Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I once traveled to China as part of an International Poetry Festival. Poetry has many possibilities for cultural diplomacy. For one, the language of metaphor hits different than the language of transnational policies and geopolitical debates.

We gathered from all parts of the globe, from Argentina, from Australia, from Italy, from Korea, from many other countries. We were deeply respectful of each other’s long literary traditions. A spirit of camaraderie and our shared belief in poetry to represent our commonality despite cultural differences bonded us.

However, one moment clarified for me how our traditions diverged. I gave an impassioned talk on Walt Whitman and the poem as a container of an individual self. “Leaves of Grass” also embodies the belief E Pluribus Unum, “out of many, one.” “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Whitman writes in “Song of Myself.” My lecture yielded polite claps, an indication of its half-hearted reception. Later, I realized that China, a collectivist country, traditionally does not celebrate overt expressions of individualism.

Since then, I have thought heavily about values that represent a nation especially, in film and poetry. In media studies, we talk about the French New Wave, Soviet Montage, the LA Rebellion, The Polish School, Italian Neorealism, and so forth. But, are these movements the result of a shared ideology and approach, or are they merely a snapshot of a group of artists who happened to be making films at the same time and were grouped together by critics? In many instances, both are true.

One of my favorite moments in Italian Cinema is the movie Cinema Paradiso. It finds a young boy named Toto as the helper of a film projectionist named Alfredo. To satisfy Church authorities, Alfredo has to cut out all depictions of physical contact between people before showing the films. Young Toto moves away from the town of his youth to become a film director himself. When Alfredo dies, he leaves behind for Toto to view a gorgeous collage of kisses from banned movies over the years. The reel of intimate moments is a beautiful display of personal desires set against a national agenda of religious and moral strictures.

Today’s ekphrastic poem interrogates one of the magnificent contradictions of Italy, that it is the seat of the holy Christian church, yet one of the most luxuriant and passionate countries in Europe.

Cinema Paradiso
by Claire Booker

When Alfredo lets the film fly on its beam of light,
I Pompieri di Viggiù comes to roost 
on a tenement block, rippling the hard lines
of masonry. Isn’t love sleight of hand after all? 

You and I, in rainy Islington, among discrete
coughs and rustles, spoon Sicily’s raw energy
into our souls. Giant faces undulate over shutters
in the hot body of night. A couple on the cliff edge

of passion, lips parted, noses positioned, close in
for the . . . Twenty years, and they’ve never
let us see a kiss! wails an old Sicilian; the withheld
moment like a slap across the wrists.


How we laugh, as the priest rings his hand bell 
and Alfredo snips each corrupting frame.
Kisses drop to the floor, shiny as snakes; alive
in our minds as only the unsaid can be.

"Cinema Paradiso" by Claire Booker. Used by permission of the poet.