If there's one thing I like, it's poetry. I not only like to read poems, I also like to write them. With poetry it happens to me like with old friendships: I'm frank, they nourish me and I'm happy. When I was a girl , my family indirectly promoted art. My father was a writer of tenths, my grandmother made stories and drew; she also made puppets. So I can say that my family environment was very conducive for creativity and imagination to germinate in me.

Another thing I like is going to the movies. Since I was a child I remember that my parents took me to a cinema that no longer exists in my city. Later, when I was a teenager, I remember collecting my allowance to go see my favorite actors, even if the films were bad. The magic of cinema caught me again and again, with each film, and I felt that it was one of those relationships that even if it leaves us without money, you don't want to end. Back to the future, Karate Kid, The Gremlins, Robocop, Ghostbusters, Dirty Dancing, Gost: The Shadow of Love and so many other blockbuster movies, but with bad reviews, became my favorites. Over time, I learned to appreciate good cinema and changed my favorite list, and made my list again: Dancing in the Dark, Blade Runner, The Shining, Cinema Paradiso, Gone with the Wind, Forrest Gump, among others, top the big list.

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So when I got the book Mary Poppins (2014) and other poems, of the Venezuelan writer Sonia Chocrón gave me a lot of satisfaction and joy because I had in my hands a book that spoke of poetry and film. In this book of poems we are going to find different poems dedicated to different films. These poems speak not only of the film, the plot of each one of them, but also of the experience of the lyrical voice as a spectator, as a person who lives and suffers the cinema. Let us remember that this experience is subjective, individual and intimate and is a look with which we can agree or not. Let's review three poems.

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I'd like to start with the poem entitled Purple Rose of Cairo. For those who know about cinema, and for those who don't, let's remember that this title alludes to a Woody Allen film, in which a woman tired of life and her loving relationship goes to the cinema to see a film and the central character leaves the film and enters the real world. This game between fiction and reality is perhaps one of the most striking resources. In the poem we can also see this idea:

If you could die several times,
if it were possible to rehearse terror and make it so common.
…
I'd adore death as if it were nothing more
the end of an infamous film.
The lights would be turned on and
the story restarting
-stubborn photogram-
again...

In this poem we see reflected the idea that if death were like a film, it would be more bearable, less sad. If death were an experience that could be lived over and over again, rehearsing it, knowing it by heart, would be more splendid and loved. To look at death as one looks at a film, from the outside, to know that what we see is unreal and that everything is fiction, false, would be an ideal. But we all know that neither death nor life is a film that is repeated daily. Death and life are real.

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The next poem is entitled: Lo que el viento se llevó. In it we can find one of the most celebrated phrases of this story as it is: "Frankly, dear, I don't give a damn about that"; it also refers to the things we lose with time:

The wind has taken so many things away
…
An inconvenient love we couldn't crown
the smoothness of my mother's hands
the exact virginity
the jasmine that perfumed the foolish afternoons
…
The Age of Innocence
abbreviated.

This poem consists of a list of things, experiences, that have to do with youth, which we lose as time goes by. The idea that emphasizes the poetic voice in this text is that we do not remain intact before the world and we are changing at each stage. Even if we don't want to, time elapses and changes us and even deteriorates us.

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Finally, I would like to leave you here, the shortest poem in the collection of poems entitled El país de las maravillas (Wonderland):

Let them cut off their heads!
for thinking

This poem of two simple verses, contains a great truth: To him who does not think, let them cut off his head. The phrase obviously comes from the Queen of Hearts, a character from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland adventures and Tim Burton's film, which is a monarch of bad temper that condemns people to have their heads cut off at the slightest offense. Note that the poem is titled Wonderland and we see that there is a quick irony in these words. I read and I don't know why I think of Venezuela, its citizens and politicians. I think of some people who don't think that although I don't think we should cut off their heads, at least fill them with ideas so that they aren't so hollow.

As you may have noticed, each of the poems that make up this beautiful collection of poems refers us to a film, an actor and even directors. There is a game of intertextuality between literature and cinema, between reader and spectator, between page and screen. At the end, not only do you close the book, but the lights go out and the well-known FIN appears on the screen.

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