How do we evaluate and rank movies?

Good question. We start with Goethe's three-star criteria for literary criticism: What was done, how well was it done, and was it worth doing?

In the instance of movies, we add a few criteria of our own:

How quickly does the film capture us and involve us in an imaginary world that is complex, realistic, and important? Memorable movies that quickly  achieve this initial feat  include Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Once Upon a Time in America, Cries and Whispers, and Gangs of New York. There are of course many, many others.

Then we try to evaluate the  characterization.  How well do the actors portray their characters and how rich, complex, and realistic are they?

Finally, there is the highly subjective evaluation of the movie in comparison with all the other movies we've seen--hundreds by the time we have become thinking adults. But above all is the question, How quickly and strongly does it grab you?

Say good night, Merchant/Ivory Team:

Ishmail Merchant died last year, breaking up the team with  James Ivory that had produced a string of wonderful movies dating back more than 30 years. 

Ralph Fiennes and Natasha Richardson share a moment. He is blind, she a former Russian countess working nights in Shanghai's Pleasure District in the 1930s. The Japanese invasion of China is only days away. And then it happens, and the ordered world is no more.

Proudly we add The White Countess to our list of the greatest movies of all time 

I can't think of a more enjoyable movie I've seen in several years. Christopher Doyle's photographic skill is evident in every scene and James Ivory's direction is unsurpassed. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote the book, Kazuo Ishiguro the screenplay. The acting is superb--it is as though these two actors were born to play their parts. And Richardson's real mother and aunt add immeasurably to the gritty reality of the life of Russian nobility living in exile.

It is a fascinating, corrupt world soon to be destroyed. The Japanese invasion overwhelms Shanghai and destroys the known world of these two friends, business partners and perhaps lovers.

Great  mise en scène. Detailing is extraordinary. A joy throughout. Not to be missed.

ELIZABETH THE FIRST

Two Versions. Who is the Best Beth? (For that matter, who is the Best Leicester?)

Helen Mirren as Elizabeth, shadowed by Jeremy Irons as her confident and probable lover, Leicester. We give the flick the grade of B. Add a plus if you like.

Cate Blanchett as Liz, comforted by Joseph Finnes as Leicester. An A-.

Irons (as the Earl of  Leicester) sums up the Elizabethan poetic spirit of the times when he sighs, "I am for the dark, Bess," and expires. Not Donne, not Marvel(ous), but quite nicely done, all the same. And the spirit is just right.

Mirren's Elizabeth is the first two-hour part of a four-hour series on the life of the queen made by HBO. We saw only the first part (a Direct TV freebie) and will lie contented with it. Mirren, as usual, is admirable and portrays the queen who is torn between her woman's heart and the demands of the kingdom's political intrigue with France and the Spanish Armada.

We all know how that turned out.

Mirren in the closing shots of Part I as the aging queen. Wow, what a face! And what great material for her to work with.

But Blanchett is excellent, too, in her version. First she is the young Bess, beautiful and in love with Leicester, played darkly and well by Joseph Finnes. She is even better later on as the angry ruler, ill-used both by the courts of Europe and by her own advisers and countrymen.

The camera work of Director Shahkar Kapar is outstanding. Though both versions are highly watchable and entertaining, Blanchett's comes out on top by a decided margin.

Perhaps there is something innately inferior about movies that are commissioned by TV networks, particularly that are supported by subscription. Of course all such movies are marketed much as any other film is handled. But there seems to be something intangibly inferior in the production process for TV subscriptions. Or so the results so often indicate.

If you disagree, name me a great movie made originally for TV.

What are the
greatest movies of all time?
How many are there, after nearly 100 years of film making? Many, but only a few have achieved this wonderful status.

