Organic Form: P&PC Consultant Dr. Drew Duncan Analyzes the Experimental Pentameter of J.F. Bunnett and Francis Kearley (along with the More General Poetics of O-Chem)

In 1971, J. F. Bunnett and Francis J. Kearley Jr.— organic chemists studying a class of cyclic molecules called arynes—pulled off one of the most astonishing but now largely unknown stunts in the history of what we can only call experimental American poetry: they reported their research on haloanilines in three pages of iambic pentameter (yes, you read that correctly) and published it as "Comparative Mobility of Halogens in Reactions of Dihalobenzenes with Potassium Amide in Ammonia" in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. (Page one is pictured here; scroll down to find pages 2 and 3; and click on the article title above for a .pdf version.)

Far out, right? Or, to quote one of the P&PC office interns, "Like, WTF, man?" Well, to help figure out W exactly TF Bunnett and Kearley might have been thinking, we solicited the help of Drew Duncan (pictured here), an award-winning teacher and professor of organic chemistry at Willamette University who took some time off from NMR spectroscopy and his favorite hobby of rock climbing to offer his own set of reactions to Bunnett and Kearley's experimental verse and the ideas of order at the intersection of poetry and O-chem. Or is that Po-chem? Either way, we think you'll enjoy what our new Periodic Consultant has to say on the matter below.

Upon receiving a copy of this article, my initial response was one of astonishment. What possessed two organic chemists to undertake the project of writing an entire scientific paper in iambic pentameter? And how had they convinced journal editors (not known as a group especially welcoming to unsolicited "creativity" in issues of formatting) to let the paper be published in this form? The paper itself provides no information regarding the former query: the authors are entirely silent about their impulse to verse. A journal editor, however, does comment in a footnote written in garden-variety prose that, while "…open to new styles and formats," the editorial staff was "…surprise[ed] upon receiving this paper." An understatement, I imagine. The editor continues, "…we find the paper to be novel in its chemistry and readable in its verse." This last statement explains why the paper was permitted to be published in such an unusual format: the choice to write in verse did not detract from the clear communication of the science. (Wasn't it Ezra Pound who told poets to "Consider the way of the scientists" and argued that "Poetry should be at least as well-written as prose"?) And in reading the paper myself, I had to agree with the editor. The text provides an effective narrative of the results of the study and the authors' analysis of their data.

So before I go any further, a few quick words on the science. (Don't worry, this will only hurt a bit.) Bunnett and Kearley's  study concerns a class of cyclic organic molecules called "arynes." Arynes are extraordinarily reactive: they suffer from a destabilizing condition that we in the business call "ring strain," which renders them quite unstable. In fact, arynes are so short-lived under typical laboratory conditions that they cannot be isolated or even observed. Obviously, this presents some challenges for their study. Bunnett and Kearley use one of the typical tricks that chemists employ to get around such issues: rather than study the arynes directly, they instead wait until the end of the reaction and study the ultimate, more stable products of the reaction. Based on the products observed, the authors can then make inferences regarding the identities and characteristics of the arynes that had been (briefly) present in the reaction mixture.

An analogy with jellybeans might help illustrate how this works. We will use two of P&PC's ever- helpful interns for our study. Based on prior "data," you know that Intern 1 exclusively enjoys red jellybeans and Intern 2 eats only greens. A bowl of jellybeans is placed in a locked room into which you (as the observer) have no access. At this point the "reaction" occurs, admitting either Intern 1, Intern 2, or both into the room for a period of time, during which time they eat jellybeans according to their preferences, and then leave. At this point you, as the experimenter, can access the room and assay the number and type of jellybeans that remain. If you find that the red jellybeans have been entirely consumed but all greens remain, you would infer that only Intern 1 had been in the room. If the greens are gone but the reds are uneaten, you would of course conclude the opposite: only Intern 2 was present. If some of both colors were missing, the appropriate inference would be that both Interns were present. If more reds had been consumed than greens, two possibilities exist: either Intern 1 was present longer than Intern 2, or both interns were there for the same amount of time, but Intern 1 ate faster than Intern 2.

Having digested the science (not the jelly- beans), I re-read the paper, interested this time in what effect the delivery of the information in verse had upon how I, as a scientific reader, interacted with the manuscript. A couple of points struck me as quite remarkable. Consider the following passage, taken verbatim from the Discussion section of the paper but presented here, for sake of argument, as "standard" prose without the pentameter's line breaks:

In Table I, data pertaining to the meta isomers show clearly that carbon-iodine bonds more readily break than carbon bromine bonds, and furthermore that carbon-chlorine bonds are even more resistant. This is, of course, a familiar order of reactivity. Somewhat puzzling is that the heavier-lighter halide ratio from meta-iodochlorobenzene is just the same as from meta-bromochlorobenzene. One would have expected almost exclusive iodine release from the former compound. In Table II…

As rendered above, the text reads as a very lucid discussion of the data: the language is clear, and the sentences effectively integrate observation and interpretation. Now, consider the same passage with line breaks restored (the underlining is mine):

In Table I, data pertaining to
The meta isomers show clearly that
Carbon-iodine bonds more readily break
Than carbon-bromine bonds, and furthermore 
That carbon-chlorine bonds are even more 
Resistant. This is, of course, a familiar
Order of reactivity. Somewhat puzzling
Is that the heavier-lighter halide ratio
From meta-iodochlorobenzene
Is just the same as from meta-bromo-
Chlorobenzene. One would have expected 
Almost exclusive iodine release
 From the former compound. In Table II ...

