Extremely flammable & world-altering four short interviews about poetry and film

For this issue’s interview, I wanted to hear more voices. Film is such an expansive theme, so I reached out to a variety of people to ask them about the intersection of poetry and film in their lives and work. I hope you enjoy this series of brief interviews as much as I do. The Café Review Interviews Editor, Jefferson Navicky

#1

Poet, librettist, theater critic, editor, film director, and The Café Review reviews editor, Megan Grumbling, does a lot of things. With Sisters Grumbling, she creates dreamy, poetic films; most recently, Megan co–directed the award–winning documentary film, “We Are the Warriors,” about the retirement of a Native American mascot.

JN: How does your poem brain interface with your film brain? Are there any parts of your experience as a poet that especially helped you when you jumped into film making?

MG: I think all the parts of my art–making brain, including my poem brain and my film brain, are fueled by curiosity, wanting to learn or understand something more deeply or in a new way, wanting to come up with the right questions or riddles or koans that will help me unlock something I hope to know. And generally, my brain parts have always been pretty fluid and happily in each other’s spaces — for example, my book Booker’s Point combined oral history interviews, natural history, and formalist poetry. Cross–training as an artist has always been exciting and exhilarating to me, and film has become a natural extension of this.

In filmmaking, of course, the power of the image is paramount —as well as pacing, rhythm, sound, music. And curiosity, making space for discovery. These are all fully in the vocabulary of the poet, of course. Specifically, with our documentary film We Are the Warriors, the production phase hinged on being curious about people and their thoughts, feelings, and internal narratives, as well as on posing the right questions and homing in on particular words or phrases or gestures that they shared in their answers that add depth and value to their meaning.

As for post–production, I did not edit the film — that was achieved by my brilliant co–director David Camlin — but I helped with the story shaping and pacing. And the significance of a particular phrase or facial expression or tone of voice can have huge impact in a film, just as do comparable elements of a poem. Making a film, you have a ton of footage and only a certain amount of time and scenes — which phrases or images do you want to end a scene / stanza? To end the whole work? Certainly these are questions that any poet grapples with, too.

JN : I love the wide–ranging parallels you draw between poetry and film, which makes me wonder, are there any films that particularly inspire you as either a poet or a filmmaker ?

MG: Yes! One film occurs to me immediately — Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time. It’s both a fascinating documentary film and (in my opinion) a gorgeous lyric poem. And a kind of mystery. And a treatise on the entire 20th century. It’s incredible! Dawson City: Frozen Time tells the story of hundreds of old silver nitrate film reels and scraps from the silent film age that were found in the permafrost under an old community center swimming pool in the Yukon in the 1970s. How and why did they get there? The answer turns out to involve the history of the frontier, colonization, and film itself — the materials, the industry, the cultural role. And Morrison tells this story using entirely found and archival footage — most especially the recovered film itself, old silent movies and newsreels, which have been exquisitely, ghostily degraded; it almost looks like chemically–altered experimental film. There’s no narrator, only intertitles, and the images that accompany a given sequence are often scintillatingly slant to the narrative. To experience the film is to literally read it, as these incredibly strange or funny or appalling or ethereal images pulse through the words, each elevating the other into far more than the sum of the parts.

The way Morrison has collected, thought about, and assembled these materials to make all of them mean more than what they are alone strikes me as precisely the process of a poet. And the experience of watching it, for me, is the experience of entering and moving through the best, most haunting and transformative poetry: a work moves me in ways I don’t even immediately understand, that I can return to again and again and find new depths and corners, that (per Blake) shows me the world in a grain of sand — or, in this case, the 20th century in a piece of extremely flammable, world–altering nitrocellulose. I weep every time I watch it.

#2
Poet Colin Cheney composes electroacoustic music, including the score for the 2023 documentary film, The Arc of Oblivion. His music, like his poetry, is beautifully rich and textured.

JN: I’m interested in how your film–scoring brain interacts with your poetry brain. Are there ways that writing / reading poetry serves you as you create music for a film?

