The Best American Poetry

"Home of the Brave" (1949): Racism, War, and Eve Merriam’s Poem [by David Lehman]

 

I've had a soft spot in my heart for Eve Merriam's poem "The Coward" ever since I watched, when I was ten or eleven, the 1949 film Home of the Brave on the old Million Dollar Movie on TV (where they played the same movie back to back to back, and the theme from Gone with the Wind played before and after). The movie, which was directed by Mark Robson, dealt with racism in the army, centering on a platoon entrusted with a dangerous mission on an island in the Pacific that the Japanese tenaciously held.

Home of the Brave was based on a play of the same title by Arthur Laurents (1945), only there it was a Jewish GI subjected to anti-Semitic abuse. The substitution of a black man (played stirringly by James Edwards) was a shrewd stroke for more reasons than one even if it is entirely artificial. It could not have happened thus for the simple reason that the US  Army was not integrated until Harry Truman made it happen in 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson won the Rookie of the Year award playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers and three years after World War II was in the books. Benny Goodman integrated his band a decade sooner than the United States military.

One thing in particular that interests me is the idea that an African-American man may be understood as an allegorical representation of a Jewish-American man -- especially in plays, movies, and musicals of the 1920s and '30s written by Jewish authors and composers. Consider, for example, “Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein) or all of the Gershwin’s’ Porgy and Bess. While the Jewish authorship of songs sung definitively though not exclusively by African American singers intimates an affinity between the two groups, it also implies a certain amount of more or less creative tension, and the more complicated feelings that inevitably attend such a relation. But back to the matter at hand.

In Home of the Brave two great friends and former basketball teammates, one black, one white, serve together until Finch, the white man, in a moment of panic, angrily calls Moss a “nitwit,” pausing long enough between the “ni” and the “twit” to leave the impression that he was going to reveal, in the one word, the real racism beyond the appearance of friendship. When Finch dies, Moss is -- and the cliche is justified here -- paralyzed not with fear but with guilt, and I won’t give the rest away. Carl Foreman and Arthur Laurents wrote the screenplay for Home of the Brave; Dmitri Tiomkin composed the music, Stanley Kramer produced. The cast included Frank Lovejoy, Lloyd Bridges, Steve Brodie, Jeff Corey, and James Edwards, Steve Brodie is very good as the redneck racist, Corporal Evans.

See it. In black-and-white. 

As for Eve Merriam's poem, Lovejoy, playing a tough-as-nails sergeant, quotes the last six lines of "The Coward," saying that his wife wrote them. The lines are meant to embolden the listener by extending a hand. But the lines do more than that; they give the moment a majesty that it would not otherwise have. This is in part because they sound like poetry – the lines scan and rhyme. But if you analyze the final couplet you see how much more ambitious and complicated is the message conveyed. 

It was very many years later that I discovered that the lines Sergeant Mingo quotes came from this poem in Eve Merriam's first book, Family Circle(1946), which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

The Coward

You, weeping wide at war, weep with me now.
Cheating a little at peace, come near
And let us cheat together here.

Look at my guilt, mirror of my shame.
Deserter, I will not turn you in;
I am your trembling twin!

Afraid, our double knees lock in knocking fear;
Running from the guns we stumble upon each other.
Hide in my lap of terror: I am your mother.

-- Only we two, and yet our howling can
Encircle the world's end.
Frightened, you are my only friend.

And frightened, we are everyone.
Someone must make a stand.
Coward, take my coward's hand.

-- Eve Merriam (1916-1992)

The poem a deserves  a wider audience – as does the movie after all these years. -- DL

Introducing The Best American Poetry 2018: Guest Editor Dana Gioia [video by Blank Verse Films]

This video was created by Mike Gioia for Blank Verse Films. For more BAP videos, scroll here. For more videos, subscribe to the Blank Verse YouTube channel. 

