Say It Ain't So: From Dickinson to Pinocchio?

The "News & Notes" section of the latest Entertainment Weekly (May 1, 2015) features "Six Secrets from the Set of Avengers" with the subtitle "What do Emily Dickinson, Gollum, and old-school romance have to do with Avengers: Age of Ultron? More than you think." A page later, we get the following bit of trivia:

Swapping Poets for Puppets

[James] Spader was sold on [Joss] Whedon's script when Ultron referenced the so-called Moth of Amherst. "It was an eight-foot robot, and in one of the scenes he was quoting Emily Dickinson," Spader says. "I got more and more excited." Whedon confirms that Ultron did have an unhealthy obsession with Dickinson's poem "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," but it was ultimately replaced with the Pinocchio song "I've Got No Strings." "You know, creative [advertising] was very angry when that got cut," Whedon jokes. "They were like, 'What's the in for Marvel fans?! Can we get some [T.S.] Eliot in there? "A pair of ragged claws" or something?'"

Too bad: Spader, Whedon, and Marvel just lost a P&PC analysis of the movie, and the office interns are thinking about staging a letter-writing campaign.

In other news, President Barack Obama recently became "the first president to recite a haiku at a state dinner" when he "included a poem about spring, friendship, and harmony" at the recent dinner for the prime minister of Japan. Read about it here.

The Poetry of Hogan's Goat Pizza

As you know, P&PC has a vast network of lookouts, helping hands, affiliates, fellow travelers, and owl-eyed spotters scouring the American landscape for material so that we can bring you your weekly fix and simultaneously try, in our own little way, to goad on the members of that school of poetry-think that perpetuates the myth (as William Logan did this past Sunday in the New York Times) that poetry is "loathed by many." Indeed! Well, if we here at P&PC try to goad 'em on, then the menu (pictured here) at Hogan's Goat Pizza of 5222 NE Sacramento in Portland, Oregon, could be said to take a more hircine approach to the issue.

We got the menu (not the pizza and definitely not the goat) hand-delivered from our friend Cheryl before she left Salem for the more enticing climes of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She'd been hanging out with all the hipsters in Portland (many of whom apparently model their facial hair after the billy pictured on the menu). She'd gotten hungry. She stopped by Hogan's Goat Pizza for a pie and, like probably everyone else, wondered who was Hogan and what was a goat pizza.

Well, Cheryl didn't have far to look for a partial answer, as the first panel inside the menu's cover explains that "Hogan's Goat" comes from a nineteenth-century song. (For one version of the song, click here.) Here are the lyrics as the menu (pictured below) presents them, complete with capitalization and punctuation issues:

Old Hogan's Goat ... Was feeling fine ... He
ate my shirts right off the line ... I took a
stick ... And broke his back ... And tied him
to a railroad track ... A speeding train ...
Came speeding by ... Old Hogan's Goat was
sure to die ... He gave a shriek ... A shriek of
pain ... Coughed up the shirts and FLAGGED
DOWN THE TRAIN!'

When we first saw this version of "Hogan's Goat," we didn't think it was a song—right?—since the pizza joint didn't print it, as song lyrics are traditionally printed, in lines and stanzas. Rather, Hogan's Goat Pizza printed it to look like a "poemulation"—the term that Sinclair Lewis used to describe the verses written by fake newspaper poet T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink in the novel Babbitt (1922), verses that were formatted to look like prose but rhymed like poetry. While Lewis may have coined the term, we're pretty sure he didn't invent the form. Among the poemulation's most esteemed and prolific practitioners was James Metcalfe, who, in the 1940s and 1950s (after his career in the FBI), penned hundreds of 'em for Chicago's newspaper The Times. (You can find lots of Metcalfe's poemulations preserved in old poetry scrapbooks.)

