Communism for Kids: Martha Millet, the New Pioneer, and the Popularity of the Old Left—A Guest Posting by Sarah Ehlers

P&PC is thrilled to introduce our new South Dakota correspondent Sarah Ehlers (pictured here), an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota who teaches and writes about modern poetry and poetics. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly, Paideuma, and Contemporary Literature, and she is completing a book titled Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics. In the following posting about the poetics of radical children's verse, Ehlers hints at what Left of Poetry has in store and how the development of modern poetics—at least in some spheres of American life—had more to do with nineteenth century verse cultures than folks generally assume. If you want to know how communist poetry, Little Miss Muffet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mother Goose, and even the poetry of Robert Southey could come together to make poetry "modern," dear reader, then read on.

Now relatively unknown, Martha Millet was heartily involved in Left literary institutions from the 1930s through the 1950s. A card-carrying communist, she worked as a labor journalist and published politically themed verse in The New Masses, Daily Worker, and Masses and Mainstream, as well as in the 1944 volume Seven Poets in Search of an Answer, which also featured poems by Langston Hughes. In the early 1940s, she wrote political tracts and pamphlets for the New York City Central Committee of the International Workers Order. In the 1950s, she published two volumes of original poetry (Thine Alabaster Cities: A Poem for Our Times [1952] and Dangerous Jack: A Fantasy in Verse [1953]) and edited The Rosenbergs: Poems of the United States (1957). And some of her verses were published in Poetry magazine. Despite this poetic output, Millet remains relatively unknown, even among scholars of the Depression-era Left, and it's worth wondering what narrative of U.S. Left poetry—and of U.S. poetry in general—might surface if we were to take as starting points Millet's engagements with children's verse and her belief in the "popularity" of Popular Front poetry.

At age fourteen, Millet published one of her first poems, "Pioneer Pied Piper," in New Pioneer, the official magazine of the communist children's organization, the Young Pioneers. The poem—which occupied a full two-page spread in the magazine's May 1933 issue—tells how a band of gluttonous Boy Scouts took over the peaceful community of Children's Town. The Scouts forced the town's children to labor in mills and on farms with barely enough food to fill their stomachs, and the newly inducted Boy Scout mayor and his council grew fat on oysters and butter. So things went until the arrival of the "Pioneer Pied Piper"—a young man clad in a blue uniform with a red hammer and sickle sewn on the shirt pocket and a bugle hanging by his side. Immediately, the Piper announced to the Mayor of Children's Town that he had come, "To set these wretched children free." In reversing the "Pied Piper of Hamelin" legend, Millet's "Pioneer Pied Piper" uses his bugle music to organize, and ultimately liberate, the youthful working-class masses. His bugle blast sets the children on a march that forces the ruling-class Scouts out of town and to their deaths. (As the Scouts flee, the bridge they are crossing collapses, and they all drown in a river.) Finally free, the citizens of Children's Town stay to rebuild their community as a "Pioneer Commune," home to a "happy race" of "folks" bursting with "carefreeness and mirth."

In Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, Julia Mickenberg describes how the "variety of stories, articles, pictures, jokes, puzzles, book and film reviews, and letters to the editor" published in the New Pioneer worked "toward serving the goals of the Communist children's movement" (67). Through story, rhyme, and illustrations by Marya Morrow, the published version of "Pioneer Pied Piper" in May of 1933 exemplifies what Mickenberg describes as the New Pioneer editors' careful efforts "to combine child appeal with political content" (67). But while the poem survives as a significant artifact from the communist children's movement, I think it also begs to be read as something more.

When considered in the context of Old Left discourses about poetics—especially those surfacing in The New Masses readers' letters and editorials—Millet's children's rhyme might be taken seriously as (at least one version of) an ideal radical Depression-era poem. If one scans the numerous editorials, commentaries, letters, debates, etc. published in Left literary magazines during the interwar period, one sees that many readers demanded a certain type of poem—a poem that was accessible to a wide audience; simple, direct, and easy to memorize; and immediately usable for political activities like union meetings, picket lines, and May Day parades. Over and over, readers of publications like The New Masses denigrated the poetry being produced in "wastelands" (a jab at T.S. Eliot, perhaps?) and "tired intellectual towers," and they pitted a "difficult," "cerebral," or "despairing" modernist aesthetic against a more "straightforward," "populist," or "optimistic" one. In a letter to the editor, one subscriber to The New Masses, R.W. Lalley, wrote that he liked "simple, direct little verses" and disliked "the amorphous type" by writers such as Muriel Rukeyser. Millet herself penned a letter to The New Masses in 1938 ("Is Poetry Dead?"). In it, she urged that, for Popular Front poetry to stay "popular," it would have to "mean more to more Americans" and, therefore, it "should, even when representative of the Left, not be confusedly ornate, pretentiously intellectual, and 'cerebrally dull.'"

Of course, these opinions re-inscribe simplistic divides between the difficult and accessible, obtuse and direct, despairing and hopeful, modernist and not. Scholars of the U.S. literary and cultural Left like Alan Wald, Cary Nelson, Paula Rabinowitz, James Smethurst, and Al Filreis have variously parsed Left writers' complicated relationships to experimental literary modernism. And the archive of radical poems composed and produced for children returns us to historical debates about the relationship of radical poetry to modernist experimentation that raged on the Left during the 1930s, allowing us to see them from a fresh perspective that enables a new narrative of U.S. poetry to surface. This new narrative stresses the continuities—not breaks—between nineteenth- and twentieth-century verse cultures, and it resists a tendency to view the tensions between popular and modernist poetry through a focalization on the latter.

