From the time she was a teenager, my mother was a moviegoer. Cary Grant! Katherine Hepburn! Jimmy Stewart! Clark Gable! Her favorite movie of all time was Gone with the Wind. My father was not a moviegoer; he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a theater, and my mother eventually gave up. She had me, and as soon as I was old enough, my summers, weekends, and holidays were framed by the movies.
This is where I picked up a habit that has driven my wife and children crazy. I cry at sad movies, sad television shoes, and even sad or sentimental reels on Facebook. I was seven when she took me to see Last Voyage, with Dorothy Malone and my mother’s latest screen heartthrob, Robert Stack). I cried throughout most of the movie because of the tension. She felt so bad (it wasn’t a kid’s movie) that she walked us across Canal Street to another big movie theater to see Some Like It Hot, which was funny but also not a kid’s movie.
All those movie memories came back as I read My Hollywood and OtherPoems by Boris Dralyuk. His sense of the movies is filtered through how he understands one of the most cataclysmic events of the 20th century – the Russian Revolution. The events of 1917 to 1922 dispersed hundreds of thousands of Russians (not to mention how many died). The emigres ended up in places like Shanghai, Berlin, Paris, New York, and – Hollywood. Many of the Russians in Hollywood developed successful careers in the movies. Many did not.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Some Tuesday Readings
The Shadows Cast by Fallen Towers – Will Rahn at The Free Press.
A Poem for the Third Anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s Death – Cynthia Erlandson ay Society of Classical Poets.
“The Tyger,” poem by William Blake – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Writing with Found Words – Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.
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