the haunted, frightened trees
on Louise Glück, Taylor Swift, and the best movie I saw last year
Louise Glück died last fall. To call her my favorite poet would be to drastically understate the impact her work has had on me. She’s one of those artists whose arrival in my life cleaved it permanently into before and after: as part of a section in our Odyssey unit in which we read a range of poems inspired by Homer, my eighth grade English teacher handed out selections from Meadowlands, and I was no longer the same. Every word I write bears and always will bear her influence, not because I am trying to ape her style — among other things, I am far more sentimental than she ever allowed herself to be, and not nearly so concise — but because discovering her poems altered, fundamentally and forever, my relationship with language. Her exquisite precision is ever among the asymptotes towards which I am content to fail.
If you’re familiar with her body of work, you know that death was one of her recurring preoccupations. Vita Nova, probably her most optimistic collection, nonetheless opens with a poem that ends: “Surely spring has been returned to me, this time / not as a lover but as a messenger of death; yet / it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.” You also likely know that she was funnier than one might be tempted to assume based on the fragments of her work that tend to circulate; the Tumblr girlies, god bless their morose little hearts, never seem to quote “I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean / your cold feet all over my dick.” That’s from “Anniversary” — not one of the Meadowlands poems my teacher copied for us, but one which was as crucial to the revelatory impact of her work as any in her more lyrical mode. I simply didn’t know that you could do that in a poem, much less a poem that sat alongside ruminations in the voices of Penelope and Odysseus. I didn’t know that a writer was allowed to call on the full scope of their imaginative inheritance such that the classic and the crass were equally viable as material in the service of the same truth. There was nothing in my life to connect these lines to, but it didn’t matter; what I was reading felt so bracingly, exhilaratingly real that I recognized it anyway as belonging to the world in which I lived, the world that was grand and petty and stupid and profound, that — like her poems — could cut me open and make me laugh.
Even the title of the book that upended my internal landscape is a bit of a joke. Meadowlands sounded to me like a fairy-tale word, the green and sweetly scented place in the stories where the maidens lie on the dew-speckled grass, or else possibly like an allusion to the Elysian Fields of the ancient Greek underworld where Odysseus, as a hero, was destined to wind up. I was baffled by “Meadowlands 3,” in which one speaker asks, “How could the Giants name / that place the Meadowlands?” — an inscrutable line that I could only assume referred to some myth I was unfamiliar with involving the kingdom of the giants; I wrote off the subsequent pivot to New Jersey as a poetic link too abstruse for me to comprehend. It was years before I learned that Meadowlands is a very real place in actual New Jersey. Specifically, it’s a sports complex, which shed some light both on why I’d never heard of it and on the lines that follow: “It has / about as much in common with a pasture / as would the inside of an oven.” A poet’s complaint about the refusal of the actual world to obey the laws of language — but it’s a little funny, too.
Given her own wryness, I like to think she wouldn’t mind knowing I found some dark humor in the timing of her death: October 13, right in the middle of the month from which the Glück poem which has made the rounds in my own internet sphere more than any other takes its title. In that poem, it’s no longer spring, but there is still beauty to be found in the dimming light — “The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful” — and an attachment to the fading world is to be considered its own reward: “Surely it is a privilege to approach the end / still believing in something.” I hope she did.
The day after her death, I went to the Museum of the Moving Image for a screening of American Movie, Chris Smith and Sarah Price’s 1999 documentary following Wisconsin native Mark Borchardt on his quest to make a movie. I saw many good movies in 2023, but this was the only one I walked out of instantly knowing it had entered my personal canon forever. It is, by turns, so achingly poignant and impossibly funny that I would say it feels like a lost Christopher Guest project except that I don’t think any of those movies, which I like very much, have moved me so deeply or made me laugh as hard.
Much of both the hilarity and emotional weight alike come from Mark, who — to call him “a character” does not do him justice. Mark is like if the guy from Bob Dylan songs were a real person who was also obsessed with horror movies. He is, in no particular order, a heavy drinker, a father of three, a high school dropout, a veteran of both the local school district’s gifted program and (possibly?) the US armed forces, a newspaper delivery man, and an aspiring filmmaker. He likes to drive to the airport parking lot to work on his screenplay and identifies as half-Christian, half-Satanist. One of his brothers tells the documentarians that he expected Mark would become a serial killer, and it’s not clear whether he’s joking. He is given to rambling, impassioned monologues that sometimes twist into startlingly evocative turns of phrase: “You’re going to be in a drive-in, a beautiful drive-in, with an umbrella of gray over you. You’re going to be in a junkyard with thousands of rusted memories just laying there.”
