From (Charles Kingsley's) Poem to (D.W. Griffith's) Screen: The Unchanging Sea (1910)

"Now You're Gonna Hear Some Real Talkin": Lord Tennyson and the Poetry of Our Gang (from "Two Too Young" [1936])

Edgar Allan Poe in D.W. Griffith's "The Avenging Conscience: or 'Thou Shalt Not Kill'" (1914)

P&PC Editor's Note: Check out the sweet poem intertitles at 16:26, 27:18, and 31:08 (quotations from Poe's poems "To One In Paradise" and "Annabel Lee").

William Butler Yeats in Steven Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001)

Adapting Tennyson: D.W. Griffith's "Enoch Arden" (1911)

"A Glee for Mixed Voices": W.K. Kellogg's "Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures" and the Poetry of Corn Flakes

If you're a regular P&PC reader, then you know that we and the office interns have been thinking a lot lately not just about poetry and popular culture in general but about how poetry fares and has fared more specifically in relation to popular non-print media, especially film and television. We've been mulling over the odd ways in which Edwin S. Porter's short 1905 Edison Studios film The Night Before Christmas quotes sections of Clement Clark Moore's 1823 poem on intertitles (like the one shown here). We've been collecting examples of poems as they've been presented in various ways for audiences to read in films like Citizen Kane, G.I. Jane and The Grey and in TV episodes of Justified, Criminal Minds, and even the goofball crime-solving comedy Psych. Some of this is just our curiosity. Some of it is an extension of our interest in how poems and hymns around the turn into the twentieth century—like Oliver Wendell Holmes's "A Sun-Day Hymn" and Reginald Heber's "From Greenland's Icy Mountains"—were projected by magic lanterns to give audiences the then-new thrill of reading via a medium other than the material page. And some of it's a longer, more concerted effort to think toward a couple of new projects including (eventually) a new book as well as an article that we've been asked to write about the transitions in the culture of popular poetry between 1910 and 1920.

Imagine our surprise and joy, then, to come across the promotional item pictured here—an eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch "Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures" poem booklet copyrighted by Kellogg's in 1909, four years after Porter's moving-pictures adaptation of Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas." If movies were trying to figure out how they related and might respond to poetry and print culture, then print culture and poetry were also trying to figure out how they related and might respond to the advent of film. And leave it to advertising to lead the way.

Building on the tradition of the small folding or meta- morphic trade card that was a common form of advertising in the nineteenth century (see one here), Kellogg's takes things several astonishing steps farther, constructing a trifold booklet with two sets of six panels inside that, when flipped back and forth on their stapled hinges, allows a reader or user to superimpose the body parts and verse captions of one set of animals onto another. In other words, it's a game of inter-species cross-dressing—animals who are doubly in drag, since they are first dressed up like humans ("we're dressed like men, you see," one verse points out) and then, thanks to the booklet's innovative architecture, re-dressed to "wear" the clothes and body parts of other animals.

It's pretty awesome, isn't it? An alligator can wear a plaid jacket, wear glasses, and then wear the head of a monkey. A tiger can wear a frilly pink blouse and skirt, then wear the roller skates of an ostrich. Or, as in the image pictured here, a singing horse (we like to think he's singing something by Cher or maybe Dusty Springfield) can wear a little chapeau and then the blue overalls and yellow body parts of a pig. As one set of verses puts it:

"Let's change about," the Lion said.
Suppose we take the feet and heads

Of the Camel, Donkey and Kangaroo.
Our friends won't know us then, would you?

Not surprisingly, perhaps, all of this non-normative reading, viewing, cross-dressing and mixing is identified in one panel of the pamphlet's poetry (the "Queer Fellows" pictured here) as "queer":

If you wish to see something queer,
Put other heads on the Cow, Horse and Deer.

Change their feet, too, try it and see
How very funny they all will be.

As the metrical variation that "too" in line three above might suggest—it changes up the metrical "foot" at the precise moment when readers are invited to "change [the animals'] feet," troping the motif of change in the pamphlet writ large—this is a pretty self-reflexive and (dare we say it?) unified aesthetic project from the vantage point of media. Even the seemingly incidental subject matter of the other verses—the refraction of light through water that produces rainbows in bubbles, the singing of songs, the "tortoise-mobiling" in the horse/pig panel pictured earlier, roller skating, and so on—keeps coming back to the topic of transmission and the tools by which various things (light, sound, bodies) get conveyed.

All of this no doubt feeds (pun intended) into the claim that Kellogg's makes on the pamphlet's back cover for its cereal as a new, improved, and modern nutritional medium. Updating the "Old Rhyme" of the woman who lived in a shoe—a moment that for us recalls the poetic "foot" mentioned in the  paragraph above and lets us indulge the fantasy that the old woman and her children are living in the genre of poetry itself—the pamphlet's new old woman does know what to do:

There was an old woman
Who lived in a shoe,
She had lots of children
But knew what to do.

She gave them Kellogg's Corn Flakes
Three times a day,
And they thrived and grew
In a marvelous way.

