Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I watched "Chris and Don" at the Quad the Thursday before last, with The Quarterback, but did not have much to say about it beyond the obvious epithets like sweet, heartwarming. The documentary, directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, depicts the three-decade long relationship between Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood and American portrait painter Don Bachardy, thirty years Isherwood's junior. The film is somewhat more penetrating and interesting about Isherwood's aristocratic background and his years in Berlin, than about Bachardy's ho-hum middle-class origins. It weaves together Bachardy's contemporary reminiscences (in the Santa Monica home he shared with Isherwood), interviews with talking heads, archival footage, and cutesy animation based on the cat-and-horse cartoons the couple drew in their correspondence. After coming out of the Quad, I felt vaguely dissatisfied with the film. For a story billed by Zeitgeist Films as an "against-all-o...

The next six poems, as promised by the book’s title, are about caring for the poet’s baby daughter. Their language is simple, almost prosaic, their imagery temporal and domestic, their movement tentative, their tone hushed. Their short lines are determined by the phrase more often than not. Except for “Endings,” the last poem of the group, they are written in regular stanzas, each of seven, four, five or three lines. Each stanza usually has a pair of end-rhymes in no predetermined place, but the last line of each stanza often rhymes with a foregoing line. “Night Feed” takes place at dawn. That time is the daughter’s season, “The moment daisies open,” and “the hour mercurial rainwater/ Makes a mirror for sparrows.” The poet-mother tiptoes into the nursery to feed the baby, and when the feed is over, the daughter opens her eyes “Birth-colored and offended.” Now dawn becomes the time of endings (“Worms turn./ Stars go in”), and poet and daughter “begin/ The long fall from grace.” In “Befo...