Poetry Unbound : Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram 9780231188944, 9780231188951, 9780231548083, 2019037617

Citation preview

Poetry Unbound Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram

Mike Chasar

POETRY UNBOUND

Poetry Unbound POEMS AND NEW MEDIA FROM T H E M A G I C L A N T E R N TO I N S TA G R A M

Mike Chasar

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-231-18894-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-231-18895-1 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-231-54808-3 (ebook) LCCN 2019037617

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow

Even whilst we speak New notes arise. — PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

CONTENTS

L I S T O F I L LU ST R AT IO N S

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

ix xi

Introduction: Poetry Unbound 1 Chapter One Letters of Fire 25 Chapter Two Receiving Millay 54 Chapter Three “Overlook the Poem, but Look the Picture Over” 79 Chapter Four Once More into the Fray 104 Chapter Five I Need a Phony Poet Tonight 138

viii CONTENTS

Chapter Six From Murder to milk and honey 175 Afterword 195 NOTES

199

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

INDEX

249

231

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1.1

FIGURE 1.2

FIGURE 1.3

FIGURE 1.4

FIGURE 1.5

FIGURE 1.6

FIGURE 1.7

FIGURE 1.8

FIGURE 1.9

FIGURE 1.10

FIGURE 1.11

Magic-lantern slide featuring “A Sun-Day Hymn” by Oliver Wendell Holmes 27 Magic-lantern slide from an Underwood & Underwood sequence featuring Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha 30 Magic-lantern slides from an Owen Graystone Bird sequence featuring Priscilla Jane Owens’s hymn “We Have an Anchor” 35 Magic-lantern slides from a Methodist Episcopal Church sequence featuring Reginald Heber’s hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” 38 Cover and interior page of Shadowgraphs advertising pamphlet for the Keeley Stove Company, c. 1880s 39 Athanasius Kircher’s illustration of a magic lantern projecting the image of a man standing waist-high in flames 41 Magic-lantern slide featuring Susan Bogert Warner’s hymn “Jesus Bids Us Shine” 43 Magic-lantern slide featuring Reginald Heber’s hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” 45 Magic-lantern slide from a sequence featuring Eben Rexford’s hymn “The Beacon Light” 47 Magic-lantern slide featuring stanza three of Reginald Heber’s hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” 49 Magic-lantern slide featuring the anonymous poem known as “My Creed” or “My Religion” 51

x I L L U S T R AT I O N S

FIGURE 2.1

FIGURE 2.2

FIGURE 2.3

FIGURE 2.4

FIGURE 2.5

FIGURE 3.1

FIGURE 3.2

FIGURE 3.3

FIGURE 3.4

FIGURE 3.5

FIGURE 4.1

FIGURE 4.2

FIGURE 4.3 FIGURE 4.4 FIGURE 4.5

FIGURE 5.1

FIGURE 6.1

Newspaper clipping stored inside the author’s grandmother’s copy of The Murder of Lidice 55 Copy of The Murder of Lidice with a 1949 newspaper clipping affixed to inside front cover 72 Columbia Records version of The Murder of Lidice with June 1942 and “late 1959” newspaper articles affixed to inside back cover 74 Copy of The Murder of Lidice with newspaper article laid inside front cover 75 Austin Kleon, “Poetry! Or: How Much Is Your Life Worth?,” April 19, 2010 77 Screenshot of first intertitle from The Night Before Christmas (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1905) 92 Still photograph of final scene of The Night Before Christmas (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1905) 93 Screenshot of first intertitle from The Unchanging Sea (Biograph Company, 1910) 96 Screenshot of intertitle from Enoch Arden (Biograph Company, 1911) 99 Screenshot of final intertitle from Enoch Arden (Biograph Company, 1911) 101 Screenshot of quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) 117 Screenshot of D. H. Lawrence’s “Self-Pity” from G.I. Jane (Ridley Scott, 1997) 121 Screenshot of poem from The Grey (Joe Carnahan, 2011) 124 Screenshot of haiku from Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) 128 Screenshot of quotation from William Butler Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001) 132 “The Poet” played by Henry Gibson; flower portrait of Allen Ginsberg 149 Screenshot of Rupi Kaur delivering her TEDx Talk “I’m Taking My Body Back” 188

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As Poetry Unbound would assert, there is a qualitative difference between a love poem printed out via laser printer and a love poem written by hand. Many people and institutions deserve long, illustrated, handwritten love poems in recognition of the support they provided as this book took shape, and it is with great pleasure, affection, and gratitude that I identify them here. Willamette University granted me the Fall 2014 sabbatical and travel and research grants that led to this book’s beginning. The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress awarded me a Fall 2015 fellowship, which greatly assisted with the completion of chapter 2. An eight-month National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 2016 made it possible for me to draft what are now chapters 3, 4, and 5. I am humbled by and grateful for this enormous investment in my work. I am also grateful for the support of my English department colleagues at Willamette University, including Leslie Cutler, Stephanie DeGooyer, Danielle Deulen, Sandy Dubuque, Ruth Feingold, Allison Hobgood, Rachel Kapelle, Lizzie LeRud, Frann Michel, Gretchen Moon, Scott Nadelson, Ken Nolley, Roy Pérez, Andrea Stolowitz, Michael Strelow, Justin Taylor, Brian Trapp, and Omari Weekes. Thank you, also, to Frank Miller in University Communications for lending me his photography skills for many of the

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

figures in chapters 1 and 2. And thank you to work-study student Alex Young, who helped me to document my research for chapter 3. Twice during the writing of this book, I had the good fortune of spending summers working with teams of faculty and students at Willamette under the auspices of the university’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation– funded Liberal Arts Research Collaborative program. I am grateful for the inspiration and illumination I found collaborating with art history professor Abigail Susik, Spanish and cinema studies professor Anna Cox, and our students Andrea Adachi, Kevin Alexander, Hannah Brown, Emma Jonas, Eli Kerry, Miles MacClure, Owen Netzer, and Amy Snodgrass. I cherish the support of colleagues at other universities as well. I will always be the student of Dee Morris, Ed Folsom, Loren Glass, and Garrett Stewart at the University of Iowa. Of special note, for reasons that may or may not be immediately clear to them, are Heidi Bean, Bartholomew Brinkman, Edward Brunner, Marsha Bryant, Stephanie Burt, Karen Ford, Caroline Gelmi, Melissa Girard, Virginia Jackson, Erin Kappeler, Catherine Keyser, Linda Kinnahan, Margaret Konkol, William Maxwell, Peter Miller, Cary Nelson, Jessica Pressman, Jed Rasula, Catherine Robson, Craig Saper, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Michael Thurston, Daniel Tiffany, Kila van der Starre, Mark W. Van Wienen, and the offsite Bukowski Seminar participants at the Modernist Studies Association meetings in Amsterdam, Boston, Columbus, Las Vegas, Pasadena, and Pittsburgh. Additionally, several anonymous readers at PMLA and JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, plus audiences at the University of Oregon and Valparaiso University, helped chapters 1, 2, and 3 to become better, more complete versions of themselves. Versions of chapters 2 and 3 appeared in PMLA and JCMS, respectively. Thank you to the editors of those journals, and to the University of Texas Press, for permission to include that material in altered form here. I am grateful, as well, to Austin Kleon for generously allowing me to reprint his comic “Poetry! Or: How Much Is Your Life Worth?” in chapter 2. Beyond, though sometimes overlapping with university life, many other people have sustained and supported me via their company, conversation, spirit, hard work, creativity, humor, adventure, patience, trust, hospitality, food, drink, neighborliness, mountain biking, road biking, hiking, music, travel companionship, and overall generosity, fueling this project in ways that it would take entire notebooks of handwritten poems to describe. I save them for last, for they have more than my gratitude; they—and many of the

xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

people mentioned above—have my love and friendship. Thank you, Meridith Brand, for being with me when I discovered my first magic lantern slide poem at the Portobello Market in London in 2007—the moment when Poetry Unbound began to take its first vague shape; thank you for sharing Washington, DC, with me, for helping to chaperone our cats (Athens and Bella) on the 5,700-mile round trip to and from Salem, Oregon, and for so much else; I am sorry-not-sorry for hitting pause so many times during our movie and TV watching in order to take notes. Thank you, Ann and Dwight Chasar, for being the parents that you are, for teaching me detail and persistence, and for encouraging my dreams. Thank you, Kati Geisler, for reminding me what it means to love writing, music, wontons, bowling, and bell-bottoms. And you—“Biscuit” Keith Agee, Rickey “Pantsuit” Armadillo, Dylan “Rattlesnake” Berger, Whitney “Christmas Day” Bray, Ross “The Biking Viking” Brody, the Charis Carlson and Donelson family (Jeff, Chris, L’Engle, Lucy, Leif, Linda, and John), Patrick Davison, Drew “Hootenanny” Duncan, Luke “Sack Lunch” Ettinger, Tim “Motormouth” Flowerday, Una “Unafist” Kimokeo-Goes, Jeff Gore and Margarita Saona, Emily Grosvenor and Adam Diesburg, Jenna Hammerich and Eric Johnson, Tammie “Hospital Squares” Hammett and Kirk “The Curious” Kindle, Chris Hanson, Catherine Hayden, Steve “Cotton Mather” Heller, Mark “Pull-up” Hernandez, Peter “Ocelot” Higgins, “Classic” Doug Hoffman, “Sweet Nectar” Darren Holmquist, “Blast Off” Tom Hultquist, “Grandma Vinyl” Pete Ingraham, Rosa “Best Man” Keam, John “The Fifth Wheel” Knowles and Hannah “Two Top” Taylor, Eryca “Loop-de-Loop” Latham, Judy Leaver, Kevin “The Most Important Person in Baltimore” Lindamood and Melisa “The Other Most Important Person in Baltimore” Marin, Chuck “Can Hands” Magee, Dan “D. E.” May, Linzee “The Matter” Mcculley, Justin “Side Eye” Mclean, James “Cat Paw” Miley, Cheryl Moy, “Buttercup” Sean Mulrooney, Don and Kristi Negri, Night Lizard, Kathryn “Fresh Mint” Nyman and Michael “Fenugreek” Fiala, Patrick Oray, Lawrence Piper, Mark “Bongo” Powers, Lisa “Shortcake” Quay, Nikki-the-Axe Russell, “Here Again, Gone Again” Sean Scanlan, Allison “The Buzzard Smells Fresh Kill” Schuette, Kristi “Cuddle Timer” Snyder, Rachel Steck, Kelley “I Kinda Wish It Were Wham” Strawn and Alejandra “Keep Your Shirt On” Reyes, Max “Punk Rock Karaoke” Stinson, Jeff Swenson, Christopher “Swiftopher” Swift, “Goosetown” Jodi Thomas and Little Lantern Floral, Mister Alex Wright, and

xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Liz Wuerffel; birthday buddies Levi Brown, Luke Snider, and Taylor Swift; many others at F/Stop, Half Time, and the White Rabbit Dinner Club; tattoo therapists Cynthia Davis, Russ Brown, and Bexey Marie; and so many more—your company, in person and otherwise, means more to me than you can ever know.

POETRY UNBOUND

INTRODUCTION Poetry Unbound

1

In 1890—more than two and a half years before the official opening of the Chicago World’s Fair, and over two decades before the first issue of Poetry magazine would go to press—twenty-nine-year-old Chicago Tribune freelance correspondent Harriet Monroe started working on a poem that she hoped would be featured during the Fair’s dedication ceremonies. “The Dedication would be incomplete without a poem,” she would later explain, “and I wanted to write it.”1 Writing the poem was one thing. Getting it on the program was another. But in the intervening months, and via what Ann Massa describes as a “farcically intense series of behind-the-scenes machinations” that involved Fair planners and wealthy, Chicago-based backers, Monroe not only managed to wrangle from the sixteen-man Committee of Ceremonies an official “invitation” to submit a poem for an event slot that was not yet on the docket for ceremonies that were not yet scheduled, but even secured a $1,000 commission for the work—the equivalent of more than $25,000 today.2 On November 3, 1891, Monroe read all four hundred lines of her poem before the committee. The response, according to Massa, was “excellent,” but most of “The Columbian Ode” never got the airing its author desired.3 Ultimately, the committee approved and accepted only two sections totaling twenty-eight lines for the staged Dedication Day ceremonies, which took

2 INTRODUCTION

place on October 21, 1892. The acclaimed New York actress and poetry reader Sarah Cowell Le Moyne recited one part. The new Chicago Symphony Orchestra director, Theodore Thomas, led the other—a choir of five thousand people singing Monroe’s words to music composed by Boston’s George Chadwick, and “accompanied,” Monroe would write, by “a great orchestra and military bands.”4 (Brooklyn’s Evening World would call it the “largest chorus assembled in the history of modern times.”5) According to newspaper reports repeated by Monroe, more than one hundred thousand people attended the performances, and the poem’s excerpts were printed as song lyrics on the published sheet music for Chadwick’s score.6 But the entire poem, published as a pamphlet in an edition of five thousand and priced at a quarter apiece, would not fare as well. In a scenario to which many poets and publishers might relate today, “So few [copies] sold,” writes Liesl Olson, “that Monroe burned stacks for winter fuel.”7 Monroe would stick with and reprint the poem as late as 1925, but perhaps its most significant instantiation occurred prior to the Fair’s opening.8 As court records later put it, the New York World newspaper “surreptitiously obtained from the rooms of the committee the manuscript [of the poem], or a copy thereof” and edited and published it without permission and “with many errors” on September 25, 1892.9 Indeed, Massa writes, “The World had not done fairly by the Ode: leaving out some lines, truncating others, and running some together; reversing the order of stanzas, printing past tense for present and vice versa.”10 It was not uncommon for nineteenth-century newspapers to lift and reprint poems without permission and even without byline. But instead of acquiescing to what Lisa Gitelman might call those media “protocols,” Monroe sued the World and, in a case that helped to establish precedent for modern copyright law and eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court (which refused to hear it), she won damages in the amount of $5,000—the equivalent of nearly $150,000 today.11 When founding Poetry years later, Monroe went out of her way to seek start-up money from Chicago patrons as a way of cultivating a diverse set of stakeholders in the magazine’s success. It is unclear how much, if any, of that lawsuit settlement directly subsidized the magazine, but it certainly stabilized Monroe’s own financial situation and perhaps afforded her the time to edit Poetry without salary as she did for its first two years.

3 INTRODUCTION

From committee room to court room; from newspaper to sheet music; from the page to the stage; from a single voice to “the largest chorus assembled in the history of modern times”; from excerpt to full text; via telegraph from Chicago to New York; from manuscript to pamphlet to kindling for the sad “little stove” of Monroe’s “bedroom-study”: when Monroe later wrote that “poetry travels more easily than any other art,” she knew it from experience and knew, as well, that its easy mobility—from place to place and from medium to medium—was no certain pleasure.12 Like many poets before and since, Monroe enjoyed and harnessed this mobility in printbased venues and platforms such as Poetry or slim book volumes, and also in audio recordings like the aluminum plate records she cut while reading at Columbia University in 1932.13 In less professional contexts, she literally traveled with poetry, as she did with the “poetic idyll” she penned and helped perform in honor of John Muir on a 1908 Sierra Club trip to Peru—a poem “enacted at the campfire one never-to-be-forgotten night” when Muir “was induced, very much against his wishes, to take part in the out-of-door drama.”14 All that said, and even though she believed that “poetry is a vocal art” and that “the radio [would] bring back its audience,” Monroe did not enjoy the verse traveling through the ether via the nationally broadcast poetry radio shows of the 1920s and 1930s, characterizing those programs’ participants as “numerous impossibles . . . reading their maudlin verses to invisible audiences of millions.”15 Certainly, Monroe knew that poetry was being projected via magic lantern and that poems were being adapted for film treatment. It is likely that she had read poetry on the back sides and, rarely, even the fronts of stereoview cards. And she knew that poetry had been recorded and played back for public and private listening since the late 1870s via various instantiations of what her 1914 poem “Night in State Street” would call the “wheezy phonograph.”16 So far as I can tell, we do not know specifically how she felt about poems traveling in these ways. What an odd mix of emotions it would have been, however, had she encountered an 1893 B. W. Kilburn & Company stereoview card that featured the poem that, just over six months after Dedication Day, was featured near the beginning of the Fair’s Opening Day ceremonies on May 1, 1893. Indeed, popular Chicago recitationist Jessie Couthoui’s performance of William Augustus Croffut’s “The Prophecy” was memorialized in a way that Monroe’s had not been: in a

4 INTRODUCTION

three-dimensional stereoscopic experience capturing what The Hub called “the vast multitude” massed in front of the Administration building during the poem’s performance. Fair exhibits in buildings surrounding that performance boasted a wide array of typewriters, printing presses, linotype machines, telephones, an early fax machine (the telautograph), and other new or updated communication technologies, including, in the nearby Electricity Building, an Edison wax cylinder phonograph exhibition that would net more than $33,000 over the next six months. Elsewhere on the fairgrounds, the American Graphophone Company had set up one hundred nickel-in-the-slot machines. Yet despite those available technologies, the capacities for mechanical reproduction they represented, and the multimedia future that the Fair seemed to be both anticipating and celebrating, B. W. Kilburn’s stereoview card version of “The Prophecy” contains not a single word of the poem itself.17 2

In Poetry Unbound, I take Monroe’s observation that “poetry travels more easily than any other art” as the first of four points of departure. One of poetry’s chief, most distinctive, and most important features, this easy mobility is also one of the most overlooked and understudied characteristics of poetry as a literary form. As the story of “The Columbian Ode” only begins to suggest, poetry over the course of history has been composed in, for, and in relation to an extraordinarily wide range of media, media platforms, and media conditions, and it has a rich and almost equally long history of being remediated and transmediated—of being converted from one medium to another, or transmitted, oftentimes by design, in multiple media forms. No other literary art form has this character or inherits this history to the same extent. Like poetry, novels are adapted to film or audiobook, but, unlike poetry, novels have not been composed for and printed on business cards or funeral brochures, nor have they been used to respond to users’ behavior on Craigslist; whole or in excerpt, poetry frequently makes its way into novels, but rarely the other way around.18 Short stories travel more easily than novels, perhaps, but short stories have not been digitally composed on the spot as poems were for PayPal users in celebration of Valentine’s

5 INTRODUCTION

Day in 2014; nor were short stories stuffed, as poems were, into speciallydesigned propaganda bombs and shot across enemy lines during World War II—or, more recently, printed on bookmarks and dropped by the hundreds of thousands via helicopter or airplane.19 And while dramatic scripts, like poems, find print, stage, acoustic, film, and television presentation, they have not appeared in or on greeting cards, postcards, calling cards, billboards, breath mint tins, trivets, table runners, stained glass windows, handkerchiefs, pillows, cross-stitchings and wall hangings, subway and bus placards, autograph albums, playing cards, posters, calendars, stickers, event tickets, cocktail glasses, ring holders, souvenir plates, candy bar wrappers and candy boxes, packaging for pet products, cereal boxes, milk bottles, thermometers, and any number of other “incidental” ways in which people have encountered and continue to encounter poems.20 Although poetry is not mainly, naturally, or inevitably a print phenomenon, most scholarship on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry nevertheless tends to treat it as such, giving special privilege to codex forms such as the anthology, the “slender volume,” and the poetry- or literature-based “little” magazine following the model of Poetry (itself described by Bartholomew Brinkman as “a slender volume”).21 Many sectors of what Charles Bernstein has called “official verse culture” likewise take single-volume and little magazine publication to be the primary or most important measure of a poet’s professional legitimacy and career status. Most job postings for poetry-writing faculty positions at colleges and universities establish minimum qualifications in terms of number of books published, for instance, and few programs encourage or train students to compose for slam, spoken word, song lyric, or other non-print-mediated formats.22 Thus, too—from Rupi Kaur’s New York Times best seller milk and honey to the far more obscure PDF-format literary journal Brine, which boasts that the “quality” of poetry in its new issue “is so high that we decided to launch the issue in print as well”—a significant mark of e-book, e-journal, or e-author success is eventual codex publication.23 According to a 2006 study and report commissioned by the Poetry Foundation, “Ninety-nine percent of all adult readers, including those adults who said that they have never read or listened to poetry, indicate that they have been incidentally exposed to poetry in at least one unexpected place” (i.e, not in a book), and “[e]ighty-one percent of the respondents who

6 INTRODUCTION

reported any incidental exposure to poetry said that they read or listened to the poem when they came across it.”24 Nevertheless, codex formats— especially if they do not sell well, but sometimes even if they do—are often taken to be the chief barometer of poetry’s popularity or cultural health more generally. Even though the World thought poetry’s public large enough to merit putting its stolen version of Monroe’s “Ode” on page one, for example, her pamphlet’s failure to sell signaled clearly to her that “the public for poetry had oozed away.”25 For some people today, book sales by so-called Instapoets like Kaur, Tyler Knott Gregson, and Lang Leav signal that interest in poetry is rising; for others, those sales figures signal that the public’s taste is as bad as it has always been, or worse than ever before, making even more precarious the cultural fate of “real” poetry. When William Charvat claimed in 1968 that “no American poet has ever made a living from his [sic] work except, in a few cases, late in life,” it was a not-so-subtle dig at the nation’s failure to support a literary culture. However, Charvat was only able to make that claim by ignoring the long multimedia careers of poets such as Edgar Guest and Anne Campbell in the first half of the twentieth century: both earned hundreds of thousands of dollars by parlaying their Detroit newspaper success into radio, advertising, book, spoken word, and even film and television activities.26 Similarly, when Janice Radway and Perry Frank took up the subject of poetry’s popularity in 1988, they, too, assumed the print “single volume” to be the genre’s best unit measure and thus concluded that poetry “has never approached the novel in sales.”27 As book sales go, such perspectives would have us believe, so goes poetry. I can’t help but wonder what Radway and Frank would have made of my June 2019 Instagram search for #poetry, which netted nearly thirty-two million results, while a similar search for #novel produced three million and #shortstory a paltry five hundred thousand. In focusing on the transmission and mediation of poetry by historically new, nonprint media technologies, Poetry Unbound offers not just a counterweight or correction to the codex-based default settings of current poetry studies and related spheres of activity, but also argues for a comparatively expansive, even alternative history to poetry in the long twentieth century. In doing so, I follow the spirit if not the practice of literary historians such as Jed Rasula, who in his 2017 essay “A Potential Intelligence: The Case of the Disappearing Poets” lobbies for reading the large body of work by hundreds of poets who were regularly anthologized and published via

7 INTRODUCTION

commercial presses in the first half of the twentieth century but who were “unceremoniously dropped” from the historical record in the reductive process of academic canon formation and reformation that followed.28 Via “total immersion” in the work of people “who invested so much of their creative imagination in books we might actually read”—that is, by reading as much of this lost verse as possible—and by concurrently studying “the variety of formats” that “the book as object” took, Rasula argues, “the spectrum of poetry is itself extended, like discovering a new bandwidth on a radio.”29 While his fidelity to the codex as a centering media platform helps to maintain the restrictive print orientation of poetry studies that I have described, Rasula nevertheless—in looking without canonical agenda beyond a select body of core texts while concurrently attending to the variations of poetry’s codex manifestations—seeks, as this book does, to learn more about “the spectrum of poetry” and its capacities.30 The history and subject of media are crucial to expanding and understanding the “spectrum of poetry.” This is especially the case in an age of rapidly multiplying media and media platforms, such as our own, as well as the period that produced what we call modernism and “modern” literature, which also saw the emergence of film and radio and the conversion of the magic lantern into a poetry-reading machine. As media studies scholar Lisa Gitelman has written, “Just as it makes no sense to appreciate an artwork without attending to its medium (painted in watercolors or oils? sculpted in granite or Styrofoam?), it makes no sense to think about ‘content’ without attending to the medium that both communicates that content and represents or helps to set the limits of what that content can consist of.”31 If, in other words, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis has put it, we should not “simply regard the poetic text as an odd delivery system for ideas and themes” but instead “engage . . . its conventional and textual mechanisms, its surfaces and layers,” then we must also regard the many media of poetry’s transmission themselves as more than a set of odd delivery systems and engage and attend to their respective sets of conventions, mechanisms, surfaces, and layers, insofar as these elements relate to, represent, limit, and otherwise affect the poetic text.32 In thus advocating for a “total immersion” in the media of poetry’s transmission, my second point of departure assumes that poetry studies stands only to gain in the process of extending Rasula’s catholicity beyond the bound volume. Looking beyond the limits that the codex sets up for what

8 INTRODUCTION

poetic content can consist of, and toward the relationships with different aesthetic, social, economic, historical, and technological forces that other media bring into varying relation with poetic materials, can benefit poetry studies in a variety of ways. Expanding its archives, it can offer a more complete understanding of poetry’s possible effects (Rasula’s “spectrum”) as well as a more complete picture of the shifting idea of poetry in the cultural imagination. It can make poetry studies more relevant to changing literary and media environments that, along with poetry itself, have not waited for poetry scholarship to catch up. And perhaps, as I will explain shortly, it can contribute in a singular way to the field of media studies. Indeed, how different a picture of poetry’s place in modern life—how it moves, who reads it and how, even what financial company it keeps—might emerge if we took as one of our baseline measures not solely “the book as object,” but also film? After two hours’ running time, for example, Ridley Scott’s 1997 G.I. Jane culminates with a scene in which protagonist Jordan O’Neil reads “Self-Pity” from a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems. Shown in 1,945 theaters, debuting at number one at the box office, and raking in more than $11 million on its opening weekend alone, G.I. Jane may have given Lawrence’s poem a larger audience in a single weekend than in the entirety of its codex history. In moving beyond the figurative language of Rasula’s exuberance (extending the spectrum of poetry is “like discovering a new bandwidth on a radio”) and instead discovering and studying actual poetry on the actual radio and in other nonprint media, this book is indebted to and likewise extends a body of scholarship that, over the past two decades or so, has emerged to challenge the print focus of poetry studies by more fully considering poetry’s instantiations as what Monroe called “a vocal art.”33 Despite the vibrancy of that work, scholars have nevertheless been reluctant to study poetry in relation to mass media forms that were new or being made new during and after Monroe’s lifetime (1860–1936)—media like the magic lantern, radio, silent and sound film, television, and digital platforms that have offered not only more ways than ever for poetry to reach audiences but also more ways to reveal, magnify, expand, cultivate, or study the spectrum of poetry’s possible effects. No doubt such reluctance even on the part of innovative scholars stems from poetry critics’ enduring mistrust of the culture industries and mass media, as well as a suspicion, long complicated or dismissed by other fields of literary and cultural studies, of what

9 INTRODUCTION

poet and former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia has called “the incurious mass audience of the popular media.”34 Precisely because mainstream poetry criticism and official verse culture remain tethered to codex-based hermeneutics and values and indifferent or averse to poetry as it functions in the larger culture, this book’s third point of departure is that, if we in fact want to learn more about poetry’s capacities in an age of nonprint media, we need to do so by looking “outside the zoo,” as it were, where poetry flourishes in the wilds of mass and popular culture and where its unique mobility and literary properties are not only regularly recognized or put on display but analyzed and theorized as well.35 Consider, for instance, the various ways in which the CBS police procedural drama Criminal Minds imagines and approaches the subject of poetry’s media mobility. On October 12, 2005, over thirteen million viewers of Season 1, Episode 4 (“Plain Sight”) followed the attempts of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit to capture a serial rapist/killer who leaves excerpts from the seventeenth-century ballad “Death and the Lady” at his crime scenes. Over the course of the episode, special agent and unit chief Jason Gideon and his team work in various ways to understand the verses and their possible significance. They consider the poem’s length and form, its “aggressive language,” its symbols and themes, its historical context and relationship to similar dialogue poems, and the nature of the killer’s editing practice (he quotes only passages in which Death is speaking), and they consider it from the point of view of class and gender. Along the way, the audience encounters the poem in at least six different media versions: read aloud from a crime scene photograph; recited from memory (inexplicably the team’s resident genius, Spencer Reid, has parts of it memorized); read aloud at a crime scene, where it has been handwritten (possibly in lipstick) on a mirror; printed out via laser printer and assembled stanza by stanza in sequence on an office bulletin board; and—in what I personally find to be the most thrilling instantiation—on a photo that detaches from a bulletin board collage and floats in the air around Gideon as the show tries to represent his mental “profiling” processes at work. Via photograph, handwriting, lipstick and mirror, several oral versions, toner and paper, and the special effects of television, “Death and the Lady” takes a more diverse set of media forms in the span of forty minutes than many non-poems ever do. As the FBI team of literary critics demonstrates via their analysis, because poetry travels so easily, it must be studied in multiple media forms

10 INTRODUCTION

if readers want to best understand the range of ways it can signify. Indeed, they are not content to study it in situ but—via the laser printer, photograph, and various oral recitations—remediate it themselves to more thoroughly understand it. Four years later, in its Season 3 finale (the 2009 “An Evening with Mr. Yang”), the USA Network show Psych picked up where “Plain Sight” left off. A comedy version of procedural or detective dramas like Criminal Minds, Psych is well aware of its genre’s conventions, including the incorporation and mobilization of poetry. In this episode, in order to stop the riddle-writing Yin Yang serial killer from killing again, fake police psychic Shawn Spencer has to solve a series of poem-clues delivered in a variety of unorthodox ways to the amusement of the episode’s initial five million viewers: via telegram (subsequently remediated by projector for police to read during a briefing); spelled out in Alpha-Bits cereal and hamster pellets pasted to paper; printed on a restaurant credit-card receipt; stenciled on poster board in purple and yellow capital letters; delivered by fax; on a piece of paper wadded up in a woman’s mouth; and, as if deliberately alluding to Criminal Minds, written in lipstick on a hotel room mirror.36 Compared to “Plain Sight,” “An Evening with Mr. Yang” ignores the types of conventional analysis used in classrooms and literary criticism. Shawn quips that Yang’s “rhyming skills are rudimentary at best” and—in a comment that, however facetious, parodies Marshall McLuhan’s famous claim that “the medium is the message”—contends that Yang’s use of AlphaBits as a writing system communicates symbolically that “breakfast for lunch is way underrated.” At the same time, the episode not only continues to showcase poetry’s mobility but also, as we see perhaps most clearly in the unconventional and even absurd example of the hamster pellets, displays how that mobility makes poetry—rather than the novel, short story, or dramatic script—an occasion to experiment with, broker, or serve as the means for discovering new or unexpected media forms. In this respect, “An Evening with Mr. Yang” is not off the mark, as poetry in fact has a long history of being a testing ground in the development, emergence, and cultural mainstreaming of new media and media technologies, though not always, as sections of this book will show, in mutually beneficial ways. Indeed, if poetry was present in the original moments or decades of movable type, sound recording, radio, film, television, and related instances of technical innovation, then why not also at the dawn of the age of

11 INTRODUCTION

hamster-pellet writing—a medium that, like many media before it, may appear to be clumsy, unnecessary, impractical, or even farcical, but perhaps only because it remains as-yet unexplored?37 Despite their corporate origins, popularity, and industrial scale of production and distribution, Criminal Minds and Psych may be more alert to the power of poetry—or to certain of its powers—than are many literary critics or media studies scholars, and they display and investigate poetry and poetry reading as a multi- and transmedial literary endeavor in insightful, historically grounded, and theoretically sound ways: poetry travels more easily than any other art; we must immerse ourselves in poetry’s various media instantiations in order to understand its range of possible meanings and effects; as much as media may affect how we understand poetry, poetry, in turn, can also play unexpected but important and formative roles in the history of media development. As the following chapters will illustrate time and again, new or emergent media often gain by strategic association with or disassociation from poetry simply as an idea, first by granting it special powers or a position of prestige and thus shaping poetry as an idea in the larger culture. But they gain from interfacing with poetry in other ways, as well, which leads to this book’s final point of departure: if we turn our attention more deliberately to the many media of poetry’s transmission, we stand to learn at least two more things about poetry’s effects on media history and media innovation. First, we learn how individual poems serve as a type of charged, sometimes ceremonial landscape on which media conduct relationships with each other and therein work to differentiate or define themselves. And, second, as much as poems are shaped by the media of their transmission, that relationship is not a one-way road: poems, in turn, shape the media that transmit them. In the scene from G.I. Jane referenced above—a scene I will examine at length in chapter  4—Jordan O’Neil opens a codex copy of Lawrence’s Selected Poems and reads “Self-Pity” to herself. But this is not simply a scene of silent, codex-based poetry reading. Rather, it is a filmic representation of silent, codex-based poetry reading, and it is a filmic remediation of the printed poem. Because the content (i.e., the poem) of the book and film remain constant, the scene becomes one about the possibilities and limitations of film, relations between film and print, and what film can “do” that the book cannot. As N. Katherine Hayles and other media scholars have long observed, new media “emerge by partially replicating and partially

12 INTRODUCTION

innovating upon what came before.”38 As we shall see later, this scene’s camerawork both harnesses and innovates on certain aspects of silent, codex-based reading for a variety of reasons that stem in part from a long and tendentious relationship history between film, sound, and print that silent film used poetry to help negotiate. Insofar as G.I. Jane revisits and continues to process this history, it undoubtedly remains tied to the book (i.e., “what came before”) for part of its identity as a medium. Media studies often proceeds from similar logics: that either the “medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan famously articulated it (e.g., “The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print”) or, in Regis Debray’s formulation, “Transport by is transformation of.” Indeed, Debray explains, “That which is transported [in this case the book] is remodeled, refigured, and metabolized by its transit. The receiver finds a different letter [or book] from the one its sender placed in the mailbox.”39 As I have suggested, this is also the case with the transportation of Lawrence’s poem. Audiences find a different “Self-Pity” in G.I. Jane’s filmic representation of the silently read codex than they would if they were holding the Selected Poems itself, and the ease with which poetry can travel as “constant” content between media forms offers plenty of test or exemplary cases for the Comparative Media Studies approach to writing, teaching, and scholarship that Hayles proposes in How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis.40 As with the various instantiations of Monroe’s “Columbian Ode,” it is far easier to find and compare manuscript, magazine, codex, audio, filmic, and digital versions of “Self-Pity” than multiple versions of, say, David Copperfield or Citizen Kane. (For an example close to home, my students and I regularly study the print, audio, slam, televised, digital text, and YouTube video versions of Saul Williams’s “Coded Language” and Patricia Smith’s “Skinhead.”) The Criminal Minds analysts know and do this, and G.I. Jane relies for some of its narrative and emotional content on the relative ease or clarity with which poetry facilitates the comparative process. Early in the film, Command Master Chief John Urgayle recites “Self-Pity” from memory while inspecting his recruits. The similarities and differences between the spoken, codex, and filmic versions of the text that emerge as a result—the same words in three different media forms—are not only central to showcasing the specific capacities of film, but also to illustrating how Urgayle’s character changes over the course of the movie.

