Section XII is one of the longest in Issue One, so I’ll be posting it over a number of posts.
It opens with Jacqueline Saphra’s “1976”, a poem that understands the cruelty of hindsight. Everything in it is still innocent because the damage has not arrived yet. The glaciers are still frozen, the ocean is still full of fishes, the night is still soft with song. But the reader is held in that terrible gap between what the poem’s fifteen-year-old self does not know and what we know is coming, even if we don’t have the exact details. What I love most about this poem is that it makes adolescence feel like something we are peering in on from the future.
Richard Skinner’s film poems then move us into another kind of unreality: cinema as dream. In “Black Swan”, identity keeps splitting and correcting itself, never allowed to rest in one body. In “Lost Highway”, the images arrive like clues from a nightmare. And in “Donnie Darko”, Frank speaks with the eerie intimacy of a figure who is part mask, part portal, part warning. All very apt for the films they’re drawing from, I must say!
Together, these poems set the terms for Dream Logic / Elegy / Afterglow, and what comes next in this section. Dreams as the place where fear, memory, performance and prophecy do their strangest work. Saphra gives us the moment before the fall. Skinner gives us the screen after the self has started to flicker.
You can buy issue one to read more!
Max
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