-- sdl

"Anthem" [poem by Bruce Bond, video by Mike Gioia]

Bruce Bond is a poet living in Denton Texas. When visiting Bond at his house in a shady suburb of Denton, multiple subtleties strike you about the man-- his quiet manner, his late hours, his constant digressions into philosophical topics -- but it's impossible to miss the abundance of cats and guitars. Deeply interested in music, Bruce studied music performance and still plays jazz and classical guitar regularly. Music is central to Bond's poetry both as a subject and a component. Bond teaches at University of North Texas and his wife teaches at the nearby Texas Women's University. Bond's most recent book of poetry is "Blackout Starlight: New & Selected Poems", which you can buy here: https://amzn.to/2Pwh3Zz

Dana Gioia selected "Anthem" for the Best American Poetry 2018. 

 

Mike Gioia is a filmmaker. His Youtube channel is Blank Verse Films, which will regularly publish videos of poets reciting their poetry. Subscribe to his channel to see more poetry videos. 

Poems and Notes by John Tranter on Hitchcock (and Noir) on Hitch's Birthday

<<<
Hamlet does not utter the words North by Northwest (a compass direction that does not exist.). He does say "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

“Shadow of a Doubt” was Hitchcock’s favorite of his movies: in it the young teenage girl is named Charlie, after her handsome uncle, played by Joseph Cotten, who (yes) is also named "Charlie”. 

 

See these poems in my book Starlight: “Boy in Mirror”, about Hitchcock’s Vertigo and its companion piece, the double acrostic poem “Girl in Water”, can be found in the “At the Movies” section of Urban Myths

 

The film (“Vertigo”) is based upon the novel D’Entre les Morts (From Among the Dead) which was written specifically for Alfred Hitchcock by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. A version is now available as Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo [Entre Deux Morts] (Between Two Deaths), London: Bloomsbury, 1997. — J.T

 

Here is the Santa Rosa house used by Hitchcock for the movie Shadow of a Doubt: 

 

 

 

From Urban Myths by John Tranter

 

Shadow of a Doubt

Handsome Uncle Charlie, burdened by crime. 
He laughs and scatters gifts, but he looks 
unwell – no, he’s fine – the man playing cards 
looks sick – he has a full hand of spades, 
but then, he gets to tell the story about 
how the ace of spades leads the pack. 
Suspicion follows you like a snake in the grass, 
so the story is torn up. But destroying the evidence 
points to the evidence. Sleeping dogs lie. 
Now, should a girl tell on the bad man? 
It would kill Mother. But Uncle Charlie 
has been killing plenty of those, it seems, 
the fat, lazy, greedy widows eating cake 
and wasting money – they deserve to die. 
Now those two men are here to see you, 
again – something about a survey, 
counting all the happy American families 
and listening closely to their apple-pie opinions 
as they look down from a high window through 
shade-dappled branches at a pair of neighbours 
pausing for a gossip in the sun. On the busy street 
the old traffic cop can’t help the girl, he’s 
avuncular and normal, and he has a job to do. 
Now everything falls to pieces 
and a killer pleads for his life. Traffic 
everywhere, an engine running and leaking gas, 
then back on the train again, the train 
that takes you out into the horrible world. 

The man with all the cards is here, somewhere, 
behind the viewfinder, watching everything, 
a resident alien with a point of view. 

Uncle Charlie has to die, we all knew that, 
it just took a while to fall into place 
in front of a speeding black locomotive 
somewhere out of town, and far away. 



North by Northwest

A hero breasts Manhattan traffic, always
ready to stop off at a tourist destination. 
A blunder with a telegram and Mother – 
a demon never seen, only hinted at 
in her distant, comfortable castle – 
will lose her little boy, who quickly 
plunges into an irritating adventure 
in the picaresque mode – leaping 
to conclusions as the scenery reels past, 
into bed and out again, dodging and weaving 
across a landscape more deadly and bucolic 
with each passing trick of the light. 
Of course it’s post-postmodern to have the hero 
an advertising man rather than a policeman-detective 
tough-guy action type, and the crop-dusting plane scene 
is funny and priceless. Perhaps the Master was trying to 
lighten up after Vertigo. There’s no fun there, just 
descending levels of madness and sadness. 
The blonde, unlike his sainted Mother, 
is very good and also devious and wicked, 
and so roller coaster morals are the norm 
and in fact this unravelling storm of incidents 
and grief is the painful future due to us 
when we stumble blinking into the light, 
for this sequence of parables was built 
by its huge crew of many talents to be seen 
and heard in the crowded dark, the wicked 
are found out and trampled on, another 
train, another bed, good night. 