The effect of the line breaks is striking: note how the endings of the second, fourth, fifth, seventh, and eleventh lines (see underlines) suggest an imminent "reveal" ("…show clearly that"…what?! ). In each case, the effect of the line break—where the reader reflexively puts a pause—is to create a sense of tension associated with having to wait until the next line to learn the result. When reading the paper in verse form, I find myself compelled to move through the text by these small moments of drama in a way I do not experience when the text is presented in standard paragraph form.

One other unique aspect of this piece concerns a single word: doth. This rather surprising conjugation appears at the top of the second column of page 185:

Therefore either halide ion doth derive
From the very same anion, and which
Is preferentially expelled depends 
Upon the intrinsic labilities
Of the two covalent bonds to halogen. 

In all instances save this one, word choice throughout the paper is consistent with standard modern scientific English. And yet there sits doth in all of its archaic glory. Why? "Does" would seem to be a perfectly reasonable choice for both meaning and meter. Too much effort went into the preparation of this manuscript to consider this anything other than a deliberate choice by the authors. Is this then, perhaps, their subtle, knowing wink to their readers? An homage to Shakespeare and the poets of yore who, like these authors, chose verse as a vehicle of expression? I have no answers here, but the effect of the word is somehow rather … enchanting.

Having spent some time parsing the text, I had to reconsider my initial astonished reaction to the paper’s unusual form. On one level, my reaction was easy to understand: one simply does not—doth not?—see Journal of Organic Chemistry papers written in verse every day. However, upon more sober reflection, I wondered whether my astonishment was truly warranted. Are chemistry and poetry such strange bedfellows? Consider that Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann has published several volumes of poetry, and that each year the American Chemical Society sponsors poetry contests throughout the nation. Furthermore, in a clever bit of April Foolery, the journal Nature: Chemistry announced on April 1, 2010 that there would be, "a new prerequisite for the consideration of manuscripts … [a]uthors are requested to include a short poem highlighting the novel conclusions of their work." The Nature: Chemistry staff even work in a sly homage to our JOC paper—an homage suggesting that Bunnett and Kearley's poetic efforts have not gone unappreciated in the scientific world—noting parenthetically that, "Special consideration will be given to those who prepare their entire manuscript in iambic pentameter."

Poetry has also played a role in my capacity as a teacher of organic chemistry: I frequently ask students to write a poem on the subject of organic chemistry for extra credit on their final exams. For some reason, haiku seems to be the most popular form among these budding scientist-poets, with my favorite all-time submission being the word "suck" repeated seventeen times:

suck suck suck suck suck
suck suck suck suck suck suck suck
suck suck suck suck suck. 

While this particular haiku does not, perhaps, adhere to the more nuanced characteristics of the form, it nevertheless succeeds admirably in capturing the pungent cocktail of stress, angst, resentment, and sleep deprivation in the exam room that day.

Having come to grips with the fact that chemistry and poetry can com- fortably occupy some of the same spaces, I had to ask one last question: what is it that compels chemists to make poetry a part of their scientific lives? I wonder whether it is something to do with order: a line of iambic pentameter has a prescribed number of syllables, with stresses in just the right places to maintain the meter. So too does the molecular world of the chemist rest on the idea of order, of everything in its proper place. One need look no further than the foundational "text" of chemistry itself: the periodic table. Just as a haiku, whose precise arrangement of syllables and lines defines its form, so too does the ordering of elements—two in the first period, eight in the second and third periods, eighteen in the fourth and fifth periods, and so on—define the entire discipline. And in the same way that a single syllable too many or too few destroys the cadence of a line of meter, a single element out of place compromises the elegant organization of the periodic table. (So regular, in fact, is the "meter" of the periodic table that when scientists were confronted with "holes" in the original periodic table, they were able to predict properties of the elements that would eventually fill those holes before those elements had been discovered.) Viewed in this light, the impulse of chemists to express themselves in verse borders on self-evident: nearly every chemist has a poem of the 118 elements hanging in his or her office or lab.

Drew Duncan is a professor of organic chemistry at Willamette University. An avid rock climber and craft beer enthusiast, he can be found at altitude, at various pubs in Portland and the Willamette Valley, or at aduncan@willamette.edu.