Tell us your favorite movies and maybe we will publish them. Or add some to our list. But to start things off, here are a few that we think must be included, but not in any specific order:

1. Citizen Kane

2. Apocalypse Now Redux

3. The Godfather, part 1

4. Once Upon a Time in America

5. The Third Man

6. All That Jazz

7. Casablanca

8. Gandhi

9. Reds

10. Chinatown

11. House of Sand and Fog

12. Ordinary People

13. Gangs of New York

14. Mr. Hulot's Holiday

15. Cries and Whispers

16. The White Countess

The Second Tier

1. Invincible (Werner Herzog, 2002)

2. Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofski 2000)

3. The Usual Suspects (1995)

4. Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino 1980)

5. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

Kingfisher Salutes:

Poet Carolyn Kizer

Carolyn Kizer as Janus
(Old photo, digitally edited for this issue)

Cool, Calm & Collected, Poems 1960-2000, Copper Canyon Press, 2001

Kizer is an accomplished poet who has been performing her craft, "or sullen art," for  half a century. She has lived through seven decades and won many awards. The times she has lived through include the powerful international feminist movement, which has affected poets male and female, and altered everybody's sensibility. And this pre-occupation with feminism comes to dominate her work at what might be called her mid-career. This is both good and bad, in my opinion. It makes it both representative of a special time and subject to the limitations of that same time.

We were in one or two of Theodore Roethke's classes together, and Ted was very respectful of her, both as a coming poet and a Seattle socialite from a family that had money.  She started the journal Poetry Northwest and helped support it through long and difficult times. She and her long-time editor of the journal (David Wagoner) were close friends and fellow poets. I knew them only slightly and spent one evening with them which was memorable, for they had returned from seeing the Arthur Miller play, "Death of a Salesman," and Wagoner was quoting from memory some monumental lines from the play. I still remember (perhaps inaccurately) Willie Lowman speaking about a salesman getting a spot on his hat and then, brother, you are through.

Thanks, Dave. I didn't forget it.

Both went on to become accomplished poets. It is a pleasure to read them, after so much time, and to find so many memorable poems. So, though what follows is not approved critical technique, it is pleasant for me to return to some of Kizer's poems from that that significant time and place, and others, and to congratulate her on her considerable accomplishment.

Thanks, Carolyn.

Now to my favorite poems of hers:

A Poet's Household

three for Theodore Roethke

I.

The stout poet tiptoes
On the lawn. Surprisingly limber
In his thick sweater
Like a middle-aged burglar.
Is the young robin injured?

II.

She bends to feed the geese
Revealing the neck's white curve
Below her curled hair.
Her husband seems not to watch.
But she shimmers in his poem.

III.

A hush is on the house.
The only noise, a fern
Rustling in a vase.
On the porch, the fierce poet
Is chanting words to himself.

From an Artist's House

for Morris Graves

I.
A bundle of twigs
On the roof. We study pictures:
Nests of hern and crane.
The artist who built this house
Arranged the branches there.

II.
In the inlaid box
With a gilt hasp concealing
A letter, a jewel?
Within a bunch of feathers
The small bones of a bird.

III.
The great gold kakemono
With marvelous tapes and tassels,
Handles of pale bone.
In a blaze on the wall. Someone
Pinned an oak leaf to the silk.

IV.
Full of weathered oranges,
The old, lopsided compote
Reposes on the swill.
Poor crockery, Immortal
On twenty sheets of paper.

Commentary:
The first three poems "A Poet's Household" are really one, divided into short numbered stanzas. (Why the numbers? They do not stand alone.) They are dedicated to Theodore Roethke and are of course about him and a visit Kizer made to his home. It is probably the early 1950s, and Roethke is newly married to a much younger person, a former student of his, Beatrice.  (Dante had his Beatrice first, many have joked.)

The image of Roethke resembling a middle-aged burglar is not bad. He, and others, had likened him to a lumbering bear. But he was amazingly light on his feet, and used to play tennis with younger friends and students. He was good.

Why he tiptoes, I have no idea. And he comes across a robin, perhaps a fledgling. Kizer drops the image immediately. A woman, unidentified so far, and not the visiting poet, "bends to feed the geese." So it is a domestic setting, and not their home in, if I recall correctly, the Montlake District of Seattle. It is a country place, where geese can be kept.

The newly married Roethke does not seem to observe his wife and her graceful neck, its curve. Ah, but he does, and so does Kizer. And notes that she will "shimmer" one day in the lines of his poem. This puts Kizer both in the present and in the future, melding them.

There is silence. Such a silence that only a fern can be heard rustling in a vase. So there is a breeze coming from somewhere. And what is a fern (presumably dried) doing in a vase? We do no ask because no answer will be forthcoming.

The poet is "fierce" and "chants" words of a poem to  himself. Else is stillness, near silence. The scene is sketched and preserved in amber. The poem is complete.
 

