The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry That Inspires Them by Jason Shinder, Billy Collins, John Lithgow

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(Hardcover)

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Synopsis

Cinema has been influencing and inspiring our country's poets almost since its inception a century ago. Hundreds of poets have written about movies including Delmore Schwartz on Marilyn Monroe, Jack Kerouac on Harpo Marx and Maya Angelou on Gone With The Wind, among many others.

At the same time, movie actors and directors have been influenced and inspired by poets and poetry, if not writing it themselves. The Poem I Turn To: Actors & Directors Present Poetry That Inspires Them represents the best loved poems by celebrated American movie actors and directors, along with their notes and comments describing how those poems, or poetry in general, has affected their lives. The included audio CD features Hollywood personalities reading their chosen works.

On the included audio CD, hear Hollywood present their favorite poems:

--Alan Arkin reads Rilke's "The Man Watching"
--John Lithgow reads W. B. Yeats' "The Lake Isle at Innisfree"
--Michael O'Keefe reads Ezra Pound's "In a Station at the Metro"
--Mary Louise Parker reads Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole"
--Lili Taylor reads Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"
and many more!

Pam Kingsbury - Library Journal

Shinder (founding director, YMCA National Writer's Voice; Arrow Breaking Apart) combines several of his loves-filmmaking, directing, acting, writing, and editing-in this compilation of poems selected by approximately 45 actors and directors. The actors/directors are a diverse lot that includes Alan Arkin, Eve Ensler, and Philip Seymour Hoffman; the poets whose work they chose range from established (e.g., Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath) to current (e.g., Nikki Giovanni, Seamus Heaney, and Mary Oliver). The text includes biographies of the poets and the actors/directors as well as a brief narrative explaining why each person selected a particular poem. On the accompanying CD are audio recordings of 30 poems read by actor Lili Taylor, National Book Award finalist Carol Muske Dukes, and others (the book's proceeds will support a scholarship in the name of the late character actor David Coleman Dukes, Muske Dukes's first husband). Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins writes the preface. With this book, whose selections each reveal something about the people they inspire, much-beloved poems are made new again. Recommended for all libraries-both public and academic-with large poetry and/or audio collections.

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Biography

Jason Shinder's books include Lights, Camera, Poetry! and Best American Movie Writing, Every Room We Ever Slept In (a 1985 NY Public Library Noted Book) and Among Women (short listed for the 2001 National Book Award for Poetry). He is also the director of The Writing Program at Sundance Institute.

Customer Reviews

Number of Reviews: 1
Average Rating: Customer Rating for this product is 5 out of 5
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Customer Rating for this product is 5 out of 5 Poetry as Creative Muse
Janet Riehl, a Woman of Letters, 04/15/2008

A lovely collection that, by extension, shows the power of poetry in the daily life of creative people everywhere. In “The Poem I Turn To” we are given an impressive cross-section of film artists sharing the poems that move and inspire them. The poets chosen lean on the Anglo-American canon, but the selections do step out and also rub against each other in interesting ways. You’ll love meeting both familiar friends and new poems in “The Poem I Turn To.”