Before Metcalfe, and as early as 1912, "Uncle" Walt Mason of Emporia, Kansas, was publishing poemulations as well (many of which also found their way into poetry scrapbooks; you can check out nearly two hundred pages of Mason's poemulations here). And, as we discussed back in 2009 in relation to a discussion in Virginia Jackson's book Dickinson's Misery, it's quite possible that Emily Dickinson could be said to have written in poemulation form before the Civil War—around the same time ... wait for it ... that the lyrics for "Hogan's Goat" were being written.

So what's the upshot of all this? Well, for starters, it's possible that "Hogan's Goat" was a poemulation before it was a song. And if it wasn't a poemulation first, well, it now is—at least in the version that Hogan's Goat Pizza prints in the menu. In fact, when Cheryl delivered the menu to the P&PC Office, she delivered what she thought was in fact a poem; she'd skipped over the restaurant's introductory words that insist on calling it a "song" even though it isn't, and she let the rhyming and lack of musical accompaniment direct her reading of it as the poem—er, poemulation—it is. She may not have loved it as much as the pizza (which she said was excellent, btw). But she certainly didn't "loathe" it as William Logan says poetry is "loathed by many." Nope. We in the P&PC Office suspect that if there's any loathing going on in the poetry world, it's not among non-readers of poetry but among poets and critics like Logan who are bound and determined to imagine that the rest of the world somehow has the spare energy to loathe what they in particular do. Indeed, if they'd just adjust their definition of what a "poem"—even a poemulation—might be, we think they'd be a lot happier. Less narcissistic, perhaps. But happier.

If the Great Poets Wrote Valentine's Day Verse: More Vintage Valentines from P&PC

Emily Dickinson:

Paul Laurence Dunbar:

 

Wallace Stevens:

Ezra Pound:

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Gertrude Stein:

William Carlos Williams:

T.S. Eliot

Walt Whitman:

Blair's Emily Dickinson: Plagiarism, Borrowing, and the Facts of Life

Before you watch the following episode of The Facts of Life from 1979—Season One, Episode 6, in which Blair (pictured here) plagiarizes a poem by Emily Dickinson (not pictured here) to fulfill an English class assignment—you might want to check out Season 2, Episode 1, of Leave It to Beaver from 1958 (now streamable on Netflix). In that episode, Beaver commits the same offense, turning in as his own a poem by his father Ward and—just like Blair—winning a poetry contest for it. And lest you think the topic of plagiarized poetry one of the distant past, take some time to mull over the case of Paris Hilton, who presented on Larry King Live what Joel Stein writing for the LA Times called "by far the most famous poem of this century" as evidence of the transformation that her stint in the clink worked on her, only to have it later revealed that the poem was actually written by a fan, Judi DeBella, who sent it to Hilton in a fan letter.

Now, we here at P&PC aren't saying that there's any specific connection between Hilton and the television shows other than the general subject of plagiarized poetry—although Paris is something of a tv creation in her own right—but what about the connection between Leave It to Beaver and The Facts of Life? Could it be that, in coming up with a script about the subject of stealing poetry, The Facts of Life actually cribbed the plot of Beaver from twenty years earlier? If so, do we call it an homage? Do we cry foul? Or do we agree with Blair herself, who remarks, "Who's cheating? I'm just borrowing a poem from a woman who died in 1886. I mean, it's not like I'm copying from the girl in front of me. Besides, it's only cheating when someone finds out"? 

The Banner-Like Breadth of Her Wing: An Interview with P&PC Hero Angela Sorby

Why more people don't flock to the work of Marquette University English professor Angela Sorby is a mystery to P&PC. With her eagle eye for the telling detail—it's rumored she can spot a metrical variation at a hundred yards—and the grace of a sandhill (or Hart) crane, she's been charming our magic casements with more than plaintive anthems since the 2005 publication of Schoolroom Poets: Childhood and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917. If you don't remember her 2010 explication of Herman Munster's civil-rights-era beatnik performance, make sure to set your spotting scope on it along with her two books of poems (Bird Skin Coat and Distance Learning) and the forthcoming anthology of nineteenth-century American children's poetry, Over the River and Through the Woods, that she has co-edited.

