Currently in production, Engaging the Senses’ documentary feature film, Be the Beauty explores the value of poetry and the role of poets in relation to a world which has become plastic and distracting. Today the power of media, language, art and music are too often used to sell products, political perspectives, and agendas. In the film, the Poet is introduced as someone who stands for something deeper, as Revolutionary, Conscience, Shaman, Legislator, Educator, and Alchemist. Revealed is how poetry and poets help to remove barriers of class, race, religion, and gender, “revolutionizing” the way people relate to themselves and their place in the world.
Be the Beauty asks and answers three important questions:
- Can poetry help us reclaim our powerful, authentic selves and connect us to the Beauty of the everyday?
- What is the role of the Poet in contemporary, political, and popular culture, especially in a time of radical upheaval and crisis such as our current one?
- What is Poetry with a capital P and where can you experience it for yourself?
Be the Beauty features contemporary poets who represent a demographic spectrum of United States culture, and whose work impacts our world in positive ways. The film includes esteemed actor, director and poet James Franco; revolutionary activist poet Margaret Randall; Kim Rosen of the Poetry Depths Mystery School; Hawai’i State Poet Laureate Kealoha; Dana Gioia, current Poet Laureate of California and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; revered Native American poet Joy Harjo; newly appointed Poet Laureate of Virginia Tim Seibles, and the vital, influential poets Patricia Scott Jones, Paisley Rekdal, David Rothman. Martha Silano, Jed Myers, and Scott Cairns. Together, they weave the story of Poetry’s place in the world by sharing their passionate belief in the power of poems to connect, heal, sustain, inspire; in short, to transform every aspect of our humanity.