Assassins & Outsiders: The Obscurity of Popular Poetry

A few weeks ago, P&PC featured the poetry of Steve Pink's 2010 comedy Hot Tub Time Machine which co-stars John Cusack as one of three adult losers who get magically transported back to their high school days of 1986 and thus get an existential do-over. There's a great scene in the middle of the movie when Cusack is caught doing bong hits and mushrooms and held accountable for writing teenage angst poetry to the famous Guns N' Roses tune "Sweet Child O' Mine."

While the P&PC Office was aware of at least one more Cusack film that incorporates poetry, we didn't remember (not until Brian Spears pointed it out to us) all of the verse in the the other famous Cusack back-to-high-school flick, 1998's Grosse Pointe Blank, which was directed by George Armitage and co-stars Minnie Driver. In the film, Cusack plays Martin Q. Blank, a hired assassin who goes back to Michigan for his tenth high school reunion and falls in love with high school sweetheart Debi Newberry (Driver) all over again. There's kissing. There's lots of gunplay. And Martin and Debi reunite.

Well, Spears called our attention to a scene near the end of the movie when, while taking a break from the reunion and after making out with Debi in the nurse's office, Martin runs into an inebriated former high school bully and current Grosse Pointe automobile dealership owner named Bob. Here's that exchange:

Martin: Hi Bob.

Bob: Debi Newberry, eh? You gonna hit that shit again?

Martin: Fine, Bob! How are you?

Bob: Real smart. C’mon, let’s see how smart you are with my foot up your ass.

Martin: Do you really believe that there is some stored up conflict that exists between us? There is no "us." "We" don’t exist. So who do you want to hit, man? It’s not me. [Martin adjusts Bob’s sport coat.] Now what do you want to do here, man?

[Bob shows him a crumpled piece of paper he's pulled out of his pocket]

Martin: I don’t know what that is.

Bob [slurring]: These are my words.

Martin: It’s a poem?

[Bob nods]

Martin: See, that’s the prop. Express yourself, Bob. Go for it.

Bob [reading]: When I feel quiet, / When I feel blue…."

Martin: You know, I think that is terrific, what you have right there. Really, I like that a lot. I wouldn’t sell the dealership or anything, but I’m telling you, it’s intense.

Bob: There’s more.

Martin: Okay. Would you mind—just skip to the end?

Bob: The very end…[reading] "... For a while."

Martin: Whoa. That’s good, man.

Bob: "For a while."

Martin: That’s excellent.

Bob: Wanna do some blow?

Martin: No. I don’t.

[They hug.]

Martin: There you go.

Bob: I missed you.

Martin: Okay, I missed you too. Okay.

It's a hilarious scene made even more hilarious by the next in which Martin literally wields the power of the pen, not poetry, to kill a fellow assassin in an adjacent hallway.

What Spears neglected to mention to P&PC, however, is that there are two other, less obvious poems in Grosse Pointe Blank. And we find them very interesting as well. The first comes when Martin is driving into town. He turns on the radio and listens to Debi, the local d.j., recount her recent playlist and comment on the upcoming reunion. She ends her little soliloquy with a riddle in the form of a poem:

Hi I’m Debi Newberry. This is WGPM FM Grosse Pointe, "Window on the Pointe." You heard from Massive Attack, Public Enemy, Morphine (my personal favorite), and Dwayne Eddie’s twangy guitar. Good to hear Toots and the Maytells, huh? And as you know, this weekend is Pointe High Class of '86 reunion. So in honor of this momentous event, I’m making this an all-80s, all vinyl weekend. Stay tuned to "Window on the Pointe" and I’ll keep you posted on all this reunion-related nonsense. Hey, I know everybody’s coming back to take stock of their lives. You know what I say? Leave your livestock alone. Kick back and relax and ponder this:

Where are all the good men dead? In the heart or in the head?

So here’s “Another Cold Cup of Coffee” from The Clash.

