Poetry Out Loud 2015

On Saturday, March 14, Willamette University once again played host to the final round of Oregon's Poetry Out Loud state competition, and P&PC was there as usual. We just can't stay away. In 2013 and 2014, we judged at the regional and state levels, and this year we judged at the regional level and then helped to convene a pre-competition luncheon discussion at W.U. along with last year's state winner Rosie Reyes, who came back from Oregon State University (where she is now a student) to share some poetry and her experiences representing Oregon at the national level in D.C. the past two years. We swapped stories about reading, memorizing, and reciting poems. We recited some poems. And we nibbled at our sandwiches over the protests of the butterflies fluttering in all of our stomachs.

This year, nine students from around the state— Gypsy Prince, Mitchell Lenneville, Sarah Dom- browsky, Jessica Nguyen, Anna Smiley, Atya-Sha Van Ness, Serena Morgan, Allegra Thatcher, and Riley Knowles—represented their regions as winners at the classroom, school, and regional levels. While final numbers for 2015 aren't yet in, the numbers from 2014 suggest that those nine are the tip of a very big iceberg. In 2014, more than 365,000 students, 2,300 schools, and 8,800 teachers participated in Poetry Out Loud nationwide, making the contest—now celebrating its tenth year—one of the most successful poetry outreach programs we can think of. We're in awe at what the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and state and local arts agencies like the Oregon Arts Commission have managed to make happen in the past decade. Tell your Congressional representatives to keep funding to the NEA flowing so that programs like this one keep going on!

This year, the Hatfield Room of W.U.'s Library was packed with families, teachers, students, and dignitaries and celebrities including the Oregon Arts Commission's executive director Brian Rogers, several OAC commissioners, Poetry Foundation ambassador Justine Haka, and Erika Lauren Aguillar, an international exchange student at the Oregon School for the Deaf who performed her American Sign Language version of Dorothy Parker's "Love Song" during intermission. We here at P&PC loved all the performances (especially Jessica Nguyen's rendition of Robert Creeley's "For Love"), and we've no doubt that judges Laurence Overmire, Ann Peck McBride, and Marty Hughley had a heck of a time coming to a decision. And it was close, coming down to a tie breaker mechanism between Gypsy Prince of the Academy of Arts and Academics in Springfield and Riley Knowles of West Linn High School.

In the end, Prince (pictured here) took first place on the strength of her final poem, Gregory Djanikian's "Mrs. Caldera's House of Things," and she will represent the Beaver State at the national competition taking place April 27-29 in Washington, D.C. (Let's give a big P&PC shout-out to Prince's teacher Scott Crowell!) Prince is a three-time school champion and was one of last year's state finalists as well. She performed William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" in round one, Margaret Atwood's "Backdrop Addresses Cowboy," in round two, and then Djanikian's poem in round three. Knowles (no relation to Bey and pictured on the right in the photo accompanying the second paragraph above) performed Gwendolyn Brooks's "A Song in the Front Yard," Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying," and Ernest Dowson's "April Love." As runner-up, she will represent Oregon in the event that Prince cannot.

Congratulations to all of this year's competitors, and thank you to all of the students, teachers, administrators, judges, and sponsors who keep this event on our Spring calendar. We are inspired by your dedication, your abilities, and your energy—and we'll see you next year. We'll leave you with the following video in which Prince recites Djanikian's poem and in which Deborah Vaughn, the Arts Education/Poetry Out Loud Coordinator of the Oregon Arts Commission, announces the judge's final results. Happy viewing—and good luck in D.C., Gypsy!

Meeting Alice Corbin Henderson (1881-1949) at Willamette University's Zena Farm

One of our favorite parts of Willamette University is Zena Farm—a five-acre, student-operated farm that is part of a larger, 305-acre property that includes a forest and a small observatory located in the Eola Hills about ten miles west of Salem proper. (Pretty awesome, right? How many other liberal arts universities do you know that can boast both a farm and a forest?) Overseen and managed by W.U.'s Sustainability Institute, the farm is a laboratory for all sorts of cool learning experiences. It sells tasty eats at the campus farm stand on Jackson Plaza during the school year. And it's also the site of the Summer Institute in Sustainable Agriculture—a residential, credit granting program that mixes hands-on learning with field trips, independent projects, and academic study in the theories and philosophies of sustainable agriculture.

We were out at the farm yesterday having lunch with students (including Shayna and Lori from last semester's Introduction to Creative Writing class) and the summer program leader Jennifer Johns, and we happened to notice the handwritten poem (pictured here) tacked to the side of the refrigerator. It's called "Kristen's Grace" and reads:

The silver rain, the shining sun
The fields where scarlet poppies run
And all the ripples of the wheat
Are in the bread that we now eat.

