“It is October. Everything is overturning,” writes Hannah Bonner in her debut book of poetry, Another Woman.
“I pack a suitcase to get through October and drive to the shore with a video camera,” begins the poem “Video Footage” in Julia Anna Morrison’s Long Exposure, her first book of poems.
It is October. And with October comes the bustle of FilmScene’s annual Refocus Film Festival, where Bonner and Morrison, along with poet Perry Janes, will read from their work as part of a Refocus conversation on the intersectionality of poetry and film. The event at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday at The Chauncey is free and open to he public.
Bonner and Morrison have long and diverse resumes that cross many media and genres. Both are nationally recognized poets, and together are longtime creative collaborators. Morrison is also a filmmaker and the University of Iowa Department of Cinematic Arts Director of Undergraduate Study; Bonner, a recent graduate of the Creative Nonfiction Program, is a film critic and the poetry editor of the literary journal Brink.
“I’m always trying to teach my students the value of poetry,” Morrison said. “I teach screenwriting classes, so I try to show them that poetry has a very strong power — images, cuts, the way you construct a narrative, pacing, composition — all of that is poetic. Those are poetic choices.”
Film and poetry are often at play in Morrison’s work, whether short film or poetry. In Long Exposure, video cameras and home videos are frequent motifs in an overarching story of motherhood, postpartum depression and grief.
In the artist’s short films, metaphors abound, from the poetic nature of trees to the dual grossness and sentimentality of teeth, a symbol so powerful that it fueled Morrison’s first film Toothache, in which Bonner stars. In a memorable scene, Morrison directed Bonner to pretend to swallow a baby tooth to showcase “the gross, not the grotesque, but just the animal in the woman.”
“I like to see women represented on screen that are just doing things that women really do,” Morrison said. “Not that all people, you know, reach down their throat and pull out a baby tooth. Just that we’re animals or do strange things we can’t even explain exactly.”
When Bonner started writing Another Woman, a cinematic connection was far from her mind.
“It’s funny. I actually wasn’t really watching film at all,” she said. “It was during the pandemic, and I think, for whatever reason, I was just in a state where I just wanted to be reading and writing.”
During the editing process, however, a more literal intersection manifested in the form of the book cover, which features an image taken directly from friend and filmmaker Carl Elsaesser’s experimental short Home When You Return. Against a stark black background, a woman smokes a cigarette, but her face is obscured in a swirl of motion as if smudged from view. The collaboration was punctuated by a special screening of Elsaesser’s film at FilmScene, alongside four other experimental shorts Bonner paired with her book in its explorations of female sexuality.
In Another Woman, Bonner wanted women presented without shame, “where women can be abject or heartbroken or grief-stricken, but they can also be sexual.” Through the poems, the writer weaves together a meditative portrait of a woman wrapped up in an affair with someone married — a play on the often weaponized “other woman” trope.
Historically, poetry and film have earned reputations for objectifying women or wiping them from the narrative entirely, Bonner hopes to disrupt the narrative through the intricacy of non-narrative poetry and, someday, film. Noting the parallels, Bonner looks to eventually translate and disrupt those themes visually.
“When I’m writing a poem, I’m really attentive to the line, and it feels really important to think about what a line break can do. And maybe that’s kind of like a cut in cinema of suturing two shots together,” Bonner said.
Both Bonner and Morrison recall cinematic shots and scenes from films that spawned poems, criticism or simply an atmosphere. For Morrison, the symbolic imagery and rhythms of filmmaking filter into her poetry, while experimental films suit Bonner’s inclination toward non-narrative storytelling and harnessing a feeling, a sensation.
“All the senses are on fire when you’re reading a poem or even writing one,” Morrison said. “It’s very in the body trying to get out.”
Bonner agreed, “It always feels like being possessed for me. And you’re trying to rid yourself of the possession.”
As much as Bonner and Morrison are special guests of Refocus on Oct. 19, they’re also avid attendees of the festival. Nickel Boys topped Bonner’s list of her most anticipated film screenings. Nightbitch and Winner were at the top of Morrison’s itinerary, along with A Real Young Girl .
“I want to see that, too,” Bonner said in response. “Will you stay awake with me at 10 o’clock on a Saturday night?”
“Yeah, I can do it,” Morrison said.
An Abbreviated Watchlist of Poetic Films from Hannah Bonner and Anna Morrison
- I Saw the TV Glow by Jane Schoenbrun
- Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog
- Force Majeure by Ruben Östlund
- Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky
- We The Animals by Jeremiah Zagar
