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What Is Noir?
Is more than darkness. Is
Corruption of the heart. Is
behind closed doors, board-
room or street. Is fucked
Whether you do, don’t sing,
Moan, sniff or shoot. Is a
ticket to all we have, never
enough. Is greed, lust, a fatal
kiss, the banker, cop, criminal, or
any other poor sucker who
screams for mercy. Is a
dream of autonomy, femme
fatality causality, breathing,
“Hey, baby, let’s take it all.”
Is a corpse, a handful of dust
and ultimately who cares, if
the only punishment is death.
I began writing On Dangerous Ground, a book, for the most part, comprised of 50 poems based on classic examples of film noir, sometime around 2012. At the time I’d no idea I’d be working on the book intermittently over the next ten years. I knew I wanted each poem to be accompanied by an image from the film that was being considered. My intention was to write solely about the images, what they contained and implied. But it wasn’t long before I found myself shifting from that remit, deploying, instead, the images more as starting points, which, in turn, allowed me to move outwards, into the world surrounding those images. Which is why the images became a kind of memory theater, setting off thoughts, reactions, rants and investigations, coherent or otherwise. A tangential process that dependent not only on the images, and how, as a viewer, I responded to them, but on various aspects of the films themselves: dialogue, lighting, set designs, and the role directors, screenwriters, cinematographers and producers. While some might take the poems simply as eccentrically humorous, fractured and perhaps contentious reviews and reactions, the intention was, on the one hand, to comment on the world around the films, and, on the other hand, to invite the reader to launch his or her own investigation into this or any subject that might reveal as much as it hides.
As I rewatched the films, and began writing about them, I found myself viewing them in a different light, as artefacts to be acted upon rather than packaged commodities existing in a static environment. And so the writing of On Dangerous Ground became a two-way process: the films activated the poems, but the poems reanimated the films, allowing me to go wherever I liked with them, from glossing the surface to drilling down into them, addressing subjects like crime, guilt, innocence, bourgeois values, late capitalism, and gendered space.
Given that much of my past writing- thirty years in the trenches of noir fiction and film- why suddenly turn to poetry as the basis for my investigation? Admittedly, at first glance, it’s a slightly off-the-wall direction to take. But, for me, it was fitting. Primarily because, prior to writing about noir fiction and film, as well as writing novels that inhabited that terrain, poetry had been my first port of call. Not that my relationship to poetry hasn’t, over the years, succumbed to a series of disgruntlements and separations. Blame it I guess on the term “poet,” and the bad faith it often entails, or absolutist dictums as Pound’s about poets being the antennae of the race (about which one can only ask, what race might the great poet have been referring to?). Even so my relationship with poetry was never to escalate into anything approaching a full-fledged divorce. And so I still carry the baggage, if not the scars, stretching back to the mid-1960s, in Los Angeles, then San Francisco, with various publications and a range of mentors, from the academic- Henri Coulette, Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert- to the peripatetic- Michael Michael McClure, Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka and Ed Dorn. Though in recent years any interest has seems to have veered towards the more linguistically-oriented, such as Clark Coolidge, Michael Gizzi, and Tom Raworth, not to mention political screeds by the likes of the wonderful Sean Bonney and Keston Sutherland.
In spite, or maybe because of that, I’ve always felt there exists a relationship, however tenuous, between poetry- at least the kind I tend to favour, that moves outwards into the world while conveying a degree of linguistic wit- and film noir. By negotiating that thin line that separates romanticism from fatalism, film noir can often be said to be as poetic as it is stylised. One need look no further than the obvious, films like Robert Wise’s The Set Up (1949) and Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl (1958), both of which were originally rhymed narrative poems by Joseph Moncure March, or, for that matter, Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), whose screenplay was written in blank verse. It could even be said that poetry and film noir share certain elements: they rely on set formats, tend to manipulate narrative coherency, and often proceed by implication rather than by anything more blatant. As for the doomed film noir protagonist, it’s not unusual for him, and it is usually him, to have the temperament of a thwarted poet, from the sadistic cop Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952) to the soda shop gangster Shubunka (Barry Sullivan) in Gordon Wiles’s The Gangster (19470, While, Slavoj Zizek, in his essay from the 1990s, “From Courtly Love to the ‘Crying Game,’” insists that film noir’s proverbial femme fatale can be traced back to the Troubadour poets and their objects of obsession, though few of the latter could have been as deadly as Kathy (Jane Greer) in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) or Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie) in Jack Bernhard’s Decoy (1946).
Added reason why On Dangerous Ground was a logical step from my previous books like Pulp Culture and Heartbreak & Vine, Cry For a Nickel Die For a Dime and Days of Smoke. Of course, it could be that the transition seems unusual only because there are few, if any, poetry collections that centre on film noir. On the other hand, there’s no shortage of poets who’ve established a working relationship with such films. Amongst those influenced by the genre one could name poets like Alice Notely, Robert Polito, Geoffrey O’Brien,, Nicholas Christopher, and, moving back in time, Weldon Keyes and Kenneth Fearing. Even Raymond Chandler began his writing career as a young man composing doggrel for the Westminster Gazette, while the great Dorothy B. Hughes garnered the Yale Prize For Younger Poets long before she wrote such classics as In a Lonely Place or Ride the Pink Horse.