Sorby's essay "The Poetics of Bird Defense in America, 1860-1918" is also one of eight essays featured in Poetry after Cultural Studies. Migrating back and forth between the bird-related poetry of turn-of-the-century children's magazines, field guides, schoolrooms, and state Bird Day publications, "The Poetics of Bird Defense" reveals how popular poetry shaped the emerging environmental movement in the United States by combining the scientific observation and study (or close reading) of nature with the emotional and moral imagination more frequently associated with poetry.

We recently got a chance to chatter with Angela about that essay, the connections between birding and poetry, rogue taxidermists, and what she's been up to since writing "The Poetics of Bird Defense." Here, in a special bonus feature supplement to Poetry after Cultural Studies, is what she had to say.

P&PC: How did you first, uh, alight on the connection between birds and poetry?

Sorby: When I was doing research for a talk on "Animal Poems and Children's Rights in America," I kept sighting birds, especially in later nineteenth-century texts. Midcentury sentimental children's poets embraced pets and farm animals like Mary's Lamb, but later poets, inspired by the Nature-Study (and Child-Study) movements, were suddenly wild about birds. I think as society urbanized, birds emerged as a visible remnant of the natural world, especially as some species became threatened. For instance, Martha, the last passenger pigeon (pictured here), died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

P&PC: Hmm. You write that "birds and birdsong are like poetry" and that some people felt like "poets were uniquely qualified to speak for (and advocate for) birds." Martha died in 1914. Poetry magazine was started in 1912, and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" was first published in 1917. Connection?

Sorby: Absolutely. There is a circular three-way occult connection between Martha, Harriet Monroe [pictured above], and the eye of the blackbird.

P&PC: Your essay ends in 1918, the year that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed and World War I ended. If this essay had a sequel, where would it go?

Sorby: I'm curious about Victorian birds, so if the essay had a sequel it would probably migrate across the Atlantic. The British imperial imagination is rife with peacock feathers and dead dodos, and certainly the Brits were, and are, avid bird-watchers.

P&PC: What's your favorite poem from the bird defense movement?

Sorby: Here's one from Over the River and Through the Woods [see below for more on this anthology] that I quite like, "The Great Blue Heron," by Celia Thaxter, though don't ask me why she spells "boulder" with a "w."

The Great Blue Heron

The Great Blue Heron stood all alone
     By the edge of the solemn sea,
On a broken bowlder of gray trap-stone;
     He was lost in a reverie.

And when I climbed over the low rough wall
     At the top of the sloping beach,
To gather the drift-wood great and small
      Left scattered to dry and to bleach,

I saw, as if carved from the broken block
     On which he was standing, the bird,
Like a part of the bowlder of blue-gray rock;
     For never a feather he stirred.

I paused to watch him. Below my breath,
     “O beautiful creature!" I cried,
"Do you know you are standing here close to your death,
     By the brink of the quiet tide?

"You can not have heard of the being called Man—
     The lord of creation is he;
And he slays earth's creatures wherever he can,
     In the air or the land or the sea.

"He's not a true friend of your race! If he sees
     Some beautiful wonderful thing
That runs in the woodland, or floats in the breeze
     On the banner-like breadth of its wing,

"Straight he goes for his gun, its sweet life to destroy,
     For mere pleasure of killing alone.
He will ruin its beauty and quench all its joy,
     Though 't is useless to him as a stone."

Then I cried aloud: "Fly! before over the sand
     This lord of creation arrives
With his powder and shot, and his gun in his hand
     For the spoiling of innocent lives!"

Oh, stately and graceful and slender and tall,
     The Heron stood silent and still,
As if careless of warning and deaf to my call,
     Unconscious of danger or ill.

"Fly! fly to some lonelier place, and fly fast!
     To the very north pole! Anywhere!"
Then he rose and soared high and swept eastward at last,
     Trailing long legs and wings in the air.