13 INTRODUCTION

In Poetry Unbound, though, I propose that a reconfiguration of Debray’s formula is also true: that “transport of [poetry] is transformation by [poetry].” As the following chapters will show, the transport of poetry helped shape and transform media as well as relations between media forms. By projecting poetry, the magic lantern temporarily forestalled its cultural obsolescence, in part by refashioning itself as a poetry-reading machine and offering an alternative to, if not improvement upon print. Poetry helped silent film boost its status as an art form in a variety of ways, sometimes by simple affiliation with poetry’s cultural prestige and sometimes by providing familiar storylines or subject matter that freed film to explore, pioneer, or showcase its capabilities as a medium without having to create its worlds from scratch. Later, poetry helped sound film secure its credibility as an established medium in relation to emergent digital media. And by mobilizing the links between poetry, queerness, and communism in the public imagination, television transported poetry during and after the Red and Lavender Scares to help establish and maintain a sociopolitical relevance and credibility in relation to the containment-era logics of the Cold War. While carrying poetry helped media differentiate themselves from each other within the larger media landscape, it also helped transform those media on internal or aesthetic levels. If, as Jahan Ramazani suggests, “poetry expands its range and possibilities, at the same time that it flaunts its distinctiveness” by incorporating “extrapoetic” or “nonpoetic genres,” then media, I argue, expand their range and possibilities by incorporating poetry.41 The magic lantern imitated and exploited the effects of poetic line breaks and stanza breaks to showcase its distinctive powers as a text-delivery system. Incorporating poetry helped film define itself in relation to sound and print while offering one answer to what Mikhail Iampolski calls “cinema’s deeply rooted need for a symbolic origin or source.” 42 Poetry also became an intertextual foil in the development of certain cinematic techniques, including subtitles and parallel editing. And television incorporated poetry—often clichéd, and often in plots centering on plagiarism—to offer an aesthetic precedent or analogy by which to style itself and its frequently borrowed or cribbed scenarios as a popular art for the masses. It is not uncommon for scholars to posit, or at least assume, that nonpoetic forms attempt to “elevate” themselves by association with poetry and poetry’s perceived cultural prestige; I am not alone in suggesting as much here in regard to silent film’s pretensions to artistic legitimacy.43 As I have just

14 INTRODUCTION

indicated, however, the transportation of poetry is far more complicated than just that. 3

In The Textual Condition, Jerome J. McGann argues that “the object of the poetical text is to thicken the medium as much as possible—literally, to put the resources of the medium on full display.”44 McGann’s scholarship is well known for attending to the relationship between print and digital media. As with that of many literary scholars interested in the future of literature and literary studies, however, that work tends to leapfrog from the book to the computer without much considering the media that are both prelude to and part of our current landscape. I would thus like to extend the spirit of McGann’s argument, just as I extended Rasula’s, and suggest that the convergence of poetry and nonprint media technologies, including, but not limited to magic lantern projection, film, radio, and television, also makes for uniquely “thickened” moments of mediation that offer poetry and media scholars rich opportunities to learn more about the respective “resources” of what I hope will become their increasingly overlapping objects of study. One goal for this book, therefore, is to illuminate as many points on the horizon as possible, so that other scholars and writers may find in them invitations, motivations, or springboards to do further work. In service of that end, I do not establish a specific, narrow preference for the poetical or technological object of my analysis; nor do I cleave to any one methodological approach, although I do follow Gitelman and others in assuming that “looking into the novelty years, transitional states, and identity crises of different media stands to tell us much, both about the course of media history and about the broad conditions by which media and communication are and have been shaped.” 45 From close to distant reading; from formal and comparative analysis to archival research; from reception studies to theories of remediation, adaptation, and intertextuality; from canonical poetry by William Butler Yeats, Frank O’Hara, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson to religious hymns and the kitschy Thanksgiving Day verse that fourth-grader Kathy Anderson writes on Father Knows Best; from renowned filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith, Orson Welles, and Steven Spielberg to sitcoms like Charles in Charge and The Facts of Life: all find quarters here. Setting out a variety of welcome mats makes particular intellectual sense when studying

15 INTRODUCTION

media because, as Paul Young explains in The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, relationships between media forms “tak[e] place on too many fronts and in too many different registers—economic, technological, formal, discursive— for a single theory to encompass them all.” We need to understand, as he puts it, “not only what kinds of information a medium carries and how it is carried” but also “how industry and consumers think about the medium, and in turn, how those ideas about its nature affect both production and reception.” 46 As such, a study like this one necessitates a broad approach in order to account for what William Uricchio and Roberta  E. Pearson call “the dialectical interplay of producers, viewers, texts, intertexts, and contexts.” 47 Given this imperative and the large historical umbrella that I am about to unfold, chapters 1 and 2 approach a central, interrelated pair of questions from different methodological perspectives. How, on one hand, can poetry affect the medium that transmits it? And how, on the other hand, can a medium affect the poetry it transmits? Following and extending Friedrich Kittler’s speculations about the long, religiously inflected side of the magic lantern’s history, chapter 1 takes for its analysis the transitional point when, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the device was commonly used for the first time to project text, making it not only a popularly available alternative to print-based reading but also the ancestor of today’s screen-reading interfaces. Instead of seeking to liberate or wholly differentiate the technology from older media forms, lantern projection of religious poems and hymns frequently brought under its auspices the bibliographic, media, and generic features of poetry, print, photography, handwriting, drawing, and various forms of vocal mediation in order to synthesize their values in legitimizing and promoting the lantern as a reading machine. Indeed, after two hundred years of projecting “moving” images of skeletons, ghosts, and devils in phantasmagoria-related “horror” shows, projecting religious poems and hymns in this manner not only helped to school audiences in the dynamics of reading via screen by way of familiar reference points or touchstones, but also worked to rebrand the lantern as a device with new uses and cultural orientations. As Kittler argues, the lantern had been heavily used by Catholics as a Counter-Reformation tool to reanimate some of the effects of older religious icons—chiefly a “fear and horror” of hell that would inspire audiences to convert—and thus at least attempt to answer the Reformation’s “letterpress

16 INTRODUCTION

monopoly.” 48 During that process, he contends, the fire, light, and heat of the lantern’s burning oil illumination source came to symbolize the fires of hell, thus bringing the mechanisms of its technology and its most famous content into a mutually reinforcing conceptual alignment that, despite its diverse other uses, adhered to the device through the nineteenth century. By projecting hymns and poems that repeatedly made the language of light and fire metaphorically central to heavenly rather than hellish powers, the lantern retroactively glossed and redefined its heat and light and thus shifted the cultural connotations of its technology. Not only did this stage a visible connection between projection and divinity—connecting light and Light as analogous to word and Word—but the accompanying projection of printbased images and a fidelity to many print protocols then also associated the lantern with the mediumistic powers of the Protestant tradition, synergizing if not reconciling the two main epistemological branches of Christian worship (image and word) and making for a powerful medial resource that subsequent warm or lit technologies would inherit. Just as poetry can help transform a medium’s cultural status or function, so media transform the ways that poems mean and the range of effects they have. We know—or at least feel—this to be the case, at least in the abstract. Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Eiffel Tower” or human and animal word portraits are vastly different experiences when encountered on the page than when read aloud. Bob Dylan’s lyrics have different effects when mediated via voice and performance or recording technologies than when read silently in album liner notes or encountered via the moving words of a karaoke screen. The 1889 or 1890 wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reading four lines of his poem “America” makes for a markedly different poetic encounter than the one that the Wieden+Kennedy advertising firm cultivated by incorporating that same recording in its 2009 “Go Forth” television spot for Levi’s jeans.49 And the poem exchanged between lovers signifies differently when it is photocopied, sent via fax, text, or Facebook message, posted on Instagram, or written out by hand in looping cursive letters with bubbly hearts replacing the tittle in every lowercase i or j. What the exact effects of these media differences are can be more difficult to ascertain, to say nothing of how to gauge or measure them. Employing the media archaeological methods favored by scholars such as Gitelman, chapter 2 thus looks to the production and reception history of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s long World War Two propaganda poem The Murder of

17 INTRODUCTION

Lidice to pursue and offer more detailed if not empirical evidence of how different media can—and have been orchestrated to—affect how audiences respond to poems. Whereas chapter 1 considers the text of individual poems in their print and projected instantiations and in relation to the cumulative power of the Christian discourse of fire and light, chapter 2 does not venture to read Millay’s poem about the Nazi destruction of a Czechoslovakian town much at all. Saving that endeavor for chapter 6, I instead read for the history of the transmediated poem’s various effects beginning in June of 1942, when the Writers’ War Board approached Millay about creating a poem for “a coast-to-coast radio program” that would contribute to the board’s goal of cultivating public support for U.S. military intervention in the war’s European theater. An antifascist activist who had been writing for some time in support of intervention, Millay responded with a now largely forgotten 750-line poem that, during a single week in 1942, became the center of a remarkably well-coordinated transmedial event having more in common with presentday marketing campaigns than with what we normally assume is possible with poetry. A short version first appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, followed by a longer, illustrated version in Life magazine. Then NBC Radio made a national broadcast of a live stage performance featuring Hollywood actors, musicians, and Czech folk dancers while simultaneously doing Spanish- and Portuguese-language versions, all of which would be shortwaved across the globe. Finally, Murder appeared in paperback via Millay’s publisher. By comparing two types of audience response—fan letters written to Millay, and a small archive of paperbacks that have newspaper articles sandwiched between the pages—I reveal how the highly mediated radio and Life versions cultivated and inspired in audiences an immediacy and urgency that the comparatively unmediated codex did not; indeed, while Life and NBC moved audiences to write immediately after reading or listening, Millay’s codex audiences took much longer, even years, to respond via their interleaved “marginalia.” One might assume that the former set of respondents—Gioia’s “incurious mass audience of the popular media” caught up in the thrill of the moment and reacting impulsively— would do so with less care or critical thinking than the presumably more reflective “book-smart” readers would, but that is not especially the case. Both are participatory, both are emotionally charged, and both appear to be more self-aware or reflective regarding the poetry and the media of its

18 INTRODUCTION

transmission than we might expect from targets of wartime propaganda. What varies, instead, is the immediacy effect that the more highly mediated versions were designed, I argue, to provoke. As we see in chapter 1, the relationship between the magic lantern and poetry was more or less mutually beneficial. Poetry helped the lantern through a moment of cultural transition and thus to renew or at least temporarily resecure its place in the shifting media landscape. The lantern, in turn, gave audiences different ways to experience and engage with otherwise familiar poems, making those poems new and possibly even “modern” and therefore revitalized in their own right. As my focus on film in chapters 3 and 4 illustrates, the relationship between poetry and emergent or new media is not always so symbiotic. Off-screen, trade and fan publications from the silent and early sound periods went out of their way to affiliate film with poetry, casting film in general as a poetic project if not an extension of, or even heir to poetry’s legacy as an art form, portraying writers, directors, and cinematographers as poets, and depicting Hollywood as a large poetry-reading community. While this discursive affiliation helped to broker film’s credibility as an emergent art form, the relationship played out much differently on-screen. Many silent-era films portrayed poets as out of date in the modern world. Others told thinly veiled allegories dramatizing poetry’s death. And some of the many films dramatizing poems— notably, Edwin S. Porter’s 1905 adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” and D. W. Griffith’s versions of Charles Kingsley’s “The Three Fishers” (1910) and Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (1911)—staged this poeticide at a formal level via intertitle quotation of the original text that either treated the source material as unnecessary or inferior to the pictorial, or else dismantled the original to the point where it became unrecognizable as poetry. Film pursued such a course out of more than an artistic rivalry, however. It also did so because poetry linked strongly to a wide range of print and sound platforms—older media whose capacities silent film either lacked (sound) or upon which it depended (print for intertitles) and thus was not yet in a technological position to replicate, innovate on, or replace. By oneupping or disparaging poetry, by muting poetry’s sonic, formal, or rhythmic qualities, or by simply eliminating the need for the intertitle’s poetic text, film could imaginatively and in some cases actually resolve its relationship insecurities regarding sound and print. The Porter and Griffith

19 INTRODUCTION

films do so in especially compelling and creative ways. After the advent of sound, film would reconfigure its relationship to poetry, regularly incorporating it into stories in far less antagonistic ways. That said, compared to silent films, sound-era films rarely display the text of a poem for audiences to read on-screen. Even today, poetry in sound film remains for the most part a steadfastly vocal, not textual, phenomenon; movies are far more likely to have characters recite from memory or read aloud from print sources, or else they convert silent reading into sound via voiceover, all of which suggests that film’s relationship to poetry’s print instantiations is still unresolved. To illuminate the nature of this ongoing anxiety, I examine some of the few movies from the sound era that have ventured to show the text of poems on-screen—movies that, in revisiting or recalling the site of silent film’s on-screen reading, attempt to process the otherwise repressed subject of film’s relationship to print. In her essay “I Remember, I Remember,” poet Mary Ruefle recalls a poetry reading during which John Ashbery compared reading his book to watching television. “He said that it was a lot like watching tv—you could open the book anywhere and begin reading, and flip around the book as much as you wanted to,” Ruefle writes. “I remember hating him for saying this. I remember the word sacrilege came to mind.”50 Indeed, the “boob tube” or “idiot box,” with its history of game shows, talk shows, sitcoms, soap operas, reality shows, televangelism, cartoons, news programs, and advertisements might seem for many people the most unlikely new media form to forge a sustained relationship with poetry, HBO’s Def Poetry and the inclusion of poetry in acclaimed shows such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad notwithstanding. As I show in chapter 5, however, television and poetry nevertheless have a long and complex relationship history stretching back to the former’s emergence during the Cold War. From I Love Lucy and Have Gun—Will Travel to The Addams Family, Star Trek, Days of Our Lives, The Tonight Show, Twin Peaks, and The Simpsons, I have found well over a hundred different shows that at one point or another and in any number of ways incorporated poetry; undoubtedly, hundreds if not thousands more have done so as well. As the aforementioned episodes of Criminal Minds and Psych suggest, television has repeatedly connected poetry with killers or other criminals, which is an association it inherits from film. Rather than focus on the implications and permutations of that shared tradition, chapter  5 examines a

20 INTRODUCTION

tradition nearly unique to television: the association of poetry and plagiarism via storylines in which characters are caught plagiarizing poems or fake being poets. From Leave It to Beaver to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, this recycled motif structures episodes of at least ten different shows and informs the treatment of poetry in so many others that, in the world of television, poetry now frequently functions as a type of clue, tell, sign, signal, or shorthand that, somewhere close by, some sort of plagiarism or equivalent act of fraudulence, fakery, or imposture is going on or just about to happen. It is no coincidence that Walter White, the chemistry teacher leading a double life as a meth kingpin on Breaking Bad, owns a copy of Leaves of Grass, or that Dick Whitman, who switched dog tags and assumed the identity of Don Draper during the Korean War, reads Frank O’Hara’s poetry on Mad Men. As I show, television forged, rehearsed, and cemented this association during the Cold War, when narratives policing and exposing poetry plagiarists troped or paralleled the social policing and outing of communism and nonnormative sexuality that was central to the era’s national security containment strategies and most visible in the Red and Lavender Scares of the 1950s. As a 1980 episode of The Facts of Life indicates, such poetry-based plotlines were flexible enough to incorporate and police perceived threats to American racial hierarchies as well. While at least nominally demonstrating television’s cultural importance as an ideologically weaponizable and Cold War–ready new medium, fidelity to this motif was not uniform or complete but, at times, provided a sort of cover under which TV writers could more subtly interrogate or subvert the very hegemonic containment-era Americanism to which those shows appeared to adhere. Even though the Cold War has ended, this association of poetry with fraudulence persists in a variety of ways, but that is not the only or most durable legacy of television’s relationship with poetry. Indeed, even as television was singling out poetry as an especially charged site of social concern, it also found in poetry—rather than in sculpture, the novel, or another fine art form—a particularly instructive aesthetic model and kinship. Forced to meet pressing and seemingly endless content demands, television writers faced the prospect that unless they relied on formulas or clichés or stole from other shows, they might run out of material. In one respect, the plagiarism plot motif provided those writers with an opportunity to process this anxiety. At the same time, the poems most frequently

21 INTRODUCTION

positioned at the center of those narratives—popular, kitschy verses anchored for their poetics not in the tradition of individual authorship, but in recycled content, clichés, and collectively owned poetic formulae such as “Roses are red / violets are blue”—offered a model for how television could itself copy, crib, or put on repeat with slight variations something like the plagiarized poem plotline without in fact committing plagiarism. In other words, by aligning itself with a long, anti-individualist, antibourgeois tradition of poetry circulation, use, and authorship, television (and its seemingly endless string of formulaic game shows, sitcoms, and soap operas) was able to stake a claim in the media landscape to being America’s truly popular medium. If poetry affects the media of its transmission and media affect the poetry being transmitted, then chapter 6, in connecting Millay’s The Murder of Lidice to the present day Instapoetry that Rupi Kaur and others are circulating via social media platforms, speculates about how the prospect of publication or transmission via new, nonprint media forms affects authors’ relationships to their writing and the poems that they produce. As I explain in chapter 2, the success of Millay’s poem was no fluke, modeled as it was on the transmedial successes of Alice Duer Miller’s The White Cliffs of Dover and Stephen Vincent Benét’s They Burned the Books. Despite its popular reception, Murder was largely pilloried by critics and friends in the poetry world, and Millay eventually went so far as to disown it, renouncing a project that might have otherwise helped to blaze a path for poets to work in multiple and popular media forms. Scholars have speculated that Millay distanced herself from Murder because she worried about how its critical reception would affect her literary reputation. Indeed, after the war, instead of continuing to experiment with the possibilities of the multimedia future that her poem would have seemed to bring more clearly into reach, she returned to the codex as the favored mode of poetry’s transmission. Millay had written for mass media outlets before, however, and she had written extensively for the stage and recited regularly on the radio. She thus knew, to some extent, how working in multimedia contexts would involve various participants, editors, directors, and other stakeholders and magnify what was for some poets an already frustrating aspect of the little magazine world, where activist editors pressured writers into cutting and rearranging poems as a condition of publication. And the construction

22 INTRODUCTION

of Murder itself seems designed to hedge against, if not accommodate this inevitability. Shrewdly composed of parts that could be cut or rearranged without significantly disrupting the central narrative, it has an accordionlike quality tailor-made for the variable demands of transmedial distribution, allowing editors to create a seven-section, 292-line version for the three pages allotted by the Saturday Review of Literature and for NBC radio producers to fit a much longer (but still cut) version into their program’s half-hour time slot. The poem does not just register those media concerns on a formal level, however. What is perhaps most surprising about Murder’s remarkable history is how Millay takes the story of a Nazi atrocity as an occasion to thematize the predicament of the poet working under modern media conditions. The narrative’s main character—a young, pure, creative, female poet figure named Byeta—ultimately commits suicide rather than endure abduction and exploitation by a Nazi soldier whom the poem stylizes as a male “editor” or “cultural businessman” figure. In effect, with Murder, as its very title implies, Millay not only constructs a poem that anticipates the conditions of the multimedia world for which it was produced but then, in that very poem, dramatizes how those conditions so threaten the poet’s sovereignty that they lead to her death. Viewing the poem from this perspective, it is reasonable to argue that Millay did not return to the codex after the war because she feared for how Murder was affecting her literary reputation, or because she was unable to handle critics who deemed the poem a failure without recognizing its sly critique. Rather, she did so because, as the character of Byeta suggests, she was finished dealing with media conditions that took the future of her work out of her own hands. In our present day, we are at a charged point not too dissimilar from the one in which Millay was composing Murder—a period when poetry has or appears to have more media forms and platforms at its disposal than ever before and yet no clear set of ways, at least within the world of official verse culture, to motivate or harness them aside from a haunting feeling that something is about to happen. Poets, publishers, and audiences are processing and experimenting with—or finding reasons to avoid processing and experimenting with—the pressures and possibilities of this moment, perhaps nowhere more so than in regard to the phenomenon of Instapoetry, whose authors are leveraging social media platforms to create large readership bases and fan followings outside the purview of official verse culture

23 INTRODUCTION

and then converting that popularity into electronic and print book sales. Of these poets, none has a profile equal to that of Rupi Kaur in terms of popularity, admiration, scorn, and symbolic or real diagnostic value regarding poetry’s cultural health. After first being digitally self-published, the print version of Kaur’s debut collection, milk and honey, sat on the New York Times Best Seller list for a year and a half and has now sold over 2.5 million copies. For those who measure poetry by the book, the effects are indisputable. In Canada, for example, poetry book sales increased 79  percent in 2016 and then jumped 154 percent in 2017, “thanks in no small part,” writes BookNet Canada, to the success of Kaur’s first two collections.51 A 2017 National Endowment for the Arts survey reports that poetry reading is also on the rise in the United States. While Amy Stolls, the NEA’s understated director of literature, does not mention Kaur by name, she comes close. “I suspect,” Stolls comments, “social media has had an influence.”52 For some, Kaur is “the voice of her generation”—“the poet every woman needs to read” who is “reinvent[ing] poetry for the social-media generation.”53 For others, in what has been called the “inevitable backlash,” she is “disingenuous,” “pitiful, vapid, exploitative,” and even a plagiarist who, as one of Kaur’s most contemptuous reviewers puts it, “seems utterly uninterested in reading books.”54 As I explain in the second half of chapter 6, Kaur does not make me feel either of these extremes. Instead, she, the nature of her work, and the range of responses to both make me feel more than a little bit as if we are back in 1942 again. As with Millay and Murder, Kaur writes about colonization and gender-based violence. Both authors feature female main characters confronting a history of gender-based silencing. Both rely on similar tropes connecting creativity, media, and the female body. The works of both are designed for transmedial rather than simply codex distribution, and both have experienced remarkable popular success doing so. What Harriet Monroe called the “invisible audiences of millions” have praised and panned them in strikingly similar ways. In fact, Kaur not only reaches back to the 1940s in identifying the roots of her poetic ancestry. She then also eerily stylizes herself as Millay’s Byeta come back from the dead to take control of her creative and reproductive powers via social media forms that allow for a personal administration of her work that Millay could only have imagined given the particular media conditions of her time. That we can find such parallels between the 1940s and now is both alarming and informative. Without knowing, much less immersing ourselves in

24 INTRODUCTION

the history of poetry in new, nonprint media like those in the chapters that follow, we risk misunderstanding or losing—or never finding in the first place—the spectrum of possibility for the art as well as its power. We risk missing how poetry helped to shape the media landscape that we have inherited. We risk missing how that media landscape has in turn shaped poetry, both as an expressive form and as an idea in the larger culture. But we do more than risk losing out on these pasts and the present into which they feed. We also risk losing sight, once again, of the futures that await. That poetry travels so easily is one of its chief features and abiding strengths. If we cannot keep up with it, that is not poetry’s fault—it is ours. But we stand only to gain by trying to follow it beyond the book, by tracking where it goes, and how, and by learning even more about what it helps to make happen.

Chapter One

LETTERS OF FIRE

In December of 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—the Fireside Poet, physician, stethoscope advocate, founding editor of the Atlantic Monthly, inventor of the American stereoscope, and early theorist of photography and other optical media—concluded his year’s final “Professor at the Breakfast Table” magazine column with his poem “A Sun-Day Hymn.”1 In a few words of introduction that read like a miniature devotional guide, Holmes asks his Atlantic Monthly readers to “forget for the moment the difference in the hues of truth we look at through our human prisms” and invites them, instead, to “join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of light we all need to lead us, and the warmth which alone can make us all brothers.”2 Coming as it does from the media-savvy Holmes, it should be no surprise that this moment aims to achieve its devotional experience via more than the hymn’s poetic form and content, and that, at the same time, the interest of its devotion is not exclusively religious in nature. Understanding or intuiting what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have since called the “double logic” of remediation, in which media, and especially new media, “oscillate between immediacy and hypermediacy,” Holmes attempts to simulate an immediate contact with “the Source of light” by making the “prisms” of mediation appear to disappear—by “ignoring or denying,” as Bolter and Grusin explain, “the presence of the medium and the act of remediation.”3 Indeed, the proposed activity of readers “forget[ting] for a

26 LETTERS OF FIRE

moment” their human prisms, interiorizing their singing, and joining Holmes in a silent choir promises to get those readers so near to the Source of light otherwise “throned afar” that they can virtually feel its warmth inside of their bodies where that inward singing is taking place: Lord of all being! throned afar, Thy glory flames from sun and star; Centre and soul of every sphere, Yet to each loving heart how near!

This experience of immediacy and nearness is far from unmediated, however. As Bolter and Grusin would contend, it is both produced by and “mutually dependent” upon the convergence of multiple media forms, media platforms, and media practices—produced, in other words, by a hypermediacy that “inevitably leads us to become aware” of the mediated experience as more than just an information- or content-based experience and then appreciate if not take pleasure in its production and orchestration.4 That is, in aiming for a “transparent presentation of the real,” Holmes’s combination of poem, prose context, print periodical, silent reading, inward singing, filtering of the “real” Holmes via the persona of the “Professor,” and even the negative presence of the “prisms” that represent or stand for other media forms, creates a corresponding effect resulting in “the enjoyment of”— perhaps even a type of devotion to—“the opacity of media themselves.”5 “A Sun-Day Hymn” struck a chord. Almost immediately, it was paired with Virgil C. Taylor’s musical composition Louvan for the purpose of being sung outwardly, rather than inwardly as Holmes had instructed. It would appear in over 350 Baptist, Episcopal, Lutheran, Mennonite, Methodist, Seventh-Day Adventist, and other hymnals for use in home, school, university, church, and Chautauqua activities. Holmes would detach it from his “Professor at the Breakfast Table” column for inclusion in his “poetical works.” And around the turn of the twentieth century, it would be cast onto walls and other screens via glass transparencies used in an early form of slide projector known as the magic lantern (figure 1.1). Via projection, audiences encountered the poem’s “Source of light” and “warmth which alone can make us all brothers” with a new and significantly intensified immediacy brought about by the actual light and heat produced by the limelight or arc lamp illumination technology of the lantern itself. As audiences sang

27 LETTERS OF FIRE

FIGURE 1.1 Magic-lantern slide featuring “A Sun-Day Hymn” by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Author’s collection.

lines such as “Lord of all life, below, above, / Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,” the lantern illuminating both the text and the darkened site of its projection brought that divine light, or at very least a potent figure for it, into the space of their worship and around their bodies—indeed, “to each loving heart how near!” As with the Atlantic version, the experience of that immediacy hinged on a corresponding hypermediacy featuring a facsimile of the printed text,

28 LETTERS OF FIRE

oral and musical performances (cued by musical notations in the left margin), and the projection making that particular experience of the poem possible. In fact, the hypermediated moment of this slide’s projection, paired with the poem’s subject of light, so directs attention to the subject of media as media (rather than simply content) that we might wonder to what extent the hymn to Holmes’s divine “Source of light”—his “One holy light, one heavenly flame”—was also celebrating and becoming a hymn to the power of illumination technologies more broadly. As this chapter will show, the association of divine light with lantern light via the projected metaphors of Christian religious illumination was not an isolated case. Projected again and again via widely used slides featuring similar poetic texts, such metaphors would gradually reshape the cultural connotations of the lantern’s illumination technologies at a time when, after more than two centuries of projecting almost only images, it was also being refashioned as a reading machine and providing a historically new set of reading experiences. In focusing on how the remediation of poetry helped to recharacterize the now relatively obscure device of the magic lantern in the cultural imagination, I am beginning this book with the beginning of the lantern’s ending—an ending that nevertheless begins a much longer history of the technological mediation and manipulation of text for the purposes of reading via screen. Even as the popularity of such poem and song-lyric slides was helping to reposition the lantern in the larger culture to the point where it would become what Tom Gunning has called “the first medium to contest the printed word as a primary mode of information and instruction,” it would not be long before the lantern would become obsolete, relegated to tech closets and basements and replaced by other moving-text and moving-picture technologies.6 For a short period, however, it occupied an unequalled profile in the media landscape as a reading machine. That brief rejuvenation—one involving a cultural rebranding anchored, in part, in the religious discourse of fire, light, and heat that we see in “A Sun-Day Hymn”—not only helped to establish the legitimacy of screen-based reading more broadly but also invested nonprint media with a religiosity that in unexpected ways informs and adheres to the reading machines we use today. However as much like second nature it may now feel to read back and forth between subtitles, text crawls, teleprompters, jumbotrons, karaoke displays, computer screens, and other non-print-based interfaces, screen

29 LETTERS OF FIRE

reading was once a new and unfamiliar experience. Just as railway travelers needed to develop what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls “panoramic vision” in order to enjoy or even register scenery from a moving train, and just as first-generation motorists struggled to read billboards while driving or riding, so audiences reading via lantern would have experienced particular discomforts, stresses, adjustments, anxieties, and thrills.7 For example, the machine allowed or required people to read in the dark. Its projected text was immaterial and at a distance; readers did not hold, adjust, and look down at physical paper copies of the text that they could manipulate and position at individualized distances from their eyes, but had to look up at a single, isolated text and read it in, with, and as a group. Perhaps more jarring, the pace of reading was standardized, as texts were often delivered slide by slide in sections at a speed determined by the lantern operator, requiring audience members to surrender not just the physicality of their reading material but also the autonomy of flipping pages and reading at their own pace. If you have ever had trouble keeping up with subtitles, you have some inkling of what they must have felt. In offering such new or unfamiliar experiences via a device that was not historically used for reading and that had—as I will explain shortly—very particular entertainment and religious associations dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the lantern required a fair amount of adjustment from first-generation screen readers. Consequently, the lantern industry went out of its way to lobby for the pertinence or legitimacy of screen reading while also accommodating audiences’ needs, addressing their concerns, and helping them improve their abilities. As the following pages will illustrate, many lantern slides facilitated relationships between print, orality, photography, and projection in order to connect lantern reading to established media forms while simultaneously presenting the device as an improvement upon them, if not unique. In itself, this dynamic is not unusual. As  N.  Katherine Hayles and other media scholars have long observed, new media “emerge by partially replicating and partially innovating upon what came before.”8 In the case of the lantern, poetry was central to this process. Remediated and transmediated more frequently than many other types of writing, poetry in general made for an especially effective bridge to new reading practices. As I have already indicated, religious poems and hymns were particularly crucial because their metaphors of

30 LETTERS OF FIRE

fire, light, and heat could be associated with and thereby sanction the lantern’s illumination. And just as importantly, poetry’s foundational formal characteristics—the line and line break, the stanza and stanza break, and the cultivation of rhyme and related wordplay—made it compatible with the mechanics of lantern-slide presentation in ways that prose was not. It is worth keeping in mind that slide manufacturers of this period were also marketing glass versions of other poems by popular and nineteenthcentury “genteel” poets, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, one ending of which is pictured here (figure 1.2). Via phrases like “the glory of the sunset,” some of those poems undoubtedly gained from and glossed the magic lantern’s illumination technologies similar to the way that “A Sun-Day Hymn” did, and some of them resonated with their new means of transmission in other ways.9 Howsoever the particulars of those dynamics worked, the larger poetic economy in which they occurred has implications for how we imagine the cultural state of poetry at the turn

FIGURE 1.2 Magic-lantern slide from an Underwood & Underwood sequence featuring Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Author’s collection.

31 LETTERS OF FIRE

of the century. Scholars regularly characterize that time as a crisis period for American poetry—a time when it needed the reinvigoration of the “new” verse, experimental or open forms, and innovative print vehicles like Poetry magazine because established modes were failing to address or keep pace with the forces of modernity and causing poetry to be increasingly pushed to the cultural margins. As the robust market in poem slides suggests, however, poetry was not marginal reading material, but a mainstream commodity with mass appeal whose lifespan the lantern extended in a variety of ways. How that happened, and how that helped to shape the cultural status and larger idea of poetry over the course of the century, is material outside the scope of this chapter. But as we revisit a moment in time when supposedly outdated poetry helped to inaugurate the history of reading via modern nonprint media, it is worth considering how poetry did not adapt to modernity solely by taking on new subject matter, finding new forms, and retreating from newer media and media platforms into magazines like Poetry, as some scholars suggest. It also made itself relevant by entering into relationships with those new media forms—relationships that helped poems to signify in new ways while also helping to make them feel modern and perhaps even new again.10 LYRICAL PROJECTION

In 1891—five years before he would take over leadership of the Salvation Army’s Limelight Department, a decade before intertitles were regularly used in films, and the year before Harriet Monroe’s “Columbian Ode” would be performed at the World’s Fair—Herbert Booth imagined audiences one day reading “red-hot gospel truth” via lantern projection. “There is no reason why, on summer evenings at suitable places, either in the centre or on the outskirts of cities, these letters of fire,” he wrote, “should not be set into operation, and why twenty, thirty, or even fifty thousand people should not be held attentively reading red-hot gospel truth as it is flashed before them at the rate of ten or twelve sentences per minute.”11 People had imagined projecting text as far back as 1646, when the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher theorized how what he called “secret messages” could be communicated via camera obscura. Only toward the end of the nineteenth century, however—due mainly to the increased power of improved or new illuminants, but also to rising literacy rates and other factors—did the type

32 LETTERS OF FIRE

of text projection on the scale that Booth envisioned become even remotely possible. Up until this time, the magic lantern projected images, most famously in the spooky, often harrowing proto-cinematic phantasmagoria ghost shows of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which skilled lanternists manipulated multiple slides, projectors, candles, and oil lamps to make what one person called “figures of departed men, ghosts, skeletons . . . and other figures of terror” appear, disappear, and move around.12 During the latter half of the nineteenth century, a variety of massmanufactured, affordable, and technologically streamlined lantern designs became common in homes, schools, churches, missionary societies, and other organizations, and uses for the lantern multiplied. Likely overstating the matter, historian Steve Humphries claims that lanterns were “almost as common in middle-class homes as television sets are today.”13 They were marketed as children’s toys and for home entertainment and educational activities. Outside the home, music halls and theaters projected illustrated song and song-lyric slides that were, Humphries writes, in what is not an overstatement, “as essential to the popular music business as pop videos today.”14 Many song-slide sequences presented lyrics line by line or verse by verse, serving as an early version of the bouncing ball or karaoke machine that enabled audiences to sing along without knowing the words by heart. Publications like The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger (1889–1903), The Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal (1904–1907), and The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (1907–1919) helped consolidate an industry that produced hundreds of thousands, if not millions of picture slides, often packaged with print material meant to be read aloud during shows. Business was so good that London’s Newton & Company alone offered one hundred thousand different slides and maintained a nine-hundred-page catalogue. In 1897, a leading distributor claimed, “no church or chapel is complete without a lantern.”15 In 1914, Newton & Company reported, “Lantern slides are now used so largely and successfully in all the best and most progressive of our schools and colleges that no educational institution of any pretension to modern methods of teaching can afford to do without them.”16 Indeed, when the American Museum of Natural History started a lending library stocked with slides and readymade lectures—including one focusing on Longfellow’s Evangeline—the program grew quickly. According to museum reports, in

33 LETTERS OF FIRE

1915, the program made 146 loans circulating 11,929 slides to 35 schools; three years later, it experienced a fivefold increase, recording 992 loans that circulated 72,287 slides to 102 schools.17 It is difficult, if not impossible to know how many slides featured the text of poems, hymns, or song lyrics. Newton & Company reported, “we have enough for a complete hymnal, nearly a thousand hymns in stock for this year’s catalogue, and the number is constantly increasing.”18 (The typographical error [“the the”] in the second line of the Longfellow excerpt in figure 1.2 may stem in part from the pressures of rushing products to market to meet public demand.) But while the phenomenon of the projected poem was new, including poetry in lantern activities more generally was not. Slide illustrations designed to be shown while people read poems aloud were common before this time, and the new documentary or photorealistic Life Model illustration style made sentimental and melodramatic verses even more popular at the turn of the century. George Sims’s “Christmas Day in the Workhouse” appears to have been a particular favorite, and poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Gray, Joy Allison, and Rose Hartwick Thorpe were also popular—so popular, as chapter 3 will reveal, that some would eventually be adapted to film. Catalogues, journals, and other publications relating to lantern use incorporated poetry. Manufacturers sometimes “captioned” slides with lines of poetry printed on the adhesive tape commonly used to secure transparencies between two panes of glass. And illustrated poem educational kits included sample poems along with supplemental materials about poets’ lives and the history of poetry. The Keystone View Company, for example, paired a card about James Whitcomb Riley’s “When the Frost Is on the Punkin” with a slide showing two people standing in an Indiana pumpkin patch; another titled “A Nightingale on Her Nest” came with a card quoting the last stanza of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and explaining that “perhaps no bird has figured in poetry so often as the nightingale.” Poetry’s presence in lantern culture prior to widespread manufacture of text-based poem slides suggests at least three things. First, poetry transitioned to screen early and easily in part because it extended an experience associated with lantern use rather than introducing something new. Second and more broadly speaking, poetry could make that leap not necessarily because it was short (many narrative poems like The Song of Hiawatha,

34 LETTERS OF FIRE

Evangeline, and “Christmas Day in the Workhouse” were lengthy, and as a forthcoming example will show, short poems were sometimes formatted to extend across long sequences of slides), but because people were accustomed to encountering poems in different media forms in a wide variety of what Joseph Harrington calls “presentation contexts.”19 At the turn of the century, poems moved easily between different oral economies (song, schoolroom and domestic recitations, church services, and a range of public ceremonies) and print and scriptural ones including books, periodicals, newspapers, broadsides, carriers’ addresses, letters, calling cards, advertisements, almanacs, funeral cards, rewards of merit, business cards, and so on. Poems appeared in print, only to be cut out, passed from person to person, memorized, recited, handwritten and sent to friends, scrapbooked, put to music and sung, recorded on wax cylinder, and then reprinted.20 Not tied in the cultural imagination or social experience to any single or primary media form or set of media experiences or protocols, poems traveled back and forth between media, media platforms, and media interfaces all the time. Their adaptation for lantern projection merely followed suit. Third, poetry’s formal and rhetorical characteristics made it particularly compatible with how people were experiencing lantern projection at the turn of the century. Punctuated by the pause of the line break and using stanzas as an ordering mechanism, poetry’s emphasis on suspensions and breaks between discrete units of text mapped well onto the serial, slide-byslide sequence of many lantern shows. Consider, for instance, the black-andwhite series pictured in figure  1.3—three of an original set of five or six featuring Priscilla Jane Owens’s 1882 hymn “We Have an Anchor,” most likely written in Baltimore but manufactured and distributed in this instance by commercial photographer Owen Graystone Bird of Bath, England—which nicely illustrates an easy synchronicity between stanza and slide. Here and elsewhere, the “blank” experienced in transition from one slide to the next finds its formal precedent in the stanza break. If the lantern’s remediation of printed text promised standardized reading speeds for some people—Booth’s continuous “rate of ten or twelve sentences per minute,” for example—then a series of slides like “We Have an Anchor” indicates that projection had other effects on reading, especially on poetry reading. Complete with text and illustration and without a clear dependence on being read in sequence to be meaningful, each stanza slide

FIGURE 1.3 Magic-lantern slides from an Owen Graystone Bird sequence featuring Priscilla Jane Owens’s hymn “We Have an Anchor.” Author’s collection.