CC: That’s a good question. I’m not sure. Writing poems has been a more–or–less constant and nearly biological practice for me for the last thirty years. Like: it’s been as much of a life–process for me as a concerted, bounded artistic practice. Scoring a film is a very different process. The material being generated emerges out of very specific constraints / contexts. It’s also intensely collaborative: with the director, the producers, the subjects, the natural or ambient sounds, the themes and rhythms of the film. I suppose one way that poetry was helpful in the scoring is that writing poems has made me intimately familiar with working from a draft, an existing artistic attempt. For example, for one scene in The Arc of Oblivion, the crew goes down into a limestone cave of Majorca with a scientist who studies bats. I’d asked them to collect any textural sounds from the cave that I might be able to manipulate and integrate into the score. Close–up sounds of bats, water dripping, sound of fingertips on limestone, that sort of thing. So when I got the first rough assemblage of that part of the film, I had all these existing fragments, materials, sensations, textures to work with. The overall questions driving the film were already in the water: why are humans obsessed with archiving things in a universe bent on destroying everything ? What can the natural, unintentional processes of “archiving” such as we find in the chemical traces of bat guano, the deterioration of limestone due to centuries of human exhaled carbon dioxide? And then the sequence of images and dialogue in the caves themselves. Then, the sounds that the crew had gathered for me. So I wasn’t composing from scratch, but working with all of this as a sort of poetic draft of something: the way that I composed the music impacted what was already there, and revealed options for both the other filmmakers (for how the scene could be edited, what themes would needed to be emphasized more explicitly, what tone we were after) and myself (for how I might continue to refine this particular part of the score, this “cue” and how this piece of music impacts others already and yet to be created). I think that drafting a poem is like that: you’re aware that you’re changing something that already exists — you know you are adding something, and maybe taking something away, but you know that that’s the whole deal: trying to see what you can do to make the poem more itself. And I guess to extend that thought: the pieces that you compose earlier in a film process have a higher degree of freedom and play than the pieces composed later. A total of fifty or so cues were eventually used for the film. Of those, maybe ten or so were versions of something I made very early on (perhaps a year or more before) that remained relevant and helpful to the process; and maybe twelve I wrote in the final weeks before we had to call the film done. Those later pieces had to fit everything else going on — had to work with what was already there — while also adding something necessary. Sometimes a poem is nearly finished, feels nearly finished, but still needs something. That late revision process (adding, cutting, amending) is so charged with everything that’s come before, so dependent on so many other creative choices.

JN: How has scoring a film affected your poetry?

CC: Maybe three ways. First, I started work on a manuscript called REPERTOIRE that is very preoccupied with music — particular the works of composer Julius Eastman. I know that without the process of working on the film score, I wouldn’t have approached this project in the same way — I might not even have started it at all. So I’m grateful for that. Second, I was struck by how I felt much more willing to create a piece of music relatively quickly and then feel that it was pretty much done. Not for every piece, but for many. There are a few cues in the film that took me maybe ten minutes to make from start to finish — the cue accompanying the title sequence, for example. I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem that I either felt that way about after only one draft, or that remained so untinkered with. Most of my poem drafts go through a dozen — or dozens — of very substantial revisions. So when this was happening with the film score, I was scratching my head a little, and wondering if I was, you know, doing it wrong. But then, of course, I found myself endlessly fiddling, re–working, re–recording, re–arranging with some of the other cues (in a way that felt much more familiar to my poem process) because they didn’t yet feel “right” — feel like themselves, if that makes any sense. But I think while doing this scoring, I think I did start to question whether there were some ways I could loosen up my drafting process, or trust in some of the originating drafts a little more. I’m still not quite comfortable with this, but I think the different artistic process with scoring shook something loose in my poetic process. Second, scoring makes you very aware of how you are combining different rhythms, melodies, timbres, textures, harmonic and nonharmonic and noisy materials. Whether building a synthesizer patch on my Eurorack system, or layering sounds in the digital audio workstation on my computer, I was hyper aware of what each element (instrument, sound, sample) was doing on its own, and then what happened when it became entangled, enmeshed, in–relation to all the other parts. I have been trying to think about what the poetic equivalent of this process is. What are the different instruments — the equivalent of a piano, a mandolin, an ebowed guitar, a cymbal, a square wave sent through reverb — that a single poem is composed of ? Or is that even the right way to think about it ? Is a poem a composition for a solo cello? What are the different ways of thinking about texture and tone and timbre in a poem, and what might improving my ear for such things in my drafts allow me to better achieve or explore in my poems? I’m still messing about with this — but I’ve enjoyed the artistic challenge of translating the practice / mode of one art into the other.

#3
I’ve been following poet Stefania Irene Marthakis’ work since we were in grad school together at Naropa University. With books such as Case Memory, A Filmmaker’s Handbook, and The Picture Show, Stefania has been writing poetry about film for decades.