The second, perhaps even more obscure poem in the film comes when Martin discovers that his childhood home has been turned into an Ultimart and that his mom, suffering from dementia and on Lithium, now lives in a nursing home. At the end of their meeting, as she is being wheeled away by a nurse, Mrs. Blank looks back over her shoulder and, in an apparent non-sequitor, misquotes Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Ladies." "The Colonel’s Lady, like Judy O’Grady / are twins under the skin,” she calls back. (Kipling's version, btw, reads "For the Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady / Are sisters under their skins!)

While Bob's poem is used by the movie to clarify his character—it reveals without a doubt that he's not a self-confident cocky businessman and bully but a an emotionally lame cokehead—the other two verses are used (as Debi suggests) to obscure. They are riddles, mysteries, or gnomic sound bites that come from a different source than Bob's "words" do. Neither is original to the speaker—that is, we're not hearing from authors, but from users, reciters or readers—and they bespeak confusion or nonsense. How do we answer Debi's rhyme? What do we do with the misquoted Kipling? These rhymes are opaque or obscure—perhaps as opaque or obscure as Modernist poetry is if we follow one of the arguments that Daniel Tiffany makes in his awesomely cool new study of criminal slang and street-talk, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance. "By its very nature," Tiffany writes, "the problematic of lyric obscurity requires that one isolate the moment of exchange or enactment, focusing not so much on a poem's composition or construction ... as on its reception by the reader, on poetic readership, and on the social configuration of poetry" (7). The poems in Grosse Pointe Blank are really good illustrations of this point. Bob's poem is so not obscure (even though most of it is missing) that Martin doesn't even need to hear most of it in order to understand it; Debi's riddle and the Kipling (mis)quotation, on the other hand, are befuddling, in part because they happen in contexts that don't have any call for the obscurity of poetic language and no clues for how to interpert them. In fact, there's a certain way in which something like T.S. Eliot's citation of Shakespeare in The Waste Land ("Those are pearls that were his eyes.") comes from the same place, and has the same effect, as Ma Blank reciting Kipling to her son—or to the nurse, or to the rest of the home's residents. (That it's hard to say for sure is part of the point.)

All of this got the P&PC Office thinking about obscurity, poetry, memory, and youth, and so we started flying (among close friends and family) the idea that perhaps, as often as not, we remember poetry because we don't understand it, not because we do understand it. That is, maybe what makes a poem memorable is the fact that it's to some extent indecipherable. Like the Sphinx's riddle, like Eliot's quotation of Shakespeare, like gnomic sound bites from Kipling or radio hosts, perhaps we remember poetry because it gives us something to chew on and think about, not because it answers our questions and solves our riddles.

As evidence of this possibility, we'll close with a scene from another movie about youth and growing up—Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film and adaptation of S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders. You remember it, right? Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell) and Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio) are hiding out in an abandoned church because Johnny knifed a guy in a late-night fight. In the church, separated from their lives that lead to violence and pain, they can be most fully themselves, and they spend their time reading Gone with the Wind to each other as they wait for Dallas (Matt Dillon) to show up and say the coast is clear. One morning, blond-haired and poetically-inclined Ponyboy gets up early to watch the sun rise through the mist. He is joined by Johnny, and they have the following conversation about (what else?) poetry:

Johnny: Golly that was sure pretty, huh?

Ponyboy: Yeah.

Johnny: It’s like the mist is what’s pretty, you know? All gold and silver.

Ponyboy: Um-hum.

Johnny: Too bad it can’t stay like that all the time.

Ponyboy: Nothing gold can stay

Johnny: Huh?

Ponyboy:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Johnny: Where’d you learn that? That’s what I meant!

Ponyboy: Robert Frost wrote it. I always remembered it because I never quite knew what he meant by it.

Johnny: Mmm. You know, I never noticed colors and clouds and stuff til you kept reminding me about it. It’s kinda like it was never there before.

