We probably already have the definitive film about an artist for this decade, in Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day. The idiosyncratic biopic makes the right choices, giving us in a sliver of time the dailiness of a working life with its gossip, money worries, and ongoing projects dwindling or cresting or inching forward. Hujar is unsure of his prospects, curious where his talent and ambition might lead, embedded in a community that may or may not take him there.
The future looms, since the viewer knows what the characters in their filmic present do not: that the friends and peers we hear about will soon be devastated by the AIDS crisis; that Hujar’s reputation will be decades in growing; and that his photographs will reveal new dimensions when the years have done their work to make them a record of a city and sensibility hardly imaginable from our moment of hyper-gentrification, gross economic disparity, and anti-immigrant state violence. Yet it’s all there, incredibly, in the fading light of Linda Rosenkrantz’s apartment, the tape recorder picking up nuances that mean everything to the sensitive pair. Creative endeavor, in the space of a few hours, flashes its many faces, arduous and sexy, fleeting and fun.
Knowing the experience might not quite measure up, I went with excitement to three films about poets over the past year: What Does That Nature Say to You, A Poet, and Late Fame. I wondered what the sudden flare of interest could mean, and what the stories would get right or very wrong. The world’s cynicism still surprises, as who would have imagined the glee with which we’d lately be encouraged to banish writing and declare it obsolete. Poet-characters are handy for asking whether resistance to this tide is worth it. But films need familiar plots, so the protagonists—all men—go searching for connection. Along the way, they recite their poems, none exactly amazing. Alcohol flows, rivalries scald, and humiliations pile up—a few prove transformative, while the rest are swallowed like medicine. The order in which I saw the films spiraled closer and closer to home.
New York’s public life, in this particular season, is sterile and uncompelling, while the streets of its past are so freighted with nostalgia they can feel exhausted and wrung dry.
The first was South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo’s What Does That Nature Say to You. It begins inside a car, parked at the bottom of a driveway. Donghwa (Ha Seongguk) is dropping off his girlfriend, Kim Junhee (Kang Soyi). Curious, after three years of dating, about her family and their home in the countryside, he asks if he should come inside for once. She reluctantly agrees, and right away they encounter her father. He expresses admiration for Donghwa’s vintage car, then marches him up to see the beautiful gardens he’s created along the hillside behind the house, a labor of love to please his own ailing mother before she died.
Donghwa’s a poet. At thirty-five, he makes a meager living shooting wedding videos, though his attorney father is rich and famous enough to be known by Junhee’s family. Mother and sister appear receptive, and invite him in. Auspiciously, the mother is also a poet, her compositions framed and hung on the walls of the house. Donghwa, deferential and earnest, praises her verse. The family questions Donghwa, politely at first, about his career, about poetry, about his relationship with his father, and with increasing pressure about the wisdom of owning (and driving their Junhee around in) such an aging and possibly unreliable car. Donghwa mostly deflects, though over the course of the day he makes no secret of his ascetic principles or his real ardor for the natural world and the life of the mind.
By dinner, the soju and whiskey flowing, things have taken a harsher turn. Junhee’s sister confronts Donghwa outright about the foolishness of not taking money from his father. Cajoled into reciting a poem, he pronounces a short one, and it doesn’t land well. Finally, extremely drunk, the young writer explodes in rage, then passes out. The parents go up to a little outbuilding on their hill to trash him further. What’s maddening is that they’re also more or less artists, and the gap between the expression they feel entitled to and what they’ll tolerate in the younger generation surely has culturally specific resonance, but at the same time seems universally recognizable. The next morning, Donghwa and Junhee make some promises neither believe they’ll keep; he drives away, and the final scene finds him broken down by the side of the road, calling for roadside assistance.
