Noisemakers 2000: Poetry in motion

>> Heather O'Neill goes from spoken word to the movies

by JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

"Candy takes this drug called 'Ripley's Believe It or Not' in a porno theatre," says Heather O'Neill, describing a scene from her latest script. "She gets so happy she tap dances down the aisles." O'Neill promptly starts laughing her head off. The film's going to be about a painter named Candy, who O'Neill describes as a cross between Ratso Rizzo and Marlene Dietrich.

Known primarily as a poet, this Montrealer's honey-voiced, deadpan spoken word performances landed her a first book deal, a volume of poetry published in 1999 by DC Books. It has received glowing reviews in Books in Canada and the MRB for lines like: "She has a job at a dyke bar/they do lots of cocaine and name their dogs/Gertrude Stein."

Filmmaker John L'Ecuyer read one of O'Neill's short stories, published in Blood+Aphorisms, and was so moved he called her up and asked her to write the followup feature to his acclaimed Curtis's Charm. St. Jude, which finished shooting this fall, is loosely based on O'Neill's life. Due out in the new year, it stars Nick Campbell from DaVinci's Inquest and Hard Core Logo's Bernie Caulson. The buzz around Jude has been so good that O'Neill was asked to write scripts for other Quebec directors, among them, Pierre Gang.

O'Neill is sunk into the love couch in her living room. The room looks like Edith Piaf's boudoir. There are photographs of boxers and starlets from the 1930s littering the walls. O'Neill's five-year-old daughter, Arizona, walks in and weaves her way through dozens of potted plants on her way to her mother's lap.

"When I was a kid," says O'Neill, "I always figured I'd have to crawl into the mouths of eccentrics and outcasts to say what I wanted to about beauty." From Heather O'Neill, we can expect a very different kind of beauty. l