From the P&PC Vault: Remembrance Day & the Case of the $400,000,000 Poem

We here at the P&PC Home Office like to call it the four hundred million dollar poem—and not just because its first stanza appears on the back of the Canadian $10 bank note, a fact that, all by itself, may very well make "In Flanders Fields" the most reprinted and most widely circulated poem, like, ever. No, we call John McCRae's World War I-era verse the four hundred million dollar poem because, shortly after it appeared in the December 8, 1915 issue of Punch magazine, the Canadian government made it the central piece of its p.r. campaign advertising the sale of the first Victory Loan Bonds, printing it, or excerpts from it, on billboards and posters like the one pictured above. According to Canadian Veterans Affairs, the campaign was designed to raise $150,000,000 but ended up netting—wait for it—over $400,000,000.

Whoever said that "poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper" clearly wasn't thinking of McCrae's rondeau, which is the centerpiece of Remembrance or Veterans Day (November 11) activities worldwide and turned the red or "Buddy" poppy into the day's icon, manufacture and sale of which has been a regular source of funding for disabled and needy VFW veterans, as well as for the support of war orphans and surviving spouses of veterans in the U.S., since 1923. It is memorized by schoolkids, recited at Remembrance Day events, has elicited all sorts of reply poems and been put to music, and resulted in the restoration of McCrae's birthplace in Guelph, Ontario, as a museum. (That's McCrae pictured above.) Heck, in Ypres, Belgium, there's a museum devoted just to the poem itself! Take that, Joyce Kilmer!

By most accounts, McCrae composed "In Flanders Fields" in 1915, the day after witnessing the death of his 22 year-old friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, though legend has it that McCrae ripped it out of his notebook and cast it aside amongst the blood-red poppies on the battlefield where it was rescued by an onlooker and sent to Punch, which printed it anonymously:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly.
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

By 1917, the Canadian government paired "In Flanders Fields" with the painting of a soldier standing in the poppy fields by British-born Canadian artist Frank Lucien Nicolet and was raising its millions of dollars in Victory Loan Bonds.

In the most famous piece of literary-critical commentary on "In Flanders Fields," Paul Fussell (see The Great War and Modern Memory) doesn't have too many good things to say about the poem, claiming that the "rigorously regular meter" makes the poppies of the poem's first stanza "seem already fabricated of wire and paper." Nevertheless, he finds the verse "interesting" for the way in which it "manages to accumulate the maximum number of [emotion-triggering] motifs and images ... under the aegis of a mellow, if automatic, pastoralism." In the first nine lines alone, Fussell explains, you've got "the red flowers of pastoral elegy; the 'crosses' suggestive of calvaries and thus of sacrifice; the sky, especially noticeable from the confines of a trench; the larks bravely singing in apparent critique of man's folly; the binary opposition between the song of the larks and the noise of the guns; the special awareness of dawn and sunset at morning and evening stand-to's; the conception of soldiers as lovers; and the focus on the ironic antithesis between beds and the graves 'where now we lie.'" But Fussell saves his most damning critique—what he calls "[breaking] this butterfly upon the wheel"—for the poem's final lines which devolve into what he calls "recruiting-poster rhetoric apparently applicable to any war." "We finally see—and with a shock—" he writes, "what the last lines really are: they are a propaganda argument—words like vicious and stupid would not seem to go too far—against a negotiated peace." (For another examination of the poem in relation to McCrae's Canadian national identity and the rondeau form, see Amanda French's paper "Poetic Propaganda and the Provincial Patriotism of 'In Flanders Fields'" first presented at the 2005 SCMLA conference.)

