yelree scipyo goldwyn
Antonio Brittenham
A pretty, blonde woman paces in the glass cage where she is being held captive. She chokes back tears and threads paper into a typewriter. In voiceover, we hear the poem she is writing. Despite the tension of the moment, as I watch I can think only one thing: this poem kind of sucks.
Where to start with the problems with this poem? First of all, inverted fairy tales (western fairy tales, at least) have been done to death in contemporary poetry and fiction. The idea that the fairy tales we hear as children will not deliver in reality is not new ground. The poem itself is also fairly unfocused, trying to handle too many heavy issues (class differences, sexual assault by a family member, parental neglect, relationship violence) without giving any of them the space they deserve. If I were to give feedback on this piece in a class or workshop, I would advise Beck to pick ONE issue she wants to write about, and save the others for future poems. The poem also lacks interesting language, opting instead for cliche-sounding, but ultimately nonsensical, similes.
You\u2019re reading a guest post on PopPoetry by Frances Klein (she/her), a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She is the author of the chapbooks The Best Secret (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and New and Permanent (Blanket Sea, 2022). Her poems and writing have been published by River Styx, Tupelo Press, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Vonnegut Memorial Library. Klein currently serves as Assistant Editor of Southern Humanities Review.
In Caroline Kepnes\u2019 2014 thriller, You, bookstore manager Joe Goldberg becomes obsessed with grad student Guinevere Beck. Joe\u2019s obsession leads him to kidnap Beck (as she is called throughout) and lock her in the basement of his bookstore. In the novel, Beck is a fiction MFA candidate at Brown University. The novel makes brief references to Beck publishing essays and poems in online journals, but she is clearly presented throughout the text as a fiction writer.
One theory is that poets and poetry are familiar ground for showrunner and screenwriter Sera Gamble. In an interview with Grazia magazine, Gamble describes using her own experiences as a young writer to influence Beck\u2019s character. In fact, Beck even performs part of a poem Gamble wrote at an open mic in the pilot episode.
Our other theory is equally practical: poems are shorter than stories. There are multiple times throughout the first season of You where Beck\u2019s poetry is read, either by the character herself or in voiceover. The poems are used to drive home character details about Beck, or to make plain some of the show\u2019s themes for viewers. Practically speaking, it would be impossible to accomplish the same effect in voiceover with a short story, which would take something like 15 minutes to read out loud. Poems can more easily cut to the heart of a scene, whereas short stories require more context and space.
For either of the above reasons, Beck is a poet. That brings us to the follow-up question: is she a good poet? Is she good enough to be believable as a poetry candidate at NYU? The short answer is no, but I\u2019ll elaborate.
Over the course of season 1 of You, Beck\u2019s poems are read three times. The first instance, as we\u2019ve discussed, is the open mic in the pilot episode. The poem Beck reads there includes lines like, \u201COne day you won\u2019t need love anymore\u201D and \u201CYou wrote poems about him/you still write poems about him/you\u2019re writing one right now.\u201D This is a poem Gamble wrote as a young woman, one she admits is bad, describing it as, \u201Cpages of angst.\u201D There are actually stronger lines in the original poem, which Gamble shared on Instagram in full to celebrate the show\u2019s debut episode. However, Gamble seems to have selected the tritest lines to include in the episode. This is fitting, considering the scene is intended to show Beck failing miserably at reading, being heckled before leaving the stage without finishing her poem.
