Bagel Nash, which was once the News Theatre, by Leeds Station
I continue to run at a poetical-deficit, but will catch up soon (12 and 14 to follow today)…
Here’s my poem based on going for a walk: on Sunday, I went on a walking tour of some of the forgotten/disused cinemas around Leeds city centre – which is part of the celebration of 100 years of Hyde Park Picture House – and was organised by these fine folk (Conway and Young). I put up some more pictures of this walk yesterday…
So I wrote this piece from jottings and thoughts while looking around these forgotten cinemas:
Windowless Walls
or, Cut (A Tour of Cinemas Past in Leeds)
At the News Theatre (where the only
fresh news is today’s bagels), we cut
open bags of popcorn and sniff
it like posies – warding something off –
and say how its aroma
is better than its taste.
Lyric, Lyceum, Olympia: we cut
a queue of ancient voices
through gusts of decades. Cinema
at the centre of the block-
buster’s vortex. The jump-
cuts in the waveforms of lives.
The Merrion Centre’s lights
and mirrors hold prisoner
a 1970s Odeon: the orange-brown
Autumnal kernel of
future past.
On a windowless wall, words over words
(of what was The Tower) meekly whisper how
there is Always a Good Programme. A frame
half-covering it booms Demand Everything! Now!
listing superstar DJ-names and Gatecrasher-choons.
3-D digi-HD smell-o-feel-o-vision gimmickry,
in this most flammable and malleable of media:
memory. Bricks begin to flicker.
Dust in the lens, my eyes
water: a strong wind, cut
full of particulate matter.
We, the City’s Editors –
its planners and punters –
razor-blades poised to cut
between CGI-progress
and/or
celluloid-preservation.
Look Up: Primark was once a cinema, too.