Blair's Emily Dickinson: Plagiarism, Borrowing, and the Facts of Life

Before you watch the following episode of The Facts of Life from 1979—Season One, Episode 6, in which Blair (pictured here) plagiarizes a poem by Emily Dickinson (not pictured here) to fulfill an English class assignment—you might want to check out Season 2, Episode 1, of Leave It to Beaver from 1958 (now streamable on Netflix). In that episode, Beaver commits the same offense, turning in as his own a poem by his father Ward and—just like Blair—winning a poetry contest for it. And lest you think the topic of plagiarized poetry one of the distant past, take some time to mull over the case of Paris Hilton, who presented on Larry King Live what Joel Stein writing for the LA Times called "by far the most famous poem of this century" as evidence of the transformation that her stint in the clink worked on her, only to have it later revealed that the poem was actually written by a fan, Judi DeBella, who sent it to Hilton in a fan letter.

Now, we here at P&PC aren't saying that there's any specific connection between Hilton and the television shows other than the general subject of plagiarized poetry—although Paris is something of a tv creation in her own right—but what about the connection between Leave It to Beaver and The Facts of Life? Could it be that, in coming up with a script about the subject of stealing poetry, The Facts of Life actually cribbed the plot of Beaver from twenty years earlier? If so, do we call it an homage? Do we cry foul? Or do we agree with Blair herself, who remarks, "Who's cheating? I'm just borrowing a poem from a woman who died in 1886. I mean, it's not like I'm copying from the girl in front of me. Besides, it's only cheating when someone finds out"? 

Thoughts on Purina, Puffery, and Other Matters, Such as the Poetics of Inflation and the Advertising Poetry of Friskies Crispies Cheese Flavor Puffs

In Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge UP, 2007), Northumbria University English professor John Strachan repeatedly reminds us that the term "puff" was once (and to some extent still is) regularly used to describe not a type of delectable, creamy pastry or profiterole, but an advertising technique. In 1836, for example, the English poet and novelist Horace Smith described "puffing" as "a species of cozenage and trickery much resorted to by the vendors of quack medicines, [shoe] blacking, novels, and other trash, for the purpose of gulling the public and cajoling them into a purchase of their wares." Quack medicines, blacking, novels, and other trash, right?

The "puff" as a sort of exaggerated or over-inflated product claim had such currency in nineteenth-century Englnd, in fact, that the Irish poet Gerald Griffin imagined it coming to life as Puff, not a magic dragon but the Spirit of Advertising itself. Of "The Prayer of Dullness" (taken from that 1843 classic The Works of Gerald Griffin), Strachan writes, Griffin "envisages the goddess of [Alexander Pope's] The Dunciad revisiting London, only to find, much to her horror, that the age of dunces has been superseded by a literary golden age: towering poets (Byron, [Thomas] Moore and [Thomas] Campbell) have supplanted her poetasters and Walter Scott has displaced her hack novelists.... Dullness prays for 'Some ally in my hour of care' to restore the empire of 'bad taste on earth.' Salvation arrives in the malign form of Puff, the personification of advertising, who blows 'a thrilling blast' on his 'brazen trumpet.'" Consider Puff's entrance:

My name is Puff—the guardian sprite,
     And patron of the dull and shameless,
Things born in shades, I bring to light,
     And give a high fame to the nameless.
Me modest merit shuns to meet,
     His timid footsteps backward tracking,
The worthless all my influence greet,
     From —'s books—to Turner's blacking.

Even the Thomas Moore referenced by Griffin and pictured here got in on the act, penning "Thoughts on Patrons, Puffs and Other Matters" from which the following comment on authorial puffery is taken:

Instead of bartering, in this age,
Our praise for pence and patronage,
We authors, now, more prosperous,
Have learn'd to patronize ourselves;
And since all-potent Puffing's made
The life of song, the soul of trade,
More frugal of our praises grown,
We puff no merits but our own.

Partially as a result of its long connection to the practice of advertising, "puff" has acquired a whole set of undesirable connotations that the Oxford English Dictionary can track for you: the empty or idle boast, a person or thing regarded as insubstantial, a person puffed up with pride or vanity, something inflated or swollen, a type of journalism (the puff piece), and even a sexual personality. Putting the profits in the profiterole (one might say), puffery is thus all about air—hot air, we might typically think, but air nonetheless.

All of this allows us to better understand the history and poetics informing Purina's Friskies Crispies Cheese Flavor Puffs and the three-stanza verse "Fun Is In The Air" printed in an appropriately airy white text on the back of the 2.1-oz. package of cat treats pictured here. Hard to read but guaranteeing good taste for your favorite feline (instead of the "empire of 'bad taste on earth'" that Griffin imagined Puff helping to restore in "The Prayer of Dullness"), "Fun Is In The Air" reads as follows:

Friskies Crispies are crispy!
     They're fluffy with air.
They're irresistibly puffy.
     It's a new love affair.

Not crunchy. Not tender.
     Not expected. Not boring.
Airy is merry!
     A new treat worth exploring.

So tasty! So cheese-y!
     Every bite's a delight.
Crisp it up anytime.
     Perfect morning, noon and night.

