"A Winter Mountain" by Benjamin Walton (1973)

Now Showing: "Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon"

If you're in or around Oregon during the next couple of days, make it a goal to hie yourself over to Willamette University's Pelton Theater and catch a showing of Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon—an experimental, group-written and provocative play to which P&PC managed to score opening-night tickets on February 15, a date nicely timed to coincide with Susan B. Anthony's birthday as well as the date of the first woman to register to vote in Oregon, Anthony's friend and leading Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway. (The play's title, btw, comes from lyrics to Duniway's "Campaign Song," written around 1871.)

P&PC has been pretty close to this production for a long time now, serving as an unofficial dramaturge because the play started with—and incorporates in a bunch of very funky ways—a collection of poems and songs sourced from The New Northwest, a suffragist newspaper that was started and edited by Duniway, that regularly featured poetry (oftentimes on the front page), and that was published out of Portland from 1871-1887. (If you're a regular P&PC reader, you might remember our four-part "Remembering The New Northwest" series here, here, here, and here.)

So, here's the story. Back in January of 2012, seeking some way to motivate and bring back to public life part of this otherwise largely forgotten archive of suffragist poetry written in the Willamette Valley, which two different instantiations of a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class helped to comb through and edit, P&PC met with director and WU Theatre professor Jon Cole, who was seeking material for the development of a devised script in conjunction with a scriptwriting class he was slated to teach. P&PC proposed starting with the New Northwest's poetry as a way of linking the show to statewide efforts to commemorate 2012 as the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage, but also as a way to experiment with how archival materials might be tied to the present day and made, well, less archival.

Cole agreed— with one caveat. Due to the nature of devised theater pieces, he explained, which are collaboratively written and oftentimes experimental in development and final product, he warned that the eventual script might not leave the original poems intact; they might be cut up, sampled, collaged, quoted, juxtaposed with other material, and the like. No worries, we responded: the age in which the poems were written was a great age of American scrapbooking where readers themselves cut out poems and articles from papers like the New Northwest and sampled, collaged, and juxtaposed them in albums. In fact, Duniway herself kept scrapbooks that are now in the Knight Library at the University of Oregon. How more appropriate a compositional model could one get? (Check out the show's awesome stage floor employing this scrapbook motif, designed by Chris Harris and lighted by Rachel Steck.)

So, during the Spring of 2012, P&PC's "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class assembled about eighty pages of poetry published by the New Northwest—poems of various styles, lengths, and performance possibilities, and representing maybe ten different arguments being made at the time for why women should have the right to vote—and presented it all to Cole's scriptwriting class. We followed up with a couple of joint class workshops to explore the material and the dynamics of collaborative script development, one of which featured a skit juxtaposing a sincere performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" ("Oh, say can you see...") with a rapping, hip-hop Duniway response:

My name is Abigail—I go by AJD—
and I'm here to tell you all what it is I see.
I see the men on the floor but the ladies aren't here
'cause they all back at home in the "women’s sphere."
Come on people—it's Eighteen Seventy-One.
Is this really how we think the dance of democracy's done?
I wanna bust a move, but I can't break out.
What I need more than anything's an angel in the house!

Needless to say, that skit didn't make the final cut. But during the Summer and Fall of 2012, Cole and his cast of student and faculty collaborators put together an energetic, funky show in which impressionistic, sometimes dance-like scenes loosely based on points in Duniway's life are juxtaposed with projected interviews featuring current women students remembering their first time voting. The contrast between the two is pretty provocative. On one hand, you've got an idealistic, highly-interpretive narrative about the women's suffrage movement (idealistic because it omits many of the movement's complications and/or contradictions including the temperance movement [which Duniway supported] and the racism that divided many American suffragists). On the other hand, you've got what is presented, in documentary fashion, as the real responses of today's young women voters (all WU students). So, the imagined (almost fictional) past contrasts with the "real," video-recorded present; highly stylized interpretations of history are juxtaposed with actual voices; scenes bringing together dance, lots of sound and movement, dreamlike tableaux, and multi-media components are set against the rather austere format of the video interview.

