These two films, I’m convinced, are meant to be considered side-by-side. The first film raises uncomfortable questions about art only tentatively answered that the second film then answers unequivocally.

Poeta (Poet)

The Poet is a Columbian movie about the Columbian poetry scene which has quite a bit of similarities to the American poetry scene. The movie follows Oscar Restrepo, a middle-aged, nearly-homeless, alcoholic career poet who’s last success was two books from his debut as a young man. His early success was bright, a National Poetry Prize and lots of critical attention. But he’s blown that up many times over since then , alienating his family, his teaching colleagues, other contemporary poets and even his own daughter.

At one point early on the movie asks “Poets? Are you stupid?”

Oscar’s beacon of literary light is Columbian modernist José Asunción Silva and like a Don Quixote Oscar will accept nothing less than the life of a full-time Poet. He repeat his early manifesto at a poetry reading, “to be a vain and misfortunate poet” and in this he has succeeded. But his books aren’t selling and his audiences are aging and small. He is full of self-importance and rages when he gets drunk about all the literary wrongs. He carries around beaten-up copies of his old paperback books but he also can’t seem to finish a third book. His passion and restless youth were a dead end. He is starting to realize he didn’t have the talent to keep it going. He mopes around like a failed poet.

In comparison, Gabriel García Márquez is on Columbian paper money (which irks him) and his main rival is Efrain, a charismatic poet who still draws large audiences full of young and pretty girls.

But Oscar’s sister helps him get another teaching job and the poets at the Poetry Center (a group that has no money but plenty of wealthy and affected benefactors) keep trying to help him by hosting his readings. Both his deadbeat friends and the strategic Efrain think the secret to writing “fucking amazing poetry” is writing about topics the rich Europeans care about: war, violence, poverty, the Indigenous, the Amazon and gay people (or maybe, the concede, it’s just good management or an early suicide).

At a Poetry Center gathering for Efrain’s reading,  middle-class poets theorize about their privilege and why the underclass doesn’t produce more poets. One young girl thinks it’s the teen pregnancy problem. But the group yearns for a lower-class poet to emerge. And one does.

While teaching Oscar meets a teen student named Yurlady and she turns out to be a talented poet, as much as a teen girl wants to be anyway. She’s writing about her adolescent feelings and that’s as much as she cares about the genre. She prefers makeup, hair and painting her nails with her friends. And her drawings.

But Oscar sees in her salvation, not only with his stalled career but also to understand how to reconcile with his estranged daughter who is the same age as Yurlady. Oscar struggles to mentor her because she finds the middle-class Poetry Center poets “weird.” And her ambivalence has a lot to do with class. The underprivileged kids in the school where Oscar teaches have different ideas about poetry than his own. They see only its practically: will it set food on the table (prize money) or win the heart of a girl? They’re under no delusions about art’s function in their lives. And they surely don’t see the point in sacrificing for it. Art driving social change is an argument the Poetry Center tries to make but on that is lost on them. As are declarations of “art will save us.”

At the other end of things, the Poetry Center benefactor (as a member of the upper class) and the two administrators of the Poetry Center (representatives of the middle class), they latch on to the teen girl as the poetic representative of the lower class they’ve been seeking.

These are all core issues in American poetry privilege as well.

Efrain talks the young student into writing a completely pandering poem about her race in order to try to win the big poetry prize from the upper-class judges. This sickens Oscar, who has never strategized for his work in his life. His intentions toward his student are pure on many, many levels  (in contrast to the popular but comparatively lecherous and cynical Efrain).

And although Oscar’s mentorship is failing with his student, she does help him reconcile with his daughter. But this all blows up when the young teen gets drunk at the Poetry Festival after reading her strategic poem. Oscar makes several innocent but bad decisions and everyone but everyone turns against him. Even you, the audience.

But the young teen Yurlady redeems herself in the end, not only reaching out to his “I’ve-had-it-with-you” daughter but finally bringing Oscar to understand how she writes what she writes. This inspires Oscar to dump his old mentors and pretenses and start writing again with simple emotion. His new poem ends the movie:

“Here I am
A Man
Old-fashioned dinosaur
Bearer of grievances
Deserving of condemnation
Fragile dreamer
But don’t lose faith yet
In this sad poet
For he is trying to write
a happy poem.”

Which is all to say there is no pretense in the effortless poetry of a teenage girl. And in the face of all who dismiss her (or want to exploit her), Oscar is the one genius to recognize this.

This movie is good at capturing the pretentions of the whole poetry scene and the class issues it raises. And the movie raises good questions about the power of art to change lives in every class category. It’s no accident a Charles Borkowski poster and references to Burkowski occur a few times in the movie, but it’s unclear what the power of poetry and art really is by the end and I think the film makes you think about that.

And think about the kinds of art that has been created and consumed in lower-class neighborhoods: graffiti artists, mural artists, early disco and rap music, low-fi music.

On the other hand, the fact that this film is a piece of art itself is significant, that the film has made art of this story about the value of the art of poetry. This film art is making us think about the value of art and poetry (at least as the middle and upper-class people who will be watching it).

