Ram Devineni – Lit Bits

Ram Devineni is the founder and editor of Rattapallax magazine, a literary journal dedicated to publishing poetry from around the world. Devineni, also a filmmaker, co-founded the film school Academia Internacional de Cinema in São Paulo and recently co-produced Amir Naderi’s Vegas: Based on a True Story, which premiered at the 2008 Venice Film Festival and showed in competition in the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. For the 2009 PEN World Voices Literary Festival, Devineni curated a panel on literary short films and documentaries.

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. Continue reading “Interview with Rattapallax Editor and Filmmaker, Ram Devineni”

In this week’s edition of New York Magazine, actor James Franco (Milk, Spider Man) shows that he knows a thing or two about poetry. Even more interesting is that as a student he made films inspired by the poetry of Anthony Hecht and Frank Bidart.

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. Continue reading “Can Film Serve Poetry?”