Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: Lucas Bernhardt

In preparation for the 2007-08 basketball season, the Portland Trail Blazers' most prominent fan-blog, Blazer's Edge, elected its first official Poet Laureate via an open contest. This year, Blazer's Edge did the same, and Lucas Bernhardt—an avid Blazers fan and recent graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop—was voted in as co-poet laureate of the site. Poetry & Popular Culture recently caught up with Bernhardt and asked him to, well, jump through a couple of hoops.

Poetry & Popular Culture: How did you become co-Poet Laureate of Blazer's Edge?

Lucas Bernhardt: Blazer's Edge held a contest during the off-season, and the voting was so close that they awarded the position to both me and a writer who uses the screen name T. Darkstar.

P&PC: It sounds like it was a tight race. In fact, the contest coordinator had to dispel suspicions of ballot stuffing when your poem “The Assistant Coach” received a wave of last-minute support from voters. “Apparently,” he reassured readers, “people were just stirred by [the] verses and had to vote. Nothing untoward went on. It's simply the mark of a great poet!” How closely did you follow the election—and how did you celebrate?

LB: I don't remember how closely I followed the contest, but I did feel the suspicious people had a point. I had mentioned the proceedings to a few friends in the Workshop, and word got around. I hadn't told anyone which poem was mine, nor what my screen name was—and, actually, another writer from the Workshop had a poem in the running—but I imagine some of those last-second votes came from nearby. My intention was to get more writers in on the act, but I probably should have known better. The celebration must have been something....I can't remember it at all.

P&PC: How many poems have you written for Blazer's Edge?

LB: Bunches of haiku, a crown of sonnets, an ode, a little number on the Spurs, and the contest poem.

P&PC: Bunches of haiku indeed. One hundred twenty of them, in fact, in a poem that was subsequently described as a “mighty endeavor.” What compelled you?

LB: Admiration for Yosa Buson. Some people are moved to write by happiness, others by envy or resentment. For me it's usually admiration, which is why I feel so lucky to have been writing about the Blazers this year. They're such an easy team to pull for. Their good-humored approach to the game, their lack of hubris—what's not to like?

P&PC: Does your approach to poetry change when you write with a specific topic in mind (the Blazers), or for a particular audience (the Blazer's Edge reader)?

LB: I always pretend I'm writing for people who are more or less like me. Flawed but polite. When I'm writing for Blazer's Edge, I do allow myself to try things I might not otherwise. For example, "The Assistant Coach," is a pretty brazen Fernando Pessoa rip-off. That's something I wouldn't normally do, but there's something about inserting basketball references that can save an otherwise bad idea.

P&PC: For example?

LB: For example, well, every poem I've written for the site. I think it has something to do with anti-poetry, the way one generation of writers can say the same things about janitors or ink cartridges that a previous generation said about roses. Those dislocations can be beautiful.

P&PC: Why the sign-on “St. Bayno” and not “Lucas Bernhardt”? Is St. Bayno to Lucas Bernhardt like Slim Shady to Marshall Mathers?

LB: It's a tribute to Bill Bayno, a good coach.

P&PC: What’s it like being a co-poet laureate?

LB: Throughout the season we've had a supportive, non-competitive relationship. Having a co-laureate is a mixed blessing for me. On the one hand, it's great to have such a generous partner, someone who always has nice things to say about what I've written and who can pick up the slack whenever—and it's often—I'm slacking off. On the other, I feel totally outclassed by him. He's a much more complete blogger than I am. He writes all sorts of interesting posts, including a recent one about finally seeing a Blazers game with his wife (they live in Milwaukee). He also is a lot better at commenting on and recommending others' posts. I'm more of a silent participant in the site, outside of the poetry. I didn't have a login until the poet laureate contest, even though I had been reading Blazer's Edge for a long time.

P&PC: Have you gotten any endorsement deals?

LB: Nope.

P&PC: How did your training at the Iowa Writer's Workshop prepare you for this responsibility?

LB: The Workshop is an amazing program, but it's hard to say exactly why. I suppose working closely with so many great writers broadens a person's scope—assuming one is willing to pay attention to what others are up to.

P&PC: In a post-election comment on the blog, you outed yourself as a workshop-trained writer and confessed to circulating the finalist poems to your friends and peers. What sort of reactions did they have?

LB: Most of them had a lot of fun reading the poems and commenting. Naturally, those who didn't never brought it up. Some people admitted they had no idea which poem was mine, and others thought they knew but were wrong. Generally, people seemed to like the idea of posting poetry where people who don't generally follow contemporary poetry might read it.