Embodying its central conceit in that wonderful sonic slippage between "love affair" and "love of air," Purina's poem is a sort of attempt to reclaim puffiness from its history of negative connotations. But in order to do that, "Fun Is In The Air" must embrace (and sell) the very excess (too much insubstantial airiness) that led the character of Andrugio in J. Marston's Elizabethan play The History of Antonio and Mellida (c. 1599) to describe how "blown up" an imprudent king might get "with the flattering puffs / Of spongy sycophants." Purina's bard of cat-tasting (rather than poetasting) therefore not only embeds the sound of "air" in "love affair" and "merry," but then embarks on the task of convincing the consumer that it's the very insubstantiality of air that's responsible for its opposite: its substantial crispiness. In other words, "Fun Is In The Air" identifies as the product's special, key ingredient the very thing that makes puffery puff, that inflates the zip-lock package of cat treats, and that, like the "darkness" of Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man," surrounds all of us. "Fun Is In The Air" doesn't have as its only goal making modestly inflated claims for Crispies' crunchiness or tenderness, but audaciously inflated claims for the very source of inflation, as well, and even the act of inflation itself!

This poetics of inflation structures the rest of the packaging too: the individual cat treats soar up into the sky and off of the plastic pouch like helium balloons, and those images themselves are inflated in size compared to the actual treats, as the admission "Treats Shown Are Not Actual Size" on the reverse informs us. If that isn't enough, a magnified "blow up" of a single Crispie pictured on the back and captioned "there's air in there!" inflates that Crispie even more, as if putting it under a microscope lens. The rhetoric of the poem and surrounding language is equally inflated, puffed up with redundancy and contradiction that embrace the "emptiness," "inflation of style," and "showy adornment" that the OED uses in one of its definitions of "puff." The first lines of the poem, for example, needlessly tell us that "Crispies are" (wait for it) "crispy" and that "They're fluffy with" (of all things) "air." Making liberal use of exclamation marks to puff things up still more, the poem moves to stanza two, which begins not by making additional claims for the product itself, but claims for what it isn't (it's not crunchy, not tender, etc.); essentially, as with the hype it gives the product's key ingredient that we can't see and that Purina doesn't make (air), the poem also makes claims for Crispies based on qualities that the product doesn't have.

If stanza one pursues a poetics of inflation via redundancy (Crispies are crispy) and stanza two via negativity (what Crispies are not, rather than what they are), then the poem's final stanza does so via hyperbole, telling us in the last two lines to "Crisp it up anytime. / Perfect morning, noon and night"—advice that other verbiage about "Feeding Instructions" on the package tells us we should not in fact take: "Feed as a treat to your adult cat. This product is a treat and is not intended to be fed as a meal. The caloric intake from treats should not exceed 10% of a cat's daily caloric requirement. If treats are given, the amount of food should be reduced accordingly..." In other words, you really shouldn't crisp it up anytime, as there are lots of times when Crispies aren't perfect. Among other things, what we learn from this mixed message and clash of discursive registers is that, when it comes to the language of truth and statistics and Fluffy's real-life health and dietary concerns, Purina goes to prose, and when it comes to making (and getting consumer permission to make) artificial claims (i.e., puffery), it goes to poetry. In other words, truth-in-advertising equals prose, while false or misleading information equals poetry.

But maybe this prose=realism/ poetry=puffery logic isn't entirely bad—just the victim of an unfortunate contrast and set of mass cultural associations about the power of poetry marshaled here. If you think that Friskies Crispies makes poetry seem showy, unreliable, ill-suited for practical matters, bombastic, inflated, and empty (like the holes in the crisps that we're asked to buy for their air), then wouldja just let your capitalist self take a look at that loveable cat on the packaging? He reaches up toward the sky not for the solid realness of the Crispies, but for the air inside of them, the air that surrounds us, the air that we can never fully grasp or see but on which our lives depend. When we want to reach for the stars (check out how little white starbursts in an otherwise daytime sky on the product's packaging rhyme with the sun toward which the hand reaches in the picture here), or when we leap as Friskies' Fluffy does for the Platonic ideal of the Crispie floating across the heavens, our chief resource isn't prose, it's poetry—even puffery. That is, when "the darkness surrounds us," as Creeley writes in "I Know a Man," we don't write expository paragraphs; instead, we "buy a goddamn big car" and start plunging ahead via the poetics of inflation—redundancy ("because I am always talking"), hyperbole (goddamn big car), and contradiction (telling ourselves at one moment to "drive" and the next to "look / out where yr going"). If Puff, Griffin's Spirit of Advertising, is the patron of the dull and shameless that brings overshadowed things to light and that gives fame to the nameless, well, then maybe that's just the thing we should do against the powers of darkness.

N.B. P&PC made several attempts to contact Purina about the poem on this package of cat treats, but neither our emails nor phone messages were returned.

