What Can You See in the Dark: A Conversation about Noir, Poetry and the Poem Noir
Suzanne Lummis talks with translator, scholar and Ukrainian poet (My Hollywood),
Boris Dralyuk, and poet, educator, critic, National Book Award recipient for Savage
Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, Robert Polito.
- I can see in the dark.
John Allman, cinematography, innovator of film noir techniques
SL: Noir salutations, Boris and Robert.
I've never met two poets who've come into an interest in Noir—things Noirish—from the same direction or for the same reason. Lynn Emanuel has written about her attraction to the objects and resonating details inside the noir mise-en-scène. She has a prose poem that opens, "The coffee cup is my favorite, although the glamorous insubstantiality of the martini glass has its attractions. It is night." For David Lehman it's associated with his love of classic black and white movies, and the immortal panache of film noir's very mortal noir heroes. For me, it involves my admiration for the "hardboiled" at its boiling wittiest, in the prose of Raymond Chandler, plus the experience of getting mugged a couple times—through which fiction and true crime fused in the smelting pot of my imagination. Something like that.
Question 1: How did it happen for each of you? Can you describe the origins of your interest in noir style, noir subject matter?
BD: Like you, I came to appreciate and understand noir, insofar as I do understand it, on the page, though I’ve loved the films of the 1940s and ‘50s since I first caught Casablanca one Saturday afternoon on the abandoned rabbit-eared Zenith my family lugged in from a Hollywood sidewalk in the early ’90s. It wasn’t until I read The Big Sleep—also found abandoned, on the discarded shelf at Fairfax High—that I began to think about noir seriously. Marlowe’s tone did it. So infectiously cool, yet so guarded, wounded. I started chasing down all the American prose of the ’30s I could find. It had occurred to me that Chandler’s setting as much as his style—or in concert with his style—had cemented my affection. His Hollywood still stood: palaces on one block, ratty motels on the next. He offered me a language, a somewhat heightened language, in which to express my feelings for the place.
Yet it wasn’t until I read James M. Cain, Nathanael West, John Fante, and, especially, Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and I Should Have Stayed Home that I fully recognized the blend of hope and despair—rather, the internal battle between hope, perhaps an illusory hope, and despair—that characterized the experiences of so many of those around me. The stakes of that psychic struggle for the Depression-era internal migrants in McCoy’s novels were high; they were lower for my mother and me, who had come to L.A. in 1991 as refugees from the collapsing USSR, but not by much. Here, at a six decade remove, were literary portraits not only of the place I knew, but of the way in which I knew it. Here were men and women strolling with heavy hearts down quiet streets lined with trees and boulevards littered with scraps of yesterday’s Variety, one foot in myth, the other in reality.
RP: For me, as I try to remember my first encounters with film noir at Boston movie revival houses, maybe everything circles back to Samuel Beckett, his trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and the simultaneous darkness and sheer innovation of his vision. The darkness of noir resonated internally with me, but also the surprises I found there. Think of Detour, a B-movie Poverty Row PRC noir — perhaps the bleakest film of 1945; but doesn’t Ulmer’s determination to lock everything inside Al Roberts’s disturbed consciousness somehow make Detour one of the most experimental American films ever created? Or think of Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman, a 25¢ drug store and newsstand paperback published by Lion Books with a lurid cover - “She lured him into the world’s oldest trap” - that now seems the most radical American novel stylistically of the early 1950s. Thompson’s sudden chapters in weird rival pulp modes, part Horatio Alger, part nonsense, and that brutal double ending of alternating lines of roman and italic type? A Hell of a Woman all but crosses over the boundaries of storytelling. Beckett, of course, wasn’t American, and my ability to articulate any of this obviously came much later than those college freshman film screenings, and my discovery then of Molloy & Co., but they’re inescapably linked for me.
SL: Thank you for these interesting responses, so interesting they send me in all directions. They make me muse on French existentialism and the noir ethos. And then they make me consider how utterly different Raymond Chandler was from, say, writers like Jim Thompson, so opposite in style and manner that they barely seem to belong under the same umbrella, on the same rain slicked street. The only commonality is that in their stories crimes get committed and people die—and not peacefully in bed.
However, we're poets talking about noir in its various forms, not filmmakers or crime writers—or I'm not anyway. Poets. And maybe as poets we're bringing our own perspective—it's possible.
Question 2: I wonder, does noir influence your own poetry? There aren't many of us in the U.S. using noir as a kind of touchstone. What does this territory offer poets, to you or poets in general?
