Mary Jo Bang: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

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A Film in Which I Play Everyone

 

In scene two, silence is a sleeve, I’m an arm in it.

In an outdated Hollywood magazine, I found a photo

 

of someone wearing my hair. How can that be?

Now I can’t stop thinking about the synaptic sparks

 

over which no one has any control. Or, they have some

control but not enough to count on in a crisis.

 

I’m making sense all the time of all the senseless endings.

A day is as long as the time it takes

 

for the mind to consider life and death countless times.

Which must make a day plus a night a highway

 

we’re only vaguely aware of since we’re busy

sitting in a chair or lying on a bed

 

with a floral-print bedspread or walking to the store

past someone with a dog on a leash and a phone

 

in their hand, into which they seem to be saying,

“That is not what I meant blah, blah, blah”

 

to an absent ear. Home, you unpack the items

you bought, crease the bags flat, stack them out of sight.

 

All without saying a word. This is a non-speaking part.

You’re an extra. That day you were filmed

 

on the steps walking into the school dance,

the costume you wore was pure you.

 

The set for the scene where everyone disappears

was painted Parisian sky-blue. The air burned

 

like a curtain on fire. The fire kept going out,

then being relit, a trick candle on a cake made of clouds.

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Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems, including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in November 2024. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.  [Author photo by Carly Ann Faye]

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    Dorothea Tanning, Self-Portrait, 1944, oil on canvas. [This is the cover image for Mary Jo Bang's book, A Film in Which I Play Everyone.]

Comments

[David Lehman]

Terriifc -- MJB's poem, the author's photo, Dorothea Tanning's self-portrait! Thank you!

[lally]

ditto to what david said

[Don Berger]

I really love how Mary Jo gives herself so much room to reflect on what seems like the imagined scene later shifting to a real one, or half-real, then fully back to her part(s) in the film, and then finally in the last three stanzas the poem wonderfully switches to past tense, to a retroactive dreamscape, the whole experience settling into a narrative mode, and ending with the most remarkable image, that "trick candle on a cake made of clouds." Such an intelligent, original poem. Terence, a wonderful poet himself, treats us to another. Bravo!

[Sr. Leslie]

Oh, she is always so darn good!…what a great opening line!: “In scene two, silence is a sleeve, I’m an arm in it.” Tanning’s “Self-Portrait” beautifully compliments the poem…Thank you Terence! and thank you Mary Jo!

[Emily Fragos]

Thank you, dear MJ. Greatness from you. Much love and admiration from me. Emily

[Clarinda Harriss]

This is truly haunting. I
I hope itll b ok for me to play with using the title exlore a way of looking at myself. How I wish my dear friend and brilliant poet kathi wolfe were to share HER versions w me.

[Grace Cavalieri]

There is simply no truth like the imagination. Mary Jo Bang just proved that. She's coming to Annapolis to read next season. Terence, come on down.

[Phyllis Rosenzweig]

Love "a trick candle." Thanks.

[Bernard Welt]

Like Don B said, dreamcape, and you know how I feel about those. (I like them.) In the dream biz, we say that dreams are movies in which we we play all the parts. And sometimes they happen when we're awake.

walking to the store
past someone with a dog on a leash and a phone

in their hand, into which they seem to be saying,
“That is not what I meant blah, blah, blah”

to an absent ear.

Now *that's* poetry.

[Angelo Verga]

Love the flow, which has a hazy almost logic, and quick jumps in time and place.
this is how we experience ourselves and few poems capture it this well.
very good poem.

[David Beaudouin]

Monday delivers this wonderful poem, where the reader, always an extra, drifts in slo-mo through dreamy cell after cell of a movie yet to be made. “ A day is as long as the time it takes / for the mind to consider life and death countless times.” Measureless wows and great thanks to Mary Jo and Terence!

[Eileen Reich]

Wonderful poem.

[Terence Winch]

David: thanks for the comment.