were made for the movies, the silhouettes
that pass across them, black on white
in a world of colour, the walking wounded
blindly feeling their way, the dread
recurrent horse-back preacher man
whose shadow howls at the moon
and bides its time, the old tin lizzie
hurrying home for Christmas, the lonely
ranch-hand moving on, the underline
of distances where love and pain
and hope and memory light out
or darken to an instance of regret
that snaps the long-shot into focus
far beyond the gate, the numbered mailbox
and the paperboy whose close-up
is the grin which wears a baseball cap
to reassure that all is well enough
and safe in spite of dancing death
who leads the troupe, his facemask
hooded, out there on the cusp
of earth and air, which then dissolves
to credits, silence, and our solitary selves.
This is where we came in, remember,
when the screen was a close-up kiss
and the back row beckoned, when love
for the price of a ticket tried it on
with my hand in yours, when this
was as far as we went, our faces
turned to the flickering print of light
like pale moths eager to be burned.
And so we were, in the flames
of a tumescent music, ready
for the next time round. No news
or second feature held a candle
to the main attraction as we stood there
shining in the rain, then sailed
a dreamboat home to nakedness
which was where we came in, remember.
Scenario
A solitary figure on the station platform
waits for trembling wires, a bell
and the signal's clunk. He paces
back and forth, regards his shoes
which he polished last night
but the rails are brighter. They shine
to a vanishing point. An empty sky.
This could be anywhere, a ghost town
at the world's end. Whatever comes next
is what he's ready for, unscripted
and prepared, but then the wrong train
thunders through. It fills the air
with the blast of its passing
as she waves from a window, whoever
she was.
*
The Flickering Dark
There were three cinemas in Taunton, the Somerset town of my childhood: the Gaumont, the Odeon and the Gaiety. The Gaiety (also known, unfairly, as the Fleapit) became my favourite when I started going on my own because it changed the programme twice a week.
But my first visit, accompanied by my mother, was to the Gaumont, and I still have the most vivid memory of that occasion. Of climbing the steps to the balcony, the stalls being rather beneath my mother in a social sense, passing through double doors with a sort of porthole in each, hearing the sound of a train as we entered the magically flickering dark, then, as we made our way down towards our seats, a huge screen came into view and a cowboy with a shotgun was leaping from carriage to carriage.
By the time we were settled, I had already become a lifetime movie addict.
Forty or so years later when I saw the film version of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, I was transported back to that primal experience. There's a marvellous moment when the young Nick is taken to Highbury Stadium by his father to watch his first Arsenal match. As they file into the stands, the pitch, a vast green rectangle, gradually scrolls down until it fills the cinema screen itself, and we cut to the boy's face lighting up with amazement and anticipation. This could have been me in my picture-house stadium. That same thrilling emergence of the pitch which was to become home-ground to the teeming team of my star-struck imagination.
I still find something magical about entering the dark where a film is playing, and hearing before I see. This was what often happened in the days of continuous performance, when the programme was made up of first and second features, the A and B movies, with a newsreel thrown in for good measure. You arrived at a certain point, picked up on the narrative of whichever of the films was running, then saw the whole programme through until the same point about three hours later. Then you turned to your companion - probably now not in the balcony but in a back seat of the stalls - and said 'This is where we came in'.
Depending on circumstances (not always to do with the film, but more to do with who you were with, and how things were going ) you either left or hung on until the lights came up again. Then, if it was the final showing of the day, a hurried exit to avoid The National Anthem or, for those of a more respectful disposition - or those who simply couldn't make it to the foyer in time - a Last Patriotic Stand.
This is where we came in, remember,
when the screen was a close-up kiss
and the back row beckoned, when love
for the price of a ticket tried it on
with my hand in yours, when this
was as far as we went, our faces
turned to the flickering print of light
like pale moths eager to be burned.
And so we were, in the flames
of a tumescent music, ready
for the next time round. No news
or second feature held a candle
to the main attraction as we stood there
shining in the rain, then sailed
a dreamboat home to nakedness
which was where we came in, remember.
Thanks to a playground craze for collecting cigarette cards, I got to know the names of many of the greats before I saw them on the screen. 'Swop you a Dick Powell and Esther Williams for your Tyrone Power' on the way to getting the complete set of Famous Film Stars. And for Christmas there was Picture Show Annual, full of glamorous, enticing stills and full-page portraits, signed flashily and diagonally across the top or bottom right-hand corner: to Picture Show, Sincerely yours...
