" Chris and Robert -
The primary literary antecedent for Apocalypse Now was not a poem, but a poetic novel - Conrad's Heart of Darkness - with the Marlon Brando character a stand-in for Kurtz."
I know this. My point was that the poem read by Brando has its epigraph taken from the novel on which the movie is based. So Brando's Kurtz -- he was named Kurtz, wasn't he? -- was reading from a poem in which he was named in the epigraph.
Clay, A.I., yes, thank you.
To justify my making this post, I will now type out a poem about movies.
The Invisible Man
We are kids with orange Jujubes stuck to our chins
and licorice sticks snaking out of our jeans pockets,
and we see him, or rather don't see him, when the bandages
uncoil from his face and lo, there's nothing between
the hat and suit. It is wonderful, this pure nothing,
but we begin to be troubled by the paradoxes of non-existence
(Can he pee? If he itches, can he scratch? If he eats
Milk Duds, do they disappear?). Sure, standing around
in the girls' lockerroom unobserved or floating erasers
in math class, who could resist, but the enigma
of sheer absence, the loss of the body, of who we are,
continues to grind against us even into the Roy Rogers
western that follows. The pungent Vista Vision embodiments
of good and evil--this clear-eyed young man with watermelon
voice and high principles, the fat, unshaven dipshits
with no respect for old ladies or hard-working Baptist
farmers--none of this feels quite solid anymore. Granted,
it's the world as the world appears, but provisional somehow,
a shadow, a ghost, dragging behind every rustled cow
or runaway stagecoach, and though afterwards the cloud
of insubstantiality lifts and fades as we stroll out
grimacing into the hard sunlight, there is that
slight tremble of deja-vu years later in Philosophy 412
as Professor Caws mumbles on about essence and existence,
being and nothingness, and Happy Trails to You echoes
from the far end of the hall.
...........................................In The Invisible Man
sometimes we could see the thread or thin wire that lifted
the gun from the thief's hand, and at the Hearst mansion
only days ago a sign explained that the orchestra
of Leonard Slye entertained the zillionaire and his Hollywood
friends on spring evenings caressed by ocean breezes
and the scent of gardenias. you can almost see them swaying
to Mood Indigo or Cherokee, champagne glasses in hand:
Chaplin, Gable, Marion Davies, Herman Mankiewicz,
and cruising large as the Titanic, William Randolph Hearst,
Citizen Kane himself. Leonard Slye sees this, too, along with
the Roman statuary and rare medieval tapestries, and thinks
someday, someday, and becomes invisible so that he
can appear later as Roy Rogers and make movies in
Victorville, California, where Mankiewicz and Orson Welles
will write the story of an enormous man who misplaced
his childhood and tried to call it back on his death-bed.
O Leonard Slye, lifting Roy's six-gun from its holster,
O Hearst, dreaming of Rosebud and raping the castles of Europe,
O America, with your dreams of money and power,
small boys sit before your movie screens invisible
to themselves, waiting for the next episode, in which they
stumble blind into daylight and the body of the world.
B.H. Fairchild
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