Setting down Paul Blackburn’s The Journals, I picked up literally the nearest book, wherein I read the following piece, entitled “intro” to a longer sequence – there are two other parts, both in three-line stanzas – called “Trilogy”:

 

monday night i went to the san francisco art institute to see nathaniel dorsky’s silent film trilogy, which consists of triste, variations, and arbor vitae.  packed house.  clark coolidge sat right in front of me.  bill berkson, who’d told me this was a must-not-miss event, did the welcome introductions.  nathaniel dorsky explained that, though folks like to call this set of films a “trilogy,” they are really just variations on a theme, with the inherent differences brought on by the fact that he was a different person when he made each film (the first one was apparently shot in the 70s/80s, the second in the later 80s, the third in the 90s).  the first 2 films were beautiful.  about 5 minutes into the 3^rd and newest film, the projector bulb “burned a hole” into the film – an abrupt stop.  a 2^nd attempt was made – film mended, rethreaded & started from the beginning.  only a few frames after the spot where the film broke the first time, it burned/broke again.  i didn’t wait to see if a 3^rd attempt was made.  the first two films were beautiful.  the day before which was sunday it was seventy degrees.  i went for a walk through golden gate park.  and sat down in the shakespeare garden until dusk.

 

I immediately had two distinct, almost contradictory, reactions. The first was that this piece offers some of the specificity whose absence I’d been mourning in the abstract after being almost overwhelmed by its presence in Blackburn’s “Ritual.” The second was an ambivalence as to whether or not the author, Del Ray Cross, even intended it as a poem.

 

There is only one other work that uses prose in Cinema Yosemite – try saying that title fast three times – suggesting that I should be suspicious about too rapidly categorizing this text as poem, particularly given the distancing title of “intro” – as if to say, this stands apart from the “real” body. Yet without it, the poems of ”Trilogy” only number two. Further, this is a text explicitly about the showing of a “trilogy” of films, yet in which only two are seen. Both of the other poems allude to events recounted here, although as poems neither could be said to depend on such knowledge. Further, there is a leap at the end of this piece, literally backwards in time by one day, bringing in the detail of the garden in the park. I end up thinking that this piece is at least as much about the presence of detail as detail, not unlike the ways in which Dorsky’s own films* proceed.

 

Detail is in fact a significant dynamic throughout Cinema Yosemite. Cross, whom I know only as the editor of Shampoo, appears almost compulsive in a desire for exactness, a bias that stands him in well in poems that shift into a more playful gear:

 

The sky’s blue

but lightly buttered.

 

Cross’ line differs radically from Blackburn’s – it shares more surface characteristics with the aforementioned Berkson, Robert Creeley & perhaps Alan Bernheimer or Kit Robinson, all of whom tend toward shorter lines & an impulse toward relatively short stanzas that operate as very complete, even elegant, units. The deep commitment to craft is a pretty good guarantee that Cross’ poems will continue to fascinate & compel readers twenty, thirty years from now.

 

Approaching Cross’ work thus, linking it back to Blackburn’s, may be idiosyncratic to the point of nuttiness on my part, though the test of specificity is a good one for any poet. What really makes Cross’ book leap out for me, tho, is something altogether different. It’s the degree to which the man can write unambiguous love poetry, most notably in the title poem. Talk about lost arts!

 

Cross’ optimism – it’s related, I’m convinced – comes across even in what on the surface professes to be a sad poem, “ll Massimo del Panino”**

 

Have you ever

read a poem

that made you cry

 

sitting in an

Italian restaurant

eating a

 

spinaci e fontina

panino

across from a

 

man with a

mustache drinking

a Diet Coke

 

while another man

walks in, arms-

outstretched shouting

 

to the owner

“Donald Trump!

Donald Trump!”

 

and next to you

two tablesful

of students

 

one loudly

letting loose with

“I no playboy!”

 

as the

others spatter

sweet lexical

 

nothings in

German, Italian,

and Japanese?

 

This single-sentence poem is as well crafted & information rich as Blackburn’s, fabulously coy in its refusal to actually name the poem referenced in the first stanza. That anonymous writing functions here very much as the plastic bag blowing back & forth in the street functions in Sam Mendes’ film, American Beauty, an icon of ineffability, an absent center around which Cross layers on detail after detail until it is the intensity of detail itself, not what it says that is in fact “the topic” of this poem, just as, in “RITUAL XVII,” the actual cashing of Blackburn’s check itself is more or less irrelevant. Each piece celebrates plenitude simply for the possibility of it.

 

What seals this particular poem for me is the care with which Cross deploys enjambment here, virtually the signature device for a Projectivist like Blackburn – think of the line recognized me from similar occasions, the. Where for all the Black Mountain poets, enjambment is used almost as an index of indeterminacy, Cross demonstrates with absolute elegance how to do it exactly the opposite way. Three lines break with the article a, a fourth with an, a fifth literally in the middle of a word, two more on prepositions. That’s nearly a fourth of the poem & yet only once does these enjambments occur at a stanza break – Cross is very carefully moving us through lineation as much as syntactic superstructure through the different realms of this sentence. The one exception, at the end of the second stanza, prefigures the movement into Italian in the third as well as calling just enough attention to the device qua device to set up the attentive reader to hear echo again right in the break between the final two stanzas of the poem as the adjectives hang deliberately far from their noun, the key word in the whole poem, nothings.

 

Cinema Yosemite is precisely the kind of book that gives one great hope for the future of poetry. In retrospect, I wonder a little at the serendipity of my picking it up right after the Blackburn until I stop and look a little harder at the cover, an image of actor George Barnes as the bandit from Edwin S. Porter’s silent classic, The Great Train Robbery, an image so closely associated with that first American action film that it once adorned a 32-cent stamp. This photograph, I realize, has more than a passing resemblance to none other than Paul Blackburn.

 

 

 

 

* The very strangest & most atypical of which must be the 1976 epic, Revenge of the Cheerleaders, co-written by Dorsky with Ted Greenwald & the somewhat mysterious Ace Baandage. This softcore flick is remembered today primarily for the film debut of Baywatch star David Hasselhoff, complete with full frontal nudity, in the role, I swear, of “Boner.”

 

** The title is the name of a restaurant next door to the Intituto Italiana di Cultura in San Francisco, on the fringe of the financial district just outside of North Beach.