Toward a Stray Cat Ethics of Poetry Criticism

Meet Bella and Athens, the P&PC Office cats. We adopted them last Fall shortly after our former friend and companion Stella reached the end of her nineteen years. (Regular P&PC readers met Stella here.) We weren't entirely sure we were ready to replace Stella, but the office got so empty so quickly that we just couldn't bear it, and so down we trooped to Salem Friends of Felines and came home with these two adorable stray tuxedos. At the time, Bella (on the left) was a little over a year old, and Athens (on the right) was eight months. They're awesome—a combined twenty pounds of confusion, excitement, energy, and curiosity that has made the office a lively and unpredictable place over the last several months.

We here at P&PC love John Keats's poem "To Mrs. Reynolds's Cat":

Cat! who hast passed thy grand climacteric,
   How many mice and rats hast in thy days
   Destroyed? How many tit-bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears - but prithee do not stick
   Thy latent talons in me, and up-raise
   Thy gentle mew, and tell me all thy frays
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -
   For all thy wheezy asthma, and for all
Thy tail's tip is nicked off, and though the fists
   Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
   In youth thou enteredst on glass-bottled wall.     

Imagine our surprise, then, when Athens—clearly the poet of the pair—began suffering from the "wheezy asthma" mentioned in Keats's poem. We took her to the vet. He put her on prednisone. That helped for a while, but she has since had two acute attacks that landed her listless and drooling in the emergency vet's oxygen chambers. We haven't yet purchased the little AeroKat inhaler that's been recommended—our non-advertising-based non-revenue has us working on a petty slim budget—but we think that, following an increase in her meds, we've finally got things under control. Wheezy is now doing just fine, and the office is clattering with the noise of tinfoil balls, feather toys, and the general racket of Bella and Athens tearing after each other and rolling from room to room leaving tufts of fur hovering in the air behind them.

Stella didn't require much from the vet, so we've never spent much time looking around the waiting room. Waiting for Athens, however, we've had a chance to peruse the decor at Steve Swart's Capitol Veterinary Clinic in Salem, and we've discovered that if Athens does indeed have a little poetic breathing disorder, then she's going to the right place, as Swart's waiting room is a not unpoetic place. In the lower left-hand corner of the framed collage pictured in the previous paragraph, for example, you'll find Francis Witham's "Stray Cat" (pictured here) done up in blue calligraphy. While it doesn't have a whole lot in common with Keats's sonnet, it does eerily recall William Ernest Henley's "Invictus"—and not just because it's got sixteen lines of iambic tetrameter just like "Invictus" does, but also because those first six lines appear to be reworking the language of Henley's poem. The famous last lines of "Invictus"—

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.

—become the lines "The master of my destiny" and "Oh, what unhappy twist of fate" in Witham's poem. Witham even recycles Henley's "straight gate" and turns it into "my gate." Here, then, is the opening of "Stray Cat":

   Oh, what unhappy twist of fate
Has brought you, homeless to my gate?
   The gate where once another stood
To beg for shelter, warmth and food.
   For from that day I ceased to be
      The master of my destiny.

In Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, Catherine Robson argues that "those who learn a work by heart and recite it frequently come to feel that it belongs to them, not the author of its being, or, even further, that it actually speaks for them." Moreover, in her Afterword, which studies the recitation and memorization of "Invictus" in particular, Robson claims that "at every turn 'Invictus' offers reciters an open opportunity to understand its expressions not as the contingent utterances of somebody else in a particular historical moment or geographical site, but rather as entirely personal to themselves in their own time of trial."

Witham's "Stray Cat" certainly offers one more piece of evidence for the far-reaching legacy of the memorized poem in popular culture, but "Stray Cat" extends the legacy that Robson maps in compelling ways, suggesting there might be a history of how the memorized poem has led to the creation of new poems as well. Indeed, Witham doesn't let "Invictus" speak for her but creates a companion poem to it through which she herself can speak. In other words, the probable memorization of "Invictus" has become a doorway to Authorship for Witham, and some of the very traits of "Stray Cat" that might be turn-offs for some literary critics ("twist of fate," "master of my destiny," etc.) are the product not of Witham's inability to use language, or some other deficiency on her part, but, rather, the product of her relationship to Henley's poem and her experience learning in an education system that told her that poems like Henley's were valuable enough to learn by heart.

