Guest Posting: Canoedling

Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Jeff Swenson writes in reporting (hubba hubba) on the racy poetry of canoedling from a time when modern love was reaching, er, something of a tipping point.

At least as early as the 1880s, “canoedling”—the canoe-based variant of “canoodleing”— was becoming tableau in American culture. The still-popular image of a man in the stern, paddling, and the woman reclining on cushions in the bow, often covered by a parasol, was commonly reproduced in magazines, calendars, advertisements and postcards. The mass production of wood-canvas canoes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries helped to make canoeing popular recreation, and young folk soon found the canoe was a remote—and sexually liberating—place for courtship.

Popular songs of the era particularly celebrated this courtship on water. Tin Pan Alley songwriters penned tunes such as "A Little Birch Canoe and You" (1918) and "Beautiful Ohio" (1918). Both songs are relatively chaste, the singer in “Birch Canoe” reflecting on the time when his “one and only dream comes true / The world is fair and fine, and all I want is mine / A little birch canoe and you.” “Ohio” is similarly nostalgic, the singer thinking back on a past love cultivated in the canoe:

Long, long ago, someone I know
Had a little red canoe
In it room for only two,
Love found its start, then in my heart
And like a flower grew

Harry Woods’ "Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home" (1925)—originally performed by ukulele legend Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards—is much spicier. In a typical canoedling scene, the singer and his gal Madeline paddle at midnight, ignoring her father’s calls. They find “a spot where we’re alone / Oh! She never says ‘No’ / So I kiss her.” Of course, the irony of the song’s title is that the singer never does get Madeline paddled home, for after the couple canoedles, he paddles “for one mile” just to “drift back for two,” hoping for the time when she will say, “‘Throw your paddles away.’" Here's "Paddlin' Madelin' Home" in its entirety:

I love a girl named Madeline
I know she loves me, too
For ev'ry night the moon is bright
She rides in my canoe

At midnight on the river
I heard her father call,
But she don't care and I don't care
If we get back at all

'Cause when I'm paddlin' Madeline home
Gee! When I'm paddlin' Madeline home
First I drift with the tide,
Then pull for the shore
I hug her and kiss her
And paddle some more

Then I keep paddlin' Madeline home
Until I find a spot where we're alone
Oh! She never says "No"
So I kiss her and go
Paddlin' Madeline
Sweet sweet Madeline
Paddlin' Madeline home

'Cause when I'm paddlin' Madeline home
Gee! When I'm paddlin' Madeline home
First I kiss her a while
And when I get through
I paddle for one mile
And drift back for two

Then I keep paddlin' Madeline home
Until I find a spot where we're alone
Oh! If she'd only say "Throw your paddles away"
Paddlin' Madeline
Sweet sweet Madeline
Paddlin' Madeline home

You can listen to a recording of “Paddlin’ Madelin’ Home’” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qtb4crdahg. Better yet, grab your uke and hit the river with your favorite gal before the summer is up.

Jeff Swenson writes from Garrettsville, Ohio, where he is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at Hiram College.

TRIVIA QUESTION: What famous cartoon character did Ukulele Ike voice?

Dinosaur Descendant to be Dad at 111

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on August 19, 2008.

And the paparazzi jump to search their files
for other famous moms and dads,
and to the Angelinas and the Brads
add Henry, paramour of reptiles,
and septuagenarian Mildred, his trophy mate,
who’s still got her looks and a great set of leathery legs.
They stand proudly by their dozen eggs
as millions of tabloid readers salivate
wanting to know about their care and feeding,
Henry’s mysterious past in the New Zealand wild,
whether lizards’ love is doggy-styled,
and whether adoption was an option before their breeding.
But can he be a father? Can he meet their needs?
Children are a blessing, he says. And feeds.

Corny Verse?

Given my recent focus on the Fireside Poets Longfellow and Holmes—and given the time of year here in Iowa, when the corn is rolling in and the huskers are hard at work (at the farmers markets and the ethanol plants)—how could I not post this little gem? It's a stereoview card with an excerpt from fellow Fireside Poet John Greenleaf Whittier's "Song of the Huskers" printed on back, beginning with:

Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard!
Heap high the golden corn!
No richer gift has Autumn poured
From out her lavish horn!

