I was at a place in my life in where I would still pick up The Best American Poetry just to see what was good. In the 1994 edition, published in 1995, there was a series of three poems by a guy named Tom Andrews. The series was called “Cinema Verite” and the poems took the form of short film scripts.
At that time, in addition to poetry, I was also very interested in screenwriting. I read books on it, talked to friends about it, collaborated with people. It was the post-Sex, Lies, & Videotape wave of independent film, and the way you might say “I’m starting a blog” now, you’d say “I’m working on a screenplay” then.
So these “Cinema Verite” poems were great—funny, sharp, original. Or at least they seemed that way to me. And in the author’s bio in the back, it said that Tom Andrews was working on an entire book in the series. So from that point forward, every few months, I’d look for the book in the poetry section in bookstores. Never saw it, but it took me a long time to give up. Years, for sure—just became a habit to look for that Tom Andrews book.
I still think of the below poem pretty regularly because I think it says something about what our lives have become in the digital era, but of course it was written well before the digital era. It also makes me chuckle.
Thinking of it today and googling, I discovered that Tom Andrews died in 2001. He never did finish that book. But there’s a volume of his Collected Poems that might have others from this series. Guess I’ll order it on Amazon.
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Cinema Verite: The Death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Tom Andrews
The camera pans a gorgeous snow-filled landscape: rolling hills, large black trees, a frozen river. The snow falls and falls. The camera stops to find Tennyson, in an armchair, in the middle of a snowy field.
TENNYSON:
It’s snowing. The snow is like…the snow is like crushed aspirin,
like bits of paper…no, it’s like gauze bandages, clean teeth, shoelaces, headlights…no,
I’m getting too old for this, it’s like a huge T-shirt that’s been chewed on by a dog,
it’s like semen, confetti, chalk, sea shells, woodsmoke, ash, soap, trillium, solitude, daydreaming…Oh hell, you can see for yourself! That’s what I hate about film!
He dies.
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