Lights, Camera, Poetry!: American Movie Poems, The First Hundred Years

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1996 by Steven G. Kellman

The Academy Award-nominated "The Postman" brought cinematic fans to poetry by dramatizing the friendship between poet Pablo Neruda and a mail carrier with literary aspirations. The adolescent males of "Dead Poets Society" assert their vitality by sneaking off at night for furtive encounters with texts by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Abraham Cowley. When the exquisite words of W.H. Auden are read at the funeral in "Four Weddings and a Funeral," a viewer might be tempted to abandon movies for poetry.

Poet Frank O'Hara refused to choose. "I like the movies too," he proclaimed. "And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies." None of those three wrote about movies, but other American poets, including Vachel Lindsay, who authored screenplays as well as the first book of film theory in English, have used the movies as muse. In Lights, Camera, Poetry!, Jason Shinder has collected more than 100 poems about the cinema that will make no one forget either "Citizen Kane" or Leaves of Grass. They will do to remind readers of the power of meticulous words and flickering images.

Arranged in chronological order, by author's date of birth--oddly, not date of publication--the volume puts its best iambic feet forward first with "Provide, Provide," Robert Frost's meditation on a faded movie star's transient glory. A few pages later comes Hart Crane's familiar depiction of Charlie Chaplin's tramp as modern human prototype, "Chaplinesque."

Although some of the weaker poems bask in the borrowed brilliance of movies they evoke, many are revelations. Most popular are odes to a star. Bette Davis is conjured up by Laurence Goldstein; James Dean by Terry Stokes and Ai; Marlene Dietrich by Edward Field and Allen Ginsberg; Errol Flynn by Gregory Corso; Jean Harlow by Michael McClure; Nastassja Kinski by Ana Castillo; Bela Lugosi by David Meltzer; Harpo Marx by Jack Kerouac; Hattie McDaniel by Thylias Moss; Marilyn Monroe by Delmore Schwartz and Sharon Olds; Zero Mostel by Stanley Moss; and John Wayne by Louise Erdrich. Specific films are the subjects of poems by Amy Clampitt ("The Godfather"), Jane Cooper ("King Kong"), William Matthews ("Throne of Blood"), Elise Paschen ("Raise the Red Lantern"), David Ray ("Gorillas in the Mist"), and Richard Wilbur ("The Prisoner of Zenda").

Mark Doty, Edward Hirsch, Colleen J. McElroy, Stan Rice, Theodore Roethke, Carl Sandburg, Charles Simic, and Ellen Bryant Voight describe the transcendent experience of sitting in a movie theater, as well as the inevitable withdrawal into what Robert Fitzgerald calls "The outside, acid air / Alien and cold." It is very much like the trauma of putting down a book of poetry.