The last picture show

SHELF LIFE Trinidad examines his obssessions in his new book of poetry.

If anyone needs a study guide to accompany his or her copy of David Trinidad’s new collection of poems, Late Show, we suggest eschewing college bookstores and canonical reference volumes. Instead, you’ll likely be better off hitting IMDb.com on your Web browser.

In Columbia College prof Trinidad’s pop culture–saturated poetry, the languid Technicolor of mid-20th-century Hollywood appears again and again, both as metaphor and as subject. In “Nature Poem,” a series of old movie titles are arranged in couplets (“The Petrified Forest / The River of No Return”), and in “Watching the Late Movie with My Mother,” Trinidad recalls spending time alone with his mom, watching the old starlets on the small screen.

“Pop culture has always been important to me and always in my poems, but not movies per se,” says Trinidad, 54. “Prior to this book, it was mostly girl-group music and Barbie dolls and popular songs.”

The first poem Trinidad wrote after completing his 2002 collection, Plasticville, was the title piece. The poem is almost a convocation of the various players who appear throughout the new book, a zigzagging run through assorted Hollywood moments: “Natalie Wood, in the middle of reciting a Wordsworth poem, bursts into tears and runs out of the classroom…. Geraldine Page begs Paul Newman for a fix…. Deborah Kerr smolders. Shelley Winters shrieks….” The instances cited are both resonant and hammy; depending on the reader’s mood, those two elements may not always be distinguishable from each other.

“I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by pop culture, I just am,” says Trinidad, who grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. “It’s definitely a personal obsession. Maybe it was because Hollywood was right there, and in the late ’50s and early ’60s with television and popular music and movies, there was just this inundation into the culture.”

Natalie Wood also plays a leading role in Late Show. She kicks off the book in the first line and guest-spots in various pieces throughout. She’s even given her own poem, “Penelope,” a rhyming ballad about her failed suicide attempt before she drowned in 1983. It’s the tragic figure of Wood—now known perhaps as much for her mysterious demise as her film career—that connects Trinidad’s collection with his other subject matter, the death of his mother. Death, in fact, is Hollywood’s strange bedfellow in Late Show. Between (and even within) poems about old Hollywood are elegies to friends and poets who have passed away, and most prominently Trinidad’s mother, who died in 1996.

“Movies were so important to me growing up, such a great escape,” Trinidad says. “I didn’t know it at first, but at some point I remember in the writing of this book, I knew it would be a book for my mother.”

Several of the poems, including “Watching the Late Movie with My Mother” and “Classic Layer Cakes,” directly address his mother’s death. In “Sonnet” he recalls his mother on the day she died, divvying up her jewelry into Dixie cups marked with the names of her children and grandchildren.

“Her death had a big impact on me,” he says, “and it wasn’t just her with this book. I wanted to write about my friends, the friends I had lost from AIDS. I think that was part of the project of this book, to deal with that, to honor the people I’d lost.”

In “A Poet’s Death,” Trinidad remembers his friend Rachel Sherwood, who died in 1979 at 25: “We both wanted to look like Patti Smith on her Horses album: disheveled, pale, thin, intense…. In truth, you were too hearty, and I too uptight, to do punk.”

Of “Classic Layer Cakes,, Trinidad says, “A friend of mine read [it] for my mother, and she said she liked how the speaker of the poem—me—didn’t know how to grieve, and the poem was a way to grieve. I look at this book as a way of letting go…letting go and moving on. Although we’re never truly free, are we?”

Trinidad reads from Late Show Wednesday 3.