Cinema Club, Kutztown State College, 1971

← v20n1, Spring 2021

Those movies about the movies: Sunset

Boulevard, Singing in the Rain, Targets . . .

We cherished every close-up of the projector,

Its smoke-swirled beam,

the film editor

Splicing footage together in the dark.

Keaton crossing the proscenium arch.

The boom mic taking center stage

In Welles’ stark trailer for Citizen Kane.

Mirrors held up to mirrors. Soliloquies

Of light.

In black-and-white especially—

That old, combustible, nitrate stock

The images themselves could touch off.

Veronica Lake in a bathrobe in Sullivan’s

Travels, the film lit as if with platinum.

art memory

Robert Gibb

Robert Gibb’s books include Sightlines (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2021), which won the Prize Americana for Poetry 2019, Among Ruins (Indiana University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), which won Notre Dame’s Sandeen Prize in Poetry for 2017, and After (Marsh Hawk Press, 2017), which won the 2016 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Other awards include a 1997 National Poetry Series title for his book The Origins of Evening (W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships in poetry, a Best American Poetry and a Pushcart Prize.