Summer Report: P&PC at Critical Margins

Yes, P&PC has been a little slow to keep up with our usual schedule of weekly postings this summer, and we apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment that has caused along the way. But there have been good reasons for our delays and postponements. Sure, our intern budget got cut back. And sure, Polly the Paper Shredder and Sally the Stenographer surprised us all by eloping and tying the knot—legally—in Oregon. But then came the two-week trip to Rome and Venice, where (among other things), we visited the graves of John Keats, Percy Shelley, Gregory Corso, and Ezra Pound and fell head over heels for Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture in Rome and Tintoretto's paintings in Venice. (That's Tintoretto's The Miracle of the Slave pictured above, btw.) And then came a trip to Iowa City where we worked, visited with old friends, and ate George's cheeseburgers for nearly four weeks. As you can probably imagine, it can be difficult to keep up the pace when out of the office, missing interns, and fielding happy pictures and texts from Polly and Sally as they do their cross-country trip honeymoon.

But that doesn't mean we've been entirely missing in action. In fact, the time away from the office gave us a chance to complete a long interview for Critical Margins about Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America and matters relating to, well, poetry and popular culture more generally. That interview went live this week, and we loved the chance to talk about the book, poetry in the media, our time writing advertising poetry, our students' work, and the book project that we've got in the works. In the way of a teaser, here's one question from the interview and our answer:

Critical Margins: What is your favorite example in the last year of popular poetry?

P&PC: I'd have to say Season Four, Episode Six ("Foot Chase") of the FX Network's show Justified. (Okay, Season Four ran in 2013, but I watched it in 2014.) There's a scene where career criminal Boyd Crowder and his hired muscle break into the home of local banker Dale Haywood, whom they think might really be Drew Thompson—a man who, twenty years earlier, faked his death to escape testifying against a Detroit crime boss and then made off with a load of the crime boss's drugs. Hoping to collect a ransom if they find and deliver the real Drew Thompson, Boyd and Colt hold Haywood hostage until he can prove he is in fact who he says he is and not Drew Thompson. Searching for evidence one way or another, Boyd and Colt discover a box of souvenirs and mementos in Haywood's house, and they pull out a piece of lined notebook paper with a handwritten poem on it. Boyd reads it aloud, then we get a chance to read it for ourselves on screen. Here's the poem:

This is a fascinating little TV moment, isn't it? Why make Dale a poet (or at least someone who has written a poem)? Why make it such a bad poem? And why have it read aloud and shown to the audience when it doesn't end up proving anything one way or another (for Boyd, at least) about Dale's true identity?

It's also a fascinating little poem—precisely, I think, because of the nature of its badness. It begins with cliché, right? The kitschy abstractions like "my heart," "my soul," "my hurt," and "sorrow," plus the rhymes and meter of an amateur love poem, anchor it in unoriginal language, thus making for bad verse. But it's not uniform in its badness from beginning to end. Pushed by the need to find a rhyme for "sorrow," Dale's final metaphor ("the size of Kilimanjaro") is so not cliché that I can only describe it as truly original work—work, one might say, that reaches new, perhaps incomparable, heights of original badness. (He could have rhymed with "tomorrow," couldn’t he?) I suspect that, on some level, this verse dramatizes—in a way that "good" poetry might not be able to do—the scene's focus on whether Dale is actually Dale or an impostor masquerading as Dale. Is he the undercover Drew Thompson pretending to be someone else (the way cliché is "pretending" to be poetry), or is he really Dale (not pretty, but as original as his metaphor)?

There's another aspect of this that's interesting, too. Dale has hidden his poem away, and, in finding it, Boyd essentially "outs" Dale as a poet—a drama that doesn't just offer a nice foil to the "outing" Drew Thompson plot but that also recalls similar moments in other shows. There's a 1973 episode of All in the Family in which Archie Bunker outs his hippie son-in-law Mike as a poet—what Archie calls "a regular Edgar Allan Poe-lock." There's a 1982 episode of The Jeffersons in which George is outed as having once written love poetry for Louise. There's the plotline in the first season of Rescue Me (2004) where macho New York firefighter Lt. Kenny "Lou" Shea is afraid that people will find out he's been writing poetry to cope with his feelings in the aftermath of 9/11. All of these scenes associate poetry with the closet and thus with queerness—as if our culture needed yet another reason to think that a dude writing poetry might be queer. (In fact, Shea's story is paralleled by a plot line involving rumors that some of his fellow firefighters are gay.) Even in Justified, the scene sets up Dale to be read as queer: he's downstairs late at night and not upstairs in bed with his wife, and in mentioning "Curt" rather than the name of the "her" in the verse, Dale's poem suggests, ever so slightly, that the "hurt" expressed in the poem comes from the pain of seeing Dale's secret beloved Curt kissing a girl and thus knowing that Curt is unavailable.

There's more, too. This plot motif goes all the way back to the 1950s when ground-breaking TV comedian Ernie Kovacs debuted his character of Percy Dovetonsils—an effeminate poet in a zebra-striped smoking jacket who used a daisy as a swizzle stick, wore glasses that made him look bug-eyed, and lisped while reciting poems like "Cowboy":

O cowboy so lean,
O cowboy so tall,
You sit there straight as an arrow.
But side-saddle you ride,
Instead of astride.
Are you perhaps a gay ranchero? 

Dovetonsils, Kovacs once claimed, was based on none other than Ted Malone of Between the Bookends radio fame, whom audiences had only ever heard—a voice incriminated by its association with poetry that Kovacs, via the new medium of TV, was able to "out" as queer, thus making a case for the reliability or truth-telling power of TV over and against radio.

