"I think you're afraid that your poem really is good": The Poetry of Roseanne ("Brain Dead Poets Society," Season 2, Episode 10 [1989])

There Are Angels: A Guest Posting by Camille Dungy about Poetry, BCS Football, Angels, and Jake Adam York

Editor's Note: If you were anywhere near Earth a little over a week ago, on Monday, January 6, then you know there was a football game that night—the stunning BCS National Championship game between the Florida State Seminoles and the Auburn Tigers. It was, by all measures, a game of poetic twists and turns on the field, but more stunning for the P&PC Office was the poetry taking place off the field in the televised commercial for Auburn, which featured—no, was completely anchored by—Jake Adam York's poem "There are Angels." (Watch it here or scroll to the video at the bottom of this post.) Like a stadium crowd silenced by a kickoff returned for a touchdown, we were speechless, hardly believing our eyes and ears; we knew Jake (pictured here) during his Auburn years and after, and, like everyone else in the poetry world, we were shocked by his sudden and untimely death in 2012. (N.B. Jake's newest book is due out in March.)

Confused, thrilled, and emotionally tangled by this mixture of football, poetry, and our memories of Jake, P&PC turned to the only person we could turn for an explanation—to Camille Dungy (pictured here and in the next image below), a poet, editor, and cousin of former NFL coach Tony Dungy. The author of three books of poetry (Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison), the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and the winner of an American Book Award, Dungy is currently a professor of English at Colorado State University. Here's what she had to say.

January 6th was King's Day, also known as Epiphany, the day the Three Wise Men presented their gifts. It is the day my family marks the conclusion of the Christmas season, and so while many other Americans were watching the BCS championship football game between Auburn and Florida State, I took down my Christmas tree. It has been years since I owned a fully-functional television (this is partially due to my belief that TV infringes upon my ability to commit myself to poetry), and even now that I have a television, I don't keep it in the living room, so while I was taking down the tree, I wasn't watching the football broadcast. I was thinking about angels.

That morning I'd had breakfast with a new friend, Mary Ellen Sanger, and she told me about her family. There were seven children in all, but one of them died in infancy. "Growing up, I remember feeling special because I was the only person I knew who had a brother who was an angel," she said. As I took angel ornaments off my tree, I was thinking about the implications of what Mary Ellen said. I was considering all the ways we perpetual mourners demonstrate our grief.

Along with all the angels and the Santas and the miscellaneous ornaments, my tree had three snowflake ornaments this year. The snowflakes were tatted by a woman who lives in Iowa City, Iowa. She tats them throughout the year and, in December, donates them to Lensing Funeral Home. If the funeral home has conducted a service for your loved one, you are eligible to receive one of these tatted ornaments. I have a snowflake for each of my mother's parents and one for my father's brother. The latter snowflake is newly on the tree this year because of services Lensing conducted for my uncle last spring. I packed away the snowflakes and kept thinking about angels.

I thought about the poet Jake Adam York, who died in December of 2012 at the age of 40. I thought about his brother's eulogy, about the fact that his brother had to write a eulogy, about the ways his brother expressed his memories, his grief. I thought about Jake Adam York's elegy for the jazz musician Sun Ra, "Letter Already Broadcast into Space." That poem begins, "You are not here..." and goes on to say "I think, / they've forgotten you." I thought about how I have not forgotten Jake Adam York and the good work he did while on this earth. I thought about how Jake's poems memorialized people who lived and died to bring attention to injustice. I thought about how important it is to remember people who make us care about the lives around us. I thought about how crucial that work is, though much of it happens away from the general public's gaze. "Come down, Uncle, come down / and help me rise," his poem pleads, "I have forgot my wings." I thought about how finding ways to broadcast our connections to our own versions of angels can prove a service to us all. I thought about how I have not forgotten my uncle, my father's brother, any more than Mary Ellen's family forgot their own angel, the infant brother they gave wings. We were born in the same year, Jake Adam York and I. I thought about this. Mine, like his, is an associative poet's mind, known for imposing emotional context on the littlest things, known for believing small things matter a great deal. I thought about all of this in my living room's TV-less quiet, as I packed away angels.