Graffiti Limericks in Mayberry? The Poetry of the Andy Griffith Show

P&PC Travelogue: The City of Big Shoulders

P&PC just got back from an exhaust- ing, whirlwind trip to Chicago where, in little more than forty-eight hours, we went to three festivals, two museums, one play, and plenty of local restaurants and watering holes while visiting with old friends and checking, in particular, to see if the Windy City's craft beer scene has done anything to displace Old Style from its privileged place in the quenching of the city's thirst (which it has, btw). But there was more than just beer and companionship brewing in the city of the big shoulders, that tool maker, that stacker of wheat, that player with railroads; there was poetry, too—and nearly everywhere we turned from the moment we stepped out of our bargain hotel room at the north side's Heart O' Chicago Motel, it seemed. Here is a little run-down of the popular—and the hopular—we got to taste.

After visiting the Art Institute on Friday afternoon to take in the newly opened Roy Lich- tenstein retro- spective— the first in twenty years and a great combination of high and low that set the tone for our weekend perfectly—we made our way west on Randolph, first to Avec for some trendy snackies and a cocktail, and then to Haymarket Square, site of the 1886 massacre now marked by the bronze statue designed by Chicago artist Mary Brogger and pictured below. What drew us there was not entirely the labor and free speech history lesson but also the Haymarket Pub & Brewery, where we stepped in to sample, in an otherwise mostly underwhelming flight of beers, Haymarket's Hogbutcher Belgian I.P.A. The menu has this to say about the choice of names:

"To celebrate the life and work of the great Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, we named this Belgian I.P.A. after his most famous poem, which celebrated the hard working folks who made our city the greatest on Earth. It's brewed with warrior and chinook, and dry-hopped with warrior and cascades alongside only the finest Belgian ale yeast."

Like many of the beers we sampled, as temperatures outside rose into the 90s reminding us of one of the reasons why P&PC is now headquartered in Oregon, the Hogbutcher was summery, light, not very hoppy, and struck us as a gentle step up from a Hefeweizen—not exactly the ideal match for the "husky, brawling laughter of Youth" in Sandburg's poem, perhaps, but nevertheless a workable gateway beer for a city just getting its craft beer footing.

We found the best beer of the night (the Founders Double Trouble double I.P.A.) not at the Map Room or the Fountain- head but at Bangers & Lace craft beer and craft sausage joint in Wicker Park. Try it—you'll love it. And, to cap of the evening, we stopped by the Green Mill—the birthplace of the poetry slam—on the way home. We'd never been there before (can you believe it?) and we absolutely loved it; the super jazz, a beautiful bar, and an atmosphere oozing with the 1920s more than made up for the standard beer selection and sent us home to our room at the Heart O' Chicago content and resolved to drink a big glass of water, take two ibuprofen, and get up at the crack of dawn the next day.

On Saturday morning, we breakfasted on Swedish pancakes, eggs, and sausage at a little Swedish diner in Andersonville, took in some of Midsommarfest, and got pulled into the Swedish American Museum by our Swedish American traveling companion, the Iowa City Press-Citizen Opinion Editor, Jeff Charis-Carlson. There, we ran smack into "The Parting Words of a Swedish Emigrant" (pictured here) stuck to a post with little in the way of explanation:

I'm bound for young America,
Farewell old Scandinavia.
I've had my fill of cold and toil,
All for the love of mother soil.
You poets with your rocks and rills
Can stay and starve—on words, no frills.
Me, I've got a stomach 'neath my hide,
No bonds can keep me on this side.
There, out west a man breathes free,
While here one slaves, a tired bee.
Drunk with our nectar they've set us afright,
But opportunity has knocked, and we'll take our flight.

Knowing that we ourselves had a flight or two in store later in the day—when we would head to Delilah's for a Belgian beer tasting extravaganza—we grabbed a bottle of water and caught the El downtown for the Printer's Row Book Fair and Lit Fest where, among the 160 or so other exhibitors, the Poetry Foundation had its own tent (pictured here). Celebrating the one-hundredth year of Poetry magazine, the Foundation was giving away free copies of the magazine, pins in the shape of Poetry's winged horse logo, and other goodies like (P&PC geek alert) the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry.

Just opposite the Poetry Foundation tent was the "Arts & Poetry" stage where, right as we stepped in, poet Mark Doty (pictured to the left) was in the midst of wrapping up what was presumably a poetry reading by answering questions from a crowd of 30 or 40 people. You can't see it in this picture, but he had a packed suitcase propped behind the lectern and ready for his flight out of town; we were told by the emcee that he had come to the Fest on his own dime—just like P&PC. After all, who could pass up the chance to visit what Sandburg called this "city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning"—right?  Well, partly so. During the weekend we were there, eight people died and 46 were left wounded elsewhere in the city, continuing a bloody year that has seen Chicago homicides rise 50 percent over 2011 numbers. "Yes, it is true," Sandburg also wrote in his Hogbutcher poem, "I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again."

