs Nin. Ever the showman, Ginsberg punctuated this display by challenging his critic to “Come and stand here, stand naked before the world. I dare you! The poet always stands naked before the world!” "

* Me & Frank O'Hara, here: he wrote brilliantly about both movies and lunch-hours.

** On the other hand, I'm also looking at a really wonderful Arthurian romance about a girl...

***His workshop group is completely full. Don't even ask him about it.