RP: For some poets, and for even more people who aren’t poets, noir tends to reduce to asymmetrical clothing, fedoras, wide ties, satin dresses, and ostensibly witty variations on hard-boiled bromides. Kenneth Fearing sent all that up in his devastating poems of the late-twenties and thirties — along with his timely reminders of the burdens of American history, and noir for me is totally entangled in American history: a nation that originated in genocide, was sustained by slavery, yet is convinced that here is God’s country. Out of those impossible tensions, that schizophrenia, comes so much noir, even when the focus isn’t explicitly on history and politics.
Noir and poems. I recall Ai—Florence Ai Ogawa—and her amazing dramatic monologues in her poetry collections with their almost totemic noir titles: Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, Greed, Vice, and Dread. For all their immersion in American history, and the everyday violences of American life, her dramatic monologues probably track to Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” a poem where a man inadvertently discloses he murdered his wife out of jealousy and anger.
I think of Lynda Hull, whom you’ve also written about, Suzanne, and this bit at the conclusion of “Counting in Chinese”:
I remember this the way I’d remember a knife
against my throat: that night, after
the overdose, you told me to count, to calm
myself. You put together the rice-paper lantern
and when the bulb heated the frame it spun
shadows—dragon, phoenix, dragon and phoenix
tumbling across the walls where the clothes
you’d washed at the sink hung drying on
a nailed cord.
I remember Amiri Baraka’s Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, and the opening there of “The Turncoat”:
The steel fibrous slant & ribboned glint
of water. The Sea. Even my secret speech is moist
with it. When I am alone & brooding, locked in
with dull memories & self hate & the terrible disorder
of a young man.
I move slowly. My cape spread stiff & pressing cautiously
in the first night wind off the Hudson. I glide down
onto my own roof, peering in at the pitiful shadow of myself.
I also think of Robert Lowell, especially his poems in Life Studies, published in 1959, the same year as Odds Against Tomorrow and The Crimson Kimono. Remember Lowell’s observation at the end of “Waking in the Blue,” his poem about a stay in McLean Hospital: “We are all old-timers,/ each of us holds a locked razor.”
BD: It’s no surprise to me that I agree completely with what Robert has said, especially with his words about the trappings of film noir scattered throughout contemporary poems. Fedoras and wisecracks are not the essence of noir; the “burdens of American history” are indeed what give so much of genuine noir weight. In my recent essay proposing a genealogy of noir poetry, Two Crooked Streets—in which I discuss three poets who emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, alongside the authors and filmmakers whom the French labeled “noir” in the mid-1940s—I point to that period’s economic disasters, ideological struggles, and echoes and premonitions of global wars as the soil from which noir sprang. I quote from Robert’s marvelous introduction to the work of Kenneth Fearing, who is a shining—or should I say tarnished but darkly glittering—exemplar of noir poetry. The point I would make about the politics of the genre is that, despite the seemingly unwavering leftist commitments of Fearing and others like him, Hammett included, the diagnosis of economic and social catastrophe in their work is always more interesting than whatever prescription they may offer. Their motivation may have been Marxian, but their vision was more likely Freudian. As I write, for them, “the capitalist system exposes, as it buckles, the true nature of the human condition: our animalistic cruelty, our susceptibility to self-delusion, our ineluctable drives towards pleasure and self-destruction.”
That brings me to the question of crime. Is it a necessary feature of noir? Something inside me (not the killer, I assure you) rebels against that notion. Chandler picked up the pen in middle age out of economic necessity; he saw what readers demanded, knew where the money was, and went all-in. Desperation drove him to crime. Would he have written crime-less novels of manners, had those paid? Perhaps. His criminal plots were notoriously terrible; no one ever remembers whodunit. Yet crime was useful to him and other noir novelists and filmmakers not only as a marketable element. It was a means of ratcheting up the stakes in their critiques of, on the one hand, the increasingly brutal social environment in which they lived and, on the other, human nature itself—a nature of which, like the existentialists who learned from them, they took a rather jaundiced view.
Noir crime novels often make us examine our notions of culpability, Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? an example. When a dog-tired, not particularly bright young man commits what he sees as a mercy killing, he breaks the law; but the system that broke him—is it not equally guilty? There is a question in the novel’s title, and another at its very heart. So yes, crime is a most useful device for noir. But is it necessary? Isn’t John Fante’s Ask the Dust noir? Aren’t Brecht’s “Hollywood Elegies”? I think so. In one of my own poems about Los Angeles, if I may share it, I hint at activities that might break laws, but without much emphasis. What makes it somewhat noirish, in my view, is its take on the Angeleno condition—which is merely a particularized example of the human one.
