Around what has become known as award season, casual conversations are buzzed with Talk of the Year's movies.

This yearly moment of cinematic recognition reminds us just how valuable the art form and the artists who make it are.

Movies are an invitation to live in someone else's shoes, to learn, to experience, to

empathize. We need these skills to nurture a culture of community now more than ever. This

week's episodes explore how poets take up movies as subjects, how the two art forms intertwine to make us feel more closely this life we share.

I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown. I once traveled to China as part of an international poetry festival.

Poetry has many possibilities for cultural diplomacy.

For one, the language of metaphor hits different than the language of transnational policies and geopolitical debates. We gathered from all parts of the globe,

from Argentina, from Australia, from Italy, from Korea, from many other countries. We were

deeply respectful of each other's long literary traditions.

A spirit of camaraderie and our shared belief in poetry to represent our commonality,

despite cultural differences, bonded us.

However, one moment clarified for me how our traditions diverged. I gave an impassioned talk on Walt Whitman and the poem as a container of an individual's self.

Leaves of grass also embodies the belief, E. Plurbus Unum.

Out of many, one.

Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, Whitman writes in song of myself.

My lecture yielded polite claps, an indication of its half-hearted reception. Later, I realized that China, a collectivist country, traditionally does not celebrate overt expressions of individualism.

Since then, I have thought heavily about values that represent a nation, especially in film and poetry.

In media studies, we talk about the French New Wave,

Soviet montage, the L.A. rebellion, the Polish school, Italian neorealism, and so forth. But are these movements the result of a shared ideology and approach,

or are they merely a snapshot of a group of artists who happen to be making films at the same

time and were grouped together by critics? In many instances, both are true. One of my favorite moments in Italian cinema is the movie Cinemar Paredizo.

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