Let’s Turn Off the Porch Light
Dappled brown moths
wooly as Grammy’s needlepoint
whirl around the bulb,
winged pilgrims desperate
for union with the Holy.
Little suns everywhere
lure us to the surface of things
where we burn for lack of shadows,
mistaking the blaze of want
for a larger love.
Laura Grace Weldon
Originally published in Shot Glass Journal. Find more poems in my collection, Tending.
You don’t have to stretch your movie-watching habits far to include movies infused with poetry. Here’s a short, by no means comprehensive list.
Biopics (often loosely) based on poets’ lives
Neruda dramatizes the search for the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet during the 1940’s, when he became a fugitive in his own country due to his Communist leanings.
A Quiet Passion explores Emily Dickinson’s life from her school days to her later years.
Kill Your Darlings looks at a 1944 murder that draws together beat generation poets Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.
Howl looks at the 1957 obscenity trial against Allen Ginsberg.
Set Fire to the Stars portrays a week in 1950, when aspiring poet John Brinnin takes his idol, Dylan Thomas, on a retreat in hopes of readying the legendary poet for a series of poetry readings in the U.S.
Reaching for the Moon Elizabeth Bishop took a trip to Rio in 1951, intending to stay only long enough to battle her drinking problem, but met and fell in love with famed architect Lota de Macedo Soares, staying 20 years.
Total Eclipse is a dramatized account of Arthur Rimbaud’s affair with Paul Verlaine.
Sylvia tells of the relationship between poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
The Basketball Diaries is a harrowing story of athleticism, addiction, and redemption based on poet Jim Carroll’s autobiography.
Barfly is based on Charles Bukowski tumultuous life.
Before Night Falls is adapted from the memoir of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, who was jailed for ‘ideological deviation’ and forced to denounce his own work.
Piñero tells the story of Puerto Rican poet-playwright Miguel Piñero, whose urban poetry is recognized as a forerunner to rap and hip-hop.
An Angel at my Table tells the story of Nene Janet Paterson Clutha, a New Zealand woman who published under the name Janet Frame. After years of psychiatric institutionalization, Frame was scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled when, just days before the procedure, her début publication of short stories was unexpectedly awarded a national literary prize.
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle brings the Algonquin Round Table to life in this portrayal of Dorothy Parker.
Tom & Viv depicts T. S. Eliot‘s brief marriage to muse Vivienne Haigh-Wood.
Endless Poetry portrays Alejandro Jodorowsky’s young adulthood of the 1940s and 50s, in the electric capital city of Santiago. There, he decides to become a poet and is introduced into the bohemian and artistic circle of the time.
Movies inspired by poems
O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the Coen brothers’ version of Homer’s “Odyssey.”
Mulan‘s story comes from the ancient Chinese poem “The Ballad of Mulan.”
The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe has been made into several movies, the most recent starring John Cusack.
Jabberwocky is a poem found in Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. The nonsense poem added words such as “chortle” and “galumphing” to the English language. This nonsense movie is directed by Monty Python alumnus Terry Gilliam.
Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Hamlet, well, there are dozens of movies versions of Shakespeare’s poetic plays. Dozens more are based on his work, including The Lion King, She’s the Man, and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran.
Beowulf comes from the oldest surviving epic poem of Old English.
Bright Star is inspired by a poem of the same name by John Keats, about his love for Fanny Brawne.
Braveheart is based on the the epic written by makar Blind Harry, “The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre and Vallyeant Campioun Schir William Wallace.”
Troy is based on Homer’s epic Iliad.
Horton Hears a Who! or any of the Dr. Seuss movies, are all based on the imaginatively rhyming books by Theodor Seuss Geisel.
Movies about poetry
Paterson takes place during one week of a poetry-writing bus driver’s life, and includes a meeting with a stranger who loves poetry.
Poetry, detailing an elderly woman’s first poem, gets a rare 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Elling is a deadpan comedic Norwegian film about two men, Elling and Kjell, who are released from a state institution. Elling discovers he is a poet and bring his work to the public in an unusual way.
Henry Fool is about an ex-convict who encourages a friend to become a poet.
