The Stuff of Hollywood

By Niki Herd

In The Stuff of Hollywood, the camera is both a witness of truths and an instrument capturing the line between real and engineered violence.

The Stuff of Hollywood is a meditation on the pervasiveness of violence in America. In this book-length poem, Niki Herd relies on various modes—images, prose, lyric and documentary poems—to reflect upon the quotidian nature of gun culture, police killings, and political unrest. A busy Waffle House, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, inside an Uber on a Chicago street, readers are placed in various “film” locations and watch as America becomes a character in its own absurd movie. In one section, excerpted language from the continuity script of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation is juxtaposed with text from the January 6 congressional hearings, suggesting a fragile line between real and engineered brutality. Herd interrogates empire and the ways in which violence is consumed and normalized. The Stuff of Hollywood is an elegy for a country that never existed beyond the screen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Aug 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781619322936

Book preview

Cover: The Stuff of Hollywood edited by Niki Herd

The Stuff of Hollywood

NIKI HERD

Logo: Copper Canyon Press

Note to the Reader

Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismod magna dignissim.

Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible.

When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

What is this famous civilization of the white men

which Hollywood reveals?

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Contents

Title Page

Note to the Reader

The Stuff of Hollywood

Credits

About the Author

Books by Niki Herd

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Special Thanks

The Stuff of Hollywood

//

EACH YEAR SHE SITS COSTUMED in violent white

patent leather shoes, a starched dress so pastel pastel.

Of the yearly pageant she knows a good man died

on two pieces of wood & the good man came back to life

to save the very same folks who wished him dead.

She lives in a world full of folk & doubts

they’re all redeemable, so she’s in it for the eggs

on the kitchen table with baskets of straw, fake green grass,

gardens of marshmallow chicks, rabbits dark & lurking.

On the idiot box a masterpiece. Charlton Heston

chooses the staff instead of the sword to free the Israelites

from Egypt. As he makes his way down Mount Sinai,

a man worshipping a golden calf says pry it from

my dead cold hands. She’s a tired child but is learning

the ways