Dark Passage 

Poor Vincent Parry: he rolls out of a garbage can 
and stumbles through a valley of coincidences, 
falling into the lap of a blonde. 

Poor Vincent: we are locked inside his head, 
seeing everything, feeling nothing but vertigo 
as the screen swoops and wobbles with his weaving 
and ducking to avoid his fate. He can’t 
have a drink, we would get splashed, 
he dare not look in a mirror, because 
we would be there gawking, dismayed… 

Poor Vincent: he gets disfigured by a man with a towel 
and a razor, and wakes up tied to the bed. 
Madge calls, and whispers, and goes away, 
and calls back again, spying, sneaking a drink, and 
every fragment of conversation ends with Madge 
who, if she can’t have what she wants, 
kills it. Vincent gets punched around 
and a pal gets it, beaten to death with a trumpet. 
Madge, fatal Madge, fallen Madge, 
defenestrated Madge on the sidewalk. 

Ah, Vincent: he used to look handsome 
with a pencil-thin moustache, then he woke up 
looking like some movie star. He wants to 
call out in his bad dream: Untie me! 
Set me free! But he will not be free 
until he takes the bus to distant Peru 
alongside a boring couple of jerks 
who have just stumbled over each other 
in a bus station of all places. 

Vincent dreams that he sits in a white jacket 
sipping a drink by the moonlit beach in Peru, 
feeling anxious until the music changes 
and a blonde appears: Well, tie me down, 
and start me dancing. 



Girl in Water 
                                                                           (Vertigo)

Waiting to meet a pretty girl – any pretty girl – 
hot summer day in 1958, beach crowd, emotional algebra,
also list and remember: makeup, perfume, lipstick, talc, 
telephone passion – no, a soda fountain, a pizza. 

Do they dream of mystery and adventure, women?
or do girls want to drown in literature? No, stupid. I 
bet she’d like a fragrant pizza topped with mozzarella, 
or is that just me? A movie: Item: Kim Novak. A drive-in –  

yes, more subtle and powerful appetites litter the sand. 
So become that detective, wounded, pitiful; so 
learn to love and fail in love in the back row at the Bijou, 
in parked cars, or snug among sandhills… your spyglass a nib, 

keyhole secrets memorised and filed away, until 
eternity comes calling at the foot of a staircase. 
After that ending, another climb, another cliff 
beyond which something awful awaits: love  

or falling in love or into love or falling into death, a
uniform and dizzying and swift descent 
that leaves you breathless, leaves you  
very unsteady like a cork in the water, 

effervescent and febrile and emotionally labile,
ready for almost anything. 
That conscious pilot spoke: scripsi quod scripsi: 
I have written what? I have written for 

girl in water ‘girl in water’, girl 
or woman in waves of water. I, 
keen to find behind mirrors, wavering echoes, burn 
in plots and complex narratives to draw 

many clues out, threads of meaning. A 
new insight into the convoluted plot 
of good and evil I can look for, where good men whine, 
villains struggle to prevail and bluster 

against ordinary background noise and hubbub: 
kaleidoscopes of criminality and subtle fiscal judo  
scam and prosper, and some ordinary guy 
will win and lose everything. I 

owe more than money. The key will turn: 
nervous ex-detectives afraid of causing harm 
drop into floods of anxiety, plunge into semi-
enervating doubt; whirlpools of suspicion, and later 

refuse help from well-meaning friends or  
from glum old girl-friends, dawdling, doodling, who 
understand too well their weaknesses, their 
lack of manly self-respect, who know how hypnotic 

those doubled mysteries within a mystery are. You reach
into a maelstrom of neurosis. Beyond bodily desire, 
these complex chess-like fantasies are the true romantic
scenes in your life: the most ludic acrostic paradises: click!