On Dangerous Ground opens with an epigraph from Edward Dorn’s hilarious mock-epic of the west Gunslinger- “Ontology! I’m just/telling you a story/about this projector, that’s all.” Metaphorically-speaking, that’s the idea behind the poems in On Dangerous Ground. Which is to say, the images project the poems and their derivatives onto the page, in a manner not dissimilar from the way Gunslinger’s literate projector is meant to turn images into text. At least that’s the idea, however fanciful and playful that process might be. Though such an enterprise isn’t without its pitfalls. After all, Dorn’s projector is literate, not literal. Likewise, On Dangerous Ground makes no pretence at being objective, much less literal. If objectivity were the end result of such a projector, it’s function would be limited to turning film noir images into either prurient prose or stale criticism. Rather, On Dangerous Ground seeks to take those images and manipulate them for all they’re worth. Albeit in an era of algorithms and AI, where subjectivity remains the name of the game, and illiterate projectors threaten to proliferate beyond control.
And so the poems in On Dangerous Ground become increasingly convoluted, which, all else being equal, might reflect the apparent contradictions regarding the machinery of Hollywood and its place in the structure of corporate America. It also points towards why the images, in pursuit of those contradictions, seek the uniformity of a block form, once referred to as a rhetorical figure. It’s a form mostly influenced by how the poems appear on the page, though never at the exclusion of breath, rhythm, sound, justified line breaks and other impingements and internalities. To be sure, giving the appearance of poetry while casting doubt on whether it is or isn’t. All this to avoid anything resembling the obviously poetic or constructed. At the same time, it’s something of a ruse. Because what looks like poetry might, in fact, be prose if it were not something called poetry. However much the poems embrace or reject their status, in the end it comes down to language and its deployment, what Robert Duncan used to call tone-leading. Though in this case nothing quite so highfalutin: just words and phrases that grind out further words and phrases, not excluding puns, irreverent asides and exploratory gestures, that leads to something that might resemble meaning, be it nuanced or otherwise,. What makes film noir amenable to this approach is its range of possible interpretation. Hopefully not unlike the poems themselves, embedded in their own interpretive, jazz-inflected whirlwind, political for some, though perhaps mere pop-corn inducing enjoyment for others.
Why title it On Dangerous Ground? Besides it being one of my favourite movies, film noir, from the end of WW2 to the end of the 1950s, really did find itself, cognisant or not, trespassing onto dangerous ground. By which I mean so many of those films reflected and questioned the values of the era, from consumerism to the paranoia regarding the cold war and the bomb to fear of women in post-war society. Created, in large part, by leftists (Nicholas Ray, Jules Dassin), soon-to-be black-listed writers and directors (Joseph Losey, Abe Biberman, Dalton Trumbo, John Berry), and European exiles, influenced by German Expressionism (Jacques Tourneur, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak), their movies might have been screened in black and white, but the world they depicted was anything but. At least not in hands of such cinematographers as John Alton, Burnett Guffey and Nicholas Muscuraca; or screenwriters like AI Bezzerides, Daniel Fuchs and Ben Hecht. But this was back when film noir had license to embrace its rough edges and romantic notions regarding the criminal, the cop, the private eye, the musician, the psychopath, the patsy, the autonomous woman, and other such subjects, a genre that yet to be categorised, commodified and eventually stripped of its populist concerns and politics, .
A word about the films selected for the book. For the most part, they are obvious choices, with one or two outliers. Films that might appear in anyone’s list of noir favourites. The collection as a whole is bookended by two poems unrelated to any specific film: one which introduces the book and the final poem which reminds the reader there is always, as Columbo was wont to say, “One More Thing.” Though, full disclosure, there’s a clear discrepancy between the poem that opens the book- in this essay entitled “What Is Noir?” but, in the book simply called “Preface”- and the subsequent poems in the collection. As well as serving as an introduction, the primary function of “Preface” is to preempt the question that comprises its title in this essay, one that’s asked wherever the subject of noir fiction or film is discussed. Moreover, it’s the sort of poem, with its late-night, tough-guy attitude, one might might expect to find in a collection of film noir poetry. Despite its loyalty to the usual tropes, the poem is really an act of misdirection, to entice the reader- the sort who might admire films like Kiss Me, Deadly and Detour and such writers as Himes, Goodis and Thompson, but who has never delved all that deeply into poetry- to turn the page and be surprised, perplexed or interested in the linguistic onslaught that follows. All of which is played to the hilt, right up to the final page, when, once again, the screen goes blank, and the reader, formerly the viewer, is left to their own devices.
“Heat, Sleep, Steal, Night, Knife, Goodbye. This one
goes out to who would remain anonymous, their
ships lost at sea. Continents long since absent,
as insomniacs out of the past darkly. Falling
adjectives like confetti between more frames
per second than reality can ever hope to count.”
(from “One More Thing”)
(an edited version of this appeared in On the Sea Wall, which you can find here)
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