Happy Halloween from P&PC: The Simpsons Cover "The Raven" (Featuring James Earl Jones)

From Cowboy to Classic: The Poetry of Longmire (Season 2, Episode 12)

We here at P&PC have long suspected that there's an undercover army of poets in Hollywood and that, cloaked in the Mackintosh of Nielson ratings and prime-time broadcast slots, they've been sneaking all sorts of poems into people's everyday lives via tv shows ranging from Gunsmoke to Breaking Bad. Well, now we've got some hard evidence to back it up: Season 2, Episode 12 of the I'll-cling-to-my-traditional-honorable-manhood-in-an-ever-changing-world-because-what-that-ever-changing-world-needs-more-than-ever-is-traditional-honorable-manhood Western cop show Longmire. If you're getting the impression that we don't totally love Longmire, well, you wouldn't be entirely wrong. We're through the end of Season 2, and we're tired of the old-man-driven plot generally speaking. We don't like the show's treatment of the Cheyenne Indians all that much. And, truth be told, we wish the show were told from the point of view of deputy Vic or Henry Standing Bear and not Sheriff Walt Longmire. But whatever, right? We've watched it this far and, as the following's gonna explain, there's no way we're gonna stop now.

First aired August 19, 2013, Season 2, Episide 12 telegraphs its literary ambitions via the allusion to Flannery O'Connor in its title ("A Good Death Is Hard to Find") and is then very neatly bookended by two poems, one a cowboy poem, and one a classic. And wouldn't you know it? It was written by real-life poet Tony Tost, author of the poetry collections Complex Sleep and Invisible Bride. Tost (pictured in the ball cap here) is a regular writer for Longmire and first caught our eye with his allusion to Emily Dickinson in the title of Season 2, Episode 6 ("Tell It Slant"), which he also wrote. So, to a certain extent we could tell that the poetry of "A Good Death Is Hard to Find" was coming, and we've been keeping a lookout for it ever since. And now that we've found it, we're looking for more. Indeed, given both Tost's inclination to the poetic and Longmire's first name (Walt), we're fully expecting to get a Whitman reference somewhere on down the line, which would be, like, totally awesome, as it would allow us to tie Longmire to Breaking Bad and Mad Men in a series of three contemporary shows—indubitably a pattern!—all using variously brooding Whitmans to process their threatened masculinity.

"A Good Death Is Hard to Find" opens with what a banner hanging in the back- ground calls the "Absaroka County Cowboy Poetry Slam" taking place at Henry's bar, the Red Pony Saloon ("and continual soiree"), which you can watch in the first clip below. The poem is by the town's sorta corrupt retired former sheriff, and some humorous scenes throughout the episode show him composing or practicing his poetry. And the episode closes—the second clip below—with a scene in which Longmire quotes the Iliad in a downright poetic "get-out-of-town-before-sunrise" ultimatum he gives to Vic's stalker. So, the episode gives us two sheriffs, both with poems in their mouths: one a writer, one a reader; one sorta corrupt, the other of impeccable honor; one trading in popular poetry, one trotting out the classics. We don't really like how the popular-poetry math works out in this regard, but we'll nevertheless raise our glass—a toast for Tost!—and hope that Tony gives us that Whitman reference we're looking for to help make up for it.

It's Not About the Empty Vase—It's About What the Empty Vase Represents: The Poetry of Friends (Season 3, Episode 12 [January 16, 1997])

"A Driver's Life": The Poetry of the 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata

Penny Dreadful: "All sad people like poetry"?

We here at P&PC haven't yet seen the Showtime series Penny Dreadful—"a psychologically dark adult drama filled with intense mystery and suspense"—but the little "Sound Bite" pictured here and appearing in the June 12 issue of Entertainment Weekly has certainly caught our interest. "All sad people like poetry. Happy people like songs," says Vanessa, an "enigmatic, composed, driven woman" who (according to Wiki) apparently "fears little, until the witches' power begins to pick at her strength." Add it to our queue—right after Grimm, True Blood, Crossing Lines, Broadchurch, Witnesses (Les témoins), and Justified? You bet.

