Wild Nights with Emily

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.

Poetry at the Movies: Groundhog Day

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.

First, Andie MacDowell's character Rita quotes a poem in the café - "unwept, unhonoured, and unsung" - which are lines from Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," Canto vi, Stanza 1, which begins with the famous line, "Breathes there a man with soul so dead...”

Bill Murray's character Phil quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Work Without Hope."

"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. 

Groundhog Day (the film)

How To Write Groundhog Day by the screenplay's author, Danny Rubin

 The film viewed as self-help: The Magic of Groundhog Day: Transform Your Life Day by Day

How the film breaks genre "rules"

Invictus

I'm happy for any attention that the media can bring to poetry. The new film, Invictus, gets its title from a poem that inspired Nelson Mandela.

"Invictus" is a poem by the English poet William Ernest Henley. It was a poem that gave strength and courage to Mandela while he was incarcerated.

Henley, at the age of 12, was a victim of tuberculosis of the bone. The tuberculosis attacked his foot and caused his leg to be amputated below the knee. He was told by his physician that amputating the leg was the only way to save his life. While hospitalized, he wrote "Invictus." He lived nearly 30 years after his release from the hospital.

...It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin

Will Keats Become A Bright Movie Star?

There is a new film, Bright Star, out this month that centers on the passionate, brief, love affair between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne before his death at age 25.

Directed by Jane Campion (her Oscar-winner is The Piano), the film is set in London 1818. The secret love affair begins between the 23 year-old English poet (played by Ben Whishaw) and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), who ia a student of high fashion. This unlikely pair begin at odds, he thinking her a stylish minx, while she was unimpressed not only by his poetry but also by literature in general.

When Fanny's mother and Keats' best friend discover the affair and feel it is dangerous to their futures. Helplessly absorbed in each other, Keats wrote to her in a letter "I have the feeling as if we're dissolving."

Keats wrote the poem "Bright Star" in 1819 and revised it in 1820, perhaps on his final voyage to Italy. Friends and his doctor had urged him to try a common treatment for tuberculosis, a trip to Italy; however, Keats was aware that he was dying.

Many critics feel that the English (AKA Shakespearean) sonnet was addressed to Fanny Brawne with evidence including one of Keats's love letters to Brawne which says "I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen. Your's ever, fair Star."

Other poems by Keats were more obviously written to Fanny, such as "The day is gone..." and "I cry your mercy..." which are similar in form to "Bright Star."

BRIGHT STAR, WOULD I WERE STEDFAST


Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art---
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors---
No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever---or else swoon in death.

By John Keats

The poem opens with the poet's desire to be as steadfast as a star. Of course, that an impossibility and he realizes by the end of the poem. Criticism on the poem talks about the "for ever" or "ever" emphasis, time and eternity.

What remains is the possibility of steadfastness in terms of human life and love and movement.

The desire for permanence, timelessness and the eternity of a star in a world bound by time and constantly in flux appears in other Keats poems.

The poet accepts the possibility of dying from pleasure. "Swoon" has sexual overtones. (An orgasm is often compared to a dying - the French term for orgasm is le petit morte, or the small death.)

Some of the Keats poems that are excerpted in the film include Endymion, "When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be," "The Eve of St. Agnes, section XXIII, [Out went the taper as she hurried in]," "Ode to a Nightingale," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and the title poem, "Bright Star."

Campion credits Andrew Motion's Keats: A Biography as an inspiration for the film's approach to their love.

See a review of the film at the Academy of American Poets site.

A Poet Wish List

A friend of mine (not a poet) recently asked me, "Ken, you're a poet. What would a poet like to get as a gift?"

Well, my first thought was that they want the same things as everyone else. (Poets are not really that strange.) But, I know what she meant. What kinds of things with a connection to poetry or writing would someone who writes poetry enjoy getting?

I gave it some thought and emailed a list and a few suggestions. I added that list to this blog on the home page as the current poll.

• poetry books (of poems, about poetry, about writing or poets)
• poetry read on audio
• blank books for writing
• music that is inspirational
• gourmet food (yes, that can be inspirational!)
• coffee / tea
• wine or other beverages
• a writing getaway (pricey but very cool)
• a Kindle book reader
  
• writing tools (pens, notebooks, magnetic poetry..)

Now, I ask you - vote in the poll and, even better, post a comment with some specifics. What would make your wish list: music that gets you writing, a place you'd like to go and write, a blank book, special pen, beverage... What book of poems would you like to get this holiday season? Is there a movie that works especially well for poets?