“Refraction” by Lisa Mecham

April is National Poetry Month and in a nice bit of synergy, Lisa Mecham, one of the writers who participated in the Quest Writing Workshop in Santa Monica in October 2013, just had two poems published. I’d like to feature one of them here today:

Refraction

Lisa Mecham

I’m always in the wrong spot
in line, last in a row of women
pulled to the edge
of the curb to fetch children.
Cars idle, mothers gather
at rolled down windows, poking
heads into mint-conditioned air, whining
about lists of to-do’s and brown
ladies who clean, and husbands
strutting around with the starch
of profit, the stench of industry.
Sunlight storms my car, singeing,
reflecting off those other
paint jobs that make black go light
or maybe it’s the silver
smirk of their bumpers.
A bell sounds the release
of leotards and pink tights
and the one with knee circles of dirt
raps her knuckles at my window.

I have grown to enjoy poetry on its own merits, but as I have pointed out on the blog many times, screenwriters can benefit from bringing a poetic mindset to our screenplays. Here are three reasons why:

* Immerse ourselves in the moment: Unlike most novels, we write in present tense which helps to convey the movie as it unfolds in the here and now. Consider Lisa’s poem: We are there with her character in that pick-up line, we can see, hear, feel, even smell what’s going on around us.

* Write ‘imagematically’: Poets and screenwriters use active verbs, vivid descriptors, and subscribe to the mantra, “Minimum words, maximum impact.” Consider these phrases from Lisa’s poem: “poking heads into mind-conditioned air… silver smirk of their bumpers… knee circles of dirt.”

* Find the emotional meaning: Every scene in a script has to have something going on in the psychological realm in order for it to resonate with script readers. The way Lisa’s poem winds its way through the narrative — a mother musing about her place in the world amidst all these other parents, then called back to earth by the arrival of her daughter — does precisely that.

Since I started reading poetry on a consistent basis a decade ago, I have come to think that scene description is much more like poetry than prose in part because of the three reasons noted above.

And if my words on the subject aren’t enough, here are some thoughts from Lisa Joy, TV writer (Pushing Daisies, Burn Notice) and screenwriter (2013 Black List script “Reminiscence”):

At the time, my focus was very much on poetry. I’ve loved poetry truly for as long I can remember, since I was a little kid actually. I wanted to pursue that even if it was just as an avocation. I figured I would write little poems in the evening and make Excel spreadsheets with financial models during the day, and that would be my life. I was content enough with that life.

Even though I lived in L.A., I didn’t really know anybody who was in the industry or anything. It never really occurred to me to try transitioning screenplays until my boyfriend at the time, now my husband, for Christmas he said, “You know, you work really, really hard at your job. Then you stay up late writing all the time. You never have enough time to do all the writing you want. Maybe there’s a way that you can combine your day job with your passion. But it’s probably not poetry. Because you probably won’t be able to pay back your loans from poetry alone.”

He scraped up his funds, he was a starving artist at the time, and bought me my first copy of Final Draft, and said, “Here’s the tools, now see if you can make something with it.”

After getting the software, I tinkered around with it a bit, and it seemed fun. I’d never read a screenplay or anything, I started reading a couple screenplays just to see what it looked like. It kind of struck me that there were some similarities between poetry, which I’d always loved and screenwriting. You don’t have that much space. You have to convey things very compactly.

You don’t want a script that’s 400 pages long, but you still want to create an evocative world. You only have a couple lines to do that, to set something up after you say like, “Interior hallway.”

What does that hallway look like? What does the man walking down it look like? You have a couple lines to say it, and to me it was the kind of challenge that I love in poetry, to find a word. It could be a very simple word. It doesn’t have to be a $10 word, but find it and try to make it count within the scene description. The same goes for dialogue.

You may read my entire interview with Lisa here.

To read some of my blog posts on the subject of poetry, go here, here, here, and here,

To read more of Lisa Mecham’s poetry, go here.

In honor of National Poetry Month, I invite any of you who have a favorite poem, one you think exhibits the three points I raised above, or simply a poem you have found to be inspirational, please click on Reply and post it in comments.

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