Please, if any of you have knowledge of any good poems involving cinema reply immediatly. I would be in your debt forever.

thank you


hutto



~My old man always swore that hell would have no flame. Just a front row seat to watch your true love pack her things and walk away~

Picture-Show
-Siegfried Sassoon

AND still they come and go: and this is all I know—
That from the gloom I watch an endless picture-show,
Where wild or listless faces flicker on their way,
With glad or grievous hearts I’ll never understand
Because Time spins so fast, and they’ve no time to stay
Beyond the moment’s gesture of a lifted hand.

And still, between the shadow and the blinding flame,
The brave despair of men flings onward, ever the same
As in those doom-lit years that wait them, and have been...
And life is just the picture dancing on a screen.

pam

Cinema Screen
---A.S.J. Tessimond

Light's patterns freeze:
Frost on our faces.
Light's pollen sifts
Through the lids of our eyes ...

Light sinks and rusts
In water; is broken
By glass ... rests
On deserted dust.

Light lies like torn
Paper in corners:
A rock-pool's pledge
Of the sea's return.

Light, wrenched at the edges
By wind, looks down
At itself in wrinkled
Mirrors from bridges.

Light thinly unweaves
Itself through darkness
Like foam's unknotting
Strings in waves ...

Now light is again
Accumulated
Swords against us ...
Now it is gone.

Les

There's a whole book: The Faber Book of Movie Verse.

Frank O'Hara's Ave Maria is a good one.

It starts:

"Mothers of America!
Let your kids go to the movies!"

It's in the book Lunch Poems, and in the Selected Poems (Carcanet, in England)

There's a really gruesome one about someone losing an eye in the cinema, but I can't remember who wrote it.

I think you'll find more by searching for [poem + "name of actor or movie"].

I just tried [poem = "Charlie Chaplin"] and learned this:

      In 1923 Hart Crane, who wrote a poem
      about Chaplin, said his pantomime "represents
      the futile gesture of the poet today."

Found this on Bartleby.com by searching the VERSE archives for the word "movies":

The Movies
by Florence Kiper Frank

SHE knows a cheap release
From worry and from pain—
The cowboys spur their horses
Over the unending plain.

The tenement rooms are small;
Their walls press on the brain.
Oh, the dip of the galloping horses
On the limitless, wind-swept plain!

=====================

Go to www.bartleby.com and try that search -- there were several hits.