The Long Hello

Eyewear thinks Noir is the major film genre.

Eyewear thinks Brick has dusted it off for a new generation.

You did good, Rian.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0393109/quotes

Poetry buys clean water for 14,000 people

Who says poetry doesn't have efficacy in the real world?

Some extraordinary sales figures in today from Oxfam's Su Lycett - Life Lines: Poets for Oxfam, launched just a few months ago, in June 2006, has already sold around 5,000 copies, and made £10,000 in profit (around $20,000 USD) for Oxfam. That translates into clean running water for 14,000 people, or equipment for five schools, or livestock for eight farms.

With National Poetry Month coming this October, and then the Christmas sales season, there is every expectation the CD (which I edited on a volunteer basis) will sell even more. The nearly-70 major and emerging poets involved also donated their time and poems, and publishers donated their rights. The list of contributors reads like a virtual who's who of UK poetry, across a broad spectrum, from mainstream, to performance, to avant-garde. This will surely make it one of the most successful poetry CDs (let alone anthologies) of its kind, ever.

The CD is now available in about 200 places and online at www.oxfam.org.uk/poetry.

Eye On Terence Malick

Terence Malick (pictured) is one of Eyewear's favourite directors in all cinema, and David Gordon Green is his de facto protege - more so even than De Palma (who also extends the work of his master Hitch through homage, pastiche and sheer bravado) becoming a remarkable second-generation director building on a considerable past oeuvre.

Malick is a poet of the cinema, sure, and one with few slim volumes to his name. His two 70s films are immediately unique signatures, that created their own cinescape, their own microcosm, their own language almost: Badlands and Days of Heaven. Fixated (this is the word) on the connections between the natural world, the fallen human domain, innocence, interiority, and the violent liminal stages which break through and defile the thin angelic membrane that is best in us, these two films chart murder, love, desire and death, in striking settings, as no other American films have ever done. I consider Days of Heaven the second most beautuiful movie ever filmed, after Vertigo.

Mirroring these two luminous masterworks, and separated by an unbelievable creative gulf of seemingly decades, have come the second two films: The Thin Red Line and The New World. Again, the films are ravishingly shot, and feature the intersection of undefiled natural environments (in the Pacific isles and pre-European North America), innocents (indigenous peoples now, not children and teens) and even greater acts of violence than individuals can muster by their wild selves (war and total colonisation).

Neither of these films is as good as the first two, but then again, who would not have them exist? We are now grateful for all of Welles. Perhaps Malick's own Touch of Evil moment (his unexpected final masterpiece and resurgence) will come with his next film, the long-expected project that (ominously) seems to promise roles for Mel Gibson and Colin Farrell.

Casting has of late been Mr. Malick's own personal downfall, just as it was once his resoundingly-fecund personal helicon. Regardless of his sex appeal, which is major, Mr. Farrell is not an actor most people can watch without disomfiture, without the suspicion the laddish Dublin-born hunk is more chancer than chanced upon, his paycock satisfactions never letting us forget he's no method Marlon immersed deeply in the seas of deep talent. Farrell pretty much robs The New World of the gravitas and grace it in fact starts with, just as Kubrick's greatest achievement, Barry Lyndon, is somewhow wasted on the charming, callow pretty highwayman, Ryan O'Neal. But Malick likely knows this.

His art is too great to resist the need to play games with the industry that is Hollywood, and he is able to insert more than enough moments of genius into both of his latest pictures to keep most cineastes satisfied. In fact, while The New World could be cruelly re-titled as Virginia Vice, it is not a star vehicle, and its squalid depiction of English explorers, set against the sublime and tranquil perfection of the idealised Indian, is stunningly (and questionably) rendered. The Thin Red Line is also one of my favourite 30 or so films, and is by far one of the top ten of the last ten years or so.

Undertow, now out on DVD, and produced by Malick, is a homage too far - a bizarrely ill-thought out admixture of elements from Night of the Hunter, The Dukes of Hazzard, and yes, Badlands, with curiously weak peformances from the fine actors Jamie Bell and Josh Lucas. And yet, it is uncannily like Malick in enough places to be wonderful some of the time, and deserves to be seen for that reason alone. That and the inexorable Glass score which seems to reprise the best moments from the Thin Blue Line (is this an in-joke?).

