Dignify the Breath—with Poetry?

Last October, P&PC brought to you the Magic Song Restorer, a 1930s-era tin of bird food and poetry designed to help nurse your under-the-weather feathered friend back to health. Who knew such poetic magic came in a pocket-sized tin for humans as well? If you're looking to fool "the wifey's sniff," then Breethem's "breath neutralizer" (three images following) might be just the thing....

LeBron James and the Poetry of "I Rise": A Guest Posting by Liz Jones-Dilworth

Back in October 2010, as the shadow cast by the huge middle finger of LeBron James still darkened most of greater Cleveland, Nike aired a 90-second commercial (watch it just below) meant to both capitalize on, and rehabilitate, the King's image as he settled into cozy South Beach alongside Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Alluding in its title "I Rise" to Maya Angelou's famous poem "Still I Rise," the commercial features LeBron trying on a number of different personae including—at just over the 1:09 point—that of a beatnik soul poet (pictured here). Mind you, this wasn't the only link connecting LeBron and poetry from around this time. Not to be outdone by Nike, the Miami Herald held a much-publicized LeBron poetry contest which interested the P&PC office very much. We tried to give you an inside report on that event, but our requests for an interview with contest judge and sports writer Dan Le Batard were repeatedly ignored. Who knows why—maybe he found out that some of us on staff are from Cleveland.

Still, despite the Lake Erie-sized chip on our shoulder, we remained curious about this poetic streak in what we can only call LeBronsville. So we turned for some answers to Liz Jones-Dilworth (pictured here, bio at the end of this posting), who completed her dissertation on 21st-century performance poetry at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. Jones, who is now the VP of Operations for a public relations firm, was more than happy to weigh in. Here (following the video) is what she had to say.



Just ask Homer: a poem is a pretty good way to make a hero. Nike’s “I Rise” commercial, featuring basketball star LeBron James, uses a variety of poetic techniques—from old-school anaphora, refrain, rhyme, and allusion to contemporary hip hop samplings and multi-track, multi-voiced layering. Perhaps wondering what in the world to do with their $90 million James contract after he was declared the sixth most-hated sports personality in September 2010, Nike ultimately chose a poetic strategy to redeem him.

The poetic structure of the commercial, which does not resemble a typical advertising jingle, lends weight and seriousness to James’s character. The ever-repeating “should I?” gives us the sense that the speaker is a complicated man wrestling with existential questions of identity and modern morality. And, on the surface, the poem-within-the-poem moment seems in tune with that message. James introduces the segment by asking, “Should I read a soulful poem?” He’s dressed all in brown, from brown sunglasses to a narrow-brimmed hat to his turtleneck. He stands in front of a brown stage curtain and reads to a silent off-camera audience. He holds a single white piece of paper.

Then, we see a man playing bongos to accompany him, and hear a smattering of polite applause.

Wait a second, you may be saying. What are the bongos doing in there? Bongos haven’t been in style in the spoken word scene now for a good, what, fifty years?

Suddenly, James’s “soulful” poem seems suspect. What's going on here? Is the commercial making fun of poems? Imagine someone who knows little about poetry refusing to go to a poetry performance. Are they imagining someone just like this—playing bongos? And what, if anything, is James-as-poet meant to reveal about who he “really” is?

The poetry James reads is an excerpt from Maya Angelou’s 1978 “Still I Rise":

. . . shoot me with your words
[ . . . ]
You may cut me with your eyes,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

In its attachment to Nike and LeBron, the power of Angelou's original poem is diminished if not entirely undercut. "Shoot" and "cut" acquire basketball and advertising connotations (shoot a basketball, shoot a commercial, cut across court, cut to a closeup) that reduce the social and gendered violence of "shoot me with your words" and "cut me with your eyes" to simple trash talk and gamesmanship. Similarly, "air" becomes a brand name, an act of commercial broadcasting, and a basketball style, not a figure for woman's survival and triumph. Admittedly, the ad is a really savvy, thought-out deployment of Angelou's poem; Nike obviously has a poetry critic (albeit a cynical one) on staff. But one nevertheless can't help wondering, how can the poem be soulful if it’s really all about basketball and shoes?

