The Brooklyn Rail

There’s a scene, very early into Wim Wenders’s 1985 film, Tokyo-Ga, where the director, filming inside the confines of the jet that will take him to Tokyo, turns his gaze from the small screen playing an in-flight movie to the plane’s window, glimpsing the aircraft coursing through clouds. “If only it were possible to film like that, I thought to myself,” the voice-over kicks in. “Like when you open your eyes sometimes. Just to look. Without wanting to prove anything.” Courtney Bush’s new project, a book-length poem called A Movie (Lavender Ink, 2025) proceeds, I think, from the same desire, the same aspiration.

In March of 2020, when the pandemic was in its acute phases, here in New York City, when Manhattan had all but emptied out, all the rich and their children having been eaten (metaphorically) by the bug and gone upstate, or somewhere more remote, and the streets of Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx grew wider, to accommodate the collaboration of local businesses and organized marches and protests, becoming more like the cooperative pedestrian-only arcades I’d only ever experienced in other cities in other countries—public space changed, and time moved differently too—all the poets I knew and many who I wouldn’t come to know until very recently were not just writing poems but making movies, or rather: making poems that read like movies.

I made one too, as the world burned, and also: as the world, however briefly, stopped burning. Do you remember? How, after two weeks of travel restrictions and shelter at home orders, air pollution and greenhouse gases decreased so drastically that the clarity and quality of water in rivers and lakes improved, aiding the recovery of ecosystems across the globe; mountain goats were seen on the streets of Wales, baby sea turtles began to gather again on beaches, white-crowned sparrows’ songs traveled twice as far. I was cutting up images at Prospect Park’s unbroken meadow, trying to reassemble them, trying to find ways to make the images move in a different sequence. Remember that even in solitude I was not alone.

Marie Buck and Matthew Walker’s collaborative project Spoilers (Golias Books) and Laura Henriksen’s Laura’s Desires (Nightboat) were both published in the spring of 2024. A few months earlier, Ed Steck’s A Place Beyond Shame (Wonder, 2023) appeared. These poems that were books, which were actually movies, were each and in their own way trying to alter not just the medium of an alphabetical text but a register of time. That all these books were written during the onset of the pandemic is not coincidental; risk, vulnerability, and drift are useful conditions for any experiment. Buck will later describe that juncture—of living and staying alive in the city during the spring of 2020—as being “bumped from our expectations of the future into what felt like some sort of alternate timeline.” We’ll be sitting together at a bookstore in Ditmas Park called Taylor & Co., gathered with Richard Scott Larson, another writer who wrote a book (The Long Hallway) from the reservoir of childhood and residue of a movie (John Carpenter’s Halloween), and I’ll have just asked about this element of time, a redistribution of time that, I hypothesized, had more to do with language, with a reformulation of language through grammatical displacement, perspective shifting without a pause from the past to the past subjunctive to the present tense of the camera: the POV of the camera that always bears intensity, immediacy. This tendency to picture things as if they are a movie until what is being depicted can only be expressed in the language of film, the ontology of the screen. It’s thrilling, I always think, to feel like you aren’t quite sure if you’re living the thing or (only) watching it happen. And even better to admit that there’s no real difference. We never really got a chance to respond to my question about a mode of writing while watching and how the book, as a non-visual media, prevents and permits different ways of seeing, if seeing can also be understood as looking at something that isn’t actually there—something not directly and objectively accessible. (We’d run out of time.)

A Movie, like its indefinite article indicates, is not just about a specific movie—for instance, the eighteen minute vampire movie directed by Bush, whose development and production is recounted throughout the book—or even about movies more generally; the book, a poem in sentences, is more interested in narrating the relationship between living and watching, watching and telling, about how movies—as a particular form of storytelling—have become systematically integrated with life. Never has this been more true than in today’s airbrushed and algorithm-inflected open-access 24/7 social media “story,” clips of which may or may not be fake. Though the mode of production (film/digital/AI) and method of consumption (cinema/videocassettes/DVD/internet) may have changed, the urge to narrate, to document, to display is transgenerational.