At first glance, the poetry written for young readers picking up New Pioneer seems to exemplify the ideal of an accessible political poem chock full of communism's "good news." After all, what could be more easy to read than a rhyming poem written for a child? What kind of poem is more widely understood than a nursery rhyme, even if that rhyme puts a starving Little Miss Muffet on the picket line, as in this excerpt from Harry Alan Patamkin's "Mother Goose on the Breadline":

Little Miss Muffet
Ate such vile stuff, it
Made her feel rotten inside
Black coffee, stale bread—
Miss Muffett saw Red!
She joined with the workers and cried:
"Don't Starve, Fight!
Don't Starve, Fight!"

In drawing on such popular forms, New Pioneer contributors also re-purposed popular nineteenth-century texts, versifiers, verse genres, and verse presentation contexts in order to construct a poetry that could reach a wide audience and have an immediate impact. Millet's "Pioneer Pied Piper," for instance, doesn't just adapt a familiar text but is also formatted in a way that recalls the print conventions of the ballad broadside as well as nineteenth-century newspaper verse.

Along these lines, the February 1931 issue of New Pioneer featured a poem titled "Old Father William" by Alice Hayes, which owes debts to both Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "You are Old, Father William" (1865) and the poem Carroll parodied, Robert Southey's didactic verse "The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them" (1799). All three poems begin with a youth telling Father William, "You are old, Father William," and then proceed with a dialogue in which the youth questions the older man about this condition. Carroll's poem turns Southey's Father William on his head, transforming a pious elder who always "thought of the future" and "remember'd my God" into a rotund, quick-tongued man who turns somersaults and balances an eel on his nose. (That's Carroll's illustration pictured here.)

Hayes's New Pioneer version of "Father William" ostensibly forgoes Carroll's nonsense and returns the poem to its original didacticism. However, while Southey's Father William was able to preserve his youth, Hayes's Father William loses his to a life of hard labor. When asked about his age, Hayes's Father William explains: 

"In my youth," the old fellow replied to the lad,
"I slaved every day for the boss
And while I turned out some perfect machines
My own health is totally lost."

In the subsequent dialogue, the youth slowly loses his ideals about the work world. At first, he assumes that Father William must have been paid a "handsome wage" because he worked so efficiently. When he learns this wasn't the case, the youth figures, "surely the boss has given a dole" to the old man. But Father William closes the poem with a more difficult truth:

"Well, to tell you the truth, I've been working right on
Till a stronger man for less pay
Has come to the factory to end up like me
And I just got kicked out today.

In the end, Hayes reverses the moral of Southey's poem. In the nineteenth-century original, Father William shows the youth that, if one takes care of oneself and thinks always of the future, then one can be comfortable in old age. Hayes's Father William never had such luxuries, however, and has been prematurely aged by factory work. The ultimate lesson is that, unless there is a fundamental socioeconomic change, these conditions are bound to continue and the youth is doomed to suffer the old man's fate. In addition to engaging Southey, Hayes also imparts this lesson by referencing Carroll's more familiar version of Old Father William. The last line of Hayes's "Father William" ("And I just got kicked out today") is a play on the last line of Carroll's "Father William" ("Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!").

The New Pioneer's recirculation of nineteenth-century verse culture did not go un-theorized. Mickenberg explains that, in general, "the New Pioneer's stories and articles tended to be more factual than fanciful, with a heavy emphasis on historical and scientific themes" (68). Every issue featured historical fiction, biographical essays on revolutionary figures, and series like "American History Told in Pictures," which retold major events in U.S. history from a Left perspective. The history of U.S. poetry was also recast from the standpoint of Left politics and aesthetics, as the magazine's editors and contributors ransacked the nineteenth century for a "usable past" for poetry, one that would illuminate a long tradition of "popular" poems written for the "common people." For instance, a short piece on revolutionary poet Philip Freneau by Millet, aptly subtitled "An American Poet of All the Peoples," suggests that Freneau's poetry reached a large number of citizens because it addressed important political issues of the time. According to the article, Freneau wrote about slavery and oppression "almost a hundred years before the slave issue grew into Civil War" and penned "fierce poetry with which he lashed out against the oppressive rule of the British king"; he became a national figure by writing "fiery songs" that gave "new power to popular issues."

Millet's little sketch of Freneau says a lot about how the 1930s communist Left's prescriptions for poetry were read back into earlier American poetic cultures. Left interpretations of nineteenth-century verse culture assume that poems written in the voice of the "common people" were, to borrow from Virginia Jackson, "made to be read … as if reading were self-evident," as if their artifices "were really a transparent language" ("Longfellow’s Tradition," 472). Such readings serve as productive misreadings, lending fact to the fiction that the most effective revolutionary poetry need not be read at all, for a poem's rhyme and melody would directly transmit its meanings to its readers and their lives. Children's poems—deliberately constructed, but in forms so familiar they seem natural—illuminate the slippage between the Left ideal of the ultimately accessible poem and the historical reading practices on which this ideal relies.

