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They Write by Night, Season 2, Episode 2

By Suzanne Lummis on June 10, 2020 in Film, Poetry

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Noir by Birthright

Where am I? Not inspecting my bunker. In a rooming house, $27.50 a week, behind some gas station. Guy named Jeff Bailey runs it. What a boring life he has. What’s Not boring? Two things: the times we’re living in, and David St. John’s poem. What a poem. What a ride.

Wayne did the pictures, moving ones. This is why they used to call them The Moving Pictures. Then, after a while, they just called them The Pictures. Now, we just call them Movies.

Because during the worldwide pandemic, the badass Vulnerable Gang — Wayne Lindberg, Hilda Weiss and me — couldn’t meet face-to-face, I phoned it in. The phrase “phoning it in” will never be the same.

– Suzanne Lummis

Top image credit to www.Poetry.LA

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Tagsdavid st johnnoirpoempoetrySuzanne Lummisthey write by night

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About the author

Suzanne Lummis

Suzanne Lummis

Suzanne Lummis, noted practitioner and exponent of NOIR POETRY, unpacks a genre infused with the ethos of mid-20th Century hard-boiled fiction and crime movies, presenting examples from poets both living and “quite dead.” An influential teacher through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and co-founder of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, Lummis produced a 2011 city-wide, 25-event series, “Night in the City: L.A. Noir Poetry, Fiction and Film.” Her 2012 essay “The Poem Noir — Too Dark to Be Depressed” (Malpais Review, Vol. 3, No. 3) is essential reading on the subject. Lummis was awarded a 2018/19 C.O.L.A. (City of Los Angeles) fellowship to create a series of new poems. Her most recent collection is Open 24 Hours (Lynx House Press). Her poems have appeared in three Knopf "Everyman's Poetry" anthologies, including Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem, and in The Antioch Review, New Ohio Review, Plume, The American Journal of Poetry and The New Yorker. She edited the anthology "Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond" (Pacific Coast Poetry Series/Beyond Baroque Books) named one of the Ten Best Books of 2015 in the Los Angeles Times. (Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher)

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