Reflections on a Lost Cinema

Before I studied poetry, I spent two years studying film; not at a prestigious film school, but at a small college in Liverpool, called South Mersey College. Those were the best two years of my life.

At the college, we watched classic Hollywood films by directors like Howard Hawks, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and William Wyler, alongside European avant-garde films by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky. We studied American Direct Cinema through the films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles. And also the experimental filmmaking pioneered by Len Lye and Stan Brakhage, as well as the underground cinema of Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. After each screening, we analysed the films’ themes, visual style, editing and historical context.

We also studied movements such as German Expressionism, Film Noir, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, Soviet Montage, Constructivist cinema, Surrealism, British Social Realism and New Hollywood. Our reading list included Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art, Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form and The Film Sense and André Bazin’s What Is Cinema?

I was fascinated by the vibrant use of colour in 1940s and ’50s films. Bright, saturated hues made every frame look like a living painting. Music was equally as important to me, producing maybe eighty percent of a film’s emotional impact. At that time, one of my musical muses was Aaron Copland. I had only recently discovered his works, such as Fanfare for the Common Man and the score he composed for the film The Red Pony. Both pieces were life-affirming, and they became a personal soundtrack to my daydreams of the sorts of films I wanted to make. In my mind, I created film sequences, rising and falling with the flow of the music.

Had I known then how cinema would evolve, I might have been less optimistic. The digital revolution has changed everything. Traditional film stock (16 mm, 35 mm, 70 mm) has largely disappeared. Cameras have become lighter, and handheld naturalism dominates the look of films, with available light replacing carefully designed chiaroscuro lighting schemes. And long takes have largely replaced montage. Digital detail is sharper, but it lacks the depth and texture of film. The deliberate use of light, shadow and colour (the visual poetry that once defined films) has given way to bland, uniform imagery. Music, too, has shifted towards ambient textures rather than emotional scores.

Maybe this will change, and film will return as a tactile, expressive medium once digital technology matures. But for now, many contemporary films have no magic. Yet when I hear a Copland score, I can still glimpse the wonder that first drew me to film.

‘Death, Taxes and Poetry, or, Poetry is My Disability’ by Joritz-Nakagawa—guest blogger

Unable to bear it any longer, I start splintering . . .

I write this in big letters, my eyesight is fading . . .

When my father in law died I wrote a poem the second line of which was "No one will notice Milton's light has dimmed" and which ended ". . . and none of this is actually visible from the lighthouse."

This poem was published under the title The Lighthouse, in New American Writing, a print journal I am very fond of, although I read mostly online now, and also appears with no title in my 2013 poetry collection titled FLUX.

Of course I was referring to John Milton's famous sonnet ‘When I Consider How My Light is Spent’ also known as ‘On His Blindness’ and ‘Sonnet XIX,’ a poem I taught several times in an undergrad course in comparative poetry here in Japan.

After that, my mother in law died, my sister in law died (in October 2025), and my husband has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. My own parents have died, two siblings died of cancer when they are the age I am now, friends died, friends of friends and relatives of friends died, etc. et al.

I survived advanced cancer but it was a kind of devil's bargain: you can live, or you can choose palliative chemo, but your body and new life will be (almost?) unrecognizable in many important ways. But not in this way: poetry is still my disability.

I have written somewhat extensively about death as well as my multiple chronic illnesses and other disabilities and those of others.

When at one of my lowest points, before my third surgery for cancer, I was so frightened of death and further disability that I read Emily Dickinson's poems aloud to myself every night from my bed. Any poem of hers that mentioned psychic pain would do. And there is a great many of such poems by Dickinson, so there was much to choose from! I didn't even have to repeat myself, as I often do!

I am not saying however that disability is bad or necessarily frightening. I don't think that at all, and I was already disabled anyhow before I got cancer. I just became much more so—more disabled I mean. I was afraid of suffering, which is not the same thing as disability, or death, and the unknown, and perhaps a feeling of my own powerlessness in this situation. Please let's not confuse these!

I was net surfing recently and found somebody much younger than myself referring to a group of young persons who are "dark" (their word, not mine!) and inevitably drawn to Plath! I was very surprised to hear this remark! First, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that young people know who Plath is! Although always interested in Plath due to her thematic range, theatricality, power, mastery of verse and stylistic achievements, I didn't really feel the depth of that kind of darkness that appears in some of her late poems until later in life when due to extensive bereavement I felt I was living in it. Or as a Christian friend said to me recently, maybe this life on earth is hell, and heaven is what we get when we die?

But we (= I) also know, if only from opera, that love makes a heaven out of life if only temporarily; love is fragile and can turn to hate or disinterest or disappointment, etc. with relative ease. Can it bounce back with relative ease?