Ponyboy: Yeah. I don’t think I could ever tell Steve [Tom Cruise] or Two-Bit [Emilio Estevez] or even Dally [Matt Dillon] about the clouds, the sunset. Just you and Sodapop [Rob Lowe]. Maybe Cherry Valance [Diane Lane].

Johnny: Guess we’re different, huh?

Ponyboy: Shoot, kid. Maybe they are.

Johnny: You’re right.

Johnny—who gets fatally burned while saving a group of children from the church as it burns down and then spends the rest of the movie in the hospital—chews on the Frost verse for the rest of the film, trying to figure it out. It's almost as if the mystery itself has the power to keep him alive, since he lives longer than anyone expects. And, when he dies, his last words (in a letter he's written to Ponyboy and placed inside a copy of Gone with the Wind) are about that poem. Here's that letter:

Pony Boy,

I asked the nurse to give you this book so you could finish it. It was worth saving those little kids. Their lives are worth more than mine. They have more to live for. Tell Dally I think it’s worth it. I’m gonna miss you guys. I been thinking about it. In that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you’re gold when you’re a kid. Like green. When you’re a kid, everything’s new. Dawn. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony, that’s gold. Keep it that way—it’s a good way to be. I want you to ask Dally to look at one. I don’t think he’s ever seen a sunset. There’s still lots of good in the world. Tell Dally. I don’t think he knows.

Your buddy,

Johnny.

P&PC recommends you check out The Outsiders if you haven't seen it lately. Where else can you find Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez and Robert Frost's poetry all in the same movie? It's—what else?—a mystery how it ever happened.

No Ideas But In Doughy Things: The Poetry of Doughnuts

Poetry & Popular Culture recently had a chance to catch up with Ross Brody (pictured here), a native Oregonian and professor of Physics at Willamette University. Like many Oregonians, Brody (a.k.a. The Biking Viking) has many hobbies including cyclocross racing, rock climbing and—most germane to this posting, perhaps—baking. Indeed, the P&PC Office has on more than one occasion been the welcome beneficiary of the frequent experiments (including cantaloupe-coconut pastries and ciabatta bread) that go on at what is unofficially known as Brody's Bakery on the south side of Salem.

A few weeks ago, Brody went searching for an old-school doughnut recipe and came upon one composed in verse. He immediately thought that P&PC readers would like to give it a shot in their own kitchens. The "Doughnut Rhyme" is taken most recently from A Taste of Oregon cookbook but originally comes from Lucretia Allyn Gurney who moved to Oregon in 1851 and settled near current-day Lake Oswego. She passed the poem on to her children and grandchildren, who passed it on to the Josephine County Historical Society, who passed it on to A Taste of Oregon, who passed it on to Brody, who passed it on to P&PC, who is now passing it on to you:

The Doughnut Rhyme

1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of milk,
2 eggs beaten fine as silk;
Salt and nutmeg, lemon will do,
Baking powder teaspoons two;
Lightly stir the flour in,
Roll on pie-board, not too thin.
Drop with care the doughy things
Into the fat that briskly swells
Evenly the spongy cells.
Watch with care the time for turning,
Fry them brown just short of burning.
Roll in sugar, serve them cool.
Price a quarter for this rule.

The "Doughnut Rhyme" isn't the only recipe to have been written in verse; some time ago, P&PC brought you a recipe for "The Original Fish Chowder" dating back to 1751 Boston and recently reprinted in Martha Stewart Living. However, what intrigues us most about the "Doughnut Rhyme" is line 7, which is (unless you want to argue that "things" is a slant rhyme with "thin" and "in") the only non-rhyming line in a poem of otherwise perfectly rhyming couplets. But why should line 7 rhyme? After all, "Drop with care the doughy things" is located at the exact middle of the poem and thus forms a sort of sonic hole in the center of an otherwise symmetrically constructed verse form—a hole that totally befits a poem about doughnuts!