If you look closely, you'll see a little American flag flying from the shoe's toe, and if you look even more closely, you'll notice that while almost all of the children are white, one is clearly not. Sitting to the right of the flag is a girl who reads as indigenous Central or South American; not only is her skin darker, but she's got that ridiculously large hat to code her as ethnic in the event there was any doubt she's not. It's kind of hard not to wonder what sort of bookend she makes when paired with the grey-skinned elephant, so often symbolic of Africa's "Jungleland," who appears on the booklet's front cover. The subjects of race, romance, and the transmission and mediation of genetic stuff do not come up in the poetry, but the robust, darker-skinned male elephant, the single old white woman in the shoe, all of the assorted children including the girl with the hat, and that American flag kind of beg the issue, no? Where did the children come from? What America is being envisioned here? What "moving-picture" of a nation is being processed via this hands-on, media-rich, hybrid poem-film, exercise in queerness, drag, and cross dressing?

As we know, the decade in which Kellogg's was designing, copy- righting, and circulating "Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures" was the historical high point in immigration to the U.S. (the decade from 1901-1910 saw nearly nine million people immigrate, double the previous decade), so it would be crazy to think that everything going on in the booklet is not in some way related to social anxieties regarding the moving picture of race and ethnicity in the U.S. While we're not going to say that Kellogg's is being entirely progressive in relation to this history, it certainly does not look like an exercise in purity—a discourse that was commonly racialized in American advertising and especially, as we've discussed before, in soap ads. Instead, as the sheet music being held by the horse and cow in the panel pictured here appears to spell out, "Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures" pitches itself—and Corn Flakes—as "A glee for mixed voices." Indeed, breakfast might be the most important meal of the day after all.

Of Kingdoms and Carillons: The Poetry of Footloose (1984)

A little over a half hour into the 1984 teen classic Footloose, dance-lovin’, spiky-haired, pug-nosed, Chicago high school student Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon) has to get away from it all: he has just moved with his mother to the no-dance, no-music, no-fun world of small-town Bomont (set in Oklahoma but filmed in Utah), where he stands out not only as the new kid in town but also by refusing the big belt buckles and cowboy hats of most everyone in school in favor of New Wave-inspired skinny ties and sport coats. He’s got a thing for the rebellious Ariel Moore (Lori Singer) and she’s got a thing for him, but there are problems with that too, as she’s dating local boy Chuck Cranston, and her dad (Ariel’s Prospero-equivalent, played by John Lithgow) is the local minister who instituted all of the no-dance, no-music, no-fun rules that now govern Bomont.

As we all remember, the movie follows how Ren leads a charge against the town’s puritanical mores (there’s even a book burning at one point) and, in the process, gets the girl, gets the minister to reassess his beliefs, and gets the town to permit a senior prom where kids can dance. But thirty minutes into this journey, Ren doesn’t know that will all happen, so he takes off in his yellow VW bug, finds a warehouse, and, in an extended show of gyrations and gymnastics, attempts to dance off his frustrations until he is interrupted by Ariel. Here’s that scene in which Ariel confronts Ren and tries unsuccessfully to seduce him in a number of ways until she reveals that she is—what else?—a poet.

Ariel: Whoo! Good times!

Ren: What are you doing here?

Ariel: Watching.

Ren: I thought I was alone.

Ariel: Hmm! Not in this town. There’s eyes everywhere!

[Ren tries to escape her by getting into his car, but she shuts the door.]

Ariel: How come you don’t like me?

Ren: What makes you think I don’t like you?

Ariel: You never talk to me at school. You never look at me.

Ren: Yeah, well, maybe that’s because if I did your boyfriend would remove my lungs with a spoon.

[Ren gets into his car.]

Ariel: Chuck Cranston doesn’t own me. Sure, he likes to act like he does. But he doesn’t.

[Ariel comes over to the open passenger-side window and leans in.]

Ariel: Do you wanna kiss me?

Ren: Someday.

[She opens the door and gets in.]

Ariel: Hey what is this "some day" shit?

Ren: Well I get the feeling you’ve been kissed a lot, you know. I’m afraid that I’d suffer by comparison.

Ariel: You don’t think much of me, do you? You think I’m small town?

Ren: I think Bomont’s a small town.

Ariel: I’m goin’ away. I’ve already applied to colleges. You know, I applied to colleges my father doesn’t even know I applied to. He’s gonna come after me, but I’m gonna be gone.

[Long pause with audible breathing. Cue the music.]

Ariel: Wanna see somethin’?

Ren: Sure.

[They drive to a trainyard and run through a bunch of industrial equipment until they come to an abandoned train car.]

Ariel: Well, we call it The Yearbook. It started four or five years ago, I guess. Stuff we’re not supposed to read.

[They enter the train car, the inside of which is covered in graffiti quotations and pages from books that have been plastered on the walls.]

Ren: Whoa. This is all out of books?

Ariel: Most of it. Some’s songs. Magazines. Some’s poems that get made up.

Ren [reading]: “I’ll sing to you of silver swans / of kingdoms and carillons…”

Ariel [reciting]: “I’ll sing of bodies intertwined / underneath an innocent sky.”

Ren: You wrote that?

Ariel: It’s not even one of my best.

Ren: It’s all right.

Ariel: Wait? You hear that?

