Charlie Kaufman’s arrival at Yale this January was a late-stage diagnosis: the film/poetry literati have unleashed an epidemic of fan behavior and opaque literary questions. We are all so, so sick.
The first symptom of fan behavior: the event was packed. I could spot people rushing out of dining hall dinners to get prime seating. One man sitting next to me on the balcony eagerly showed me his peeling copy of Antkind, Kaufman’s 2020 novel while explaining how Synecdoche, New York had single-handedly saved his life.
The film itself—quite obviously an opener for the main act of witnessing Charlie Kaufman “in person!”—was entirely fine.1 Setting Eva H.D.’s poem to video, Jackals and Fireflies falls into a long tradition of sprawling verse dedicated to the Intangible Transcendence and Mundane Beauty of New York City. Ginsberg has done it; many a youth poet laureate has done it. Eva’s verse is also fine. I like her existentialism; I snapped for a phrase here and there. And in the most literal sense, the short manages to bring Eva’s poem to life—the camera playing flâneur as Eva ventriloquizes the city and its inhabitants, her voice spilling out the mouth of a woman with a gleaming silver tooth.
But to pretend that this short film is anything great, anything beyond the twist-reveal that it also happens to be an ad for the Samsung Galaxy S Series camera,2 is to fall into blind sycophancy. Despite all the fanfare, Kaufman’s direction largely results in vignettes you could find on a bisexual Bushwick creative director’s Instagram story. Eva, on the other hand, tries too hard to universalize New York, her poem’s attempts at multicultural inclusion often falling into farce: “how the wind whips our hair into a mustache or a burka.” Like Kaufman, Eva’s poetry falters in her project of clichés, meandering until she too is lost in her own obsession with alienation. “Watch me sway among the fallen,” she says as she walks out of a diner, the film anticlimactically drawing into the dark.
Here was the second glaring symptom: the presumption of greatness—of artistic purity motivated by the muse or innate genius—is exactly where the subsequent Q&A lost its plot. In retrospect, the conversation was predestined to fail, staging a parody of academia with two Yale professors—Charles Musser and Richard Deming—flanking Kaufman and Eva on the stage of the auditorium. Musser sounded the death knell from the start; he spent several minutes asking his first question, laboring through an extensive historiography of prior collaborations between artists and poets. Perhaps this was merely an occupational hazard and Musser’s instincts as a lecturer overcame him. In any case, I do not remember what his ultimate question was. Meanwhile, Kaufman and Eva, wearing two different shades of blue flannel, fielded the professors’ barrage of long-winded, vague theoretical questions with blithe honesty. Without really intending to, the pair obliterated every question about distance and narrator and artistic instinct with the unrelenting force of shrugs and IDGAF energy.
One particular highlight: upon being asked what she thought a “line of verse” constituted, in Deming’s clear attempt to pose a greater philosophical question about capital-p-Poetry, Eva responded in quite literally the most cutting way possible: isn’t a line of verse just a bunch of words? Again, when asked why she narrated her poem in a whispered, melodic cadence, she answered: I just thought that’s how I was supposed to read it. Over and over again, the interviewers stared back, stunned. It wasn’t clear who everyone was laughing at—Deming or Eva. I started recording the Q&A on a voice memo.
These exchanges between Deming and Eva are emblematic of the event’s problem—the tendency in literary (and film) circles to over-intellectualize craft. Deming and Musser are both practicing artists; you would think that they would be the perfect pair to interview Kaufman and Eva. This is also not the first time I’ve heard an interviewer ask about someone’s philosophy on a “line of verse”; it’s a basic question of poetics. Most poets in Eva’s place would’ve offered thoughtful, contemplative answers worthy of deep sighs and snaps from the audience.
This isn’t a localized issue, either. The poetry world has long endured an epidemic of effusive, drawn-out praise. Read the blurbs for any chapbook or collection published in the last five years and you will find nothing but compliments crystallized into prose poems—glittering with such verbiage as “galactic tone,” “lustrous clarity,” glorifying each books’ divine capacity to open the reader’s “third eye”. The poetry world is insular with its small presses and Twitter mutuals, and here are the consequences: friends write blurbs for each other, the same names circulating through both the covers and backs of each chapbook. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a staunchly negative review in the annals of online lit mags. In the end, poetry as a medium loses; already, the literary world has alienated regular readers with its sociolect of metonymic praise and theoretical doublespeak.
A guy in the row before me called Eva crazy. Here is what he and the professors on stage should’ve known—despite her publications and status as a winner of the Montreal International Poetry Prize—brief, fleeting emblems of prestige—Eva is a fuckass poet who bartends at a dive bar. Call her esoteric, call her enigmatic, call her pretentious. Maybe even call her style evocative of the #WhiteWomanMFA. But she is the antithesis of the contemporary poetry establishment’s obsession with abstraction and godhood, and for that she has proven herself to be far more authentic than the draped set of self-edification surrounding her.
There were still instances where the Q&A shined. They were the conversations’ most tangible anchors—when audience members simply asked about specific figures or moments they enjoyed in the film. Perhaps the pun about a duck with a baseball hat on, or a gray-haired woman sitting on a street corner. And despite their interviewers’ waffling questions, Kaufman and Eva managed to distill run-on sentences and buzzwords into their most easily graspable parts, forming a startlingly humanistic treatment of artist practice. When asked about how they felt about this “unique bridging of mediums”, Eva answered plainly: “I was just surprised that Charlie wanted to make a film with me.”
Her response is what redeems Jackals and Fireflies, if only for a few flickering moments.
There is a simple delight in creating anything amid absurd circumstances, in producing and mass-distributing a poem on a technology conglomerate’s dime. If it is hard to make a film these days, as Kaufman has often said, it is even harder to publish a 20-minute-long poem. But the incongruity between the two visiting artists and the professors’ questions reveals a fundamental issue in the way we—professors, chronic Letterboxd users, self-professed critics—have disconnected art from its practicalities. So no, I don’t care if Jackals and Fireflies was shitty. Kaufman’s visit was a diagnostic, not a disaster. That is what matters.