But there's another hole in the recipe as well, for while the "Doughnut Rhyme" tells you how much sugar, milk, eggs and baking powder you're going to need, it leaves out measurements for another main ingredient—flour. For those of you trying this recipe at home, Brody recommends going with about 3 or so cups of flour. "I had a tad too much," he remarks, "and they got a bit chewy once cooled." The interns at the P&PC Office aren't saying they don't believe you, Ross, but you'd better bring a batch around the next time so we can try 'em ourselves.

Small Business Profile: Personalized Poem Service in Downtown Portland

Nearly two years ago, P&PC remembered the entrepreneurial efforts of minister and poet Carl Wilson—a.k.a. Tramp Star and Curly Shingles—who advertised "Poetry for Sale" on a sign outside his Indiana home in the first half of the twentieth century.

Who would've thought that Wilson's spirit is still alive? And not in southern Indiana, where some folks still like to spell potato with an "e," but at the Saturday Market in Portland, Oregon, where the potatoes are organic and the more "e's" you can fit in the locals' favorite color "greeeen" the better?

It's not just the potatoes—or berries, or fruit, or salmon—that are locally sourced in Stumptown, however. As the fetching, retro-style "Personalized Poems" outfit pictured to the left suggests, even the poems are made locally. Complete with a menu ranging from a $1.00 haiku to a $5.00 slam poem and performance, this mobile, briefcase- sized start-up may not be making any IPO's soon, but it's got our vote for best new business in town.

Poetry & the Movies: The Hot Tub Rhyme Machine

Regular P&PC readers might have surmised by now that someone in the P&PC office has an abiding interest in Hollywood's ongoing relationship with poetry. Not only are there lots of movies explicitly about poets and poetry, but film after film—ranging from Citizen Kane to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Long Hot Summer, Groundhog Day, and Fight Club (just to name a few)—makes use of poetry as a plot device, as shorthand for one type of character development or another, or (seemingly) as an almost entirely gratuitous detail.

Think back to Woody Allen's 1977 masterpiece Annie Hall, for example. Alvy Singer (Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) have just met while playing tennis. She gives him a harrowing ride home, weaving in and out of traffic on New York's narrow streets, and ultimately invites him to her place for a glass of wine. There—on what is more or less their first date—Alvy peruses Annie's bookshelves and pulls out a copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel. Here's that exchange:

Alvy: Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.

Annie: Oh yeah. Right. Well, I don’t know. I mean, some of her poems seem neat.

Alvy: Neat?

Annie: Neat, yeah.

Alvy: I hate to tell you, this is 1975, you know? Neat went out, I would say, at the turn of the century.

Predictable? Maybe in Annie Hall. But what about Steve Pink's 2010 comedy Hot Tub Time Machine in which three unhappy friends—Adam (John Cusack), Lou (Rob Corddry), and Nick (Craig Robinson)—are transported, along with Adam's teenage nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), back to "Winterfest '86" which was a pivotal weekend in all of their lives. Caught between the need to recreate the past exactly (so that the future is unaffected and Jacob still gets born) and an understandable desire to change the events that led to their current unhappiness, the three are forced in hilarious fashion to re-live and/or revise some of their most humiliating moments: Lou gets abandoned by his friends and beaten up by the psychotic head of the ski patrol; Nick gets a second chance to rock the house at what was an otherwise uninspiring concert the first time around; and Adam gets a second shot at finding the woman of his dreams.

Part of Adam's respon- sibility in this process is to recreate his break up with his high school girlfriend Jennie, who stabbed him in the eye for splitting with her the first time around. This time, however, Adam is fraught by second thoughts and delays the break, giving Jennie time to beat him to the punch. (She gives Adam a break-up note but still ends up stabbing him in the eye.) Devastated to have things turn out even worse than they did the first time around (or so he thinks), Adam retreats to his hotel room and gets stoned out of his mind. This is where Jacob finds him: in darkness, wallowing in self-pity while listening to The Cutting Crew's song "(I Just Died) In Your Arms Tonight," and—what else?—writing poetry. Here's that scene:

Jacob: Adam, hey. Thank God you’re back. Awesome. What’s going on here? Where are the guys?