The happiest elegy (actually a so-called "self-elegy" which is why it is more cheerful!) I know is Christina Rossetti's ‘Remember,’ another poem I have taught to undergrads; the saddest is ‘Ending with a Line From Lear’ by Marvin Bell, which I have not. At times of intense suffering (e.g. physical pain, or, bereavement or depression) I have often repeated to myself his line: "I will never be better again" oftentimes followed by the final line, the repetition of the word "never." I was wrong about that, but it helped me to say it, anyway. There's also song lyrics by the band Everclear which begin "I hate waking up, it means I have to die again tonight…" another set of words I have repeated in my head upon waking up during my worst moments in life. As well as the beginning and ending of William Carlos Williams' poem ‘The Widow's Lament in Springtime;’ interestingly, the lyrics to Everclear's ‘Fire Maple Song’ contains a line similar to one in Williams' poem. These poems and songs soothe me somehow during difficult times, although they do much more than that.

Yet life changes, we change, things change.

But poetry is still my disability.

As a person with fibromyalgia, one of the Plath lines I most identify with, from her incredible poem ‘Tulips’ published when I was two years old, is: "The tulips are too red in the first place they hurt me."

I was raised by Plath. No, I don't mean I was raised on Plath or knew her personally. I mean Plath's generation was my mother's generation and they both raised me, if not revived me. A fiction writer friend who also likes poetry once said: "All women can relate to Plath." She meant all women of our generation. Because we were raised by Plath.

When I say "blue bladder" I don't mean the color blue. I mean my bladder is sad. Because it was removed from my body seven years ago.

When I say "There are baroque places inside me" I am quoting someone else.

Poetry is my disability.

NOTES:

“There are baroque places inside me” comes from the poem ‘The Believable Weather of His Baroque Face on a Wall’ by Raymond Farr in the journal Upstairs at Duroc, ed. Barbara Beck, issue 17, 2020, Paris.

A monograph by the author about Plath and other female poets under the title Dying Swans is available online via Argotist Ebooks.

Bob Dylan’s “Jimmie Rodgers” Voice on ‘Nashville Skyline’

Last year I noticed for the first time that Bob Dylan’s singing voice on Nashville Skyline was a direct homage to Jimmie Rodgers. I’d been a Dylan fan for years without realising this; and wouldn’t have, had I not happened to hear a clip of Rodgers singing. I was astounded by the similarity.

When Nashville Skyline came out in 1969, Dylan’s voice was widely remarked upon as being very different from his usual one. The nasal, reedy tone had been replaced by a warmer and smoother sound. This was seen as being more “country music–oriented”, though in what specific sense was never really explained. It was simply taken as a given.

As far as I know, no one has ever identified this “specific sense”, which I now believe to be Dylan’s adoption of Jimmie Rodgers’ vocal style.

Jimmie Rodgers is often called “the father of country music” for his relaxed, storytelling delivery, which helped define the genre’s emotional vocabulary. He was also distinct in his use of yodelling, which, as far as I know, was never used in country music before him.

Dylan, with his near-encyclopaedic knowledge of folk and country songs, would have known Rodgers’ songs inside out. He grew up with Rodgers’ music, and in interviews mentioned owning the album Hank Snow Sings Jimmie Rodgers as a teenager. And in The Bootleg Series Vol. 15: Travelin' Thru, 1967–1969 sessions, he sang Jimmie Rodgers medleys with Johnny Cash.

It seems very likely, then, that for Nashville Skyline he chose to base its vocal “sonic architecture” on Rodgers’ voice. Every song on the album can be heard as an homage to Rodgers’ singing.

Though critics immediately noticed Dylan’s changed voice, none remarked on how much it sounded like Rodgers’. That oversight is glaring, given the unmistakable resemblance.

And while Dylan never said outright, 'I sang like Jimmie Rodgers on Nashville Skyline' the parallels are obvious.

This is not to suggest that he was "channelling" Rodgers or mimicking him. It was more a continuation of a lineage. Rodgers’ voice represented the ordinary person singing about their troubles and pleasures in a simple, unembellished way. However, where Rodgers had turned American “work songs” and blues into country, Dylan turned country into something like an “art song”—but without pretension.

Rachel Lisi—Still Remembered

A dear friend of mine died in 2010, aged only 40. Her name was Rachel Lisi. She was an unknown poet who deserved to be known. She was also a photographer and graphic artist, and did a few cover images for Argotist Ebooks.

I just wanted to mention her now, after all these years, to keep her memory alive.

Here is a YouTube video her family put together after she died.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xbL4R0CS34

Kent Johnson: In Praise of Mischief and Literary Disruption

It’s been several years now since Kent Johnson passed. I had corresponded with him for roughly a decade, from around 2008 until a few months before his death, and I once interviewed him for The Argotist Online. At one point, he approached me about publishing an ebook of his collected writings. I was eager to do so but the project ultimately fell through: the sheer volume of material he offered, and the extensive editing it required, felt beyond my capacity. Still, I was genuinely flattered that he had asked me—and that he had such faith in ebooks as a medium.

Kent was something of a mythical figure in the circles of contemporary poetry. He was someone no one could quite categorise: was he a critic, a satirist, an archivist or a literary provocateur? When he was a child in Montevideo, he played ping-pong with the sons of ambassadors and even had Duke Ellington pat him on the head, and saying, ‘And what is your name, handsome young man?’—which he mentioned decades later with fondness. And in his early twenties, he was a literacy teacher in Nicaragua, living with revolutionaries and translating his first poetry collection in collaboration with Ernesto Cardenal, a priest and poet.

