Nature's Own Pleasant Remedy: The Poetry of Jarvis Blackberry Brandy

Toward a Stray Cat Ethics of Poetry Criticism

Meet Bella and Athens, the P&PC Office cats. We adopted them last Fall shortly after our former friend and companion Stella reached the end of her nineteen years. (Regular P&PC readers met Stella here.) We weren't entirely sure we were ready to replace Stella, but the office got so empty so quickly that we just couldn't bear it, and so down we trooped to Salem Friends of Felines and came home with these two adorable stray tuxedos. At the time, Bella (on the left) was a little over a year old, and Athens (on the right) was eight months. They're awesome—a combined twenty pounds of confusion, excitement, energy, and curiosity that has made the office a lively and unpredictable place over the last several months.

We here at P&PC love John Keats's poem "To Mrs. Reynolds's Cat":

Cat! who hast passed thy grand climacteric,
   How many mice and rats hast in thy days
   Destroyed? How many tit-bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears - but prithee do not stick
   Thy latent talons in me, and up-raise
   Thy gentle mew, and tell me all thy frays
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -
   For all thy wheezy asthma, and for all
Thy tail's tip is nicked off, and though the fists
   Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft as when the lists
   In youth thou enteredst on glass-bottled wall.     

Imagine our surprise, then, when Athens—clearly the poet of the pair—began suffering from the "wheezy asthma" mentioned in Keats's poem. We took her to the vet. He put her on prednisone. That helped for a while, but she has since had two acute attacks that landed her listless and drooling in the emergency vet's oxygen chambers. We haven't yet purchased the little AeroKat inhaler that's been recommended—our non-advertising-based non-revenue has us working on a petty slim budget—but we think that, following an increase in her meds, we've finally got things under control. Wheezy is now doing just fine, and the office is clattering with the noise of tinfoil balls, feather toys, and the general racket of Bella and Athens tearing after each other and rolling from room to room leaving tufts of fur hovering in the air behind them.

Stella didn't require much from the vet, so we've never spent much time looking around the waiting room. Waiting for Athens, however, we've had a chance to peruse the decor at Steve Swart's Capitol Veterinary Clinic in Salem, and we've discovered that if Athens does indeed have a little poetic breathing disorder, then she's going to the right place, as Swart's waiting room is a not unpoetic place. In the lower left-hand corner of the framed collage pictured in the previous paragraph, for example, you'll find Francis Witham's "Stray Cat" (pictured here) done up in blue calligraphy. While it doesn't have a whole lot in common with Keats's sonnet, it does eerily recall William Ernest Henley's "Invictus"—and not just because it's got sixteen lines of iambic tetrameter just like "Invictus" does, but also because those first six lines appear to be reworking the language of Henley's poem. The famous last lines of "Invictus"—

It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

—become the lines "The master of my destiny" and "Oh, what unhappy twist of fate" in Witham's poem. Witham even recycles Henley's "straight gate" and turns it into "my gate." Here, then, is the opening of "Stray Cat":

   Oh, what unhappy twist of fate
Has brought you, homeless to my gate?
   The gate where once another stood
To beg for shelter, warmth and food.
   For from that day I ceased to be
      The master of my destiny.

In Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, Catherine Robson argues that "those who learn a work by heart and recite it frequently come to feel that it belongs to them, not the author of its being, or, even further, that it actually speaks for them." Moreover, in her Afterword, which studies the recitation and memorization of "Invictus" in particular, Robson claims that "at every turn 'Invictus' offers reciters an open opportunity to understand its expressions not as the contingent utterances of somebody else in a particular historical moment or geographical site, but rather as entirely personal to themselves in their own time of trial."

Witham's "Stray Cat" certainly offers one more piece of evidence for the far-reaching legacy of the memorized poem in popular culture, but "Stray Cat" extends the legacy that Robson maps in compelling ways, suggesting there might be a history of how the memorized poem has led to the creation of new poems as well. Indeed, Witham doesn't let "Invictus" speak for her but creates a companion poem to it through which she herself can speak. In other words, the probable memorization of "Invictus" has become a doorway to Authorship for Witham, and some of the very traits of "Stray Cat" that might be turn-offs for some literary critics ("twist of fate," "master of my destiny," etc.) are the product not of Witham's inability to use language, or some other deficiency on her part, but, rather, the product of her relationship to Henley's poem and her experience learning in an education system that told her that poems like Henley's were valuable enough to learn by heart.

