The Night Goes on All Night: Noir Inspired Poems edited by Rick Lupert

THE NIGHT GOES ON ALL NIGHT: Noir Inspired Poems, edited by Rick Lupert (Ain’t Got No Press, November 2011) was published in conjunction with the 2011 Los Angeles Poetry Festival’s “Night and the City” Noir Festival.

The collection features work from 24 poets who, according to the book description, explore “their own noir-de-vivre with humor, grit, nostalgia, and the requisite fedora.” The book includes an introductory note about noir from Los Angeles Poetry Festival director Suzanne Lummis.

CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: E. Amato, Michael C. Ford, Michael Cluff, Brendan Constantine, Mike Daily, Gloria Derge, Peggy Dobreer, Jerry Garcia, Joelle Hannah, Kris Huelgas, Elizabeth Iannaci, Jack Bowman, Ruth Nolan, Marc Olmsted, Kevin Patrick Sullivan, Angela Penaredondo, Douglas Richardson, Anthony Seidman, Eric Steineger, Eric Tuazon, Mehnaz Turner, Wyatt Underwood, Wanda VanHoy Smith and Florence Weinberger.

Here is a sampling from the collection…

PANORAMA CITY (Excerpt)
by Brendan Constantine

We started wearing 
dark glasses between the house & the garage. 
Panorama City had no view; from any window 
we saw another window.

Note: Brendan Constantine will appear at the POET NOIR reading at the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, Nov. 24, 2013. Details here.

ABOUT THE EDITOR: Rick Lupert has been involved in the Los Angeles poetry community since 1990. He served for two years as a co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets, a non-profit organization that produces readings and publications out of the San Fernando Valley. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, including The Los Angeles Times and Chiron Review. He edited A Poet’s Haggadah: Passover through the Eyes of Poets anthology and is the author of thirteen books. Since 1994, he has hosted the long-running Cobalt Cafe reading series in Canoga Park and is regularly featured at venues throughout Southern California. Rick created and maintains the Poetry Super Highway, a major internet resource for poets. (PoetrySuperHighway.com) Currently Rick works as a music teacher and web designer and can be reached by email at Rick@PoetrySuperHighway.com.

Find the 56-page THE NIGHT GOES ON ALL NIGHT: Noir Inspired Poetry at Amazon.com.

Poem Noir performances at Bradbury Building on 11/24/13

The Los Angeles Visionaries Association (LAVA) will host a POEM NOIR reading at the historic Bradbury Building on Sunday, November 24, 2013.  Poem Noir performers include: Carl Weintraub, Brendan Constantine and Suzanne Lummis (pictured above). The reading is part of a FREE walking tour called “Flaneur & the City: Broadway on My Mind.”

WHAT: Flaneur & the City…Broadway on my Mind walking tour

WHEN: Sunday, Nov. 24, 2013 from 2:30-3:30 p.m.

WHERE: Downtown Los Angeles. Details here.

Listen to a September 2013 interview with Suzanne Lummis on NPR’s “All Things Considered” at this link.

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.

The Night Goes On All Night: Noir Inspired Poetry, edited by Rick Lupert

At the Silver Birch Press blog, one of our favorite topics is noir — novels (anything by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or Ross MacDonald) and films (especially Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder, with a script by Chandler and Wilder). That’s why we were intrigued when we learned about THE NIGHT GOES ON ALL NIGHT: Noir Inspired Poems, edited by Rick Lupert (Ain’t Got No Press, November 2011) published in conjunction with the Los Angeles Poetry Festival’s “Night and the City” Noir Festival.

The collection features work from 24 poets who, according to the book description, explore “their own noir-de-vivre with humor, grit, nostalgia, and the requisite fedora.” The book includes an introductory note about noir from Los Angeles Poetry Festival director Suzanne Lummis.

CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: E. Amato, Michael C. Ford, Michael Cluff, Brendan Constantine, Mike Daily, Gloria Derge, Peggy Dobreer, Jerry Garcia, Joelle Hannah, Kris Huelgas, Elizabeth Iannaci, Jack Bowman, Ruth Nolan, Marc Olmsted, Kevin Patrick Sullivan, Angela Penaredondo, Douglas Richardson, Anthony Seidman, Eric Steineger, Eric Tuazon, Mehnaz Turner, Wyatt Underwood, Wanda VanHoy Smith and Florence Weinberger.

Here is a sampling from the collection…

PANORAMA CITY (Excerpt)
by Brendan Constantine

We started wearing
dark glasses between the house & the garage.
Panorama City had no view; from any window
we saw another window.

ABOUT THE EDITOR: Rick Lupert has been involved in the Los Angeles poetry community since 1990. He served for two years as a co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets, a non-profit organization that produces readings and publications out of the San Fernando Valley. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, including The Los Angeles Times and Chiron Review. He edited A Poet’s Haggadah: Passover through the Eyes of Poets anthology and is the author of thirteen books. Since 1994, he has hosted the long-running Cobalt Cafe reading series in Canoga Park and is regularly featured at venues throughout Southern California. Rick created and maintains the Poetry Super Highway, a major internet resource for poets. (PoetrySuperHighway.com) Currently Rick works as a music teacher and web designer and can be reached by email at Rick@PoetrySuperHighway.com.

Find the 56-page THE NIGHT GOES ON ALL NIGHT: Noir Inspired Poetry at Amazon.com.