In the correspondence I had with him, I saw the breadth of his vision. He engaged deeply with avant-garde practice, the politics of poetry and the sociology of literary communities. He was always curious about the literary world; and no claim, scandal and poetic controversy was too insignificant for his attention. He questioned cliques, examined complicity and exposed absurdities with a sharp wit, but never with cruelty.

Looking back, I think what fascinated him most about poetry was its potential as a kind of “performance art”. Not in the sense of being performed as in “performance poetry”, but as an “idea” that could be used for performative interventions: mischief, satire or creative disruption. He cared less for poetry as a personal or aesthetic expression than for its capacity to function as a “disruptive element”—a kind of conceptual defamiliarisation that could unsettle, provoke or even create chaos.

Even in his youth, chaos was never too far away. A bowling alley in Carrasco, Uruguay, was bombed by Tupamaros (a Marxist–Leninist urban guerrilla group that operated in Uruguay during the 1960s and 1970s) just a few hours after he'd been there with the two sons of two CIA counterinsurgency specialists.

In the end, his work demonstrates that poetry is not only about the page, but is a performative act, a playground for imaginative intervention. He treated the literary world as a stage, and poetry as the stage directions.

When my friend the poet and photographer, Rachel Lisi, died unexpectedly at the age of only 40 in 2010, Kent commiserated with me, saying that though as a poet she was little-recognised, she would always be remembered. May the same be true of him.

Poetry and Song Are the Same Artform

The debate over whether poems and songs are separate art forms or simply variations of the same aesthetic expression has a long history. At first sight, the difference seems obvious: poems are primarily meant to be read, while songs are experienced as sound, with music and vocals creating a listening experience. This distinction is often taken as self-evident, determining how audiences approach and categorise these forms. Yet this superficial difference overlooks deeper questions about how each affects us emotionally and cognitively, and about the complex ways in which language, sound and rhythm interact to determine artistic experience.

One significant difference is in how we experience rhythm. Poems rely on rhythm, rhyme and line breaks built into the written text, engaging the reader’s “inner ear” as they mentally hear the flow while reading. This internal auditory experience is an imaginative process, determined by linguistic background, prior knowledge and personal interpretation. Songs, on the other hand, deliver rhythm externally through melody, instrumentation and vocal performance, creating a direct auditory impact. The physical presence of sound waves and the nuances of timbre, pitch and volume give songs a sensorial immediacy that written poetry lacks. The performative element (the singer’s voice, the arrangement, even the listening setting) adds layers of meaning and emotion beyond the text itself.

Critics sometimes suggest that poems and songs invoke fundamentally different responses, yet much of this originates from cultural expectation and setting. In many traditions, songs belong to communal gatherings, rituals and celebrations, engaging listeners through shared sound and movement, while poetry is more often associated with solitary reflection or intellectual engagement. Reading a poem draws on the “inner ear”, determining rhythm and tone through imagination, whereas hearing a song delivers these qualities directly through melody, repetition and performance. In both cases, response is determined not only by the work itself but by the way it is encountered: in private or in company, in silence or in sound, in memory or in the moment. The boundary between them is fluid: many songs contain poetic language, and many poems have been set to music, underscoring the interplay between the two forms.

Despite this, the difference between a poem read on the page and a song heard aloud is less absolute than it seems. Poetry, when read, activates the imagination and inner hearing, drawing us in through patterns of sound and rhythm in the mind’s ear. These sonic qualities can evoke emotion and meaning much like music does, even in silence. The pauses between lines, the visual layout of stanzas and the typography of the text all shape its rhythm and pacing, producing effects that songs sometimes echo but cannot fully replicate. This internalisation of sound allows poetry to transcend the limitations of the printed page, creating a deeply personal and intimate experience that varies widely between individuals and contexts.

Whilst formal distinctions remain (poems are lines on a page, songs combine lyrics with melody and instrumentation), both share a common aesthetic foundation of sound, rhythm, voice and emotional resonance. The difference between them lies more in context and expectation than in essence.

Neuroscience corroborates this connection, demonstrating that reading poetry and listening to music engage overlapping brain networks, particularly in processing rhythm, sound patterns and emotion. Brain imaging shows that both activities stimulate regions linked to auditory perception, emotional regulation and pattern recognition; whether the rhythm is imagined through the reader’s “inner ear” or carried to us on waves of melody and instrumentation. At the same time, each form also draws on specialised circuitry: poetry on the page largely utilises language-processing areas, while song largely utilises pitch and melody-related regions. This blend of shared and distinct activation suggests that the mind responds to both with a common aesthetic framework, yet determines that response to match the sensory pathway (silent reading or audible performance) through which the art is experienced.

Ultimately, the difference between poems as read experiences and songs as heard experiences shows how context, perception and mental engagement determine our experience of artistic expression. Recognising their shared aesthetic roots and the fluidity between reading and listening gives us a broader appreciation of how rhythm, voice and sound create meaning: whether imagined in the mind or heard through the ears. The borders between literary and musical arts, therefore, are permeable, shifting with culture, history and individual perception.