Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate and one of America's best-selling poets, is not big on technology. As far as I know (based on a conversation way back in 2007), he was not big on using email or computers. But he recognizes the power of the web in promoting poetry. He has been doing a poetry podcast on Facebook that started in the Pandemic Times. His Poetry 180 project while he was Laureate is available online and in book form (including a sequel).
Back when we had that 2007 conversation, there were 11 short animated films set to Billy reading his poems. There's not much information online about them. They are produced by JWT-NY. You can watch most of them on YouTube. I have embedded a few here to sample.
Here's an interpretation of Billy's poem "Forgetfulness" with animation by
Julian Grey/Head Gear.
"Budapest" is also animated by Julian Grey/Head Gear.
"Now and Then" is animated by Eun-ha Paek of Milky Elephant.
Emily (Molly Shannon) doing what she should be best remembered for -writing
WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY - Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment
This is not a review but a preview since I have not seen the new film about Emily Dickinson, Wild Nights with Emily. The reviews have been positive.
I have posted a few times in recent years here about poets and poetry portrayed on film. The results have been mixed, but I think it is difficult to explain what poetry's power is to someone who does not read or write it. It would be even more difficult to make it come to life on a screen. It comes to life for many of us on a page, read silently or read aloud.
On the film's website "About" page, they describe the film in this way:
"In the mid-19th century, Emily Dickinson is writing prolifically, baking gingerbread, and enjoying a passionate, lifelong romantic relationship with another woman, her friend and sister-in-law Susan...
Yes this is the iconic American poet, popularly thought to have been a recluse.
Beloved comic Molly Shannon leads in this humorous yet bold reappraisal of Dickinson, informed by her private letters. While seeking publication of some of the 1,775 poems written during her lifetime, Emily (Shannon) finds herself facing a troupe of male literary gatekeepers too confused by her genius to take her work seriously. Instead her work attracts the attention of an ambitious woman editor, who also sees Emily as a convenient cover for her own role in buttoned-up Amherst's most bizarre love triangle.
A timely critique of how women's history is rewritten, WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY remains vibrant, irreverent and tender--a perhaps closer depiction of Emily Dickinson's real life than anything seen before."
Emily (Molly Shannon) and Susan (Susan Ziegler) in bed - WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY - Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment
Not every filmgoer will know walking into a theater that the film's title comes from one of her poems. It is one of my favorites of Emily's poems.
Wild nights - Wild nights! Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury! Futile - the winds - To a Heart in port - Done with the Compass - Done with the Chart! Rowing in Eden - Ah - the Sea! Might I but moor - tonight - In thee!
The Atlantic editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Brett Gelman) visits Emily to tell her that her poems are inaccessible, so he won't be publishing them. WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY - Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment
I liked Terence Davies' film A Quiet Passion, which is a biopic about Ms. Dickinson, but it followed the traditional story - which is at least partially true - of Emily's chronic pain, unrequited love, literary obscurity, self-confinement and isolation.
What makes this new film different from other works about Emily is that it takes some of the evidence that has been found through studying the poems and Emily's erasures which seem to indicate more than just a friendship with her brother's wife, Susan.
If Emily was on Facebook, her relationship status would read "It's Complicated."
Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz) who narrates the film and assembled and edited the first posthumous collection of Dickinson’s poetry was also the mistress of Emily’s brother. Mabel's edits out Emily’s now-famous dashes and deleted the dedications to her sister-in-law, Susan. Fake news.
Madeleine Olnek’s film is a reinterpretation of the somewhat standard story of Emily's life that was taught for many years. I certainly was given a picture of a hermetic poet who never left her bedroom and would gaze out the window at flowers, funerals and the world passing by. She wanted her poems destroyed and forgotten.
That story is not accurate. How much closer to the truth is this film's interpretation? The film is rated PG-13 for "sexual content" but it is a gentle intercutting of the edited Emily and the version of her where petticoats fall to the floor. Molly Shannon's Emily is more of a heroine in what is probably a romantic comedy. If that interpretation brings more readers to the poems and blows the dust off Emily's portrait, I'm all for it.
Have you seen the film The Kindergarten Teacher, now available on Netflix?
"In her new film “The Kindergarten Teacher,” Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a frustrated aspiring poet who discovers that a boy in her kindergarten class may be a budding literary genius, and begins co-opting his verses as her own.
When Gyllenhaal was preparing for the role, she thought a lot about what sort of poetry her character, a Staten Island teacher named Lisa Spinelli, would write. She figured Lisa’s poetry would be somewhat labored and clichéd — maybe verses about flowers and butterflies. So she and the film’s writer and director, Sara Colangelo, decided to ask a real poet to write some lines for the movie.
