Everyday Reading Outtakes: The Bealor Family Poetry Scrapbook

On Wednesday of this week, P&PC was thrilled to learn that Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America has been nominated for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award, and we would have celebrated by sending the office interns home early, except that they had already gone home early for Thanksgiving festivities with family and friends. Alone in the office, a single light bulb glowing from its chain in the middle of the room, the rain of the Oregon winter coming down on the dark streets, and a turkey awaiting our ministrations at home, we turned, as we not infrequently do in times of meditation, to one of the 175 or so old poetry scrapbooks that form the archive we consider in Chapter One of Everyday Reading, that are representative of a widespread American practice of cutting and pasting poems between the Civil War and World War II, and that we've written about from time to time on this blog (here, here, here, here, here, and here).

It's one of our regrets that Everyday Reading didn't give us enough space to focus on every one of our favorite poetry scrapbooks, because many of them are really provocative and moving. Take, for example, an album started by Minnie R. Shaw Bealor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 29, 1926—almost exactly eighty-six years ago. Between 1926 and 1938, Minnie would collect over seventy poems in her anthology, most of them cut out from newspapers but a few written longhand. A high concentration of poems from Edgar Guest's syndicated "Just Folks" newspaper column suggests that Minnie was a particular fan of the "people's poet"; she even pasted a picture of Guest on the album's inside front cover (pictured here). But we find others as well, like "In Flanders Fields" and "From an Oldtime Flapper" (see the next picture below) that also anchor Minnie in the modern world of World War I, the nineteenth amendment, the Roaring 20s, and the era of the New Woman. Here's "From an Oldtime Flapper" (a sonnet written in couplets by someone identified only as "Diana"):

I was a flapper in nineteen-two,
Big Pompadour and a big hat, too;
Habit-back skirts were then in date
And suited alluring out-curves great.
We smoked cigarets [sic] on the strict Q. T.,
And a cocktail or two never worried me!
Now I am a cheery blithe old dame,
While the habits of youth are just the same—
They devil their elders and kick their heels.
Old Fate smiles on as their doom she seals
With a ring and a book and a bridal veil,
A Harlem flat and an infant's wail—
Jazz along, girls, here's luck to you
From an old-time flapper of nineteen-two!

Was Minnie herself meditating on the "doom" of marriage, motherhood, and domestic life that Diana sees linking successive generations of women: "Old Fate smiles on as their doom she seals / With a ring and a book and a bridal veil / A Harlem flat and an infant's wail"? We think it's very likely. The first poem Minnie pastes in the album, for example, is "Our Mother" by children's author and poet Josephine Pollard, which concludes:

Better for us to be faithful and kind
To mother dear, while she is living;
Better for us when we bear in mind,
Kisses and sympathy giving,
Than after her presence is missed from the home,
And she's gone from this world to another,
To weep and lament, and with anguish repent
Of the way we neglected our mother.

Minnie uses several Guest poems—"The Good Wife," "My Wife and I," "Ma and I," "Picking Up After Him," "Ma and the Auto," "She Mothered Five," and "Babies"—to extend her theme, offering evidence not only of how scrapbooking provided readers with a way to meditate in an extended way on a topic, but also how important Guest might be to studies of women's poetry and twentieth-century women readers as well.

What's so moving about this scrapbook is not just Minnie's reflection, but that it witnesses to her death as well. About halfway through the album, Minnie has dated (Oct. 29, 1936), handwritten, and signed a poem of her own (pictured here)—the only time she includes her own verse. Here it is:

Where are all the thoughts we think and then forget?
They surely cannot melt away and never leave a trace.
Perhaps I'll find in later years they're close around me yet—
At least I'll find their history is written in my face.

Minnie's final words—which we can't help but read as an epitaph retooling Keats's famous line, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water"—are followed by a blank page and then a full-page notation (pictured here) handwritten and signed a year and a half later by Minnie's daughter, Margaret Jane Bealor: "This Scrap Book continued in Loving Memory of my Mother, Minnie Rebecca Shaw Bealor, This Twenty-fourth day of March, in The Year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Thirty Eight."