This slippage is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the biographical sketch of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that Millet penned for the October 1938 New Pioneer. Millet casts Longfellow (pictured here) as, above all, a social poet enraptured by "the love of literature and writing" and the uses to which such writing could be put. Over the course of the essay, she highlights his interest in the "impoverishment and oppression" of the people of Spain, his "deeper awareness" of Native American culture, and his condemnation of the "criminal institution" of slavery. Millet's narrative of Longfellow's political activism is overly forgiving, if not downright wrong. But it's also canny. In mentioning Spain, the colonization of the American West, and the antislavery movement, Millet refers to the U.S. Left's solidarity with the international anti-fascist front in Spain as well as the anti-imperialist and anti-racist discourses characterizing Popular Front politics. In so doing, she also extracts Longfellow from the conservative schoolroom, where, as Angela Sorby explains in Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, his poems served a "fantasy of universal humanity" rooted in nationalist discourses (11). Millet repurposes Longfellow for the New Pioneer schoolroom, where the ideal of a united "common people" is meant to enact an international and potentially revolutionary political community.

Millet glorifies Longfellow's politics not only so that they match her own, but also so they match what she perceives to be the politics of his poetic form. She highlights how his poems' political messages are conveyed through simple and musical verse that could be enjoyed by all and praises Longfellow as a writer who:

wrote simply and understandably. He will be remembered as the ever-musical poet of simplicity who could make people see the traditions and folklore of the much-abused Indian through his poetry, and who dealt with life and people in a manner that all could enjoy.

Millet's understanding of Longfellow's poetry is symptomatic of prevalent twentieth-century conceptions of his work that privilege its apparent simplicity as well as the promises for reception such simplicity implies. Millet does not, for example, mention Longfellow's use of classical meter (like the trochaic tetrameter lines of "Song of Hiawatha," which she eventually quotes); rather, she describes him as an "ever-musical poet" whose work reached the "people." In Millet's estimation, Longfellow, in a strange way, becomes the ideal radical poet. And, as she suggests through strategic excerpting from "Song of Hiawatha," he advocates peace and solidarity by speaking to children:

O children; my poor children!
Listen to the words of wisdom,
Listen to the words of warning,
From the lips of the Great Spirit,
From the Master of Life, who made you.
…
I am weary of your quarrels,
Weary of your wars and bloodshed,
Weary of your prayers for vengeance,
Of your wranglings and dissensions;
All your strength is in your union,
All your danger is in discord;
Therefore be at peace henceforward,
And as brothers live together.

Capitalizing on the poem's apparent popularity while foregoing its nationalist and imperialist discourses, Millet's short article makes "Song of Hiawatha" read like a Popular Front political vision of "strength in union." Her appropriation of this widely-circulating nineteenth-century poem stands as yet another example of Longfellow's continued popularity, but it also provides insight into the significance of children's poetry for understanding Old Left poetic culture. Millet's own children's poems, as well as her re-readings of popular poems like "Song of Hiawatha," illustrate the complex ways in which poets associated with the Communist and Popular Front Left attempted to make poetry "popular" and "accessible" in forums like New Pioneer as well as in more well-known publications like The New Masses. Read in this context, the radical children's poetry in New Pioneer also archives significant dimensions of Left poetic output during the 1930s. Whether these poems remain obscure (like Millet's own unread verse), and howsoever they represent political appropriations of popular texts, they index the history of a poetic Left involved in the radical re-appropriation of popular poems, generic conventions, and traditional forms. Left poets and readers of Left poetry did more than simply draw on the poetry of the past—they actively re-imagined the history of poetic forms and the discourses about the social uses that those forms might have.

P&PC Broadcasting this Week from the Studios at Columbia University Press

For this week's posting, P&PC is sitting in with the Columbia University Press blog as part of its special National Poetry Month programming. There, you can not only enter to win a six pack of poetry, but you can also read a mini-memoir about how and why one person in the P&PC Office was moved this past year to get part of Robert Creeley's poem "I Know a Man" tattooed on his arms.

Even better than all of that, however, is how, for a limited time, you can take advantage of CUP's Spring Sale to score a 50% discount on Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America. If you're a customer in the U.S. or Canada, just enter the coupon code SALE in your shopping cart, click "apply," and your half-off savings will be calculated. Why not take a moment out of your National Poetry Month festivities and head on over today?

Panoptic Poetry & Everyday Life: Thoughts on the Poetry of Cold War Ring Holders & Cocktail Glasses

We've all heard about how poetry serves as a mnemonic device, right? Its meter, rhyme, fixed forms, and other types of patterned language make it easier to remember stuff whether you're a bard charged with reciting the entirety of Beowulf to a bunch of mead-swigging Anglo-Saxons, a child tramping through the woods with the ranger's advice "leaves of three, let them be" ringing in your ears, the Burma-Vita Company seeking a new Burma-Shave billboard jingle to lodge into a consumer's mind, or a student charged with memorizing a poem for class. We remember which months have thirty or thirty-one days not just by compiling and memorizing a boring list of 'em all, but by making a rhyme:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
Thirty-one the others date,
Except in February, twenty-eight;
But in leap year we assign
February, twenty-nine. 

Dad taught us "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" to remember which way to turn a screwdriver or faucet handle. Old Salt the Sailor taught us, "Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky in morning, sailor's warning." And to this day, even the interns at the P&PC Office can tell the difference between a red, yellow, and black king snake and a red, yellow, and black coral snake (pictured above) not because we're some troop of field biologists, but because we once learned the old rhyme, "Red touches yellow, dangerous fellow. Red touches black, friend to Jack."

