OFF-SCREEN: A Double Feature of Poets and Movies
REVIEW by Bill Mohr
Thematic anthologies can serve a number of synchronic purposes, including the desire of the publisher and the editor to initiate a canonical intervention, or to call attention to a particular social cause or stratification. Anthologies on political themes, for instance, began to proliferate in the 1980s, as poets attempted to raise consciousness about the threat posed by nuclear weapons as well as about such tragedies in the previous decade as the United States overthrowing democratically elected governments in Chile. Geographical affiliation has additionally been a favorite sifting mechanism for well over a half-century. In Los Angeles, for instance, Paul Vangelisti, Suzanne Lummis, and myself have all edited multiple surveys of poets based in Los Angeles for print culture, all of which either adumbrate or underscore the points made by Edward Field in his introduction to his influential collection, A Geography of Poets in 1979. Lummis’s latest anthology, Poetry Goes to the Movies, is also tethered to Los Angeles, though in a manner that she claims makes it unique.
In her introduction to Poetry Goes to the Movies, she emphasizes how her collection of cinematically influenced poems will be different from any other anthology with a similar rubric: “this will be the first such collection to rise from L.A.” In that regard, the table of contents indeed favors the locale. “More than half (the poems) come from poets who live in Los Angeles or the general region.” The combination of these two factors should have enabled Lummis to organize the contents in manner that supports the anthology’s distinctiveness. One of the problems with the anthology is that its organization makes the unforced error of diverging from its basic premise. Instead, the volume is divided into three untitled parts, with no easily discernable reason for poets being in one section rather than another. Lummis mentions in her introduction that “(b)eyond simply drawing together pieces that share, broadly, the same subject matter, I’d always intended this anthology to capture something of the sensibilities of our times.” Ouch! Was there no alternative to such a boilerplate, generic invocation? With an insipid vagueness worthy of a politician’s press conference, Lummis gives a seal of approval to the “big tent” approach to editing; in doing so, however, she provided no detectible hints to explain which exact “sensibilities” ended up plopping one poet in section two and scooting and nudging another into section three. Perhaps even more distressing is the missed opportunity to thoroughly explore questions specific to poetry’s relationship to movies. Keywords matter. By the time one has read the entire volume, the two nouns in the title should end up being perceived by the reader in a manner different from when the book was first picked up, and “sensibilities” (broadly or not) do not suffice in this instance as the best starting point for intellectual rigor. A missed opportunity to delve into the binary of verse and film would have been Gail Wronsky’s recollection of her student film in a poem that ultimately reminds us of how cinema enabled Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” to create a metanarrative that lurks near almost all the contents in this book.
Given that the main distinction that Lummis makes between other anthologies of “movie verse” and Poetry Goes to the Movies is that her collection has more poets based in Los Angeles, some of whom in fact work in the industry, I truly don’t understand, therefore, why that distinction was not used as an organizing principle. Part One: Poets from Elsewhere. Part Two: Poets from L.A. Of course, then the question becomes, “Is there really any difference between these two groups? Are the poetics of their poems about movies any different?” For the most part, no, which then brings us back to the well-meaning, but self-defeating superficiality of the purpose of the book as a whole.
In her defense, however, since Lummis has informed the reader of the book’s instigating motive, I would like to be fair to her and provide at least a hint of how the book’s contributors do indeed reflect her accomplishment. Here are two columns of poets, one based in Los Angeles, and the other elsewhere. It is only a partial list of the contributors, but it is I believe sufficiently indicative. To keep with the theme of the anthology, I have adopted movie lingo as a category.
BACK LOT
Ron Koertge
Mariano Zaro
Nicelle Davis
Michelle Bitting
Amy Gerstler
Pam Ward
William Archilla
Jerry Garcia
Harry Northup
Cecilia Woloch
Michael C. Ford
Hilda Weiss
Brendan Constantine
Ramón García
Maura Simon
Cathy Colman
Amber Tamblyn
Dorothy Barresi
Jeremy Ra
Phil Taggard
Christopher Buckley
Charles Harper Webb
Suzanne Lummis
Donna Hilbert
Amelie Frank
Richard Garcia
Terry Wolverton
Kate Gale
Sarah Maclay
Jim Cushing
Jessica Goodheart
Carol V. Davis
Alison Turner
Beth Ruscio
Ceci Peri
Gail Wronsky
ON LOCATION
David Meltzer
Tim Seibles
Kim Addonizio
Rita Dove
A. Van Jordan
Maxine Chernoff
Joseph Stroud
Larry Levis
Martin Espada
Edward Hirsch
D.A. Powell
Robert Pinsky
Lee Herrick
R.S. Gwynn
David Lehman
Diane Seuss
Lawrence Raab
Lynn Emmanuel
Troy Jollimore
Timothy Green
Paisley Rekdal
Those who know the Los Angeles scene will be familiar with almost all these poets: Zaro, Koertge, Northup, St. John, and Muske-Dukes as well as Seshu Foster, Pam Ward, Michelle Bitting, Kim Dower, and Cecilia Woloch. Their contributions to this anthology are every bit as solid as anything else they’ve written. I want to call attention, though, to two others who are lesser known but deserve increasing attention. Nicelle Davis and, in particular, Marsha de la O. Davis, who strikes me as one of the most promising voices I have encountered in years. It is perhaps not just a coincidence that one of her poems in another recent anthology, Beat Not Beat, is also one of that volume’s stand-out contributions. Davis is hardly “new” to the scene, by the way; her first book, Circe, came out in 2011, but she is only recently beginning to gain serious traction in a very capacious poetic environment.