James is portrayed not just as a poet, but as a television personality, an actor, an ad man, a student, a basketball player, and a construction worker. And really, none of these roles are taken very seriously—he acts in silly westerns and cop shows, and there aren’t too many real-life construction workers who’d tear up a basketball court with a loader while people were standing on it. As a brand, Nike creates heroes—performer-athletes with strong personalities. Nike is the poet, not LeBron.

The pink suits and fat doughnuts, squeaky microphones and bongos may invite us to laugh at the absurd, ever-changing faces of James. Yet when he says, “Maybe I should just disappear” and the screen blacks out, the impulse seems suicidal—and possibly reminiscent of Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," which ends "Or does it explode?" The relentless “should, should, should” from the hero worshippers is tinged with a hatefulness that possibly threatens James’s career, his identity, and his soul. Ultimately, though, it's the commercial (or the poem) that brings or sings James back to life—back to the screen and the court where he (supposedly) belongs. Paradoxically, while Nike argues for allowing LeBron to be his own man, it does not present a clear image of who that man is other than a basketball player.

As Nike keeps bringing LeBron's complex human individuality back to the court and to the subject of advertising, it doesn't treat him any differently than it does the vocabulary of Angelou's poem; everything comes back to basketball and commercials. Thus, even though both Angelou and LeBron are presented as poets, neither is given a byline in "I Rise." That distinction is reserved for the poet—the maker of heroes and the maker of meaning, Nike itself, which signs off with an autograph everyone knows: the swoosh.

Liz Jones-Dilworth currently lives in Austin, Texas, where she is the VP of Operations at Jones-Dilworth, Inc., a PR firm specializing in start-up tech firms (a.k.a., the poetry of spreadsheets). Her dissertation, The Role of the Poet: The Performance of Poetry at the Beginning of the 21st Century, discusses the public roles and performance styles of Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Beau Sia, and Patricia Smith and grew out of her own experiences performing, coordinating, and publicizing poetry in a variety of venues. For her take on writing a dissertation and completing graduate school, check out Becoming Doctor Jones.

Madison About You

It's no secret that folks at the P&PC home office love the language let loose by signs. We've covered the poetry of anti-Palin rallies in Alaska, driven through the jingles on Burma-Shave billboards, and counted down the top ten roadside rhymes we encountered on a road trip out West back in 2009. So here's a small gallery of the puns, witticisms, spoonerisms, and various other linguistic twists and turns on display in Madison, Wisconsin, over the past week and a half. Before you scroll down, though, check out these other links:

Call for Poems about the Wisconsin Protests
Poems about the Protest
Protest Poetry Slam
Poetry in Madison
Wisconsin Poets
Berton Braley Cyber Museum
Wisconsin, Poetry, & Animal Rights
Carl Sandburg, Badger & Socialist by Choice
Lorine Niedecker
Kenneth Patchen
Wisconsin State Ballad
Council for Wisconsin Writers
Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets
Wisconsin Book Festival
Wisconsin Center for the Book
Jawbreaker Poetry
and
"The Poetry of Revolt" by Elliott Colla

G.I. Jane & D.H. Lawrence

A couple of weeks ago, P&PC noticed that The Expen- dables—Sylvester Stallone's 2010 testos- terone-filled vehicle for a fraternity house of fading action heroes— unexpectedly ends with a poem. Well, wouldn't you know it: right after that post went up, the P&PC Office interns were having their annual Demi Moore film festival, and they came back to report that Moore's 1997 flick G.I. Jane ends with a poem too. Early in the movie (see clip #1 below) Navy SEAL Master Chief John Urgayle recites D.H. Lawrence's "Self-Pity" while inspecting his recruits:

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Then, sort of like a Chekhovian gun, Lawrence's poem reappears in the film's final scene—after Moore has shaved her head, after she's endured brutal hazing and abuse during training, and after she's distinguished herself in action in part by saving Urgayle's life—where it becomes part of a gift that, along with the Navy Cross, Urgayle gives to Moore as an expression of gratitude and apology (clip #2 below).

