Richness and Rightness: A P&PC Noir

I'm a man who likes to talk to a man who likes to talk, so when I first heard Jack Milton call Poetry Poultry—it was about eleven o'clock one Tuesday morning down at the Paradise Lost, a joint where you couldn't buy a free verse for a nickle—I knew him for a pal. Jack was blind. He had been since the war, though he had a pair of mitts that could scoop a pot from the table before the butter and egg man knew what was what. He wasn't a chisel, just called 'em for what they were and let the devil take all.

We were reminiscing about the dip he'd caught with his hand knee deep in Jack's fogger the week before, when in she walked. Even Jack put down his snort to lean over and get a slant at her enormous notebook—a big ham of a thing with clippings stuck out the sides and rings from long gone drinks staining the cover. She had on a French cap and lipstick as red as some jasper's face near the last call that never came. And wouldn't you know but she went straight for me like a cheat to a Chicago overcoat.

"Got a light?" she asked.

I had one, all right, but I didn't know her from a hatchetman, and I didn't know what sort of juice she was after.

"As in Sandover," I replied, "or Tennyson's Brigade?"

Something fell over the bar, and for once it wasn't Dick being cuffed by the hammer and saws. It was her notebook. A clipping fell to the ground.

"Yeah," I said. "I got a light."

Behind the bar, Mickey said, "He's not a bad goose, sister. And this ain't no hash house either. What can I get you—this round's on him."

I flipped him the dactyl, but if she were fazed, she didn't let on.

"Calvert," she said, "straight up."

"What's in your bindle?" I asked. "Is that your scrapbook?"

She avoided my eye and reached into her bag. I got ready to beat it like a peterman on the job, but instead of the roscoe I thought she was aiming to aim my way, she pulled out a little red and white striped matchbook with a cute little Calvert owl decorating the cover. "Let the owl select / His favorite refrain," I thought.

Still, I couldn't figure it—I thought she didn't have a light.

And she didn't.

What she had was a little folder of tissues. She tore one off as her drink arrived and pressed it between her lips like a shiv between some snooper's ribs, and I got a load of the verse printed inside:

Yes, Calvert has lightness
And richness and rightness
In a blending as mellow as chimes
It's whiskey perfection—
Your wisest selection—
The Happiest Blend for the times!

"Clear Heads Choose Calvert" read the slogan printed beneath. But by then my head was dizzy.

"It's poetry," I said. "Popular poetry."

"Poultry, baby" she replied, shooting her whiskey. "It's popular poultry."

"With a twist," I said. "Now let's take a look at that scrapbook."

Rat On Toast—For Dinner

It has been a tough week for the P&PC Office cat Stella (pictured here). Courtesy of the SPCA of Pinellas County, Florida, where we found her the victim of two abandonments in a row and slated for, uh, disposal unless someone immediately adopted her, she's now an estimated eighteen years old and has been with P&PC since before there was a even a P or PC on the horizon. Moved from Florida to Iowa, then from Iowa to Oregon, she has done more than measure out her life in coffee spoons. But Time's winged chariot is hurrying near, and this week saw two trips to the vet, a round of oral antibiotics, the regular administration of subcutaneous fluids, and a series of pretty gross litter box-related events.

And so, to speed Stella along the road to recovery, we offer the strange 1898 "Rat on Toast—for Dinner" steroeview card issued by T.W. Ingersoll and pictured here. "Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of glass and pasteboard!" wrote the Fireside poet and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. of his stereoview card collection in "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," first published in The Atlantic Magazine in 1859.  Credited with inventing the "American stereoscope," Holmes imagined that the mechanism's 3-D viewing experience would produce an effect similar to bodily resurrection and that "posterity might therefore inspect us ... not as surface only, but in all our dimensions as an undisputed solid man of Boston."

Stella is certainly no man of Boston, and we're not so pessimistic that we're already viewing her from the vantage point of posterity, but maybe the quasi L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poem on the card's reverse will help in some small way to restore her to her full dimensions:

Do you see the cat?
Do you see the rat?
I see the cat and the rat. The cat caught the rat and killed it with her sharp teeth.
Does the cat eat rats?
Fat rats make fat cats.
The Chinese eat rabbit stew made of rats.

The poem itself is an odd, paratactic stew of elements taken from nursery rhymes, grammar school food chain hierarchies, and nineteenth century American nativism culminating in that bizarre non-sequitur of a last line, and that stew is made even more perplexing when paired with the surreal image on front. But after the week of needles, drip chambers, and eyedroppers we've had, not even that is enough to surprise us.

