"Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem": Bonus Features & Extra Extras

If you pick up your copy of the January 2015 issue of Poetry magazine, you'll find in the monthly "Comment" section an essay titled "Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem"—a piece that P&PC was asked to write in part to reflect on the total coolness of Catherine Robson's great new(ish) book Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, which tracks the history and literary and cultural impact of poetry memorization and recitation in British and American schools. You might recall that one of P&PC's favorite writers (and recent National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship recipient) Melissa Girard reviewed Heart Beats in these very, uh, pages a year and a half ago.

To think about Robson's book in a different but related way for the Poetry article, we took a little bit of The Outsiders and a little bit of Robert Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" at Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, mixed both with some thoughts about the oral/aural experiences of poetry in non-print media formats, and came up with a piece about how we value poems in relation to what Robson calls "the particular circumstances of [their] assimilation into a culture"—that is, whether we encounter and experience them orally, aurally, in print, or via other media. In an age where poems are circulated and remediated by film, tv, audio formats, and digital platforms of all types in addition to print, the effects of media on poetry—and poetry's effects on media and its audiences—is a conversation in which we love to take part. A particular hallmark of popular verse (and of verse encountered in popular contexts) is, after all, its refusal to stay obediently on the printed page of the book or little magazine, and if we're invested in assessing the cultural impact of poetry on a broad scale, we'd do well to extend our attention (and in some cases our admiration) to what poetry is doing in and for non-print media and what non-print media are doing for (and to) poetry. We know you all know this, or that you've at least heard us say it before, so forgive us if we sound a little bit like the metaphorically-apt but nonetheless dated broken record; we're just taking our cues from the larger media landscape and trying to make it new, dig?

One of the things that Poetry noted when first contacting P&PC about reviewing Heart Beats was the fact that in 2013—a year after Robson's study appeared—Caroline Kennedy published Poems to Learn by Heart, a kid-friendly collection issued by Disney's Hyperion Press and featuring colorful watercolors by Jon J. Muth. Was this book a sign, Poetry wondered, that poetry memorization was on an upswing? That some cultural nostalgia for days long past was finding new expression? That the age of the internet—fueled in part by things like Disney's "A Poem Is..." video series that premiered during National Poetry Month in 2011 featuring celebrities like John Leguizamo, Jessica Alba, and Owen Wilson reciting poems—was perhaps, unexpectedly and surprisingly, participating in if not prompting this upswing?

Unbeknownst to Poetry, Girard was already writing her P&PC piece and had also made the same connection between the Robson and Kennedy books, so how could we ignore that correspondence, coincidental or not, when writing our essay? That's when we thought of John F. Kennedy's inauguration and how, flustered by high winds and bright sun, Robert Frost was unable to read the verse he'd composed specially for the event and, instead, recited from memory "The Gift Outright"—perhaps the most famous recitation of a poem in U.S. history and a moment when the values of the memorized poem trumped the values of the printed or written poem on a national stage. Born in 1957, Caroline Kennedy—the only living child of President Kennedy and current U.S. ambassador to Japan—wouldn't have even been four years old at the time. (That's Jackie reading to Caroline in the picture here, taken before 1961 but published by Time on the occasion of Kennedy's inauguration.) But is it possible that something from that day about the durability and reliability of the memorized poem stuck with her?

It's hard to say for sure (we haven't yet contacted Caroline's people to ask), but there's no denying Caroline's advocacy for poetry and especially the incorporation of poetry into children's lives where it is often memorized. She has published The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (2001); A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children (2005); A Family Christmas, which incorporates poems (2007), and She Walks in Beauty—A Woman's Journey Through Poems (2011), in addition to Poems to Learn By Heart. She hasn't been especially shy about this either. For example, check out her 2013 appearance on The Colbert Report where she plugged Poems to Learn By Heart, explained why one would memorize poems, defended the merits of poetry in the age of Twitter as "the language of the human heart," and along with Colbert did a tag-team recitation of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" as well as a thoroughly entertaining memorized-poem back-and-forth tennis match with him.