Bush, a poet and filmmaker whose previous books include the National Poetry Series selection I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023), is interested in the relationship between the disappearing materiality of movies and their non-indexical preservation as stories, a process that is contingent upon audience interaction and anecdotal exchange. A Movie begins there: in the darkness of the seventh-floor theater of downtown Brooklyn’s Regal Court Street, as she brushes up against the forearm of the woman, a stranger, beside her, as they await the feature film they’ve paid to see. “They just wanted to make a movie,” the woman next to Bush remarks as a trailer fades out, in a tone that is meant to be disparaging. But behind the endeavor of making a movie is exactly the kind of purpose and purity that Bush is after, “a hyper-driven state of togetherness,” as Bush herself writes, describing the hangover of returning to real life after making a movie, of being “inside the same envelope, the envelope of a movie.” At stake is not permanence or a desire for the eternal, but a different kind of trajectory provoked by the rhizomatic life cycle of art.

Like Spoilers, which redefined what it meant to “make movies”—by talking about one’s experience of them—A Movie explores the seductive link between desire and description.
“I tell her that what I do most of all is narrate,” Bush writes, explaining about how she responds to a mother’s question about caregiving activities upon starting a new nanny job with a new family. “I narrate our time together.”

I speak to the baby about what we are looking at.
I tell the baby what he is seeing.
A movie can be like that, too.
It feels good for a brain to be told what it is seeing, to be directed in its seeing by a generous other.

The difference between real life and a movie, or one difference, Bush remarks, is the existence of a frame, through which people can make meaning with certain provisions: a fixed amount of content accommodated by the ratio of the screen or the measurement of the film. Though as A Movie continues, the distinctions between art and life disintegrate under the current of performance and art, separately and together, as when Bush announces: “I was asked to act in someone else’s movie based on my performance in my own, but in my own I was portraying myself.” When living and watching and telling serve a form of making and life becomes a stand-in for a movie, the difference between filming and the found footage of everyday life becomes slim, as when Bush arrives for a babysitting gig at the apartment used by the character played by Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, not long after discovering, at a party downtown, as she regards the home’s strangely familiar bathroom, that’s she’s inside the Glenn Close apartment in Fatal Attraction.

Entangled in the Möbius strip of on-location storytelling, the search for a form of art that might best render the totality of the screen while treating the discontinuities and frictions of film becomes the book’s textual leitmotif and metaphysical pledge. “I just did something so insane I need to write about it,” Bush relates, referring to the vampire movie (Rejoice In the Lamb) that has just wrapped, but also the book we’re reading, “and though it is not about a movie, it is about artmaking, so it is not unrelated. In fact, it’s about poetry.” And if A Movie is truly about anything, it is this grind and striving toward a poetics that, like Bush’s ideas about moviemaking, is unadorned and earthy and everyday. As she acknowledges a few pages in: “I don’t feel adequate to language that is too exciting, too different from the way we speak it when we just want the listener to understand.”

Unsurprisingly, for a book concerned with re-presentations, this impulse toward an idealized authenticity and immediacy is reproduced in the text, as Bush embeds the blueprints of an earlier version of A Movie, influenced by poems “with magical properties, like certain poems … by Ariana Reines,” and a friend named Shy who suggests that Bush could not write a poem like that but could, perhaps, write a poem like a movie:

I wrote it in couplets.
It was long and made of memories and stories and moved fast between still images.
[…]
I looked at my long poem and it was nothing like a movie.
It was just like a poem, and a bad one, because I was trying and failing to make it be a movie.

A Movie is about trial and error; it’s about the offhand acquisition of an aesthetic education and the horror of permanence (“The privilege of being able to say goodbye in the exact way you want to is not something I think we are supposed to experience.”). It’s about the difference between making art and selling it (“I decided I could write a movie, but to then write about the movie, to explain what it was, why it might have value? That I could not do.”). It’s about the duty of the filmmaker and the appetite and obligation of the viewer. It’s about vanishing spaces (Blockbuster video) and outmoded practices (rentals, rewinding tapes) and the violence implicated and obscured by the act of making the images move. In one of the many anecdotes Bush gleans from her panoramic memory, we observe the irony of Werner Herzog’s response to whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. “In my heart,” Herzog replies, in Bush’s recitation, “the answer was yes, but I said no.” Bush follows with the clarifying assessment:

On the set of that movie, several indigenous people died trying to do the work Herzog had hired them to do. 
But I don’t know whether or not they were the ones in his heart when he answered the question.