36 LETTERS OF FIRE

FIGURE 1.3 (Continued)

appears temporarily as an isolated, self-contained tableau that can stand apart from the rest of the poem. Compared to the slide version of “A SunDay Hymn” in figure  1.1, in which the entire poem is visible and thus unforgettable or ever-present, a single slide in the “We Have an Anchor” sequence has no history (readers cannot see what came before) and no certain future (readers cannot see what, if anything, is coming next). This feeds the immediacy of the reading experience in a way that is not only characteristic of remediation, as Bolter and Grusin would have us understand it, but also of a then-emergent species of what Virginia Jackson calls “lyric reading,” in which a poem or part of a poem is felt to be “temporally self-present or unmediated.”21 That is, when projecting stanzas in sequence, as with “We Have an Anchor,” the lantern balanced or counterpointed, and thus mediated or oscillated between the immediacy of twentieth-century lyric reading and the “more explicitly mediated, historically contingent”

37 LETTERS OF FIRE

modes of poetry reading that, Jackson argues, more strongly characterized poetry reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.22 None other than T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) registers the lantern’s ability to produce a sensation of unmediated lyric interiority and intensity. “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” Prufrock laments of his inability to put feelings into words, “But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen . . .” (emphasis added). If the advent of lantern reading—fueled by the “double logic” of remediation and brokering a newly immediate encounter with the poem in a sort of suspended lyric time—accelerated, or at least corresponded with, the rise of lyric reading and the experience of a text as “temporally self-present,” then how far could this effect go? If the slide version of “A Sun-Day Hymn,” with its wholly visible poem, stands at one end of a spectrum, with “We Have an Anchor” in the middle, then perhaps the slides pictured in figure 1.4 stand at the other end. These slides—numbers four and five from a brightly colored series of perhaps thirty-two produced by the Lantern Slide and Lecture Department of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City—are not sequenced according to the logic of the stanza or even the sentence. Instead, they break the singlesentence-long opening stanza of Reginald Heber’s 1819 hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” into discrete syntactical units based on the poem’s lineation, interrupting the sentence’s continuity and cultivating at the level of the phrase what Jackson calls “the apparent immediacy” of lyric time in which readers could almost lose themselves inside a string of five words that, as the background photographs of locations around the globe perhaps suggest, promise their own self-contained worlds of meaning to discover.23 This effect no doubt shaped people’s perceptions of the lantern’s possibilities as a reading machine as well as the poetry it projected, to say nothing of differentiating the lantern from print. Via the combination of poem, color image, projection, and possibly vocal and musical performance, the double logic dynamic of remediation transports readers to the “ancient river” and “palmy plain” only to make them aware—as the lantern controller switched to the next slide across the “blank” and possibly mid-breath—of the hypermediation making that reading experience possible and thus the magic of the lantern itself.

FIGURE 1.4 Magic-lantern slides from a Methodist Episcopal Church sequence featuring Reginald Heber’s hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains.” Author’s collection.

39 LETTERS OF FIRE

DEALING WITH THE DEVIL

In the 1880s, the Keeley Stove Company of Spring City and Columbia, Pennsylvania issued a small advertising booklet for home stoves that addressed, in limerick form, the practice of making hand “Shadowgraph” images via the most basic of projection technologies, light and shadow (figure 1.5): Here is a Deer in a fright, A timid, but sweet little sight— It’s not a dear deer, You’re noticing here, For the only expense is a light!

This pamphlet is noteworthy in part for the analogical relationship it establishes between the special effects of projection and the comparatively familiar, unthreatening effects of poetry. Both are affordable, easy to produce, entertaining, and even—as the booklet’s cover indicates—a type of

FIGURE 1.5 Cover and interior page of Shadowgraphs advertising pamphlet for the Keeley Stove Company, c. 1880s. Author’s collection.

40 LETTERS OF FIRE

child’s play. The text’s black ink visually associates the poem and the blackened shadow images as similar kinds of media content, both of which are produced by hand on flat white surfaces. The three hand configurations imply a type of simple vocabulary that maps onto the poem’s simple diction. Moreover, by presenting those hand configurations and the shadows they produce alongside a poem dense with internal rhymes, end rhymes, and homonyms (“deer” [the animal], “dear” [meaning expensive], and also probably, in the acoustic background of this time, the “dear” of “dear reader” or “dear child”), the pamphlet suggests that the image source and the projection rhyme with, but are not identical to each other just as words rhyme with, sound like, or look like, but are not identical to each other. In so doing, Keeley figures projection as a type of poetry-writing in its own right, hence the term “shadowgraph,” or writing with shadows. I use the terms “comparatively familiar” and “unthreatening” to differentiate between poetic effects and projection effects because, even as late as the 1880s, projection-based visual effects were not entirely unthreatening. Despite Keeley’s depiction of projection as child’s play, the pamphlet evokes a darker, more disturbing side of the history of projection that, despite the lantern’s many other uses, persisted at the end of the nineteenth century and needed amelioration in order for people to imagine it not as “the lantern of fear” (as one spectator called it) but a technology appropriate for use in churches, homes, and schools.24 That persistent history began before but was most clearly fueled by the phantasmagoria. Indeed, referring to Athanasius Kircher’s illustration of magic lantern use from the 1670s (figure 1.6), Friedrich Kittler argues that initially the lantern served as a Counter-Reformation propaganda machine designed to “produce military or religious effects among the receivers,” chief among which were “fear and horror.”25 Jesuits, Kittler explains, intended images like Kircher’s naked man surrounded by waist-high flames to produce in the lay public “sensual hallucination[s]” of hell and thus inspire people to convert. Kircher himself described the lantern projecting “the devil’s image,” and lantern descriptions and projections regularly hearkened back to and sustained this iconography.26 Skeletons, ghosts, reapers, sinners burning in hell, devils, and what one viewer described as “nocturnal apparitions for terrifying spectators” were standard fare.27 The pioneering Belgian projectionist and phantasmagoria conductor Étienne-Gaspard Robert reflected on his motivations in a similar vein. “The devil refusing to communicate to me

41 LETTERS OF FIRE

FIGURE 1.6 Athanasius Kircher’s illustration of a magic lantern projecting the image of a man standing waist-high in flames. (Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 2nd edition [1671], 768.)

the science of producing wonders,” he wrote in the 1830s toward the end of his life, “I set myself to producing devils, and my wand had only to move to force the whole infernal procession to see the light.”28 Such associations persisted across time and national borders. British author Francis West wrote in the 1830s, for example, how a hand-held lantern he was selling might conjure up “some supernatural agent’s aid”: Or some arch demon, lab’ring in the work, Whose cunning spirit in each shade should lurk, To give it, spectre-like, to sink, to rise, To vanish, or enlarge to fearful size, And thus delude the senses thru’ the eyes.29

Similarly, an advertising calendar for the Pygmalion Stores in Paris from the 1890s pictures a family gathered around a lantern watching an image

42 LETTERS OF FIRE

of a devil holding a person skewered on a pitchfork.30 The Keeley Stove Company’s Shadowgraphs pamphlet follows suit, evoking the “fear and horror” associated with projection while displacing those feelings onto the “Deer in a fright” in the first line of its limerick before relieving them in line five (“the only expense is a light!”). And while the pamphlet’s interior pages offer playful, unthreatening images of a deer, a rabbit, and perhaps the profile of someone with an elaborate hairdo or hat smoking a cigar, its cover does not. Indeed, via simple hand gestures in front of the lamp—and employing what Booth’s fellow Salvation Army affiliate, the poet Vachel Lindsay, would call “the occult elements of motion and light”—Keeley’s rosy-cheeked child knowingly or unknowingly brings forth a dark, sinister “arch demon,” an anti-Semitic shadow of a man with horns, or the devil himself.31 For Kittler, these associations connected nations (Germany, Belgium, England, France, and the United States) that had different lantern cultures and economies, and were produced by more than just the content that people used the lantern to deliver. He writes of Kircher’s illustration, “It would not be wrong to assume that these flames only signal to our modern eyes . . . that the message of every medium is the medium itself—in this case, the oil lamp—but among Kircher’s contemporaries and audiences these flames meant something entirely different—namely, the fires of hell.”32 In order to fully assimilate the lantern into schools, homes, churches, missionary work, and religious reform activities, then, it was necessary to not just address those associations of fear and terror indirectly as the Shadowgraphs pamphlet does, but to more thoroughly resolve them by redefining the meaning of the lantern’s light. Many quarters of the lantern industry tried to do so by replacing the term “magic lantern” with “optical lantern,” but transforming the devil’s “lantern of fear” into God’s “lamp of life”—that is, getting people to imagine it as a source of heavenly light and not hellish firelight— required more than a name change. How poetry helped facilitate that transformation, what the stakes of that process were for relationships between media forms more broadly, and how some of the residual effects of that transformation are visible even today make up the rest of this chapter. FROM THE LANTERN OF FEAR TO THE LAMP OF LIFE

As with “A Sun-Day Hymn,” many poems adapted for lantern projection took as their subject or guiding metaphor the fire- and/or sunlight of the Christian

43 LETTERS OF FIRE

God, describing God, for instance, as the “lamp of life” or “one holy light, one heavenly flame” “whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,” and whose word in the Bible is a “golden light, / Streaming as from unveiled sun.” He sits on a “blazing throne” and is figured as the “changeless beacon light” in a lighthouse and an illuminating force to dispel the “shadows of doubt” and the “night of sin.” Missionaries do his work “gleaming in the light,” called to action because “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,” and—as seen on a slide vividly illustrating the chain of associations linking book, fire, and projector as homological sources and subjects of illumination—he “bids us shine / with a clear pure light / Like a little candle / Burning in the night” (figure 1.7).33 Projecting such texts had a variety of possible effects on the religious  experience: reanimating longstanding religious tropes, changing

FIGURE 1.7 Magic-lantern slide featuring Susan Bogert Warner’s hymn “Jesus Bids Us Shine.” Author’s collection.

44 LETTERS OF FIRE

the congregation’s behavior in church as well as their relationship to religious reading material, forging new links between the church and the home, and, in the process, changing people’s perception of the lantern’s firelight and thus of the lantern’s cultural status more broadly. By replacing multiple hymnals with a single text, lantern slides could dramatize and figure the singular Word of God in ways that print did not, while also, via the collective subject formation that took place in the reading, interpellating audiences as the singular, unified Body of the Church. Projection could focus a congregation’s attention on the front of the worship space, bringing an altar, cross, and religious text into spatial and conceptual alignment and asking viewers to look up and forward in a posture of religious openness and attention rather than down at a hymnal in a posture of privacy and meditation, in the process helping to make religious enlightenment a stronger group experience. Projected texts represented the illumined Word of God as literally, not just metaphorically enlightened and, as congregations sacrificed individual control over the codex hymnal, they not only gave up the possibility of flipping pages at will but put their reading in the hands of the lantern controller in a way that figured their relationship with the divine. Furthermore, in nineteenth-century U.S. contexts, where what John Timberman Newcomb has called the “fetishization of the fireside” had already produced an “analogical linkage between familial hearth and divine source,” the illumination of texts at church and home extended the chain of associations in which fire served as a figure for divinity and “moral enlightenment.”34 (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would later connect radio to this associative chain via his “Fireside Chats,” and Lindsay tried to extend it to film, writing “Let us then go to the hearth fire of the fancy which we will build in Hollywood, a sort of descendant of all these hearth fires of which we have spoken.”35) All of these effects deserve more attention than I can give them here, and more sitespecific studies of lantern use and text-based slides would certainly help to illuminate them. In enumerating them, however, I want to argue that their cumulative force did not just reinforce longstanding religious tropes and affect reading protocols in church, but reciprocally glossed the device of the magic lantern as well, working effectively to disarticulate its firelight from hell and articulate it to the divine. At times, the process of redefining or recharacterizing the “message” of  the medium almost entirely collapsed the distance between the

45 LETTERS OF FIRE

image-making machine and the Maker in whose image Christians believe humans to be created. Consider, for example, another slide version of “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” by some accounts the missionary hymn most frequently printed in nineteenth-century American hymnals, and one that Gandhi in 1925 would call “clear libel on Indian humanity” for the second stanza’s depiction of the “vile” unconverted heathen (figure 1.8).36 If Heber’s hymn was so well known and widely available, then what was gained by projecting it? The slide version certainly made the traveling preacher’s baggage lighter and more affordable: it was easier to carry and cheaper to purchase a hundred different slides than a hundred hymnals. As with

FIGURE 1.8 Magic-lantern slide featuring Reginald Heber’s hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains.” Author’s collection.

46 LETTERS OF FIRE

“A Sun-Day Hymn,” projection brought participants into physical proximity with the divine light referenced in stanza three (“Can we, whose souls are lighted / With wisdom from on high”). And while the hymn overtly evangelizes on behalf of the Christian God, it at the same time more subtly works to sanctify the affiliated piece of technology. Indeed, on the slide, as opposed to on paper, the phrase “the lamp of life” (stanza 3, line 4) becomes newly referential in its metaphor. It not only figures the divine as the very piece of technology making the poem visible, but reciprocally figures that device as an extension—in fact, the medium—of the divine. The inclusion of “[t]he Lamb for sinners slain” in line 6 of the poem’s final stanza seems eerily prescient in securing this connection, encouraging us to see and hear the “lamp” in “Lamb” and the “Lamb” in the “lamp.” Hymns and other components of Christian discourse so commonly used the phrase “Lamb of Life” that it would have been nearly impossible for congregations to not see and hear it in the “lamp of life” of Heber’s hymn. As the projection of such poems brought God’s light and the lantern’s light into conceptual alignment, slide designers reinforced that association by placing text in the sky (figure 1.9). Superimposing poetry on the heavens (and prompting audiences, as the slide does, to “look above the billows” for “the steady gleaming / Of our changeless beacon light”) not only synchronized God’s light, the sky’s light, the projector light, and the revealed word as manifested in poetry in particular, but also separated the material world from the immaterial, using a formal hierarchy (text and text box in the sky, image on earth) to figure a cosmological one. Seeing this motif in figure  1.9, we can further understand the additional cultural and religious work that “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” accomplished via projection rather than print. Directed upward, where the projected image and “wisdom from on high” converge between heaven and earth, the slide not only keeps readers looking toward the heavens in the type of reading posture I described earlier, but the text of the poem itself appears to indirectly reference that posture, using it to distinguish between Christians and nonChristians. While modern Christians, “whose souls are lighted,” read by looking (and probably singing) upward and outward toward heaven and the immaterial text of God’s wisdom, the “benighted” nonbeliever, figured by the absence of light, “[b]ows down to wood and stone.” An emergent difference between the converted and unconverted in the age of nonprint media, therefore, entails not just what one reads but also how one reads;

47 LETTERS OF FIRE

FIGURE 1.9 Magic-lantern slide from a sequence featuring Eben Rexford’s hymn “The Beacon Light.” Author’s collection.

believers study the dematerialized, illuminated text of the heavens’ projection, and nonbelievers study the material world. Once established and routinized, this religious pose would inform people’s relationship with other media, especially film (which, early on, was sometimes screened in converted magic-lantern theaters), as moviegoers maintained it even in the absence of explicitly religious content. As viewers sit and look up at the

48 LETTERS OF FIRE

illumination effects of projection itself, it is thereby possible for media to become, as communication studies scholar Tony Schwartz subtitled his 1981 book, “The Second God.” And yet, despite all of the conceptual distinctions that recharacterizing the “lantern of fear” as the “lamp of life” entailed—distinctions between heaven and hell, light and darkness, immateriality and materiality— individual poem slides like “Jesus Bids Us Shine” (figure 1.7) or “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” (figure 1.8) constantly reference and incorporate oral, print, scriptural, and photographic media not to disparage them, imagine them as rivals, or propose replacing them with the projected text, but to relate them and their various accumulated values to each other and especially to the projector and its changing status. In figure 1.7, as I have mentioned, the projector, book, and two light sources (candle and projector light) are compositionally and connotatively linked. And in figure 1.8, the page-like dimensions of the hymn’s border, its Arts and Crafts style design, and the projected representation of black “ink” on white “paper” tie the slide to print economies, while singing the hymn incorporated oral ones, all of which worked to demonstrate the lantern’s continuity with older media forms. As yet another version of Heber’s hymn suggests—a slide situating stanza three in what appears to be an American rather than East Indian missionary context—this media orchestration could get pretty elaborate (figure 1.10). Here, as with previous examples, we see the connection between lantern, words, and sky: a slide-viewing audience looks up at the projected text including the phrase “the lamp of life” and then up again at the missionary who holds his book above his audience and points even higher to the celestial source of the Word and thus to the source of light channeled by the lantern. By contrast, the native nonbeliever, the darkest (cf. “benighted”) and only unclothed figure in the scene, sits with his back turned to the text itself, presumably studying the world of wood and stone. But even as the scene differentiates between human figures, the slide itself synergizes the values of the different communication systems it references, tying together the preacher’s oral expression; the printed codex he holds; a scriptural economy suggested by the curling parchment and the calligraphic “C” in the stanza’s first word; the photorealistic drawing; and the lantern. In a sense, we see a version of what Henry Jenkins calls the “black box” fantasy of today’s media world—the dream that all media content might be routed

49 LETTERS OF FIRE

FIGURE 1.10 Magic-lantern slide featuring stanza three of Reginald Heber’s hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains.” Author’s collection.

through and coordinated by a single centralizing device—except that here the black box is not an object but the institution of the church, whose multimedia project of enlightenment is metonymically represented by the lamp of life.37 Such a dream, as indicated by this slide and others like it, does not imagine earlier media as outmoded or irrelevant. Rather, it imagines an interplay between media forms whose “functions and status are shifted,” as Jenkins argues, “by the introduction of new technologies.”38 As their different functions in relation to different users linked to or implied by this slide suggest, oral communication, the scroll, the codex, the image, and the lantern are important for various reasons: the slide’s non-missionary

50 LETTERS OF FIRE

Christian viewer uses the lantern and reads or sings the poem on the scroll; the missionary uses and reads from the codex; and the native audience is being spoken to. One of the few sources of friction in this otherwise well-oiled imaginary media environment stems from how the composition of most slides keeps their words and images apart: a text box separates a poem from the sky on which it is superimposed (figure 1.9); an ornate border around the text of “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” separates the words from the decoration on the rest of the slide (figure 1.8); and the parchment motif in the two other versions of Heber’s hymn (figures 1.4 and 1.10) keeps the text, as it were, on “paper,” preventing it from becoming part of the slides’ individual scenes. Discouraging audiences from reading or experiencing words as images or icons in their own right, such design strategies help to preserve the presumed neutrality and transparency of print. The most extreme example of word/image blending that I have found is a quotation from the anonymous poem commonly known as “My Creed” or “My Religion,” the lantern’s projection of which makes the slide’s calligraphic design into a sort of literally illuminated manuscript. However appealing its hybridity, this design still preserves as the default medium for the delivery of text the standard dimensions and other conventions of what Robert (Bob) Carlton Brown in 1930 called “the arbitrary page” and “the antiquated worddribbling book” (figure 1.11).39 Imagining a new type of reading in which viewers might read “letters of fire” rather than of ink, even Herbert Booth does not escape this regime. He doesn’t envision letters catching fire, flickering, being burned into the screen, or lighting up, nor do they become moving pictures. Rather, they are “set into operation,” the word “set” coming from the post-Gutenberg world in which the moveable type of what Kittler calls “the Reformation’s letterpress monopoly” was set and inked, not lit on fire and projected.40 The use of “set”—and related tropes that work to maintain the default status of print conventions in the dawning age of screen-based reading— reflects more than Booth’s inability to find a new language by which to describe the projected word. It is also, I think, a function of his Protestant heritage. The third son of Salvation Army founder William Booth, Herbert was the first of the organization’s officers to use the magic lantern extensively for presentations in England and abroad. As Kittler points out, however, the magic lantern was first employed by Catholics during the

51 LETTERS OF FIRE

FIGURE 1.11 Magic-lantern slide featuring the anonymous poem known as “My Creed” or “My Religion.” Author’s collection.

Counter-Reformation in order to create an intensified visual religious experience that could “combat Luther’s Bible” and, by extension, the “Reformation’s letterpress monopoly”; the lantern, he contends, “brought back the old religious images in a changed or improved form—no longer as icons or panels on a church wall, no longer as religious miniatures of the Acts of the Saints that even a child could comprehend, but rather as psychedelic visions.” 41 In employing a vision-making machine for the projection of words, then, Booth, as a Protestant, is compelled to de-emphasize the potential for experiencing text as an image. Thus, he and many other slide-makers and -users take care to frame the projection of language within the bibliographical codes of the Protestant print and letterpress tradition, replicating, enforcing, and further naturalizing page dimensions, ink and paper color, and other facets of print culture that would keep people anchored to Luther’s page and manage as much as possible the risk of experiencing language as a psychedelic vision.

52 LETTERS OF FIRE

However compelled Booth and others were to maintain the Reformation’s legacy, it does not change the fact that, except for people looking at the physical slides themselves, most readers, and especially the first generation to read via screen, do not experience a projection as a printed, material text. What we quite unexpectedly see by examining the lantern’s remediation of poetic texts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then, is not only the recharacterization of the entertainment machine and the heat and light it produces, the new ways of reading and worship it made possible, and the effects of projection on poetry reading. We also glimpse a possible ending to the Reformation’s image wars, as the Catholic image and Protestant text—and thus Catholicism and Protestantism more broadly—are united via the phenomenon of the projected poem, which one can “read” for its “red-hot gospel truth” or experience as an icon via its “letters of fire.” If the church sought the power to unite new and old media around this time, then the power to reunite the church lay, in fact, with the “second God” of modern media. Fueled by the convergence of poetry, fire, and light in the magic lantern, that power would pass (as the examples of Roosevelt and Lindsay mentioned earlier suggest) to warm or lit film projectors, radios, televisions, computers, and other pieces of technology such as the 1960s-era Sony Sterecorder, which was marketed for a time as “The fire and poetry of Sony sound.” That is to say, somewhere in the background of the Hotmail we have used for electronic communication, the Hotwire we use to make travel arrangements, the Flash animation of text, the Firewire of our computer connections, the Kindle Fires on which we read, the CDs we burn, and the hot hits, hot singles, hot movies, and hot TV shows of our present age, we can see the flicker of an oil lamp’s flame, the strike of an arc lamp, or the flash of limelight still burning with a religious light and offering consumers what “A Sun-Day Hymn” called “the warmth which alone can make us all brothers.” AFTERGLOW

As Lisa Gitelman explains, no medium emerges monolithically; media “are very particular sites for very particular . . . historically and culturally specific experiences of meaning” and “are far from static” in their uses.42 That is true for the magic lantern and its history as a poetry-reading machine as well; its popularity and global use and the huge selection of images and texts

53 LETTERS OF FIRE

produced for it involved individual and group practices, relationships, and narratives that run parallel or counter to the narrative that I have identified here. Indeed, remembering the lantern shows put on by the Anglican Church’s evangelical arm, the Church Army, in the early 1900s, an Englishman named Ted Harrison commented: When we were hop picking in Kent, every year they’d put on one or two of these shows for us. It would be at night time when we’d finished work and we’d all crowd around, there must have been more than a hundred of us. It was great there were funny pictures and views of places. . . . Then there was the religious stuff at the end and some hymns. They thought they’d converted the bleedin’ lot of us but there was no chance of that. We joined in with the hymns for a good sing song and we’d put dirty words in as well.43

Nor would the devil go quietly. As we can see from movies like Poltergeist, other stories about spirits possessing machines, or the mythology surrounding the backmasking of rock songs such as Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” Old Scratch—if only in the form of interference or static—is never completely out of the picture. But the fact that we can imagine the devil possessing or taking over our media in the first place is a testament to the poetry and the remediation of that poetry that helped get him out of there more than a century ago.

Chapter Two

RECEIVING MILLAY

My maternal grandmother, Sophia “Danny” Salvatore (née Danca), died in 1993, leaving behind, among other things, basement shelves filled with home-canned food dating back to the 1950s, hundreds of cookbooks, a collection of miniature shoes, and a copy of The Murder of Lidice—the long poem that Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in 1942 at the behest of the Writers’ War Board (WWB) to help cultivate public support for United States military intervention in the European theater of World War II. The oldest of eight children, Danny was born in 1911 and grew up on a farm outside of Fremont, Ohio. Although she completed high school and earned a degree from a two-year women’s business school in Cleveland, she was neither what we would call a reader (despite her cookbooks) nor someone who read or collected poetry. Her husband, James, an Italian machinist, painter, and trumpet player, whom she married in 1936, was not a reader either. After Danny’s death, her copy of Murder passed to me; I was twenty-two years old and the only one in the family who had exhibited any inclination toward poetry. I was surprised to discover my grandmother had once been so inclined as well. Quite possibly the most widely distributed American poem up to that point in history thanks to an astonishing set of cross-media collaborations facilitated by the WWB and involving Life magazine, the Saturday Review of Literature, Harper and Brothers, Columbia Records, and NBC Radio,

55 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

Murder dramatizes the 1942 Nazi destruction of the Czechoslovakian town of Lidice and ends (in the Life, Saturday Review, and Harper versions, at least) by imploring audiences to pursue “the maniac killer” responsible for the atrocities. “Oh, catch him! Catch him and stop him soon!” Millay writes in the Harper version, “Never let him come here!”1 Surprised as I was to inherit Danny’s Murder, I was even more surprised to discover inside the book—folded in half and sandwiched between pages 28 and 29—a newspaper photograph from May 25, 1946, showing the postwar hanging of Nazi official Karl Hermann Frank, one of the two men in charge of carrying out the atrocities at Lidice (figure 2.1). Nearly four years after the poem’s release, Danny appears not only to have remembered Millay’s call to action but then, through the act of interleaving, to have answered it with a clear “mission accomplished.” For Danny to have been so moved by a poem—and to have then kept it for the next half-century—seems an extraordinary thing, but she was not the only one who responded this way to Millay’s poetry in general or The Murder of Lidice in particular. Over the past decade, I have found six

FIGURE 2.1 Newspaper clipping stored inside the author’s grandmother’s copy of The Murder of Lidice. Author’s collection.

56 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

additional copies of Murder and over fifty other books by Millay with clippings stored inside them, plus many more with pages bearing the brownish stains of materials that have since been removed, marks left by what archivists call the acidic “slow burn” of deteriorating paper and used-book dealers refer to as “ghosting.” As a species of marginalia, such interleavings open the door to a type of reading common in the twentieth-century United States. If I begin this chapter with a promise—to reveal other interleaved copies of Murder as private, sometimes critical end points to the poem’s otherwise massively public, state-sponsored production—I want to start with the history of Murder itself, a major work by a canonical poet that has rarely been studied and that Millay herself eventually wished into that literary ghosthood, writing, “This piece should be allowed to die along with the war which provoked it. I only hope its death will not be so lingering as that of the war itself.”2 I start with this history because much of it has never been told, and it can be hard to believe that more than seventy-five years ago the transmedial logics of present-day marketing campaigns were employed in the distribution of poetry, and by writers working at almost every level of what Jonathan Vincent has called the period’s antifascist “copartnership with the US government.”3 Murder’s release was so carefully plotted that during a single week in 1942 a sequence of four different versions went out to audiences in the United States. The first appeared at the beginning of the October 17 Saturday Review of Literature, accompanied by an introduction by Franklin P. Adams relating the poem’s WWB origins and explaining how this “part is herewith published by special arrangement with Life, which is publishing a large extract from the poem in its current issue. The radio version, substantially the same as that to be published by Harper’s on October 25, at a price well within popular reach ($.60), is to have its premiere on the evening of October 19, over the National Broadcasting network. It will be obvious that the verses were written more with a view to being heard than being read.”4 This is an interesting story in its own right—Readers! Collect all four versions today!—and I hope it may encourage others to reconsider the poem’s various instantiations and their implications. As Susan Schweik demonstrates in one of the few critical examinations of Murder, those variants were very different poems that could produce very different effects.5

57 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

While not running entirely in that direction, this chapter nevertheless charts a complementary course by examining how the different media conditions of the poem’s transmission, rather than the variants of the poem itself, appear to have prompted different types of audience response as well. Most versions of Murder in the United States were intended for people like my grandmother, who would not have bristled at being called “ordinary” and who in fact regularly described themselves that way, but the radio and Life versions provoked a much more immediate set of responses than Harper’s book version did. Indeed, audiences responded to the NBC and Life versions with letters and poems composed sometimes only minutes after they closed the magazine or turned off the radio, whereas they engaged the Harper version much more slowly, sometimes returning to it years later as a way to evaluate World War II’s various narratives and the passing of history, including the shifts in global power the war helped to create.6 My goal is not to categorically rate one set of responses over the other. Both were participatory, both were more self-aware or reflective than we might expect from the targets of wartime propaganda, both were emotionally charged, and in sharing these characteristics, both are consistent with the culture of popular poetry reading in the first half of the century as it has been tracked elsewhere.7 Instead, I want to argue that we can attribute some of the differences in response types not to particular individuals who may or may not have been hoodwinked by propaganda, nor to the different versions of the text, but to the ways people encountered it. This thought—that we can not only imagine, as chapter 1 did in part, how particular media conditions might have affected how readers related to poems, but then also study and learn about those effects from actual audience experiences—leads me to wonder, at the end of this chapter, about the situation of poetry in a multimedia world in which, since World War II, the chief measure of poetry’s achievement and popularity has been the slim, single-author book and not popular print forms like Life or nonprint media like film, radio, sound recording, television, and, today, the Internet. Murder’s production, which was not without precedent, could have been a watershed moment in American poetry, a high-profile model by which poets could reach millions by tapping the power of synergized and “new,” or nonprint, media.8 A Pulitzer Prize–winner, Millay made a fair income from the poem’s many instantiations. As WWB archives indicate, other poets

58 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

found little problem also lending their skills to state-sponsored propaganda efforts. And the prewar poetry landscape out of which Murder arose—in which poems were projected via magic lantern, made into movies, and recited on local and national radio shows—would seem to have promised an increasingly multimedia future for American verse. Yet Murder did not usher in that moment, and that future has yet to come about—or at least has not come to be much acknowledged by literary critics and official verse culture. What happened during its production and its various afterlives cannot single-handedly explain this, but Millay’s fame and the poem’s prominence make Murder a compelling flash point in a history in which, as the media landscape offered more ways to disseminate poetry than ever before, much of American poetry chose to remain anchored in the book. BY COMMITTEE

Formed on December 8, 1941, the WWB was the civilian-run domestic propaganda organization tasked with being “the focal point of a group of American writers, several thousand in number, who have offered their talents to the Government for the duration of the war.”9 Chaired by detectivefiction writer and New Masses cofounder Rex Stout, the WWB answered to the Office of War Information (OWI), then directed by the radio news reporter and eventual three-time Peabody Award–winner Elmer Davis. A major part of the war’s cultural front, the WWB recruited authors to write specific topic-oriented campaign pieces. It also encouraged them to take up campaign themes more broadly—to “turn out something,” as one letter to poets and songwriters put it, “on the joys of farm labor, of what you get from working with the green growing things of earth” that would indirectly support (in this case) the Victory Garden campaign urging people to combat food shortages by growing their own food and volunteering on farms.10 In other words, “propaganda” didn’t have to look, walk, or quack like propaganda to be propaganda. Had Stout perused Poetry magazine in November 1943, he might have counted Theodore Roethke’s “Florist’s Root Cellar” (“Nothing would give up life: / Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath”) an unqualified propagandistic success.11 Shortly after the Nazi destruction of the Czech villages of Lidice and Leäáky, Davis made a Lidice-based campaign the WWB’s “first directive,” and the group formed the Lidice Lives Committee (LLC) to turn “the

59 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

wanton destruction of the defenseless Czech village” into “a symbol of our determination that evil shall not prevail” and thus into a rallying cry for U.S. military intervention.12 In a letter, the WWB’s Clifton “Kip” Fadiman was more blunt. “We are using Lidice as a symbol,” he wrote, “as a first rate atrocity story in order to make people generally hate Germans.”13 The WWB had in place an Advisory Council including Stephen Vincent Benét, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Edward R. Murrow, Clifford Odets, Thornton Wilder, and others, and the LLC followed suit, assembling a “committee of sponsors” that eventually numbered more than 130 United Nations ambassadors, Supreme Court justices, governors, mayors, university presidents, actors (such as Charlie Chaplin), scientists (including Albert Einstein), prominent public individuals (such as Helen Keller and Marshall Field), and writers whose names would thereafter appear at the foot of LLC letterhead. The committee was not unsuccessful. Almost immediately, to memorialize Lidice and counter German claims that “the name of the village was immediately abolished,” it arranged for the Stern Park subdivision of Crest Hill, Illinois, to change its name to Lidice and inspired towns in Mexico, Canada, Peru, Venezuela, Panama, and Brazil to do likewise. Notes from the LLC’s first meeting, on June 26, 1942, include a bevy of other ideas—some realized, many not—including instructions to secure cooperation from a major radio network for “the reading, a la White Cliffs of Dover, of a poem to be written we hope by Edna Millay.”14 The same day, Fadiman—a former Simon and Schuster editor, the editor of the New Yorker’s book review section, and a well-known radio quiz-show host who would become the WWB’s point-person for Murder—dictated a letter to Millay formally requesting that she write an “occasional” poem, again referring to The White Cliffs, another wartime poem by the American writer Alice Duer Miller, which gained fame when it was broadcast over the radio in 1940. Here is that letter: Dear Miss Millay: You have doubtless read about the Lidice massacre. One of the jobs the board has undertaken is to keep the memory of Lidice alive for the duration of the war, so that we may keep continually before our eyes the bestial face of the enemy.

