Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Asshole, and the Haiku of Fight Club

Last week, Poetry & Popular Culture tried—via some amateur and possibly dubious ornithological sleuthing—to argue for the singular importance of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" in understanding Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Make no mistake: the P&PC Office wasn't allowed to carry off this claim unchallenged. Some respondents contended that whether or not the nightingale in the park scene was actually a nightingale makes no difference and that, in that scene, "bird" is understood to signify "nightingale" simply enough. Other whistle blowers argued that Jekyll's transformation into Hyde wasn't precipitated by poetry at all all but by the fact that Jekyll witnessed a cat eating a bird; observing an instinctual predator at work hailed Mr. Hyde and prompted his manifestation. Still other naysayers argued that Victor Fleming's 1941 remake is more sophisticated than P&PC gave it credit for being even though Fleming axed Keats from the script and left Jekyll whistling a song he first heard, as Hyde, in the company of Ivy.

Fair enough, we say, while nevertheless sticking to our guns: the fact that Jekyll's first-ever involuntary transformation into Hyde occurs immediately after he addresses a poem to another creature makes that moment particularly significant. It suggests that the re-appearance of Hyde has less to do with the return of the repressed than it does with either 1) the ability (or inability) to communicate to the proper auditor, or 2) the gap between reality and the world imagined by poetry. It's not poetry, per se, that the film associates with Jekyll's propriety, or with learning, or with class, or with culture, but, rather, the activity of saying or thinking about poetry as a way of relating to the specifics of this world.

Admittedly, part of our obstinacy in this matter is due to temperament, but part stems from the fact that one of the most recent Jekyll-and-Hyde movies—David Fincher's 1999 Fight Club starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton—also suggests the central importance of poetry to the destabilization of the self. Fight Club centers on two characters, played by Pitt and Norton, who begin an underground amateur fight-club scene as a way of recruiting disaffected men into a terrorist network intent on breaking the power of financial institutions, especially the credit system and its record of debt. Pitt plays Tyler Durden, the impulsive, charismatic Hyde to Norton's nameless, conservative, insomniac Jekyll. As the movie develops [SPOILER ALERT], we discover that Norton's character is a delusional schizophrenic and that Tyler is really his alter ego with a six pack full of wish fulfillment. (At one point, his girlfriend Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter, describes Norton as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Asshole" to sum up her feelings of being mistreated by both his selves.) How Norton ultimately untangles himself from himself—how he even discovers himself within himself—is the primary "fight" at the center of Fight Club.

There's a scene in the middle of the movie where Norton's heretofore cautious character begins to embrace Tyler's life philosophy in earnest; he detaches himself from the mind-numbing trappings of consumerist America in order to experience LIFE in all of its brutal vitality. He goes to work with blood on his shirt. He smokes cigarettes in his cubicle. You know, productive, radical stuff. In a little poetic series of voice-over I statements accompanying this change, he explains:

I was the Zen master.
I became the calm little center of the world.
I wrote little haiku poems.
I emailed them to everyone.
I got right in everyone's hostile little face.

That's not the poetry, however. As Norton is explaining this, we get a close-up view of his computer screen where he is in the process of word processing one of those "little haiku poems" that symbolizes his new attitude. Here's that haiku:

Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The queen is their slave

Unlike Dr. Jekyll in the 1931 film, who becomes a performer of the Keats poem prior to his trans- formation, Norton's character becomes an author. And the haiku may be the perfect poetic form to bring his two selves into some sort of alignment: it's as lean as Tyler's six pack and has the sort of Spartan ethos Tyler would advocate, yet its regular 5-7-5 form would appeal to the structure Norton's other half needs. And it's a poetic form as at home in the iconoclastic, seventeenth-century, world-renouncing hands of Basho as it is in the the 21st-Century American cubicle. (See how Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has been writing haiku in lieu of error messages to help police disruptive activity on the online site.) Rather than separating Norton from his alter ego, as it does with Jekyll, poetry appears, however uneasily, to synchronize the two.

All of this isn't to say that Jekyll's recitation of "Ode to a Nightingale" in 1931 and Norton's composition of seventeen syllables in 1999 are equivalent acts. Far from it. While both do occur at a significant moment of transformation from Jekyll to Hyde—or from Jekyll to Mr. Asshole—those transformations are complicated by the nature of authorship (Norton is an author, Jekyll is not), the media entailed (Jekyll uses his voice, Norton uses email), their respective cultures (Jekyll is in 19th-century Britain, Norton is not), etc. That is, if the 1931 flick is about the birds (the Nightingale), then the 1999 film is about the bees (drones, workers, queens). But the simple fact that this Jekyll-Hyde transformation is articulated in both cases via poetry should be enough to create some buzz—if not give one something to sing about.

Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and John Keats

Poetry hit the big screen in some big and lasting ways in the 1930s. James Whale, for example, opened 1935's Bride of Frank- enstein by staging a discussion between Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley about the nature of Mary's horror story which Whale himself had brought to movie theaters in 1931. (That's Byron, who in the film calls himself "England's greatest sinner," pictured above.) Then, in 1936, Frank Capra made small-town poet Longfellow Deeds (played by Gary Cooper) the center of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a story which pitted the values of earnest, small-town poetries against the cynicism and condescension of New York and its literati. If we think of Bride of Frankenstein—with its campy black humor and extravagant hair-dos—as an unpredictable sequel to the 1931 flick, then we could do worse than think about Mr. Deeds Goes to Town as a sort of Depression-era warm-up for Capra's 1946 classic It's a Wonderful Life.

Before Whale and Capra, however, there was 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, brought into being by director Rouben Mamoulian and starring Frederic March as the famous doctor who morphs back and forth between respectably professional Jekyll (he of the pent-up aching rivers who is kept from the affections of his fiance Beatrix by a future father-in-law who insists on postponing the marriage) and lustful, simian Hyde who abusively takes out Jekyll's sexual frustrations on a local dancer named Ivy.

Three-quarters of the way through the film, Jekyll swears off his addiction to Hyde. He destroys the bubbly potion. He gets rid of the key that allows him secret, back-door, after-hours entrance into his laboratory. He heads off to a social event at which his impending nuptials with Beatrix will be announced, but then disaster strikes. The potion is still in his bloodstream. Jekyll is unable to control its effects. He transforms into Hyde, misses the social event, kills Ivy, transforms back into Jekyll, denies himself his fiance's love, turns into Hyde again, clubs his future father-in-law over the head with a cane, and leads the police on a chase through London that ends at his laboratory and with his death.

But there's more to the story than that. There's also the poetry of John Keats. As the resolute, newly sober Jekyll heads off to meet his fiance at the social event celebrating their impending marriage—and before he loses control and turns back into Hyde—he walks through a park where, hearing a bird singing, he stops to contemplate life and death and the possible meanings of the bird's song. If Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were a musical, this is the moment when the good doctor would launch into song. But this isn't a musical, and so he launches into a poem instead, quoting the first two lines of stanza seven from Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale":

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down...

No sooner does Jekyll thoughtfully repeat that first line then he sees a black cat lurking in the tree. He watches the cat slink down a branch. "Oh no! No!" he cries as he watches the cat kill and eat the bird. He again repeats, "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird" and immediately morphs into Hyde.

Like Jekyll's high spirits and resolution, the romantic moment is fleeting. Perhaps appropriately so because life in the bird world is different from life in the human world. Not only does everything go pear-shaped for Jekyll from there on out, but the Keats quotation itself disappeared from the story in 1941 when Victor Fleming remade the film with Spencer Tracy playing a far inferior Jekyll, Ingrid Bergman playing Ivy with a mixture of accents, and Lana Turner playing Jekyll's fiance. (In 1941, instead of quoting Keats in the park, Tracy goes a-whistling down the boulevard only to be interrupted by his gullet-clutching transformation into Hyde.)

As brief as it is, the moment is a spectacular articulation of the film's central tragedy, for while Jekyll quotes "Ode to a Nightingale" correctly, he quotes it to a bird that is not—not as far as the amateur ornithologists in the P&PC office can tell, at least—a nightingale. (Elsewhere in the movie, Jekyll, appearing as Jekyll, calls Beatrix a "starling," so it's not unreasonable to think the "nightingale" in the park was, in fact, a starling). In the act of speaking Keats to the wrong bird, Jekyll inadvertently queers what have been—up to that point at least—two separate discourses, and it is the queering or misapplication of these discourses and their respective subject positions that precipitates the identity crisis that leads to his own demise. That is to say that his loss of control and subsequent breakdown occurs in the realm of language before it does in body or mind. It's as if in misapplying or misidentifying the referent of the Keats poem, the walls separating the dichotomies of his life—Beatrix and Ivy, body and mind, man and ape, sexual appetite and social bearing, starling and nightingale, Hyde and Jekyll—come tumbling down as well. He is, for better or worse, unable to integrate these aspects of his experience into a new subject position: the "sole self" of the poem's final stanza.

