Breakages


There is a short film of Garbo,
somewhere in the reels and rushes
of preserved monochrome that no-one knows about,
somewhere in the last cabinet that Doctor Caligari
would ever look in, right at the back,
seared in black and white, in which, unawares,
she throws her shoulders into laughter, the sky goes dark
and all the glasses on the drinks table shatter to pieces.

I know this because I have seen the remake
as you look across at me when I say that you
could be a big-screen idol,
postmodern Ninotchka, and you laugh
with a laugh that could put broken glass back together,
if you wanted to, that is; I wish I'd never met you.


John Stammers

I would also add Frank O'Hara's wonderful "Ave Maria" - the first poem of his I ever read, & I loved him from that moment - but it has too many indents. Mothers of America, let your children go to the movies... Maybe I'll do it anyway, later.

Who has others? (Stammers has a couple, of course.)

KEB

PS - I've written a couple, too, I think the movies is a good subject.

On a related note, I tried to think of movies based on poems (excluding verse dramas and movies about poets like "Stevie" and "Sylvia" and that Janet Jackson masterpiece "Poetic Justice") and I could only immediately come up with these:

--Poe's "The Raven" with Vincent Price
--Homer's "Troy" (well, that's admittedly a stretch, but still... I can't remember if anyone has made a film based on "The Odyssey")
--Pasolini's version of some of Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales"
--Pasolini's version of some of Boccachio's "The Decameron"
--Kipling's "Gunga Din" with Cary Grant and a cast of thousands
--Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" with Errol Flynn and Olivia DeHavilland (I'm pretty sure someone made a movie of "The Lady of Shallot" as well)
--Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" (it's fairly recent; I'm sure there must be other "Longfellow movies"--Paul Revere seems a natural)

Epics and narrative poetry, of course--films tend to "need" a plot. Hard to imagine a movie based on anything l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e-"y" or postmodern or heavily lyrical.

As far as poems about the movies, well yes, O'Hara of course , but I somehow remember taking out an anthology of "movie poems" from the NYPL a few years ago. Can't remember the title but maybe it will come to me.

What would be interesting to look at is how the poems changed with the advent of more "naturalistic" acting styles such as The Method. Do the poems become more "naturalistic," less camp (the O'Hara poems about the movies tend to have a strong camp/kitsch tone)? Or do the poems exhibit a kind of reaction formation, becoming more reliant on artifice as the movies they use for source material became more naturalistic? Just wondering.

I did a little series of "Movie Monster" poems a few years ago that were fun to write. It is a rich topic to mine for source material.

Oh, there is a very good villanelle by Mary Jo Salter that I liked, but can't remember the details (you know, like the title). Perhaps someone might be able to site it.

A poem is sometimes pivotal to a movie, even if the movie isn't about the poem. Watching "In Her Shoes," on a transatlantic flight (watchable enough under the circumstances), I was surprised that a transformative scene for Cameron Diaz's character hinges on her reading a poem--Bishop's "One Art". A Cummings poem also makes a cameo.

It is very interesting ways in which movies are represented or dealt with in poems. I'll be back with some examples...

Well sure, there are plenty of movies where poetry is used within a movie for a pivotal scene--think of "Funeral Blues" in Four Weddings and a Funeral or pretty much all of Dead Poets' Society to name just two of the more well-known examples. I was just thinking how hard it must be to make an entire movie out of a single poem, and then was surprised I could think of seven right off the bat. And I'm sure there are quite a few more.

KEB,

“A poem is sometimes pivotal to a movie, even if the movie isn't about the poem.” --A. E. Stallings

I had never thought of D. H. Lawrence as a poet before I saw the movie titled, “G. I. Jane” in which

Self-pity

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

was pivotal, in showing that the drill instructor was cultured.

The Prisoner of Zenda

At the end a
"The Prisoner of Zenda,"
The King being out of danger,
Stewart Granger
(As Rudolph Rassendyll)
Must swallow a bitter pill
By renouncing his co-star,
Deborah Kerr.

It would be poor behavia
In him and in Princess Flavia
Were they to put their own
Concerns before those of the Throne.
Deborah Kerr must wed
The King instead.

Rassendyll turns to go.
Must it be so?
Why can't they have their cake
And eat it, for heaven's sake?
Please let them have it both ways,
The audience prays.
And yet it is hard to quarrel
With a plot so moral.

One redeeming factor,
However, is that the actor
Who plays the once-dissolute King
(Who has learned through suffering
Not to drink or be mean
To his future Queen),
Far from being a stranger,
Is also Steward Granger.

(Richard Wilbur)

Just following up on Tom's posting: according to Dana Gioia's essay on Longfellow, "Evangeline became a movie three times - the last in 1929 starring Dolores del Rio Evangeline, who sang two songs to celebrate Longfellow's arrival in talkies. 'The Village Blacksmith' became a film at least eight times, if one counts cartoons and parodies, including John Ford's 1922 adaptation, which updated the protagonist into an auto mechanic."

By the way, Boccaccio's Decameron is in prose. It was Keats (among others) who turned its stories into poetry.

I've heard it said, on the TSE-list a few years ago, that Apocalypse Now is really "The Waste Land" in movie form, but that's stretching the definition a bit; if you go that far, you can make a case for The Petrified Forest being TWL too.

Robert Meyer


[This message has been edited by Robert Meyer (edited March 21, 2006).]

There are probably many instances of movies with titles pulled from poems but one I think worth mentioning is the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," in which the protagonists, after breaking up, try to have their memories of each other erased to begin with a "fresh slate." Alexander Pope is mentioned in the movie along with I believe this part of his poem "Eloise to Abelard"

How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot:
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d

The character played by Jim Carrey then spends most of the movie trying to stop the memories from being erased.



[This message has been edited by Mario Pita (edited March 21, 2006).]