Jack Ramey, poet and spoken word artist, brings to life the poems of Keats & Shelley and the revolutionary times in which they lived, with parallels to his own life in the late ‘60s at Kent State. Rome was of special importance to these two poets. Shelley wrote some of his greatest works in Rome, Keats died there, and they both are buried there in the Protestant Cemetery. This film shows how they live on as bright stars in the poetic firmament, as beacons for humanity, for truth, and for beauty.
I have always been fascinated by the Romantic poets and the rock star status of poets during their time period. They didn’t need a guitar; they used the power of words.
Shelley’s hatred of tyranny and his love of freedom and Keats’ search for truth and beauty still resonate deeply in these troubled times. We need the words of these poets now more than ever.
Our film was screened at the Utopia Film Festival in Greenbelt MD, an Award Winner at the Rome International Movie Awards, a Semi-Finalist in the Stockholm City Film Festival, a Nominee for the Falcon International Film Festival, and accepted at the Roma Cinema Doc festival, and is now available on YouTube.
On Grafton Street a legless busker
Begged a tune from his plastic flute
Gazing the while at his missing feet
By Saint Stephen’s Green
With the swans and the palms and mist
And the rain and his upturned orange cap
Lying filthy and empty on the street
As Christmas shoppers
Rushed on by towards Dolce & Gabbana.
The ghost of Joyce appeared by his side
And chided him for a no-good boy-o
Stuck here forever, out only for
The price of the odd pint.
But a pint is comfort at least at last
And salvation across the long wet night
Huddled up in a thin worn blanket.
O the buskers and the beggars
On Grafton Street by the high-priced
Gaudy shopping lane with golden lights
Strung all overhead and foreign greed all in the air.
The pigtailed killer of the wicked witch
led daddy’s kids thru Emerald City
before she made it there herself
while Round John Virgin smothered the child
(holy infant so tender and mild) ——————————–in the Silent Night
of catholic childbirth
I was a starver a server a saint
but she was Dorothy of yellow brick road
living her movie each Halloween
each aging easter in Oz ——————————–queen of Kansas
of Hollywood oiling her tinman thirst
the frightened cat of her heart
screaming for years a burning scarecrow
and no bucket wet enough
in all of Oz
until the Wizard showed his sideshow hand
and you touched it Dorothy —————————all polka-dot and hunger
you rode his cure-all car —————————thru cheering munchkins
cheering long live Dorothy and
long live our john wayne sham & hambone
saviour our dodge city gambler and now
I am scared out of my baby fat
at this point at this scene
my altar bells ring ————————my ghost mask falls
my shopping bag full I cry
as I cry each year at this time: —————————–Dorothy be careful —————————–look out
his fingers are needles are lightning
his floodlights are thrilling
but he’s Halloween’s bad candy man ————————dealing the cards like
Tombstone Tarot like Lash Larue
who holds no bluff for tincan hearts
who beats out your song ————————on his Halloween porch
a Broadway magus with musical bones ——————————– (Oh Dorothy)
your straw wanted real ones
made in Oz yes but
not by this wizard of nightclub bubbles
this junkman wizard of trick or treat ——————————-who stole the heels
from your red red slippers
each year of my movie ————————each day of your story
in Emerald City ——————– in Oz
on the tail end of America’s fairy tale.
[/Poem]
—–
On June 22, 1969, I was listening to the radio in my room across from the campus of Kent State University, when Judy’s voice came on singing Somewhere over the Rainbow, and then an announcer interrupted and said: “Today that voice was stilled. Judy Garland is dead.” Judy Garland had died of an overdose of drugs and alcohol. Like most everyone across the country, I was stunned. We had grown up watching the Wizard of Oz every Halloween on television, and Dorothy’s story was not supposed to end that way. Perhaps it was not all her fault. When she was making the Wizard of Oz and other movies, the studio fed her amphetamines to get her through the day’s rigorous shooting schedule and then downers to get her to sleep at night, which resulted in a lifelong dependency on drugs. My heart was full of sorrow as I sat down at my typewriter during a fierce lightning and thunder storm and this poem poured out of me.
Day after day becomes night after night and he is still gone . . . gone of a cancer deep in the bones
from filming 9/11 disaster him and first responders inhaling toxic vapors fumes and ash
and then 20 years later marrow turns maverick against him.