Thus, the "badness" or the "goodness" of "Stray Cat" is not Witham's goodness or badness alone. It is also Henley's goodness or badness. And it is also the goodness or badness of the education system where Witham learned it—or perhaps where she was even forced to memorize it and thus understand it as a valuable poem to know and on which to model her own poems. That is, just as it takes a village to raise a child (or a cat), it also takes a village to produce a poem. Rather than keep those poems outside the gates of critical understanding, we here at P&PC prefer to side with the ethical poetics that Witham herself metaphorizes at the end of "Stray Cat": "Well...don't just stand there...come on in!"

The Poetry of The X-Files: Fox Mulder Reading Robert Browning in "The Field Where I Died" (Season 4, Episode 5 [1996])

Lewis Turco Reviews "The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram"

Editor's Note: When P&PC received a gold-foil-wrapped review copy of The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram, our first thought was:

If Ingram, Paul
Has a ball
Writing clerihews,
Who's to lose?

We wondered if the pun on "to lose" and "too loose" was not audible enough. But then our thoughts turned to poet Lewis Turco (pictured here), author of, among other things, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Who else—cleriwho else—we figured, than Turco to best tell us about the complex structure of the clerihew form as well as its bawdy history, which Ingram has now both inherited and expanded? Publishing both under his own name and the pseudonym Wesli Court, Turco is the author of numerous books including, most recently, The Familiar Stranger (Star Cloud Press) and The Hero Enkidu: An Epic (Pen & Anvil Press), both set to drop this coming week on May 2. (If you're a devoted P&PC reader, you might remember an interview we did with Turco a number of years back about his youthful indiscretions writing sci-fi genre poetry.) In short, we kept the gold foil for ourselves and sent the book to Turco. Here's what he had to say:

According to the publisher, this collection of "lost" clerihews by the "Legendary bookseller at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa, Paul Ingram," came to light after having been "long lost," apparently in the author's basement. In his Introduction Ingram says, "I started writing Clerihews about twenty years ago. The process seemed involuntary, rather quick Tourette's-like explosions bound by rhyme and form. I would speak a name and the rest of the poem would spill from me without careful thought."

When I was attending Paul Engle's Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa considerably earlier, in 1959-60, there were two bookshops in town, Iowa Book and Supply, and Prairie Lights, both of which are still there, and both of which I haunted. One of them supplied a book, Green Armor on Green Ground, by Rolfe Humphries, that caused me to begin writing The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, which was published by E. P. Dutton in 1968. This is the way that I describe the verse form called the clerihew in book's fourth edition:

The clerihew, a particular type of epigram, was invented by E[dmund] Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). It is a quatrain in dipodic [two-beat] meters rhyming aabb, the first line of which is both the title and the name of a person:

SIGMUND FREUD AND KARL JUNG

Sigmund Freud
Became annoyed
When his ego
Sailed to Montego.

Sigmund Freud
Became more annoyed
When his id
Fled to Madrid.

Sigmund Freud
Grew most annoyed
When his superego
Tried to Montenegro.

Sigmund Freud
Was nearly destroyed
When his alter-ego
Showed up in Oswego.

Karl Jung
Found himself among
Archetypes
Of various stripes. 

 Oddly enough, Ingram's collection begins with this clerihew:

Carl Gustav Jung
Was impressively hung,
Which sorely annoyed
The good Dr. Freud. 

Wikipedia says:

"E. C. Bentley (10 July 1875 – 30 March 1956) was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. One of the best known is this (1905):

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's."

Perhaps in my definition I ought to have said simply "podic" rather than "dipodic," because Clerihew's practice was to allow his lines three, or as many as four beats if an author such as Ingram wishes; even I allowed myself three stresses in some of the lines of my examples above. But the inventor of this form was even less strict than the Wikipedia definition, for sometimes Clerihew (pictured here) didn't write about people:

The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps. 

And sometimes personal opinion is more important than biography:

What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead. 

On occasion fiction overcomes even personal opinion in Clerihew's epigrams:

Edward the Confessor
Slept under the dresser.
When that began to pall,
He slept in the hall. 

Clerihew even allowed himself at times to be judgmental:

It was a weakness of Voltaire's
To forget to say his prayers,
And one which to his shame
He never overcame. 

But this is a review, not an encyclopedia entry, and the book under consideration is certainly a worthy descendent of the work of the English journalist who invented the form, which Ingram stretches to the breaking point on occasion:

Margaret Mead
Used to fart when she peed,
A fact well known
To every Samoan. 

Of course, the object of derision in a clerihew must be famous, or at least well-known, if the verselet is going to be effective:

Charles Baudelaire
Picked at his scrotal hair,
And found a weevil
In his Flowers of Evil. 