JN: When I was thinking of poets for this issue about film, you’re one of the first poets that came to mind. Even when we were in grad school together almost twenty years ago (!), it seems to me that film often made it into your poems. Would you talk about how your interests in poetry and film came about?

SM: First came film — and theater. Since I was a kid, film was everything. Characters, narration, and settings have been so inextricably intertwined within my own memories. “The sudden roar, the woman’s gesture, the crumpling body, and the cries of the crowd on the jetty blurred by fear.” (from Chris Marker’s La Jetée).

For one reason, I didn’t talk much when I was a kid, so films were a way to experience communication, to experience social life —albeit in a very voyeuristic way. How to communicate visually ?

And then, because afterwards, the energy of the film stays with you. A group of friends still imbibing the characters in a movie theater parking lot or sparking critical discussions on topics such as fidelity, finality, or separation at an all–night diner.

So when I needed to find a way to actually communicate myself, poetry arrived. Language, simultaneously, can create connections / intimacy as well as create distance. No other art form plays with constraint and liberation in the way that poetry can, no other art form can come as close in expressing the human experience.

Film — and theater — (always there) resurfaced when I started writing prose poetry in graduate school. This specific form of poetry allows for such entry points or mutations. The poet, Rosmarie Waldrop, refers to the writing of prose poetry as “gap–gardening,” or to borrow films’ language, aperture. The gap refers to the space or lack created by this form that is built out of non–transitional sentences. Sentences that don’t fold back onto the sentence before. Sentences that don’t signal the next sentence, but instead widen the gap. Prose poetry allows for narration and characters. Through this mutable and active form, I’ve been able to incorporate elements of filmmaking or directly respond to certain films.

#4

I also wanted to talk with someone whose job it is to think about film, someone who knows it both intimately and expansively. Through a connection from a long–ago mutual friend, I spoke with Bates College Film Professor Jonathan J. Cavallero.

JN: In your opinion, what makes a film poetic?

JC: In Film Studies, “poetics” is most often associated with the work of David Bordwell. Bordwell studied how the aesthetic construction of a film led to certain effects in the audience. For me, this enterprise is a little fraught because not everyone watches the same movie in the same way, nor do they arrive at the same interpretation. That said, the use of aesthetics to encourage certain reactions highlights the importance of film construction and emphasizes the way that different choices lead to different kinds of films.

JN: What are some poetic films you admire?

JC: Some of my favorite poetic films include Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Federico Fellini’s La Strada, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. More recently, I have really liked Darius Marder’s The Sound of Metal, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, and Sian Heder’s CODA. I find Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to be an intensely uncomfortable and yet very valuable experience, because of its poetic use of aesthetics.

Jonathan J. Cavallero: is Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies at Bates College. He is the author of Hollywood’s Italian American Filmmakers: Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino (University of Illinois Press, 2011) and Television Directors, Race, and Gender: Written Out of the Story (Routledge, 2024). His scholarship has appeared in Cinema Journal / Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television, The Journal of Popular Culture, MELUS, and Diasporic Italy.

Colin Cheney: is the author of, Here Be Monsters, a National Poetry Series selection. His poems have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He received a Pushcart Prize and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He also composes electroacoustic music, including the score for the 2023 documentary film The Arc of Oblivion.

Megan Grumbling: is the author of the poetry collections Persephone in the Late Anthropocene and Booker’s Point and the chapbook To and From Deepening. She often collaborates as librettist with composer Marianna Filippi; their latest works–in– progress include choral pieces about glaciers and “the great blue.” She is also the co–director of the award–winning new documentary film We Are The Warriors, about the retirement of a Native American mascot. She is reviews editor for The Café Review and edits the poetry column Deep Water in the Maine Sunday Telegram.

Stefania Irene Marthakis: holds a BA in Poetry & Theatre from Columbia College Chicago and an MFA in Poetry & Poetics from Naropa University (Boulder, CO). She interned and volunteered at The Poetry Project (NYC). She is the author of Case Memory (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022) as well as three chapbooks: The Summer Flood Came Home, The Picture Show (Another New Calligraphy, 2016), and A Filmmaker’s Handbook (dancing girl press, 2017). Her poems can be found in Columbia Poetry Review, New American Writing, Bombay Gin, The Recluse, Lungfull!, Tarpaulin Sky Press, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others.