Remembering The New Northwest, Part IV: "Paddy's New Idea"

About two years ago, P&PC ran a three-part series, "Remembering The New Northwest," that spent some time thinking about the poetry published in the suffragist newspaper started in 1871 by Oregon women's rights leader Abigail Scott Duniway. (That's Duniway with a copy of her paper pictured here.) Now digitized, The New Northwest ran poetry—some political, some not so overtly political, some written by Willamette Valley poets, and some sourced from other papers across the United States—in nearly every issue, frequently printing it not as filler between articles but as prominent page-one news (cf. "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower").

Although many people today think of the history of Pacific Northwest poetry more in relation to writers from the second half of the twentieth century like William Stafford, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, and others, the region's poetic tradition goes back much earlier—back, at least, to when Duniway's weekly began offering a way for disparate (and oftentimes anonymous) Northwest voices to find a community of people reading and writing under the paper's motto "Free Speech, Free Press, Free People."

The year 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in Oregon—a centennial being commemorated statewide in events chronicled, sponsored, or otherwise linked to the Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote 1912-2012 project. And so, in helping to mark this anniversary, P&PC has directed its current crop of interns to dip back into the poetic archives of The New Northwest. In 2010, we showcased "The Perplexed Housekeeper" and "Don't Quarrel About the Farm," and we argued that Samuel Simpson's once popular and now much maligned nature poem "The Beautiful Willamette" got converted into a suffragist poem by virtue of its appearance in Duniway's paper.

Now, for the fourth installment of "Remembering The New Northwest," we bring you Stephen Maybell's problematic suffragist poem "Paddy's New Idea," which ran in late January or early February of 1872. (Due to some haphazard records kept by a former P&PC office member, as well as several missing issues in the otherwise spectacular digitized run, we are unable to pinpoint the exact publication date at this time.) Maybell was a regular contributor to the paper, and, we think, one of its most consistently interesting if troublesome voices. Here—in an Irish dialect, in two voices, and referring to the Democratic Party's post-Civil War New Departure political platform as well as to the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870—is "Paddy's New Idea":

PADDY:

"Och! Biddy, did ye hear the news,
How politics has got the blues,
Turned upside down and inside out?
Bedad, one don’t know what he's 'bout
When he goes votin'."

"Shure once 'twas plain Democrisy;
Now 'New Departure' troubles ye.
With Ku Klux Klan and Loyal Laygers,
We're no better than the others
Whin we go votin'."

"Shure things ain't things at all of late;
The Pope and Boney's bald pate;
And, faix, I heard Mullroony say
The Chinese'id take Amerikay
By beatin' us a votin'."

"Shure, Chinese, nagurs and the Injun
All can vote without infringin',
For the new 'mendment gives, 'tis clare,
To everything with skin and hair
The power to go votin'."

BIDDY:

"Spite of all the clergy's prachin',
Spite of all old fogy teachin',
I always knew a woman's head
Held brains, no matter what they said –
Aye, brains enough for votin'."

"Oh, Paddy, darlint, whin wid me
It's then you are sobriety;
It only is when ye're away
Ye go upon the bastely sprae,
Dead blind drunk wid votin'."

"It's brains ye may have in your head,
And wit and all that may be said;
Though kin intelligence vote right
Whin that intelligence is tight?
Whisky doin' the votin'?"

"Last election whiskey won it;
Ye's all drunk upon it;
Your polls were held at whiskey mills,
Your candidates run whiskey stills,
And whisky did the votin'."

"Now, had the ladies been adjacent
Ye'd tried and been a little dacent.
Would it not be the nation’s gains
Were whiskey less and more were brains
To do Columbia’s votin'?"

"So, Paddy, whin we can do so,
We'll arm in arm together go
To cast our vote in freedom's pride,
And say who shall tax our fire-side,
FREE MEN AND FREE WOMEN!"

PADDY:

"Shure, Biddy, this caps all the bother
For maid, wife, sister, mother;
Say, if kind to pagan misters,
Why not kind also to sisters
And let them go votin'?"

"This is liberty's dominion,
The boasted land of free opinion,
And if free men are but true men,
Why not make you a free woman
And let you go, too, to votin'?"

While the dialect-facilitated rhyme of the words "adjacent" and "dacent" is totally pleasing, "Paddy's New Idea" is never- theless a puzzling and complex poem—especially as it depicts the nature of the "lightbulb moment" when Paddy makes the right decision to support women's suffrage but makes that decision for the wrong reasons.

