POSITION IN THE FIELD
by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
The professor began with a question, and he would end with one, too. I answered: my position in the field of film studies is around the weeds, the ripening barely, off the path. Against a binary view, of Hollywood and “its alternative.” The camera never crosses, never switches: the boy and his mother look the same way. Two levels, no indication of staircase: the house is circular, always sunny: not an accident. There is no perfect repetition: I answered. First: beach dog, hazy waves, rolling score. Birds in a cage: outside, inside, their keeper making matcha. Back to the house’s interior: never exterior: lingering on interior after everyone left. Characters go up stairs, never down. A balloon flying away. Angry husband seethes into the camera: scorned women sit parallel: look away: quiet. Birds, buddha, church spires: there is no perfect dereliction. He answered: off screen, only finding is announced. Family cuts. A moment of acceptance, of change: happens at the beach. “We’ve been so happy together,” a mother looking, wistfully. Final shot: fields of Yamato, wind blowing, summer: what comes next?
Can you guess the movie?
This poem came in a few ways. I started a new quarter of grad school last week, and I was “shopping” among two different classes: a cinema studies course and a visual art theory course. I ended up going with the visual arts one (on “indigenism,” which I’m sure will pop up in my poetry at some point soon), but I did very much enjoy the one seminar I attended of the cinema studies course. It was my first foray into “studying” movies, which appears to me to be using big words to describe small moments in a film.
That’s where this poem began: from notes I took in class, and more notes I took while watching an assigned movie. (Leave a comment if you can recognize it!) But turning notes into a poem can be boring—for you and me—especially since it ends up being pretentious abstractions about a specific topic that only the speaker is seeing.
Sitting in a pub waiting for my trivia night team to show, I drank a beer and read Ada Limón’s “After His Ex Died.” It’s been a while since I read or worked into the prose poem form, and it gave me a jolt of inspiration to try it out again.
Thus, “Position in the Field.” Sort of a Frankenstein’s monster of grad school notes, cinematic moments, and themes of a changing season. I read once that a prose poem should be a “world of its own.” In this week’s poem, I considered how syntactic structure—specifically the repetition and almost overuse of the colon (:) mark—can create relationships among words within a sentence. Think a Russian nesting doll. Or a recursive loop of code. Or a camera lens that controls what you see, one shot to the next.
Wistfully, Ricky