by Eric Morris-Pusey

Let’s start with a confession: I haven’t written anything new, poetry-wise, in over a year. Hell, I haven’t even done much revision during that time.

I’ve watched a few movies, though. And I’m convinced that’s helpful.

Another confession: This thought may have been conceived only as an elaborate justification for my incessant procrastination. On the other hand, cinema is much more than a delightful distraction—and it has much to teach us about the art of poetry.

While at first glance the movies I’ve watched may seem to have more in common with novels, given their reliance on narrative, I’ve come to think of them (the good ones, anyway) as rather long, highly image-focused poems.

The mechanical apparatus and operation of the camera mimic the way the poet uses words to imply and then shift perspective—now zoomed all the way in on a particular image, now leaping through time and space or widening the shot to reveal the world around that image. The rhythms of fades and cuts are a mirror for the rhythms of line and stanza. Two deliberately similar scenes in a film could be said to rhyme, and a poem’s images or motifs are its mise-en-scène.

The poet A. Van Jordan makes use of the conventions and structure of film a bit more directly in his collections MacNolia and Quantum Lyrics, in which large sections are formatted in the manner of a film script, complete with spoken dialogue and comments on the qualities of a given shot. Several of his poems are “montages” that make the film technique into a poetic form to great effect.

In MacNolia, even the collection as a whole, taken as a single unit, is rather like watching a film in its presentation of the overall narrative arc: the story of MacNolia Cox, the first black person to reach the final of the national spelling bee, sabotaged by the judges’ (and the country’s) racism.

The book intensely focuses on the singular moments of her achievement and her subsequent elimination from the competition by a word not on the spelling bee list—nemesis—and the ripples and echoes of this tiny moment throughout her entire life and the whole history of the United States make this one word the center of the collection’s narrative and commentary, both literally and metaphorically, in much the way the word rosebud functions in Citizen Kane.

In a more recent A. Van Jordan poem, “Aerial View: Jackson State College,” published in the Spring 2017 issue of The Greensboro Review, film is still a presence, both in the way the poem’s events are presented and in the construction of the poem itself.

The poem opens with a sort of establishing shot in the form of a prose introduction giving context for the Jackson State College shootings:

On May 15, 1970, the Jackson State killings occurred … a group of student protestors against the Vietnam War were confronted by city and state police. Shortly after midnight, the police opened fire, killing two students and injuring twelve. … The Kent State incident captured national attention; the Jackson State killings did not.

From there, Jordan guides us to an extreme close-up of a traveling bullet. After the factual introduction written in prose, the transition is jarring, but this effect is purposeful: bullets, after all, should be jarring, as they “[sing] a single note / of advice: run.”

The poem moves on through three numbered sections, each of which is a discrete scene with a different focus within the piece’s larger context. Even within these sections, the perspective shifts in the way that cameras cut in films’ dialogue and action sequences: first on the poem’s narrator, a student struck dead by a cop’s bullet, then on the whole of “the veldt / of the campus quad,” students running and being gunned down. Then on a night, both literal and symbolic, so long it seems to go on forever.

Jordan has discussed the relationship between film and poetry in essay as well, in a wonderful piece entitled “The Synchronicity of Scenes.” He delves deep into both the technical aspects of each art form and the ways in which he has interacted with both throughout his life, including frank discussions of his own awkwardness with poetry as a young man.

“I look to film now,” he writes, “as a way to solve some of the artistic problems I encounter in poetry.”

While some poets and poems will always be more influenced by film than others, there’s something we can all learn from Jordan’s view of film that goes well beyond the obvious, concrete influence and inspiration the cinema has had on his poems and mine.

The way that Jordan looks beyond poetry as a way of writing and understanding poetry is one of his great achievements in “The Synchronicity of Scenes.” Finding a new way to talk and think about poetry, an innovation in both its construction and the way it is taught, is extraordinary.

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Note: This piece is (very loosely) adapted from my graduate lecture at Vermont College of Fine Arts, “The Screen Lit Up with Our Faces: Intersections between Poetry & Film.” The phrase “the screen lit up with our faces” is borrowed from Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem “Saturday Night at the Buddhist Cinema.”

