WATCH TRAILER

The Poetry Deal: A Film with Diane di Prima

A film by Melanie La Rosa

US | 2011 | 27 minutes | Color | DVD | English | Order No. 121074

Host a screening
Watch on Kanopy
Watch on Docuseek

SYNOPSIS

She remains the most famous woman poet of the Beat Generation; her friend Allen Ginsberg called her “heroic in life and poetics.” THE POETRY DEAL is an impressionistic documentary about legendary poet Diane di Prima. Still actively writing in her late 70s in San Francisco, where she is poet laureate, di Prima is fierce, funny and philosophical. She is a pioneer who broke boundaries of class and gender to publish her writing, and THE POETRY DEAL opens a window looking back through more than 50 years of poetry, activism, and cultural change, providing a unique women’s perspective of the Beat movement. Much of the story is told through di Prima’s recorded readings, including a deeply moving reading of her unpublished poem The Poetry Deal, reflecting on her relationship with her art. Essential for women’s studies, poetry studies, women’s history courses and more, THE POETRY DEAL puts di Prima’s life and work on screen in a unique, beautiful portrait using rare archival footage, impressionistic scenes and powerful stories told by friends and colleagues.

PRESS

"In just 27 minutes, The Poetry Deal brings into clear view the strong determination and e’lan vital of this remarkable poet."

Ingrid Swanberg Feminist Collections

“[V]isually powerful and provocative, and a tribute to this unique poet’s transformative alchemy as thinker, visionary, and trail-blazer. I highly recommend this documentary to literary scholars, students, writers and anyone interested in the culture of these complicated times.”

Anne Waldman, Poet Co-founder, Distinguished Prof, Jack Kerouac School, Naropa Univ.

“The film is a visual poem -- a great way to experience DiPrima direct."

Bob Holman, Bowery Poetry Club Endangered Language Alliance Visiting Professor of Writing

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

  • Michigan Womyns Music Festival

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Melanie La Rosa

Melanie is an award-winning filmmaker, producer, and educator. Her documentaries focus on social issue stories and have generated critical acclaim and applause at human rights festivals and organizations. These include: Sir: Just A Normal Guy (2001), which was reviewed as a sensitive first-person portrait of a widely misunderstood area of human experience; and The Poetry Deal: a film with Diane di Prima (2011), which was released to acclaim as a rare glimpse into this avant-garde poet's storied life. Both films have screened nationally and internationally, and are in wide educational distribution. Sir: Just A Normal Guy won two awards and The Poetry Deal has been widely cited in literary and scholarly research.

Melanie's films have been recognized with grants from the New York State Arts Council, the Eastman Fund, the Brooklyn Arts Council, The Puffin Foundation, The Yip Harburg Foundation, the Solutions Journalism Project, the IFP Project Involve, and a residency at the Starry Night artist retreat. Her celebratory video about the historical importance of LGBTQ literature, made for the Lambda Literary Awards, was featured to outstanding reviews on www.advocate.com. (7/19)

Beyond her own filmmaking, Melanie also worked for Emmy- and Peabody-award winning journalist Maria Hinojosa at Futuro Media Group, as a Special Projects Producer, creating multi-platform media events for the NPR show “Latino USA” and the PBS series “America By The Numbers with Maria Hinojosa.”

Melanie is an Assistant Professor teaching film and media production at Pace University. She grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and lives in New York City.

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN

Sir: Just a Normal Guy

Screened to acclaim at Gay & Lesbian Film Festivals worldwide and LBGT events across the nation, this candid and courageous portrait of more than 15-months in the female-to-male (FTM) transition of Jay Snider explores both the emotional and physical changes of this profound experience--beginning prior to hormones and concluding after top surgery. Footage shot before and after the surgery captures dramatic physical transitions, while intimate interviews with Jay, his ex-husband, his best friend and his lesbian-identified partner aptly capture the emotional and psychological shifts that occur during the process. With support from those closest to him, Jay’s experience is remarkably positive, though not without conflict. During the course of the film, he renews long-distant ties with his brother, but also faces permanent estrangement from his parents. SIR is an in-depth and humanizing exploration of the challenges, discrimination, and alienation faced by transgender and gender expansive individuals. Jay’s conflicted feelings around queer identification are portrayed along with his significant other’s continued identification as lesbian. A much-needed look at FTM transition, the film demonstrates both the fluidity of sexual identification and that love and human resilience can triumph over deep-rooted differences.
Learn more

The Body of a Poet

An imaginary biopic, THE BODY OF A POET centers on the efforts of a group of young lesbians of color to devise a fitting tribute to one of this century's great visionaries. Its genre-bending celebration of the life and work of Audre Lorde, black lesbian poet and political activist, daringly meshes diverse media conventions and techniques as it explores Lorde's trajectory from birth to death. Refreshing and visually stunning, this brave film features assured acting by a dedicated cast and a taut script comprising the work of contemporary African American lesbian poets.
Learn more