"I don't know why a cow goes moo": The Love Poetry of "Silver Spoons"

Check out the following episode of Silver Spoons (Season 1, Episode 5 [October 23, 1982], "Takin' a Chance on Love") in which Ricky's love for a new girl at school goes unrequited. From about 13:00-16:45, you'll find a scene in which Ricky is writing a (bad) love poem, followed by a scene in which Ricky's father recalls the (bad) love poem that he once wrote.

Once you've enjoyed those verses, then recall the (bad) love poem written by banker Dale Haywood in Season 4, Episode 6 of Justified (see the screen-shot shown below the video). All three are rhyming quatrains written by white American males in love. But what else do they have in common? How do they motivate and interrupt cliche? What type of poetics starts to come into view as a result of this comparison? Your five-page paper on the subject is due Monday!

"A Glee for Mixed Voices": W.K. Kellogg's "Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures" and the Poetry of Corn Flakes

If you're a regular P&PC reader, then you know that we and the office interns have been thinking a lot lately not just about poetry and popular culture in general but about how poetry fares and has fared more specifically in relation to popular non-print media, especially film and television. We've been mulling over the odd ways in which Edwin S. Porter's short 1905 Edison Studios film The Night Before Christmas quotes sections of Clement Clark Moore's 1823 poem on intertitles (like the one shown here). We've been collecting examples of poems as they've been presented in various ways for audiences to read in films like Citizen Kane, G.I. Jane and The Grey and in TV episodes of Justified, Criminal Minds, and even the goofball crime-solving comedy Psych. Some of this is just our curiosity. Some of it is an extension of our interest in how poems and hymns around the turn into the twentieth century—like Oliver Wendell Holmes's "A Sun-Day Hymn" and Reginald Heber's "From Greenland's Icy Mountains"—were projected by magic lanterns to give audiences the then-new thrill of reading via a medium other than the material page. And some of it's a longer, more concerted effort to think toward a couple of new projects including (eventually) a new book as well as an article that we've been asked to write about the transitions in the culture of popular poetry between 1910 and 1920.

Imagine our surprise and joy, then, to come across the promotional item pictured here—an eight-and-a-half by eleven-inch "Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures" poem booklet copyrighted by Kellogg's in 1909, four years after Porter's moving-pictures adaptation of Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas." If movies were trying to figure out how they related and might respond to poetry and print culture, then print culture and poetry were also trying to figure out how they related and might respond to the advent of film. And leave it to advertising to lead the way.

Building on the tradition of the small folding or meta- morphic trade card that was a common form of advertising in the nineteenth century (see one here), Kellogg's takes things several astonishing steps farther, constructing a trifold booklet with two sets of six panels inside that, when flipped back and forth on their stapled hinges, allows a reader or user to superimpose the body parts and verse captions of one set of animals onto another. In other words, it's a game of inter-species cross-dressing—animals who are doubly in drag, since they are first dressed up like humans ("we're dressed like men, you see," one verse points out) and then, thanks to the booklet's innovative architecture, re-dressed to "wear" the clothes and body parts of other animals.

It's pretty awesome, isn't it? An alligator can wear a plaid jacket, wear glasses, and then wear the head of a monkey. A tiger can wear a frilly pink blouse and skirt, then wear the roller skates of an ostrich. Or, as in the image pictured here, a singing horse (we like to think he's singing something by Cher or maybe Dusty Springfield) can wear a little chapeau and then the blue overalls and yellow body parts of a pig. As one set of verses puts it:

"Let's change about," the Lion said.
Suppose we take the feet and heads

Of the Camel, Donkey and Kangaroo.
Our friends won't know us then, would you?

