Poetic Gestures of Film

In her introduction to I Found it at The Movies, a new anthology of film poems, editor Ruth Roach Pierson describes how hard it can be to "draw a sharp line between movie and life":

On a car trip through the Canadian Shield some years ago, a friend of mine commented on how paintings by members of the Group of Seven organized her view of the landscape. I think the same could be said of the impact movies can have on our perceptions. One might say movies provide a prism through which we view our lives. In “Emerald City Blues,” Phoebe Tsang sees Hong Kong through remembered images from “The Wizard of Oz.” Barry Dempster, on his ramble through a Simcoe County forest, is visited by scenes of Russian birches from Tarkovsky’s "Ivan’s Childhood." If asked: “Which would you choose: movies or life?”, how many of us might answer, on some occasion or other: “Movies!” In the 1970s, after viewing, during a long Victoria Day Weekend, twenty-two films in four days at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Federation of Film Societies, I looked out the window of the train on which I was travelling and, thinking the take of passing landscape was going on far too long, caught myself just before crying out: “Cut!”

Jonathan Ball was under the sway of specific filmmakers—among them David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky—for his most recent book of poems, The Politics of Knives:

Lynch’s mastery comes from dramatic shifts in tone, his ability to move in an instant from a banal to a nightmarish realm. He continually sacrifices sense for tone, and in the course of this shift he creates strange, poetic worlds that we move through emotionally but which make little logical sense, although there is a poetic logic that underlies and gives order to Lynch’s worlds. I try to use language in a similar manner throughout the book, which has a sort of grammatical slipperiness. A sentence will begin as if describing a scene (“The mist dissolved…”) but then switch the grammar to describe an event (“The mist dissolved what it did not need”) with an alien actor (here, the mist becomes a sort of living force). Tarkovsky’s poetic approach to filmmaking, and his occasional use of genre material (horror and science fiction plots) have inspired me, but especially influential are his occasional, striking long takes. The book’s final poem, “That Most Terrible of Dogs,” is structured like a long film take—like a slow movement across a cultural wasteland, toward some inevitable terror.

In a 2011 interview, American poet D. A. Powell unpacks more of connections between the two arts:

I also think that, for my generation, we have learned so much of our poetic technique from the poetic gestures of film: fade, jump cut, montage, long shot, close up, match edit. I make no secret of the fact that I learned most of what I know about poetry by watching the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, and Robert Altman. Yes, the subjects of films are wonderfully engaging. But even more engaging is the way in which film can intercut between multiple narratives and splice together actions, reactions, balancing shots, non sequiturs. The way in which film allows the artist to move quickly, deftly, and intelligently through multiple frameworks without having to worry whether the spectator will catch up. We can rely upon our audience's ability to process and respond to a different palette of images, tones, and ideas.

Hooking: Review Round-Up

Jared Bland:

Mary Dalton’s Hooking (Signal) offers sophisticated centos—poems made entirely of lines from other poems—that make an eloquent argument for the idea that all poems exist in relation to other poetry

Jonathan Ball:

Dalton "hooks" these lines into her own patterns with true craft, to form powerful, evocative sentiments.

Chad Pelley:

This is truly, to my knowledge, an unprecedented work of poetry, and a great one at that.

Barbara Carey:

Dalton’s stitch work is very fine: it makes for some strange juxtapositions, but they are often as evocative as they are enigmatic. In effect, the collection as a whole is a celebration of creation, and subtly links writing to other products of human making, such as cloth, braids, lace, filaments and thread, all of which are mentioned in the poems. At their best, the strung-together lines and phrases have a new, arresting beauty.

What's Jonathan Ball Reading?

The Politics of Knives

A fan of Jonathan Ball's previous book, Clockfire ("a rare combination of accessibility, experimental cred, and linguistic craft"), Stewart Coles doesn't do a very good job of hiding his disappointment with Ball's new collection:

while perhaps ambitious, The Politics of Knives undertakes a narrowly cerebral approach to its complex concerns, resulting in language that, while often vivid, rarely stirs from its cold inertia long enough to be truly tactile....most of its engagements with politics and violence remain purely theoretical, or more properly, purely verbal, so that we never sense the author’s investment in anything other than the somewhat patronizing constructs he cobbles together from the abstracted lexicons of these spheres of very real compromise, exploitation, and suffering

Lazy Bastardism Reviewed

Jonathan Ball giveth...

"Starnino is a smart and savvy reader, with a stunning ability to attend to the smallest details. This fine sensibility allows Starnino, at his best, to recuperate the work of people that might actually need recuperating, like John Glassco, whose observation that “man ‘is destined for slaughter in the course of things’” won’t end up riding the bus anytime soon. Moreover, as everyone knows, Starnino shines on the attack. Here, he assaults Atwood, McKay, and Moritz. Although they are to some degree easy targets (Atwood for lazy languishment in simplistic political prose-with-line-breaks, McKay for devolving into self-parody, and Moritz for sham artistry), Starnino neatly dissects their development and the larger significance of the poetic trends they represent. At the same time, Starnino’s attacks are rarer, more nuanced, and fairer than in the earlier A Lover’s Quarrel (2004), and he has toned down the mean-spirited glee that sometimes surfaced in that earlier collection."

...and Jonathan Ball taketh away:

"The tragedy and triumph of Carmine Starnino are thus the same: once bitten, twice shy, he has avoided engagement with the avant-garde in this second collection. As a result, he has produced a better but less interesting book, because the real poets he should be grappling with are the ones that he does not understand, and so cannot engage. Everything Starnino loves in poetry—formal rigour, ambition, intellectual engagement with the world’s complexity, tactile and aural obsession with language—has become the domain of the avant-garde he hates."

Verbatim

"I don’t believe it has any impact on the writing itself. It certainly has a tremendous impact on the culture and on the industry. But does it change the way writers work, on a day-to-day basis? There’s less hope, and writing feels more futile. Is that change? Unless attempted by deranged celebrities, writing always seems hopeless and futile."
Jonathan Ball on whether the dry spell of book reviews will affect Canadian writing.

My Ears Are Burning

I'm very grateful to poets Jonathan Ball and Maurice Mierau for agreeing to chew over my bpNichol essay which appears in the new issue of Maisonneuve.

"I have long wondered why Starnino insists on writing at length about things he appears to hate, but although he is critical here toward the end, a real fondness for Nichol and an appreciation for aspects of his oeuvre shine through. Finally, some willingness to engage, which I find lacking in his other writings on the so-called avant-garde, which often, as they do here, descend into straw-man bullying."

You can read the rest it here.