And when we sit at every meal
And say our grace we always feel
That we are eating rain and sun
And fields where scarlet poppies run.

For us, the poem's "scarlet poppies" immediately recalled John McCrae's famous World War I poem "In Flanders Fields," and so, intrigued by the apparent distance between World War I and what's going on at Zena, we set the office interns to work. Who was "Kristen," and was this her poem or her grace—or both? Might the poppies really link back to McCrae and World War I? And, if so, how does that affect how we read the poem today, especially in relation to the farm's mission? Well, we haven't found out who Kristen is, but the interns have discovered that while this is her grace, Kristen isn't the actual author of the poem. Indeed, it's a verse not uncommonly cited and used by sustainable foodie types—and sometimes by feminist types who see in the scarlet poppies a figure for menstruation—and it's usually titled "The Harvest" and attributed to Alice Corbin Henderson.

So who, you might be wondering, is Alice Corbin Henderson? Well, if it's the Alice Corbin Henderson we think it is, "Winter Harvest" not only links us to McCrae but also to Poetry magazine, where Henderson (1881-1949) was an editor and close associate of Harriet Monroe in the magazine's early years, co-editing with Monroe three editions (1917, 1923, 1932) of The New Poetry anthology. Henderson graduated from high school in Chicago and entered the University of Chicago, but due to her susceptibility to tuberculosis, she relocated to Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans for the completion of undergraduate school. (Henderson's mother died of tuberculosis when Alice was three.) Upon graduation, Alice moved back to Chicago where she took classes at Chicago's Academy of Fine Arts, in the process meeting and subsequently marrying William Penhallow Henderson, an instructor at the Academy and a notable Arts and Crafts artist who, among other things, was working on Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens Project. Alice worked with Poetry and she also wrote poetry (her first book Linnet Songs was published in 1898 when she was seventeen years old).

Because of Alice's persistent health concerns, however, the Hendersons relocated to the more lung-friendly climes of New Mexico, where they settled in Santa Fe, becoming central figures in the area's art scene that included Witter Bynner, D.H. Lawrence, and eventually Georgia O'Keeffe. By 1925, at least, poets were meeting weekly at the Henderson residence to read and discuss their work, and it's quite likely that Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, and W.H. Auden dropped by for one or more of these meetings over the years; we'd bet a considerable sum that on his cross-country travels—some on foot—Vachel Lindsay did too. (As we know, New York and Chicago weren't the only centers of modern art activity in the U.S.)

Alice continued to work for Poetry from Santa Fe, but that work—and her own poetry—became less and less the focus of her attention, as she and William became increasingly interested in Native and Chicano cultures and histories. She and William were cofounders of the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs (1922) and the Indian Arts Fund (1925). Many native artists visited their home. William produced and acted in plays to support Indian drought relief efforts in the 1920s. Alice helped organize the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, and she became a librarian and curator for the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art—housed in a building designed by William. (Alice, btw, was also the editor of New Mexico: Guide to the Colorful State [1940], one of the American Guide series books sponsored by the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression.)

That's all very interesting stuff, you might be thinking to yourself, but what about those scarlet poppies in "The Harvest"? Well, we can not only make a good argument that Henderson's poppies do, indeed, directly reference the poppies that McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" made synonymous with World War I, but that this reference also makes "The Harvest" a stunning poem about our relationship to food sources and one of the most surprising poems that we've come across in a while. During World War I, Alice worked as publicity chair for the Women's Auxiliary of the State Board of Defense and, like many poets whom we don't typically view as "political" today (Sara Teasdale most immediately comes to mind), Alice wrote about the war as well. Here is her poem "A Litany in the Desert," for example, which first appeared in the April 1918 issue of the Yale Review:

I.

     On the other side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains there is a great welter of steel and flame. I have read that it is so. I know nothing of it here.
     On the other side of the water there is terrible carnage. I have read that it is so. I know nothing of it here.
     I do not know why men fight and die. I do not know why men sweat and slave. I know nothing of it here.

II.

     Out of the peace of your great valleys, America, out of the depth and silence of your deep canyons,
     Out of the wide stretch of yellow corn-fields, out of the stealthy sweep of your rich prairies,
     Out of the high mountain peaks, out of the intense purity of your snows,
     Invigorate us, O America.
     Out of the deep peace of your breast, out of the sure strength of your loins,
     Recreate us, O America.
     Not from the smoke and the fever and fret, not from the welter of furnaces, from the fierce melting-pots of cities;
     But from the quiet fields, from the little places, from the dark lamp-lit nights—from the plains, from the cabins, from the little house in the mountains,
     Breathe strength upon us:
     And give us the young men who will make us great.

