Screen quests: Poet Zegans’ moving texts

Once apprenticed on the Apocalypse Now soundtrack, this US spoken word specialist has inserted his literate visions into a series of ground-breaking short films

FROM THE jazz poetry of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance to the spoken word experiments of the Beats, from the political critiques of Gil Scott-Heron to the Pulitzer Prize rap versifying of Kendrick Lamar and the electrifying meditations of Brit powerhouse Kae Tempest, rhymes and stanzas have mixed sociably with the modes and manners of music-making. 

Marc Zegans’ acclaimed poetry film collaborations, like last year’s prize-nominated Requiem for a Spoken Word with the director Jim Hall, are now adding an extra dimension: the moving image.

Zegans was both amused and delighted in very recent times to be dubbed ‘a Beat poet’. He smiled, because he feels several generations away from that incendiary genesis but he certainly continues to connect with the intentions and spirit of those early streetwise and booksmart innovators.

In fact, Zegans has often evoked the special character of the late 1950s in which poems on the page spoke to the revolutionary vibes that were also infiltrating rock’n’roll and jazz, with their extraordinary societal backdrops of political upheaval, racial resistance and sexual rule-breaking. 

In 2018, I was delighted, as co-editor, to include two of Zegans’ verse works in the essay collection Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack – ‘passing tones’ and ‘Mining the Vernacular’, which both referenced musical sources – and our conversations have continued since then in multiple directions.

We have touched base on his interest in the Bay Area punk explosion the 1980s, with regard to his principal professional life as a mentor to creative artists and, of late, his active engagement with poetry as it re-emerges as a key element in a number of eye-twistingly inventive moving image texts: short suites that draw on the ever-extending abilities of computer animation and recording innovation.

I interviewed the north California based writer just as 2022 stirred into life. Here he talks about film poetry and poetry film and the plans and hopes he has for this increasingly active and undeniably interesting multi-medium. 

What film projects have you worked on and with whom?  

The recent films based on my poems were powerfully inspired by two projects that I worked on in my youth at Different Fur, a superb recording studio in San Francisco.  When I was in my teens, my mentor Ray Dolby introduced me to Different Fur’s founder Pat Gleeson who invited me to become a studio apprentice. Pat, still active in his late eighties, was a seminal figure in musical synthesis and electronic music and toured back in the day with Herbie Hancock. Before Pat began his full-time career in music, he was a professor in the English department at San Francisco State, and was a thesis advisor for my recently passed friend, the poet and short story writer, Don Skiles.  

I offer this as background because the first project was a film soundtrack for KQED TV, the local public television station, about San Francisco poets. Working with Pat on that soundtrack exposed me to spoken poetry in the context of film, an experience that was entirely novel to me. I recall vividly working on the sound relating to a poem by William Dickey called ‘Rainbow Grocery’. The integration of the sonic, spoken, and visual elements in that piece stuck with me for years.   

Some months later Pat invited me to apprentice with him in his work on the soundtrack for Apocalypse Now.  It was a novel soundtrack in a variety of ways. Primarily a synthesized score, it was recorded at the very cusp of the transition from analog to digital recording on an enormous 3M 32 track digital machine that we brought in for the project; and it was laid down for a five-channel spilt surround system pioneered by Dolby Labs.  It also put to famous use Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, and Randy Hansen’s Hendrix-style guitar work on the Do Long Bridge scene.   

A defining feature of that film was the voiceover narration by Martin Sheen. During mixing sessions that sometimes ran to 17 hours, I would hear Sheen’s voice in fragments over-and-over again as we built up the sound that created the mood, context, and accentual structure for the narrative.  There’s no doubt that this experience embedded in me a visceral understanding of how to bring vocal expression, music and visual imagery into vital contact.   

Jumping forward several decades, I began to collaborate with several filmmakers on a series of small poetry films, and, in some cases, on what might better be described as film poems.  In rough terms, a poetry film is an effort to render an existing poem on film, whereas a film poem asserts that the film itself is the poem.

A film poem may depart from a prior text, but the film is not a translation: it is a synthesis of sonic and visual elements that work together to form a poem. In this connection, Sarah Tremlett has done a superb job of articulating the semantic distinctions between different types of film poetry in her recent book The Poetics of Poetry Film (2020, University of Chicago Press). 

My approach to collaborating with filmmakers hasn’t been much concerned with how our projects are categorised, but, rather, with making something true, meaningful, original and engaging.  