Margaret would go on to include 35 pieces of her own selection—poems and passages about grief and existential need such as "Consolation," "What Is Life About?," Kipling's "If We Only Understood" "The Lonely Road," "Is Life Worth Living?," "Fear," "Resolve," and "Courage." Was Margaret continuing her mother's album as a way of working through the anguish that Pollard identifies at the end of "Our Mother" quoted above—as an act of repentance? Had Margaret discovered, upon her mother's death, Minnie's private, twelve-year wrestle with the subject of motherhood and married life? Had she recognized the "doom" that they shared but likely never talked about—and was she now processing it in private, via the scrapbook, just as her mother had done? Was Margaret possibly thinking of her own daughter, or her future daughter, and how—as in "From an Oldtime Flapper"—she would live to see women's doom repeat itself at midcentury?

The silence—of the individual reader, but also the silence between mother and daughter—that themes the two parts of this album is moving, but it's not as moving as the horrible silence that ends it. Margaret's additions to the scrapbook end, like her mother's section, with a handwritten, epitaph-like passage beginning, "One reason our Lord gives for not worrying about the future is that we have nothing to do with it." Then, repeating the transitional motif she established halfway through the album upon the occasion of her mother's death, Margaret skips a page and writes:

September 3, 1939
     War in Europe Begins
December 7, 1941
     Japan attacked Pearl Harbor
December 8, 1941
     We entered the war against Japan, Germany + Italy.
May 7, 1945
     The War in Europe ended.
August 6, 1945
     The first Atomic Bomb was dropped by the U.S. in Japan
August 14, 1945
     The War ended.

The rest of the scrapbook—sixty pages—is entirely blank. P&PC flips page after page looking for something—some word, some gesture, some voice, some recovery from the war, some continuation of any type, but it's like there's nothing to say or do after the dropping of the atom bomb, no possible answer any longer to the question "Is Life Worth Living?" that the earlier poem of that title posed. It's a nuclear holocaust as figured by the scrapbook, a test pattern that is nothing but white on white. Margaret probably wouldn't have known who Theodor Adorno was, but it's her version of Adorno's famous statement, "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

"I'll Tell You What Poetry Writing Is All About": The Bill Cosby Show (1970)

From the P&PC Vault: Remembrance Day & the Case of the $400,000,000 Poem

We here at the P&PC Home Office like to call it the four hundred million dollar poem—and not just because its first stanza appears on the back of the Canadian $10 bank note, a fact that, all by itself, may very well make "In Flanders Fields" the most reprinted and most widely circulated poem, like, ever. No, we call John McCRae's World War I-era verse the four hundred million dollar poem because, shortly after it appeared in the December 8, 1915 issue of Punch magazine, the Canadian government made it the central piece of its p.r. campaign advertising the sale of the first Victory Loan Bonds, printing it, or excerpts from it, on billboards and posters like the one pictured above. According to Canadian Veterans Affairs, the campaign was designed to raise $150,000,000 but ended up netting—wait for it—over $400,000,000.

Whoever said that "poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper" clearly wasn't thinking of McCrae's rondeau, which is the centerpiece of Remembrance or Veterans Day (November 11) activities worldwide and turned the red or "Buddy" poppy into the day's icon, manufacture and sale of which has been a regular source of funding for disabled and needy VFW veterans, as well as for the support of war orphans and surviving spouses of veterans in the U.S., since 1923. It is memorized by schoolkids, recited at Remembrance Day events, has elicited all sorts of reply poems and been put to music, and resulted in the restoration of McCrae's birthplace in Guelph, Ontario, as a museum. (That's McCrae pictured above.) Heck, in Ypres, Belgium, there's a museum devoted just to the poem itself! Take that, Joyce Kilmer!

By most accounts, McCrae composed "In Flanders Fields" in 1915, the day after witnessing the death of his 22 year-old friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, though legend has it that McCrae ripped it out of his notebook and cast it aside amongst the blood-red poppies on the battlefield where it was rescued by an onlooker and sent to Punch, which printed it anonymously:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly.
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

By 1917, the Canadian government paired "In Flanders Fields" with the painting of a soldier standing in the poppy fields by British-born Canadian artist Frank Lucien Nicolet and was raising its millions of dollars in Victory Loan Bonds.