I've come a long way from Justified, haven't I? Maybe you now see a bit more clearly the types of vantage points that can open up via poetry in popular culture; it can be much more complex than it initially appears, with implications—in this case—for how we understand the taxonomies of poetic "badness," for how poetry has gotten linked to (indeed, how it's been presented as a symptom of) queer sexualities and thus has become a repository for cultural anxieties about homosexuality, and how it serves as an occasion by which changing media hierarchies are conducted. Kind of amazing, no? 

Please head over to Critical Margins for the rest of the interview? We hope you do.

"Put Readings on YouTube"

Here's the skinny on what's been happening literature-wise in Iowa City of late. After several years of application-making, bell-ringing, and horn-tooting, Iowa City was named a UNESCO "world city of literature," joining Edinburgh, Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia as the only other cities in the world with that designation. Check out the press release yourself here. Way to go, Iowa City.

At the same time, as it was becoming clear that Iowa City would indeed achieve "world city of literature" status, Iowa Public Radio announced that it would be dropping "Live From Prairie Lights" from its programming schedule. For as long as most people remember, "Live From Prairie Lights" has broadcast visiting poets and fiction writers reading, well, live from Prairie Lights Bookstore in downtown Iowa City. Apparently, though, a number of forces conspired to drive listeners away. The show's host was boring. The readers (like many readers) didn't perform their work with any particular flair. And the show ran once or twice on air which, as you and I both know, simply ain't gonna fly in an age of YouTube and podcasts. Are you gonna rearrange your schedule, wait until 8 pm, then tune in your crystal set to listen to a boring reading followed by an even more boring set of questions? "Poetry & Popular Culture" sure isn't.

But the old-time codgers here in Iowa City—many of whom haven't listened to "Live From Prairie Lights" in ages (and many of whom would privately admit that the show actually is pretty boring)—have been lamenting the passing of the wireless torch and the demise of the radio show. How horrid, they say, that on the eve of being designated the world's third city of literature Iowa City should strip away its literary radio programming. Some heavies like former Iowa Poet Laureate and Writers' Workshop teacher Marvin Bell and current Iowa Poet Laureate Robert Dana have weighed in on the controversy.

And what follows is Mike Chasar's take on the topic, a view officially endorsed by "Poetry & Popular Culture."

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on November 25, 2008

Put Readings On YouTube

Congratulations, Iowa City, for being designated UNESCO's third City of Literature. Via the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the International Writing Program and other innovative and historically significant literary efforts, you have changed the way writing happens in the United States and around the world.

It is now time to remember that history, stop lamenting the disappearance of "Live from Prairie Lights" from Iowa Public Radio and seize on that disappearance as an opportunity to reimagine what such broadcasts might look and sound like in a digital age where podcasts and YouTube reach a much larger audience than WSUI and Julie Englander ever could.

Radio poetry history

Literature has long been a part of public and commercial radio programming. In the 1920s, poetry radio shows emerged as popular parts of the media landscape. Some shows -- like Ted Malone's "Between the Bookends" and Tony Wons's "R Yuh Listenin'?" -- were broadcast nationwide and had large, avid audiences who not only waited by their sets to hear poems read aloud to live organ music, but who flooded the studios with fan mail as well.

At the height of his popularity in the 1930s, Malone's show received more than 20,000 fan letters per month. Much as I hesitate to mention that other state university north of Ames, you can go there and read some of these fan letters yourself, which are now in the Arthur B. Church Papers in the Special Collections Department of that university's Parks Library.

Malone and Wons weren't the only ones to dazzle first generation radio audiences with poetry. A.M. Sullivan's "New Poetry Hour" on WOR (New York) strove to broadcast poetry of only the highest literary quality. Eve Merriam's Out of the Ivory Tower on WQXR (New York) featured Leftist poets reading their work. Ted Malone was known for showcasing "amateur" poetry sent in by his listeners, but he also read poetry by Shakespeare, Keats, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot.

And on the eve of World War II -- when radio was the major source of up-to-the-moment news for many Americans -- NBC broadcast Edna St. Vincent Millay's book-length propaganda poem "The Murder of Lidice" to a nationwide audience of millions. It was performed by Hollywood actor and two-time Academy Award nominee Basil Rathbone and was accompanied by a chorus of singers. Not only was that broadcast shortwaved to England and Europe, but the poem was translated into Spanish and Portuguese and beamed to South America as well.

Finding today's audiences

Those days may be over, but audiences still await -- though they're not sitting in Prairie Lights, nor, apparently, are they sitting by their radios diligently tuning in to Iowa Public Radio.

Instead, they are online watching "The Daily Show" and Tina Fey impersonate Sarah Palin on YouTube. They are downloading podcasts. They tune in at their convenience, but they do so in enormous numbers.

"Live from Prairie Lights" should find a model in President-elect Barack Obama, who recently gave the weekly Democratic radio address not just on radio, but also for the first time on YouTube.

If, as one university official claimed, "Live from Praire Lights" is a "standard-bearer" for Iowa City's literary culture, then it should not be constrained by the time tables of either a bookstore or a public radio schedule. It should be recorded in video and audio formats. It should be posted online for listeners to access at their convenience -- at a coffee shop, at work, or even (anachronistic as it might sound) at a fireside.

The readings of Iowa City's writers and visiting writers should be posted on YouTube where people not just in Iowa City, but around the world, can access them. Imagine the global audiences who might tune in to hear participants in the International Writing Program read from their work.

If "Live from Prairie Lights" really is the "gem" that people say it is, then why not share that wealth with as many people as possible? That would not only be a move in keeping with Iowa City's leadership and innovation in arts and letters, but the mark of a true world city of literature as well.