Informed by the criticism of iconic filmmaker Pier Pasolini, The Cinema of Poetry offers spirited explorations of poetry's influence on classic films by Dimitri Kirsanoff, Ingmar Bergman, and Andrey Tarkovsky. It also highlights how avant-garde films made by Joseph Cornell, Lawrence Jordan, Jerome Hiler, Gregory Markopoulos, and others found rich, unexpected sources of inspiration in a diverse group of poets that includes Stéphane Mallarmé, Emily Dickinson, H.D., Ezra Pound, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, and Aeschylus. Written with verve and panache, it represents the culmination of P. Adams Sitney's career-long fascination with the intersection of poetry, film, and the avant-garde.

Stan Brakhage, American artist born in 1933, accomplished from 1952 to the year of his death in 2003, more than 300 films, all on film. Founder of a visionary cinema which finds its plastic and critical powers in the material itself of the film, Stan Brakhage is like a spiritual father for a whole generation of artists today.

His work, fecund and multiple, which feeds as well on his private and family universe as on nature and political events in his time, finds a fecund humus in abstraction for its visual researches. Great technician of the film tool – the camera as well as the film and the systems of printing –, Brakhage invents an unique film form, whose importance in the history of cinema sometimes made him compared with Pollock for painting.