When Frank wrote "Herbert White" he was a student at Harvard.

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Frank grew up in Bakersfield, California.

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Frank had a tough childhood. He wanted to be a filmmaker. He loved film. His mother would drive him to LA to see films.

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There were only technical film schools in the 1950s, nothing like USC or NYU now, so Frank went to Riverside and studied English, and then went on to Harvard and studied with Robert Lowell.

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His first book, Golden State, was published by Richard Howard. None of the poems had been published in magazines.

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Golden State, what a fucking title. Frank is the loving son of Lowell and the rebel son of Ginsberg. He is the recondite and the hip.

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Herbert came out of a cheap, dime-store, medical case study called 21 Abnormal Sex Cases, cases that included "The Homosexual" and "The Transvestite." Herbert was "The Necrophiliac." In that book he did horrible things, like fuck dogs' stomachs while they were still alive. In Frank's poem Herbert fucks a goat.

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James got to know Frank when he asked Frank if he could make a movie out of his poem. Frank told James he loved him in Pineapple Express.

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They spent eight hours together the first time they met. They talked and talked at the restaurant, Frank's regular place in Cambridge, Mass., where he eats every Friday with his buddy Louise Glück. James and Frank stayed after everyone left, oblivious that the restaurant had left a waiter behind to lock the door after them.

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James knew after hearing the poem read in a class at Warren Wilson that it was something he wanted to adapt into film. These impulses are visceral. It wasn't only because it was about a killer. The killer had been fused with something else. Frank was playing with both sides of the coin again. There are moments in the poem when the killer takes down his mask, and the poet shows through.

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It wasn't just that Frank had decided to put Herbert's story into lines of verse; Frank had given elements of his own Bakersfield childhood to Herbert. The father, the place, and the desire to make sense of the world were all Frank's.

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James learned all of this later.

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Frank also gave Herbert his own young life's isolation and loneliness. This is a guess, but Frank as a young gay man in 1950s Bakersfield must have felt like he had a secret, a secret so dark that he could tell no one. A secret so dark he attempted to become a priest to avoid himself.

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At the end of the poem it sounds like Herbert is in hell or in jail. He says,

—Hell came when I saw
                          MYSELF...
                                         and couldn't stand 
what I see...

This is a reference to Lowell's "Skunk Hour," "I myself am hell," which references Milton's Satan. There is no way Herbert, without Frank's help, would ever reference Milton.

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There is a part in the poem,

Still, I liked to drive past the woods where she lay,
tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss,
hop out and do it to her...

The whole buggy of them waiting for me
                                                                       made me feel good;

He has a family! And they don't know he's a killer! So, he has a deep secret. This was the source of tension that James would use in the film. Herbert has a secret—he's a murderer of women and a fucker of corpses—which he can tell no one.

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A beautiful thing happened. In the place in Virginia where James was planning to shoot the film, they started tearing down the trees. Huge machines cutting them down and shipping them away. Machines like you've never seen, one with a tractor body and a crane arm at the end of which is a huge claw that clutches whole trees and cuts them with a circular saw in one, two, three seconds, then tosses the trunk like a doll.

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They let the actor playing Herbert, Michael Shannon, get in this machine and drive it for the film.

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The machine stood in for Herbert's inner life. He cut people down.

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The man who actually operated the machine for a living was named Gator. He taught Michael Shannon to drive the terrible thing. It was as easy as playing a video game.

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Once they had the machine as a metaphor they had everything they needed. The machine was the key to the story of Herbert White as told on film.

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Frank never reads the poem to audiences. The one time he did, back in the 1960s, he warned the audience that it was not a confessional poem, because confessional poetry was all the rage in those days. The only way into the hall was a wooden staircase, and after Frank started the reading an elderly woman made her way up the stairs, clop, clop, clop. She came in and listened. She didn't like what she heard. She got up and went back down, right through the reading, clop, clop, clop.

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The poem is told in the first person, but it isn't Frank speaking. He's wearing a mask. Or two.

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Frank isn't married. He lives alone among stacks of books and DVDs and CDs. The stacks are so large and numerous they have become his walls.

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"Herbert White" is a poem by my dear friend and mentor, Frank Bidart. It is about a serial killer, but it is also strangely autobiographical (not the literal killing parts). I met Frank when he gave me permission to adapt the poem into a short film starring Michael Shannon. In Frank's new book, Metaphysical Dog, he has a poem called "Writing 'Ellen West'" in which he revisits the creation of one of his most well known poems, decades after. "Herbert White" and "Ellen West" are companion pieces as they are the two great persona poems from his first two books. For "Directing Herbert White," I took the structure of "Writing 'Ellen West'" for my own poem about revisiting a filmic interpretation of the same subject.