The Bureau of Street Lighting
“A Bureau of Street Lighting was created within the Department of Public Works in 1925, which establishes criteria for all street lighting and determines locations of the lighting units.”
— Eddy S. Feldman, The Art of Street Lighting in Los Angeles (1972)
What would we be without the light you lend us?
Hard to imagine what we were back when…
A desert pueblo, sleepy haciendas
with smoke-stained lanterns blinking out by ten.
Yes, I suppose I’ll thank you for the darkness
your light supports: the luring night-bound streets,
the anonymity of motels and apartments,
all the small trade that’s done without receipts.
Yes, for the city limit, for your tactless,
incessant focus on just who we are.
You will not let the zodiac distract us --
you make our private misery the star.
SL: We three agree that the poem noir isn’t just about dressing up or talking tough in an outdated vernacular—you know, the poem where women are dames and a gun is a gat, and that’s as far as it goes. There is, however, a type of “fun noir”—as I think of it—that walks and talks in the noir style, the poem that uses the figures of classic noir, the lone wolf detective, the fatal woman, the gunsel, to reflect contemporary situations and concerns.
I do differ with you on this: crime or the evocative suggestion of crime, past, present, or down the road a piece—that, together with style—is what makes a poem noir for me, rather than simply darkish or pessimistic, depressive or downbeat. If “dark” is interpreted too broadly, that could encompass…what? Twenty percent of the poems out there? In any case, the term could become so unspecific, general. It could come to include nearly any poem that’s Not Happy. In film, if dark moods, pessimism and emotional anguish make a thing noir then Cries and Whispers is film noir.
And regarding print, I can’t recall that I’ve heard books outside of crime fiction, true crime or murder mysteries identified as “noir.” I don’t think of of John Fante as “noir” though I love the guy, his wonderfully distinctive voice. True Ask the Dust is set among the last resort rooming houses of L.A.’s Bunker Hill in the 30s, and the character’s down on his luck. But again, if all that’s required is a broke protagonist who’s hard up for rent, that’s rather broad. Unless you count as a crime Arturo Bandini’s theft of some bottles of milk (which turn out to be the despised buttermilk).
I have a seminal piece defining the poem noir that can be found—if anyone can find it!—in my essay The Poem Noir, Too Dark to Be Depressed, which keeps moving through different print publications, none of them easy to acquire. It appeared first in 2012 in the now retired Malpais Review out of New Mexico, edited by the late Gary Brower. It was reprinted in 2023, in Pratik (ed. Yuyutsu Sharma), in an issue I guest edited called Darkness in Style. (If ordered, that one must travel from Katmandu, not by jet plane. ) And now a version of it is in the debut issue of an eclectic new publication called Headwind, ed. Dan Ritkes, a defense attorney. (As of this writing, it can only be acquired by sending $19 to Headwind: 2530 Wilshire Blvd., Floor 3, Santa Monica, CA 90403).
In addition to what I’ve mentioned as essential criteria—from my view—malfeasance counts. And mood suffused with a sense of danger, dread—yes, that might get you a ride on the late-night bus heading to the end of the line.
The noir style gave me a way to write about violence, various forms of it, street crimes among them. Something I know about. In the course of my adventures, I picked up some noir cred. The hard way.
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I’d like to touch on humor in the noir style, noir voice, the attitude. Early on that attracted me—I loved the outrageousness of it, how in situations where real people might be screaming, the protagonist can laugh in the face of pain, failure and mortal danger.
Probably, Raymond Chandler’s lone wolf detective Philip Marlowe hits the benchmark in terms of wit. Here’s a brilliant passage, funny and yet somehow wise.
The cover of a day bed proved that I’d been lying on my face if I still had one. I
rolled over gently and sat up and a rattling noise ended in a thump. What rattled
and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved
me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less
had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People
have moods.
(from Playback by Raymond Chandler)
So that’s a hardboiled example; elsewhere, in my YouTube series They Write by Night, I’ve made a case for Weldon Kees (1914 – 1955) as the author of the first quintessential modern poem noir. I see Kenneth Fearing as a strong precursor to the poem noir, and as the author of The Big Clock and other crime novels, he certainly has noir cred. And yet, Kees’ “Crime Club” contains all the elements, the crime, the voice of detachment and, in the closing, a sense of hopelessness about not just our country (as if the other countries of the world are oh-so-perfect), but humanity itself. Yet, still, despite everything, there’s the mordant wit.
This excerpt describes the corpse lying, still undiscovered, in a suburban home.
Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,
the torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team
scattered with check stubs in the hall,
the unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,
the Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,
the note: To be killed this way is quite alright with me.
