Last Saturday, I led a class for the Corpus Christi Writers Studio, with my good friend Stephen Jay Schwartz which focused on the similarities of film and poetry. I always thought the two were very closely related, but it wasn’t until someone like Stephen who made a living in the film industry for many years validated the ideas that I had any confidence in my observations. What follow is a recap of my contributions to the class. I hope they are of interest.
Before we tackle why I believe narrative poetry and film are closely related. I’d like to a few minutes to talk about narrative poetry general. I’d like to point out that 40 years ago narrative poetry was totally out of favor and on life support along with rhyming poetry. When the New Formalists released their first anthology Rebel Angels, they included formal and narrative poetry. As formalist like R.S. Gwynn received praise from critics for innovative rhyme schemes, the poetry of BH Fairchild was being called gateway poetry. You know the soft stuff that gets you hooked before you move on the real poetry. When I started writing narrative poems, it was not unusual to get rejection notes from editors that claimed there was no such thing as narrative poetry, or that my poems were only failed short stories. Begrudgingly the genre has gained a bit of respectability and a good deal of life in that last 30 years. I think mainly because it remains popular with the public who enjoy a good story and were happy to see it again.
Personally, mainly because I have a brain that turns everything into a story, I believe there are only narrative poems. Even the most lyrical of lyric poems I believe to be stories mainly because the readers of the poems work their way across each line and then down the page, and in doing so they move through time and space, which is the essence of any story, but I digress.
I also believe the quip about failed short stories shows a real misunderstanding of the nature of narrative poetry. A narrative poem boils a story down to its essence. The narrative poet attempts to make the story immediate. It distinguishes itself from long form fiction through the dependence on images and concision and distinguishes itself from flash fiction through the use of segmentation: line and stanza breaks to further the reader’s understanding. It is the application of images and the use of segmentation where narrative share the same techniques of film. When I was taking my first graduate level creative writing class, I happened to be auditing an introduction to film class. When I read of the theories of early Russian film makers like Kuleshov and Eisenstein, I suddenly had a scale-from-the-eyes moment. The Russian film industry didn’t have the money for stunt doubles and special effects, so they learned to tells stories by juxtaposing images. The example of narrative through image that I first saw was Eisenstein’s formula shot A plus shot B equals shot C. The example I learned was a shot of a man reading a paper crossing a street; shot b, a different man behind a steering wheel suddenly gets a look of horror on his face and jerks the wheel, shot c man lies in the middle of a street as a newspaper flutters away. The viewer puts the three images together and interprets the story to conclude a distracted man got run over in a street. Kuleshov also postulated that one could take a series of shots change the order and tell a whole different story. Here’s a clip of Alfred Hitchcock explaining the theory. Hitchcock clip . Another Clip from a 100 Years of Film on Eisenstein.
The first poem I wrote after being exposed to this theory is in the handout of my poems. It’s Remission. I consider it the first real poem I ever wrote. It changed my life. Early drafts of the poem won the UNT writing award that year, and I was recruited to do a creative thesis. A later draft of the poem was published in American Literary Review. Probably, the highest cotton I’ve ever romped in. In graduate school, people also started referring to me as a poet, and that’s how I was introduced to Alice (nee Adams) Berecka, who told me the introduction perked her interest.
Remission
While shooting hoops
practicing for teams
I wouldn’t make,
I pivoted, faked,
shot, followed through
and wished
she would die.
Follow your shot,
my instincts coached,
urged my frozen legs.
Still, I watched
the ball fall
free from the net.
Bounce, bounce
and roll away.
As a boy,
I was often ill.
Drowsy with fever,
my beaded head
would rest
in my mother’s lap.
I remember
when the medicine
came, how she
raised my head
and pressed it gently
to her breast
which pulsed
and soothed
my ailing
chest and head.
Bed-bound
head shaven,
shriveled she lies.
Her pain
her drugs
I don’t understand,
only her half-formed
words: Jesus take me.
Gaudy jewelry
Rosaries, medals,
brown scapulars
adorn but do not comfort
her foreign shape.
Nor do I,
I only hide
my father’s
razor blades.
Today, the basketball,
flat, covered by dust
lies hidden on some
garage shelf. She,
healed, but scarred
more than most,
finds some comfort
in knowing life
is the only sense
found in pain.
She sits quietly.
My nephew rests,
nesting by her side.
Her paled hair and face,
the child’s easy blond pose
confuse my senses,
and for one moment
I stare at my mother’s
apparition nursing
my childlike ghost.
What did the theory do for me:
I learned the importance of an image (or object) to carry the emotional weight of a poem. In Remission, the basketball becomes associated with the wish that the mother would die and the guilt associated with that thought. Other images carry the weight of religiosity, etc. But I was learning a more indirect but powerful means to write poetry. As a narrative poet, even if I have a good story, I know I need to find an image before I can write a poem. In Of Suffering and Idiots, the thin veneer of the tabletop allowed to get an implied definition of “paper asshole.”
