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Paul Guilfoyle not only reads poetry, but writes about it with compassion and imagination. His commentary on the Irish-drenched Seamus Heaney's Casualty is near poetry itself: "This poem reminds me of when I was a little boy in the 1950s. It was different. Starting as a child I remember there was WORK [sic] and Mass and work and Camel untipped cigarettes and work and parades and soda bread and work and scully caps and beer and whisky and work and callused hands and music and boxing and a coughing kind of laughter and yelling and blood and work and no loose change, all money either saved or spent." It's got a good poem's cadence, to be sure.
Fine, but who the hell is Paul Guilfoyle? Well, you've likely seen him, but know nothing about him. He's the head cop—Capt. Jim Brass—on the original CSI. Yeah, that guy. Knowing this, that Guilfoyle admires Heaney and has more than a bit of the poet in him, too—knowing this changes both Guilfoyle the actor and Heaney the poet. For the moment, at least, I'm paying attention to Heaney, because he's the inspiration here, but next time I surf and land on CSI I'll see Guilfoyle in a slightly different light. He'll have a dimension I would never have imagined. My nonchalance or inattention will be altered. I'll know him, kind of.
This is the doing of Jason Shindler in The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry that Inspires Them (Sourcebooks: sourcebooks.com, Naperville, IL). And for his efforts, along with co-editors Michael O'Keefe (Caddyshack, The Great Santini) and Lili Taylor (Dogfight, High Fidelity), we should all be grateful. This is a book (including a CD of selected actors reading their favorite poets) whose time is way past due. Don't we have enough books on books that inspired writers; or on musicians who praise a note, a sound, a singer of great power?
I mean, who knew that Peter Coyote (an accomplished if not terribly visible actor) turns to the raging Buddhist poet Gary Snyder for inspiration (more about Snyder below); or that Jane Fonda digs on Rilke; John Lithgow on Keats and Yeats? Or that Carrie Fisher finds her inspiration in ee cummings (which kind of makes sense, I suppose) but also Phillip Larkin (which doesn't, but then that's one reason the book is valuable)?
[N.B., Snyder and Coyote: Snyder is a poet I've admired seemingly forever. He's a stealthily subversive poet, Zen-quiet and unrelenting in his remorseless visions of who we really are and the many worlds we inhabit. He's a manically serene poet, who would at first seem insular and remote, perhaps. But Coyote understands him brutally. About Snyder's This Tokyo, Coyote says: "Things which emerge as form, which are named, have beginnings and consequently endings, the path between is inevitable decay." That's just about right.]
How about Daryl Hannah finding inspiration in Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars and Pablo Neruda? Or Diane Wiest admiring Sylvia Plath and Ezra Pound? And how perfect that Mary-Louise Parker—perhaps our most versatile of actors, and quirkily beautiful—surprises us with her choices: Kenneth Koch and Mark Strand. Her commentary on Koch's To You is, simply, perfect:
"To You is one of the first poems I fell in love with. My heart rarely stops when I meet another person, but a poem or two has knocked me on my back….I love the giddiness of it, the way it sort of trips over itself with such unabashed enthusiasm and sweetness. It's told so unselfconsciously but with enormous skill and wit."
These are all revelations that surprise and please and, yes, even impress. Actors aren't supposed to be highly literate, are they? Of course, liking a few high-minded or mind-boggling poets doesn't make you highly literate, either. But it makes you real—interesting and real.
Mostly, actors are not real to us. If they're good, they are who they played in their last couple of films; if they are legendary, they are who they played years, ages ago. But that's their persona, and it doesn't change; it simply shifts from character to character, like an accent.
Shindler's book allows us to get acquainted with these figments of the large or small screen, if only for a moment. It may be a superficial knowledge, but so what? I'll look at Michael O'Keefe differently knowing he finds inspiration in Denis Johnson; or see Adam Arkin in a new way realizing he has a fondness for Theodore Roethke.
Many of the poems selected by these actors seem just about perfect for what we do know about them. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, perhaps our most protean of actors, finds inspiration and guidance (one presumes) in Meghan O'Rourke's Inventing a Horse, whose poem is about transformation and empathy and the requirements on those of us who would strive for either. Among other acts, says O'Rourke, inventing a horse demands "that you must walk him in the cold;/feed him bran mash, apples;/accustom him to the harness." Hoffman invents a horse in every role he plays.
If poetry isn't fully dead, it's dying, having been transformed into a Pentecostal-like string of sounds that exist only for academicians to lecture on, and of course build dissertations around. And that's too bad: we're losing something vital and important and, yes, inspirational. Shindler's compilation is not of course going to breach the cul-de-sac poetry is heading down. But it will help us understand its fundamental vitality and its capacity for inspiration, if only for a moment or two.
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