A Trip to the Stars: Another Vintage Valentine from P&PC

A Vintage (Vinegar) Valentine from P&PC

"It's hard to keep cool when you talk like a fool": Samantha the Bard & the Poetry of Bewitched

Fans of Joss Whedon's popular teen television drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer often cite Season 6, Episode 7 ("Once More, with Feeling")—in which a demon casts a spell on the town of Sunnydale that compels people to break into song—as evidence of the show's innovation and aesthetic complexity. We here at P&PC aren't gonna pick a fight and disagree with the conventional wisdom of Buffy Studies, but we do think it's worth checking out Season 5, Episode 18 of Bewitched—aired more than thirty years earlier, on January 30, 1969—as a possible precedent if not source of inspiration for Whedon's November 6, 2001 production.

In "Samantha the Bard," which was co-written by the show's creator Sol Saks (see the videos below), Samantha the witch comes down with a virus that makes her speak in nothing but rhyme. Initially misdiagnosed as Venetian Verbal Virus but later identified as Primary Vocabularyitis and mainly presenting in the form of couplets, her rhyming speech causes problems especially at a business dinner where her husband, an ad man, is trying to convince a dog-food manufacturer to adopt a new, more modern campaign that—get this—does not use jingles. We're not going to play spoiler and ruin the episode for you, but, as you watch, it's worth keeping in mind how "Samantha the Bard" not only links poetry with outmoded forms of communication but with disease as well. (And then, if you're taken by the logic of this convergence, go check out Dino Franco Felluga's 2005 book The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius, which explores the links between poetry and sickness in nineteenth-century British poetry.)

Is "Samantha the Bard" a precursor to Whedon's "Once More, with Feeling"? Both episodes have plots centering around a magical female main character. Both pathologize rhyme (spoken or sung) as a disease or curse brought to a community from the outside. Both present rhyme as contagious (at the end of "Samantha the Bard," Samantha's mother comes down with symptoms). And both associate the return to health and normalcy as a desirable return to the prose of everyday life. It's quite possible, of course, that Whedon didn't have "Samantha the Bard" in mind as he was writing "Once More, with Felling," but then again, no one sets out to get sick either. A figure for the workings of literary influence, Samantha's Primary Vocabularyitis may very well have affected Whedon whether he knew it or not. As they say in Bewitched, after all, "There's a lot of it going around."

Breaking News: Did Richard Blanco Lip-Sync the Inaugural Poem?

Speculation fueled more speculation this week about whether or not pop singer Beyonce lip-synced the U.S. national anthem at the  swearing-in ceremonies for President Barack Obama this past Monday. Now that same speculation is leading some to wonder about the performances of the event's other speakers as well—including the poet Richard Blanco, pictured here, who delivered the well-received inaugural poem "One Today."

"Did Blanco lip-sync?" wondered one critic aloud. "If he did, I certainly couldn't tell, as he did an admirable job of looking down at his poem so that it looked like he was reading. But after the whole Robert Frost ordeal in 1961, who could blame him if he did?"

In 1961, eighty-six year-old Frost had prepared the poem "Dedication" to deliver at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. When buffeting winds and the sunlight's glare off the paper and snow made it impossible for him to read, however, the four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner recited another, shorter poem, "The Gift Outright," from memory instead. Although "The Gift Outright" was first published in 1942, Frost's 1961 recitation of it is not only frequently credited with popularizing the poem, but with setting the gold standard for inaugural poems as well.

"I'd understand completely if Blanco did lip-sync it," remarked a fellow poet, also citing the Frost scenario and the pressure of reading before such distinguished company. "But I don't think he did."

Investigations into Beyonce's performance have revealed that it isn't uncommon for such performances to be recorded ahead of time in the event of inclement weather like the wind and sun that dogged Frost. "Each piece of music scheduled for performance in the Inauguration is pre-recorded for use in case of freezing temperatures, equipment failure, or extenuating circumstances," explained Captain Kendra N. Motz, Media Officer of the U.S. Marine Band.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who cello-synced during Obama's first inauguration in 2009, explained his decision by saying, "You can't play cellos in 25 degrees."

"It would be totally understandable," another spokesperson for the Marine Band said. "You try being Richard Blanco, standing up there as the youngest inaugural poet in history, trying to hold your paper in that type of cold. Paper just doesn't function the same way when the temperature drops to near freezing."