Mamoulian's movie was made before the full enforcement of the Production Code and contains a surprising if not shocking amount of skin, violence and sexual content. To quote my nephew, "It's a little bit scary." When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer remade Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1941, most of this material was cut—a cinematic repression analogous to Jekyll's repression of his sexual desire early on in the movie. But the 1941 film cut out Keats as well. Could it be that poetry is a sort of Mr. Hyde for the 1941 version? A human experience that, once given voice, precipitates all sorts of crises demanding the disintegration and reconstruction of the self? A dangerous tool in the hands of people who might misapply it, who might ask "do I wake or sleep" at the wrong time and thus see the world around them anew? We are not Keats scholars here at P&PC. Nor are we ornithologists or film critics or linguists or Lacanian psychoanalysts, but we can't shake the feeling that Mamoulian's use of "Ode to a Nightingale" is not only a sophisticated reading of the poem—an act of literary criticism taking place in Hollywood—but that other scholars and specialists would find this moment of poetry in popular culture to be rich and provocative as well, as so many are.

Limbaugh to Judge Miss America Pageant

—Appeared in the Salem Statesman-Journal November 1, 2009

The studio is quiet now.
The staff has all clocked out.
The issues have been flogged to death.
There's no room left for doubt.

He turns the "On Air" sign to "Off."
The microphone is too.
Yet he stays in his seat and thinks.
There's still work left to do.

He judges right and wrong all day,
heroically and hurried.
But judging a beauty pageant leaves him,
frankly, rather worried.

For what does he know of beauty—
of fields of stars or flowers?
He is the star, fielding incoming calls
every day for hours.

He deals with pageantry all the time.
He's got some talent there.
He practices his scowl and then
a very studied stare.

The Poetry of Extortion: The City Cab Co. of Hays, Kansas, & The 21 Club of Buffalo, NY

In his essay "Business and Poetry," Dana Gioia wonders why "[t]here have been many important American poets who supported themselves—either by necessity or choice—by working in business, but none of them has seen it as an experience fit to write about." T.S. Eliot didn't write about Lloyd's Bank of London. Wallace Stevens didn't write much about insurance. A.R. Ammons didn't write about being a salesman. James Dickey didn't write about working in advertising. Richard Hugo didn't write about working at Boeing, and Archibald MacLeish didn't write about his time as editor of Fortune. Gioia goes looking for office cubicles, interest rates, and quarterly profits, and when he doesn't find them, he concludes that "Business does not exist in the world of poetry."

Poetry & Popular takes umbrage with this notion, since a huge number of writers—ranging from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Tillie Olsen, Muriel Rukeyser, Philip Levine and Robert Pinsky—have, in fact, written about business and money in America. Much of this poetry belongs to an American protest tradition that explores the lives of workers and trades, class inequalities, the exploitation of workers by business, and the business-based divides between rich and poor. We have ground that specific axe elsewhere and long ago, however. Here, we want to claim that a whole other realm of American poetry is also concerned with the business of making, getting, and spending money. Money—one of what Gioia calls the central "concerns of the average man"—is central to the world of popular poetry.

Money is so central to popular poetry—think of the enormous amounts of poetry that have been written for, or incorporated into, advertisements, for example—that it's impossible to cover all of its various manifestations and permutations in this one little posting. (If you're interested or can't get enough of advertising poetry, though, check out our previous postings focusing on Levi's, corsets, Blatz beer, Chocolove, Ex-Lax, and thread.) So here, for a moment, as Halloween approaches, we want to dwell on the poetry of extortion—the poetry of blackmail.

Consider the poem printed at the top of this posting, which appears on the back of a business card for the City Cab Company of that great metropolis, Hays, Kansas. Poems were commonly printed on business cards (see, for example, the business cards of Dr. C.B. Weagley, Veterinary Surgeon, or C.G. Blatt's Photographic Emporium), but this one is extra special for the threat it humorously levels against the passenger/client:

The taxicab driver sits in his car
And waits for calls from near and far;
He knows all the crooks and he knows all the rooks;
He knows all the bad roads; he knows all the nooks;
He knows our sorrows; he knows our joys;
He knows all the girls who are chasing the boys;
He knows all our troubles; he knows all our strife;
He knows every man who ducks from his wife;
If the taxicab driver told half that he knows,
He would turn all our friends into foes;
He would sow a small breeze that would soon be a gale;
Engulf us in trouble—land us in jail;
He would start forth a story, which gaining in force;
Would cause half our wives to sue for divorce;
He'd get all our homes mixed up in a fight;
And turn our bright days into sorrowing nights
In fact, he could keep the whole town in a stew,
If he told half of the things he knew.
So here we are—just pay us our fees,
We won't know a thing but our ABC's.

