As The World Burns

George W. Bush alert: The American poet Ken Waldman has produced a timely intervention, so close to November: a book, CD and additional materials, As The World Burns:

www.kenwaldman.com/astheworldburns

Parliamentary poems online

One of my poems was selected by Pauline Michel, Canada's current poet laureate, for her site, which represents Canadian poetry by offering a poem a week.

Below is the link; browsing will yield many poets and poems of interest, in both official languages:

http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/people/poet/index.asp?lang=e¶m=4&id=1&id3=3&id2=111

Reading Tonight

Monday 9th October
7.00pm for a 7.30pm start
Bloomsbury Oxfam Two Writers Series
Oxfam Books
12 Bloomsbury Street
London, WC1B 3QA


Hosted by Todd Swift - Oxfam Poet In Residence


Readings, Questions & Answers, Book Signings


Goran Simic
&
D M Thomas

D.M. (Don) Thomas is a poet and novelist. After reading English at New College, Oxford, he became a teacher until he became a full-time writer. His third novel, The White Hotel, was an international bestseller, translated into thirty languages and shortlisted for The Booker Prize. He has won a Cholmondeley Award for his poetry, and the Orwell Prize for his biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn He is also a much-praised translator of Russian poetry. His poems appeared in the Penguin series in the 60s. His translations of Anna Akhmatova have been newly published in the Everyman Pocket Poets series. Other collections include Dreaming in Bronze (Secker and Warburg, 1981) and The Puberty Tree (Bloodaxe Books, 1992). Today also marks the launch of a verse collection from Bluechrome, Not Saying Everything. He lives in Cornwall, where he was born and grew up.

Goran Simic was born in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1952. His poetry, short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in many prominent journals such as the TLS and Independent. In Bosnia before the war (1992-1995) he was the editor of several literary magazines and founder of PEN Bosnia-Hercegovina. He came to Canada as a landed immigrant in 1996 under the auspices of PEN Canada. He has been a recipient of the Helman-Hammet grant and the PEN America award for brave writing. Recently he was granted the position of writer-in-residence by The Banff Centre. His poetry was included in several world anthologies such as Scanning the Century by Penguin (2000), and 101 Poems against War (2003) by Faber and Faber. His collections of poetry include Sprinting from the graveyard (Oxford University Press, England, 1997), translated by David Harsent and his forthcoming Selected poems from Biblioasis.




Admission free, suggested donation £6
Please contact Alison Jackson to reserve seats

Telephone: 020 7637 4610
email: oxfambloomsbury@hotmail.co.uk

Review: The Departed

As the saying goes, spoiler alert ahead.

Critics have written that The Departed by Martin Scorsese (released in the UK on Friday) is his best film since Goodfellas. I'd go further and argue that The Departed is actually his best film since Raging Bull, and in some ways is his late masterpiece, bettering Taxi Driver - in the same curious way that Welles made Touch of Evil as a pulp genre film whose stylish command of film language exceeds his youthful classics Kane and Ambersons.

A few things need to be noted early on in this review, to establish the signal importance of this great American movie. For The Departed is also, surely, the first great American film of the 21st century. 1) Scorsese is a master historian of American cinema; 2) Violence (in terms of power) is the central theme and trope of American cinema, from Birth of a Nation on; 3) The two great American film genres are The Western and the Gangster picture; 4) Directors of Scorsese's generation began to rethink violence, and the Gangster/Western genres, relating them to current political trends, such as Viet Nam and Watergate - so, we get Bonnie & Clyde, Badlands and Taxi Driver, the three great films that combine the Western and the Gangster film and throughly revised them, in terms of style and relevance. 5) Scorese's key set of films - Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York - represent an unparalleled contemporary development of American cinema, then.

Returning to the present, The Departed is a thrilling advance for Scorsese in his command of cinema. Never before (or at least not since De Niro-Foster) has he been able to present a sexual-romantic chemistry on film between his main characters that fully expands on the themes of the film, and does not seem false or a commerical appendix. Vera Farmiga is wonderful to watch here, as she moves between DiCaprio and Damon, her intelligence and sexual intensity never repressed, and always allied.

Further, Scorsese has always before had trouble balancing commercial and artistic imperatives. The Departed is as exciting a commercial film as Pulp Fiction but also a masterclass in film-making of the highest order. Indeed, The Departed does everything Tarantino can do (blending hip music, shock violence, great acting and dialogue, and exteme style) with the important addition of providing a moral subtext that evaluates and questions said violence and style.

I predict The Departed will, in time, be seen as a classic, and a loved film that is returned to, again and again. It works so perfectly on so many levels, it is a treat to watch, and reflect on. The acting is superb and inspired - having Jack Nicholson and Martin Sheen as the twin older rivals and mentors in the Manichean struggle means that so many classic 70s films, from Five Easy Pieces to Badlands, to of course, The Shining and Apocalypse Now, are shadowed and present. Then, the tough-talking 80s Mamet element is superbly represented by Alec Baldwin in his greatest cameo. Finally, the three roles of the young turks, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon represent the rise of the latest indie cinema. Di Caprio, especially, gives a fine performance, one that, in its method intensity, reminds the viewer of James Dean, if not Brando.

