B- Liked this has the feel of snippets of conversation overhead in my local café (greasy spoon par excellence!) where one never quite hears the whole conversation
P
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Barry Alpert
Sent: 17 August 2011 22:33
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Snap Sirk's Sleep
SLEEP, MY LOVE
[via] D[ouglas] SIRK
Serious, very serious
last half hour,
every thing’s all right.
Experiences real & imagined variety
peculiarly party.
Man I adore--
you better hurry,
love call the clergy (little jumpy).
Our kind of place--easy to get a table.
Very well.
Everybody’s different, everybody’s fine, different.
Dogs, I just adore dogs,
sign of him back there--
it may strain her.
Run away, get away, the balcony . . .
Kill you if you don’t jump.
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring MD US / 8-17-11 (5:31 PM)
Revised immediately after drafting during my first experience of this noir melodrama, recently restored after years of unavailability because of the condition of the nitrate original. The director Douglas Sirk, born 1897 in Hamburg with the name Hans Detlef Sierck and apparently a peer of Brecht and Weill in Germany during the thirties before escaping to Hollywood, originally came to my attention via critical references to his impact on Rainer Fassbinder, a director I followed in detail along with Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders during the re-emergence of German cinema in the seventies. Sirk subsequently said that he was only interested in Claudette Colbert's character in this film, and had I known that before viewing I might have entitled my cine-poem [Claudette Colbert by Douglas Sirk] and limited myself to the words which exited her mouth instead of the multi-voiced texture evident here. As it was, i changed my original strategy in process to pursue an additional formal possibility since a fair amount of running time remained, and I'm pleased with the appropriately twisted melodramatic language caught in the last five lines.
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