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.
Where we
came in
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.
Where
We Came In
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:
Distant Horizons
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.