Meant to provoke discussion (and even anger), the play doesn't resolve the relation- ship between these two ways of engaging and recording history—neither of which is or can be a completely "accurate" representation of women's voting history in the U.S.—but leaves them there as points of comparison. The telling of all history, it implies, is a political endeavor insofar it is always-already interpretive: some things are included, some are left out, some embellished, some selectively remembered, some quoted, some taken out of context, and very little of it, no matter how ambitious, can be representative of all voters' experiences—an irony made all the more inflammatory by the play's subject matter of voting, a political activity in which everyone's voice is supposed to "count."

So what of the eighty pages of poetry that our "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" provided? Not a lot of it remained, as Cole had promised, but it was certainly there, especially if you knew what you were looking for as P&PC did. Sometimes, the text of a poem was projected onto the screens set up on two sides of the 360-degree stage. One poem ("Woman vs. Horse") was turned into a folk song. The actors sang a suffragist song. In a great scene dramatizing the emotional content of "The Perplexed Housekeeper" (written by Mrs. F.D. Gage and published in the New Northwest on June 2, 1871), the actor—overwhelmed by domestic burdens symbolized by an ever-growing duffel bag repeatedly thrust at her—"recited" the entirety of the poem via a series of moans, groans, mumbles, and other vocal expressions decipherable only because the poem's words were on screen in the background.

Then, in a move that P&PC did not even remotely anticipate but absolutely loved, the opening and closing scenes—both first-person accounts of students' responses to voting for the first time—took the form of contemporary, spoken-word or slam poetry. In these two moments, the play's fairly well-policed divide between the imagined, stylistically presented past and the "documentary" interviews with present-day women voters broke down. What linked the play's women voters, as a result, was not just a history of voting rights as a form of political expression, but a history of voting rights as a history of poetic expression, as well, as the voices of forgotten Willamette Valley women from the 1870s joined with the voices of Willamette Valley women in 2013. How better to motivate and make meaningful a 150 year-old archive of poetry than that?

We hope you get a chance to see the play soon. Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon only runs until February 23, so get your tickets today!

"I'll Tell You What Poetry Writing Is All About": The Bill Cosby Show (1970)

From the P&PC Vault: The Poetry of Michael Phelps

Boy, can London do the Olympics right or what? Olympic Park is decorated with permanent poem monuments like the sweet-looking one by Caroline Bird pictured here and the Tennyson one pictured below—3-D verses that are part of the Winning Words initiative run by U.K. National Poetry Day founder William Sieghart who has said he wants to "carpet our nation with poetry." But that's not all. Winning Words has also designed an interactive poetry game to go with the Olympics, and there was an Olympic poetry competition that received over 2,000 entries from kids in London. Furthermore, on July 23, London mayor Boris Johnson recited (in ancient Greek as well as English) "Ode for the London Olympics 2012," a poem commissioned from Oxford scholar Armand D'Angour who composed one for the Athens Olympics back in 2004 as well. Add to all this the Poetry Olympics held in London in late June, and you've got one heckuva Po-lympic scene going on across the pond.

All of this poeti- fication seems to have gotten people inspired, too. NPR has reported on how poetry was a regular part of the Olympics before 1948 and, in that tradition, is hosting a Olympic-themed poetry contest on Morning Edition next week where listeners will get to choose the winner. The Economist, Huffington Post, and The New York Times, among others, have been writing about poetry and the Olympics. And Wells-Next-the-Sea in England has stepped up and done a collaborative performance of "Going for Gold" that you can watch here.

All of this made the P&PC staff think back to February of 2009 when we posted "What's In Your Bowl Today: The Poetry of Michael Phelps," which we are re-posting here to help commemorate the opening of the 2012 games. Phelps may have moved beyond the little marijuana-involved indiscretion that provided the occasion for our meditation on inspiration, inhalation, and ingestion, but "Amazing Awaits"—a theme also taken up by Maya Angelou in her 2008 Olympic poem "Amazement Awaits"—reminds us that while London's efforts are pretty darn cool, it isn't the first, nor the last, endeavor to mix poetry and sport. London may have erected monuments to poetry, but in 2009 Kellogg's and Phelps asked us to eat it up. 

