From the P&PC Vault: Happy St. Patrick's Day from Poetry & Popular Culture

The following posting—on Ella Higginson's little bit of Biblical shamrock & roll titled "Four-Leaf Clover"—ran just a year ago, but given the poem's history of being reprinted (read on to find out more), we here at P&PC see no reason not to follow suit by reposting it this year.

Here's a cool little postcard poem wishing you all the luck o' the Irish for St. Patty's Day 2011. Printed to look as if it were written out by hand, "Four-Leaf Clover" is signed by its author, poet and short story writer Ella Higginson (1861-1940) who was born in Kansas, grew up in Oregon, married in Portland, and later moved to Washington state where she became active in civic and political affairs. On the subject of divorce, she wrote, for example, the "real evil was not that divorce was too easy, but that marriage was too easy, and that there should be a law preventing marriage before the age of thirty." Higginson was named Poet Laureate of Washington State in 1931, a post that was apparently eliminated sometime thereafter but officially brought back to life in 2011 with the appointment of Samuel Green following passage of Washington Substitute House Bill 1279. Higginson's papers—18 boxes of them at least, all awaiting scholarly investigation—are now at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies located at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

We here at P&PC like the look of this postcard for a number of reasons, starting with its appearance of having been personally handwritten by Higginson herself (pictured here), whose facsimile autograph stands in lieu of a commercially printed byline and copyright notice. This handwritten front, we think, encourages the postcard's user to view the writing of his or her own personal handwritten message on reverse as poetic in orientation as well—an invitation that this particular postcard's (unidentified) user seems to have accepted. "This is a beautiful thought," he or she writes in pen to an unnamed recipient, "and I want you to just try out this thought for yourself, and don't get nervous or to [sic] tired, 'for quietness and confidence shall be your strength.'"

Those of you who read your Bible don't need to be told that the phrase "for quietness and confidence shall be your strength" is from Isaiah 30:15; what's kind of cool, though, is how the sender is perhaps motivated to quote scripture by Higginson's own allusion to 1 Corinthians 13 in "Four-Leaf Clover" ("One leaf is for hope, and one for faith / And one is for love, you know"). As both writers sample and thus personalize Biblical passages, we have a really funky bit of communication in which the sender uses his or her own Biblical reference (Isaiah) in conjunction with Higginson's poem and its Biblical reference (Corinthians) to encourage the recipient to "try out this thought for yourself," which is pretty much an extension of the invitation we think the handwritten look of the postcard presented in the first place.

It is fair to say that "Four-Leaf Clover" got around. According to one source (1911's Studies in Reading by James William Searson and George Ellsworth Martin), "no other little gem of the language has been more widely appreciated and more warmly loved." Apparently, it was written in 1890 and published in Portland's West Shore magazine. Then it was published in McClure's (1896), The Outlook (1898), the Northwest Journal of Education (1898), Friends' Intelligencer and Journal (1898), American Cookery (1899), Oregon Teachers' Monthly (1902), the Journal of Education (1911), and Sunset (1918). Higginson included it in her book of poems When the Birds Go North Again (1899), and it was reprinted in Annie Russell Marble's Nature Pictures by American Poets (1899), Edmund Clarence Stedman's An American Anthology (1900), The Listening Child (1903), Robert Haven Schauffler's Arbor Day (1909), The Home Book of Verse (1912), and a range of school readers and publications for educators. It was also, Searson & Martin report, put to music "by at least fifty composers."

This is what happens when you don't copyright a poem: it goes viral. May you be so lucky this St. Patrick's Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Just In: John Ashbery More Accessible than Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser and the subject of poetic "accessibility" have gone hand in hand for a long time. The Poetry Foundation reports, for example, that the former U.S. Poet Laureate (pictured here avec chiens) "is known for his honest, accessible verse." James H. Billington of the Library of Congress has praised Kooser's ability "to touch on universal themes in accessible ways." A reader posting a comment on Amazon admires Kooser "for writing poetry that is accessible, inviting, familiar and ordinary in a most extraordinary way." Even Kooser thinks about himself in this manner; asked in the recent (October/November 2010) issue of The Writer's Chronicle to account for the ongoing sales of his book Delights & Shadows, he explains, "My poems are accessible to a broad general audience."

Here at the P&PC Home Office, we suspect that accessibility is most often measured in the way that Justice Potter Stewart once measured obscenity (i.e., we know it when we see it). But curious nonetheless about the popularity of this yardstick, we decided to put Kooser's accessibility to the test and determine, once and for all, just how accessible his poetry is. So, using the online calculator available here, we subjected the five sample Kooser poems presented alongside his interview in The Writer's Chronicle to three common readability tests: the Flesch Reading Ease Test, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test, and the Gunning fog index.

