I Found It at the Movies

Although poetry is one of the oldest art forms and cinema one of the youngest, a symbiosis exists between the two — an interchange of metaphor, rhythm, point-of-view. No surprise, then, that so many contemporary poets write about film and the magnitude of its effect on modern life. Featuring work by some of the most acclaimed poets writing in Canada today (and three from the USA), I Found It at the Movies includes poems inspired by the full range of cinematic history — from silent films to blockbusters, from neo-realism to cartoon, from Fred Astaire to vampires, and from all around the world. Entering this collection is an experience as beguiling as a trip to the movies itself. Among the poets included: Margaret Atwood, Don McKay, Michael Ondaatje, Steven Heighton, David W. McFadden, Karen Solie, Marilyn Bowering, Julie Bruck, Stephanie Bolster and Ken Babstock.

AUTHOR

Ruth Roach Pierson

Ruth Roach Pierson has taught women?s history, feminist, European and post-colonial studies at the University of Toronto and Memorial University of Newfoundland. Since retiring in 1980, she has published three poetry collections: Where No Window Was, 2002, Aide-Mémoire, which was a Governor General Literary Award for Poetry finalist in 2008, and CONTRARY, 2011. In spring 2014, Guernica Editions published an anthology of film poems she edited entitled I Found It at the Movies. Aperture, her chapbook of poems written in response to the photography of Josef Sudek, was launched in July 2014. Realignment is her fourth poetry collection.

Reviews

Incontestably movies play an important role in the lives of most of us, poets included. Movies, all kinds of movies, are part of our common experience. For some of us, it’s occasionally difficult to draw a sharp line between movie and life. On a car trip through the Canadian Shield some years ago, a friend of mine commented on how paintings by members of the Group of Seven organized her view of the landscape. I think the same could be said of the impact movies can have on our perceptions.

If movies are dreams, then these poems about cinema are the dreams dreamt by the dreams – oneiric experience piled high, deliriously drizzled golden, twizzled sweetly and carried into the dark! Reading them I feel I’m peeling back an extra pair of eyelids. This collection takes you closer to films than you ever been before.

We go to the movies in search of a certain practical poetry, the kind that enlarges our perspective of the world or simply entertains us. It’s often assumed that we are empty vessels into which the art flows. And yet Ruth Roach Pierson’s fine anthology of film poems, I Found It at the Movies, proves that the process magnificently works in both directions. The writers here emote eloquently about the movies, from Apocalypse Now to The Wizard of Oz, and all aspects of the cinematic form. There is passion in this poetry, projected at 24 frames per second upon the mind’s eye, and I urge you to engage with it.

Because the experience of movies is so widely shared and so deeply personal, the poems in this wonderful anthology – hilarious, poignant, thoughtful, shrewd and romantic – speak vitally and openly to all of us. And more than that: read as a collection, these poems confront us with the fact that movies are not merely an escape from reality but a powerfully influential feature of our world, a shared projection of dreams whereby, for better or worse, we shape our collective identity and the direction of our history.