Lest ye think that poetry is a recent, new-millennial interest of Kennedy's, check out the curious book (pictured here) that the P&PC interns got their hands on recently: The Caroline Kennedy First Lady Dress-Up Book, published by Rolton House Publishers in 1963. Illustrated by Charlotte Jetter (whom we think did lettering for Marvel comics in the 1960s and 70s), the book features colored drawings of Caroline dressing up in period-appropriate First Lady attire accompanied by extensive runway-like captions about those costumes. "When I make-believe I am Martha Washington," the first caption in the book explains, "I wear a beautiful eighteenth century gown. It is made of finest taffeta with a big full skirt and a tight-fitting bodice which laces down the back. The material was purchased in London and it is salmon pink in color. The dress is hand-painted with white ribbon chains all over it. Violets, buttercups, daisies and morning-glories are embroidered beside ladybugs, wasps and grasshoppers. I wear a lace cap on my head, lace mitts on my hands and a lace shawl over my shoulders. Don't you think Martha Washington is pretty? I do."

But the Dress-Up Book is more than just a fashion show: it's also an anthology of children's poems! Many are little ditties about presidents; others (some written by Alene Dalton) appear to have nothing to do with fashion but are almost cut-and-pasted, scrapbook-like, into the book. Take, for example, the page-spread pictured here: a picture of Caroline dressing up as Florence Harding, a poem written about "Warren Harding," and three poems ("The Grasshoppers," "The Chickens," and "The Apple Tree" that are linked to each other in theme but that appear to have little or no connection to the roaring twenties, Harding, or a time when "clothes were tight and hats were high." It's kind of a bizarre assemblage—one that connects dress-up play, sanitized versions of history ("We danced and played without a care / Laughter and joy were everywhere," reads "Warren Harding"), and rhymes and metered language. P&PC comes away from it all feeling like childhood, history, and poems are all exercises in pretending and, in the process, poetry emerges from this mix as the language of childhood naivete. Far from the memorized poem, which the grown-up Caroline values for its durability and longevity in the human mind, the verse in the Dress-Up Book appears to feed a discourse in which poetry is the language of childhood—something precious, yes, but ultimately something that we leave behind for the more serious (and prosaic) endeavors of adulthood and "reality." Most of the Dress-Up Book, in fact, is about the past: past presidents, past first ladies, American history, and a fantasy world rooted in farms, apple trees, and ponies.

For this reason, the most interesting page of the Dress-Up Book is the last one, which pairs "The Old Frontier" (about Columbus, who "sailed and found our land, / The one we love 'cause it's so grand") with "The New Frontier" (pictured here and featuring a little space-person pointing up at, what, the moon? the sun? some other heavenly body?). That final poem in the book reads as follows:

When history books open up
In future years
They will show that Kennedy's plans
Were called The New Frontiers.

Astronauts blasted off
In shining silver missiles
Sounding like explosions
From a billion giant whistles.

And, who can deny it?
Maybe one day soon
We may see a New Frontier
Staked out upon the moon.

This is the most "adult" poem in the book, one where the activity of dressing-up takes on new and different implications. Here, history is in the making. Evoking the space race admits into the Dress-Up Book for the first time the subject of the Cold War, as does the comparison of rockets to "silver missiles" in line six—a line that, months removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, couldn't be read as naive or innocent. Anticipating the moon landing—line 9 even seems to anticipate conspiracy reports denying the landing ever took place—makes this poem about the future, not the past. And even the dress-up taking place here is different; it's a gender-neutral space suit freed from the taffeta, satin, and ruffles of earlier pictures in which all markers of gender are disguised. Boy or girl, you can imagine yourself inside that suit, and it's a moment that caps off a narrative of American history by looking forward from childhood, beyond the corsets of bygone eras, and into new frontiers where pretending (like pretending to be an astronaut) is still in play but leads to actualization—to history making. Even the voice of the poem is different; while retaining the rhyme and meter of previous poems, line 9 contains the only unanswered question in the entire book.

There's a much darker side to the history in which the Dress-Up Book is embedded, of course. It was published in 1963, and Caroline's father would be shot and killed in November of that same year—a moment so seared into the American memory that we here at P&PC can't but imagine it in some type of relationship with the history of the memorized poem, the decline of memorizing poems in American classrooms that Robson pegs to the 1960s, the made-up histories in the Dress-Up Book, the loss of American innocence that many people attribute to the moment of Kennedy's assassination, and Caroline's advocacy of poetry memorization now. As Frost demonstrated at Kennedy's inauguration, and as Caroline argues in Poems to Learn by Heart, the memorized poem is always with you and something that—for better or worse—you can't forget.