It is unavoidably unfair to single out just one poet’s specific poems, but in a review this short, it behooves me to set that limit. Mariano Zaro’s pair of poems seem representative enough to stand in for the whole. In particular, “Mandarin” has a Proustian flavor in which he conjures up a scene from his youth. The end of the poem teethers at a liminal point that is almost heartbreakingly “ordinary,” worthy of a film by one of the directors mentioned in his poem, Robert Bresson. While Zaro’s skill at avoiding the melodrama of erotic desire partially accounts for the poem’s shimmering entwining of knowledge gained and knowledge deferred, it is his control of the camera of language that enables the poem to conclude at the rim of its enlightenment without over explanation. I only wish that the poems by the three Garcia’s in the book (Ramon, Jerry, and Richard) could have been clustered with Mariano’s. The repetition of surnames would be awkward on one level, I grant you, and yet Ramon Garcia’s account of the “Jaws” movie would be an even more delicious counterpoint to read if it followed Zaro’s “Mandarin” poem.
Editorial shortcomings, therefore, should not cause readers to set this book aside; at least three dozen of the poems, as individual poems, are certainly solid enough to have merit inclusion in the next anthology of “poems about movies.” Of one thing we can be certain, in fact: there will be another anthology of poems about movies sometime in the not-too-distant future, and that editor or editors will be pilfering Lummis’s anthology for some of the best examples. The majority of these poems are by poets who fall into the “Back Lot” list, which reflects the various “studios” that make up the scenes and movements in Los Angeles poetry since 1970.
On the whole, the best work in this anthology ends up contradicting the title: poetry does not go to the movies. Instead, it uses movies as poets have used their fantasies about a beloved person to write love poems. Think of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s great sonnet: “Love is not meat nor drink.” The subject appears to be the indomitable recompense that only love can provide, but the music of Millay’s poem hints at the poem’s true gravitational pull: the dialogue between eros and thanatos. Movies are merely the instigators of the best poems in Lummis’s anthology. The poets have not so much “gone” to the movies but have dug as they must always do — in this instance, with the movie theater as the triggering town — in order to summon their most vulnerable thoughts. “What can be left unsaid, even as I speak with as much little reliance on rhetorical tricks as possible?” It is worth noting that Woloch’s prose poem about “Zone of Interest” is one of the outstanding responses to this question in Lummis’s book.1
In answering that question, I do not want to neglect several fine poems by poets outside of Los Angeles. I’m sure it will come as no surprise that two of them are by Edward Hirsch and David Meltzer. In fact, the first ten names in the “On Location” list set a standard which all too many poems from this set of contributors fall short of. Meltzer’s “Stuntman” is not about the 1980 film “The Stuntman,” but instead is an extended metaphor for the tribulations endured by anyone who undertakes the Rimbaudian challenge of becoming a seer. In contrast with Meltzer’s tonal control and eidetic flamboyance, does Lummis have the nerve to expect readers to admire the poems she chose by Troy Jollimore and Timothy Green? (As in the film business, some poems deserve to go straight to DVD.) To put it more bluntly, why is space provided for tepid work by Lehman, Seuss, Gwynn, and Pinsky instead of being given to poems that would give this volume more historical depth? The list of overwhelmingly deserving poets and poems left out is shocking. Where is Jack Grapes’s classic poem, “The Count?” B.H. Fairchild’s ”The Invisible Man?” Alicia Ostriker’s profound meditation on “The Seven Samuri?” And while I hardly admire John Wayne’s politics, it would have behooved Lummis to at least mention in her introduction how he has served as a cultural lightning rod for the cinematic muse. Both William Pillin and Louise Erdrich have written anthologized poems about Wayne. And do not poets, whose careers include time served in the culture industry, such as Michael Lally and S.A. Griffin also deserve a nod from Lummis? Was there not a single poem in Paul Vangelisti’s Motive and Opportunity that would not have deserved at least a mention in the introduction? Did Lummis never read Jim Krusoe’s second book of poems, Small Pianos and notice his poem, “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman”? Did she not glance at the Faber Book of Movie Verse and see a poem by Jack Thomas, “In Plato’s Cave”? Do readers of this anthology not deserve to know about I Want to Be Loved by You, an anthology of poems about Marilyn Monroe to which Lummis herself contributes? Perhaps, though, the ultimate lapse is a failure to mention Edward Field’s “Silver Wings: Notes for a Screenplay,” an almost thirty-page poem that appears in his collection, A Frieze for a Temple of Love. Given Field’s importance in the Stand-Up poetry movement that has been so important to Lummis’s career as a very accomplished poet (who more than deserves to be appointed the next poet laureate of Los Angeles), I find Field’s erasure from this book to be astonishingly inexplicable and disconcerting. Granted, one can’t include everything in a book like this, but failing to even mention any of this in the introduction as briefly as I have in this review makes Lummis appear as if she simply hasn’t done the research work necessary to give this project the depth of field it deserves. At the risk of belaboring this point, I want to point to an especially egregious lapse: the omission of Mark Salerno from this anthology. His book of poems, Odalisque, reeks of the noir “sensibility” that Lummis is very fond of, which makes his absence all the more puzzling. How can prefer the trite work of Troy Jollimore or Timothy Green over Mark Salerno?
