Pavilion Theater Marquee Hosts Last Haikus After Poetry Project

PARK SLOPE, NY — A poetry duo that has filled Park Slope's old Pavilion Theater marquee with movie-themed haikus for six-months is bidding farewell to the neighborhood with a final collection.

The art-installation group Saint Flashlight teamed up with owners of Nitehawk Cinema in the summer to install the monthly series of poems on the unused 188 Prospect Park West venue's marquee during the theater's renovation.

With Nitehawk expected to start repairs to the sign soon, the duo installed the final volume of three haikus on Friday.

"It is a bittersweet moment," said Drew Pisarra, who started Saint Flashlight with lifelong friend Molly Gross.

"I don’t know if either of us envisioned it resonating in the neighborhood the way it did. It's been really exciting."

The duo based haikus on movie titles throughout the project, especially ones that took place in the borough, but ended the series with poems simply about seeing movies in a theater, Pisarra said.

The story begins
In the dark with you and me
Light beams popcorn crunch.

"We wanted to shift it one last time by having poems that were about the movie-going experience," said Pisarra."Just to give it a sense of closure and anticipating the opening of the theater."

Pisarra and Gross in front of their final "Movie Marquee Poems" collection.

Nitehawk took over the formerly tattered Pavilion Theater in 2016 with plans to renovate the neglected space into a second location for its dine-in theater. The first is in Williamsburg.

After several delays as workers uncovered original architecture, the new space plans to open in the spring.

Pisarra lives several blocks away from the theater and kept seeing the Pavilion sign advertising outdated movies. With Gross, he came up with the idea to fill it with haikus instead and reached out to Nitehawk, whose owners gave him the go ahead to start in April.

Their first volume was pushed back because the previous theater owners took the letters for the sign and Nitehawk needed to get new ones. The project finally launched on July 4 with a haiku based on Spike Lee's film "She's Got to Have It" the day the filmmaker was hosting a panel nearby on a new series based on the movie.

"It just felt like kismet," said Pisarra. "It just felt like we were off the right foot immediately in terms of its connection."

The duo collected submissions from 19 poets throughout the series, mainly focused on writers who live in or were from Brooklyn, and ran a Twitter contest to get the best haikus for one month. They then spent hours putting the words in place.

"It was really physically grueling," said Pisarra. "I won't miss that."

However, Pisarra will miss seeing the online interactions from people who post about the poems. He often catches people counting to see if the pieces have 17 syllables, the number need to qualify as a haiku.

"It was immediately being engaged with in a playful manner," he said.

While the duo won't be installing poetry on the marquee anymore, they're already hard at work on the next project. Saint Flashlight will put up missing poem fliers around Miami that have a number people can call to hear a poem.

Images courtesy of Saint Flashlight