Ren: What?

There’s a train coming. Ariel stands on the tracks and plays chicken with it until Ren knocks her out of the way, but that's not really what cements their relationship. We know it's the poetry—even just four lines of it. For who in their right mind could refuse a girl who not only uses the word "carillons" in a poem, but then is audacious enough to rhyme it with "swans"? To quote Walt Whitman, we here at the P&PC office know very well that we could not.

Once More Into the Fray: The Remediation of Poetry in Liam Neeson's The Grey

Anyone notice that—like G.I. Jane (1997) and The Expendables (2010)—the 2011 Liam Neeson flick The Grey ends with a poem? Yup: it's a four line verse titled "The Fray" that main character Ottway (played by Neeson, a trained hunter hired to protect oil workers from wolves in Alaska) remembers hanging in a frame over the desk in his father's den and that runs through his head (and in flashback on the screen) as he prepares to make a last stand against a wolf pack that has been pursuing him and systematically offing the other survivors of a plane crash in Alaska. (Check out the movie's last scene in the first video clip at the end of this posting; for some reason, btw, the scene has been transposed on the youtube clip so that the poem appears as a mirror image of the original and reads backwards [it reads forward in the original]; you'll get the idea nonetheless).

The Grey does G.I. Jane and The Expend- ables one better, though, as the poem (pictured here) doesn't just end the movie but provides the frame mechanism for the entire narrative itself (it's even quoted on the movie poster). Indeed, at the beginning of the film—during a heavy-handed montage that shows Ottway killing wolves, lying in bed with his wife whom we eventually learn has died, writing a final letter to her about how miserable his life has become, flashing back to what we eventually learn is his childhood, and making preparations to commit suicide—the poem's words run through his head as part of a voice-over, presumably a section of what he's writing in his final letter. At this point, though, we don't even know it's a poem. In fact, the clash of discursive registers between it and what he's thinking is a little confusing: "I want to see your face, feel your hands in mine, feel you against me. And I know that will never be. You left me. And I can’t get you back … I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t know what can come of it. I know I can’t get you back … I don’t know why this has happened to us. I feel like it’s me. Bad luck. Poison … And I’ve stopped doing this world any real good...," he writes. Ottway pauses, then adds the poem's first two lines, "Once more into the fray—into the last good fight I'll ever know." The camera shows Ottway putting a rifle muzzle into his mouth, and then we hear the poem's final lines, "Live and die on this day...  Live and die on this day..."

What we don't know at the beginning of the movie— that he's remem- bering a poem, that his father wrote it, that it hung above his father's desk in the den—gets cleared up partway through the film, after the plane crash, after lots of competition for the Alpha position among the crash survivors, and after the men seek shelter in the woods. There, around a campfire, as the wolves surround them in the darkness, and as one of their group is hallucinating in the process of dying from hypoxia, the men start sharing their stories—about sex, faith, family, and whatever source of inspiration keeps them fighting. Ottway, by this point established as the group's Alpha, tells part of his story and, in an extended scene, flashes back to his childhood. Here's what he says:

My dad, uh, my dad was not without love. But a clichéd Irish motherfucker when he wanted to be—drinker, brawler, all that stuff. Never shed a tear. Saw weakness everywhere. But he had this thing for poems—poetry. Readin' 'em, quotin' em. Probably thought it rounded him off. His way of apologizing, I guess. There was one that hung over his desk in the den. It was only when I was a lot older did I realize that he'd written it. It was untitled—four lines. I read it at his funeral: "Once more into the fray / Into the last good fight I'll ever know / Live and die on this day / Live and die on this day."

A clap of thunder sounds. Ottway concludes, "Storm clouds." And the men turn their attention back to the present.

So, by the last scene of the movie, then, we've heard the poem twice, and we've seen it—or at least the paper it's written on—several other times as Ottway has stored the letter in which it's written in his wallet and saved it from the plane's burning wreckage. Ottway is the only one left alive, and he's somehow managed to stumble into the wolves' den, metaphor that it is for all of his unresolved issues. Surrounded by bones, standing in the falling snow, and ringed by the wolf pack, he kneels down, makes a pile of all the wallets that he's been collecting from everyone who's died, and adds his own to the stack. He flashes back to the woman we saw him thinking about and writing to in the film's opening montage, and we realize now, for the first time, that she she didn't leave him but died, perhaps of cancer. Then he tapes a dagger to one hand, breaks a bunch of airplane liquor bottles against a rock so that they become weapons, and tapes them to his other hand. Thus armed for his final stand, he flashes back again to his dad's den where the poem hangs on the wall. (You get get it, don't you? Wolf den=dad's den?) He says, "Once more into the fray."

Then, as you can see for yourself in the backwards video clip below, the camera shows us the poem. But what's remarkable about this scene is that we don't see the typewritten poem clearly at first. Rather, in becoming a metaphor for his life, which has slowly come into focus over the course of the film, the poem is blurry at first and is brought into focus and made readable by the camera, letting the audience experience in miniature Ottway's journey toward clarity. With the poem newly readable, Ottway repeats it a final time:

Once more into the fray...
Into the last good fight I'll ever know...
Live and die on this day...
Live and die on this day...