As the slurs in Paddy's catalog of ethnic others ("Chinese, nagurs and the Injun") suggest, the poem serves to remind us that not all progressive political agendas go hand in hand. That much we know and have known, not only generally but specifically in relation to the movement for women's suffrage, which was stressed from the inside by racist rhetoric, agendas, and policies that distinguished between, and divided, white women and women of color.

What "Paddy's New Idea" offers in addition to this, however, is a demonstra- tion of how, at least from the vantage point of history, a progressive political stance can be founded upon a logic that is not, in fact, progressive. That is, while Paddy comes to see the light (that women should vote) in the final two stanzas of the poem, he not only doesn't acknowledge the legitimacy of Biddy's arguments about how women have "brains enough for votin'" and could help reform the drunken culture of voting in the Northwest, but he makes his decision on the basis of a nativist and racist political logic that fears, and seeks to curtail, the new voting power of Chinese, African American, and American Indian men named in stanzas three and four. For Paddy, enfranchising women has less to do with women's rights than with finding a way to come up with extra votes to counter and overwhelm newly enfranchised social groups whom he perceives as threatening to "take Amerikay / By beatin' us a votin'." A similar argument for women's suffrage was used in the American south, where suffragists appealed to white southern men by claiming that larger numbers of white women going to the polls would work to keep black men from gaining power.

We think there's even more at work in "Paddy's New Idea" than this, however —an extra-extra dimension to how Paddy instrumentalizes the women's suffrage movement to accomplish something other than the enfranchisement of women. In fact, that added dimension is suggested all over the poem, right there in the Irish dialect that should remind us how, in the nineteenth-century U.S., the Irish weren't necessarily considered "white" but racially other; that is, many Americans—perhaps cued in part by the drunken stereotype that Biddy evokes in her part of the poem—would would have been inclined to include "Irish" alongside "Chinese, nagurs and the Injun" in Paddy's catalog from stanza four. In her famous essay "The Yellow Wallpaper and the Politics of Color in America," for example, Susan Lanser traces in part how the adjective "yellow" referred in daily discourse not solely to peoples of Asian heritage but to a range of ethnicities and races including the Irish. Consider also the cartoon pictured here (taken from from the mainstream periodical Harper's Weekly), which depicts the Irish (on the left) as more similar to the "Negro" (on the right), with the "Anglo Teutonic" in the middle.

The "whitening" of the Irish is thus a fascinating and complex history that includes, but is hardly limited to, the color of skin, and we here at P&PC think that "Paddy's New Idea" gives us one of the many plot points in that history. For if Maybell's character of Paddy sees women's suffrage as a way to counter the voting power of newly enfranchised people of color, he also finds in its occasion for nativist performance a way to distinguish himself from other people of color and thus affiliate himself with whiteness. That is, in this "lightbulb" moment wherein he embraces one progressive political agenda (women's suffrage) only to simultaneously embrace—and recruit Biddy for—an unprogressive political agenda (the project of white supremacy), Paddy demonstrates solidarity with white America and thus works to whiten the Irish in the process. In a sense, then, we can do worse than to read Paddy's moment of political "enlightenment" as a moment of political "en-whitenment" as well.

We are left, therefore, at the end of "Paddy's New Idea," to wonder what, exactly, the singular "new idea" of the poem's title refers to. That women should have the right to vote? That voting women are a viable political weapon to leverage against the votes of people of color? Or that Paddy can use this occasion to demonstrate, and even establish solidarity with, white America? We here at P&PC are going on record to say that Paddy's Machiavellian new idea is not any one of the above, but that he can do all three at once.

The Cutting Edge of Advertising Poetry?

National Poetry Month Events in Salem

On Saturday, March 31, the Oregon state finals for this year's Poetry Out Loud competition were held in Salem on the campus of Willamette University, which was for the most part enjoying Spring Break at the time and so heard little about it; coverage in the local press was pretty slim, too, even though the winner of Saturday's contest goes on to represent Oregon at the National finals scheduled for May 13-15 in Washington, D.C. Go Oregon!

Saturday may have marked a milestone in some high school student's life—P&PC reporters can, as of yet, find no mention of who prevailed— but it might also be said to have marked the beginning of National Poetry Month 2012 in Salem as well. If you're in and around the state capital this month, you'll find plenty of poetry and poetry-related events to keep you busy. From open mics to visiting authors, poetry contests, and even a lecture on the poetry of fishing, you could say that this year's events are pretty, uh, diverse, and so we've done our best to gather as many as possible here for your convenience and easy reference.

