Kudos, all! Our last “Next Line, Please” elicited 88 comments. The most popular of the three prompts I offered in that column (“What a Strange Path”) was the one highlighted in the title and photo-illustration, both taken from Robert Bresson’s movie Pickpocket, which concludes with these words: “Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take.”
Pamela Joyce Shapiro hit the ball out of the park with “The Road to Lumière”:
Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take.
I raced through bridges with Jules and Jim, the stairs scaffolding love
above the river of your longing and your end. Jeanne, I have
been both man and woman to know your shadowed face, the serene
silence of your brow. And I have wrecked a train for the art of
your downturned mouth. Jeanne! I rode an elevator to the gallows
that we might be lovers in the night and climbed beyond the clouds.
Your murderous truth chimes at midnight. Ours is an immortal
story, a trial of sorts. Jeanne, I sought to marry, but the bride wore black.
Pamela took the liberty of identifying the “Jeanne” of the quotation as Jeanne Moreau. The poem weaves together the titles of numerous movies featuring the great French actress: Jules and Jim, Elevator to the Gallows, The Bride Wore Black, Lumière, Chimes at Midnight, The Trial, The Immortal Story and doubtlessly other titles I missed. The result is a wonderful and mysterious tribute to a wonderful and mysterious film star.
Kaleiheana Stormcrow gave us “The journey to return,” an impressively fast-moving summary of an extended journey:
Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a strange path I had to take,
through the enchanted forest, past a babbling brook and grandmother oak.
I stood quietly at the summit of mountain ridges, ran past rushing rivers,
navigated by scintillating stars to bizarre lands.
I partook in potions a-plenty,
listened to the din of ravens calling in the distance,
meandered carefully behind cascading waterfalls where ancestral spirits dwell.
I worshipped at an ancient temple covered in moss and vines and rot,
watched the sun rise and cried beneath a clear blue sky.
And after all that movement, at the end of my journey,
I find that I went nowhere,
and here we now are,
back at the point where the journey began.
Oh Jeanne, you have been with me all along.
Kaleiheana’s conclusion is a variation of the epiphany that T. S. Eliot articulated in Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
The poet Andrei Codrescu, famous in these parts for his ability to write swiftly, came up with this riff on the line from Pickpocket:
Oh, Jeanne, I won’t picture for you muddy roads, blown tires, the stubborn Mississippi Johnny Cash rode to catch you flitty flirt, fog over the bayous, or even the mental gymnastics of your look-alike puppets in bucket seats at the ICU. I won’t display lost time like stigmatas, or broken clocks in the thieves’ markets. Roads and time, I now know, lead away from you, they make you as strange as those efforts. All this spiraling and spinning was for naught when all I had to do was follow the arrow chip scent to where I laid my head moments before I even packed to go.
Another prompt I offered was based on the last line of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” I asked our writers, “For whom do you speak?” and Rachel Hadas came up with something special in the form of “For Whom?”:
It’s not who you speak to, it’s who you speak for, said Sharon Olds.
Adrienne Rich wrote “You are reading this poem,”
addressing a woman or women? No, speaking for them.
Cavafy’s “Walls” spoke for me at a time
when I sensed I had been stealthily walled in.
And when I raided my students’ poems for lines
to stitch into a cento, everyone
was speaking, it turned out, for everyone.
The poems peeled their private pronouns off
and bared their shared humanity,
which is what I hope some of my poems can sometimes do,
whether or not I know for whom I’m speaking.
Pamela Joyce Shapiro praised “The poems peeled their private pronouns off,” and Michael C. Rush singled out “everyone / was speaking, it turned out, for everyone.” I concur with both.
John Davis Jr.’s “Messenger for the Rural Lost,” also in response to the Ralph Ellison prompt, impressed me with its concision and its terrific alliteration:
I know the vernacular of the plow,
the pitcher pump’s slang and song.
In seeding seasons, I translate the wind
and hear forgotten secrets in raindrops.
I cannot speak visitor, tourist.
Foreignness confounds the native.
But I can give you the words of our passed;
beneath twice-turned burial soil,
their leather-bound phrases resound,
uttered into growing trees that spread
cursive canopies across the horizon –
admonition, encouragement, love.
John’s poem elicited this wonderful comment from Michael C. Rush: “Tremendous mouth-feel!” I agree. It would be difficult to do better than “beneath twice-turned burial soil.” (John, have you been reading Gerard Manley Hopkins?)
My third prompt was based on the opening line of The Beautiful and Damned (1922), in which Scott Fitzgerald proposed that “irony” was “the Holy Ghost” of his time. I asked for poems identifying the spiritus sanctus of our own secular age. Millicent Caliban scored with this untitled effort:
I’m sorry, Dave.
The Holy Ghost in our digital age has neither body nor spirit.
He works through algorithm, can learn, create, but may hallucinate.
He is our saviour, counselor, comforter, content provider.
Fountain of seeming wisdom we both believe and fear. But must beware.
Do not praise him. He is not to trust. Keep faith with our humanity.
Paul Michelson, winner of the Samuel Johnson award for practical criticism, pointed out the sneaky reference to Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001, in which the malevolent computer HAL says “I’m sorry, Dave” to the astronaut (Keir Dullea’s David Bowman) he hasn’t killed.
Paul also sang the praises of Carey James’s haiku and responded to it with a haiku of his own. The two share the Polonius Award for brevity. Carey wrote,
“Don’t ghost me,” the dove
said to the loving couple
that ate the apple.
Paul replied with “Sui Genesis” – written “for (& after) Carey James”:
“We didn’t mean to,”
replied the loving couple.
“We just wanted more.”
Emily was frustrated by the typographical limits of Disqus; she had wanted a line from Taylor Swift—“I don’t want to lose you”— as a refrain between each line, but was unable to post that poem as intended. Still, her entry’s ending packs a wallop:
Is where I’m walking
where I’ll lose my footing; my breath’s
engraved on all my trophies.
For next time, here is a new prompt:
Take your own name and, using anagrams on the one hand and onomastic associations on the other, write a short poem that reveals yourself to yourself, if only in code. For example, let’s say your name is REBECCA THOMAS. You might think of Rebecca in the Bible, mother of the twins Jacob and Esau, or Thomas (Dylan or Edison). Your name also yields a plethora of anagrams, including Rome, mate, heart, acre, create, and a bunch of words that can act as either noun or verb: tear, trace, bear, care. (Gosh, I never thought I’d ever use “onomastic” in a sentence.) Combine as many associations and anagrams as you like, in 14 lines max.
Deadline: January 26, 2025.
