By Kira Logan
Showing up for his graduate creative writing program at New York University in his only suit jacket, as recipient of a creative writing scholarship, the poet and filmmaker Shane Book thought he was “hot shit.”
“I got quite drunk and stood on a chair when they made the announcement of the scholarship recipient — which was me. ‘I am currently homeless, so if anyone would like to…’ then I fell onto the table of food and rolled across onto the program director,” Book recounted to a UC Santa Barbara audience last week.
Poet and filmmaker Shane Book, who spoke at UCSB’s Old Little Theater.
Photo courtesy of The Poetry Foundation.
That first night at NYU, which included both his award ceremony and an act of humiliation in front of his future professors, was one of many anecdotes Book shared at An Evening of Film and Poetry With Shane Book in the Old Little Theater.
The College of Creative Studies, Film and Media Studies, and the Center for Black Studies Research all co-sponsored the event for Book to screen two of his short films and read a selection of poetry from his award-winning books.
Book was mentored by the late U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, who, as Book said, did not hold back in his feedback to students.
“He would tell my classmates: ‘The first part of this poem is shit. Give it to The New Yorker. They pay well, I just had a poem in there last week. Submit the second part of the poem to an obscure literary journal. It’s really good,” Book said, citing Levine.
Book has lived in many different places around the world, including Ottawa, Philadelphia, Brazil, San Francisco, Lynchburg, and Santa Cruz. When he was living in New York City, he used his poem-turned-short-film, Dust, to pay his rent for a few months.
“I always thought of this as a movie when I wrote it,” Book said.
His adaptation of a poem into a movie then migrated to the theater. For the film version, many of the scenes were shot in a hotel room in Philadelphia on 35mm film, with “so many rookie mistakes,” Book recalled.
Now 54 years old, Book explains how the pre-digital era of film was both hard to manage and to keep track of.
“We were given ends of film from a photography studio in Philadelphia, and we didn’t know how long each strip of film was. We had someone in another room with a hand in a bag cranking the film to let us know how much time was on each strip,” Book said. “But he was getting them wrong! We would be prepared to shoot for four minutes when there were really two minutes of film.”
Reflecting back on his filming experience, Book described the naiveté he displayed with his student films, both logistically and thematically.
The audience at UC Santa Barbara’s Old Little Theater watches poet and filmmaker Shane Book’s poem-turned-short-film, Dust, at his recent speaking event.
“You use grammar and syntax to fit moments in poetry together, but in movies you can’t fake that if the two different scenes don’t fit together,” Book said.
The short film, Dust, switches scenes between a young man bathing his grandfather in a nursing home and the same young man and his girlfriend sharing a romantic bath together.
“We shot stuff later, we cut it all together. It took several years in total,” Book said.
His second short film, Praise and Blame, also had its filming complications, despite the already accomplished cast of Costas Mandylor, Alberto Bonilla and Pun Bandhu.
“It’s November in New York, there’s been a hurricane, and there’s no electricity or heat in the old hotel we were shooting at,” Book said.
Mandylor, despite the cold, showed up to shoot in flip flops and a muscle tank top, later explaining to Book that he didn’t know how to buy clothes or pack. Book hired a cast member to take care of Mandylor, who bought him milk and wine and spent his money for him.
“If you ever have to make a movie in these adverse conditions, it bonds you together. We had moments of solidarity as a group. It was like being at a really cheap and uncomfortable camp,” Book said.
He described a huge crew made up of 50 people who would sleep in the day and huddle together while shooting scenes to maintain warmth.
Book then read some of his poems from his many books, including: Dad Bod, Caribbean Flex, Glock Weather, Dust, Santa Cruz, and HNIC.
“You don’t really want to have the words be exactly the image, because it gets boring,” he said, advising the student poets in the audience to balance detail and vagueness.
“For poetry, you want to have images and descriptions but there’s a moment of too much. You don’t want the detail standing into the whole,” he said.
Book also stressed the importance of collaboration in creative writing, while maintaining one’s individual voice.
“I find it really generative to have collaboration. It’s nice being able to write in solitude and take it to be made, but being around too many cooks can spoil the broth.”
Kira Logan is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in English. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.