Of Suffering and Idiots
All for one and one for all… Alexandre Dumas
As a kid I could never understand why
my father went ballistic when my Uncle Ben
said something stupid. Everyone knew Ben
was an idiot, a good man of sorts, but limited
at best. In his clumsy attempts to impress,
Ben flashed his profound ignorance. The fact
that he dropped out in the third grade never
kept him from claiming that he had aced
calculus. Once when Ben overheard my aunt
and mother commiserating about that time
of month, he bragged as a kid on the farm
he had ridden his menstrual cycle
without training wheels before he had turned
six. Everyone laughed, but my father fumed.
He screamed, Ben, you talk like a guy
with a paper asshole! My wounded uncle
wept, my mother screamed, Albert!
and the rest of us sat there laughing,
wondering, What the hell is a paper asshole?
Today in a meeting, a Psych professor
who is long on ego and short on brains
was holding our pointless committee hostage
yet again with his mindless prattling,
but when he said, …and I for one,
the inane phrase sparked a rage
so hot in my core that it fried the filter
that normally sits between my mouth
and brain, and I found myself barking,
And I for one! What are you, some kind
of schizophrenic musketeer? The virgin silence
slowly filled with the titters of a few committee
members, while others stared at our tabletop,
as if they hoped the etiquette for exiting
the awkward situation I had caused
could be found in its fake veneer.
The prattling pedant blushed and hushed,
then he gave me that hurt—You’re a real
asshole kind of look. And I thought, Touché,
d’Artagnan, but at least I’m not a paper one!
I learned transitions between stanza were not necessary. The end of a stanza is the end of the scene, the fade to black. You can write, meanwhile back at the ranch, but your reader doesn’t really need it ; they will figure it out.
I began writing a lot of comparison and contrast poems letting the juxtaposition of two stories create a meaning for the whole poem. Both the Capra Conundrum and Of Suffering.., fall into this category. In one the story of the father illuminates the story of the son. In the other the idea every time a bell rings an angel gets their wings is taken to the extreme when an immortal monkey trying to type out the works of Shakespeare can’t find the carriage return. The Capra poem was my first Pushcart nominated poem. It was sent up by Michelle Hartman at The Red River Review
The Capra Conundrum
In one corner of the universe
a monkey keeps hitting the I key
of an old typewriter, expecting
the banana that won’t come.
In another corner of the universe,
the angel in charge of making wings
is being overwhelmed with orders
and running out of possible takers.
And in another corner of the universe
preachers and sinners begin to sense
a new hope as the eye of the needle
stretches into a camel-sized hula hoop.
One other thing, although I always look to find an image that can give me a way into writing a poem, I never worry if the image will translate to the reader. Recently, I received my third Pushcart nomination for a poem call The Builder of Bigger Angel Dance Floors. In it I’m really hoping the reader is familiar with the old thought problem, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” The poem will have another layer of meaning if they do. But the image that came to me was the barstool and how the seat in of a barstool resembles the head of a pin. With that thought, the three union members became angels themselves, like Humphrey Bogart in the old movie We’re no Angels. In my actual memory a man named Dean Gribnaugh told me about my dad when we had a moment alone at the Moose Club in Maynard, New York. But the idea of the barstool led to We’re No Angels which in turn led to memories of three guys my dad worked with. Lumpy, I believe was his foreman. My family is big on not trusting authority, so Lumpy was rarely spoke warmly of. Goo Goo was perhaps the handsomest man I knew as a kid. He was a union brother of my dad, a Lithuanian American whose last name was something like Gugalauskus, hence Goo-Goo. Crazy Joe was I guy my dad hung out with after he retired. He knew him from the union also, and Joe introduced my father to his second wife. Anyway, with the barstool image, I had a good story, but the image lead to a much better one. Here’s the poem.
The Builder of Bigger Angel Dance Floors
Home from college, one summer weekend
with not much to do, I went to a local bar
with my dad. When he left his stool to piss,
Goo Goo, Crazy Joe, and Lumpy, his co-workers
and union brothers, sidled over to educate me.
“Sport, your old man would kill us if he knew
we told you this, but you should know.
Your father is the best damn welder in the local.
They say Al Berecka could weld the heads
of two pins together.” They all shook their heads
in agreement and skedaddled back to their stools
once the men’s room door swung open.
As he reclaimed his seat my dad asked,
“What was that about?” “Ah, nothing,”
I said as the other men nodded knowingly,
and I tried to hide any hint of admiration.
Just as someone asked, “So who’s buying
the next round?” and the bar settled back
to its proper business—washing down pride.
Well, that’s all the random thoughts I have for now, on how Eisenstein’s theory influences my writing to this day. I hope you found this of interest.
ab