When thinking of his feelings he imagined it as carefree
having relearned risk management on the roof of Hollywood High
because he thought the years of tv light and reason were behind him
he went his own way and took his lumps for it end of story
in the movie the renegade cop resists the system and does good
by transforming the figurative and shoring up useless fragments
he was just seeing himself as unlucky he was playing the sap
if you step over the line once you get smacked you get canned
or sometimes you just find yourself over the line
he thought of himself as below compass and good to go
nothwithstanding several aspects simultaneously and a lead pipe logic
immigrants beauty school graduates scriveners and the like
sentenced under The Pottery Barn Rule and mouthing off to authority
long after the point of speaking slowly and simple vocabulary.(“Trouble No More”)
Salerno’s poem also points to the matter of the “mainstream” quality of the poetry. “Poetry Goes to My Kind of Poetry about Movies” might have been a more accurate title, given the lack of any “experimental” poetry in this volume. One looks in vain for even tiny clues in this book that at least one poet has ever admired the work of Stan Brakhage. In point of fact, there are poems that are perfectly accessible and not at all in the “difficult” mode derided by the advocates of Stand-Up poetry that would have fit perfectly within Lummis’s volume. A case in point: Tina Darragh’s “Raymond Chander’s Sentence.” I can easily imagine Lummis finding all kinds of reasons for not including that five-page poem in her project, but (once again) what was preventing her from citing this poem in the introduction, other than her own limited reading in language-centered reading?
Finally, the most puzzling aspect about the introduction is that Lummis devotes its final portion to an obnoxious lecture on the importance of verbs in writing. Does she think her readers are still fifth graders? What makes her comments almost ridiculous is that she can write this with a straight face and then title her book, “Poetry GOES to the Movies.” Lummis’s title whiffs just as badly as a baseball anthology would if it had the title, “Poetry Goes to the Ball Game,” or an ekphrastic poetry anthology entitled “Poetry Goes to the Museum.” I assume the reader would share my slightly exasperated sigh. A book with this high a percentage of memorable poems deserves a title worthy of the ensemble.2
David St. John once commented that a poem was a little word-movie for the ear. That struck me as pithy and accurate for a certain kind of poem; it certainly fits a considerable amount of the poetry written by poets living on the West Coast for the past sixty to seventy years. An echo of that comment appears in Lummis’s final comment in her introduction. Even as I read it, I found myself wishing for more of the “word movies” I admire, such as Laurel Ann Bogen’s “Rat City” to have their way into this book.
In the end, Lummis took on a job of matchmaking that had no possibility of a Hollywood ending. The reality is that poetry and cinema can only cohabit. Neither truly wants to get married to the other. I suppose they can share the romances of bed and board long enough to become common-law spouses, but to imagine a wedding is to impose on each a ritual for which neither can agree on the vows to be taken. Perhaps that inability to concur is what Lummis wanted this anthology to demonstrate. Enough poems in this collection sustain the enabling fiction of poignant reciprocity between poems and films to seduce readers into falling for the story line of a querulous romance. The “movie poster” of the book’s cover may never become a collector’s item, but it does evoke both the allure and post-screening sadness of how this particular affair turned out.
NOTES
1. Psychotherapists are trained to notice what someone avoids talking about. While there was no requirement for poets to go to movies in which poets play leading roles, it would have been worthwhile to remind readers of the contrast between earlier depictions of poets (A Fine Madness; Reuben, Reuben) and more recent portrayals (Il Postino; Paterson) In a similar manner, readers would benefit from being reminded how poets were also victims of Hollywood’s witch hunts. Don Gordon lost his job as a script reader; and while Tom McGrath lost his teaching job around that time for the same reason, he also was involved with making movies, and it’s telling that his collected poems was titled, The Movie at the End of the World.
2. It’s not, by the way, that Lummis is bad at titling an anthology. I think her 1992 anthology, Grand Passion, for instance, has a more engaging title than the one I gave my 1985 anthology of Los Angeles poetry, Poetry Loves Poetry, which was a comment the late Jack Hirschman made to poet-actor Harry Northup.