Commissioning poems wasn’t easy, it turns out..." continue reading
Films have never quite known what to do with poets. And when poetry appears in a film, there is the question of how to judge it. If the poet is supposed to be a good poet, where do they get the poems? And who determines what is "good poetry?"
Some recent films that have portrayed poets, both famous - A Quiet Passion (about Emily Dickinson) and Bright Star (about John Keats) - and unknown, as in Paterson. In portraying the life of a famous poets, at least you have the poet's own work to use and it has been already stamped as "good."
But if your subject is an unknown poet, you need to get the poems from somewhere. In the case of Paterson, the poet Ron Padgett provided the poems attributed to the character Paterson. The film features four of Padgett's existing poems and three new poems written for the film. The film's director, Jim Jarmusch wrote the poem "Water Falls" attributed to a young girl in the film.
For The Kindergarten Teacher, the poems written by the were solicited, from the poet Dominique Townsend, who had to rewrite he contributions to make them more "mediocre" (as one film critic called them). They also needed poms for her young student. Jimmy's poems had to be exceptional and memorable, but also plausibly written by a 5-year-old. For those poems, the filmmakers turned to two young contemporary poets, Ocean Vuong and Kaveh Akbar.
The plot of this new film, as described on Wikipedia, begins this way: Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a kindergarten teacher from Staten Island, is struggling with feelings of dissatisfaction in her life. She is in a loving yet passionless marriage with her husband Grant (Michael Chernus), and her teenage children, Josh (Sam Jules) and Lainie (Daisy Tahan), are distant with her. Lisa attends a poetry class every week led by Simon (Gael García Bernal), but her poetry is dismissed as derivative. One of Lisa's students, Jimmy, is routinely picked up late from school by a babysitter. One day, Lisa overhears Jimmy reciting a poem he wrote while he is waiting to be picked up. Lisa reads the poem at her poetry class, where her classmates and Simon are struck by it and compliment Lisa on her talent. Lisa decides that Jimmy is a prodigy, and begins to dedicate her time to nurturing his talent.
Have you seen the film The Kindergarten Teacher? If so, what do you think about what it has to say about poets and poetry? Leave a comment on this post.
The new film, A Quiet Passion, is a story about Emily Dickinson. I had brunch with two friends last weekend and they had seen the film. One, an English major but not particularly a poetry reader, loved the movie. The other, not a poetry reader, didn't like it at all. And that seems to be the split between critics and audiences generally.
It is difficult to portray writers writing on screen because it is a solitary and not very interesting act. You need to show a life. I have always thought that Edgar Allen's life story is more interesting than his poetry, and that tale would be more appealing to contemporary audiences than his fiction. Emily Dickinson's life, as far as most people know it, does not seem to be movie material.
If you view Emily as a reclusive spinster who sat in her sepia room and wrote poems that she would hide away, then you're correct. Not movie magic. But it seems that this film has other ideas.
A Quiet Passion opens with Emily getting booted out of Mount Holyoke College. This Christian women's university was not happy with her unorthodox religious views. Emily the rebel.
My English major friend said that Emily in the film is witty and sassy. She takes digs at suitors, family and editors. She doesn't hide in her room all day, and is someone who would be good for lunch conversation.
I doubt that many of us would want to live her Amherst home life. She did escape from midnight to 3 am (when her father "allowed" her to write) to poetry, and there she put down, if somewhat cryptically, her real thoughts that probably didn't get expressed at the family dinner table.
Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 and died in 1886. The film covers her schooling to her death. She ages in the film through multiple actresses: Emma Bell as young Emily, becomes the older Emily through Cynthia Nixon in a family portrait session. One of my brunch reviewers liked this and one though they just should have aged Bell with makeup.
Join Maria Gillan and filmmakers Kevin Carey and Mark Hillringhouse at the Theater at Passaic County Community College, 204 Ellison Street, Paterson, NJ on Saturday, October 6.
They will be screening the new documentary on the life and work poet and poetry crusader, Maria Mazziotti Gillan.
The screening will be followed by a reception, poetry reading, question-and-answer session with the filmmakers, and a book signing for Maria's brand new collection, The Place I Call Home.
Parking is available at the PCCC faculty lot at the corner of College Blvd and Church Street. Directions
Poetry is a character study of a film (available on DVD) that examines many of the same big topics that poetry on paper has always addressed - like beauty, truth and mortality.
It comes from Korean writer-director Lee Chang-dong poetry poetry. His script won the best screenplay prize at Cannes last year. His previous directing effort, 2008's "Secret Sunshine," won the festival's best actress award for Jeon Do-yeon and some say that the new film's star, Yun Jung-hee, should have won best actress as well.
In the film, Mija is attempting to live life fully. Part of that attempt is focused on trying to write one good poem.
Her teacher tells her that her difficultly is not writing the poem but finding the heart to write it.