Thus, the "badness" or the "goodness" of "Stray Cat" is not Witham's goodness or badness alone. It is also Henley's goodness or badness. And it is also the goodness or badness of the education system where Witham learned it—or perhaps where she was even forced to memorize it and thus understand it as a valuable poem to know and on which to model her own poems. That is, just as it takes a village to raise a child (or a cat), it also takes a village to produce a poem. Rather than keep those poems outside the gates of critical understanding, we here at P&PC prefer to side with the ethical poetics that Witham herself metaphorizes at the end of "Stray Cat": "Well...don't just stand there...come on in!"

A Magic Song Restorer

In a sense, the Norton Anthology of Poetry is not just a collection of great poems but an aviary as well. From Percy Shelley's skylark to John Keats's nightingale, Emily Dickinson's bobolink, Edgar Allan Poe's raven, and William Butler Yeats's falcon, English poetry is part field guide if not tutorial in birdwatching and even the skill of birding by ear. "Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop" calls the hermit-thrush from the pine trees of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." Robert Frost's ovenbird "makes the solid tree trunks sound again." And Gerard Manley Hopkins records the lark's "rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score / In crisps of curl..."

If birdwatching has long inspired poets, who see or hear their own singing more clearly in relation to "the thing with feathers," then it's a pleasure to see poetry—at least on the Magic Song Restorer tin of bird food pictured here—returning the favor. The prose directions on the side of the Depression-Era tin read: "Fill the treat cup daily with this song food. If the canary is run down or feeling out of sort feed this food exclusively in the regular food cup." But the prose isn't where the magic is. The magic, of course, is in the poetry printed on the back of the tin:

Magic cures him when he's sick
Magic cheers him when he's well
Makes his feathers smooth and slick
And his voice just like a bell

A little chant or incantation calling forth the forces of healing and recovery in a way that prose cannot, this quatrain also visualizes the canary getting better, narrating a process of recovery—curing, cheering, smoothing feathers—which is signaled as complete by (what else?) birdsong.

Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Asshole, and the Haiku of Fight Club

Last week, Poetry & Popular Culture tried—via some amateur and possibly dubious ornithological sleuthing—to argue for the singular importance of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" in understanding Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Make no mistake: the P&PC Office wasn't allowed to carry off this claim unchallenged. Some respondents contended that whether or not the nightingale in the park scene was actually a nightingale makes no difference and that, in that scene, "bird" is understood to signify "nightingale" simply enough. Other whistle blowers argued that Jekyll's transformation into Hyde wasn't precipitated by poetry at all all but by the fact that Jekyll witnessed a cat eating a bird; observing an instinctual predator at work hailed Mr. Hyde and prompted his manifestation. Still other naysayers argued that Victor Fleming's 1941 remake is more sophisticated than P&PC gave it credit for being even though Fleming axed Keats from the script and left Jekyll whistling a song he first heard, as Hyde, in the company of Ivy.

Fair enough, we say, while nevertheless sticking to our guns: the fact that Jekyll's first-ever involuntary transformation into Hyde occurs immediately after he addresses a poem to another creature makes that moment particularly significant. It suggests that the re-appearance of Hyde has less to do with the return of the repressed than it does with either 1) the ability (or inability) to communicate to the proper auditor, or 2) the gap between reality and the world imagined by poetry. It's not poetry, per se, that the film associates with Jekyll's propriety, or with learning, or with class, or with culture, but, rather, the activity of saying or thinking about poetry as a way of relating to the specifics of this world.

Admittedly, part of our obstinacy in this matter is due to temperament, but part stems from the fact that one of the most recent Jekyll-and-Hyde movies—David Fincher's 1999 Fight Club starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton—also suggests the central importance of poetry to the destabilization of the self. Fight Club centers on two characters, played by Pitt and Norton, who begin an underground amateur fight-club scene as a way of recruiting disaffected men into a terrorist network intent on breaking the power of financial institutions, especially the credit system and its record of debt. Pitt plays Tyler Durden, the impulsive, charismatic Hyde to Norton's nameless, conservative, insomniac Jekyll. As the movie develops [SPOILER ALERT], we discover that Norton's character is a delusional schizophrenic and that Tyler is really his alter ego with a six pack full of wish fulfillment. (At one point, his girlfriend Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter, describes Norton as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Asshole" to sum up her feelings of being mistreated by both his selves.) How Norton ultimately untangles himself from himself—how he even discovers himself within himself—is the primary "fight" at the center of Fight Club.

