Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 9, 2022

Nitrate and Gin, a poem by Shawn D. Standfast

Longtime Louise Brooks fan Shawn D. Standfast sent me a poem "about Louise Brooks" titled "Nitrate and Gin." It comes from his 2019 collection Dark Passages: Moments of Transition, published by Sirens Calls Press. Copies of the book can be purchased through amazon HERE.

Nitrate and Gin


A dancer from Kansas
Cherryvale born and bred
Dancing gave you opportunity
Your ticket to New York City

You met the juggling man
Found The street of forgotten men
Dreams flickered on the silver screen
Seeped in nitrate and gin

A jazz baby moving with rhythm
Flowing lines with acting so sublime
A social celebrity in silk stockings
A Venus in evening gowns

Lost in a world of make believe
Choices made upon a whim
Going where boredom led
Not wanting to play their game

Speeding your way to Berlin
Leaving a beggar’s life behind
Fame and immortality waited
Lulu was your destiny

Returning to Hollywood full of hope
Only to find the marquee lights fading
Replaced by bit parts and empty promises
A lost girl imprisoned by Pandora’s Box


 









Wednesday, May 5, 2021

A Kartoon or Komic, and a Kinema Karol mentioning Louise Brooks

As I have mentioned many times in the past, one comes across all kinds of unusual and interesting stuff while researching a subject from the past. That goes for Louise Brooks, as well.

First up, here is a cute Paramount promotional cartoon titled "The Family Selects a Movie" which references Evening Clothes, the 1927 Adolphe Menjou film which features Louise Brooks. The actress herself is not mentioned. Nevertheless, it is rather charming, and speaks to how Paramount saw their films in the American marketplace.

Next up is a bit of verse, with the last piece, "My Best Girl" by Fussy in Beachy Head, England  referencing Louise Brooks (and Clara Bow). These "Kinema Karols" were published in an English film magazine, and also contain a bit of period charm. (And, if I am not mistaken, the Laurel and Hardy caveman still just below the date is from Flying Elephants, a two-reeler from 1928. That film is notable as the only other film in which Brooks' American Venus co-star, Fay Lanphier, made an appearance.)


Monday, January 25, 2021

A poem on the theme of love, and an advert of a Louise Brooks film on the theme of love

Late last year, I ran a short series of blogs highlighting some of the new and unusual material I have come across while researching Louise Brooks' life and career. This was research conducted over the internet during the stay-at-home doldrums of the 2020 pandemic lock-down. My research has continued into 2021, as have the stay-at-home orders. Thanks to longtime Louise Brooks Society supporter Tim Moore, I have recently come across a handful of new and unusual items which I wish to share. This post kicks off another short series of blogs highlighting that material.

Here is a little something I recently came across which caught my eye, an advertisement for the Louise Brooks film, Love Em and Leave Em (1926), which appeared in the Jewish Chronicle, a newspaper published in Newark, New Jersey. Next to the ad is a poem on the theme of love by Louis Ginsberg, the father of the famed poet Allen Ginsberg. Together, the poem and the film ad make for an interesting juxtaposition.

Unlike his son, Louis Ginsberg is not considered a major poet. Rather, he was an accomplished versifier whose poems appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Masses, the New York Evening Post, Argosy, and other periodicals and newspapers, as well as in Modern American Poetry: A Critical Anthology, Third Revised Edition (1925) and Modern British Poetry, both edited by Louis Untermeyer.

Though not shown, the poem printed above is titled "Reasons" and it was dedicated "(For Naomi)" -- Louis Ginsberg's first wife and Allen Ginsberg's mother. As indicated, it appeared in Anthology of Magazine Verse For 1926 And Yearbook of American Poetry, edited by William Stanley Braithwaite.

Let me end with another curious Louise Brooks-Beat Generation overlap.... On Dec. 15, 1948, Lowell, Massachusetts journalist (and future Jack Kerouac in-law) Charles Sampas mused about the silent film star in his newspaper column, writing “I can remember Way Back When and actress named Louise Brooks was the Number One favorite of the Square Beaux….”

Thursday, October 1, 2020

Another newly found poem which references Louise Brooks


Last week, I came across yet another published poem which references Louise Brooks. The poem, titled "The Time Machine," is by Jon Anderson (1940–2007), a contemporary American poet and educator. Anderson's first book, Looking for Jonathan, was an inaugural selection of the Pitt Poetry Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1967. His second, Death & Friends, was nominated for the National Book Award. Anderson won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976; the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1983 for career achievement; and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry in 1986.