60 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

I know how good poets dislike the writing of “occasional” poems. Yet we all feel that perhaps this terrible crime might stir you to take up your pen, so that your verse might crystallize for us all the horror and the iron hatred we feel for such barbarism. We have plenty of material on hand, if you feel impelled to do this. Would you let us know. We feel it is important. We have just received word that a little town in Long Island now called Bohemia is considering changing its name to Lidice. We hope to arrange a coast-to-coast radio program which will base itself on the re-naming ceremonies perhaps three weeks from now. If it is at all feasible it would be splendid to have your poem read at these ceremonies and broadcast. On the other hand, if the poem should turn out much too long for this purpose, we think we can arrange to have it read on the air separately by someone like Lynn Fontanne or Helen Hayes in the hopes that the poem would get as much prominence and publicity as did Alice Miller’s “The White Cliffs.” Sincerely, Clifton Fadiman15

Occasional poems are almost always highly mediated—only rarely are they “overheard” like the lyric poetry John Stuart Mill describes in his nowfamous essay “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties”—and Fadiman imagined that, ideally, Millay’s would meet at least four media-related criteria.16 It would be specifically for “coast-to-coast” radio. It would be “much too long” to be absorbed or mediated through another program. It would remediate a familiar print story (of which Millay had “doubtless read”) in spoken verse. And it would be performed (mediated) by someone else. Given Millay’s success as a radio reader—she was so popular, Derek Furr reports, that people bought radios specifically to listen to her Sunday evening readings—why would Fadiman forego the resource of her voice in favor of someone else’s?17 Even at these early stages, I think, he was not imagining an intimate reading performance like the ones for which she was known, but rather a production exploiting what media studies scholars Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call the “double logic” of remediation: one that would cultivate through live radio, vocal performance, and a standalone show the thrilling “immediacy” or illusion of unmediated experience

61 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

while at the same time so thickly layering media forms, platforms, and practices that the “hypermediacy” on which that immersiveness depended would be evident and equally thrilling.18 (Production manager Wynn Wright later explained that the poem “came to us at NBC to be made real and immediate through the power of the human voice.”19) For Fadiman, a third-party reader would preserve the immediacy of the spoken voice while adding to the production another layer of mediation, distancing Millay so that she herself became an appealingly mediated subject. Indeed, news reports and press releases would announce Murder as the first poem Millay had written specifically for radio, thus promising readers a new type of encounter with her: immediate because unmediated by the printed page from which one normally imagined her reading, yet newly mediated by someone else’s radio voice.20 “It will be obvious,” the Saturday Review therefore tempted readers, “that the verses were written more with a view to being heard than being read.”21 Charged with “keep[ing] the memory of Lidice alive,” Fadiman was undoubtedly imagining the double logic of remediation serving this goal on a larger scale, too, something very much like the multistage, multimedia release that eventually came to be, in which every instantiation of the poem would make its subject newly (he uses the term “continually”) immediate by virtue of its differently remediated form. As his comment about the relationship between good poets and occasional poems might suggest, Fadiman was a tactful motivator, and he needed only to mention Miller’s White Cliffs to telegraph his plans and explain to Millay his preference for someone else’s voice. For Millay could not have failed to remember that even as critics in 1940 were taking to task her just-published political and war-related poems (Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook and There Are No Islands, Any More: Lines Written in Passion and in Deep Concern for England, France, and My Own Country), Miller’s long poem was becoming an enormous, though unplanned and unexpected sensation, not to mention a literary force that helped shift opinions regarding U.S. intervention in the war. The story of a young American woman who marries a British man, moves to England, only to see him enlist and perish in World War I, and then worries on the eve of World War II that their now-grown, newly enlisted son will suffer the same fate as his father, White Cliffs experienced tepid sales when it first appeared in print but, Rebecca Stelzer reports, “became a hit when on October  13, 1940, Lynn Fontanne read a

62 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

dramatic version of the poem on NBC.”22 Fueled by radio and the Broadway star’s performance, White Cliffs went on to sell over seven hundred thousand book copies, spent thirteen weeks on the best-seller list, appeared in abridged form in Life, was recorded by Columbia, and was even adapted to film. Given Murder’s eventual trajectory—its periodical publications, performance on NBC, book release, Columbia recording, and even tentative discussions about a film version, which never panned out—it is clear how Fadiman would imitate, refine, and build on the success of White Cliffs by more strategically sequencing the stages of Murder’s launch and by having the poem translated into Spanish and Portuguese, thus making it globally available, as White Cliffs was not. Remarkably, he had another precedent to follow that was even closer to home. Earlier in 1942, the Council on Books in Wartime—another organization of literary types (booksellers, publishers, librarians, and authors) cooperating with the OWI—had secured and sent to the WWB Stephen Vincent Benét’s manuscript for They Burned the Books, a radio verse play marking the ninth anniversary of the first German book-burning. Given a half-hour broadcast by Hollywood star Ralph Bellamy over NBC’s Red Network on May 11, 1942, They Burned the Books was mimeographed and distributed for free through the Association for Education by Radio and published by Farrar and Rinehart as “a little book” that, in size and format, recalls Harper’s version of Murder.23 There were plans, which do not appear to have been realized, to translate it “into Spanish and other foreign languages for short-wave transmission.”24 Nor did the poem disappear. A year later, on May 9—seven months after the first abridged version of Murder ran in those same pages—it would appear in the Saturday Review of Literature. In attempting “to supply the entire hemisphere” with Murder in October 1942, Fadiman and the WWB would thus emulate and improve upon earlier examples.25 The abridged Saturday Review version would appear on October 17. An expanded, abridged, and illustrated version published over seven pages in the much more popular Life on October 19 would direct the magazine’s three million subscribers to that night’s radio broadcast, a live program at NBC’s Studio 8-H that was attended by 1,400 people. Built around a half-hour performance of the poem by “an all star cast,” including Academy Award–winning actor Paul Muni as narrator, the program opened with an hour-long prebroadcast ceremony featuring Frank Black

63 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, as well as Czech folk dancers and instrumentalists, and concluded with a charity auction of Millay’s original manuscript conducted by Alexander Woollcott, the writer, radio personality, and actor serving as the night’s emcee.26 Made possible by “an unusual triple control system” that NBC boasted about in publicity materials, the broadcast was accompanied by simultaneous live performances in Spanish and Portuguese, was shortwaved “to Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Alaska and India,” and was “rebroadcast the following morning . . . to the British Isles and the Middle East.”27 No doubt symbolizing a united set of allies, this convergence of media forms and content producers would plug the following day’s release of Harper’s book version and would culminate on October 25 with Lidice Memorial Day. It is unclear when, exactly, Millay sent the twenty-seven-page, doublespaced typescript of Murder to Fadiman, but it was in his hands by September 11. “I am the only one so far who has read your magnificent poem but I am sure we will all be as enthusiastic about it,” he wrote to her that day. “Naturally, it is all up to the networks, but I have every confidence that we can secure a tremendously effective production. I am thinking of somebody like Orson Welles as the narrator. You have done a wonderful thing for your country and for the United Nations and you do not need me to tell you so.”28 In a letter to Anthony Hyde at the OWI the same day, he gushed, “Edna St. Vincent Millay has just completed a dramatic poem on Lidice suitable for terrific network broadcast. If all goes well this should be the biggest thing of its sort since Norman Corwin’s Bill of Rights program.”29 Marking the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Rights and broadcast on all four major networks a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Corwin’s hour-long dramatic show We Hold These Truths had featured Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, and, yes, Orson Welles. It reached an audience of more than sixty million listeners—nearly half the U.S. population. Fadiman was not thinking small. BEYOND WORDS

With so many moving parts and the tight turnaround between the manuscript’s submission and its various releases, Murder’s production was not without misunderstandings, complications, or mistakes. As of October 2, Fadiman and Millay were still corresponding about adding new material,

64 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

ordering the poem’s parts, and making the “most delicately considered cuts” needed to fit the poem into NBC’s half-hour time slot.30 Fadiman did not get Welles as narrator, nor Paul Robeson, though he asked both. (Charlie Chaplin, Stewart, José Ferrer, Fontanne, and Fredric March were also floated as possibilities.) The manuscript was pitched to Reader’s Digest, This Week, Time, and the New York Times before being taken by Life, which received its version in time to publish by October 19 but too late to send Millay proofs for her review. After publication, on October 27, Millay’s husband, Eugen Boissevain, wrote to Life complaining that the magazine had failed to note that its version was abridged, had neglected to insert asterisks indicating omitted material, and, by presenting the poem as uncut, had effectively “killed the sale of the pamphlet.”31 A day earlier, in a letter to the Saturday Review of Literature, Boissevain had criticized that publication for printing almost three hundred lines instead of a preapproved fifty, “thus giving the impression that you are the publishers of this poem.”32 (As it turned out, Millay had given the editor-in-chief, Norman Cousins, permission to print the longer excerpt.) In response to concerns that Boissevain had raised about the book version of the poem, Harper’s vice president, Eugene Saxton, wrote to him on November 18, “When you consider that the book . . . was produced overnight without any opportunity for salesmen’s orders or preparatory traveling, and that stock to the extent of several thousand copies was sent out from our shipping room to hundreds of dealers throughout the country from whom we had no orders, I think you will agree that it would have been little short of a miracle if some misunderstandings and mistakes had not taken place.”33 If Boissevain had his problems, Millay’s critics had theirs, the most strident coming from the political left, with which Millay, Stout, Hughes, Odets, and other WWB collaborators had once been strongly affiliated. Ranging from the details of the poem’s execution to the LLC’s conversion of the atrocity into a wartime advertising jingle, such critics described Murder in scathing, oftentimes infantilizing and gender-related terms that few (if any) other WWB pieces or authors elicited. The resulting damage to Millay’s literary reputation persists today. (The Poetry Foundation, for example, calls Murder “a trite ballad on a Nazi atrocity.”34) In The New Republic, Babette Deutsch criticized Millay’s “inept” syntax, imagery, and metaphor, called Murder a “mawkish ballad” with “lines that read like a schoolgirl’s translation of second-rate verse,” and concluded, “The fact remains that a tragedy

65 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

with revolutionary implications is here reduced to a hasty piece of propaganda, jejune in conception, childish in execution and enervating in its effects.”35 Calling it “full of unintentionally comic lines like ‘Heydrich the Hangman howls tonight. He howls for a bucket of bubbly blood,’ ” another (anonymous) New Republic writer claimed the poem “served only to reduce the very real and terrible tragedy of Lidice to embarrassing bathos.”36 “Such writing,” Deutsch argued, “is evil in its effects,” guilty by way of its “false feelings and false thinking” of “misleading the common reader, of betraying the common man.”37 Even Millay’s longtime friend Arthur Davison Ficke couldn’t see himself through to supporting the poem. “I don’t know how people manufacture such things,” he wrote in his journal on the eve of Murder’s broadcast. “I will not, I must not, accept or express the hysterical patriotic war-moods of these awful days.”38 Such critiques rarely considered Murder from a media standpoint—the various media of its transmission, the effects of that mediation, its composition for radio (not print), and its performance-related aspects such as the manner of recitation, the celebrity cast, the music, and NBC’s technologyenabled trilingual performances. If they wished Murder free of those contexts—an impulse, perhaps, toward what Virginia Jackson has called “lyric reading”—other reviewers did not. Instead, those reviewers embedded the poem thoroughly in its media contexts. Newsweek opened its review, for example, by painting the scene at NBC’s Studio 8-H: an “expectant audience,” the NBC Symphony on stage, actors standing before microphones, the flashing “on-the-air signal,” and Woollcott’s introduction.39 Not blind to the techniques that concern Deutsch, a Billboard author designated by the initials M. R. remarked, “the imagery and meter are simple yet effective, and the performers did a top-notch job. . . . Without a sensitive portrayal of the roles by the performers the constant repetition of the rhythmic patterns of the verse would tend to make the poem monotonous and meaningless.” 40 Harriet Van Horne noted “a cast worthy of its fine and tender writing” and contended that “the production unquestionably set a milestone in radio.” 41 In fact, both Newsweek and Van Horne cite as particularly effective the same “bucket of bubbly blood” passage that the New Republic’s anonymous writer used to exemplify the poem’s “unintentionally comic” effects. As opinions regarding this passage indicate, critics who considered the mediated nature of Murder responded to the poem quite differently from

66 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

those who did not—a trend, as I have proposed, suggesting that audience responses correlated not insignificantly with media conditions. But what of the “common reader” toward whom Murder was mainly directed and on whom, according to Deutsch, its false feelings and false thinking were supposed to have worked their evil effects? Given Murder’s global distribution, it is impossible to generalize, but a cluster of fan letters to Millay from October and November offer a glimpse into the experience of audience members who regularly describe themselves as “humble” (Drogichen, Bonner), “feeble” (Evans), and “poor and unknown” (Pyka), and who suggest that, as individuals, they nevertheless represent “many listeners like me” (Brennan) or “millions in my category” (Pyka).42 These letters suggest that audiences were so affected by what Fadiman imagined would be the immediacy of the media experience that they were compelled to respond immediately as well. And yet, as Bolter and Grusin’s thesis about the double logic of remediation would suggest, those audiences were also made highly aware of the media-constructed nature of their experiences and how that contributed to Murder’s effectiveness as a piece of propaganda. In a sense, these letters present Murder’s audience as a group of amateur media theorists—people who were moved by media conditions, who attempted to describe the dynamics of those conditions, and who understood what they were responding to. Far from being misled or betrayed, they appear to have known what they were being expected to do and, to paraphrase the line Slavoj Çiäek made famous in The Sublime Object of Ideology, enthusiastically did it.43 As their dates suggest, most letters were from people who had just encountered the magazine or radio version of the poem, and they did not hesitate to say so. J. P. Bemmington at the Naval Training Station in Noroton Heights, Connecticut may have had to wait until October 26 to write, as the single copy of “the Life magazine in which your poem appeared went up and down the rows of bunks in our barracks as each man read the poem,” but Private Alexander Drogichen at Fort Sam Houston, Texas picked up his pen having “just read” it.44 Philadelphia’s Theda Evans wrote to Millay “about two minutes” after having read the poem.45 Immediately following NBC’s broadcast, Alfred F. Brewster of New York City composed and sent his poem “Sequel to a Murder,” opening with the couplet “Upon the radio one day / I heard a poem by Miss Millay.” 46 Ethel E. Jones, a teacher or administrator at Baltimore’s Edgar Allan Poe Junior High School, dated her

67 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

Department of Education letterhead 11:15 p.m. on the 19th—fifteen minutes after the broadcast ended.47 So soon did Julia Naylor write after the “radio dramatization” that she could “hardly see to write. Through the Tears.” 48 Mrs. Joseph L. Chase of Dorchester, Massachusetts did not even wait that long. Listening to the radio “while doing my household duties,” she explains, “I couldn’t help but drop my ironing and write this note.” 49 Life’s version of Murder ends with a call to immediate action (“Catch him! Catch him! Do not wait. / Or will you wait, and share the fate / Of the village of Lidice? Or will you wait, and let him destroy / The village of Lidice, Illinois?”). The urgency of readers’ replies—written before their tears even dried—is exactly the response that the poem was designed to elicit and that its remediation intensified.50 Readers and listeners thus conveyed their responses in a language of sudden, even unprecedented inspiration and awakening. “You have been the first person to inspire me to write [a fan letter] in my twenty four years of life,” Evans confessed.51 “That very moment,” wrote Walter J. Pyka of the broadcast, “whatever complacency there was in my heart towards this present world conflict, it imediately [sic] disappeared.”52 Ruth Mills Carr of Fulton, New York praised Millay’s “efforts to awaken those of us who sleep.”53 “You are right,” Private Rolf Ranay wrote from the Marine barracks in Puget Sound, Washington, “ ‘Catch him and stop him soon! Never let him come here.’!”54 Nor was Ranay the only one to quote or paraphrase the poem back to Millay. Thelma Leal of Oswego, New York explained, “If ‘Pearl Harbor’ can happen, so could we have ‘The Murder of Lidice’ right in our own home town. Let us hope that your poem helps the Americans realize what we are fighting against and wakes them up as I have been wakened.”55 But listeners were not so suddenly awakened by the poem that they forgot it was a performance. Indeed, despite their immediate responses, many understood that Murder was not only what Pyka called “your version” of history, but propaganda as well.56 Frances Baker of Kenmore, New York called it a “splendid vehicle of propaganda,” and Peter and Virginia of Dalton, Massachusetts, suggested the day after NBC’s version aired that the poem might have “gone over the top” but that “as propaganda it is tremendous, dwarfing all the efforts of the press.” (Virginia “could not listen to all of it; she was so affected.”)57 Pyka and Drogichen called it “effective,” and Mildred C. Drake “volunteer service,” acknowledging that they understood its intent.58 Brewster’s poem called it a “fairy tale” and a “warning hiss.”59

68 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

Other respondents tried to find a language to describe the mixed-media or hypermediated event they had experienced, calling it a “blood warm verbal painting” and “word-pictures of life” that brought “great poetry to the people. As Homer did. Though he had but a lyre.” 60 While Amy Bonner, Poetry magazine’s eastern business representative, might not have qualified as a “common” reader, the note she wrote to Millay after attending the live performance might be read as encapsulating the way readers reflected on how they responded so emotionally to something they nevertheless knew was “over the top” and that did not catch them by surprise. “I found it moving and eloquent and true beyond words,” Bonner wrote. “I mean it was true in its integrity. And the apparently simple, concrete incidents were big in their total effect and message.” 61 What did audiences hope they were accomplishing by responding not just immediately, but in writing? At this moment in the war, writing in response to Millay’s call for action (“Catch him! Do not wait . . .”) would have been freighted with a significance that exceeded the media specifics of Murder itself. As Benét’s They Burned the Books, broadcast five months before Murder, indicates, many Americans understood the war and the distinctions between Allied and fascist values partly in terms of freedom of speech and expression. (The WWB was also distributing lists of books banned by Germany.) By writing to Millay, then, these audience members were making up for their personal inability to “catch him” through a symbolic act and thus pledging to fight against fascism writ large—however humbly, however feebly, yet in the manner of Millay and other more “talented and important people of the world.”62 They thus went out of their way to raise the subject of writing. Evans, who otherwise feared “this letter is really a feeble attempt to express what is in my heart,” added a postscript: “My hobby is writing, and classical music.” 63 Willis Eberman sent Millay a sonnet titled “The Spirit of Lidice” which, “inspired by” her poem, begins, “You have not silenced me: I am not slain.” 64 Drogichen concluded by outing himself as a writer, too, “one whose humble attempts are beneath your notice, I know, but whose pen has turned a phrase or two, to advantage.” He continues, “I thank you for your guidance. I will not write a flippant line again, nor lend my poor talents to gaudy, tricky, showy verses; not as long as there are things to say, that in humanity’s name demand expression.” 65 Part of participating in the war, these letters suggest, meant showing oneself as committed to expression “in humanity’s name” and to the

69 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

idea that, if writing is done with integrity—and perhaps more effectively through the “conventional outworn details” that Deutsch criticized than through the “gaudy, tricky, showy” verses of an individualistic literary tradition—something “true beyond words” would come through. BY THE BOOK

Initially, Millay gave Saxton the impression that Murder was a “labor of love,” but, as Boissevain’s letters to the Saturday Review of Literature and Life suggest, she and Boissevain were pinning their financial hopes on the Harper version.66 And she needed the money. Paper shortages threatened to put her books out of print, and questions about “rather violent rises and falls in public interest as the war news swings one way or the other” had postponed her Collected Lyrics.67 Life bought publication rights for a notinconsequential sum of $500 and the Saturday Review paid $50, but she had received nothing from the WWB and little (if anything) from NBC, and she freely granted permission for most reprints and rebroadcasts. When Saxton suggested a fifty-cent retail price for the book version with profits going to advertising and promotional activities, Boissevain countered by proposing the sixty-cent price that came to be, with seven cents per copy going to Millay. Getting readers to the book from the radio and magazine versions would be challenging, however. Saxton wrote on November 11, “We are going to keep hammering in the fact that the full text can be had only in book form. . . . The salesmen have just gone out, and are pushing for reorders on the ground that THE MURDER OF LIDICE is the ideal Christmas card.” 68 According to royalty paperwork in Millay’s papers at the Library of Congress, 18,195 “Christmas-card” copies sold during the final ten weeks of 1942, providing about $1,275 in royalties for Millay (just shy of an inflationadjusted $19,000) but falling far below the sales figures for White Cliffs.69 Subsequent statements indicate that only 3,000–3,500 more copies would sell by war’s end, even though, as the following material illustrates, readers would return to it long after the urgency of its release wore off. The well-known participatory relationship that Millay created with her audiences certainly helped to motivate her letter-writers and extended to book-readers as well, through the practice of interleaving. As a type of marginalia, interleavings can be idiosyncratic and mysterious—it is often impossible to say who inserted what, when it was inserted, and why—and

70 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

thus unreliable indicators of reading practices.70 Nevertheless, the clippings in the fifty copies of Millay’s books I have collected suggest relatively coherent trends. People most commonly expanded their books by inserting into their pages additional poems (by Millay and others), photos of Millay, articles on Millay and reviews of her books, and her obituaries. One has fourleaf clovers pressed between the pages. As such items indicate, readers returned to and “updated” their books over time. For example, a copy of Second April, published in 1921, when Millay was not writing “occasional” verse, contains a newspaper copy of “There Are No Islands, Any More” (1940), nicely juxtaposing the “lyric” Millay with the political one. Similarly, a clipping of “For My Brother Han and My Sisters, in Holland” (1945) appears in Wine from These Grapes (1934). A copy of Conversation at Midnight (1937) contains copies of both “There Are No Islands, Any More” and “For My Brother Han,” as well as a 1940 article, “Edna Millay, Academician: Perfectionist Feels She Must Write Fast Now.” None of the copies of Murder I am studying (leaving out my grandmother’s, let us call them copies A–F) contain additional poems, photos of Millay, articles about her, or obituaries. That evidence of an author-based hermeneutic is absent, perhaps reflecting the shift toward reading Millay as a political poet that the aforementioned interleavings in Second April, Wine from These Grapes, and Conversation at Midnight suggest. What these reader-augmented copies of Murder demonstrate more clearly, however, is the cultural longevity of a presumably occasional poem. It was not, as the drop in book sales might imply, a poem that disappeared from readers’ radar. Rather, readers continued to engage with it even after the war ended as a way to narrativize and process the workings of history and some of the war’s implications.71 Such readers did not grant Millay her wish and allow the poem “to die along with the war which provoked it,” because for them, as their interleavings indicate, the events of that war and its effects continued to matter. As copies A–F imply even in their small sample size, reader responses to the Harper version differ vastly from those of people encountering the Life and NBC versions. Far from immediate, book-based responses occurred along—even created—a much longer timeline. I would like to propose that, just as the media conditions of the former versions prompted one type of response, so the conditions of Harper’s book provoked another. Indeed,

71 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

what is noteworthy about this version is how unmediated it feels compared to the others. Issued in pale-blue paper wraps with only an austerely printed title and byline on the front cover, the book contains no photos, no art, none of the other adjacent material contained in the periodicals, and no notice of upcoming or related events, let alone the radio version’s media circus. Even the WWB’s foreword downplays the poem’s media circumstances as historical fact, presenting Murder as a fait accompli, calling it “one of the finest pieces of true propaganda to come out of the war” and concluding, “We are proud of our little part in this.”72 In editing a draft of the foreword, Millay herself avoided referring to other media by deleting the Saturday Review of Literature’s description of the poem as “written more with a view to being heard than being read.”73 With little in the way of remediation’s “double logic” to inspire a feeling of either immediacy or media reflexivity, it is perhaps not surprising that readers took more time to respond to Harper’s version and, without much in the way of directional signals, even looked for help with reading or— more compellingly—rereading it. Clippings in copies A and B suggest this is so. Copy A contains John K. Hutchens’s New York Times article “Miss Millay’s New Poem,” which discusses how Murder deviates from “the flawless, studied line” of her other poetry in favor of “noble fury” and “passionate loathing.” Whether or not the poem ranks high in Millay’s oeuvre is “beside the point.” Instead, Hutchens differentiates between versions of the poem, explores how media affected it, and employs a set of criteria by which to argue that it “finely serves the time, the medium, and the intention.” Moreover, he argues, Murder is “good radio writing” because “it assumes that its audience knows what has been going on in the world and will contribute some emotion of its own.” Similarly, copy B contains a New York Times review of Columbia’s recording in which Howard Taubman rejects what he calls a “detached” aesthetic that would ignore “the poet’s emotion” and the performers’ “passionate feeling.” Like Hutchens, he makes audience participation key to understanding the poem. “If one reads it coolly, one may have reservations,” he explains; the poem’s force is not freestanding but partly produced by how a listener “brings to the subject deep sympathies.” As a framework for rereading the demediated Harper version— indeed, as a way of restoring its media contexts, if not some of the immediacy of which the book is a sort of souvenir—neither article is a bad start.

72 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

If these clippings anticipate a future in which Murder might be read, reread, or remembered, copies C–F use interleavings to focus on the geopolitical future the poem asks readers to imagine. Copy C does so imaginatively, preserving two clippings—one featuring Millay’s “Catch him, catch him” passage and the other proclaiming, “Lidice will rise again . . . [I]t will rise to glories such as it has never known”—that ask readers to envision a future that might come to pass. Through the postwar news articles about Lidice’s reconstruction pressed between their pages, copies D and E contain messages from that future and thus talk back to Murder about the making of the history it wishes while also offering perspectives by which to measure the war’s effects. Dated in pencil “6/16/49,” the article in copy D reports on how Cincinnati’s “Miss Marie Newby” would be traveling to Europe “to help rebuild Lidice” (figure 2.2). “One of five from this country who will represent the American Unitarian Association in an international youth project in Europe this summer,” Newby was to “meet many young men and women from many nations who will be taken into Czechoslovakia under the International Religious Fellowship.” Something of a testament

FIGURE 2.2 Copy of The Murder of Lidice with a 1949 newspaper clipping affixed to inside front cover. Author’s collection.

73 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

to the allied coalition that Murder helped to rally—Lidice has been liberated and is being rebuilt—the article nevertheless casts backward an ambivalent shadow about the nature of that success. Newby’s generational cohort, too young to have participated in World War II, now had its own war—the Cold War—in which Lidice once again served as a center, positioned at the heart of ideological struggle even in the article’s three-line headline: “Cincinnati Girl Chosen / To Help Rebuild Lidice / And Pass Iron Curtain.” Almost four years after the end of “the war which provoked it,” Millay’s poem—at least in the mind of the reader who preserved the article on Newby—was still a relevant and perhaps motivational, though somewhat less idealistic lens through which to view history as it had been made and was being made. Copy E is not, I confess, a Harper version, but a Columbia one: a set of three 78-rpm records containing Basil Rathbone’s narration and featuring Blanche Yurka and a Czech and Slovak chorus. However, I include it here because, even though it appears to be much more mediated (a color cover, an animated prose introduction, vocal performance), its comparatively durable material format, heavy covers, flat spine, and record-sleeve pages borrow from and materially encode the codex as a framing medium. In fact, two newspaper articles taped inside the back cover suggest that copy E’s owner also imagined it as a type of book—an audio book—and, in keeping with the extended reading practices elicited by Harper’s version, also used it to think about a longer timeline of history (figure 2.3). One clipping reporting on the assassination that precipitated Lidice’s destruction is dated June 4, 1942—five days before the massacre, twenty-two days before Fadiman wrote to Millay, and six months before Columbia’s recording was available for sale. The other, undated article reports from “late 1959” about the “stupendous paradox” that Lidice should be liberated from Germany only to fall under the control of the USSR, which helped make the village “complete . . . again” but did not rebuild its church. “By the creed of the Communists,” the piece ends, “Lidice today is a godless memorial.” Separated by nearly twenty years, these articles use Murder as a centering mechanism by which to view all three events (the assassination, Lidice’s destruction, and the town’s reconstruction) in relation to one another. While it is difficult to determine with certainty the conclusion copy E’s owner might have reached— Does a “Red-Ruled” Lidice reanimate Millay’s poem? Does it question World War II’s success?—it nevertheless extends or “rewrites” Murder’s

74 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

FIGURE 2.3 Columbia Records version of The Murder of Lidice with June 1942 and “late 1959” newspaper articles affixed to inside back cover. Author’s collection.

ending, with the future, not just the present moment’s immediate concerns, in mind. Near the end of Murder, Millay asks American readers: What have we done?— Who, after all, are we?— That we should sit at ease in the sun, The only country, the only one, Unmolested and free?74

In bringing the future to bear on rereading Murder, copies D and E end the poem less triumphantly than does my grandmother’s, whose photograph of Karl Hermann Frank’s execution declared “mission accomplished.” Nevertheless, they leave unquestioned the American exceptionalism—the ideology—of its ending. Copy F, however, contains a clipping headlined “Restitution Due: Jap Exclusion ‘Unjustified,’ Dillon Myer Says” and reports

75 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

FIGURE 2.4 Copy of The Murder of Lidice with newspaper article laid inside front cover. Author’s collection.

how Myer, the former director of the American relocation camps, believed Congress “should create a commission to receive claims for ‘several million dollars-worth’ of property loss or damage from those forcibly removed from their homes and businesses” (figure 2.4). Holding western defense commander Lieutenant General John L. Dewitt responsible for the unnecessary “mass evacuation” of Japanese Americans, and spotlighting those who had yet to return home, Myer argued that the policy “was by no means free of racial feelings” (my emphasis). It is impossible to say for sure that copy F’s owner read this phrase in relation to the “unmolested and free” of Murder’s ending, but the clipping’s presence, and the comparison it forces between the Nazis’ treatment of Lidice and the U.S. government’s treatment of Japanese Americans, cannot but resist the ideology of American

76 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

exceptionalism on which the poem was founded and to which it appealed. As an expression of dissent, copy F may be fugitive and private, but the point of view it articulates and records nonetheless reveals how the act of interleaving’s extended reading timeline, prompted by the media conditions of the book, could make space for alternative, counterhegemonic perspectives unwelcome or perhaps unavailable in the hypermediated moment of the poem’s broadcast. BY THE BY

In 1930, while theorizing a hypothetical reading machine as an alternative to what he would later call “the antiquated, word-dribbling book,” Robert (Bob) Carlton Brown argued, “The written word hasn’t kept up with the age. The movies have outmaneuvered it.” He suggested, “Let’s let writing out of books, give it a chance and see what it does with its liberty.”75 In today’s culture of increased transmediation and hypermediation, the possibilities of that liberty—and the possibilities of poetry to motivate the potential effects of that liberty—are, in theory, greater than ever. And there are poets and poetries finding them and affecting audiences: Instapoets leveraging digital interfaces to become best-sellers; poets who have written free Valentine’s Day poems for PayPal; poetries mediated and remediated via Craigslist haiku forums, YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, and karaoke screens across the world. As the story of Millay’s Murder suggests, the possible media effects on poetry are many and various. Yet, for a lot of people in the United States, the book remains the goal, the end point, and the measure of a poet’s arrival, legitimacy, and accomplishment, even as laments about small publication runs and low book sales are common (figure 2.5). I attended a reading at which, in a few words prefacing the poem he would read next, a poet expressed dismay and discomfort that an earlier, different version of that poem was available online. He encouraged audiences to ignore that one and find, instead, the finished and final version contained in the book from which he was reading. He held the book up so that we could all see it. It was in equal parts religious gesture, elegy, and sales pitch. And yet it was deeply ironic, as many people were attending because they wanted to experience the poetry as mediated in that moment—by him, out loud, in that room, and in the company of others—not because they wanted to read the book.

77 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

FIGURE 2.5 Austin Kleon, “Poetry! Or: How Much Is Your Life Worth?,” April 19, 2010. Used by permission.

One can certainly understand the desire for a durable medium like the book, which one can personalize, keep, and reread—possibly for fifty years, possibly until one’s death. That book might find itself in a grandson’s hands. He might be moved by what he finds inside, and he might be haunted by it for another quarter-century and come to write this chapter, which might in turn move readers and critics to reread or listen to Murder and consider what value it has to us today or imagine the world it creates and in which it

78 R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

was created. As powerful as the book is, however, our idealization of it as the chief or best measure of poetry’s value and as the culmination of a poem’s life cycle privileges and enforces very particular ways of relating to poetry and experiencing its effects, limiting poetry and what poetry might do. Literary critics, gatekeepers of official verse culture, and those who bestow awards and certifications, as well as poets themselves, need to take note. The ghosts haunting American poetry are not just those of what poetry has been, but also the spirits of what it might become.

Chapter Three

“OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

In chapter 1, I illustrated how poetry helped to rebrand or broker a position of legitimacy for the magic lantern as a reading machine in the changing media landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The affiliation between poetry and lantern worked to the advantage of both. Poetry lent its formal logics, cultural familiarity, and established religious discourse of lightness and darkness to help transform the lantern from the “lantern of fear” into the “lamp of God.” In turn, the lantern helped poetry to achieve new communicative effects, maintain its cultural standing, and facilitate social activity in ways that existing media, functioning alone or in conjunction with each other, could not. Although this alignment was uneven and relatively brief, it would set in motion a much longer history of screen-based reading and propel a parallel history in which, as the current and subsequent chapters will show, poetry would continue to help purchase or secure the place of other new media in American life. The lantern’s prestige as a reading machine did not last long. The nickelodeon’s popularity (largely between 1905 and 1915) created a need for larger theater spaces, and many auditoriums or performance spaces where the lantern once flourished as a proto–karaoke machine for community singalongs were eventually repurposed as movie theaters.1 In addition to taking over one of the lantern’s physical homes, early cinema was also absorbing and adapting lantern-slide uses by projecting slides between reels, by

80 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

sometimes using text-based slides as intertitles, and by often adopting a relatively unadorned, text-forward intertitle format that recalled some lantern-slide designs and could thus form a bridge between reading via lantern and reading via film. More germane to this chapter, filmmakers seized on and began to redo many of the nineteenth-century poems that had become illustrated lantern-slide standards. Between 1897 and 1922, for instance, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Village Blacksmith” was adapted to film at least seven times. At least five film versions of his Evangeline were produced between 1908 and 1929 and four of The Song of Hiawatha between 1903 and 1913. John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Maud Muller” found its way to screen five times between 1909 and 1928. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was adapted three times between 1898 and 1914, and at least four film versions of his Enoch Arden were released between 1911 and 1916. All told, the Internet Movie Database affords Longfellow forty-four writing credits, Whittier sixteen, and Tennyson thirty-six. As such titles and writing credits suggest, film’s emergence in the United States was conducted in relation to poetry more frequently than one might anticipate, and one of this chapter’s goals—and also of the chapter that follows—is thus quite simple: to introduce the sustained relationship between these two art forms as a broad topic of study for film, literature, and media scholars, including but not limited to those who focus on adaptation theories, which have been far more concerned with the adaptation of novels and comic books, for example, than with poetry.2 From silent films like those mentioned above to Paramount’s first talking short subject Builders in 1928 (“a symphony in noise” based on Edgar Guest’s poem “The Song of the Builder”); from the quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” that appears at the beginning of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) to the feature-length adaptations of Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 booklength poems The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949) and The Wild Party (James Ivory, 1975); and from the recitation of W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” in Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994) to the electronically scrolling version of William Butler Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001), movies have from nearly the very beginning been bringing poems—long and short, in part or whole, as the basis for entire film scenarios or as parts within films, via the additional mediation of intertitle, voice, printed book, or computer—to the screen and, in the process, to audiences of millions.3

81 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

Poetry brokered the advent of film in many ways, however, not just at the level of adaptation. Thus, a second and more specific goal of this chapter is to reveal the various strategies of affiliation and disaffiliation by which the silent film industry attempted to manage and motivate its relationship to poetry. So many movies have adapted or incorporated poetry in so many ways that no single chapter can cover or explore the subject fully, but I do want to tease out of that early film archive of remediated poems and related materials an ongoing, constitutive, and fundamentally compensatory discourse about poetry on which film’s emergence was predicated and to which—as the following chapter will also show—filmmakers and their cinematic support system have regularly returned for purposes of selfdefinition and even self-defense. Only to some extent did poetry serve the drive for film’s cultural respectability that scholars such as William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson have traced.4 Compared to the relatively symbiotic dynamic between the lantern and poetry, wherein each worked to help revitalize or modernize the other, early film’s remediation of poetry was more antagonistic, if not at times outright hostile. Indeed, motivated by a sense of its own limitations or shortcomings as a medium—its lack of sound capabilities and its unwelcome dependence on print for the production of intertitles—early film made poetry, poetry’s ties to other media, and poetry’s accumulated or imagined cultural and aesthetic values into a sometimes positive, often negative foil against which to construct its legitimacy as a new medium. In the early industry’s discourse—and decades before experimental film began understanding and articulating its aesthetic and social goals via what David E. James calls “analogies with poetry”—film sought regularly to define itself in relation to poetry, going out of its way to identify poetry as an artistic predecessor and often casting film as an outgrowth of, if not heir apparent to “the spirit of poetry,” a term that Frank E. Woods used in 1915 to describe what audiences were experiencing in D. W. Griffith’s movies.5 Not only did film reviews and advertisements reinforce this genealogical linkage by using phrases such as “a motion picture poem,” “a pictorialized poem,” “a poem in pictures” “an optical poem,” and “a photo-poem,” but at one point or another the entire industry was figured as a collection of poets or people defecting from poetry to film: poet-screenwriters, poetdirectors, poetry-writing union workers and trade journals, even poetrymaking studios.6 At the same time, filmmakers staged a corresponding

