Life (and poetry) as a Saturday matinee
Getting cinematic with poet Chuck Kinder
Chuck Kinder made his bones for many years as a writer of lyrical novels of bad behavior starting with a pair of Bildungsromans, “Snakehunter” (1973) and “The Silver Ghost” (1979).
Both are brimful with prose that revs like a souped-up hot rod ready to break for the back roads of West Virginia. Take these lines from “Snakehunter”:
“Jimbo could feel Judy’s breasts and thighs as she pressed tightly against him and they swayed slowly together to the song, their song, their summer-place song, on the car radio, their feet nearly motionless in the deep grass.
“In the headlights they were a movie couple, incandescent and romantic perfectly. And somewhere beyond the edges of shimmering light, somewhere out in the darkness where lightning bugs blinked like tiny flashbulbs, an ice cupid melted slowly bluegreen.”
That yearning, adolescent desire is a red thread purled into Mr. Kinder’s work gifting his writing with a burning, braided edge.
In 2014, Mr. Kinder retired as the director of the creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, and that same year he made the move from novelist to published poet. His latest poetry collection, “Hot Jewels,” finds him still camped out in his preferred hothouse: a structure held up by the twined lattice of memories and movies.
“Hot Jewels” raises its curtain with a wink, a disclaimer that “The motion picture contained in this DVD is protected under the Articles of Agreement of Old Babylon.” It’s possible that Mr. Kinder is simply giving a postmodern tweak to the reader’s nose, a little nudge to the ribs that reduces the perceived high art of poetry down to the level of a popcorn flick, and he is doing that, but he’s also tipping his cap to Jack Kerouac, who wrote, “The world you see is just a movie in your mind.”
Jack Kerouac takes a starring turn in the five-part poem “Jack Is Back in Town,” dedicated to Mr. Kinder’s running buddy and legendary short story writer Raymond Carver.
The poem is a paean to friendship wherein Mr. Kerouac and Neal Cassady function as stand-ins for Mr. Kinder and Mr. Carver, “Two young men brimming / With the fullness of fate / Their future fame stretching before them / Like white lines leading into forever / Adrift and journeying in America.”
The quartet of writers are united in their quest for America, the idea of it as much as the country itself, but find themselves locked out and “Never quite a part of America.”
Here’s the plot to Mr. Kinder’s movie: The artist pursues his art, an art that explores and questions the underpinning myths and the cold reality of America that he perceives correctly will unite and comfort the audience.
However, this artist will in the end find herself estranged and stuck on the other side of the door unable to enter the shared comfort of the art she created. The artist is John Wayne at the end of “The Searchers.”
Art as Chuck Kinder sees it in his poem “Birds of Hammered Gold” or “A Great Gathering of Eunuch Poets in the Old Poet’s Hometown of Pittsburgh,” is a Saturday matinee that provides the audience with a mirror reflecting “Their exquisite torments and thrills / Their dramatic cinematic urgency / Captured live by the emotional pirouettes / Of the shape-shifting powers of their poems and dance.”
The combustible emotions of youth provide the heat to Mr. Kinder’s work.
The Beat Generation and the hippie counterculture of the ’60s were Mr. Kinder’s own milieu, and they continue to engage with younger generations, but the poet is an old man living his final act off the southern coast of Florida in Key Largo. Age and distance burnish his poems.
In the bittersweet “Return to the Garden City of the Northwest,” Mr. Kinder observes: “Finally you have to accept / That there is no spot / In the Garden City / Of the Northwest / Safe from the pain of memory / Lost romance or old violence.”
Once again I’m struck by the image of John Wayne exiled from the hearth, but here again Mr. Kinder’s love of old movies offers the reader a more hopeful resolution to the exigencies of the Garden City.
I’m thinking about Humphrey Bogart now at the end of the movie “Key Largo” after dispatching a crew of gangsters, piloting a battered boat to a possible new home on shore with Lauren Bacall.