The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Six): Chad Foret [by Angela Ball]

We May Never Get Back Here

That soft yellow two-story place
in the Spanish style was a movie
       house, remember? Marilyn who
       pitied horses danced the desert

conscious while Clark watched.
       They don’t open doors in Niagara:
       too many bodies in the bell tower.
At the movie house, they exclusively
served expired snack cakes. Everyone

       should have to see a horse experience
a storm for the first time much like the way
it is a sin not to sneak into a movie house.
       When sad birds sleep, certain moths

       salivate, eat from eyes like a record
needle, music carving circles in a mirror,
like when you hear a sound or phrase so
       right you have to hum. Every once
       in a while, you notice you’re the only
animal at home & no one is waiting
to remember you & no, there’s not
       a person with a different perfume

in each individual eyelash waiting
to be squeezed like honeysuckle,
       someone you can turn to & say,
       I think you’re the talking I’ve
been with all day, someone

       to help you miss a movie house
       & a dog that lives to bite the air,
the right there. Again, I climbed
into a taxi with all your time.
       The dog you don’t even own
       yet hears your disc slip. Our

home is a lilac dropped at the feet
       like cigars or the afternoon, all those
       fortresses at the mercy of my breathing.
Driving by the movie house can turn you

       confident enough to make a noise, regret
       small things like owning one too many
clocks, the trouble of objects that give
you no trouble. One day, all at once,
       your neighbors realize they’re old
       & in the wrong room & I’ll just
wish I had been there the night

       you got your eyes. Who wouldn’t
       want their whole life to be a funeral
for a movie house, & who can afford
to live in a house with a person no one

       bothered to name? The mind is a generous
butcher. You’ve forgotten me like a child
spending his entire life in a water tower.
       At least I was always a laugh. Just one
       more film before they feed us vacation
footage. Perhaps it’s not a sad idea to stay

       children, a home without money, laughed
       human. What I mean is many families
moved, were moved in this house.
That’s all. What kind of families? Who cares.
       I was going underground until I touched you.
       Now I want to be old & realize the room I’m
in is not what I meant. When I watch movies,

       I often think about the time my teacher hugged
       his daughter like a haunted rocking chair. Had
I stepped into a play by Pinter? Was I a bird

       crying on pictures of more beautiful birds?
       I think of how the angel left Mary in Luke,
like my grandpa left Nilda with hell on her
hands, shrinking in some coffee shop. Stay

       for the morning, I’d say, my wings a torn
movie ticket. You’ll like getting born.

--Chad Foret

This began as a writing exercise after reading and watching Pinter's play The Homecoming. Around the same time, my wife and I drove past a building out in the country and she told me how it used to be a small movie theater. Each time we were in the area and I tried to point out the building, it was the wrong one, or it was in a different place than I remembered. It was like it was never there to begin with, or like all the buildings were a theater once. I drafted and revised with this experience in mind, and the allusions and mutations of memory and place all fused into this poem. --Chad Foret

Chad Foret is a freelance writer and editor from southeast Louisiana. His first book of poems, Scenes from a Rain Country, will be published with Lavender Ink in New Orleans. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, CutBank, Electric Literature, Prime Number Magazine, Bayou Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Flock, Barely South Review, New Rivers Press, and other journals and anthologies. More info can be found at chadforet.com.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Six): Chad Foret

Chad Foret’s fugue on a lost movie house begins with references to two films featuring Marilyn Monroe: The Misfits, her last completed film; and Niagara, her first film with star billing. A  movie exposes us as we watch,  sets us in juxtaposition. For Frank O’Hara of the New York School of Poets, the movies were education, with eager gunfire banging from horseback cowboys as hands, fingers slid toward new places; sexual discoveries juxtaposing the Little Tramp as he strolls his cockeyed sailor’s stroll away from  a scorned circus poster, a naked field. For Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits it was her being in a movie that her now-unloving husband had written when he loved her, so that the character she portrayed no longer existed, only her own boundless anxiety; for Clark Gable it was life beyond life, being a photogenic husk, concerned and leathery. The poem’s second movie, Niagara, carried this tagline:

“Marilyn Monroe and Niagara—a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control”

Here, Monroe and a waterfall are one: amalgam of fluvial and sexual potency, their combined power overmastering the forces that produced them.

Foret’s poem displays a related power: the uniting of statement with a compelling impulse to search. Surrealism had film as an ally almost from its start, gathering vigor when movies were just beginning to talk, when Spain and South America were talking to North America through Federico Garcia Lorca, through Pablo Neruda. Its dream method, opposing the sober, fed the young New York School of Poets, especially Kenneth Koch. In an interview with David Kennedy recorded in 1993, Koch says:

I wrote poem when I was just eighteen, maybe on my birthday, called 'For My Eighteenth Birthday' or 'Poem For My Birthday' and it was influenced by French surrealism in so far as I understood it. I understood it mainly from a surrealist magazine called View. It was edited by Charles Henry Ford and André Breton had something to do with it too. Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things and I wrote this poem when I was eighteen beginning, I can only remember part of, "At eighteen I walk on the surface of things, I tread in my stocking feet in houses of soft love..." [Laughs] and other sort of surrealist lines.

Foret’s poem, I believe, walks in “stocking feet in houses of soft love”: “I’ll just / wish I had been there the night / / you got your eyes. Who wouldn’t / want their whole life to be a funeral / for a movie house . . . .”  In this declaration, soft love meets extravagance. A possible dictum of surrealism: Going too far is not enough.

Wherever they run, movies make night, though in them the sun may blister the plank sidewalks of a western town, challenge the lonely nubs of cacti; a fluid night where all is new and possible, nothing held back by usual identities or connections. “Had I stepped into a play by Pinter?” the poem asks. Though Harold Pinter was no surrealist, his plays remove conventional social cushioning to establish an associational atavism that captivates and disturbs. He was a writer of terrific screenplays, like the one he wrote for L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, in which Julie Christie in a gauzy dress becomes a scissoring butterfly in flagrante with Alan Bates.

Every house a movie—either in one, or containing one, or both. In home movies, we are most real and most illusory, always doing things that look like fun. In non-movie life, fun is hard to identify, our place in it elusive: “Now I want to be old & realize the room I’m / in is not what I meant.”

In Chad Foret’s vivid, cinematic poem, “We May Never Get Back Here,” we live in film’s sacred craziness, we fly—our wings “a torn movie ticket.” We absorb his lens’s feverish optimism, rewarded in the poem’s vivid close: “Stay for the morning,” it invites. “You’ll like getting born.”

--Angela Ball

Comments

[J. Guaner]

Enjoyed reading the poem and the insightful analysis. Like this: music carving circles in a mirror, / like when you hear a sound or phrase so / right you have to hum