When the camera takes us away from Ottway's father's den and back to the wolf den, we see Ottway still mouthing the words to the poem. We see him next as a boy sitting on his father's lap. We see the woods. We have a close-up on his eyes. We hear a growl that may come from him or from the wolves. Then Ottway leaps forward toward the viewer, and the camera goes black.

Back when we discussed G.I. Jane, P&PC argued that the last scene of that movie (in which the camera helped us to read and interpret an annotated print version of D.H. Lawrence's poem "Self Pity") positioned the film's director—and, by extension, the medium of film—as a type of literary critic better suited than the pencil, pen, or book to the interpretation of poetry in the age of new media. In the last scene of The Grey we see a similar thing happening all over again, as it's not the emotional content of the poem, per se, or the conclusions we as an audience come to about the significance of the poem via our own reading or someone else's annotations, but, rather, the film's treatment of the poem in its various forms that becomes the most important (or at least the most foregrounded) expressive and interpretive act, heavy handed in its metaphor though it may be.

It is, after all, the camera—a piece of technology whose multimodal capacities add to the emotion, interiority, and clarity of insight typically associated with poetry—that makes the verse readable, literally giving us a focus that we did not have previously. As the external manifestation of Ottway's internal state, the movie thus positions film (not the poem, letter, or typewritten document) as the most complete expression of the human psyche, able to bring together and synthesize Ottway's thinking (the memorized poem), speaking (the recited poem), writing (the letter to his wife), and typewriting (the version of the poem on the wall of Ottway's father's den) as no other medium can. That is, thanks to film, we can see the poem thought, spoken, written, and typewritten all at the same time.

You might be asking yourself, how can poetry compete with this tour-de-force and with all the resources that film has at its disposal? Well, we here at P&PC think that maybe that's the wrong question to be asking. As Henry Jenkins writes in his Introduction to Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, "[O]nce a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within the larger system of communication options. Once recorded sound becomes a possibility, we have continued to develop new and improved means of recording and playing back sound. Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theater. Television did not kill radio. Each old medium was forced to coexist with the emerging media....Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies" (14). In other words, maybe The Gray and films like it aren't in the process of disparaging or one-upping poetry (as we've previously argued) so much as they are grounding themselves and their own credibility in poetry and, in the process, opening new possibilities for experiencing poetry. Rather than experiencing the poem solely as a print artifact, for example, The Gray lets us experience it in many media simultaneously.

As a medium, poetry more than just survived the transition from oral culture to written culture (no one today would advocate for going back to a purely oral or spoken poetry). Then it more than just survived the transition from written culture to print culture (no one would advocate for abandoning printed books and going back to only handwritten poetry). Along its long history of remediation, poetry only got more and more complex and more and more aesthetically rich, retaining aspects of its previous media manifestations and mixing those with new ones. As obsessed with the past as Neeson's story in The Gray may be (Ottway's dead father, his dead lover, etc.), the film may nevertheless be pointing us to the future of poetry.

Mermaids in the Basement & Automatons in the Loft: The Poetry of Hugo and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

Of the three films set in the 1920s that were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year (The Artist, Midnight in Paris, and Hugo), P&PC liked Martin Scorsese's Hugo the best. It wasn't even close. I mean, we enjoyed the others a lot—we did. The characters of Salvador Dali and Ernest Hemingway in Midnight in Paris had us clutching our sides and ROTFLOL. And we sat, like the rest of the audience at the Salem Cinema, stunned as George Valentin did the best reworking of the silent-to-talkie transition thing since Sunset Boulevard (and way better than the 1975 Merchant Ivory film The Wild Party, which we mention here mainly because we've got to give it props for being one of the few films ever based on a poem (Joseph Moncure March's jazzy, underrated, and once-controversial 1928 book-length poem of the same title). But Hugo's story of the 12 year-old fugitive orphan who maintains the clocks at the Gare Montparnasse and who serendipitously strikes up a relationship with a toy store owner who happens to be the silent film maker Georges Méliès in hiding just got us. Based on Brian Selznick's novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scorsese' movie had all the Parisian romance that Midnight in Paris did, and it had all the celebration of movies that The Artist did, but it had at least one thing that the others didn't: poetry.

We're not talking "poetry" in the "it was as eloquent as poetry" sense, nor in the "it had all the beauty and pathos of poetry" sense. No, Hugo really had poetry in it. About forty-five minutes into the film, Hugo and his precocious, middle-class schoolgirl friend Isabelle are at the train station. They've just been kicked out of a movie theater (Hugo sneaked them in by picking the lock to a back door), and Hugo is taking her to see the automaton that he's been trying to repair in memory of his father—the automaton that, with the help of Isabelle's heart-shaped key, eventually draws a picture that links Hugo to Isabelle's godfather Méliès (played by Ben Kingsley) and thus helps bring the automaton-like Méliès back to life. Before they can get to Hugo's digs in the train station loft, however, Hugo and Isabelle are stopped by the Clouseau-hilarious, existentially-wounded train station policeman Inspector Gustave—played wonderfully by Sacha Baron Cohen in the scene pictured here—who has had his eye on Hugo for weeks and who specializes in sending unchaperoned children off to the orphanage. Inspector Gustave grills Hugo and Isabelle about why they are roaming the station without parents, and Gustave's doberman companion Maximilien (as in Robespierre, we assume), who has given chase to Hugo a time or two before, sniffs them up and down suspiciously. Here's the exchange that follows:

Maximilien: Bark, bark.

