Hmm, I'd forgotten The Decameron was prose--it's been at least twenty years since I last read it!

OK--so make that six movies based on poems...

My first contact with Dylan Thomas was Rodney Dangerfield's reading of "Do Not Go Gentle," in the movie Back to School; I think it had something to do with his attempts to sleep with an English prof. Needless, I now remember the poem much more easily than the movie.

In Apocalypse Now there was that reporter who kept reciting Prufrock, & then Kurtz himself quoted from the Hollow Men, the epigraph to which is, "Mistah Kurtz, he dead." An interesting little intertextual game, I thought.

I also saw a Steven Spielberg film about a robot boy that used a poem from Yeats ("The Faery Child"?), but I can't remember the name of the film. I don't think it was very good.

Chris

Chris and Robert -

The primary literary antecedent for Apocalypse Now was not a poem, but a poetic novel - Conrad's Heart of Darkness - with the Marlon Brando character a stand-in for Kurtz.

[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited March 21, 2006).]

Stretching the subject a bit again, but there was the 1994 film on Eliot's first marriage, Tom and Viv, in which Willem Dafoe abso-fucking-lutely nails Eliot's speaking voice. He must have listened to every recording the man ever made. (If you want to admire an actor, watch Dafoe in that film and Platoon back-to-back.) And I bet there were a slew of films on poets.

[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited March 21, 2006).]

Perhaps apropos, perhaps not, see the following link:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2000/02/14pound.html

This is, of course, satire.

Quincy

For movies on poems, all the Shakespeare films; the films on Lorca like Blood Wedding; El Cid; and Claudel's Partage de Midi was made into a tv film I've never seen. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.

Wot, no Frank O'Hara??

Margaret.

This is a favorite subject of mine; I have written a series of poems about films and film stars and plan to write more. Because I am so interested in the subject, I find it odd that I don't find more poems about film.

It's now quite the trend to include poems in films. One of my favorites from way back, though, is the use of Whitman's "The Untold Want" in Now Voyager.

I just found a link over on the Accomplished Members forum to this wonderful poem, Noir , by Alicia Stallings. It seems pertinent here.

Gregory

p.s. Thanks to Paul Lake and Thomas Newton.

Hart Crane's, Chaplinesque, though not exactly about movies has got to be the finest evocation of movie derived imagery in poetry so far as I'm concerned.

I've experimented with movie iconography myself a few years ago writing a sonnet sequence taking Hopper's Nighthawks as a starting point and developing a series of film noir derived scenes from it.

Never got finished - one day maybe....
http://p197.ezboard.com/fthesonnetbo...icID=114.topic

Alan