Courtney Bush Wanted to Write a Poem Like a Movie

The poet and filmmaker discusses her creative process, moviegoing habits, and love of baseball with Kathy Del Beccaro.

by Kathy Del Beccaro

Courtney Bush has a new book, A Movie, which is a poem. Courtney is a poet-writer-filmmaker-moviegoer based in Brooklyn. A Movie began with a casual task that a friend of Courtney’s offered: “I think you could write a poem like a movie.” This idea grew into an obsession with the phrase “a movie,” how often we say it, and what it means.

Courtney and I met up to consider the expansive plane of life that is the movies. I asked Courtney to meet at her favorite diner, which is currently Mike’s Coffee Shop in Clinton Hill. The first thing I asked Courtney about wasn’t her book A Movie, but her movie Every Book is About the Same Thing: The Movie, which I watched at Spectacle Theater last year and which is based on her debut book of poetry, Every Book is About the Same Thing.

We accidentally talked for a few hours, so this interview is extremely condensed.

A Movie.

Del Beccaro: I wrote down a line from your movie: “I wonder if I'm being generous or dutiful or just being willing to share for the sake of whatever sharing is meant for.” I've also heard people say things like, it's selfish not to share and not to create, but I've personally struggled with feeling like I've earned the right. What are your thoughts about what sharing is meant for?

Bush: When it comes to self-expression, I do think it's a fine line. I sometimes worry about my compulsion to share. I don't think it's a compulsion in a negative way. I just think there is the danger of thinking that everything that happens to you is interesting to other people. But I do think that's part of what the risk is and why I think it's really fun to write about extremely personal and specific things.

Even as [the book] has come out, I feel a little mischievous and almost worried, because there are parts of the book that are so, so intimate. There's this part of the book where Milo is showing me these movies that he made, and it's like this little Halloween toy. It's so specific and personal and… that's a part of the book that a lot of people have responded to. The aspect of life where this little shit happens to you that isn't worth talking about. I think I want to bank on the idea that this is the stuff that's really interesting. But it does feel risky. A lot of people will be like, “Oh my God, this must be so vulnerable.” And I'm like, “I don't feel that way at all.”

I come from a poetry background and like thinking of language as a physical material. When I write about things or turn them into language, I almost am transferring them from the immaterial world to the material world, and making something that is not solid, solid, and actually making myself safer from it. It's less vulnerable if I build with it.

Do you feel that once it's written, it’s a reproduction of what was real, and that’s somehow freeing?

I think once it's written, it's like, oh, now it's language. It exists now, but not even just as a thought or an account of an experience; it exists as a material, which to me feels freeing. I've had this experience where, whether it's one of my movies or a book or the Courtney Report, somebody's like, “I feel like I know you so well,” or like, “I feel like I learned so much about you.” And it's interesting, because I'm like, “Oh, no, you just read a book. I'm me, and that's a book.” And in those moments, I realize I almost wrote the book because that’s where I don't have to be vulnerable, the way I am vulnerable in real life.

A conversation I’ve had with filmmakers is about the massive difference between approaching a movie with the belief that you have something to say and trying to communicate that, versus the belief that meaning will be discovered in the act of creation. That is a very freeing idea to me: that you would rather not be in control.

Yeah, it's something else. [In one sense], it is you because you're making it, but once you make something, it is separate from you, and you have to have a relationship with it. If something is something else, you can't have control over it.

And then you get to find out, if you're very open to seeing what it becomes…

Yes, that's my favorite part. [The movie] shows you what it is. No matter what, it will show you what it is because what you capture is nothing like real life. Even if you're making something that's like “realism,” there are billions of variables that come together.

When you go about that process, are you trusting the movie? What are you putting your trust in?

When I'm trusting that a movie is gonna reveal itself, I'm trusting that, like in life, there are all these things competing with each other that you don't notice but that contribute to the whole of something. When I make movies, with my collaborators [or] just by myself, I trust that I will capture something about the world and there will be meaning – always. I find the more you try to control the meaning, the less actual meaning there is. Life is so interrupted and fragmented, and I hate when I see a movie that is so art directed. There’s one moment in The Rehearsal, the Nathan Fielder show, that I think about all the time. He goes into someone's house and there's a phone charger balanced on a little lip of a kitchen shelf. He asked a cameraman to get an image of it. That is art and it’s the stuff you can't stage that actually makes things look real and beautiful.

A Movie.

Are there things that you experience that you have an instinct to keep private?

There are certain things that I don't find interesting, but that's a different thing. It’s interesting to push into that, because it's like: Why are you talking about this weird thing that happened when you were babysitting? Will it be interesting to other people? And it's really hard to see it as anyone else.

In the moment, do you recognize something as special and maybe worth sharing? How do you think about what might end up in your work?

I do keep little notes of things that happen to me all the time, which I use for different projects. With this [book], I started to realize I was always using the phrase “a movie,” and that people are constantly doing that and it's so non-specific and it's just a part of life now. It’s a kind of time now. And it made me think more in terms of that part of life that we all experience in different ways. Everything is about movies, it's movies all the time.

Yeah, it's become one of the primary dimensions of life, and it means so many different things to all of us. One of the most distinctive things about a movie is that it is time-based, like you were saying. It's one of the most helpful distinctions between different types of art, for me.

Oh yeah, you submit to the movie's time. My friend wrote this really good book about movies and dreams, and how both of them are instances where you submit to another kind of narrative. You have no option. You're not in control. With a movie, you can leave, but you don’t [leave]. But knowing you can leave is part of the experience of it. That's the power of movies: You can leave, but the movie exists.