P&PC: Are there any plans to have you read at the Rose Garden Arena?

LB: No—what a terrifying idea! I'm pretty sure it wouldn't fly. I get the feeling that elements within the (Blazer) organization are aware that Portland is an atypical sports market. That said, trying to appeal to the eccentric side of the audience would probably slow things down. The Rose Garden is all about amplifying the loud, fast, superhuman spectacle of pro basketball.

P&PC: Hmmm....You could call it a poetry slam dunk.

LB: Maybe if it involved being shot out of a cannon reading a poem, and culminated in a dunk...then maybe.

Last Voyage for the Keeper of the Hubble

for John Grunsfeld

And as Atlantis opens up its door
to float him into space, and as he glides
in his bee-suit across the telescope’s sides
how will the stimulus seem to him—or,
as the shuttle opens up its bays,
will the housing market, or Iraq,
or Octomom be enough to bring him back?
What does genocide look like from space?
Here to fix a thing he can’t redo,
will the pebble below him leave him blinded?
Can the heavens make him single minded?
As he floats, I’ll be floating too,
me in my bee-suit wondering why
we’ve been built as we are but still can fly.

Poemulations: Emily Dickinson, James Metcalfe & Chum Frink

On October 17, 1851—as Virginia Jackson notes in her great book Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading—Emily 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" raises a number of questions for 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?"

These and similar questions drive Jackson's inquiry into the historicity of the "lyric" as a sub-genre of the genre of poetry; people in the 19th century, she reveals, didn't understand the genre of the lyric anywhere near the way they do now, and we can gain a greater understanding of Dickinson's verse if we in fact recover what people thought about the lyric "back then" rather than imposing we what we've come to think of as the lyric over the course of the 20th century. The Poetry & Popular Culture office likes Jackson's line of questioning a lot, although, as always, we'd prefer to start off with a different question: "What, if anything, does a study of popular poetry have to tell us about Dickinson and verses like 'There is another sky'?" As it turns out—betcha couldn't see this coming—it can tell us quite a bit.

A look at popular verse forms supports the Poetry & Popular Culture position that Dickinson never intended for "There is another sky" to be cut into lines and that, moreover, Dickinson's brother Austin would have recognized full well that his sister's writing was, in fact, meant to be read as a type of poem in its own right—as what Sinclair Lewis would later call a "poemulation." It was not at all uncommon for newspapers to print rhyming prose just like "There is another sky." We've seen such poems saved in poetry scrapbooks and would turn the reader's attention, for an example, to a little booklet of poems by James Metcalfe, titled Portraits (pictured to the left), which collects verses that Metcalfe published in a column of the same name that appeared daily in The Times (billed as "Chicago's Picture Newspaper") in 1946. We cite "Going Out" here as a sample of Metcalfe's writing which is printed as prose with ellipses substituted for linebreaks:

When we get ready to go out ... It is not long before ... My hat is in my hand and I ... Am standing at the door ... I call my wife and she declares ... That she is nearly through ... And in another minute now ... She will be ready too ... So I go out and start the car ... And get all set to go ... But after while it seems my spouse ... Is just a little slow ... I honk the horn and she replies ... That it will only be ... A tiny second more until ... She will be joining me ... But seconds pass and minutes fade ... I feel my patience snap ... And shutting off the motor I ... Decide to take a nap.

You may be asking yourself round about now, Well just how "not uncommon" was this sort of verse? It's hard to say for sure, but it was common enough for novelist Sinclair Lewis to capitalize on it in his portrayal of T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink, the poet in Babbitt (1922) and "the author of 'Poemulations,' which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world." When we first meet Chum, in fact, his work is explicitly described as "lyric" poetry, though Lewis was likely using "lyric" in a more general and expansive sense than the specific sub-genre of poetry that interests Jackson in Dickinson's Misery. "Two hours before [meeting Babbitt]," Lewis writes, "Frink had completed a [Prohibition Era] newspaper lyric beginning:

I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and wunk, and groaned, 'There still are boobs, alack, who'd like the old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and smelly old saloon!' I'll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as any babe new-born!" (Italics in the original)

Later in the novel, as Babbitt is speaking before the dinner of the Zenith Real Estate Board, he incorporates one of Frink's poemulations into his talk and situates it among other popular poets and popular reading practices of the time. Babbitt prefaces Frink's verse by saying, "I always like to remember a piece that Chum Frink wrote for the newspapers about his lecture-tours. It is doubtless familiar to many of you, but if you will permit me, I'll take a chance and read it. It's one of the classic poems, like 'If' by Kipling, or Ella Wheeler Wilcox's 'The Man Worth While'; and I always carry this clipping of it in my note-book." Like Frink's lyric cited above, the poem Babbitt quotes is composed entirely in the rhyming, metered verse that both Metcalfe and Dickinson use in their own work.