The reason I haven't had a fully-functional television in the house for years is because, some time ago, I disconnected my cable and, rather than spend the 2.8 hours that the average American spends watching television each day, I spend my time reading and writing or walking and cooking or talking and thinking instead. For the first two years that my cousin, Tony Dungy, led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the NFL playoffs, when I didn't have a television but still wanted to support him, I haunted sports bars and colleagues' couches every Sunday and Monday the team played. (This might seem like a major commitment if it weren't for the fact that my uncle, Jesse L. Dungy, even more dedicated to family than I, spent every game weekend flying or driving to whatever city in which the Bucs, and later the Indianapolis Colts, were scheduled to play.) A few games into the Buccaneers' third consecutive winning season, I calculated the hours I'd spent watching football over the previous two years: at least 120 hours, and probably more like 200.

Tony and his team weren't spending 60+ hours a year thinking about what I did for a living—of that I was sure. They were focused on football, which is where their talents find expression. My talent was writing poetry, to which the world of football gives comparatively little thought. Why was I dedicating so much energy to a pastime that would likely never return my investment? The Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics report that revealed America's 2012 TV watching habits also informs us that, on weekend days, the average American over the age of 15 spends one hour reading. Younger Americans read even less. "Individuals ages 15 to 19 read for an average of 7 minutes per weekend day," the report claims. The TV watching public could care less about literature, these statistics would suggest, and the people who build television content for them know this. I resolved, again, to dedicate my time to poetry instead of the TV.

This season, though, there was poetry on ESPN. I'm not just talking about color commentary describing a well-executed play as "poetry in motion." I'm talking about actual poetry recited during actual football broadcasts. These poems appeared in the spots each university gets during a game to talk about what makes their campus great, why students in that 15-19 year old non-reading demographic would want to go there, why donors should donate more cash.

My dad was watching Iowa lose to LSU in the Outback bowl on New Year's Day, and as I walked through the basement to pick out linens for the dinner table, I caught the Louisiana State ad. (That's a still from the ad pictured here; view the entire commercial at the bottom of this posting.) Apparently it's been playing all season, a clip of the "student poet" reciting her ode to LSU, but I had no idea about this intersection between football and poetry until New Year's Day. "I know you're rooting for Iowa," I told my Dad, "but LSU just made a fan out of me."

A week later, on King's Day, after I stripped the tree of all its ornaments, I went to my computer to find out what to do with my naked noble fir. I've just moved to Colorado, and little questions like this sometimes swamp me. I was still thinking of Jake Adam York, who lived in Colorado, with whom I spent a delightful afternoon in Denver two months before he died, and on whom I think I would have called, often, for advice about life on the Front Range. My family ate barbeque on New Year's Eve, for instance, and I thought about how I wished I could have asked him about the best places to buy barbeque in Northern Colorado. (Jake believed in barbeque and wrote about it often, even in his poem to Sun Ra.)

Online, I found the best way to recycle a Christmas tree, and then I found myself on Facebook. (I might have preserved more time for poetry by watching less television, but it is possible that Facebook has come to occupy an equivalent number of my hours). The first post I saw was from Jake Adam York's former colleague, the poet Nicky Beer: "ESPN just broadcast some of Jake Adam York's poetry before the BCS bowl game. Speechless and crying."

If I didn't already know that the world is stitched from confluence, I would have been surprised that the first post I saw was about a poet about whom I had just been thinking. But that's not what surprised me. If I hadn't seen the LSU spot on New Year's Day, I would have been shocked to learn that poetry was to be aired on ESPN. (Okay, I'll admit, even having seen the LSU spot, I was shocked to learn that poetry would be broadcast on ESPN.) What finally surprised me was the fact that, according to Beer's link, right about the time I was taking my angels off the tree and thinking about my football fan uncle and thinking about Jake Adam York and thinking about "Letter Already Broadcast into Space," and thinking of how we honor our angels and thinking about the crazy connections poetry allows, ESPN broadcasted a one minute and twenty-six second clip featuring a reading of Jake's poem, "There Are Angels," over footage of a moment in football history I've wished, nearly every day since I saw the replays on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, that I could have shared with my dead uncle.