N.B. P&PC's fact checkers have been out of the office and on Spring Break for the past week, so we can't vouch for the absolute accuracy of the following times, dates, and places. We therefore recommend that you double check with each sponsoring organization to make sure that information is up to date.

April 1-29
National Poetry Month Exhibit
Main Floor, Salem Public Library

The library continues its tradition of exhibiting finely printed poetry broadsides in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year’s show focuses on the works of four Oregonians—Carl Adamshick, twin brothers Matthew and Michael Dickman, and Michael McGriff—all of whom are recent winners of major national poetry prizes.

Tuesday • April 3 • 7:00 pm
Poetry Open Mic
Salem Public Library Loucks Auditorium

To celebrate National Poetry Month, Salem Public Library invites area poets and poetry aficionados to participate in this special edition of Grown-Up Storytime. Local actors Claire Diehl, Jeff Sanders, Tom Wrosch, Geri Greeno, and Lyndsey Houser read contemporary poems. Also, anyone who has a favorite poem—whether original or by a published poet—may also read. The only requirement is that it takes five minutes or less. For more information or to reserve a place on the program, contact Ann Scheppke at 503-588-6124 or ascheppke@cityofsalem.net.

Wednesday • April 4
First Annual Edible Book Festival
Hatfield Library, Willamette University

Held in conjunction with (who knew?) the International Edible Book Festival (Festival international du livre mangeable) this, uh, feast for the eyes offers some, well, food for thought as entries are made of food and inspired by literary titles, characters, or authors. Looking for inspiration? Check out some entries from the Seattle Festival, University of Puget Sound, Duke, and the University of Illinois. Viewing and drop-off of entries from 8:00 am - 1:00 pm; awards ceremony at 2:30 pm. Prizes include People's Choice, Most Beautiful, Most Creative, Most Literary, and Punniest.

Wednesday • April 4 • 7:30 pm
Oregon Book Awards Author Tour
Hatfield Room, Willamette University Library

In partnership with Literary Arts, Inc., of Portland, the Hallie Ford Chair and English Department will host a reading by three finalists—poet Geri Doran, memoirist Jennifer Lauck, and graphic novelist Greg Rucka—for this year's Oregon Book Award. The Oregon Book Awards are presented annually for the finest accomplishments by Oregon writers working in various genres, including fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and young adult literature.

Thursday • April 5 • 7:00 pm
Classic Poetry Group
Salem Public Library, Plaza Room

Meeting on the first Thursday every month, this group shares favorite poems from British and American poetry written before the First World War. Each member brings a handful of poems to read aloud to the group. For more information call Wendell Buck at 503-588-6317.

April 6-May 26
Art & Poetry Exhibition
Bush Barn Art Center

This year's Art & Poetry Exhibition will feature work by students from Hillcrest Oregon Youth Authority Correctional Facility. During this project, poet Dawn Diez Willis and photographer Barry Shapiro spent the semester bringing art and poetry to a group of exceptional young artists who wrote and then illustrated poems.

Wednesday • April 11 • 12:00-1:00 pm
"The Poetry of Fishing"
A lecture by Henry Hughes
Oregon State Library

Spend your lunch hour with Western Washington University English professor Henry Hughes as he shares his own poetry and meditates on various "classic and contemporary poems and stories that involve the art of angling."

Thursday • April 12 • 4:00 pm
Dan Kaplan Poetry Reading
Hatfield Room, Willamette University Library

Dan Kaplan is the author of Bill's Formal Complaint (The National Poetry Review Press, 2008) and the bilingual chapbook SKIN (Red Hydra Press, 2005). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, VOLT, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He teaches at Portland State University and is visiting professor of creative writing at Willamette this semester.

April 13-15
Salem Public Library Spring Book Sale

Sponsored by the Friends of Salem Public Library, this might be the place to find that used copy of Rod McKuen or Jewell that you need to complete your collection.

April 13-21
Silverton Poetry Festival

Technically not in Salem, Silverton's annual festivities—poetry readings, workshops, feasting and hobnobbing—are worth putting on your to-do list since they're only a couple miles down the road. Public events held April 13, 14, 15, 18, and 21.