82 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

on-screen discourse that regularly depicted poetry and the activity of writing poetry in the modern world as trivial, impractical, and obsolete. Some films went so far as to thematize this obsolescence in stories about poets dying—stories that no doubt served as a form of parricidal wish-fulfillment that imagined doing away with poetry in order to usurp its position of artistic prestige. Indeed, Chicago Daily News drama critic Amy Leslie would offer some of the highest praise an early film could hope to get when, instead of describing it as a form of poetry (i.e., a “poem in pictures”), she gushed that Antony and Cleopatra (Enrico Guazzoni, 1913) “held the audience in a spell no manner of word or mouth or poet could have wrought.” “Thus,” she triumphantly concluded, “can the silent drama outstrip mere poetic words, words, words! They do not say so. They do it” (emphasis added).7 Such tactics may have been rhetorically effective, but the outstripping of “mere poetic words” proved more difficult in practice, as the use of intertitles (and often the need to “say so”) consistently exposed film’s lack of sound capability and maintained an unwelcome dependence on print, as intertitles were filmed pieces of text spliced between action sequences. The resulting frustration—expressed in discussions about how much text to use, the speed at which to present it, and whether it should be an aesthetic opportunity or a utilitarian tool—concerned many filmmakers, not just those seeking to adapt poems, but poem-film adaptations were especially charged sites of that frustration. On the one hand, audiences were so familiar with many poems that their adaptation required fewer intertitles than other source materials and thus afforded film a greater amount of independence from the “words, words, words” of its print and oral predecessors.8 The fact that many of those poems were widely memorized made them even more attractive as source texts.9 On the other hand, any quoting from those texts introduced language at its most musical. Rhymed, metered, and employing a range of other devices that appealed specifically to the ear, poetry intertitles served as an unwelcome reminder of film’s technological limitations and its reliance on the media and art forms it sought to harness, supplant, outstrip, or leave behind. If a 1915 Saturday Evening Post blurb quoted in an advertisement for Christy Cabanne’s version of Enoch Arden is any indication, some audience members may not have needed much in the way of a prompt to remind them of film’s limits, as a mere image from an adapted well-known poem could move a viewer to supply the sounds or words that movies by themselves could not. As “the click of the machine was lost in

83 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

the booming of breakers on far-off beaches,” the Post reports, “longforgotten lines of smooth-running verse came back to us all.”10 Film producers and advocates managed this predicament in different ways. In his 1912 essay “Edison Poetry, Pathos and Humor,” for example, Louis Reeves Harrison denied it altogether, writing that “it has already been proven that the voice, powerful as it is as a medium, may be dispensed with.”11 Attempting “to furnish pictures which shall not only be attractive to the eye, but which shall also engage the auditor in its oral or vocal description,” the Kalem Company took another approach modeled on the illustrated slide sequences of magic-lantern projections that frequently went hand-in-hand with poem recitations, starting a project in 1908 “to reproduce Longfellow’s beautiful poem ‘Evangeline,’ the pictures to follow the text as the poem is being read [aloud].”12 Some theaters followed suit by removing intertitles and reading them out loud to eliminate their on-screen interruptions. That said, some films—and here I want to use Edwin S. Porter’s adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in The Night Before Christmas (1905) and Griffith’s adaptations of Charles Kingsley’s “The Three Fishers” in The Unchanging Sea (1910) and Tennyson’s poem in Enoch Arden (1911) as primary examples—not only managed the predicament of incorporating poem intertitles but devised ways to resolve it, turning the potential display of film’s technological limitation into an opportunity to identify and showcase film’s particular abilities and even stake a claim to its independence from print and sound. In finding a way through, rather than around, the problem of film’s relationship to print and sound, The Night Before Christmas, The Unchanging Sea, and Enoch Arden are especially noteworthy for how they one-up, outstrip, defang, and even (in the case of Griffith’s films) depoeticize their source texts so that audiences would—as the title of this chapter and a 1912 Rex Motion Picture Company advertisement for Love’s Four Stone Walls suggests—“overlook the poem” and its print or oral sources and “look the picture over” instead.13 OFF- SCREEN

From 1908 to 1915 or so, Motion Picture News, Variety, and especially the influential trade journal The Moving Picture World reported on or mentioned more than seventy-five poems by a diverse range of writers being adapted in one way or another to the screen—a shocking sign of poetry’s

84 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

cultural currency and prestige during an age in which, according to many of its critics and advocates both then and now, it was supposedly occupying or being pushed to a place on the cultural margin.14 More adaptations would come in the following years, but in some ways a simple list of titles obscures the intensity with which the film industry was elsewhere steeping itself in and defining itself in relation to poetry. This intensity appears to have reached a particularly high pitch during 1914 and 1915, when, according to accounts in Moving Picture World, Motion Picture News, and Variety, more than thirty-five poems were made into movies. These projects were matched by a correspondingly high rate of reviews and other discussions comparing film to poetry. Sixty Years a Queen (Bert Haldane, 1913), for example, is described as “a veritable poem of a great ruler’s intimate life.”15 Lincoln the Lover (Ralph Ince, 1914) “rises to vision and kindles the imagination like poetry,” A Good Little Devil (Edwin S. Porter, 1914) “is poetry and fantasy, mingled with reality,” and An Odyssey of the North (Hobart Bosworth, 1914) is “a rare combination of poetry, romance and thrill.”16 Scenes in Frou Frou (Eugene Moore, 1914) and The Inscription (Edgar Jones, 1914) are respectively praised for being “full of poetry” and “filled with poetry,” and Émile Chautard, director of The Little Dutch Girl (1915), “shows how the atmosphere of poetry may be brought to the screen.”17 The Perils of Pauline (Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie, 1914) contains “fine touches of poetry,” and the “delightful comedy prologue” to A Gentleman for a Day (Thanhouser, 1914) is “full of poetry and childhood spirit.”18 Three separate ads for The Story of the Blood-Red Rose (Colin Campbell, 1914) describe the film as “the very poetry of picture making,” “the poetry of photoplay making,” and “the poetry of picture-play making.”19 Other writers push the comparison even further. In an enthusiastic review of Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience: or “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (1914), a film based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” and that also includes quotations from the poem “Annabel Lee,” Louis Reeves Harrison argues, “There is something in the photo drama that Poe’s own work seems to lack, ‘The Message’. . . . this message [thou shalt not kill] is only tinkled in the poem—it rings out clear and sweet in the screen story.”20 Six months later, Harrison would extend his comparison, this time along lines of formal similarities, when claiming that movies can “exhibit a metrical beauty of arrangement, like that of a poem.”21

85 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

In addition to films that adapted poems to the screen, twenty or so others from 1914 and 1915 feature characters who are poets. However, instead of hewing to the broader industry discourse seeking to credential film via the “idea” of poetry, such story lines often contribute to a counterdiscourse disparaging, trivializing, or dismissing poets and the activity of poetry writing.22 This discourse often took one of two forms, frequently for comedic effect. Following the model of The Persistent Poet (Lubin, 1909)—in which a really bad poet insists on reading his poems to “unwilling victims”—some of these story lines typecast the poet as hapless, weak, inappropriate, socially retrograde, a pretender deluded about his talent, someone working in an outmoded form, and so on.23 A “spineless poet” in The Millinery Man (Joseph Kaufman, 1915) is punched out.24 A “starving poet” in A Disciple of Plato (Lee Beggs, 1915) flirts with a chef’s wife, not for love but to get fed.25 In Syd’s Love Affair (Sidney De Gray, 1915), “Syd meets a hypnotist who makes him believe he is a great poet, whereupon Syd creates ‘An Ode to His Dog Schneider’ ” and “recites this to several people with disastrous results,” including “his girl, who drenches him with water and orders him out.”26 Hi Judd, the main character of It’s No Laughing Matter (Lois Weber, 1915), is described as “a village postmaster, poet, town cut-up, hen-pecked husband, and philosopher . . . wearing spectacles that sit on the end of his nose . . . [and] woolen socks which are prone to gather about his ankles.”27 He is, another review explains, “a sort of inglorious Browning, for he sees mostly the good in life and he is always ready with a laugh and a joke.”28 Topsy-Turvy Sweedie (Essanay, 1914) includes a “distracted writer of verse”; François Villon in Monsieur Bluebeard (Charles Giblyn, 1914) is a “vagabond poet”; and the poet in Martin Eden (Hobart Bosworth, 1914) is a socialist.29 When Dolly from the twelve-part series The Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies (Walter Edwin, 1914) writes a poem, she sends it out for publication to— where else?—the Jester magazine. If such story lines work to convince audiences to not take poets or poetry writing seriously, others take a more ingenious approach and work, in what I read as a type of wish fulfillment, to stage, herald, or figure poetry’s disappearance or death. Insofar as they do so, such films follow in the footsteps of The Unappreciated Genius (Edwin S. Porter, 1908), in which a poet finds that someone has used his poem as kindling for a fire, understands that “the charred bits on the grate tell the unhappy story,” and then dies by

86 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

suicide.30 In visiting the range of the character May West in The “Pote Lariat” of the Flying A (Lorimer Johnston, 1914), a “European poet laureate” unintentionally inspires a cowpuncher to “be a ‘pote lariat’ and make enough money to buy a saloon.” The cowboy “indites his first poem about ‘the big red stere,’ ” pens another one on the occasion of West’s birthday, and composes his final one only to be trampled to death in the thinly veiled aesthetic condemnation of a cattle stampede.31 In the fiftieth episode of the serial Our Mutual Girl (Jack Noble, 1914), a newspaper editor asks Margaret to “make an illustration for a poem of great strength”; when she has finished, “the art editor fairly sobs out over the wire that the poem has been discarded” and that a “story has been substituted” (my emphasis).32 And in Heart Beats; or, The Useless Crime (Savoia Film, 1914), an artist-actor named Hazel forgoes marrying her financially strapped true love in favor of an affluent “celebrated poet.” When the poet fakes his own death and discovers “that by his marriage to Hazel he has broken her heart,” he chooses to stay dead and bequeaths to her his fortune. “What would be the use,” Moving Picture World’s plot summary asks, “of returning to life?”33 Writ large, Heart Beats—its very title evoking poetic meter—is film’s fantasy of poetry voluntarily going “gentle into that good night” and bequeathing its artistic riches to the movies. This discourse about poetry and its relationship to film was not limited to discussions or descriptions of the final, on-screen product but also extended—as even my narrow focus on 1914 and 1915 indicates—to nearly every level of the motion picture industry. Griffith, as I have already mentioned, was praised for harnessing “the spirit of poetry,” and James Searle Dawley, who directed 149 films between 1907 and 1926, including The Charge of the Light Brigade (1912), was billed as “the poet of the screen.”34 In the realm of intertitles, Epes Winthrop Sargent credited Albert Stillman with being the “originator of the metred leader” and the “screen poem.” Sargent’s 1914 “Photoplaywright” column for Moving Picture World showcased a letter from Clarence J. Harris explaining, of his own screenwriting endeavors, “I work very hard over titles, and being a great reader and admirer of [Robert] Browning, I draw heavily from him for inspiration and help in title writing.”35 A year after printing Harris’s letter, Sargent would extend the reach of poetic logic to the writing of scenarios as well by including correspondence from Emily Brown Heininger, who argued that her endeavors were “something like poetry—anybody can learn how poetry ought to

87 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

look to deserve its name, but how to put real thoughts and sentiments into poetic form is an art that only those who are born with a poet’s talent can acquire.”36 In 1914, screenwriter Henry J. Vernot would be identified as “a poet, too.”37 Actor Frank Dayton was likewise described as “also a poet of great ability,” and R. Henderson Bland was called “more than an actor. He is a poet—a real one, not of the rear variety.”38 Indeed, it seems that nearly everyone attached to the industry—including the workers in the Moving Picture Operators’ Local Union No. 75 of Peoria and Pekin, Illinois—was capable of bringing the legacies of poetry to film. For, as Moving Picture World reported, “David C. Adams, secretary of Local 75, is something of a poet.”39 In spirit and on screen, in intertitles, scenarios, acting, and projection, poets and people defecting from the world of poetry (or perhaps escaping its sinking ship) thus came together to work in a new type of poetry factory. Vitagraph’s new plant in Flatbush “looks like a fort,” one writer reported. “But in this building the most elusive emotions that a poet can imagine will be given, as it were, a living body that millions may see and recognize”—this filmic “living body” standing in stark contrast to the poets’ dead bodies mentioned in the previous paragraph.40 Even Moving Picture World made sure to tie itself to this endeavor. In 1914 the journal declared itself to be “writing the epic of the motion picture business: every week we get out a canto.” 41 ON- SCREEN

Cinema’s ambivalent regard for poetry extended to the structure of individual film adaptations of poems as well, especially in the use of verse intertitles and the relationship between those intertitles and the films of which they were a part. As I have suggested, poems offered familiar, often previously remediated or adapted source texts that filmmakers could rework with minimal reliance on print and sound technologies. Such sources were not easy to come by: as Moving Picture World wrote in 1911, “How many stories are there, either in prose or rhyme, to which allusion can be made before the average audience with the assurance of being understood? You may probably count them on the fingers of one hand. A popular classic is a precious possession.” 42 In what many people regard as the first book of film criticism, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), poet Vachel Lindsay underscored the importance of such material, arguing that “the fewer words

88 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

printed on the screen the better.” 43 As strong as this impulse to wordlessness was, however, films nevertheless found in the incorporation of poetic language various uses and effects beyond dialogue and exposition. As Sarah Berry observes, some filmmakers used verse intertitles to cultivate a “lyric mode of temporality” that could operate in “complex interplay—and occasional antagonism” with the “typical narrative temporality” of “the classical Hollywood style of narration.” 44 Other films, like Porter’s The Night Before Christmas and two adaptations directed by Griffith, The Unchanging Sea and Enoch Arden, found in the predicament of poem intertitles an occasion to face down poetry as an artistic predecessor while also staking out film’s independence from sound and print. Just as the place of poetry in the history of silent film has been largely overlooked, so, too, have scholars afforded Porter and Griffith important places as innovators in film history without giving much credit to the extent to which their innovations entailed the use of poetry and poetry intertitles. Porter worked for the Edison Manufacturing Company, helped to organize the Rex Motion Picture Company, made over 250 films, and has been credited with helping to make the shot, rather than the scene, the basic unit of film structure. Griffith’s contributions to the narrativization of film— his use of cutaway shots, parallel editing, close-ups, camera placement, and so on—are also widely known. These and other formal and artistic innovations are on display in The Night Before Christmas, The Unchanging Sea, and Enoch Arden, and thus they make for powerful filmic environments in which to situate and examine film’s broader relationship to poetry, print, and sound. The Night Before Christmas is noteworthy for its elaborate sets, miniatures, special effects, and use of crosscutting. Enoch Arden contains an early film flashback and a then-uncommon use of the close-up. Along with The Unchanging Sea, it has been cited for its pioneering or innovative use of parallel action and cutaway shots.45 Eileen Bowser credits “the quiet pace, the restraint of the actors, the avoidance of dramatic gestures, [and] the still figures viewed in back-to-the-camera shots” in the Griffith films with “mark[ing] a change in American film style in general.” 46 Moreover, as one of the first two-reel pictures, Enoch Arden became a milestone in film length and thus an important moment in the development of feature-length cinema. It is no coincidence, I argue, that all three films take poetry as the occasion for which to display these and other innovations.

89 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

Importantly—and this is another reason to connect these films—many of the verse intertitles in The Night Before Christmas, The Unchanging Sea, and Enoch Arden are in fact unnecessary for storytelling purposes. Excerpts of poems “to which allusion can be made before the average audience with the assurance of being understood,” their source texts were so well known that the film versions would have required little to no text in the way of intertitle exposition or dialogue. As the following material shows, Porter and Griffith directed those intertitles to serve other ends. Given its seasonal appeal and history of memorization, performance, parody, quotation, and illustrated print editions, Porter’s choice of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” needs as little in the way of introduction today as it would have in 1905. Moving Picture World wrote in 1909, “Every American child knows the story of ‘Santa Claus and the Night Before Christmas,’ ” and in 1912 an anonymous New York Times writer called it “the deathless poem.” 47 “Nothing,” the Times wrote, “not even excepting Dickens’s favorite ‘Christmas Carol,’ has ever been written on the subject of Christmas for children that has enjoyed greater popularity than this poem.” 48 It may surprise today’s readers, but Enoch Arden was also a widely known “popular classic” in the years surrounding Griffith’s film variations. In fact, when Moving Picture World was discussing the scarcity of stories “to which allusion can be made . . . with the assurance of being understood,” it was in fact doing so in response to Griffith’s 1911 film. “A popular classic is a precious possession,” ran the review, “and in the treasury of English literature there is none more sure of immortality than ‘Enoch Arden.’ ” 49 Another reviewer stated, “The story is so well known that no repetition seems necessary.”50 Biograph banked on this familiarity as well, reminding readers in the first sentence introducing the film in the Biograph Bulletin that “there is small need to describe this subject as the poem of Lord Tennyson is so well known.”51 Audiences were so familiar with the story via poem, illustrations, stage adaptations, lantern-slide shows, recitations, and even a novelistic adaptation that it became a common reference point—“sort of an ‘Enoch Arden’ plot,” “an Enoch Arden sort of affair,” a “latter day treatment of the Enoch Arden theme,” etc.—to describe similar works.52 This is likely why, even though The Unchanging Sea announces itself as “Suggested by Charles Kingsley’s Poem ‘The Three Fishers,’ ” its comparable story of lovers separated by a storm at sea was also advertised as “a subject on the life of Enoch Arden.”53

90 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

As with “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” a wide range of audiences in the years immediately surrounding Griffith’s adaptations would also have been familiar with Tennyson’s poem as a vocal performance, often incorporating the piano accompaniment composed in 1897 by Richard Strauss for the German actor Ernst von Possart. The New York Times reports that Max Heinrich presented it in recitals in 1909, 1910, and 1914; that Amy Grant did so yearly from 1910 to 1913; and that performances were given in 1911 to benefit the Finch School Neighborhood House Day Nursery and in 1914 for the Wayside Home. Marion Leland performed it at Cooper Union in February 1911 and David Bispham at Carnegie Hall in December 1910, and Jacob Adler led a Yiddish version of it in 1906. Nor did the film dampen audiences’ interest in the poem’s live performance and auditory past. After the release of Griffith’s 1911 version, W. Stephen Bush began to offer “lecture work, rendered in a resonant musical voice” to accompany the movie. Of a  screening and lecture pairing at the Park Theatre in Brooklyn, one reviewer—again pressing the relationship between poetry and film, this time to the detriment of film—would remark, “Without Mr. Bush, Enoch Arden would have been only half as good as it was. Mr. Bush has the happy qualification of being a poet by nature.”54 Pushing film’s artistic and technical frontiers, yet having to perpetually confront its limitations, Porter and Griffith must have realized that, while the popularity of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” and Enoch Arden made for excellent source material, the films would also need in some way to acknowledge or address the source texts’ status as poetry as well as the dynamic print and oral experiences that those poems would inevitably evoke. Ultimately, neither director needed the words of the poem, and, in choosing to include them, opened a counterintuitive but nonetheless real opportunity to show off the capabilities of film while presenting possible ways to resolve its fraught relationships with poetry, print, and sound. A December 16, 1905 New York Clipper advertisement for Porter’s nine-minute “Faithful Reproduction in Motion Pictures of the Time-Honored Christmas Legend, in Twelve Beautiful Scenes” subtly previews this drama, first converting Moore’s poem into a “legend” and then, in the final description of its sceneby-scene film outline, teasing audiences with the prospect of not just seeing the scene acted out but also somehow experiencing Santa’s famous spoken last line of the poem in a new way via silent film:

91 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

Santa Claus Feeding His Reindeer—Santa Claus in His Workshop—Santa Claus Looking Over His Books—Children Hanging Their Stockings—Children Romping and Peeking—Santa Claus Leaving His Castle in the Frozen North—Santa Claus on the Journey (Panoramic View Covering Thousands of Miles)—On the Roof and down the Chimney—Filling the Stockings—Christmas Morning—Christmas Tree Party—“Merry Christmas to All and to All a Good Night.”55

As we shall see, this moment both brought Porter’s film to a close and completed a more extended, step-by-step demonstration of film’s independence from print. The Night Before Christmas is not exactly the “faithful reproduction” of Moore’s poem that it was billed to be. It adds a fair amount of backstory— St. Nicholas feeding a herd of reindeer, working in his shop, and so on— and makes other changes, including a rowdy pillow fight the children have when, according to the poem, they should in fact be “snug in their beds.”56 For scenes not in the poem, it uses a painted backdrop and miniatures, and it incorporates special effects still capable of taking one’s breath away, like those in which St. Nicholas rides in his sleigh over hills and mountains and then takes flight en route to the poem’s featured house. Along the way, it less-than-faithfully quotes five passages from the original text via five unadorned, sans-serif intertitles that reformat Moore’s tetrameter couplets as dimeter quatrains, giving the impression, perhaps, that the film is excerpting more of the poem than it actually is—an impression reinforced by the capitalization of each intertitle line and the use of periods that turn single sentences from the poem into two on screen. The first intertitle appears more than a quarter of the way into the film, prefacing the scene in which the family hangs up its stockings (figure 3.1). The second (“The children were nestled, / All snug in their beds. / While visions of sugarplums, / Danced in their heads.”) comes twenty seconds later, opening the pillow-fight scene. The third (“Now Dasher! Now Dancer! / Now Prancer and Vixen! / On! Comet; on! Cupid; / On! Dunder and Blitzen”) follows two minutes after that, immediately after St. Nicholas exits the screen with a bag of toys over his shoulder and just before the scene in which he flies over the moon. The fourth (“So up to the house-top, / The coursers they flew. / With sleigh full of toys, / And St. Nicholas too.”) comes three-quarters of the way through, just after the sleigh arrives on the housetop. And the final

92 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

FIGURE 3.1 Screenshot of first intertitle from The Night Before Christmas (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1905).

(“He had a broad face, / And a little round belly. / That shook when he laughed, / Like a bowl-full of jelly.”) comes a minute before the end, just as St. Nicholas disappears up the chimney. At first glance, the purpose for including these excerpts appears inconsistent and perhaps haphazard. The first, for example, prefaces and describes the scene that follows and thus, serving no necessary expository or dialogic role, seems redundant. The second contradicts the action in the corresponding scene (the kids are pillow-fighting, not “snug in their beds”), not at all “helping the audience to maintain a conscious correspondence between the screen drama and the book,” as film historian Charles Musser contends.57 The third functions in lieu of a shot of St. Nicholas speaking and while he is off-screen, more reasonably augmenting the visual rather than duplicating or contradicting it. The fourth follows an action we have just seen and thus, like the first, seems superfluous. The fifth, describing St. Nicholas’s face and belly long after his first screen appearance, is likewise unnecessary. And a sixth does not appear when a viewer might most expect it—before or after the film’s final shot, a close-up of Santa speaking “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.” Instead, the work of a sixth intertitle is accomplished by a caption in the moving image itself, superimposed on Santa’s

93 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

FIGURE 3.2 Still photograph of final scene of The Night Before Christmas (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1905). Paper Print Fragments Collection, Library of Congress.

body at the bottom of the screen and styled so that the “typeface” looks icy and snow-covered—one of the earliest subtitles in history (figure 3.2). William F. Van Wert has suggested that filmmakers used redundant or inconsistent intertitles like those above in order to “suspen[d] the fascination of the imagery, calling attention to the process of viewing itself, before triggering some new incongruity in the images.”58 The intertitles in The Night Before Christmas do more than that, however. In Porter’s hands, they also serve as a set of occasions to demonstrate and even show off the capabilities of film for the eventual purposes of exhibiting the medium’s independence from print. Indeed, by the time the first intertitle (“The stockings were hung . . .”) appears more than two minutes in, the film has already established via the invented backstory that it can tell a story without “words printed on the screen.” But by juxtaposing the visually austere print-based passage from Moore’s poem with the moving scene that follows, The Night Before Christmas begins a side-by-side or back-and-forth comparison of film and print narration, offering readers a choice between the two: a denatured passage from the poem or the scene itself. The gag that the second

94 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

intertitle helps execute—anchored in the contradiction between what we read and what we see—is not just a joke that print poetry can’t perform; it also contrasts the received and “fixed” print narrative with the revisionary imagination offered by film. Print and oral versions of the poem are “snug in their beds” and dreaming, as it were, while film is alive, excited, full of energy, and bringing those dreams to life. In so rejecting the source text, this moment also anticipates or tropes the rejection of print as a whole that happens via subtitle at the film’s end. The fourth and fifth intertitles extend this comparative motif, using the heightened special effects of their corresponding and surrounding scenes to amplify the contrast; after the sleigh flight, and after Santa waves his arms and makes a fully trimmed Christmas tree appear in the family’s living room, the print version seems far less versatile and magical than what Tom Gunning has called the “illusory power” of the counternarrative “cinema of attractions.”59 Only the film’s third intertitle—a piece of filmed printed text that can represent sound when the source of that sound (“Now Dasher! Now Dancer!”) is absent and technically impossible for silent film to produce— raises a legitimate claim for the power of print on screen, but like a good rhetorician Porter raises the issue for the purpose of resolving it by the end. Indeed, piggybacking on the poem’s famous last line, The Night Before Christmas concludes its demonstration of film’s capabilities by doing away altogether with intertitles and their print interruptions. Using special effects to accomplish what its one justifiably functional intertitle accomplishes, the representation of sound, Porter moves film into a new realm where it may incorporate language but, as Lindsay imagined, have “no words printed on it at all” (emphasis added). Given the choice of poem, the quoting of the last line in the New York Clipper advertisement, the final close-up of St. Nicholas speaking, and the broader culture of what Eileen Bowser calls “community singing” in early cinema, it is entirely possible that audiences raised their own voices to join Santa’s at this point.60 If so, Porter’s movingpicture letters create a bridge from the oral to the filmic, locating the movie’s soundtrack in the audience and the participatory world of orality while staging a media history in which print becomes little more than a transitional medium. Despite reducing the text of Moore’s poem to a few incorrectly quoted passages, The Night Before Christmas nevertheless remains connected to the

95 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

genre and text of its source material, if only to show off or promise film’s independence from print. In a sequence of three movies from 1908 to 1911, D. W. Griffith discovers a variety of ways that don’t just move film even further away from poetry but work to completely sever that connection and, in the process, also sever film’s links to the print and oral economies with which poetry was associated. After Many Years (1908), The Unchanging Sea (1910), and Enoch Arden (1911) variously rework the narrative of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden in which two lovers (Enoch and Annie) are separated by a catastrophe at sea—a narrative that I view as troping the estrangement between poetry and film. As in Tennyson’s poem, the Enochs and Annies of After Many Years and Enoch Arden are divided by shipwreck when Enoch is marooned on an island, while the Enoch figure in The Unchanging Sea loses his memory after almost drowning in a shipwreck and is in that way metaphorically “marooned” and thus also parted from his beloved. After Many Years and The Unchanging Sea have happy endings—Enoch finds his way home and reunites with Annie in the former, and recovers his memory and reunites with her in the latter—while Enoch Arden follows Tennyson’s plot more closely, as Enoch returns home to find Annie partnered with Philip, a former rival for her love, then chooses to not interfere in what he perceives to be her happiness and dies. Among other things, these separation plots afforded Griffith the occasion to explore parallel editing for its storytelling, emotional, and psychological effects, cutting, for example, from Enoch marooned on his island to Annie pining for his return at home. For Tom Gunning, the parallel editing in After Many Years “contains the essence of . . . psychological editing: an interruption of a line of action reveals a character’s thoughts or emotions.”61 For James W. Hood, it gives viewers a “sense of the lovers’ transtemporal and trans-spatial communication” anchored in specifically Victorian spiritual sensibilities. Griffith’s crosscutting “so constrains the viewer’s perception,” he argues, “that one has no choice but to conclude that a synchronous and equivalent spiritual connection exists between the lovers separated by time and space.”62 Maureen Turim calls Griffith’s crosscutting a “triumph,” partly because “it can generate a complex interaction between objective narrative modes and the subjectivity of desire.” 63 For Thomas Leitch, it tropes how characters in Enoch Arden “change their minds in crucial ways.” 64 The fact that Griffith chose the Tennyson and Kingsley

96 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

poems as the grounds on which to stage crosscutting innovations also begs us to consider the technique in relation to the broader subject of film’s relationship to poetry. Indeed, just as the parallel editing in action sequences helps to dramatize the lovers’ spatial and temporal separation, so that connection between form and content informs the nature of the cut from film to poetry and picture to text that takes place via intertitle editing as well. In a sense, the relationship between film and poetry becomes the shadow story to Enoch and Annie’s tale of love and separation, both dramatized and experienced in new ways via the cutting from picture to text, shot to shot, and one narrative or expressive mode to another. And in Griffith’s hands— Aaron Sultanik calls him “the original film poet,” and The Moving Picture World would praise the 1911 Enoch Arden as “a motion picture poem, pure and simple”—the ending to that shadow story is not a happy one for poetry.65 Fourteen minutes long, The Unchanging Sea divides the first and third stanzas of Kingsley’s popular three-stanza poem from 1851 across four intertitles, all of which appear in the film’s first half (see figure 3.3 for the first of these). Notably, Griffith does not incorporate the poem’s second stanza,

FIGURE 3.3 Screenshot of first intertitle from The Unchanging Sea (Biograph Company, 1910).

97 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

which, operating within the poem itself, creates the type of parallel editing effect Griffith sought to achieve via film. Here is that stanza: Three wives sat up in the light-house tower, And they trimm’d the lamps as the sun went down; They look’d at the squall, and they look’d at the shower, And the night rack came rolling up ragged and brown! But men must work, and women must weep, Though storms be sudden, and waters deep, And the harbor bar be moaning.

In the first stanza, three fishers head to sea; in the second, while the men are at sea, the poem cuts to their wives sitting in the lighthouse and worrying as a storm rolls in; in the third, the men’s corpses wash onto the shore. By removing the second stanza—which asks readers to do their own imaginative cutting between the women and men, shore and sea, and lighthouse and boat— Griffith claims for film the poem’s crosscutting effects and reduces “The Three Fishers” to a single focalizing point of view. To keep the juxtaposition of women and men established by the second stanza, however, he also has to alter the wording of the first, changing the “camera direction” of Kingsley’s original from “the children stood watching them out of the town” to “the women stood watching them out of the town” (emphasis added; figure  3.3). Not only does The Unchanging Sea substitute itself as the source of the second stanza’s crosscutting effect, but by eliminating the children’s perspective, it also takes the poem’s tripartite emotional complex—which would have presented a far more innovative or difficult set of crosscuts for early film—and reduces it to the male–female one. As the film’s non-poem intertitles constantly remind us—”Will they ever return?,” “Still hopeful they may return,” “Restored to health but his memory a blank,” “Familiar scenes restore his memory”—The Unchanging Sea is a story of loss and restoration. It is all the more telling that, while quotations from Kingsley open the film, Griffith abandons the poem just over a third of the way through in favor of decidedly nonpoetic language. In other words, while the main character comes back from sea, and while his memory ultimately returns, the text of Kingsley’s poem does not. The final six intertitles are all clipped, expository text (“Years roll by,” “Their child now grown,” “The boy perseveres,” and so on), and despite the historically

98 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

mnemonic functions and associations of poetry and poetic language, the film narrates its main character’s recovery in prose. In fact, what I find to be the most moving—one might say the most poetic—set of crosscuts in The Unchanging Sea occurs at the end, when the husband goes back to sea, initiating the chain of events that restore his memory. Relegated to the first half of the story’s subject of loss (lost with the other fishers who died and “who will never come back to town”), poetry does not facilitate the husband’s recovery or the reunion with his wife as Kingsley’s refrain given via intertitle twice earlier might lead viewers to expect. Instead, as the final intertitle informs us, “Familiar scenes” do. “Each one of [Griffith’s] films,” writes Mikhail Iampolski, “represses its own source.” 66 And indeed, by the end of The Unchanging Sea, we have a story in which everything is remembered and in its original place except for the film’s source genre, which we are ironically encouraged to forget and replace with the poetry of film. If The Unchanging Sea quite literally pushes poetry out of the picture, Griffith’s Enoch Arden brings it back, only to stage its disappearance in new and different ways: in intertitles that strip Tennyson’s original of its poetic features and thus eliminate the differences between poetry and other types of on-screen text, and in a narrative that makes Enoch into a figure for poetry and poetry’s links to other media more generally. In The Unchanging Sea, Griffith maintained a typographical distinction between the intertitles’ poetry and prose, consistently formatting the expository intertitles in roman type and the poem excerpts in italics while preserving the lineation and line indentations of Kingsley’s original. In Enoch Arden, however, he not only abandons the typographic distinction between poetry and prose—all text, regardless of source or genre, appears in italicized capital lettering—but he typically forgoes Tennyson’s line breaks as well, turning lines such as Ev’n to the last dip of the vanishing sail She watch’d it, and departed weeping for him

into Ev’n to the last Dip of the vanishing Sail she watches it,

99 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

And departed Weeping for him (FIGURE 3.4)

Even though Griffith uses quotation marks to signal that the lines are from Tennyson, the formatting changes—the conversion of the passage from two lines to five, the change in line breaks, the change from left to center justification, and the typographical similarity with other, nonpoem intertitles— have the effect of eliding the visual difference between poetry and prose. They also quiet the acoustic appeals of the poem’s meter, line pacing, line breaks, and alliteration that, as I suggested earlier, would have otherwise called attention to film’s lack of sound capabilities by way of intermedia contrast. Thus, the quotation marks used here and in three other poem intertitles are misleading if not disingenuous. These may be Tennyson’s words, but in many ways—especially in regard to the particular form those words take—they constitute Griffith’s poem. An aspiring poet who recited verse on set and who was said himself to “speak metrically” and “in iambic pentameters of a sort,” Griffith knew poetic form and knew, as well, the effects his intertitles would have on it.67 Standardizing the formatting of almost every intertitle, Enoch Arden mixes “direct” quotations like the one above with passages quoted nearly

FIGURE 3.4 Screenshot of intertitle from Enoch Arden (Biograph Company, 1911).

100 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

word for word but without quotation marks, plot summaries (“Enoch tells his wife / of his intended voyage”), time markers that essentially serve as chapter headings (“After the wedding of / Enoch and Annie”), and, in the fifth intertitle, a severely redacted section of Tennyson that condenses the eighty-nine words and twelve lines of the seventeenth stanza to ten words and four lines.68 This mixture effectively eliminates the generic and cultural prestige differences between poetry and other passages as they appear on the screen, and thus also works, as Iampolski has proposed is Griffith’s practice more generally, to efface the genre of the film’s source text. A similar vanishing act goes on at the level of narration. While the poetry does not disappear completely as it did in The Unchanging Sea—for a crucial reason, as I will explain shortly—Enoch Arden nonetheless pushes it to the margin, making Tennyson’s poem the basis of four of nine intertitles in the first thirteen minutes but only two in the final eleven; prose increasingly takes the place of verse. In a more innovative move, Griffith makes Enoch’s character into a figure for poetry itself. Via the lock of his baby’s hair he keeps throughout the film, Enoch is associated with the past, memory, and nostalgia for art and creativity in the period of its “infancy.” He is the only character to whom the film gives voice, and when he does speak, he does so in verse in the final intertitle: O God Almighty, aid me Give me strength Not to tell her, Never to let her Know (FIGURE 3.5)

Enoch Arden goes to significant lengths to signal Enoch’s final words as “poetry” and thus differentiate them from the film’s otherwise highly standardized text. Actually a condensed passage from the original, his words nevertheless appear in quotation marks, which perhaps identifies this as Enoch speaking or (as is Griffith’s practice elsewhere in the film) as a direct quote from Tennyson’s poem.69 Either way, the quotation marks effectively collapse the distinction: when Enoch speaks, he speaks in the verse of the film’s source text. Unlike most of the other intertitles, the text is indented rather than center-justified, adhering to a common mode of poetic

101 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

FIGURE 3.5 Screenshot of final intertitle from Enoch Arden (Biograph Company, 1911).

presentation in narrow-column print contexts (e.g., newspapers), further affirming it as poetry. In choosing an excerpt that begins with the apostrophic “O”—the lyric trope that Jonathan Culler describes as “the very figure of voice”—the fi lm marks Enoch’s speech as acoustically and even quintessentially poetic.70 And despite condensing the original, Griffith not only preserves Tennyson’s line breaks (“strength” and “know”) but also manages, quite remarkably, to maintain the poem’s pentameter as well. Print, sound, and poetry thus converge in the character of Enoch as they do nowhere else in the film. When Enoch returns home and fi nds Annie partnered with Philip in apparent domestic bliss, he voluntarily removes himself from her life, going off to die in the film’s final scene and thus taking with him the artistic form he has come to embody or represent, a conclusion that reworks the previously-mentioned dying-poet plot motifs of The Unappreciated Genius, The “Pote Lariat” of the Flying A, Our Mutual Girl, and Heart Beats. In his act of self-sacrifice, Enoch also takes with him the two media economies—print (newspaper and intertitle) and sound (his voice as well as the poem’s acoustic appeals)—of which poetry was fi rmly a part and from which Griffith’s film seeks its mediumistic independence. The viewer is not entirely

102 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

unprepared for this move, either. More than twenty-five minutes earlier, in fact, the intertitle explaining how Philip cedes Annie’s love to Enoch is formatted in the exact same way as Enoch’s final words; it is the only other intertitle in the film that is not center-justified, is indented, appears in quotation marks, and preserves Tennyson’s line breaks and meter: “‘He slipt aside, and like a wounded life / Crept down into the hollows of the wood.’ ”71 Befitting a film that makes foreshadowing one of its motifs (as in the intertitle “His heart foreshadowing all calamity, he reached the time”), poetry is thus twice linked with would-be suitors who disappear of their own volition. Enoch Arden does more than just stage the death or self-surrender of poetry and film’s corresponding independence from sound and print, however. At the same time that Enoch is witnessing the relationship between Annie and Philip, Griffith also dramatizes film’s ascendance as a medium and artistic form by putting on display its capacities for creating narrative and emotional effects via the parallel editing he had been exploring on the back of Tennyson’s poem since After Many Years. In its last three minutes, from the penultimate intertitle (“Enoch’s crowning sorrow—All that was his another’s”) and the time that Enoch first peers in the window of Annie’s new home until the time of his death, the film uses fourteen cuts, all between Philip and Annie inside the house and Enoch, the film’s figure for poetry, either outside or on his deathbed. Griffith varies the duration of those shots from twenty seconds to one second for maximum dramatic effect, putting on a barrage-like display of film’s crosscutting abilities to stage a moment in which film replaces the sounds, line breaks, parallel effects, and other aspects of poetry as an alternative expressive mode and thus carves out for itself not just a place in the media landscape more broadly but within the realm of art. Thus, when Enoch silently mouths his dying words in the movie’s final shot, we are given no dialogue intertitle, no representation of a voice, and no poem. In Tennyson’s original, Enoch cries, “a sail! a sail! / I am saved.” But this is not a moment of salvation in the film. In Griffith’s hands, it is a moment of silence for poetry’s selfless retreat and a moment acknowledging film’s ascent.72 The advent of commercially viable sound technology would eventually bring to an end film’s predicament regarding the “words, words, words” of print-based intertitles, but movies after the silent era would not let poetry or the subject of poetry go. As the next chapter will show, the silent era’s

103 “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

industry-wide discourse linking the two art forms would continue, epitomized, perhaps, by Orson Welles, who in 1958 would both extend and reinforce that continuity by remarking that “a film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”73 But, freed by sound from its reliance on print, film would rework its relationship with poetry’s accumulated and imagined values and its mercurial media instantiations. Movies in the sound era would rarely depend on poems to provide entire script scenarios as they had in the past—in large part because longer films typically require more material than poems like “The Village Blacksmith” or “The Charge of the Light Brigade” can provide—but filmmakers would continue to incorporate poems or parts of poems into the fabric of their stories on a regular basis. P. Adams Sitney contends that “poetic modes and sources— which were always marginal—became the preserve, by and large, of the avant-garde which emerged after the Second World War.”74 But as this chapter has argued, poetic modes and sources were not in any way marginal in early film, nor would they remain marginal or primarily the province of the avant-garde in the following years. The ongoing character of mainstream cinema’s relationship to poetry in the sound era—and the silent era’s anxieties with poetry that still haunt that reconfigured relationship in surprising ways—are thus the subject of chapter 4.