David Gordon Green is not the next Malick. He is his own man. But thankfully, some of what he thinks and feels is Malickian.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000517/

Eye On Jack Beeching

John Tranter, the editor of Jacket, recently drew my attention to the curiously-undervalued work of the poet Jack Beeching (pictured, above, with his wife of the time, Catherine, off Ibiza, in the 1960s).

Beeching's poetry is impressive, lovely and often unique, and it is hard to understand how or why it has been allowed to become so marginalised, unless one stops to consider how actually convoluted and concentrated poetry publishing - and more to the point, reviewery - often still is in England.

I'll be seeking out his Modern Penguin Poets 16 selection from 1970.

Here are some links to good articles on Beeching in Jacket, and some of his poems:

http://jacketmagazine.com/26/beech-l-w.html

http://jacketmagazine.com/29/beech-wood-luck.html

http://jacketmagazine.com/26/beech-5p.html

4 Poems At Jacket

Jacket continues to be one of the very best places on the internet for poems and poetics so I'm glad to be able to tell you that four of my poems appear in the forthcoming issue.

Take a peek here:

http://jacketmagazine.com/31/index.shtml

Canadian Strange

My work is featured along with a bunch of other Canadian poets, including (pictured above) Adeena Karasick

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Elizabeth Bachinsky, John Barton, derek beaulieu, Nicole Brossard, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Joelle Hann, Ray Hsu, Jeanette Lynes, Erin Moure, Trish Salah and Nathalie Stephens at:

http://www.drunkenboat.com

look under Canadian Strange.

De Palma D'Or, or A Certain Slant of Light

A.O. Scott is someone in The New York Times I enjoyed reading this long summer in North America. Recently, on a trans-Atlantic flight, I caught this article by him:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/movies/17scot.html?_r=1&ref=movies&oref=slogin

I've often thought Brian De Palma a cineaste worthy of auteur status - Femme Fatale was one of the best films of the last few years (its visual panache is lurid and Wellesian) and its non-release in UK cinemas was revelatory of the need for the director's status to be reconsidered. No one else does Vertigo-homage like he does, and no one else ever featured Frankie Goes To Hollywood so well. With the release of The Black Dahlia, which I have yet to see, now's as good a time as any for such a re-evaluation to begin.

So, I look forward to reading the articles at Slant, below:

http://slantmagazine.com/film/features/briandepalma.asp

As something of a post scriptum, let me note that Scott writes:

"[...] the movies that secured Mr. De Palma his critical following (which has not, it should be noted, been limited to Ms. Kael’s followers) exhibited many of the attributes of what people would eventually call postmodernism: a cool, ironic affect; the overt pastiche of work from the past; the insouciant mixture of high and low styles."

I note this definition of the postmodern with some pleasure, as it is the one I have long worked with, and the recognition is comforting. Indeed, critics of my own poetry collections would do well to consider it when reading my work in anything but the light of cinema and the postmodern period.

In the UK, such postmodern writing in poetry finds an uneasy audience, since it is neither part of the sublime-sincere manifold but nor is it necessarily accepted by the dominant new-modernist movement - the British schools currently at play, play less than they aim to possess the heights and limits of seriousness. I too dig seriousness, most especially when it is one of several layers at work.

UK poetry tends to cautiously police slippage between levels in tone, diction, theme and styles. Another reason for the indifferent reception of some aspects of the postmodern in British poetry is that recent tensions in poetics tend to emphasise language as the main source of drama, while, however, somewhat overlooking the image. Postmodern use of narrative and image (as in the work of Motion or Duffy) in contemporary British poetry is often sidelined by those who don't know much about film theory or how to read the visual - for them, there is a language of cinema, but no cinema of language.

A little-known UK critic-poet oddly-reviewed my collection Rue du Regard in Poetry London, last year, arguing I had no idea what the postmodern (or poetry) was, for instance, though the collection was informed by multiple references to postmodern film, and postmodern film theory.