There's a scene in the middle of the movie where Norton's heretofore cautious character begins to embrace Tyler's life philosophy in earnest; he detaches himself from the mind-numbing trappings of consumerist America in order to experience LIFE in all of its brutal vitality. He goes to work with blood on his shirt. He smokes cigarettes in his cubicle. You know, productive, radical stuff. In a little poetic series of voice-over I statements accompanying this change, he explains:

I was the Zen master.
I became the calm little center of the world.
I wrote little haiku poems.
I emailed them to everyone.
I got right in everyone's hostile little face.

That's not the poetry, however. As Norton is explaining this, we get a close-up view of his computer screen where he is in the process of word processing one of those "little haiku poems" that symbolizes his new attitude. Here's that haiku:

Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The queen is their slave

Unlike Dr. Jekyll in the 1931 film, who becomes a performer of the Keats poem prior to his trans- formation, Norton's character becomes an author. And the haiku may be the perfect poetic form to bring his two selves into some sort of alignment: it's as lean as Tyler's six pack and has the sort of Spartan ethos Tyler would advocate, yet its regular 5-7-5 form would appeal to the structure Norton's other half needs. And it's a poetic form as at home in the iconoclastic, seventeenth-century, world-renouncing hands of Basho as it is in the the 21st-Century American cubicle. (See how Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has been writing haiku in lieu of error messages to help police disruptive activity on the online site.) Rather than separating Norton from his alter ego, as it does with Jekyll, poetry appears, however uneasily, to synchronize the two.

All of this isn't to say that Jekyll's recitation of "Ode to a Nightingale" in 1931 and Norton's composition of seventeen syllables in 1999 are equivalent acts. Far from it. While both do occur at a significant moment of transformation from Jekyll to Hyde—or from Jekyll to Mr. Asshole—those transformations are complicated by the nature of authorship (Norton is an author, Jekyll is not), the media entailed (Jekyll uses his voice, Norton uses email), their respective cultures (Jekyll is in 19th-century Britain, Norton is not), etc. That is, if the 1931 flick is about the birds (the Nightingale), then the 1999 film is about the bees (drones, workers, queens). But the simple fact that this Jekyll-Hyde transformation is articulated in both cases via poetry should be enough to create some buzz—if not give one something to sing about.

Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and John Keats

Poetry hit the big screen in some big and lasting ways in the 1930s. James Whale, for example, opened 1935's Bride of Frank- enstein by staging a discussion between Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley about the nature of Mary's horror story which Whale himself had brought to movie theaters in 1931. (That's Byron, who in the film calls himself "England's greatest sinner," pictured above.) Then, in 1936, Frank Capra made small-town poet Longfellow Deeds (played by Gary Cooper) the center of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a story which pitted the values of earnest, small-town poetries against the cynicism and condescension of New York and its literati. If we think of Bride of Frankenstein—with its campy black humor and extravagant hair-dos—as an unpredictable sequel to the 1931 flick, then we could do worse than think about Mr. Deeds Goes to Town as a sort of Depression-era warm-up for Capra's 1946 classic It's a Wonderful Life.

Before Whale and Capra, however, there was 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, brought into being by director Rouben Mamoulian and starring Frederic March as the famous doctor who morphs back and forth between respectably professional Jekyll (he of the pent-up aching rivers who is kept from the affections of his fiance Beatrix by a future father-in-law who insists on postponing the marriage) and lustful, simian Hyde who abusively takes out Jekyll's sexual frustrations on a local dancer named Ivy.

Three-quarters of the way through the film, Jekyll swears off his addiction to Hyde. He destroys the bubbly potion. He gets rid of the key that allows him secret, back-door, after-hours entrance into his laboratory. He heads off to a social event at which his impending nuptials with Beatrix will be announced, but then disaster strikes. The potion is still in his bloodstream. Jekyll is unable to control its effects. He transforms into Hyde, misses the social event, kills Ivy, transforms back into Jekyll, denies himself his fiance's love, turns into Hyde again, clubs his future father-in-law over the head with a cane, and leads the police on a chase through London that ends at his laboratory and with his death.

But there's more to the story than that. There's also the poetry of John Keats. As the resolute, newly sober Jekyll heads off to meet his fiance at the social event celebrating their impending marriage—and before he loses control and turns back into Hyde—he walks through a park where, hearing a bird singing, he stops to contemplate life and death and the possible meanings of the bird's song. If Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were a musical, this is the moment when the good doctor would launch into song. But this isn't a musical, and so he launches into a poem instead, quoting the first two lines of stanza seven from Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale":

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down...

