Poetry and Film: Reading in the Dark

Remember the movies? Those dollar days spent in dollar theaters watching what Amy Clampitt called “epicene cartoons?” We had burnt popcorn, bad seats, sticky floors, and a shared sense of purpose with the strangers present because even if that public dark had another use—a place to be in love if only for the film’s runtime—the point was to bear communal witness. In those velvet-walled flickering halls we could soak in a mythology that launched a thousand ’50s diners, where the parasocial played out in Ray-Bans and Marlboros, ruby red slippers and blue jeans. There we could metabolize fears that would follow us home—showers, sharks, satanic possession, and more. Yet as the preceding has proven, any discussion of movies quickly becomes an act of nostalgia—a yearning for a time when seeing a film was a shared experience free of streaming services and respiratory viruses and gun violence, when theaters offered a safe place in the dark where we could be alone but never lonely. These days the extinction of film is as popular a headline as the extinction of poetry though such anxiety over film, just like anxiety over poetry, betrays our investment—what we worry over will never die; it’s what we forget to worry about that withers.

Back in 2020, as we all stewed with terrified boredom in our homes, I gave an interview to the Scottish Poetry Library. The interviewer, Colin Waters, and I got along like houses and fire—that is to say, combustively and destructively. In this case, 15 minutes of our interview had to be cut as we got into a long digression about the films of George A. Romero, which include Night of the Living Dead. and from those discarded ashes grew an idea—a podcast about poetry and movies (“Poetry Goes to the Movies”). And, given our genre leanings, we challenged ourselves to forgo more obvious “poetic” film choices and instead explore what poetry could tell us about how Face/Off handles identity or how Poltergeist deals with our ever-present past or what Groundhog Day teaches us about revision. Highbrow meets lowbrow, you might say. Or, as we said, “the most niche podcast in the history of podcasting.” With every episode we asked the same questions of poets: What did your poetry learn from the movies?

As Diana Delgado writes, “The best movies begin with an encounter and end with someone setting someone free.” The same could be said of the best poems about movies—those that mine a good moment from a mediocre film to reveal something great (if reboot-hungry Hollywood’s reading this, consider Timothy Donnelly’s transformative take on Ridley Scott’s subpar Alien prequel, Prometheus, or Justin Phillip Reed’s shattering exploration of The Hitcher’s unrepentant vileness shot through the lens of James Wright’s plainspoken tenderness). It’s a decidedly tricky art: How to write a poem about a film without it becoming summary? How to write about a movie star without succumbing to hagiography? How to conjure Los Angeles without conjuring the cinematic Los Angeles, that citywide film set bathed in beery light where the palms, just like the dreams it portrays, are imported? The devil, as ever, is in the details.

Poetry, like the movie theater, is built out of dark and light. The ink and the page. The room and the screen. Both poetry and movies, to echo Eliot, are where the pattern of our nerves are thrown as if by a magic lantern, so let’s call them projective industries. If cinema reveals the aperture of our desire, then poetry deepens the depth of field. Restriction and compression are at the center of their proverbial magics—restriction through aspect ratio (the frame and the page), compression through revision (editing and splicing). The question of composition is key—how best to arrange the shot and the stanza, where to cut the scene or break the line, how to stage the montage (Eisensteinian) and the reveal (volta), how the juxtaposition of images creates meaning or mood (Kuleshov effect)—because in the end it’s the form that informs the function. And within that form we might lose ourselves for a few hours ... but only if we believe in what we’re seeing. 

At the heart of each art is that most Stevensian of questions: fancy vs. imagination—that which exists because we want it to (i.e., MCU “cool!”) and that which exists because it must (i.e., Kubrickian “My God, it’s full of stars!”). CGI and wordplay can dazzle the eye and ear, but no amount of either is worth a damn if we can’t believe in what’s being presented to us. As Kevin Prufer writes in “Into the Weeds,” “Cinema is committed to a pact with the audience that allows for certain unreal elements to pass as real.” The suspension of disbelief (for example, the way we believe that Richard Kimble, as played by Harrison Ford, survives his hundred-foot leap in The Fugitivebecause we want the film to keep going rather than acknowledging the good doctor would most certainly die) finds a corollary in the line break and volta—those leaps that, when struck right, surprise the reader and spur them onward. These two arts, indeed very hard to master, must seduce us if they are to be successful. So what might we call success (a loaded term if there ever was one)? That which lasts. That which is remembered. That combination of image and sound that calls us back to where we first encountered them.

So, as Kate Northrop whispers, “Come, loveliest. Let’s go.” Or as Frank O’Hara, patron poet of the movies, implores, “Mothers of America, let your kids go to the movies!” The lights have dimmed. The trailers are running. Let’s grab a seat and settle in for the show.