Breaking News: Did Richard Blanco Lip-Sync the Inaugural Poem?

Speculation fueled more speculation this week about whether or not pop singer Beyonce lip-synced the U.S. national anthem at the  swearing-in ceremonies for President Barack Obama this past Monday. Now that same speculation is leading some to wonder about the performances of the event's other speakers as well—including the poet Richard Blanco, pictured here, who delivered the well-received inaugural poem "One Today."

"Did Blanco lip-sync?" wondered one critic aloud. "If he did, I certainly couldn't tell, as he did an admirable job of looking down at his poem so that it looked like he was reading. But after the whole Robert Frost ordeal in 1961, who could blame him if he did?"

In 1961, eighty-six year-old Frost had prepared the poem "Dedication" to deliver at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. When buffeting winds and the sunlight's glare off the paper and snow made it impossible for him to read, however, the four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner recited another, shorter poem, "The Gift Outright," from memory instead. Although "The Gift Outright" was first published in 1942, Frost's 1961 recitation of it is not only frequently credited with popularizing the poem, but with setting the gold standard for inaugural poems as well.

"I'd understand completely if Blanco did lip-sync it," remarked a fellow poet, also citing the Frost scenario and the pressure of reading before such distinguished company. "But I don't think he did."

Investigations into Beyonce's performance have revealed that it isn't uncommon for such performances to be recorded ahead of time in the event of inclement weather like the wind and sun that dogged Frost. "Each piece of music scheduled for performance in the Inauguration is pre-recorded for use in case of freezing temperatures, equipment failure, or extenuating circumstances," explained Captain Kendra N. Motz, Media Officer of the U.S. Marine Band.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who cello-synced during Obama's first inauguration in 2009, explained his decision by saying, "You can't play cellos in 25 degrees."

"It would be totally understandable," another spokesperson for the Marine Band said. "You try being Richard Blanco, standing up there as the youngest inaugural poet in history, trying to hold your paper in that type of cold. Paper just doesn't function the same way when the temperature drops to near freezing."

Other poets and critics have been less charitable when hearing the speculation about Blanco's possible simulation, however.

Said one, "Lip-sync? Lip-sync? Would Walt Whitman have lip-synced his barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world? I think not!"

"Well, I'm not so sure," replied another. "What if it was really bad weather? Can you yawp in 25 degrees?"

Still another stated simply. "I don't know if Blanco lip-synced or not. But one thing I do know for sure is that John Ashbery wouldn't have lip-synced. Allen Ginsberg wouldn't have lip-synced either. Nor would Adrienne Rich. This is what happens when you exclude radical poets and the avant-garde from consideration in events like these. Capitalism takes over, poets are turned into mouthpieces for ideology, and poetry becomes a simulation of itself if not a simulation of a simulation!"

This is not the first time that lip-syncing charges have been leveled at an inaugural poet. When Maya Angelou read "On the Pulse of Morning" at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993, some viewers reported a disconnect between Angelou's physical presence and the words they heard.

"I swear," said one commentator. "It looked like Angelou stopped speaking altogether, but the words just kept coming. I don't know how to explain it other than to say she was lip-syncing."

"I totally agree," said another who was in attendance. "But I just thought she'd been elevated to a higher level of being and had become an oracle that no longer needed the body as a medium to speak through. The poem just seemed to come straight from her soul. I have to say, though, the whole Beyonce thing has me thinking twice about it."

An inaugural poem historian acknowledged such conflicting experiences from 1993. "For some people," she explained, "Angelou's performance was nearly transcendent. But for others it was simply, as one of my peer reviewers once put it, 'the Maya Ange-low point' of inaugural verse."

Another scholar suggests that focusing too narrowly on the controversy of lip-syncing in inaugural poems distracts from the longer historical engagement between poetry and lip-syncing more generally, which has its canonical roots in the early twentieth century. According to him, the earliest manuscript versions of Wallace Stevens's famous poem "Sunday Morning" reference lip-syncing.

