The horror of poetry (and vice versa)

In this month’s American Poet, cultural critic Robert Polito illuminates the secret passageways that connect horror films with poetry. Polito begins with the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe (who was the subject of a D.W. Griffith short), before examining the work of less obvious horror shows, Frank Bidart and Edward Field:

Over recent decades, celebrated poems, as numerous commentators have observed, increasingly appear in movies, yet not always to the advancement of either art. As poets occasionally try to borrow street glamour from, say, classic noir films with easy invocations of guns and shadows, so poems sometimes enter modern films—from Sophie's Choice to Four Weddings and a Funeral, from Crimes and Misdemeanors to In Her Shoes—as a grasping after class and seriousness, both gestures instances of a middlebrow cultural move that film critic Manny Farber once tagged "white elephant art": "reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago.... filling every pore of a work with glinting, darting Style and creative Vivacity."

But from Griffith on, poetry and the movies have stalked an ongoing conversation of mutual affinities and refractions, sources and collisions, analogues and renunciations . . .

(More from Polito here)