Dickinson, as Jackson and other scholars have observed, collected all manner of artifacts from print culture of her time, sending clippings to friends, composing on scraps of paper, and perhaps even incorporating this material into the surround or various "backstories" of her poems. How possible is it, then, that Dickinson was in fact writing a prose-poetry, newspaper-style lyric or "poemulation" to her brother Austin in October of 1851? Very possible, say we in the Poetry & Popular Culture office. Very possible indeed.

A Gallery of Suffragist Poetry

For the work of a day,
For the taxes we pay,
For the Laws we obey,
We want something to say.





















This is pretty heavy work,
But I'll never, never shirk.





















I think we'll get them if we try.
And we shall try until we die.











If I can vote, why not propose?
If I am bold you must excuse me.
I've loved you ages, goodness knows!
And don't you dare, Sir, to refuse me.

















A Suffragette you're going to wed
and after you've been quite well dead
your friends will gather round and say:
"A nice 'enuff fellow in his henpecked way,"
But you'll chip up with "Well! Well! Well!
This ain't so bad, this place called H........"

Thai Firefighter Dresses Up as Spiderman to Coax Eight-Year-Old Boy Off Window Ledge

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on March 27, 2009

Hero is a word I don’t use lightly.
He didn’t grab ahold of me but took
the arm of something from a comic book
while I climbed down the ladder, held on tightly,
and set him on the ground. I didn’t write
the story or mix the ink to burn like fire.
I perhaps did a fair impression of Tobey Maguire,
but I didn’t direct the movie, or delight
millions of kids, or even bring the ladder there.
I didn’t sew the suit or drive the truck
but simply hoped for a little bit of luck
as I put on the costume I was brought to wear.
Who should get the credit? Don’t ask me:
maybe the folks know better at A.I.G.

Casey at the Hoop?

Try as it might to resist the media frenzy surrounding the annual NCAA basketball tournament, Poetry & Popular Culture can't help but feel a little bit seduced by March Madness and the strange poetry—or poetic justice—that somehow underwrites the science of "bracketology" even if the poetry of March hasn't been as celebrated as the poetry of October has. It was with the joy of serendipity, then, that folks in the Poetry & Popular Culture office happened across Season 4, Episode 2, of Northern Exposure which originally aired October 5, 1992 under the title "Midnight Sun."

In this episode, the town's doctor—Joel Fleischman, a New York-trained Jewish physician who gets stuck paying back his med school bills by serving in the small Alaska town of Cicely—experiences 24 hours of sun for the first time and goes "light looney" when his biological clock can't adjust to the absence of night. Randy and manic, Joel takes over the head-coaching duties for Cicely's woeful community basketball team, the Quarks. One "night" when everyone else is asleep, he sits behind the microphone of the town's radio station KBHR and, with the music of John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" playing in the background, announces he's begun writing basketball's long-awaited epic, which he's titled "Casey at the Hoop." Here's the text of that scene, spoken as the station's regular host Chris dozes in the corner:

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying our nation is consumed by lethargy or enamored of the status quo, but why not ask a few hard questions of our legislators? For instance, "Why, sirs, is it engraved in steel that baseball is our national pastime?" Now, I understand the need to perpetuate exemptions from our antitrust laws. I mean, it serves the selfish interests of a few Steinbrennerish elitists, but why should hundreds of millions of citizens be deprived of a new and better candidate? The answer, my friends? Basketball! That’s the true American sport. Oh, and I’m not saying that baseball doesn’t have a claim on our collective psyche. After all, it had a half century jump on basketball, which was invented in 1891 by James Naismith in Springfield, Mass, site of the Basketball Hall of Fame, and which you should all visit as I did with my Uncle Nat and Cousin Lenny when I was 14. I loved it.

Hey, did I mention that baseball is sneaky? Yeah, very sneaky, see. 'Cause it uses poetry to invade our brains and stick to the walls of our unconscious. You take "Casey at the Bat": clever advertising campaign disguised as farmers' doggerel. Well, how is basketball supposed to fight such a folksy appeal to the hearts and minds of the American people? Well, up to last night it couldn’t. But now there is a new weapon. If I may, I would like to recite a few words written at midnight last night. Herewith a sample of an epic to come:

And so, the rubber spheroid arced beneath the brilliant lights
Headed for a hoop of dreams he’d dreamt of all those nights.
The crowd gasped as the ball descended. Would it grant their fondest wish?
There was no doubt in Casey’s mind: he knew it was a swissssh!