Note the torn paper on the back of the card: no doubt an indication that someone pasted it inside a scrapbook somewhere along the way. Read in connection with the magic lantern slide with Holmes's "Lord of all being, throned afar" on it (see "Projected Verse" below), the Whittier stereoview card is further evidence of a 19th century multi-media poetry that anticipates the radio and digital poetries of the 20th century. Thoughts on this early 3-D poetry?

Freaking Out about "Freaked"

This has been a freaky week for your favorite Poetry & Popular Culture blog, which accidentally helped to create what one reader called a "media frenzy" around J.T. Dutton's forthcoming novel "Freaked." I highlighted Dutton's book on August 9 because the novel—like many other novels in 20th century American literature—incorporates poetry, including Grateful Dead song lyrics, on a number of levels. For Dutton, this incorporation was made, um, more difficult than she expected because the copyright owner for the Dead songs (Ice 9) wouldn't allow Dutton to quote as extensively as she wanted to do.

University of Iowa Communications Professor Kembrew McLeod—a specialist in the politics of copyright and proud owner of the trademark for "Freedom of Expression"—sent an excerpt from my post on Dutton's book to Boing Boing, which ran it under the somewhat sensational headline, "Grateful Dead lyrics cannot be quoted in children's book." That posting quickly created a furor. From fans claiming Ice 9 was betraying the Dead's legacy by restricting use of the band's lyrics, to folks advocating for copyright protection of artists' work, people responded passionately to the behind-the-scenes copyright issues of Dutton's book. You can see that discussion here: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/12/grateful-dead-lyrics.html. "Poetry & Popular Culture" registered this energy as well, with a massive spike in site traffic: thanks to McLeod and Boing Boing, there were 676 visits to "Poetry & Popular Culture" on August 14, up from 30 the day before; there were 665 views of the post on Dutton's book; 84% of visitors were new to the site.

Dutton herself eventually weighed in on the issue, clarifying that her relationship with Ice 9 was amicable and explaining Ice 9's concerns with allowing extensive use of the band's lyrics. Here's what Dutton wrote:

Hi,
I am the author of Freaked and here is my perspective on this story. I had no legal battles or even conflict with Ice 9. I contacted them for permissions and they offered me some, but not all of what I wanted. Usually money changes hands when writers ask for permissions. In my case, Ice 9 gave me the use of what lyrics I did use for free.

Their hesitation about giving the full amount had to do with the feeling that allowing me to use too much would seem to be an endorsement of my work. Getting their endorsement would be huge--as one commenter put it, a money vein. Of course they have to be careful about what they lend. I wrote about the Dead because I happen to love their music, and using their lyrics was part of telling this story.

Yours,
J. T. Dutton

For a while, Dutton's posting put a stop to the argument on Boing Boing. Without the saga of a legal battle to propel the matter, and with Dutton's report of her compromise with Ice 9, people backed off and the discussion stalled. What I see as a central issue with "Freaked" went no further: no matter how amicable the compromise with Ice 9, the legalities of copyright—and the economic power Ice 9 leveraged to grant or refuse permission—forced Dutton to change the book and compomise her original vision. The book that your bookstore will carry is not the book Dutton entirely wanted; in the end, for better or worse, economics trumped the art.

I'm bringing this up now because the passion unleashed by Boing Boing's headline—a passion which demonstrates the proprietary interests that consumers, music listeners, and readers have in the texts they hear and support—has its roots in the popular culture of poetry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We're familiar with the fan's sense of ownership over, and participation in, the rock and roll song and its success—see your mix tapes, your fan zines, the Boing Boing commenters who claim to carry on the Dead's communitarian spirit in an era when their works are copyright protected, etc. But this passion, and this way of engaging with texts (be they read or heard) is not unique to rock and roll culture.

