Sunday, January 3, 2016

Anne Tibbitts writes



Circus



Sometimes a bluesky day over represents itself. 
The short circuits aren’t crackling in ways 
The electric company can fix. 
Instead, the mind pulses on 
Complicated and frantic.



The tight rope walker goes 
Off to the left and falls 
The bear comes down 
Off his ball and cries 
The tiger roars to his own tune 
And then bites the head off 
His trainer and escapes onto Main Street 
Where he is promptly shot 
By rather impervious deputies.



The blacktop is bleeding and broken into clumps 
From where the elephants made their truths known 
One guy who jingle jangles their trunks full of old peanuts 
 Turns beet red when the kids ask why he’s whipping Dumbo.
 dereliction row: This is my mood today

1 comment:

  1. In 1941, when Walt Disney needed to recoup the financial losses of Pinocchio and Fantasia, his studio wanted to produce a simpler, less ambitious animated feature. The result was "Dumbo," the story of a baby elephant who is ridiculed for his enormous ears -- which turn out to be wings that enable him to fly! The film was based on a children's story by Helen Aberson to demonstrate the prototype of the Roll-A-Book, a storytelling toy display device similar to a panorama. Kay Kamen, the company's head of merchandise licensing, had brought it to Disney's attention in 1939. The original story only had eight drawings and a few lines of text, but Dick Huemer and Joe Grant plumped out the plot; they wrote the script in chapters, like a book, an unusual way of writing a film script. Bill Tytla was put in charge of animation. Under Ben Sharpsteen's direction, Dumbo became the most financially successful Disney film of the 1940s. Costing only $950,000 to produce, it grossed $1.6 million during its original release and (except for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which had cost twice as much to produce) was the only pre-1943 Disney feature to turn a profit.

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