[Cusack hands him the breakup note.]

What’s this?

[Jacob reads] "Dear Adam, you are a super terrific guy, and I love you, which is why this is so hard for me. I cherish our friendship…”

[Jacob laughs]

She broke up with you? And you still fucking got stabbed in the eye?

Adam [while writing]: Leave me alone. Get out of here.

Jacob: What are you doing here? Are you writing poetry?

Adam: Just leave me alone and get out of here. No.

Jacob: You’re writing fucking break-up poetry.

Adam: Alright, I’m writing break-up poetry, ok? … Because my heart hurts.

Jacob [looking around at all the drugs]: What is this shit? You’re wasted!

Adam: I’ve had like two wine kills, Captain Buzzcooler. God!

Jacob: You’re fucked up.

[Jacob picks up Adam's poem and reads]

"Jennie’s eyes,
like a gypsy’s lies,
cut right through the night.
Now those eyes
are another guy’s,
and I’m alone with my pain."

Adam: That was clean!

Jacob: Are you shitting me with this, Adam!?

Adam: Look, you can recite it straight or to the tune of "Sweet Child O’ Mine." It doesn’t matter.

Jacob: Are these mushrooms? Did you eat these mushrooms, Adam?

Adam: I like to eat 'em, you know. A couple of 'em.

Jacob: Holy fuck, man, you gotta stay straight. You’ve got to help me get the guys back.

Adam: You know, it’s not always about my emotional journey. It can be about yours.

Jacob: Put the coke down!

It's a funny, riotous scene in which the grown-up Adam revisits the genre of teenage poetry, and the ridiculousness of the entire endeavor (aside from the Guns N Roses homage, of course) serves to illustrate in miniature why the three adult men can't be entirely held hostage by the past. No matter how much poetry may express longing for a time it can't recover (as in pastoral poetry), or despite poetry's attempt to escape time altogether (as in many conceptions of the lyric), time must move forward and the guys must re-enter and make history. As if suggesting this very thing, the movie interrupts the argument between Adam and Jacob with the arrival of Chevy Chase who plays "the mystical time travel guide guy" come to remind them—as the thunder and lightning of a Romantic poem storm in the background—that the hot tub time portal will be closing soon. To get things done (or to make things happen, as Auden might put it), one needs more than the self-indulgence or reflection that poetry as a genre offers; one needs a plan or a plot to move forward in time (and/or through the pain of a breakup)—the exact thing, or so the movie's logic goes, that Hollywood provides that poetry cannot.

What all these movies have in common— Hot Tub Time Machine, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Groundhog Day, and Fight Club—is their substantial focus on moving through time in one way or another. In Steve Pink's comedy, that movement is backwards and forwards; in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is stuck repeating the same day over and over; in Fight Club and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, characters completely lose sense of time when they change into their alter egos. And Annie Hall and Citizen Kane are about sorting through the past, reflecting on what is now unattainable and what might have been. Thus, at some level, all these films must confront the fact that they are treading on poetry's traditional and culturally-sanctioned terrain, and they solve the resulting rivalry in different ways, all of which end up—no surprise here—privileging the technology of film and leaving P&PC, like Adam in Hot Tub Time Machine, alone with our pain.

Herman Munster, Pragmatic Beatnik: A Guest Posting by Angela Sorby

A while back, one of P&PC's summer research interns happened upon the following choice clip from the popular 1960s CBS TV show The Munsters in which "jolly green giant" Herman Munster (played by Fred Gwynne) is called on to recite some beatnik poetry while hosting a totally rad shin dig at his pad with a bunch of cool wanna-be beatnik cats. Unsure what to make of his performance, we dropped a line to Angela Sorby (pictured here), Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and author of the P&PC "highly recommended" study Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917. Take a gander at the clip here, then check out Sorby's commentary below.



