Poetry Out Loud 2015

On Saturday, March 14, Willamette University once again played host to the final round of Oregon's Poetry Out Loud state competition, and P&PC was there as usual. We just can't stay away. In 2013 and 2014, we judged at the regional and state levels, and this year we judged at the regional level and then helped to convene a pre-competition luncheon discussion at W.U. along with last year's state winner Rosie Reyes, who came back from Oregon State University (where she is now a student) to share some poetry and her experiences representing Oregon at the national level in D.C. the past two years. We swapped stories about reading, memorizing, and reciting poems. We recited some poems. And we nibbled at our sandwiches over the protests of the butterflies fluttering in all of our stomachs.

This year, nine students from around the state— Gypsy Prince, Mitchell Lenneville, Sarah Dom- browsky, Jessica Nguyen, Anna Smiley, Atya-Sha Van Ness, Serena Morgan, Allegra Thatcher, and Riley Knowles—represented their regions as winners at the classroom, school, and regional levels. While final numbers for 2015 aren't yet in, the numbers from 2014 suggest that those nine are the tip of a very big iceberg. In 2014, more than 365,000 students, 2,300 schools, and 8,800 teachers participated in Poetry Out Loud nationwide, making the contest—now celebrating its tenth year—one of the most successful poetry outreach programs we can think of. We're in awe at what the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and state and local arts agencies like the Oregon Arts Commission have managed to make happen in the past decade. Tell your Congressional representatives to keep funding to the NEA flowing so that programs like this one keep going on!

This year, the Hatfield Room of W.U.'s Library was packed with families, teachers, students, and dignitaries and celebrities including the Oregon Arts Commission's executive director Brian Rogers, several OAC commissioners, Poetry Foundation ambassador Justine Haka, and Erika Lauren Aguillar, an international exchange student at the Oregon School for the Deaf who performed her American Sign Language version of Dorothy Parker's "Love Song" during intermission. We here at P&PC loved all the performances (especially Jessica Nguyen's rendition of Robert Creeley's "For Love"), and we've no doubt that judges Laurence Overmire, Ann Peck McBride, and Marty Hughley had a heck of a time coming to a decision. And it was close, coming down to a tie breaker mechanism between Gypsy Prince of the Academy of Arts and Academics in Springfield and Riley Knowles of West Linn High School.

In the end, Prince (pictured here) took first place on the strength of her final poem, Gregory Djanikian's "Mrs. Caldera's House of Things," and she will represent the Beaver State at the national competition taking place April 27-29 in Washington, D.C. (Let's give a big P&PC shout-out to Prince's teacher Scott Crowell!) Prince is a three-time school champion and was one of last year's state finalists as well. She performed William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" in round one, Margaret Atwood's "Backdrop Addresses Cowboy," in round two, and then Djanikian's poem in round three. Knowles (no relation to Bey and pictured on the right in the photo accompanying the second paragraph above) performed Gwendolyn Brooks's "A Song in the Front Yard," Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying," and Ernest Dowson's "April Love." As runner-up, she will represent Oregon in the event that Prince cannot.

Congratulations to all of this year's competitors, and thank you to all of the students, teachers, administrators, judges, and sponsors who keep this event on our Spring calendar. We are inspired by your dedication, your abilities, and your energy—and we'll see you next year. We'll leave you with the following video in which Prince recites Djanikian's poem and in which Deborah Vaughn, the Arts Education/Poetry Out Loud Coordinator of the Oregon Arts Commission, announces the judge's final results. Happy viewing—and good luck in D.C., Gypsy!

Poetry Out Loud State Championship!

This year, the Oregon state championship for Poetry Out Loud—the national poetry recitation contest sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts in conjunction with state and local art agencies—was held in the Hatfield Room of Willamette University's Hatfield Library. There, surrounded by the rather austere looking, glass-enclosed private library of former U.S. Senator and Bearcat alum Mark Hatfield, nine high school students from around the state recited their hearts out in hopes of heading on to the national competition being held in Washington, D.C., at the end of April.