From one perspective, it's kind of amazing to think that the same person who wrote "The Harvest" also wrote "A Litany in the Desert" and that a "modern" poet was moving back and forth between the rhyming quatrains of the former verse and the long, Whitman-like, Sandburg-like lines of the latter. But the spirit linking them—the faith in the local (what Vachel Lindsay called "the new localism"), the connection between the social and environmental, the suspicion that modern urban life separates the human being from her food source and leads to environmental and social catastrophe—comes from something of the same place, does it not?

So here's the kicker. Setting "The Harvest" in its historical context (World War I), authorial context ("A Litany in the Desert"), and philosophical/ethical framework reveals "The Harvest" to be a much more sobering poem than it initially appears, and much less optimistic than "A Litany in the Desert." In fact, it's a downright gruesome couple of quatrains, probably written after the war, about what we eat and where our food comes from. Indeed, Henderson invests the bread of the poem not just with natural phenomena ("rain and sun"), but also—as represented by the "scarlet poppies" that McCrae's verse made so famous—with the blood of modern war. This is not a poem about menstruation. Rather, it is a poem about how the bread that we eat "at every meal" contains the the war's dead, both way back then and in the present moment of the poem in which, as line four says, we "now eat." The "harvest" of the poem's title thus refers to the wheat mentioned in stanza one and to the harvest of death (see Timothy H. O'Sullivan's famous Civil War photo of that same title). If you compare this view of nature with the view of nature and its purifying forces in Whitman's "This Compost," you'll get a sense of just how shocking we find "The Harvest" to be. Indeed, when we now read "The Harvest" in the P&PC Office, we aren't finding ourselves saying grace. Rather, we find ourselves asking for some.

Poetry Out Loud State Championship!

This year, the Oregon state championship for Poetry Out Loud—the national poetry recitation contest sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in conjunction with state and local art agencies—was held in the Hatfield Room of Willamette University's Hatfield Library. There, surrounded by the rather austere looking, glass-enclosed private library of former U.S. Senator and Bearcat alum Mark Hatfield, nine high school students from around the state recited their hearts out in hopes of heading on to the national competition being held in Washington, D.C., at the end of April.

As was the case in 2013, P&PC spent two weekends working with Poetry Out Loud this year. Alongside poet Stephanie Lenox and actor/professor Susan Coromel, we helped to judge the regional contest one weekend ago in Salem, and then yesterday at Bearcat central we served on a panel of judges that included current Oregon poet laureate Paulann Petersen, Eleanor Berry, and Wendy Thompson. Contestants—all of whom had succeeded at school and regional levels in making their way to the finals—met at W.U. in the late morning, where they had an intimate lunch with Petersen in an Eaton Hall seminar room and talked about the oral character of poetry and reasons for reciting it and reading it aloud. That's our Oregon Nine pictured above. From left to right, they are: Gypsy Prince of Springfield; Rosie Reyes of Portland; Rebekah Ratcliff of Medford; Sofia Gispert Tello of Hermiston; Stephanie Gordon of Bandon; the mostly-hidden McKinley Rodriguez of Portland; Kylie Winger of Medford; Maxwell Romprey of West Salem; and, rocking the pink hair, Jerika Fuller of Oregon City. (Two poetry superheroes whom you don't see in the picture are Deb Vaughn and Sarah Dougher of the Oregon Arts Commission who do all of the contest's coordination and legwork.)

As always, P&PC came away better, smarter, and happier for being involved. Fuller wowed us with her recitation of Stephen Crane's "In the Desert." Ratcliff introduced us to Paul Engle's "Hero." Rodriguez soared through Kevin Young's "Cadillac Moon." And Tello, a sophomore from Hermiston High School whom we had admired in the regional contest, wowed us with her understated version of "The Cities Inside Us" by Alberto Rios. When all was said and done, however, it was Rosie Reyes—last year's state champion, pictured here—who once again walked away with first prize. Her renditions of Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying" and Emily Dickinson's "It was not Death, for I stood up" were superb, but it was her spellbinding performance of Alberto Rios's "The Pomegranate and the Big Crowd" that took the cake. Rosie is heading to Oregon State University next Fall to study physical therapy, but the P&PC Office hopes she sticks with the poetry thing as well—and that she kicks some butt in representing Oregon in D.C. Go, Rosie!

In the event that Rosie is for some reason unable to represent the Beaver state, that responsibility will fall to contest runner-up and West Salem resident Max Romprey (pictured here with his teacher Christina Eddy), whose folksy, aw-shucks demeanor won the crowd over with his versions of Bob Hicok's "After Working Sixty Hours Again for What Reason," Dick Allen's "What You Have to Get Over," and Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias." This was Max's first year in the contest, and because P&PC is headquartered in the Cherry City, we were particularly pleased to see a local performer do so well. Congratulations, Max, and congratulations to all of this year's finalists. We're crushing on you big time.