We only have to look at a book like Meredith McGill's "American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) to realize that the controversy stretches back nearly 200 years. In this book, McGill reports on the formation of copyright law in the early nineteenth century U.S. and how many Americans perceived copyrighting to be downright anti-American—more a legacy of British aristocratic culture than an expression of America's democracy and equal availability and ownership of texts once they were made public, purchased, and owned.

This was (and is, if the controversy over the Dead lyrics is any indication) especially the case with poetry, which was short, easily excerpted and reprinted, easily clipped and saved in poetry scrapbooks, easily slipped into and out of what Joseph Harrington calls new and different "presentation contexts." (See his book "Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics" [Wesleyan UP, 2002].) Poems by Longfellow and Poe were reprinted word for word with impunity in this pre-royalties age, and not just on brochures for noble civic and educational events, but in advertisements as well. When American readers clipped poems from newspapers and magazines for their scrapbooks, they regularly cut off the author's name and bibliographical information; for many individuals, those things meant far less than they do now. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a byline is positioned underneath the title or headline today—rather than being printed at the end of a poem or article—because it makes cutting the author's name off much more difficult than if it appeared at the end). As the 19th century scrapbook art in the image to the left illustrates, this is the age in which the collage ethic of popular culture was born.

There are many examples that illustrate the recirculation and cutting and pasting of poetry that characterized American culture and provides us with a historical understanding for the Boing Boing discussion surrounding the Dead Lyrics. I'll close by briefly highlighting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" which appears on the back of a 1944 Christmas dinner menu for the U.S.S. Lynx, pictured here. (How much you want to bet that no one asked Longfellow or his heirs or assigns for permission?)

"I Heard the Bells" was written during the Civil War in 1864 and was put to music in 1872. Like the Dead lyrics in Dutton's book, it is both poetry and song lyric. Here's the poem as Longfellow originally wrote it:

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

Till ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound the carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn, the households born
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

But check out the redacted version of the poem that appears on the U.S.S. Lynx menu, in which stanzas 3, 6, and 7 have been cut entirely to form a new 4-stanza poem. Not only is the Lynx using Longfellow's verse as if it's a sort of common national resource that people can appropriate into different presentation contexts at will, but it shows no particular faithfulness to the original. In fact, the Lynx not only removes "I Heard the Bells" from its Civil War context, but it transforms a pretty depressing original poem (in which the households born of peace are made forlorn) into a little inspirational after-school-special in which the forces of God and right triumph over despair:

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Considering the drastic changes that the U.S.S. Lynx has made to the poem, it's a wonder that the ship nevertheless felt moved to print Longfellow's name as author at the same time. While, yes, Longfellow did write the words that appear on the menu, there really isn't any way to say he authored the actual poem that the Lynx has come up with for its Christmas meal.

I realize I've come a long way from the stir that Dutton's book elicited on Boing Boing, but the history of "I Heard the Bells" provides an interesting point of comparison: an artifact from a day when copyright ownership worked differently than it does today, and from a time when readers—at home with their scrapbooks or at sea on Christmas day—felt just as licensed to cut up, recirculate, or otherwise own poetry and song lyrics as they do now. Only nobody got as freaked out about it as they do today.

J.T. Dutton's "Freaked"

Ezra Pound famously wrote that poetry should be as well-written as prose. Judging from the evidence, American novelists appear to believe that prose, at the same time, should aspire toward the poetic—or at the very least discuss poetry. If you keep a lookout, in fact, you'll find that few "literary" novels in the twentieth century fail to incorporate or mention poetry at some point along the way. Sometimes those references are obvious—the way that Leslie Marmon Silko weaves poems into the text of her novel Ceremony—and others are fleeting. In "Slaughterhouse Five," Vonnegut quotes from Roethke's "The Waking" and mentions William Blake. Saul Bellow's Herzog reads Blake, Dryden and Pope. When a tramp commits suicide by throwing himself into a thresher in Willa Cather's "My Antonia," he is found to have been carrying a pen knife, a wishbone, and a poem "cut out of a newspaper and nearly worn out." Heck, in Dashiell Hammett's "Maltese Falcon," Sam Spade calls Effie "the sister of the boy who stood on the burning deck"—a direct reference to the often-taught and often-memorized 1826 Felicia Hemans poem “Casabianca.”