We met friends from the University of Illinois for dinner at D'Candela, a sweet Peruvian restaurant in Irving Park, saw "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind" at the Neo-Futurists theater on North Ashland, had a cold one at the Hopleaf just around the corner after that, and, fighting the sandman's inevitable approach, wrapped up the night with a warm and watery PBR at Carol's country-western bar. (Yes, by then it was about 3:30 am.) After happening on Mark Doty at the Lit Fest, though, we didn't see any more poetry the rest of the weekend—with the sole exception, perhaps, of the subtractive, scatalogical, semi-poetic graffiti (pictured here) defacing the Jim Beam-sponsored pool table sign-up chalkboard at Delilah's punk rock bar (where, if you recall our mentioning it two paragraphs earlier, we visited to do one-ounce tastings of Belgian beers earlier in the day). So, one might say, in just a matter of minutes we went from Doty to doo-doo. That's Chicago—singing, wicked, crooked, strong, cunning, and laughing.  Sandburg had it right. And that's exactly how we like it.

The Banner-Like Breadth of Her Wing: An Interview with P&PC Hero Angela Sorby

Why more people don't flock to the work of Marquette University English professor Angela Sorby is a mystery to P&PC. With her eagle eye for the telling detail—it's rumored she can spot a metrical variation at a hundred yards—and the grace of a sandhill (or Hart) crane, she's been charming our magic casements with more than plaintive anthems since the 2005 publication of Schoolroom Poets: Childhood and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917. If you don't remember her 2010 explication of Herman Munster's civil-rights-era beatnik performance, make sure to set your spotting scope on it along with her two books of poems (Bird Skin Coat and Distance Learning) and the forthcoming anthology of nineteenth-century American children's poetry, Over the River and Through the Woods, that she has co-edited.

Sorby's essay "The Poetics of Bird Defense in America, 1860-1918" is also one of eight essays featured in Poetry after Cultural Studies. Migrating back and forth between the bird-related poetry of turn-of-the-century children's magazines, field guides, schoolrooms, and state Bird Day publications, "The Poetics of Bird Defense" reveals how popular poetry shaped the emerging environmental movement in the United States by combining the scientific observation and study (or close reading) of nature with the emotional and moral imagination more frequently associated with poetry.

We recently got a chance to chatter with Angela about that essay, the connections between birding and poetry, rogue taxidermists, and what she's been up to since writing "The Poetics of Bird Defense." Here, in a special bonus feature supplement to Poetry after Cultural Studies, is what she had to say.

P&PC: How did you first, uh, alight on the connection between birds and poetry?

Sorby: When I was doing research for a talk on "Animal Poems and Children's Rights in America," I kept sighting birds, especially in later nineteenth-century texts. Midcentury sentimental children's poets embraced pets and farm animals like Mary's Lamb, but later poets, inspired by the Nature-Study (and Child-Study) movements, were suddenly wild about birds. I think as society urbanized, birds emerged as a visible remnant of the natural world, especially as some species became threatened. For instance, Martha, the last passenger pigeon (pictured here), died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

P&PC: Hmm. You write that "birds and birdsong are like poetry" and that some people felt like "poets were uniquely qualified to speak for (and advocate for) birds." Martha died in 1914. Poetry magazine was started in 1912, and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" was first published in 1917. Connection?

Sorby: Absolutely. There is a circular three-way occult connection between Martha, Harriet Monroe [pictured above], and the eye of the blackbird.

P&PC: Your essay ends in 1918, the year that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed and World War I ended. If this essay had a sequel, where would it go?

Sorby: I'm curious about Victorian birds, so if the essay had a sequel it would probably migrate across the Atlantic. The British imperial imagination is rife with peacock feathers and dead dodos, and certainly the Brits were, and are, avid bird-watchers.

P&PC: What's your favorite poem from the bird defense movement?

Sorby: Here's one from Over the River and Through the Woods [see below for more on this anthology] that I quite like, "The Great Blue Heron," by Celia Thaxter, though don't ask me why she spells "boulder" with a "w."

The Great Blue Heron

The Great Blue Heron stood all alone
     By the edge of the solemn sea,
On a broken bowlder of gray trap-stone;
     He was lost in a reverie.

And when I climbed over the low rough wall
     At the top of the sloping beach,
To gather the drift-wood great and small
      Left scattered to dry and to bleach,

I saw, as if carved from the broken block
     On which he was standing, the bird,
Like a part of the bowlder of blue-gray rock;
     For never a feather he stirred.

I paused to watch him. Below my breath,
     “O beautiful creature!" I cried,
"Do you know you are standing here close to your death,
     By the brink of the quiet tide?

"You can not have heard of the being called Man—
     The lord of creation is he;
And he slays earth's creatures wherever he can,
     In the air or the land or the sea.

"He's not a true friend of your race! If he sees
     Some beautiful wonderful thing
That runs in the woodland, or floats in the breeze
     On the banner-like breadth of its wing,

"Straight he goes for his gun, its sweet life to destroy,
     For mere pleasure of killing alone.
He will ruin its beauty and quench all its joy,
     Though 't is useless to him as a stone."

