Monday's Poem: 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' by Kim Bridgford

This is a film about the source of fear,

The house it built. Boo Radley listens there

In silence, steeped in myth. When Cruelty

Goes by, its smile like a snake that is so still

It makes you sleepy, slow, and vulnerable,

Boo feels the love in his chest. Is it family,

This silver well? His capacity to weep?

He runs, and moves, and saves.

It wasn't rape.

To be a myth is like the Bible's flutter

In the hot pages of Church, immediate,

The sound of all the things in life that matter.

It's like a lie from loneliness, like that,

And then you can't go back and make it true.

In this town, they cry wolf and they cry boo.

Kim Bridgford is the director of the West Chester University Poetry Center and the West Chester University Poetry Conference, the largest all-poetry writing conference in the United States. As editor of Mezzo Cammin, she was the founder of the Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, which was launched at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington. Her new book of poems, Hitchcock's Coffin: Sonnets About Classic Films, was just published by David Robert Books.

The Chronicle Review's poetry editor, Lisa Russ Spaar, of the University of Virginia, notes:

The effects of cinematography and the influence of the advent of film on poetry cannot be overstated. As Susan McCabe writes in her fascinating study Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2004) , one can only imagine the "thrill ... modernists must have felt in response to the emergence of film in its revolutionary ability to represent somatic movements and gestures as they had never been represented before. The body could be deliriously elsewhere, uncannily absent, yet viscerally present." Whether unconsciously anticipating the techniques and vocabulary of cinema (montage, elision, dream logic, quick cuts, changes in gaze and camera angle, frames, parataxis) or deliberately appropriating them, poets as diverse as H.D., William Carlos Williams, Anne Carson, Tom Andrews, Hart Crane, Federico Garcia Lorca, Kevin Young, Joseph Chapman, Michael Ryan, Frank O'Hara, and a host of surrealists and Dadaists have engaged with and been influenced by film, as subject, form, and foil. As Tom Andrews puts it in "Intermission: The Discreet Charm of Unfilmable Films," part of his marvelous series "25 Short Films About Poetry": "Imagine two early readers of The Waste Land and The Cantos—one a lover of movies, the other never having seen a single frame of moving film. What different poems they would have read! The writer of an 'unfilmable scenario' simply makes explicit his or her debt to, and delight in, cinematic techniques."

Speaking of the profound impact of the medium of film on her generation, Gertrude Stein wrote, "I cannot repeat this too often any one is of one's period and this our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production." One wonders how to characterize our period—the period of the illuminated, palimpsestic palm, the flickering thumbs, the swiping fingerpad?—the period of distractibility and download and disembodied simultaneity? How exciting, then, to find contemporary poets like Kim Bridgford, well known for her poetic formal dexterity, especially with the sonnet, casting her own lens on the abiding phenomenon of the classic film from the vantage point of our contemporary moment.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" concerns, of course, the iconic film based on Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. At first reading, the poem seems to be fairly straightforward and more about cinema than it is of or influenced by the techniques of film. An Italian sonnet, the poem is upfront about its discursive and meta approach: "This is a film about the source of fear, / The house it built. Boo Radley listens there / In silence, steeped in myth." Yet it's quickly clear that the poet is concerned with houses within houses—the characters within the film within the novel, the novel inside the movie, the actors within the characters, the unvoiced intentions behind actions, the truth within myths—and vice versa: the rooms constructed by emotion, imagination, memory, text. That all of this is suggested within the 14 lines of a sonnet—a sequence of interior and narrative meditations all offered within a single "frame" (or two frames, really, suggested by the octave and the sestet)—is where the poem becomes subtly but steeply experimental.

With an agility reinforced by the octave's intricate rhyme scheme (aabccbdd), Bridgford moves from exposition and statement ("This is a film about") to interiority and symbolism ("Boo Radley listens there"—but where? inside "fear"—and not just his own, but the town's), to exteriority and allegory ("When Cruelty / Goes by, its smile like a snake that is so still / It makes you sleepy, slow, and vulnerable"), to somatics and psychological depth ("Boo feels the love in his chest. Is it family, / This silver well? His capacity to weep?"), and then back to the present tense of the film, in which Boo "runs, and moves, and saves" Jem and Scout (still in her ham costume) from murder by Bob Ewell as they make their way home through the dark schoolyard after the school Halloween play. These gestures, inward, outward, physical and psychological, are offered with a rapidity that Fredric Jameson, in Signatures of the Visible (Routledge, 1990), finds intrinsic to movies: Films offer "a physical experience, and are remembered as such, stored up in bodily synapses that evade the thinking mind."

At the volta, Bridgford turns to a meditation on what it means to be, like Boo, like the novel and the movie made of it, a "myth":

To be a myth is like the Bible's flutter

In the hot pages of Church, immediate,

The sound of all the things in life that matter.

It's like a lie from loneliness, like that.

Even as she plunders the word "lie," whose letters are literally contained within the word "loneliness" (again frames within frames), addressing if not absolving the Ewells, Boo, and the relationship of lying and loneliness to the actions of all of them, Bridgford also speaks to the experience of movie-going. Who, watching humanity on a screen in a dark theater (or, for that matter, who in the midst of a certain kind of poem?), does not feel, for a moment, "the sound of all things that matter"? The beauty, essence, and fallacy of this moment is something Bridgford deconstructs in the final couplet:

And then you can't go back and make it true.

In this town, they cry wolf and they cry boo.

To return to McCabe's language on film for a moment, Bridgford's poem allows us to experience ourselves in relation to this classic film "as deliriously elsewhere, uncannily absent, yet viscerally present." We are implicated in the fear, vulnerability, guilt, and bravery of its fabrications. The sonnet reminds us of the artifice, but we register the truth of its "lie" in our bodies. We emerge from the theater of the poem, the fluid, atemporal arc of its "narrative," changed. To overthink the formal "movie magic" by which Bridgford achieves this effect would be a bit like Dickinson's splitting the lark to find the music. Or like killing a mockingbird.

Why Monday's Poem? Because what day needs a poem more? Watch for it most weeks at ChronicleReview.com.