"The Time Machine" was included in the author's 1982 book, The Milky Way: Poems 1967-1982, published by Ecco Press. The poem appears in the section of new work, suggesting it was one of the poet's more recent efforts. I am not sure when exactly the poem dates from, but I did find it appeared in the 1981 winter / spring issue of the literary journal Antaeus.

 

In David Wojahn's review of The Milky Way in Prairie Schooner, a literary journal, Wojahn describes Anderson as a tonal poet, and his selected poems a "satisfactory achievement." Wojahn writes that most poets under 45 years old don't have cause for such a book -- as they have not yet truely found their voice. Wojahn writes, "Most poets find their subjects early in their careers, but arrive at at their voices much later, and this is not surprising; we all know what we would like to write about, but few of us can easily delineate our attitude toward the subjects that obsess us." Anderson, Wojahn writes, is an exception.

Some of the poems in The Milky Way concern other writers, artists and composers. Wojahn writes, "Another new poems, 'The Time Machine,' is an homage to the silent-movie actress Louise Brooks, who becomes another member of the Anderson pantheon. . . . Again and again in Anderson's work we see situations in which the speaker attempts to release himself from solipsism through his homages to his saints...."

To me, Anderson's poem is somewhat oblique, though its indirectness is not so much we don't know which scene in Pandora's Box the poet is meditating on. I wish Anderson were still alive, as I would like to write to him and ask him about his work. And why, and what was he referring to, when he titled this poem  "The Time Machine."


Sunday, September 6, 2020

Two poems - one Louise Brooks, one Lulu - second installment in memory of my feelings

With time on my hands due to the coronavirus pandemic quarantine, I was digging around the corners of the internet the other day - two different corners actually, when I came across a couple of poems which I thought might be of interest to readers of this blog which concerns itself with all things Louise Brooks and Lulu. This is the second installment.

Unlike Frank O'Hara's poem featured in the previous blog, I don't know anything about Emilio Vasquez's poem, "Kutinijata Wa, Lulu!"


All I know about it is that it was published in the July-August 1929 issue if Amauta, a significant avant-garde journal published in Peru (though read around the world). Is this Lulu poem is some way about our Lulu, Louise Brooks? It is hard to say.  It was published a few months after Pandora's Box debuted in Germany, though a few months before the film made its way to South America. (Pandora's Box was first screened in Latin America in December of 1929, though coverage of the film began appearing the previous month.)

Here is a poor translation of the poem, via the google translation function. Words in bold I could not translated. Can anyone suggest a better translation, or suggest a meaning for the words in bold?

KUTINIJATA WA, LULU

So under those past moons
as kelluncho mananero
pecked in your eyes in my waters

Today looking for you in his cabin
my suicidal loneliness gallops desperately

Song of kena soledana
my voice calls yelling at you
           kirkincho rose from your ears

Your sneak like recent wikunite
and only the wind burns me with its kiss

My eyes lacewing you in false

Why do you throw me up to kiss the earth

            But
you will return at dawn of fresh milk
like the puqu-puqu to its nest another day

We will start later in song and dance
the same waynu started a sowing day

Your green skirt turns wonder
our path will set afire again


There is little online about the author, Emilio Vasquez, who is unfamiliar to me. However I did find a passing reference to him on the web which mentioned he is considered an Andean modernist. That led me to pull my copy of Dudley Fitts' 1942 New Directions collection, Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry, and I found this brief biographical blurb.

I emailed a scholar of Latin American poetry, but have yet to hear back.

Coincidentally, the Blanton Museum of Art (at the University of Texas at Austin) along with the Museo de Arte de Lima (in Peru) just organized a new exhibit, The Avant-garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s, which relates to the very magazine in which I found this poem. The exhibit description reads: "The 1920s were a period of rapid modernization and artistic innovation across the globe; magazines played an integral role in disseminating bold new ideas and movements. The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s explores this history in Latin America through the magazine Amauta, published in Peru from 1926 to 1930. With an expansive network of collaborators, Amauta captured major artistic and political conversations of the decade including international discussions of the avant-garde, traditional craft as innovation, the visual identity of leftist politics, and the movement of Indigenism. The exhibition has more than 200 objects — including paintings, sculptures, poetry, ceramics, tapestries, woodcut prints, publications, and ephemera —  that richly evoke the milieu of this radical period."