"Now perhaps you may live and be happy," I said;
     "Fly, Heron, as fast as you can!
Put the width of the earth and the breadth of the sea
     Betwixt you and the being called Man!"

P&PC: Forgive me for not remembering all of the details from 2011's The Big Year, but how is poetry part of the birding world today?

Sorby: Today's birders still adore poetry. They're especially taken with Emily Dickinson, whose poems are quoted in everything from John O'Neill's Great Texas Birds to Kenn Kaufman's City Birding. This makes sense because bird watching is non-narrative and fragmentary, and so birding is more like reading poetry than like following a prose narrative. You have to notice (and enjoy) patterns and details. Also, as you tramp through the woods in search of a Thick-Billed Vireo, you have to be willing to pause, change directions, or double back as needed—again, like a poetry-reader. However, contemporary birders seem to have conservative tastes; they haven't ventured far into twenty-first century poetry, unless you count Mary Oliver.

P&PC: Counting Mary Oliver? Only on this year's Christmas Bard Count. You're a birder, too, right? (My parents are, as well—that's them pictured here!) When and how did that start?

Sorby: Sadly wrong. I have bird-watched once, in coastal Washington State, with two ex-Deadheads-turned-biologists. I was shocked at the sheer variety of seagulls, since I'd always assumed that all seagulls were alike, i.e. plain white. But I am too constitutionally disoriented to bird watch on my own.

P&PC: Not even a bird feeder in the yard?

Sorby: We do have a bird bath that attracts mosquitoes. In the Midwest they almost qualify as birds by virtue of their enormity.

P&PC: Your 2009 book of poems is titled Bird Skin Coat. Coincidence?

Sorby: I have long been fascinated by rogue taxidermists. I spent a lot of time finding a cover image for my book, finally tracking down the work of a very publicity-shy artist (I won't mention her name) who stuffs and dresses San Francisco pigeons in elegant gowns. So my title was inspired by one of her pieces: a white bird in mourning garb.

P&PC: Both Schoolroom Poets and "The Poetics of Bird Defense" have as a central focus the intersection of poetry and childhood. Where to next?

Sorby: Karen Kilcup and I just finished a huge doorstop anthology of nineteenth-century American children's poetry, Over the River and Through the Woods, which will come out from Johns Hopkins University Press. Beyond that, I remain interested in how poetry circulates socially, precisely because it circulates so awkwardly. So my next critical book, Amateur Hour, is about the poetics of embarrassment, though it's still a work in progress. I also continue to write and publish colloquial poems in the spirit, if not the style, of the American popular poets—only without the part of "popular" that involves being widely read, well-known, or profitable.

P&PC: I'm almost too ashamed to ask, but "poetics of embarrassment"?

Sorby: I've been tracking the use of poetry in TV and film contexts, and have observed that it is primarily used to embarrass either the poet or the audience. Why is poetry so discomfiting? In 1974 Christopher Ricks wrote a smart little book called Keats and Embarrassment, but I think our collective sense of poetry as an inappropriate medium has only grown since the romantic era. When a poet begins to read or recite, no one knows what to do or where to look. To introduce a poem into an otherwise ordinary social context is the literary equivalent of stripping naked.

P&PC: That gives new meaning to "exposing" people to poetry, doesn't it?

Sorby: "Hankering, gross, mystical, nude"—what's not to like?

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."

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.

Warm Holiday Greetings from Poetry & Popular Culture

For the past two years, the P&PC office has marked the holiday season by bringing you the poetry of greeting cards. Last year, we shed some light on the abbreviated Hooverized greetings being sent during the Great Depression. The year before that, we brought you some of the fine-art Christmas cards that Robert Frost produced over the course of a 30-year collaboration with printer Joseph Blumenthal. We're going to continue this tradition in 2010, but we're going to give it a small generic twist. Many aspects of the mid-century object pictured here—the folding design, the "Merry Christmas" greeting, the poetic message contained inside, and the familiar Hallmark imprimatur on back—ask us to consider it a holiday greeting card. Which it is. In a way. With a small difference.