Gustave: Seems Maximilien doesn't like the cut of your jib, little man. He is disturbed by your physiognomy. He is upset by your visage. Why would he not like your face? Eh?

Isabelle: Well, perhaps he smells my cat.

Gustave: Your cat?

Isabelle: Yes, Christina Rossetti's her name, after the poetess. Would you like me to recite?

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd chute;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set...

Gustave: All right, all right. I know the rest. That’s enough poetry for today. I love poetry, particularly … that poem … by Christina...

Isabelle: Rossetti.

Gustave: Yeah yeah—she's one of my favorites. I know it's Rossetti. I know it's Rossetti. I love poetry, just not … in the station. We’re here … to get on trains 'n' get off 'em, work in different shops. Is that clear?

Isabelle: Yessir.

Gustave: Watch your step. Go on. Go!

Fending off Gustave's advances, Isabelle is quoting the first four lines of Rossetti's "A Birthday," and one of the many compelling things about this scene and the role of poetry in Hugo is that there's no mention whatsoever of Rossetti in the original novel—it was added for the film. Even more curious than this, perhaps, is that the poetry that is mentioned in the book is left out of the movie. Apparently, as Hugo's father suggests in one of the novel's early scenes, and as Selznick explains in his acknowledgments, the automaton that Hugo is trying to repair—and that, in the story that the movie tells, once belonged to Méliès—is based on an actual automaton (pictured here) that was built by the 18th century Swiss mechanician Henri Maillardet. Now in the collection of the Franklin Institute museum in Philadelphia, Maillardet's automaton not only draws four different pictures, but it writes three poems as well, two in French and one in English.

Examining the broken automaton in Selznick's novel, Hugo's father explains, "I'm sure that if it were working, you could wind it up, put a piece of paper on the desk, and all those little parts would engage and cause the arm to move in such a way that it would write out some kind of note. Maybe it would write a poem or a riddle. But it's too broken and rusty to do much of anything now.” Hugo's dad was right—one of the poems written by the Maillardet automaton is pictured here, and you can see a couple of videos of the machine working here—but Scorsese's automaton is, apparently, only capable of making pictures. We here at P&PC understand the movie logic, of course, which is also at play in other films like G.I. Jane, The Contract, and The Long Hot Summer that either construct their credibility as art in relation to poetry or else participate in waging what we've called a "strange, low-level, but ongoing smear campaign against poetry." Hugo is ultimately about the magic of movies, and so the magical things in it must (so movie logic goes) be associated with visual phenomena—pictures that are moving both literally and emotionally—and not with what emerges, in the process, as the counter-discourse of words and their epitome: poetry.

If you pay attention to these sorts of things like the investigative reporters on staff at P&PC do, then the Christina Rossetti scene in Hugo, as original as it seems, might actually sound a little familiar—not because it's in Selznick's book (which it's not), but because it's essentially a replaying of a scene from the disturbing 1976 Nicolas Gessner thriller and murder mystery The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. In a great illustration of T.S. Eliot's quip about how the good artist borrows but the great one steals, Scorsese's film basically takes Gessner's scene—in which a precocious girl outmaneuvers a police officer by quoting poetry in a small New England town—and transports it to 1920s Paris. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is the story and quasi-Oedipal drama (adapted from Laird Koenig's 1974 novel of the same name) of Rynn Jacobs (Jodi Foster), an orphan (sound familiar?) who keeps living in her poet-father's house long after he's died (hello, Hugo). Rightly suspicious about the whereabouts of Rynn's parents, Officer Miglioriti stops by one night, asking to speak with Rynn's father for the purpose of telling him about the improper attention that town resident Frank Hallett (a totally creepy Martin Sheen) has been paying to Rynn. Rynn goes upstairs to get her dad, but, as usual, comes back down saying he's unavailable because he's hard at work on his poetry. Here's that scene:

Rynn: Sorry, he's working. He's translating some Russian poetry. When that door is locked I can't bother him.

[Rynn sits on the couch and picks up a cup of tea]

I suspect the only reason [landlord] Mrs. Hallet lets us into her village is because my father is a poet. Mrs. Hallet loves poets. That's one of his books over there.

Miglioriti [picking up the book from the mantle]: He wrote that, huh?

Rynn: Yeah. You want him to sign a copy for you?

Miglioriti: Yeah, sure, I never met a real poet. I mean … Look, don't laugh at me, but I can't believe people like poetry. I'm not talking about that birthday card stuff, but real poetry. And when it doesn't even rhyme!

[Rynn snickers}

Rynn: Oh, I'm not laughing at you. My father says that most people who say they like poetry only pretend to like it. You're honest.

Miglioriti: He's your favorite poet, huh?

Rynn: No, he's my father. Emily Dickinson's my favorite.

Miglioriti: Emily—Emily Dickinson, yeah.

