13/04/2024
Hollywood or Home
A poetry collection by Kathryn Gray.
I am preparing my talk with Kathryn at the Rainham Poetry Festival, which Goat Star Books has been invited to programme this year. Hollywood or Home is a series of meditations on how Hollywood films shape our minds and inform the way we look at the world, placing ourselves in it.
Poem after poem, we are invited to see ourselves reflected in what each says about that strange relationship we humans have with fiction, which is not something that appeared with Cinema at the turn of the twentieth century, but was there since the beginning of time. I have seen articulated puppets in exhibitions on the Palaeolithic cultures of more than forty thousand years ago. They were probably used in shadow shows staged inside caves, illuminated by bonfires. The shows, like all art would fulfill a double role, both entertainment and teaching tools. Later on, in our Western world we have Greek tragedies, from which citizens learnef the limits of power and the consequences of transgressing rules.
Katryn Gray's Hollywood or Home falls into that tradition: poetry as lamp and mirror, helping us see what is wrong and right with us. It is a book that questions as well as mythologises, but it doesn't judge. The catharsis is always up to us. In "Mommie Dearest", for example, and unlike in the film, we don't know who is the victim and who is the monster. It is a very clever comment on the power of films to create reality and lead us to a place which is not quite where truth lies.
The there are poems like "Six Ways of Looking at John Cazale", in which the poems draws for us a quick sketch that brings to life the celebrated seventies character actor, bringing him back to life as powerfully, if no more so, as the actual interpretations of the man in the bare five films in which he took part.
It is this interaction between poetry and film, fiction and truth, what we will be discussing in our session with Kathryn Gray at the Rainham Poetry Festival on Saturday June 1st.
Join us, please:
https://www.rainhampoetry.org/