Here's what we had to say back in '09:

 It's perhaps a little unfair of Poetry & Popular Culture to bring up the topic of gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps so soon after his recent indiscretion, but we're going to do it anyway, because the poetic box of Corn Flakes with his smiling mug on front is nigh irresistible. Issued not long after his record-setting Olympic performance, the 18 oz. carton pictured to the left includes a 10-line snippet of poetry from the official U.S. Olympic Team poem on one side panel (betcha didn't know there was such a thing as a U.S. Olympic Team poem in the first place) and the entire 30-line verse, "Amazing Awaits," printed inside. The 10 lines printed on the exterior begin with the title and read:

where we least expect it, or
after training for it all our lives.

it awaits in our Olympians.
in all Americans.
in the honor of victory
and the glory of pursuit.

with a nation behind us,
with a world before us,
and within us all ...

amazing awaits

Mind you, this isn't the first time that the Battlecreek, Michigan, company has used poetry to promote a bowl of its cereal as the cure for the morning munchies. Early in the 20th century, for example, Kellogg's issued illustrated booklets full of rhymes (pictured to the left) serving to promote the most important meal of the day. Nor is Phelps the only recent Olympian to hitch his athletic cart to this blog's favorite genre. Iowa gymnast Shawn Johnson, for one, includes inspirational poems under the "Get to Know Shawn" portion of her web site. (Poetry & Popular Culture has tried to reach Johnson for comment, but she and her agents have declined to be interviewed.)

The inclusion of "Amazing Awaits" isn't gratuitous, nor does it disrupt the overall rhetoric of Corn Flakes. Kellogg's printed an order form for a free Michael Phelps poster on the inside of the box, so it took little in the way of extra time or money to print the poem there as well. As the order form suggests, the lion's share of the box's rhetoric works to direct the consumer's attention toward the morning goodness inside the carton: the order form is inside, the nutritional information focuses on the contents ("Corn used in this product contains traces of soybeans"), five of the six pictures of Phelps show him in the water, a sentence printed near the tab instructs the hungry breakfaster how to open the box ("To open, slide finger under tab..."), and a little blurb cautions us against accepting poseur cereals: "If it doesn't say Kellogg's on the box, it's not Kellogg's in the box." Kellogg's and Phelps share a predilection for, and particular expertise with, the preposition and prefix "in." Kellogg's is occupied with ingesting. Phelps—the swimmer and recreational user, natch—is in the business of inhaling.

As the genre most associated with interiority, the poetry follows suit if not swimsuit. As the excerpt above suggests, "Amazing Awaits" is taken with the language of inherence, immanence or inspiration. The poem's first stanza—

it awaits in 200 meters,
in a hundredth of a second,
in our courageous first steps,
and with our every last breath

—establishes this focus, and while the rest of poem plays with the various other places where "amazing awaits," it makes sure to end with lines—

with a nation behind us
with a world before us
and within us all

—that repeat the central trope of inspiration illustrated so well by the amphibious Phelps who, in two pictures, is gulping in air as he swims. Along the way, of course, Kellogg's is managing to make its product not just a source of Olympic and national inspiration but also a means by which hungry Americans can participate in Olympian endeavors themselves—via, well, whatever bowl they happen to have at the breakfast table.

Organic Form: P&PC Consultant Dr. Drew Duncan Analyzes the Experimental Pentameter of J.F. Bunnett and Francis Kearley (along with the More General Poetics of O-Chem)

In 1971, J. F. Bunnett and Francis J. Kearley Jr.— organic chemists studying a class of cyclic molecules called arynes—pulled off one of the most astonishing but now largely unknown stunts in the history of what we can only call experimental American poetry: they reported their research on haloanilines in three pages of iambic pentameter (yes, you read that correctly) and published it as "Comparative Mobility of Halogens in Reactions of Dihalobenzenes with Potassium Amide in Ammonia" in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. (Page one is pictured here; scroll down to find pages 2 and 3; and click on the article title above for a .pdf version.)