[At the mention of Dickinson, Miglioritti changes the topic, and their discussion turns to Mrs. Hallet's son and how it can be pretty nice in the village once someone gets used to it.]

So you do the math: in both movies, a precocious young woman protects a secret from an older, threatening, male law enforcement official by rebuffing him with a magic charm in the form of an unmarried, nineteenth-century woman poet. Sure, Isabelle in Hugo actually quotes Rossetti while Rynn doesn't quote Dickinson. But isn't the reclusive Rynn—living alone in the house in a small New England town—actually channeling Dickinson herself? In fact, given the secrets Rynn has in the house's basement, and the father she pretends is on the upper floor, it's hard not to hear the first two stanzas of Dickinson's poem "I started Early—Took my Dog" as a silent soundtrack to this scene:

I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –

And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – upon the Sands –

Hollywood hasn't been shy about linking poetry with criminals and other people trying to avoid the law: an escaped hit man played by Morgan Freeman quotes it in The Contract; it makes up the world through which assassin Martin Q. Blank moves in in Grosse Pointe Blank; it is quoted by Ponyboy in The Outsiders; it interferes with Daddy Varner's authority in The Long Hot Summer; it is linked with "England's greatest sinner" in Bride of Frankenstein; and it is written by Edward Norton's character in Fight Club. Trend? We think so. Both The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane and Hugo participate in this tradition, but in putting poetry into the mouths of juvenile female speakers, they turn it, we feel, in slightly different direction. We're not sure what that direction is at the moment. But like Gustave's doberman Maximilien, we're not entirely confident, here at the beginning of National Poetry Month 2012, that we like the cut of its jib—or its visage.

Expendable Poetry

Anyone notice that The Expendables—the shoot-em-up, blow-em-up mercenary bromance starring bad boys Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Steve Austin and Bruce Willis with a cameo by governator Arnold Schwarzenegger—ends with a poem? You bet. After ousting the military dictator of a small Spanish-speaking island, after bringing the right hand of justice down on the corrupt C.I.A. agent funding said dictator's cocaine operation, after the explosions, gunfights, grisly deaths and double-crossings, and after the girl is saved, the guys come back to bond, celebrate each other's awesomeness, and hear some poetry at Rourke's tattoo shop. CCR plays in the background. Rourke and Statham start a knife-throwing competition while the other dudes let off steam and work on welcoming formerly double-crossing but now drug-free Lundgren back to the team.

Stallone: So you’re back from the dead. How’re ya healin?

Lundgren: Good ... considering you coulda killed me.

Jet Li: I forgive you.

Lundgren: OK

Li: I would’ve won.

Lundgren (winking): Of course.

[Stallone slaps Li on shoulder.]

Randy Couture: Hey Gunner [Lundgren]. Whatever doesn’t kill ya makes ya stronger, brother. Therapy!

Stallone: Man’s got a point.

[Statham winds up but doesn’t throw. Instead, he laughs. There's a gleam in his eye. He's got an idea and steps backward toward the doorway.]

Statham: You know what? I’m gonna do you a favor, Tool [Rourke]:

I once knew a man called Tool ...

Stallone: I looooove poetry!

Statham: ... Who, to me, was the epitome of cool ...

[Guys laugh.]

... Good with a knife ...

[He walks out the door into the alley.]

... Bad with a wife ...

Stallone: That hurts.

Statham: But to think he could beat me?
Dreamin he’d defeat me?
Cool Tool, you gotta be a fool!

Oh yeah ...

[Statham wings his knife from the street hitting the bullseye. Movie fades to black as a cover version of Thin Lizzy's "The Boys are Back in Town" plays on.]

Turning for a moment from knife slinging to word slinging, Statham (never one to shy away from cinematic wordplay) isn't just fooling around; in getting the movie's last words, he actually delivers an interesting little limerick-and-a-half-long poem that gives us a little lesson in what manhood's all about. Gesturing to a recognizable and democratically available verse form (the limerick), yet improvising on that form so that the final poem tests the limits of what it's allowed to do (it's two lines too long), Statham's longer-than-average limerick demonstrates how real men become men and not just meatheads. Like the poem, every one of the beefcakes in The Expendables follows a specific recipe for masculine success—they're good with a knife and bad with a wife, as the poem says—while at the same time personalizing that model so that they aren't entirely following someone else's idea of manhood. That is, the formal drama of Statham's poem argues that, to be a real man, it's not enough to be big and strong. You've also got to have some style in how you fight, how you flex your muscles, how you throw your knives—or how you rhyme. Without any of that, you're just somebody's bodyguard.

Poetry & the Movies: The Hot Tub Rhyme Machine

Regular P&PC readers might have surmised by now that someone in the P&PC office has an abiding interest in Hollywood's ongoing relationship with poetry. Not only are there lots of movies explicitly about poets and poetry, but film after film—ranging from Citizen Kane to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Long Hot Summer, Groundhog Day, and Fight Club (just to name a few)—makes use of poetry as a plot device, as shorthand for one type of character development or another, or (seemingly) as an almost entirely gratuitous detail.