This feature of poetry starts to explain the two relatively bizarre items that P&PC has gotten its hands on recently—the spooky wooden clown ring holder pictured to the left, and the frosted cocktail glass pictured below. Both items and their respective poems are designed to address common predicaments involving memory or the lapse thereof. Rings are particularly fraught sites where memory is concerned, because, while they are oftentimes meant to help us remember things (like the fact that we're married), we oftentimes need to remove them (like "While you wash the dishes, / While you wash the clothes") and thus we put ourselves at risk of forgetting where we put the thing meant to help us remember. And if you've ever had a party—and then taken off your rings when you wash up all the dishes after that party, natch—you know that one skill in entertaining is to encourage people to drink a bit and thus forget their concerns for a while while at the same time remembering where they put their glasses and which glasses are theirs. A couple of quandaries from la vie quotidienne, no? You might say that when it comes to rings, we risk forgetting what we need to remember and, with drinking, we risk not remembering where we put the thing that we want to help us forget.

We here at P&PC think that both of these items, like the rest of la vie quotidienne, are more complex than they initially appear and that a lot of that complexity has to do with their use in the home and their connection to domestic chores and responsibilities. Why, one might be moved to ask, is there a clown of all things pictured on the ring holder and not, for example (as one P&PC intern suggested), a unicorn? And why do we put a ring on the phallic wooden knob of his oversized nose? In a sense, perhaps, the clown helps turn the removal and retrieval of one's ring into a little circus trick or a carnival ring-toss game—a kind of fun-yet-scary variation on the Fort/Da (Gone/There) game that Freud noticed his grandson playing, with the ring's circular shape troping the child's pleasurable "o-o-o-o" expressed upon discovering items he'd thrown away. Considering the site of the clown ring holder (the kitchen or laundry room in the 1950s), rather than the site of the child's Fort/Da game (the nursery), we can speculate on the nature of this process for the Cold War housewife in particular. In taking off her ring, leaving it on the clown's nose, and finding it later, is she mastering a painful experience of some sort (of being married? of losing the sign and thus status of her marriage?) by reproducing it herself? Or, as other Freudian analysts have suggested of the Fort/Da game, is she responding to a painful experience of some sort (marriage? housework?) by redirecting her anger onto the ring and the clown's woody phallic knob which in some way represent that experience? And to what extent is the grotesque figure of the clown and his Pinocchio nose a stand-in, cartooned version of the male husband and father, whose knob has been made ridiculously large and whose hat has been made ridiculously small? Given how the poem both licenses and instructs the housewife to distance herself from the physical sign of her marriage while doing housework (take off your rings to do your chores, dearie), to what extent does this item thus reveal or manage an anxiety that doing housework over and over (which—as dishes pile up, then get cleaned, only to pile up again—is its own sort of Fort/Da activity) is like getting unmarried over and over again as well? Or that, in order to do housework in the first place, one has to symbolically get unmarried, turning oneself, in an ongoing drama of domestic schizophrenia, from a spouse to a maid, and back again

Given the psychosocial drama incited by Mr. Clown, it's no wonder that Betty Draper might want a cocktail or two. But inviting the neighbors over, passing around the spiked punch, and using drink to help forget one's double identity as a spouse and maid would invite its own set of memory-related issues as the little cocktail glass pictured here suggests. It's a lot like the clown ring holder, actually, isn't it? It, too, is a kitchen-related item from the 1950s. It, too, features a man with a curly mustache. That man wears a particularly noteworthy hat—one that's oversized, this time, not undersized. He, too, has a larger-than-life appendage of some sort (the magnifying glass) that, as it appears to protrude from below the belt of his mackinaw trench coat, also seems to associate with the phallus. (The pun on "knob" and "woody" suggested by the clown's nose even finds its witty partner in the "cock" of the cocktail glass.) And to top it all off, the glass also includes a rhyme that provides crucial information about the object's use:

There isn't a drink snatcher
This side of _ _ _ _
That this little gent
Will fail to smell
Note your name and
Note your drink
And leave the rest to
PINKERSTINK!

For all that the two items have in common, though, they differ significantly from each other in that the poems printed on them are addressed to two different audiences: the clown poem is addressed to the woman doing household chores, while the cocktail glass poem is addressed to the person drinking, not to the person who will be doing the chores. In fact, the poem on the glass seems to channel the voice of the housewife herself: "Note your name and / Note your drink [so that I don't have to wash more dishes than I already have to wash!]"

What's so clever about this effort at dish-washing damage control is not just the direct message it sends from hostess to guest, but how, beyond that message, it schools the guest in a self-discipline or self-supervision that Michel Foucault (pictured here) might appreciate. Indeed, since the hostess can't be everywhere watching everyone all the time, she has to establish a sort of cocktail party panopticon in which individual guests surveil themselves in the absence of her authority. This happens in part by linking together the drinker (the potential offender) and Pinkerstink (the figure of law enforcement), as both hold glasses (the former is holding a cocktail glass, the latter a magnifying glass); the criminal and the policeman are thus, in this scenario, two sides of the same coin, as the material glass's cylindrical circuit between the picture of Pinkerstink on one side and his written name on the other might dramatize.