As was the case in 2013, P&PC spent two weekends working with Poetry Out Loud this year. Alongside poet Stephanie Lenox and actor/professor Susan Coromel, we helped to judge the regional contest one weekend ago in Salem, and then yesterday at Bearcat central we served on a panel of judges that included current Oregon poet laureate Paulann Petersen, Eleanor Berry, and Wendy Thompson. Contestants—all of whom had succeeded at school and regional levels in making their way to the finals—met at W.U. in the late morning, where they had an intimate lunch with Petersen in an Eaton Hall seminar room and talked about the oral character of poetry and reasons for reciting it and reading it aloud. That's our Oregon Nine pictured above. From left to right, they are: Gypsy Prince of Springfield; Rosie Reyes of Portland; Rebekah Ratcliff of Medford; Sofia Gispert Tello of Hermiston; Stephanie Gordon of Bandon; the mostly-hidden McKinley Rodriguez of Portland; Kylie Winger of Medford; Maxwell Romprey of West Salem; and, rocking the pink hair, Jerika Fuller of Oregon City. (Two poetry superheroes whom you don't see in the picture are Deb Vaughn and Sarah Dougher of the Oregon Arts Commission who do all of the contest's coordination and legwork.)

As always, P&PC came away better, smarter, and happier for being involved. Fuller wowed us with her recitation of Stephen Crane's "In the Desert." Ratcliff introduced us to Paul Engle's "Hero." Rodriguez soared through Kevin Young's "Cadillac Moon." And Tello, a sophomore from Hermiston High School whom we had admired in the regional contest, wowed us with her understated version of "The Cities Inside Us" by Alberto Rios. When all was said and done, however, it was Rosie Reyes—last year's state champion, pictured here—who once again walked away with first prize. Her renditions of Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying" and Emily Dickinson's "It was not Death, for I stood up" were superb, but it was her spellbinding performance of Alberto Rios's "The Pomegranate and the Big Crowd" that took the cake. Rosie is heading to Oregon State University next Fall to study physical therapy, but the P&PC Office hopes she sticks with the poetry thing as well—and that she kicks some butt in representing Oregon in D.C. Go, Rosie!

In the event that Rosie is for some reason unable to represent the Beaver state, that responsibility will fall to contest runner-up and West Salem resident Max Romprey (pictured here with his teacher Christina Eddy), whose folksy, aw-shucks demeanor won the crowd over with his versions of Bob Hicok's "After Working Sixty Hours Again for What Reason," Dick Allen's "What You Have to Get Over," and Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias." This was Max's first year in the contest, and because P&PC is headquartered in the Cherry City, we were particularly pleased to see a local performer do so well. Congratulations, Max, and congratulations to all of this year's finalists. We're crushing on you big time.

Poetry Out Loud Comes to Salem

This is an exciting couple of weeks for Oregon high school students, teachers, parents, and judges who are partici- pating in the final leg of the state-level Poetry Out Loud competition—the nationally run program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and state art agencies in which students compete for scholarships and other prizes awarded on the basis of excellence in poetry recitation. (That's 2011 Oregon finalist McKinley Rodriguez with Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen pictured here.)

P&PC is excited about this for a couple of reasons: not only are we sending a repre- sentative to help judge the Northern Regional Contest taking place tomorrow (Saturday, March 9) from 5-8pm at the Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton, but then the following weekend—Saturday, March 16 from 1-4pm—the State Finals take place in Salem at the Willamette Heritage Center at Mission Mill right across the street from Willamette University, one of the few times that the literary arts in Oregon run not through the big city just to the north but through the state capital. Both events are free and open to the public, so come on out for one or both!

As a side note, Petersen will be spending additional time in Salem this coming week when she visits Willamette to meet with students and give a public reading from her new book on Wednesday, March 6 at 7:30pm in the Hatfield Room of the WU library. That reading, too, is free and open to the public. Things poetic are shaking in the capital these days—WU's Prisoner's Poetry program has launched a web site and is getting national attention, the Gold Man Review has just published its new issue, Brightly Dawning Day has just wrapped up its run, and Everyday Reading recently broke the top 100,000 best sellers on Amazon—and it's not even National Poetry Month yet! So leave the dream of the '90s behind in Portland one of these days, and come see what the new millennium is hatching in Salem: poetry with, ahem, a state-capital P.