In the most famous piece of literary-critical commentary on "In Flanders Fields," Paul Fussell (see The Great War and Modern Memory) doesn't have too many good things to say about the poem, claiming that the "rigorously regular meter" makes the poppies of the poem's first stanza "seem already fabricated of wire and paper." Nevertheless, he finds the verse "interesting" for the way in which it "manages to accumulate the maximum number of [emotion-triggering] motifs and images ... under the aegis of a mellow, if automatic, pastoralism." In the first nine lines alone, Fussell explains, you've got "the red flowers of pastoral elegy; the 'crosses' suggestive of calvaries and thus of sacrifice; the sky, especially noticeable from the confines of a trench; the larks bravely singing in apparent critique of man's folly; the binary opposition between the song of the larks and the noise of the guns; the special awareness of dawn and sunset at morning and evening stand-to's; the conception of soldiers as lovers; and the focus on the ironic antithesis between beds and the graves 'where now we lie.'" But Fussell saves his most damning critique—what he calls "[breaking] this butterfly upon the wheel"—for the poem's final lines which devolve into what he calls "recruiting-poster rhetoric apparently applicable to any war." "We finally see—and with a shock—" he writes, "what the last lines really are: they are a propaganda argument—words like vicious and stupid would not seem to go too far—against a negotiated peace." (For another examination of the poem in relation to McCrae's Canadian national identity and the rondeau form, see Amanda French's paper "Poetic Propaganda and the Provincial Patriotism of 'In Flanders Fields'" first presented at the 2005 SCMLA conference.)

But Fussell's right, isn't he? As the slogan "If ye break faith—we shall not sleep" in the "Buy Victory Bonds" ad pictured at the top of this posting indicates, McCrae's poem was in fact pitch-perfect "recruiting-poster rhetoric," wasn't it? Well, almost. P&PC would submit that it's worth noting how the Canadian government didn't exactly quote "In Flanders Fields" word for word. Instead, it excised the four words ("with us who die") that separate "If ye break faith" from "we shall not sleep" in the original poem—an act that works to repress the war's human costs and thus redirect the expression of faith to its financial ones. That is, in staging itself as an act of remembrance, the Canadian advertisement actually erases the subject of the McCrae's memorial ("us who die"). In this bowdlerized version of the poem—and we use the term bowdlerize on purpose, meaning "to remove those parts of a text considered offensive, vulgar, or otherwise unseemly"—the poster sanitizes the war by silencing the voices of its dead, depicting war as a financial and not human struggle and thus making the "propaganda argument ... against a negotiated peace" that Fussell describes.

But the repressed has a way of returning, just like the dead do. Consider, for example, the awesome item (pictured here) that P&PC got its hands on recently—a used ink blotter with Canada's "Buy Victory Bonds" ad featured on front. On the reverse, the ink stains grimly read like blood stains. And on the front (where the pun asks us to also read it as the battle line of war), the artifact's owner Vivian Hogarth signed her name in the upper right corner and corrected Canada's version of the poem, restoring the phrase "with us who die" and thus—in an act of what we might think of as zombie poetics—effectively writing the dead back into existence. Thank you, Vivian Hogarth. That's the type of memorial we're keeping in mind this Remembrance Day.

Make This Rabbit a Habit: The Poetry of the Energizer Bunny Squeeze Light

The Spectacle of Everyday Reading (and Coupon Codes) at the Modernist Studies Association

From October 18-21, P&PC participated in the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference, this year held at the airport-like Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and appropriately structured around the theme of "Modernism & Spectacle." Surrounded by everything we love, hate, love to hate, and hate to love about the Entertainment Capital of the World, P&PC presented on one panel ("Beyond Modernist Periodization"), chaired another panel ("Spectacular Language and Projected Verse"), hobnobbed with new and old friends and colleagues, and even got a chance to visit the center of Vegas home-brew activity, Aces & Ales. As you might assume from our lack of posting activity over the past two weeks, we've been trying to recover ever since. No, we didn't get a Mike Tyson tattoo on our face, nor did we meet up with Zach Galifianakis, nor did much happen that had to stay in Vegas. But the city's crush of bikini-clad dancers, artificial light and smell, slot machine chimes, overpriced everything, and lots of sloshed, overweight people staggering by on the sidewalks wearing balloon hats and fake grass skirts put us in a bit of a funk from which we're just beginning to emerge.

By far, for us, the most memorable part of this year's MSA was the first release of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, which Columbia University Press featured at its book table, which will hit warehouses in a week or two, and which P&PC got to hold for the very first time. It's beautiful—and it sold! Indeed, perhaps due to some shameless promotion on the part of this blog and its associates, it was Columbia's best-selling conference title; when we left for the airport, only one copy remained on the book table, and we've got our fingers crossed that that one went as well. Maybe Everyday Reading wasn't dressed up in a balloon hat or a fake grass skirt—can you imagine the gents on the book cover at Treasure Island or the Luxor?—but it found its own little place in the desert that we won't soon forget.

