Can poetry tell us anything new about the movies we love? Or is it the other way round? Can the blockbusters we watched in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s shed light...
Poetry Goes to the Movies S01E06: Good Poets, Bad Films
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.Â
-------- Â
54:57
Draft and redraft (and redraft) with Groundhog Day
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 have a think about why light verse and film comedies don't get the respect they deserve. And there's a little look at Bill Murray's well-publicised love of poetry. Look out for poems by Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Emily Dickinson, David Berman, Wendy Cope, and Marianne Chan.
Guest star: Emma Hine, author of Stay Safe, on When Harry Met Sally and Jaws.
-------- Â
44:18
Poetry Goes to the Movies S01E04: Polterzeitgeist!
The haunted house is the metaphor that keeps giving. Poems are sort of haunted houses (haunted by its influences) as is the USA 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 O. Davis discusses his collection Index of Haunted Houses and the economic roots of haunted houses.
Guest star: Joy Priest, author of Horsepower, on Mississippi Damned.
-------- Â
48:58
Poetry Goes to the Movies S01E03: Cracking the Code with Zodiac
People often think poems are codes to be cracked. 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 terrorised 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.
-------- Â
46:02
Poetry Goes to the Movies S01E02: Face/Off, Masks and Identity
With its stylised gun play, 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 Nicholas Cage and John Travolta play a hitman and cop who swap identities. Can Yeats, Ovid and Fiona Benson direct a spotlight on the film's unexpected depths?
Guest star: Chad Bennet, author of Your New Feeling is an Artifact of a Bygone Era, on film fade outs
Can poetry tell us anything new about the movies we love? Or is it the other way round? Can the blockbusters we watched in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s shed light on poems old and new? If anyone knows, it‘s poet Adam O. Davis and soi-disant film buff Colin Waters.
Adam and Colin ‘met‘ when Colin recorded a podcast interview online with Adam in the autumn of 2020 about his (then) new collection Index of Haunted Houses. In the course of talking, both men discovered that they were as great fans of David Lynch and John Woo as they were of T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. Under lockdown and with too much time on their hands, they started talking about the films and poems they loved and began to see connections between them.
Boldly disregarding a sneaking suspicion they were recording possibly the most niche podcast in the history of podcasting, Adam and Colin have made six episodes charting their obsession, moving from exploring films made by poets to films about poets. Adam and Colin have made six podcasts charting their obsession, moving from looking at films made by poets to films about poets. In between, they look at Face/Off, Zodiac, Poltergeist and Groundhog Day, and ask if they have anything to tell us about such traditional poetic concerns as identity, poems as codes, how the past haunts the present, and drafting and redrafting (and redrafting).
![Podcast This Cultural Life](https://za.radio.net/podcast-images/175/this-cultural-life.jpeg?version="07599d4411e4df969894b562e113928d")
South Africa