P&PC Travelogue: The City of Big Shoulders

P&PC just got back from an exhaust- ing, whirlwind trip to Chicago where, in little more than forty-eight hours, we went to three festivals, two museums, one play, and plenty of local restaurants and watering holes while visiting with old friends and checking, in particular, to see if the Windy City's craft beer scene has done anything to displace Old Style from its privileged place in the quenching of the city's thirst (which it has, btw). But there was more than just beer and companionship brewing in the city of the big shoulders, that tool maker, that stacker of wheat, that player with railroads; there was poetry, too—and nearly everywhere we turned from the moment we stepped out of our bargain hotel room at the north side's Heart O' Chicago Motel, it seemed. Here is a little run-down of the popular—and the hopular—we got to taste.

After visiting the Art Institute on Friday afternoon to take in the newly opened Roy Lich- tenstein retro- spective— the first in twenty years and a great combination of high and low that set the tone for our weekend perfectly—we made our way west on Randolph, first to Avec for some trendy snackies and a cocktail, and then to Haymarket Square, site of the 1886 massacre now marked by the bronze statue designed by Chicago artist Mary Brogger and pictured below. What drew us there was not entirely the labor and free speech history lesson but also the Haymarket Pub & Brewery, where we stepped in to sample, in an otherwise mostly underwhelming flight of beers, Haymarket's Hogbutcher Belgian I.P.A. The menu has this to say about the choice of names:

"To celebrate the life and work of the great Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, we named this Belgian I.P.A. after his most famous poem, which celebrated the hard working folks who made our city the greatest on Earth. It's brewed with warrior and chinook, and dry-hopped with warrior and cascades alongside only the finest Belgian ale yeast."

Like many of the beers we sampled, as temperatures outside rose into the 90s reminding us of one of the reasons why P&PC is now headquartered in Oregon, the Hogbutcher was summery, light, not very hoppy, and struck us as a gentle step up from a Hefeweizen—not exactly the ideal match for the "husky, brawling laughter of Youth" in Sandburg's poem, perhaps, but nevertheless a workable gateway beer for a city just getting its craft beer footing.

We found the best beer of the night (the Founders Double Trouble double I.P.A.) not at the Map Room or the Fountain- head but at Bangers & Lace craft beer and craft sausage joint in Wicker Park. Try it—you'll love it. And, to cap of the evening, we stopped by the Green Mill—the birthplace of the poetry slam—on the way home. We'd never been there before (can you believe it?) and we absolutely loved it; the super jazz, a beautiful bar, and an atmosphere oozing with the 1920s more than made up for the standard beer selection and sent us home to our room at the Heart O' Chicago content and resolved to drink a big glass of water, take two ibuprofen, and get up at the crack of dawn the next day.

On Saturday morning, we breakfasted on Swedish pancakes, eggs, and sausage at a little Swedish diner in Andersonville, took in some of Midsommarfest, and got pulled into the Swedish American Museum by our Swedish American traveling companion, the Iowa City Press-Citizen Opinion Editor, Jeff Charis-Carlson. There, we ran smack into "The Parting Words of a Swedish Emigrant" (pictured here) stuck to a post with little in the way of explanation:

I'm bound for young America,
Farewell old Scandinavia.
I've had my fill of cold and toil,
All for the love of mother soil.
You poets with your rocks and rills
Can stay and starve—on words, no frills.
Me, I've got a stomach 'neath my hide,
No bonds can keep me on this side.
There, out west a man breathes free,
While here one slaves, a tired bee.
Drunk with our nectar they've set us afright,
But opportunity has knocked, and we'll take our flight.

Knowing that we ourselves had a flight or two in store later in the day—when we would head to Delilah's for a Belgian beer tasting extravaganza—we grabbed a bottle of water and caught the El downtown for the Printer's Row Book Fair and Lit Fest where, among the 160 or so other exhibitors, the Poetry Foundation had its own tent (pictured here). Celebrating the one-hundredth year of Poetry magazine, the Foundation was giving away free copies of the magazine, pins in the shape of Poetry's winged horse logo, and other goodies like (P&PC geek alert) the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry.

Just opposite the Poetry Foundation tent was the "Arts & Poetry" stage where, right as we stepped in, poet Mark Doty (pictured to the left) was in the midst of wrapping up what was presumably a poetry reading by answering questions from a crowd of 30 or 40 people. You can't see it in this picture, but he had a packed suitcase propped behind the lectern and ready for his flight out of town; we were told by the emcee that he had come to the Fest on his own dime—just like P&PC. After all, who could pass up the chance to visit what Sandburg called this "city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning"—right?  Well, partly so. During the weekend we were there, eight people died and 46 were left wounded elsewhere in the city, continuing a bloody year that has seen Chicago homicides rise 50 percent over 2011 numbers. "Yes, it is true," Sandburg also wrote in his Hogbutcher poem, "I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again."

