So what do you want to film first?? Daniel Humphrey asked his best friend and girlfriend of six weeks, Vanessa Abrams. Dan attended renowned Upper West Side boys school Riverside Prep, while Vanessa attended Constance Billard, but they had gotten permission to collaborate on a special senior project calledMaking Poetry . Vanessa, a budding film director, was going to film Dan, a budding poet and occasional star of Vanessa?s films, writing and revising his poems. Not exactly box-office-smash material, but Dan was so cute in a scruffy, rumpled, angst-ridden-artist sort of way that people would probably want to see it anyway. ?Just sit down at your desk and write something in one of those black notebooks like you always do,? Vanessa instructed, peering through the lens of her digital video camera to see if the light was okay. ?Can you clear some of that shit off your desk?? Dan swept his arm over the desk and sent pens, paper clips, scraps of paper, rubber bands, books, empty packs of unfiltered Camels, matchbooks, and empty Coke cans crashing to the brown-carpeted floor. They were filming in Dan?s room because that was where he usually worked. Besides, it was a straight shot through the park from Constance Billard on East Ninety-third Street between Fifth and Madison to Dan?s apartment building on West Ninety-ninth Street and West End Avenue. ?And maybe take your shirt off, too,? Vanessa suggested.Making Poetry was going to be about the artistic process, illustrating that whatdoesn?t go into the work is just as important as what does. There would be lots of shots of Dan crumpling up paper and throwing it angrily across the room. Vanessa wanted to show that writing?or creating anything, for that matter?wasn?t just a mental exercise: it wasphysical . Plus, Dan had these great little muscles in his back that she couldn?t wait to get on film. Dan stood up and peeled off his plain black T-shirt, tossing it onto his unmade bed where the Humphreys? fat old cat, Marx, lay asleep on his back like a furry beached whale. Everything about the apartment Dan shared with his father, Rufus, an editor of lesser-known Beat poets, and his little sister, Jenny, was unmade, falling apart, or at the very least completely covered with cat hair and dust bunnies. It was a large, bright, high-ceilinged apartment, but it hadn?t been properly cleaned in twenty years, and the crumbling walls were gasping for a new coat of paint. Dan and his father and sister rarely threw anything away, either, so the sagging furniture and scratched wooden floors were strewn with old newspapers and magazines, out-of-print books, incomplete decks of cards, used batteries, and unsharpened pencils. It was the kind of place where your coffee got cat hair in it the minute you poured it, which was a problem Da............