Not surprisingly, perhaps, all of this non-normative reading, viewing, cross-dressing and mixing is identified in one panel of the pamphlet's poetry (the "Queer Fellows" pictured here) as "queer":

If you wish to see something queer,
Put other heads on the Cow, Horse and Deer.

Change their feet, too, try it and see
How very funny they all will be.

As the metrical variation that "too" in line three above might suggest—it changes up the metrical "foot" at the precise moment when readers are invited to "change [the animals'] feet," troping the motif of change in the pamphlet writ large—this is a pretty self-reflexive and (dare we say it?) unified aesthetic project from the vantage point of media. Even the seemingly incidental subject matter of the other verses—the refraction of light through water that produces rainbows in bubbles, the singing of songs, the "tortoise-mobiling" in the horse/pig panel pictured earlier, roller skating, and so on—keeps coming back to the topic of transmission and the tools by which various things (light, sound, bodies) get conveyed.

All of this no doubt feeds (pun intended) into the claim that Kellogg's makes on the pamphlet's back cover for its cereal as a new, improved, and modern nutritional medium. Updating the "Old Rhyme" of the woman who lived in a shoe—a moment that for us recalls the poetic "foot" mentioned in the  paragraph above and lets us indulge the fantasy that the old woman and her children are living in the genre of poetry itself—the pamphlet's new old woman does know what to do:

There was an old woman
Who lived in a shoe,
She had lots of children
But knew what to do.

She gave them Kellogg's Corn Flakes
Three times a day,
And they thrived and grew
In a marvelous way.

If you look closely, you'll see a little American flag flying from the shoe's toe, and if you look even more closely, you'll notice that while almost all of the children are white, one is clearly not. Sitting to the right of the flag is a girl who reads as indigenous Central or South American; not only is her skin darker, but she's got that ridiculously large hat to code her as ethnic in the event there was any doubt she's not. It's kind of hard not to wonder what sort of bookend she makes when paired with the grey-skinned elephant, so often symbolic of Africa's "Jungleland," who appears on the booklet's front cover. The subjects of race, romance, and the transmission and mediation of genetic stuff do not come up in the poetry, but the robust, darker-skinned male elephant, the single old white woman in the shoe, all of the assorted children including the girl with the hat, and that American flag kind of beg the issue, no? Where did the children come from? What America is being envisioned here? What "moving-picture" of a nation is being processed via this hands-on, media-rich, hybrid poem-film, exercise in queerness, drag, and cross dressing?

As we know, the decade in which Kellogg's was designing, copy- righting, and circulating "Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures" was the historical high point in immigration to the U.S. (the decade from 1901-1910 saw nearly nine million people immigrate, double the previous decade), so it would be crazy to think that everything going on in the booklet is not in some way related to social anxieties regarding the moving picture of race and ethnicity in the U.S. While we're not going to say that Kellogg's is being entirely progressive in relation to this history, it certainly does not look like an exercise in purity—a discourse that was commonly racialized in American advertising and especially, as we've discussed before, in soap ads. Instead, as the sheet music being held by the horse and cow in the panel pictured here appears to spell out, "Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures" pitches itself—and Corn Flakes—as "A glee for mixed voices." Indeed, breakfast might be the most important meal of the day after all.

Rob Lowe Reads James Franco's Poetry on Conan

"Def Poet's Society": The Poetry of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" (Season 1, Episode 7 [October 1990])

John Milton on The Untouchables: "The St. Louis Story" (Season 1, Episode 16 [January 28, 1960])

"There Is a Plethora of the Mundane": Dick Van Dyke Meets the Avant-Garde (Season 2, Episode 26 [March 27, 1963])

The Poetry of the Chrysler 200: "Miggy at the Bat"

The Poetry of Quirt Manly and The Beverly Hillbillies (January 1, 1964)

In this episode, Granny thinks that Quirt Manly—a rugged and heroic TV cowboy—would be a perfect match for her granddaughter Elly May, so she invites him for a visit, only to discover that the real-life Quirt is not the manly man he plays on TV. Nope. He's super short. He's scared of horses. He can't shoot. And what he likes to do, as he explains to Elly, is "make up poems for girls like you." Of particular note, Quirt is played by Henry Gibson, who had recited poetry on The Jack Paar Tonight Show and on The Dick Van Dyke Show and who appears here to be further fashioning the character of The Poet, which he would eventually play on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.