But Fussell's right, isn't he? As the slogan "If ye break faith—we shall not sleep" in the "Buy Victory Bonds" ad pictured at the top of this posting indicates, McCrae's poem was in fact pitch-perfect "recruiting-poster rhetoric," wasn't it? Well, almost. P&PC would submit that it's worth noting how the Canadian government didn't exactly quote "In Flanders Fields" word for word. Instead, it excised the four words ("with us who die") that separate "If ye break faith" from "we shall not sleep" in the original poem—an act that works to repress the war's human costs and thus redirect the expression of faith to its financial ones. That is, in staging itself as an act of remembrance, the Canadian advertisement actually erases the subject of the McCrae's memorial ("us who die"). In this bowdlerized version of the poem—and we use the term bowdlerize on purpose, meaning "to remove those parts of a text considered offensive, vulgar, or otherwise unseemly"—the poster sanitizes the war by silencing the voices of its dead, depicting war as a financial and not human struggle and thus making the "propaganda argument ... against a negotiated peace" that Fussell describes.

But the repressed has a way of returning, just like the dead do. Consider, for example, the awesome item (pictured here) that P&PC got its hands on recently—a used ink blotter with Canada's "Buy Victory Bonds" ad featured on front. On the reverse, the ink stains grimly read like blood stains. And on the front (where the pun asks us to also read it as the battle line of war), the artifact's owner Vivian Hogarth signed her name in the upper right corner and corrected Canada's version of the poem, restoring the phrase "with us who die" and thus—in an act of what we might think of as zombie poetics—effectively writing the dead back into existence. Thank you, Vivian Hogarth. That's the type of memorial we're keeping in mind this Remembrance Day.

Make This Rabbit a Habit: The Poetry of the Energizer Bunny Squeeze Light

The Spectacle of Everyday Reading (and Coupon Codes) at the Modernist Studies Association

From October 18-21, P&PC participated in the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference, this year held at the airport-like Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and appropriately structured around the theme of "Modernism & Spectacle." Surrounded by everything we love, hate, love to hate, and hate to love about the Entertainment Capital of the World, P&PC presented on one panel ("Beyond Modernist Periodization"), chaired another panel ("Spectacular Language and Projected Verse"), hobnobbed with new and old friends and colleagues, and even got a chance to visit the center of Vegas home-brew activity, Aces & Ales. As you might assume from our lack of posting activity over the past two weeks, we've been trying to recover ever since. No, we didn't get a Mike Tyson tattoo on our face, nor did we meet up with Zach Galifianakis, nor did much happen that had to stay in Vegas. But the city's crush of bikini-clad dancers, artificial light and smell, slot machine chimes, overpriced everything, and lots of sloshed, overweight people staggering by on the sidewalks wearing balloon hats and fake grass skirts put us in a bit of a funk from which we're just beginning to emerge.

By far, for us, the most memorable part of this year's MSA was the first release of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, which Columbia University Press featured at its book table, which will hit warehouses in a week or two, and which P&PC got to hold for the very first time. It's beautiful—and it sold! Indeed, perhaps due to some shameless promotion on the part of this blog and its associates, it was Columbia's best-selling conference title; when we left for the airport, only one copy remained on the book table, and we've got our fingers crossed that that one went as well. Maybe Everyday Reading wasn't dressed up in a balloon hat or a fake grass skirt—can you imagine the gents on the book cover at Treasure Island or the Luxor?—but it found its own little place in the desert that we won't soon forget.

We're hoping that Everyday Reading might find a place with you, too. It found a happy home with SUNY Buffalo graduate student Margaret Konkol (pictured here), who got a copy and a personalized inscription for a consumer-friendly conference discount. And even if you weren't at MSA, P&PC has made sure that you can get a hefty discount if you order right from Columbia University Press as well. That's right: if you use the coupon code EVECHA, Columbia will—as a courtesy to P&PC readers and friends—give you a 30%-off discount. That brings the cost of Everyday Reading to under $20, or to just about the cost of printing four boarding passes ($5 each) at the Flamingo Hotel. We're not going to say that the opportunity to get out of Vegas isn't worth it—we were more than ready to go. But what's going to stick with you longer: the breakfast buffet at the Westin ($22.96), six coffees from Java Detour ($3.23 each), two rolls of quarters and an hour sitting at the slots, or the 302 pages of Everyday Reading? Hold on for a moment—is P&PC making a spectacle of itself? I guess maybe we learned something from Vegas after all.