Chapter Four

ONCE MORE INTO THE FRAY

“Of course,” the December 5, 1929, issue of The Film Daily quotes A. Stueler of Stuttgart, Germany, commenting on the future of “the new motion picture with sound”: The matter is not ended with the solution of the principal technical problems. Psychological improvement must now begin. The motion picture with sound, as an intimate union of hearing and sight has its own possibilities, but also its own laws. Here ends the realm of the technician, while the kingdom of the poet and artist begins. It is their task to create the new motion picture with sound, bringing real life to a complicated mechanism.1

The advent of commercially viable sound capabilities and the resulting “union of hearing and sight” would help put to rest some of film’s insecurities regarding the print and oral media forms that preceded it. But as Stueler’s reference to the “kingdom of the poet and artist” begins to suggest, the world of film would not let go of poetry—or the idea of poetry—in its ongoing attempts to articulate its “own possibilities” and understand its “own laws” in the post–silent film era. As chapter 3 demonstrates, the project of “bringing real life” to the “complicated mechanism” of film via poetry was well underway before Stueler weighed in, and as this chapter will show, sound film inherited and extended

105 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

that history in a variety of ways. Poetry did not become, as Mikhail Iampolski has argued, the “unused reserve” or “dead stock” of cinema, but continued to be, and remains, the subject of film adaptation even though it is overshadowed by popular and scholarly attraction to what he calls the “evolutionary intertext” of the novel.2 Especially in the 1930s, sound film and its expanding cinematic apparatus sustained the silent era’s discourse affiliating film with poetry for the artistic values film might accrue by association. People continued to compare movies to poems and heralded advancements in film technologies for the poetic effects they made possible. Industry publications described movie-making in poetic terms and created an even more detailed picture of a modern cinema—theater owners and publicists, camera operators, directors, and especially Hollywood celebrity actors—populated with poetry readers and writers. Relying less on poems for entire scenarios, sound films nevertheless incorporated poems or parts of poems into the fabric of larger storylines for a whole range of reasons and effects that, as with the silent era, often worked to depict poetry in negative ways and thus disaffiliated film from poetry on screen, however much the industry was affiliating with poetry off screen. As sound film secured its cultural footing as an artistic medium, the metadiscourse used to couple mainstream film and poetry lost some of its urgency and was reanimated by the avant-garde, but the practice of representing poetry on screen continued. The Academy of American Poets lists nearly 250 sound films that incorporate poetry, and that list—limited only to “recognizable, often canonical poems, or excerpts from poems”—is far from complete.3 From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931), in which Dr. Jekyll quotes John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” just prior to turning into Mr. Hyde, to Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012), in which M quotes Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to defend the “double-O” section against government cutbacks, film has been “talking poetry” on a regular basis for nearly ninety years in front of countless numbers of viewers.4 Those films’ potential cumulative effect on the cultural standing of poetry cannot be underestimated, although the size and diversity of that archive, not to mention the many titles omitted from the AAP’s list (including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), makes it a difficult body of work to order, contour, or otherwise describe. One might attempt to map out the various narratives to which poetry has been attached and consider, for instance, the long history of films associating poetry with criminal behavior—films that

106 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

have criminalized poetry or that have poeticized crime.5 What interests me most here, however, is how infrequently audiences since the 1930s have encountered the text of poems to read on screen, as the vast majority of films incorporating poetry in the sound era incorporate it as an acoustic phenomenon. Audiences hear poetry far more frequently than they read it, and, as we shall see, filmmakers go to fairly significant lengths to keep it that way. Despite its now-unimpeachable profile in the larger media economy, its status as an art form, and its long independence from print intertitles, film appears to have all but buried—one might even say repressed—the readable texts of its poetic past, refusing time and again to revisit the poetryrelated media predicaments from which the previous chapter argues film once sought to escape. Because most sound films steadfastly avoid facing this aspect of their past, I want to spend the majority of the present chapter examining some of the exceptions—moments in individual films that do in fact present poems on screen as texts for audiences to read.6 Especially noteworthy for daring to go where so many others have not, such moments in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), G.I. Jane (Ridley Scott, 1997), Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001), and The Grey (Joe Carnahan, 2011) are all the more carefully orchestrated, fraught with significance, unexpectedly innovative, and thick with media-based concerns as they revisit the site of film’s silent-era anxieties. And by facing down or transforming the perceived deficits of film’s history, they continue to make reading poetry a mode of securing film’s place in the media landscape, using verse to negotiate film’s ongoing relationship with print and oral media, and also using it to face the perceived challenges or threats posed by newer media forms in an age where film can not only no longer be imagined as a new medium but in which it might indeed be considered old. OFF- SCREEN

While longer, multireel and feature-length films relied less frequently on poems for plot scenarios than those in the early-to-mid-silent era, filmmakers between 1927 and the early 1940s nevertheless adapted poems by Will Carleton, Frank Desprez, Eugene Field, Edgar Guest, Thomas Hood, Joyce Kilmer, Rudyard Kipling, Bruce Kiskaddon, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edwin Markham, Edgar Allan Poe, James Whitcomb Riley, Sir Walter

107 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

Scott, Robert Service, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and John Greenleaf Whittier. As with earlier films, audience familiarity with the respective source texts was a motivating factor. One reporter, for example, wrote that The Charge of the Light Brigade (Michael Curtiz, 1935), starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, was “being done upon a big scale, on the theory that millions of persons know the poem, however much they may affect to despise Tennyson.”7 And Evangeline (Edwin Carewe, 1929), wrote Don Ashbaugh, “is known to every person that ever droned through its lengthy passages.”8 If such comments suggest or help to create a sense of malaise or tedium regarding people’s encounters with poetry in other media and cultural contexts—a fatigue not present in the 1910s when audiences were consuming poems like Enoch Arden and “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in multiple media forms—it did not carry over to the concept of “poetry” on screen. Indeed, reviewers praised a wide range of films for their poetic achievement. F. W. Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) was “a veritable screen poem of tragedy.”9 Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby (The Man I Killed) (1932) was “a beautiful, living poem,” and The Gay Divorcee (Mark Sandrich, 1934), starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, was “a poem in pictures.”10 Walter Wanger’s Vogues of 1938 (Irving Cummings, 1937) was described as “literally a poem of grace and beauty in color,” and James  A. FitzPatrick’s “Traveltalk” installment Japan in Cherry Blossom Time (1930) was billed as a “veritable poem in pictures.”11 While Martin Quigley Jr. admitted that “the box office value of ‘screen poetry’ is an unknown quantity,” he nonetheless praised “the essence of beauty, both in sight and sound” that he found in Fantasia (Walt Disney, 1940). “In other words,” he concluded, “it bears a closer relationship to poetry than anything hitherto presented.”12 As it did in the silent era, this discourse extended throughout the film industry to characterize its technologies, aspirations, artistic methods, people, and even the places of its production and encounter. A new animation technique coming out of England was described as “a study in the poetry of motion, of rhythm,” for example, and a new illumination process could create “a ‘tint poem’ without actually having a colored film.”13 A review of Resorts and Quaint Towns of the Blue Coast (Paul Devlin, 1938) praised “the camera artist who paints poetry into his scene compositions and studies of people,” and the caption for “an unusual camera study” of the California countryside (perhaps a metonym for nearby Hollywood) “proves again the

108 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

poetry of the well manipulated lens.”14 In 1934, Rouben Mamoulian explained, “My ambition as a director is to convey the rhyme and cadence of poetry in pictorial images,” a sentiment echoed a year later by A. Consiglio, who remarked, “Of all the collaborators in a film the director alone, being untrammeled by any special function, is able to take in the work as a whole at once; and his function can result only from the essential qualities of the poet: taste and intuition.”15 Orson Welles proposed that “a film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”16 Cecil B. DeMille claimed a poetic sensibility for the screenwriter, too, arguing that “a scenario is almost as flexible an art form as the sonnet, and the scenario writer (of a historical picture) has to be allowed at least as much license as the poet in making his material correspond to his medium.”17 In such a collective endeavor, it should not be surprising to learn that Tennyson’s greatgrandson, Pen, would discover his calling in the industry: he served as an assistant director for Alfred Hitchcock on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The 39 Steps (1935) and went on to direct three films of his own before his career was cut short in poetic fashion when he died in a plane crash at the age of twenty-eight. Even as this discourse connected the silent and sound eras to argue for film’s unbroken artistic genealogy and credibility during a period of technological uncertainty or adjustment, it functioned in new ways to characterize Hollywood’s elite. What is amazing from today’s perspective is how often fan magazines such as Silver Screen, Screenland, and Photoplay went out of their way to connect poetry to actors and actresses, creating in the process a behind-the-scenes picture of a Hollywood populated not by superficial box-office royalty but by poetry-writing and poetry-reading enthusiasts. In 1931, for example, Clark Gable was reported to have had eight books of poetry on his dressing room table. “We peeped between the covers,” revealed Photoplay, “and they’re thumb worn and many passages are heavily underscored. He reads them!”18 Jean Harlow “writes poetry, as pastime.”19 “When things were going wrong,” Mae West would “go home and write poetry about it.”20 Janet Gaynor “loves the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” and so did Claudette Colbert, whose “idea of a perfect afternoon was to curl up in a window seat” reading Millay’s poems.21 Irving Pichel “goes off on music and poetry sprees. He’ll read Milton aloud for hours!”22 Charles Boyer’s “pet poet” was Baudelaire.23 Olivia de Havilland had “a curious penchant for writing poetry in bed,” and Fay Bainter was “crazy

109 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

about poetry and will read it aloud by the hour—to herself if no one else will listen.”24 As a boy, Robert Donat “shut himself up in his room, reading, or reciting poetry out loud to himself”; George Brent “loves poetry and has a prodigious memory for it”; Carmel Myers “writes poetry, which she never shows to anyone, on the backs of envelopes”; and Jane Withers “loves poetry better than anything in the world.”25 Douglas Fairbanks Jr. would rather Joan Crawford “see a poem of his and like it than go to a preview of his latest picture,” and Joan Fontaine and Brian Aherne hosted “ ‘poetryreading evenings’ . . . often alone, sometimes with sister Olivia and Jimmy Stewart and one or two other familiars.”26 So many others were so into poetry—Anthony Quinn “loves” it; Barbara Hutton “loves Chinese poetry”; Patricia Dane “dabbled” in it; May Robson “is an ardent collector” of it; Clara Bow “is writing” it—that a 1931 Photoplay note calling Estelle Taylor “another Hollywood poet” seems to not quite grasp the composite photo it had been helping to create when remarking somewhat flatly, “It’s surprising, how many film actresses turn to verse now and then.”27 This portrait of a Hollywood full of poetry readers and writers seems to contradict the rest of the industry’s desire to supplant or replace poetry while articulating its values to film, but poetry joined a number of elements to help mediate the public’s relationship with celebrity figures. Poetry spoke variously to professional theater and acting competence via memorization and elocution skills; to artistic integrity, idiosyncrasy, taste, and passion; and to authenticity and relatability. It took audiences onto Hollywood’s window seats and into its living rooms and bedrooms. Just as the industry was channeling the spirit and ambitions of poetry into a new and improved medium, so that medium’s most visible ambassadors—or so Silver Screen, Screenland, and Photoplay encouraged audiences to think—were assimilating poetry via the print and oral contexts of poetry’s past and producing a new and improved artistic expression via their on-screen performances. As a result, perhaps audiences no longer needed to read poetry to experience it. Clark Gable’s eight books of thumb-worn, heavily underscored poetry, for example, are distilled into a screen performance in which, according to James R. Quirk in “Why Women Go Crazy About Clark Gable,” the star becomes a “challenge,” a “mystery,” an “uncertainty,” “a magnet that both attracts and repels,” and an “enigmatic” figure who “begins with indifference, demands utter submission, and ends with either complete and uncompromising domination or defeat.” “No tender lover, strumming sweet

110 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

love songs; no smitten cavalier throwing his mantle over a puddle to save the tender tootsies of his fair one,” Gable in 1931 had become Hollywood’s answer to the modernist poem.28 As poetry invited audiences into Hollywood stars’ private lives, it also attracted audiences to movie theaters. Especially during the Great Depression, theaters advertised with poetry in ways they did not during most of the silent era, incorporating recitations, partnering with schools and newspapers, and promising free passes and other giveaways as prizes for moviethemed poetry-writing contests. The Motion Picture Herald reports, for example, that in February 1933, Eddy Gilmore, publicist for Loew’s Theatre in Washington, DC, “put over an effective scheme” to advertise the romantic drama Cynara (King Vidor, 1932) “by offering free admissions to every man, woman or child who could and would recite word for word Ernest Dowson’s poem [“Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae”]. Several hundred applied . . . but only one succeeded in getting away with a perfect recitation.”29 In October 1936, a Cleveland, Ohio newspaper and theater cosponsored “ ‘The Doodlers’ contest for ‘Mr.  Deeds Goes to Town,’ the small town contest for ‘Small Town Girl’ and a silly poem contest for the Jack Benny–Mary Livingston engagement.”30 The Blue Mouse in Portland, Oregon had the same idea, “ushering in a twelfth week for ‘Deeds’ ” by holding “a promotional poem contest, with ten daily passes to best poets [sic] writing four-line verses dealing with ‘Deeds’—their daily good deeds.”31 For Mother’s Day in 1940, the Alhambra and “a cooperating newspaper” in Philadelphia had the “author of a poem dedicated to Mothers, stationed in lobby [sic] autographing copies of it for patrons.”32 The Clemmer Theatre in Spokane, Washington offered “a special booklet . . . filled with poetry for the youngsters . . . the kids secure the book by attending the matinees, they get a page each time they attend until the book is complete.”33 Even MGM got in on the action, celebrating Marie Dressler’s sixty-second birthday and the release of Christopher Bean (Sam Wood, 1933) with an advertising campaign “the ‘topper’ of which is a national poetry contest for a prize of $250 for the best Dressler poem”—the equivalent of roughly $4,500 today.34 Under construction in 1927 and intended to “contain paintings on the walls in interpretation of the famous poem after which the theatre is named,” Denver’s Hiawatha Theatre no doubt imagined its name and novelty design an advertisement in its own right.35 What an appealing immersive multimedia experience it might have made to have shown illustrated lantern

111 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

slides of The Song of Hiawatha (figure  1.2) before or after Disney’s short Little Hiawatha (David Hand, 1937) in a building named after and featuring illustrations of the poem itself. ON- SCREEN

While reinforcing and expanding cinema’s claims to an artistic genealogy and media credibility, the aforementioned affiliations with poetry did not necessarily translate to the screen where, as was frequently the case during the silent era, sound-era films regularly disaffiliated from the literary form by typecasting poets and poetry as the inefficient, impractical residuum of a bygone era with little to offer modern life. In a telling amplification of Amy Leslie’s praise for Antony and Cleopatra twenty years earlier (“[Movies] do not say so. They do it.”), a 1934 Motion Picture Herald “Bound for Studio” review of Between Two Worlds would remark, “Poets do nothing—they were made . . . to remain everlastingly dumbfounded.”36 Thus, Val Harris in Fair Days (Vitaphone Varieties, 1929) “recites a non-sensical poem,” and in Meistersinger (Ludwig Burger, 1929), a “town crier is convicted of plagiarism of the poem written by the shoemaker and given to the nobleman to be entered in the contest for the girl’s hand.”37 Maurice Chevalier plays François, “the happy-go-lucky poet, philosopher, advertising sandwich-man of the sidewalks” in Paramount’s The Way to Love (Norman Taurog, 1933), and Walter Byron is “a would-be poet, who talks and thinks in flowery terms” in East of Fifth Avenue (Albert S. Rogell, 1933), a film that Gus McCarthy described as “a study of two kinds of love—the old-fashioned kind [read: poetry] and the modern stop-at-nothing variety [read: film].”38 The costume musical I Give My Heart (later titled The Loves of Madame Dubarry; Marcel Varnel, 1935) includes “a penniless poet.”39 And while audiences might have sympathized with Gary Cooper’s character Longfellow Deeds in the Academy Award–winning Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936), the poetic mode that Deeds represents—as an impulsive, small-town-living, tuba-playing, inspirational-greeting-card verse writer with fantasies of rescuing a damsel in distress—is thoroughly at odds with the modern world except, as a six-page testimonial ad in The Motion Picture Herald boasted, it can convert to a movie offering “scores of excellent sales angles” that promise to “pile a lot of dough into exhibitor tills” and produce “big grosses everywhere.” 40

112 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

Today, with film’s artistic credibility now beyond question, the off-screen discourse affiliating film and poetry in the silent and early sound periods is no longer as urgent, although it has far from disappeared. (Critic Roger Ebert wrote of 1999’s He Got Game, for example, that director “Spike Lee brings the spirit of a poet to his films about everyday reality.” 41) The 1930s portrait of Hollywood as something of a big poetry club seems almost unbelievable today. This has as much or more to do with the shifting place of poetry in American culture as it does with the movies, although, as the foregoing material in this and the previous chapter suggests, film has certainly done its part to contribute to the nature of that shift, especially given the sustained on-screen depiction of poetry as disconnected from the modern world. That said, even in scripts that do not take the subject of poetry or poets as their primary subject matter, films continue to incorporate poetry or references to poetry on screen.42 In Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Footloose (Herbert Ross, 1984), White Men Can’t Jump (Ron Shelton, 1992), Reality Bites (Ben Stiller, 1994), Dangerous Minds (John  N. Smith, 1995), Mr. Holland’s Opus (Stephen Herek, 1995), The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, 1995), Grosse Pointe Blank (George Armitage, 1997), Hoodlum (Bill Duke, 1997), Girl, Interrupted (James Mangold, 1999), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001), Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), The Notebook (Nick Cassavetes, 2004), Coach Carter (Thomas Carter, 2005), Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014), The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014), Wild (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2014), The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, 2017) and many other titles, contemporary popular film has been talking poetry on a regular basis. I use the term “talking poetry” purposefully, for what interests me most about the continued relationship between film and poetry is not the frequency with which the former cites, references, or incorporates the latter, or the specific texts that are chosen, but the medium-related ways in which those citations, references, or incorporations take place. As I explained earlier, most films after the silent era remediate poetry as a vocal phenomenon rather than as a written or printed text meant to be read; even when movies have occasion to present the text of a poem on screen, they very rarely revisit that site of the silent era’s relationship predicament with print. In Bull Durham (Ron Shelton, 1988), for example, Annie reads poetry aloud to “Nuke” LaLoosh and quotes from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” via voiceover. Kurtz reads T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow

113 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

Men” to his followers in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). In the famous cave scenes from Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989), a group of Welton Academy English students passes around an anthology and each one takes a turn reciting from it. When giving a poem to Jada Pinkett in All Eyez on Me (Benny Boom, 2017), Tupac Shakur pulls a handwritten copy out of his pocket and reads it aloud. After Sophie and Nathan die by suicide in Sophie’s Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982), Stingo picks up Nathan’s copy of Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems and reads aloud “Ample Make This Bed,” even though he is the only one in the room. Similarly, when François Pienaar visits Nelson Mandela’s prison cell in Invictus (Clint Eastwood, 2009), he imagines Mandela sitting on his bunk reading William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus”; although Mandela is alone, in Pienaar’s mind and via voiceover, he reads the poem aloud. As the books or papers used by these characters all suggest, print—the printed poem, like the printed screenplay—is not the primary, most desirable, or final home for language, but only a stopping point or storage mechanism along the way to its greater realization in the world of sound. If poetry’s recitation or performance history makes for a particularly inviting and effective way for film to position itself in relation to a culturally prestigious oral art form while simultaneously maintaining a separation from print, then poetry’s history as a memorized literary form deepens that connection in a way that the history of the novel, for instance, cannot, offering a companion art form at times linked to, but either independent of or not reliant on print. Film does not require print either, or so goes the fantasy logic of sound film in an age of what Walter Ong calls “secondary orality,” when acoustic media offer the simulated experience of orality but remain inevitably anchored in the logics and records of print. Therefore, like Dr.  Jekyll, the characters Rita Hanson and Phil Connors have memorized the poems they quote in Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993): Rita quotes from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Phil from Jacques Brel’s “La bourrée du célibataire.” Similarly, Ponyboy recites from memory Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” in The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983). (“I always remembered it,” he explains to Johnny, focusing on his ability to recall the poem rather than look it up in a book, “because I never quite knew what he meant by it.”) Even though he distributes handouts that likely contain poems for class reading, Melvin Tolson in The Great Debaters (Denzel Washington, 2007) has long passages

114 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

memorized and recites them as part of his lecture. On their first date in Madea’s Family Reunion (Tyler Perry, 2006), Frankie surprises Vanessa by signing her up to read at “Poets and Painters Night,” but she is largely unfazed because she has a poem memorized. And, unlike the students from Dead Poets Society, who need their poetry anthology to recite an excerpt from Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo,” Barney Ross, Lee Christmas, and the rest of their action-hero crew in The Expendables 2 (Simon West, 2012) chant the poem from memory. In fact, at the end of the first Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, 2010), Christmas composes a poem on the spot in the midst of a knife-throwing contest, offering an instance of poetry that is, one might say, “born oral” and thus completely independent from the page. If film piggybacks on poetry’s links to orality in such ways, it also motivates those associations in scenes that use poetry to dramatize the virtues of shifting from writing and print to sound. In testifying before a government panel in Skyfall, for example, M not only recites a passage from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” that she has “despite my best intentions” memorized, but does so only after we first watch her using a finger to follow along a written script. (“Here today,” she explains, shifting from that script to her extemporized recitation and thus into what Ong calls the “real, existential present” of orality, “I remember this.”)43 Poetry thus becomes an occasion for Skyfall to dramatize how moving from the value systems of writing or print and into the value system of sound offers a more meaningful, authentic, and human mode of communicating. The emotional impact of the wellknown funeral scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994) similarly hinges on the visible act of someone giving up on print. As Matthew delivers the eulogy for his partner Gareth, he looks down at a piece of paper in order to explain his rationale for using someone else’s words, but then looks up and proceeds to recite the entirety of W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” from memory without referencing the page. Likewise, when Antwone Fisher gives a poem to Dr. Davenport in Antwone Fisher (Denzel Washington, 2002), he begins by reading from the page but continues reciting without its assistance. In the parody Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (Paris Barclay, 1996), Dashiki points to a page in her notebook, closes it, and then speaks her poem from memory for Ashtray. And when Nina participates in poetry night at The Sanctuary at the end of  Love Jones (Theodore Witcher, 1997), she begins reading from her notebook but ultimately closes it in order to recite her

115 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

poem’s final lines from memory. Indeed, a line from her poem seems to gloss film’s more general approach to print poetry that I have been describing: “I am looking,” she has written, “at sound.” Perhaps nowhere is film’s impulse to liberate poetry (and thus itself) from its print contexts greater than in moments like the one in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) when Lee lies in bed reading silently from a book of E. E. Cummings’s poetry purchased and given to her by Elliot in the preceding scene. The sequence leading up to this moment evokes a plethora of material, bibliographical, and cultural signs that anchor poetry in silent, print-based reading: Lee and Elliot browse in the Pageant Book & Print Shop (the print-based word “page” even embedded in the store’s name); the book Elliot buys is hardcover and wrapped in a glossy dust jacket; Elliot twice reminds Lee to read the poem on page “a hundred and twelve,” thus employing the indexical protocols of the codex; then we see Lee curled up with the book in bed, a conventional scene of silent, print-based reading. But instead of following Lee’s gaze and showing what is actually on page “a hundred and twelve,” Hannah and Her Sisters breaks from its series of print-based signs, hides the book from the audience (we view Lee from the back), and delivers stanzas two and five of Cummings’s “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” in Lee’s voiceover. In leaving the page as the films mentioned in the previous paragraph do, Hannah and Her Sisters puts on display the power of orality while maintaining sound film’s preferential treatment of poetry as an acoustic event. By externalizing Lee’s interior voice, suggesting that we read out loud even when we read silently, it also makes the greater argument that all poetry is fundamentally a sonic phenomenon (even the typographically experimental Cummings), in the process exposing print’s essential dependence on sound for its content and thus, by extension, also subordinating print to the sonic capabilities of film.44 The amount of energy that filmmakers expend on casting poetry as an oral phenomenon—it is spoken, read aloud, chanted, voiced over, and performed by all sorts of characters in airplanes, bedrooms, living rooms, caves, classrooms, parks, bars, government hearings, funeral homes, prisons, and more—is hardly matched by their treatment of poetry as a textual one, except insofar as film doggedly goes out of its way to avoid giving theater audiences poems to read on screen. From time to time, they do tease audiences with the prospect, however: when Stingo picks up Dickinson’s

116 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

Selected Poems in Sophie’s Choice, for example, we see the book’s title page but not the poem itself; and the camera in All Eyez on Me shows us Shakur’s handwritten poem but moves too quickly to make it legible. However, it is extremely rare for the sound-era film to return to the practice of presenting poetry in textual form. That said, when movies do revisit that one-time predicament and take on film’s perceived historical limitations as an emergent medium, they manage those moments with particular care, fraught as they are not just with historical anxieties but also new ones produced by an expanding media landscape where alternate ways of distributing text continue to proliferate. If such moments are remarkable for their rarity, they are also remarkable for the daring and ambitious ways they devise to manage poetry in textual form while also—following in the footsteps of Edwin  S. Porter and D. W. Griffith—converting those potential sources of anxiety into occasions to display and secure the special capabilities of film. ONCE MORE INTO THE FRAY

In the previous chapter, I suggested that Griffith’s movies allegorize film’s relationship to poetry; narratives about separated lovers in After Many Years, The Unchanging Sea, and Enoch Arden trope the estrangement of film and poetry, with Enoch Arden staging this relationship as a rivalry between suitors and making Enoch and his voluntary death into a figure for poetry more broadly. Just as cinema in the sound era sustained or extended the silent era’s various affiliations and disaffiliations with poetry, so the narratives of the few sound films venturing to present poetic text on screen also hearken back to Griffith’s example by allegorically narrativizing the relationships among film, poetry, and the print and oral media by which poetry circulated before film. The sled “Rosebud” burns at the end of Citizen Kane, eulogized by Welles, perhaps, but otherwise leaving no permanent record of its poetic name and emotional significance in the modern journalistic and prose-heavy world of the film. In G.I. Jane, Commander John Urgayle’s eventual recognition of changing gender hierarchies in the U.S. Navy dramatizes changing hierarchies in the media landscape. The battles in Fight Club and The Grey are metaphors for battles between media forms. And A.I. Artificial Intelligence invests the changing cultural associations of media forms in its main character’s quest to transcend his robotic programming and become emotionally human. That such films use one set of

117 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

rivalries to figure another is an interesting continuity. What they do at the particular moments when poetry is shown on screen is more interesting yet, as they become, in increasingly varied and innovative ways, especially charged sites of filmic definition and redefinition. Take, for example, the moment at the beginning of Citizen Kane when a quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” appears on screen (figure 4.1). The passage serves as the “hook” in the News on the March newsreel obituary that reporters eventually interrupt to ask about the meaning of Kane’s last word, “Rosebud.” It helps to depict the opulence of Kane’s estate, which is immediately described as a “Florida Xanadu, world’s largest pleasure ground,” and possibly, as Iampolski suggests, it serves to identify the film’s source text.45 The passage is easy to overlook as poetry, however, in part because Welles adopts Griffith’s Enoch Arden strategy of stripping it of its most salient poetic feature, formatting the two lines “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree” as a single sentence (no upper-case “A” signals the beginning of the second line, and no indentation in the third line signals a continuation of line two), thus edging Coleridge’s original verse toward prose.46 It is also easy to overlook as poetry because

FIGURE 4.1 Screenshot of quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941).

118 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

its remaining poetic features (its meter, the implied but hidden rhyme, and its inverted “poetic” syntax) are nearly overwhelmed or buried in the mash-up of other writing systems in surrounding shots where Welles seems intent on remediating as many types of text as possible and thus taking on film’s historical problem with “words, words, words” not just in relation to poetry but tout court. The film’s first shot is a “No Trespassing” sign on a chain-link fence. Shortly thereafter, we see a capital letter K built into the wrought-iron fence surrounding Kane’s mansion, then a “Bengal Tiger” sign on one of the animal cages, then a wooden golf-course sign, “no 16 365 Yards Par 4.” Those are followed by a News on the March newsreel headline and an obituary notice for “Xanadu’s Landlord.” Following the Coleridge quotation, we see words on shipping crates, in expository intertitles, in newspaper headlines, printed on the side of a newspaper truck, in a threeline dialogic intertitle formatted like the Coleridge quotation (“I am, have been, and / will be only one thing— / an American.”), on banners, as graffiti, in an electric text crawl, in neon signs and electric lights, on plateglass windows, on handwritten pages and legal contracts, and carved on tombstones. So much text surrounds the Coleridge quotation that whatever distinctiveness might adhere to what remains of the delineated poem virtually disappears among all the other forms of language and thus becomes just one of many other textual fragments swept up by Welles’s camera, which uses those occasions to put into operation many of the innovative and diverse film techniques for which Citizen Kane is known and that print cannot duplicate. Lest audiences mistake the “Kubla Khan” quotation for a conventional intertitle and thus a reminder of the silent era’s dependence on print, for example, the image of Kane’s estate over which it is superimposed transitions from one part of the building to another, calling attention to the dynamism of moving pictures and film’s ability to manipulate rather than simply “cut to” print. As much as the film strips “Kubla Khan” of its distinctiveness as poetry, however, it nevertheless preserves and animates one of the passage’s remaining poetic features in a way that no other text to this point in the film might be motivated, using it to claim for Citizen Kane’s voiceover narrator—and, on a larger scale, the voice of film—not the obscured rhyme or line breaks of “Kubla Khan,” nor its meter, but the inverted syntax that marks it as “poetry.” Indeed, as the “Kubla Khan” shot fades, the news reporter narrator speaks for the first time and declares,

119 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

“Legendary was the Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. Today almost as legendary is Florida’s Xanadu, world’s largest private pleasure ground . . .” This transition—from the inverted syntax of “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan” to the inverted syntax of “Legendary was the Xanadu”—not only challenges poetry’s proprietary claim to that literary device, but also stages a miniature transition from the print-based world of which the text is part to the voice of the sound era. Indeed, immediately thereafter, the film’s narrator rephrases Coleridge’s opening as “Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome,” standardizing the original’s syntax, reserving the possible effects of the inverted syntax for the news reporter, and, by extension, claiming the stylistic markers of poetry for the prose voice of film. The continuities between adjacent shots—we hear the same music, and we see more images of Kane’s estate—further highlight this transition of rhetorical power by maintaining a comparatively neutral playing field. Nor does the film let its newly poeticized voice go. Presented in three lines like the Coleridge quotation and read aloud by the narrator to further associate the inverted syntax of the poetic tradition with the voice of film, the following “intertitle” reads, “In Xanadu last week / was held 1941’s biggest / strangest funeral.” The poetic syntax continues: “To forty-four million news buyers, more newsworthy than the names in his own headlines, was Kane himself, greatest newspaper tycoon of this or any other generation.” Welles thus anchors Citizen Kane in the classical texts and inverted syntax of poetic language—it is indebted to poetry for the stylistics of its voice—and, in doing so, disguises that debt by making the more difficult-to-assimilate features of poetry disappear or else subordinating them to the look and sound of film. There are probably sound films made before Citizen Kane that present readable poetic texts on screen, but I have not yet found them. Nor have I discovered films that venture to do so in the decades immediately following, suggesting that Welles’s innovative use of “Kubla Khan” is yet another way that the film stands out in cinema history. I am unaware, in fact, of any movies that follow suit until Ridley Scott’s 1997 G.I. Jane, which proves quite telling by contrast. In a move that perhaps reflects the level of security and confidence that film gained as a medium and art form after Citizen Kane, G.I. Jane doesn’t introduce a poetic text only to digest, abandon, or repress it, as the Griffith and Welles films do. Rather, Scott’s film reverses that strategy by working up to and ending on a moment of screen reading

120 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

in order to reveal and display the type of participatory richness that film brings to the poetry-reading experience that sound and print, functioning either alone or in combination, cannot. Early in G.I. Jane, U.S. Navy Combined Reconnaissance Team (NCRT) Command Master Chief John Urgayle recites D. H. Lawrence’s 1929 poem “Self-Pity” while walking among and inspecting rows of silent new recruits during “hell week.” He finishes his recitation while standing in front of the NCRT’s first female candidate, Jordan O’Neil: I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Then at the end of the film—after O’Neil shaves her head, after she survives Urgayle’s hazing and abuse, and after she distinguishes herself by saving Urgayle’s life during a live combat situation—the poem reappears, sort of like a Chekhovian gun, when it becomes a gift from her former tormentor. She finds it when she takes a break from celebrating with her graduating cohort, goes to her locker, and pulls a copy of Lawrence’s Selected Poems from the locker’s top shelf. Urgayle’s Navy Cross bookmarks the page. She looks up, meets his gaze as he walks out the door, and opens the book, at which point, in close-up, the camera slowly tracks the movement of her eye from the Cross, diagonally down and to the left across a hand-annotated page spread, to where it stops at “Self-Pity,” circled in red (figure 4.2). The book trembles in her hand as the audience joins her—indeed, for a moment even becomes her—in reading it. In part, Urgayle’s gift signals the epistemological transformation that he has experienced over the course of the film: an external sign that he has rejected the calcified classification system excluding women from the NCRT and that he no longer reads human—or literary—texts at a superficial level or as static phenomena. This change is illustrated not only because Lawrence’s poem occurs in a different narrative context and is thus newly meaningful, but because Urgayle, the film demonstrates, interprets it differently than he did earlier. When he recited “Self-Pity” during hell week, he did so to model soldier comportment, reading the poem as a miniature instruction manual for human behavior: soldiers should be like the poem’s “wild

