Kathleen Rooney watches Poetry at the Movies
by Ernie on 16/11/07 at 10:30 am
In the new issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review, Kathleen Rooney writes about poetry in movies. This is a piece I suggested to her about a year back, and as the editor of the CPR I have worked quite closely with her on it. I think she’s done an excellent job. I’ve added links to the two movies, so feel free to click on the images to watch. Here’s an excerpt from Rooney’s essay:
No discussion of poetry and responsibility—or lack thereof—can be called comprehensive without a mention of Dead Poets Society, so here you go: Dead Poets Society. This is the one poetry film almost everybody seems to have seen, and I’d argue that it transcends the rather narrow genre of Poetry Movie, or at the very least straddles other genres, including the Inspiring Teacher Movie, or the Coming-of-Age Movie. DPS is worth a mention here because of the way it too seems at first to champion poetry as a symbol of freedom and irresponsibility. Professor John Keating has his young charges read poems, but they rarely have to write any, and therefore they circumvent issues of talent and hard work almost entirely. The film appears to conclude that, although it may be powerful, alluring, and even, on rare occasions, threatening to the dominant order�as Keating declares, �No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world��the world of poetry is not to be taken as a substitute for the quote-unquote real one. To do so, as the delicate and suggestible Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard) illustrates, is not only na�ve, but also suicidal. Rather than providing a whole new sphere of existence, poetry is best viewed as a means of finding your place in the already existing sphere, non-conformist though that place may be. Through poetry, one can always rebel against the status quo, but one should be wary of tricking oneself into thinking the status quo can be made to vanish.
Dead Poets Society makes these points through serious drama, but also worth mentioning are films that illustrate the supplementary but not substitutive place of poetry in contemporary society through comedy. These films tend to question the notion that poems are the best way to make a difference. David O. Russell’s 2004 I ? Huckabees affectionately but effectively deflates Shelley’s myth of the poet as unacknowledged legislator of the world through its portrayal of the well-meaning yet misguided poet-activist Albert Markovski. At the beginning of the film, Albert suffers from the delusion that his efficacy as the leader of an environmental coalition attempting to save a marsh and its surrounding woods from development by a Wal-Mart-style chain known as Huckabees is not only aided by, but predicated upon, his prowess as a poet. “Nobody sits like this rock sits,” he recites:
You rock, rock.
The rock just sits and is.
You show us how to just sit here
and that’s what we need.
By pitting poetry against such superpowers as Huckabees, Russell guarantees that both Albert and his ludicrous verse have our sympathy, but also that we know they have no chance of winning the day, a knowledge that makes us love both Albert and his poetry all the more.
Read the full article for free at the Contemporary Poetry Review.