But my real film education began when I was sent away to boarding school. There was a wonderful enthusiast, Stuart Keen, who arrived several times a term with a 16mm projector and a screen rolled in a tube on top of his van. He set everything up in the school gym, and always gave a short introductory talk before the show. Thanks to him there are anecdotes, and above all, images, that have stayed with me now for over fifty years. The haunted, cadaverous face of Jack Palance, an escaped criminal suspected of carrying bubonic plague, in Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets, Jaques Tati as Monsieur Hulot winding up his serve on the tennis court, and three others in particular. I still remember first seeing the air attack at the beginning of René Clément's Les Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games), where zinging bullets slice through the dust on a bridge where terrified refugees are crossing, killing a little girl's parents and pet dog as they lie flat in the road. One moment they are alive, then suddenly they convulse and you know they are dead. The girl's bewildered reaction and her refusal to let go of the dog are heartbreaking. The first appearance of the Beast in Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête is another such moment, simultaneously fierce, glittering and vulnerable, and in an Italian film I have never seen since - Marcellino Pan y Vino - the scene where an orphan boy who has grown up in a monastery enters an upstairs room to find himself alone with a life-sized crucified Christ which slowly extends an arm to receive his offer of bread.
All three, in their different ways, were haunting for an adolescent, and the last of them truly gave me sleepless nights. They have become unconscious points of reference, images which come to mind, unbidden, often when I'm least expecting them. There have, of course, been so many others since then amounting, I suppose, to what Robert Frost calls 'the wonder of supply,' and they often tend to find their way into poems, either as a trigger for the imagination or as a straight lift from one medium to another. And if another poet, Patricia Beer, is right when she says that all poets suffer brief, painful glimpses of the past on which they find they have to work, it is certainly the case that for me these can include those cinematic moments which have somehow embedded themselves as events in my life as real as others that have happened off-screen.
A number of the poems I have written over the years are, I suppose, for want of a better term, compacted scenarios, threading together a sequence of images, and aware of what they owe to their sources. For example in a two recent pieces, 'Distant Horizons' and 'Scenarios' you may spot frames from, among others, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, any number of scenes in which a lone figure stands on a station platform in some god-forsaken hick town (Spencer Tracey at Black Rock, Sidney Poitier in The Heat of the Night. . . ), along with archetypal situations from war films, westerns, and the world of Frank Capra. I have to trust that if readers are not familiar with the particulars they will nevertheless recognise the genres and respond to what I have done with them:
were made for the movies, the silhouettes
that pass across them, black on white
in a world of colour, the walking wounded
blindly feeling their way, the dread
recurrent horse-back preacher man
whose shadow howls at the moon
and bides its time, the old tin lizzie
hurrying home for Christmas, the lonely
ranch-hand moving on, the underline
of distances where love and pain
and hope and memory light out
or darken to an instance of regret
that snaps the long-shot into focus
far beyond the gate, the numbered mailbox
and the paperboy whose close-up
is the grin which wears a baseball cap
to reassure that all is well enough
and safe in spite of dancing death
who leads the troupe, his facemask
hooded, out there on the cusp
of earth and air, which then dissolves
to credits, silence, and our solitary selves.
Scenario
A solitary figure on the station platform
waits for trembling wires, a bell
and the signal's clunk. He paces
back and forth, regards his shoes
which he polished last night
but the rails are brighter. They shine
to a vanishing point. An empty sky.
This could be anywhere, a ghost town
at the world's end. Whatever comes next
is what he's ready for, unscripted
and prepared, but then the wrong train
thunders through. It fills the air
with the blast of its passing
as she waves from a window, whoever she was.
The cinema has also instructed me in the manipulation of oblique narratives, where everything is hinted, nothing explained, no 'voice over' to locate the event, no design upon readers other than that they should share my relish for the way that images can dissolve into each other without comment.
In his excellent introduction to The Faber Book of Movie Verse, Philip French refers to 'the syntax of vision', and that is exactly what I find myself exploring in another recent poem, 'The Getaway'. I have no idea what it is 'about' except that it is a succession of frames which almost certainly derive from my fascination with Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and '50s, and the cinematic paintings of Edward Hopper. I visualise it happening in black and white as it shifts disconcertingly (to me anyway) between close-ups and long-shots, and plays with notions of identity. It is, I'm sure, a far cry from that world of escapist adventure in which a cowboy scrambles across the carriage roofs of a racing train, that orderly moral world of heroes and villains, but if life has become so much more complex since my first visit to the Taunton Gaumont, I nevertheless feel that at least something of the poem's genesis is located there as cigarette smoke (not yet mine) swirls in the projector's beam of light, the screen is printed, and my journey is already under way:
The Getaway
1
On the bed
a suitcase empty
but still open.
The room key's
ball and chain.
Your nightdress.
His passport
handed back
too quickly at the desk.
Look at him
and tell me
do you recognise this man?
2
Your heart is beating
behind bars.
The blinds are down.
That hammering
is neither wind nor rain
but somebody wants in.
He waits outside.
A fine mist
shrouds his face.
You call him by a name
already lost
so who is it that comes?
3
Between the pillow
and his head
an understanding.
Between the mattress
and your thigh
a sheet of ice.
Between his nakedness
and body heat
an absence.
Between your hunger
and his appetite
a shadow line.
4
The car you planned
to leave in
is unregistered.
Its ignition's tick
a flint
that will not catch.
The road ahead
has narrowed
to a vanishing perspective.
The way you came
without him
takes you home.