Once More Into the Fray: The Remediation of Poetry in Liam Neeson's The Grey

Anyone notice that—like G.I. Jane (1997) and The Expendables (2010)—the 2011 Liam Neeson flick The Grey ends with a poem? Yup: it's a four line verse titled "The Fray" that main character Ottway (played by Neeson, a trained hunter hired to protect oil workers from wolves in Alaska) remembers hanging in a frame over the desk in his father's den and that runs through his head (and in flashback on the screen) as he prepares to make a last stand against a wolf pack that has been pursuing him and systematically offing the other survivors of a plane crash in Alaska. (Check out the movie's last scene in the first video clip at the end of this posting; for some reason, btw, the scene has been transposed on the youtube clip so that the poem appears as a mirror image of the original and reads backwards [it reads forward in the original]; you'll get the idea nonetheless).

The Grey does G.I. Jane and The Expend- ables one better, though, as the poem (pictured here) doesn't just end the movie but provides the frame mechanism for the entire narrative itself (it's even quoted on the movie poster). Indeed, at the beginning of the film—during a heavy-handed montage that shows Ottway killing wolves, lying in bed with his wife whom we eventually learn has died, writing a final letter to her about how miserable his life has become, flashing back to what we eventually learn is his childhood, and making preparations to commit suicide—the poem's words run through his head as part of a voice-over, presumably a section of what he's writing in his final letter. At this point, though, we don't even know it's a poem. In fact, the clash of discursive registers between it and what he's thinking is a little confusing: "I want to see your face, feel your hands in mine, feel you against me. And I know that will never be. You left me. And I can’t get you back … I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t know what can come of it. I know I can’t get you back … I don’t know why this has happened to us. I feel like it’s me. Bad luck. Poison … And I’ve stopped doing this world any real good...," he writes. Ottway pauses, then adds the poem's first two lines, "Once more into the fray—into the last good fight I'll ever know." The camera shows Ottway putting a rifle muzzle into his mouth, and then we hear the poem's final lines, "Live and die on this day...  Live and die on this day..."

What we don't know at the beginning of the movie— that he's remem- bering a poem, that his father wrote it, that it hung above his father's desk in the den—gets cleared up partway through the film, after the plane crash, after lots of competition for the Alpha position among the crash survivors, and after the men seek shelter in the woods. There, around a campfire, as the wolves surround them in the darkness, and as one of their group is hallucinating in the process of dying from hypoxia, the men start sharing their stories—about sex, faith, family, and whatever source of inspiration keeps them fighting. Ottway, by this point established as the group's Alpha, tells part of his story and, in an extended scene, flashes back to his childhood. Here's what he says:

My dad, uh, my dad was not without love. But a clichéd Irish motherfucker when he wanted to be—drinker, brawler, all that stuff. Never shed a tear. Saw weakness everywhere. But he had this thing for poems—poetry. Readin' 'em, quotin' em. Probably thought it rounded him off. His way of apologizing, I guess. There was one that hung over his desk in the den. It was only when I was a lot older did I realize that he'd written it. It was untitled—four lines. I read it at his funeral: "Once more into the fray / Into the last good fight I'll ever know / Live and die on this day / Live and die on this day."

A clap of thunder sounds. Ottway concludes, "Storm clouds." And the men turn their attention back to the present.