There are no stars today but those of memory: he lives still in my reverie and I need recall only the good times now:
Our times together in England and France and Germany Cologne Stuttgart Paris Lyon
with cousin Anne-Marie who lives in the hot magic of Provence just a few footfalls from the Marquis de Sade’s chateau and while there you showed me the source of the river Sorgue the Fountaine de Vaucluse and in the distance Cezanne’s old man Mt. Ventoux.
And with sweet Aunt Lucette in LeHavre mixing perfect Pernod aperitifs and fixing a home-cooked Norman supper near D-Day beach head where your father braved his way ashore and somehow in midst of war fell for a mademoiselle named Renee, your lovely mother.
Then London touring in the Hun Mobile and shooting random poems on film locals thinking we were Germans due to Deutschland license plates up all silly dodgy night laughing drinking Benedictine B&B at Houndless Water Bed&Breakfast in Surrey England surrounded by chronically screaming peacock birds.
Or here above the Ohio river where I live now where we worked together for the love of art and each other and I see before my mind’s eye that time years ago when you and Meredith brought little Zach and Sammy and we went to the Louisville Slugger Museum with those two cute card-collecting baseball fans and had our pictures taken beside that giant bat on Main Street.
Or back in NYC in 1983 CBGBs and me auditioning for the role of Dr Richard Benedict, your great creation, the mad psychiatrist who transitions others, metamorphoses others from one state of infancy into full-blown manta-hood.
Oh those mad rehearsals late night shoots all culminating in The Age of Insects cult classic parodic horror dystopian par excellence installed into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
That gala night MOMA showing your films on the big screen all your fans and friends gathered there standing room only to see your work and to hear you speak of life and art and music in 1980s era New York City.
Dinner in Little Italy with your childhood pal Joe Piazzo after a hard day’s work in your Chinatown studio on the William Blake project You ordering up bottles of wine and stuffed pork chops Joe buying a bag of frozen gnocchi from the kitchen me watching the great joy of being alive and Italian in Little Italy in America in a new century.
It seems as if I’ve been on a long journey with you, my old friend. And now that journey has come to an end. A bit of magic has left the world.
Your life was a sum of diligence and passion: a great all-encompassing love for the good in mankind and an equal loathing for the evil that now scourges the minds of misled men.
Your great voice for good is stilled now as green leaves fall from trees prematurely in mid-August presaging the inevitable slide into winter’s embrace.
No more will stories old and new pass through your lips, my brother silent now in infinite sleep.
But your words and your work fly forward on bright wings shining a light in the darkness of night.
Therefore, I do not grieve. You are not dead. You are alive in eternity through your artistry and like Shelley’s Keats, you have merely awakened from the dream of life.
……………………
[/Poem]
Featured Photograph by Fred Hatt: “I often worked with Eric as a camera operator. To work with Eric was to be invited into a wide variety of fascinating special worlds – SWAT team exercises, pro domme parlors, off-off Broadway theater. I will cherish these experiences forever.” Fred Hatt is an artist, photographer, filmmaker, writer, teacher, and projectionist at the Museum of Modern Art.
Eric Marciano was a New York based filmmaker, media designer and storyteller. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he earned a BFA in filmmaking in 1984. In 1984 he formed American Montage to engage in editing, motion picture production and storytelling to its fullest. In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art acquired all of Mr. Marciano’s early film works for their permanent collection. Segal Theatre Center A Special Presentation by Eric Marciano at MoMA
With his primary production company, American Montage, Eric completed projects for such well-known media outlets, agencies and corporations as HBO, Discovery Channel, ESPN, A&E, TLC, The New York Times, Grey Advertising, Bristol Meyers Squib, Pfizer, Continuum Health Partners. He often works with musicians, visual artists and theater companies and artists such as Galt MacDermot, James Moody, Fanny Sanin, LeRoy Neiman, LaMaMa ETC, New York Theater Workshop and Lee Breuer. American Montage
“He was a Villager, a collector, a reader, a thinker, an activist, a producer, a talker, a prankster, a truth teller, a cineaste, a Francophile, a Bohemian, a storyteller, a worker, a dreamer, a teacher, a loyalist, a partisan, a family man, a gentleman! And he was my friend. Eric Marciano. Taken from us by cancer. I will miss you.” Beck Lee, Media Blitz
I’m sorry to tell all his friends that Eric, who has been fighting Multiple Myeloma for 2 years, has succumbed to this beast of a cancer. He leaves 2 sons he was extremely proud of, Zac and Sammy, and a wealth of interesting, eclectic and fun films that he made over his 40 years in NYC. Eric was blasting this Garland Jeffreys record while he was editing just a few weeks ago, got up and danced around a little, saying how much he’s loved this song since the 70’s. And he was, wild in the streets….. Meredith Jacobson Marciano, Eric’s wife
Eric has meant so much to us since our early days in New York when I had the leading role in his cult classic film, “The Age of Insects,” which was screened and archived at MoMA in 2018 as part of their exhibit Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village. Eric directed and co-produced my documentary, “William Blake: Inspiration and Vision”, which won an Aegis award for best educational film. And he also edited and shot video for our documentary “Ecstasy and Death: Keats & Shelley in Rome,” which was in the Utopia Film Festival last year.