We're proud of the interns for noticing this, of course, but we're even more proud for what they had to say about it. The gift, they argued, is obviously meant to signal the transformation that's taken place in Urgayle—he's accepted a woman into the masculine world of the SEALS, is now a bigger and better person, and is apologizing for the abuse Moore suffered at his hands—but that transformation is expressed not simply because Lawrence's poem is present but because Urgayle interprets it differently than he did earlier in the film. That is, his transformation is visible not only because he acts (and promises to act) differently than before, but because he reads (and promises to read) differently as well.

Early in the film, Urgayle uses "Self-Pity" to model soldier comportment by comparing human activity to that of the animal kingdom; soldiers, he suggests—drawing a one to one correspondence between humans and the poem's wild things—should be like animals and not feel sorry for themselves. But as the camerawork in the final scene indicates, however, Urgayle's changed self reads the poem in reverse—that human beings are capable of emotional and communicative heights that the animal kingdom of "Self-Pity" is not. We see this especially when the camera, under Ridley Scott's direction, focuses in on Urgayle's marked-up copy of "Self-Pity" and especially on the repeated word "sorry." While the camera doesn't quite cut off the poem's final two words ("for itself"), it certainly comes close, centering our attention instead on the apology Urgayle is using the poem to express. Wild things, the camera helps us understand, don't feel sorry, but human beings like Urgayle do. In the process of becoming a different human being, the movie suggests, Urgayle's become a different reader too.

The P&PC interns liked the look of Urgayle's heavily-marked paperback; both the ballpoint underlining of "The Mosquito Knows" and the red pencil circling of "Self-Pity" suggest he's read and thought about the poems many times. What stood out for them, therefore, was how his final reading of the poem went unmarked by pen. He could, they argued, have very easily circled the word "sorry" in order to make his new interpretation clear. What ultimately "underlines" the text, however, is the camera, so that if this final scene is in fact an act of literary interpretation, that activity is not conducted on the page by Urgayle himself, but, instead, by the filmmaker for the benefit of the viewer. (Could we therefore read G.I. Jane not as a movie about women in the military but as an English Department lecture about how to read Lawrence's poem?) In the process, the pencil markings on the page (and the act of handwriting marginalia) become remnants of Urgayle's earlier and reprehensible self, while the acts of seeing and filming are linked to his later, more sophisticated and certainly more human self. So, while the end of G.I. Jane is designed to demonstrate Urgayle's transformation, the movie uses that narrative cover to wage a sort of smear campaign against the page and the power of the pen, casting them as remedial and less human technologies when compared to the more sophisticated interpretive and emotional technology of film. At the end of the day, it's Hollywood—not Urgayle, not Moore, and not even your English teacher—who is the most credible literary critic.

See what you think about this by watching the two clips here. Sorry about the low quality of the second one, but it's the only version of the film's final scene we could find.

Ronald Reagan's ABC's

Ronald Reagan (February 6, 1911 - June 5, 2004)

Note: If an image is blurry, click on it once to isolate it; then click on it again to magnify it.






















A is for Auto:
As the profits rise higher,
I'll help out the bosses
Not workers or buyers.

B stands for Big Business
And Bankruptcies, too.
We're making it easy
To cut wages for you.

C's Civil Rights
And the sins of Commission.
Those equality fights,
We've put in remission.

D stands for big Deficit:
Why does it get harder
To stop it from growing?
I'll just blame it on Carter!

E's for Ecology:
A liberal plot
To put shackles on industry.
Let's bring back Jim Watt!

F's Full Employment,
A nice thought, but yikes...
Without lots of jobless,
Who'd we get to break strikes?






















G's for General Dynamics
And the Pentagon's frills.
They rake in profits,
And you pay the bills!

H stands for Health Care,
"No problem," I say,
As long as you're there
With the money to pay.

I—watch the Imports
And Interest rates rise!
We're not selling you short:
It's just free enterprise!

J stands for Jobs.
You'll get one some day,
As long as you're willing
To take lower pay.

K stands for Kids,
I like them all, but...
Funds for their schools
I've just got to cut.

L is for Labor,
It's giving me pains.
They'll either play my way, or
I'll put them in chains.

M is for Ed Meese,
A misunderstood soul.
For the hungry, he's got cheese,
For the rich, more loopholes.






