So, by the last scene of the movie, then, we've heard the poem twice, and we've seen it—or at least the paper it's written on—several other times as Ottway has stored the letter in which it's written in his wallet and saved it from the plane's burning wreckage. Ottway is the only one left alive, and he's somehow managed to stumble into the wolves' den, metaphor that it is for all of his unresolved issues. Surrounded by bones, standing in the falling snow, and ringed by the wolf pack, he kneels down, makes a pile of all the wallets that he's been collecting from everyone who's died, and adds his own to the stack. He flashes back to the woman we saw him thinking about and writing to in the film's opening montage, and we realize now, for the first time, that she she didn't leave him but died, perhaps of cancer. Then he tapes a dagger to one hand, breaks a bunch of airplane liquor bottles against a rock so that they become weapons, and tapes them to his other hand. Thus armed for his final stand, he flashes back again to his dad's den where the poem hangs on the wall. (You get get it, don't you? Wolf den=dad's den?) He says, "Once more into the fray."

Then, as you can see for yourself in the backwards video clip below, the camera shows us the poem. But what's remarkable about this scene is that we don't see the typewritten poem clearly at first. Rather, in becoming a metaphor for his life, which has slowly come into focus over the course of the film, the poem is blurry at first and is brought into focus and made readable by the camera, letting the audience experience in miniature Ottway's journey toward clarity. With the poem newly readable, Ottway repeats it a final time:

Once more into the fray...
Into the last good fight I'll ever know...
Live and die on this day...
Live and die on this day...

When the camera takes us away from Ottway's father's den and back to the wolf den, we see Ottway still mouthing the words to the poem. We see him next as a boy sitting on his father's lap. We see the woods. We have a close-up on his eyes. We hear a growl that may come from him or from the wolves. Then Ottway leaps forward toward the viewer, and the camera goes black.

Back when we discussed G.I. Jane, P&PC argued that the last scene of that movie (in which the camera helped us to read and interpret an annotated print version of D.H. Lawrence's poem "Self Pity") positioned the film's director—and, by extension, the medium of film—as a type of literary critic better suited than the pencil, pen, or book to the interpretation of poetry in the age of new media. In the last scene of The Grey we see a similar thing happening all over again, as it's not the emotional content of the poem, per se, or the conclusions we as an audience come to about the significance of the poem via our own reading or someone else's annotations, but, rather, the film's treatment of the poem in its various forms that becomes the most important (or at least the most foregrounded) expressive and interpretive act, heavy handed in its metaphor though it may be.

It is, after all, the camera—a piece of technology whose multimodal capacities add to the emotion, interiority, and clarity of insight typically associated with poetry—that makes the verse readable, literally giving us a focus that we did not have previously. As the external manifestation of Ottway's internal state, the movie thus positions film (not the poem, letter, or typewritten document) as the most complete expression of the human psyche, able to bring together and synthesize Ottway's thinking (the memorized poem), speaking (the recited poem), writing (the letter to his wife), and typewriting (the version of the poem on the wall of Ottway's father's den) as no other medium can. That is, thanks to film, we can see the poem thought, spoken, written, and typewritten all at the same time.

You might be asking yourself, how can poetry compete with this tour-de-force and with all the resources that film has at its disposal? Well, we here at P&PC think that maybe that's the wrong question to be asking. As Henry Jenkins writes in his Introduction to Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, "[O]nce a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within the larger system of communication options. Once recorded sound becomes a possibility, we have continued to develop new and improved means of recording and playing back sound. Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theater. Television did not kill radio. Each old medium was forced to coexist with the emerging media....Old media are not being displaced. Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies" (14). In other words, maybe The Gray and films like it aren't in the process of disparaging or one-upping poetry (as we've previously argued) so much as they are grounding themselves and their own credibility in poetry and, in the process, opening new possibilities for experiencing poetry. Rather than experiencing the poem solely as a print artifact, for example, The Gray lets us experience it in many media simultaneously.

As a medium, poetry more than just survived the transition from oral culture to written culture (no one today would advocate for going back to a purely oral or spoken poetry). Then it more than just survived the transition from written culture to print culture (no one would advocate for abandoning printed books and going back to only handwritten poetry). Along its long history of remediation, poetry only got more and more complex and more and more aesthetically rich, retaining aspects of its previous media manifestations and mixing those with new ones. As obsessed with the past as Neeson's story in The Gray may be (Ottway's dead father, his dead lover, etc.), the film may nevertheless be pointing us to the future of poetry.