Baudelaire's reputation has stood the test of time, but other of Ingram's targets may not be quite so lucky:

Forrest Gump
Told Donald Trump
"You know I like you
We have the same IQ."

Although Clerihew was a journalist, it was not his practice to be historically accurate, as Ingram is well aware:

Rebecca West
Became obsessed,
With the nether smells
Of H. G. Wells. 

and

Vivian Vance
Put cheese in her pants,
Both Swiss and Havarti,
When she used to party. 

I might have gone on with this review for quite some time except that a phone call came in from an old friend and colleague, Robert Shure, the author of a little book called Twink, full of epigrams in dialogue form that was popular back in the 1960s and 70s. I hadn't heard from him since those days, so we talked for an hour or more. Besides, I want to leave something for the reader to discover, and there is lots more in The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram, which I recommend happily.

P&PC Correspondent Colleen Coyne Reviews David Rakoff's Novel-in-Verse "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish"

Colleen Coyne (pictured here) lives outside of Boston in Ashland, Massachusetts, where she teaches writing and works as a freelance editor. She is the author of Girls Mistaken for Ghosts (forthcoming from dancing girl press), and her work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Handsome, alice blue, Women's Studies Quarterly, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. Read her P&PC review of Jess Walter's novel The Financial Lives of the Poets here.

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish—essayist David Rakoff’s 2013 foray into fiction-as-poetry—flies through the twentieth century from stockyards to suburbs, from office parties to weddings and deathbeds, from Chicago to Burbank to San Francisco to Great Neck. Dipping into the lives of Margaret, Hirschl, Sally, Nathan, and Hannah, and lingering longer with Clifford, Helen, Susan, and Josh, we eventually come to understand how all these characters’ lives are, to varying degrees, connected. In turns devastating and hilarious, the characters commit, and commit to, the acts enumerated in the title, with the scales tipped toward some more than others: marry, for instance, doesn’t have much to recommend it, appearing in Helen’s reluctant hope for that elusive “cared-for existence,” and less endearingly in Susan’s insufferable pageantry. But while dishonor and perish seem to dominate, love also makes a strong showing.

At 113 pages, the book is relatively slim, and the characters, while compelling, aren’t as fully developed as they would be in a more substantial tome. This doesn’t detract from the book’s power, though; rather, Rakoff (pictured here) skillfully chooses to sustain selected scenes. He builds, by accretion, settings and contexts for characters’ significant moments, cataloguing the contents of a closet, the trappings of the nouveau riche, the decadence of the Castro, the gore of the slaughterhouse. Some characters are given their moment and are never heard from again; others reappear until their stories are done. Most compelling, at least to this reader, is Helen, who, by the end, we understand has a more significant role in the story than even she realized; she is “The Girl Who No One Wanted” and “The Girl Who Ruined Christmas,” a flickering candle of loneliness, but she’s also the glimmer of kindness and hope, the “present and vivid, alive” reminder of “what’s still to come.”

Perhaps Rakoff was familiar with Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 novel-in-verse, The Wild Party, a riotous account of a 1920s carousal that syncopates jazzily. But Rakoff’s lines, by contrast, tend toward anapestic tetrameter, a metrical pattern most commonly associated with Dr. Seuss and Clement Clarke Moore; occasionally, the lines break pattern and, one such time, echo radio jingles (one of which appears in Clifford’s childhood: “Takes recipes meager and renders them rich, / If eager for tender cakes, Mother should switch!”). This might seem an odd choice for a story that features rape, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, infidelity, and other difficult subjects. But don’t mistake Rakoff’s meter for comedy or lightheartedness. Whereas iambic pentameter (a seemingly more logical choice) might more closely mimic everyday speech or tie the poem more clearly to epic traditions, anapestic tetrameter resists easy assimilation and positions the text firmly in the realm of artifice. Rakoff continually draws attention to the form—but why?

In The Wild Party, the main players are “far too busy living first-hand / For books. / Books!” Real life—not the representation thereof—is the only thing that matters. But in LDMDCP, reproductions of famous artwork:

…filled Clifford with a near-physical need
To render as best as he could all he saw
The only desire Clifford had was to draw,
To master the methods the artist commands
That translate a thing from the eye to the hands. 

Manipulating the real world from a creative distance is a valuable way of experiencing that world; in LDMDCP, artifice, at its best, is a necessary outlet for the outcasts of the world. At the same time, it defines the relationships that bring both joy and heartbreak, such as the affair between Helen and her boss, during which “They walked arm in arm in some crude imitation / Of other real couples en route to the station.” Seeing the potential in this kind of constructed world, Rakoff never lets his readers forget that they are, in fact, reading; this way, readers can become invested in this world without becoming lost in it, remaining aware of the value of the book—as art—itself.

