Silver Birch Press Noir Erasure Poetry Anthology features over 40 poets from around the world

The soon-to-be-released Silver Birch Press Noir Erasure Poetry Anthology features poems by over 40 poets around the world who based their work on the writings of about 20 different noir authors. No surprise, I’m sure, is that by far the most popular authors were Raymond Chandler (16 poems based on his work) and Dashiell Hammett (9 poems based on his work), with Ross Macdonald coming in third (three poems based on his work). Other classic authors represented in the collection include James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich, with some current day authors (Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosely, and others) filling out the collection.

Erasure poems are created by photocopying a page from a book, then marking out, whiting out, or in other ways (see examples), eliminating some of the words. The remaining words  constitute the erasure poem.

The Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology will be released by Dec. 1, 2013.

A special thank you to contributing editors Jenni B. Baker, Catfish McDaris, james w. moore, and Gerald So for their fabulous work in bringing fellow authors into the collection and helping spread the word.

Cover: Guy Budziak, filmnoirwoodcuts.com.

Daylight Noir, photographs by Catherine Corman

THE BIG SLEEP (Excerpt)
by Raymond Chandler

We drove away from Las Olindas through a series of little dank beach towns with shack-like houses built down on the sand close to the rumble of the surf and larger houses built back on the slopes behind. A yellow window shone here and there, but most of the houses were dark. A smell of kelp came in off the water and lay on the fog. The tires sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard. The world was a wet emptiness.

We were close to Del Rey before she spoke to me for the first time since we left the drugstore. Her voice had a muffled sound, as if something was throbbing deep under it.

“Drive down by the Del Rey beach club. I want to look at the water.”

****

The above photo and passage from Raymond Chandler‘s novel The Big Sleepappear in the superb photo collectionDaylight Noir byCatherine Corman, with a preface by Jonathan Lethem. A series of photos from the book — including the photo of the Del Ray Beach Club above — were featured in a review by Rollo Romig in The New Yorker (October 7, 2010).

Photo: Del Ray Beach Club by Catherine Corman, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Find Daylight Noir by Catherine Corman at Amazon.com.

Poetry Noir, essay by John S. O’Connor

POETRY NOIR
by John S. O’Connor
Reprinted from poetryfoundation.org (2009)

This year I’m teaching a new class called Literature and Film. Since I’m always thinking of ways to use poetry in the classroom, we started the year by screening Run Lola Run while we read Oedipus the King (the brilliant Robert Fagles translation replete with devastatingly ironic line breaks). In our film noir unit, we read some terrific noir poems from Kevin Young’s Black Maria and some excerpts from Robert Polito’s fine new collection, Holywood and God. (Check out the podcast on Poetry Noir from Poetry off the Shelf.)

Then, while we were examining mise-en-scene (for our purposes, the physical setting of the film) in movies such as Double Indemnity and Chinatown, I asked students to write noir poems of their own. As a first step, I had students work in small groups to make a list of 50 concrete nouns, objects that fill the frame. When they were finished, I asked them to write down 10 “tough guy” lines. With that group-generated word pool, I asked individual students to tell a story that uses no verbs or adjectives that were not on their lists. (They could feel free to add “small words” such as articles and prepositions). For the sake of coherence, I didn’t really care if they broke these arbitrary rules, but for the most part they stayed within the parameters I laid out. Here is an example from Michael:

FEDORA CITY
Candle-lit brooches blinds the darkness

Whiskey perfumes the pearled dame:

Her thin eyebrows, false lashes, painted red lips. Manicured nails

Put pen to pad to pistol

Bourbon shadows suffocate

Every crowded bar
Police fire on the heels of her fur coat

Streetlamps spit halos of light in the boozy night

The Fedora City lights like a knife

A neon scream hits my gut like a brick

Gasping for my life, my lungs find only stale air

I need a drink
 
The broad beat it outta there quick,

dangling rope

earrings her only trace

A doll on the run,

a run in her stockings–
Camera to crime to cuffs.