The musuem webpage has a rather nifty virtual tour of the exhibit, which to my eyes, suggests the influence of German expressionism on the Amauta artists. So who knows? Perhaps Emilio Vasquez was hip to what was going on in Germany, especially the considerable amount of coverage given Brooks and her role as Lulu in Pandora's Box, and was inspired to write a poem? Who knows?

Thursday, September 3, 2020

Two poems - one Louise Brooks, one Lulu - first installment in memory of my feelings

With time on my hands due to the coronavirus pandemic quarantine, I was digging around the corners of the internet the other day - two different corners actually, when I came across a couple of poems which I thought might be of interest to readers of this blog which concerns itself with all things Louise Brooks and Lulu. This is the first installment.

The first poem is one I have known about for some time; it is called "F.Y.I. (Prix de Beauté)" and it is by Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), one of the key New York School poets and one of the key American poets of the 1960s. (His 1964 book, Lunch Poems, is a classic and a favorite!) Not only does the poem's title reference a Brooks' film, namely Prix de beauté (1930), it also begins with a quotation from that film, "Et peut-être je t'aimerais encore," or "And maybe I will still love you," which is ascribed to the actress. Here, the poem is dated 7/31/61.


I found the poem while looking through a keyword searchable database of post WWII small press publication which included some lesser known poetry magazines, or what we might today call 'zines. This find was surprising, in that it references the actress rather early on in the history of the Brooks' revival - and that it comes from a poetry journal, not a film journal. The publication was called Audit-Poetry, and it was published out of Buffalo, New York. This issue, vol IV, no. 1, from 1964, featured the work of Frank O'Hara.


I was first made aware of the poem by Bill Berkson (1939-2016), a good friend of O'Hara's and a poet of renown who is also associated with the New York School of Poets. I had known Berkson back when I lived in San Francisco. We met after I had mounted a small exhibit of Louise Brooks memorabilia at a local coffee shop in my San Francisco neighborhood. Among those who visited the exhibit were the artist/filmmaker Bruce Conner (who wrote in the guestbook, see below), the artist known as Jess (who was brought by the poet Norma Cole), and Berkson himself.


Berkson, who lived in my San Francisco neighborhood, suggested we meet. He told me about his own interest and affection for Brooks and that he had written a poem related to the actress which was titled "Bubbles." He also told me about "F.Y.I. (Prix de Beauté)" and his friendship with O'Hara. Berkson said that both of their poems were inspired by a July 31, 1961 screening of Prix de Beauté at the New Yorker theater in New York City which the two young poets attended. O'Hara's poem, dated to the day of the screening, was first published three years a later in Audit-Poetry, and then again in The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, edited by Donald Allen, a book which shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. [I treasure my old hardback copy of this collection, which I had autographed by the late poet John Ashbery (who once met Brooks, which he told me about) and who wrote the introduction. I regret that I did not have Donald Allen sign it as well, as I was acquainted with him during my days as a bookseller in the late 1990s. He was a bit of a curmudgeon.]

Well anyways, Berkson and I got to know one another a bit, and we talked about Brooks, poetry, and art when we met (Berkson was also well known art critic, and I recall the Philip Guston paintings which hung in his apartment). He gave me a copy of his 1984 book Lush Life, which contained "Bubbles." I put on a poetry reading with him at the bookstore where I worked. (The store used to issue trading cards for most all of its events, and I collected a set of signed cards.)


Around that time, I also began making a series of limited edition broadsides in conjunction with some of those bookstore readings, and one that I issued in conjunction with Berkson's reading was of his Brooks-related poem. These broadsides were printed at home on my laser printer on hand-fed watercolor paper (it was a laborious project trying to feed thick textured paper through a printer not meant to accept such paper), usually in an edition of 25 or 50 copies, with each autographed by the poet. Here is the "Bubbles" broadside , which includes a portrait of Brooks in The American Venus discretely drawn like a watermark into the background, just as the actress discretely inspired Berkson's oblique poem. (BTW: Some of the language in this poem is drawn from Brooks' own writings, especially her piece on the making of Beggars of Life.)