Then I cried aloud: "Fly! before over the sand
     This lord of creation arrives
With his powder and shot, and his gun in his hand
     For the spoiling of innocent lives!"

Oh, stately and graceful and slender and tall,
     The Heron stood silent and still,
As if careless of warning and deaf to my call,
     Unconscious of danger or ill.

"Fly! fly to some lonelier place, and fly fast!
     To the very north pole! Anywhere!"
Then he rose and soared high and swept eastward at last,
     Trailing long legs and wings in the air.

"Now perhaps you may live and be happy," I said;
     "Fly, Heron, as fast as you can!
Put the width of the earth and the breadth of the sea
     Betwixt you and the being called Man!"

P&PC: Forgive me for not remembering all of the details from 2011's The Big Year, but how is poetry part of the birding world today?

Sorby: Today's birders still adore poetry. They're especially taken with Emily Dickinson, whose poems are quoted in everything from John O'Neill's Great Texas Birds to Kenn Kaufman's City Birding. This makes sense because bird watching is non-narrative and fragmentary, and so birding is more like reading poetry than like following a prose narrative. You have to notice (and enjoy) patterns and details. Also, as you tramp through the woods in search of a Thick-Billed Vireo, you have to be willing to pause, change directions, or double back as needed—again, like a poetry-reader. However, contemporary birders seem to have conservative tastes; they haven't ventured far into twenty-first century poetry, unless you count Mary Oliver.

P&PC: Counting Mary Oliver? Only on this year's Christmas Bard Count. You're a birder, too, right? (My parents are, as well—that's them pictured here!) When and how did that start?

Sorby: Sadly wrong. I have bird-watched once, in coastal Washington State, with two ex-Deadheads-turned-biologists. I was shocked at the sheer variety of seagulls, since I'd always assumed that all seagulls were alike, i.e. plain white. But I am too constitutionally disoriented to bird watch on my own.

P&PC: Not even a bird feeder in the yard?

Sorby: We do have a bird bath that attracts mosquitoes. In the Midwest they almost qualify as birds by virtue of their enormity.

P&PC: Your 2009 book of poems is titled Bird Skin Coat. Coincidence?

Sorby: I have long been fascinated by rogue taxidermists. I spent a lot of time finding a cover image for my book, finally tracking down the work of a very publicity-shy artist (I won't mention her name) who stuffs and dresses San Francisco pigeons in elegant gowns. So my title was inspired by one of her pieces: a white bird in mourning garb.

P&PC: Both Schoolroom Poets and "The Poetics of Bird Defense" have as a central focus the intersection of poetry and childhood. Where to next?

Sorby: Karen Kilcup and I just finished a huge doorstop anthology of nineteenth-century American children's poetry, Over the River and Through the Woods, which will come out from Johns Hopkins University Press. Beyond that, I remain interested in how poetry circulates socially, precisely because it circulates so awkwardly. So my next critical book, Amateur Hour, is about the poetics of embarrassment, though it's still a work in progress. I also continue to write and publish colloquial poems in the spirit, if not the style, of the American popular poets—only without the part of "popular" that involves being widely read, well-known, or profitable.

P&PC: I'm almost too ashamed to ask, but "poetics of embarrassment"?

Sorby: I've been tracking the use of poetry in TV and film contexts, and have observed that it is primarily used to embarrass either the poet or the audience. Why is poetry so discomfiting? In 1974 Christopher Ricks wrote a smart little book called Keats and Embarrassment, but I think our collective sense of poetry as an inappropriate medium has only grown since the romantic era. When a poet begins to read or recite, no one knows what to do or where to look. To introduce a poem into an otherwise ordinary social context is the literary equivalent of stripping naked.

P&PC: That gives new meaning to "exposing" people to poetry, doesn't it?

Sorby: "Hankering, gross, mystical, nude"—what's not to like?

Heber, Hymns, Holmes, and Holy Light: Thoughts on Poetry & Popular Culture's New Acquisition

According to some sources, it took the 36-year-old Anglican cleric Reginald Heber all of twenty minutes in 1819 to write "From Greenland's Icy Moun- tains"—a hymn that would go on from its initial composition in Wrexham, Wales, to become one of the most well known hymns in the British Empire and the nineteenth-century United States. As the story goes, Heber (1783-1826), who had won prizes for poetry writing in college and had even by then published a volume of poems and translations, was asked one evening by his father-in-law, the Vicar of Wrexham and Dean of St. Asaph, to write something to be sung the following day. Heber removed himself from company and, within twenty minutes, penned the song's four stanzas, the second of which Mahatma Gandhi would eventually call "clear libel on Indian humanity" and the third of which was printed on the illustrated magic lantern slide just acquired by P&PC and pictured above.