The next time we hear Beck\u2019s poetry, it\u2019s read in voiceover as she writes furiously on her laptop. Beck has just had a terrible day with her father and his new family at a Dickens festival (complete with period costumes and snotty step-siblings), and the poem is intended to serve as an emotional catharsis, a list of the ways in which Beck\u2019s father has failed her. The poem is\u2026fine? Not excellent, mostly a series of disconnected fragments that beat the reader over the head with the intended emotional effect: \u201Cthe beached whale/the silent walk home/the grill that doesn\u2019t start on the Fourth of July.\u201D
Perhaps I should be more generous, though. This is a first draft, and who among us hasn\u2019t written a tearful poem in response to adverse life events? The problem with this, however, is the reception the poem receives from Beck\u2019s MFA classmates. Beck\u2019s classmate, Blythe, is presented as the alpha in the workshop. She\u2019s shown in an earlier scene cutting down other workshop members, Beck included. In response to Beck\u2019s poem about her father, though, Blythe texts that she has read the poem twice, and is \u201Chere for it.\u201D We are meant to see Blythe as an arbiter of literary quality, and to assume from her positive response that, in the You universe at least, Beck has written a good poem.
The final and most egregious example is a poem the internet teens have dubbed \u201CBluebeard\u2019s Castle.\u201D Beck writes this poem while she is being held captive. What she writes, in part, is this:
(Yet again, I have to try and moderate our criticism with a little fairness to Beck. She wrote this draft while being held against her will, which for many people is not the world\u2019s most favorable writing condition. Worrying about whether you will be murdered has rarely, if ever, brought writers to produce their best work, Paul Sheldon notwithstanding.)
So Beck isn\u2019t a great poet. Does that matter? To understand why Beck\u2019s lack of talent with poetry is jarring to some viewers, it\u2019s helpful to know a little about the NYU writing program.
NYU\u2019s writing program is one of the better-known creative writing MFA programs in the country, and is very exclusive. According to their website, NYU accepts anywhere from 2% to 3% of applicants each year into their cohorts. That means that, in order to be accepted, Beck would have had to submit a stellar work sample, one that would cause her to be one of the few students selected from the 800 or so applicants that year.
The NYU program has also produced some of the most influential and celebrated poets currently working. Graduates include current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Lim\u00F3n, Ocean Vuong, Morgan Parker, and Solmaz Sharif. The poets that come out of this program are MacArthur Fellows and National Book Award Finalists. Their poems explore everything from intimate family dramas to larger social and cultural issues. All of them, at some point, every one of these poets likely wrote an angsty poem about a family member, but it certainly didn\u2019t see the light of day until it had gone through multiple drafts. For all these reasons, it just doesn\u2019t seem realistic that Beck would be a student in the NYU program.
The most likely explanation for changing schools is name recognition. NYU is simply a much more recognizable school name than Brown. Even if viewers know next to nothing about writing or America, they at least recognize the name New York City. Making Beck a student there is the same as having the characters in 90210 go to \u201CCalifornia University\u201D instead of Occidental College.
In the end, the most likely explanation for both of our key questions can be chalked up to convenience for the showrunners. And anyway, who doesn\u2019t like a little escapism? Perhaps Beck\u2019s position in an elite grad program is the equivalent of the massive apartments the characters in Friends can somehow afford, or how dressed up the Pretty Little Liars girls get to go to high school every day.
Dear Reader, I am here to tell you, if you haven't yet seen Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, you missed out on the best movie of 2018. The animated Spider-Man movie from Sony (I know, there's a weird shared intellectual property rights thing between Disney-owned Marvel and Sony that makes it confusing, but this film is technically not in the MCU timeline like Spider-Man: Homecoming and the upcoming Spider-Man: Far From Home are) won critical and commercial acclaim when it debuted in December 2018. Winning six industry awards, including the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, Into the Spider-Verse is the perfect movie for both decades' old Peter Parker fans and entry-level viewers who got caught in the excitement of Miles Morales debut.
For those unfamiliar with Miles, the Afro-Latinx hero debuted in 2011 and went onto to star in his own comics run in 2015 when Marvel shuttered a majority of its Ultimates universe and folded Ultimates Miles into the Earth-616 universe (for those of you keeping track, Earth 616 is the prime universe, the one that we live in). The teenager took over the mantle after the untimely death of Peter Parker, and Into the Spider-Verse follows a similar format.
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