Other poets and critics have been less charitable when hearing the speculation about Blanco's possible simulation, however.

Said one, "Lip-sync? Lip-sync? Would Walt Whitman have lip-synced his barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world? I think not!"

"Well, I'm not so sure," replied another. "What if it was really bad weather? Can you yawp in 25 degrees?"

Still another stated simply. "I don't know if Blanco lip-synced or not. But one thing I do know for sure is that John Ashbery wouldn't have lip-synced. Allen Ginsberg wouldn't have lip-synced either. Nor would Adrienne Rich. This is what happens when you exclude radical poets and the avant-garde from consideration in events like these. Capitalism takes over, poets are turned into mouthpieces for ideology, and poetry becomes a simulation of itself if not a simulation of a simulation!"

This is not the first time that lip-syncing charges have been leveled at an inaugural poet. When Maya Angelou read "On the Pulse of Morning" at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993, some viewers reported a disconnect between Angelou's physical presence and the words they heard.

"I swear," said one commentator. "It looked like Angelou stopped speaking altogether, but the words just kept coming. I don't know how to explain it other than to say she was lip-syncing."

"I totally agree," said another who was in attendance. "But I just thought she'd been elevated to a higher level of being and had become an oracle that no longer needed the body as a medium to speak through. The poem just seemed to come straight from her soul. I have to say, though, the whole Beyonce thing has me thinking twice about it."

An inaugural poem historian acknowledged such conflicting experiences from 1993. "For some people," she explained, "Angelou's performance was nearly transcendent. But for others it was simply, as one of my peer reviewers once put it, 'the Maya Ange-low point' of inaugural verse."

Another scholar suggests that focusing too narrowly on the controversy of lip-syncing in inaugural poems distracts from the longer historical engagement between poetry and lip-syncing more generally, which has its canonical roots in the early twentieth century. According to him, the earliest manuscript versions of Wallace Stevens's famous poem "Sunday Morning" reference lip-syncing.

"If you look closely at the manuscripts done by the youthful Stevens," he explains, "You'll see that the poem's final two lines don't in fact read 'Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings,' as they do in final manuscript versions, but, rather, 'Ambiguous undulations as they sync, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.' Stevens is very clearly tying the mystical earthly spirituality of the pigeons, which imitate but not entirely replicate the holy figure of the dove, to practices like lip-syncing. For if we're honest with ourselves, when it comes to matters of faith and belief, all most of us can ever do is mouth the words."

As of yet, Blanco has made no public statement about whether "One Today" was pre- recorded and lip-synced or delivered live this past Monday. Nor has he commented on his relationship to the history of lip-syncing in American poetry. Nevertheless, that has not prevented some readers for scouring the poem itself for clues.

"Obviously," one poet remarked, "the line 'without prejudice, as these words break from my lips' is meant to signal the live delivery of the poem, with the presence of the poet's words troping the immediacy of the national moment to which all are summoned 'without prejudice,' as it were."

"Au contraire," another suggested, "That's the irony that makes Blanco's work so political. When Blanco the poet is lip-syncing that line and the words really aren't breaking from his lips, the performance undercuts the text and implies that the wind carrying those words is not doing so without prejudice, but with the prejudice that Blanco, as an immigrant, Latin@, and gay man has undoubtedly experienced in the U.S."

"I doubt," he concluded, "that John Ashbery could have done any better."

Popular Poetry: The Little Magazine

For years now, P&PC has desperately wanted to find a modernist-era little magazine to call its own. You know, something like Others, Blast, The Egoist, or Seven Arts except not devoted to the avant garde or Ezra Pound. Something that might help put the world of popular poetry on the radar screens of modernist studies scholars who do so looooove their little magazines. Something—and why not?—that might even get digitized by and included in the awesome Modernist Journals Project, which has as its slightly overstated tagline "modernism began in the magazines."

Well, it's possible that we've finally found it. After lo these many years of searching, we recently came across this single, solitary issue (Volume 1, Number 8) of Popular Poetry, issued out of Cincinnati, Ohio, in March of 1931 by the people who were at that time already bringing Writer's Digest to the world. We don't know much about Popular Poetry yet; an initial query to Writer's Digest revealed that current editorial staff don't know anything about it and don't have any idea whether or not there's a company archive boxed up in some warehouse somewhere that could shed some light on who started it, why, how, and what eventually came of it once the 1930s—the decade during which what Joseph Harrington called the "poetry wars" established a serious split between "high" and "low" in the world of American verse—came to a close.