'Tis the Last Rose of Summer: LARC at WU

Folks in the P&PC Office have spent a good portion of the last two weeks revving up for the school year: we've been buying new magic markers, trying on the latest hip jeans and gym shoes, putting together our Trapper Keepers, designing syllabi for two classes focusing on the poetry of Walt Whitman, and wistfully reflecting on Thomas Moore's "last rose of summer / left blooming alone." School starts next week, and we're excited—don't get us wrong. But we also don't want to leave summer, because leaving summer means leaving our LARC summer research team—a grant-funded group of three Willamette faculty and four Willamette students who have been working independently and collaboratively on projects related to "The Age of Projection: Remediation, Reformation, and Revolution."

Every summer for three or four years now, Willamette University's Mellon-funded LARC (Liberal Arts Research Collaborative) program has been making it possible for faculty and students to do collaborative, interdisciplinary research in the humanities. Set up in part to discover potential models for humanities-based student-teacher research at small undergraduate universities, LARC provides funds for students (living space for the summer plus a stipend) and faculty to work in teams on proposed projects. And this year P&PC got a chance to take part. Along with Abigail Susik (Art History), Anna Cox (Spanish and Film Studies), and four students (Andrea Adachi, Hannah Brown, Emma Jonas, and Amy Snodgrass), we pursued projects based in some way on how projection- and other screen-based media affected literature, art, film, politics, and graffiti over the course of the twentieth century. (See our proposal and five others here.)

So what did we all do? Well, P&PC pursued its current fascination with the projection of poetry via magic lantern at the turn of the century—the first time in history, we believe, when people began to commonly experience reading as something that happens off of the handwritten or printed material page. (See a couple of our past postings on the subject here and here; that's an example of a lantern poetry slide pictured just above.) For us, this moment not only sets in motion an age of screen reading leading up to the computer and e-reader, but it also gives us a historical starting point to help nuance our discussions about the "death of print." As it turns out, the hegemony of print reading was coming under pressure long before digital media, and the fact that poetry—popular poetry, natch—was central to this phenomenon makes us rethink (for one) the roles poetry played in the development of modern life and (two) how poetry scholars might do well to better account for the proliferation of poetry in non-print media formats over the course of the twentieth century.

For their part, Abigail and Emma both studied the incorporation of projection into contemporary new media art and graffiti practices (they even attended the Elektra International Digital Arts Festival in Montreal); Anna and Hannah studied the aesthetic and political pressures that Spanish filmmakers faced under Franco's dictatorship (Hannah spent time in the Basque country for part of her project); and Andrea sort of partnered with all of us as she studied how the ephemeral poetic graffiti of Quito, Ecuador (such as the example pictured here) has found an unexpected permanence or afterlife via preservation and documentation online.

Just as Abigail worked closely with Emma, and Anna worked closely with Hannah, so P&PC worked especially closely with our seventh team member, Amy Snodgrass, who studied the the proliferation of new poetry reading and writing experiences enabled by digital and online media ranging from the programmed works of single authors to the group-generated haiku "discussions" of Craigslist. (Why someone hasn't yet written in a prominent way about the haiku "discussion forum" of every city's Craigslist is a wonder to us!) Check out some of the poems that Amy took as the initial objects of her study:

"Separation/Séparation" by Annie Abrahams
"Sooth" and other poems by David Johnston
"Soliloquy" by Kenneth Goldsmith
"The Sweet Old Etcetera," a set of e.e. cummings poems choreographed by Alison Clifford
"Toucher" by Serge Bourchardon, Kevin Carpentier, and Stephanie Spenle
"Fitting the Pattern" by Christine Wilks
"This is How You Will Die" by Jason Nelson

Our students will all be presenting their projects to the W.U. community this Fall, by which time summer will be mostly a distant image in the rear-view mirror. But make no mistake about it. Both our formal meetings and discussions (every member of the team led a three-hour group discussion about his or her research) and our informal gatherings and sharings were eye-opening, energizing, and inspiring, and we'll remember them and continue learning from them for a long time. Thank you, Mellon. Thank you, LARC administrators. And thank you, Abigail, Anna, Andrea, Emma, Hannah, and Amy. We loved every minute of it.