Mark has, perhaps, missed his true vocation as a folk preacher/spoken-word poet, but he does have a calling: he wants to direct horror movies. In one way, he has been doing this, as family lore goes, since a neighbor gave him a camera at the age of fourteen, and clips of young Mark and friends from the first volume (of either three or four, depending on whether you count unfinished entries) of The More the Scarier back this up. In another, this is his great unfulfilled dream. American Movie announces itself as though it’s going to follow his attempt to make Northwestern, his first feature, but he abandons that early on, realizing that it’s a tall order to make a feature film with literally no money. He focuses his attention instead on finishing another abandoned project — Coven, a direct-to-market short about a guy who tries out Alcoholic Anonymous only to discover the group he’s joined has more sinister aims — in the hopes that the sales of Coven will provide enough profit to get Northwestern off the ground.
As business plans go, it’s… optimistic. His fundraising for Coven mostly involves cajoling his elderly Uncle Bill through the necessary steps to secure an “investment” and ignoring his bills. He is joined in this endeavor by a ragtag crew of creative types in Wisconsin looking for an outlet or a gig, locals in search of something to do and intrigued by the possibility of helping the weirdest man they’ve ever met achieve his dream, and friends and family tagging along out of personal loyalty. Chief among these is Mike Schank, a nearly affectless but endearingly stalwart sweetheart who has traded what seems to have been a genuinely terrifying set of drug habits for the controlled risk of scratch-offs. He recounts how happy it made him to discover in Mark someone who would come over and drink vodka with him with a remembered joy so pure it suggests he would do anything for the person who once gave him someone to drink vodka with; given what we see of Mark’s current drinking habits, the fact that their friendship has survived Mike’s sobriety is one of cinema’s great love stories. Mike tells a story about a trip that landed him in the hospital that I won’t spoil here but is the hardest I laughed in a theater all year, has hair the curlygirl subreddit would covet, and is better at playing guitar than I will ever be at anything requiring manual dexterity.
An obvious concern with a project like this, one where you can feel the thrill the documentarians must have experienced as they realized what they were getting on camera, is that it will veer into meanness or worse: did Smith and Price follow around these guys for two years just so the type of person who would go to see an independent documentary could laugh at the hapless, deluded yokels? The movie, as I have said several times, is funny, and it knows it’s funny; it can’t not know. I mean, Jesus, Mark pronounces Coven with a long o, as in frozen, and is not only shocked but indignantly offended to learn anyone might pronounce the word another way: “I don’t want my movie to rhyme with oven!” He’s absurd, undeniably, but the movie takes pains not to portray him as simply a buffoon. We see some of the complexities of his life: his acrimonious relationship with the mother of his children; the tenderness with which he coaxes Uncle Bill into the bath, so gentle it can’t be brushed off as an attempt to suck up for some more cash; his existential crisis about finding himself at thirty years old, cleaning shit off the bathroom walls at his part-time job.
The other thing the movie makes clear is — Mark may be ridiculous, but he’s not an idiot. And I’m not just talking about his stacks of books on filmmaking, or the body of technical knowledge still required twenty-five years ago to make a film — not a good film; any film — or even about the fact that as a concept, “demonic AA meeting” honestly kind of rips. I mean: he knows he’s not George Romero. He berates himself for his failures as both a director (“There were stilted performances and I did nothing to rectify the situation”) and a screenwriter (“There’s some corny dialogue that would make the Pope weep”), and the tone of his recriminations will be familiar who to anyone who has ever wrestled with the amorphous brambled shadow known as the creative process and lost, which is just about anyone who has ever tried to make anything. The days when every sentence is ugly, every connection tenuous, every metaphor somehow simultaneously ramshackle and leaden even though, God, aren’t those, like, inherently contradictory, how would that even work, you idiot, are you asking readers to picture a cottage built from toothpicks made of cement? — I saw those in Mark’s frustration. And I saw, too, deeper than the embarrassment of things badly made, the shame of things left unfinished: “I think there’s gotta be some fear, like if you go ahead and do it and complete it, there’s more consequences to it. You let a day go by and fantasize and that day slips into years and all of a sudden you’re sitting in this living room watching something from six years ago, and that shot does look good.”