Too often I hear people suggest that poetry has no place in this modern world. Sometimes I'm one of those people myself. I haven't had a television for all these years, because I begrudge the cumulative minutes it distracts me from poetry. But when I rediscover the confluence between my deepest longings, our communities' celebrations, and the mundane details of everyday life, I understand, again, that poetry's transmission is unstoppable. They come to us like gifts, the connections poetry allows.


"There are Angels" ~ Jake Adam York | BCS National Championship from Bluefoot Entertainment on Vimeo.

P&PC at MLA: Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism

P&PC is busy getting its parkas and long underwear out of storage in preparation for everyone's favorite-slash-least-favorite event of the year—the Modern Language Association's annual convention, being held at the end of this week (Thursday-Sunday) in balmy downtown Chicago where thermometers currently read a Windy-City-bracing negative nine degrees Fahrenheit. 

Things stand to warm up a little bit, though, especially on Saturday, January 11, when P&PC will be part of a panel titled "Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism," scheduled for 5:15-6:30 pm in the O'Hare conference room of the downtown Chicago Marriott. Unlike many conference activities, which require an official badge and paid-up elbow patches for entry, "Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism" is being made free and open to the public. Liesl Olson of Chicago's Newberry Library will be moderating and commenting, and the panel's speakers include Erin Kappeler and Sarah Ehlers, both of whom should be familiar voices to faithful P&PC readers. If you're in town, why not escape the cold and ice and stop on by? Here's a preview of what's in store.

The panel's first paper, Erin Kappeler's "Harriet Monroe's Museum," reconsiders the canonization of modern poetry by examining how Monroe's curatorial practices extended beyond the poetry she published to the readers Poetry addressed. In Poetry’s promotional materials, Monroe argued that the art form lacked an audience because it had no organized institutional support, but Poetry's editorial files tell a different story. In a series Monroe labeled her "museum" files, she singled out correspondence from lay readers and disgruntled would-be contributors not as evidence of poetry's missing audience but, rather, as evidence of the outmoded aesthetic paradigms Monroe intended Poetry to replace. The sheer volume and diversity of these letters show that, far from bringing poetry to readers who had been ignoring it, Monroe sought to discipline readers out of their promiscuous habits of consumption. This paper focuses especially on Monroe's gendered response to these "bad" readers to consider how modernist ideals of print circulation shaped the presentation of modernism to popular audiences in the 1910s and 1920s.

In "Set Vivid Against the Little Soft Cities: Outsourcing Chicago Modernism," Mike Chasar uses the relationship between Poetry magazine and poetic communities in Portland, Oregon, to argue that Poetry's early success depended upon the production of new verse around the country. Just as the railroads brought livestock to Chicago, so Poetry routed regional new verse movements through the city and used that verse to forward Chicago's profile as a modern center. Like a venture capitalist, Monroe visited Portland in 1926, establishing relationships with an active and coordinated modern poetry scene that was working out what modernism meant for the Pacific Northwest. Tracing circuits between Portland and Chicago, and following the new verse as it circulated far outside the sphere of Poetry in unexpected places such as church bulletins and funeral home brochures, Chasar argues that focusing on Poetry as a product of Chicago's modernism obscures how widespread the new verse movement was.

Building on Chasar's consideration of Chicago and Poetry's relationship to other geographic sites, Sarah Ehlers's "The Harriet Monroe Doctrine: Poetry's Interwar Internationalism" contextualizes changes in Poetry during the 1930s by looking at two significant archival sources: Monroe's unpublished letters and journals from the 1936 P.E.N Conference in Buenos Aries, and the collection of unpublished letters, tributes, and elegies sent to the Poetry office after Monroe's untimely death in South America. While at the conference, Monroe was consistently annoyed that conversations about poetry turned to "politics and split-hair metaphysics," and her responses to debates about poetry at the international writers conference provide insight into how she framed transnational literary histories of modern poetry in relation to U.S. cultural institutions. The events of the P.E.N. conference also reveal how discourses about the role of art amidst global political turmoil relate to how Poetry was conceived in Depression-era Chicago.