As with many foreign films for Americans, the pace of the film will comparatively slow, but, then again, that's part of the film's story.
I wrote something on another blog about the Zen of the film Groundhog Day. (Don't laugh. It's there.) If you haven't seen the film, you should. (Though I have said that to several people who really disliked it - "It just keeps repeating!")
It is the story of a cynical TV weatherman who finds himself reliving the same day over and over again when he goes on location to the small town of Punxsutawney to film a report about their annual Groundhog Day. His predicament drives him to distraction until he sees a way of exploiting the situation. While researching that earlier post, I realized that it's a film with several poems in it too.
"All Nature seems at work; slugs leave their lair,
The bees are stirring; birds are on the wing,
And winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring;
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing."
The French poem that Phil recites in the German restaurant was written by the film's co-writer Danny Rubin, based on Jacques Brel's "Bachelor's Dance" lyrics".
Translated into English the poem reads:
The girl I will love
is like a fine wine
that gets a little better
every morning.
I just read a review of a new movie, World's Greatest Dad, with Robin Williams, and what hit me right away was the line at the top: "Robin Williams stars as a glum high school poetry teacher in this surrealist fable."
I taught secondary school for 25 years and I never met a teacher who could claim to be a high school poetry teacher. I may have to watch the film just to see what kind of high school has an English teacher who only teaches poetry. (All of you high school poetry teachers out there, feel free to post a comment below.)
The "glum" adjective didn't make me flinch. Teachers are a pretty glum lot, English teachers more so and poets are always moody. At least, that's what I have been told. I actually enjoyed teaching and especially enjoyed teaching poetry, but there's no movie script in that story.
I guess Mr. Clayton is partially glum because he's a writer who has never published anything.
A friend sent me a link to a video clip about dolphins being killed in Japan. He is someone I know cares deeply about the ocean, so I watched the video. Shocking. Even if you know what to expect.
From the website I clicked a link and eventually ended up on the site for the source of the clip. It is from a documentary film, Earthlings.
It's a feature length documentary about "humanity's absolute dependence on animals (for pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and scientific research) but also illustrates our complete disrespect for these so-called "non-human providers."
The narrator is Joaquin Phoenix and features music by Moby (both are known for their support of related issues).
The film hits hard at pet stores, puppy mills, some animal shelters, factory farms, the leather & fur trades, sports and entertainment industries, and the medical and scientific profession.
I suppose that if you had to label it, it would be under "animal rights" but I think that slights the film (and probably turns away some potential viewers). Better to look at it as the filmmakers do - that its an issue we need to address as inhabitants of the Earth.
So where is the poetry in this? There isn't any.
I write online on several blogs and websites, but this site, with its audience of poets, seems to be the best place for me to pass on this information. I'm not going to analyze that choice, but perhaps it came when I saw the part of the film that listed: The 3 Stages of Truth 1. Ridicule 2. Violent opposition 3. Acceptance
WARNING: This clip is tough to watch. If it hits you so hard that you can't watch it all, try this link from the film's website to a 7 minute excerpt that explains the intent of the film without showing any of the animal brutality.
Maybe you will write about it. Perhaps, not a poem, but an email, a blog post...
The film started as a series of Public Service Announcements by the writer/director Shaun Monson. After 5 years, in 2005, it premiered at the Artivist Film Festival, (where it won Best Documentary Feature), followed by the Boston International Film Festival, (Best Content Award), and the San Diego Film Festival, (Best Documentary Film, and the Humanitarian Award to Joaquin Phoenix).
The DVD came out in late 2005, but I had never heard of it before this email came to me. I hope that impression of the readers of this blog is accurate and that you will be sensitive to this issue, pass on the message, buy, rent, view the film and support the issues it addresses.
Saturday, October 6, 2012 at 1 pm
Join Maria Gillan and filmmakers Kevin Carey and Mark Hillringhouse at the Theater at Passaic County Community College, 204 Ellison Street, Paterson, NJ on Saturday, October 6.
.
Poetry is a character study of a film (available on DVD
) that examines many of the same big topics that poetry on paper has always addressed - like beauty, truth and mortality.
poetry poetry. His script won the best screenplay prize at Cannes last year. His previous directing effort, 2008's "Secret Sunshine," won the festival's best actress award for Jeon Do-yeon and some say that the new film's star, Yun Jung-hee, should have won best actress as well.
s "Lay of the Last Minstrel
," Canto vi, Stanza 1, which begins with the famous line, "Breathes there a man with soul so dead...”
, based on Jacques Brel's "Bachelor's Dance" lyrics".
A friend sent me a link to a video clip about dolphins being killed in Japan. He is someone I know cares deeply about the ocean, so I watched the video. Shocking. Even if you know what to expect.