Bees vs Cillian Murphy

I spend so much time watching films and TV, it seems only natural to me to incorporate them into my poetry writing, and encourage other people to do the same. Although I know a lot of poets don’t agree.

I was on a panel at the ‘Poetry and TV’ symposium at Birmingham University in 2018 (organised by wonderful poets Richard O’Brien and Jenna Clake), and I was surprised to hear some poets still talking about a sense of shame or embarrassment when they bring pop culture into their work. I don’t have that. My position is pretty straightforward, I think. Poetry should be an expression of our complex lived experience. And that experience contains, for example, Barbenheimer.  

But why write about Barbenheimer, when you could write about a bee? A bee is natural, relatable, eternal (we hope). So perhaps though are Cillian Murphy’s eyes.

I think there are three main things that put people off. The first is that poems can become so rooted in the specifics of the inspiring material, the poem becomes unreadable to anyone not already familiar with that material. Try telling that to Pound and Eliot… But is there still such a thing as universal cultural context? Was there ever, or was there just one that excluded lots of other people?

I don’t think specificity is a problem. I’ve read Alice Oswald’s Memorial, and I’m not an Iliad scholar. I’ve read W. Todd Kaneko’s Dead Wrestler Elegies and I’ve never seen any wrestling. It’s okay. If a poem remains truly impenetrable, it might just be a shit poem. 

The second issue is around thinking poetry should be concerned with the eternal rather than the ephemeral – that being locked into contemporary proper nouns will date your work immediately and render it redundant. Conversely, invoking things which have already stood the test of thousands of years will lend your work weight (instead of making it seem, say, unimaginative, and only artificially ‘important’ in scope).

I mean, I get it. Poetry is thousands of years old. Television is less than a hundred. Motion pictures have little more than a century under their widescreen belts. Screens aren’t going anywhere, though, except into our glasses and possibly eyeballs. We don’t know what will last. We don’t know if anything will be read at all in another few thousand years, or if we’ll all be Eloi jabbing at dead tablets in the burning dark.

That being the case, why on earth not write a poem inspired by Twin Peaks, or Taskmaster, or Is It Cake? All any artwork needs to do is show us something interesting about ourselves. The world is long, and our individual lives are short. I think it’s okay to lean into that. 

The third issue of course is that some people, especially Guardian headline writers, consider film and TV-inspired poetry to be inherently flippant, as they still look at pop culture as one of the ‘low’ artforms to poetry’s ‘high’, concerned with humanity’s trappings rather than its betterment. But I find that argument so ludicrous and narrowminded that I refuse to entertain it.

I should perhaps also clarify that I’m not talking about poems that are ‘about’ films and TV. I can’t bear poems that read like a Wikipedia synopsis with linebreaks. I’m talking about asking: what does this film or TV show do best, with its cinematography, acting, editing, talking dogs or whatever other creative choices, and how can we use those choices to inspire what a poem does best? 

Sidebar: what does a poem do best? Try these: “the best words in the best order” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge; “language at its most distilled and most powerful” — Rita Dove; “Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.” Calm down, Shelley. Let’s get you back to bed.

So, I run a lot of writing workshops. The most exciting ones so far have come from looking at David Lynch’s work, which is a no-brainer in terms of mystery and poetry and imaginative force (I hope I’ll run those sessions again sometime). But just as interesting has been looking at moments when Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Wars made us laugh, or cry, or rue their entire franchises into dust. 

For next year, I’m planning to run a new ten-week poetry course inspired by films directed by women. It’ll be a strange mix, from Ida Lupino to Greta Gerwig, via Agnes Varda and Amy Heckerling. It’s going to be fun. And bleak as hell. Two of my favourite things. 

In the meantime, I’m going to look at two tremendous action movies in one-off Zoom workshops for the Poetry School: Aliens on the 28th October, and festive favourite Die Hard on 16th December, in case you’d like to join me.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I may be gearing up for future rants. Or a poem about Cillian Murphy’s eyes outliving all of us.