 
Bill told me he liked what I had made, and went about signing the edition of 50. I gave him a few copies, and he told me that one would go into his archive which a university was considering purchasing. I was pleased. I also told Bill about my hopes to make a similar broadside for O'Hara's "F.Y.I. (Prix de Beauté)". In fact, I showed him a draft copy, which Bill also liked. He was enthusiastic about the project, and gave me the email of O'Hara's estate so I could write and get permission to publish a broadside. I did so, but was turned down. Alas. And that was the end of that. Here is a low res scan of one of two draft copies. [I recall I gave Berkson one, and kept one.]


post script. I printed a few more broadsides back then, though not all were related to Brooks. Among those that were include an August Kleinzahler poem, "Watching Young Couples with an Old Girlfriend on Sunday Morning," which references Louise Brooks and her "annealed" hair. Beautiful. I also made a Barry Paris broadside at the time I put on event for his reissued biography of Brooks. That was back in 2006....  

 
One of my best efforts was a triptych of broadsides (edition of 25 copies per each poem, total edition of 75) made at the time I did an event with the acclaimed poet Mary Jo Bang for her superb book, Louise in Love. Here is a picture of the three poems, "Louise in Love, - " She Loved Falling" - The Diary of a Lost Girl", along with the cover of Bang's 2001 book.



This blog is a prose poem, if you will, written in memory of my feelings, as it were. The next blog,  the second installment, concerns a Lulu poem written by an obscure Andean modernist published in 1929. Stay tuned.

Friday, December 26, 2014

A poem from Cuba about Louise Brooks

Since Cuba is in the news of late, I thought to rerun this post from the past: A webpage from Cuba once featured a handful of poems "about" eary film stars, including one "about" Louise Brooks! There were also poems "about" Theda Bara, Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, Mae Murray, Charlie Chaplin and others. The poems are by Carlos Esquivel, a contemporary Cuban writer. Here is the Brooks' piece (whose title translates as "A Love Letter to Louise Brooks").

                                                      UNA CARTA DE AMOR PARA LOUISE BROOKS

Nada me une a ti sino lo que está más lejos:
el padre que no pude decir abrácense hijos,
esta sequía que ya aburre
 y junta las hebras de dormir con las de estar muertos,
ese perro recién nacido por los golpes y la fragilidad
de los apostadores,
y el trueno que no nos deja un águila viva.
Nada une como secar la pólvora en que hemos estado a salvo
mientras guardan en los sepulcros las hachas húmedas por la sangre
de otras muchachas.
Condenado a ser un hombre triste,
como un mensajero que se acoda
en la tribu enemiga, viviendo fuera de los muertos que le pertenecen,
doloroso y elegido en esta religión de olvidarte,
en la tierra que huele a abalorios, a coz,
advenedizo ante el oráculo y el agua áspera de las consignas.
Pero no soy quien cae de rodillas
y echa fuera de la armadura su presagio de vejez.
Sólo soy quien declara su amor como el prisionero
apostado a soñar con lo imposible.
Ya la madre no pensará en nosotros,
y en las misas los tambores llamarán a la fornicación,
heridos por el ácido de las absoluciones
y por los peñascos de quienes vaticinan
una zona blanca para los esqueletos amados.
Bienvenidos, dirán los niños,
y rezaremos ardiendo los sepulcros,
vueltos a callar en la carne y en la madera,
derribados por el coraje y la orina con que el hijo nos condenaba.
La sangre debe unir todo lo que en mí se hunde.
Debajo de esta barba de príncipe, mi corazón intacto
a las arrugas y a los zarcillos,
derramándose por las moras y los herbolarios,
húmedo de las concubinas que  habrán cobrado mi locura.
El corazón cercado,  como el tonto pájaro de Atamelipa.
Nada me une a ti sino lo que ruedea devolviéndose.
Augurar también que nos pregunten,
que en el vientre y los muslos un hijo nos pertenezca.
Nada me une más a ti que lo que no existe,
una espalda que imagino como única mentira,
y una muchacha con su cuerno de caza terminando la historia.
Quién sabe con qué esperanza tendremos el alcohol,
y la garganta hará un incendio para hacernos olvidar,
para sentarnos ante el poema
e inventar un grito.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

"Louise Brooks," a poem by William Logan

Willian Logan's poem, "Louise Brooks," was first published in the TLS (Times Literary Supplement) on April 8, 2008. Logan is a poet whose most recent book, Madame X (Penguin), was published in 2012. "Louise Brooks" will be in his next book, tentatively titled Rift of Light (probably 2016).  The poem is published here with the permission of the author.


