You may get the feeling from recent posts that everyone is going to descend on Washington, D.C. this week for the AWP conference. Alas, I'm not going. But that hasn't stopped me from looking at the panels on offer and dreaming about which ones I would attend if I could. Here's one that I would set my alarm for. I asked Stephanie Brown to tell me little bit more about what I'm going to miss:
"Strangers on a Train: What Poets Can Learn from Hitchcock" with Ralph Angel, David St. John, Michelle Mitchell-Foust, Suzanne Lummis, and Stephanie Brown, on Thursday at 10:30 in the Diplomat Ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel, West Lobby.
What will poets learn if they attend this panel? David St. John says, “They will learn why the psychological inner narratives of Hitchcock movies are exactly like the enactments of voice we find in contemporary poems. They will learn why Poe set the stage not only for Hitchcock but also for many late 20th Century poems of revelation and epiphany.” Suzanne Lummis will discuss how to use Hitchcock's films in creative writing classes. She’ll illustrate some of Ezra. Pound's and Hitchcock's principles with a discussion of the visuals and narrative from Hitchcock's early film Sabotage along with comparisons to the work of Wislawa Szymborska. Michelle Mitchell-Foust will talk about Hitchcock’s use of vertical perspective (a camera shooting up and under Anthony Perkins’ chin in Psycho, for instance, rather than the use of a horizontal perspective) and how this choice of perspective be used as a method for both teaching and writing. Stephanie Brown will discuss the way Hitchcock layers narrative in Vertigo, using the landscape of California to create a reverse timeline of California history that runs throughout the story. A writer can layer narratives in the same way via the use of symbols and landscape. Ralph Angel will discuss Hitchcock’s women, a subject as large and complex than any of the others.
If you weren't planning to go, this should change your mind:
-- sdh