More information about A. Van Jordan can be found here.

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Eric Morris-Pusey has written a few poems, some of which appear in The Missouri Review, Driftwood Press, and 3Elements Review, among other places. He holds an M.F.A. from Vermont College of Fine Arts and works on the Nimrod Editorial Board. You can find him on the interwebs or on his stoop in Columbia, Missouri, staring wistfully at the moon.

by Britton Gildersleeve

I’m working on the materials for a poetry workshop I’m teaching in the fall. The course’s title—say it with tongue firmly in cheek—was going to be “So you think you don’t like poetry: On words that sing & dance for a living.” Unfortunately, that’s not the title going out to prospective participants. The part about not liking poetry—the whole point!—was cut. Sigh.

Initially the class was to be (rather obviously) geared to those who have reservations about poetry and everything about it: the forms, rhyme, the pretentious attitude of too many poets and poetry profs, the abstruse content, the SYMBOLISM. As if reading poetry were a kind of exercise in translating a little-known dialect.

I introduced the idea of such a class to my adult ed class this past spring, and even in a demographic self-chosen for learning, at least half the participants freely admitted they didn’t know/get/like poetry. I suspect several more agreed, as they didn’t raise a hand on like or dislike (this despite recent research showing a 5% increase in poetry reading from 2012 to 2017). Also in spite of the excellent case the Academy of American Poets makes for poetry’s excellent fit with today’s social media culture.

Still not a draw for at least half my class. They cited all kinds of reasons when I pressed them. See above.

I know intellectually that poetry isn’t fun for most folks. But it is for me, and it used to be for almost everyone, back when we were all small. When we read doggerel, children’s classics (Robert Louis Stevenson! Edward Lear! Lewis Carroll! Kipling!), limericks, and all, we loved it. My five-year-old grandson adores rhyme and rhythm (and much of poetry is all about those). He’s more into narrative poetry than lyric; since he’s been able to ask, he’s wanted stories in verse. At age two, he wanted me to make a poem about missing his parents when they were on a short overnight trip. Now, three years later, he wants rhyming books. On robots, true, but it’s still poetry!

What happens on the road from kindergarten to adulthood? Where do we lose our delight in language play, our wonder at how an image can open up an experience like a flower blossoming? How can I help prospective students—most of them older than I am—recapture that sense of play and magic?

I know enough NOT to begin with the classics we learned in middle school and high school, even in college. No Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson the first week. No modernists. Nothing that smacks of tests we crammed for years ago. Nothing earlier than the late-20th century, for starters. We’ll probably begin with a poem I love to teach: Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry.” I want them to know immediately that this is NOT a class where we beat poems with hoses.

Please don’t misunderstand: We’ll certainly read some “harder” poems, as well. But in the same way you don’t begin to train for a triathlon by first running a marathon, we’re going to move gently into poetry. Besides, who says poetry has to be hard, anyway? Not everyone wants to read Eliot or Pound!

Can’t poetry be a letter, like the exchange of poems between Nimrod Literary Award winner Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón? These two poets use their incomparable talent and craft to do something amazing, creating a place where ideas and language fuse into the poetic equivalent of favrile glass, iridescent and new. Can’t it be a story, as so many poets—new and older—have spun for us? Former Nimrod poetry judge Pete Fairchild weaves together this thread and that image into a story of small-town baseball, and suddenly a nameless player in a small-town game becomes an icon we all know well. A story, in poetry, about baseball and lost dreams and the thoughtless grace of youth.

So, we’ll look at new (lesser-known) poets as well as big names. Yes, we’ll do Carlos Williams. We’ll also do Merwin, who was a Nimrod poetry judge one year. And we’ll do Robin Coste Lewis (another Nimrod judge) and Nikki Giovanni—both consummate artists—writing both from the tradition of poetry and from outside its traditional borders.  We’ll read both Robert Hayden (grossly under-read, in my passionate opinion) and Naomi Shihab Nye, Joseph Bruchac and Robert Hass. We may even take a look at old poets—haiku from Bashō, a sonnet from Keats. But we’ll be looking at them not through the lens of the “poetic tradition,” but through the eyes of readers who are hungry for the graceful dance of words, the play of images on a page.