Far out, right? Or, to quote one of the P&PC office interns, "Like, WTF, man?" Well, to help figure out W exactly TF Bunnett and Kearley might have been thinking, we solicited the help of Drew Duncan (pictured here), an award-winning teacher and professor of organic chemistry at Willamette University who took some time off from NMR spectroscopy and his favorite hobby of rock climbing to offer his own set of reactions to Bunnett and Kearley's experimental verse and the ideas of order at the intersection of poetry and O-chem. Or is that Po-chem? Either way, we think you'll enjoy what our new Periodic Consultant has to say on the matter below.

Upon receiving a copy of this article, my initial response was one of astonishment. What possessed two organic chemists to undertake the project of writing an entire scientific paper in iambic pentameter? And how had they convinced journal editors (not known as a group especially welcoming to unsolicited "creativity" in issues of formatting) to let the paper be published in this form? The paper itself provides no information regarding the former query: the authors are entirely silent about their impulse to verse. A journal editor, however, does comment in a footnote written in garden-variety prose that, while "…open to new styles and formats," the editorial staff was "…surprise[ed] upon receiving this paper." An understatement, I imagine. The editor continues, "…we find the paper to be novel in its chemistry and readable in its verse." This last statement explains why the paper was permitted to be published in such an unusual format: the choice to write in verse did not detract from the clear communication of the science. (Wasn't it Ezra Pound who told poets to "Consider the way of the scientists" and argued that "Poetry should be at least as well-written as prose"?) And in reading the paper myself, I had to agree with the editor. The text provides an effective narrative of the results of the study and the authors' analysis of their data.

So before I go any further, a few quick words on the science. (Don't worry, this will only hurt a bit.) Bunnett and Kearley's  study concerns a class of cyclic organic molecules called "arynes." Arynes are extraordinarily reactive: they suffer from a destabilizing condition that we in the business call "ring strain," which renders them quite unstable. In fact, arynes are so short-lived under typical laboratory conditions that they cannot be isolated or even observed. Obviously, this presents some challenges for their study. Bunnett and Kearley use one of the typical tricks that chemists employ to get around such issues: rather than study the arynes directly, they instead wait until the end of the reaction and study the ultimate, more stable products of the reaction. Based on the products observed, the authors can then make inferences regarding the identities and characteristics of the arynes that had been (briefly) present in the reaction mixture.

An analogy with jellybeans might help illustrate how this works. We will use two of P&PC's ever- helpful interns for our study. Based on prior "data," you know that Intern 1 exclusively enjoys red jellybeans and Intern 2 eats only greens. A bowl of jellybeans is placed in a locked room into which you (as the observer) have no access. At this point the "reaction" occurs, admitting either Intern 1, Intern 2, or both into the room for a period of time, during which time they eat jellybeans according to their preferences, and then leave. At this point you, as the experimenter, can access the room and assay the number and type of jellybeans that remain. If you find that the red jellybeans have been entirely consumed but all greens remain, you would infer that only Intern 1 had been in the room. If the greens are gone but the reds are uneaten, you would of course conclude the opposite: only Intern 2 was present. If some of both colors were missing, the appropriate inference would be that both Interns were present. If more reds had been consumed than greens, two possibilities exist: either Intern 1 was present longer than Intern 2, or both interns were there for the same amount of time, but Intern 1 ate faster than Intern 2.

Having digested the science (not the jelly- beans), I re-read the paper, interested this time in what effect the delivery of the information in verse had upon how I, as a scientific reader, interacted with the manuscript. A couple of points struck me as quite remarkable. Consider the following passage, taken verbatim from the Discussion section of the paper but presented here, for sake of argument, as "standard" prose without the pentameter's line breaks:

In Table I, data pertaining to the meta isomers show clearly that carbon-iodine bonds more readily break than carbon bromine bonds, and furthermore that carbon-chlorine bonds are even more resistant. This is, of course, a familiar order of reactivity. Somewhat puzzling is that the heavier-lighter halide ratio from meta-iodochlorobenzene is just the same as from meta-bromochlorobenzene. One would have expected almost exclusive iodine release from the former compound. In Table II…