Think back to Woody Allen's 1977 masterpiece Annie Hall, for example. Alvy Singer (Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) have just met while playing tennis. She gives him a harrowing ride home, weaving in and out of traffic on New York's narrow streets, and ultimately invites him to her place for a glass of wine. There—on what is more or less their first date—Alvy peruses Annie's bookshelves and pulls out a copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel. Here's that exchange:

Alvy: Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.

Annie: Oh yeah. Right. Well, I don’t know. I mean, some of her poems seem neat.

Alvy: Neat?

Annie: Neat, yeah.

Alvy: I hate to tell you, this is 1975, you know? Neat went out, I would say, at the turn of the century.

Predictable? Maybe in Annie Hall. But what about Steve Pink's 2010 comedy Hot Tub Time Machine in which three unhappy friends—Adam (John Cusack), Lou (Rob Corddry), and Nick (Craig Robinson)—are transported, along with Adam's teenage nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), back to "Winterfest '86" which was a pivotal weekend in all of their lives. Caught between the need to recreate the past exactly (so that the future is unaffected and Jacob still gets born) and an understandable desire to change the events that led to their current unhappiness, the three are forced in hilarious fashion to re-live and/or revise some of their most humiliating moments: Lou gets abandoned by his friends and beaten up by the psychotic head of the ski patrol; Nick gets a second chance to rock the house at what was an otherwise uninspiring concert the first time around; and Adam gets a second shot at finding the woman of his dreams.

Part of Adam's respon- sibility in this process is to recreate his break up with his high school girlfriend Jennie, who stabbed him in the eye for splitting with her the first time around. This time, however, Adam is fraught by second thoughts and delays the break, giving Jennie time to beat him to the punch. (She gives Adam a break-up note but still ends up stabbing him in the eye.) Devastated to have things turn out even worse than they did the first time around (or so he thinks), Adam retreats to his hotel room and gets stoned out of his mind. This is where Jacob finds him: in darkness, wallowing in self-pity while listening to The Cutting Crew's song "(I Just Died) In Your Arms Tonight," and—what else?—writing poetry. Here's that scene:

Jacob: Adam, hey. Thank God you’re back. Awesome. What’s going on here? Where are the guys?

[Cusack hands him the breakup note.]

What’s this?

[Jacob reads] "Dear Adam, you are a super terrific guy, and I love you, which is why this is so hard for me. I cherish our friendship…”

[Jacob laughs]

She broke up with you? And you still fucking got stabbed in the eye?

Adam [while writing]: Leave me alone. Get out of here.

Jacob: What are you doing here? Are you writing poetry?

Adam: Just leave me alone and get out of here. No.

Jacob: You’re writing fucking break-up poetry.

Adam: Alright, I’m writing break-up poetry, ok? … Because my heart hurts.

Jacob [looking around at all the drugs]: What is this shit? You’re wasted!

Adam: I’ve had like two wine kills, Captain Buzzcooler. God!

Jacob: You’re fucked up.

[Jacob picks up Adam's poem and reads]

"Jennie’s eyes,
like a gypsy’s lies,
cut right through the night.
Now those eyes
are another guy’s,
and I’m alone with my pain."

Adam: That was clean!

Jacob: Are you shitting me with this, Adam!?

Adam: Look, you can recite it straight or to the tune of "Sweet Child O’ Mine." It doesn’t matter.

Jacob: Are these mushrooms? Did you eat these mushrooms, Adam?

Adam: I like to eat 'em, you know. A couple of 'em.

Jacob: Holy fuck, man, you gotta stay straight. You’ve got to help me get the guys back.

Adam: You know, it’s not always about my emotional journey. It can be about yours.

Jacob: Put the coke down!

It's a funny, riotous scene in which the grown-up Adam revisits the genre of teenage poetry, and the ridiculousness of the entire endeavor (aside from the Guns N Roses homage, of course) serves to illustrate in miniature why the three adult men can't be entirely held hostage by the past. No matter how much poetry may express longing for a time it can't recover (as in pastoral poetry), or despite poetry's attempt to escape time altogether (as in many conceptions of the lyric), time must move forward and the guys must re-enter and make history. As if suggesting this very thing, the movie interrupts the argument between Adam and Jacob with the arrival of Chevy Chase who plays "the mystical time travel guide guy" come to remind them—as the thunder and lightning of a Romantic poem storm in the background—that the hot tub time portal will be closing soon. To get things done (or to make things happen, as Auden might put it), one needs more than the self-indulgence or reflection that poetry as a genre offers; one needs a plan or a plot to move forward in time (and/or through the pain of a breakup)—the exact thing, or so the movie's logic goes, that Hollywood provides that poetry cannot.

What all these movies have in common— Hot Tub Time Machine, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Groundhog Day, and Fight Club—is their substantial focus on moving through time in one way or another. In Steve Pink's comedy, that movement is backwards and forwards; in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is stuck repeating the same day over and over; in Fight Club and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, characters completely lose sense of time when they change into their alter egos. And Annie Hall and Citizen Kane are about sorting through the past, reflecting on what is now unattainable and what might have been. Thus, at some level, all these films must confront the fact that they are treading on poetry's traditional and culturally-sanctioned terrain, and they solve the resulting rivalry in different ways, all of which end up—no surprise here—privileging the technology of film and leaving P&PC, like Adam in Hot Tub Time Machine, alone with our pain.

