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Hi there Jerome,
Like you I have been fascinated by poets in the movies, and, I suppose, by their close adherence to the death drive. I grew up watching Tennessee Williams movies, and was always inspired by Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, and the way he wrote one poem a year during a sex-tour of Mexico. And his alter ego, the aged, 90 year old "Nonno" in The Night of the Iguana, who could not die until he had finished his last poem. When he finally intones it at the end of the movie, that was actually my first experience of high camp. Even the child watching the movie is thinking, All that effort to this terrible result? In consequence lines from the poem have always stayed with me. I wonder if they will be my last words, right before I die?!?!
How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.
Sometimes while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.
A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then
An intercourse not well designed
For Beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The Earth’s obscene, corrupting love.
And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.
O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
No only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?
(This apparently is the favorite poem of a lot of people!)
Is Poetry Dangerous to Society?
I've always been fascinated and amused by the way poetry, and the identity of the poet, are portrayed in popular culture. This clip from the opening of Roger Corman's 50s camp classic, A Bucket of Blood, pretty much says it all: The poet you see there, in a version of the "beatnik coffeeh...
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Apr 26, 2010
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