 

-- John Tranter

>>>

Alfred Hitchcock's Fate Was in His Stars [by David Lehman]

At 3:15 in the morning, in London, England, on August 13 of the nineteenth century, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock was born, a solid Leo with a macabre imagination (moon in Scorpio). When August 13 falls on a Friday, as it did in 1993 and 1999, you may expect bats to fly in through the slightest opening in the bathroom window, and the phone will ring at 11 PM and it will be someone you have never met, a waitress who writes poetry and is calling from Oregon to ask you for a job. She sounds drunk and promises to make it worth your while. But when you explain nicely that it is very late and not the right time, etc, she says fuck you and hangs up. Then you grab a broom, turn out the lights, and chase the bats out the door. Hitchcock was short (5'5) and stout and perhaps unaware that he shared his birthday with both Annie Oakley and Fidel Castro.

There is a tremendous amount of fire in his natal chart (see below): more than 50%. This accounts for his energy, drive, ambition. The water in his chart, topping 18%, indicates a man of subtlety and sensitivity. He has three times as much yang as yin in his personality, and no one should be surprised to learn that a man whose dominant planets are the sun, Venus, and Mars may luxuriate in bathtubs in the English manner and have an almost phobic distrust of showers ad oceanic vastness, which comes through in such movies as "Lifeboat" (in which Tallulah Bankhead and company survive on a raft in the North Atlantic in World War II), "Vertigo" (in which Kim Novak does not drown in the Pacific Ocean) and "Psycho" (in which Janet Leigh meets her shocking fate behind a torn shower curtain). Leo, Sagittarius, and Scorpio are the predominant signs of a man whose self-confidence can lead him to commit the sin of pride. I hear that Janet Leigh greatly prefers baths to showers and has ever since working with Hitch.

A picture of the master of suspense emerges from a study of Hitchcock's chart. He is a Roman Catholic; a lover of blondes (especially American blondes); and a prankster of the imagination who knows that a straight face is best for effects either comic or scary and that the best way to get an actor and an actress to understand their parts as quarreling lovers is to handcuff them together and lock them in a room overnight, as in the filming of "The 39 Steps." When he was a boy, Hitchcock's dad sent him to the local police constabulary with a note instructing the officer on duty to lock the boy in jail for a few hours. This experience had the desired effect on the lad, who worked out his guilt complex by dispatching heroes, heroines, and villains to their deaths from the top of a church tower, or from a moving train, or in a wood stove, or by an attack of killer birds, or from the top of the Statue of Liberty, or in an out-of-control merry-go-around at an amusement park, or by a nasty piece of goods who uses his necktie as a strangling device, or sometimes with a gun, a knife, or a pair of handy scissors. The leonine Hitchock had his sun and his Venus in Leo. This makes him a most logical man, a constant man, generous in his affections but domineering, and almost tyrannically loyal to his lovers and friends.

Given his stellar combination of assertive confidence and deep-seated guilt, it comes as no surprise to students of the great man's chart that (1) the great Hitchcock actors (male) tend to be old-fashioned types (James Stewart, Cary Grant) rather than the method-trained new breed; (2) in some (not all) of the best Hitchcock movies, the villain is either more interesting than the hero (Robert Walker versus Farley Granger in "Strangers on a Train") or at least complicated in an attractive way (e.g., Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt," James Mason in "North by Northwest," Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder," the birds in "The Birds"); and (3) the perfect Hitchcock heroines are Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Priscilla Lane, Larraine Day, and Teresa Wright. Hitch shows us the craziness inside every man and his (almost invariably blonde) fantasy lady.

A tip of the old fedora to Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the music of Hitchcock's mind-- DL

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.

Noir Cool [by Suzanne Lummis]

 

 

"Ives" [poem by Mandy Kahn, video by Mike Gioia]

Mandy Kahn is a poet who lives in Los Angeles. She studied with poet Robert Hass at Berkeley. In her most recent book, "Glenn Gould's Chair", she writes several poems about famous composers such as Glenn Gould, Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, and many others. You can buy her most recent book here: https://amzn.to/2KACFFe

Mike Gioia is a filmmaker. His Youtube channel is Blank Verse Films, which will regularly publish videos of poets reciting their poetry. Subscribe to his channel to see more poetry videos. 