Dear Angela,

So, like, what's the deal with Herman Munster's performance?

The P&PC Office

***************************************

Dear P&PC,

In August of 1965, Marie Jordan wrote to Negro Digest magazine, objecting to the Beat poet LeRoi Jones's Afrocentric vision; Jordan insisted that “the first duty of any writer, be he black, white, or green, is to be continually striving to develop and improve his craft and artistic skill.” Jordan's letter does not acknowledge that at least one green poet emerged from the crucible of the Civil Rights era: Herman Munster, whose verdant hue enabled him to register anxieties about integration—and about poetry—on network TV. Like The Addams Family and The Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters depicts awkward social mixing within neighborhoods, and Munster's green skin enables him to act as a racialized other while ducking the politics of black and white.

Literary histories of the 1960s, such as Conrad Aiken's Twentieth-Century American Poetry (1963), tend to be chrono- logical, nationalistic, and largely white. But Munster's performance offers a pop counterdiscourse that is fluid, transnational, and multicultural, including an anonymous sixteenth-century British rhyme (“Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary”); a bit of nineteenth-century didacticism (Sarah Josepha Hale's “Mary's Lamb”); a phrase from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “Psalm of Life” (“Life is real! Life is earnest!”); a snippet from Rudyard Kipling (“Fuzzy Wuzzy”) and some snatches from the R & B star Louis Jordan (“That chicken's not too young to fry”). And, of course, the whole poem is recited to the beat of an African drum, recalling Allen Ginsberg's “Negro Streets” of Harlem. Munster's poem, then, is a compressed précis of verses that circulated orally and that are understood as available for use by non-elite speakers. Indeed, his final trope on Longfellow (“If you're cold / turn up the furnace”) recasts Longfellow's romanticism as pragmatism, and sums up Munster's implicit ars poetica: do what works.

And his poem does work, at least for his TV audience —and this is a rare moment. Ordinarily, poetry on TV is a source of embar- rassment and discomfort, and indeed in the beginning, Munster's wife Lily says apprehensively, “I think he's going to recite.” However, Munster does not recite, exactly; rather, he channels fragments of popular poetic history, recombining them into a kind of monster mashup that makes the familiar new—without making it unpalatable or threatening. By the end, one bearded spectator enthuses, “Man! That cat is deep.” But Munster succeeds, not because he is deep, but because he is practical and syncretic. The point of Munster's poem is not to express his romantic self-identity (despite his genealogical relation to Mary Shelley), but rather to establish a social comfort zone—a green space, neither black nor white—where the oral tradition can thrive, and where poetry is, at least potentially, a popular art, grounded in the practice(s) of love and theft.

Yours,

Angela Sorby

Be Kind to Animals: Bookmarks, George Comings & Barry the St. Bernard

George Comings (pictured here) was born in Vermont in 1848, one year before John Muir's family would move to the U.S. and start Fountain Lake Farm near Portage Wisconsin. In 1870, at the age of 22—two years before the creation of the world's first national park (Yellowstone) and four years after the foundation of the American Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals—Comings moved with his parents to Michigan to help them establish and maintain a fruit farm.

Thirty years later, in 1900, as Louis Lassen went about his work paving the way for McDonald's and Burger King by inventing the modern hamburger in Connecticut, Comings moved to Muir's Wisconsin where he would start and run a dairy farm and breed Holstein cattle. Shortly after the institution of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, he served two terms (1921-1925) as Wisconsin's Lieutenant Governor and made an unsuccessful run for Governor, losing in the 1924 primaries to fellow Republican John J. Blaine. (Milwaukee had a socialist mayor at the time, btw.) Well-known as a lecturer on agricultural topics, Comings then began working for the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture and was made a state humane officer in 1928—a post he held until his retirement in 1939, the year that famous vegetarian and Humanitarian League founder Henry Stephens Salt passed away.