N's for Nicaragua:
If they don't toe my line,
I'll shoot first and talk later,
Send the CIA to lay mines.

O is for OSHA:
It's better ignored.
To put lives before profits,
We just can't afford.

P is for PATCO,
I sure gave 'em hell.
If they'd only been Polish,
I'd have wished them all well.

Q stands for Quality
Of Life (for a few).
It's great if you're wealthy,
But we can't include you.

R is for Runaway
Plants in far lands,
Where they cut workers' pay
Because unions are banned.

Social Security
It's an awful expense.
Why subsidize the elderly
With tax dollars and cents?

T's for my Tax bill
And Trickle-down, too.
Don't worry, the rich will
Pass their cuts on to you.






















U's for Utilities:
Let's de-regulate!
Oil, gas, and electricity—
We'll let them raise rates!

V's for my Veto
Of the auto content bill.
The Republicans don't like it, so
Kill it, yes, I will!

W stands for Women—
I won't give them ERA.
In our economic system,
Equality's too high a price to pay.

Put an X right by my name.
Forget your silly fears.
You think my program's been too tame?
Well, just watch my next four years!

Y is for the Japanese Yen,
Whose value will get lower
As I push up the dollar; watch
The imports gain more power.

Z is for my Zig-zag course:
I stay it all the while.
In foreign countries, I'll use force;
While at home, I nod and smile.

Expendable Poetry

Anyone notice that The Expendables—the shoot-em-up, blow-em-up mercenary bromance starring bad boys Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Steve Austin and Bruce Willis with a cameo by governator Arnold Schwarzenegger—ends with a poem? You bet. After ousting the military dictator of a small Spanish-speaking island, after bringing the right hand of justice down on the corrupt C.I.A. agent funding said dictator's cocaine operation, after the explosions, gunfights, grisly deaths and double-crossings, and after the girl is saved, the guys come back to bond, celebrate each other's awesomeness, and hear some poetry at Rourke's tattoo shop. CCR plays in the background. Rourke and Statham start a knife-throwing competition while the other dudes let off steam and work on welcoming formerly double-crossing but now drug-free Lundgren back to the team.

Stallone: So you’re back from the dead. How’re ya healin?

Lundgren: Good ... considering you coulda killed me.

Jet Li: I forgive you.

Lundgren: OK

Li: I would’ve won.

Lundgren (winking): Of course.

[Stallone slaps Li on shoulder.]

Randy Couture: Hey Gunner [Lundgren]. Whatever doesn’t kill ya makes ya stronger, brother. Therapy!

Stallone: Man’s got a point.

[Statham winds up but doesn’t throw. Instead, he laughs. There's a gleam in his eye. He's got an idea and steps backward toward the doorway.]

Statham: You know what? I’m gonna do you a favor, Tool [Rourke]:

I once knew a man called Tool ...

Stallone: I looooove poetry!

Statham: ... Who, to me, was the epitome of cool ...

[Guys laugh.]

... Good with a knife ...

[He walks out the door into the alley.]

... Bad with a wife ...

Stallone: That hurts.

Statham: But to think he could beat me?
Dreamin he’d defeat me?
Cool Tool, you gotta be a fool!

Oh yeah ...

[Statham wings his knife from the street hitting the bullseye. Movie fades to black as a cover version of Thin Lizzy's "The Boys are Back in Town" plays on.]

Turning for a moment from knife slinging to word slinging, Statham (never one to shy away from cinematic wordplay) isn't just fooling around; in getting the movie's last words, he actually delivers an interesting little limerick-and-a-half-long poem that gives us a little lesson in what manhood's all about. Gesturing to a recognizable and democratically available verse form (the limerick), yet improvising on that form so that the final poem tests the limits of what it's allowed to do (it's two lines too long), Statham's longer-than-average limerick demonstrates how real men become men and not just meatheads. Like the poem, every one of the beefcakes in The Expendables follows a specific recipe for masculine success—they're good with a knife and bad with a wife, as the poem says—while at the same time personalizing that model so that they aren't entirely following someone else's idea of manhood. That is, the formal drama of Statham's poem argues that, to be a real man, it's not enough to be big and strong. You've also got to have some style in how you fight, how you flex your muscles, how you throw your knives—or how you rhyme. Without any of that, you're just somebody's bodyguard.