Louise Brooks

Certain memories, uncertain,
and bearing toward gentle impoverishment—

Brooks, I mean, of the bow mouth
and ink-rimmed eye, the raccoon’s

calculating, injured stare,
and a black coiffure like an Achaean helmet.

There were few like her along the Niobrara.
 

Sunday, January 19, 2014

All Movies Love the Moon Trailer

Louise Brooks is pictured in this trailer for a forthcoming book, Gregory Robinson's All Movies Love the Moon: Prose Poems on Silent Film, to be published by Rose Metal Press in March 2014. The book will be for sale at www.rosemetalpress.com, www.spdbooks.org, and Amazon.com. Thanx to writer Lisa K. Buchanan for pointing me to this video.


About the book from the publisher: Anyone who watches silent movies will notice how often crashes occur—trains, cars, and people constantly collide and drama or comedy ensues. Gregory Robinson's All Movies Love the Moon is also a collision, a theater where prose, poetry, images, and history meet in an orchestrated accident. The result is a film textbook gone awry, a collection of linked prose poems and images tracing silent cinema's relationship with words—the bygone age of title cards. The reel begins with early experiments in storytelling, such as Méliès' A Trip to the Moon and Edison's The European Rest Cure, and ends with the full-length features that contested the transition to talkies. Of course, anyone seeking an accurate account of silent movies will not find it here. Through Robinson's captivating anecdotes, imaginings, and original artwork, the beauty of silent movies persists and expands. Like the lovely grainy films of the 1910s and 20s, All Movies Love the Moon uses forgotten stills, projected text, and hazy frames to bring an old era into new focus. Here, movies that are lost or fading serve as points of origin, places to begin.

Sunday, March 16
Gregory Robinson reading from All Movies Love the Moon at the Marble Room Reading Series at 4:00 pm. Free and open to the public

The Marble Room Reading Series
The Parlor
1434 N. Western Ave., Chicago, Illinois


Friday, April 11
Gregory Robinson reading from All Movies Love the Moon at the Caffeine Corridor Poetry Series at 7:00 pm. Free and open to the public.


The Caffiene Corridor Series
9 The Gallery
1229 Grand Ave., Phoenix, Arizona

Saturday, July 27, 2013

New book of poems based on Louise Brooks

Hazard Press in Wales has published LULU REFLECTS: A BIOPOEMOGRAPHY OF LOUISE BROOKS, a sequence of fourteen poems forming an imagined autobiography of the silent film star Louise Brooks. This hand-made book is 24 pages (105mm x 148.5mm) including card cover with patterned endpapers and Japanese binding. Edition of 100, with the number hand-stamped on the reverse.

More information and ability to order at http://www.hazardpress.co.uk/

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Stanzas about Louise Brooks

Did you know that Vachel Lindsay wrote poems about Mary Pickford? Or that Hart Crane wrote poems about Charlie Chaplin? Or that Frank O'Hara wrote a poem inspired by Louise Brooks? 

The tradition of writing poems about silent film - and especially about silent film stars, goes all the way back to the silent film era. Lindsay was among the first, and is certainly the most famous practitioner. Anthony Slide's book, The Picture Dancing on a Screen: Poetry of the Cinema (Vestel Press, 1988) collects a number of early examples by both well known and little know writers from the first half of the 20th century. Another expansive anthology is The Faber Book of Movie Verse (Faber & Faber, 1995). This latter collection contains a selection devoted to the silent era.  One book I've come across on the subject is Laurence Goldstein's The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History (University of Michigan Press, 1995).  

A blog which continues the tradition is Silent Stanzas. It bills itself as "poetry, photos and anecdotes about silent film." It's well worth checking out. And, its where I found this poem about Louise Brooks.

Scrubbie's Sonnet

Her liquid gaze could melt the coldest heart,
Her perfect face framed ‘round by ebony;
Since early on her dancing was an art –
Lithe hands and limbs in quaking ecstasy.
Not one to walk on eggshells, biting wit
And knife-blade tongue would often trouble make;
But unrelenting, in the face of it
She’d stand, too proud to let it see her break.
From featured player to forgotten star,
To author/critic, razor-edged and quick:
A sharpened, honey-coated scimitar,
A heady blend of sex and arsenic.
With such a life – complex beyond compare –
How strange her strongest legacy’s her hair.
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