Robert Polito and David Trinidad. Photo: Tyler Flynn Dorholt.

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Poets in Hollywood: Robert Polito & David Trinidad
Columbia College’s Film Row Cinema, Chicago
April 9, 2009

Poets in Hollywood: Robert Polito & David Trinidad was co-sponsored by Columbia College Chicago’s English Department, Creative Writing–Poetry Program

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“I have my own little kind of cult of the dead.”

— Robert Polito

Robert Polito’s most recent books are the poetry collection Hollywood & God and The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (forthcoming August 2009). His other books include Doubles, A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle award in biography. He is the founder and Director of the New School Graduate Writing Program, and is completing a new book, Detours: Seven Noir Lives.

David Trinidad’s most recent book, The Late Show, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2007. With Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie, he co-wrote Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse (Turtle Point, 2003), a mock-epic based on the 1950 film All About Eve. His other books include Answer Song (High Risk Books, 1994), Hand Over Heart: Poems 1981-1988 (Amethyst Press, 1991), Pavane (Sherwood Press, 1981), and Plasticville (Turtle Point, 2000), a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets. With Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, he edited Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007). Trinidad teaches poetry at Columbia College Chicago, where he co-edits the journal Court Green.

Below are two poems, Robert Polito’s “Confidential” and David Trinidad’s “The Late Show”.

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Robert Polito. Photo: Tyler Flynn Dorholt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Polito

Confidential

She wears the Sacred Heart on her sleeve
for Christ’s sake,
who would have pegged her as a blackmailer?

There is a photograph I use to live inside,
many have taken it one time or another—

By the end she would only step out
with her cute boy reporters,
the ones who wrote she was pretty, sad, & misunderstood—

Love came over us, everyone said, like destiny,
to give it up would be like giving up God—

But listen, this is confidential—

We are at the Formosa. It is no year
I can think of, but in rapid succession
I’m Frank Sinatra/
Barbara Stanwyck/Gloria Graham/Orson Welles.

You’d think this would be fun. They’re all cool,
Right? Plus all the sex,
the love, even? The yearning in those faces
yearning towards me. But it’s not—
and not just because I have no control
Over who I become—Orson/Barbara/Gloria/Frank
. . . would it matter?

But instead I’m always too old—
or too young. Someone’s just walked out on me,
or I’ve just left him or her.

I’m not discovered yet, or no one wants me
except for who I used to be.

I’m too drunk or too fat or too crazy.
I’m in someone’s office, unzipping his fly.


I’m shouting—don’t you know who I am?

And that’s the problem, I always do.
I know exactly who I am.

David Trinidad. Photo: Tyler Flynn Dorholt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Trinidad

The Late Show

(circa 1970)

Natalie Wood, in the middle
of reciting a Wordsworth poem,
bursts into tears and runs out
of the classroom. Carroll Baker
gasps in an oxygen tent, her
platinum Harlow hair damp
and flat. Kim Stanley throws
a champagne glass at her mother’s
taxi, screaming “There is no god!
There is no god!” In a chiffon
cocktail dress and ankle-straps,
Joan Crawford staggers down
the beach, convinced her lover,
Jeff Chandler, is out to murder
her. Lana Turner learns that
she and her daughter, Sandra
Dee, are in love with the same
man. Jilted and demented, Suzy
Parker crouches in an alleyway
in a soiled trench coat, sifting
through Louis Jourdan’s trash.
To avoid forging the signature
of her twin sister, whom she’s killed,
Bette Davis grabs the red-hot end
of a fire iron with her writing hand.
Doris Day, in a black lace peignoir,
sobs into the telephone: “Who are
you? Why are you doing this to me?”
Julie Harris hears Hill House
beckoning, beckoning. Geraldine
Page begs Paul Newman for a fix.
Simone Signoret wipes her finger-
prints off the glass as James Caan
collapses, dead at her feet. Lee
Remick pours herself another
drink. Trembling, Ingrid Berg-
man watches the gaslights dim.
Shirley MacLaine breaks down,
admits her attraction to Audrey
Hepburn. Barbara Stanwyck tries
to keep Capucine. Elizabeth Taylor
scrawls, with lipstick, “No Sale”
across a mirror. Deborah Kerr
smolders. Shelley Winters shrieks.
Kim Novak screams and backs out
of the bell tower, into thin air.