For Poetry & Popular Culture, this semi- colon-happy poem is not just a facetious reminder to pay up—an excessively verbose argument about the value of silence. It's also a poem in the tradition of wassailing and other extortionary lyrics that Leon Jackson illuminates in his great essay, "We Wont' Leave Until We Get Some: Reading the Newsboy's New Year's Address." For Jackson, poems like the carriers' addresses of 18th and 19th century America were not dominated in their distribution "by a single, market-based economy" but "were disseminated through a number of different economies—charity, patronage, gift-exchange, credit network, competitive writing, and so on," some of which carried threats of retribution or violence that challenged the way that money typically organized class relations. One of the examples he offers is the tradition of wassailing where "a group of poorer men would 'invade' a home at Christmas time, sing songs or perhaps perform a brief play, and then demand money or food. The wassailers would refuse to leave until they had been recompensed, and if they were forcibly ejected they would undertake a campaign of sabotage and destruction that often lasted for months at a time." Every act of wassailing thus contained an implicit threat: pay up, or face occupation.

The rhetoric of the City Cab Co. business card works in a similar way, revealing the cabbie to have a monopoly on a town's dirty laundry and blackmailing the customer into forking over some dough. When read in this context (and in a tradition of extortionary verse rooted in carriers' addresses, handbills circulated by people with disabilities, and the like), the second image above—a poem on the inside of a matchbook for the 21 Club, "The Finest Club in Buffalo"—reveals itself to be working in much the same way. Here, "The Bartender Knows" rehearses much of the same material as "The Taxicab Driver" and, at times, is a word-for-word repetition of the City Cab Company's business card, sans the excessive punctuation. This repetition is, btw, way intriguing for the P&PC office; we sometimes lie awake at night wondering about the original "source" poem from which these verses were cribbed.

The most significant difference between the two versions, however, is the fact that "The Bartender Knows" makes the threat of exposure implicit. So tight-lipped is the well-paid bartender, in fact—or so the logic of the poem goes—that even the activity of his blackmail goes unstated. Modern readers may read the poem's conclusion

So when out on a party
And from home you steal
Drop in for a drink
THE BARTENDER WON'T SQUEAL

as a gesture of friendship, solidarity, or male bonding, but contemporary verses such as "The Taxicab Driver" help us see that that is not the case at all. Don't be fooled. Friendship, solidarity, and male bonding are secondary developments of what is, first and foremost, an economic relationship grounded in an information economy where extortion—not your pint of Guinness—is the order of the day.

Lines Encountered at the New Moon Restaurant in Olympia, Washington

If you came upon a chinchilla in Chile
And shaved its beard willy-nilly,
You could honestly say
That you've just made
A Chilean chinchilla's chin chilly.
















More about the New Moon Cafe here, chinchillas here, Chile here, and a little about Roberto Ampuero (cute as a chinchilla and from Chile) here.

Is That a Poem in Your Pocket?

We submit for your contemplation this week two little men. One (pictured to the left) is a rosy-cheeked U.S. sailor produced in 1941 by Calambra Products of Alhambra, California. The other (pictured below) is a drop-drawered "Bull Clinton" made and distributed as part of the "Meanies" satirical doll collection. One says "Hello." Saith the other, perhaps, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." They've been propped up on the P&PC Office coffee maker for awhile now, and so we share them with you.

With an Edgar Guestian folksiness even Clinton himself might admire, Joe Sailor reads:

I'd like to be with you awhile
And hear about the folks,
I'd like to sit and see you smile
At the same old jokes,
But since you are so far away
I cannot hope to go,
I'll just send this little token
Just to say—HELLO!

Joe Sailor's weren't the only wartime greetings expressed in poetry, of course, as verses long and short, complicated and not-so-complicated, crisscrossed the oceans on and in postcards, pin-up girly pictures, letters, souvenir pillows, handkerchiefs, chapbooks, newspaper clippings, and the like. Frank Capra's Private Snafu military training videos were narrated in verse. Cary Nelson has reminded us how propaganda poems were shot across enemy lines in capsules specially made to open, mid-air, in order to shower enemy combatants with poetry. Even the Communist Party got in on the action, publishing Victory Verses for Young Americans (pictured above). In Partisans & Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War, Mark W. Van Wienen records the many uses to which poetry was put during World War I. P&PC is waiting for someone to write a companion book about the political work of poetry in World War II.

The specter of poetry's various applications has dogged Bill Clinton, too, especially in the wake of news reports tracking how he once greeted Monica Lewinsky by giving her a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. He isn't the only one that the Meanies series has lampooned in verse; one wonders what history of the 1990s could be written via the limericks attached on each doll's tag:

Bull Clinton is "full of it" they say.
His "staff" couldn't get out of the way.
He's in and out of courts
Cause of his fallen shorts.
He leans to the left, so they say.

