G.I. Jane & D.H. Lawrence

A couple of weeks ago, P&PC noticed that The Expen- dables—Sylvester Stallone's 2010 testos- terone-filled vehicle for a fraternity house of fading action heroes— unexpectedly ends with a poem. Well, wouldn't you know it: right after that post went up, the P&PC Office interns were having their annual Demi Moore film festival, and they came back to report that Moore's 1997 flick G.I. Jane ends with a poem too. Early in the movie (see clip #1 below) Navy SEAL Master Chief John Urgayle recites D.H. Lawrence's "Self-Pity" while inspecting his recruits:

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Then, sort of like a Chekhovian gun, Lawrence's poem reappears in the film's final scene—after Moore has shaved her head, after she's endured brutal hazing and abuse during training, and after she's distinguished herself in action in part by saving Urgayle's life—where it becomes part of a gift that, along with the Navy Cross, Urgayle gives to Moore as an expression of gratitude and apology (clip #2 below).

We're proud of the interns for noticing this, of course, but we're even more proud for what they had to say about it. The gift, they argued, is obviously meant to signal the transformation that's taken place in Urgayle—he's accepted a woman into the masculine world of the SEALS, is now a bigger and better person, and is apologizing for the abuse Moore suffered at his hands—but that transformation is expressed not simply because Lawrence's poem is present but because Urgayle interprets it differently than he did earlier in the film. That is, his transformation is visible not only because he acts (and promises to act) differently than before, but because he reads (and promises to read) differently as well.

Early in the film, Urgayle uses "Self-Pity" to model soldier comportment by comparing human activity to that of the animal kingdom; soldiers, he suggests—drawing a one to one correspondence between humans and the poem's wild things—should be like animals and not feel sorry for themselves. But as the camerawork in the final scene indicates, however, Urgayle's changed self reads the poem in reverse—that human beings are capable of emotional and communicative heights that the animal kingdom of "Self-Pity" is not. We see this especially when the camera, under Ridley Scott's direction, focuses in on Urgayle's marked-up copy of "Self-Pity" and especially on the repeated word "sorry." While the camera doesn't quite cut off the poem's final two words ("for itself"), it certainly comes close, centering our attention instead on the apology Urgayle is using the poem to express. Wild things, the camera helps us understand, don't feel sorry, but human beings like Urgayle do. In the process of becoming a different human being, the movie suggests, Urgayle's become a different reader too.

The P&PC interns liked the look of Urgayle's heavily-marked paperback; both the ballpoint underlining of "The Mosquito Knows" and the red pencil circling of "Self-Pity" suggest he's read and thought about the poems many times. What stood out for them, therefore, was how his final reading of the poem went unmarked by pen. He could, they argued, have very easily circled the word "sorry" in order to make his new interpretation clear. What ultimately "underlines" the text, however, is the camera, so that if this final scene is in fact an act of literary interpretation, that activity is not conducted on the page by Urgayle himself, but, instead, by the filmmaker for the benefit of the viewer. (Could we therefore read G.I. Jane not as a movie about women in the military but as an English Department lecture about how to read Lawrence's poem?) In the process, the pencil markings on the page (and the act of handwriting marginalia) become remnants of Urgayle's earlier and reprehensible self, while the acts of seeing and filming are linked to his later, more sophisticated and certainly more human self. So, while the end of G.I. Jane is designed to demonstrate Urgayle's transformation, the movie uses that narrative cover to wage a sort of smear campaign against the page and the power of the pen, casting them as remedial and less human technologies when compared to the more sophisticated interpretive and emotional technology of film. At the end of the day, it's Hollywood—not Urgayle, not Moore, and not even your English teacher—who is the most credible literary critic.

See what you think about this by watching the two clips here. Sorry about the low quality of the second one, but it's the only version of the film's final scene we could find.

Ronald Reagan's ABC's

Ronald Reagan (February 6, 1911 - June 5, 2004)

Note: If an image is blurry, click on it once to isolate it; then click on it again to magnify it.






















A is for Auto:
As the profits rise higher,
I'll help out the bosses
Not workers or buyers.

B stands for Big Business
And Bankruptcies, too.
We're making it easy
To cut wages for you.

C's Civil Rights
And the sins of Commission.
Those equality fights,
We've put in remission.