Given the regularity with which American novels address or incorporate poetry, one such as yours truly could be easily forgiven if he argued that this tendency is more than just a tendency. Could it in fact be a constitutive discourse of the U.S. novel as a genre?

I recently showcased a poetry-related excerpt from Cheeni Rao's forthcoming memoir/novel "In Hanuman's Hands," and here—in an ongoing effort to track how novelists are dealing with the other genre—I want to introduce a section of J.T. Dutton's young adult novel "Freaked" which is due out in stores from HarperCollins imprint HarperTeen on March 17, 2009. "Freaked" is the story of a 15 year-old boarding school student named Scotty Douglas Loveletter. In addition to being the son of America's most famous sex self-help therapist, Scotty jams on drugs and the Grateful Dead. In "Freaked," he needs to get to Freedom to see Jerry, and the lack of a ticket, a ride, or money in his pocket isn't going to keep him from the promised land.

Note, as you read the following account of the show, the unattributed reference to Keats. Some gossip about the Dead, its lyrics, and permissions issues in "Freaked" will follow, so keep reading!

Here is Dutton:

The music was the only thing saving us. The notes were golden threads that wove themselves into the wild tapestry of images, smells, and the floor wobbling under my feet. The acoustic ran as as it always does, higher and lighter than the backup guitar; Jerry's voice danced another couple notes above that. I could hear him coming through the music. People in the crowd chose the line they were going to move to. There were girls fluttering through the backdrop of light, taking wing almost, and guys hunkering low to the ground, swinging their arms and stomping. The whirling-helicopter girl whipped past. I was just a step above an open riser overlooking the stage, and her hair and arms and skirt blew a breeze across my face. She made all kids of gestures with her hands, wrapping them around and under each other like snakes on Erasmus's pole as she talked to me in signs. She repeated every note just as Jerry played it and transformed it into a movement of her body. Everything about her was beautiful: the way the light moved in her ebony braids, the way her shadow reduced the glare from the spots on the ceiling, the way she became the moon eclipsing the sun, the symbol of yin and yang. She was love, all right. Pure, uncut, pay-with-your soul, put you in the hospital love.

"Truth, beauty—" I said into the microphone in an effort to catch the moment before it slipped.

By the time I had finished reporting, she was gone. All around me, the crowd surged, an ocean that rose and reared before dashing itself against a rocky shore of ecstasy. We were stirred by the girl's appearance and the music rippling from Jerry's harp unstrung. No music the Dead plays has quite the same intensity as Jerry's music—not Bobby's booze ballads or blues. I liked "One More Saturday Night" but I worshiped all of Jerry's songs, and the ones that really made me fall on my knees were the ones with women's names: "Bertha," "Althea," Scarlet Begonias," "Dear Prudence." My mother was just like Sugar Magnolia: "She can dance a Cajun rhythm / Jump like a Willys in four wheel drive." She wanted to be thrown to the wind, left to drift on the currents that moved her.

I got up and danced myself crazy in search of the whirling-helicopter girl, my pack flying out to the left and right of me, my tie and the tails of my jacket sucking up the air and making me fly. At first it was strange being on my feet again. I couldn't stand up, but I wasn't exactly falling down, either. I smacked some guy with the microphone of my tape recorder.

"Look out douche bag," he said.

"Sorry," I said into the tape, for posterity.

*****

In her original manuscript, Dutton had opened every chapter with a quotation from a Dead song, titling each chapter with the title of the song being quoted from. When it came time to publish, though, Ice 9 Publishing—which somehow owns the rights to all of the Dead's songs—wouldn't grant permission to Dutton to use all of the lyrics she wanted to use. Ultimately, Dutton was allowed to quote from "Dire Wolf" and was given leave to use brief phrasings from the songs here and there within the text (as with "She can dance a Cajun rhythm..." in the preceding passage).