"If you look closely at the manuscripts done by the youthful Stevens," he explains, "You'll see that the poem's final two lines don't in fact read 'Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings,' as they do in final manuscript versions, but, rather, 'Ambiguous undulations as they sync, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.' Stevens is very clearly tying the mystical earthly spirituality of the pigeons, which imitate but not entirely replicate the holy figure of the dove, to practices like lip-syncing. For if we're honest with ourselves, when it comes to matters of faith and belief, all most of us can ever do is mouth the words."

As of yet, Blanco has made no public statement about whether "One Today" was pre- recorded and lip-synced or delivered live this past Monday. Nor has he commented on his relationship to the history of lip-syncing in American poetry. Nevertheless, that has not prevented some readers for scouring the poem itself for clues.

"Obviously," one poet remarked, "the line 'without prejudice, as these words break from my lips' is meant to signal the live delivery of the poem, with the presence of the poet's words troping the immediacy of the national moment to which all are summoned 'without prejudice,' as it were."

"Au contraire," another suggested, "That's the irony that makes Blanco's work so political. When Blanco the poet is lip-syncing that line and the words really aren't breaking from his lips, the performance undercuts the text and implies that the wind carrying those words is not doing so without prejudice, but with the prejudice that Blanco, as an immigrant, Latin@, and gay man has undoubtedly experienced in the U.S."

"I doubt," he concluded, "that John Ashbery could have done any better."

Going Nuts Over Tax Cuts

This afternoon, President Barack Obama will sign an $858 billion tax bill into law. Extending the Bush-era tax cuts for another two years, the bill will also cut the estate tax for the most super-mega-ultra-filthy-dirty-rich Americans—a provision that Republicans demanded be included if they were to also approve the bill's extension of unemployment benefits for 2 million people currently out of work. In short, Republicans delayed support for those 2 million until the wealthiest Americans—those who have estates of more than $5 million per individual or $10 million per couple—benefited from the deal as well. How many people were the Republicans fighting for, you ask? Forbes reports that, as a result of Republican advocacy, fewer than 4,000 people will pay a federal estate tax next year. No one can blame the Republicans for betraying their own.

Which is why, come the annual office Christmas party, P&PC will be handing out the helpful object pictured here—a poetic Squirrel Dimesaver issued by the Calvert Savings & Loan Association in the early 1940s (the date on the Mercury head dime in the squirrel's paw on the cover pictured above is 1941). We figure that if the P&PC staff is going to be among those 4,000 wealthiest Americans some day, we'd better get started now. As the poem printed inside advises:

Like our friend make Savings Pay,
Start with a dime in this folder today
For it's steady savings in small amounts
That add up fast in your saving account.

The P&PC office doesn't yet have an accounting intern to do the calculations for us, so forgive us if our math is wrong. As far as we can figure, though, the reduced estate tax kicks in at $5 million per person ($10 million per couple). So, if we use this Calvert Savings & Loan "steady savings" mechanism—which collects $3 worth of dimes when completely full—we will only have to fill it 1,666,667 times before we die in order to meet the $5 million threshold (or $3,333,333 times per couple) that will put us among the wealthiest 4,000 people whose estate tax rates have just gone down.

That shouldn't be all that hard, should it? I mean, if we live another 50 years, we'll only need to fill this dime saver about 33,333 times per year—or just about 91 times per day. Admittedly, we'll probably get a pretty serious case of carpal tunnel syndrome along the way, and our thriftiness might be called unpatriotic. But that's nothing our good old American bootstrapping heirs will have to worry their pretty little heads about now, is it?

I Might, I Would, I Will: Remembering Frost's "The Gift Outright"

As Yale University professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander prepares for the most important poetry reading of her life—on Tuesday, January 20, she'll read at the inauguration of now President-elect Barack Obama—it's worth taking a moment to reconsider what has become in most people's minds the gold-standard for inaugural poets: Robert Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. There, blinded by the sun's glare off of the snow and baffled by high winds, the 86 year-old Frost had to give up on the poem he'd in fact prepared for the occasion ("Dedication") and recited from memory one that he'd written more than 20 years earlier. "The Gift Outright" is now so linked to 1961 that many people assume Frost wrote it for the inauguration itself.