When the Cat's Away, the Mice Read Poetry: The Case of The Long Hot Summer

In the 2006 Bruce Beresford flick The Contract, Ray Keene (played by John Cusack) is an unsuc-cessful father who, out on a camping trip with his son, encounters escaped hit man Frank Carden (played by Morgan Freeman) and tries to win his son's admiration by bringing Carden back to civilization and justice. Carden tries to warn Keene against playing the hero, and during the hike back, Keene and son are pursued by Carden's paramilitary team, shot at, attacked via helicopter, and subjected to Carden's psychological assaults. They run, they talk, they scale cliffs, they sweat. There are attempted escapes and explosions and moments of unanticipated bonding, and Carden does everything he can to slow the group's progress—including quoting poetry. P&PC can't remember the exact poem he tries to recite before Keene shuts him up, but we think it was part of "The Road Not Taken." Not entirely sure. For our purposes here, though, the specific poem doesn't matter as much as the fact that the movie seems to identify poetry in general as a force that impedes forward progress and threatens efficiency—something that slows our hikers and runs counter to the endgame Keene has in mind. Aligned with the African-American killer Carden and set up as contrary to the forces of fatherhood, whiteness, law, and justice, poetry is thus—in the world of The Contract at least—a criminal undertaking.

This isn't exactly the case in The Long Hot Summer—Martin Ritt's extremely entertaining 1958 film which is based on a couple of Faulkner stories—but it's not that far off. The film features Orson Welles as rich, Mississippi plantation owner Daddy Varner, Joanne Woodward as Varner's unmarried schoolteacher daughter, Clara, and Paul Newman as the Machiavellian, bootstrapping, six-packed stranger whom Varner picks out as a perfect mate for Clara. Daddy sorely wants grandchildren. He wants a virile family. Especially now that his health is growing suspect, he doesn't want Clara to dilly dally with her mama's-boy of a suitor; he wants a quick, efficient, direct way to manufacture descendants. Most of the movie, as such, has to do with how Clara learns to appreciate and accept the crass Ben Quick (played by Newman). But The Long Hot Summer is also a love story between Daddy Varner and Quick, as Varner manages his attraction to the younger man via his daughter's bedroom instead of his own.

As with The Contract, The Long Hot Summer identifies poetry as a force impeding the efficient execution of patriarchal and legal powers. In The Long Hot Summer, however, that force is wielded not by an African-American male criminal postponing his submission to the criminal justice system, but by a white woman postponing her submission to the patriarchal sex-gender system of marriage and pregnancy. Check out the following passage from early in the movie when Daddy Varner returns from an out-of-town operation and ruthlessly belittles everyone—especially his only son Jody—for not doing enough in his absence. After he thoroughly lays into Jody, this is the exchange between Daddy Varner and Clara that follows:

Daddy Varner: I'm my old self again. Them doctors down in Jefferson, they gutted me, and they took away just about every organ they thought I could spare, but they didn't pare my spirit down none. Thank you, Jody, for your kindly inquiry as to my health. [Jody didn't ask.]

Clara: Next!

Daddy: All right, sister. You're on.

Clara: What do you want to know, Papa?

Daddy: You still fixin' to get yourself known as the best-looking, richest old maid in the county, or have you seen any young people lately? Any young people seen you? At any parties, any picnics, any barbeques, any church bazaars? Have you mingled? Have you mixed? Or you kept yourself up in that room all this time reading them poetry books? Huh?

Clara: I hope this doesn't come as a shock to your nervous system, Papa, but when you're away, I do what I please.

Daddy: Well, I'm back!

Clara: Welcome home.

This passage is brilliantly done, in part for how it reverses the expec- tations of conven- tional story lines; when the cat's away in The Long Hot Summer, the mice don't play—they read poetry. And that's exactly what infuriates Daddy Varner, as he associates poetry with, and thus conflates, a combination of things including female independence, sterility, solitude, onanism, and (most likely) rhyme. Unlike the stereotypical over-protective father, he wants his daughter to go mix and mingle, but she does what she pleases while she's alone in her bedroom; for her (and for her father), poetry is a form of birth control. That Clara's aware of the threat her poetry reading poses to the dominant sex-gender system Daddy Varner represents is clear, as her reference to his personal "nervous system" no doubt implicates the larger systemic forces she feels bearing down on her as well.

Of course, The Long Hot Summer falls on the side of order, justice, law, fatherhood, patriarchy, etc., as Clara eventually partners up with Quick. For some reason, we don't remember the end of The Contract, but we suspect the same is true there as well—that Carden is caught or killed, that poetry is equally domesticated or disciplined, and that Hollywood perpetuates its strange, low-level, but ongoing smear campaign against poetry. Nevertheless, these two films remain intriguing to P&PC because they don't suggest that some poetry is oppositional and some is not (as many people claim), but that, in the American cultural imagination, at least, all poetry—in the woods, or between the sheets—is somehow associated with forces that challenge dominant orders. Carden and Clara are both criminals for reading it. Who knows if maybe you are too?