121 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

FIGURE 4.2 Screenshot of D. H. Lawrence’s “Self-Pity” from G.I. Jane (Ridley Scott, 1997).

thing” or “small bird” and not feel self-pity or “sorry” for themselves. But as the camerawork that moves right to left across the pages in the final scene suggests, Urgayle’s newer and better self reads the poem against the grain, not for what “Self-Pity” says but what it implies or does not say: that while wild things do not feel self-pity, human beings do and are thus capable of reflection and change in ways that animals are not. His relationship to the signifier (the female body, the literary text) and the process of signification fundamentally altered, he can also animate the polysemy of the word “sorry” in lines two and four, so that it functions as an apology as well as a synonym for “self-pity.” Should we or O’Neil need further evidence of this new way of reading, it is there on the page. In a previous reading, Urgayle underlined “Self-Pity” and parts of other poems in pencil. Now, rather than underline a single term or phrase to anchor the poem to a dominant meaning or single perspective, he has circled the entire text as an invitation to engage the whole. As G.I. Jane chronicles Urgayle’s development as a reader, it also tells a miniature developmental or evolutionary history of increasingly participatory media forms that begins with orality (the recitation), moves through print (Lawrence’s Selected Poems), and ends with film (the filmed version of “Self-Pity”). While oral communication may take place in what Ong would call the “real existential present” of G.I. Jane, it does not—in this film, at least—allow for or permit audience response or participation. It is hierarchical insofar as it involves a single, authoritative speaker and silent,

122 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

obedient auditors. It is impersonal insofar as it is not directed to anyone in particular and has a one-size-fits-all message whose overdetermined meaning cannot be contested or engaged. And it is temporally defined and ephemeral, lacking a material form that would afford others the ability to consider, reflect on, add to, or otherwise later engage it. By comparison, as the handwriting in Lawrence’s Selected Poems suggests, print is portrayed as significantly more participatory. The printed page not only invites the markings of an engaged, meaning-making reader and thus a dialogue with the speaker or author, but also allows for a far more individualized record of engagement than oral communication does. G.I. Jane might have followed Hannah and Her Sisters, Bull Durham, and Invictus by offering a voiceover of Urgayle or O’Neil or even a third party reading “Self-Pity.” Instead, by anchoring itself in silent reading where neither the reader nor the author has a privileged “voice,” this scene further distinguishes between the authoritarian dynamics of orality displayed by Urgayle’s recitation and the comparatively egalitarian and participatory nature of print. Given how consistently filmmakers in the sound era have worked to depict poetry as an acoustic experience and thereby avoid the silent, printbased reading experience of the silent era, it might seem counterintuitive for G.I. Jane to dissociate itself from orality as strongly as it does, but this is the savviness of Scott’s direction. While not ignoring sound—the noise of graduates in the background mixes with the musical soundtrack—G.I. Jane nevertheless stages a moment of silent reading via film that offers the audience more subject positions and therefore more opportunities to participate in the circuit of literary exchange and meaning-making than either sound or print (at least insofar as sound and print have been portrayed in the movie). Indeed, the presence of this third text—the filmic one—acts, as Iampolski describes such moments, “to undermine the one-dimensionality of the text’s didactic content. Meaning is opened up, made more enigmatic, ambiguous, even to the point of being reversed.” Threefold constructions such as the one Scott offers in G.I. Jane, he continues, “simultaneously widen and narrow the range of meaning, creating different potential perspectives in reading.”47 Because the close-up shot and Scott’s refusal to voice the poem resist anchoring the scene’s perspective in a single speaker or reader, audience members are allowed for a moment to read “Self-Pity” from multiple perspectives. They get to read the poem as O’Neil would read it. They get to read the poem as Urgayle has twice read it—once when he annotated in

123 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

pencil (when “sorry” meant self-pity) and again when he circled it in red (when the word also served as an apology). And they get to read it for themselves. While the camera establishes a link between Urgayle’s medal and the poem, the exact nature of that link and the poem’s possible meanings ultimately go unresolved. It is a moment of vicarious reading and hermeneutic richness that stands in stark contrast to Urgayle’s earlier recitation and one that—in giving us access to an otherwise private moment of live, silent reading—surpasses the participatory and emotional possibilities of print. While G.I. Jane’s remediation of “Self-Pity” demonstrates film’s capacities as a participatory medium over and against those of sound and print, Joe Carnahan’s 2011 action thriller The Grey presses the relationship between contemporary film and silent reading to not only showcase film’s power to synthesize and direct (rather than surpass or supplant) preceding media forms, but also to dramatize the readerly epiphany or moment of interpretive clarity in a way that print’s fixity cannot. In the film, John Ottway—a hunter hired to protect oil workers from wolves in Alaska and so crushed by his wife’s recent death that he is on the verge of killing himself—survives a plane crash and attempts to lead survivors to safety as they are pursued and killed one by one by a wolf pack. Ultimately the last person standing, Ottway finds himself cornered in the wolves’ den, stops running, and, in the final scene, confronts the animals that metaphorically represent the psychological and emotional demons that have been pursuing him. As he readies himself for this confrontation—laying out his personal effects and taping broken airplane liquor bottles to his hands in lieu of knives or claws— the film flashes back to a scene of Ottway as a boy sitting on his father’s lap and pointing to a typewritten poem hanging on the wall. In the film’s present, Ottway recites the poem’s first line. The camera cuts to a close-up of the framed poem as Ottway continues to speak, then cuts back to the wolves’ den, where he finishes reciting (figure 4.3). We hear a wolf’s growl as Ottway leaps into battle, and the film ends. Ottway has been fighting more than the animals and his emotions over the course of the film. He has also been fighting to understand the poem. Indeed, we first encounter it at the very beginning of the movie via voiceover during a montage that shows him killing wolves, lying in bed with his wife, writing a final letter to her about how miserable his life has become, flashing back to his childhood, and preparing to die by suicide. Presumably

124 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

FIGURE 4.3 Screenshot of poem from The Grey (Joe Carnahan, 2011).

part of what he is writing in the letter, the poem’s words run through his head, but the film offers nothing in the way of context or preface for them and even interrupts them with its camera movement. Embedded as it is in the letter’s prose, the verse feels less like a poem and more like a confusing shift in discursive registers perhaps pointing to the main character’s mental instability. “I want to see your face, feel your hands in mine, feel you against me,” Ottway writes: 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 happened to us. I feel like it’s me. Bad luck. Poison . . . And I’ve stopped doing this world any good . . . Once more into the fray, into the last good fight I’ll ever know.

The camera then cuts to Ottway putting a rifle muzzle into his mouth. Both the editing choice and the scene’s existential magnitude distract from and postpone the rhyme between “fray” and “day” in the final two lines he eventually speaks (“Live and die on this day . . . Live and die on this day . . .”),

125 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

making it all the more difficult at this moment to register the verse as verse, rather than prose. After the plane crash, however, the movie clarifies that the lines are in fact a poem. Sitting around a campfire as wolves surround them in the darkness, the men start sharing their stories. Ottway tells his, explaining in part that, even though his father “saw weakness everywhere,” He had this thing for poems—poetry. Readin’ ’em, quotin’ ’em. Probably thought it rounded him off . . . 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.”

By the end of the movie, then, audiences have heard the poem three times (in the letter scene, around the campfire, and in the wolf den); have several other times seen (but not actually read) the folded-up letter in which it was written, as Ottway has stored it in his wallet, saved it from the plane’s burning wreckage, and placed it on the ground in front of him in the final scene; and have read the typewritten version hanging over his father’s desk. The flashback to his father’s “den”—the word no doubt chosen for its lupine connotations—makes Ottway’s long relationship with the poem more than just a framing mechanism for The Grey. Rather improbably, that relationship becomes the film’s primary narrative, in which the wolves function (along with the death of Ottway’s wife, his father’s difficult personality, and his father’s funeral) as yet another moment in the story of his hermeneutic struggle with the poem. In this respect, The Grey bears more in common with George Nichols’s 1912 adaptation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” than it does with any of the films I have thus far examined. As Sarah Berry observes, The Cry of the Children “is framed by the opening and closing lines of the poem” so that the movie “seems like a particular instance within the more capacious scope of the poem. It is as if the chronology of the particular events depicted in the film exists within the time of the poem.” 48 While The Grey does not depict the events in Ottway’s father’s poem—there being no specific events to depict—it clearly opens and closes with the poem and depicts the events in Ottway’s ongoing attempts to understand it. The movie’s poster suggests that this is in fact the film’s primary drama as well; it does not picture any wolves, but

126 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

only Ottway’s face underscored by the title and, in smaller print, a (mis) quoted line from the poem (“Live or die on this day,” it reads, rather than “Live and die on this day”). This looks very much like the movie’s subtitle, directing attention to the relationship between The Grey and the line of verse more than anything else. It is no longer common for movies to take poems as starting points for their scenarios, but a good argument can be made that The Grey does just that. In gradually untangling it from the surround of its first instantiation, The Grey also uses the poem as an occasion to stage and resolve some of film’s historical relationship struggles with poetry as transmitted by other media. By first burying it in Ottway’s voiceover letter, the movie gives itself the opportunity to excavate, later identify, and even make legible the poem as a poem in the first place. As the first scene demonstrates, sound alone does not make a poem register as a poem, or else sound is so susceptible to manipulation or misunderstanding that, in and of itself, it remains a limited or incomplete way of knowing. When Ottway later identifies the lines as poetry, he explains why, laying out a set of criteria that separate it from other types of language: it is removed from the everyday, used for special occasions such as funerals, and displayed on the wall. Heard a second time, the same words that Ottway read earlier are unmistakably a poem, but only because the film has created the conditions under which they might be identified as such. Instead of repressing a source text or intertext, The Grey in fact makes its source more and more manifest—something it can perhaps venture to do in ways that previously mentioned films by Welles and Griffith cannot because Carnahan in fact invented his film’s source text: it was written originally for the movie. This impulse to reserve for film the ability to identify and even “make poetry poetry” explains in part why the verse’s written text remains hidden until the end; were audiences to view it earlier, they would see the line breaks and realize that print, too, has poem-making or poem-identifying capacities parallel to those of film. Indeed, when audiences finally do see the poem, they immediately recognize it as such because of print-based poetic effects that are impossible for sound to achieve: line breaks; a ragged left margin or center justification; ellipses at the end of three lines; the distinctive typewriter font that gives it an amateur or homemade feel; the wrinkled or antiqued paper. Here, however—at the moment when print’s

127 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

capabilities appear to be on full display—film demonstrates what only film can do to the reading experience, first presenting a page of blurred print, then slowly bringing that print into focus to make the poem legible as text and as a poem. Manipulating the text in a way that the intertitles of silent film could not, The Grey not only masters the experience of reading by print and combines it with sound to achieve the “intimate union of hearing and sight” that Stueler imagined in 1929. It then turns that into an expressive moment to dramatize Ottway’s new understanding of the poem, which—at the very moment the camera brings it into focus for the viewer—becomes clear to him as never before. G.I. Jane and The Grey emerge from and respond in shrewd and innovative ways to film’s fraught relationship history with poetry, sound, and print, but they nevertheless imagine a media landscape that, by the time of their respective releases in 1997 and 2011, was becoming or had already become anachronistic due to the emergence and proliferation of new electronic and digital media and their associated writing systems and alternative modes of communication. Urgayle, for instance, does not use a fax machine, computer, printer, or beeper. And Ottway, who appears to live in a world without the internet or satellite technology, does not carry a PDA, cell phone, or laptop. While Scott and Carnahan reconstruct older or passing media landscapes in order to demonstrate film’s capacities as a reading machine, other films have registered the media changes that G.I. Jane and The Grey do not, and seek to maintain and even boost film’s position in relation to them via poetry and the remediation of digital or electronic sites of poetry reading and writing. To bring film’s long if intermittent history of poetry reading closer to the lived media landscape of the present day, I want to focus on David Fincher’s 1999 adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club and Steven Spielberg’s 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Both movies offer audiences the experience of reading digitally transmitted poetry as it is remediated via film, and both motivate those moments to suggest that digital media offer inferior reading experiences. That is, rather than using poetry to broker a place for film as a new medium as G.I. Jane and The Grey continued to do, Fight Club and A.I. represent film as an established medium and use that status to defend against the potential encroachments of newer media. Partway through Fight Club—in a scene that might be his final chance to avoid succumbing to his Hyde-like criminal alter ego—the film’s

128 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

unnamed narrator (played by Edward Norton) goes to work with blood on his shirt, ignores the office dress code, and smokes at his work station. He explains of his new attitude, “I was the Zen master. I became the calm little center of the world. I wrote little haiku poems. I emailed them to everyone. I got right in everyone’s hostile little face.” The 1996 novel (in which the narrator faxes rather than emails) offers several haiku as samples, but Fincher’s adaptation uses just one. As Norton’s character sits at his standard-issue office desk and types the final line into his computer’s email application, audiences witness the poem coming keystroke by keystroke to completion as Apple-logoed wallpaper and a list of email addresses in an open background window reinforce the specifically computer-based scene of its composition (figure 4.4). Fight Club prepares us for the pathetic nature of the poem—the narrator’s attempt to use it to get “into everyone’s hostile little face” is pathetic; the word “little,” which he uses three times in his preceding remarks, suggests that it is pathetic; and its metaphor is a pathetic attempt at poetry—by referencing poetry in two equally pathetic, reductive, or clichéd contexts earlier in the fi lm. First, in an ultimately failed attempt to manage his insomnia and the feeling that in his life “everything is a copy of a copy of a copy,” the main character attends a tuberculosis support group named “Seize the Day,” a phrase that in film history resonates not only with its

FIGURE 4.4 Screenshot of haiku from Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999).

129 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

origin (carpe diem) in Horace’s Odes and the seventeenth-century British Cavalier poets but also with Dead Poets Society, in which English teacher John Keating implores his students to “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” And second, when the narrator and his love interest, Marla, talk about the spiritual death of modern life, he clarifies that the type of death he is personally experiencing comes from his meaningless desk job and corporate American value system rather than a more general existential crisis. “In the Tibetan-philosophy-Sylvia-Plath sense of the word,” he clarifies, “I know we’re all dying.” If poetry for Fight Club is “little,” feeble, outdated, cliché, or an inadequate way to express the narrator’s contemporary experience of alienation—it is a coping mechanism, a type of shorthand that has lost its original power, or a weak attempt at gravitas—Fincher offers film as its antidote and antithesis, rehearsing or updating some of the dynamics that I discuss in the previous chapter. Indeed, the narrator’s alter ego or idealized and “projected” self, Tyler Burden, works nights projecting films, using the job as an occasion, the narrator explains with admiration, to “[splice] single frame pornography into family films.” In the accompanying meta-cinematic explanation about the film industry, projection protocols, and how to identify reel-to-reel transitions via the “cigarette burns” on screen, film is foregrounded as poēsis—as a constructed aesthetic experience that punctures the fictions of consumer culture and restores vitality and legitimacy to the media experience as underground fight clubs do to physical life. Fight Club sticks with this meta-cinematic motif throughout: the narrator thanks “the Academy” after successfully lying to the police; near the end of the film, he comments on the movie’s “flashback humor” (Fight Club is one big flashback); and Fincher winkingly splices in a pornographic image at the end as well as a mysterious flicker or two near the beginning that the viewer understands only in retrospect. The vitality of these effects is heightened by a corresponding portrayal of other media and art forms—like the narrator’s haiku—as static, outdated, decaying, cast by the wayside, or (worst of all) complicit in the anesthetization of daily life. After fighting with each other for the first time, for example, the narrator and Tyler walk down “Paper Street” on an unpopulated and blighted city block containing “just some warehouses and a paper mill.” In Tyler’s grungy apartment, rain trickles down bound stacks of old magazines. And the narrator says he is resisting giving in to what “we’ve all been raised by television to believe.”

130 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

In a film focusing on a main character who is himself experiencing a media-related crisis—the narrator is the unknowing medium for Tyler, whose “message” gets criminally out of control—the layers in Fight Club’s media landscape can get pretty thick, although they all serve to reinforce the vitality of film. This is true for the scene of the narrator writing on the computer as well. In fact, the most remarkable aspect about Fight Club’s representation of the digital poem is not the underwhelming nature of the verse but the underwhelming display of communicative and interactive effects made possible by writing and reading via computer and email. Norton’s main character composes in a default font reminiscent of the intertitle font from The Night Before Christmas. He does not cut and paste, change the size, color, or typeface, or employ any of the other dynamic or discontinuous literary resources available on the computer. There are no links, no hypertext, no pictures, no web, no desktop design, no scrolling, not even the movement of a mouse. Despite the fact that the narrator uses email, we do not see him press Send, we do not see any responses, and we do not see a message chain, all of which would gesture to the possibilities of distribution and interaction made possible by email and digital communication but not by film. Indeed, the poetic effects that we do experience—line breaks, indented lines, and slant rhymes (leave/slave/even, and leave/bees/queen/ even)—are effects anchored in print and sound, not computer. Even as the last line’s letters appear one by one in real time, Norton’s main character might as well be sitting at a typewriter and composing in print. Film can certainly record letters appearing one by one in real time, but that is nevertheless a type of reading or writing experience difficult for film itself to produce without seeming derivative of earlier technologies, so Fincher once again juxtaposes film with poetry to manage the potential cinematic limitation. The narrator’s continuous, linear, letter-by-letter and line-by-line poetic composition parallels the continuous, frame-by-frame composition of a film strip—an extension of the stanza-by-stanza logic that helped structure the magic-lantern poem sequences discussed in chapter 1—and the multiple open windows on his computer screen themselves rhyme with and possibly even trope the film or video frame. In the comparison, both poetry and reading and writing by computer come up short. Not only are Tyler’s spliced-frame edits and film’s screen effects more dynamic than the haltingly moving text of the computer screen and its

131 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

frames, but, so Fight Club suggests, that difference in degree corresponds with aesthetic power, too. Unlike Tyler’s edits, which one can appreciate from the standpoint of technique and content as well as their subversive goals, the narrator’s moving-text poem is simple, slow-moving, and clumsy, both in terms of technique (its cadences, diction, and end-stopped lines) and concept (its metaphor). And despite its newness, the experience that the digital interface and computer-based reading offers—at least in Fincher’s depiction of its expressive and communicative possibilities—is inferior to film’s and perhaps, in its time-based, sequential, letter-by-letter format, even derivative of it. Produced shortly after Fight Club and also telling a story about a main character functioning as a medium in a multimedia world, Spielberg’s 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence similarly disaffiliates from poetry and then links poetry to digital media in service of securing film’s place of prestige in an expanding media landscape. Unlike Fight Club, G.I. Jane, and The Grey, A.I. does not downplay or ignore the potential power of contemporaneous new media forms, but, as its title suggests, registers, anticipates, and speculates about the diverse forms they might take as well as their impact on the production, distribution, and circulation of information. After acknowledging that power, however, and after delivering poetry in digital, projected, and material forms, A.I. ultimately depicts poetry, its newer forms of transmission, and even its combination with film as inferior captures of human experience. Unlike any of the movies examined here, A.I. does not attempt to resecure film’s status by showcasing its existing capabilities or by absorbing, building on, or manipulating other media forms, but by hearkening back to the aspirational wordlessness of its silent past. Considered by some critics to be “too poetical and intellectual in general for American tastes,” A.I. is a Pinocchio variant, based on Brian Aldiss’s short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” that tells the story of David, an experimental robot child programmed to love.49 After being abandoned by his human “mother,” he feels that, while he can love, he himself as a robot is unlovable. Haunted by what he perceives to be his programming limitations, David sets out on a journey to find the Blue Fairy he believes will help him become a real boy. Along the way, he meets another robot, Gigolo Joe, and the two travel to the red-light district of Rouge City to ask Dr. Know for guidance. When they sit down in Dr. Know’s theater,

132 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

curtains retract mechanically to reveal a screen where a stylized cosmic explosion produces the floating cartoon hands and head of the titular wildhaired, bespectacled, bushy-mustached, holographic digital genie who is, David and Joe learn, equal parts entertainment activity and encyclopedia. David immediately demands, “Tell me where I can find the Blue Fairy,” and Dr. Know responds with a rhyming advertising couplet: “Question me? You pay the fee. / Two for five you get one free.” After David and Joe insert their money, Dr. Know rapidly lists a number of informational database categories whose titles appear in multiple colors and fonts and swirl dizzyingly around the room. Immediate, immersive, hypermediated, and futuristic, his theatrical emporium is anything but the static, austere site of digital reading and writing depicted by Fight Club. David and Joe ask a series of questions under the categories of “Flat Fact” and “Fairy Tale” but elicit unhelpful information because, they realize, they are choosing the wrong categories (a “blue fairy,” Dr. Know tells them, is a type of flower, the name of an escort service, and a character from The Adventures of Pinocchio). They creatively ask him to answer David’s question “How can the Blue Fairy make a robot into a real live boy?” by combining “Fact” and “Fairy Tale.” At this, Dr. Know vanishes and the theater space shuts down and goes dark. Then a series of five comparatively unmediated projected lines from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child”

FIGURE 4.5 Screenshot of quotation from William Butler Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001).

133 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

scroll up the screen while being read aloud in a human voice (the voice of Robin Williams; figure 4.5). Subsequent scrolling text instructs David to seek out Dr.  Hobby, a scientist working to transform robots into human beings. A.I.’s media logic at this point seems clear: when faced with an imagined or unprogrammed category, the media circus of Dr. Know’s digital interface short-circuits and resorts to a simulation of an earlier medium, namely the “intimate union of hearing and sight” from “the kingdom of the poet and artist” that Stueler imagined for sound film. A recorded and “real” human voice replaces Dr. Know’s exaggerated and manipulated cartooned voice. Williams’s voice in particular intertextually links to the earnestly recited poems and vocational poetic advice that the actor’s character Mr. Keating offers to his students in Dead Poets Society.50 This moment feels even more genuine because, unlike Dr. Know’s hyper-digital advertising jingle, which unambiguously presses poetry into service of A.I.’s information economy, the filmic version of the Yeats quotation invites David to leave that economy. Not only does it invite him to “Come away,” but the apostrophic utterance of the lyric “O” in Yeats’s first line is absent of semantic content, promising something more than a transactional, content-driven economy in which, as Joe explains, “nothing costs more than information.” In fact, we later learn that Dr. Hobby and his team placed the poem there precisely to fuel David’s quest and thus better elicit the extent to which David is motivated by human rather than mechanical stimuli. In the film’s broader context, however, poetry—even the conjunction of poetry and film—does not signal humanity in full so much as it signals the simulated or aspirational humanity of the machines that humans have invented; it leads them toward, but is not the culmination of selfactualization. Indeed, somewhat in the manner of The Grey, A.I. is seeded with less obvious forms of verse in several earlier scenes, all of which signal robotic rather than human behavior or communication. Early on, for example, immediately after being brought home from the lab and before he is set to “imprint” on his mother—that is, before he starts running his human programming—David explains to her, “I can never go to sleep, / but I can lie quietly and not make a peep,” an awkward rhyming couplet reminiscent of Dr. Know’s advertising jingle; their roboticness is expressed in somewhat robotic verse. Later, telling David where Dr. Know is located, the similarly robotic Joe explains in a rhyming couplet of his own: “Rouge

134 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

City—across the Delaware. / Too far for our feet. We’ll need help to get there.” Explaining his plan to romance the Blue Fairy, Joe continues: She will make you a real boy, For I will make her a real woman And all will be right with the world Because you held my hand Saved my brain so that once again My customers may ask for me by name: Gigolo, Joe, what do you know?

Joe’s British accent makes especially clear the rhymes and slant rhymes of “again,” “brain,” and “name” and thus the poetic inclinations of his loosely metered speech. When Joe and a fellow android greet each other in reciprocal fashion (“Hey Joe, whaddaya know?” Jane says; Joe responds, “Hey Jane, how’s the game?”), one cannot help but think that it is common—as the preceding examples suggest—for one machine to speak to another in rhyme. It is no wonder, then, that Dr. Hobby and his team would use poetry to communicate with David at Dr. Know’s theater: it is a form of communication or programming language to which emergent humanity inclines—a type of artificial intelligence. We encounter poetry a final time at what feels at first like the film’s climax, but there, too, the poem ultimately marks a site of technological rather than human communication. Arriving at Dr. Hobby’s Manhattan headquarters, David and Joe believe that they have reached their destination in part because—in a plot point seemingly modeled on The Grey and G.I. Jane, both of which conclude with their respective poems finding material form— Yeats’s lines from “The Stolen Child” reappear on the glass of Dr. Hobby’s office door. However, instead of using this occasion to reiterate the connection between film, poetry, and human expression that the theater scene made, and instead of dramatizing the participatory, expressive, or interpretive capabilities of reading by film, as The Grey and G.I. Jane do, A.I. moves away from the poem altogether once it has done its job of getting David there. David walks through the doorway and discovers a duplicate version of himself sitting in a chair and reading in front of small library of books. “Is this the place they make you real?” he asks. His likeness responds, “This is the place they make you read.” But when his twin invites him to “read

135 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

together,” David erupts and destroys him and, by extension, the “unreal” print media he represents. Dr. Hobby enters and praises David’s real human ability to follow his dreams and make rather than follow a narrative. After promising to introduce him to his team of creators, however, Dr. Hobby disappears, leaving David on his own. David wanders into the lab’s production facility and discovers an assembly line for making and packaging other Davids and Darlenes. Confronted with the predicament of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility—as the narrator of Fight Club says, “everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”—he jumps out of the building and into the ocean that has flooded Manhattan. Although led to his demise by the false promise of poetry, David’s story— and the film’s story about media and aesthetic hierarchies—does not end there with his death, nor solely with the filmic disaffiliation from the poetic text and the distinction between the “real” and the “read” that the library scene dramatizes. Instead, two thousand years after humans go extinct, an evolved generation of robots recovers David from the sea floor with the goal of downloading his memories in order to study humanity. Because he is a unique archive and they want him to participate willingly in their endeavor, they agree to reunite him with his mother, bringing her back to life for a single day via a lock of her hair that David’s mechanical super-toy companion Teddy has improbably saved and that, in the intertextual history of cinema, recalls the lock of hair that Enoch saved while separated from his wife and child in Griffith’s Enoch Arden. In the process, the evolved robots tell David about his importance to them. “Human beings,” they explain, “have created a million explanations of the meaning of life—in art, in poetry, in mathematical formulas. Certainly human beings must be the key to the meaning of existence.” When they download David’s memories, however, they do not find art, poetry, or mathematical formulas. Instead, David functions as a type of film projector. Despite the acoustical playback capabilities he has displayed in a variety of ways over the course of the movie, his memories play telepathically inside their heads as a montage of soundless, flickering film clips that return film, in a more overt way than the lock of hair, to its silent origins. Given the concerns that the film industry has expressed in recent years about dwindling theater audiences, a precarious archive in need of preservation, and competition from television, Netflix, and other media forms, it is understandable that film might want to tell a story about its signal virtue and future value. And in A.I., at least,

136 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

that story, told allegorically via David’s search for his mother’s love, comes in the form of a journey through the world that preceded it (poetry and reading) that abandoned it in favor of presumably more “real” experiences (digital media) despite its attempts to fit in (via sound) and that only in film’s purest form could live on. A FINAL WORD

At a party in Nicole Holofcener’s 2013 romantic comedy Enough Said, divorced masseuse Eva meets two people for the first time: an unlikely romantic interest, Albert, and a potential new client and friend, the wellknown poet Marianne Hope. As her romantic interest in Albert blossoms, and as she separately becomes friends with Marianne, Eva listens to the horror stories they tell of their former spouses and comes to realize that Albert and Marianne were in fact once married to each other. She knows she should do something about this knowledge but keeps it to herself and continues seeing both, fascinated by her window into the breakup and using Marianne, as she explains to a therapist friend, as a sort of “TripAdvisor” to help vet Albert. Despite her real affection for Albert, however, Eva begins seeing in him the traits that Marianne despises and begins to channel Marianne’s disdain, in the process sabotaging a genuinely affectionate relationship. Confused by Eva’s turn, the otherwise patient and understanding Albert eventually discovers her friendship with his ex-wife and realizes that Eva has not been making up her own mind about him after all. Heartbroken, he dumps her. Months later, seeing her drive past his house, he comes outside and they sit together as—we are led to believe—they give things a second chance. Nominally, Enough Said is a love story, and it has been lauded for its realism. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, for example, praised “Holofcener’s gift for portraying life as it is lived.”51 But from the standpoint of Poetry Unbound, Enough Said does not portray life at all as it was lived in 2013, but fantasizes about media and art on all sorts of levels. Albert works as a television archivist, transferring old shows to digital formats so that “if anyone under fifty ever wants to put down their phones and come in here and watch something original and brilliant they can find what they’re looking for.” In the film’s world, however, we hardly ever see adults or their many high school–aged children using a smartphone, sitting in front of a

137 O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

computer, playing video games, or reading on a Kindle. In fact, when Eva comes home one night, she finds her neighbor’s daughter sitting in the living room watching a black-and-white show on TV. Add to this that Marianne makes her living by being a poet—improbably, she is something of a rock star, recognized by fans on the street, and dating a man who first knew of her from reading her poetry—and the film’s picture of a digitally unplugged world of best-selling poets and teenagers watching classic shows on TV seems, well, like the stuff of movies. There is, however, one media-related moment in Enough Said that rings entirely true. Albert and Eva chat while watching a movie in a mostly empty theater, and a fellow patron shushes Albert for talking too loud. While the film makes later use of his inability to whisper, it abandons the subject of film’s disappearing audience, displacing those worries, via Albert’s job as a television preservationist, onto another form of moving image that, in today’s lived mediascape (but not the film’s imaginary one), is experiencing greater success and reach than ever. What plays out via this clever bit of displacement is something of a love-triangle allegory in which Eva wants to pursue a relationship with both halves of a divorced couple—a successful poet, on the one hand, and a figure for film’s anxieties on the other. The marriage, we are led to believe, was never a good one in the first place. (“I never felt understood by him, you know?” Marianne explains, “He didn’t get the poetry. He never got me.”) And as each half of that broken relationship proceeds to bad-talk the other and it becomes clear that continuing to pursue relationships with both is impossible, Eva has to choose. Of course, she ultimately chooses the stand-in for film—near-empty theaters and digital archives, warts and all—over the highly successful poet. This may be enough said about poetry and the movies for the time being, but given the relationship history between poetry and film that I have been examining here, it is very unlikely to be the final word.

Chapter Five

I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

In Father Knows Best’s 1954 “Thanksgiving Day” episode, insurance salesman Jim Anderson learns that his football-loving tomboy daughter Kathy has won a contest for writing the best fourth-grade Thanksgiving poem. Seeing in the award a confirmation of Kathy’s “real genius” and the beginning of a bright literary future, he celebrates by reciting verses by Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Greene. When he hears the poem for the first time, however, it disappoints him. He does not understand why Kathy changed her middle name from Louise (Jim’s mother’s name) to Joy on the poem’s byline, and the poem itself, “Thanksgiving Day,” fails to live up to his lofty expectations: Thanksgiving is a happy day For all the girls and boys. It isn’t just like Christmas When your parents give you toys. It isn’t even like Easter When you get an Easter bunny Or even like your birthday When your uncle sends you money. It isn’t like the Fourth of July Or Decoration Day

139 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

Or summer vacation or Halloween. Thanksgiving is a different day, The day I like the best. It’s even better than Sunday Which is called the day of rest. Thanksgiving is my favorite day Though skies are grey and murky, Cause that’s the day when I get to eat The drumstick of a turkey.