If you want to skip right to Quirt's poems, start around 16:45.

"Whatever happened to 'Hickory Dickory Dock'?": The Poetry of Family Ties (Season 3, Episode 20 [1985])

The Poetry of The X-Files: Fox Mulder Reading Robert Browning in "The Field Where I Died" (Season 4, Episode 5 [1996])

P&PC's New Acquisition: The Poetry of Motorola's TV Trays

The P&PC Office is certainly going to use them to serve hors d'oeuvres and other tasty treats at this weekend's National Poetry Month Black-Tie Benefit, but we wanted to give those of you who won't be on hand a preview of our most recent acquisition: a set of four promotional TV serving trays that were either sold or given away with Motorola televisions, phonographs, and other entertainment devices in the 1950s or 1960s. Each tray is about sixteen inches long with rounded corners, has a wood-grain veneer, features a colorful cartoon scene by commercial illustrator Vernon McKissack, and includes—what else?—a quatrain like the one accompanying the jazz scene pictured here:

Clap your hands and lift your feet
And dance around to that solid beat
This real gone jive that lets you laugh
Sounds groovy too, on a phonograph.

In addition to the simple fact of the poetry printed on 'em, we were initially attracted to these trays for how this particular one incorporates jazz-related slang for commercial purposes and (of course) for that super-spectacular pun on the word "groovy," which is used to describe both an immaterial social vibe as well as the material substance of the vinyl playback format. Listening to jazz is "groovy" in more than one way, ya dig?

While preparing our franks-in-blankets and deviled eggs, though, we've also become increasingly interested in how Motorola is using the trays to stage a media conversation between the phonograph, music, poetry and print, illustration, and even the television itself, as the television is (we think) simulated by the trays' wooden frames. Indeed, the original box pictured here—which has a cut-out television screen window through which one can view the top tray inside—suggests we are intended to read the rounded wooden tray frames as the rounded wooden frames of old televisions. In a sense, then, the "box" of that television ties together word, picture, music, and phonograph—a claim for the power and unique thrill of what was then the newest new medium of the twentieth century.

As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin might describe it in their 1999 book Remediation: Understanding New Media, the jazz scene is characterized by what they call "the twin preoccupations of contemporary media": an interplay between the experience of "immediacy" and the experience of "hypermediacy." On the one hand, the tray (and by extension Motorola's phonograph and television) cultivates immediacy by promising to immerse us in the "live" moment of the improvised jazz performance, thus offering us a "transparent presentation of the real." On the other hand, we are (as Bolter and Grusin say) "challenged to appreciate the integration" of media forms—print, music, image, phonograph, and television—and thus enjoy not the representation but the "opacity of media themselves." That is, not entirely unlike the artist whom the poem tells us is looking "through the window" at the musician playing in the flat next door, we become immersed in the moment by looking through one medium or interface at another. But even here, as the poem explains, the enjoyment of immediate experience hinges on, is accompanied by, or is in a sort of inevitable relationship with a corresponding "opacity" suggested (like the pun on "groovy") by yet another pun: the "fidelity" of the poem's last line, which links the "high fidelity" of the audio playback experience with the authentic experience of live listening. Relying on the pun's cultivation of multiple meanings to direct our attention away from the transparent "content" or "message" and toward the pleasure of multiple media interconnections and media interplay, the tray uses the opacity or thickness of language as a medium to trope the opacity of media more generally, focusing our attention not on the "content" or the "message" being conveyed, but on media itself. (Why else use the triple rhyme of "melody" and "fidelity" if not to call attention to language itself?) Here's that poem:

This master piece will have to wait
Maybe until it's quite too late
Cause who can deny that vibrant melody
Coming through the window with such fidelity.

