Image 1 of 1
Sussman’s turbo-charged tribute to cinema covers an amazing range of film’s true innovators—and he does so in an innovative, pun-packed style that blends memoir and critique with flickering, fast-paced imagery, forcefully recalling these masterpieces to the reader’s mind. Sussman has chosen a hybrid form that allows him to engage in critical commentary while also sheerly and exuberantly celebrating the artists he loves. It explodes the genre of the movie review, throwing it wide open in the most vivid and promising ways.
— Cole Swensen
Film history, film theory, and film criticism all are ever on offer: no shortage of stodgy profs to trudge you through the “greats” of film if that’s what you want. But now there is also Screen Memories, so I’m going to stay in breathless step with Henry Sussman’s screenings, plenty smart but also alert to “every roundness we can spin, / hips, knees, arms, / loooosening engrained tension, / this OTHER body we address / in wonder & compassion.”
—H. L. Hix
Henry Sussman's ouroboric sojourn kindles a brilliant collision of youthful inspiration revisited and a life of acquired scholarly critique. Here a seasoned cinematic scholar comes full circle when the inspiring films of his youth and poetry's magical constructions merge head-on. Behold a tectonic poetics as language bursts the boundaries of cinema, poetry, and critique!
—Maureen Owen
Author of everything turns on a delicate measure
"In the very first strophes of THE BRIDGE, America's originary cinematic poem, Hart Crane wrote of 'multitudes bent toward some flashing scene.' With SCREEN MEMORIES, Henry Sussman graphs the ecstasies of that scene across successive decades, continents and cultures, arriving, with an originary candor all his own, home once again in an American idiom amplified by those ecstasies. Too, he has made the acuity of that idiom an instrument of Vision."
—Donald Revell
subjecting ourselves
to darkened Delphic oracles,
one broken image after the next,
Henry Sussman’s Screen Memories unfolds in the spliced temples of memory and cinema. Acknowledging to what degree the modern reader has absorbed the “camera as fish-eye” between watching and reading, these stanzas occur kinetically, marking the page at angles. An ekphrasis of the cutting room floor, the poems subsume through a linguistic piling on or layering of their own unspooling: in image (“flashes of its illumination spent”), recollection (“Time steps in, blurred by dissonance”), and direction (“LONGSHOT’s twin sib: / LOW WIDE-ANGLE PAN”)—akin to the stills or frames of a reel, “foisted on a clueless son.” From the fragmented celluloid of one’s own beholding, and mindful of Buñuel, comes a visual language capable of recognizing itself, “its baffling rebus bereft,” as it shows us the light behind the page.
—Edric Mesmer
With Screen Memories Henry Sussman has achieved an original and astonishing fusion of film and poetry. In this book-length poem formed by sections named for great directors of world cinema, he splices together cultural critique and intimate lyricism, historical exploration and electric immediacy. Sussman uncovers a “primal revelation,” a vital and astounding dance of inevitability and surprise that is “Nothing less than life.”
—Peter Campion
Henry Sussman brings a wealth of knowledge and critical frames to Screen Memories and creates a hybrid work that runs like a filmstrip through a projector: it flashes with image and insight as it winds and weaves its way through a series of auteurs and canonical film texts. A heartfelt tribute to the lasting and sinuous impression left by the film image on the mind across time.
— Lauren Myers-Hinkle
Henry Sussman is a critic and writer currently living in New York City. Trained in nineteenth and twentieth-century Euro-American Literatures and Critical Theory, he has practiced poetry for decades as an alternative text-medium to fiction and discursive prose. Literacy, the interplay of media, and the theory and architecture of prevailing cultural systems have, over recent decades, been his driving interests. Drawing their impetus from French theory and twentieth-century philosophy, the Frankfurt School, and psychoanalysis, his writings about literature largely concentrated on Euro-American modernism and its austere aftermath. Ongoing research created occasions for extended travel. His most recent work of cultural criticism is The Great Dismissal: Memoir of the Cultural Demolition Derby, 2015-22 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). October, 2023 saw the premier of his play, “Soirée at Walter Benjamin’s,” in the Winterfest season of the New York Theater Festival. Polaroids of Turbulence, his debut volume of poetry, also appeared under the BlazeVOX imprimatur, in 2024.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 106 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-486-4
$22
