Ken Tucker's review of "Howl" and Jon Hamm's appearance on Craig Ferguson remind me of this passage from Wislawa Szymborska's 1996 Nobel lecture:
It's not accidental that film biographies
of great scientists and artists are produced in droves. The more
ambitious directors seek to reproduce convincingly the creative
process that led to important scientific discoveries or the
emergence of a masterpiece . . . Films about painters can be
spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous
painting's evolution, from the first penciled line to the final
brush-stroke. Music swells in films about composers: the first
bars of the melody that rings in the musician's ears finally
emerge as a mature work in symphonic form. Of course this is all
quite naive and doesn't explain the strange mental state
popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to
look at and listen to.But poets are the worst. Their work is
hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a
sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a
while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one
of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes,
during which nothing happens … Who could stand to watch this
kind of thing?
— sdh