In "A Chicago Institution: The Harriet Monroe Collection and the Rise of the Modern Poetry Archive," Bart Brinkman compares Monroe's initial fundraising venture for Poetry to the formation of the Harriet Monroe Collection, willed to the University of Chicago upon Monroe's death in 1936. When Monroe initially sought funding for what would become Poetry, she pitched the magazine to potential donors as a Chicago cultural institution, not unlike a museum or an opera house. This institutionalization of Poetry would become more tangible upon Monroe's death. The Monroe Collection provides a detailed portrait of poetic modernism from the perspective of one of its key figures, housing thousands of rare books and magazines along with corrected proofs and strings of correspondences that illuminate authorial and editorial intention. Beyond having particular importance for investigating Poetry's role in modern poetry, the collection also illuminates the institutionalized collecting of modern poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century more generally. 

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday!

Happy New Year from P&PC

Pausing on Christmas Eve

Back in the old days, when the senior members of the P&PC office staff were growing up in small-town Ohio, it was customary to give what we then called the mailman a Christmas gift—usually a little bit of walking around money left in the mailbox in the way of a tip to acknowledge how neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night had stayed him from the swift completion of his appointed rounds during the preceding year. This was undoubtedly an extension of, and eventually became a companion practice to, tipping the newspaper boy who, dating back to the 1700s, used New Year poems called carriers' addresses to remind readers in a more polite way than John Cusak's nemesis in Better Off Dead to, well, shell out some change. In whatever poetic style they took, such poems usually concluded with a reminder in one form or another of the social obligation to remember the poorest member of the newspaper staff. "[D]oubtless he is poor, and you / And I tonight can something do / To make his Christmas bright," concludes one long poem from 1897 about a newspaper staff sharing their life stories with each other on Christmas Eve and eventually emptying out their pockets for "the little lad" who "deserves it." (For a great archive of carriers' addresses and accompanying essays, btw, check out the online collection at Brown University's Center for Digital Scholarship.)

As the holiday card pictured here indicates, the tipping of postal carriers was also accom- panied by poetry, though it was not as directly purposed to reminding people to fork over some dough as carriers' addresses were. Here, on the left inside panel, the Reverend John Holland of WLS Radio—Holland led the Little Brown Church of the Air for twenty-two years beginning in 1933 and also published eight books including John Holland's Scrapbook of poems and other quotable morsels—is pictured reading at a microphone, the ostensible text of his broadcast printed above. And the right inside panel pictures a Christmas tree with a slit cut into it just wide enough to accommodate and anchor a folded bill (as pictured above) and maybe even a silver dollar. Here's the poem Holland is "reading":

The bells that chime at Christmas time

Bring gladness and good cheer;

Their joy was meant for sacrament

To last throughout the year.

To make the day a time for play,

And then, next day forget,

Is but to stage a sacrilege

And fill life with regret.

Only as love, sent from above,

Abides throughout our days,

Can we begin to enter in

To joy that always stays.

So let's extend the praise we send,

To God on Christmas night,

All through the year, to calm our fear,

And crown our heart's delight.

"Christmas all the Year" is a funky little poem—and not just because it starts with a line that appears to have been cribbed from an advertisement that appeared in the Roswell Daily Record on Christmas Eve in 1928 ("The bells that chime / At Christmas time / Wish you what's fine — / As in Auld Lang Syne"), or because the P&PC interns can't turn up any record of it via Google Books or a general Google search. No, we at P&PC think it's a funky little poem because of how it alternates between (on the one hand) very readable, easily-consumed, sing-songy passages without caesurae (pauses or stops in the middle of the line signaled in prosodic notation by a "//," as in the example shown above) and (on the other hand) passages in which caesurae are extremely prominent, not only interrupting the poem's established rhythm and drastically changing the syntactic style, but interrupting that rhythm almost gratuitously. Do we need the commas around "next day forget" in line six, for example? Not at all. Do we need them around "to calm our fear" in the penultimate line? Nope. Heck, we could even make an argument that the poem's other, more reasonably-used caesura (middle of line nine, the first line of stanza two) could be eliminated without hardly anyone noticing.