What I hope is that at least one of the poets we read in the workshop will do for the participants in this informal 6-week workshop what so many Nimrod poets have done for me: ignite over and over again a passion for words, and the many ways they sing and dance both on the page and in our heads. A passion only satisfied by reading more poetry.

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Britton Gildersleeve’s creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, This Land, and many other journals. She has published three chapbooks and was the director of the Oklahoma State University Writing Project for twelve years.

Molly Bess Rector lives and works in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she co-curates the Open Mouth Reading Series. Rector’s “Ecology Lesson: Alewives” appeared in Nimrod‘s Awards 39 last fall. Since then, we’ve had the opportunity to talk with her about her writing life.

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Was “Ecology Lesson: Alewives” originally inspired by an encounter with animal nature, like the fish dying in the poem, or by the kind of rumination on human nature we see in the last stanzas? Or are these two things not disparate in your mind?

Rector: I wrote a series of “ecology lesson” poems during a time when I was grappling with a powerful grief. I started having synchronous experiences with fish imagery—I’d be mired in anxiety about loss and change, and suddenly a truck would drive by with a vinyl fish on the side—that kind of thing. The marine world is often described as “alien,” and at the time my interpersonal world was feeling very much that way too, so I became sort of fixated on writing about fish. “Ecology Lesson: Alewives” takes its central imagery from an experience I had with my twin sister one summer when we saw the results of a mass die-off of thousands of alewives in Lake Michigan, but it takes its central spirit from trying to understand how we participate in our own ignorance (of self, other, system) by pretending away enormous losses.

When writing from a memory, do you ever let yourself alter the facts, either as a way of abating grief or in order to go in a new direction the poem seems to seek?

Rector: It seems to me like one of the tasks of writing poems is to go beyond saying what happened toward saying why what happened matters. I’m not sure I believe that memory is all that factual to begin with, and I think writing memory—personal memory, at least—is more about asserting an emotional truth than about recounting events. I’ll often draw on several memories that share an emotional thread. In the case of the alewives, I drew also on memories of fishing with other kids by other lakes. I often turn other kids from my childhood into my sister in my poems.

Of course, I think writing collective or political memory is a little different and that when looking outward in that way, poets have to be very careful with our speculation—to make sure our interpretation doesn’t serve as an eraser. I think of the many excellent poems out there about the murder by police of Tamir Rice (like Reginald Dwayne Betts’s “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving,” or Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s “To Bless the Memory of Tamir Rice,” or Mark Doty’s “In Two Seconds”)—those are poems that take care to preserve the facts of what happened and do their interpretation through highlighting those unaltered facts (“there was no riot” or “a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires / before his heart beats twice”).

I think it’s important to be really conscious of this distinction and of the places where “memory” and “facts” stop belonging to us individually. In either case, I don’t tend to go in the direction of abating grief, because I think it’s one of our most important emotions.

Did you have to do extensive research on ecology in order to write the “ecology lesson” poems, or did the subjects in the poems give you all you needed?

Rector: I wouldn’t consider most of my research extensive, unfortunately. I did some reading about fish ecology to write the ecology lesson poems—for this poem, I looked at a few articles about alewives and read a piece about mass die-offs—but only enough to absorb a bit of vocabulary and to have slightly more knowledge than I actually needed to write the poems.

Any advice for new or struggling writers looking for inspiration?

Rector: Find a community. So much of taking ourselves seriously as writers depends on finding ways to share our work, to join our work with that of others. I know that can be a tall order, but in my view there is nothing more valuable than having the support, insight, and honesty of other writers who share your values and understand your voice, interests, and goals.

I’ve found a powerful source of community in the reading series I co-curate, Open Mouth Reading Series. The poets who run the organization with me and the poetry lovers who show up regularly are a huge source of inspiration for me. Together we are able to celebrate each other’s work and engage more deeply with the work of writers outside our immediate circle.

For those struggling to find community, I’d say don’t be afraid to attend readings where you live and talk to the other writers there, don’t be afraid to reach out to writers you admire or to engage in online forums. Writing is hard, beautiful, vulnerable work. We don’t have to—I’m inclined to say we can’t—do it alone.