In the second poem, which has four similarly Roman numbered  stanzas, Kizer is at the house of Painter Morris Graves. (What good company she is found in!) The visit is for the material-gathering purpose of a future poem. Kizer is keen, super-aware to the occasion. She is there to acquire the substance for another poem. She keenly looks round.

Twigs bundled on the roof, or are they branches? Whatever, the painter "arranged" them there. And he also built the house, as we students know. Domain and domicile were always important to whoever had to have them just right, along with the accoutrements that go along with them.

The inlaid box with the gilt clasp. Can't be much more specific than that. If the box conceals a jewel, a letter, the poet doesn't know, yet a moment later she tells us that there is  a bunch of feathers and the bones of a small bird inside. Hmmm.

A kakeono is hung on the wall. We discover this to be a Japanese scroll painting. It has "marvelous" tapes and tassels, and is of gold, or gilt. We can mentally fill in the spaces. Beautiful. Again is the image of bones, that which remains after the soul and the material substance of the body is gone. We are left with the ghostly remains. All fitting to such a poem, as is the "blaze" they make on the wall.

The "someone" who has pinned an oak leaf to the silk of the kakemono is no doubt the painter, or someone acting in concert with the painter and his wishes; it would have to be so in a  house the painter built and arranged so perfectly.

And now the poet shifts  her gaze, her attention, to the "poor crockery," the ancient compote, the "lopsided" dish that holds what Graves has painted or will paint soon: a piece of crockery with the withered remnants of a number of oranges. They don't just "lie" there, they "repose" on the sideboard or kitchen counter. (What's the difference?) They await the painter "immortalizing" them on 20 sheets of paper.

They may be drawn or painted on brown wrapping paper, old disassembled grocery bags, cheap drawing paper, whatever the painter finds handy. Nobody then knows that Graves's slightest effort (and his slightest is often a major one in the marketplace) will often be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more.

Kizer knows. It is one reason why she is at Graves's home and is observing so keenly. It is for herself, of course, but it is for all of us. It is for the future, for poesy, for all of us who care about such things, too. We owe her thanks.

Other poems I've enjoyed and will probably return to again:

from The Fifties

Afterthoughts of Donna Elvira
The Great Blue Heron
The Patient Lovers
[the two aforementioned]

from The Seventies

Voyager
On a Line from Sophocles
Semele Recycled

 from The Eighties

Bitch
The Gift
Horseback

from The Nineties

Reunion [which is a sonnet]
An American Beauty [which commemorates Ann London, whom I also knew]

and from New Poems

Trio
In The Night
 

from Classical Chinese [done, I think, from translations]

The Meandering River Poems
Thwarted

Other poems are of course with  high merit, though not my favorites. Her long poem over decades, "Pro Femina," once turned me against her, but I'm afraid I didn't read the sections carefully as they came out and I undervalued them. It might be a worthy project for some college English major to analyze and examine these important poems for a paper, if this hasn't been done so previously and extensively.

Kizer is accomplished in many ways, and her early efforts in traditional and often rhymed verse forms are well executed. They indicate a poet long self-trained in the complex history of verse form. And Kizer's sense of humor and wit are commendable. She has practiced her craft long and hard, and successfully. She has been widely recognized.

As a poet of the Fifties, she took academic positions of high merit, teaching at the University of North Carolina, Ohio State, Columbia, Princeton, and Stanford. Whew! That is a career in itself!

Her collected poems ends just shy of 500 pages. That too is a poetical statement. It indicates a lot of hard, enjoyable work. And they are enjoyable to read, too.

I

POETRY SECTION

Must a poet die in order that a new poem be born? And then what happens?

It shouldn't be that way, but occasionally it is. One poet dies and another poet--often a friend, but more often an acquaintance of long standing--writes a poem commemorating the dead poet. It almost seems, sometimes, that there is a tacit compact to use each other as subject matter. No holds barred. But one wonders? Often the dying poet is lying in hospital and is being kept  alive by mechanical or chemical support systems. It is not a merciful time.

Often it is the doctors' choice. Te patient is vulnerable. He lies there helpless, while the healthy poet pays his visit, or hers,  and consoles himself with thoughts such as, "Thank God it isn't me, lying there on the 'high bed.' Whew. Escaped again!" And we think of that by-now-cliché of Dylan Thomas's, "Do not go gentle into that good night. . ."

Why the hell not? Well, it was apparently not meant to be.