Poetic Justice includes several poems by Maya Angelou.
Big Bad Love highlights the struggles of a poet and writer dealing with his own war memories and alcoholism. Based on the short stories of Mississippi writer Larry Brown, Brown’s own poems and those of William Carlos Williams, are in the film.
Slam is about a young man’s dedication to spoken word poetry after his release from prison.
Dead Poets Society—Robin Williams plays an English teacher in an East Coast boys’ prep school who inspires his students to love poetry, among other life lessons. The film, which popularized the tradition of carpe diem poems, features verse by Frost, Tennyson, and Shakespeare.
Shakespeare in Love—The endeavors of a young William Shakespeare, with allusions to Shakespeare’s later work.
The Kindergarten Teacher is the story of an Israeli kindergarten teacher who is convinced that one of her students is a poetry prodigy, and becomes obsessed with what she perceives as his ability.
Welcome
Eyes, fingertips, tongues
form one from two.
Yield three.
You.
Snowflake fingerprints,
tiny palms creased with foreknowledge,
DNA whirling proteins
into the plot of a new story.
Despite vast mathematical improbabilities
here you are.
Your mother’s hundred thousand eggs
your father’s five trillion sperm,
a one-in-five-hundred-million-million-million
chance of your existence.
Our gladness is incalculable.
Laura Grace Weldon
Find more poetry in my collection, Tending.
Summer Day at Huntington Beach
I tick with alarm clock worry.
My sister is afraid of nothing.
Not the dark or death or
Jay Preslan down the street
who pushes kids in front of cars.
Look at her run into the water
while I stand squinting.
She doesn’t pinch her nose
to dive under. Doesn’t pause
before splashing back
strange splashing kids. Doesn’t heed
the lifeguard’s megaphoned warning
to stay away from the ropes.
Lake Erie grabs at the shore,
slurps it greedily in foaming waves.
I picture monstrous goggly-eyed fish
lurking under the pier,
ships skudded in the depths,
lost sailors forever unburied.
I inhale the curved scent
of suntan lotion, clench my toes
in the sand, stand still. Far out,
bobbing in foil-bright waves,
my sister is another being entirely,
straining at the boundary ropes
trying to see all the way to Canada.
Originally published by Silver Birch Press. Find more poems in my collection, Tending.
Failure Too
Failure is more than shame’s
hot tar and feathers.
It’s cancer cells
destroyed daily
in the body’s
relentless furnace.
The unseen mugger
turning away
as a friend’s greeting
crosses the street, bright
streamers through the dark.
The beads of a broken necklace
rolling in his mother’s
dresser drawer, evidence
of that long gone afternoon
he scooped blue stones and dust
from the floorboards,
weeping till she soothed
with words softer
than her disappointment.
Finding them the week she died
he’s glad the necklace broke,
carries those stones
in his pocket to this day,
as ruins remind
us of splendor
in civilizations that spawned us.
Laura Grace Weldon
Originally published in Mom Egg Review. Find more poems in my collection, Tending.
Perfectly Good
The chair broke years ago
leaving jagged oak
at its topmost edge.
Repairs never held and
here my youngest son sits
his face lit from within
like all God’s children.
If I could I’d fashion everything broken
into a greater whole, forming
a bridge to his highest possibilities.
Instead he eats supper
with sharp wood bristling at his ear
and when I suffer it aloud
the boy says, “It’s perfectly good.”
This was the mantra of my childhood.
Spoken over fat and gristle
left on my plate till I forked those last bites
in my reluctant mouth. Invoked with each
hand-me-down, though Jennifer Kling’s
mother always made me wear suspenders
at her house to spare her
my sagging trousers. Implied
in a fistful of stubby No. 2 pencils
my schoolteacher father saved
from the classroom trash can,
the same ones my mother darkened
her eyebrows with each morning.
Today my son helped with yard work
at my childhood home, then stopped
CSI-faced, to hold up a dark loamy figure.
My mother dismissed it casually,
“Oh, the overcoat in the azaleas.”
Her father’s moth-eaten wool coat,
good tailoring still apparent in the shoulders,
was too good to discard, but perfectly suited
to smother weeds forty long years.