In the years since its release, American Movie seems to have resonated particularly with filmmakers and the similarly afflicted, and I think this is why: regardless of the quality of his art, Mark’s doubts are an artist’s doubts, his regrets an artist’s regrets. The dignity the film grants his mission, no matter how ludicrous the particulars get, is rooted in these moments when Mark speaks so honestly about hardships of creation that no one who has ever embarked on the same twisting journey can pretend to maintain their distance from him. And it’s rooted in the way he loves the things he loves. Asked what it was about the horror classics of his youth that influenced him, Mark answers: “Oh, it’s simple. Dawn of the Dead seemed a lot more realistic than Hollywood films. There was gray skies and dead trees and the National Guard out there, and it was just something I didn’t see in other films.” That line echoed in my mind for days: watching a zombie movie and remembering gray skies and dead trees. The world you live in, the world you know and love and hate, reflected back at you for the first time in all its dirty glory. I recognized this, too; he was describing the way that Meadowlands woke me up, all those years ago.
Among poems exploring Telemachus’s detachment and Circe’s bitterness, Meadowlands intersperses a series of snapshots of a troubled marriage, some in the form of a dialogue between the nameless couple. In “Butterfly,” the husband — the lines are unlabeled but the context is suggestive — encourages his wife to wish on a butterfly, against her protest that you don’t wish on butterflies; when she relents, he tells her, “It doesn’t count.” Later, in “Wish,” he asks what she wished for the time he lied to her about the butterfly:
What do you think I wished?
I don’t know. That I’d come back,
that we’d somehow be together in the end.I wished for what I always wish for.
I wished for another poem.
As a retrospective coda on this portrait of marital dissolution, you can read that last line as a rejoinder to the husband’s own capriciousness: you tried to trick me, but it didn’t matter; my wishes are my wishes, whether they counted or not. You can read further into the accusation, too: all those years, and you still didn’t bother to learn this most basic thing about who I am. You can even read it more coldly than that if you read this contemporary speaker in conversation with the legacy of Penelope, a woman in a poem who may have wished she could hear or even live in something other than the tale of a complicated man.
But to me the core idea is found in the reading that asks you to remember the implication of a poet wishing for another poem — or, perhaps, that asks you to remember that always wishing for another poem is what being a poet means. Taken this way, as the dream of a poet who dreams the same dream as all poets dream, the line indicates something profound of both the loneliness and the beauty of the creative life. To be a poet, to be an artist, is to harbor a secret, selfish engine that will never shutter itself, a chamber in your heart that remains as impermeable to the encroach of the world’s tenderness as it does to its demands.
On the darkest days, it can burn like the touch of a fire none can extinguish. And yet: isn’t it wonderful, too, to have one part of you that can only ever be yours? A private hunger only you can feed? What power there is in knowing that you hold something, forever, that no lover or enemy or asshole husband can mar or take away. What a gift to feel a yearning as alive and real as any bodily desire and know that this will belong to you as long as there is a you to hold it. To know that as you approach the end — of your life, of your marriage, of a friendship or a city you thought would always be yours, of everything else you were counting on, of the person you thought you wanted to be and can no longer recognize — you can still believe in this: every time you make a wish, you will wish for another poem.
Towards the end of American Movie, Mark gestures towards a desolate midwestern view of dead trees and gray skies: “These are the vistas, right here. And what does it feel like to have a couple rusty cars parked right against a rusty background?” An artist’s question — perhaps the artist’s question: how do you take the ineffable, inarticulable sense of what it feels like to be alive at a particular place, in a particular time, and somehow articulate it? Mark’s art may or may not be up to the task, but his impulse is an artist’s impulse. He wishes every day for another poem: another shot, another scene, another movie. Another attempt to bridge the gap between what he sees in his mind and what he can show the world. It costs him sleep, peace of mind, remunerative employment, and thousands of dollars. But it gives him a shape to his life that will endure all manner of humiliation and setbacks.
In “Ithaca,” Glück writes of the suitors observing Penelope’s endless weaving and unweaving: “They don’t know that when one loves this way, a shroud becomes a wedding dress.” Love — lost or found, requited or not, consummated or abandoned — transforms your life. By the end of American Movie, as badly as I was rooting for him to finish Coven, I had also come to see something gorgeous in the depth of his wanting, whether or not it was ever fulfilled. Whatever anyone else sees, however much it plagues him, Mark lives for what he loves. How many of us are lucky enough to do that, or bold enough to claim it?