I admit being overly sensitive on the subject. Kingfisher Journal was born when Robert Sund died; he too lay in hospital, visited by a few compassionate friends. (No, that is not the name of an organization, nor should it be.)

Instead of making my own visit, I chickened out.  I sent him a letter instead. Later mutual friends told me he briefly came out of a morphine-induced state and became momentarily lucid. Then the comatose state returned. Eventually it claimed him.

Unfortunately, he never got my letter, which was a good one. Its bearer, Gallery Owner Dana Rust, never bothered to deliver it or read it to Robert. Bad luck, I guess, but I had only the best of intentions.  I respected his pain, his state of helplessness. He needed to die in private, I told myself. But something was missing on my part. Hence, Kingfisher and served as a tribute. Or so I thought.

We were all of a time, he and I, and students of that great teacher and poet, Ted Roethke. Some students became very fine poets themselves. Not I. But  a time came for each of them, each of us. When Richard Hugo sickened and lay dying, he was visited by friend and fellow Poet David Wagoner. And when Jim Wright was hospital-ridden and helpless, Fellow Poet Carolyn Kizer paid him a final visit.

But I wonder. In both instances, a poem followed. David Wagoner told me he had tried to write a poem about Wright's death, too, but had failed to come up with anything his critical judgment would accept. I told him I understood. Though I probably didn't.

Should there not be more such built-in critical mechanisms in our practicing poets?

Let's look at these two commemorative poems, plus another by W. S. Merwin, on the death of Ted Hughes, and see what we can find:

Robert C. Arnold
Editor

Poet Carolyn Kizer

Final Edition
for James Wright

Old friend, I dressed in my very best
Wore the furs I never wear,
Hair done in Bloomingdale's,
Even a manicure; splashed on the good perfume
Before I rode the bus up Madison
To the rear of the hospital:
Transversed for miles the corridors underground
Where orderlies in green wheeled metal carts
Piled with soiled linen, bottles, pans, and tubes.

Then, elevators found, I followed a colored line
To the proper nurse's station,
Embraced your wife: pale, having wept for weeks,
Worn out with your care,
She led me to your bedside, I swept in with an air,
Wrapped you in fur; censed you with my perfume.
Jaunty and thin, with the fine eyes and pursy lips
Of one of Holbein's Unknown Gentlemen,
You could not speak
Except for some unintelligible grunts
Through the hole they had made in your throat;
Impatient with your wife
Who, after years of understanding,
Could not understand.

Enough, I think, though the poem goes on for six similar stanzas. We get the picture. The poet, an old friend since college days, visits the dying poet and tries to overwhelm him with her feminine self.

Sheesh. He lies helpless with throat cancer. Note the acute detail of the start of the visitation: I must remember all this for the poem I will afterward write. And then she dredges up, for publication, details from their shared past--the classes with Ted Roethke, and the telling, condescending observation: "Dear one, back then you were so plain!/A pudgy face, a button nose, with a little wen/Right at the tip.  . . ." And a bit later, "Now pain has made you beautiful."

I'll bet. And defenseless, as well. Nailed to a bed, unable to speak, a tube in the hole in his throat. Drip morphine in his arm, as well. Did he know she was there? Hope not.

I knew them both a little, back then, some fifty years ago, as a fellow student of Roethke's in classes at the UW. And when this poem rang condescendingly false in my tin ear, I asked David Wagoner about whether he had written a poem to commemorate the death of Jim, too. For I was looking for something to counter this with. He replied in an email.

"No, Robert: I tried to, but didn't like the results. --David W. "

A tough task, admittedly. Wagoner did write an affectionate poem commemorating the death of Richard Hugo, another fine poet from our time, who also died too young of a similar ailment. It goes:

POET DAVID WAGONER

Eulogy for Richard Hugo
(1923-82)

We both wore masks. Mine over my mouth
Was there to catch each word, each dangerous breath
Before it reached the man sitting in bed
And found its way through his defenseless blood.
His mask was a royal bruise across his chest
(Where one lung labored, labored hard as Christ
To cure the marrow that had turned against him)
And the swollen flesh of a face, once lean and handsome,
Now stretched past guilt and fear, past innocence
And courage into a skintight radiance.