"Midnight Sun" ends, of course, when Joel—who has been wide awake for several days—involuntarily falls asleep and misses Cicely's big game, when the Quarks get crushed (as they do every year) by the neighboring town. In returning to his normal sleeping schedule, he also, apparently, never got around to finishing "Casey at the Hoop." Anyone out there want to, well, give it a shot?

Guest Posting: The Poetry of Patchwork

Reading between the lines of text and textile, Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Adam Bradford writes in about mid-19th-century mourning poetry and the poetic wrap (not rap) that Eliza Howells quilted to help stave off the chills of death and grief.

When Mark Twain set about lampooning what he felt was an overly-morbid 19th-century culture of mourning, he did so (in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) via the character of Emmeline Grangerford. As folks in the Poetry & Popular Culture office may recall, Emmeline was known for her “crayons” (hand-drawn pictures of people mourning at the tombs of their deceased) and “tributes” (poems depicting the deceased “sport[ing] aloft in the realms of the good and the great”). Twain’s satire gained traction because some of the age's “popular” poets like Lydia Sigourney and Julia Moore had made their reputations (not to mention a respectable sum) filling best-selling books such as 1847's The Weeping Willow with line after line of “consolation verse.” Consider, for example, Sigourney’s “The Consenting Mother":

"I see the green fields, and glowing flowers;
I see bright streamlets flow,
Sweet voices call to glorious bowers;
Dear Mother! Let me go.”
His cheek grew pale. Had hasting death
Dealt the last final blow?
List! List! Once more the fainting breath,
“Oh Mother! let me go.”
How could her love the soul detain,
That struggled to be free?
Or, leaguing with that tyrant Pain,
Obstruct its liberty?
“Lord! Not my will,” she said, “but Thine,”
And high her darling soar’d,
And from the skies that ever shine
An angel’s descant pour’d.

Sigourney’s poem may strike contem- porary readers as trite or contrived, but for many people in 19th century America — people such as Eliza Howells, whose quilt square appears to the left—such poetry was an important tool for dealing with grief. Sometime in the 1840s, Eliza Howells began accumulating a number of quilt squares as gifts from family and friends. Largely commemorative, these squares mark important events in Eliza’s life such as her wedding in 1843 and her Grandmother’s death in 1845. The same grandmother whose death is commemorated on one square, in fact, produced the square celebrating Eliza’s marriage.

Eliza produced the central, "capstone" square of the quilt herself. The images she penned here—the heavy curtains, the urns with emerging flowers, the clock, the dark dress—are all contemporary symbols of mourning, and the voice she gives the object is, perhaps fittingly for the time, a rather poetic one that testifies to the power of this rather curious text-ile and provides insight into how it became meaningful for Eliza. Together, the poems show that the quilt connected her in two ways to a “spiritual community” of loved ones whose physical presence she no longer enjoyed. The first, which seems the most “memorial” of the two, is entitled “Friendship” and reads:

In Vain—in different paths we tread—
And though no more mayest soothe or cheer;
Yet we have those hours of friendship shed,
A sweetness that still lingers here;
Thy form & look, in memory’s glass,
I still distinctly see;
Thy voice and words, in fancy’s ear
Are whispering still to me.

"Friendship" is followed by the second, more consolatory piece entitled “Eternity":

When the dream of life is fled,
When its wasted lamp is dead,
When in cold oblivion’s shade,
Beauty, power, wealth are laid;
Where immortal spirits reign,
There may be all we meet again;
On the tree of life eternal
Man, let all the hope be staid
Which alone, for ever vernal,
Bears a leaf that shall not fade.

Together, these poems suggest how the quilt enlivens the people who helped produce it while simultaneously prefiguring Eliza's reunion with them in the "ever vernal" afterlife. Crafted as it was by hand (or hands), it quite literally served as a site where Eliza could stitch, bind, and tie herself to those, like her grandmother, who had not only helped produce the blanket's other squares but who were commemorated there as well. Morbid? Maybe. But for Eliza, who could wrap herself in the combination of image, text, and material—and perhaps for more than just a few people in our current day—it was one way to keep warm against chills borne of gale or grief.

Adam Bradford writes in from the University of Iowa where he is finishing a dissertation on the literature of 19th century American mourning practices.