Poets in their youth.

For a while there, still a student, I thought I wanted to be a poet. I wrote quite a bit and even managed to place more than a few poems in obscure literary journals here and there. The first time, actually, I must have been ten? Eleven? Twelve? Free verse for a children's magazine.

I don't know why, but poetry had always been around. By junior high, I'd read The Bell Jar and dog-eared a copy of Ariel and then decided I preferred Anne Sexton. By the time Annie Hall came out, I already knew I wanted nothing more to do with the confessional school and knew to smirk knowingly when Alvy cross-examines Annie's apartment.

ALVY: Sylvia Plath.

ANNIE: M'hm...

ALVY: Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality.

ANNIE: Oh, yeah.

ALVY: Oh, sorry.

ANNIE: Right. Well, I don't know, I mean, uh, some of her poems seem - neat, you know.

ALVY: Neat?

ANNIE: Neat, yeah.

ALVY: Uh, I hate to tell you, this is 1975. You know that "neat" went out, I would say, at the turn of the century.

So, too, for me, had America's mid-century poets. For drama, there was Donne. For diction, Eliot. And Stevens to pry the mind wide open. By the late 80s, James Merrill, and by way of John Ashbury, the poets looking for, as David Lehman puts it in the title of one of his volumes, An Alternative to Speech. And then you get old enough to realize that exclusion really isn't the best tool for carving out a personal canon. Robert Lowell was back in.

But I still haven't come back around to Sylvia Plath. Even as she keeps coming back around to us. Just a few years ago, it was the release of husband Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, and now, here she comes again, Sylvia. I was intrigued to learn in Diane Middlebrook's excellent piece at Alternet that Gwyneth Paltrow is no great fan, either. "The journals made her dislike Plath, she said."

You can probably tell I'm not particularly looking forward to Sylvia and I'm wondering why director Christine Jeffs decided we needed this story on film. The knee-jerk cynical reaction, which, frankly, did come to me early on, would be that it's Oscar bait all around. It's hard not to think of The Hours, the movie that made me wish all that time, money and effort had been put into a depiction of Virginia Woolf's sparkling intelligence and wit rather than in her late and all but mute withdrawal from the world. AO Scott's admiring review has me withholding judgment til the film comes around over here, particularly since he's written so sharply about Lowell, but the final sentence - "The makers of Sylvia may, to some degree, have neglected this brilliant, unsettling and tragically foreshortened body of work, but they have not betrayed it." - suggests that it's probably worth holding onto my reservations.

What can a filmmaker do with a poet? If she's looking for drama in the life, a little something more than a long denouement, she can choose a dramatic life, Lord Byron or Ezra Pound, something along that line. But if the poet warrants attention but hasn't wandered the world or made it new, what's left is the act of writing. And as Javier Bardem, who's portrayed a writer himself, said in our recent interview, "No, I think it's very difficult to portray painters in movies. Same with writers or artists in general because they have to explain how they create their things, write their music, paint their paintings, whatever. And it can be very boring."

But it can be done, Middleton argues, pointing specifically to The Swimming Pool and, as an example of a cinematic portrayal of the impact a poem can have, Regeneration. So, here's a challenge to filmmakers out there. Just as an intriguing exercise. Steer clear of any drama in the life at all and find it in the work itself. Take, for example, a vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company who happens to write poetry on the side. If that doesn't sound particularly inviting, consider not worrying so much about Wallace Stevens as recreating a "mind of winter" on film.

It shouldn't be as numbingly literal as Ron Howard's mathematical formulas unwoven from a necktie, but it could be as delightful as Julie Taymor's all too brief, all too few flights into Frida's imagination. We've seen the diaries of mad housewives now; let's explore other places poets want to take us.

Posted by dwhudson at October 18, 2003 4:12 PM