The dialogue is funny, memorable and brilliantly structured (the references to Shakespeare are both telling and ironic). The script is of course a remake of Infernal Affairs - and it works, bettering a great Hong Kong thriller (startlingly) by enriching the colours, themes, and even use of the mobile phone. Suspense never lags, and there are even moments of Beckettian comedy (as in the all beautiful women are cops routine near the final reel). Then, the mise-en-scene is lovely - all the use of blue skies and light especially. The editing is superb - consider the first five minutes before the opening credits that sets up the central binary conflict. But what is best is the powerful critique of American foreign policy in Iraq.

Scorsese, in interviews, admits that Iraq presents the disheartening ground on which the film's strangely terrible anarchy unfolds. It is, in short, Scorsese's Titus Andronicus (the severed hand at one point suggests this) - this is a roman world of pain, of savagery, where the moral order is so compromised as to be absent, except in the potentially empty signs of Christian faith (priests, nuns, etc.). As the threatened priest at one point says, "Pride comes before a fall" - well, we've had the pride, and the fall, and now this is what's left. Indeed, the fall of Sheen is the death-knell of liberal American values of decency and justice. The golden dome of the state house shines in the distance, like Gatsby's green light, but the reflecting sun blinds Damon to the truth - he can never reach it from his penthouse no matter how close it looks - for there is all that dreadful bright blue sky between him and truth.

The central pull of the movie is Nicholson's performance, however. It threatens to dominate and destroy the artistry of the whole, but, except in one slightly ill-judged use of a prosthetic phallus in a porn cinema, never goes entirely OTT. Then again, that's Nicholson's way. From The Shining to his role as The Joker, Jack's been crazed. Here, he is allowed to play a role that is a grotesque parody of ego unbound - a man who "kills and fucks" to avoid facing his own lack of line, his barren bed (and empty ethos). In the movie's weirdest, red-lit and melodramatic moments, Nicholson enters a Faustian world of cocaine-fulled orgies, sandwiched between a black and a white woman of great beauty, signalling that sometimes, neither black or white leads to anything but more bloodlust, establishing the neurotic terror at the film's observant core (there may be no good or bad that works on an Earth bereft of a divinity).

While the script observes that Freud felt the Irish to be immune to the talking cure, this does seem the Oedipal tension in the movie - especially since Nicholson's decadent gang-leader seems to admire, even fear, DiCaprio's (dead) father, the one who worked in the Airport handling baggage and refused to be corrupted. It's a homely but timely image, of the man in the aiport who can be trusted, post-9/11. In one of the film's oddest and most compelling moments of dialogue, DiCaprio and Nicholson discuss progeny and extension of power. DiCaprio tells Nicholson "I could be you - but I don't want to be you" - an inversion of "I could have been a contender" (On The Waterfront being of course the great template for films about corruption and doubles, brothers - i.e. "this man doesn't need a doctor, he needs a priest") - and it is also a thrilling meta-cinematic statement about film careers and choices. Scorsese is annointing Leonardo as the next Jack. He is the new Robert De Niro.

The Departed deserves the Academy Award that has for too long been withheld from Scorsese. It is only the cruellest of ironies that this, his finest stament on American evil, and the subtlest exploration of American society and politics, has appeared in the same year as United 93.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000217/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Scorsese

Get It At Lulu

Babylon Burning

the new global anthology of post-9/11 poetry

will be available from 5 October 2006

National Poetry Day

from print on demand publisher Lulu

at http://www.lulu.com/content/447370

October Poetry At nth position

Good morning, Mrs Garcia & The new geography
by Paul Hoover

Thinking long range & Intersections of the pause
by Mercedes Lawry

Winter songs & Rabbit ears
by Steve McOrmond

Museum, male bust, First frost, The Prodigal
by Nathan Hamilton

The horse
by Laurence O'Dwyer

Walking a path between dark hornbeams & Lights in the desert
by Paul Kingsnorth

On the nature of desire & A rose by any other name
by Andrew Boobier

Pensacola Beach Bridge
by Barbara Marsh

One way to use lightning, The Messiah or The Fall & Auteur
by Jenna Cardinale

My father carried a black lunch bucket
by Glen Sorestad

Stuffed birds & Minus ten
by Norman Jope

Casterlan & Spoiler
by Dudley Burrow

Translating the cactus, Five poems I didn't write & 12 New Zealand Snapshots
by Catherine Vidler

Poem by Carol Jenkins

Carol Jenkins lives in Sydney, concocts images (one of which is above) and writes various fiction, interspersed with facts, some of which are remnants from her former career in chemical regulation and assessment.

Her work has appeared in journals including Heat, Island, Cordite, Quadrant, Snorkel and Otolith, and will soon be broad-and-podcast on Radio Adelaide’s Writers Radio.

Eyewear welcomes her this Friday.

Esters on a Tree Dark Morning

The day starts early, some phantom interloper
firing colour off, lows the clouds
to a weasel wrung morning, a little empty
dust scuds under the table, must be spring
season of slammed plates, some great
para-aldehyde, like nature is an artificial
ester, or was the orange blossom
a gag of unrealized patrimony

if I was better practiced at forgetting
you wouldn’t be so displacingly apparent
I don’t even like the word I, I, I, the whey
of its cheese seepage, the whole remembrance

tulle and corelli work, a needle needed to
re-sew as spinal misalignments
for a some ripe plucked myth-historic figure
to extemporize, patch over plot
lack,

all time’s showing off, as if there was a greater
attention to seek, dog-nose like, how hard to
even write the word, sound, image; that seeks
me to attend to

a thousand phrases, the inapparent bliss

way out the back – when I look up
into the miasma of trees, in that giddiness
of leaves, there is everything of you

poem by Carol Jenkins