Question 3: I wonder, do either of you have examples, from film, poetry, fiction, anywhere, that amuse you? The passage might not be laugh-out-loud funny but have that rough wit, that intelligent cleverness. That noir insouciance.
RP: Noir is often hilarious - that moment in Detour when Vera (Ann Savage) abruptly wakes up in the car and confronts Al Roberts (Tom Neal): “Where did you leave his body? Where did you leave the owner of this car? You're not fooling anyone. This buggy belongs to a guy named Haskell. That's not you, Mister!" That moment is terrifying, chilling, but also hilarious.
This example isn’t exactly insouciance, but a favorite noir mordant comic turn is a sequence in Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280, where Nick Corey’s vision of the “emptiness” of this world veers into a religious justification for murder:
…And suddenly the emptiness was filled with sound and sight, with all the sad terrible things that the emptiness had brought the people to.
…There were the haggard faces, drained white from hookworm and blotched with scurvy. There was the near-starvation, the never-bein’-full, the debts that always outrun the credits. There was the how-we-gonna-eat, how-we-gonna-sleep, how-we-gonna-cover-our-poor-bare-asses thinkin’. The kind of thinkin’ that when you ain’t doing nothing else but that, why you’re better off dead. Because that’s the emptiness thinkin’ and you’re already dead inside, and all you’ll do is spread the stink and the terror, the weepin’ and wailin’, the torture, the starvation, the shame of your deadness. Your emptiness.
I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our Creator to create such downright hideous things in the world, so that something like murder didn’t seem at all bad by comparison. Yea, verily, it was indeed merciful and wonderful of Him. And it was up to me to stop brooding, and to pay attention to what was going on right here and now.
Amazing.
BD: Yes, thank you, Suzanne! What fun this has been. And I agree with you about Kees, though I wouldn’t place “Crime Club” (1943) at the head of the noir poetry canon. I think of it as a witty verse precursor to W.H. Auden’s essay “The Guilty Vicarage” (1948), in which that other great poet (who’d been quite noirish in his own right in the 1930s), draws a distinction between the comforting, sense-restoring mysteries of the Golden Age and the noir mode of crime fiction, where nothing can be mended. “I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place,” writes Auden, “and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.” In Kees’s poem, the name of detective rendered “incurably insane” by the motiveless, unsolvable crime is LeRoux, a Frenchified effigy of Poe’s Dupin, Chesterton’s Flambeau, Christie’s Poirot, and, perhaps most directly, of William Le Queux, author of the collection The Crimes Club (1927). We’re not in the neat and tidy Golden Age anymore, Kees tells us. And you’re right about the international element. Just a year before “Crime Club” appeared, Borges published his own great upending of the Chestertonian Golden Age mystery, “Death and the Compass.”
Auden calls Chandler’s novels depressing, and on a certain level they are: if you’re looking for solutions, big or small, you’re barking up the wrong tree. But Marlowe is also a laugh riot, insouciant as all get-out. “A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window,” etc. I wrote a long essay on Paul Cain, whose novel Fast One (1933) Chandler called “some kind of high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner.” In it I quote the opening of Cain’s story “Dutch Treat,” which still makes me smile. It’s as pure an expression of the noir attitude as we’re likely to get: “Lefty Bowman and I played Spit-in-the-Ocean to see who’d take whose vacation when. I won, or maybe I lost—I forget which.” When I think of the comic element in noir, I think of Leiber and Stoller’s “Is That All There Is?” as Peggy Lee sang it, of that Brechtian mordancy of tone (it was based on a story by Thomas Mann), of that resigned hollowness, that slow dance on the edge of despair. It’s a funny world, when you think of it. Nothing to do but to break out the booze and have a ball.
SL: I endorse that, though in our particularly conscientious, post-classic noir age, I’d add—But don’t drink and drive.
Seems to me we could go on and on, and I hope someday, somewhere, we can continue this exchange live. That’d be not only “live” but lively.
Boris Dralyuk, and poet, educator, critic, National Book Award recipient for Savage
Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, Robert Polito.
- I can see in the dark.
John Allman, cinematography, innovator of film noir techniques
SL: Noir salutations, Boris and Robert.
I've never met two poets who've come into an interest in Noir—things Noirish—from the same direction or for the same reason. Lynn Emanuel has written about her attraction to the objects and resonating details inside the noir mise-en-scène. She has a prose poem that opens, "The coffee cup is my favorite, although the glamorous insubstantiality of the martini glass has its attractions. It is night." For David Lehman it's associated with his love of classic black and white movies, and the immortal panache of film noir's very mortal noir heroes. For me, it involves my admiration for the "hardboiled" at its boiling wittiest, in the prose of Raymond Chandler, plus the experience of getting mugged a couple times—through which fiction and true crime fused in the smelting pot of my imagination. Something like that.