Saturday • April 14 • 5:00 pm
Celebrating Poetry with Airlie Press
Hatfield Room, Willamette University Library

The Willamette Store hosts five Airlie Press poets—Chris Anderson, Donna Henderson, Stephanie Lenox, Annie Lighthart, and Dawn Diez—in a cornucopia of locally-sourced Willamette Valley poetry. Admission is free with a suggested donation of canned and other non-perishable food items for Marion-Polk Food Share. For more information, call 503-370-6772.

Monday • April 16 • 5:00 pm
Deadline to enter the Willamette Store’s 6th Annual Poetry Contest

A cornucopia of awards—for best rhymed poem, best unrhymed poem, and best haiku in each category—are distributed each year by the Willamette Store to poets ranging in age from elementary school to adult.

Wednesday • April 18 • 7:00 pm
Who Are We? A Poetic Discussion of Our Identities
Willamette University, Hudson Hall

Come out for an evening of spoken word poetry focusing on the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of our identities. Say the organizers of this event, "We are still looking for poets to read a piece or two. This is not at all limited to Willamette students, so please spread the word and get in contact if you or someone you know are interested in speaking!" Click here for the Facebook Event Page.

Wednesday • April 18 • 7:00 pm
Chrysalis Reading
Hatfield Room, Willamette University Library

Enjoy a cup o' joe at Willamette University's student-run coffee house as writers from The Chrysalis—Willamette's campus literary magazine—read from their published work.

Thursday • April 19 • 7:30 pm
Poetry Night at the Willamette University Bistro

Take a break from the week and come listen to Willamette faculty and staff read their favorite poems.

Thursday • April 26 • 6:00 pm
Bold Expressive Arts Theater
West Salem High School

Bold Expressive Arts Theater (B.E.A.T. 2012) will perform live at West Salem High School. Students from the Oregon School for the Deaf will show a variety of talent on the stage. They will perform dance, song and poetry through American Sign Language. For more information on the show, call (503) 378-3840.

Thursday • April 26 • 7:30 pm
Musical Sing-Along: Chicago
Grand Theater

Come sing along to this fantastic musical! Lyrics are projected on the screen, so don't worry if you don't know all the words. Doors open at 6:30. Cost: $8 adults, $4 youth (16 and under).

Saturday • April 28 • 11:00 am
6th Annual Young Persons Poetry Reading
Salem Public Library, Loucks Auditorium

Winners of the Willamette Store's sixth Annual Poetry Contest start up an open mic by reading from their work.

Saturday • April 28 • 7:00-9:00 pm
Adult winners of the Willamette Store's Poetry Contest
Grand Vines Restaurant

Have a glass or two of wine and order from a menu of appetizers, soups, sandwiches, and chocolates as adult winners of the Willamette Store's annual poetry contest read from their work. For more information call (503) 399-9463.

Monday • April 30
Submission Deadline for Mama Ain't Raised No Fool

Willamette University's 'zine is accepting poetry submissions for its next issue. Accepted work submitted before April 21 will be read on stage at this year's Wulapalooza. Submissions from students may be sent to mama.aint@gmail.com; submissions from students and community members may also be delivered in person at Mama's festival booth.

April 30-May 1 • Times TBA
New Literary Works Festival
Putnam Studio, Willamette University Theater Building

This two-evening program will celebrate the written word with a combination of dramatic readings of plays, poetry, and prose by students in the Theater Department's Atypical Performance class and the English Department's Senior Seminar in Creative Writing.

Mermaids in the Basement & Automatons in the Loft: The Poetry of Hugo and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane

Of the three films set in the 1920s that were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year (The Artist, Midnight in Paris, and Hugo), P&PC liked Martin Scorsese's Hugo the best. It wasn't even close. I mean, we enjoyed the others a lot—we did. The characters of Salvador Dali and Ernest Hemingway in Midnight in Paris had us clutching our sides and ROTFLOL. And we sat, like the rest of the audience at the Salem Cinema, stunned as George Valentin did the best reworking of the silent-to-talkie transition thing since Sunset Boulevard (and way better than the 1975 Merchant Ivory film The Wild Party, which we mention here mainly because we've got to give it props for being one of the few films ever based on a poem (Joseph Moncure March's jazzy, underrated, and once-controversial 1928 book-length poem of the same title). But Hugo's story of the 12 year-old fugitive orphan who maintains the clocks at the Gare Montparnasse and who serendipitously strikes up a relationship with a toy store owner who happens to be the silent film maker Georges Méliès in hiding just got us. Based on Brian Selznick's novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Scorsese' movie had all the Parisian romance that Midnight in Paris did, and it had all the celebration of movies that The Artist did, but it had at least one thing that the others didn't: poetry.