Monsieur Big Bang came from a situation with his mother of being somewhat hopelessly broke all while in the midst of middle-class Overland Park, Kansas. So we talked about this movie in that context. It reminded me of Sarah Lawrence and two of the poets in my graduating master’s class (2 out of maybe 30 or 40?) who were not raised in middle or upper-class homes. (As a reference, Sarah Lawrence was the most expensive undergraduate school at the time and full of children of the wealthy art class. For example the daughter of Tom Petty was there at the time and there was a false rumor the daughter of Peter Gabriel was there as well.) And I remember these two as it were “up-from-nothing” poets being actively bemused by the often clueless privilege of the other wealthy students pretending to be bohemian. I gave one of those poets a ride back to Boston one weekend and he said as much, adamantly refusing to drop me off near his downtown Boston apartment.

Monsieur Big Bang was much lest bemused at a Sarah Lawrence alumni party we went to at a mansion in Los Angeles where one broke formerly-rich-kid poet posed the philosophical question to our table: “is it better to grow up rich and end up poor or grow up poor and end up rich.” At that point Monsieur Big Bang decided we should leave. Rich liberals, he said were better than rich conservatives but it was still hard to listen to their speeches “talking down to poor people while thinking they were helping them.” He usually points back to this song as indicative of his experiences with it. “Everybody hates a tourist, especially one who thinks it’s such a laugh.” Sarah Lawrence students had a tendency to be these types of tourists.

The movie’s Poetry Center’s launch party for their annual festival had some of the same spirit. So I asked Monsieur Big Bang about the power of art and poetry.  He said if you would have asked him 30 years ago he would have believed in the idealism and alchemy of art. But that now he sees art as a luxury item people with money use to stay off boredom.”

Ouch. That’s kind of harsh on many levels. Considering how much art we consume.

But I have this different belief about it. I do believe art still feeds my heart and soul (and, yes, this is a luxury opportunity for a middle-class me, no doubt). But if the middle and upper-classes create and control social policies that affect the lower classes, managing our consciences is very important. And it means art is important for all the classes, even if we don’t consume the same art and entertainment.

And I think that’s why this movie was even bothered to be made.

Come See Me In The Good Light

I have never seen such a life affirming movie in my life. And I had been waiting for months for time to watch it, since late last year when my friends told me about it. I was afraid it would be too sad for me. But although I was a bit weepy 17 minutes in, overall it wasn’t that bad.

That said, it is a movie is about cancer…and death…and poetry.

But Andrea Gibson is not Oscar Restrepo from Poeta. Like at all. Andrea Gibson is the anti-Oscar. Gibson was known as “the James Dean of the gay world” and “the rock star poet” for the fact that their (Gibson chose a non-binary pronoun but was not transgender) spoken word tour could fill a theatrical musical venues mostly used for music artists.

In contrast, the audiences seen in Poeta are more typical of normal poetry readings: a few people in a classroom. Even spoken-word festivals and big poetry festivals fail to pull in the kind of crowds Gibson once had.

And yet I had never heard of Andrea Gibson until they died and made poet headlines. I’m more of a paper/medium poet myself and do not see many spoken-word shows. But my lesbian friends knew this poet very well. And I dug out a book I had received as a gift and found Gibson to be one of the most universally accessible poets I’ve read in a long time.

And after seeing this movie, I feel her popularity might arise from coming across like the best kind of motivational speaker, both metaphorical and direct and full of hard-earned joy.

There are so many wonderful dimensions of this movie for writers to enjoy:

(1) Andrea Gibson and wife Megan Falley (a poet herself and poetry teacher) compare writing and editing styles.

(2) Gibson and Falley compare their differing relationships to words. Gibson says, “why write a poem that’s over somebody’s head. You know more than that over somebody’s heart?” (I would argue that poets like Emily Dickinson are never trying to do write complicated poems but are writing out of her own minds.

(3) Gibson talking about performing their poems and the idea of losing their voice (or the part of your work that makes you feel like yourself. This comes up when their cancer treatments take away Gibson’s voice and they have to choose whether or not to keep taking those treatments and losing forever that part of themselves.

(4) Gibson talking about how poetry saved their life and how poetry continued to add value to their life and the lives of their audiences, particularly how writing and performing poetry was instrumental in their struggle to both come out and to deal with a lifetime of suicidal ideation.

(5) The tactile quality of Gibson holding her book, their physical way of moving through the movie and the quality of Andrea’s voice. Particularly that amazing mouth and that smile. So distinctly Gibson and so connected to their identity as a spoken-word poet and advocate for their friends.

(5) The idea of generosity in art, Gibson asking “what can I create to give to people?” You can tell from Gibson’s performances, they are a generous performer.

(6) Gibson talks about craft a bit, how they come up with the poem’s rhythms and cadence first, the “sound” of the poem before placing in the words, which reminds me of Joan Didion (and Didion will come up again below) when she talks about her process in Blue Nights.