Until we find those answers, we'll be repeatedly reading this issue, which bills itself as being "modern without being modernistic and mid-way between the classic and the popular." True enough: from the poems "City Streets" and "Traffic in Hearts" listed on the cover, to the little editorial "Poetry Offshoots: The Commercial Side of Verse" pictured here, Popular Poetry does not appear to have been a throwback to the nineteenth century's genteel dreams of the fireside and family homestead but, like the New Verse more generally, incorporates and engages with the spirit of modernity. We dig Ruth Rukin's "Poetry Offshoots" a lot, which tries to find a home "for a rhyme with reason" that isn't "a page of formless verse in jerky ecstatics," on one hand, and that doesn't "[die] a horrible death on the battle-field of technique" on the other. "Standardization is the very last and least thing wanted in verse," Rukin writes, "but compromise with the needs of your market is desirable—if you're writing to sell."

What Rukin ultimately advises aspiring writers is what teachers still tell their students hoping to publish today: study the publications to which you're sending before you go sending your poems out. She makes her case by quoting, of all things, Tristan Tzara's Dadaist poem "Toto Vaca" and explaining that poems like it have a place in the "artistic journal, published for the sole purpose of encouraging new forms of literature" but not necessarily in the mainstream press. Here is Tzara's verse (and that's TT pictured here):

TOTO VACA

          I

ka tangi te kivi
kivi

ka tangi te moho
moho

ka tangi te tike
ka tangi te tike

tike

he poko anahe
to tikoko tikoko
 
heare i te hara
tikoko

k ote taoura te rangi
kaouaea

me kave kivhea
kaouaea

a-ko te take
take no tou

e haou
to ia

to ia ake te take
take no tou

What's kinda compelling about this example is how Tzara's avant-garde poem—which, according to Rukin, first appeared in "the lately suspended transition, an American-English magazine published in Paris"—is finding new audiences via Popular Poetry, which reprints it without irony and with full awareness of the editorial state of transition as a peer-level journal; in other words, Popular Poetry is situating itself in a world of modernist literary magazines not only without disparaging the competition but by educating the audience of Popular Poetry about it as well. "The reading aloud of this poem may give you some hint of its purpose," Rukin writes. "The syllabic arrangement is very musical and rhythmic when intoned." Once we find specific circulation figures for Popular Poetry, we'll let you know how many readers Tzara's poem reached and then think more coherently about the possible debts that the avant garde little magazines might owe to the world of popular poetry!

It would have been interesting to have Rukin weigh in on the conversation that P&PC recently had with Jed Rasula over at the Boston Review ("Glut Reactions: The Demographics of American Poetry"), because Rukin acknowledges late in her article that a poetry "glut"—the jumping-off point for the BR piece—is nothing new in American poetry. As P&PC argued, it in fact "isn’t a glut so much as a fundamental condition of poetry in the long twentieth century, a period when—thanks in part to the emergence and maturation of the culture industries, the development of mass media as well as personal communication technologies, and the expansion of consumer capitalism and the consumer marketplace—more poetry was written, distributed, circulated, and consumed than at any other time in history." Indeed, Rukin writes, "There are, generally speaking, more writers of poetry than markets for it. This naturally overcrowds the usual markets—the magazines—with salable offerings. However, there are certain by-products of poetry in our commercial era of writing for the poet. Among these are song poems, greeting card verses, advertising jingles, and humorous verse. The latter finds markets in such humor journals as Life, Judge, College Humor, Film Fun." We wonder: could that list of journals be a dissertation table of contents in the making?

One of the more entertaining parts of Popular Poetry is a section called "Borderliners" (pictured here), which contains a list of "poems not acceptable for publication" along with brief, Twitter-like critiques of those poems. Ethel Whipple Crooks of Kansas, for example, has her poem rejected with the editorial comments, "You have a nice, rhythmical sense, but no outstanding ideas behind it." Kinda harsh, right? Mildred Marsh Rankin of Iowa doesn't fare much better; her poetry has "too much dawn-and-pussy-dear sentiment" in it. Grover Wilson Morgan's poetry is "Not quite up to snuff." Edmund Kiernan is "too pedantic." And poor Virginia Brookhart of Pennsylvania: "Your poems stop short of being good." Seriously, this is pretty fun reading—we haven't seen anything like it—and there's five pages of it just in the March number alone!