The party's panoptic regime is more fully established, however, by what doesn't appear on the glass at all: by the letters that would fill in the four blank spaces in the poem's second line. As Loren Glass explained in his P&PC posting last September, moments of "censorship" like these give readers the thrill of silently hearing dirty words even though those words have been suppressed by print. The reader, he writes, can "have it both ways: one submits to the censorship of print while evading it in (silent) speech." In the case of the Pinkerstink glass, then, drinkers, too, have it two ways that result in the self discipline the hostess needs her guests to exercise: they are both the offender (saying the dirty word or forgetting one's glass) and the enforcer (leaving the letters blank and thus monitoring one's own behavior and remembering one's glass).

If the picture of the panopticon in the previous paragraph looks vaguely familiar in the context of this posting, it might be because it recalls the clown's nose on the ring holder; indeed, if you set the ring holder flat on its side, the clown's nose projects up from the center of the object just like the tower in the prison's center does—or just like the cocktail glass in a drinker's hand. Incredibly, all three rely on the same physical shape to establish discipline and thus enforce particular behaviors—in prison, in the kitchen, and in one's hand. In the case of the ring holder and cocktail glass, though, that power is further reenforced by the power of poetry to help us remember how things are done, because, outside the clink, ideology needs to do more than in if it would have us act like prisoners in our daily lives as well.

Harriet Monroe's Museum: The Boosts, Knocks, and Crank Letters of Poetry Magazine—A Guest Posting by Erin Kappeler

Editor's Note: In Chapter Two of Everyday Reading, P&PC studies an archive of fan letters written in the 1930s and mailed to the popular, nationally-broadcast poetry radio show Between the Bookends, which received upwards of 25,000 such letters per month at the height of its popularity. These letters are oftentimes movingly (perhaps embarrassingly) confessional, make large and sometimes (it would seem) exaggerated claims for the importance of poetry in listeners' lives, and sound almost bizarre to our ears today for those very reasons. 

Who knew that the venerable Poetry magazine also received the same types of letters—and that editor Harriet Monroe didn't just pitch 'em into the trash but collected them in a special file she labeled as her "museum" file? In the following guest posting by one of the most provocative new voices we've encountered on the modernist studies scene, Erin Kappeler—currently a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow at Tufts University and pictured here and above—ruminates on the implications of these letters (and the poetry they reference) for how we think about their writers, Monroe's aesthetic, Poetry's role in shaping the landscape of American poetry, and American poetry criticism in general, which has frequently bestowed upon Poetry a privileged, even messianic, place in the rejuvenation of American verse in the twentieth century. This material comes from the final chapter of Kappeler's dissertation, Shaping Free Verse: American Prosody and Poetics, 1880-1920, other segments of which are forthcoming in Critical Rhythm (ed. Jonathan Culler and Ben Glaser, Fordham University Press). We love what Kappeler has to say about Monroe's Museum, and we think you will to.

In her autobiography, published two years after her death, Harriet Monroe (pictured here) reflected on why she founded Poetry magazine in 1912: "[T]he well of American poetry seemed to be thinning out and drying up, and the worst of it was that nobody seemed to care. It was this indifference that I started out to combat, this dry conservatism that I wished to refresh with living waters from a new spring" (250). By most accounts, Monroe succeeded. As the poet A.R. Ammons once noted, "[T]he histories of modern poetry in America and of Poetry in America are almost interchangeable, certainly inseparable" (qtd. in "The Moneyed Muse"). Poetry has come to stand for an experimental strain of American poetry that supposedly revitalized a dying art form. While the mouthpieces of genteel culture such as Scribner's, the Atlantic, and Century "policed Parnassus" and enforced a "restrictive standard" of aesthetic value that stifled public interest in poetry, as Andrew DuBois and Frank Lentricchia argue in the Cambridge History of American Literature, Poetry, with its promise "to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach," seemed to open up a new world of poetic possibilities that widened the audience for poetry. The genre that had become extraneous to the American reading public was suddenly brought back into contact with the currents of "living waters," saving poetry from cultural irrelevance.

This is a compelling story, and, to paraphrase Hemingway, it would be pretty to think that it was so. But rumors of poetry's demise were sparked by a particularly narrow view of poetry's role in cultural life. Any number of sources can dispel the idea that the poetry of the 1890s, 1900s, and early 1910s was stagnant, out of touch, and unread, but one particularly useful (and surprising) source of evidence is the archives of Poetry itself. Monroe donated her editorial files to the University of Chicago in 1931, including a series she labeled "museum" files (now boxes 42-46), which house an impressive array of fan letters, poems, complaints, and appeals, identified variously as "boosts," "knocks," "crank letters," and "amusing letters." The curious thing about these files is the way they group seemingly outré exchanges with letters from poets who simply seem too lowbrow for Poetry. The ramblings of an isolated crank or religious visionary, for instance, are given as much credence as the protests of Ella Wheeler Wilcox or the entreaty of an amateur poet. This grouping reflects Monroe's tendency to dismiss as uniform in character any aesthetic paradigms that did not mirror her own. If none of the hundreds of unsolicited letters she received on a monthly basis (Monroe claimed that at one point Poetry received roughly 2,500 poems from 500 would-be contributors every month; only a small percentage of these letters are represented in Poetry's official archive) reflected her own self-avowedly modern poetic vision, then it proved that American poetry was going through a particularly arid phase, and "needed stirring up" (249). But the sheer volume of these letters gives the lie to the story of poetry's stagnation. A closer look at Monroe's "museum" files shows that, far from bringing poetry to readers who had been ignoring it, Monroe sought to discipline readers out of their promiscuous habits of consumption.