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."

Who Was Vincent Godfrey Burns? Thoughts on Inaugural Poems & Poet Laureates

Nearly fifty years ago to the day, baffled by the heavy winds and so blinded by the sun's reflection that he couldn't read the poem he'd originally prepared for the occasion, 86 year-old Robert Frost recited from memory "The Gift Outright" to mark the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as U.S. President. The poem and improvised performance have not only gone down in poetic history as the gold standard by which inaugural poems are measured, but sometimes one even gets the impression that Frost and Kennedy somehow invented the ritual—that inaugural poems began then and there.

Of course, as the "Souvenir Inaugural Poem" (pictured here) from President Eisenhower's 1953 inauguration suggests, Frost and Kennedy didn't initiate the practice any more than Frost had invented the television that made the inauguration and "The Gift Outright" especially famous. People just don't remember—nor do they probably much want to remember—the poem "A Nation Prayed" which minister-turned-poet-turned-best-selling-novelist-turned-successful-screenwriter and soon-to-be controversial poet laureate of Maryland Vincent Godfrey Burns wrote in Eisenhower's honor.

So who was Burns—whose papers are scattered about in collections at Syracuse, UC Santa Barbara, Columbia, University of Maryland, the Maryland Historical Society, Kent State, and the University of Vermont? He was born in Brooklyn in 1893 and studied at Penn State, Harvard and the Union Theological Seminary. After serving in France in World War I, he was ordained in 1920 as a Congregationalist minister and plied that trade in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts before he eventually had some sort of falling out with the church that, despite his later appeals for forgiveness, was irreconcilable. He was married twice and had three kids.

None of this is particularly exceptional, but it appears that Burns increasingly turned from working on one Word to another in the making of his living. In 1932, in collaboration with his brother Robert Elliott who'd just escaped from a Georgia prison, Vincent got a big break, co-writing Robert's autobiography I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. Serialized in True Detective, the story was then made into a Warner Brothers movie that scored Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, Best Picture, and Best Sound; it was entered into the National Film Registry in 1991. Apparently, both the book and the movie came to be influential in efforts to reform prison conditions in the deep South, and Vincent would go on to pen a sequel, Out of these Chains in 1942—the year, btw, that Frost's "Gift Outright" first appeared in print. (That's Vincent standing on the right in the picture here, presenting a copy of An American Poet Speaks to then-Governor of Maryland J. Millard Tawes in 1956.)

Some people suggest that Vincent couldn't recover from the celebrity status his brother's escape and autobiography attracted, and that a corresponding megalomania led to the breakup of his first marriage and caused problems with his congregation. We here at the P&PC Office don't know enough to take sides in the matter. However, in the years following the film's release, Burns would go on to edit anthologies, write poetry, television scripts, plays, and novels including the racily-illustrated Female Convict which went on to sell over a million copies—and which might well have starred Lady Gaga and Beyonce had the divas been around at the time.

Interestingly, even though Burns wrote "A Nation Prayed" in honor of Eisenhower's inauguration, that part of his life story is almost uniformly left out of every source we consult, making us wonder whether his poem was any more official than Robert Lowell's "Inauguration Day: January 1953." Sources on Burns concentrate, instead, on the fact that he was appointed Maryland Poet Laureate by Governor Tawes in 1962, a post he held with a fair degree of controversy until passing away in 1979. Seems that thirty years before that controversially liberal Amiri Baraka was appointed and then unappointed to the New Jersey Poet Laureate position, Burns was using Maryland's equivalent post to broadcast his own politically and religiously conservative views. A poem "Down at the Watergate," for example, reportedly took sides in depicting Nixon as the victim of a witch hunt—a not unsurprising view, perhaps, coming from a poet who, back in '53, made Eisenhower out to be a leader appointed by God and not an electorate. Burns's opponents tried to oust him from the post several times but never succeeded. Who knows. Maybe they would have been more effective if they'd lobbied for the elimination of the Poet Laureate post altogether, as the Jersey legislature did.