The Poetry Wimp of Family Ties

Reading #$%*&: Loren Glass Comments on the Poetics of Obscenity

Editor's Note: A few weeks back, P&PC came across the late nineteenth-century business card for Michigan hotelier Magnus Hallgren pictured here. While we admire his hipster 'stache—and while his attire makes us think of Robert Frost's "A Hundred Collars"—we haven't been able to find out much about Hallgren himself except that, in 1889 (according to Michigan Supreme Court records) he was appointed Street Commissioner of the City of Menominee, Michigan, after former commissioner William Campbell, who "graded and graveled a road on the town line" without city council permission, was "removed from office."

It's not Hallgren's style, occupation, or court appearance, but his taste in poetry, that got the attention of P&PC, however. Like Dr. C. B. Weagley Veterinary Surgeon, C.G. Blatt's Photographic Emporium, The Palace Saloon and Restaurant, and the City Cab Company of Hays, Kansas—Hallgren had a poem printed on the back of his business card (shown here). And what a poem it is! In five stanzas, "A Fair Bather" incorporates as many dirty words as it can, except that none of those words actually appear in print; instead, they're evoked by the poem's rhyme scheme, as in line two of the following example (stanza 3):

She would float on her side and for shells she would hunt,
And go through the motions of washing her
Clothes out so tidy and wringing them dry,
And hanging them out with a tired out sigh.

At its most clever, "A Fair Lady" makes sense both with and without the dirty words; in the passage above, for example, one can read from line 2 to line 3 ("washing her / clothes") and make sense, or one can mentally supply the dirty word and make another kind of sense.  Same goes for stanza 4:

She could dive like a frog and swim like a duck,
And showed by her actions that she knew how to
Frolic in water clear up to her chin,
Without being drowned as so many have been.

You can probably hear the entire P&PC Office snickering, right?

Still, despite all of our adolescent humor, we wanted to know more about how we might read "A Fair Bather," and so we turned to old friend, mentor, and University of Iowa English professor Loren Glass (pictured here). In addition to studying American literature and celebrity culture (see Authors, Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States [2004]), Glass is an expert on dirty words and the history of obscenity. He is co-editor of Obscenity and the Limits of Liberalism (Ohio State UP, 2011), and his new book, Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (forthcoming from Stanford UP, Spring 2013) traces the history of the anti-censorship publisher that printed—and was taken to court again and again for printing—such "obscene" books as Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer. (When you get a chance, check out Part I and Part II of the preview to Counter-Culture Colophon that Glass published in the Los Angeles Review of Books about a year ago.) In other words, if anyone could tell us about the poetics of obscenity in "A Fair Bather," Glass would be the one.

So, yes, we wrote to Glass. And here's what he had to say:

Dear P&PC,

In Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, Garrett Stewart argues that "silent reading processes a text as the continuous inhibition of the oral" (2). Stewart has little to say about literary obscenity in this book—he is hunting for larger game—but the idioms in which he expresses the relationship between the phoneme (the smallest unit of spoken language) and grapheme (the smallest unit of written language) continuously evoke the process of censorship.

In addition to using "inhibition" in the passage I quote above, for example, Stewart specifies that "silent reading locates itself…in the conjoint cerebral activity and suppressed muscular activity of a simultaneously summoned and silenced enunciation" (1); he continues to explain that "inwardly, reading voices only as a concerted veto of sound. Where we read to ourselves is thus the place, always, of a displacement, a disenfranchisement of voice, a silencing" (2, italics mine). I couldn't help but think of Stewart's study when you sent me "A Fair Bather"—a poem that relies on the reader's unspoken knowledge of the sounds of the dirty words that are absent from the written rhyming couplets.