Set match to photograph

Smothering the city in Venetian streaks

The blinds are drawn shut

Case closed.

Photo: Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, based on Dashiell Hammett‘s novel.

Haruki Murakami Reads Ross Macdonald

In this excerpt from The Paris Review interview with Haruki Murakami — bestselling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — the writer discusses the influence of hardboiled detective fiction on his work.

INTERVIEWER: … hard-boiled American detective fiction has clearly been a valuable resource. When were you exposed to the genre and who turned you on to it?

MURAKAMI: As a high-school student, I fell in love with crime novels. I was living in Kobe, which is a port city where many foreigners and sailors used to come and sell their paperbacks to the secondhand bookshops. I was poor, but I could buy paperbacks cheaply. I learned to read English from those books and that was so exciting.

INTERVIEWER: What was the first book you read in English?

MURAKAMI: The Name Is Archer, by Ross Macdonald. I learned a lot of things from those books. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. At the same time I also loved to read Tolstoyand Dostoevsky. Those books are also page-turners; they’re very long, but I couldn’t stop reading. So for me it’s the same thing, Dostoevsky and Raymond Chandler. Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoevsky and Chandler together in one book. That’s my goal.

INTERVIEWER: At what age did you first read Kafka?

MURAKAMI: When I was fifteen. I read The Castle; that was a great book. And The Trial.

INTERVIEWER: That’s interesting. Both those novels were left unfinished, which of course means that they never resolve; your novels too—particularly your more recent books, like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—often seem to resist a resolution of the kind that the reader is perhaps expecting. Could that in any way be due to Kafka’s influence?

MURAKAMI: Not solely. You’ve read Raymond Chandler, of course. His books don’t really offer conclusions. He might say, He is the killer, but it doesn’t matter to me who did it. There was a very interesting episode when Howard Hawks made a picture of The Big Sleep. Hawks couldn’t understand who killed the chauffeur, so he called Chandler and asked, and Chandler answered, I don’t care! Same for me. Conclusion means nothing at all. I don’t care who the killer is in The Brothers Karamazov.

INTERVIEWER: And yet the desire to find out who killed the chauffeur is part of what makes The Big Sleep a page-turner.

MURAKAMI: I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

Read the rest of The Paris Review interview here.

Photo: Haruki Murakami and cat friend.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Influence on Ross Macdonald

The Moving Target — originally published in 1949 — features Lew Archer, an L.A. private investigator, who appears in a series of novels by Ross Macdonald.

While reading the work of this amazing wordsmith/poet, I was struck by its similarity to the best passages in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — and figured somebody somewhere must have written about this. A quick Google search revealed more than I’d hoped.

My research uncovered a fascinating article entitled “Ross Macdonald’s Marked Copy of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of Influence” by Robert F. Moss. In the article, Moss demonstrates how Macdonald learned from Fitzgerald on a variety of levels, including language, plot, structure, and technique. Macdonald is quoted as calling Fitzgerald “a dream writer,” “our finest novelist,” and “my master.” Read the entire article here.

To give a sense of Macdonald’s command of language, here is the opening paragraph from Chapter 4 of The Moving Target:

We rose into the offshore wind sweeping across the airport and climbed toward the southern break in the mountains. Santa Teresa was a colored air map on the mountains’ knees, the sailboats in the harbor white soap chips in a tub of bluing. The air was very clear. The peaks stood up so sharply that they looked like papier-maché I could poke my finger through. Then we rose past them into chillier air and saw the wilderness of mountains stretching to the fifty-mile horizon.

The Moving Target was made into Harper, a 1966 movie starring Paul Newman. Legendary screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men) adapted the novel for the screen — and considered The Moving Target his breakthrough script (it was his second screenwriting credit). Newman also starred as Lew Harper (the screen name for Lew Archer) in the 1975 movie The Drowning Pool, based on Ross Macdonald’s novel of the same name.

David Goodis: Master of Noir Fiction

In 1947, Humphrey Bogartand wife Lauren Bacall starred in the film adaptation of David Goodis‘s noir novel DARK PASSAGE (1946). The book also served as inspiration for the television series THE FUGITIVE (1963-1967) starring David Janssen.

