[New-Poetry] Miscellanea: Film and Language and Poetry, Oh My!

[amy king]

POETRY:  BETTER THAN TEXTING!

By Patrick Buckridge
It's a strange thing, but in the current enthusiasm
for creative writing courses in Australian universities, poetry - the
oldest of the literary art forms - has been left out in the cold. 
In Brisbane, for example, Griffith, UQ and QUT all teach full
Creative Writing programs, but I've heard of only one
poetry-composition course (irregularly offered by the Brisbane poet
Ross Clarke at QUT.)
 
Maybe it's to do with the market: new poetry books certainly don't
sell like fiction or media scripts. Maybe it's because so little poetry
is read in high schools these days. Or maybe it's because poetry
doesn't look like it would train business students in 'effective
writing', in the way prose is conveniently supposed to do.
 
Whatever the reason, it's a great pity, because reading, studying
and writing poetry is easily the best way of learning to take pleasure
in language.
Cont'd here -- http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/21/2196324.htm  


~~~

Peter Gizzi: For me film language is closer to
lyric poetry than it is to fiction. Most likely because I’m interested
in both modes of expression. Film language is unavoidable—it’s part of
our unconscious, our desires, memories, etc., and is very captivating
and powerful. I went to NYU in my twenties to study film but quickly
changed my major to literature and then ancient literature. Maybe now
looking back I can see that the connection to ancient language and film
has to do with origins of expression. Film is a relatively new language
technology of our recent human history (i.e., we are in its early
phases), and if silent film is like cuneiform or hieroglyph, we might
say classic film language of the thirties and forties is like Greek and
Latin. I don’t know—it’s just something I can see now.

Like poetry, film tells a story by compressing time, and through an
emotive, image-based structure. There is a syntax of images, a rhythm.
And it works with light—a material light. Not a major observation, but
still an endlessly fasinating medium—light I mean. It gives relief to a
void or a darkness, opacity of being. In some way it makes a reality
out of the darkness. I love the opening to Beckett’s late novel Company, too: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” That the book is titled Company
but the voice comes to “one.” It’s a wonderful description of how it is
to be in a cinema, an inherently public experience—to be alone together
connected by images and phantasms of light and shadow, dreams. But it’s
also a wonderful correlative to being alone in one’s room, in one’s
library, memory, alone together in one’s books, and a voice comes to
one, and then a poem begins. A world comes to one. And for a moment you
are your self and another becoming another thing, a poem.
Cont'd here -- http://www.poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_gizzi.php

_______



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