No sooner does Jekyll thoughtfully repeat that first line then he sees a black cat lurking in the tree. He watches the cat slink down a branch. "Oh no! No!" he cries as he watches the cat kill and eat the bird. He again repeats, "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird" and immediately morphs into Hyde.

Like Jekyll's high spirits and resolution, the romantic moment is fleeting. Perhaps appropriately so because life in the bird world is different from life in the human world. Not only does everything go pear-shaped for Jekyll from there on out, but the Keats quotation itself disappeared from the story in 1941 when Victor Fleming remade the film with Spencer Tracy playing a far inferior Jekyll, Ingrid Bergman playing Ivy with a mixture of accents, and Lana Turner playing Jekyll's fiance. (In 1941, instead of quoting Keats in the park, Tracy goes a-whistling down the boulevard only to be interrupted by his gullet-clutching transformation into Hyde.)

As brief as it is, the moment is a spectacular articulation of the film's central tragedy, for while Jekyll quotes "Ode to a Nightingale" correctly, he quotes it to a bird that is not—not as far as the amateur ornithologists in the P&PC office can tell, at least—a nightingale. (Elsewhere in the movie, Jekyll, appearing as Jekyll, calls Beatrix a "starling," so it's not unreasonable to think the "nightingale" in the park was, in fact, a starling). In the act of speaking Keats to the wrong bird, Jekyll inadvertently queers what have been—up to that point at least—two separate discourses, and it is the queering or misapplication of these discourses and their respective subject positions that precipitates the identity crisis that leads to his own demise. That is to say that his loss of control and subsequent breakdown occurs in the realm of language before it does in body or mind. It's as if in misapplying or misidentifying the referent of the Keats poem, the walls separating the dichotomies of his life—Beatrix and Ivy, body and mind, man and ape, sexual appetite and social bearing, starling and nightingale, Hyde and Jekyll—come tumbling down as well. He is, for better or worse, unable to integrate these aspects of his experience into a new subject position: the "sole self" of the poem's final stanza.

Mamoulian's movie was made before the full enforcement of the Production Code and contains a surprising if not shocking amount of skin, violence and sexual content. To quote my nephew, "It's a little bit scary." When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer remade Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1941, most of this material was cut—a cinematic repression analogous to Jekyll's repression of his sexual desire early on in the movie. But the 1941 film cut out Keats as well. Could it be that poetry is a sort of Mr. Hyde for the 1941 version? A human experience that, once given voice, precipitates all sorts of crises demanding the disintegration and reconstruction of the self? A dangerous tool in the hands of people who might misapply it, who might ask "do I wake or sleep" at the wrong time and thus see the world around them anew? We are not Keats scholars here at P&PC. Nor are we ornithologists or film critics or linguists or Lacanian psychoanalysts, but we can't shake the feeling that Mamoulian's use of "Ode to a Nightingale" is not only a sophisticated reading of the poem—an act of literary criticism taking place in Hollywood—but that other scholars and specialists would find this moment of poetry in popular culture to be rich and provocative as well, as so many are.

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: An Interview with Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist

Poetry & Popular Culture was pleasantly surprised when it opened up the September 2009 issue of Wired magazine and discovered that a significant portion of a feature article on Craigslist (Gary Wolf's "Why Craigslist is Such a Mess") was given over to the poetry that has become part of the warp and woof of what is now the world's largest classified section. Wolf reports that Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster (pictured here) has turned to poetry as a weapon in the fight against spammers, con artists, message-happy business owners posting in too many categories at once, and other people interfering with the site's effective performance. "Without a computer science research department to work on evil-fighting algorithms, or a call center to take complaints," Fox explains:

"Buckmaster has settled on a different approach, one that involves haiku. The little poems he has written appear on the screen at times when users might expect a helpful message from the staff. They function as a gnomic clue that what you are seeing is intentional, while discouraging further conversation or inquiry. For instance, start too many conversations in the forums and your new threads may fail to show up. Instead, you will see this:

frogs croak and gulls cry
silently a river floods
a red leaf floats by

Attempt to post a message that is similar to one you've already entered, and this may appear:

a wafer thin mint
that's been sent before it seems
one is enough, thanks

The slight delays in cognitive processing that these haiku cause are valuable. They open a space for reflection, during which you can rethink your need for service. But haiku can't solve everything....."

