Lights, Camera, Poetry!: American Movie Poems, The First Hundred Years.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

The Academy Award-nominated "The Postman" brought cinematic fans to poetry by dramatizing the friendship between poet Pablo Neruda and a mail carrier with literary aspirations. The adolescent males of "Dead Poets Society" assert their vitality by sneaking off at night for furtive encounters with texts by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Abraham Cowley. When the exquisite words of W.H. Auden are read at the funeral in "Four Weddings and a Funeral," a viewer might be tempted to abandon movies for poetry.

Poet Frank O'Hara refused to choose. "I like the movies too," he proclaimed. "And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies." None of those three wrote about movies, but other American poets, including Vachel Lindsay, who authored screenplays as well as the first book of film theory in English, have used the movies as muse. In Lights, Camera, Poetry!, Jason Shinder has collected more than 100 poems about the cinema that will make no one forget either "Citizen Kane" or Leaves of Grass. They will do to remind readers of the power of meticulous words and flickering images.

Arranged in chronological order, by author's date of birth--oddly, not date of publication--the volume puts its best iambic feet forward first with "Provide, Provide," Robert Frost's meditation on a faded movie star's transient glory. A few pages later comes Hart Crane's familiar depiction of Charlie Chaplin's tramp as modern human prototype...