We're not talking "poetry" in the "it was as eloquent as poetry" sense, nor in the "it had all the beauty and pathos of poetry" sense. No, Hugo really had poetry in it. About forty-five minutes into the film, Hugo and his precocious, middle-class schoolgirl friend Isabelle are at the train station. They've just been kicked out of a movie theater (Hugo sneaked them in by picking the lock to a back door), and Hugo is taking her to see the automaton that he's been trying to repair in memory of his father—the automaton that, with the help of Isabelle's heart-shaped key, eventually draws a picture that links Hugo to Isabelle's godfather Méliès (played by Ben Kingsley) and thus helps bring the automaton-like Méliès back to life. Before they can get to Hugo's digs in the train station loft, however, Hugo and Isabelle are stopped by the Clouseau-hilarious, existentially-wounded train station policeman Inspector Gustave—played wonderfully by Sacha Baron Cohen in the scene pictured here—who has had his eye on Hugo for weeks and who specializes in sending unchaperoned children off to the orphanage. Inspector Gustave grills Hugo and Isabelle about why they are roaming the station without parents, and Gustave's doberman companion Maximilien (as in Robespierre, we assume), who has given chase to Hugo a time or two before, sniffs them up and down suspiciously. Here's the exchange that follows:

Maximilien: Bark, bark.

Gustave: Seems Maximilien doesn't like the cut of your jib, little man. He is disturbed by your physiognomy. He is upset by your visage. Why would he not like your face? Eh?

Isabelle: Well, perhaps he smells my cat.

Gustave: Your cat?

Isabelle: Yes, Christina Rossetti's her name, after the poetess. Would you like me to recite?

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd chute;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set...

Gustave: All right, all right. I know the rest. That’s enough poetry for today. I love poetry, particularly … that poem … by Christina...

Isabelle: Rossetti.

Gustave: Yeah yeah—she's one of my favorites. I know it's Rossetti. I know it's Rossetti. I love poetry, just not … in the station. We’re here … to get on trains 'n' get off 'em, work in different shops. Is that clear?

Isabelle: Yessir.

Gustave: Watch your step. Go on. Go!

Fending off Gustave's advances, Isabelle is quoting the first four lines of Rossetti's "A Birthday," and one of the many compelling things about this scene and the role of poetry in Hugo is that there's no mention whatsoever of Rossetti in the original novel—it was added for the film. Even more curious than this, perhaps, is that the poetry that is mentioned in the book is left out of the movie. Apparently, as Hugo's father suggests in one of the novel's early scenes, and as Selznick explains in his acknowledgments, the automaton that Hugo is trying to repair—and that, in the story that the movie tells, once belonged to Méliès—is based on an actual automaton (pictured here) that was built by the 18th century Swiss mechanician Henri Maillardet. Now in the collection of the Franklin Institute museum in Philadelphia, Maillardet's automaton not only draws four different pictures, but it writes three poems as well, two in French and one in English.

Examining the broken automaton in Selznick's novel, Hugo's father explains, "I'm sure that if it were working, you could wind it up, put a piece of paper on the desk, and all those little parts would engage and cause the arm to move in such a way that it would write out some kind of note. Maybe it would write a poem or a riddle. But it's too broken and rusty to do much of anything now.” Hugo's dad was right—one of the poems written by the Maillardet automaton is pictured here, and you can see a couple of videos of the machine working here—but Scorsese's automaton is, apparently, only capable of making pictures. We here at P&PC understand the movie logic, of course, which is also at play in other films like G.I. Jane, The Contract, and The Long Hot Summer that either construct their credibility as art in relation to poetry or else participate in waging what we've called a "strange, low-level, but ongoing smear campaign against poetry." Hugo is ultimately about the magic of movies, and so the magical things in it must (so movie logic goes) be associated with visual phenomena—pictures that are moving both literally and emotionally—and not with what emerges, in the process, as the counter-discourse of words and their epitome: poetry.