D stands for big Deficit:
Why does it get harder
To stop it from growing?
I'll just blame it on Carter!

E's for Ecology:
A liberal plot
To put shackles on industry.
Let's bring back Jim Watt!

F's Full Employment,
A nice thought, but yikes...
Without lots of jobless,
Who'd we get to break strikes?






















G's for General Dynamics
And the Pentagon's frills.
They rake in profits,
And you pay the bills!

H stands for Health Care,
"No problem," I say,
As long as you're there
With the money to pay.

I—watch the Imports
And Interest rates rise!
We're not selling you short:
It's just free enterprise!

J stands for Jobs.
You'll get one some day,
As long as you're willing
To take lower pay.

K stands for Kids,
I like them all, but...
Funds for their schools
I've just got to cut.

L is for Labor,
It's giving me pains.
They'll either play my way, or
I'll put them in chains.

M is for Ed Meese,
A misunderstood soul.
For the hungry, he's got cheese,
For the rich, more loopholes.






















N's for Nicaragua:
If they don't toe my line,
I'll shoot first and talk later,
Send the CIA to lay mines.

O is for OSHA:
It's better ignored.
To put lives before profits,
We just can't afford.

P is for PATCO,
I sure gave 'em hell.
If they'd only been Polish,
I'd have wished them all well.

Q stands for Quality
Of Life (for a few).
It's great if you're wealthy,
But we can't include you.

R is for Runaway
Plants in far lands,
Where they cut workers' pay
Because unions are banned.

Social Security
It's an awful expense.
Why subsidize the elderly
With tax dollars and cents?

T's for my Tax bill
And Trickle-down, too.
Don't worry, the rich will
Pass their cuts on to you.






















U's for Utilities:
Let's de-regulate!
Oil, gas, and electricity—
We'll let them raise rates!

V's for my Veto
Of the auto content bill.
The Republicans don't like it, so
Kill it, yes, I will!

W stands for Women—
I won't give them ERA.
In our economic system,
Equality's too high a price to pay.

Put an X right by my name.
Forget your silly fears.
You think my program's been too tame?
Well, just watch my next four years!

Y is for the Japanese Yen,
Whose value will get lower
As I push up the dollar; watch
The imports gain more power.

Z is for my Zig-zag course:
I stay it all the while.
In foreign countries, I'll use force;
While at home, I nod and smile.

Expendable Poetry

Anyone notice that The Expendables—the shoot-em-up, blow-em-up mercenary bromance starring bad boys Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Steve Austin and Bruce Willis with a cameo by governator Arnold Schwarzenegger—ends with a poem? You bet. After ousting the military dictator of a small Spanish-speaking island, after bringing the right hand of justice down on the corrupt C.I.A. agent funding said dictator's cocaine operation, after the explosions, gunfights, grisly deaths and double-crossings, and after the girl is saved, the guys come back to bond, celebrate each other's awesomeness, and hear some poetry at Rourke's tattoo shop. CCR plays in the background. Rourke and Statham start a knife-throwing competition while the other dudes let off steam and work on welcoming formerly double-crossing but now drug-free Lundgren back to the team.

Stallone: So you’re back from the dead. How’re ya healin?

Lundgren: Good ... considering you coulda killed me.

Jet Li: I forgive you.

Lundgren: OK

Li: I would’ve won.

Lundgren (winking): Of course.

[Stallone slaps Li on shoulder.]

Randy Couture: Hey Gunner [Lundgren]. Whatever doesn’t kill ya makes ya stronger, brother. Therapy!

Stallone: Man’s got a point.

[Statham winds up but doesn’t throw. Instead, he laughs. There's a gleam in his eye. He's got an idea and steps backward toward the doorway.]

Statham: You know what? I’m gonna do you a favor, Tool [Rourke]:

I once knew a man called Tool ...

Stallone: I looooove poetry!

Statham: ... Who, to me, was the epitome of cool ...

[Guys laugh.]

... Good with a knife ...

[He walks out the door into the alley.]

... Bad with a wife ...

Stallone: That hurts.

Statham: But to think he could beat me?
Dreamin he’d defeat me?
Cool Tool, you gotta be a fool!

Oh yeah ...

[Statham wings his knife from the street hitting the bullseye. Movie fades to black as a cover version of Thin Lizzy's "The Boys are Back in Town" plays on.]