Question 1: How did it happen for each of you? Can you describe the origins of your interest in noir style, noir subject matter?
BD: Like you, I came to appreciate and understand noir, insofar as I do understand it, on the page, though I’ve loved the films of the 1940s and ‘50s since I first caught Casablanca one Saturday afternoon on the abandoned rabbit-eared Zenith my family lugged in from a Hollywood sidewalk in the early ’90s. It wasn’t until I read The Big Sleep—also found abandoned, on the discarded shelf at Fairfax High—that I began to think about noir seriously. Marlowe’s tone did it. So infectiously cool, yet so guarded, wounded. I started chasing down all the American prose of the ’30s I could find. It had occurred to me that Chandler’s setting as much as his style—or in concert with his style—had cemented my affection. His Hollywood still stood: palaces on one block, ratty motels on the next. He offered me a language, a somewhat heightened language, in which to express my feelings for the place.
Yet it wasn’t until I read James M. Cain, Nathanael West, John Fante, and, especially, Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and I Should Have Stayed Home that I fully recognized the blend of hope and despair—rather, the internal battle between hope, perhaps an illusory hope, and despair—that characterized the experiences of so many of those around me. The stakes of that psychic struggle for the Depression-era internal migrants in McCoy’s novels were high; they were lower for my mother and me, who had come to L.A. in 1991 as refugees from the collapsing USSR, but not by much. Here, at a six decade remove, were literary portraits not only of the place I knew, but of the way in which I knew it. Here were men and women strolling with heavy hearts down quiet streets lined with trees and boulevards littered with scraps of yesterday’s Variety, one foot in myth, the other in reality.
RP: For me, as I try to remember my first encounters with film noir at Boston movie revival houses, maybe everything circles back to Samuel Beckett, his trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, and the simultaneous darkness and sheer innovation of his vision. The darkness of noir resonated internally with me, but also the surprises I found there. Think of Detour, a B-movie Poverty Row PRC noir — perhaps the bleakest film of 1945; but doesn’t Ulmer’s determination to lock everything inside Al Roberts’s disturbed consciousness somehow make Detour one of the most experimental American films ever created? Or think of Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman, a 25¢ drug store and newsstand paperback published by Lion Books with a lurid cover - “She lured him into the world’s oldest trap” - that now seems the most radical American novel stylistically of the early 1950s. Thompson’s sudden chapters in weird rival pulp modes, part Horatio Alger, part nonsense, and that brutal double ending of alternating lines of roman and italic type? A Hell of a Woman all but crosses over the boundaries of storytelling. Beckett, of course, wasn’t American, and my ability to articulate any of this obviously came much later than those college freshman film screenings, and my discovery then of Molloy & Co., but they’re inescapably linked for me.
SL: Thank you for these interesting responses, so interesting they send me in all directions. They make me muse on French existentialism and the noir ethos. And then they make me consider how utterly different Raymond Chandler was from, say, writers like Jim Thompson, so opposite in style and manner that they barely seem to belong under the same umbrella, on the same rain slicked street. The only commonality is that in their stories crimes get committed and people die—and not peacefully in bed.
However, we're poets talking about noir in its various forms, not filmmakers or crime writers—or I'm not anyway. Poets. And maybe as poets we're bringing our own perspective—it's possible.
Question 2: I wonder, does noir influence your own poetry? There aren't many of us in the U.S. using noir as a kind of touchstone. What does this territory offer poets, to you or poets in general?
RP: For some poets, and for even more people who aren’t poets, noir tends to reduce to asymmetrical clothing, fedoras, wide ties, satin dresses, and ostensibly witty variations on hard-boiled bromides. Kenneth Fearing sent all that up in his devastating poems of the late-twenties and thirties — along with his timely reminders of the burdens of American history, and noir for me is totally entangled in American history: a nation that originated in genocide, was sustained by slavery, yet is convinced that here is God’s country. Out of those impossible tensions, that schizophrenia, comes so much noir, even when the focus isn’t explicitly on history and politics.
Noir and poems. I recall Ai—Florence Ai Ogawa—and her amazing dramatic monologues in her poetry collections with their almost totemic noir titles: Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, Greed, Vice, and Dread. For all their immersion in American history, and the everyday violences of American life, her dramatic monologues probably track to Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” a poem where a man inadvertently discloses he murdered his wife out of jealousy and anger.