As rendered above, the text reads as a very lucid discussion of the data: the language is clear, and the sentences effectively integrate observation and interpretation. Now, consider the same passage with line breaks restored (the underlining is mine):

In Table I, data pertaining to
The meta isomers show clearly that
Carbon-iodine bonds more readily break
Than carbon-bromine bonds, and furthermore 
That carbon-chlorine bonds are even more 
Resistant. This is, of course, a familiar
Order of reactivity. Somewhat puzzling
Is that the heavier-lighter halide ratio
From meta-iodochlorobenzene
Is just the same as from meta-bromo-
Chlorobenzene. One would have expected 
Almost exclusive iodine release
 From the former compound. In Table II ...

The effect of the line breaks is striking: note how the endings of the second, fourth, fifth, seventh, and eleventh lines (see underlines) suggest an imminent "reveal" ("…show clearly that"…what?! ). In each case, the effect of the line break—where the reader reflexively puts a pause—is to create a sense of tension associated with having to wait until the next line to learn the result. When reading the paper in verse form, I find myself compelled to move through the text by these small moments of drama in a way I do not experience when the text is presented in standard paragraph form.

One other unique aspect of this piece concerns a single word: doth. This rather surprising conjugation appears at the top of the second column of page 185:

Therefore either halide ion doth derive
From the very same anion, and which
Is preferentially expelled depends 
Upon the intrinsic labilities
Of the two covalent bonds to halogen. 

In all instances save this one, word choice throughout the paper is consistent with standard modern scientific English. And yet there sits doth in all of its archaic glory. Why? "Does" would seem to be a perfectly reasonable choice for both meaning and meter. Too much effort went into the preparation of this manuscript to consider this anything other than a deliberate choice by the authors. Is this then, perhaps, their subtle, knowing wink to their readers? An homage to Shakespeare and the poets of yore who, like these authors, chose verse as a vehicle of expression? I have no answers here, but the effect of the word is somehow rather … enchanting.

Having spent some time parsing the text, I had to reconsider my initial astonished reaction to the paper’s unusual form. On one level, my reaction was easy to understand: one simply does not—doth not?—see Journal of Organic Chemistry papers written in verse every day. However, upon more sober reflection, I wondered whether my astonishment was truly warranted. Are chemistry and poetry such strange bedfellows? Consider that Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann has published several volumes of poetry, and that each year the American Chemical Society sponsors poetry contests throughout the nation. Furthermore, in a clever bit of April Foolery, the journal Nature: Chemistry announced on April 1, 2010 that there would be, "a new prerequisite for the consideration of manuscripts … [a]uthors are requested to include a short poem highlighting the novel conclusions of their work." The Nature: Chemistry staff even work in a sly homage to our JOC paper—an homage suggesting that Bunnett and Kearley's poetic efforts have not gone unappreciated in the scientific world—noting parenthetically that, "Special consideration will be given to those who prepare their entire manuscript in iambic pentameter."

Poetry has also played a role in my capacity as a teacher of organic chemistry: I frequently ask students to write a poem on the subject of organic chemistry for extra credit on their final exams. For some reason, haiku seems to be the most popular form among these budding scientist-poets, with my favorite all-time submission being the word "suck" repeated seventeen times:

suck suck suck suck suck
suck suck suck suck suck suck suck
suck suck suck suck suck. 

While this particular haiku does not, perhaps, adhere to the more nuanced characteristics of the form, it nevertheless succeeds admirably in capturing the pungent cocktail of stress, angst, resentment, and sleep deprivation in the exam room that day.

