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!

Daring Greatly: The Poetry of Cadillac and Teddy Roosevelt

Imagine our surprise to find a poem (pictured here) as the primary text in a full-page ad for Cadillac gracing the back cover of the the February 20 issue of Entertainment Weekly. ("Neil Patrick Harris Goes Full Oscar" is the lead cover story, btw, and Annie Lennox's Grammy performance is at the center of "The Bullseye.") Part of Cadillac's "Dare Greatly" campaign, the ten-stanza poem floating mid-air between two buildings adapts a passage from Teddy Roosevelt's speech "Citizenship In a Republic," which the Bull Moose delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910. Here's that passage:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. 

This ad raises a number of interesting questions, no? Are the "writers" at Cadillac pulling a Kenneth Goldsmith who, in his book Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, argues that contemporary writers "confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language" in databases and other electronic and digital forms now "have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist"? Perhaps someone (or a team of someones) from Goldsmith's famous class on the topic of uncreative writing at the University of Pennsylvania has found gainful employment at the advertising agency working for Cadillac and is trying to "reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language" via General Motors and not from the innovative artistic fringe? Are these writers daring greatly? And how, exactly, are they managing, parsing, appropriating, and reconstructing previously existing texts for the commercial marketplace?

We here at the P&PC Office can't help but also think of Virginia Jackson's Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading, where, in a compelling little anecdote, Jackson presents something of a similar situation. On October 17, 1851, Jackson explains, Dickinson wrote a letter to her brother Austin that ended with a "poem" that Dickinson did not cut into standard poetic lines but that she presented, instead, as rhyming prose. So far as Poetry & Popular Culture can discern from the facsimile in Jackson's book, that poem read:

There is another sky, Ever serene and fair, and there is another sun-shine, tho it be darkness there—Never mind faded forests, Austin, never mind silent fields—Here is a little forest, whose leaf is ever green; here is a brighter garden, where not a frost has been; in its unfading flowers I hear the bright bee hum; prithee, my brother, into my garden come!

Editors of Dickinson's work, Jackson goes on to note, published "There is another sky" as prose in 1894, 1924, and 1931, but beginning with Thomas H. Johnson's The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts (1955) it began to be printed in conventional lines:

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields—
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,

Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum;
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

The history of "There is another sky" prompts a number of questions from Jackson about when the poem in fact became a poem. "Was it never ... a poem," she wonders at one point, "since it was never written as verse? Was it always ... a poem, because it could always have been read as verse? Or was it only ... a poem after it was printed as verse?" Later on, she continues with related questions: "In view of what definition of poetry would Dickinson's brother have understood the end of his sister's letter to him as a poem? Did it only become a poem once it left his hands as a letter? According to what definition of lyric poetry did Dickinson's editor ... understand a lyric poem to be if it was not the passage at the end of the 1851 letter? Can a text not intended as a lyric become one? Can a text once read as a lyric be unread? If so, then what is—or what was—a lyric?"

So, let's go ahead and rephrase Jackson's set of questions with the Cadillac ad and Teddy Roosevelt's words in mind. Was the Rough Rider's speech never a poem since it was never written as verse? Was it always a poem, because it could always have been read as verse? Or was it only a poem after it was printed as verse on the back of Entertainment Weekly in 2015? In view of what definition of poetry would Roosevelt's listeners have understood his speech at the Sorbonne as a poem? Did it only become a poem once it was delivered? According to what definition of poetry did Roosevelt's editor (here Cadillac) understand a lyric poem to be if it was not the passage in Roosevelt's Sorbonne speech? Can a text not intended as a lyric become one? Can a text once read as a lyric be unread? If so, then what is—or what was—a lyric?

Your five page paper on how to best read Cadillac's poem (or is it Roosevelt's poem?) "It Is Not the Critic" is due on Monday. Dare greatly—and make your criticism count!

Why Audiences Matter: Lorelai's Version of "I Will Always Love You" (Season 7, Episode 20 [May 1, 2007])

In the final season of the Gilmore Girls, Lorelai sets out to sing Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" to her daughter Rory, who is on the verge of graduating from college. Then Luke walks in. Grab a hankie and watch this unexpectedly touching illustration of P&PC's poetics at work.

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

"I don't know why a cow goes moo": The Love Poetry of "Silver Spoons"

Check out the following episode of Silver Spoons (Season 1, Episode 5 [October 23, 1982], "Takin' a Chance on Love") in which Ricky's love for a new girl at school goes unrequited. From about 13:00-16:45, you'll find a scene in which Ricky is writing a (bad) love poem, followed by a scene in which Ricky's father recalls the (bad) love poem that he once wrote.

Once you've enjoyed those verses, then recall the (bad) love poem written by banker Dale Haywood in Season 4, Episode 6 of Justified (see the screen-shot shown below the video). All three are rhyming quatrains written by white American males in love. But what else do they have in common? How do they motivate and interrupt cliche? What type of poetics starts to come into view as a result of this comparison? Your five-page paper on the subject is due Monday!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rob Lowe Reads James Franco's Poetry on Conan