Hollywood's Recent Turn to Poets

Alexandra Alter speaks with the creators of a new film, The Kindergarten Teacher, in which poetry takes center stage, including poetry by noted writers Kaveh Akbar, Ocean Vuong, and Dominique Townsend. For the New York Times's Book News section, Alter explains: "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." From there: 

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.

The first verses they solicited, from the poet Dominique Townsend, an old friend of Gyllenhaal’s, weren’t quite plausible. They were too layered and complex — too good.

“I called her and said, ‘I think we need to make them more conventional, maybe just, in a way, not as good,” Gyllenhaal said.

Townsend tried to revise the verses to make them worse — an odd request that one could read as simultaneously flattering and mildly offensive.

“As you might imagine, it was a strange process,” said Townsend, who teaches at Bard College. “It was like, ‘We love your work, and also can you write for this woman who is dying inside and feeling strangled and is a mediocre writer?’ That was a strange prompt to receive, to write a bad haiku about flowers.”

Strange as it seemed, it was an intriguing challenge for a poet, and Townsend delivered.

Read more at the New York Times.