Wanting to know more about the power of these gnomic clues, and taken by the prospect of the huge audiences that Buckmaster's poems might command (even if a fraction of each month's 20 billion page views results in a user reading a poem, that's a huge audience that even Billy Collins and Mary Oliver combined can't touch), Poetry & Popular Culture decided to track Buckmaster down and ask him a few questions. Here's what he had to say for himself.

P&PC: When and why did you start using poems on Craigslist?

Jim: In 2000, strictly for the fun of it.

P&PC: Do you write them all? Like, do you have a secret MFA degree that we don't know about?

Jim: No MFA, but I did write the haiku.

P&PC: What's your favorite?

Jim: Probably:

frogs croak and gulls cry
silently a river floods
a red leaf floats by

P&PC: Why limit yourself to haiku?

Jim: We don't. We've also used bits from Shakespeare's Sonnet 33, Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," and I believe something from A.E. Housman.

P&PC: Your poems appear when people are potentially abusing the site. What sort of discipline does haiku offer in contrast to other poetic forms?

Jim: Brevity.

P&PC: Gary Wolf's Wired article suggested you match certain haiku with certain offenses. How does that pairing happen?

Jim: Each haiku was composed to address a particular aspect of our user interface, often to take the place of an error message.

P&PC: What sort of feedback do you get?

Jim: Users seem mostly to like them, at least compared to error messages.

P&PC: Can we expect a Craigslist Collected Poems anytime soon?

Jim: Not sure the corpus merits it, but one can dream.

J.T. Dutton's "Freaked"

Ezra Pound famously wrote that poetry should be as well-written as prose. Judging from the evidence, American novelists appear to believe that prose, at the same time, should aspire toward the poetic—or at the very least discuss poetry. If you keep a lookout, in fact, you'll find that few "literary" novels in the twentieth century fail to incorporate or mention poetry at some point along the way. Sometimes those references are obvious—the way that Leslie Marmon Silko weaves poems into the text of her novel Ceremony—and others are fleeting. In "Slaughterhouse Five," Vonnegut quotes from Roethke's "The Waking" and mentions William Blake. Saul Bellow's Herzog reads Blake, Dryden and Pope. When a tramp commits suicide by throwing himself into a thresher in Willa Cather's "My Antonia," he is found to have been carrying a pen knife, a wishbone, and a poem "cut out of a newspaper and nearly worn out." Heck, in Dashiell Hammett's "Maltese Falcon," Sam Spade calls Effie "the sister of the boy who stood on the burning deck"—a direct reference to the often-taught and often-memorized 1826 Felicia Hemans poem “Casabianca.”

Given the regularity with which American novels address or incorporate poetry, one such as yours truly could be easily forgiven if he argued that this tendency is more than just a tendency. Could it in fact be a constitutive discourse of the U.S. novel as a genre?

I recently showcased a poetry-related excerpt from Cheeni Rao's forthcoming memoir/novel "In Hanuman's Hands," and here—in an ongoing effort to track how novelists are dealing with the other genre—I want to introduce a section of J.T. Dutton's young adult novel "Freaked" which is due out in stores from HarperCollins imprint HarperTeen on March 17, 2009. "Freaked" is the story of a 15 year-old boarding school student named Scotty Douglas Loveletter. In addition to being the son of America's most famous sex self-help therapist, Scotty jams on drugs and the Grateful Dead. In "Freaked," he needs to get to Freedom to see Jerry, and the lack of a ticket, a ride, or money in his pocket isn't going to keep him from the promised land.

Note, as you read the following account of the show, the unattributed reference to Keats. Some gossip about the Dead, its lyrics, and permissions issues in "Freaked" will follow, so keep reading!

Here is Dutton:

The music was the only thing saving us. The notes were golden threads that wove themselves into the wild tapestry of images, smells, and the floor wobbling under my feet. The acoustic ran as as it always does, higher and lighter than the backup guitar; Jerry's voice danced another couple notes above that. I could hear him coming through the music. People in the crowd chose the line they were going to move to. There were girls fluttering through the backdrop of light, taking wing almost, and guys hunkering low to the ground, swinging their arms and stomping. The whirling-helicopter girl whipped past. I was just a step above an open riser overlooking the stage, and her hair and arms and skirt blew a breeze across my face. She made all kids of gestures with her hands, wrapping them around and under each other like snakes on Erasmus's pole as she talked to me in signs. She repeated every note just as Jerry played it and transformed it into a movement of her body. Everything about her was beautiful: the way the light moved in her ebony braids, the way her shadow reduced the glare from the spots on the ceiling, the way she became the moon eclipsing the sun, the symbol of yin and yang. She was love, all right. Pure, uncut, pay-with-your soul, put you in the hospital love.

