Flip Days

by Lawrence BRIDGES

Overview

Using Hollywood screenplay structure to illustrate a life in three acts, eighteen scenes, each with two poems as mirrors to action, filmmaker/poet Lawrence Bridges sequences through tragicomic plot twists and subplots to create a character-driven, novel-like book of lyric poems. An unnamed protagonist is torn from a lover, torn from himself, in perpetual transition while starting a new family, surrounded by a lively array of colleagues and friends as his career implodes, asserting his autonomy only to become part of life's "conspiracies." Strangers shift around him in a murky world beyond his control, a world with signs of indeterminacy and happenstance: Restaurant patrons smile innocently while thieves quietly rob, a death pact is used to escape a lover, disguised signals from space aliens announce that our enemies are now their allies. How do you tie up loose ends when characters we like are actually the bad guys? Bridges prods us to answer the main question: Can a man love as his world spells farewell? A unique, delightful read—an invitation to explore something new in what may be a new genre fusing some of the elements of screenplay with poetry. Today is already yesterday to tomorrow, in Flip Days.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597093590
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	11/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	460 KB

About the Author

Lawrence Bridges lives Los Angeles, California. This is his second book of poems from Red Hen Press. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and most recently, The Tampa Review. Bridges founded the acclaimed film and design studio, Red Car, and has directed several hundred commercials and music videos, features and documentaries.  Stanley Kubrick has called his work in film "visual poetry.” More recently, he directed a series of six documentaries on prominent American authors for the NEA's “Big Read” initiative, which include Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan, Rudolfo Anaya, Ernest J. Gaines, Tobias Wolff, and Cynthia Ozick.

Table of Contents

1 - ESTABLISH MOOD AND ENVIRONMENT.

Like Letting Babies Live With Gravediggers                                                 8

Blue, The Color                                                                                                 11

2 - ESTABLISH PLACE AND TIME. WHERE.

Doppler Dream                                                                                                 13

Example                                                                                                             15

3 - WHO. MAIN CHARACTERS.

The Rubber Band Days                                                                                    17

Mail                                                                                                                     19

4 - MAIN CHARACTER’S GOAL.

Unassailable Jazz                                                                                             22

Negative Exuberance                                                                                       24

5 - A PLOT TWIST SETS THE STORY IN MOTION.

The Poet Who Carried A Hubcap Among Briefcases                                  26

On Love After A Passage                                                                                29

6 - THE SUBPLOT.

Flight                                                                                                                   31

Legendary Forgetfulness                                                                                 32

7 - THE ANTAGONIST.      

The Helicopter Dreams                                                                                    34

The Capitalist In His Cab                                                                                 35

8 - CONFLICT.

Glass, Memory, Mirror                                                                                      37

The Night Puts The Relentless & Invisible

     Vocation Of Seeking To Sleep                                                                  38

ACT  2

9 - CHECK FOR MOMENTUM.

“Here Is What It Would Have Been Like, Captured On Film”                       40     

The Individual Is A Thesaurus                                                                          41     

10 - A TWIST IN THE SUBPLOT.

Lament                                                                                                               43

Three Split Infinitives: Luck                                                                              44

11 - ANOTHER MAIN PLOT TWIST.

I Imagined You As A Little Old Man                                                                 46

Winter Object                                                                                                     49

12 - RELIEF.

Gallery Incident: A Picture Tells What You Did All Afternoon In Response To The Sunlight 51

Skylight                                                                                                               52

13 - ANOTHER SUBPLOT TWIST (STRONGEST).

That Spells Farewell                                                                                         54

Kiln and Arrow                                                                                                   55

 

14 - ANOTHER MAIN PLOT TWIST (STRONGEST).

True Calling: Pleasure Piece                                                                           58

The World is Toil                                                                                               59           

ACT  3

 

15 - COME FULL CIRCLE RAPIDLY AND CONCLUDE.

Ajar, Kansas                                                                                                      62

Or And One                                                                                                        63

                                                                                                                           

16 - END SUBPLOT BEFORE CLIMAX.

Door To The Empty Store                                                                                66

Bought Me                                                                                                         67

17 - TIE UP LOOSE ENDS.

Level 11                                                                                                             69

Free Association: Monoploy                                                                            70

 

18 - ANSWER THE MAIN QUESTION.

Editorial Reviews

Dissociative Poet! Dis-sociative?! - when the ruling motif is precisely the opposite, when what we are struck by, again and again and again is the intuitive wizardry of lightening associations, association, junctions, segues, startling linkages that make you see as you've never seen before and think as you've never thought before!  As feel as you've never felt before. And very often jump out of you skin! "Our profiles are what make us look strange." There is pure lyricism, the beautiful "Winter Object: Oath of Silence," wherein the images are Yeatslike.  Elsewhere, this lovely phrase" "All the cells want to be flowers." All the cells want to be flowers. Oh, to have written that!”
—Cynthia Ozick

From the Publisher