Book Review - Jason Schindler's The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry that Inspires Them

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 Schindler in The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry that Inspires Them. 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.]

Article Author: Stephen Foster

Stephen Foster (no relation to the composer) plays the violin and piano, but so what? He doesn't play them well. So he writes about music, has written extensively about rock, soul, jazz, and all things alt. He goes to sleep listening to Portishead every Tuesday and Thursday. …

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