I think of Lynda Hull, whom you’ve also written about, Suzanne, and this bit at the conclusion of “Counting in Chinese”:
I remember this the way I’d remember a knife
against my throat: that night, after
the overdose, you told me to count, to calm
myself. You put together the rice-paper lantern
and when the bulb heated the frame it spun
shadows—dragon, phoenix, dragon and phoenix
tumbling across the walls where the clothes
you’d washed at the sink hung drying on
a nailed cord.
I remember Amiri Baraka’s Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, and the opening there of “The Turncoat”:
The steel fibrous slant & ribboned glint
of water. The Sea. Even my secret speech is moist
with it. When I am alone & brooding, locked in
with dull memories & self hate & the terrible disorder
of a young man.
I move slowly. My cape spread stiff & pressing cautiously
in the first night wind off the Hudson. I glide down
onto my own roof, peering in at the pitiful shadow of myself.
I also think of Robert Lowell, especially his poems in Life Studies, published in 1959, the same year as Odds Against Tomorrow and The Crimson Kimono. Remember Lowell’s observation at the end of “Waking in the Blue,” his poem about a stay in McLean Hospital: “We are all old-timers,/ each of us holds a locked razor.”
BD: It’s no surprise to me that I agree completely with what Robert has said, especially with his words about the trappings of film noir scattered throughout contemporary poems. Fedoras and wisecracks are not the essence of noir; the “burdens of American history” are indeed what give so much of genuine noir weight. In my recent essay proposing a genealogy of noir poetry, Two Crooked Streets—in which I discuss three poets who emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, alongside the authors and filmmakers whom the French labeled “noir” in the mid-1940s—I point to that period’s economic disasters, ideological struggles, and echoes and premonitions of global wars as the soil from which noir sprang. I quote from Robert’s marvelous introduction to the work of Kenneth Fearing, who is a shining—or should I say tarnished but darkly glittering—exemplar of noir poetry. The point I would make about the politics of the genre is that, despite the seemingly unwavering leftist commitments of Fearing and others like him, Hammett included, the diagnosis of economic and social catastrophe in their work is always more interesting than whatever prescription they may offer. Their motivation may have been Marxian, but their vision was more likely Freudian. As I write, for them, “the capitalist system exposes, as it buckles, the true nature of the human condition: our animalistic cruelty, our susceptibility to self-delusion, our ineluctable drives towards pleasure and self-destruction.”
That brings me to the question of crime. Is it a necessary feature of noir? Something inside me (not the killer, I assure you) rebels against that notion. Chandler picked up the pen in middle age out of economic necessity; he saw what readers demanded, knew where the money was, and went all-in. Desperation drove him to crime. Would he have written crime-less novels of manners, had those paid? Perhaps. His criminal plots were notoriously terrible; no one ever remembers whodunit. Yet crime was useful to him and other noir novelists and filmmakers not only as a marketable element. It was a means of ratcheting up the stakes in their critiques of, on the one hand, the increasingly brutal social environment in which they lived and, on the other, human nature itself—a nature of which, like the existentialists who learned from them, they took a rather jaundiced view.
Noir crime novels often make us examine our notions of culpability, Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? an example. When a dog-tired, not particularly bright young man commits what he sees as a mercy killing, he breaks the law; but the system that broke him—is it not equally guilty? There is a question in the novel’s title, and another at its very heart. So yes, crime is a most useful device for noir. But is it necessary? Isn’t John Fante’s Ask the Dust noir? Aren’t Brecht’s “Hollywood Elegies”? I think so. In one of my own poems about Los Angeles, if I may share it, I hint at activities that might break laws, but without much emphasis. What makes it somewhat noirish, in my view, is its take on the Angeleno condition—which is merely a particularized example of the human one.
The Bureau of Street Lighting
“A Bureau of Street Lighting was created within the Department of Public Works in 1925, which establishes criteria for all street lighting and determines locations of the lighting units.”
— Eddy S. Feldman, The Art of Street Lighting in Los Angeles (1972)
What would we be without the light you lend us?
Hard to imagine what we were back when…
A desert pueblo, sleepy haciendas
with smoke-stained lanterns blinking out by ten.
Yes, I suppose I’ll thank you for the darkness
your light supports: the luring night-bound streets,
the anonymity of motels and apartments,
all the small trade that’s done without receipts.
Yes, for the city limit, for your tactless,
incessant focus on just who we are.
You will not let the zodiac distract us --
you make our private misery the star.
