Don’t listen to him. Mr. Voice-Over-Man. He’s one man, with one vocal timbre, and an uncanny knack for taking a sensitive, intelligent, nuanced film, and making it sound like corn syrup. Don’t listen to the voice in the preview. I did. It made me queasy. I suppressed the gag reflex only by remembering that a trusted, smart, literate friend recommended the film to me after seeing it at the Toronto film festival. And I’m glad she did.
“Bright Star” is visually stunning. But beyond this, the immediacy of the acting, the intensity of commitment in each moment, and, of course, the respectful treatment of poetry, make this a movie that stayed with me long after the final recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale” over the simple scrolling credits. This is a romance with no sex, and no happily ever after. In fact, after witnessing the scene in which Fanny learns of John’s death, if your heart isn’t smashed into glittering pieces, you probably don’t have one.
I memorized “Bright Star” as a teenager, shortly after memorizing Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star”–and was led from one to the other by Frost’s mention of “Keats’ Eremite.” This film brought back the magnificence of adolescent angst, that deepest yearning for some ineffable ideal–the very essence of romance. It is a fitting tribute to the man himself–who died young after a life marked by external suffering, and great inner beauty. If you love poetry, and especially the Romantics, do yourself a favor–along with your cheapskate bag of microwave popcorn, sneak your own inner romantic in to the darkened theater, and witness the fleeting brilliance of this portrayal one of literature’s bright falling stars.
I woke up recently with a line from a song in my head. The song was “Cemetery Gates” by The Smiths–one of their signature jaunty-melody-with-morose-lyrics numbers. The actual meaning of the song is less important than the way my own subconscious seems to have appropriated the message upon waking. I rolled over in bed and repeated the line to Val: “Keats and Yeats are on your side.” She smiled. “You know, I think that’s true. I think they are on your side, Robert.”
What a strange and comforting thought. What would those generations of poets stretching back into antiquity think of those of us still practicing the art in the era of iPhones and micro-blogging? I think they might be proud. The prospects for wealth and recognition are certainly far greater in other disciplines, and always have been. And yet, in that moment, it occurred to me that the ghosts of poetry past might somehow be rooting for us, now more than ever, as we ply an art that must seem, to some, anachronistic.
Still, the poets of yesteryear probably had the same combination of wild inventiveness and ferocious discipline that attracts us contemporary poets to the page. Had we all met, therefore, we might have got along–and perhaps one day in the poetic afterlife, we will find, despite our factions and fracases, that we were all on the same side all along.
For those of you interested in hearing the whole song, here it is:
In case, like me, you may have been taking yourself a bit too seriously lately, please enjoy what may be one of the strangest Monty Python sketches in history, featuring three of the big six of Romantic poetry, ants, the queen, and lots of sherry–all conveniently subtitled in Spanish:
We sheltered in John Keats’s house this afternoon. (“Hampstead isn’t far; we won’t need our rain wear!”) Poignant, to see the couch on which he retired, the view he contemplated, toward the end of his short life. More fodder for my thinking on poetic tradition: apparently he wrote poems in the pages of his Complete Works of Shakespeare as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Talk about responding when the inspiration strikes… Afterward, I barely managed to roll back through The Heath after a phenomenal Indian food meal on High Street. No doubt ghee is now seeping from my pores. And on that note, I’m off to write some gritty laments on the back pages of the Larry Levis book I brought along.
“…at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously–I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”
What struck me most about both The City In Which I Love You and Rose was Lee’s tenderness. It is not softness per se or looking only on the gentler side of things–far from it, his poetry encompasses, contains and holds moments of profound suffering and injustice sharply in its lens. Yet there is a quality of seeking to understand the human side of everything this poetry looks upon. This is a compelling kind of tenderness–not the tidy, maudlin tenderness of Hallmark greeting cards, but a profound ability to look lovingly and longingly at the deeper themes of life, which are necessarily complex and unresolved.
I find satisfaction in Lee’s poetry through its sensitive details. He seems to let me in unflinchingly to his most intimate moments. Yet despite such vulnerability, he never steers the experience toward any overt manipulation of what I should feel or think–the dignity of that burden is left solely with me. By focusing on detail in a spare and careful way, and resisting any urge to tie things up too neatly, Lee’s poems ring with an incredible veracity, and leave me feeling as though I have experienced, briefly, another’s life.
For example, this is part of the final section of “My Sleeping Loved Ones” from Rose:
More than the cheekbones I inherited from my mother,
more than my left hand, the spear,
or my right hand, the hammer, more
than humility, like my father’s heavy hand
on the back of my neck,
it is my love
for the sleeping ones
which recommends me.
Continue Reading “Li-Young Lee’s Compelling Tenderness” »