The hymn was sung the next day—set, like the much older "A Famous Sea Fight Between Captain Ward and His Majesty's Ship the Rainbow," to the tune of the even older ballad "'Twas when the seas were roaring." Four years later, in 1823, Heber (that's him pictured here) was appointed Bishop of Calcutta and would hold that post for three years, until 1826, when he died from a cerebral hemorrhage he suffered while taking a bath in Tamil Nadu, India. The Poetical Works of Reginald Heber was published in 1841, but Heber is most remembered for the hymns he wrote. As our new lantern slide perhaps suggests, "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" had wide circulation and appeal: it was (according to Wiki) the missionary hymn most frequently printed in nineteenth-century American hymnals; it was a particular favorite of the Methodists; it was included in the first Mormon hymnal in 1835; and it was still common enough in 1925 India for Gandhi to use it as a key point of reference in his argument against Christian missionaries who "come to India thinking that you come to a land of heathens, of idolators, of men who do not know God."

Because of their international circulation and appropriation, hymns like Heber's can frustrate narratives of national literature common to many English departments and poetry anthologies. It might be tempting, for example, to see "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" as a piece of British literature until one considers that, after its initial singing in Wales, it was (by one account) first published with music composed in 1823 by an American bank clerk and music teacher named Lowell Mason, who was living in Savannah, Georgia. Apparently, Mason wrote "Missionary Hymn" (his first published hymn tune) in just half an hour—a speed befitting Heber's own twenty-minute composition of the lyrics and making visible a pattern of fast writing (some might say "inspiration") that could make one wonder about the amount of care and reflection with which widespread Christian texts were created. When "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" is sung to Mason's tune, then, it's no longer just a British production, but a British-American hybrid. This type of cross-Atlantic collaboration isn't unique to Heber's hymn. When American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the poem that would get put to music as the hymn "Lord of all being, throned afar," for example, it would eventually move the other way across the ocean—from the U.S. to England—where it was printed on a magic lantern slide (a sort of projectable hymnal page, pictured here) that contained directions for singing. Holmes, who in 1859 imagined his Atlantic Monthly readers "singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light we all need," is only the starting point of a text that, like "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," got changed and hybridized as it was imported and exported around the globe.

All of this may help to shed some, uh, light on the somewhat perplexing nature of the magic lantern slide that P&PC just got its hands on. It's a cool little item that, like the Holmes slide, draws substantial meaning from the projection technology of the magic lantern itself; that is, the "One holy light" mentioned in the Holmes poem and the "lamp of life" in the Heber poem not only evangelize on behalf of a god but also on behalf of the lighting technology that makes the images possible in the first place:

Can we, whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high,
Can we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny?
Salvation! oh, salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation
Has learnt Messiah's name.

But beyond that McLuhan-esque "medium is the message" analysis, what also got P&PC thinking is the content of the picture itself. Who are the missionaries? Where are they? Who are they preaching to? So, in hopes of finding some answers (we're no experts in religious history), we sent a picture of the slide to our old University of Iowa friend Everett Hamner, who now teaches at Western Illinois University where he studies the intersections of literature, science, religion, and technology. He in turn sent the picture to all of his religious history friends. And this is when things started to get even more interesting.

Most everyone agreed—based on the repre- sentation of the audience, and on the fact that the bearded man is holding a book—that these are missionaries of a Protestant ilk doing their work in the Americas, and possibly South or Central, not North, America. The missionaries look like early portraits of Joseph Smith, so they could be possibly be Mormon, except for the fact that most Mormon men (as one contributor pointed out) wore beards after the 1850s as a sign of their patriarchal swag. But, curiously, the slide itself is not of New World origin; based on its size, it is most likely of British manufacture—a fact confirmed by the eBay vendor, a retired film professor living in Hertfordshire, England, who sold the slide to P&PC and said it was first purchased it in a lot of about 1,000 slides from a sale in Leicester five years ago. (There were other hymns in the lot, but this was the only one that combined a hymn and an illustration.)

So, the slide is possibly a British creation for British audiences imagining what missionaries at work in the Americas would look like. But when we factor in the British origin of Heber's hymn, its lyrics' emphasis on India and "Ceylon's isle" (in the stanza that Gandhi objected to), Heber's own connections to India, and the hymn's circulation in India and thus its role in the British imperial project more broadly, things get kind of complicated. Why aren't the American "Indians" pictured as the East Indians who would have been more on the minds of an English subject? Perhaps, in its need to picture "earth's remotest nation," the slide couldn't turn to India, because India was no longer remote enough a place in the British imagination. Or perhaps—and this is the most tantalizing possibility we've come up with—this slide (of a British hymn penned in Wales by a future Anglican missionary to India superimposed over a scene from the Americas) is a hybrid text like the hymns by Heber and Holmes eventually became. It's as if the British slide maker borrowed imagery from the Americas understanding that the British audiences for which it was intended would conceptually "set it to the tune" of British activity in India, in much the same way that Lowell Mason set Heber's words about Greenland, Africa, and India to music in Savannah, Georgia.

We here at the P&PC office can't say for sure, and we'd love for someone out there to help shed some light on the matter. If you have any thoughts as you sit there in front of your computer—our age's version of the magic lantern's "holy light" and "lamp of life"—by all means please drop us a line.