Behind or underneath the possessive act of photographic capture is the setting and conditions through which a subject, and a text, is constructed or composed. If A Movie changes the way we think about narrative time, its ambulant narrative also begs the question about what it means to make art in a time of pandemic. Remember that beyond the clouds that open Tokyo-Ga is the Japan that Wenders sees in the spring of 1983, the Japan that is clouded, not unlike the director’s sought-after pure image, with imported nostalgia: not for what was, but for what may have been, what could be. Viewers likewise cannot gaze upon the anomalous landscapes of Wenders’s gaze without also seeing a space that has been irrevocably shaped and recast by the ghost of nuclear war and the imminent threat of its return.

Among the phenomena Bush alights upon throughout A Movie is the adaptable temporality of watching: various styles of viewing capable of denaturalizing the relationship between narrative and time on the basis of lag and repetition. We learn about her childhood way of watching a movie: the films she’d fall asleep to and that she’d swap only at the end of each school year’s nine-week term. We learn about her sister’s way of watching a movie: “She only likes to watch a movie if she’s seen it many times before, but I was always confused because there is no move you could watch for the first time if you needed to have already seen it.” We learn about her mother’s way of watching a movie, which Bush dubs “the kaleidoscopic method”:

Because she falls asleep so easily, and because she truly does want to watch the movie, when she wakes up, she decides whether she wants to just keep watching from wherever it is or if she wants to rewind the movie so she can piece it together. […] In this way, my mother experiences narrative time in new and interesting ways. 

As readers pick up more about Bush’s life through her and her loved ones’ scopic habits, we also make out glimpses of a methodology that could double as an artist statement, an indiscriminate, itinerant practice that indulges coincidence and curiosity and the absentminded trance necessary for momentous return, the accumulated profit of postdated retrieval. “On the street,” she writes, “where I pick up almost anything that interests me and bring it into my home, I found a large blue book called THE MOVIE GUIDE: THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE FILM REFERENCE OF ITS KIND. I put it on the shelf and forgot about it.”

Bush’s ideas about poetry and cinema are shaped by her past, as well as the fantasy of all the future movies that she’s yet to make real. “Nobody in my family has ever oriented their life around artmaking,” she tells readers, before asserting that what some folks might not understand about art is that it’s not about anything; “poetry is just made of words, and you have to use something from your life to apply the words to, because of what language is.” Pages later, as Rejoice In The Lamb undergoes its final cut following two years of intensive and absorbing work, Bush writes of the miracle of critical distance engendered by postpartum estrangement: “I had seen it in my imagination once, then for a long time, while I was making it, I couldn’t see it. Now suddenly it was back. But not the way I imagined it, because now it was real.”

If there’s a message projected on the cinematic dreamscape of A Movie it’s not unlike the undetectable discrepancy produced by changeover when a reel of film gets replaced: anything can be endowed with the breath of life in the blink of an eye; and every giving requires multiple takes, the material reality of which is so often hidden from view. For the aesthetic object—a poem, a movie—to become something truly redemptive, perhaps it is necessary for the work of art—its collaborative labor and responsibility—to be addressed within the artwork, as Bush does so often, and so openly, in A Movie. Her latest book not only reminds us that, as Bush herself learns as a child, after watching her mother’s favorite movie, “there were kinds of life possible beyond the ones I was aware of,” but, more provocatively, suggests that there are other conceptualizations of art, and other identifications of artists, beyond the ones many of us are aware of or are comfortable recognizing. The indelible image that stays with me, the image I can’t get out of my head—I want it to stay here, to twist my vision and infect my sensibilities—is the one of Bush and her mother watching movies together as a tender ritual, in her childhood home, in her Mississippi Gulf Coast hometown otherwise abandoned after Hurricane Katrina; of her mother enacting a different temporal register through which narrative might, piece by piece, be remade.