One quickly discovers, however, that the holiday greeting doubles as a giant matchbook about 3 inches wide and 4 inches high featuring a fiery, pun-filled poem written line by line on the individual matchsticks. (The match heads have been removed, we presume, for purposes of safe storage.) Way totally cool, right?

It is, admittedly, one of the funkiest (dare we say most innovative?) objects that P&PC has come across of late—in fact, we had a hard time convincing the office interns to wait until the holidays to share it with readers—but we think it also raises some questions for poetry scholars more generally. It's not difficult to find poetry critics who champion poetry as the genre that pays most attention to what folks call "the materiality of language." In The Textual Condition, for example, Jerome McGann writes:

Poets understand texts better than most information technologists. Poetical texts make a virtue of the necessity of textual noise by exploiting textual redundancy. The object of the poetical text is to thicken the medium as much as possible—literally, to put the resources of the medium on full display, to exhibit the process of self-reflection and self-generation which texts set in motion, which they are.

McGann is not necessarily wrong, but, for him, the poets and poems that best exemplify his claims—here and elsewhere—are folks like William Blake, Ezra Pound, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe, and so on. (That's a section of Howe's "Thorow" pictured to the left.) A lot of the street cred of 20th-century avant garde, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and post-avant poets and poetries comes from this place: that these writers and their texts "thicken the medium" of language, make the material aspects of language evident, and, in so doing, help in some way to save language from exploitation by the marketplace or affiliated parties who use language instrumentally—that is, as a transparent vehicle for conveying information.

Given these types of claims, what should one make of Hallmark's holiday production which—in its amalga- mation of Christmas card, matchbook, and poem—can certainly be said to put "the resources of the medium on display" while making a virtue of double meanings and puns that, by their very nature, truck in the excess meanings or "noise" present in all linguistic activity? Should we give snaps to Hallmark for its inventiveness—for the DADA-inspired, performance aesthetic a user enacts as he or she slowly picks apart the poem and burns it up, thus putting on display the essential ephemeral nature of all human communication? Or, should we cry foul for this very reason, since Hallmark invites us to envision a totally instrumental purpose for its poem: a reader sacrificing it, line by line, in order to perform the mundane task of lighting a candle? (Think, for example, if Hallmark issued a companion matchbook edition of Emily Dickinson and encouraged readers to light their candles by burning its pages!)

With the interns all gone home early and an episode of Mad Men or Fringe awaiting us at home, we don't have time to linger over these questions any more tonight. You might say we're, uh, burning to get on the road. So from the whole P&PC Office, we wish you the warmest greetings for your holidays. May they be full of joy, companionship, music and good food. And, of course, some poetry.

Now at the Boston Public Library: The Public Life of Poetry

From now until January 31, 2011, the Boston Public Library is hosting The Public Life of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, Longfellow, and Their Contemporaries—an exhibition that pulls together a wide range of 19th-century temperance poetry, abolitionist poetry, broadsides, ephemera, occasional verse, poetry scrapbooks, and books and manuscripts relating to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Because of recent budget cutbacks, P&PC was unable to score a plane ticket and make it to Boston to give you a first-hand report. However, we did get a chance to catch up with Nadia Nurhussein (next picture below), the show’s primary organizer and Assistant Professor of English at University of Massachusetts at Boston. Here’s what she had to say.

Poetry & Popular Culture: How did this exhibition take shape?

Nadia Nurhussein: Last semester, I taught a class on public poetry in the U.S. The students and I met once a week at the Rare Books Room of the Boston Public Library (pictured above), where we would select from among the surprisingly impressive collection’s manuscript and printed poems ones that we wanted to examine closely. After the course was over, we organized some of our more interesting discoveries into this exhibit

P&PC: What’s your favorite part of the show?