So—to use language appro- priate to the holiday and the purpose of the greeting card alike—what gives? Why all these apparently extraneous commas? Why all these unnecessary pauses? It is possible, we suppose, to argue that these are simply marks of poor writing that, intentionally or unintentionally, give "Christmas all the Year" a folksy, amateur quality entirely consistent with WLS Radio, which was known as "The Prairie Farmer Station." That is, just as President George W. Bush cultivated a down-home, aw-shucksness in his unique, uh, vernacular to purposely dim the sheen of his Yale education and thus blend in with the folk, so "Christmas all the Year" might be said to be professionally written greeting card verse in drag.

We think there's a more elegant explanation than that one, however. Almost the entire logic of the card—why not call it the card's poetics?—is geared toward the act of insertion: on the cover, the mailman is putting Christmas gifts into the mailbox; John Holland is broadcasting into your home where the Christmas tree is set up (can't you just imagine the radio in the corner?); and, of course, a dollar is supposed to go into the slot in the card. Given all of this, we'd propose that all of the gratuitous comma usage in "Christmas all the Year" also enacts this very logic at the level of language, where the commas give the appearance of phrases that have been "inserted" into the text as well. That is, via those commas, readers experience on a linguistic plane the very activity the card as a whole is designed to motivate. If at the same time one takes a moment to reflect—shall we say pause?—on the meaning of Christmas and how Christmas shouldn't, as the poem explains, be a one day break but should "last throughout the year," all the better. 

Indeed, the Rev. John Holland has bigger fish to fry than just the delivery of a buck to the mailman or a stack of Christmas gifts to loved ones, for all of this insertion ultimately tropes the spiritual conversion Holland is calling for—one in which, via "love, sent from above," we ourselves "enter in / To joy that always stays." It's no coincidence that that line is the only enjambed line of the entire stanza; when it comes to entering into God's love, neither Holland—outlined in white and glowing like the Christmas tree on the facing panel—nor "Christmas all the Year" is gonna go fooling around with gratuitously used commas and other pauses. Sermon complete. Now can we finally open up those gifts under the tree?

John Denver recites "Alfie the Christmas Tree" on The Muppets (1979)

Singing the Body Electric: The Poetry of Reddy Kilowatt and Free Enterprise

When P&PC's office interns hear the term "political poetry," they typically think of poetry produced by the Left or for leftist causes, but there's a long and largely untold story of political poetry written and distributed to serve conservative political agendas as well. Take, for example, the flier pictured here, which features "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers" as an illustrated poem modeled on Septimus Winner's well-known 1868 song "Ten Little Injuns" and replacing Winner's Indian boys with a parade of workers (doctor, railroader, miner, steelworker, farmer, lawyer, grocer, salesclerk, and reporter) all led by Reddy Kilowatt—the longtime cartoon representative and corporate spokesman for private electricity in the U.S. (Reddy was first created by the Alabama Power Company in 1926.) Here, as the poem relates, Reddy is the first "free worker" to fall victim to American "socialists" seeking to expand the federal government's power (pun intended, right?). One by one and couplet by couplet, "Uncle" (as in Uncle Sam) takes over various private enterprises with the final stanza—seizing on the organizational rhetoric of "working together" across class lines that we might normally associate with leftist rhetoric—summing things up:

Ten little free workers—but they are no longer free.
They work when and where ordered, and at a fixed rate you see,
And it all could have been prevented if they'd only seen fit to agree
And work together instead of saying "it never can happen to me!"

We at the P&PC office appreciate how the flier takes advantage of the poem's stanza breaks for expressive purposes. At the beginning of the poem, as the little free workers march across and thus populate the stanza break, there is essentially no space between couplets, but as the government whittles away at workers' freedoms, the silence of those breaks becomes a more and more powerful representation of disappearing free enterprise. That growing silence or disappearing voice culminates in the final stanza where "the reporter son-of-a-gun" loses his voice or freedom of speech under a tyrannical system that has not only done away with free enterprise but that now won't allow him to "criticize the government" as well.