A year before Comings retired—and one year after the Atlantic Monthly accepted Rachel Carson's essay "The World of Waters" for publication—Comings oversaw the creation and distribution of a series of "Be Kind to Animals" bookmarks that mixed prose and poetry from various sources in asking readers to reconceptualize their relationship with our furry and feathered friends. On the front of the marker pictured above and to the left, for example, we have the story of Barry the St. Bernard, a quotation by one-time Missouri Senator and Yellowstone champion George Graham Vest, and three stanzas by the much maligned but extremely popular poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox who was born on a farm in—you guessed it—the badger state. In fact, it is Wilcox who gets the most column inches of anyone quoted on the bookmark, front or back:

I am the voice of the voiceless;
Through me, the dumb shall speak;
Till the deaf world's ear be made to hear
The cry of the wordless weak.

And I am my brother's keeper,
And I will fight his fight,
And speak the word for beast and bird,
Till the world shall set things right.

For he who would trample kindness
And mercy into the dust—
He has missed the trail, and his quest will fail;
he is not the guide to trust.

Wilcox's "Voice of the Voiceless" went on to become part of the animal rights movement beyond Wisconsin as well; the official journal of the Animal Liberation Front (Voice of the Voiceless) takes its title from her verse. In the specific context of the bookmark, however, Wilcox's words mix with those of Seneca, Abraham Lincoln, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others to create a multicultural, cross-Atlantic, historical coalition of individuals lobbying under the slogan "Every Day in Every Way Be Kind to Animals." And the poetry is a central part of this effort: the rhyme in the slogan helps us remember the motto; the verses by Wilcox (pictured here) and Coleridge tie sympathetic human emotion to animal rights in ways that the genre of prose cannot; and because of the longstanding link between birds and poets in the cultural imagination—Wilcox rhymes "word" and "bird" in line 7 for a reason—the figure of the poet lends an even greater authority to the discourse of animal rights than simply his or her status as curator of moral emotion generally speaking.

What we here at the P&PC Office really appreciate about Comings's campaign, however, is how the medium of the bookmark synchronizes with, or materially tropes, the Humane Agent's political message. Beginning with the story of Barry, the famous dog who "saved the lives of forty-one Alpine travelers," the bookmark itself, as an object, is all about the act of salvation as well—it's designed to save one's place in a book. Through an associational logic that connects Barry saving Alpine travelers to bookmarks saving readers, the "Be Kind to Animals" project transforms the everyday act of marking one's place in a text, making it into an extension of an animal rights agenda. By using the bookmark, an individual participates in—even rehearses—the type of ethical activity he or she is encouraged to practice "every day in every way" in regards to animals. In its vertical orientation, the bookmark may even figure the "beautiful monument erected" in Barry's honor in Paris—itself a marker—thus making three acts of remembrance (of Barry, of one's place in the book, of one's ethical responsibility) simultaneously possible. It's an accomplishment, we think, that should give us, er, paws.

Just What Poetry's Spin Doctor Ordered: A Review of The Poetry Foundation's New iPhone Application

The P&PC Office has just downloaded the Poetry Foundation's cool iPhone app, and we love it. In the Foundation's words, the new app means "you can now take hundreds of poems by classic and contemporary poets with you wherever you go," but we're less interested in this portability—which simply extends a long tradition of pocket editions and pocket anthologies into the digital age—than we are in how the application itself is structured around traditionally popular ways of poem reading instead of the Modernist ones that first gave Poetry its street cred.