NN: One of the exhibit’s most exciting cases is devoted to Longfellow parodies. My favorite is Bret Harte’s “Excelsior”—an 1877 versified advertisement for the popular Sapolio soap brand. As Gary Scharnhorst has pointed out, Harte (pictured here) turned to advertising when his famed literary career was collapsing, selling “Excelsior” to Enoch Morgan’s Sons for $50. Unlike Longfellow’s hero, who carries a banner and summits a mountain with “Excelsior!” as his motto, Harte’s “youth…bore, through dust and heat / A stencil-plate, that read complete—‘SAPOLIO!’” He finds space to hawk Sapolio on crowded fences, alongside similar ads for Bixby’s Blacking and Mustang Liniment.

P&PC: If only he could have put up billboards like Burma- Shave did.

NN: That wouldn’t have been good enough for him. He is so thoroughly a product of late 19th-century advertising that, with stencil in hand, he comically defaces even the natural landscape with the language of commerce. Not satisfied with fences, he manages to get paint to stick to a snow bank and paints every rock on White Mountain, where tourists “to their dismay, / …read that legend strange, always—‘SAPOLIO.’ Finally, he even paints the tourists’ luggage when they get to the top of the mountain!

P&PC: That doesn’t seem to be the best p.r. campaign for the advertising industry, does it?

NN: It’s incredible that Enoch Morgan’s Sons would use a poem that deplores the ubiquity and inescapability of advertising. But, then again, Harte’s “Excelsior” wasn’t permitted to stand alone. Alternating with Harte’s poem are pages of more straightforward advertising, including the imperative to “SCOUR POTS, KETTLES, PANS AND ALL BRASS AND COPPER UTENSILS WITH SAPOLIO.”

P&PC: Were there other Longfellow parodies?

NN: The most parodied Longfellow poem was probably The Song of Hiawatha—and Longfellow was well aware of the parodies. In an 1877 letter addressed to Karl Knortz (who translated Hiawatha into German), Longfellow replies to Knortz’s request for the titles of Hiawatha parodies with which he is familiar. Knortz initially names four parodies, but Longfellow comes up with two more.

P&PC: Why Hiawatha?

NN: Hiawatha’s easily recognized meter (modeled after the Finnish epic The Kalevala) probably inspired amateurs to imitate it. One parodist admits as much, claiming that “already afloat upon the rhythmical flow of the Hiawathan verse, his thoughts yielded to the alluring current and took ‘the form and pressure’ of the occasion.” James W. Ward’s 1868 parody, The Song of Higher-Water (pictured to the left) was written only three days after Hiawatha was published. One review accurately describes The Song of Higher-Water as “just such a brochure as a clever writer might readily throw off for the amusement of a circle of friends; it is scarcely adapted to the dignity of print.” It is, the reviewer concludes, “an excellent work to give away.” In fact, Ward himself claimed that the poem was “chiefly issued for private distribution” and was published only because “some person, from motives, the rectitude of which is not self-evident, has surreptitiously published an imperfect edition of it, which, I am informed, he is selling for his own account.”

P&PC: Tell me about the poetry scrapbooks in the show. (The page pictured here is from Anne Sexton's scrapbook.)

NN: There are some amazing scrapbooks at the BPL. One of my students found one by a man named Julius L. Brown. There was no further information about him in the card catalog, but my research leads me to believe that he was the same Julius L. Brown whose father was Joseph E. Brown, an unpopular governor of Georgia during the Civil War, when this scrapbook was compiled. He was an eccentric graduate of Harvard Law School and was described by the New York Times as a "collector of the rare in all things."

Another interesting scrapbook, elaborately bound and formally titled Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill 1775-1875, was compiled by Mellen Chamberlain, a 19th-century BPL librarian. As the title suggests, he was interested in collecting material related to Revolutionary War battles, including poetic treatments of these battles by Holmes, Whittier, and Emerson (pictured below). We are displaying a fair copy of Emerson's "Concord Hymn," accompanied by a letter by Chamberlain explaining how he came into possession of the manuscript. He writes that Mrs. Charles Porter, Emerson's cousin, offered to "prevail upon Mr Emerson to transcribe his battle hymn into the volume" if Chamberlain would travel with her to Concord. Chamberlain also notes that Emerson, whose "health was considerably broken," died soon after.