(7) Gibson connects their poetry career to their high school basketball career and wanting to “end on a make.” The logistics of planning that last show and their health concerns are negotiated, along with how to perform when their vision and memory are slipping away.

And then there are the human elements of the movie:

(1) Gibson’s take on her gender identity before and after the cancer diagnosis and all the issues in the movie around gender and sexual orientation.

(2) This is a movie about life and death and Gibson’s belief that cancer made them more of themselves and a person who was “easier to find.” How acceptance of death let “all the sweetness trickle in…then I get to be with light.”

This movie also illustrates how death is a separation from the beloved beyond any potential for wishful thinking. Gibson knows this and worries about how Falley will cope after Gibson’s death. This also harkens back to Joan Didion’s struggle after the loss of her husband, writer John Donne and her book about that, The Year of Magical Thinking. Isn’t so much of love magical thinking already? Which is what makes the idea of death so clearly profound here. Falley talks about “the weight of holding it all.” Unlike Joan Didion, this couple gets to consider everything before it happens.

(3) This movie is also about love, sorrow and the gift of aging. Gibson and Falley look at themselves in an “aging app” and this gives Gibson insight into her love for Falley. This movie is primarily a love story. The piano decoupaged with love poems. (!!) I was specifically moved when Gibson calls Falley “bad ass.” Coming from Gibson, this showed how they recognized bad-assery as far from the loud, aggressive stereotypical package, but rather in a very feminine and serene person.

(4) Dogs are never referenced specifically but they quietly co-star in the movie quite movingly.

(5) Gibson’s humor in the face of her dying. Their very funny. The whole thumb joke.

(6) Dealing with illness and feeling versus the data of medical test results. We faithfully follow Gibson through symptoms of pain and abstract test result numbers to track the progress of the cancer.

This is a hard, hard journey getting ready to die. It’s a roller-coaster of extreme emotions. (I know this myself, having just lost my mother to a series of long illnesses.)

(7) Megan Falley’s meditations on the body, her own insecurities about her body in contrast to Gibson dealing with cancer and what it does to the body, how caner puts emotional wounds into perspective for Falley . She focuses on the female stomach as a site of insecurity, a theme that I was very….familiar with. Gibson’s initial response to that when they met was ultimately liberating for Falley (and very, very moving).

(8) And just the relationship between Gibson and Falley is one of the most wonderful things about the movie, their couplehood a bedrock throughout the challenge of illness, their communication with each other, unflinching and ultimately defining on film what a healthy relationship looks like, its purpose and its gift.

This reminds me of Mary Roach’s book on sex, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, and how scientific studies found that the couples most satisfied with their sex lives happen to be gay. And they surmise this is because gay couples communicate better than heterosexual couples do. My theory has always been, based on watching my gay friends who are couples, that because gay couples are so constantly under threat from anti-gay groups, that good communication could literally be a matter of life and death. And constant threats of violence would sure put the mind-fucks of love games into stark relief. It’s crucial to be clear and open here. This movie illustrates good communication in various shades of possibility, a mentor to heterosexual couples who struggle understanding what good communication looks like between two people.

In the same vein, Gibson’s exes populate the movie. (One is her manager.) Gibson has stayed friends with them and they freely discuss their experiences with each other in friendly and supportive ways. Gibson says gay people tend to stay friends with their exes because they have lost so much family, they are hard-pressed to lose any member of a “found family.” Again, another profound and beautiful lesson for heterosexual couples who are suffering a complete breakdown right now in communicating with each other.

Poems excerpted in the movie:

Songs in the movie:

  • “The Story” by Belinda Carlisle (used as the performance song for Gibson’s last appearance)
  • “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” by Belinda Carlisle and Sara Bareilles based on verses by Andrea Gibson (credits)

Sara Barrielles executive produced this movie, which I didn’t know before this weekend but I’ve been reading a lot about Bareilles forthcoming album on grief. I read her Rolling Stone interview where she talks about how brave and open Gibson and her family and friends were in this documentary and how it inspired her to be more open and how it tied in with the grief album she made.

The fact that poetry can be motivational speaking returns us to our first movie’s crisis of purpose. And this movie is the answer to the other one.

As Gibson says in the poem “Guardian Angel Fish”….

“Anyone who thinks poetry is frivolous has never needed someone to tell them something unpleasantly hard…beautifully.” Gibson was a career poet who made a career out of affirming the role of art and poetry.

The last words of the movie are Gibson’s meditation on time and the passage of the years, months, weeks, days and seconds she has been measuring her remaining life with:

“Wow. I got this life. Wow. I got tomorrow too.” Of the final seconds Gibson says, “Damn. I wish I had a million more of these.”

The movie took a year to capture in 2024, with filming finally ending in December of 2024. Gibson died 7 months later in July of 2025. She died surrounded by her parents, friends, ex-girlfriends, the dogs and Megan Falley. Her last words allegedly were “I fucking loved my life.”

I sincerely wish Oscar Restrepo (and all of us) get to that place with life, love and poetry, too.