Here is the text of the poem Frost read in 1961, as recorded by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum:

The land was ours before we were the land’s
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she will become.

"The Gift Outright" had a pretty long and interesting history before 1961, however. It first appeared in the Spring 1942 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, although Frost claimed he had written it six or seven years earlier—smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression. As VQR notes in its history of "The Gift Outright," Frost soon thereafter revised the poem's last line for publication in The Witness Tree (1942), changing it from "Such as she was, such as she might become" to "Such as she was, such as she would become." Indeed, this is the version (pictured to the left) that the Library of Congress presents as the 1961 inaugural manuscript, even though this manuscript version contains a note in the upper right-hand corner that reads "Three War Poems II" and is identified in the bottom left as being from The Witness Tree in 1942. Clearly—as will become even more evident in a moment—this handwritten manuscript is a version of the poem Frost read in 1961, but it's not the actual poem he recited.

In addition to using "The Gift Outright" in The Witness Tree (which won him his fourth Pulitzer Prize, in 1943), Frost also used the poem on his Christmas card for 1942 (pictured here). Late in 2008, "Poetry & Popular Culture" showcased some of the Christmas cards which Frost produced in collaboration with Spiral Press printer Joseph Blumenthal. What's particularly interesting to "Poetry & Popular Culture" at the present moment, however, is how Frost—sending his holiday wishes a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor—politicizes the Christmas holiday by greeting friends with one of his "war poems." For a poet whom many people assume to be pretty darned unpolitical, this is a pretty political move.

So the history of "The Gift Outright" was a fairly complex and political one before 1961 even rolled around—a history in which Frost repeatedly situated the poem in relation to the world he was living in and even changed its wording to serve as a sort of barometer for how he was currently feeling about the U.S. VQR in fact points this out, arguing that "The substitution of 'would' for 'might' makes the poem more optimistic, more assured of America’s future glory. The version published in VQR seems to reflect a deep and perhaps healthy uncertainty about the nation’s future trajectory." It makes sense that, writing in the middle of the Depression, Frost would articulate his sense of the nation's future in less certain terms than he would on the eve of World War II when calls for patriotism demanded stronger language on all fronts, poetic fronts included. If Edna St. Vincent Millay could be convinced into writing a book-length propaganda poem (The Murder of Lidice) at the bequest of the Writer's War Board, then certainly Frost could be moved to change a verb from "might" to "would."

What VQR's history of "The Gift Outright" doesn't tell, however, is that Frost would go on and change the poem and its final verb another time, just as the poem's political stakes were at an all-time high. If the Kennedy Museum's transcript is in fact correct—and it is only partly so, as my postscript to this entry explains—it reveals that in 1961 Frost ended with the line "Such as she was, such as she will become." If VQR's argument about the significance of the verb changes holds water, then what are we to make of this move—from "might" to "would" to "will"? If the shift from conditional Depression-Era "might" to definitive Wartime "would" reflects Frost's changing levels of optimism, then how are we to interpret the postponement of American success implied in the shift to the future tense "will become" used at Kennedy's inauguration? Was the 86 year-old Frost tapping into and reinforcing the forward-looking and progressive rhetoric of the 35th and youngest American President? Or was Frost audaciously tempering his enthusiasm for the nation and qualifying his Cold War endorsement of Kennedy by shifting tenses from "would" to "will"?

In the way of a conclusion to this history, it's interesting to sit and listen to In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry—a four-CD anthology of 79 poets reading their poems aloud—which includes what sounds like Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" in 1961. Rather than play up the most poetically ambivalent moment of "The Gift Outright," its final line, the recording tapers off at this exact moment and blends into Robert Graves beginning "To Juan at the Winter Solstice" so that the listener can barely hear in the overlap of the two voices whether Frost is in fact saying "might" or "would" or "will" (though I believe it's "will"). Many people prize these sorts of recordings for the sense of authenticity they seem to add to poems; hearing a poet read in his or her own voice (as the anthology's title suggests) supposedly restores something that the poem otherwise lacks. "Poetry & Popular Culture" isn't going to agree or disagree with that assessment (not now anyway), so much as it wants to stress that even the recording of poets reading their work is an act of literary interpretation. Here, the sound people of In Their Own Voices actually obscure what might in fact be the most interesting verb-iage in "The Gift Outright." Presenting itself as documentary evidence, the recording nonetheless erases the most contentious—and perhaps the most political—part of Frost's poem.