SL: We three agree that the poem noir isn’t just about dressing up or talking tough in an outdated vernacular—you know, the poem where women are dames and a gun is a gat, and that’s as far as it goes. There is, however, a type of “fun noir”—as I think of it—that walks and talks in the noir style, the poem that uses the figures of classic noir, the lone wolf detective, the fatal woman, the gunsel, to reflect contemporary situations and concerns.
I do differ with you on this: crime or the evocative suggestion of crime, past, present, or down the road a piece—that, together with style—is what makes a poem noir for me, rather than simply darkish or pessimistic, depressive or downbeat. If “dark” is interpreted too broadly, that could encompass…what? Twenty percent of the poems out there? In any case, the term could become so unspecific, general. It could come to include nearly any poem that’s Not Happy. In film, if dark moods, pessimism and emotional anguish make a thing noir then Cries and Whispers is film noir.
And regarding print, I can’t recall that I’ve heard books outside of crime fiction, true crime or murder mysteries identified as “noir.” I don’t think of of John Fante as “noir” though I love the guy, his wonderfully distinctive voice. True Ask the Dust is set among the last resort rooming houses of L.A.’s Bunker Hill in the 30s, and the character’s down on his luck. But again, if all that’s required is a broke protagonist who’s hard up for rent, that’s rather broad. Unless you count as a crime Arturo Bandini’s theft of some bottles of milk (which turn out to be the despised buttermilk).
I have a seminal piece defining the poem noir that can be found—if anyone can find it!—in my essay The Poem Noir, Too Dark to Be Depressed, which keeps moving through different print publications, none of them easy to acquire. It appeared first in 2012 in the now retired Malpais Review out of New Mexico, edited by the late Gary Brower. It was reprinted in 2023, in Pratik (ed. Yuyutsu Sharma), in an issue I guest edited called Darkness in Style. (If ordered, that one must travel from Katmandu, not by jet plane. ) And now a version of it is in the debut issue of an eclectic new publication called Headwind, ed. Dan Ritkes, a defense attorney. (As of this writing, it can only be acquired by sending $19 to Headwind: 2530 Wilshire Blvd., Floor 3, Santa Monica, CA 90403).
In addition to what I’ve mentioned as essential criteria—from my view—malfeasance counts. And mood suffused with a sense of danger, dread—yes, that might get you a ride on the late-night bus heading to the end of the line.
The noir style gave me a way to write about violence, various forms of it, street crimes among them. Something I know about. In the course of my adventures, I picked up some noir cred. The hard way.
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I’d like to touch on humor in the noir style, noir voice, the attitude. Early on that attracted me—I loved the outrageousness of it, how in situations where real people might be screaming, the protagonist can laugh in the face of pain, failure and mortal danger.
Probably, Raymond Chandler’s lone wolf detective Philip Marlowe hits the benchmark in terms of wit. Here’s a brilliant passage, funny and yet somehow wise.
The cover of a day bed proved that I’d been lying on my face if I still had one. I
rolled over gently and sat up and a rattling noise ended in a thump. What rattled
and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved
me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less
had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People
have moods.
(from Playback by Raymond Chandler)
So that’s a hardboiled example; elsewhere, in my YouTube series They Write by Night, I’ve made a case for Weldon Kees (1914 – 1955) as the author of the first quintessential modern poem noir. I see Kenneth Fearing as a strong precursor to the poem noir, and as the author of The Big Clock and other crime novels, he certainly has noir cred. And yet, Kees’ “Crime Club” contains all the elements, the crime, the voice of detachment and, in the closing, a sense of hopelessness about not just our country (as if the other countries of the world are oh-so-perfect), but humanity itself. Yet, still, despite everything, there’s the mordant wit.
This excerpt describes the corpse lying, still undiscovered, in a suburban home.
Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,
the torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team
scattered with check stubs in the hall,
the unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,
the Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,
the note: To be killed this way is quite alright with me.
Question 3: I wonder, do either of you have examples, from film, poetry, fiction, anywhere, that amuse you? The passage might not be laugh-out-loud funny but have that rough wit, that intelligent cleverness. That noir insouciance.
RP: Noir is often hilarious - that moment in Detour when Vera (Ann Savage) abruptly wakes up in the car and confronts Al Roberts (Tom Neal): “Where did you leave his body? Where did you leave the owner of this car? You're not fooling anyone. This buggy belongs to a guy named Haskell. That's not you, Mister!" That moment is terrifying, chilling, but also hilarious.
This example isn’t exactly insouciance, but a favorite noir mordant comic turn is a sequence in Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280, where Nick Corey’s vision of the “emptiness” of this world veers into a religious justification for murder:
…And suddenly the emptiness was filled with sound and sight, with all the sad terrible things that the emptiness had brought the people to.
