Blockbuster Movie Poems
Poems about movies: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
There are movies with big budgets and big explosions, ones with great special effects and even greater expectations. They feature spies, superheroes, zombies, and aliens. We’ve had over 100 years of blockbusters—from Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance Avatar (2009) and The Avengers (2012). There have been countless trailers and endless merchandise related to these movies, but what about poems? The following poems interact with the world of blockbuster film to infuse them with the poetic imagination. To borrow the opening line of Kate Northrop’s poem “The Film,” “Come, let’s go in.”
Superhero Pregnant Woman
Jessy Randall
The Flash Reverses Time
A. Van Jordan
What I Learned From the Incredible Hulk
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Love is Like a Faucet
Yolanda Wisher
- Kathryn Maris
From the magazine:
The X Man
Sci-Fi
Tracy K. Smith
Man in Space
Billy Collins
Confession
Bob Perelman
gigantic mountains
Brandon Scott Gorrell
Terminator Too
Tom Clark
- Ann Stanford
From the magazine:
The Spy
The James Bond Movie
May Swenson
The Phyllis
R. T. Smith
- Howard Nemerov
From the magazine:
The Spy
The Fifth Fact
Sarah Browning
On Spies
Ben Jonson
- John Hollander
From the magazine:
Reflections on Espionage
Kaddish
Allen Ginsberg
The New Zombie
Rae Armantrout
- Turner Cassity
From the magazine:
A Walk with a Zombie
- Wyatt Prunty
From the magazine:
Making Frankenstein
- Dorothea Lasky
From the magazine:
Monsters
The Monsters in My Closet
Phil Bolsta