-- sdl

Is a market top on tap? "Noodles" weighs in [by David Lehman]

Everyone knows that stocks these days, especially US stocks, are overvalued. But picking a market top is no easy matter. David Aronson, former professor at Baruch College,now president of a research firm that develops methods to enhance stock market trading systems, says, "the process of topping out can take a really long period of time, evolving over a year or more." Aronson demonstrated his credentials as a two-armed economist when he told Mark Hulbert of the Wall Street Journal.that only time will tell whether the coming top will precede a major bear market or something less dire, something of merely "intermediate-term significance." (See The Myth of Stock-Market Tops," September 5, 2017, p. . R1). 

Admirers of Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America know that the character named David Aaronson, played by Robert de Niro (top left), bears the nickname "Noodles" from the time he and his buddy Maxie were the most notable personalities of a gang of Jewish teenagers in New York's Lower East Side in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Noodles remains "overweight" on emerging-market equities. as well as overweight in the old-fashioned sense, as befits a man of his mature years who has done his share of losing, done what he had to do and now finds it all so amusing to think he did all that . "All that"  includes knifing a vicious rival, for which act he serves time. He has fallen hopelessly in love with Deborah (played by Jennifer Connelly as a youth [top center] and by Elizabeth McGovern as a grown up [top right]). She is his one true love, yet, alas,he date rapes her in the back of a rented limousine. He has also smoked his share of opium with the song "Amapola" in his brain, cried in his sleep, carried on with Tuesday Weld, a decoy during a jewel heist, and teamed up with "Uncle" Maxie (James Woods) and buddies to smuggle booze during prohibition and run a fabulous speakeasy,

Thirty years have gone by in some remote upstate burg after his gang buddies are shot in one fatal last caper. During this time, and prior to mysterious letters that lead him to return to New York City and learn that he had been deceived and betrayed, David Aaronson has had the opportunity to make an independent study of stock market trends. In the book that made his academic reputation, Aaronson writes that "bottoms are easier to identify, in real time, than tops." When asked whether he had in mind either Jennifer Connelly or Elizabeth McGovern, Noodles just winked, whistling a few bars of Cole Porter's classic "You're the Top."

The take-away: Major bull market tops are a process, not an event. The long-term topping process may have begun without anyone taking note. Many people have shunned the market since the 2008-09 collapse. Only when they start buying stocks will we know for sure that the long-awaited end has come. Will there be a correction -- or a crash? How painful will it be? The jury is still out .Meanwhile when they ask me what the market will do tomorrow, I always say: it will go up and down. -- DL

originally posted September 8, 2017

Mozart, Symphony #5 in B Flat major

 He wrote it at the age of nine.

He didn't lose his touch in "later" years.

 

In Favor of Barbara Stanwyck [by David Lehman]

I cast my ballot in favor of Barbara Stanwyck.

Born in Brooklyn Heights on July 16, 1907, Barbara Stanwyck was an atypical Cancer, with both her moon and her rising sign in Virgo. Gemini, the sign of the twins, rules her midheaven. A talented actress (Mercury in Leo), she was able to project a wide variety of women -- a paranoid hypochondriac, a confidence artist, a calculating femme fatale, an unflappable witness to a murder -- in modes tragic or comic.

According to Isaac Babylon in The Charts of the Stars, his classic study of six Hollywood starlets from the 1940s (Stanwyck, Ingrid Bergman, Irene Dunne, Olivia de Havilland, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford), Stanwyck's Virgoesque self-restraint combined with the gush of watery emotion that comes from having not only her sun but her Venus, Jupiter, and Neptune in Cancer. She was a good businesswoman (Mars in Capricorn) but prone to morbidity (Saturn in Pisces). 

The actresses of the 1940s – we can add Katherine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell to Babylon’s list -- belie the notion that women born before the age of female enlightenment lacked strong models who could either keep their families together despite the stresses of war or be psychiatrists, reporters, con artists; they could solve murders or commit them, could go crazy, could run a restaurant, pack a gun, slap her daughter, commit adultery, or risk her life as an American agent in South America during World War II.