So in short, because of the exigencies of copyright law and the concerns of Ice 9, the "Freaked" that you'll see at the store is not the "Freaked" that Dutton had in mind. But never fear! Yours truly has managed to acquire what is now believed to be the list of quotations Dutton wanted to use as chapter epigraphs in the original book but was not allowed to use in the final version. Here they are. And remember, you heard it first here:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung . . .
—Robert Hunter, "Ripple"

But I’ll still sing you love songs
Written in the letters of your name.
And brave the storm to come,
For it surely looks like rain.
—John Perry Barlow, "Looks Like Rain"

A box of rain will ease the pain
And love will see you through.
—Robert Hunter, "Box of Rain"

… the heart has its beaches,
Its homeland, and thoughts of its own.
—Robert Hunter, "Eyes of the World"

Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart.
You just gotta poke around.
—Robert Hunter, "Shakedown Street"

Trouble with you is
The trouble with me.
Got two good eyes
But we still don’t see.
—Robert Hunter, "Casey Jones"

You must really consider the circus
‘Cause it might be your kind of zoo.
I can’t think of a place that’s more perfect
For a person as perfect as you.
—John Perry Barlow, "Hell in a Bucket"

When I awoke, the Dire Wolf
Six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinnin at my window
All I said was “come on in.”
—Robert Hunter, "Dire Wolf"

There’s a dragon with matches loose on the town.
Take a whole pail of water just to cool him down.
—Robert Hunter, "Fire on the Mountain"

Given the vagaries of quoting with and without impunity from the Dead lyrics, you might like to know one final note on "Freaked." Dutton originally titled the book "Ripple," but her editor lobbied for "Dark Star" instead (both titles of Dead songs). Although the publisher is legally allowed to use the song title in this way, Ice 9 expressed its objection by withholding permission for the epigraphs quoted above. Shortly after the change to "Dark Star" and the conflict with Ice 9, Harper's marketing department decided that "Dark Star" sounded too much like a sci-fi novel title and wouldn't work for Dutton's book. Hence the change to "Freaked," which has no official connection to the Dead. One wonders if Harper had in fact gone forward with a title like "Freaked" from the beginning, whether Ice 9 wouldn't have gone into such a tizzy, whether it wouldn't have withheld permission for the epigraphs, and whether Dutton's book would have been published in a form much closer to the one she initially wanted. But hey, who ever said publishing is actually about the author and the work?

Projected Verse

Long before Charles Olsen wrote "Projective Verse" (1950), Americans were projecting their own poetry onto walls, sheets, movie screens, and other backdrops via magic lantern projectors and glass slides such as the one shown here. These lanterns and slides were precursors to the projectors that kept us hostage to family vacation shows in our childhoods or art history courses in undergraduate school; instead of hot-burning bulbs, they ran on kerosene lamp oil and an open flame, but the technology was otherwise fairly similar, offering an in-home or portable quasi-cinematic experience. In some cases, the slides were industrially manufactured, and in other cases people were encouraged to make them at home by sandwiching transparencies between two pieces of glass. "By carefully following the directions," an instruction manual from 1882 reads, "your Magic Lantern will give you much pleasure."

This pleasure included poetry as well. In an age where poetry was read aloud at home, recited in school, encountered on the lecture and Chautauqua circuits, and performed regularly as part of civic events, it's no surprise to learn that a technology enabling people to project it textually would be popular as well. The lyrics to popular songs were projected so people could follow along; cartoon verses preceded feature attractions in movie theaters; some magic lantern slide sets contained only the illustrations for poems—sometimes ballads, sometimes nursery rhymes—presuming the text itself would be read aloud. The 1882 manual I've referenced above ("Home Entertainments, or Evenings with the Magic Lantern") includes, for example, a poem called "The Lazy Ant," and another called "Crossing the Ferry." The instructions for "Crossing the Ferry" read: "Our next picture will show you a ferry scene, and while we are crossing we will relate to you the conversation between the little lovers before us. (Here let a little girl and boy take the part of the young lovers, and recite the poem.)" What would Walt Whitman say to that?!

