This September, New Zealand director Jane Campion (The Piano, An Angel at My Table) brought us a biopic about  John Keats (1795 – 1821), one of the most romantic of the later Romantic poets.  Bright Star dramatizes the love affair between Keats and his Hampstead neighbor Fanny Brawne.  Campion decided to make the movie lush in image and sound, heavy with emotion, and short on Keat’s social life. (No Charles Lamb. No Percy Bysshe Shelley. None of that set.)

This, as some reviews have said, was a smart movie. Since Keats was such a rich character, his life offers too many channels to explore in one feature-length movie. And it was clever of Campion to deliver Keats’s exquisite poems on the stream of an intoxicating love affair. General movie goers may not have known of Keats, and general students of poetry may not have known of the affair. The result: more poetry for all.

Fanny, played by the milk-skinned Abby Cornish, begins as a spirited seamstress and designer stitching fantastic stand-up collars and intricate pleated skirts. Keats, played by Ben Whishaw, is whimsical, serious, and thin, nursing his ailing brother Tom.  Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’s rascally friend and quasi-benefactor, triangulates the love affair,  his jealousy growing in pace with the couple’s affections.

While the movie’s  lupin- and daffodil-filled fields and the blossoms of English spring are dazzling, even better is Whishaw’s reading of Keats. At the screening I attended, everyone stayed for the final credits in order to listen to the entirety of Whishaw reading “Ode to a Nightengale.”  (You can hear a brief excerpt here [click “download”].)

(Caleb Crain, writing in the On Language column in the New York Times last Sunday, muses on Keats’s language and some of Campion’s language choices for Bright Star.)

The film wasn’t a total success for me since the lovesick pining followed by howling grief became hard to sit through. I also would have liked to have seen more of Keats’s life in poetry and I was dismayed that Fanny’s proud sewing was reduced to mere stitching as she became more besotten—but perhaps that’s just the reality of  first love. (I’m comforted by the fact that she did not end her days traipsing the heaths of Hampstead reciting poetry, as the film says, but rather went on to marry and have a family.)

It was a pretty picture that leaned more in the direction of a love story than a cinematic-literary masterpiece.

An informal poll around the office finds opinions on poet biopics are pretty low. They suffer from “heavy-handed miserablism”  or are “a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as courageous” delivered by “bloviating and gesticulating” characters. (Watch for future posts here by these two passionate writers.)

Question:

1. Do biopics help make poets and their poetry more approachable for students? Or do their efforts to appeal to the mainstream turn students off? How do you manage student responses?

2. Which biopics work best in your classroom? How do you assign them?

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

The Teaching Poetry blog asked Ram a few questions about his work with poetry and film.

Teaching Poetry: Tell us about your documentary on Ginsberg.

Ram Devineni: Ginsberg’s Karma is a thirty-minute documentary about the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It follows his mythical journey to India in the early 1960s that transformed his perspective on life and his work. Poet Bob Holman, director of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, traces the two years Ginsberg spent in India by visiting the places where he stayed and talking with the people he met and influenced, as well as intimate interviews with Beat poets and friends. Bob and I make appearances in it, too.

TP: So Ginsberg’s Karma is a documentary about a poet. Yet you included more ephemeral pieces that animate actual poems for the panel at the PEN World Voices Literary Festival in New York last week. What are some ways that film captures the essence of poetry?

RD: I have always felt that a “poetry film” has to be (first) a great film. I am not sure if the artistic medium of cinema can do a better job of catching the essence of poetry than a dance piece or a play can, but film allows more options.

TP: Can film ever make a poem “better”? How, in your opinion?

RD: I have often seen excellent films based on mediocre poems, that’s why I place strong emphasis on the filmmaker. All films are based on interpretations. A filmmaker interprets a script and makes it into a moving picture, which is what the filmmaker does with a poem. The poem is the base.

Here is an example. It’s one filmmaker’s interpretation of William Blake’s “The Tyger.”

I am sure Blake never imagined his poem would be interpreted like that. But the film captures the essence of the poem and, as a film , it is outstanding.

TP: What are some of the most successful films inspired by or based on poems? What makes them work?

RD: It’s hard finding feature length films based solely on a poem, but a poem becomes the catalyst for the film. I always loved Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. But, there are many excellent short films based on poems. Because of their length, short films and poems work perfectly together. The poem becomes the finished script for the filmmaker to use.

TP: What’s your dream poem to represent on film?

RD: Something by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda or Spanish poet Frederico Garcia-Lorca–they are my favorites. But since they are so well known, you have to be more careful in interpreting their work to film. I liked a series that the Sundance Channel did on Billy Collins, where they asked numerous filmmakers to turn his poems into short films. Here is one example; Collin’s poem “Forgetfulness,” interpreted by director Julian Grey.

Here are two more films that make for good discussion:

Metformin looks at the biology of love through collage and animation. Based on a poem by Helen Clare and directed by Kate Jessop. 2 minutes

Two short films by D. J. Kadagian who reworks classic poems using found video footage. Screening of “Good Morning America” by Carl Sandburg and “Standard Oil Co.” by Pablo Neruda. Special appearance by the D. J. Kadagian. 15 minutes.

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

New York Magazine writes, “At a Gucci-hosted cocktail party for an art film called Erased James Franco, Franco said he discovered Bidart while studying poetry at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. ‘This teacher brought it into class, and everybody was kinda shocked. It’s very dark and it’s about this guy. He’s a murderer, a necrophiliac, and it’s in a poem, right?’ said Franco. ‘What struck me is that it’s a kind of a confessional poem, or a dramatic monologue. It’s as if the poet is using this crazy man as a mask to express certain feelings and go to an extreme place where those feelings could be felt.’ ”

Franco, who has literary aspirations, will star as Allen Ginsberg in the soon-to-be-released movie, Howl, named after Ginsberg’s break-out poem.

Still the question remains, can a film inspired by a poem effectively serve that poem? After all, the visuals in the readers’ mind are very personal. Can a film do justice to that experience? Here’s a YouTube movie of Langston Hughes’s “Weary Blues.” Decide for yourself by watching the movie below, and answering the questions that follow.

For discussion:
1. What does this mini-movie add to your understanding of Hughes’s poem?

2. How do its images complement or challenge your own images of this poem?

3. Does the movie change your understanding of the poem? How?

4. Draft a “screenplay” of a poem you like. How would you represent, in film, what is captivating this poem? (Will you chose literal or abstract images? Will you have characters speak the poem, or have a voice over? How long will the film be?)

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.