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Werner Herzog informs poems on film
“May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.” —Werner Herzog, in interview
“I am seeing a film
and the world does not belong to me.” —Emily Schultz, “I Am Seeing a Film”
The hard-working poet is a shameless gleaner of imagery, the cinema an impossibly vast scrap yard that flickers fleetingly enough to incite in some of these gleaners a certain convulsive interpretive rapture. It disappears and disappears and disappears. But the poet’s images are even more ruthless: they’re unstable, eschewing apparition altogether, contained exclusively in the imaginative faculties of the reader. Maybe movies and poems are cousins. Maybe they’ve cut some sort of deal.
The poems in Emily Schultz’s Songs for the Dancing Chicken (ECW, $16.95) spring in part from the films of Werner Herzog, particularly the string of 1970s features that made his international reputation: Aguirre: Wrath of God, Stroszek, Nosferatu. Herzog’s often described filmmaking as a craft perhaps best pursued by illiterates, yet Schultz has seized words from Herzog’s films as though they were holding shards of literature hostage. (Probably at gunpoint.)
Of course, what these poems really reflect are subjective readings (again, a literary term) of these films or, more accurately, readings of the memory of watching these films and the idiosyncratic reveries they ignite. In her conjuring, the poet hijacks the mise en scène. By Schultz’s account, actress Eva Mattes’s ass constitutes “a poem on its own,” the rats are the true stars of Nosferatu, and the vampire’s fingernails extend from the marsupial hands of Max Schreck.
“Going into a Herzog film is like slipping into another space and time,” says Schultz. “Something I love about his images is that they’re so dream-like, and so like photographs, because his work has such a stillness. That’s one of the reasons I thought about working with them.”
I met with Schultz at a Toronto hotel where a week previous she was launching Songs For the Dancing Chicken, publicly conversing with film critic Jason Anderson about Herzog while a sort of “best of” track of film clips looped behind them: the writhing jungle; the boat in the tree; the penny arcade chicken trained by Herzog to go the limit; the dwarf-covered truck trapped in its apocalyptic circuit; the mountainous German moustache that cements the filmmaker’s distinctive deadpan.
One of these images has been taken wholesale for the book’s cover: Stroszek’s truck on fire, again, in one of these interminable loops of doom, but frozen below seven words made of smoke plumes in an otherwise white sky.
“Herzog’s one of those people who will do anything for art,” explains Schultz, “and that was really inspiring to me. He’s placed himself in a lot of insane situations, travelled to a lot of very remote places, hired a lot of people, all in the service of retrieving one or two images. And I’m fascinated by that. It goes so far beyond what I do for poetry. When Herzog was working on Even Dwarfs Started Small, he felt he put his actors through so much that to make up for it he threw himself into a cactus.”
Maybe he just wanted to merge with the landscape. Herzog has described the landscapes in his films as being reflections of the human soul. Likewise, Schultz’s poems, even when they’ve no direct reference to Herzog, seem often to reveal the most about their characters through descriptions of landscapes and sky. Schultz concedes that her writing tends to be concerned with place. “Small places, really,” she says.
“Poetry tends to focus more on the visual, so we’re automatically going to have scenes of watching. I think most writers would relate to this thing where you walk through the world wishing your brain could just record it all, like a film.”
I see Schultz’s point, but I (and I suspect, she) prefer(s) the half-remembered, half-invented quality of her quietly calamitous poems to anything so directly rendered and relayed. Its like Di Brandt says on the back cover: “If the apocalypse is coming, let it come like this: heartbroken, open to light, reaching for joy.” V
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