Indeed, reading "A Fair Bather" in terms of Stewart's provocative (and neglected) thesis reveals the logic, and the phenomenology, behind the most common methods of invoking forbidden speech in print. Conventionally, bad language is represented through the substitution either of a random series of typographic symbols (as in my title above) or in a series of dashes, occasionally preceded by the first letter of the suppressed word (hence f-bomb or c-word). This allows the reader to hear the word which has been suppressed from print, enabling both reader and writer to have it both ways: one submits to the censorship of print while evading it in (silent) speech. One hears what cannot be written.

But, of course, the reader must know these words in order to hear them, thus asymmetrically mapping this division between voice and print onto the distinction between childhood and adulthood. The mapping is asymmetric since the correlation is not between childhood and voice, on the one hand, and print and adulthood, on the other, though it is true that young children don't yet know how to read; rather, the distinction is between those old enough to have heard the concealed words and those too young to have become familiar with them. Thus a secondary acquisition of reading is added on to the primary one. This secondary acquisition is marked by a knowledge of the speech that is suppressed by the conventions used to represent bad language. Ultimately, then, this poem reveals that dirty words, unlike children, are heard but not seen.

Moo-ving Verse: The Poetry of Rod's Steakhouse

A couple of weeks ago, P&PC brought you the matchbook poem- ulations of El Fenix Cafe in Texas—the oldest Mexican restaurant chain in the United States. Turns out that El Fenix wasn't the only enchilada in the West to serve up poetry with steaming portions of homemade food, however. Just two states over, in Williams, Arizona, Route 66-era Rod's Steak House was doing El Fenix one better, one-upping the cafe's folding poetry-delivery system with the cool steer-shaped table menu pictured here.

Founded in 1946 by Rodney Graves, a Maine- born, onetime surveyor for the U.S. Coastal and Geodetic survey, Rod's is proud of its menu design, boasting on its web site that "The registered trademark menu, die cut in the shape of a steer, that the restaurant uses today, is the same one Rod used to open the Steak House with back then." Given the steakhouse's emphasis on the "registered trademark" status of its menu, it's a little ironic that the poem "Little Town" featured inside (next picture below) appears without any byline whatsoever, as if it had simply been found growing between a prickly pear and a saguaro cactus and harvested as a natural resource. Is there such a thing as a poetry rustler, riding the Western plains looking for stray poems to corral and send to market? If so, "Little Town" might be one of those poems.

Not that Rod's is unique in reprinting —or even implicitly claiming authorship for—the poem. The city of Pekin, North Dakota (population 80) has claimed "Little Town" as its own as well, reprinting it on the city's official website with "anonymous" as its byline. It appears, though, that "Little Town" does in fact have an author—several authors, in fact. Some web sites list Pearl Wheatley as the poet and date the verse's composition to 1948. Another site—for the small town of Lebanon, Kansas—names Edie Price. Yet another site names Al White, one time mayor of Three Rivers, Michigan, who supposedly penned the poem in 1836.

So, what does it mean that "Little Town" is attributed to so many authors? We here at P&PC don't have a fully formulated answer yet, but we do find the solution presented by the public library in Clark County, Wisconsin, to be a provocative one. The folks there don't attempt to identify the poem by author at all; rather, they note that "Little Town" has been "Submitted by: Bertha Peterson"—attributing the poem to its user, or to the person who keeps it circulating, rather than to the writer, or the person who brought it into circulation. Somewhere in here, we think, is a key to understanding a structural element of the way poetry works within popular culture—that there's an alternative bibliographic system wherein credit is given, like in some gift economies, to the person who keeps the poem moving (or, moo-ving, in the case of Rod's Steakhouse) and not to the person who started things out. With its privileging of momentum and transient ownership, rather than stasis and accumulation, there's something utopian, or at least anti- or non-capitalist, at work here—something that poetry (rather than other literary genres) facilitates and is facilitated by—and we think that's maybe one reason why poetry has gotten a bad rap (as useless, trivial, sentimental, etc.) in the age of industrial and consumer capitalism. Who knew, from a first glance at "Little Town," that so much could be at stake—or at steak?