The $40,000 Pill, Psycho Poetica, at BFI Southbank, Whitechapel Gallery, Latitude Festival, Royal Festival Hall, 2010
Psycho Poetica was a collaborative, multi-media project conceived by Simon Barraclough for the 50th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller. Each performance featured 12 poets, 12 new poems, 12 stills from the film and an original score by Oli Barrett of Petrels and Bleeding Heart Narrative.
I loved this project. Researching for it included reading loads about it and watching Psycho over and over again, including Gus Van Sant’s puzzling and redundant 1998 shot-for-shot colour remake of it. Each poet was allotted a section of the film and tasked with creating a two minute poem which added up to a 35 minute poetically warped version of the film in when all the poets got together to read their poems in performance. The Psycho Poetica anthology, now a difficult to find book, gathered all 18 poems and stills from the film used in the project into one book published by Sidekick Books.
16 poets were involved: Simon Barraclough, Dzifa Benson, Emily Berry, Isobel Dixon, Jane Draycott, Joe Dunthorne, Annie Freud, Luke Heeley, Chris McCabe, Heather Phillipson, Richard Price, Catherine Smith, John Stammers, Liane Strauss, Matthew Welton, and Roddy Lumsden The musicians involved were Oli Barrett, Claryssa Carlyon, Philip Noyce and Simon Trevethick.
The $40,000 Pill
After Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock
I runne to death, and death meets me as fast… John Donne, Holy Sonnet 1
Stifling in your apartment Marion you can’t hold
your own gaze in the mirror. Sun shines but it’s not
for you, even your own shadow trips before you.
Thirty plus with a yen for hardware store dealers,
too old to grab for lunchtime gropes on the side.
Too sick to pander to loudmouth high-rollers
with nothing to declare but the flash of cold, hard cash.
Little league blonde, girl Friday ten years in the making
ordinary woman, extraordinary temptation. Take one
last gasp to fit the skin of the American Dream before
it jump cuts to black.
Get the hell out of dodge, white bird, take flight, go to
seed to get hitched in black torpedo bra. Before you
leave Marion, be sure to turn Mama’s eyes to the wall.
Lowery, askance at the crosswalk while the die casts
your face glazed, the twist in your gut knits the flat
planes of your perky mug while that headache still
woodpeckers away.
Two days on the lam, in a black ’56 Ford Mainline,
desert highway yawns cacti and white lines. Check
your status in rear-view, eyes fixed, clench the steering
wheel. Will Sam be pleased to see you?
All that driving, those inner voices clamouring, that bitten
lip and gnawed finger. Violas breathe hard, stringing
and plucking dread over your mind and that wad
of greenbacks stashed in your black handbag.
From Arizona to California on a wing and not enough
prayer. We can’t see you or your white picket fence
in John Law’s aviators. Look! His car’s a raven black hulk
in your rear-view mirror.
Hurtling from headaches to headlights, U-turns
and headlines, a magpie in car reg. ANL-709.
You can’t buy off unhappiness with pills, you said.
Marion, you should have spent the weekend in bed.
Vertiginous, BFI southbank, 2018
In a follow up to Psycho Poetica and to celebrate the 60th anniversary year of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Simon Barraclough brought six poets together - Mona Arshi, Simon Barraclough, Dzifa Benson, Isobel Dixon, Chris McCabe and Chrissy Williams - to write and perform Vertiginous at the BFI. Vertiginous took the viewer on a tangential journey through the film, its characters, associations, symbols and emotions. Original music was composed by Oliver Barrett and Simon Barraclough, written in response to Bernard Herrmann’s score. John Canfield was the technical assistant and the performance was generously supported by the BFI and The Poetry Society.