At the near tipping point of the world that tilts ever more sharply now,
greed and brutality slide down toward the vast abyss that gaps beneath us
and we stand at the still edge of rapture as the candy-colored clown laughs
half-aloud his metamorphic chuckle and the earth we walk upon buckles
like an uprooted sidewalk in a sideshow farce that plays on and on forever:
a forgotten suburban nightmare where dreams tumble down slowly
into dreams and we are left standing dizzy on the thin precipice of a myth.
[/Poem]
And now it’s time to panic. In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells warns us that “No matter how well informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.”
The Doomsday Clock is ticking, and it’s less than two minutes to midnight. “Midnight” is the total destruction of the environment and with it the destruction of many species of life, including homo sapiens.
We can no longer control the fires around us, but still we burn the Earth with petroleum and coal. Even the Bible predicts our fiery Hell, which is turning out to be man-made.
Featured Photograph: Ohio River Sunset by Bernie Kasper
We hold these truths to be self-evident: all white men who own property are created equal – this of course excludes black people and Indian people and women and poor white whiskey tangos who have no pot to piss in.
Nonetheless, it is a beautiful morning this morning when all Americans are freed from work (except those who work at Walmart and MacDonald’s and Burger King and Pizza Hut and Kroger and Safeway and Piggly Wiggly) freed to pursue barbeque picnics by the lake and drunken relatives and loud firework displays that proclaim with colored gunpowder our freedom.
Oh say can you see? Those rockets bursting over your villages for the past ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cluster bombs and napalm exploding in jungles forty years ago in Vietnam, just look at the beautiful tracers shooting out from the sides of ironic helicopters bearing the name of those we have subdued –
Apache! Geronimo! shouted those paratroopers who leaped out of planes on D-Day two years or so before I was born into this land of freedom and gory.
The list of those we have invaded to protect our freedom is too long to tell: hello Philippine Islands, hello Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Grenada, Cuba, Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan,Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Japan (and all the islands she laid claim to) Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Korean Peninsula, the Five Nations, the Creek Nations, the Cherokee Nation, the Chickasaw Nation, the Shawnee Nation, the Sioux Nations, the Comanche Nations, the Yuma, the Pomo, the Ute, the Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Crow, the Mandan, the Sauk and Fox, the Navajo, the Hopi, Apache, Pueblo, all those half naked starving savages we small-poxed and grape-shot out of existence and gave the remaining few their freedom on reservations in Oklahoma where the wind comes whippin’ cross the plains, freedom to be Americans just like you and me.
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed freedom from the tyranny of a foreign power for a group of privileged white men—landowners and bankers in New England whose forbearers ethnically cleansed their property of the indigenous populations. Desire for land and gold took settlers all the way to the Pacific Ocean, pushing the native populations further and further toward the margins of existence. I wrote this poem on July 4 to witness through the smoke and noise of celebratory fireworks what freedom means for those who have been left out of the American dream.
All Americans, except for native Americans, are descended from immigrants. In stark contrast to Donald Trump’s proposed wall to keep out the immigrants, Steve Wall recorded the following words of wisdom from Leon Shenandoah in his book, To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah:
[Poem]
“What you call the United States, we Indians call the Great Turtle Island. This is where the Creator planted us and when He did, He made us free. Europeans were not planted here, but you came here because you wanted to be free like us. In our original Instructions we were told that nobody owned the land except the Creator. That’s why we welcomed you.”