Sadly, this world lost Rakoff in 2012, when he died at 47, after his cancer, which had been in remission for two decades, reappeared. Published posthumously, LDMDCP may not be his greatest work, nor his most personal, but it’s possible to think of it as an unassuming but potent guide to living. Whatever kind of life we’re given—painful, joyous, unpredictable—Rakoff believes we can forge a path with “No secrets, no longing, no desperate hoping / Just reach out and grab from a world cracked wide open.” This may seem too glib or easy, but Rakoff rejects overt clichés, assigning that kind of thinking to characters like Susan (who renames herself Sloan, then Shulamit, as part of an unending identity crisis) who offers the fortune-cookie wisdom of “After all, it’s the journey, not the destination.” Rakoff doesn’t want us to admire Susan for this weak effort, but rather acknowledge that we need to push ourselves beyond these bumper-sticker slogans and ask ourselves the harder questions, which might lead to more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, answers.

One question: what’s the difference between die and perish? Seemingly they are synonyms, and in a title with only six words, each must do a substantial amount of work to warrant a spot. In many ways, perish is more dire; though death is certainly a dire situation, perish suggests particularly desperate circumstances, wherein endings aren’t neat and tidy but rather fraught with destruction and damage. Beyond the obvious act of dying, we perish in our relationships, in our own self-doubt, in the ephemerality—and perhaps unreliability—of memory. Josh embodies this loss in a particularly Proustian moment when going through his father’s long-boxed-up things redirects him to a childhood scene—“He was there through some magical olfactory feat!”—but this distance from the memory, and from his father, also renders him “irrevocably lost.” It’s worth noting that perish has etymological connections to “to be shipwrecked, ruined, damned”—scenarios in which all is, irrevocably, lost.

It’s interesting that when discussing Rakoff’s book, some writers shorten the title to Love, and some to Perish; this choice may say more about the writer than about Rakoff or his book. In truth, the title’s words are all inextricably linked; one leads to the others, and none exists without the others. Rakoff perhaps best illustrates this in a particularly moving passage, where Clifford confronts his impending mortality (and which we can perhaps read as Rakoff’s acknowledgment of own his imminent death):

When poetic phrases like “eyes, look your last”
Become true, all you want is to stay, to hold fast.
A new, fierce attachment to all of this world
Now pierced him, it stabbed like a deity-hurled
Lightning bold lancing him, sent from above,
Left him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love. 

This mixture of pleasure and pain isn’t a new idea—but in Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, it’s made new in this moment, and we’re left with Rakoff’s encouragement to love all of this world, to cherish all we can before the inevitable becomes true, and we perish.

P&PC's New Acquisition: The Poetry of Motorola's TV Trays

The P&PC Office is certainly going to use them to serve hors d'oeuvres and other tasty treats at this weekend's National Poetry Month Black-Tie Benefit, but we wanted to give those of you who won't be on hand a preview of our most recent acquisition: a set of four promotional TV serving trays that were either sold or given away with Motorola televisions, phonographs, and other entertainment devices in the 1950s or 1960s. Each tray is about sixteen inches long with rounded corners, has a wood-grain veneer, features a colorful cartoon scene by commercial illustrator Vernon McKissack, and includes—what else?—a quatrain like the one accompanying the jazz scene pictured here:

Clap your hands and lift your feet
And dance around to that solid beat
This real gone jive that lets you laugh
Sounds groovy too, on a phonograph.

In addition to the simple fact of the poetry printed on 'em, we were initially attracted to these trays for how this particular one incorporates jazz-related slang for commercial purposes and (of course) for that super-spectacular pun on the word "groovy," which is used to describe both an immaterial social vibe as well as the material substance of the vinyl playback format. Listening to jazz is "groovy" in more than one way, ya dig?

While preparing our franks-in-blankets and deviled eggs, though, we've also become increasingly interested in how Motorola is using the trays to stage a media conversation between the phonograph, music, poetry and print, illustration, and even the television itself, as the television is (we think) simulated by the trays' wooden frames. Indeed, the original box pictured here—which has a cut-out television screen window through which one can view the top tray inside—suggests we are intended to read the rounded wooden tray frames as the rounded wooden frames of old televisions. In a sense, then, the "box" of that television ties together word, picture, music, and phonograph—a claim for the power and unique thrill of what was then the newest new medium of the twentieth century.