Has the movie somehow justified, by stranding the poet, the family’s vain but common-sense view of life? Or is this merely another test of Donghwa’s idealism and resolve, the expected price to pay for those heightened encounters beholding trees and sky? We ourselves aren’t sure if he’s any good, or if he’s really equipped to hang in there until he gets better, or even in what context his poems circulate, if any. Earlier, before the disastrous dinner, he’d traveled with Junhee and her sister to contemplate stone pagodas erected in honor of the deceased. He points out that although the names of the honorees are long forgotten, the statues still stand and compel visitors to wonder.
If a parable for art, they’re a time-honored but lonely one. I thought of Proust’s rhapsody about an anonymous carver of stone who left his immortal mark at Chartres cathedral. Donghwa’s sincere appreciation for form over individuality at least assures us he’s not the preening faker the family suspects him of being. Director Hong may feel that he himself is seen the same way by a public perhaps disenchanted or even annoyed by his steady chipping onward at a lifework—he often makes two films a year, on a shoestring budget—that seems so mulishly detached from the spectacle normalized by his industry.
A Poet (Un Poeta)—only the second feature from Colombian director Simón Mesa Soto—gives us another idealist, yet suggests that position is not only untenable but a cover for myopia and cowardice. Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) is middle-aged, living with his mother, and occasionally getting so drunk that he sleeps on the street after shouting lines by his hero José Asunción Silva to nighttime Medellín. Invited to read at the literary center where he hangs out, he attempts a speech about the suffering of poets before being prompted by the center’s director to please just read his work. Oscar’s last book won a prize, but that was decades ago, and now he is reckoning with inaction while his sister and brother-in-law harangue him into finally getting a job as a high school philosophy teacher. His estranged daughter thinks he’s a disappointing joke.
Oscar’s intense and weird, and though at first it could go either way, his class winds up kind of liking him. One student, Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) writes poems, and Oscar sees something in them. We hear a few, over the course of the film, and they’re okay, proffered as naive but luminous observations not unlike the work of Adam Driver’s character (penned by Ron Padgett) in Paterson, as if William Carlos Williams wrote that way, which he most definitely did not. It takes some persuading, but Oscar gets Yurlady to enroll in a creative writing workshop at the center. There she encounters Oscar’s rival Efrain, a poet-turned-successful novelist, and in Oscar’s eyes a craven sellout. In fact, Efrain encourages Yurlady to start writing more about her poor upbringing and racial identity, the better to give the center’s rich, white donors what they tacitly demand. She complies, reads at the gala, and both out of her element and feeling manipulated, gets drunk and passes out. Oscar drives her home and, paralyzed by the situation, leaves her unconscious at her family’s door.
The poets don’t need the movies as much as the movies need characters who still have something unruly to lay on the line.
The family, suspecting Yarludy’s been assaulted by her teacher, accuses both Oscar and the center. A scene in which the center’s director and the novelist visit the family, attempt to minimize their concerns, and simperingly try to weasel both the center and themselves out of trouble plays like straight documentary. The rest of the story involves Oscar trying to reconcile with his daughter, with whom he was making some headway until she got wind of the allegations against him. Yurlady eventually acts as peacemaker, writing to the daughter that her father is a decent man, and didn’t hurt her. The swerve in the plot, and its happy resolution, may have been necessary for the screenplay’s arc. Poetry gets left behind by the exigency of character development or, in the movie’s self-defeating logic, because the art form doesn’t really matter and is only a lame excuse for people who won’t take responsibility and grow up.
Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), the hero of Late Fame, has made his peace with all that. He came of age, we understand, alongside the poets whose photographs appear on screen in the first shots of the film: Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer. Then stopped writing, and took a job at the post office (someone mentions Bukowski, don’t worry) for forty years. After his shift, he drinks and plays pool at his local spot, with workingman pals. One night, coming home, he’s waylaid at his doorstep by Meyers, a recent college grad, and an unexpected fan of Saxberger’s long-forgotten book of poems. Saxberger is wary, but Meyers’s admiration touches something, and soon the older man’s convinced to join a nightly meeting of young aesthetes. They in turn are thrilled to be his potential rediscoverers, and borrow his gravitas.