All of this history, of course, was made possible by the serendipitously bad weather which forced Frost off script in 1961 and burned the poem he wrote in the 1930s into the popular imagination. Let's hope—as the temperatures in Iowa City threaten to plunge to -15 tonight—that Elizabeth Alexander might have similar luck when she reads this year.

Postscript: The history of "The Gift Outright" and its final line grows ever more complex the more one listens and looks. As the actual transcript of Frost's reading reveals, Frost did end the 1961 inaugural poem with "will become" but worked his way up to that ending by first sifting through a number of other verb tenses: was, would, and hath. As Frost notes, he uses the future tense "will become" expressly "for this occasion"—a reminder from one of our most "timeless" poets that not only are all poems occasional poems, but that occasional poems (not to mention their recordings and transcriptions) are political poems as well.

Chicago Politics

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on December 12

You say you like the North side best?
We’ll say we like the South.
Talk badly to the press of us?
We’ll slug you in the mouth.

Send our guy to the hospital?
Yours will show up dead.
Brag your books are in the black?
We’ll cook ’em till they’re red.

Hope to hold your convention here?
We guarantee you’ll fail.
And your guy goes to Washington?
Another goes to jail.

At the Foxhead on Election Night

Appeared in the Press-Citizen November 7, 2008

How to say it except to say it straight?
I saw things on Tuesday night that I
never expected to see and which I’ll try
to tell to my grandkids, who’ll say I exaggerate:
the first black man elected president
amidst fears of war and economic depression;
McCain delivering a genuinely touching concession;
a white man from Alaska, his head bent,
crying after hearing Obama speak;
Chicago’s million-strong all-nighter;
and, to cap off a night of dreaming, a writer
walking into the bar as usual, except this week
his date was a life-size doll of Uncle Sam,
and he was giddy and smiling, and it wasn’t a sham.









More on Good Bad Poetry:

"Writing Good Bad Poetry"
"My Poetic License"
"OMG! Buddhist Nun Texting Novel"
"Dinosaur Descendant to be Dad at 111"
"Cat Chasing Mouse Leads to 24 Hour Blackout"
"Man Faces Jail for Smuggling Iguanas in His Prosthetic Leg"
" 'Lingerie Mayor' Vows to Stay in Office"
"O.J. Simpson Questioned in Vegas Incident"

Burma-Shave Politics

Many thanks to Angela Sorby, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and author of Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917, for alerting "Poetry & Popular Culture" to a recent tidbit at the Onion. In "McCain Blasts Obama As Out Of Touch In Burma-Shave-Style Billboard Campaign," the Onion depicts this year's Republican presidential candidate as being out of touch via an old-style advertising medium: the serial billboard poem made famous by the Burma-Vita Company's "Burma-Shave" campaign which dotted American highways from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Loved by Americans ranging from my mother-in-law to Gertrude Stein (who, in Everybody's Autobiography wrote "I wish I could remember more of them, they were all lively and pleasing.... I wish I could remember them I liked them so much”), the Burma-Shave signs have been called part of "the national vocabulary" and have been installed in the Smithsonian Institution as relics of our 20th Century past. At the height of the Burma-Shave campaign, over 7,000 sets of signs using 600 individual poems were maintained in 44 states and were seen by untold numbers of drivers. It’s possible that through the 1920s, the Depression, World War II, and the 1950s, Burma-Shave’s poems were the most public, widely read verse in America.

What the Onion doesn't suggest—in cartooning McCain as outta date—is how the model Burma-Vita pioneered is, in fact, still used as part of political campaigns today. Drive through central Illinois, and you'll see signs made by locals lambasting gun-control advocates or promoting soy bio-diesel as an alternative fuel. Four years ago, in my own town of Iowa City, several neighbors along Muscatine Avenue pitched in to post poetic signs in their yards supporting the presidential campaign of Howard Dean. Those signs read:

Feeling Bushed?
Lost your grin?
Cheer up folks:
The Doctor's In.
Caucus for Howard Dean.