If you pay attention to these sorts of things like the investigative reporters on staff at P&PC do, then the Christina Rossetti scene in Hugo, as original as it seems, might actually sound a little familiar—not because it's in Selznick's book (which it's not), but because it's essentially a replaying of a scene from the disturbing 1976 Nicolas Gessner thriller and murder mystery The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. In a great illustration of T.S. Eliot's quip about how the good artist borrows but the great one steals, Scorsese's film basically takes Gessner's scene—in which a precocious girl outmaneuvers a police officer by quoting poetry in a small New England town—and transports it to 1920s Paris. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is the story and quasi-Oedipal drama (adapted from Laird Koenig's 1974 novel of the same name) of Rynn Jacobs (Jodi Foster), an orphan (sound familiar?) who keeps living in her poet-father's house long after he's died (hello, Hugo). Rightly suspicious about the whereabouts of Rynn's parents, Officer Miglioriti stops by one night, asking to speak with Rynn's father for the purpose of telling him about the improper attention that town resident Frank Hallett (a totally creepy Martin Sheen) has been paying to Rynn. Rynn goes upstairs to get her dad, but, as usual, comes back down saying he's unavailable because he's hard at work on his poetry. Here's that scene:

Rynn: Sorry, he's working. He's translating some Russian poetry. When that door is locked I can't bother him.

[Rynn sits on the couch and picks up a cup of tea]

I suspect the only reason [landlord] Mrs. Hallet lets us into her village is because my father is a poet. Mrs. Hallet loves poets. That's one of his books over there.

Miglioriti [picking up the book from the mantle]: He wrote that, huh?

Rynn: Yeah. You want him to sign a copy for you?

Miglioriti: Yeah, sure, I never met a real poet. I mean … Look, don't laugh at me, but I can't believe people like poetry. I'm not talking about that birthday card stuff, but real poetry. And when it doesn't even rhyme!

[Rynn snickers}

Rynn: Oh, I'm not laughing at you. My father says that most people who say they like poetry only pretend to like it. You're honest.

Miglioriti: He's your favorite poet, huh?

Rynn: No, he's my father. Emily Dickinson's my favorite.

Miglioriti: Emily—Emily Dickinson, yeah.

[At the mention of Dickinson, Miglioritti changes the topic, and their discussion turns to Mrs. Hallet's son and how it can be pretty nice in the village once someone gets used to it.]

So you do the math: in both movies, a precocious young woman protects a secret from an older, threatening, male law enforcement official by rebuffing him with a magic charm in the form of an unmarried, nineteenth-century woman poet. Sure, Isabelle in Hugo actually quotes Rossetti while Rynn doesn't quote Dickinson. But isn't the reclusive Rynn—living alone in the house in a small New England town—actually channeling Dickinson herself? In fact, given the secrets Rynn has in the house's basement, and the father she pretends is on the upper floor, it's hard not to hear the first two stanzas of Dickinson's poem "I started Early—Took my Dog" as a silent soundtrack to this scene:

I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –

And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – upon the Sands –

Hollywood hasn't been shy about linking poetry with criminals and other people trying to avoid the law: an escaped hit man played by Morgan Freeman quotes it in The Contract; it makes up the world through which assassin Martin Q. Blank moves in in Grosse Pointe Blank; it is quoted by Ponyboy in The Outsiders; it interferes with Daddy Varner's authority in The Long Hot Summer; it is linked with "England's greatest sinner" in Bride of Frankenstein; and it is written by Edward Norton's character in Fight Club. Trend? We think so. Both The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane and Hugo participate in this tradition, but in putting poetry into the mouths of juvenile female speakers, they turn it, we feel, in slightly different direction. We're not sure what that direction is at the moment. But like Gustave's doberman Maximilien, we're not entirely confident, here at the beginning of National Poetry Month 2012, that we like the cut of its jib—or its visage.

P&PC in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture

Between 1860 and 1920, advertising strategies for two products almost singlehandedly changed the face of consumer culture in the United States—or so Cary Nelson and P&PC claim in "American Advertising: A Poem for Every Product," which is Chapter 7 in the newly-released, 700-page tome U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920 (Volume 6 of Oxford's History of Popular Print Culture series). At $160, the book's no cheapie (maybe Oxford needs a jingle or two to help advertise it?), but Nelson and P&PC offer ten images from their private collections and lots of great verse to show how poetry—a genre that many people associate with anticapitalist endeavors—fueled the development of the advertising industry and paved the way for a myriad of advertising techniques we're familiar with today.