Maurine Halliburton of Milan, Missouri, was one of the hundreds of people who sent poems to Monroe in March of 1919. Halliburton's letter, like many of the "crank letters" in the Poetry archive, testifies to how integral poetry was to her daily life, both as an aesthetic form and as a social force. (Page one of her letter is shown here; page two appears below.) Halliburton wrote to Monroe to express her enthusiasm for the March issue of Poetry—not for the seventeen William Carlos Williams poems leading off the issue, but for Florence Snelling's "March in Tryon" and Frances Shaw's "World Lullaby." Halliburton noted that she enjoyed these poems especially because "the metre of the verses keeps them in my mind even if I forget the happily chosen words." She was able to appreciate the finer points of versification because she had been born a poet, she explained, thanks to the prenatal influence of the wildly popular Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

In your correspondence department I find that you are really interested in the poets who contribute to or read your magazine. Maybe you will be interested in hearing how I happened to be born a poet. For that it was. Before my birth my mother was given a copy of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poem, "Maurine," with some other of her verses. She enjoyed it so much and read it over and over, with no thougth [sic] however as to prenatal influence on the child to which she was to give birth. When I came and proved to be not the boy that was wanted but a girl instead, I was named for the poem that had been so enjoyed by my mother. Before I could write them I was composing verses. When I learned to write I wrote short poems to all members of the family, including numerous poets of which I was fond. I kept this up through all my school days. The product was, of course not at all remarkable as literature but I enjoyed it. I have only a few of the many poems I wrote during my growing up although at one time I had about thirty or more all together in a note book. I lost it and only have those I could remember and re-write. I am twenty-one. In the last five years I have completed one hundred and seven poems, all of which I have. The last year has been the one in which most of my writing was done. Probably this was die [sic] to the fact that I was compelled to remain at home with my mother and thus had more time than I had had before. The other day I read a copy of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's life and was surprised to find that she attributed her talent to the prenatal influence of her mother's reading of poetry and literature. However this is not uncommon but it interested me as Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poems had been the direct cause of my having the talent she claims came to her in a similar manner. 

Halliburton's oeuvre may not have been "remarkable as literature," but the hundreds of poems she composed testify to the way that poetry suffused her life, even before she was born. No dry well here—for Halliburton, poetry flowed in and out of her body in a quite literal way, constituting both her personal history and her sense of self. One can only conjecture how Halliburton's mother used Maurine to make sense of her own experience as a pregnant woman (Did she fear succumbing to Helen's fate, dying in childbirth? Did she dream of another life like Maurine's, where she could be a creative woman and a mother?), but it is clear that to Halliburton, Wilcox's poetry helped to give her life meaning. She was not the boy her parents desired, but by taking on the name of a poem her mother cherished, she was able to ease some of her mother's disappointment. Her collection of "one hundred and seven poems" attests to how common it was for Halliburton to think in verse—to process her experiences by putting them into poetic form. Her syntax in describing these juvenile poems is telling; she wrote poems to members of her family, "including numerous poets of which I was fond." She did not simply admire the poets she read, but went so far as to include them in her inner circle, assimilating them into the Halliburton clan. The simplicity of her admission that she had been "compelled to remain at home" with her ailing mother shows that her daily sphere of action was restricted, and that she used the reading and writing of poetry to enlarge the scope of her world. Wilcox is thus a doubly significant figure for Halliburton, as she was a highly public woman who had been able to create a successful literary career outside the home. Halliburton's affective bonds with Wilcox allowed her to reach beyond the confines of her role as her mother's caretaker, and to justify her identity as a "born poet." Halliburton added that a few magazines had begun to confirm this identity, mentioning:

I have had two poems published in THE AJAX, a poetry magazine of Alton, Illinois, and have not long ago received a check from LIFE for a short poem. Aside from that I am quite obscure. But the writing of poetry is a pleasure and, altho [sic] one desires to be recognized, the lack of recognition does not discourage a writer. I hope sometime to have something in your pages, so will continue to send verses at times... P.S. Just as I finished this the postman brought me another check from "Life." I'm rather elated.

For Halli- burton, getting published in Life was proof that she was a poet. She recognized that Poetry was a step up from The Ajax and Life in terms of prestige, but she underscored the continuity between commercially successful popular poetry and prestigious "literary" poetry. There was no reason why a popular poet such as Wilcox could not inspire a poet to create both light verses for mass-market magazines as well as "high" literary work that would be worthy of Monroe's notice. Life confirmed her talent, and this success encouraged Halliburton to do something more "literary" that would belong in Poetry. For Halliburton, as for so many other Poetry subscribers, modern poetic practices were capacious enough to include both the Monroes and the Wilcoxes of the world, and this capaciousness was poetry's strength rather than a sign of its decline.

Wilcox herself had tried to say the same thing to Monroe in 1913. After Monroe dismissed Wilcox as a "milk-and-water" poet in one of her editorials, Wilcox sent a sharp rebuke, explaining that, "There are as many kinds of poetry as there are intellects in men," and that Monroe's "assumption that 'lovers of the art resent my kind of work' is only true when these lovers chance to be of your special make of mind. There are other kinds!" (Pages one and two of Wilcox's letter are shown in the paragraph above and the one here.) As proof, Wilcox included a letter she had received from an admiring reader named Jessie A. Hill (see the following two pictures) who wrote to Wilcox to say that, "I should like to tell you how much I love your poems, & what a help & pleasure they have been to me, in a long & lonely illness.... I want you to know that 'you have performed the mission of the poet in helping one sad heart to bear its pain.' Please write as many more as you possibly can, for they are bound to do good to all who read them."