David Goodis — who never achieved the status of fellow noir writers Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett — has been called “The Poet Laureate of the Bleak.” He died in 1967 at age 49.

With his work often out of print, the prestigious Library of America decided to solidify Goodis’s place as a top noir stylist by in 2012 issuing GOODIS: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s. The Library of America states as its mission “to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.”

Here’s an example of Goodis‘s prose — the opening passage to his 1947 novel NIGHTFALL:

It was one of those hot, sticky nights that makes Manhattan show its age. There was something dreary and stagnant in the way all this syrupy heat refused to budge. It was anything but a night for labor, and Vanning stood up and walked away from the tilted drawing board. He brushed past a large metal box of water colors, heard the crash as the box hit the floor. That seemed to do it. That ended any inclination he might have had for finishing the job tonight.

Heat came into the room and settled itself on Vanning. He lit a cigarette. He told himself it was time for another drink. Walking to the window, he told himself to get away from the idea of liquor. The heat was stronger than the liquor.”

Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology: Deadline 9/15/13

There are still a few more days until the Sept. 15, 2013 deadline for the Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology, a collection of passages from hardboiled detective novels — by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, and others — with sections marked out to create poems. If you’re unfamiliar with erasure poetry, check out our posts that feature erasure poems by james moore and  Cathy Dee. For more about hardboiled fiction, visit Wikipedia.

TO SUBMIT: Photocopy a page from a noir/hardboiled novel, mark out passages with magic marker or whiteout (or another form of your choosing) to create a noir poem. On a separate sheet, list your name, address, phone, and email, along with the title of the novel, author, edition, publisher, page number, and any other identifying information. Include your one-paragraph bio along with a typed version of the poem(s).

SEND TO: Silver Birch Press, P.O. Box 29458, Los Angeles, CA 90029 (DO NOT FOLD, AS WE WILL FEATURE THE ORIGINAL SUBMISSIONS IN THE BOOK) or email as an attachment to silver@silverbirchpress.com.

DEADLINE: September 15, 2013

PAYMENT: All contributors featured in the book will receive a paperback copy of the Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology

We look forward to reading your inspired NOIR erasure poems! 

And thank you to everyone who has already submitted. We plan to review all submissions by the end of September and release the book in late fall.

Cover art: Guy Budziak, filmnoirwoodcuts.com.

Blinds Ambition, New Yorker cartoon by Ward Sutton

CAPTION: “If I hire you to find my husband, will you turn some lights on in your office?”

CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Ward Sutton, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at condenaststore.com.

Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology: Deadline extended to 9/15/13

We are extending the deadline to Sept. 15, 2013  for the Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology, a collection of passages from hardboiled detective novels — by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, and others — with sections marked out to create poems. If you’re unfamiliar with erasure poetry, check out our posts that feature The Great Gatsby erasure poems by james moore and  Cathy Dee.

TO SUBMIT: Photocopy a page from a noir/hardboiled novel, mark out passages with magic marker or whiteout (or another form of your choosing) to create a noir poem. On a separate sheet, list your name, address, phone, and email, along with the title of the novel, author, edition, publisher, page number, and any other identifying information.

SEND TO: Silver Birch Press, P.O. Box 29458, Los Angeles, CA 90029 (DO NOT FOLD, AS WE WILL FEATURE THE ORIGINAL SUBMISSIONS IN THE BOOK) or email as an attachment to silver@silverbirchpress.com.

DEADLINE: September 15, 2013

PAYMENT: All contributors featured in the book will receive a paperback copy of the Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology

We look forward to reading your inspired NOIR erasure poems! 

Cover art: Guy Budziak, filmnoirwoodcuts.com.

Detective Story, New Yorker cartoon by Ward Sutton

CAPTION: “If I hire you to find my husband, will you turn some lights on in your office?”

CREDIT: New Yorker cartoon by Ward Sutton, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at condenaststore.com.