That same brochure has a page titled "Five Popular Poets" and explains, "I will now show you the pictures of five of our most popular poets." The page no doubt served as a sort of script, containing biographical information on, and excerpts from, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and Alfred Lord Tennyson—a core of Fireside Poets that drove American poetry in the 19th century and who were familiar faces in the American home. Indeed, when Jean Toomer in "Bona and Paul" from Cane (1923) writes "Art sat on the piano and simply tore it down. Jazz. The picture of Our Poets hung perilously," he is referring to the portraits of Fireside Poets that Americans hung on the walls at home.

The Magic Lantern slides remind us that poems are not just produced, but are always used for one thing or another—for family entertainment, advertising, preaching, etc.—as well. That is, the "life" of a poem doesn't stop when the author publishes it. In fact, a poem's social life may become more interesting once it leaves the author's desk and begins to socialize with other poems on magazines pages, in anthologies, on web sites, as it gets excerpted, quoted, reviewed, so on and so forth. Take, for example, the slide I've included here: a poem written in 1848 by one of "Our Poets," Oliver Wendell Holmes, who then published it in the December 1859 Atlantic Monthly as part of his "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" column—a role he'd reprise later as Professor at the Breakfast Table and Poet at the Breakfast Table. (Holmes was not only a physician who coined the term "anesthesia" and the popular author of "Old Ironsides" [1830], but he developed what would become the most popular design for the stereoscope as well—an interest in entertainment technology that must have made him pleased to have his verse become part of magic lantern culture.) This poem concluded Holmes's contribution for December 1859, and he introduced it with the following words:

"And so my year’s record is finished. Thanks to all those friends who from time to time have sent their messages of kindly recognition and fellow-feeling. Peace to all such as may have been vexed in spirit by any utterance the pages have repeated. They will doubtless forget for the moment the differences in the hues of truth we look at through our human prisms, and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light we all need to lead us and the warmth which can make us all brothers."

No matter how much Holmes (1809-1894) wanted his readers to join him in "singing (inwardly)" this hymn, American audiences did just the opposite: they proceeded to put it to music and sing it outwardly! In so doing, they made it one of the most popular hymns of the 19th and 20th centuries. Says the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, the resulting hymn "belongs to the slender anthology of sacred songs that are indubitable poetry."

I purchased the slide shown here at Kensington's Portobello Market in London, pulling it from a collection once owned by a British church that had no doubt found it necessary to update its technology. Most of the slides were pictures—in fact, most magic lantern slides are pictures, with no more than a small percentage containing song lyrics and poems—but there were 6-8 hymns that were probably projected in front of the congretation in lieu of hymnals. (You can see cues in the margins directing certain parts of the congregation—men and women, women, chorus, pastor—when to sing.) I picked out "Lord of all being, throned afar" as a souvenir. It struck me as important, not just for the combination of poetry and singing there, but for the fact that I was finding it in England. Usually, when we think of the 19th century, we think of America importing British poetry (Tennyson especially) not the other way around, but the Holmes slide suggests how the literary trade routes ran both ways.

Magic lantern poetry seems important to me—and relevant to our current age—for another reason as well, as it helped to transition Americans' reading and entertainment practices away from from the human and domestic scene of the fireside and toward a piece of projection technology and its script. This transition heralds the age of the cinema, radio and tv, an age which would see the replacement of the 19th century hearth by projection and broadcast technologies on a colossal scale. Poetry—and especially the revered poetry of "Our Poets"—helped to provide a sense of continuity for readers encountering and no doubt struggling with the new ways of relating to each other that the new technologies required. With Our Poets at the helm, though, how could this transition be bad?

Obama's Bitter Muse: Frank M. Davis

The following article—by yours truly—first appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen and The Des Moines Register on Wednesday, April 30, 2008. For a while, it was available online as well, but since those links have now expired, I'm making it available here.


Obama's Bitter Muse: Frank M. Davis

I was a weaver of jagged words
A warbler of garbled tunes
A singer of savage songs
I was bitter
Yes
Bitter and sorely sad
For when I wrote
I dipped my pen
In the crazy heart
Of mad America

—Frank Marshall Davis

Of the potential father figures in Barack Obama’s autobiography "Dreams from My Father," one of the first—and most mysterious—is a poet whom we only ever know as “Frank.”

