There Will Be Blood

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I don't give readings, no, although I have recorded three of my collections, just to show how I should read them. Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much- the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go your own pace, taking it in properly; hearing it means you're dragged along at the speaker's own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing there and their and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his own personality between you and the poem, for better or worse. For that matter, so may the audience. I don't like hearing things in public, even music. In fact, I think poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music: the text is the 'score' that doesn't 'come to life' until it's 'performed.' It's false because people can read words, whereas they can't read music. When you write a poem, you put everything into it that's needed: the reader should 'hear' it just as clearly as if you were in the room saying it to him. And of course this fashion for poetry readings has led to a kind of poetry that you can understand first go: easy rhythms, easy emotions, easy syntax. I don't think it stands up on the page. Philip Larkin

john baker, February 28th, 2008. No comments. Filed under reviews.

This film, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on a novel by Upton Sinclair, and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, was interminably long at 158 minutes. But if it had been cut down by half it still wouldn’t have amounted to much.

It depicts an anarchic world ruled by mindless and gratuitous violence, greed and revenge. The landscape of Southern California where most of the action takes place is sandy desert, good for goats but very little else. It reflects most of the characters’ lack of culture, beauty, meaning or fellow-feeling and offers us nothing as substitute apart from the psychopathy of the Day-Lewis depiction and the raving insanity of fundamentalist religion.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview is magnificent, and Paul Dano as Eli Sunday, the preacher, manages to keep pace with him for the duration of the film. There are close-ups of Day-Lewis from time to time which reminded me of the power of Brando at his best. The man can act and convey emotion and power with the nerve-endings of his eye-lids and lips. This must rank highly among the greatest performances on screen. It is a pity that such a tour de force didn’t have a better vehicle.

Since its release in December 2007 There Will Be Blood has won 2 Oscars and another 36 wins & 37 nominations in various festival and critics awards.

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