Wilcox added a note to this enclosure (the final image of this posting below), explaining that it was "a sample of letters which come to me by the thousands. I confess it is a kind of 'popularity' which appeals to me." For Halliburton and Wilcox alike, holding out a single aesthetic standard for poetry would result in a misreading of much of the poetry available to readers at any given time and would fail to do justice to the multiple roles that poetry could play in social life. If "milk-and-water" poetry failed on an aesthetic level, it remained vitally connected to the everyday life of thousands of readers who found in it ways to cope with the personal and existential disappointments of modern life.

Monroe was unswayed, of course. As the marketing materials for Poetry attest, Monroe was interested in the prestige value of poetry and how cultural capital could be converted to actual capital via officially-sanctioned prizes, societies, and institutions. Wilcox and Halliburton had as much place in this vision of poetry as did "Her Grace—the Almighty God, Human Name Grace C. Wright," who wrote to warn Monroe that the poems she submitted to Poetry were "Divine, they bear an inspired message" and that "in two years time all art, science, culture ... will kneel at the feet of the Almighty God the writer of the trash you rejected and find in that God, that Life, a Science, an art above all sciences."

Monroe filed Halli- burton's letter right next to Wright's in her "crank letters" series, implying that all affective uses of poetry were at best foolish and at worst crazy. Monroe's version of aesthetics won the day, which has made it difficult for us to hear Halliburton's and Wilcox's voices as anything other than naïve and a little embarrassing. But these are the voices that remind us that poetry before modernism was not at all out of touch with the daily life of an average American. If anything, it was too much a part of it, which prompted Monroe and other modernists to stake a claim for poetry as a purely aesthetic concern.

Poetry Out Loud Comes to Salem

This is an exciting couple of weeks for Oregon high school students, teachers, parents, and judges who are partici- pating in the final leg of the state-level Poetry Out Loud competition—the nationally run program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and state art agencies in which students compete for scholarships and other prizes awarded on the basis of excellence in poetry recitation. (That's 2011 Oregon finalist McKinley Rodriguez with Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen pictured here.)

P&PC is excited about this for a couple of reasons: not only are we sending a repre- sentative to help judge the Northern Regional Contest taking place tomorrow (Saturday, March 9) from 5-8pm at the Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton, but then the following weekend—Saturday, March 16 from 1-4pm—the State Finals take place in Salem at the Willamette Heritage Center at Mission Mill right across the street from Willamette University, one of the few times that the literary arts in Oregon run not through the big city just to the north but through the state capital. Both events are free and open to the public, so come on out for one or both!

As a side note, Petersen will be spending additional time in Salem this coming week when she visits Willamette to meet with students and give a public reading from her new book on Wednesday, March 6 at 7:30pm in the Hatfield Room of the WU library. That reading, too, is free and open to the public. Things poetic are shaking in the capital these days—WU's Prisoner's Poetry program has launched a web site and is getting national attention, the Gold Man Review has just published its new issue, Brightly Dawning Day has just wrapped up its run, and Everyday Reading recently broke the top 100,000 best sellers on Amazon—and it's not even National Poetry Month yet! So leave the dream of the '90s behind in Portland one of these days, and come see what the new millennium is hatching in Salem: poetry with, ahem, a state-capital P.

From the P&PC Archive: Assassins & Outsiders: The Obscurity of Popular Poetry

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

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

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

Martin: Hi Bob.

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

Martin: Fine, Bob! How are you?

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

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

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

Martin: I don’t know what that is.

Bob [slurring]: These are my words.

Martin: It’s a poem?

[Bob nods]

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

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

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

Bob: There’s more.

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

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

Martin: Whoa. That’s good, man.

Bob: "For a while."

Martin: That’s excellent.

Bob: Wanna do some blow?

Martin: No. I don’t.

[They hug.]

Martin: There you go.

Bob: I missed you.

Martin: Okay, I missed you too. Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johnny: Golly that was sure pretty, huh?

Ponyboy: Yeah.

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

Ponyboy: Um-hum.

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

Ponyboy: Nothing gold can stay

Johnny: Huh?

Ponyboy:

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

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

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

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

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

Johnny: Guess we’re different, huh?

Ponyboy: Shoot, kid. Maybe they are.

Johnny: You’re right.

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

Pony Boy,

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

Your buddy,

Johnny.

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

Now Showing: "Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon"

If you're in or around Oregon during the next couple of days, make it a goal to hie yourself over to Willamette University's Pelton Theater and catch a showing of Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon—an experimental, group-written and provocative play to which P&PC managed to score opening-night tickets on February 15, a date nicely timed to coincide with Susan B. Anthony's birthday as well as the date of the first woman to register to vote in Oregon, Anthony's friend and leading Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway. (The play's title, btw, comes from lyrics to Duniway's "Campaign Song," written around 1871.)

