How a Tallahassee poet's 'Bird Odyssey' takes wing as Italian screenplay

When Pulitzer Prize-winner Rita Dove, in a 2018 article for the New York Times Magazine, called “each page” of Barbara Hamby’s volume of poetry, "Bird Odyssey," (University of Pittsburg Press) “a new wonder,” you know it’s something good.

But Hamby, author of seven books of poetry, recipient of dozens of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an FSU grant to cross Russia by train on a literary voyage, has known for years that her happiness lies in words and ideas and the strange jumps in between. Her most recent volume of poetry, "Holoholo," like many of her readable, funny, brilliantly erudite works, uses location as an inspiration and springboard into thought circles that one can’t put down.

Now, five years after "Bird Odyssey’s" publication, one of its sections, “The Odyssey in Six Sonnets” — is set to become part of a movie. An Italian film no less — though the setting is ancient Greece. But then Hamby loves to travel and continental divides really mean nothing at all. “Travel is my stimulus, an inspiration where ideas and images sometimes jump at me out of the street.”

She says that prior to the trip that took her and husband/poet/professor, David Kirby to Crete and the Ionian Islands, following one of the most logical of the routes that Ulysses might have sailed, she read voraciously about that mythic voyage from many sources and many translations. In the end, her takeaway was that “women in the tale needed a voice.”

She gave it to them in six sonnets in "Bird Odyssey" where the “inner thoughts” of Calypso, Nausicaa, Circe, Anticlea, Penelope, and the siren Leucosia sound like a group ticked-off housewives and goddess-lovers who’ve had just about enough of an arrogant sailor who’s come back 20 years later to boast about his adventures.

Like other of Hamby’s books that have been translated into distant languages, several years ago, "Bird Odyssey’s" translation found its way to the literati of Italy. There a multitalented Italian creator, Roberta Cortese, who lives in both Torino and Vienna, resonated with the hands-on-hips attitudes of Hamby’s female characters.

With the poet’s permission, Cortese wrote a very modern-day screenplay based on Hamby’s sonnets in which a winged Siren approaches the self-assured sailor and in Italian says “Ulysses, my dearest, are you finished shooting the sh-t?” The poet and the director both are adamant about the strong feminine voices who boldly pull no punches.

“Roberta, who is a director, screenwriter, actor, singer, and musician, has been very transparent with me,” says Hamby. “She offered to buy the rights to the sonnets, but I just said “Go at it!”

Cortese, from Italy, writes that she had always been fascinated by the story of the Odyssey, but over time realized the misogyny and discrimination that are hidden in the text. Having already produced a play in German about Ulysses’ travels and travails, she writes that when she discovered Hamby’s sonnets, she “found them marvelous.”

Cortese immediately envisioned a film where the characters speak directly into the camera, giving their versions of their relationships and irritations. The working title, “Ulysses Has Short Legs,” gives some idea of the cheeky dialogue and eye-rolling sarcasm expounded by the likes of Circe, Calypso, and Penelope.

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To date, the film has been cast, costumes designed, and filming plans set for the fall in Torino where an old textile factory will serve as the setting in which the action occurs. Funding is still in process, but Cortese looks forward to fall or spring to begin shooting.

“I’d love to watch it being filmed,” says Hamby, but when asked if she might be tempted to branch from poetry into film-writing  one day, she just laughs and says, “I’m not all that young anymore. I think I’ll just keep on doing what I do.” And that news is sure to make a lot of people very, very happy.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Tallahassee poet Barbara Hamby's 'Bird Odyssey' lands in Italian film