The lack of a question mark at the end of this verse turns query into fact: what comes "through the window"—a phrase that (for us) recalls the cut-out "window" on the box cover and thus also what comes "through the window" of the television screen or the invisible window of the phonograph—has more fidelity to reality (immediacy) than any of the other media taken in isolation. Like the sketches on the studio floor (or so the logic goes), all other media are incomplete or unfinished except for television and phonograph, which have the power to combine previous media in creating the most immediate of immediate experiences.

Based on this interplay between immediacy and hyper- mediacy, Bolter and Grusin argue that "Although each [new] medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium." Such is the case with the phonograph and television and Motorola's TV trays. For despite offering TV and the phonograph as more immediate or authentic experiences than the verbal, pictorial, or painterly, Motorola only simulates the phonograph and TV on the TV trays themselves; TV is only figured by, not actually present in, the box's cut-out window and the frame of cheap wood, and the phonograph is only mentioned by name, not pictured. Thus, we become aware of "the new medium as a medium" because of the difficulty of representing the phonograph or TV in any other media but themeselves. Oddly, by choosing this print-based format to "advertise" television and phonograph, Motorola is unable to actually dramatize the newness of those media, whether it be their immediacy or hypermediacy; we don't experience the media that Motorola wants us to buy but, instead, have to imagine them for ourselves—just like the child in the tray pictured here who has to look up and away from the media limitations of the book to imagine the scene it describes.

And maybe this is the whole point of the TV trays and the dynamic between immediacy and hypermediacy that the poems point us to and help to cultivate—not to replicate television or the phonograph, but to get us, as consumers, to imagine what the television and phonograph can do. If advertising is designed not to sell a product but to cultivate in a consumer the desire for a product, then the desire produced by the inability to experience television or phonograph via the simulation of older media (the cut-out window on the box, the wooden frame around the scenes, the puns on "groovy" and "fidelity") has an easy fulfillment: simply "grab a partner and do-ce-do" out to the store to buy the real thing.

"I think you're afraid that your poem really is good": The Poetry of Roseanne ("Brain Dead Poets Society," Season 2, Episode 10 [1989])

There Are Angels: A Guest Posting by Camille Dungy about Poetry, BCS Football, Angels, and Jake Adam York

Editor's Note: If you were anywhere near Earth a little over a week ago, on Monday, January 6, then you know there was a football game that night—the stunning BCS National Championship game between the Florida State Seminoles and the Auburn Tigers. It was, by all measures, a game of poetic twists and turns on the field, but more stunning for the P&PC Office was the poetry taking place off the field in the televised commercial for Auburn, which featured—no, was completely anchored by—Jake Adam York's poem "There are Angels." (Watch it here or scroll to the video at the bottom of this post.) Like a stadium crowd silenced by a kickoff returned for a touchdown, we were speechless, hardly believing our eyes and ears; we knew Jake (pictured here) during his Auburn years and after, and, like everyone else in the poetry world, we were shocked by his sudden and untimely death in 2012. (N.B. Jake's newest book is due out in March.)

Confused, thrilled, and emotionally tangled by this mixture of football, poetry, and our memories of Jake, P&PC turned to the only person we could turn for an explanation—to Camille Dungy (pictured here and in the next image below), a poet, editor, and cousin of former NFL coach Tony Dungy. The author of three books of poetry (Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison), the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and the winner of an American Book Award, Dungy is currently a professor of English at Colorado State University. Here's what she had to say.

