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A Minor Press
86 pages, $12.95, £ 8.45, € 9.82
Review by Michelle Elvy
1. The beginning, middle, and end
When you dive into Sam Rasnake’s poetry, you give yourself over to words and worlds you’ve not touched before. I’ve read plenty of Rasnake’s words before, from online journals to his last collection, Inside a Broken Clock. He challenges and inspires, both intellectually and emotionally. And now, with his latest offering, Cinéma Vérité, I find myself caught up in his heady love affair with poetry and film, image and truth, space and silence, fragments and wholes.
I’m not a film buff like Rasnake, I admit. But the way he combines observations from and about films with observations of life, love, art, and death has me rethinking Welles, Malick, Kubrick, Godard, and Campion (and many more, from Wim Wenders to Spike Lee). He fits language and image together in a close examination of a wide selection of modern films. Here we have film reconsidered through a poet’s eye, connecting the specific to the universal.
In keeping with the collection’s title, Rasnake examines not merely films themselves but the truths they may reveal (which may turn out to be lies). Rasnake’s reverence for great films and their makers is clear, but he pushes beyond mere admiration to scrutinize the meaning behind words and images.
The collection is organized into three parts:
I. The Way the Story Begins
II. Spaces between the Words
III. A Scribbling on the Walls
The first part indicates certainty – begin at the beginning. The second reveals there’s more to the story than the words on the page. By the time we reach the third section, we know we’ve got to rethink the notion of beginning, middle, and end. In the end, the end is not so much a definitive thing after all (as Rasnake reminds us), but ‘a scribbling’: a hint of things we’ve read and seen as well as things yet to come, an inkling of what we know and don’t know.
2. Themes & Details
Playing with narrative and story – asking to what extent these constructs hold any meaning at all – is a central theme. We hear this message in the opening lines of the first poem – The beginning middle and end don’t fit/ our lives anymore – and it’s a common thread. Rasnake’s examination of cinema has nothing to do with mere movement from A to B; plot is not nearly as interesting as the perplexities of the order of things. We see this in “Games of Persuasion” (This is the way the story begins./ Just repeated lines. Words shifting), in “Everything in Motion” (The end bullies its way into our joints/ moves us closer until the face we see/ we no longer recognize), and in “Woman in Tableaux [middle]: My life, chapter 3” (her words finding her at last – or should I say ‘at beginning’ – finding her where she has always been) – a poem ordered in three parts, starting in the middle (“My life, chapter 3”), then moving to end, then beginning.
Other Rasnakian themes include music and silence, inextricable from film and poetry. We see this from the opening phrase of “Lines Written Under the Influence” to voices whispering (or coughing) hallelujahs in more than one place. Silence haunts in “Frame Line: ‘A New World of Gods and Monsters’” (what a closing!) and the ‘Blue’ section of “Four Colors” (the missing lines of ink on paper,/ the flute with no streets to fill). Death and memory go hand in hand with silence in “Omen. Seduction. Reunion.”: Then he’s back home, circling through the dark, empty house./ There’s nothing. No one. But when he comes round again/ in one long take, there she is – the dead woman, the one he left –
As always with Rasnake, details matter. Portraits are sculpted with great care and are far from typical. A poem called “You Broke My Heart” – potentially sentimental – is saved by its fine focus: eyes, hands, hair, veins, jaw, blood, breath. Other portraits contain details with universal meaning; “Woman in Tableaux [end]: My Say” includes this close observation: “the thinnest line of happy finds the corners of your/ mouth. You type away into unmoving darkness: an I, a me.” – which reaches beyond Janet Frame to every writer. And poems about war and death stare us in the face with hard details, walking in war’s wreckage in Rome 1943 (the perfect image of war), Naples 1944 (a blister of fragments), and Berlin 1947 (empty stairwells where/ music is silence.). Indeed, the title poem, “Cinéma Vérité,” tells us much about the poet’s devotion to small things nestled among big happenings and ideas.
Rasnake pays attention to detail when it comes to shape and pace, too. Readers are reminded visually that the poet engages film: meaning runs deep, but appearance is important, too. Take the shape of the four poems of the colorful Krzysztof Kieslowski series, for example, or the sequence from opening to fading scene in “Two-Reeler”, or the quiet tower built by “The Falling Man”. Meanwhile, “Of Koyaanisqatsi” mirrors the film in form and pace: there is no rest, no breath between words. It’s not a poem to be read fast but to be read as a whole, taking in all of it, no matter how hard, from the beauty of Deep layers/ of cloud, roiling in their own perfection, we say, and/ over the sea’s great curls of time, mountains, always the sky’s careful, most stunning lover to all that follows.
3. A serious sense of play
Rasnake is a thoughtful poet with a serious sense of play. “Poem to Read Aloud While Positioning a Framed Sketch of Frankenstein’s Monster on a Table” (just think about that title for a moment) contains comical quips and unexpected turns. There is existential angst here, and greatness, and smoking, and – not least of all – a note on how to save your soul. “The Wolf Who Cried Boy” turns things on their heads, examining and poking at the fable, “the beginning of literature.” It’s a mindfuck à la Nabokov on Kafka. And “Begin the Beguine”– look closely – is funny and irreverent and also serious about the art of writing (beginning with its opening, one of my favorites in the whole collection), with existential worry aplenty. Agency is the key to art – even if we don’t know exactly who the agent is – Writer? Actor? Director? Reader? This poem digs deep while interjecting flippancies about the “…happy ever after. Sort of.”
Also, one can’t help but notice how poems are juxtaposed – how, for example, in “Third Draft, Suicide Note, Found in a Notebook” we hear that truth hides in art, but this is followed directly by a poem titled “All Art Is Betrayal.”
4. Take it from the top
In the end, the only thing to do – the poet would insist – is to return to the beginning. If we go back to the opening poem, we now see hints of what’s to come: a love of language, shadows between light and dark, rhythms and heartbeats, dreams and realities (however shifting or fleeting). And also something concrete to guide us: The right car/ and music, the highway.
And then, a promise: No borders.
Sam Rasnake’s Cinéma Vérité aims high, and it delivers in every way. It leaves me feeling expansive about both poetry and film.
***
Michelle Elvy is based in New Zealand. She edits at Blue Five Notebook and Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction. She shares poetry and stories at Glow Worm and her views on writing and editing at michelleelvy.com. She lives on a sailboat and is presently in Indonesia.