They’re ridiculous. They make speeches about the stultifying effects of technology, but continually sneak looks at their phones. Extol the poet’s life, but Meyers is revealed to live in an ostentatious loft bought by rich parents. He knows to apologize for it, which makes it somehow even worse. Saxberger is finally all-in when Gloria (Greta Lee), the group’s self-appointed muse, appears on the scene to flatter and flirt. He’s increasingly seduced by the promise in the film’s title, and we wince to watch his ego inflate. The group plans their debut reading, and Meyers insists that Saxberger contribute a new poem. To inspire himself, he plays recordings of poets he loves—Williams and H.D., Snyder and Schuyler. If nothing else, it’s a pure delight to hear Schuyler, gravelly on tape, recite “Salute” in a movie theater in 2026. “Past is past, and if one/remembers what one meant/to do and never did, is/not to have thought to do/enough…”
Saxberger can’t manage to write that new poem. Taking photographs is a natural subject for films—we’re already looking—and sometimes even painters operate convincingly (Basquiat’s not bad on this). But otherwise-deft Kent Jones is another in a long line of directors so terrified by the threat of an inert figure at a desk that he depicts the writing process as a feverish ramble through Greenwich Village, complete with a voiceover that’s just Saxberger murmuring the phrase “seasons collide” over and over. Collision or at least collage could be a viable poetics for the character, but the problem is the opposite, for him and for us: New York’s public life, in this particular season, is sterile and uncompelling, while the streets of its past are so freighted with nostalgia they can feel exhausted and wrung dry.
In any case, it all falls apart quickly: Gloria retreats, the literary event is largely a farce. But in its midst, Saxberger reads not a new poem but one from his long-lost book. It’s worlds better than everything else we hear, and yet not up to his heroes’ level, either. What it is, is a “New York School” poem, meaning in this case that it names actual people and locates them in a precise time and place. This is sometimes considered passé—I don’t know why, everyone does it, it’s unfailingly humanizing—but one of its hidden powers is revealed, in the scene, in that the poem transports Saxberger himself to the authentic past of the poem’s composition, and he smiles, the meaningful circle he didn’t know he was seeking now completed, not in fame but in art.
So close. The references are perfect. But while I can’t speak for Seoul or Medellín, I know that most poets don’t really live this way in New York, in solitary exile from some crystallized high point in the past, as romantic or revolutionary as it may have been (Peter Hujar’s Day treats it as both radiant and ordinary). The poetry world in the city is multifarious and energetic, with waves of practitioners reading, listening to, and publishing one another. They protest, party, and parent together, while arguing over questions of aesthetics, identity, ideology, and class. Many are serious scholars, picking up threads academia ignores, attending to lineages and legacies—it’s unlikely there would be a Saxberger no one knew or reached out to, or that he could be quite so unaware that Eileen Myles or Anne Waldman read at the Poetry Project on New Year’s Day. Late Fame was adapted faithfully from the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s late nineteenth-century novella, itself a recent recovery, but the transposition to the present functions only up until this point. If the film acknowledged that Anselm Berrigan or erica kaufman or Simone White might show up at any time, the plot would immediately collapse.
Is it wistful or cruel, the movies looking at poets only to find them pitiable, even or especially when they’re howling at the moon? The last artists who can’t make money, who have a pressing and practical concern about old books and what’s in them, who even apparently stand for the directors’ own frustrations regarding the path of devotion and the specter of artistic failure, they somehow can’t help but get kicked around anyway. The intricacies of their discourse and society might be unfilmable, or at least, not many have tried to represent it in full. It’s all right—the poets don’t need the movies as much as the movies need characters who still have something unruly to lay on the line.
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The Hummingbird by Matt Longabucco is available from Nightboat Books.