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In his youth, Bill Murray wrote poetry, although he's been wise enough not to share it with the world. "Everything rhymed," he's said of those juvenile efforts, a sentence halfway between a brag and a confession. In recent years, the actor has become a public supporter of the Poets House, an independent library in Manhattan devoted entirely to poetry, with over 60,000 volumes in its collection. "I think there's really an alignment between comedy and poetry, and you see that in the way that Bill operates," Lee Briccetti, the executive director of Poets House,...

“Normally, we have radios and shit to do this with, but we’re going bare bones today,” shouts Michael Maren, author and first-time director, during the very last day of filming his debut feature, A Short History of Decay. A volunteer cast eagerly follows his direction, which consists mainly of the orders “Look up,” “Look down,” and “Get back to work!” “Work” happens to be their day job, the distinctly unfilmable act of writing.Forty-three bona fide New York authors arose as early as 4 a.m. to make this morning’s six o’clock call at Park Slope’s popular freelancer perch, the Kos Kaffe. An hour into the shoot, half of them are in the glare of the film’s single light and a rented camera. At a front table, Elissa Schappell, Darin Strauss, and Mary Morris pretend to work. Behind them are memoirist-poet Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City...