Collection

Poetry and Film: Reading in the Dark

Poetry, like the movie theater, is built out of dark and light. The ink and the page. The room and the screen.

BY Adam O. Davis

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2018, Karyna McGlynn, Night Flight. Collaged paper, 24” x 18”.

This collection, curated by Adam O. Davis, delights in film and movie culture as it weaves in and out of poetry. In his introduction, Davis writes,

Poetry, like the movie theater, is built out of dark and light. The ink and the page. The room and the screen. Both poetry and movies, to echo Eliot, are where the pattern of our nerves are thrown as if by a magic lantern, so let’s call them projective industries. If cinema reveals the aperture of our desire, then poetry deepens the depth of field. 

The lights have dimmed. The trailers are running. Let’s grab a seat and settle in for the show.

Introduction

Lights, Camera, Action!

Let’s go to the movies.
Auteur Theory
A film is a singular vision made by a multitude of people, but don’t tell that to the directors. Poets get a final cut they could only dream of, though they might balk at their box office returns.
Behind The Scenes
Blocking, staging, plotting, filming—this is the stuff that dreams are made of, but who’s doing the dreaming?
Showtimes
Halls. Theaters. Palaces. For lovers, those liminal spaces between the daylit shame of a public park and a cheap motel’s neon anterooms. But for those of us watching the screen, what do we find? Who and where are we in the popcorn-scented dark?
Map To The Stars
You can live in Hollywood, but you wouldn’t want to rent there. Stars and the city upon whose sidewalks they shine from.
Cinema Of The Self
With smartphones, we’re all stars, so consider our attention span the new Soylent Green. But what about what we see when we see ourselves onscreen? From Sidney Poitier slapping Larry Gates to the bottle of Smirnoff on James Bond’s dresser, how has Hollywood shaped the shape of identity and commodity in our lives?
Poem Films: Poetry In Motion
Poetry—literally—goes to the movies.
Prose Goes To The Movies: Essays And Theory
Longform adventures in poetic cinema.
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack: Poetry Goes To The Movies Podcast
How often have you heard a film described as “poetic”? And what does that term mean other than “looks nice”? What, if anything, do poems and films have in common? The podcast Poetry Goes the Movies explores film directors who wrote poetry and poets who made films.
  • What, if anything, do poems and films have in common? We explore film directors who wrote poetry (Derek Jarman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Abbas Kiarostami) and poets who made films, with a particular focus on Maya Deren and Margaret Tait. Guest star: Gerda Stevenson, author of Quines, talks about acting in Tait’s sole feature-length film and her own poetry.
  • With its stylized gunplay, John Woo's action films have been called “ballets of bullets”, which hints at their unexpectedly “poetic” qualities. We test that theory to destruction with Woo's 1997 blockbuster Face/Off, where Nicolas Cage and John Travolta play a terrorist and cop who swap identities. Can Yeats, Ovid, and Fiona Benson direct a spotlight on the film's unexpected depths?Guest star: Chad Bennett, author of Your New Feeling is an Artifact of a Bygone Era, on film fade outs
  • People often think poems are codes to be cracked—so is it possible to enjoy a poem without “solving” it? In search of an answer we turn to David Fincher's 2007 masterpiece, Zodiac, which is based on the true story of the serial killer who terrorized San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s. Is there more to our hosts' cheeky suggestion that there are similarities between Zodiac's fondness for writing letters to newspapers and poets submitting work to journals? We find out with the help of poems by Billy Collins, Rimbaud, and Harryette Mullen.Guest star: Diana Marie Delgado, author of Tracing the Horse, on Bram Stoker's Dracula.
  • The haunted house is the metaphor that keeps giving. Poems are sort of haunted houses (haunted by their influences) as is the United States itself (haunted by the ghosts of the indigenous and enslaved peoples who suffered at the hands of early European settlers). The two metaphors meet in Tobe Hooper's 1982 horror film Poltergeist. We get spooked by poems by Mary Oliver, Samuel Menashe, and T.S. Eliot, while our host Adam discusses his collection Index of Haunted Houses and the economic roots of haunted houses. Guest star: Joy Priest, author of Horsepower, on Mississippi Damned.
  • Bill Murray found himself stuck on repeat in 1993's Groundhog Day. Can being forced to relive the same day give an insight into the redrafting process? We also discuss why light verse and film comedies don't get the respect they deserve. And there's a little look at Bill Murray's well-publicized love of poetry. Look out for poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, David Berman, Wendy Cope, and Marianne Chan.Guest star: Emma Hine, author of Stay Safe, on When Harry Met Sally and Jaws.
  • ​We end the first season with a look at how two poets have fared when their lives have been turned into celluloid: Allen Ginsberg (Kill Your Darlings, Howl, Pull My Daisy!, Renaldo and Clara) and Byron (Bad Lord Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb, Gothic). Can these films provide any real insight into poets and poetry—or are they mere parodies unworthy of the people they depict?Guest Star: Ruben Quesada, editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry and author of Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal, on Pedro Almodóvar and Terrence Malick. ​