To your question about partners, I’ve recently worked on films with Jenn Vee, Aaron Shadwell, Paul Broderick, Jackie Todd and Vernon McCombs, Ellen Hemphill and Jim Haverkamp (aka Jim Hovercraft), Jutta Pryor, Jim Hall, Peg Simone, Eric Edelman, and Janice Blaze Rocke. 

How is poetry fitted into those ventures: an inspirational idea, a starting point, a final addition?  

My poems have always been a starting point for these films, but the ways in which they’ve been incorporated have varied widely. For example, in the two films I’ve made with Jim Hall, Requiem for a Spoken Word and Price, the text of the poems is presented as voiceover narration accompanied by words or phrases from the poem provocatively appearing on screen. Sometimes Jim uses this titling for simple emphasis. More frequently, the word or phrase he selects functions as a visual salient that develops its own meaning and resonance. In the case of these two films, the poems are delivered into fully elaborated visual worlds that spring straight from Jim’s, and his alter-ego Muffy Drake’s, imaginations. 

Pictured above: A promotional poster for Jim Hall’s film Price, providing a strong sense of the collaborative process between director, poet Marc Zegans, narrator Peg Simone and composer Joria Ragel

A poem of mine, ‘Alpha Betsy’, that appeared in my book Swizzle Felt’s First Folio from the Typewriter Underground, was the subject of two films, one by Jackie Todd and Vernon McCombs and the other by Peg Simone. Jackie and Vernon’s piece is a surreal black and white silent film with colorised elements. Its narrative structure was determined by the poem, and it displays excerpts from the text at varying intervals to introduce the poem’s central ideas and to advance the film’s narrative. Though originally created as an element of an immersive theatrical event, Jackie and Vernon’s film functions quite brilliantly on its own.  

Peg’s Alpha Betsy, a film that profoundly touches my heart, takes a very different tack. Peg approached making the film through her intense empathy with the character.  She decided to make a stop-motion film that brings to life both Betsy’s emotional interior, and the cluttered world she inhabits. The stage set, property, and wardrobe for the character are all elements drawn from the poem and the larger community of the typewriter underground.

To wit, the walls were papered with miniature versions of collages by Eric Edelman that illustrated the typewriter underground’s First Folio.  We also see the interiors of Alpha-Betsy’s handmade journals and notice that her wild hair is laced with tiny letters, including the name Swizzle Felt, after whom the First Folio is named. The film’s soundtrack is an original song recorded by Peg, one that fits the essence and motive structure of the character perfectly.  The poem and the film share a common heartbeat in the person of Alpha-Betsy, but the film is a thing unto itself. 

By contrast, Ellen Hemphill and Jim Haverkamp’s films from my poems ‘Manicotti’ and the ‘Danger Meditations’ are interpretive dramatisations of the written material. Each film delivers the full text of the poem through voiceover narration and illustrates its action in a series of carefully choreographed scenes delivered by casts of real actors. The power of each film is enhanced with compelling and scene specific original scores. 

Pictured above: Hipper than Hopper? A still from the film Requiem for a Spoken Word

How is the moving image, the soundtrack and the verse integrated: do you speak to a film or a score? Or does the filmmaker sometimes respond to your concepts?  

If the text of the poem is going to be read on film, I prefer that it be done by the filmmaker, a recording artist, or an actor. I’m very interested in how others interpret the work, and I think that inviting the director to choose the reader gives the filmmaker more interpretive freedom.  Accordingly, to this point, narration in these films has been the province of others.  

There’s considerable variety in which elements the film directors bring into play. For example, Jenn Vee’s film of my poem ‘Broken Lines’ integrates a tight cinematographic narrative line with her acting as the main character doing voiceover narration, and a musical soundtrack that lends drama to the production. Of particular interest in this film is a silent dialogue that takes place between the eyes of the central character’s younger and older adult selves, the latter played by her mother.  

From a very different perspective, Eric Edelman’s films of the first and second fragments from the typewriter underground are silent animated digital collages that carry the narrative forward via elements taken from old etchings. In these films, the texts of the poems are cleverly incorporated as visual elements. Eric has also made animations that depart from the idea of the typewriter underground but are not the product of a particular poem.  A charming example is The Oliver Boys versus the Blick Gang, which evokes for me the delightful animations that Terry Gilliam did whilst a contributor to Monty Python.   

I'm particularly interested in the musical dimension for reasons linked to the title of this website. What is the relationship between the notion of spoken word and musical accompaniment and poetry and film: are they connected, do you feel?  