Here, Courtney and I took a long tangent to share stories about the magic of walking across West Houston Street before and after movies and meeting special strangers in the lobby of Film Forum. By this time we had spent too much time at Mike’s Coffee Shop, and Courtney is very considerate of diner staff. We walked over to Clementine Bakery to continue our conversation.

You mentioned you want to watch more movies. Why do you want to watch more?

I think I watch a good amount of movies, but… there are so many different kinds of movies and you only find the really great ones by watching a lot of movies. Or, you unlock different versions of what a movie is by watching it all. [My boyfriend and I] got really into Radu Jude recently, and now all I want to watch is Romanian movies. But we keep not watching them…which is also being in a relationship with someone... I wanted to watch Onibaba the other night and he wanted to watch Enemy of the State, and then we ended up watching Body Heat. You end up with something that doesn't really please anyone.

Onibaba.

It was a compromise, but nobody wanted it?

Nobody wanted it and we didn’t really like it. So it's like we should have just stayed on the Romanian syllabus. This is only something I've been thinking about very recently. When you're a solo movie watcher, you start to develop proclivities, and then you have to protect them.

There's a lot of times when it's like, “Am I prioritizing [that proclivity] over connection or friendship or something else?” And I think actually a lot of times that's fine.

I think that’s what I mean about becoming a kind of fetishist. Or it’s why the audience laughing so hard at Charlie Chaplin disturbed me [as described in her book]... or why my friend was disturbed [at a standing ovation] at MoMA… because you're seeing people with very different relationships to movies. For some people, movies are just social. And that's also fine, but when you start to get deeper and deeper and deeper into it, there are people that I don't understand or that I understand from afar, who are into, like, super vintage prints of ‘70s B horror, or a very particular thing. And that kind of scares me a little bit.

What is scary to you about that?

I think it's not like those people scare me in themselves, but it scares me because I know how ecstatic it is and also how it gets lonelier the deeper you go in. If you’re looking for something [specific], it can become solitary… It's a lonelier and lonelier place and in some ways, that's so beautiful… But then also, sometimes it makes me feel sad when I'm like, “Oh, no one is interested in this except for me.” But then people are there at the movie, and then you know who's interested.

Do you find that experience lonely?

It may be with other people, but you together are alone in this interest. I get the sense that some people never follow any interest to that point, because of the aloneness it requires and the courage to do something that other people aren't interested in automatically.

You have this part in the book where you were watching a lot of movies, and then it's baseball season. I notice that a lot of cinephiles love baseball, and give up movies for daily baseball games.

The time that I would normally spend watching a movie, in summer, I spend watching a baseball game almost every day. I [hardly] watch movies during baseball season… I think the reason for that is that I feel like, “Oh, well, movies exist forever.” Every baseball game is different and it's live… But I start to feel bad by the end of baseball season. For example, last season I missed the Bresson retrospective at Film Forum. And it was like, “Oh my God, I'm an artist, I'm supposed to be engaging with this stuff, but I cannot go to any of them because I am watching baseball every day.” Toward the end of the season, I start to say, “Okay, I'm gonna be able to watch movies again soon, and I'll be smart again soon.”

How do you keep up the endurance of your motivation or inspiration?

I trust. It's letting a movie show you itself. I really trust and believe that if you stay with something and keep writing something and you're honest with how you feel while you're doing it, something will be made. It’s real discipline; trust and discipline go hand in hand. Sometimes I will feel lost in a piece of writing and I'm like…”This is so stupid. Why am I doing this?” But if I'm working on something, I know that if I stay with this long enough, something will come of it. I think it is faith.

The combination of faith and discipline.

It has to be both. Because, also, I think I have such a huge amount of respect and awe for the work of art. It's such a strange mystery that if I've given myself permission to imagine some work, whatever it is after that – I'm in service of that. I actually work for that. And if you do it that way, there is no vulnerability, because it's kind of like, this isn't about you; you're in service of this thing. And if you're operating in service of that thing, insecurity doesn’t make sense. And so you can kind of trick yourself.

That's beautiful. I really love that it can be the same reverential story if you're creating or however you relate to movies. My feeling is: I have received so much from movies and I will never be able to give enough back. I wanted to ask a follow up about trusting, and staying honest with yourself. Do you have any tools to know when you're staying honest about how you feel?

I do have a question that I ask myself that was given to me by a teacher. I [had told them] I don't include research in poems. “That's not my thing, I think it’s boring.” But sometimes it's really easy to confuse your interest or a disinterest in something with a fear that you're going to be bad at it. Was it worth it? And I ask myself that a lot of times when I find myself being lazy and saying I don’t need [to do something: Are you just scared that you're not gonna be able to get what you need or do it right? And then if there's any question about that, I just try to do it. And I really think anyone can do anything.

Kathy Del Beccaro is an urban planner and researcher dedicated to the preservation of small business and the evolution of moviegoing in communities. She is the Managing Director of the Rockaway Film Festival.

• Matt York is looking for a male comedic actor (25 - 35) for a short shooting Tuesday. DM him on IG.

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• Applications are open for the Jerome NYC Film Production Grant. Deadline is April 3. Supports NYC-based early career filmmakers working in short or long form, experimental, narrative, animation, doc, or any combination of genres. Up to $30K available.

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Bonus Lightning Round with Courtney Bush

Do you ever leave a movie theater during the movie?

I left during House of Gucci.

Why?