By an accident of scheduling, American Movie formed the first half of a peculiar double feature on, you could say, the power of the creative spirit; I walked out of the museum, elated and stunned, and hopped on the train at Broadway to catch Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. I will pause here for laughter, much as Taylor does for applause approximately nine hundred times during each and every one of her little speeches. Taylor Swift, man. Like… okay. Part of me wants to throw up my hands and say, “What is there even left to say?” You could at this point put together a full-length “We Didn’t Start the Fire” parody just made up of Taylor Swift news items, and 2023 alone would be good for a couple verses at least. But then, as Dave points out in his terrific series, there’s a weird lack of content in the sea of Taylor Swift content. People talk around and about her, but little actually gets said. I can’t remember seeing anyone comment even on something as basic as the fact that the name of this tour is Taylor once again snapping up a concept she saw on the internet in a manner that somehow underlines her perpetual inability to be in on the joke. (See also: referring to herself, in the interview that made readers around the world say what the fuck? is she on something?, as having had an “imperial phase,” which only sounds like generic celebrity grandiosity if you don’t know that Tom Ewing popularized that phrase as a cheeky way of talking about a pop star’s peak in 2010.)
Being chronically online has made the Year Of The Taylor strange, because, like — I am, I promise, no stranger to working out your complicated feelings about your embarrassing adolescent self through the vehicle of deeply felt musings about Taylor Swift’s fame and What It Means, but I just kind of thought we did this already? Like, a decade ago? Such I suppose is the fate of all who have frequented the most avant-garde of the literary salons of their time (2013 Tumblr), which is something we used to joke about (on Tumblr in 2013) but I’m not sure any of us actually expected our culture (the culture that existed in 2013, on Tumblr) to seep into the mainstream on a ten-year delay. Well, and also, I don’t begrudge anyone their personal revelations, but I do find it annoying how much of recent Taylor coverage, from actual adults, contains some undercurrent of: You gotta hand it to her! To which I would counter, in the words of perhaps the foremost poet of our digital age, you do not. You just don’t. “You can’t deny she puts on a great show” — she quite demonstrably does not. Or, like, I have read at this point six thousand variations on the line “Taylor Swift’s genius is that she makes personal things feel universal,” like, yeah, that’s… songs? That’s just songs? Not all songs, but a lot of them? I am not speaking as a hater, here — her batting average is not super high for me, but her prolific output means that at this point there are a lot of Taylor Swift songs I love! But I would not say I love them because they make the personal feel universal, because that would be like saying I love them because they are made up of notes and words and sometimes they rhyme. “Coppola’s gift is that he sequences images and sound to tell a story.” Okay. So does Mark Borchardt. Where’s his Oscar?
Anyway. The movie. Taylor made herself “learn” to “dance” for the Reputation tour, because the whole gimmick — sorry, “concept” — of that album was that she was playing a character, and the character she was playing was the bad girl as personified by Iconic Pop Queen Who Slays. You simply cannot claim the throne as a woman in pop without choreography, which I would argue is one of the legitimate ways Taylor Swift has been harmed by misogyny: no one is out here making Ed Sheeran do a body roll. Good dancing, of course, makes incredibly difficult feats look effortless, and Taylor… opposite. Her dancing is bad, stiff and amateurish, which by itself is kind of endearing — her gracelessness can’t help but be authentic, and there’s something nice about seeing the awkward, ungainly human no amount of money or training can erase. The real problem is her faces, which — have you ever found yourself in the middle of a sexual encounter that was not going, perhaps, as well as you hoped it would, only to lock eyes with the person you were sexually encountering and find on their face an expression it seemed they had rehearsed in the mirror which could only be interpreted as Yeah, girl, you like this, right? It’s like that.