Bull's toothy smile hearkens back in at least one way to the era of our little sailor, as editorial cartoons often showed F.D.R. with a grin like this one. (There was a fair amount of anti-F.D.R. verse in circulation back then too.) The puns in this poem are most appropriate for Bull, however, as their double meanings parody the political equivocations and doublespeak common in the beltway. Not so for Joe, though, whose boyish charm and blond crew-cut are certified legit by the earnest rhymes and the "little token" that fills at least our hearts.

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: An Interview with Tessa Kale, Editor of The Columbia Granger's Index To Poetry

Perhaps no single book testifies to the vast amounts of poetry produced and consumed in the 20th-century U.S. more than Granger's Index to Poetry. Since its first edition in 1904, Granger's has tracked and charted only a fraction of America's total poetic activity—mostly poetry in books and anthologies—but what a fraction it's been. That 1904 edition included over 30,000 titles culled, editor Edith Granger explained, from "the contents of three hundred and sixty-nine volumes, comprising standard and popular collections of poetry, recitations (both prose and verse), orations, drills, dialogues, selections from dramas, etc." By 1918, Granger's would list 50,000 titles. By 1940 the Index would list 75,000 titles and bill itself as a "Practical Reference Book for Librarians, Teachers, Booksellers, Elocutionists, Radio Artists, Etc." (Note how "Literary Critic" is not on that list.) Now available in electronic formats, The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry is in its 13th edition and offers users access to 250,000 full-text poems and 450,000 citations organized under 6,000 subject headings.

For over a century, Granger's has been a standard reference book on the shelves of libraries small and large across the U.S., but as far as the P&PC Office can tell, there is no history of the book, nor much in the way of information about the woman who lent the book her name. We're keeping our interns busy researching those matters, but we also had a chance to catch up with Tessa Kale, current editor of the Index and author of the novel Daphne Underground. Here's what she had to say.

P&PC: What's the job description for "The Editor" of The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry?

Tessa Kale: The tasks are too numerous to risk boring you by enumerating.

P&PC: Try me.

TK: Keeping vigilant about the best new anthologies coming out is impor- tant when we're not actually indexing them for the next print edition. Then, in order to do that indexing, we have to have all the right machinery in place, which can also handle the work that is done for the web site: this involves a decided slice of time for development of editorial management systems. For the web site, full text of the poems must be found, permission sought, and keyed in XML, and commentaries of the poems and biographies of the poets must be edited with links added throughout to all the many wonderful features on the site.

P&PC: Your talk of "management systems" and "XML" makes me think Granger's has changed a little bit over the years?

TK: The web site is the biggest change. Before that, there were CDs in that time of transition before the web became the way of the world.

P&PC: I write poems for the local newspaper. How can I get my poems indexed in Granger's?

TK: Sorry, our business is to index anthologies.

P&PC: That hasn’t always been the case, has it?

TK: No, for a time we also indexed poems in Collected and Selected Volumes. It was an additional enhancement we thought we'd try out.

P&PC: Why stick to anthologies?

TK: The idea is to help people locate a poem they are looking for, though they may, for instance, not remember the title or the author, but have a sure idea of the first line. So the poem they've got in mind is probably already well-known. That's the business of anthologies—gathering up the best, according to the editors, and making the poems known to an ever-growing readership.

P&PC: How does one measure the success of something like Granger's?

TK: Most likely the same way success is measured elsewhere in publishing: the financial gain.

P&PC: How many copies of the latest edition (the 13th) have been sold?

TK: 2,636 copies so far.

P&PC: How many subscribers does the electronic version have?

TK: We have approximately 500 subscribers through our own platform and reach an additional 100 subscribers through the Ebsco host. It's a little tough to gauge just how many people we reach at major public library systems. New York Public Library, the National Library of Singapore, Chicago Public Library, and the Auckland City Public Library are examples of large subscribers. In 2008, we recorded approximately 237,000 sessions. So far this year, we've recorded over 200,000 sessions. Our daily average has increased from 650 sessions a day to 733.

P&PC: Who was this Edith Granger who got the whole thing rolling?

TK: Edith Granger was a stunning, bespectacled redhead who, after graduating from Smith College, worked in a Chicago bookstore and hit upon the brilliant idea of indexing the titles and first lines of poems—for which librarians all over the country will be forever deeply grateful.

P&PC: A stunning, bespectacled redhead?

TK: It's nice to think so. I hear "Edith Granger" and I think Rita Hayworth, with glasses.