And in 1996—so Bill Vossler reports in his history of the advertising campaign Burma-Shave: The Rhymes, the Signs, the Times—rhymster Republicans in Washington, D.C., experimented with serial anti-Clinton billboards to pitch that year's ticket:

If you’re tired of a White House
That’s always smokin’ hemp
Vote for our future
Vote Dole-Kemp!

This was not the first time that Bob Dole associated himself with Burma-Shave verse. For the 1990 reissue of Frank Rowsome Jr.'s book The Verse By the Side of the Road: The Story of the Burma-Shave Signs and Jingles (first published in 1965), Dole was asked to write a Foreword that concluded with his own original five-line ditty:

In politics
It's always safer
Not to make waves
It's not my style
I've had some close shaves

Not the best imitation of Burma-Shave poetry, to be sure. But what's worth noting—and what bodes well (or bards well?) for Barack Obama in 2008—is that, despite the billboard poets having their backs, neither Dean nor the Dole/Kemp ticket were successful in their presidential bids. That's not to say that "Poetry & Popular Culture," uh, bristles at the thought of Obama using poetry in his campaign. Just that he shouldn't at this point get cheeky.

Sudsy Politics: Then & Now

Awash in campaign ads, anticipating its share of the $700 billion bailout, and looking forward to tonight's town-hall debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, "Poetry & Popular Culture" looks backward more than a century to the presidential campaign of Republican Benjamin Harrison, who served one term as President from 1889-1893. Without radio or tv at his disposal, Harrison found an unlikely poetic campaign ally and endorsement from Snow & Silver Soaps manufactured by Thompson & Chute of Toledo, Ohio, which—on the trade card pictured above—plugged Harrison's campaign with a little ditty titled "Victory":

Election day is near at hand,
To choose the President of our land—
One of honor, strength and hope,
Who uses SNOW and SILVER soap.

In every place, from every mouth,
From east to west, from north to south,
The people's voice will sure attest,
That SNOW and SILVER are the best.

The wrappers, too, will bring a treasure,
Which gives unbounded joy and pleasure.
Mail twenty in to our address,
A gift most rare you will possess.

Forgive "Poetry & Popular Culture" for being a little bit cynical in noting that Snow & Silver soaps fail to mention Harrison by name in their advertising poem, relegating his likeness to the reverse side of the card. I wouldn't be surprised to find a similar card published by Snow & Silver that has Grover Cleveland—Harrison's Democrat opponent and then-incumbent president—pictured on it as well. Indeed, like Big Oil or any industry seeking a lobbying presence in D.C. today, Snow & Silver soaps is playing two sides at once (literally), possibly even using the same vague poetic endorsement to promote both candidates. After all, as their poem indicates, the soaps' desire is more to ensure their own commercial success than to endorse any particular candidate or platform.

Indeed, Snow & Silver is positioning itself not just as an equal opportunity endorsement, but as a purer expression of American democracy than the election! Buoyed by "the people's voice" and available to one and all, the soaps offer—at the minor inconvenience of sending in a couple of wrappers—"a gift most rare" to any American seizing the chance. Characteristically vague in this respect as well, the ad withholds what, exactly, that gift will be: a $10 gas card? A new hybrid? An oil slick in Alaska?

If all this sounds eerily familiar, consider that we were talking a lot about the Cleveland/Harrison election a few years ago when Al Gore won the popular vote and our beloved W won the electoral vote. Indeed, it was the 1888 election that saw the Democrat Cleveland win the popular vote while sudsy-slick Republican Harrison took the electoral vote. Karl Rove or no Karl Rove, it's clear that, a century later, political endorsements, campaign ads, and the U.S. electoral system have yet—soap or no soap—to clean up their acts.