All three tests measure "reada- bility" by using mathe- matical formulae taking into consi- deration word count, sentence length, and word complexity. On the Flesch Reading Ease Test (and according to Wikipedia), a score of 90-100 indicates a text is "accessible" to the average 11 year-old student; a 60-70 suggests a text is understandable by 13-15 year-old students; and a 0-30 score indicates a text best understood by university graduates. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test articulates the Reading Ease Test in terms of specific grade levels, as does the Gunning fog index. All three tests, while incomplete or limited in design, have social imperatives; if the average newspaper is supposed to be written at the literacy level of an 8th grader, for example, tests like these are supposed to be able to help make news and information available—er, accessible—to as many people as possible.

So you're no doubt wondering by now, how did Kooser's poetry fare when plugged into these tests? Well, it turns out that Kooser is a fairly accessible poet but—in receiving grade-level scores that range from 5th grade through advanced graduate school—the poems are not nearly, completely, or constantly as accessible as Kooser himself and others would have us believe (not based on the results of our limited 5-poem set at least). Here are the scores for the five pieces:

"The Very Old"
Reading Ease Score: 73.7
Grade Level: 8.1
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 11.2

"After My Grandmother's Funeral"
Reading Ease: 72.6
Grade Level: 11.1
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 15

"Flying at Night"
Reading Ease: 80.2
Grade Level: 5.3
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 7

"There is Always a Little Wind"
Reading Ease: 72.1
Grade Level: 12.4
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 15.9

"Porch Swing in September"
Reading Ease: 54.9
Grade Level: 19.3
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 22.7

As you can see, the Gunning Fog test consistently places Kooser's poems at a higher grade level than the Flesch-Kincaid index. Even so, one can't discount the fact that the Flesch-Kincaid test places three of Kooser's poems at, near, or above, twelfth-grade level. That is, Kooser's poems are accessible, but not as accessible as a regular newspaper would be. "Flying at Night" stands out as being especially accessible—a newspaper-level poem—and "Porch Swing in September" stands out as being particularly inaccessible. Go read "Porch Swing in September" and check for yourself; it might be hard to imagine how Kooser could take the topic of a country swing and turn it into a poem that places at the Ph.D. level in both Grade Level metrics, but that's just what he's managed to do.

After studying Kooser via these readability tests, we started to hanker after a larger frame of reference. How would other poets fare when subjected to the same battery of tests? How would Kooser fare in comparison to those poets? What might we learn about American poetry and "accessibility" if we expanded our study to consider a wider segment of the poetry-writing world, and especially poets who are considered to be as inaccessible or as downright obscure as Kooser is considered to be accessible and familiar? So, in search of some answers, we plugged John Ashbery (pictured here) into the three tests, and we were shocked by what we learned.

John Ashbery is more accessible than Ted Kooser.

Hands down.

It's not even close.

To keep things as fair or constant as possible, we ran five Ashbery poems— "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape," "The New Higher," "Syringa," "Daffy Duck in Hollywood," and "For John Clare"—through the Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid, and Gunning Fog machines. And the data was, to put it mildly, very surprising, as Ashbery not only scored as more accessible more consistently than Kooser did, but consistently scored below a 9th-grade reading level on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test as well!

Here are the scores for Ashbery's poems:

"Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape"
Reading Ease: 78.5
Grade Level: 6.2
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 9.4

"The New Higher"
Reading Ease: 92.2
Grade Level: 3
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 6.4

"Syringa"
Reading Ease: 75.4
Grade Level: 7.4
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 10.5

"Daffy Duck in Hollywood"
Reading Ease: 67.7
Grade Level: 8.4
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 12.1

"For John Clare"
Reading Ease: 83.3
Grade Level: 6.3
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 9.5

This Kooser/ Ashbery experiment is, we imagine, just the start of a new method of assessing and measuring contemporary American poetry via the concept of "accessibility" and according to metrics that other spheres of academia have used for some time. The P&PC Office is thrilled about what lies in store—how we might help to reveal the obscurity of heretofore "accessible" poets like Billy Collins and Mary Oliver and also shed light on the accessibility of "obscure" poets like Charles Bernstein and Jorie Graham. We thank you for your support as we move forward with this endeavor.

Ernie Kovacs as Percy Dovetonsils, Poet Laureate (circa 1955)