If you are into the individual talent or the individual masterpiece, this app does give you—via a little window at the top of the screen—the ability to search for specific "poems and poets," but that method of poetry finding takes a distinctly secondary back seat to others: you can more easily browse poems by "mood" or "subject" or, if you press a "spin" button or simply shake your phone, the app randomly cross-indexes moods and subjects to produce a catalog of poems along thematic lines (as in the first image above). We just shook the tax-deductible office iPhone, for example, and came up with a list of poems themed around the intersection of "Optimism" and "Work and Play." A second shake gave us "Passion" and "Nature." A third gave us "Worry" and "Youth." Surprisingly, for a little magazine that has come to be associated with individual talents and poetic personalities, the new app is pretty author-free: as the "spin" results in the image pictured above indicate, moods, subjects and titles are far more crucial to the app's operation and use than the author names that dominate the organization of classroom anthologies like the Norton or even the table of contents for Poetry magazine itself (see Vol. 1 No. 1 pictured below).

The Poetry Foundation apparently knows, however, that author names and specific poem titles often pale in importance to subject matter, theme, or mood among a popular readership and so, in reaching out to that readership via the iPhone app, the Foundation has put on a distinctly popular face—a face that probably has Ezra Pound rolling (if not spinning) in his grave. (Try to imagine, for example, an anthology of Modernist poetry being structured around sections titled "Joy" and "Commitment"!) That is, after nearly a century of standing for modernist quality, taste and discrimination, Poetry has gone thoroughly middlebrow if not downright popular in its ambitions, and it's not the world of the little magazine but digital communication technologies—such as the Poetry Tool on the Foundation's web site and the iPhone app discussed here—that have taken it there.

So, what are the implications of this finding system? For one, the iPhone app appears to completely disregard the importance of style, poetic voice, or school of poetic thought when it comes to poetry reading; the modernist call to originality (Pound's battle cry to "make it new") takes a back seat to an index that trucks in the vague categories that Pound cautioned against in the March 1913 issue of Poetry magazine when he wrote "Go in fear of abstractions." As its transhistorical themes suggest—Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti and Ella Wheeler Wilcox (pictured here) turn up together when our spin results in "Passion" and "Nature," for example—the app also foregoes categorization along the lines of literary periodization, disrupting the oftentimes Hegelian narratives of literary history that Poetry and Modernism depended on for literary cachet; thanks to Apple, AT&T, and the Poetry Foundation, all poetry—to misquote T.S. Eliot—is eternally present.

The depreciation of style, the subordination of the individual talent, and the loss of a linear literary narrative results in a general homogenization of poetic history that might leave Harold Bloom, the avant-garde, the English major, and the M.F.A. student at a loss for what books and dissertations to write next. But with the removal of brow lines, the disappearance of an aesthetic priesthood, and the waning aura of authorship and history alike comes a possible restoration or reconfiguration of the early 20th-century reader whom Joan Shelley Rubin has examined in Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. In the day before scholars took it upon themselves to separate highbrow poetry from lowbrow poetry and genteel poetry from modern poetry, Rubin argues, Americans read eclectically, finding and using poems from various literary traditions and time periods for many different purposes, in the process becoming "repositories of both the high and the popular—aware of, but not constrained by, a shifting boundary between them." If the Poetry Foundation is reaching out to touch someone, this is the reader it's likely got in mind.

Make no mistake, P&PC is not claiming that the Poetry Foundation iPhone app is the new beacon of popular poetry reading, although it does improbably contain eight poems by one Edgar Guest, the "people's poet" of the Detroit Free Press (pictured to the left) who would have never fit with Poetry during his lifetime, although he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Michigan—a school that had bestowed the same honor on Robert Frost. However, we are enthused by the new sets of categories which encourage readers to apply poems to their lives and not just to their term papers and GRE tests, and we like the restoration of affect to poetry reading that this suggests. (We're also very curious, btw, about the process of designing the app.) Combined with the "spin" feature—which makes us think of a disc jockey playing records on a turntable—these aspects of the poetry app make us feel like we're holding and carrying around a sort of portable, poetry mix-tape generator. Maybe that means an audio version will be available soon?