Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101908033 ISBN 13: 9781101908037

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2019

Synopsis

A unique Pocket Poets anthology of a hundred years of poetic tributes to the silver screen, from the silent film era to the present.

The variety of subjects is dazzling, from movie stars to bit players, from B-movies to Bollywood, from Clark Gable to Jean Cocteau. More than a hundred poets riff on their movie memories: Langston Hughes and John Updike on the theaters of their youth, Jack Kerouac and Robert Lowell on Harpo Marx, Sharon Olds on Marilyn Monroe, Louise Erdrich on John Wayne, May Swenson on the James Bond films, Terrance Hayes on early Black cinema, Maxine Kumin on Casablanca, and Richard Wilbur on The Prisoner of Zenda. Orson Welles, Leni Riefenstahl, and Ingmar Bergman share the spotlight with Shirley Temple, King Kong, and Carmen Miranda; Bonnie and Clyde and Ridley Scott with Roshomon, Hitchcock, and Bresson. In Reel Verse, one of our oldest art forms pays loving homage to one of our newest—the thrilling art of cinema.

About this title

About the Author:

HAROLD SCHECHTER is a retired professor of American literature and culture at Queens College, CUNY, and the author of several mystery novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe, as well as coeditor of two previous Everyman's Library Pocket Poets. He lives in New York City.
MICHAEL WATERS is the author of numerous poetry collections, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist Darling Vulgarity (2006) and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001). His honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and five Pushcart Prizes. Waters teaches at Monmouth University and Drew University. He lives in Ocean, New Jersey.

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Foreword
 
If, as Henry David Thoreau says, “our truest lives are when we are in dreams awake,” then millions of people have led, if not their truest, certainly their most vivid lives in darkened theaters, immersed in the transporting dreams unreeling before their open eyes. The narrator of Walker Percy’s classic novel, The Moviegoer, speaks for many in recalling the high points of his life: “Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Pantheon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I, too, once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach. And the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
                 
That poets—practitioners of what is traditionally viewed as the most refined of arts—should devote their writings to a medium as demotic as the movies might seem paradoxical at a glance. But as the poet Vachel Lindsay was the first to acknowledge, the deities of the ancient pantheon have been replaced in the modern world by the gods and goddesses of the silver screen. Far from being mere entertainment, the movies constitute the myths of our time. In the century since the birth of the Hollywood studios, poets, as the works collected here attest, have been deeply engaged with the movies, exploring the countless ways those celluloid dreams have nourished, excited, and shaped the modern imagination.
 
—Harold Schechter and Michael Waters

About this edition

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1101908033
• ISBN 13: 9781101908037
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Waters Michael, Schechter Harold