☀ Today's Poem: "Cold" James Womack

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September 17, 2024

Cold

It was a smug film, smug on its own evil, fat with it,
the actor-king so smug, the direction, allegedly so cold, so pure,
in fact only smug-drunk on its ambience of slush and nicotine,
springtime and grey city light and all the poor beige suicides,
the camera always moving, side to side, more fear, more broken
people, the surrounders, who indulged their man’s brokenness,
the always sense of a wink to the camera, of men complicit in their
acting, their actions. I want to know nothing—this is not grief,
this is a teenage boy’s, an Italian’s fantasy of grief, how to weaponise
grief, grief as the royal road to a woman’s body—and we tell the
audience that she is unsatisfied, and she keeps coming back
doesn’t she, she’s asking for everything that is filmed and shown,
and the great statue, Brando collapsing, Brando shouting,
the reason for all this, the centrepiece, his grunting
the audible sign of a great actor, just how close can you approach
a full contempt for the audience and still pivot on their love,
Brando grunting and dangerous even through the screen. One moment
in this vast smug film, black stain on the negative, when
I tell you I felt as pure a cold as any art has ever made me feel,
when Jeanne shouts across the metro station, a train passing,
to her useless and aggressive boyfriend, screams in a fury she
deserves je suis fatigué de me faire violer | I am tired of being raped
and the train passes and she has her fury out in the world
and that clever-clever camera switches to show how she is seeing
and there is no one standing or listening on the other platform.
And I saw this film in the cold cinema, the Spartak cinema,
the unheated former Lutheran church on Kirochnaya Street,
in 2001, before it was destroyed in an insurance fire,
in spring, almost spring, I was unhappy, not that unhappy, in love.
The film a scratched print, the sound horrid, the underpaid
abused lektor read out the script in a dry Russian monotone,
and the film was so cold, the church so cold, the camera eye so too . . .
I did not deserve to feel so cold, but what saved me was the world
existing outside the film, the cinema, the church, the abyss,
that voyeur, always ready with a few home truths, and to know that
yes, there was always standing and listening and watching,
and you can see the world without judgement and knowledge, it is not
all grey and tired, even in the grey-tired, grey-skinned city.
I came out into the grey evening, and forced myself to see life,
and that evening the bridges opened like a great stone bible,
and the river, the frozen river, the river, tore pages from itself.

from the book WHY ARE YOU SHOUTING? / Carcanet Press

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Forward

This is a poem based on real events, but as is the way of these things I wrote it a long time after the events it describes. I think this is an important part of its structure, as the anger which I perhaps feel with myself for having given in to "Last Tango in Paris" the first time I saw it (and it can be a grimly seductive movie) is turned into a slightly healthier if still hypocritical denunciation.
James Womack on "Cold"

"How Seamus Heaney Wrote His Way Through a War"
"To Heaney, a good poem was 'a site of energy and tension and possibility, a truth-telling arena but not a killing field.' The poet should be tolerant, disinterested, clear-eyed about long-standing animosities but not constrained by them. Allergic to propaganda, and loath to let anyone tell him what to write, he worked to carve out a space of creative freedom—then used this freedom to meditate on what he owed to others."
via THE NEW YORKER

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

What Sparks Poetry: Dior Stephens on "UYP 7"

“The plum and the plum tree, then, became a philosophical center for me. Or, if not center, a lily pad of poetic thought, leading me to reflect on what exactly it meant for such fruition, such overabundance, to result in death, rot, and souring. And how, in a number of ways, these stages of growth remarked upon the trends of capitalism, (over)production and exploitation in Western society. I couldn’t help but wonder, day after day, if this cycle—that of bud to bloom to death and decay—was inevitable in all arenas of life.”

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