Poetics in Motion: Appropriating C. K. Williams’s Poetics in Film — The Case of Tar

Scholarship on bio-pics of authors and poets has thus far focused mainly on issues pertaining to the appropriation of literary works and life stories, sometimes, but now always highlighting the latter as a source of inspiration for the former. This article explores how both poetry and poetics may be appropriated in film, taking Tar, the title poem of a collection of C. K. William’s poems (1983), Williams’s poetics (“Poetry and Consciousness” 1998, 1–9) and Pamela Romanowsky’s cinematic rendition of the poem in The Color of Time (Dir. Edna Luise Biesold et al. 2014) as its case study. I begin with a review of Williams’s poetics, followed by a reading of the figurative and discursive import of key metaphoric constructs in the poem Tar. Finally, I examine how Romanowsky appropriates such structures to communicate both the poem’s emotional and contemplative effects.