Postscript: In the time since the foregoing entry was posted, I had occasion to contact University of Illinois professor of English Cary Nelson, who has assembled a very large archive of 19th- and 20th-century advertising poetry. Nelson has confirmed my suspicions that, yes indeedy—you guessed it—Snow & Silver did in fact issue a trade card with the likeness of Cleveland on one side and the same "Victory" poem (pictured above) on the other. Pick a card, any card: it's business as usual.

Palin Poetry Watch: Rhymes of the Times

While "Poetry & Popular Culture" has yet to hear from Palin or the Palin/McCain campaign about Palin's poetic preferences, it is clear that some folks are getting poetic in their opposition to the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate. On September 14, an "Alaska Women Reject Palin" rally was held in Anchorage in front of the Loussac Library and drew nearly 1500 people. According to some reports, it was the largest political rally ever held in Alaska and much larger than the previous pro-Palin gathering that attracted a lot more coverage from the so-called liberal media. One eye-witness reports:

"When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep! I could hardly find a place to park. I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.

"Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn't honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn't happen here."

Befitting its literary location in front of the public library, some of the homemade signs rhymed—reading "Hockey Mama for Obama" and "The Alaska Disasta," for example—and others like the raven image shown above were indubitably poetic (or Poe-etic) in origin. It seems that while Palin and the Palin/McCain campaign may be closed-lipped on the subject of her relationship to this blog's favorite genre, it's clear that her well-versed opposition is not.

"Poetry & Popular Culture" interviews son of poet Frank Marshall Davis

"My father's fondest dream"
Setting the record straight on Frank Marshall Davis

Reporting for the Iowa City Press-Citizen newspaper back in April 2008, I wrote about one of Barack Obama's early influences, the poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis who appears as "Frank" in Obama's autobiography Dreams from My Father. In the late 1940s, the FBI harassed Davis (and everyone else, it seems) for being a suspected commie. This past February, right-wing writers, including Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, or AIM, began resurrecting this paranoia in order to expose what they call Obama's "carefully concealed communist and foreign connections." These reports have called Davis (1905-1987) "a Communist pawn of Moscow" and "Obama's Communist Mentor."

I recently had a chance to catch up with Mark Davis, son of Frank Marshall Davis, who retired from a career in the U.S. Air Force in 1993. Mark has recently started a blog to counter what he calls the disinformation campaign being conducted by AIM. (See http://my. barackobama.com /page/community/blog/Kaleokualoha).

Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

MC: When did you first learn about Obama's relationship with your father?

MD: I believe it was only this past May, when my lovely significant other advised me that he was mentioned in Obama's book. She also mentioned that my father's background was becoming an issue. I went online and discovered thousands of hits connected to AIM's disinformation campaign.

MC: What did you think when you read "Dreams from My Father"?

MD: Obama's portrayal of my father corresponds quite closely with my own memories. I believe it actually reinforces the point that Obama did not consider him to be his mentor but merely a colorful character who provided some useful (and not-so-useful) advice. Obama recognized that despite (or due to) his wealth of experience, my father was "incurable" of his notion that the glass ceiling for African-Americans may be permanent. This is the central question of race relations. When writing "Dreams," Obama seems to have recognized that the glass ceiling was an anachronism.

It's unfortunate that my father didn't live long enough to see race lose so much value as a factor of success. While it may be true that African-Americans will always be perceived as black, or even as "niggers" to some, race is increasingly irrelevant to success in America. For an increasing share of America, racial prejudice is disappearing. Like MLK Jr., my father's fondest dream—that we could all be judged exclusively by the content of our character—may be at hand.

MC: What made you decide to personally fight back against Kincaid and AIM?

MD: When Kincaid claimed that Obama "developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis," I said "Whoa!" Kincaid also absurdly claimed that my father's "values, passed on to Obama, were those of a communist agent who pledged allegiance to Stalin." I knew I needed to immerse myself in this fight to defend my family honor. From my background as an Intelligence Officer, I could see him mimicking a full-blown Soviet KGB "active measures" disinformation campaign.

For Kincaid, my father seems to be just "collateral damage" in a war against Obama. Although I may not have been as supportive of my family as I could have been while on active duty, I'll be damned if I allow the Kincaid Brigade to demonize my father in this dishonest campaign against Barack Obama—or anyone else.