"Dreams from My Father" credits Frank with being the sole older black man in Hawaii to take seriously the teenage Obama’s search for identity, and the poet thus becomes a major touchstone in Obama’s life. Nearly every time Obama reflects on his role models, the memory of Frank comes up.

When Obama first meets him, Frank is nearly 80 years old and living “in a dilapidated house in a run-down section of Waikiki.” The man with “a big, dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion” read poetry to Obama, shared whiskey, and sometimes asked for help writing dirty limericks. And in that house “with its wobbly porch and low-pitched roof,” the two men separated by 60 years in age talked about the reality of racism in America. Those discussions—filled with Frank’s anger, warnings, and bitter realism—stay with Obama through the book.

“That’s the way it is,” Obama remembers Frank saying, “You might as well get used to it.”

‘Negative Capability’

It’s a strange withholding, in a book as candid as "Dreams from My Father," that Obama doesn’t reveal Frank’s full name, much less anything from his past. For Frank was in fact a real, published poet, and knowing more about him might help illuminate who Obama is now and his relationship to the past. It might also help explain Obama’s nigh-poetic capacity for “negative capability”—the term John Keats coined in 1817 to describe someone’s ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

“Frank” is Frank Marshall Davis, a poet, journalist, and activist.

Davis was born in Kansas in 1905 and died in Hawaii in 1987. He published four books of poems that are now collected and published by the University of Illinois Press as "Black Moods" (2002). Davis began writing poetry just after the Harlem Renaissance, but unlike Langston Hughes (also a Midwesterner), Davis didn’t move East. He worked as a journalist in Chicago’s Harlem, known as Bronzeville—the same south-side neighborhood Obama would represent as an Illinois state senator. Apparently, Davis felt equally at home writing poems as he did articles about bootlegging and Bronzeville politics.

Davis, who went on to edit the first successful daily black newspaper in U.S. history, also wrote an autobiography, "Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet" (1992). That autobiography begins with a harrowing story of how Davis was lynched by a group of white boys when he was 5. The bitterness stemming from that event hangs over the book, just as Frank’s bitterness echoes through Obama’s.

For Davis, there is no evading the impediment of Jim Crow violence and prejudice, and, because of this, "Livin’ the Blues" becomes something of an anti-Horatio Alger tale. At the same time, though, in the amount of spirit, music, humor, resilience, and creativity that Davis records in the face of racist impediments, Livin’ the Blues in some ways out-Algers Alger.

‘A Solitary Rebel’

Interestingly, anti-Obama crusaders know more about Davis (whom they call “Obama’s communist mentor”) than Obama’s own political party does. Like many individuals interested in combating American racism in the 1930s and 40s, Davis worked with people affiliated with the Communist Party. He was never a card-carrying member himself; in fact, in "Livin’ the Blues" he calls himself “a solitary rebel” who avoided joining any organization at all.

Nevertheless, the FBI assigned agents to track and harass Davis and his white wife when the two moved to Hawaii in 1949.

More interesting than Davis’ association with supposed communists is the fact that his life doesn’t, in fact, fit into the categories by which either the right or the left tend to operate. Davis, for example, was a Republican who voted against Roosevelt throughout the 1930s. He spoke as a heterosexual black man on behalf of gay rights. He openly linked Jewish and black experiences of oppression and raged against America’s hypocrisy as it fought Nazi Germany while maintaining a race-based caste system at home.

A Republican with Communist friends?

A journalist who wrote poetry?

Bitterness tempered by hope?

On the surface, it’s easy to see what Davis and Obama have in common; both were born in Kansas, both have families with mixed race marriages, both lived in Hawaii. That Obama would later represent the part of Chicago that Davis wrote about years before is suggestive as well.

Davis certainly was one role model for the young Obama. But Davis—even, or especially, in the specific bitterness he comes to represent in "Dreams from My Father"—may be Obama’s muse as well.