Who Was Vincent Godfrey Burns? Thoughts on Inaugural Poems & Poet Laureates

Nearly fifty years ago to the day, baffled by the heavy winds and so blinded by the sun's reflection that he couldn't read the poem he'd originally prepared for the occasion, 86 year-old Robert Frost recited from memory "The Gift Outright" to mark the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as U.S. President. The poem and improvised performance have not only gone down in poetic history as the gold standard by which inaugural poems are measured, but sometimes one even gets the impression that Frost and Kennedy somehow invented the ritual—that inaugural poems began then and there.

Of course, as the "Souvenir Inaugural Poem" (pictured here) from President Eisenhower's 1953 inauguration suggests, Frost and Kennedy didn't initiate the practice any more than Frost had invented the television that made the inauguration and "The Gift Outright" especially famous. People just don't remember—nor do they probably much want to remember—the poem "A Nation Prayed" which minister-turned-poet-turned-best-selling-novelist-turned-successful-screenwriter and soon-to-be controversial poet laureate of Maryland Vincent Godfrey Burns wrote in Eisenhower's honor.

So who was Burns—whose papers are scattered about in collections at Syracuse, UC Santa Barbara, Columbia, University of Maryland, the Maryland Historical Society, Kent State, and the University of Vermont? He was born in Brooklyn in 1893 and studied at Penn State, Harvard and the Union Theological Seminary. After serving in France in World War I, he was ordained in 1920 as a Congregationalist minister and plied that trade in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts before he eventually had some sort of falling out with the church that, despite his later appeals for forgiveness, was irreconcilable. He was married twice and had three kids.

None of this is particularly exceptional, but it appears that Burns increasingly turned from working on one Word to another in the making of his living. In 1932, in collaboration with his brother Robert Elliott who'd just escaped from a Georgia prison, Vincent got a big break, co-writing Robert's autobiography I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. Serialized in True Detective, the story was then made into a Warner Brothers movie that scored Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, Best Picture, and Best Sound; it was entered into the National Film Registry in 1991. Apparently, both the book and the movie came to be influential in efforts to reform prison conditions in the deep South, and Vincent would go on to pen a sequel, Out of these Chains in 1942—the year, btw, that Frost's "Gift Outright" first appeared in print. (That's Vincent standing on the right in the picture here, presenting a copy of An American Poet Speaks to then-Governor of Maryland J. Millard Tawes in 1956.)

Some people suggest that Vincent couldn't recover from the celebrity status his brother's escape and autobiography attracted, and that a corresponding megalomania led to the breakup of his first marriage and caused problems with his congregation. We here at the P&PC Office don't know enough to take sides in the matter. However, in the years following the film's release, Burns would go on to edit anthologies, write poetry, television scripts, plays, and novels including the racily-illustrated Female Convict which went on to sell over a million copies—and which might well have starred Lady Gaga and Beyonce had the divas been around at the time.

Interestingly, even though Burns wrote "A Nation Prayed" in honor of Eisenhower's inauguration, that part of his life story is almost uniformly left out of every source we consult, making us wonder whether his poem was any more official than Robert Lowell's "Inauguration Day: January 1953." Sources on Burns concentrate, instead, on the fact that he was appointed Maryland Poet Laureate by Governor Tawes in 1962, a post he held with a fair degree of controversy until passing away in 1979. Seems that thirty years before that controversially liberal Amiri Baraka was appointed and then unappointed to the New Jersey Poet Laureate position, Burns was using Maryland's equivalent post to broadcast his own politically and religiously conservative views. A poem "Down at the Watergate," for example, reportedly took sides in depicting Nixon as the victim of a witch hunt—a not unsurprising view, perhaps, coming from a poet who, back in '53, made Eisenhower out to be a leader appointed by God and not an electorate. Burns's opponents tried to oust him from the post several times but never succeeded. Who knows. Maybe they would have been more effective if they'd lobbied for the elimination of the Poet Laureate post altogether, as the Jersey legislature did.