Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Lynda Hull’s "Real Movie, With Stars" is an evocative and layered exploration of identity, longing, and dislocation, set against the contrasting backdrops of Los Angeles and the Atlantic shore. Hull employs cinematic imagery and fragmented narratives to juxtapose personal crises with larger existential questions, creating a poem that feels both immediate and dreamlike, grounded and ephemeral.

The poem begins with the tide—a timeless, cyclical force—bringing "its cargo of debris," a metaphor for the detritus of human experience. Hull introduces a man in "evening clothes" who kneels, "delirious," begging the speaker for something unspecified. His desperation, contrasted with his formal attire, evokes a sense of dissonance, a performance gone awry. The setting—"off-season, the boardwalk?s empty"—emphasizes abandonment and decay, while the "chemical Atlantic?s curse and slap" situates the poem in a space of unnatural disruption, where nature and human influence collide.

Hull’s speaker is both observer and participant, "another stranger with empty pockets, / bad habits." This admission situates her alongside the man as a figure of transient identity, burdened by her own past—a sequence of "crises vanquished, surpassed then spread upon the beach." The imagery of unpacking crises mirrors the tide’s debris, suggesting that human struggles are cyclical and inevitable, carried to and fro by forces beyond control.

The poem’s tone shifts as Hull introduces the motif of the theater—a space of artifice and imagination. The speaker envisions herself "swimming in a theater?s musk of plush," detached and observing her own actions as if they are part of a film. This cinematic framing underscores the performative nature of identity and memory, as the speaker recalls a past encounter in a "two-bit Sonoran rodeo." The vivid details—the "chestnut gelding, shoulders lathered," the "slim Mexican saying estrella, estrellita"—imbue the memory with sensory immediacy, yet the moment is tinged with alienation. The speaker reflects on "larger and larger circles of not belonging," acknowledging her own disconnection within a broader context of cultural and geographical dislocation.

The recurring image of the kiss—"full on the mouth"—becomes a powerful symbol of both connection and transience. The kiss is described as "sweet fruit, miraculous chemistry of salts and water," linking it to the ocean’s elemental forces. It is an act of intimacy that feels both fleeting and profound, embodying the poem’s tension between impermanence and the yearning for meaning.

Hull’s language is lush and tactile, filled with sensory contrasts. The "oleander, whatever ravening thing we want that’s so illusory" captures the seductive yet poisonous allure of desire. The imagery of "gnarled rafts of weed, the styrofoam and high heels" evokes both beauty and waste, a blending of the natural and artificial that mirrors the poem’s exploration of identity as constructed yet deeply human.

The poem culminates in a meditation on mortality and belonging. Hull invokes "La Pelona, / that old bald uncle, Death," grounding the narrative in the inevitability of loss. Yet even as the speaker confronts the impermanence of "those intangible empires of fear and regret," there is a sense of transcendence. The "heavenly infernos, burning here above the sea" remind us of the vastness and beauty that exist beyond human concerns, a cosmic backdrop to the small yet poignant dramas of individual lives.

"Real Movie, With Stars" is a masterful blending of personal narrative and universal themes, rendered with Hull’s signature lyricism and precision. The poem’s cinematic structure and richly layered imagery invite readers to inhabit a space where memory, desire, and the ineffable converge, creating a work that is both intimate and expansive, rooted in the particulars of lived experience yet reaching for the transcendent.

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