We met friends from the University of Illinois for dinner at D'Candela, a sweet Peruvian restaurant in Irving Park, saw "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind" at the Neo-Futurists theater on North Ashland, had a cold one at the Hopleaf just around the corner after that, and, fighting the sandman's inevitable approach, wrapped up the night with a warm and watery PBR at Carol's country-western bar. (Yes, by then it was about 3:30 am.) After happening on Mark Doty at the Lit Fest, though, we didn't see any more poetry the rest of the weekend—with the sole exception, perhaps, of the subtractive, scatalogical, semi-poetic graffiti (pictured here) defacing the Jim Beam-sponsored pool table sign-up chalkboard at Delilah's punk rock bar (where, if you recall our mentioning it two paragraphs earlier, we visited to do one-ounce tastings of Belgian beers earlier in the day). So, one might say, in just a matter of minutes we went from Doty to doo-doo. That's Chicago—singing, wicked, crooked, strong, cunning, and laughing.  Sandburg had it right. And that's exactly how we like it.

Just What Poetry's Spin Doctor Ordered: A Review of The Poetry Foundation's New iPhone Application

The P&PC Office has just downloaded the Poetry Foundation's cool iPhone app, and we love it. In the Foundation's words, the new app means "you can now take hundreds of poems by classic and contemporary poets with you wherever you go," but we're less interested in this portability—which simply extends a long tradition of pocket editions and pocket anthologies into the digital age—than we are in how the application itself is structured around traditionally popular ways of poem reading instead of the Modernist ones that first gave Poetry its street cred.

If you are into the individual talent or the individual masterpiece, this app does give you—via a little window at the top of the screen—the ability to search for specific "poems and poets," but that method of poetry finding takes a distinctly secondary back seat to others: you can more easily browse poems by "mood" or "subject" or, if you press a "spin" button or simply shake your phone, the app randomly cross-indexes moods and subjects to produce a catalog of poems along thematic lines (as in the first image above). We just shook the tax-deductible office iPhone, for example, and came up with a list of poems themed around the intersection of "Optimism" and "Work and Play." A second shake gave us "Passion" and "Nature." A third gave us "Worry" and "Youth." Surprisingly, for a little magazine that has come to be associated with individual talents and poetic personalities, the new app is pretty author-free: as the "spin" results in the image pictured above indicate, moods, subjects and titles are far more crucial to the app's operation and use than the author names that dominate the organization of classroom anthologies like the Norton or even the table of contents for Poetry magazine itself (see Vol. 1 No. 1 pictured below).

The Poetry Foundation apparently knows, however, that author names and specific poem titles often pale in importance to subject matter, theme, or mood among a popular readership and so, in reaching out to that readership via the iPhone app, the Foundation has put on a distinctly popular face—a face that probably has Ezra Pound rolling (if not spinning) in his grave. (Try to imagine, for example, an anthology of Modernist poetry being structured around sections titled "Joy" and "Commitment"!) That is, after nearly a century of standing for modernist quality, taste and discrimination, Poetry has gone thoroughly middlebrow if not downright popular in its ambitions, and it's not the world of the little magazine but digital communication technologies—such as the Poetry Tool on the Foundation's web site and the iPhone app discussed here—that have taken it there.

So, what are the implications of this finding system? For one, the iPhone app appears to completely disregard the importance of style, poetic voice, or school of poetic thought when it comes to poetry reading; the modernist call to originality (Pound's battle cry to "make it new") takes a back seat to an index that trucks in the vague categories that Pound cautioned against in the March 1913 issue of Poetry magazine when he wrote "Go in fear of abstractions." As its transhistorical themes suggest—Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti and Ella Wheeler Wilcox (pictured here) turn up together when our spin results in "Passion" and "Nature," for example—the app also foregoes categorization along the lines of literary periodization, disrupting the oftentimes Hegelian narratives of literary history that Poetry and Modernism depended on for literary cachet; thanks to Apple, AT&T, and the Poetry Foundation, all poetry—to misquote T.S. Eliot—is eternally present.