P&PC has been pretty close to this production for a long time now, serving as an unofficial dramaturge because the play started with—and incorporates in a bunch of very funky ways—a collection of poems and songs sourced from The New Northwest, a suffragist newspaper that was started and edited by Duniway, that regularly featured poetry (oftentimes on the front page), and that was published out of Portland from 1871-1887. (If you're a regular P&PC reader, you might remember our four-part "Remembering The New Northwest" series here, here, here, and here.)

So, here's the story. Back in January of 2012, seeking some way to motivate and bring back to public life part of this otherwise largely forgotten archive of suffragist poetry written in the Willamette Valley, which two different instantiations of a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class helped to comb through and edit, P&PC met with director and WU Theatre professor Jon Cole, who was seeking material for the development of a devised script in conjunction with a scriptwriting class he was slated to teach. P&PC proposed starting with the New Northwest's poetry as a way of linking the show to statewide efforts to commemorate 2012 as the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage, but also as a way to experiment with how archival materials might be tied to the present day and made, well, less archival.

Cole agreed— with one caveat. Due to the nature of devised theater pieces, he explained, which are collaboratively written and oftentimes experimental in development and final product, he warned that the eventual script might not leave the original poems intact; they might be cut up, sampled, collaged, quoted, juxtaposed with other material, and the like. No worries, we responded: the age in which the poems were written was a great age of American scrapbooking where readers themselves cut out poems and articles from papers like the New Northwest and sampled, collaged, and juxtaposed them in albums. In fact, Duniway herself kept scrapbooks that are now in the Knight Library at the University of Oregon. How more appropriate a compositional model could one get? (Check out the show's awesome stage floor employing this scrapbook motif, designed by Chris Harris and lighted by Rachel Steck.)

So, during the Spring of 2012, P&PC's "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class assembled about eighty pages of poetry published by the New Northwest—poems of various styles, lengths, and performance possibilities, and representing maybe ten different arguments being made at the time for why women should have the right to vote—and presented it all to Cole's scriptwriting class. We followed up with a couple of joint class workshops to explore the material and the dynamics of collaborative script development, one of which featured a skit juxtaposing a sincere performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" ("Oh, say can you see...") with a rapping, hip-hop Duniway response:

My name is Abigail—I go by AJD—
and I'm here to tell you all what it is I see.
I see the men on the floor but the ladies aren't here
'cause they all back at home in the "women’s sphere."
Come on people—it's Eighteen Seventy-One.
Is this really how we think the dance of democracy's done?
I wanna bust a move, but I can't break out.
What I need more than anything's an angel in the house!

Needless to say, that skit didn't make the final cut. But during the Summer and Fall of 2012, Cole and his cast of student and faculty collaborators put together an energetic, funky show in which impressionistic, sometimes dance-like scenes loosely based on points in Duniway's life are juxtaposed with projected interviews featuring current women students remembering their first time voting. The contrast between the two is pretty provocative. On one hand, you've got an idealistic, highly-interpretive narrative about the women's suffrage movement (idealistic because it omits many of the movement's complications and/or contradictions including the temperance movement [which Duniway supported] and the racism that divided many American suffragists). On the other hand, you've got what is presented, in documentary fashion, as the real responses of today's young women voters (all WU students). So, the imagined (almost fictional) past contrasts with the "real," video-recorded present; highly stylized interpretations of history are juxtaposed with actual voices; scenes bringing together dance, lots of sound and movement, dreamlike tableaux, and multi-media components are set against the rather austere format of the video interview.

Meant to provoke discussion (and even anger), the play doesn't resolve the relation- ship between these two ways of engaging and recording history—neither of which is or can be a completely "accurate" representation of women's voting history in the U.S.—but leaves them there as points of comparison. The telling of all history, it implies, is a political endeavor insofar it is always-already interpretive: some things are included, some are left out, some embellished, some selectively remembered, some quoted, some taken out of context, and very little of it, no matter how ambitious, can be representative of all voters' experiences—an irony made all the more inflammatory by the play's subject matter of voting, a political activity in which everyone's voice is supposed to "count."

So what of the eighty pages of poetry that our "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" provided? Not a lot of it remained, as Cole had promised, but it was certainly there, especially if you knew what you were looking for as P&PC did. Sometimes, the text of a poem was projected onto the screens set up on two sides of the 360-degree stage. One poem ("Woman vs. Horse") was turned into a folk song. The actors sang a suffragist song. In a great scene dramatizing the emotional content of "The Perplexed Housekeeper" (written by Mrs. F.D. Gage and published in the New Northwest on June 2, 1871), the actor—overwhelmed by domestic burdens symbolized by an ever-growing duffel bag repeatedly thrust at her—"recited" the entirety of the poem via a series of moans, groans, mumbles, and other vocal expressions decipherable only because the poem's words were on screen in the background.

Then, in a move that P&PC did not even remotely anticipate but absolutely loved, the opening and closing scenes—both first-person accounts of students' responses to voting for the first time—took the form of contemporary, spoken-word or slam poetry. In these two moments, the play's fairly well-policed divide between the imagined, stylistically presented past and the "documentary" interviews with present-day women voters broke down. What linked the play's women voters, as a result, was not just a history of voting rights as a form of political expression, but a history of voting rights as a history of poetic expression, as well, as the voices of forgotten Willamette Valley women from the 1870s joined with the voices of Willamette Valley women in 2013. How better to motivate and make meaningful a 150 year-old archive of poetry than that?

We hope you get a chance to see the play soon. Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon only runs until February 23, so get your tickets today!