Poetry in Motion

Old Buk is featured at the very beginning, middle and very end of the movie and, despite being the only poet on the thing not to read one word of poetry, steals the show. I laughed out loud as he talked about how reading Tolstoy gives him a headache and giggled again when he said that he was driven to write because everyone else was doing it so badly.

His words rang especially true after the parade of pompous, boring, and nauseating poets featured on the film. With a few exceptions (Allen Ginsberg, Helen Adams, Tom Waits, William Burroughs and a few others), I found myself wondering if perhaps the filmmaker was trying to to illustrate Bukowski's points by making a movie about how bad most poetry is and how obnoxious most poets are. If so, the film is a success -- but still a waste of time. Truth be told, I don't think the filmmaker could tell the difference between good and bad poetry if it were right in front of him -- which, in fact, it was. Way too much bad poetry performed by pompous jerks overshadows the few gems on this video. I don't know where else Bukowski can be seen on video though, so some will want to buy it for that reason alone.

I would also hope that the DVD would offer more options for how to view each piece. On the CD-Rom the text of each poem is always on-screen next to the video of the performance, and I find myself having trouble watching the tiny video instead of following the text as it's read. It would be nice to be able to choose for oneself whether to direct one's attention to the performance or the printed text by adding or removing the words from the screen. **Update -- I bought the DVD and it doesn't include text copies of the poems at all. It's just the movie, chapterized so you can jump to particular performances of course. So it's far better for viewing the performances, but loses all the cool multi-media features of the CD-ROM. I'm a bit disappointed they didn't do more with the DVD format.

As for the poems and performances themselves, I'd say they're pretty middling overall, with of course a few bright spots. One of my favorites is actually "Four Horsemen," who perform a vocal quartet that is wordless and tuneless, but nevertheless very meticulously organized and musical -- sort of like four mad Bobby McFerrins performing a Charles Mingus score based on a lost Bartok string quartet. Anne Waldman's reading of "Makeup on Empty Space" is spectacular, with her signature energy and wit, and there are good outings by Tom Waits, Michael Ondaatje, Robert Creeley, and a couple of others. But a lot of the work -- both the writing and the reading -- suffers from a host of post-Beat cliches, making for some pretty tedious clips to sit through. As for Charles Bukowski, he declines to read at all. And as for the prescription he offers for contemporary poetry, it's amusing to a point, but ask yourself whether you really care to savor what he offers as the model for a poem.