As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin might describe it in their 1999 book Remediation: Understanding New Media, the jazz scene is characterized by what they call "the twin preoccupations of contemporary media": an interplay between the experience of "immediacy" and the experience of "hypermediacy." On the one hand, the tray (and by extension Motorola's phonograph and television) cultivates immediacy by promising to immerse us in the "live" moment of the improvised jazz performance, thus offering us a "transparent presentation of the real." On the other hand, we are (as Bolter and Grusin say) "challenged to appreciate the integration" of media forms—print, music, image, phonograph, and television—and thus enjoy not the representation but the "opacity of media themselves." That is, not entirely unlike the artist whom the poem tells us is looking "through the window" at the musician playing in the flat next door, we become immersed in the moment by looking through one medium or interface at another. But even here, as the poem explains, the enjoyment of immediate experience hinges on, is accompanied by, or is in a sort of inevitable relationship with a corresponding "opacity" suggested (like the pun on "groovy") by yet another pun: the "fidelity" of the poem's last line, which links the "high fidelity" of the audio playback experience with the authentic experience of live listening. Relying on the pun's cultivation of multiple meanings to direct our attention away from the transparent "content" or "message" and toward the pleasure of multiple media interconnections and media interplay, the tray uses the opacity or thickness of language as a medium to trope the opacity of media more generally, focusing our attention not on the "content" or the "message" being conveyed, but on media itself. (Why else use the triple rhyme of "melody" and "fidelity" if not to call attention to language itself?) Here's that poem:

This master piece will have to wait
Maybe until it's quite too late
Cause who can deny that vibrant melody
Coming through the window with such fidelity.

The lack of a question mark at the end of this verse turns query into fact: what comes "through the window"—a phrase that (for us) recalls the cut-out "window" on the box cover and thus also what comes "through the window" of the television screen or the invisible window of the phonograph—has more fidelity to reality (immediacy) than any of the other media taken in isolation. Like the sketches on the studio floor (or so the logic goes), all other media are incomplete or unfinished except for television and phonograph, which have the power to combine previous media in creating the most immediate of immediate experiences.

Based on this interplay between immediacy and hyper- mediacy, Bolter and Grusin argue that "Although each [new] medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium." Such is the case with the phonograph and television and Motorola's TV trays. For despite offering TV and the phonograph as more immediate or authentic experiences than the verbal, pictorial, or painterly, Motorola only simulates the phonograph and TV on the TV trays themselves; TV is only figured by, not actually present in, the box's cut-out window and the frame of cheap wood, and the phonograph is only mentioned by name, not pictured. Thus, we become aware of "the new medium as a medium" because of the difficulty of representing the phonograph or TV in any other media but themeselves. Oddly, by choosing this print-based format to "advertise" television and phonograph, Motorola is unable to actually dramatize the newness of those media, whether it be their immediacy or hypermediacy; we don't experience the media that Motorola wants us to buy but, instead, have to imagine them for ourselves—just like the child in the tray pictured here who has to look up and away from the media limitations of the book to imagine the scene it describes.

And maybe this is the whole point of the TV trays and the dynamic between immediacy and hypermediacy that the poems point us to and help to cultivate—not to replicate television or the phonograph, but to get us, as consumers, to imagine what the television and phonograph can do. If advertising is designed not to sell a product but to cultivate in a consumer the desire for a product, then the desire produced by the inability to experience television or phonograph via the simulation of older media (the cut-out window on the box, the wooden frame around the scenes, the puns on "groovy" and "fidelity") has an easy fulfillment: simply "grab a partner and do-ce-do" out to the store to buy the real thing.

P&PC at Joshua Tree National Park

P&PC has just returned to drizzly Salem from a brief Spring Break trip to L.A, where, among other things, we visited for three days with P&PC Consultant Drew Duncan. One of those days, hoping to get away from it all, we hightailed it out of town to Joshua Tree National Park, home to the famous Dr. Seussian forest of Yucca brevifolia. We drove around. We hiked the Lost Horse Mine trail in the miserably high winds that put Duncan's rock climbing plans on hold. And we figured that out there in the high Mojave we could put our poetry radar on hold. That's when we ran into longtime California resident Robinson Jeffers near the end of the small, one-mile Hidden Valley trail near the park's West entrance, who reminded us—in the last of a series of informational placards—that

Integrity is wholeness...
The wholeness of life and things,
The divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man apart from that.

It's always a strange and beautiful thing to come back to oneself so far from home. Thank you, Joshua Tree, and thank you, Mr. Jeffers, for helping us better center ourselves by first uncentering our minds from ourselves.