You'll see that the Otter Tail Power Company has "signed" the poem with a script-like font at the bottom of the flier, but despite the copyright note of 1961, the Minnesota-based company is probably not the author of "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers." The poem was in fact widely reprinted in newspapers across the country, oftentimes as an ad "signed" or endorsed by individual power companies like Paul Smith's Electric and Power Company of Au Sable Forks, New York, the Montana Power Company, the Potomac Light and Power Company of West Virginia, the Iowa Public Service Company, the Carolina Light and Power Company of North Carolina, the Montana-Dakota Utilities Company, Potomac Edison of Maryland, and the Kentucky Power Company. Most of these printings date to the first half of the 1960s, but the P&PC interns have found at least two ads—for the Montana Power Company and the Potomac Light and Power Company—that date to 1950. In other words, this was one heckuva widely distributed poem that, much to its distributors' chagrin, was (a la Ezra Pound) "news that stayed news."

"The Story of Ten Little Free Workers" wasn't Reddy Kilowatt's first or only appearance in poetry, however. As the comic panel pictured above illustrates, Reddy also talked in rhyme: "My name is Reddy Kilowatt! / You'd be surprised at all I've got / and all the things that I can do / if put to work by men like you!" It's as if, in singing his own body electric, Reddy's language generates more power via the dynamics of resistance and flow in poetic form. While we in the P&PC office can be many things to many people, we're not electricians, but we bet that an electrician could explain how the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance might map quite fittingly (syntax, line break, rhyme?) onto the poetics of Reddy's speech. Consider, if you will, the poem "Reddy Says," printed on the reverse side of a late 1950s or early 1960s package containing a glow-in-the-dark Reddy Kilowatt business card holder:

I'm a real live wire—
and I never tire,—
Yes Sir! I'm a
red hot shot.
I can cook your meals,—
turn the fact-ry wheels
'cause I'm
REDDY KILOWATT!

When you toast your toast—
or you roast your roast,—
it is I who makes 'em hot.
I'm in your TV set—
with ev-ry show you get,—
'cause I'm
REDDY KILOWATT!

I wash and dry your clothes,—
play your radios,—
I can heat your coffee pot.
I am always there—
with lots of pow'r to spare,—
'cause I'm
REDDY KILOWATT!

Were it not for the fact that he can "turn the fact-ry wheels," Reddy seems like the perfect little homemaker, doesn't he? He cooks, makes coffee, does the laundry, and makes sure that home appliances are up to snuff. But what intrigues us about "Reddy Says" more than its content is all the extra punctuation (the comma followed by a dash) at the line breaks as well as the elided letters in "pow'r," "ev-ry," and "fact-ry" that not only add a pleasing vernacular to Reddy's speech but also lend it a certain extra charge consistent with Reddy's self description as a "live wire." Are we crazy, or can we read Reddy's poetic lines as power lines as well? All those dashes certainly look like live wires to us.

From newspaper ad and flier, to business card holder and (see the image just above) souvenir stick-pin, Reddy's place in mid-century American life was brokered by poem after poem. To understand just how consistently this was the case, one only has to look at an April 18, 1947, bill for the Public Service Company of New Hampshire (pictured here) in which Reddy comes out of a wall socket to explain the "charge" for his services:

One full month I've labored
And this is all my pay
Divide this sum by thirty—
See how cheap I worked each day.

By portraying Reddy as a laborer, this rhyme in a sense returns us to the political agenda of "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers" presented earlier. Freed from the "fixed rate" imposed by the "socialist" government in "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers," Reddy demonstrates for Don Draper-types and their neighbors not just the benefits of private power companies and their cheap labor (Reddy makes about twenty cents per day) but also just how darn happy people can be when working for mere pennies a day. Of course, as we all know, converting the physical phenomenon of electricity into the jolly humanoid worker Reddy works to obscure all of the real people working at power plants and the subject of how much they actually get paid. For most of us, that tactic is not a surprise. What might be more, uh, shocking is the role that poetry played in the process.