Mitsuye and Nellie

This absorbing documentary examines the lives of Asian Americans through the inspirational poetry of Mitsuye Yamada and Nellie Wong. Interviews, rare archival footage, intimate family scenes and a lively dialogue between these fascinating women underscore the different histories of Chinese and Japanese Americans but also shared experiences of biculturalism and generational difference. Ideal for literature and poetry classes, women's studies and Asian American groups.
Learn more

Between the Lines: Asian American Women's Poetry

BETWEEN THE LINES offers rare interviews with over 15 major Asian-Pacific American women poets. Organized in interwoven sections such as Immigration, Language, Family, Memory, and Spirituality, it is a sophisticated merging of Asian-American history and identity with the questions of performance, voice, and image. This engaging documentary serves as poetry reading, virtual anthology, and, perhaps most importantly, moving testimony about gender, ethnicity, aesthetics, and creative choice. The carefully edited interviews and poems read reflect the filmmaker's desire to show both individual voice and diversity within the Asian-American women’s community. Theoretically as rich as the images and poems provided, there is also an implicit conversation in the film about the possibility and usefulness of an Asian-American women’s aesthetic/poetic. Using carefully selected archival images, historical footage, and brilliant photography as the scrim through which we hear the poets, BETWEEN THE LINES provides important and lively viewing for literature, history, ethnic and women’s studies classes.” - Joseph Boles, Visiting Scholar, Center for Visual Culture, Bryn Mawr
Learn more

Beah: A Black Woman Speaks

BEAH: A BLACK WOMAN SPEAKS Celebrates the life of legendary African American actress, poet and political activist Beah Richards, best known for her Oscar nominated role in GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER.
Learn more

Tillie Olsen: A Heart in Action

This revelatory documentary is an inspiring homage to Tillie Lerner Olsen – a renegade, revolutionary, distinguished fiction and non-fiction writer, feminist, humanist, labor organizer and social activist. Politically active, class conscious, deeply joined to the world, Tillie countered the very core of American writing by immortalizing the lives of working class women and single mothers. Her short stories “Tell Me a Riddle,” and “I Stand Here Ironing,” galvanized the literary world and set in motion an essential new perspective on the lives of ordinary women. Filmmaker Ann Hershey tells not only the story of Olsen as a writer, but also documents her life as an activist. Extended interviews with Olsen during the last years of her life are deftly interspersed with footage from her readings, lectures and book signings as well as with archive materials and comments from notable feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Alice Walker. A perfect companion film in courses covering Olsen’s literature, this documentary is also recommended for women’s studies, labor studies, political studies and American history courses.
Learn more

Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker?

A multi-layered work featuring animation, archival footage and interviews with the likes of William Burroughs, Carolee Schneemann and Richard Hell, Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker by Austrian artist Barbara Caspar and co-produced by Annette Pisacane (Nico Icon) and Markus Fischer, is a thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late outlaw writer and punk icon, whose formally inventive novels, published from the ’70s through the mid-’90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon. A beguiling and intensely contradictory figure, Acker is best known for books which creatively appropriated texts from Great White Male writers, retelling them in an emotionally raw, sexually blunt, and politically questioning female voice. With her conceptual art videos in the ’70s, her close-cropped dyed blond hair, her tattoos, and her piercings, Acker was a performance artist, proto riot grrl, and living link to the transgressive authors of the ’50s and ’60s US and French experimental fiction scenes. Caspar has made a film that captures the essence of both Acker the writer and Acker the person while celebrating the avant-garde legacy of an artist who forever expanded the limits of self-expression. — Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine
Learn more

Poetry of Resilience

Academy® Award nominated director Katja Esson’s (FERRY TALES, LATCHING ON) exquisitely made film explores survival, strength and the power of the human heart, body and soul—as expressed through poetry. She highlights six different poets, who individually survived Hiroshima, the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, the Kurdish Genocide in Iraq, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Iranian Revolution. By summoning the creative voice of poetry to tell stories of survival and witness, each reclaims humanity and dignity in the wake of some of history’s most dehumanizing circumstances. POETRY OF RESILIENCE gives us an intimate look into the language of the soul and brings us closer to understanding the insanity of war and how art will flourish, in spite of any obstacle.This film is recommended for courses in poetry studies, literature, peace and conflict studies and genocide studies.
Learn more

Regarding Susan Sontag

REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is an intimate and nuanced investigation into the life of one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the 20th century. Endlessly curious, passionate and gracefully outspoken throughout her career, Susan Sontag became one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of her generation. This beautifully constructed documentary tracks Sontag’s life through evocative experimental images, archival materials, accounts from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, as well as her own words as read by Patricia Clarkson. From her early infatuation with books to her first experience in a gay bar; from her early marriage to her 15-year relationship with legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz, REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG is a fascinating look at a towering cultural critic and writer whose works on photography, war, illness, and terrorism continue to resonate today. REGARDING SUSAN SONTAG premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast nationwide on HBO.
Learn more

The Rest I Make Up

A portrait of visionary Cuban-American dramatist Maria Irene Fornes and the story of her unexpected collaboration with filmmaker Michelle Memran.
Learn more
Shopping Cart