Eras is less stressful to watch than the Reputation doc she did for Netflix, largely because there’s less actual dancing and more wandering around the stage pointing at stuff. Still with the faces, though. The faces and the cornball factor, I mean, God, the dread that went through me when I realized she was laying the table with the fancy shit for the song where she sings about laying the table with the fancy shit. The same aggravating literalness that plagues her music videos, but three hours of that. Three hours of spinning a circle with her finger at her temple whenever she sings about anyone being crazy. Three hours of miming a phone from thumb to fifth finger when there’s a line about a phone call. Three hours of the winking and the smirking and the pretend-coyness: You like this, right? Right?! RIGHT???? OH GOD PLEASE—
But here’s where Taylor always loops me back in on myself, because I can only make fun of her special mix of smugness and desperation for so long before I have to admit I’m really talking about me (hi, I’m the problem…). Watching Taylor perform stresses me out because she has made things I love, songs I admire and cherish and sometimes feel real human feelings about, and the question that hangs over the frantic spectacle is: could she have done one without the other? Can she be the person who wrote The Archer if she were not also the person who did… this? I make fun of her for being such an annoying tryhard, but one of my favorite Taylor lines is in Mirrorball — “I’m still a believer, but I don’t know why / I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try” — and I love it because I couldn’t believe she finally fessed up like that, but I also love it because, girl, same. She’s just like me, fr fr. I like to think, smugly, I am not as terminally uncool as Taylor Swift; I want, desperately, to know that people like what it is I have to say.
I think the answer to the question Taylor forces me to confront is no. I think art is like sex: if you’re not willing to risk embarrassing yourself, you may as well not do it at all. Nothing that genuinely connects with anyone has ever been universally beloved. And Taylor does connect — that part actually is undeniable. I come back to that too, in the end: the fans, the girls, the ones crying and shrieking and holding each other’s hands. They’re experiencing something real. I would never tell them to go look for it somewhere else.
When I think of the artists that have truly changed my life, the ones who shifted something inside me such that it never went back, Louise Glück is there, but in any honest accounting, so is British-Irish reality television boy band One Direction. I know how completely fucking deranged that sounds, and I also know it’s true. Art is like sex: you don’t decide what turns you on. I saw them live — twice, actually, both times before Zayn left — and I imagine the atmosphere at Eras is something like that was: gaggles upon gaggles of teenage girls, a mix of enthused adults and patient chaperones, emotions at a giddy, full-body frenzy. “Teenage girl” is cultural shorthand for a particular kind of fannish zeal, but watching them fill the stadium with their glitter and their signs and their crop tops on which they had lovingly written lol ur not harry styles in puff paint, all I could think was that when I was a teenage girl, I never would have let myself love anything that openly or that hard. I would have rather fucking died than be caught acting, even in my own head, like I didn’t know what I was supposed to be embarrassed about. And here were these girls, the kind of teenage girls I had been so afraid to be when I was young, and they were so happy. This was the greatest day of their lives. I couldn’t understand what I had been so scared of. I felt so glad that they had this, and so stupid for all my wasted time. The sun went down and the band came out and I screamed right along with them, and I was different after that. Not only because of those two nights, but that was part of it. A few hours where I let myself feel what it was like to love something too much to be afraid.
At our showing of the Eras movie, when 1989 flashed on the screen, some of the kids in the theater stood up as if they had planned this in advance — maybe they had — and trotted down the aisles to jump up and down at the front. I hate that album, but there was no hardness in my heart watching them; I just kept thinking how funny they were going to think this was one day. What a sweet memory they were making. Towards the end of American Movie, Mike tells the camera, in his plainspoken way: “I value his friendship and enjoy doing stuff with him, you know. And making movies is what he does, you know? So I make movies with him.” The alchemical paradox of creation is that a fundamentally solitary drive can transmute into something shared. Or as Mark puts it, surveying his rusted view: “It’s a lonely road, but there’s warm houses and cars.”
After the movie, as we spilled back out into reality, a nearby group of girls discussed getting someone to take a picture in front of the cardboard display in the theater. “How do we do that?” asked one, uncertain. Another, bold — fearless, some may say — asked me, “Will you take our picture?” and when I said sure, of course, she looked at her friend and said, “That’s how.” I was charmed by the wisdom of what she had already figured out: the wishes may not count, but the wishing always does. Later, at home, we looked up what had become of the stars of American Movie. Mike died, sadly, in October 2022; two months earlier, he had posted on Twitter in celebration of twenty-seven years clean and sober. Mark never did finish Northwestern, but in 2018, he screened a short film at a few small festivals: a documentary centered on a local convention devoted to the discussion of UFOs. Sometimes, life does give you another poem.
Here’s one more. The first time I saw One Direction, I bought tickets as close as I could get to New York. They were already huge by then, so that meant MetLife Stadium, out in Jersey. I’m not a sports person, so it wasn’t until we were coordinating travel plans from the city a few days before the show that I caught the name of our shuttle destination and realized what that meant: I was going to reach the Meadowlands at last.