[I drop a stanza here because of space limitations, alas. Ed]

For thirty years I'd know a starving child
Inside him, tough and subtle, shrewd and squalid,
Who shared his body, glaring through his eyes
And balking at the cost of wretchedness.
Outside, he wore a life intensely human
And over that, at times, like a mad shaman,
The skulls of enemies and the skins of beasts,
Tatters of beggar boys and family ghosts--
Sacred disguises. "What I do is me"
Became for him "What I seem, we all may be."

These struggling selves made poems, did without
The gibberish of God, grudge-matching wit,
The urge to poses or maunder, prattle or preach,
And sang blunt beautiful American speech
In voices none of us had heard before,
Whose burden was "We can grow up through fear."
He spent his days in search of a hometown
Where he could be class hero and class clown,
Unknown and famous, friendly and alone.
Wearing his old school colors, the grey and white
Of ashes,  he lies there now, its laureate.

Wow! What a poem! In a time of easy, careless free verse, this poem is written in heroic couplets (iambic pentameter that rhymes, that is) and is taut as a bowstring. And where is the poet who writes this poem? Nearly invisible, but a controlling intelligence of great insight and compassion. He has keen knowledge of the dying poet's life, his history and his problems from the past. It is full of love and respect, knowledge and compassion.

The poem compares  chillingly with Kizer's. Hers, alas, is about Carolyn Kizer. Poor dying Jim Wright is lost in the poetic shuffling process. He lies smothered in fur and perfume, fighting for each breath and hoping it is the last.

POET W. S. MERWIN

Planth For The Death of Ted Hughes

we were going to catch up with some of the sentences
in France or Idaho we were going
to shake them out again and listen
to what had not been caught by history or geography
or touched at all by the venomous weather
it was only a question of where and when

Merwin's fine poem is more of a lament to the passage of unexercised time than it is to the death of a fellow poet, but it is clearly that, too. As he grows older (he is 80 now, many of his friends dead) a sad, nostalgic note creeps into his poetry. The poem is an elegy, or as he puts it in that appropriately archaic word, a planh.

There is not much about Hughes the man or Hughes the poet; what we need to know we must bring to the poem. Likewise about Bill Merwin , one the finest and most prolific poets of our times.

It might help us understand the seeming obscurity of the poem's language to know that Merwin once explained that standard capitalization and punctuation "nails" the words to the page. A good point, but I'm not sure all would agree. Just listen with your tongue: When the words form in one's head, there is no need for punctuation and it seems gratuitous; the meaning comes through clearly enough.

The unspoken sentences he cites would be "shaken" out again. Like old comfortable clothes, they would be shaken anew into form and life. They would be worn again.

Similarly, history and geography are not complete until the people who form and live their concepts get back together and bring these academic concepts into everyday real life.

The verbs of the poem are in the past tense, which adds a slowness to the poem's literal progress. This is clearly intended by Merwin. To return to the present was always the intention of friends separated by distance and time. If only they had "world enough and time," we now ask. But we can't. Time has caught up with us, year by quick year, and we are filled with a compounding sense of loss.

Hearts "stop." But the "silent wailing" of grief does not. It goes on and on, until our individual hearts cease beating, like the hearts of our dead friends. And maybe even then they do not stop. Maybe grief is eternal and the heavy hearts go on beating in eternity.

And at the poem's close, the Merwin sentence doesn't end with a period. It is not finished working on us and our minds.

BACK ISSUES of Kingfisher Journal
(Available only online)

<sub>Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 1, Poet Robert Sund Issue;

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 2, Iridescent Light Issue

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 3, Sylvia Plath Issue;

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 4, James Wright Issue

Kingfisher Journal Vol.2, No.1, Richard Hugo Issue

Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 1, Theodore Roethke Commemorative Issue</sub>

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 2, No 3, W.S. Merwin/Richard Ford issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 4, Fishtown Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, William Stafford Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 2, David Wagoner Edition}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, Edna O'Brien Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 4 Anthony Powell and Donald Justice issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 1, Robert Sund and Graham Greene Issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 2 Saul Bellow  and Robert Creeley Issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 3 Philip Whalen and Vincent Van Gogh Issue.}

_{Kingfdisher Journal, Vol. 4, Number 4, J. M. Coetzee, W. S. Merwin, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter)}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol.5, Number 1, Poet Frank O'Hara and Artist Larry Rivers}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 5, Number 2, Jim Harrison Issue}