Spoken word and musical accompaniment must be vitally connected if both elements are to be used. When this connection isn’t deep and doesn’t feel organic, the film simply won’t work.  For example, the filmed recordings of Jack Kerouac reading to Steve Allen’s piano don’t really work. Allen is a superb pianist, but his comping for Kerouac is a kind of projective device, an indicator to the audience that we are now going into what they might imagine to be a cool Beat groove, rather than a connected dialogue between pianist and poet. To my ear, the music and the vocal performance don’t have much to do with each other.  

By contrast, my late friend, downtown poet Steve Dalachinsky’s work with musicians, especially Loren Conors, was truly connected. These two listened intently and played off each other in generative ways, delivering to their audiences in the process the blessings that come with true exchange.  

In a film, such connection can be manifested in both direct and indirect ways. Jim Hall’s two films from my poems have original soundtracks that directly activate the viewer’s emotions and body in a manner that visual images or voiceover narration alone cannot. In Price the effect of the film is inseparable from the interplay of the narrative line and the blues guitar soundtrack. The musical element in this film is a dramatic actor and the music provides the emotional context that enables a very short poem to truly move a listening audience.   

A beautiful illustration of indirect effect is Peg Simone’s film Woodshed from my poem of the same name. ‘Woodshed’ functions very well as a spoken piece, and I have performed it many times in front of audiences, but it’s also a poem that operates as a musical score when the physical text is turned on its side. This is deliberate. The poem takes up the question of cross-disciplinary creative influence, looking at boogie-woogie pianist Pete Johnson’s effect on Mondrian’s paintings. I wanted to carry the essence of such influence not only into the words of the poem, but back into music.

Peg took the sideways score, arranged, and recorded it. It’s a beautiful recording, reminiscent of Satie. Having brought the poem’s music to life, she was inspired to create a tender stop-motion film.  In Woodshed, the original music alone carries the film. There is no need for vocal performance because the poet’s voice has been completely internalised and re-expressed in instrumental form. Peg’s version of Woodshed is in the purest sense a film poem. 

Have you future plans to work in this multimedia way?  

I hope to collaborate with more filmmakers soon and, also, to engage in more immersive theatre projects. There’s something magic about live performance. 

At the minute, I’m not working on any film projects, though I would love to invite David Lynch to make a film from my poem cycle The Snow Dead. About a dozen years ago he did a fine animated video of Moby’s ‘Shot in the Back of the Head’, and I think he’d be the perfect filmmaker for this small body of work.  

What are the satisfactions of the process? Are there frustrations?  

The greatest satisfaction is the joy that comes with seeing a filmmaker, actors and musicians take a poem into their hearts and bring forward an interpretation that transports the original work into a new realm. I’ve been fortunate to work with sensitive and highly imaginative people who have honoured the source material and brought their own magic to it. 

When people respect the work and each other, the frustrations tend to be minor.  Most have to do with technical issues, limited resources, and the difficulty inherent in creating a synthetic work. It’s a vulnerable experience letting go of what you’ve written and putting it in the hands of another, but it opens the possibility of new worlds. For the film to be successful, this transmission into the filmmaker’s hands must be an act of total trust.  

Is there a danger of the oral text being submerged by the movie images or the musical score? How do you manage that process? 

Yes, there is a real danger to this. An even greater danger is that the film will be a trivial take on the material. One often sees poetry films in which the text is read over a montage of rather generic images and repeated as subtitles across the bottom. I’m not saying that this method is consistently ineffective, but it can become rather disconnected, nonspecific, and mechanical at the expense of both the poet and the audience.   

I think that the key to rendering the oral text – if there is one – effectively, is for the filmmaker and the poet to share a common understanding of what kind of film they are making. They will do well to ask together: Is this a film devoted to the oral exposition of the poem? Is this a film that aims at an expansive interpretation of the poem, placing the oral rendition of the text at its core? Is this a film that seeks to enhance the audience’s access to the poem by supplementing it with musical and visual elements? Is this a film that wants to take the poem as a point of departure, as opposed to giving it a literal rendering? Or is this a film that is meant to be a poem in its own right?

When the poet and director have agreed, the only remaining questions are how the film can best satisfy its specific objective, and does it do so? The former is primarily the province of the filmmaker, although the poet can provide useful perspective as the project proceeds. The latter falls under the purview of both, and the film is done when each can without hesitation embrace the result.

Note: Marc Zegans would like to acknowledge the input of his friend and collaborator Deborah Oster Pannell, who copy edited the thoughts he gathered in relation to these questions and provided various editorial suggestions

You can find a link to the outstanding short Requiem for a Spoken Word, one of the collaborations of Zegans and Jim Hall mentioned in the text, here

Marc Zegans’ ‘Beat Soundtrack’ appeared in Rock and the Beat Generation on October 4th, 2021