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A series of wonderful pieces
I am seeing a film.
I am seeing a film
and you are with me.
I am seeing a film
and you are far from me.
I am seeing a film
and the theatre is bathed
in blue light, but the insides
of my mind are crimson.
I am seeing a film
and morality is small
as popped corn.
I am seeing a film
and thinking about story,
how it has its downfall,
how narration isn’t
worth spit, because we are
able to sit in two places.
(from "I Am Seeing a Film," Emily Schultz)
For Toronto writer and editor Emily Schultz, her first poetry collection Songs for the Dancing Chicken (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2007), references the films and life of acclaimed director Werner Herzog, the man who made such films as Grizzly Man (2005), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Stroszek (1976) and the infamous Nosteratu (1979), turning biography into poem, as the back cover compares her work to Michael Ondaatje's infamous The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970). Compared to Carr's ropewalk, Emily Schultz's Songs for the Dancing Chicken is less lyric, and a bit more grounded in concrete images and straightforward sentences. Using references to Herzog as her starting point for particular poems (she includes a list of such at the back of the collection), she is able to create poems that move in strange and sometimes surreal places, writing small stories triggered by an image, or a still.
For Werner Herzog
The man
with a gun in his hand
that will bring the ending
mounts the empty
ski lift
and rises
a sign on his back
above the story
Previously editor of Broken Pencil magazine, Schultz is the author of the novel Joyland (Toronto ON: ECW Press) and the short story collection Black Coffee Night (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press), and works her poems through a kind of narrative as well, weaving the collection through the life and work of a single individual through six sections, including "songs for the dancing chicken," "better hell," "a climax of dirt," "in the factory," "letters to heartbreak" and "poems for the wrong person." Unlike Carr's use of subject to propel a poem (Louise Labé), Schultz might use more concrete images, but goes off into further tangents, and thus moves further away from her source in a series of wonderful pieces.
The Boy from the Theatre, the Excrement of Dogs
When we were together
we were always seeing ghosts.
The moon was the fullest and brightest
it had been in a hundred years.
I made love to you
but I was thinking of another.
Now you make love to another
and think of me.
We wandered the streets like two clowns, sleuthing
the stolen red circle of our one-ring show.
In our absence the little dog shat on the floor
and the crowd went home.
Out my window you saw something
that made you cry.
You lay back down next to me
under the cover of night.
I lay dreaming
that we were a thousand years old.
When I woke you were sunlight
and my heart was the cold colour of snow.
In the apartment below me
a spoon scraped the bottom of an empty bowl.
One of the pieces in the final section of the collection is "The Week John Ditsky Died," a poem for a poet, editor (former poetry editor for The Windsor Review) and University of Windsor professor (as well as former mentor to Toronto poet John Barlow), I can only presume that Schultz might have gone to the University at one point, or was from the City of Windsor?
In Detroit, fifty officers have a warrant
to seek his remains. Hoffa, that is,
on the front page; Ditsky's in the back.
A man of crime is exhumed. A man of letters
laid to rest. Delivered via e-mail and old acquaintance,
the paper's smudged weight sits upon screen, illuminated,
uncanny, popping with ads for its own Classifieds.
The Death Notices yawn with tulips.
Visitation is for an 11 a.m. already passed.
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