MC: Your blog is run through barackobama.com. Why did you locate it there, and is it an endorsement of Obama as well as a defense of your father?

MD: An Obama blog seemed most appropriate because not only was Obama a friend of my father but also the enemy of my father's self-declared enemy. AIM deliberately is misrepresenting their relationship as a scandal when there was no wrongdoing, and deliberately misrepresenting Obama's reference to him as just "Frank" (without further identification in Dreams) as a "cover-up" of their imagined scandal.

I abhor such injustice, especially when committed in the name of "fairness, balance, and accuracy in news reporting." Although such defamation can no longer directly hurt my father (may he R.I.P.), it is intended to injure Obama.

I feel it's my responsibility, as an officer and a gentleman, to protect both of their reputations against this disinformation campaign. I want to protect Obama not only to repay the trust and regard he displayed for my father but also to help ensure that these lies don't hurt the campaign of the best candidate for President of the U.S. My.barackobama.com provided a ready-made media vehicle to neutralize those lies.

MC: Were you aware, growing up, that the F.B.I. was assigned to investigate your father in the late 1940s?

MD: I was vaguely aware that he was investigated because of his past activism, but I don't recall him ever providing much detail. The vast majority of his activism was in the civil rights struggle. As a teenager, I recall his delight with King's "I Have A Dream" speech and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We had little discussion of international events other than the Vietnam War, where he encouraged me, for school projects, to research the underlying reasons beyond its media portrayal.

The fact that he did not try to indoctrinate me in any Marxist ideology, although I lived with him until the age of 18, makes me absolutely positive that he did not do so with Obama.

MC: What do you think of your father's poetry now?

MD: I have never been much of a poetry buff (perhaps due to a recessive gene?), but reading his work since the controversy reinforces my determination to disprove Kincaid's misrepresentation of his character.

A slightly different version of this interview appeared in the Press-Citizen on 31 August 2008.

Biden's Bard

Breaking News: "Poetry & Popular Culture" has just learned, from sources sorta close to the Biden campaign, that the vice-presidential nominee's favorite poem may well be Seamus Heaney's "The Cure at Troy" (Heaney's translation of "The Philoctetes" by Sophocles) and especially the lines in the third stanza below which Biden has repeatedly quoted:

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

What's the appeal for Biden? While "Poetry & Popular Culture" has been unable to reach Barack Obama's running mate himself, our source sorta close to Biden comments: "I think Heaney's poem taps into the growing sense of frustration that this country feels, knowing our past flirtations with rebelling against inept power. And I think this poem is appropriate for Joe and Barack because together they represent hope and history."

Go team.

It's interesting to note that while Biden attaches himself to Nobel Prize-winning Heaney, and while Obama was once friends with politcal poet and civil rights activist Frank Marshall Davis, John McCain's choice verse might well be William Ernest Henley's 1875 poem "Invictus." Indeed, writing for The New York Times on January 21, 2008, William Kristol reported that McCain had to memorize Henley's verse in school and still has it by heart. For Kristol, McCain's affinity for Victorian-era poetry suggests that McCain himself is "not thoroughly modern"—as if the Original Maverick's inability to use email and the internet weren't evidence enough. "John McCain," Kristol writes, "Is a not so modern man. One might call him a neo-Victorian—rigid, self-righteous and moralizing, but (or rather and) manly, courageous and principled." "Invictus" ends:

It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

"Poetry & Popular Culture" now eagerly awaits McCain's choice of running mates. What shall his or her poetic preferences be?

Obama's Bitter Muse: Frank M. Davis

The following article—by yours truly—first appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen and The Des Moines Register on Wednesday, April 30, 2008. For a while, it was available online as well, but since those links have now expired, I'm making it available here.


Obama's Bitter Muse: Frank M. Davis

I was a weaver of jagged words
A warbler of garbled tunes
A singer of savage songs
I was bitter
Yes
Bitter and sorely sad
For when I wrote
I dipped my pen
In the crazy heart
Of mad America

—Frank Marshall Davis

Of the potential father figures in Barack Obama’s autobiography "Dreams from My Father," one of the first—and most mysterious—is a poet whom we only ever know as “Frank.”

