Keith Montesano is the author of the poetry collections Ghost Lights (Dream Horse Press, 2010), and Scoring the Silent Film (Dream Horse Press, 2013). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Literary Review, Third Coast, Blackbird, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his wife in New York, where he is a PhD Candidate in English and creative writing at Binghamton University.
His poem "The Author as Man Who Stares Out His Window with the Others as John Rooney and His Men are Gunned Down in the Street in Road to Perdition" appears in Issue Thirty-Eight of The Collagist.
Here, Keith Montesano talks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about ekphrasis, movies, and sound that sneaks into one's ears.
1. Usually when I encounter ekphrastic poetry, I find that it’s based off of some still art—a painting or sculpture—not something that already had a “voice” like a movie. Could you talk about writing a poem around a scene from a movie?
I started writing this poem and the other ekphrastic film poems in my new book coming out next year, Scoring the Silent, from a springboard of having always wanted to include more film in my poems. I’m a cinephile and always have been, so there was a natural progression, I think, toward that inclusion over time.
There are numerous allusions to film—and poems specifically about films—in my first book, and the same goes for what I hope will eventually be my third book. So it seemed only natural, after I’d written a handful of these “The Author…” poems, to try and build them into a conceptual manuscript, even though I’d never tried anything like that before.
The first handful of poems came from specific scenes of various films that I thought would make an interesting poem from the vantage point of a fake peripheral character who’s watching something take place, but a character who could certainly be real, and, as far as the poem goes, is real. Then I started, as the project was coming to fruition, thinking about other scenes, or encountering new scenes, from various films, and sketches and notes were created about all of them.
In simple—and perhaps somewhat “too easy”—terms, considering all the films and scenes from which someone could choose: I let those scenes that needed to turn into poems come to me over time, and went from there.
2. What was the process of writing “The Author as Man Who Stares Out His Window with the Others as John Rooney and His Men are Gunned Down in the Street in Road to Perdition” like?
This was a film I’d hoped to write about after I had maybe half of the book written. Conrad Hall’s cinematography is amazing and always has been (Road to Perdition was his last film he lensed before he died also), and once I re-watched it, I knew the slow motion scene of the gang getting gunned down would be perfect—I just needed to try and do justice to it.
The idea of watching, and in many poems as a kind of voyeurism, is central to many of the poems in Scoring the Silent Film, and this one especially was interesting for me to write because at the heart of the scene there are these men being gunned down in an alley between buildings—yet Sam Mendes and Conrad Hall don’t shy away from that. You can see curtains drawn and the blurred faces of families staring through their windows as it’s happening right before their eyes.
I wanted to try and get into the psyche of someone watching something like this, forcing the idea of ekphrasis from the scene and the entrance into that artistic world within a world that, in the moment, we take for the present in a filmic reality.
3. Sonically this poem relies heavily on the “w” sound, especially in the first half, with a line like, “What we want can be provided, if only we wait, & wait” and then the use of “watching,” “writhing,” and “wash” towards the beginning of three lines. Do patterns of sound like this emerge in first drafts to be honed in on? Or, perhaps, are they always sneaking in the background of your ears? Or something else?
I would have to say that those sounds you mention—and I like how you put it—snuck into the background of my ears. The poem is also a persona poem too, even though it remains only inside the speaker’s head. As someone who’s teaching poetry this semester, I try to tell my students that any semblance of luck with the success of a poem comes also with the hard work—but luck is certainly a part of it. Even if it’s as basic as a repetition working that you never really realized or intended as you were writing. That’s the magic that can happen with poetry, and I like to think also when you enter a speaker or persona’s psyche who’s describing some specific cinematic event that they’re witnessing.
4. Have any book suggestions for us?
I’ve recently started trying to find all my original, sometimes out-of-print copies of my favorites on my bookshelves: “Ghost Money” by Lynda Hull, “Tar” by C.K. Williams, “The Last Nostalgia” by Joe Bolton, “Winter Stars” by Larry Levis,” “Walt Whitman in Hell” by T.R. Hummer, “Mystery Train” by David Wojahn. There’s something about opening the original copy—not that single collection within a Selected or Collected—that can do something magical with its influence. And just as I’m a fan of natural film grain and as little DNR as possible when it comes to the reproduction of film digitally, I’m a purist, when I can be, when it comes to favorite books.
As far as newer books go: I’ve been really liking “Little Black Daydream” by Steve Kistulentz, and I’m always turning back to the recent collections “Paper Anniversary” by Bobby C. Rogers, and “Clamor” by Elyse Fenton.
So many to name, and still to read, and never enough time.
5. What other sorts of writing are you working on right now?
I’m still shopping around my third book of poems, but thankfully I think it’s officially finished now, or at least I’m not technically writing new poems for it anymore, and that’s always a great thing after you’ve spent years on a book. I’ve also been at least attempting to generate ideas for a while now, and since I’m currently teaching the lyric essay, I have many ideas that I thought could work in poems that I now hope to turn into lyric essays of some kind (Lia Purpura has talked about the piece making itself known to her, whether it’s going to be a poem or lyric essay, and though I’m not even close to that stage, I feel like I’m learning more, as far as my intentions go, about which idea may be right for one or the other). There’s always the balance of trepidation and excitement when you begin to write something new, especially after, in my case, writing poetry for so many years in a row, so I’m excited to see what I can do with these. And also, finally, I’m hoping to start some book reviews and have that as a new outlet when the creative ideas aren’t coming to me as quickly as I’d like them to.