January 6th was King's Day, also known as Epiphany, the day the Three Wise Men presented their gifts. It is the day my family marks the conclusion of the Christmas season, and so while many other Americans were watching the BCS championship football game between Auburn and Florida State, I took down my Christmas tree. It has been years since I owned a fully-functional television (this is partially due to my belief that TV infringes upon my ability to commit myself to poetry), and even now that I have a television, I don't keep it in the living room, so while I was taking down the tree, I wasn't watching the football broadcast. I was thinking about angels.

That morning I'd had breakfast with a new friend, Mary Ellen Sanger, and she told me about her family. There were seven children in all, but one of them died in infancy. "Growing up, I remember feeling special because I was the only person I knew who had a brother who was an angel," she said. As I took angel ornaments off my tree, I was thinking about the implications of what Mary Ellen said. I was considering all the ways we perpetual mourners demonstrate our grief.

Along with all the angels and the Santas and the miscellaneous ornaments, my tree had three snowflake ornaments this year. The snowflakes were tatted by a woman who lives in Iowa City, Iowa. She tats them throughout the year and, in December, donates them to Lensing Funeral Home. If the funeral home has conducted a service for your loved one, you are eligible to receive one of these tatted ornaments. I have a snowflake for each of my mother's parents and one for my father's brother. The latter snowflake is newly on the tree this year because of services Lensing conducted for my uncle last spring. I packed away the snowflakes and kept thinking about angels.

I thought about the poet Jake Adam York, who died in December of 2012 at the age of 40. I thought about his brother's eulogy, about the fact that his brother had to write a eulogy, about the ways his brother expressed his memories, his grief. I thought about Jake Adam York's elegy for the jazz musician Sun Ra, "Letter Already Broadcast into Space." That poem begins, "You are not here..." and goes on to say "I think, / they've forgotten you." I thought about how I have not forgotten Jake Adam York and the good work he did while on this earth. I thought about how Jake's poems memorialized people who lived and died to bring attention to injustice. I thought about how important it is to remember people who make us care about the lives around us. I thought about how crucial that work is, though much of it happens away from the general public's gaze. "Come down, Uncle, come down / and help me rise," his poem pleads, "I have forgot my wings." I thought about how finding ways to broadcast our connections to our own versions of angels can prove a service to us all. I thought about how I have not forgotten my uncle, my father's brother, any more than Mary Ellen's family forgot their own angel, the infant brother they gave wings. We were born in the same year, Jake Adam York and I. I thought about this. Mine, like his, is an associative poet's mind, known for imposing emotional context on the littlest things, known for believing small things matter a great deal. I thought about all of this in my living room's TV-less quiet, as I packed away angels.

The reason I haven't had a fully-functional television in the house for years is because, some time ago, I disconnected my cable and, rather than spend the 2.8 hours that the average American spends watching television each day, I spend my time reading and writing or walking and cooking or talking and thinking instead. For the first two years that my cousin, Tony Dungy, led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to the NFL playoffs, when I didn't have a television but still wanted to support him, I haunted sports bars and colleagues' couches every Sunday and Monday the team played. (This might seem like a major commitment if it weren't for the fact that my uncle, Jesse L. Dungy, even more dedicated to family than I, spent every game weekend flying or driving to whatever city in which the Bucs, and later the Indianapolis Colts, were scheduled to play.) A few games into the Buccaneers' third consecutive winning season, I calculated the hours I'd spent watching football over the previous two years: at least 120 hours, and probably more like 200.

Tony and his team weren't spending 60+ hours a year thinking about what I did for a living—of that I was sure. They were focused on football, which is where their talents find expression. My talent was writing poetry, to which the world of football gives comparatively little thought. Why was I dedicating so much energy to a pastime that would likely never return my investment? The Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics report that revealed America's 2012 TV watching habits also informs us that, on weekend days, the average American over the age of 15 spends one hour reading. Younger Americans read even less. "Individuals ages 15 to 19 read for an average of 7 minutes per weekend day," the report claims. The TV watching public could care less about literature, these statistics would suggest, and the people who build television content for them know this. I resolved, again, to dedicate my time to poetry instead of the TV.