Back to The New Northwest: Suffragist Poetry in the Gold Man Review

Regular P&PC readers will remember our ongoing interest in the poetry published in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in The New Northwest—a weekly suffragist newspaper published out of Portland by Abigail Scott Duniway, a leading voice in the fight for Oregon women's suffrage. Between 2010 and 2012, we did a four part series on this poetry, which oftentimes appeared on the paper's front page, which was frequently written by Willamette Valley writers long before folks like William Stafford put Oregon on the national poetry map, and which was sometimes sourced or cut-and-pasted from other newspapers around the country (a common practice in an age when poets and their publishers didn't seem to care about regulating the circulation of verse via copyright laws). Then, in 2012 and 2013, we collated a set of these poems for use in the development of Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon, an original and experimental script produced at Willamette University earlier this year in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage.

Now Salem's start-up literary magazine, the Gold Man Review, has joined in the fun, reprinting a portfolio of seven suffragist poems from The New Northwest in its second issue—the one with the snazzy cover pictured above, which puns on the design characteristics of mass market women's magazines to transform the Gold Man pioneer who currently tops the state's capitol building into a Gold Woman pioneer. Themed around the "pioneer spirit," the issue joins the work of nineteenth-century poets with over twenty-five pieces by people writing in Oregon today, and it's also got a long interview with P&PC about The New Northwest, the history of women's suffrage in Oregon, the situation of American poetry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the poems P&PC selected for reprinting in Gold Man with the assistance of students in a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class we taught last Spring.

When you get a chance, pick up a copy of Gold Man Review for yourself. In the meantime, we're giving you a small taste of our interview here—a portion that we think displays some of the best of what an interdisciplinary liberal arts college can offer students: experience working with and using archives, in-class study, cross-departmental collaboration, research into the historical forms and genres of poetry, and engagement with social and community endeavors. We here at P&PC don't talk about the pedagogical possibilities of popular poetry all that frequently, but here's an example of what we do when we're not running the office and bringing you your weekly fix.

Gold Man Review: Why did you and your class decide to pick these poems [for republication in Gold Man Review]?

Mike Chasar: In addition to studying the poems, the most recent instantiation of my "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class also partnered with an experimental scriptwriting class in the Theatre Department that wanted to create a play about the history and legacy of women's suffrage in Oregon as one way to mark and commemorate 2012 as the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage. (See Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote 1912-2012 for other such events.) As part of the experimental nature of the script, the Theatre class thought it would be cool to start with a bunch of poems from The New Northwest, using them as raw material to collage, break up, or interlace through the script in funky and innovative ways. It can sometimes be difficult to figure out what to "do" with archival materials other than, well, archive them and study them; so we thought it would be interesting to motivate them in another way, too—toward the creation of a new piece of art.

So, our first goal was to select poems to present to that class, and toward that end we had two main priorities: 1) select poems that surveyed the different types of arguments being made at the time for extending the vote to women; and 2) select poems with varying poetic strategies, rhetorical components, and performance possibilities. We thought the former would gesture to some of the political complexities of that historical moment that get lost in a debate framed simply as "for" or "against" women’s suffrage. (As with the debate about healthcare today, people aren't just for or against it, but have different reasons for being for or against it, or partly for it and partly against it—you get the idea.) And we thought the latter would shine a light on the diversity of styles and poetic techniques of popular verse, which oftentimes gets characterized as entirely "sentimental" and generally homogenous in style, format, rhetoric, etc.; in actuality, the poetry is pretty diverse—song lyrics, persona poems, narrative poems, lyric poems, satire, dialect, etc.—so we wanted to honor that aspect of the writing.

I made the selections for Gold Man keeping these two elements in mind as well, so that we have inspir- ational song lyrics ("Campaign Song"), two very different dramatic monologues that make different arguments about women and the vote ("The Perplexed Housekeeper" and "'Siah’s Vote"), a serious narrative with children as main characters ("Reasons"), a humorous narrative ("Wife Versus Horse"), a romance ("Katie Lee and Willie Grey"), and a lyrical extended metaphor ("My Ship").

In addition to the generic diversity— all are also part of a culture of poetry that lent itself to oral delivery or performance—the poems also make a pretty wide variety of arguments for how and why women should get the vote: "The Perplexed Housekeeper" suggests that women are already excellent multi-taskers and won't be burdened with the additional responsibilities of voting; "'Siah’s Vote" argues that women already participate in voting via the advice they give to their menfolk; "Campaign Song" says women will help clean up a corrupted culture of voting, but also makes the problematic claim that "John Chinaman" can now do the work once done by women and thus free women up for public life; and "The Ship" shows us a character abandoned and forlorn because what must be the "ship of state" mentioned in Duniway's poem never comes for her. That's just a quick overview, but you get the idea: poets are using different poetic strategies to make different types of arguments about the political enfranchisement or disenfranchisement of women.