Turning for a moment from knife slinging to word slinging, Statham (never one to shy away from cinematic wordplay) isn't just fooling around; in getting the movie's last words, he actually delivers an interesting little limerick-and-a-half-long poem that gives us a little lesson in what manhood's all about. Gesturing to a recognizable and democratically available verse form (the limerick), yet improvising on that form so that the final poem tests the limits of what it's allowed to do (it's two lines too long), Statham's longer-than-average limerick demonstrates how real men become men and not just meatheads. Like the poem, every one of the beefcakes in The Expendables follows a specific recipe for masculine success—they're good with a knife and bad with a wife, as the poem says—while at the same time personalizing that model so that they aren't entirely following someone else's idea of manhood. That is, the formal drama of Statham's poem argues that, to be a real man, it's not enough to be big and strong. You've also got to have some style in how you fight, how you flex your muscles, how you throw your knives—or how you rhyme. Without any of that, you're just somebody's bodyguard.

Who Was Vincent Godfrey Burns? Thoughts on Inaugural Poems & Poet Laureates

Nearly fifty years ago to the day, baffled by the heavy winds and so blinded by the sun's reflection that he couldn't read the poem he'd originally prepared for the occasion, 86 year-old Robert Frost recited from memory "The Gift Outright" to mark the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as U.S. President. The poem and improvised performance have not only gone down in poetic history as the gold standard by which inaugural poems are measured, but sometimes one even gets the impression that Frost and Kennedy somehow invented the ritual—that inaugural poems began then and there.

Of course, as the "Souvenir Inaugural Poem" (pictured here) from President Eisenhower's 1953 inauguration suggests, Frost and Kennedy didn't initiate the practice any more than Frost had invented the television that made the inauguration and "The Gift Outright" especially famous. People just don't remember—nor do they probably much want to remember—the poem "A Nation Prayed" which minister-turned-poet-turned-best-selling-novelist-turned-successful-screenwriter and soon-to-be controversial poet laureate of Maryland Vincent Godfrey Burns wrote in Eisenhower's honor.

So who was Burns—whose papers are scattered about in collections at Syracuse, UC Santa Barbara, Columbia, University of Maryland, the Maryland Historical Society, Kent State, and the University of Vermont? He was born in Brooklyn in 1893 and studied at Penn State, Harvard and the Union Theological Seminary. After serving in France in World War I, he was ordained in 1920 as a Congregationalist minister and plied that trade in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts before he eventually had some sort of falling out with the church that, despite his later appeals for forgiveness, was irreconcilable. He was married twice and had three kids.

None of this is particularly exceptional, but it appears that Burns increasingly turned from working on one Word to another in the making of his living. In 1932, in collaboration with his brother Robert Elliott who'd just escaped from a Georgia prison, Vincent got a big break, co-writing Robert's autobiography I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang. Serialized in True Detective, the story was then made into a Warner Brothers movie that scored Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, Best Picture, and Best Sound; it was entered into the National Film Registry in 1991. Apparently, both the book and the movie came to be influential in efforts to reform prison conditions in the deep South, and Vincent would go on to pen a sequel, Out of these Chains in 1942—the year, btw, that Frost's "Gift Outright" first appeared in print. (That's Vincent standing on the right in the picture here, presenting a copy of An American Poet Speaks to then-Governor of Maryland J. Millard Tawes in 1956.)

Some people suggest that Vincent couldn't recover from the celebrity status his brother's escape and autobiography attracted, and that a corresponding megalomania led to the breakup of his first marriage and caused problems with his congregation. We here at the P&PC Office don't know enough to take sides in the matter. However, in the years following the film's release, Burns would go on to edit anthologies, write poetry, television scripts, plays, and novels including the racily-illustrated Female Convict which went on to sell over a million copies—and which might well have starred Lady Gaga and Beyonce had the divas been around at the time.