This season, though, there was poetry on ESPN. I'm not just talking about color commentary describing a well-executed play as "poetry in motion." I'm talking about actual poetry recited during actual football broadcasts. These poems appeared in the spots each university gets during a game to talk about what makes their campus great, why students in that 15-19 year old non-reading demographic would want to go there, why donors should donate more cash.

My dad was watching Iowa lose to LSU in the Outback bowl on New Year's Day, and as I walked through the basement to pick out linens for the dinner table, I caught the Louisiana State ad. (That's a still from the ad pictured here; view the entire commercial at the bottom of this posting.) Apparently it's been playing all season, a clip of the "student poet" reciting her ode to LSU, but I had no idea about this intersection between football and poetry until New Year's Day. "I know you're rooting for Iowa," I told my Dad, "but LSU just made a fan out of me."

A week later, on King's Day, after I stripped the tree of all its ornaments, I went to my computer to find out what to do with my naked noble fir. I've just moved to Colorado, and little questions like this sometimes swamp me. I was still thinking of Jake Adam York, who lived in Colorado, with whom I spent a delightful afternoon in Denver two months before he died, and on whom I think I would have called, often, for advice about life on the Front Range. My family ate barbeque on New Year's Eve, for instance, and I thought about how I wished I could have asked him about the best places to buy barbeque in Northern Colorado. (Jake believed in barbeque and wrote about it often, even in his poem to Sun Ra.)

Online, I found the best way to recycle a Christmas tree, and then I found myself on Facebook. (I might have preserved more time for poetry by watching less television, but it is possible that Facebook has come to occupy an equivalent number of my hours). The first post I saw was from Jake Adam York's former colleague, the poet Nicky Beer: "ESPN just broadcast some of Jake Adam York's poetry before the BCS bowl game. Speechless and crying."

If I didn't already know that the world is stitched from confluence, I would have been surprised that the first post I saw was about a poet about whom I had just been thinking. But that's not what surprised me. If I hadn't seen the LSU spot on New Year's Day, I would have been shocked to learn that poetry was to be aired on ESPN. (Okay, I'll admit, even having seen the LSU spot, I was shocked to learn that poetry would be broadcast on ESPN.) What finally surprised me was the fact that, according to Beer's link, right about the time I was taking my angels off the tree and thinking about my football fan uncle and thinking about Jake Adam York and thinking about "Letter Already Broadcast into Space," and thinking of how we honor our angels and thinking about the crazy connections poetry allows, ESPN broadcasted a one minute and twenty-six second clip featuring a reading of Jake's poem, "There Are Angels," over footage of a moment in football history I've wished, nearly every day since I saw the replays on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, that I could have shared with my dead uncle.

Too often I hear people suggest that poetry has no place in this modern world. Sometimes I'm one of those people myself. I haven't had a television for all these years, because I begrudge the cumulative minutes it distracts me from poetry. But when I rediscover the confluence between my deepest longings, our communities' celebrations, and the mundane details of everyday life, I understand, again, that poetry's transmission is unstoppable. They come to us like gifts, the connections poetry allows.


"There are Angels" ~ Jake Adam York | BCS National Championship from Bluefoot Entertainment on Vimeo.

More Muppet Poetry: Two Poems by Rowlf

Forget the turkey, mashed potatoes, and football. We're on a Muppet kick here in the P&PC Office. Doesn't the first clip below—of Rowlf reading "Silence"—remind you of Season 4, Episode 7 of The Brady Bunch (1972) where Mike reads Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Day Is Done" as part of the Westdale High School's Family Night Frolics? And might that be Walt Whitman's famous cardboard butterfly coming to life in "The Butterfly," Rowlf's second poem below? Both "Silence" and "The Butterfly" are from Season One (1976) of The Muppet Show. Happy viewing!

The Poetry of General Hospital (c. 2004)