Poetry Out Loud Comes to Salem

This is an exciting couple of weeks for Oregon high school students, teachers, parents, and judges who are partici- pating in the final leg of the state-level Poetry Out Loud competition—the nationally run program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and state art agencies in which students compete for scholarships and other prizes awarded on the basis of excellence in poetry recitation. (That's 2011 Oregon finalist McKinley Rodriguez with Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen pictured here.)

P&PC is excited about this for a couple of reasons: not only are we sending a repre- sentative to help judge the Northern Regional Contest taking place tomorrow (Saturday, March 9) from 5-8pm at the Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton, but then the following weekend—Saturday, March 16 from 1-4pm—the State Finals take place in Salem at the Willamette Heritage Center at Mission Mill right across the street from Willamette University, one of the few times that the literary arts in Oregon run not through the big city just to the north but through the state capital. Both events are free and open to the public, so come on out for one or both!

As a side note, Petersen will be spending additional time in Salem this coming week when she visits Willamette to meet with students and give a public reading from her new book on Wednesday, March 6 at 7:30pm in the Hatfield Room of the WU library. That reading, too, is free and open to the public. Things poetic are shaking in the capital these days—WU's Prisoner's Poetry program has launched a web site and is getting national attention, the Gold Man Review has just published its new issue, Brightly Dawning Day has just wrapped up its run, and Everyday Reading recently broke the top 100,000 best sellers on Amazon—and it's not even National Poetry Month yet! So leave the dream of the '90s behind in Portland one of these days, and come see what the new millennium is hatching in Salem: poetry with, ahem, a state-capital P.

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.

National Poetry Month Events in Salem

On Saturday, March 31, the Oregon state finals for this year's Poetry Out Loud competition were held in Salem on the campus of Willamette University, which was for the most part enjoying Spring Break at the time and so heard little about it; coverage in the local press was pretty slim, too, even though the winner of Saturday's contest goes on to represent Oregon at the National finals scheduled for May 13-15 in Washington, D.C. Go Oregon!

Saturday may have marked a milestone in some high school student's life—P&PC reporters can, as of yet, find no mention of who prevailed— but it might also be said to have marked the beginning of National Poetry Month 2012 in Salem as well. If you're in and around the state capital this month, you'll find plenty of poetry and poetry-related events to keep you busy. From open mics to visiting authors, poetry contests, and even a lecture on the poetry of fishing, you could say that this year's events are pretty, uh, diverse, and so we've done our best to gather as many as possible here for your convenience and easy reference.

N.B. P&PC's fact checkers have been out of the office and on Spring Break for the past week, so we can't vouch for the absolute accuracy of the following times, dates, and places. We therefore recommend that you double check with each sponsoring organization to make sure that information is up to date.

April 1-29
National Poetry Month Exhibit
Main Floor, Salem Public Library

The library continues its tradition of exhibiting finely printed poetry broadsides in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year’s show focuses on the works of four Oregonians—Carl Adamshick, twin brothers Matthew and Michael Dickman, and Michael McGriff—all of whom are recent winners of major national poetry prizes.

Tuesday • April 3 • 7:00 pm
Poetry Open Mic
Salem Public Library Loucks Auditorium

To celebrate National Poetry Month, Salem Public Library invites area poets and poetry aficionados to participate in this special edition of Grown-Up Storytime. Local actors Claire Diehl, Jeff Sanders, Tom Wrosch, Geri Greeno, and Lyndsey Houser read contemporary poems. Also, anyone who has a favorite poem—whether original or by a published poet—may also read. The only requirement is that it takes five minutes or less. For more information or to reserve a place on the program, contact Ann Scheppke at 503-588-6124 or ascheppke@cityofsalem.net.

Wednesday • April 4
First Annual Edible Book Festival
Hatfield Library, Willamette University

Held in conjunction with (who knew?) the International Edible Book Festival (Festival international du livre mangeable) this, uh, feast for the eyes offers some, well, food for thought as entries are made of food and inspired by literary titles, characters, or authors. Looking for inspiration? Check out some entries from the Seattle Festival, University of Puget Sound, Duke, and the University of Illinois. Viewing and drop-off of entries from 8:00 am - 1:00 pm; awards ceremony at 2:30 pm. Prizes include People's Choice, Most Beautiful, Most Creative, Most Literary, and Punniest.

Wednesday • April 4 • 7:30 pm
Oregon Book Awards Author Tour
Hatfield Room, Willamette University Library

In partnership with Literary Arts, Inc., of Portland, the Hallie Ford Chair and English Department will host a reading by three finalists—poet Geri Doran, memoirist Jennifer Lauck, and graphic novelist Greg Rucka—for this year's Oregon Book Award. The Oregon Book Awards are presented annually for the finest accomplishments by Oregon writers working in various genres, including fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and young adult literature.