…There were the haggard faces, drained white from hookworm and blotched with scurvy. There was the near-starvation, the never-bein’-full, the debts that always outrun the credits. There was the how-we-gonna-eat, how-we-gonna-sleep, how-we-gonna-cover-our-poor-bare-asses thinkin’. The kind of thinkin’ that when you ain’t doing nothing else but that, why you’re better off dead. Because that’s the emptiness thinkin’ and you’re already dead inside, and all you’ll do is spread the stink and the terror, the weepin’ and wailin’, the torture, the starvation, the shame of your deadness. Your emptiness.
I shuddered, thinking how wonderful was our Creator to create such downright hideous things in the world, so that something like murder didn’t seem at all bad by comparison. Yea, verily, it was indeed merciful and wonderful of Him. And it was up to me to stop brooding, and to pay attention to what was going on right here and now.
Amazing.
BD: Yes, thank you, Suzanne! What fun this has been. And I agree with you about Kees, though I wouldn’t place “Crime Club” (1943) at the head of the noir poetry canon. I think of it as a witty verse precursor to W.H. Auden’s essay “The Guilty Vicarage” (1948), in which that other great poet (who’d been quite noirish in his own right in the 1930s), draws a distinction between the comforting, sense-restoring mysteries of the Golden Age and the noir mode of crime fiction, where nothing can be mended. “I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place,” writes Auden, “and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.” In Kees’s poem, the name of detective rendered “incurably insane” by the motiveless, unsolvable crime is LeRoux, a Frenchified effigy of Poe’s Dupin, Chesterton’s Flambeau, Christie’s Poirot, and, perhaps most directly, of William Le Queux, author of the collection The Crimes Club (1927). We’re not in the neat and tidy Golden Age anymore, Kees tells us. And you’re right about the international element. Just a year before “Crime Club” appeared, Borges published his own great upending of the Chestertonian Golden Age mystery, “Death and the Compass.”
Auden calls Chandler’s novels depressing, and on a certain level they are: if you’re looking for solutions, big or small, you’re barking up the wrong tree. But Marlowe is also a laugh riot, insouciant as all get-out. “A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window,” etc. I wrote a long essay on Paul Cain, whose novel Fast One (1933) Chandler called “some kind of high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner.” In it I quote the opening of Cain’s story “Dutch Treat,” which still makes me smile. It’s as pure an expression of the noir attitude as we’re likely to get: “Lefty Bowman and I played Spit-in-the-Ocean to see who’d take whose vacation when. I won, or maybe I lost—I forget which.” When I think of the comic element in noir, I think of Leiber and Stoller’s “Is That All There Is?” as Peggy Lee sang it, of that Brechtian mordancy of tone (it was based on a story by Thomas Mann), of that resigned hollowness, that slow dance on the edge of despair. It’s a funny world, when you think of it. Nothing to do but to break out the booze and have a ball.
SL: I endorse that, though in our particularly conscientious, post-classic noir age, I’d add—But don’t drink and drive.
Seems to me we could go on and on, and I hope someday, somewhere, we can continue this exchange live. That’d be not only “live” but lively.
Boris Dralyuk is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (2022). He has translated and edited many volumes of prose and verse, and his work has appeared in the NYRB, the TLS, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry 2023, and elsewhere. His honors include the 2022 Gregg Barrios Translation Prize from the NBCC and a 2024 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Formerly editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, he is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, a Tulsa Artist Fellow, and the editor-in-chief of Nimrod International Journal.
In 2026 Robert Polito will publish After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace (Liveright/Norton); Jim Thompson Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 1960s (Library of America); and in collaboration with Sophie Brown and Robert Rubin, Barbara Loden’s WANDA (Film Desk Books). Previous books include Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, and Hollywood & God. He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in New York City.
Suzanne Lummis' fourth collection, Crime Wave, was published by Giant Claw, imprint of What Books, Fall 2025. She’s the editor of the new anthology Poetry Goes to the Movies. Poetry.la produces her seriocomic YouTube series on poetry and film. She received her MA from CSU Fresno during its golden era (yes, even Fresno had one) and studied with Philip Levine, then one of the West’s most influential poetry teachers. She’s sometimes referred to as a Fresno Poet, more often a Los Angeles Poet, and, because she was born and raised on the northern end, occasionally a California Poet. She’s always referred to as a Noir poet. Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Plume, Catamaran, Rattle, and The New Yorker. She is, herself, an influential teacher in Los Angeles and taught for thirty years through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