We're hoping that Everyday Reading might find a place with you, too. It found a happy home with SUNY Buffalo graduate student Margaret Konkol (pictured here), who got a copy and a personalized inscription for a consumer-friendly conference discount. And even if you weren't at MSA, P&PC has made sure that you can get a hefty discount if you order right from Columbia University Press as well. That's right: if you use the coupon code EVECHA, Columbia will—as a courtesy to P&PC readers and friends—give you a 30%-off discount. That brings the cost of Everyday Reading to under $20, or to just about the cost of printing four boarding passes ($5 each) at the Flamingo Hotel. We're not going to say that the opportunity to get out of Vegas isn't worth it—we were more than ready to go. But what's going to stick with you longer: the breakfast buffet at the Westin ($22.96), six coffees from Java Detour ($3.23 each), two rolls of quarters and an hour sitting at the slots, or the 302 pages of Everyday Reading? Hold on for a moment—is P&PC making a spectacle of itself? I guess maybe we learned something from Vegas after all.

Once More Into the Fray: The Remediation of Poetry in Liam Neeson's The Grey

Anyone notice that—like G.I. Jane (1997) and The Expendables (2010)—the 2011 Liam Neeson flick The Grey ends with a poem? Yup: it's a four line verse titled "The Fray" that main character Ottway (played by Neeson, a trained hunter hired to protect oil workers from wolves in Alaska) remembers hanging in a frame over the desk in his father's den and that runs through his head (and in flashback on the screen) as he prepares to make a last stand against a wolf pack that has been pursuing him and systematically offing the other survivors of a plane crash in Alaska. (Check out the movie's last scene in the first video clip at the end of this posting; for some reason, btw, the scene has been transposed on the youtube clip so that the poem appears as a mirror image of the original and reads backwards [it reads forward in the original]; you'll get the idea nonetheless).

The Grey does G.I. Jane and The Expend- ables one better, though, as the poem (pictured here) doesn't just end the movie but provides the frame mechanism for the entire narrative itself (it's even quoted on the movie poster). Indeed, at the beginning of the film—during a heavy-handed montage that shows Ottway killing wolves, lying in bed with his wife whom we eventually learn has died, writing a final letter to her about how miserable his life has become, flashing back to what we eventually learn is his childhood, and making preparations to commit suicide—the poem's words run through his head as part of a voice-over, presumably a section of what he's writing in his final letter. At this point, though, we don't even know it's a poem. In fact, the clash of discursive registers between it and what he's thinking is a little confusing: "I want to see your face, feel your hands in mine, feel you against me. And I know that will never be. You left me. And I can’t get you back … I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t know what can come of it. I know I can’t get you back … I don’t know why this has happened to us. I feel like it’s me. Bad luck. Poison … And I’ve stopped doing this world any real good...," he writes. Ottway pauses, then adds the poem's first two lines, "Once more into the fray—into the last good fight I'll ever know." The camera shows Ottway putting a rifle muzzle into his mouth, and then we hear the poem's final lines, "Live and die on this day...  Live and die on this day..."

What we don't know at the beginning of the movie— that he's remem- bering a poem, that his father wrote it, that it hung above his father's desk in the den—gets cleared up partway through the film, after the plane crash, after lots of competition for the Alpha position among the crash survivors, and after the men seek shelter in the woods. There, around a campfire, as the wolves surround them in the darkness, and as one of their group is hallucinating in the process of dying from hypoxia, the men start sharing their stories—about sex, faith, family, and whatever source of inspiration keeps them fighting. Ottway, by this point established as the group's Alpha, tells part of his story and, in an extended scene, flashes back to his childhood. Here's what he says:

My dad, uh, my dad was not without love. But a clichéd Irish motherfucker when he wanted to be—drinker, brawler, all that stuff. Never shed a tear. Saw weakness everywhere. But he had this thing for poems—poetry. Readin' 'em, quotin' em. Probably thought it rounded him off. His way of apologizing, I guess. There was one that hung over his desk in the den. It was only when I was a lot older did I realize that he'd written it. It was untitled—four lines. I read it at his funeral: "Once more into the fray / Into the last good fight I'll ever know / Live and die on this day / Live and die on this day."

A clap of thunder sounds. Ottway concludes, "Storm clouds." And the men turn their attention back to the present.