Having come to grips with the fact that chemistry and poetry can com- fortably occupy some of the same spaces, I had to ask one last question: what is it that compels chemists to make poetry a part of their scientific lives? I wonder whether it is something to do with order: a line of iambic pentameter has a prescribed number of syllables, with stresses in just the right places to maintain the meter. So too does the molecular world of the chemist rest on the idea of order, of everything in its proper place. One need look no further than the foundational "text" of chemistry itself: the periodic table. Just as a haiku, whose precise arrangement of syllables and lines defines its form, so too does the ordering of elements—two in the first period, eight in the second and third periods, eighteen in the fourth and fifth periods, and so on—define the entire discipline. And in the same way that a single syllable too many or too few destroys the cadence of a line of meter, a single element out of place compromises the elegant organization of the periodic table. (So regular, in fact, is the "meter" of the periodic table that when scientists were confronted with "holes" in the original periodic table, they were able to predict properties of the elements that would eventually fill those holes before those elements had been discovered.) Viewed in this light, the impulse of chemists to express themselves in verse borders on self-evident: nearly every chemist has a poem of the 118 elements hanging in his or her office or lab.

Drew Duncan is a professor of organic chemistry at Willamette University. An avid rock climber and craft beer enthusiast, he can be found at altitude, at various pubs in Portland and the Willamette Valley, or at aduncan@willamette.edu.

Bill Nye the Science Guy Poetry Contest

Whatever You Wish To Give (Part 2): An Inglorious Milton?

Written and distributed by James Boon Cheatham around 1880, this 20-stanza carrier's address ("Sympathize with the Blind!") incorporates some of the same rhetorical strategies as "A Railroad Boy's Appeal" and "The Wounded Soldier's Appeal" which I've highlighted below: an expressed (though frustrated) desire to labor for one's living as able-bodied Americans do, and appeals to not only Christian charity but to earning one's place in the afterlife. The railroad boy, for example, ends his poem "by-and-by may all we meet / In realms just over there," punning on the word "just" to indicate not only the proximity of that afterlife but the justice he expects to experience when distinctions between abled and disabled are no longer operative. If things are "just over there," then the poem implies that things are not so just over here and that a small donation will help—at least in the short term—to remedy that; the acts of earning capital and earning salvation are parallel if not overlapping endeavors. Indeed, as a quotation in the upper right-hand corner of Cheatham's broadside explains, "Lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven."

In the poem, Cheatham—after imploring his reader "to buy this poem, every line"—explains:

But I'm blind, I cannot see
The beauty of your loving face,
Be true and grateful and He will be
A loving Saviour of His grace.
But there is a day God's saints shall see
And God will give me light,
When Christian friends shall meet above
Where the blind receive their sight.

As with "A Railroad Boy's Appeal," this poem appeals to ideas of justice and equality in the afterlife in order to encourage people on earth to acts of charity. Cheatham relies on the poetic form to impress this as well, using the linebreak in line three to remind people of the reciprocity in the Christian, not-by-faith-alone, contract for salvation: "Be true and grateful and He will be [as well]". Even more interesting is the implication that able-bodied people are rewarded with salvation for leading good lives while the blind are rewarded with sight; there are two sets of rewards. For the able-bodied, faith alone is not good enough to get one into heaven, but for the disabled, faith—and the pain of enduring the world without sight which that faith makes possible—is enough (especially if they serve as town criers for God). Indeed, Cheatham makes this distinction later in the poem when he writes:

I love my Saviour's welcome voice
His word is my delight;
In early life make him our choice
And battle for the right.

A moral compass, the blind person ("I") can hear and delight in the Saviour's "voice"—an act of revelation that privileges sound over sight—but it's the sighted person who has the responsibility (and power) to "make him our [collective] choice" and lead the "battle for the right." The contractual nature of salvation differs depending on one's physical abilities, and the corresponding cultural economics of ability—at least as they are rhetorically positioned—are in the end more complex and more morally entangled than simply flipping two bits to a blind guy.

The prevalence of poems like "Sympathize with the Blind," "A Railroad Boy's Appeal" and "The Wounded Soldier's Appeal" in the 19th century popular print landscape would seem to offer the field of disability studies a rich entryway into that period's discourses about ability and disability and the ways that disabled individuals harnessed not just a genre but an entire rhetorical constellation in surviving an inhospitable world via their wits and linguistic capacities. It should also offer literary critics another way to think about how poetry was used within popular culture; it was not just easy reading.