Standing next to her in the doorway
I knew identity as something
broader than a name.
This is who we are.
Resilient enough
to chew the fat, hitch up our pants,
and raise our brows— smoothing the way
for our children the best we can.
I grew up missing my grandfather,
yet all the while his coat
lay right outside the window
arms spread wide,
keeping a place for flowers to grow.
Laura Grace Weldon
Find more poems in my collection, Tending.
Fog As Visible Dreams
Mysteries flicker under each tender eyelid.
Become mist. Pass through walls.
Crowd the street, stories in symbol
lingering over a neighborhood asleep.
Houses and mailboxes
walk toward my headlights,
ghosts stepping into form.
I see each thing clearly
only as it passes by.
Laura Grace Weldon
Originally published in Shot Glass Journal. Find more poems in my collection, Tending.
Nose pressed in tiny squares
against the screen, I watch
casual laughing gods
walk home from school.
I envy their long legs
and glossy notebooks,
their unseen power
to unlock
words from shapes,
My sister drops A+ papers
and library books
on the speckled Formica table.
Asks me how many times
a butterfly flaps its wings.
Tells me I’m wrong.
Eats two cookies.
Announces we’re made up
of tiny things called cells,
made up of tinier things
called atoms,
also made of what’s smaller.
The kitchen walls stretch
to galaxy proportions,
the table a raft among stars.
I hold tight to my chair
and concentrate,
keeping my short legs,
my clumsy fingers,
the balloon of my body,
from dissolving into bits.
Laura Grace Weldon
Originally published by Litbreak.
Laura Grace Weldon
from Tending
When people tell me their largest stories I am helpless as a page under pen.
A woman told me how, as a child of 11, she struck out when her grandparents were ignored rather than served at a restaurant in the deep South. Her anger was so heated that she used the restaurant’s complementary matches to start the place on fire.
It wasn’t entirely the content of the memory or the force in her voice. It was the way she strung words together; spare yet detailed. She talked about her grandmother’s arthritic hands picking up and putting down a salt shaker. She described her grandmother’s dark green dress and sensible heels, the patient smile she wore even though no one came to take their order. Before this raised-up-North granddaughter could utter a word of complaint she was shushed by her grandmother’s stern look. As her grandparents stood to go the girl ducked into the cloakroom and in seconds set to smoldering the hair oil soaked fedoras left there by white gentlemen. Of the fire she said little, except that the restaurant was forced to turn everyone away that day.
A teen described how, when he was a small child, his mother got so strung out that she’d leave him alone for days at a time.
He ended most sentences with “you hear me” and “wasn’t nothing” as he talked about licking his fingers before running them along the insides of drawers and cupboards to find crumbs. He said his mother got angry if she caught him sleeping curled next to the apartment door. She’d yell “I didn’t raise no dog.” When his story ended a refrain continued. He said “wasn’t nothing” four times, each repetition softer until his moving lips made no sound at all.
An elderly woman recounted the story of union busters coming by their cabin at supper time to beat up her father, who’d been organizing his fellow coal miners.
She didn’t recognize her own family any longer but vividly remembered this tale from her earliest years. Her words were impressions. I saw her mother standing fearfully at the door insisting her husband wasn’t home, children clustered behind her wide-mouthed with alarm. I envisioned this little girl with the presence of mind to hide her father’s dinner dishes. “Just laid em in the stove with a cloth over,” she said. When the men barged in they found only enough place settings for mother and children on the table. They left, never looking under the porch where her father hid. She had no other stories left to tell. This one was large enough for a lifetime.
Not only do I feel what they’re saying, I’m awestruck by how they say it.
When people talk about extremes they’ve experienced they speak as poets do. They rely on verbal shorthand made up of sensory description and metaphor. They drift from past to present, change viewpoints, dip into myth and scripture. Often they end abruptly, as if what they’re trying to say can’t truly be said. Their stories, powerful already, gain a sort of beauty that sends ordinary language aloft. It’s truth that trembles. To me, it’s poetry.
This essay first published in Poet’s Quarterly.