"Dreams from My Father" credits Frank with being the sole older black man in Hawaii to take seriously the teenage Obama’s search for identity, and the poet thus becomes a major touchstone in Obama’s life. Nearly every time Obama reflects on his role models, the memory of Frank comes up.

When Obama first meets him, Frank is nearly 80 years old and living “in a dilapidated house in a run-down section of Waikiki.” The man with “a big, dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion” read poetry to Obama, shared whiskey, and sometimes asked for help writing dirty limericks. And in that house “with its wobbly porch and low-pitched roof,” the two men separated by 60 years in age talked about the reality of racism in America. Those discussions—filled with Frank’s anger, warnings, and bitter realism—stay with Obama through the book.

“That’s the way it is,” Obama remembers Frank saying, “You might as well get used to it.”

‘Negative Capability’

It’s a strange withholding, in a book as candid as "Dreams from My Father," that Obama doesn’t reveal Frank’s full name, much less anything from his past. For Frank was in fact a real, published poet, and knowing more about him might help illuminate who Obama is now and his relationship to the past. It might also help explain Obama’s nigh-poetic capacity for “negative capability”—the term John Keats coined in 1817 to describe someone’s ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

“Frank” is Frank Marshall Davis, a poet, journalist, and activist.

Davis was born in Kansas in 1905 and died in Hawaii in 1987. He published four books of poems that are now collected and published by the University of Illinois Press as "Black Moods" (2002). Davis began writing poetry just after the Harlem Renaissance, but unlike Langston Hughes (also a Midwesterner), Davis didn’t move East. He worked as a journalist in Chicago’s Harlem, known as Bronzeville—the same south-side neighborhood Obama would represent as an Illinois state senator. Apparently, Davis felt equally at home writing poems as he did articles about bootlegging and Bronzeville politics.

Davis, who went on to edit the first successful daily black newspaper in U.S. history, also wrote an autobiography, "Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet" (1992). That autobiography begins with a harrowing story of how Davis was lynched by a group of white boys when he was 5. The bitterness stemming from that event hangs over the book, just as Frank’s bitterness echoes through Obama’s.

For Davis, there is no evading the impediment of Jim Crow violence and prejudice, and, because of this, "Livin’ the Blues" becomes something of an anti-Horatio Alger tale. At the same time, though, in the amount of spirit, music, humor, resilience, and creativity that Davis records in the face of racist impediments, Livin’ the Blues in some ways out-Algers Alger.

‘A Solitary Rebel’

Interestingly, anti-Obama crusaders know more about Davis (whom they call “Obama’s communist mentor”) than Obama’s own political party does. Like many individuals interested in combating American racism in the 1930s and 40s, Davis worked with people affiliated with the Communist Party. He was never a card-carrying member himself; in fact, in "Livin’ the Blues" he calls himself “a solitary rebel” who avoided joining any organization at all.

Nevertheless, the FBI assigned agents to track and harass Davis and his white wife when the two moved to Hawaii in 1949.

More interesting than Davis’ association with supposed communists is the fact that his life doesn’t, in fact, fit into the categories by which either the right or the left tend to operate. Davis, for example, was a Republican who voted against Roosevelt throughout the 1930s. He spoke as a heterosexual black man on behalf of gay rights. He openly linked Jewish and black experiences of oppression and raged against America’s hypocrisy as it fought Nazi Germany while maintaining a race-based caste system at home.

A Republican with Communist friends?

A journalist who wrote poetry?

Bitterness tempered by hope?

On the surface, it’s easy to see what Davis and Obama have in common; both were born in Kansas, both have families with mixed race marriages, both lived in Hawaii. That Obama would later represent the part of Chicago that Davis wrote about years before is suggestive as well.

Davis certainly was one role model for the young Obama. But Davis—even, or especially, in the specific bitterness he comes to represent in "Dreams from My Father"—may be Obama’s muse as well.