"Truth, beauty—" I said into the microphone in an effort to catch the moment before it slipped.

By the time I had finished reporting, she was gone. All around me, the crowd surged, an ocean that rose and reared before dashing itself against a rocky shore of ecstasy. We were stirred by the girl's appearance and the music rippling from Jerry's harp unstrung. No music the Dead plays has quite the same intensity as Jerry's music—not Bobby's booze ballads or blues. I liked "One More Saturday Night" but I worshiped all of Jerry's songs, and the ones that really made me fall on my knees were the ones with women's names: "Bertha," "Althea," Scarlet Begonias," "Dear Prudence." My mother was just like Sugar Magnolia: "She can dance a Cajun rhythm / Jump like a Willys in four wheel drive." She wanted to be thrown to the wind, left to drift on the currents that moved her.

I got up and danced myself crazy in search of the whirling-helicopter girl, my pack flying out to the left and right of me, my tie and the tails of my jacket sucking up the air and making me fly. At first it was strange being on my feet again. I couldn't stand up, but I wasn't exactly falling down, either. I smacked some guy with the microphone of my tape recorder.

"Look out douche bag," he said.

"Sorry," I said into the tape, for posterity.

*****

In her original manuscript, Dutton had opened every chapter with a quotation from a Dead song, titling each chapter with the title of the song being quoted from. When it came time to publish, though, Ice 9 Publishing—which somehow owns the rights to all of the Dead's songs—wouldn't grant permission to Dutton to use all of the lyrics she wanted to use. Ultimately, Dutton was allowed to quote from "Dire Wolf" and was given leave to use brief phrasings from the songs here and there within the text (as with "She can dance a Cajun rhythm..." in the preceding passage).

So in short, because of the exigencies of copyright law and the concerns of Ice 9, the "Freaked" that you'll see at the store is not the "Freaked" that Dutton had in mind. But never fear! Yours truly has managed to acquire what is now believed to be the list of quotations Dutton wanted to use as chapter epigraphs in the original book but was not allowed to use in the final version. Here they are. And remember, you heard it first here:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung . . .
—Robert Hunter, "Ripple"

But I’ll still sing you love songs
Written in the letters of your name.
And brave the storm to come,
For it surely looks like rain.
—John Perry Barlow, "Looks Like Rain"

A box of rain will ease the pain
And love will see you through.
—Robert Hunter, "Box of Rain"

… the heart has its beaches,
Its homeland, and thoughts of its own.
—Robert Hunter, "Eyes of the World"

Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart.
You just gotta poke around.
—Robert Hunter, "Shakedown Street"

Trouble with you is
The trouble with me.
Got two good eyes
But we still don’t see.
—Robert Hunter, "Casey Jones"

You must really consider the circus
‘Cause it might be your kind of zoo.
I can’t think of a place that’s more perfect
For a person as perfect as you.
—John Perry Barlow, "Hell in a Bucket"

When I awoke, the Dire Wolf
Six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinnin at my window
All I said was “come on in.”
—Robert Hunter, "Dire Wolf"

There’s a dragon with matches loose on the town.
Take a whole pail of water just to cool him down.
—Robert Hunter, "Fire on the Mountain"

Given the vagaries of quoting with and without impunity from the Dead lyrics, you might like to know one final note on "Freaked." Dutton originally titled the book "Ripple," but her editor lobbied for "Dark Star" instead (both titles of Dead songs). Although the publisher is legally allowed to use the song title in this way, Ice 9 expressed its objection by withholding permission for the epigraphs quoted above. Shortly after the change to "Dark Star" and the conflict with Ice 9, Harper's marketing department decided that "Dark Star" sounded too much like a sci-fi novel title and wouldn't work for Dutton's book. Hence the change to "Freaked," which has no official connection to the Dead. One wonders if Harper had in fact gone forward with a title like "Freaked" from the beginning, whether Ice 9 wouldn't have gone into such a tizzy, whether it wouldn't have withheld permission for the epigraphs, and whether Dutton's book would have been published in a form much closer to the one she initially wanted. But hey, who ever said publishing is actually about the author and the work?