Barbara Stanwyck came from a working class background. She went to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. Thanks to shrewd investments (Mars in Capricorn) she grew rich. It figures that she never won an Oscar though she was nominated four times. Her real name was Ruby Stevens. She was hilarious in The Lady Eve and superb in Golden Boy. She helped William Holden get the title part and became Holden's lucky star. He was crazy about her as photos taken on the set of “Executive Suite attest. In 1939 she married Robert Taylor. Whisperers said it was a sham designed to get gullible people to believe the two stars were heterosexual. Taylor was four years younger than Stanny. "The boy's got a lot to learn and I've got a lot to teach," she said. She kept the ranch and horses when they divorced in 1951. Robert Wagner said he had a four-year affair with her. Could be.

Stanwyck had a sharp tongue. She defined "egotism" as "usually just a case of mistaken nonentity." She had a proud notion of her true worth. "Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture and I don't care what happened before. I don't even care if I was IN the rest of the damned thing. I'll take it in those fifteen minutes." During the filming of Double Indemnity, the Billy Wilder masterpiece, she says that her co-star, Fred MacMurray, would look at the rushes every day. Babs would say, "How was I?" And Fred, perhaps in keeping with their dialogue in the movie, would reply, "I don't know about you, but I was wonderful!" Actors look only at themselves.

On the day we visited, Stanwyck, a self-described "tough old broad from Brooklyn," took one look at the script and started laughing. What's the matter? "Be a good lad and re-fill my glass. Scotch, rocks, no water. You know what my biggest problem is? My biggest problem is trying to figure out how to play my fortieth fallen female different from my thirty-ninth."

-- DL  Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration

"Ghost Ship": poem by Sonia Greenfield, video by Mike Gioia

Sonia is a poet who lives in Los Angeles. The fire struck her because she had frequented many artistic scenes similar to "Ghost Ship". Or in the words of her poem, she "had been that young." Feeling a great affinity for the victims of the Ghost Ship fire, she was moved to write "Ghost Ship" for Rattle magazine's Poets Resound issue. "Ghost Ship" was recently selected for the The Best American Poetry 2018 anthology.

Mike Gioia is a filmmaker. His Youtube channel is Blank Verse Films, which will regularly publish videos of poets reciting their poetry. Subscribe to his channel to see more poetry videos. 

Click here for the video Mike Gioia made for Brendan Constantine's poem that will appear in BAP 2018.

Marilyn Monroe as Chanteuse [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday it is) sang. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Ethel Merman and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all. 

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as "Heat Wave," are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. You can't keep your eyes off her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice.

Listen to her sing "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.

Compare her version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.

Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and forbids Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses.

-- DL

The Well-Versed Movie [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Hope Davis finds a poem in "Day Trippers"

In the opening pages of the novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s time-haunted heroine drifts toward Bond Street for some early-morning shopping, hardly noticing the busy thoroughfare as happy and unhappy memories swirl in her mind. Suddenly, an open book in the window of Hatchard’s bookstore catches her eye, and she reads these lines of Shakespeare:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages.

The lines stop her cold. They frame her thoughts and put her mind in order, giving form and meaning to the welter of momentary impressions and recollections that had previously overwhelmed her. “The late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears”—this is what the poem tells her, this fundamental and inescapable truth. It is a defining moment in the momentous day that stretches before her, a day in which the lines recur as a bass note in her consciousness.

In Long Day’s Journey into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical melodrama, James Tyrone, the patriarch of the dysfunctional Tyrone family, delivers speeches from Shakespeare to remind his feckless sons that he was once a great actor. (They respond by spouting passages from Swinburne and Dowson, whom they know he detests.) In A Touch of the Poet, O’Neill’s later play, the lead character, Cornelius Melody, poses in front of the mirror and recites histrionically from Byron’s "Childe Harold":

I have not loved the World, nor the World me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee. . . .