But what of the poetry in Popular Poetry? We're not ready to comment on all of it yet, but we'll leave you with our favorite so far—Bernice G. Anderson's "Gypsy Fortune Teller":

She was picturesque in her flowered skirt
That puffed at the dust and flipped the dirt,

And her orchid waist was hung with strings
Of coins and coral beads. Bright rings

Adorned each finger; and her tawny head
Was draped with a blazing scarf of red.

I gazed at her while she read my hand,
And I knew she'd far from understand—

Not think it even slightly funny
That I should cross her palm with money

Merely to sit and read her face
There in that rug-hung, mystic place.

If anyone out there knows anything about Popular Poetry, please let us know! We'd love to learn more about our new favorite little magazine.

Tennyson in Chaps? The Poetry of Gunsmoke

Happy New Year from P&PC

Here at the P&PC Office, there's a New Year's Eve party in the works. The streamers are up. The kazoos are out. Pointy hats are stacked and at the ready. The bubby's chillin' on ice. Sally the stenographer has got her dancing shoes on and is flirting with Carl the copy guy. And some of the interns have been passing around this goodie from 1939: a promotional calendar issued by the Household Finance Corporation and featuring a year's-worth of poetry by the guy once known as the "people's poet"—longtime bard of the Detroit Free Press, perhaps the most prolific poet of twentieth century America, and a P&PC hero, Edgar A. Guest. "Here," writes Guest on the front of an accompanying folding flier (pictured below), "is my 1939 calendar which you asked me to send you. Both Household Finance and I appreciate your request very much. I hope that you will find the calendar useful and that the poems will give you many pleasant moments in the days ahead. Best wishes for a happy and prosperous new year."

The calendar begins with "It Couldn't Be Done," one of Guest's most popular and lasting verses and a poem that Poetry Out Loud recommends to students as a potentially successful recitation piece today. (It's also a poem, btw, that makes an appearance in Chapter Two of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, where we speculate on the vagueness of that "it" in the title especially as it functions in an age of "no ideas but in things.") Here is the rest of the year's sequence:

February: "When Father Shook the Stove"
March: "Home"
April: "The Package of Seeds"
May: "Compensation"
June: "The Stick-Together Families"
July: "Out Fishin'"
August: "Ma and the Auto"
September: "It's September"
October: "Autumn"
November: "Courtesy on Departure"
December: "On Going Home for Christmas"

We here at P&PC find "Compen- sation" (which is about looking for a way to pay "my debt to God for life divine") a particularly fitting bridge between Guest and his sponsor, the Household Finance Corporation. After all, the "Doctor of Family Finances"—which was founded in 1878 and by 1939 had branches in 152 cities in the U.S. and Canada—uses the calendar to address the subject of paying back debts as well. "When you are troubled by money problems a visit to your local Household Finance man may prove very helpful," the verbiage at the end of the calendar reads. "He has had years of experience finding ways out of family money worries."

While a reader might not get to that reminder—after all, you've got to flip all the way through the year to find it buried behind December—he or she is not likely to overlook the "How I got a Loan of $200" testimonial (pictured here) printed inside of Guest's introductory wishes for a "prosperous" new year. Our favorite part of this ad? It's gotta be how the homonym for "a loan" ("alone") in the heading previews the thrust of the subheading below it—"without co-signers or endorsers" (i.e., alone)—not to mention how that message is reinforced by the single hero of the poem "It Couldn't Be Done" on the calender who, despite "thousands to prophesy failure," finds success by working alone.

While readers today are likely to find it a little nauseating, the partnership of Guest and Household Finance makes a lot of conceptual sense beyond this discursive synchronicity as well, as they're both more or less in the same line of work: Guest helps us with our metaphysical debts, and Household Finance with our monetary ones. And what better time to bring them together than at the beginning of the new year when, as the month-by-month flipping design of the calendar suggests, we make resolutions to turn over all sorts of new leaves—to pay down the balance on our credit cards, to more responsibly repay the kindnesses we've been shown, and to attend to the bottom lines of our lives in general?

But that's enough cogitation for now—there's a party to prepare, and the interns have started doing the limbo in the other room. It's time, it seems, to welcome in 2013. On behalf of the entire P&PC Office, then, we hope that you find happiness, fulfillment, and the beginning of many new dreams in the coming year.