Poetry on Film by Russell Stanley Geronimo Howl...

Poetry on Film
by Russell Stanley Geronimo

Howl (2010)
D: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
S: James Franco, Jon Hamm, David Strathairn

Howl’s narrative is split into five sections, and it manages to compose a cinematic fugue the same way a documentary does. The sections show Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) in an interview with Time (where he reflects on his creative process in the writing of Howl), his first time performance of the piece to a public, a dramatization of his early life, an interpretation of the poem in animation, and the obscenity trial surrounding the publication of Howl.

It turns out that Howl is not a biopic, though it ranks higher in the scale of accuracy than The Social Network (admittedly more fiction than biography). It is incidentally also a good period piece. But mainly it is an analysis and performance of the poem Howl. No final understanding of the work is offered (an impossible task), but it guides us how to think about the poem — indeed, about any poem. Ginsberg’s early life is relevant insofar as it helps us understand some aspects of the piece, but this is not the only approach offered. Stanley Fish calls Howl a literary criticism in performance, and it does touch on issues in interpretation and reading, issues on literary influence and originality, and briefly on poetic elements, form and style.

This seems like a small miracle of Western cinema. It is rare enough to see a film about a writer as he is. It is even rarer to witness a discussion of aesthetics unfold into a narrative. But I believe this is possible and permissible (in an age where the humanities are “under attack”) because whole society has had an obvious stake: the state of America’s (and the rest of the world’s) freedom and morals depended on how the law would treat the case. The outcome of the trial would determine the degree of liberality of the nation with regards to expression and speech. It was a social situation bent on ‘making’ history. The poem, for all its merits and “weaknesses”, is a concern of the average man.

Censorship was a blessing in disguise to poetry. We can only speculate if Aristotle found a motivation to write his treatise on the art of poetry if his teacher Plato did not condemn it so passionately in The Republic. The obscenity trial was therefore a convenient device to segue into a lecture in literature, one that does not only involve experts, but also the ordinary citizen. We owe this kind of ‘intellectual’ film to the incidental practicality in which literary criticism had been thrust upon. ‘Incidental’ because, in truth, no film about the scansion and the use of punctuations in John Donne’s poetry would gain popularity if it did not touch on the issue of life and death, as in the film adaptation of “W;t”.