BY: ROBERT WHITLOCK
Poetry makes some people genuinely happy. Filmmaker Lawrence Inglee—producer of the Oscar-nominated 2009 film The Messenger and the just-released Rampart, and author of the short, light-bending mirage of a poem called “Nine”—is one of them. Inlgee has written poetry—good poetry—for fifteen years that I know of, maybe more. We first met in the mid-1990s, when he was a precocious undergrad who had convinced a Syracuse University professor to admit him to a graduate-level course in creative writing. He wasn’t a writing or a lit major, but a film student with a serious poetry habit. Over the course of the semester, I watched as he read, listened to, questioned, and analyzed poetry with an intensity that impressed (and sometimes intimidated) the masters-degree candidates. Even then I was struck by one thing: his unconditional love for poets and their work. It’s a rare trait, and one that hasn’t faded with time. For Inglee, writing poetry is a selfless and joyful act: a profound and perfect gift, miraculously created by and exchanged between flawed beings. His own poems have always been personal and private in that same spirit—a passion shared with a small circle.
Now, as I think about the body of this private work—of which “Nine” seems a particularly fine example—what appeals to me most is the way his poems marry immediacy, exuberance, and truth, with utter fearlessness. He challenges, plays, risks, and winks. Never conventional, he has a knack for exposing the profound in ways that aren’t immediately obvious, and without being ponderous or weighty. His ideas are large and lighter than air. I don’t want to tell you how to read “Nine.” But I will say that it bears reading more than once. Because only on multiple readings are its mysteries revealed: how it defies speech (try reading it out loud); what it says about the conventions of language (letters, words, spaces, and breaks); how it resolves out of apparent chaos; and so much more. In “Nine,” Lawrence Inglee has created an exquisite little verbal mandala. Meditate on it. Ask questions of it. (Why write? Or make films? Or cross a mountain? Why love, or be loved?) “Nine” answers back with pleasure and well-deep wisdom. What more can we ask of a poet? originmagazine.com | 63