Thursday • April 5 • 7:00 pm
Classic Poetry Group
Salem Public Library, Plaza Room

Meeting on the first Thursday every month, this group shares favorite poems from British and American poetry written before the First World War. Each member brings a handful of poems to read aloud to the group. For more information call Wendell Buck at 503-588-6317.

April 6-May 26
Art & Poetry Exhibition
Bush Barn Art Center

This year's Art & Poetry Exhibition will feature work by students from Hillcrest Oregon Youth Authority Correctional Facility. During this project, poet Dawn Diez Willis and photographer Barry Shapiro spent the semester bringing art and poetry to a group of exceptional young artists who wrote and then illustrated poems.

Wednesday • April 11 • 12:00-1:00 pm
"The Poetry of Fishing"
A lecture by Henry Hughes
Oregon State Library

Spend your lunch hour with Western Washington University English professor Henry Hughes as he shares his own poetry and meditates on various "classic and contemporary poems and stories that involve the art of angling."

Thursday • April 12 • 4:00 pm
Dan Kaplan Poetry Reading
Hatfield Room, Willamette University Library

Dan Kaplan is the author of Bill's Formal Complaint (The National Poetry Review Press, 2008) and the bilingual chapbook SKIN (Red Hydra Press, 2005). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, VOLT, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He teaches at Portland State University and is visiting professor of creative writing at Willamette this semester.

April 13-15
Salem Public Library Spring Book Sale

Sponsored by the Friends of Salem Public Library, this might be the place to find that used copy of Rod McKuen or Jewell that you need to complete your collection.

April 13-21
Silverton Poetry Festival

Technically not in Salem, Silverton's annual festivities—poetry readings, workshops, feasting and hobnobbing—are worth putting on your to-do list since they're only a couple miles down the road. Public events held April 13, 14, 15, 18, and 21.

Saturday • April 14 • 5:00 pm
Celebrating Poetry with Airlie Press
Hatfield Room, Willamette University Library

The Willamette Store hosts five Airlie Press poets—Chris Anderson, Donna Henderson, Stephanie Lenox, Annie Lighthart, and Dawn Diez—in a cornucopia of locally-sourced Willamette Valley poetry. Admission is free with a suggested donation of canned and other non-perishable food items for Marion-Polk Food Share. For more information, call 503-370-6772.

Monday • April 16 • 5:00 pm
Deadline to enter the Willamette Store’s 6th Annual Poetry Contest

A cornucopia of awards—for best rhymed poem, best unrhymed poem, and best haiku in each category—are distributed each year by the Willamette Store to poets ranging in age from elementary school to adult.

Wednesday • April 18 • 7:00 pm
Who Are We? A Poetic Discussion of Our Identities
Willamette University, Hudson Hall

Come out for an evening of spoken word poetry focusing on the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of our identities. Say the organizers of this event, "We are still looking for poets to read a piece or two. This is not at all limited to Willamette students, so please spread the word and get in contact if you or someone you know are interested in speaking!" Click here for the Facebook Event Page.

Wednesday • April 18 • 7:00 pm
Chrysalis Reading
Hatfield Room, Willamette University Library

Enjoy a cup o' joe at Willamette University's student-run coffee house as writers from The Chrysalis—Willamette's campus literary magazine—read from their published work.

Thursday • April 19 • 7:30 pm
Poetry Night at the Willamette University Bistro

Take a break from the week and come listen to Willamette faculty and staff read their favorite poems.

Thursday • April 26 • 6:00 pm
Bold Expressive Arts Theater
West Salem High School

Bold Expressive Arts Theater (B.E.A.T. 2012) will perform live at West Salem High School. Students from the Oregon School for the Deaf will show a variety of talent on the stage. They will perform dance, song and poetry through American Sign Language. For more information on the show, call (503) 378-3840.

Thursday • April 26 • 7:30 pm
Musical Sing-Along: Chicago
Grand Theater

Come sing along to this fantastic musical! Lyrics are projected on the screen, so don't worry if you don't know all the words. Doors open at 6:30. Cost: $8 adults, $4 youth (16 and under).

Saturday • April 28 • 11:00 am
6th Annual Young Persons Poetry Reading
Salem Public Library, Loucks Auditorium

Winners of the Willamette Store's sixth Annual Poetry Contest start up an open mic by reading from their work.

Saturday • April 28 • 7:00-9:00 pm
Adult winners of the Willamette Store's Poetry Contest
Grand Vines Restaurant

Have a glass or two of wine and order from a menu of appetizers, soups, sandwiches, and chocolates as adult winners of the Willamette Store's annual poetry contest read from their work. For more information call (503) 399-9463.