Like T. S. Eliot embedding bits and pieces of Baudelaire, Dante, Goldsmith, and many others in his brief epic, The Waste Land, O’Neill knows that an enlarged vision of experience is incomplete without the verbal formulations made by earlier writers for a range of rhetorical effects.

Fiction writers, dramatists, and poets resort to quotation constantly in order to create stop-motion effects like Woolf’s and O’Neill’s. Filmmakers too appreciate how verse creates a change of register, a complicating of character and plot. If poetry naturally pops up in films about poet’s lives or in “toast and eulogy” scenes that mimic real life—Shakespeare quoted by Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, a Tennyson pep talk uttered by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, Auden‘s “Funeral Blues” recited by John Hannah in Four Weddings and a Funeral—it also appears in dramatic ways that go beyond the expected.

continue reading  . . .

Find a partial list of poetry in movies here. 

"The Opposites Game" [poem by Brendan Constantine, video by Mike Gioia]

Brendan Constantine is an LA poet whose most recent book "Dementia, My Darling" was published by Red Hen Press. You can visit his website here. The poem was selected by Dana Gioia for the Best American Poetry 2018.

This video was created by Mike Gioia for Blank Verse videos. For more videos, subscribe to the Blank Verse YouTube channel. 

-- sdl

The Cliff Robertson Quiz

What was Cliff Robertson's most memorable role?

as JFK in "PT 109"

as the Nixon-like Cantwell in "The Best Man"

as the guy who loses Kim Novak to William Holden in "Picnic"

as the fellow who falls in love with the same woman twice in "Obsession"

as the mentally-impaired bigamist whose wives are Joan Crawford and Vera Miles in "Autumn Leaves"

For extra credit, (1) Would you have voted for Henry Fonda or his opponent in "The Best Man"? (2) Who wrote the American lyrics for "Autumn Leaves"? (3) Compare Genevieve Bujold, New Orleans and Florence in "Obsession" with Kim Novak and San Francisco in "Vertigo."

The winner's photograph will be posted on this site next week.

"The Joker Is Wild": original trailer

 

plus Jimmy Durante brought to you by Colgate Palmolive

"Laura" [by David Lehman, with Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney]

Then the doorbell rang.
Time for one more cigarette.
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
He is not in love with a corpse.

Time for one more cigarette.
The venomous drama critic insinuates
He is in love with a corpse.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.

The venomous drama critic knows
He is sane.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.
He thinks she is dead and she thinks he is rude.

Is he sane?
Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
He thinks she is a ghost and she thinks he is rude
When the picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman.

Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
It hasn’t stopped raining.
The picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman:
Gene Tierney in Laura.

It hasn’t stopped raining.
“Dames are always pulling a switch on you,”
Dana Andrews says in Laura.
There was something he was forgetting.

“Dames are always pulling a switch on you.”
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
There was something he was forgetting.
Then the doorbell rang.

"Perky Cuties I Had a Crush On": Movies and Beauty [by Mark Strand]

8 / 26 / 09

Dear David

Pursuant to our conversation of the other night, the one in which we discussed what various movie stars meant to us, I have decided to write not simply one email to you, but several. 

When I was very young, say, around seven or eight, I went in for cowboy flicks.  I usually went with a pack of boys my own age, we paid our dime and watched a double feature. The National Anthem was played and sometimes there’d be a yo-yo contest.  There were usually one or two cartoons, a serial of Superman or Captain Marvel and always Movietone Newsreels.  I had no use for Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.  I liked Randolph Scott, I guess because I admired his perfectly chiseled features and the fact that he didn’t sing.  But I’ll talk about the male stars of my past at another time. 