So, by the last scene of the movie, then, we've heard the poem twice, and we've seen it—or at least the paper it's written on—several other times as Ottway has stored the letter in which it's written in his wallet and saved it from the plane's burning wreckage. Ottway is the only one left alive, and he's somehow managed to stumble into the wolves' den, metaphor that it is for all of his unresolved issues. Surrounded by bones, standing in the falling snow, and ringed by the wolf pack, he kneels down, makes a pile of all the wallets that he's been collecting from everyone who's died, and adds his own to the stack. He flashes back to the woman we saw him thinking about and writing to in the film's opening montage, and we realize now, for the first time, that she she didn't leave him but died, perhaps of cancer. Then he tapes a dagger to one hand, breaks a bunch of airplane liquor bottles against a rock so that they become weapons, and tapes them to his other hand. Thus armed for his final stand, he flashes back again to his dad's den where the poem hangs on the wall. (You get get it, don't you? Wolf den=dad's den?) He says, "Once more into the fray."

Then, as you can see for yourself in the backwards video clip below, the camera shows us the poem. But what's remarkable about this scene is that we don't see the typewritten poem clearly at first. Rather, in becoming a metaphor for his life, which has slowly come into focus over the course of the film, the poem is blurry at first and is brought into focus and made readable by the camera, letting the audience experience in miniature Ottway's journey toward clarity. With the poem newly readable, Ottway repeats it a final time:

Once more into the fray...
Into the last good fight I'll ever know...
Live and die on this day...
Live and die on this day...

When the camera takes us away from Ottway's father's den and back to the wolf den, we see Ottway still mouthing the words to the poem. We see him next as a boy sitting on his father's lap. We see the woods. We have a close-up on his eyes. We hear a growl that may come from him or from the wolves. Then Ottway leaps forward toward the viewer, and the camera goes black.

Back when we discussed G.I. Jane, P&PC argued that the last scene of that movie (in which the camera helped us to read and interpret an annotated print version of D.H. Lawrence's poem "Self Pity") positioned the film's director—and, by extension, the medium of film—as a type of literary critic better suited than the pencil, pen, or book to the interpretation of poetry in the age of new media. In the last scene of The Grey we see a similar thing happening all over again, as it's not the emotional content of the poem, per se, or the conclusions we as an audience come to about the significance of the poem via our own reading or someone else's annotations, but, rather, the film's treatment of the poem in its various forms that becomes the most important (or at least the most foregrounded) expressive and interpretive act, heavy handed in its metaphor though it may be.

It is, after all, the camera—a piece of technology whose multimodal capacities add to the emotion, interiority, and clarity of insight typically associated with poetry—that makes the verse readable, literally giving us a focus that we did not have previously. As the external manifestation of Ottway's internal state, the movie thus positions film (not the poem, letter, or typewritten document) as the most complete expression of the human psyche, able to bring together and synthesize Ottway's thinking (the memorized poem), speaking (the recited poem), writing (the letter to his wife), and typewriting (the version of the poem on the wall of Ottway's father's den) as no other medium can. That is, thanks to film, we can see the poem thought, spoken, written, and typewritten all at the same time.

You might be asking yourself, how can poetry compete with this tour-de-force and with all the resources that film has at its disposal? Well, we here at P&PC think that maybe that's the wrong question to be asking. As Henry Jenkins writes in his Introduction to Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, "[O]nce a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within the larger system of communication options. Once recorded sound becomes a possibility, we have continued to develop new and improved means of recording and playing back sound. Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theater. Television did not kill radio. Each old medium was forced to coexist with the emerging media....Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies" (14). In other words, maybe The Gray and films like it aren't in the process of disparaging or one-upping poetry (as we've previously argued) so much as they are grounding themselves and their own credibility in poetry and, in the process, opening new possibilities for experiencing poetry. Rather than experiencing the poem solely as a print artifact, for example, The Gray lets us experience it in many media simultaneously.

As a medium, poetry more than just survived the transition from oral culture to written culture (no one today would advocate for going back to a purely oral or spoken poetry). Then it more than just survived the transition from written culture to print culture (no one would advocate for abandoning printed books and going back to only handwritten poetry). Along its long history of remediation, poetry only got more and more complex and more and more aesthetically rich, retaining aspects of its previous media manifestations and mixing those with new ones. As obsessed with the past as Neeson's story in The Gray may be (Ottway's dead father, his dead lover, etc.), the film may nevertheless be pointing us to the future of poetry.

The Poetry Wimp of Family Ties