Monday • April 30
Submission Deadline for Mama Ain't Raised No Fool

Willamette University's 'zine is accepting poetry submissions for its next issue. Accepted work submitted before April 21 will be read on stage at this year's Wulapalooza. Submissions from students may be sent to mama.aint@gmail.com; submissions from students and community members may also be delivered in person at Mama's festival booth.

April 30-May 1 • Times TBA
New Literary Works Festival
Putnam Studio, Willamette University Theater Building

This two-evening program will celebrate the written word with a combination of dramatic readings of plays, poetry, and prose by students in the Theater Department's Atypical Performance class and the English Department's Senior Seminar in Creative Writing.

Bill Nye the Science Guy Poetry Contest

Rhyming with Salem

Hey, everyone, check out all the poetry-related business in Salem, where the capitol's cherry trees are a-bloomin', where the lilacs are being bred from the not-so-dead ground, and where verse (and a fair amount of drizzle) is in the spring air.

From bilingual English/ Spanish readings at the Public Library, to Emily Dickinson set to music, an open-mic night of peace poetry, a couple of fisher poets reading at Willamette University, and contest and publication opportunities, the second half of this month is full of regular and not so regular poetry-related events. Do your soul—and your city—a favor by checking 'em out.

Crowned in Song
Sunday, April 17, 3-4:30 pm
Loucks Auditorium, Salem Public Library—Free to the Public

Willamette University professor of music and women's studies, Marva Duerksen, brings musical settings of poems by Emily Dickinson to the stage.

Poems for Peace
Sunday, April 17, 7-9 pm
Clockworks Cafe & Cultural Center—Free

Bring your own poem about peace to read, or come to hear others at this all-ages, open-mic event in downtown Salem.

Monthly Meeting of the Third Thursday Poets
Thursday, April 21, 5:30 pm
Gallery 205, Reed Opera House, Downtown Salem

For the past seven years, the Third Thursday Poets have been meeting to hear and share poetry by Oregon and non-Oregon poets alike. With plans for 501c(3) designation in the works and the creation of Brigadoon Books in the Opera House, TTP is setting the groundwork for another seven years.

High Seas in the Valley: A Reading by Fisher Poets Moe Bowstern & Geno Leech
Thursday, April 21, 7 pm
Eaton Hall, Room 209
Willamette University—Free to the Public

For the past twenty years Moe Bowstern has been known to fish for shad on New York's Hudson River, shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico, and salmon in Kodiak, Alaska. Geno Leech started fishing for crabs, shrimp, and albacore off the coast of Washington in 1979, but most of his ocean experience comes from working on merchant and salvage ships pulling other boats and barges out of wrecks off the beach. Both participate in the annual Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, and both appear in the award-winning 2005 documentary Fisher Poets.

La Voz de la Poesia/The Voice of Poetry Bilingual Poetry Reading
Thursday, April 21, 7 pm
Salem Public Library—Free to the Public

Efrain Diaz-Horna and Juan Marcos Cervantes will each do a 20-minute bilingual poetry reading followed by a Q&A and reception. Diaz-Horna, a native of Talara, Peru, has published poetry in Expreso, the Oregonian, the Hispanic News, the National Catholic Reporter, and in the book The Many Faces of Love. Morales, from Oaxaca, Mexico, was awarded the 2010 Proyeccion Latina for first place in poetry; he has recently published El Jardin del Eden.

Poetry Potluck
Saturday, April 23, 6 pm
Undisclosed location that changes month to month

Every month, a group of poetry-lovin' organic farmers and their patrons and fans gather to read poetry and eat good food.


The 5th Annual National Poetry Month Contest for Children & Adults
Deadline: 5:00 pm, Friday, April 29th,
Sponsored by the Willamette Store & the Salem Public Library

In celebration of National Poetry Month, celebrity judges will give awards in three categories (Best Rhymed Poem, Best Unrhymed Poem, Haiku) for four different age groups (grades 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, adult). For complete contest guidelines as well as information on the May 14th awards ceremony and reading at the Salem Public Library, go here.

New Salem-Based Literary Journal—the Gold Man Review

Named after the pioneer statue on top of the Oregon capitol building in Salem—not for the investor who teamed with Mr. Sachs—the Gold Man Review is accepting email submissions of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art, and photography until May 1. Dedicated to featuring work by Salem-area residents, Gold Man pitches itself as, ahem, a pioneer in promoting the local arts.

The Blood Orange Review

One third of the editorial board for this online lit mag is located in Salem—poet Stephanie Lenox who recently received a grant from the Oregon Art Commission and who is looking forward to the issue of her first full-length book with the Willamette Valley's poetry publisher, Airlie Press. Blood Orange Review has just come out with its new number.