Now I want to discuss the females that I had begun to want to watch, the many on whom I developed a crush.  I was nine or ten when I thought Esther Williams was hot. It was her swimming, naturally, that did it for me. In those days I like women who evinced some athleticism. I never really thought of them as women, but as grown up girls,   Esther Williams could swim. That was it for me. I thought her face a little broad, especially when she wore a swimming cap. The crush was short lived. I moved on. Athleticism ceased to be a necessity, since almost none of the female stars was athletic, at least not on screen. That is, with exception of Ginger Rogers, whose dancing I considered a kind of athletic event. (As I grew older I ceased to think of it as merely that.) I should also mention Betty Grable, who does a terrific solo in “The Gay Divorcee.” But this and other Rogers/Astaire movies I saw sometimes as many as ten years after they first appeared.  It wasn’t simply Rogers’ athleticism that got to me, it was her energy, he perkiness. That’s it: she was perky, despite those eyes that could be a shade soulful, a little hurt.

Other Perky cuties I had a crush on were Janet Blair, Joan Leslie. I have not seen Janet Blair since I was ten years old, so I can’t say what effect she would have on me now, but I recently watched “Flying Down to Rio” and took a good hard look at the young Ginger Rogers but was not overwhelmed. More overwhelming was the seemingly endless Carioca dance numbers with Fred and an ensemble of hundreds (it seemed). And most overwhelming was Dolores Del Rio to whom I had paid no attention when I was a boy. Ah Dolores! I ran into her once in an elevator in Mexico City back in 1953. I was with my father and he noticed her right away and practically fainted on the spot. She was then 48 and I was 19.  She was still beautiful, but not the way she was in “Flying Down to Rio.” She was darkly glamorous, which is about all that I could be certain of in the few seconds we were on the elevator. In “Flying Down to Rio” you noticed the playful intensity of her eyes and her perfect features. But more about the true beauties next time.
>>>

Hitchcock Villains and Heroes: Multiple Choice [by David Lehman]

Which of the following is not an authentic Hitchcock moment?

-- Grace Kelly cozies up with Harper's Bazaar while her beau, nursing a broken leg, takes a nap
-- Raymond Burr signs a contract to play first base for the New York Yankees after the death of Gary Cooper
-- Ingrid Bergman offers her beau "a leg or a breast" as they stand on the terrace on a tropical evening
-- With one exception, everyone watching a tennis match moves his or her head as the movement of the ball dictates
-- Doris Day belts out Che Sera,Sera at a posh party peopled by diplomats in London

The better the villain, the better the film." Acknowledging that "better" is an elastic term, which of the following is the best villain? Discuss at least three.

(a) James Mason in "North by Northwest"
(b) The birds in "The Birds"
(c) Robert Walker in "Strangers on a Train"
(d) Claude Rains and his mother in "Notorious"
(e) Anthony Perkins and his mother in "Psycho"
(f) Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder"
(g) Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt"

What conclusions can we come to?
(a) bad guys tend to be guys, or guys with mother complexes, or enraged beasts
(b) "the more deranged, the better"
(c) the "suave index" (Ray Milland, James Mason) makes the movies less threatening

Which of the following does not qualify as a typical Hitchcock joke?

-- to cuff his hero and heroine, leave the room and lock the door
-- to pose as the fat man in a weight-reducing ad that is espied if not read on a lifeboat full of the survivors of a shipwreck 
-- to employ Otto Preminger to play the commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp
-- to suggest the act of fornication by showing a speeding train enter a tunnel
-- to kill Kim Novak twice, in both cases at the top of the church tower at Mission San Juan Batista in California

In the auction scene in North ny Northwest, Cary Grant makes contradictory and ludicrous bids in order to

-- attract attention because he is a certified narcissist who thinks he is Cary Grant
-- attract attention and get ejected because the cops are preferable to the killers awaiting his exit
-- fulfill his part of the bargain with Ingrid Bergman, who has done her part by going to Brazil and enduring a near-lethal dose of poison administered slowly so it looks like sickness and not murder
-- warn about an imminent terrorist threat in a way that wouldn't panic the public because only one man present would understand the message
-- arouse the admiration of co-star Eva Maria Saint, who has aired her doubts about his skill as a comic actor

Groucho's Last Stand!

The one and only. . ."They're tearing down part of your old neighborhood." "That's not coincidental," says Julius (Groucho) Marx,, who lived on 93rd Street and went to PS 86 in NYC.

"Ladies and gentlemen, where were you on September 5, 1969?" -- Dick Cavett