P&PC: What do you mean by occasional verse? Does "Concord Hymn" qualify?

NN: "Concord Hymn" does qualify as occasional verse: it was written and performed at the dedication of an obelisk erected to commemorate the battles at Lexington and Concord. The Mellen Chamberlain manuscript is in the scrapbook case, but the occasional verse case includes a print copy of the poem (donated to the library by the family of William Lloyd Garrison) that was circulated at the event apparently for the purpose of audience participation.

Another interesting bit of occasional verse is a poem written by Holmes for the laying of the cornerstone of the BPL's McKim Building in 1888. On the underside of the cornerstone, two pieces were cut out to accommodate copper boxes that served as time capsules commemorating the ceremony, and Holmes's poem was one of several items placed inside.

P&PC: When I think of Dickinson, I don’t necessarily think “public.” How does she fit into the show?

NN: The exhibit focuses mainly on the marketing of Dickinson immediately after her death. Some of the correspondence between Dickinson editors Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd surrounding the first and second "series" of Poems is displayed, along with the books themselves. One of these letters talks about the cover illustration of an Indian Pipe—a rare white flower that seems to have been chosen to evoke the sense of reclusiveness that was already associated with Dickinson. Her strangeness and reclusiveness were part of the marketing strategy; the preface to Poems, for example, calls her "a recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting foot beyond the doorstep."

The "public" Dickinson is also reflected in two poems published during her lifetime, probably without her permission: "The May-Wine" (known as "I taste a liquor never brewed") in The Springfield Republican, and "Success" (known as "Success is counted sweetest") in A Masque of Poets. Both were published anonymously. The exhibit also includes a letter from Lavinia Dickinson, thanking Higginson for "giving Emilies wonderful letters to the world"—in other words, for making her public.

P&PC: If you were to do a companion exhibit on the public life of 20th-century poetry, where would you start?

NN: That's a good question! This exhibit actually does extend a bit into the early 20th century, with a case of dialect poetry that includes James Whitcomb Riley's 1908 Orphant Annie book and Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1901 Candle-Lightin' Time. (That's Dunbar pictured to the left.) But, of course, the popularity of dialect poetry didn't last very far into the century. There are also three mid-century photographs related to 19th-century poets. One depicts an event at the Longfellow House for the 1957 sesquicentennial of his birth. Over 2,000 visitors gathered there, and there was even a live television broadcast. (It's hard to imagine such a turnout to celebrate, for instance, Robert Frost, less than 150 years after his birth.)

Perhaps a companion exhibit could begin with the Beat movement, which I think penetrated popular culture in a way that no other 20th-century poetry movement did. I remember watching cartoons that made fun of "beatnik" readings. And apparently Herman Munster was a Beat poet, as Angela Sorby wrote about for P&PC! Even today, the depictions of poetry readings in popular culture usually correspond to those stereotypes of Beat readings.

P&PC: What’s the feedback been like so far?

NN: I've heard from the staff at the BPL that visitors to the exhibit seem to be spending more time looking around than they have with exhibits in the past, which is encouraging to hear. Susan Glover, who holds the title of Acting Keeper of Prints, Rare Books, Manuscripts and Archives at the BPL, suggested that I try to include more visual materials, and I suspect that that has made a difference. Even people interested in books don't necessarily want to look at cases and cases of print! So, items like the broadside of Whittier's "Our Countrymen in Chains!," with its striking wood engraving of a supplicant slave captioned "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" (the central image of the anti-slavery movement), show how verse and images were integrated—in this instance, to make the strongest possible argument against slavery. The exhibit will be up until the end of January, so I hope that P&PC readers who have plans to be in Boston during the holidays will stop by!