Inspired by Bill Corbett's responses to John King's drawings in Return Receipt, I've decided to do a bunch of poems on films. Or more specifically, poems literally written WHILE watching films, so as to get the immediate response to the film, and thus, the poem unfolds as the film does, becoming a sort of shadow-film itself. I wrote a few on Stan Vanderbeek shorts at the Video Balagan at Coolidge Corner last week, and am more or less happy with the results. It is interesting because I could not tell where exactly on the page the lines were going, thus it sort of screws with the chronology of the lines. Which is appropriate for Vanderbeek, but for other films I think I'd want to have a little more control.

Does anyone know where I can get one of those pens with the little red lights in it that film critics use for making notes during films? It would be good to have one of those, that way I can see what I'm writing when I want to!

Bill himself is a great writer on film, as evinced by the following from Return Receipt (Since excepting from the book is, as it should be, all the rage these days...):

Like a cloth sea
the black one
in Fellini's Cassanova
Sutherland rows across
through the tempest
but this one is white
and inland, those hummocks
are snow, the tracks
rabbit, ptarmigan
and migrating caribou.
Alaska is one place
I will never go.