Interestingly, even though Burns wrote "A Nation Prayed" in honor of Eisenhower's inauguration, that part of his life story is almost uniformly left out of every source we consult, making us wonder whether his poem was any more official than Robert Lowell's "Inauguration Day: January 1953." Sources on Burns concentrate, instead, on the fact that he was appointed Maryland Poet Laureate by Governor Tawes in 1962, a post he held with a fair degree of controversy until passing away in 1979. Seems that thirty years before that controversially liberal Amiri Baraka was appointed and then unappointed to the New Jersey Poet Laureate position, Burns was using Maryland's equivalent post to broadcast his own politically and religiously conservative views. A poem "Down at the Watergate," for example, reportedly took sides in depicting Nixon as the victim of a witch hunt—a not unsurprising view, perhaps, coming from a poet who, back in '53, made Eisenhower out to be a leader appointed by God and not an electorate. Burns's opponents tried to oust him from the post several times but never succeeded. Who knows. Maybe they would have been more effective if they'd lobbied for the elimination of the Poet Laureate post altogether, as the Jersey legislature did.

On the Poetry Beat in Salem Oregon

Friday, January 21 sees not one, but two poetry events taking place in Salem, Oregon, and the P&PC staff is hoping to make it to both. Consider:

1. The SAIF Corporation Agri-Business Banquet

With a long list of sponsors, this year's "celebration of Willamette Valley agriculture" is featuring renowned mustachioed cowboy poet and humorist Baxter Black as the evening's entertainment. With his ten gallon hat, huge ol' belt buckle, and spirit channeling Canadian balladeer Robert Service, Black has been described by the New York Times as "probably the nation's most successful living poet," appears on NPR, and lives—where else?—"between the horse and the cow—where the action is." No slouch when it comes to touring, the Brooklyn-born, former large animal veterinarian is set up for five January events alone which take him to Ohio, Montana, Arizona and Florida before he hits Oregon. You can check out some of his poems here, here, and here.

2. Willamette University MLK Celebration featuring Angela Davis & Good Sista/Bad Sista

The same night that Baxter Black brings his stylized spurs to the sold-out Salem Conference Center event, renowned civil rights leader and activist Angela Davis will be speaking on the campus of Willamette University as part of the school's two week-long MLK Day celebration. As cool as this is, what's landing her event on P&PC's calendar is actually the opening act that Willamette has lined up for Davis—the Portland-based spoken word duo of Turiya Autry and Walidah Imarisha known as Good Sista/Bad Sista. Check out an interview with them here and watch them perform here:



As far as P&PC can determine, tickets to the Agri-Business Banquet are sold out (they were $40 per person or $400 for a table of 10), but there are still seats left for the Davis & Good Sista/Bad Sista event. They're $15 each, with proceeds going to benefit the World Beat Festival and Oregon African American Museum.

Poetry & Popular Culture's 2010 Year-End Report

In previous years, year-end reports from Poetry & Popular Culture have been private affairs sent almost exclusively to our investors. Things are proceeding differently for the 2010 year-end report, however. Acting in concert with our marketing consultant (who hopes to see P&PC land on as many "Best of 2010" lists as possible), the P&PC Board of Directors has mandated that the 2010 year-end report be made available to the public. In the interest of transparency and accountability, then, the following document is hereby released.

During the 2010 calendar year, Poetry & Popular Culture not only experi- enced certain milestones—including our 45,000th unique visitor and our 70,000th page view—but saw a marked increase in site traffic from the previous year: 29,374 unique visitors accessed P&PC in 2010, compared with 20,280 in 2009. Accordingly, individual page views went up as well, from 26,710 in 2009 to 39,653 in 2010. Stated in terms of percentage increase, P&PC experienced a 44.8% increase in unique visitors from 2009 to 2010, and a 48.4% increase in page views. Some of this increase can be attributed to the current culture-wide craze for zombies and, therefore, also for zombie haiku (see below). However, this does not explain the sudden growth entirety. While consumer confidence in the retail marketplace remained lethargic, confidence in P&PC appears to have gone up. We do not think the correspondence is an incidental one.

Much of P&PC's success in 2010 can be attributed to guest opinions and guest postings. (That's Edgar Guest pictured to the left, though he has yet to do any guest posting for P&PC.) While contributions from P&PC's home office in Salem, Oregon, remained popular and clearly played an important part in sustaining reader interest and attention, some of the year's most successful postings came from P&PC correspondents around the country including Ce Rosenow, Melissa Girard, and Angela Sorby, to whom the entire P&PC organization remains grateful. The top 10 most visited postings in 2010 were:

1. The Book of the Undead, Part One: Ce Rosenow Reviews Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku
2. Assassins and Outsiders: The Obscurity of Popular Poetry
3. Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: An Interview with Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist
4. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Asshole, and the Haiku of Fight Club
5. Slam, Spoken Word, and the Democratization of Poetry: Melissa Girard Reviews The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry
6. A Picture of Our Poets
7. Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: Firefly, Sci-Fi, & the Latterday Chronicles of Lewis Turco
8. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and John Keats
9. Robert Frost's Christmas Cards
10. Herman Munster, Pragmatic Beatnik: A Guest Posting by Angela Sorby

Next, in moving beyond the quantitative aspect of this report, we would like to present a series of more subjective and even anecdotal pieces of praise and critical acclaim that P&PC received this year. These items are not meant to be an exhaustive account of such correspondence but a sampling:

"The only legitimate poetry blog around." — Ernest Hilbert, author of Sixty Sonnets and former editor of Contemporary Poetry Review

"My first stop for the news that stays news!" — Meredith Martin, Princeton University

"Almost all of the posts on Poetry & Popular Culture are things I skim with plans to go back and read when I have the time." — Ryan Mecum, author of Zombie Haiku, Vampire Haiku, and Werewolf Haiku

"I'm glad to know about this blog/site." — Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate and founder of the Favorite Poem Project

"This is the most positive ad-verse environment I've ever worked in!" — Sally the Stenographer

"One of my new favorite poetry bloggers." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University

"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Poetry & Popular Culture. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that Mike Chasar has yet contributed." — Angela Sorby, author of Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917

"It made me more popular just reading it." — Bartholomew Brinkman, co-editor of The Modern American Poetry Site

"Everybody should be reading the newsy and fun P&PC." — Desperately Seeking Salem

Finally, we would like to conclude with an expression of thanks to all who wrote, researched, read, oversaw, audited, guided, photocopied, paper shredded, designed, litigated, marketed, promoted, computed, and otherwise worked to make P&PC the success that it was in 2010. The Board is grateful for your ongoing and generous involvement and wishes you even more success in 2011.

Extra, Extra! A Happy, Happy New Year from P&PC

A year ago, P&PC took some time to muse on the cultural significance of the "Carrier's Greeting" tradition of New Year poems and then directed you to check out the 900 or so digitized examples in the great Brown University Library collection. By now—downloading and reading at the pace of 2-3 per day—you've probably been able to make your way through that archive and can thus make several immediate observations about the greeting shown here: compared to the poems that Brown has put online, it's small (about 4 inches high and 3 inches wide), short (only 14 lines), vague in its language, and new (most people associate the carrier's greeting with the 18th or 19th century, not with the advent of the 20th).

It's tempting to see the shortness of this 1900 New York Star address as evidence of the genre's dwindling cultural purchase. And that's not a bad estimation. Yet, with its deckle edges, judicious use of ornament, convenient size, and decorated initial capital letter, isn't it rather elegant as well? Sleek, efficient, easy to save, sonnet-like in both length and rhetorical structure, it strikes the P&PC office as a thoroughly modernized carrier's greeting. Compare it, for example, to the carrier's address (pictured to the left) issued by the Sunday News just eleven years earlier, in 1889. At 11 inches high and 4 inches wide, not only is the News greeting an awkward size to save and read—printed on a floppy card stock, it's also got what book-arts people would call horrible (or at least totally unpleasing) "action"—but it's got those unnecessarily ornate borders cluttering things up as well. Then, compare the language of the two poems. Here's an excerpt from the News version:

Fifty two have come and gone.
Weeks of the old, old year.
Weeks of sunshine and weeks of storm.
With their burdens of joy and fear.

Weeks that have brought to the town of Z
Changes fair and foul, I ween.
But through it all, sunshine and storm,
Faithful the "Carrier Boy" has been.

In these stanzas and elsewhere, the poem is full of unneeded information, abstraction and generalization, hyperbole, redundancy, archaic diction and forced rhymes. In comparison—or so we "ween"—the Star's tetrameter sonnet is more coherent, more to the point, and even more elegant in its standard request for an end-of-year tip. Sure, it's perhaps a bit too padded with adjectives, but in some ways that's consistent with the discourse of the trade—it's the same impulse that puts an extra "extra" in the famous cry, "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!"—and so seems forgivable if not entirely appropriate. And so it is in the spirit of the Star's anonymous poet that we here at P&PC don't just wish you and yours a Happy New Year, but a Happy, Happy 2011.