The depreciation of style, the subordination of the individual talent, and the loss of a linear literary narrative results in a general homogenization of poetic history that might leave Harold Bloom, the avant-garde, the English major, and the M.F.A. student at a loss for what books and dissertations to write next. But with the removal of brow lines, the disappearance of an aesthetic priesthood, and the waning aura of authorship and history alike comes a possible restoration or reconfiguration of the early 20th-century reader whom Joan Shelley Rubin has examined in Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. In the day before scholars took it upon themselves to separate highbrow poetry from lowbrow poetry and genteel poetry from modern poetry, Rubin argues, Americans read eclectically, finding and using poems from various literary traditions and time periods for many different purposes, in the process becoming "repositories of both the high and the popular—aware of, but not constrained by, a shifting boundary between them." If the Poetry Foundation is reaching out to touch someone, this is the reader it's likely got in mind.

Make no mistake, P&PC is not claiming that the Poetry Foundation iPhone app is the new beacon of popular poetry reading, although it does improbably contain eight poems by one Edgar Guest, the "people's poet" of the Detroit Free Press (pictured to the left) who would have never fit with Poetry during his lifetime, although he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Michigan—a school that had bestowed the same honor on Robert Frost. However, we are enthused by the new sets of categories which encourage readers to apply poems to their lives and not just to their term papers and GRE tests, and we like the restoration of affect to poetry reading that this suggests. (We're also very curious, btw, about the process of designing the app.) Combined with the "spin" feature—which makes us think of a disc jockey playing records on a turntable—these aspects of the poetry app make us feel like we're holding and carrying around a sort of portable, poetry mix-tape generator. Maybe that means an audio version will be available soon?

Good News About "Good Bad Poetry"?

Imagine the surprise over here at "Poetry & Popular Culture" to learn that one of this blog's favorite terms—"good bad poetry"—is now being bandied about by the folks over at the Poetry Foundation which, in its own words, "exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience." On the Foundation's blog "Harriet," Javier Huerta begins "Mcgonagalls All" with the November 29 declaration, "More and more I am convinced that what we need now is a revival of bad poetry" and goes on to try to distinguish between "good bad poetry or bad bad poetry."

Now, far be it from "Poetry & Popular Culture" to take particular umbrage at the Poetry Foundation's use of the term "good bad poetry"–despite the fact that Huerta doesn't cite the essay "Writing Good Bad Poetry" that appeared in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and that was excerpted on this blog back in October. No, I repeat, there is no umbrage taken, in part because the term "good bad poetry" is an adaptation of George Orwell's term "good bad fiction." While the Poets & Writers essay did acknowledge the Orwellian origin of "good bad poetry," it's perhaps no surprise that the folks at the Poetry Foundation want to make it seem like the term originated there—in the million-dollar Chicago offices of the nation's oldest and most prestigious little magazine. After all, it's Poetry's own standard-bearer T.S. Eliot who famously quipped that while good writers borrow, great ones steal—a quip Eliot himself cribbed from Oscar Wilde.

No, "Poetry & Popular Culture" takes no offense at this, nor even at Huerta's own description of bad poetry as "a value neutral category of writing that involves the affected, the hyperconventional, the ornamental, the anticlimactic, the disproportionate." What does rankle "Poetry & Popular Culture," however, is how quickly Huerta's posting reduces the expansive category of "good bad poetry" to humorous poetry. Barely 75 words into his blog posting, and immediately after distinguishing between "good bad poetry" and "bad bad poetry," Huerta brings up the International Society for Humor Studies and, from there on out, "good bad poetry" and "humor" become inseparable. The specters of Ogden Nash, Mark Twain, and William McGonagall are raised to debate the intentionality or unintentionality of humor, while the larger category of poetry that "involves the affected, the hyperconventional, the ornamental, the anticlimactic, the disproportionate" goes entirely unexplored.

While it's nice to see the term "good bad poetry" gain some currency, it's a shame—though admittedly predictable, too predictable—to see its simultaneous devaluation at the hands of the Poetry Foundation. If the Foundation really is "committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture" as it says it is, then it should be wary of such mischaracterization and explore, instead, the many other ways that good bad poetry—and its ornament and convention—might do more than just provide a chuckle or two for the folks in the Windy City.