In "A Poem for Every Product," Nelson and P&PC argue that, while poems were used to pitch everything from galoshes to carriages, two consumer items in particular—patent medicines and soap—deserve special credit (or blame) in powering the development and expansion of the American advertising industry and its poetry, as U.S. poets found at that conjunction the possibility for regular incomes and audiences appreciative of their skills. In the writing of this essay, Nelson took on the subject of patent medicines while P&PC picked up on the issue of soap (a topic we've addressed on this blog before), and we found the two products to be intimately related, as soap assumed the dominant place in advertising that patent medicines occupied prior to the Progressive Era's truth-in-advertising movements that culminated, in part, in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The shift from snake oil to soap—two items with simple recipes that needed advertising to differentiate one brand of similar material from another—was complicated and not accomplished overnight, but one of the poets helping it along was the phenomenally successful Canadian writer and artist Palmer Cox. Thus, Cox serves as a sort of fulcrum in "A Poem for Every Product," a moment halfway through the essay when Nelson's argument about patent medicines transitions to P&PC's thoughts about soap. Here, in the way of a preview of that essay, follows an excerpt from the moment in "A Poem for Every Product" when the shady business of advertising starts relying on soap to help, uh, clean up its act:

"In 1890, five years after writing 'Wisdom in Fable' for Pond's Extract, Palmer Cox [pictured here] produced 'A Friendly Turn' to advertise Ivory Soap for Cincinnati's Procter and Gamble Company. There, in four pages of his trademark tetrameter couplets and whimsical pen and ink illustrations, Cox called on his 'Brownies' to spin a tale of Ivory's elfin origin, purity, and medicinal qualities. While not as universal in its application as Pond's—which in 1885 had purported to resolve a range of skin ailments in addition to 'Sore Throat, Rheumatism, Wounds, Catarrh, Hemorrhages, Nose Bleed, Sprains, [and] Swellings'—Ivory is nonetheless credited with the ability to treat people's 'scabby heads,' 'unsightly pimples,' 'scaly crust,' and 'body sore.' Like a miracle cure, the 'pure and perfect' Brownie concoction works its transformative magic almost overnight:

No more were seen the scabby heads,
Or finest garments all in shreds,
No more unsightly pimples rose,
To mar the chaps, or scaly crust,
Made people wish themselves in dust.
For, from the infant on the breast,
To those who neared their final rest,—
For rich and poor, the great and small,
Found Ivory Soap had cleansed them all.

For people suffering, Cox writes, as if pitching the merits of a patent medicine, 'Their sole relief and only hope / Is found in using Ivory Soap.'

"The apparent ease with which Cox moves—or has been moved—between patent medicine advertising and soap advertising is in part an indication of his poetry's general marketability and public appeal, but it's also emblematic of a larger, conceptual shift that took place in American advertising in the last decade of the nineteenth century. That shift—which occurred as the age of patent medicine advertising was coming to an end—saw advertisers seize on and redeploy the curative rhetoric of nostrum advertising in order to market other consumer goods as well. In promoting a transformative power inherent to the commodity item, this new strategy not only contributed to the further fetishization of goods in the new 'modern' consumer economy by further obscuring the labour relations of their production. It also publicized the notion that the commodity item was itself a cure for people's many and varied ills—promising to be not just a physical good with a specific use, but a shortcut to social status, sex appeal, or lifestyle—and that the corresponding act of buying and consuming was a medicinal activity in its own right. That is, in the expansion of patent medicine advertising strategies more broadly at this time, we can see the birth of what we now call 'retail therapy.'

"That expansion didn't happen all at once, nor did it happen equally from product to product. Indeed, restructuring the logic of consumption and Americans' relationship to commodity items in this way required a tangible form of what Fredric Jameson would call a 'vanishing mediator'—that entity which 'serves as a bearer of change and social transformation, only to be forgotten once that change has ratified the reality of the institutions.' In the case of American consumer capitalism, that signal mediating product was soap, partly because soap had been included in the patent-medicine industry for a long time [it was oftentimes an ingredient in nostrums], and partly because it provided an outward performance—taking something dirty and making it clean—of the transformative character that advertisers hoped would eventually become linked in the American psyche to every other product....So twinned were the discourses of patent medicine and soap at the end of the nineteenth century that at least one nineteenth-century producer of nostrums—Palmer Cox's patron, Pond's Healing and Pond's Extract—was able to respond to the Pure Food and Drug act by transforming itself almost immediately into a skin-care cleansing specialist, Pond's Cold Cream, which is still on the market today."

For the rest of this essay—including the performance of Dreydoppel's Borax Soap in "The Great Contest!!"—check out Chapter 7 of U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920 from Oxford University Press.