Jim says he does not understand why “Thanksgiving Day” is not more about Thanksgiving. And, apparently oblivious to how “money” meets the need for a rhyme with “bunny,” he is confused as to why Kathy would reference a money-sending uncle, because Kathy’s uncle never sends the Anderson children money. Let down, he eventually calls the poem “nonsense.” As part of Kathy’s prize, the school asks her to recite on its televised Thanksgiving program, but she gets stage fright at the microphone and completes only the first line before bursting into tears. Watching at home, Jim and his wife, Margaret, cancel their Thanksgiving dinner restaurant plans and reflect on how the holiday is not what it used to be: their son, Bud, is off celebrating with the football team; their older daughter, Betty, is at a friend’s house; and there isn’t a turkey baking in the oven. Jim realizes that the Thanksgiving he used to enjoy was indeed “a happy day” and quotes from Kathy’s poem. When Kathy returns home, she explains that she was unable to complete the poem because her father “didn’t think it was any good,” but Jim patches things up by saying he was disappointed only because he expected it to be perfect. He then relates how he once thought a Shakespeare poem was “the worst thing I’d ever heard in my life,” proving that he knows nothing about poetry. Kathy forgives him, Bud and Betty unexpectedly come home, and as the family sits down to an impromptu hamburger dinner, Jim leads them in a prayer of gratitude for, among other things, “the privilege of living as free men in a country which respects our freedom and our personal rights to worship and think and speak as we choose.” The song “America the Beautiful” plays in the background, and the scene goes dark. For any number of reasons that have made Father Knows Best emblematic of 1950s television, “Thanksgiving Day” feels thoroughly cut from the

140 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

cloth of Cold War America. Of most immediate concern for the present chapter, however, is how the episode’s impulse to restore domestic or family order plays out in miniature the U.S. State Department’s guiding national security strategy—a strategy predicated on the notion that, as Michael Davidson puts it, “[Because Russian] goals for world domination depended on disrupting the internal security of Western powers . . . military containment abroad depended on the maintenance of domestic order at home.” Hewing to this premise, Davidson explains that Cold War fears about national security were frequently processed or “acted out as dramas of private insecurity” in which “the threat of communism was translated into a renewed concern over the stability of the American family.” Such concern, he continues, rationalized and produced much of what we now know to have been the pervasive surveillance culture of the time. “Just as the government had to monitor Soviet expansion abroad,” he writes of containmentera logics, “so individuals had to police their sexual, social, moral, and domestic lives for signs of breakdown.”1 “Thanksgiving Day” is a crisp object lesson in that process at work, tracking not only how Jim and Kathy experience and resolve a breakdown precipitated by aesthetic (and, as we shall see, related social, moral, and potentially sexual) misunderstandings, but also how the force of their reconciliation renews and fortifies the stability and coherence of the larger Anderson—i.e., American—family unit. Not everything in “Thanksgiving Day” resolves so neatly, however, and its lack of resolution is also a feature of containment-era national security crises acted out as dramas of familial or private insecurity. For even as breakdowns could be policed and temporarily resolved at home, their actual source or sources—certain but unidentified contamination from without—had to remain shrouded in nature and origin, left open-ended to represent communism’s perpetual threat abroad. In order to restore or impose domestic stability at the end of the episode, Father Knows Best shelves, ignores, or leaves open a number of questions or concerns related to Kathy, her poem, and her pretension to authorship that it raised along the way. When the family gathers to congratulate her on the award, for example, Kathy appears to assume that something is wrong, immediately declaring, “I ain’t done nothing to nobody” and demanding to know, “Who’s been squealing on me?” Why does Kathy get so defensive? And might that have to do with her failure to perform on TV—not because she was ashamed or missed her family, as she later explains, but because she fears

141 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

something will in some way be revealed? While no one lends Jim’s objections much credence, it is nevertheless worth repeating his question: why does Kathy assume a partial pseudonym by changing her middle name from Louise to Joy on the poem’s byline? And what about other characters who cultivate the episode’s whiff of suspicion by expressing their own surprise or reservations? What should we make of Jim’s secretary, for instance, who remarks, “Somehow I never pictured Kathy as a poet,” or of Bud, who wonders “this is a poet?” In sum, while “Thanksgiving Day” concludes with a performance of domestic and national stability, the unresolved or unaddressed sources of its initial breakdown help to cultivate, maintain, and justify a hermeneutic of suspicion, further rationalizing, routinizing, and thus naturalizing the need for the institutional and informal aspects of the surveillance culture upon which national security containment strategies depended.2 Many situation comedies would reiterate, reconfigure, vary, challenge, and otherwise engage this ideological drama over the next half century in constituting and reconstituting what Thomas Doherty calls the “elastic arrangement” between the Cold War’s urge to conformity and the “unsettling opinions and unruly talent” of television’s more defiant or transgressive impulses.3 As we shall see, sitcoms would also follow “Thanksgiving Day” by specifically and with surprising frequency connecting this drama to poetry. From the 1950s through the era of Three Network Hegemony (the 1960s and 1970s) and into the Age of Cable (1980s and 1990s), a range of shows would excavate, make manifest, and explore the implication that poetry has an especially close relationship to fraudulence or duplicity. Episodes of Leave It to Beaver (1958), The Bill Cosby Show (1970), The Waltons (1973), The Facts of Life (1980), The New Leave It to Beaver (1986), Cheers (1986), Charles in Charge (1989), and Veronica Mars (2004) all feature characters who plagiarize poetry. A host of other shows ranging from All in the Family (1973) to Taxi (1979), The Jeffersons (1982), and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990) focus on characters who fake being poets or who hide the fact that they actually do write or have written poetry.4 And many other episodes of many other shows tap in various ways into this associative matrix of poetry, plagiarism, and imposture to make poetry a clue, metonym, sign, symbol, symptom, or indicator pointing to frauds, fakes, impostors, impersonators, characters seeking to deceive or evade discovery, or characters generally pretending to be someone or something they are not.5 In fact, the

142 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

repeated association of poetry, plagiarism, and related acts of imposture would become so central to television’s representation of poetry that, more than sixty years after Kathy’s prize-winning poem, some online plot summaries would project or back-read that history onto “Thanksgiving Day.” A contributor’s plot summary on the Internet Movie Database, for example, explains, “Kathy has to write a poem for a school project. . . . But when she reads the poem to her parents, Jim realizes the poem is not her own work.” 6 And TV.com writes that Jim “is sure his daughter will be the next Shakespeare. Pride turns to disappointment when the [sic] Jim actually hears the prize winning poem. Is it really Kathy’s work?”7 One can’t help but speculate about the impact of this history on the public opinion or perception of poetry since the 1950s. This is certainly not the only way in which television’s broad range of programming formats has cited, incorporated, or motivated poetry: I have identified over one hundred episodes from 1952 to the present that include poetry in other ways, and that archive, even in its formative state, offers many possibilities for further analysis.8 That said, because of its durability and because it corresponded with television’s emergence in the media landscape, the discourse connecting poetry, plagiarism, and other forms of fraudulence is a  particularly compelling place to start understanding the relationship between television and poetry. As the next two parts of this chapter will illustrate, television’s concern with exposing or outing poetry-related frauds, impostors, counterfeits, pretenders, shams, and their ilk either troped or went hand in hand with the identification of hidden or undercover queers and communists during the Lavender and Red Scares. It has become a common understanding among scholars studying the Cold War that, as John D’Emilio has put it, many Americans of the time imagined homosexuality as “an epidemic . . . actively spread by Communists to sap the strength of the next generation.”9 Outing queer behavior and dramatizing the domestic order’s risk of queer contamination at least nominally helped television position itself as an ideologically relevant or weaponizable Cold War–ready medium. At the same time—activated on some level by being paired with poetry and thus with an aesthetic and social obscurity or hermeneutic slipperiness that made poetry in the 1950s already a somewhat fishy art form—the Cold War drama’s unanswered questions, unresolved concerns, open endings, and other ambiguities provided a type of generic

143 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

shelter or cover for inserting material that could critique, resist, or interrogate hegemonic containment-era Americanism. As I argue at the end of this chapter, television writers pursued and reworked the plagiarized poem plot motif and its associated spinoffs for at least one other reason: because it figured and became a way to explore television’s own fear that it might itself be perpetually on the brink of committing plagiarism or counterfeiting art. Pressured by increasing and seemingly endless content demands—Season One of Father Knows Best had twenty-six episodes, Season Two thirty-seven, Season Three thirty-seven more, and so on—television writers faced the real and no doubt frightening prospect that, unless they relied on formulas or clichés, cribbed from other shows, or straight-up repeated themselves, they might run out of material. If the plagiarized poem motif became a figure for and even therapeutic way of displacing, analyzing, and managing this anxiety, it came with additional benefits. Indeed, the dynamics structuring the aesthetics and circulation economies of popular poetry within the larger culture— dynamics that do not privilege originality and individualism but hinge, instead, on a kitsch-related aesthetic of reuse, cliché, cultivated unoriginality, and what in other contexts might be called plagiarism or fraud— offered television a way to not only deal with its content predicament but also turn its solution to that predicament into a signal virtue that helped differentiate its product from that of other nonprint media. From “Roses are red, violets are blue” variants to excerpts from Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, we see this on display in both the form and content of the poems made into and for television. And insofar as the poetics of those works bear an aesthetic kinship to the formulaic, carefully paced halfhour television episode, they suggest that, even as television was singling out poetry for special scrutiny, it was in fact learning more from poetry than it would let on. PINK TV

“Poetry,” writes Michael Davidson, “has often been the site of alternative— often perverse—gender positions, nowhere more so than during the repressive 1950s.”10 The first decade of poetry on television was no exception. Consider, for instance, the example that Davidson cites from popular

144 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

culture: Percy Dovetonsils, the humorous “Poet Laureate” whom comedian Ernie Kovacs created for and played on Three to Get Ready on Philadelphia’s WPTZ in the early 1950s. Perhaps the most memorable of Kovacs’s stable of characters and one of the most prominent representations of a poet in television history, Percy speaks with a lisp, giggles and purses his lips, sports a pencil moustache, combs the slicked-down curls of his hair over his forehead, and wears a pair of novelty eyeglasses that appear to have oversized eyeballs painted inside the lenses. He uses a long cigarette holder, drinks a cocktail with a swizzle-stick flower, sometimes dons a zebra-striped smoking jacket and scarf, and recites with great self-satisfaction poems like “Cowboy”: O cowboy so lean, O cowboy so tall, You sit there straight as an arrow. But side-saddle you ride, Instead of astride. Are you perhaps a gay ranchero?

Davidson describes Percy as a homophobic “pansy” stereotype who nevertheless, as “a feminized male,” offered “a queer alternative to the masculine ideals of the day.”11 If Percy was in some measure “out,” he was nonetheless an entertainingly poseur poet, his character’s humor coming partly from the fact that the quality of his verse merits neither the satisfaction he takes in his own cleverness nor the stuffy title of Poet Laureate. But Percy was more than a representation of a homophobic stereotype triangulating the subjects of queerness, poetry, and fraudulence. What Davidson does not note is that the character’s “queer alternative to the masculine ideals of the day” was a specifically television-based product of a Cold War culture of exposing and policing nonconforming sexuality in the first place. Kovacs in fact based Percy on the radio personality of “Ted Malone,” the longtime host of the nationally-broadcast CBS poetry show Between the Bookends. Using television to reveal a well-known public figure purportedly hiding his appearance and behavior under the cover of radio, Kovacs’s outing of Malone staged in miniature television’s claim to Cold War relevance and its legitimacy vis-à-vis the more culturally dominant medium of radio.12

145 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

Television’s logic associating fraudulence, poetry, and alternative gender positions underwrites Kathy’s character in “Thanksgiving Day.” As a football-loving tomboy, she answers Percy’s “feminized male” with a “masculinized female” that in part drives her brother’s query, “this is a poet?” (a question we might also hear as “this is a girl?”). It also feeds the complexity of the poetry that Ward Cleaver writes for his seven-year-old son four years later in Leave It to Beaver. In “Beaver’s Poem” (1958), the title character postpones his homework assignment to write a poem until the night before it is due; when he does not respond to Ward’s guidance—only choosing the topic of bears—Ward writes the poem himself. Beaver eventually copies it in his own handwriting, turns it in, and, like Kathy, wins a prize and is asked to recite it at a school assembly. In his attempt to coach Beaver, Ward tries to model how to write a poem. “I would like to be a bear,” he says, “Now you write the second [line]. It has to rhyme with bear.” Instead of complying, Beaver leaves to get a glass of water. Ward’s wife, June, interrupts, cautioning “Ward, don’t write it for him,” but Ward continues, hoping the rhyme will lead him somewhere. “I would like to be a bear,” he muses, “something, something everywhere.” When June and Beaver go to sleep, leaving him alone with his thoughts and relieved for the moment from his duties as father and husband, Ward is struck by inspiration and completes the couplet: “Gay and happy, free from care.” The scene ends there, leaving audiences to wonder about the nature of Ward’s meditation, how the “gay” of Percy Dovetonsils’s “gay ranchero” sounds in the mouth of a suburban father, and what wishes or fantasies the occasion might be giving him cover to express. At breakfast the following day, Beaver recites part of “his” poem for the family and reveals more of Ward’s composition: I would like to be a bear, Gay and happy, free from care. That’s the life like no other— Climbing trees with my mother.

His brother Wally laughs at the fourth line, calling it “corny.” Shortly thereafter, June also teases Ward about that line. And later, when Ward tries to explain to Beaver’s teacher, Mrs. Rayburn, why Beaver turned in a poem that

146 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

was not his original work, she calls even more attention to it by repeating it aloud with a measure of skepticism. “I purposely wrote that to try to make it sound like a nature ode,” Ward says, presumably to defend his use of “climbing trees.” The exact source of the line’s humor or interest is ambiguous, however. Is it the image of Beaver in a tree with June that is so funny? Or of Ward in a tree with his mother? Is it the forced rhyme of “other” and “mother”? Is it that, as Beaver’s would-be amanuensis, Ward’s rendition of Beaver’s “voice” betrays Ward’s own secret desire to return to childhood? (Ward also attempts to address this possibility with Mrs. Rayburn, explaining, “I tried to put down the way I know Beaver feels about animals. I mean the sort of thing he might have said.”) “Beaver’s Poem” layers and entangles the subjects of plagiarism, fraudulence, and sexuality pretty thickly. Literarily speaking, Ward attempts to fake “a nature ode” and feels as if he has been called out on it. He attempts to fake Beaver’s voice but feels called out on that, too. Beaver tries to pass the poem off as his own and does not understand the exact nature of his crime because, as he explains, he chose the topic and copied the poem in his own handwriting. (“But, gee, Dad,” he says, “I really did write the poem.”) Even though the episode’s domestic crises eventually resolve—Ward is forgiven for being an overly helpful father, Beaver writes a new poem, and the Cleavers follow the model of “Thanksgiving Day” by reuniting at the breakfast table—these acts of literary fraudulence become the vehicle for another set of more subtly raised but ultimately unanswered questions or concerns about the level of Ward’s sexual and masculine fitness as the head of a 1950s nuclear family. In wanting to live “free from care,” is Ward not entirely on board with the role society expects him to play? How does “climbing trees” suggest the way he really feels about his mother? How does the poem’s shadow Oedipal drama color his relationship with his wife June? Are “gay” and “happy” in line two merely synonyms, or does Ward’s “gay” slide uncomfortably and with plausible deniability toward the “gay” of Percy’s ranchero? To what extent is “Beaver’s Poem” outing Ward as an impostor, someone copying the era’s sex and gender codes just as he tried to copy Beaver’s voice and the generic expectations for a nature ode, in the process concealing some other self and thus deceiving everyone around him? Reading backward the meanings of “bear” in the queer lexicon, does Ward in some way feel emasculated by his place at the head of the family? And how—given the episode’s educational contexts and how Beaver mindlessly

147 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

copies the poem—will this affect what D’Emilio called “the strength of the next generation”? Twenty-five years later, in a moment that nicely dramatizes the persistence of the plagiarized poem plot line, television’s awareness of it, and its associated anxieties, The New Leave It to Beaver followed up on some of the original’s concerns. In “Bad Poetry” (1986), Beaver’s niece Kelly retitles and submits “Brookhurst” by the fictional Philip Carey as her own work. (She retitles it “Mayfield,” after her hometown, but otherwise keeps it the same.) In the series revival, Ward has been dead for five years. A divorced Beaver, who has copied his parents’ procreative model and now has two sons, lives with his mother and next door to his brother Wally, Wally’s wife, Mary Ellen, and their two children. One might say that Beaver, having abandoned his place at the head of his own nuclear household in order to take over his father’s, appears to have realized a version of the Oedipal fantasy Ward expressed in “The Bear” a quarter-century earlier, living “gay and happy . . . the life like no other— / Climbing trees with my mother.” If copycat Beaver follows in Ward’s footsteps, Beaver’s niece Kelly suggests that such tendencies run in the family. Like Beaver, Kelly plagiarizes a poem for school, turning in a poem that her father offers as a model to “get you started on the right track.” Like Beaver (and like Kathy Anderson before him), she is asked to recite at a school event (a talent show), although she eventually avoids doing so with the help of Beaver’s son, who performs a magic trick that makes her disappear. Also like Beaver, Kelly has a cheating father. (Wally does not write Kelly’s poem as Ward did for Beaver, but Mary Ellen later reveals that Wally did cheat in school.) Unlike Ward, Wally, and Beaver, however, Kelly is female, and that makes a world of difference. Her act of domestic and gender transgression—a girl fraudulently claiming the property of a male—ultimately becomes a homophobic cautionary tale about what happens to women who act like men. After Kelly recites for class, she is approached by “creepy” Heather Montgomery, a new girl in school who has no friends and who boasts insufferably about her father’s job and her family’s class status in a way that is clearly unbecoming for a young Mayfield girl. Heather puts her hand on Kelly’s shoulder and says, “Nice poem, Kelly . . . almost as nice as ‘Brookhurst’ by Philip Carey. I had to memorize it last year in my private school.” Blackmailing Kelly into becoming her friend—despite her innocent white attire and her French affectations, Heather effectively acts as a masculinized

148 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

female and makes Kelly her “bitch”—the new girl isolates Kelly from her best friend, advises her how to avoid telling Wally about talent night, and threatens to expose her if Kelly doesn’t agree to sleep over at her house, hold her ankles as she does sit-ups in gym, and even spend the summer with her at her aunt’s house. In short, Cold War national security crises are acted out in the domestic sphere of “Bad Poetry” when Kelly becomes what would be called a “security risk” targeted by a foreign agent as an asset under threat of blackmail. When Heather illustrates this risk by threatening to expose Kelly’s fraudulence, Kelly breaks down and confesses to her parents. In a show of household solidarity, Wally and Mary Ellen kick Heather out before asking Kelly—in language eerily similar to what they might have used if she had been sexually abused—“Kelly, why didn’t you tell us what Heather was doing to you?” As the girl explains that she did not want her parents to learn that she had cheated, Mary Ellen reveals that she herself once did Wally’s homework and then leaves Wally alone with Kelly to help her understand the nature of her crime. As he works things through with her, the implications of his own cheating go largely unaddressed, suggesting that what is problematic in this case is not necessarily the crime itself but that Kelly—a girl—committed it. After all, when Ward cheated, he was not only pardoned, but praised for being a good father who wanted to help his son. When Beaver cheated, he was given a second chance and everyone went home happy. And when Wally cheated within the property structure of a socially normative heterosexual relationship, no one even called him out; even in the show’s present day, he barely considers it cheating (although Mary Ellen feels differently). But when Kelly breaks from those genderbased norms and acts like her male progenitors, problems arise: she is pressed into a predatory relationship with sociopolitical undertones that she does not invite, does not want, and is unprepared to handle. As “Bad Poetry” suggests, the legacy of Percy Dovetonsils, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver forged in television’s formative years echoes throughout and becomes a citational and compositional resource for television’s subsequent treatment of poetry. As with Beaver, Kelly, and Kathy, the characters of Chet Kincaid, Blair Warner, Charles, Will Smith, and Eli “Weevil” Navarro (on The Bill Cosby Show, The Facts of Life, Charles in Charge, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Veronica Mars, respectively) all

149 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

plagiarize poetry in educational settings, and all but Weevil out themselves after threat of publication. Television’s parallel efforts to expose, process, and police nonconforming gender or sexual expression in relation to even the most inconsequential poetry has an equally strong tradition. In “A Man for Elly” (1964), Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies discovers that in real life her rugged television cowboy idol Quirt Manly (played by Henry Gibson) is a far cry from being John Wayne: he is short, afraid of horses, cannot shoot, has a high-pitched voice, needs both a body double and a voice double to play his character, and (of course) likes to “make up poems.” He is a fraudulent cowboy and, like Percy, his low-quality verse makes him a counterfeit poet as well.13 In his late-1960s role as “The Poet” on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In—probably the most famous representation of a poet on television since Kovacs’s—Gibson recited verse while holding a giant flower that, despite or because of its exaggerated size, recalls the one Percy used to stir his drink a decade earlier, linking “The Poet” and Percy in a genealogy of queer TV poets.14 It is quite possible, in fact, that Allen Ginsberg was citing both Percy and “The Poet” in a series of flower portraits taken later in life and thereby positioning himself—with his own roots in the 1950s—on that family tree (figure 5.1). Given all of this history, it is not unreasonable to hear Percy’s lisp echoing slightly if unexpectedly

FIGURE 5.1 (left) “The Poet” played by Henry Gibson; (right) flower portrait of Allen Ginsberg.

150 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

and ironically in the feminine rhyme in the final two lines of the verses that Edith Bunker on a 1973 episode of All in the Family (“Archie Goes Too Far”) reminds her aggressively masculine husband Archie that he once wrote to her: When skies are blue, I think of you. And in the rain I think again. So please remember me, dear Edith, When safe at home these lines thou readeth.

In the first decades of its popularity, television regularly conducted the first steps of its relationship with poetry via naïve children like Kelly, Kathy, the Beaver, and Ben Walton of The Waltons, who at twelve or thirteen years old plagiarizes one of his brother’s poems and wins a contest with it in “The Chicken Thief” (1973). Adults trafficking in poetry are accordingly infantilized, linked by childhood tropes to the verse they read or write or by the nursery-rhyme forms those poems often assume. Ward wants to climb trees with his mother; Quirt is diminutive, with a voice that appears to have not yet broken; the size of the flower that Henry Gibson holds accentuates his Poet’s shortness. Indeed, when, on a 1970 episode of The Bill Cosby Show (“The Poet”), gym teacher Chet Kincaid reveals to an embarrassed poetrywriting jock that he himself once wrote poetry, he goes out of his way to date his poems to a 1955 breakup and goes on to explain repeatedly that his poetry writing—and the act of plagiarism that has returned to haunt him— happened “when I was very young.” The courtship poems George Jefferson of The Jeffersons wrote for his wife Louise and that he finds “embarrassing” years later when she publishes them in a book in “Poetic Justice” (1982), most likely also date to the 1950s. Archie Bunker’s verses, too, hearken back to an earlier, more idealistic or innocent period of life when he wrote to Edith in a rudimentary, childish form and diction, out of which he has since grown, having routinized to the point of parody a performance of cynical adult heterosexual American masculinity. When Edith finishes reading the ending to Archie’s poem and exclaims, “ ‘Thou readeth!’ Oh my, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody talked like that in real life!” Archie can only respond, “No, Edith, it would be dumb.” Characters like Kelly, Kathy, Beaver, Ben, Ward, Percy, Quirt, and The Poet—and Chet, George, and Archie in their younger years—are not mature

151 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

enough to understand the ideological stakes of their fraudulence and the crises they unintentionally court. They thus served as object lessons or cautionary or morality tales for Lavender Scare–era home audiences about the security risks of poetry and poetry users as well as the hidden or unseen threats that poetry might invite home. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, TV audiences and characters had grown older: like Beaver, Wally, Chet, George, and Archie, they had learned and routinized the associations between poetry, imposture, gender trouble, and sexual deviance, knowing that if one must traffic in poetry—thereby risking domestic crisis and, by extension, national security—that endeavor is best concealed, carefully managed, rationalized, or kept, as it were, in the family. When Sam Malone of Cheers publishes under his own name a poetic passage from one of Diane’s love letters in “Everyone Imitates Art” (1986), for example, he enjoys the joke that he is playing but tells the drinkers at his bar, “Don’t let it get out, though, that I’m a sensitive guy.” (He eventually confesses to Diane, whose outrage turns to joy when she realizes that it is proof that he saved her letters and is a sensitive guy after all.) Other men labor under the same threat of an incriminating sensitivity and the implications that come with it. George Jefferson winces when his housekeeper, Florence, and a potential publisher call him a “sensitive man” and “a man with true sensitivity.” In the Charles in Charge episode “Poetic License” (1989), the beautiful editor of the Copeland College Poetry Review calls Charles “sensitive” when he recites one of his employer’s daughter’s poems at a school poetry reading and claims it as his own creation. In “Elaine’s Secret Admirer” on Taxi (1979), Elaine says of a character who claims falsely to have written the poems she has been anonymously receiving that, despite all appearances, there is “a sweet, sensitive human being inside” of him. Not all moments that use the plagiarized poem or undercover poet motif to police the expression of masculinity and thus manage domestic stability are so euphemistically expressed. As a 1990 episode (“Def Poet’s Society”) of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air suggests, television maintained the language as well as the logic of the 1950s long after the height of the Lavender Scare, continuing to create characters (especially males) who, despite having only passing or marginal association with poetry, are still “phobically charged with queerness” and “constantly shadowed by queer meaning,” as Gavin Butt has described the social suspicion of artists in the 1950s.15 When hip urban teenager Will joins a poetry club and starts writing verse that he later

152 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

denies having written and attributes, instead, to the fictional street poet Raphael de la Ghetto, whom he claims to know personally, Will’s best friend Jazz asks if he is going to also “Bake some cookies? Hem a dress?” Reaching all the way back to Davidson’s term to describe Percy Dovetonsils, Will’s cousin Carlton then makes up the taunting rhyme, “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Pansies are poets / Will, tell me it isn’t true.” In fact, when Will’s love interest observes that de la Ghetto “uses a lot of metaphor” and Will answers, “Aw, no, baby. He used to. He went to the clinic. He’s straight now,” it is entirely possible to hear in the “straight” of Will’s objection not just an echo of Percy’s “straight as an arrow” cowboy, but also a preemptive assertion of heteronormativity meant to fend off suspicions about the nature of his poetic inclinations. After the contagious imposture of “Def Poet’s Society”—Will fakes having written poetry; he fakes his relationship with de la Ghetto; he recruits his aunt and uncle’s British butler, Geoffrey, to dress up in a dashiki and afro and pretend to be the poet; and Geoffrey’s over-the-top performance of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” marks him as an impostor—the episode ends very much as it might have ended in the 1950s, with the family gathering at home in a restoration of middle-class domestic order, Geoffrey included. In that scene, Will’s Aunt Viv reads aloud five lines of poetry, but only after first affirming the centrality of the nuclear family unit and then, by citing author and title, modeling the proper way to relate to literary texts and the bourgeois property system of which they are part. “This is a poem that your father and I especially love,” she explains. “It’s by Amiri Baraka. It’s called ‘Three Modes of History and Culture.’ ” Not surprisingly, she skips over the poem’s overt social critique and insistent collective voice (e.g., “we go where flesh is cheap,” “we arrive and set up shacks,” etc.) in favor of its last lines and first-person narration, beginning with “I think about a time when I will be relaxed . . .” Whether or not Aunt Viv will eventually reveal the rest of the poem—or if the rest of the family will seek it out, or if TV audiences will find it for themselves—is anyone’s guess. But the episode’s last words don’t exactly encourage it. Will looks directly into the camera and, in the manner of a promotional sales pitch, says, “If you’d like to learn more about poetry, you can reach us at . . .” He then breaks down in laughter. “Psych,” he continues. “We just kidding. Good night, y’all.”

153 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

SEEING RED

While television episodes such as those above illustrate how, as Davidson put it, “the threat of communism was translated into a renewed concern over the stability of the American family,” they rarely name or directly confront the specific nature of that threat, even as they defend against it in the domestic sphere. Thus, even though Wally and Mary Ellen restore domestic order in the Cleaver household, Heather’s blackmailing of Kelly goes largely unaddressed. Kelly learns her lesson and Heather gets kicked out of the family house, but the Cold War containment ideology cannot have the Cleavers report Heather to the teacher or other authority, because the outsider needs to remain an unspecific and unidentified predatory force in order to normalize and justify the maintenance of a surveillance state with no foreseeable end. In other words, “Heather” just might be moving to—or already in—a town near you. Not all television shows yielded to this pressure, however. Occasionally, the more transgressive energies of what Doherty calls television’s “unsettling opinions and unruly talent” reconfigured the plagiarized-poem plotline and identified the otherwise-unnamed threat of communism. In doing so, they brought that threat into discourse and thus into hegemonic rather than ideological relation to natural security dramas, making it possible to reveal ideological contradictions, admit dissenting or competing voices, and open space for critique. Consider, for example, “Archie Goes Too Far” from Season Three of All in the Family, in which Archie Bunker goes searching through son-in-law Mike’s closet for sports magazines and accidentally runs across “a hunk o’ homemade poetry” that he gleefully and, much to Mike’s chagrin, reads aloud to Edith and Mike’s wife, Gloria. “We got a regular Edgar Allan Poe-lock here,” Archie says, casting Mike—whose countercultural affiliation and Democratic politics already mark him as suspicious in Archie’s eyes—as an ethnic outsider linked to Russia via Poland’s status as a Soviet satellite state. (In the show’s British original, Till Death Us Do Part, Mike’s equivalent is an out and proud Trotskyite, a character trait that, for reasons I have explained, the American version suppresses.) Upon reading the poem, which Mike had once given to Gloria and which Gloria thought he had written specifically for her, Archie also reads its dedication, “To Vicky,” revealing Mike as a self-plagiarizer and fraudulent suitor.

154 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

Even though Mike explains, “it was my best poem. I wanted you to have it,” Gloria channels television’s poetry-related logic, insinuating that poetryrelated fraudulence is about more than just the verses. “Michael, you lied to me,” she argues. “You never even wrote me a poem. What else have you lied to me about?” Mike deftly avoids answering and instead accuses Archie of invading his privacy “like a storm trooper.” However angry Gloria is at Mike, she also piles on her father, calling him a “monster.” Archie attempts to deflect their criticism by returning to Gloria’s initial insinuation and making Mike’s poetry-related fraudulence signify a diminished masculinity, as we have seen it do in other shows. “It ain’t my fault that the meathead had only one poem in him,” Archie says, “and then he spread it around like fertilizer, which, by the way, it is.” But when that strategy fails to gain traction, he justifies his actions in the name of national security, saying, “Well, I happen to agree with my government. If you ain’t got nothing to be ashamed of, you don’t need no privacy.” Gloria storms out. Mike storms out. Even timid Edith storms out. All three eventually end up at Gloria’s friend’s house where—in front of Edith, Gloria, and a group of young women drinking wine, eating pizza, and sitting around in silk robes in a room with a hippie vibe at a “come as you are” party—Mike delivers a “fresh poem” to Gloria by way of reconciliation, one that, in rhyming with her name, could only be for her (“O Gloria, / You made my life euphoria. / I wanna get more of ya. / Gloria, I adore ya.”) When Archie finally tracks them down, he barges in and immediately says, “It’s like an opium joint in here—a bunch of commies doing high jinks.” Much to his surprise, however, two young women visiting from Texas go on the counteroffensive, turning the tables by subjecting to scrutiny Archie’s claims to American patriotism and thus making him, not them, the object of suspicion despite his nationalist fervor. “Mr. Bunker,” one explains, “My sister and I are from Dallas, and our daddy would think you’re a communist . . . because you live in New York City.” Even though Archie protests that “I know when my legs are being pulled by a couple o’ little pinkos,” they go on to sing “daddy’s favorite song,” and Archie has no choice but to agree, “Well, your daddy’s favorite song is a damn good song”: If Communism comes a-knocking at your door Don’t answer it If Communism comes a-knocking at your neighbor’s door

155 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

Don’t let him answer it. For Democracy’s the way to live each and every day So when Communism comes just say you’re not at home From Democracy we’ll never, ever roam.

To avoid looking like a communist, he has to agree with the women’s public, exuberant expression of nationalism despite its possible fraudulence, or else figure out a way to prove their insincerity. Facing this unresolvable predicament, Archie runs into the very surveillance structure or hermeneutic of suspicion that he himself has so far most strongly represented and advocated for. Ultimately, when Edith, Gloria, and Mike say they will not return home until he admits to having wrongly invaded Mike’s privacy, he has to relent. While he does so and thus participates in restoring domestic order and, by extension, national security, the implications are nevertheless clear: that the people most fervently outing and policing communism themselves sow the seeds of domestic breakdown and, in so doing, threaten the very national security they claim to defend. In fact, as the episode’s conclusion suggests, those very people might even have skeletons of their own to keep hidden in the closet and for which their zeal perhaps compensates. In the final scene, Edith reads the poem Archie once wrote for her, exposing his secret verse-writing history and its suggestions of ideological contamination. In the interests of national security or just plain reason, however—and perhaps to reinforce the lesson that Archie has however temporarily learned in the process of outing Mike—she tells no one else. As “Emily Dickinson” from Season One of The Facts of Life (1980) illustrates via its version of the plagiarized poem story, improper or unsanctioned association with poetry can lead to other types of domestic disruption or breakdown as well. Teenaged Blair’s plagiarism not only disrupts the familial and educational hierarchies of her boarding-school household, but also precipitates a breakdown of domestic racial hierarchies that, insofar as it ultimately goes unresolved, effectively substitutes for the perpetually unresolved threat “from without” typically reserved for communism. While this sleight of hand rationalizes extending containment-era surveillance logics to the maintenance of American racial hierarchies, it also allows “Emily Dickinson” to bring the subject of economic inequality into discourse, making space for a critique of capitalist logics and practices even

156 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

as it urges continued vigilance against racially based threats to national (i.e., white) security. Too preoccupied with her current love interest and her lead role in the prestigious Eastland School’s production of Romeo and Juliet, the blonde and beautiful Blair (like Beaver and Kelly Cleaver) postpones completing a poem-writing homework assignment and, in search of last-minute inspiration, finds and then submits as her own work Emily Dickinson’s four-line poem “Beauty crowds me till I die.” She does so in the presence of her younger African American housemate, Tootie, explaining à la Ward Cleaver, “It’s a beautiful poem. You know, she writes the way I’d write if I had the time. I’ll just change a few lines, you know, to give it the Blair touch.” When Tootie says, “Blair, you don’t have to be Nancy Drew to figure out that’s cheating,” Blair argues, “Who’s cheating? I’m just borrowing a poem from a woman who died in 1886. I mean, it’s not like I’m copying from the girl in front of me. Besides, it’s only cheating when someone finds out. And no one knows but you and me.” Tootie makes clear that her complicity does not come cheap, however, and Blair—who, like Kelly, becomes a security risk because of her susceptibility to blackmail—purchases her silence by offering to make Tootie’s bed, clean Tootie’s room, and press Tootie’s uniform every day. Tootie agrees and, while exiting the room, exclaims, “This is too much! Having a white maid!” Blair’s plagiarism eventually disrupts the familial domesticity of the house where she lives with several fellow students, but “Emily Dickinson” does not abandon the disruption of American racial order that the act provokes. When Blair finally confesses to her housemates that she copied the poem and thus ruined the grading curve by receiving an A+, Tootie says to her in private, “I’d hate to see you get kicked out of school. You have been a gem of a maid. By the way, these pleats aren’t as sharp as I like them.” And after Blair writes a new poem, confesses to her teacher, and accepts the punishment that he metes out, the episode gives Tootie the last word. “Blair,” she remarks, “I’m sorry for what I put you through. But can I still have you for half a day on Thursday?” Even though Blair claims to have “gotten all of the guilt out of my system,” the effects of her actions reverberate in the larger system of race relations. By simultaneously expanding Tootie’s horizon of racial possibility while revealing the fragility of white supremacy, the story works to normalize and justify the policing of race relations “for

157 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

signs of breakdown” in the interest of maintaining national security. For how stable can American racial hierarchies be if something as apparently insignificant as a plagiarized poem at an all-girls boarding school in Peekskill, New York can disrupt them? If Blair’s actions threaten the racial fabric of American order, her housemates and fellow students feel her plagiarism to be a breach of student as well as domestic solidarity: they accuse her of throwing them under the bus and say that she should go into politics. Mr. Bradley, Blair’s teacher and headmaster, feels so acutely that his professional status and the school’s integrity are under assault that he shocks the girls and Mrs. Garrett by swearing when she confesses: “Blair, what the hell are you talking about? I didn’t mean it. Yes I did!. . . How could you do this to Eastland? To me? You let me go around praising a poem you never even wrote. I feel like a complete idiot.” Threatening the Cold War project of containment at so many different social levels—domestic, familial, educational, gender, racial, and professional—the disruption of internal security and order here opens the door, as Mr. Bradley’s use of “hell” suggests on a linguistic level, for competing discourses and critiques exemplified by housemother Mrs. Garrett, who uses the subject of school grades to challenge the unfair distribution of capital and thus the economic logics differentiating the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the red-haired Mrs. Garrett—the show’s unifying character, whose primary job is to maintain domestic order—becomes a surrogate voice for the Red. When Mr. Bradley returns their homework, the girls are uniformly disappointed by their low grades, and he explains that he graded on a curve, awarding an A+ to Blair and Cs or lower to the others. Mrs. Garrett almost immediately remarks, “Don’t you think it’s unfair to lower the other girls’ grades just because one girl wrote a poem that particularly caught your fancy?” Responding “Life isn’t always fair,” Bradley goes on to praise Blair’s poem. While Mrs. Garrett recognizes it as “extraordinary” and “a nice surprise,” she nonetheless returns to the subject of how Bradley has chosen to distribute the capital of grades and the significant and painful “income gap” and resulting precarity that the majority of the students are experiencing. Echoing Karl Marx’s famous slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” she asks, “Mr. Bradley, don’t you think that each poem should be graded according to its own merit? I don’t see how

158 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

you can grade poems on a curve.” Protesting what she sees as the unfair accumulation of capital in the hands of a few, pushing back at the arbitrary reward system punishing the academic lower class, and resisting the logic of Mr.  Bradley’s curve at a systemic rather than individual level, Mrs. Garrett may not be an actual Red, but the questions she asks admit and articulate a competing economic discourse in ways that other shows do not. Indeed, to display and further impress upon Mr. Bradley the type of distributive justice for which she advocates, she turns to the resources most under her control. When she heads to the kitchen to make the girls a blueberry cheesecake, Mr.  Bradley gets excited and says in anticipation, “Oh good. That’s my favorite.” But, denying him the treat to which he feels entitled, Mrs. Garrett responds coolly, “Too bad there won’t be any left over for you. I’m baking it on the curve.” As with the potential for racial disorder expressed by Tootie, the rest of “Emily Dickinson” does not let the subject of economic justice or Mrs. Garrett’s advocacy for the worker disappear. Unlike the threat that Tootie represents, however, this does not remain hidden from the household but is brought fully into discourse. When the opportunistic Tootie announces that a pizza-store employee gave her too much change, Mrs. Garrett makes her return the money, explaining that such mistakes come out of the worker’s pay. Her ideas find reception elsewhere, as well, dramatizing how quickly counterhegemonic discourses can spread if gone unchecked. Molly, one of the youngest girls in the house, not only echoes Mrs. Garrett’s sentiments (“We can’t exploit the wages of the working class,” she says. “It’s a tainted pizza!”) but also takes up a feminist mantle Mrs. Garret does not, refusing to watch the Dallas Cowboys because “They exploit women by using cheerleaders as sex objects.” In doing so, Molly offers a miniature preview of the intersectional feminism into which Mrs. Garrett’s ideas might grow and that would subsequently question Mr.  Bradley’s grading logics and the ideology they represent along the lines of gender as well as class inequity.16 Although “Emily Dickinson” works diligently to contain the various types of disorder that Blair’s plagiarism unintentionally unleashes and to restore the domestic order that concludes so many similar plots, it is ultimately impossible to ignore the objections or inequities that Mrs. Garrett voices. Indeed, justice is never fully served. Blair is forced to withdraw from

159 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

the play, is grounded for a month, and flunks her English literature class. But while she may feel better for having “gotten all of the guilt out of my system,” the episode does not allow her or Mr. Bradley to think about, much less seek and gain restitution for the other students who not only received lower grades because of her but had to rewrite their poems as well. In fact, when Blair writes an original poem to help make up for plagiarizing the first, it becomes a cause for celebration, while the poems by the other girls, who completed the assignment twice and thus worked twice as hard, are ignored. The contradictions are clear. Even though Blair and Mr. Bradley are happy with how the system is working—they believe that domestic order has been restored—audiences are left with a pile of evidence to the contrary and might be forgiven for thinking that “Emily Dickinson” really leaves little resolved in the end. As the episodes studied here indicate, the stakes of associating with poetry during the Cold War could be unexpectedly high, resonating at the level of the family and the nation in ways that might move people to assume what Dana Gioia’s 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” describes as a “public skepticism” of poetry that “represents the final isolation of verse as an art form in contemporary society.” It is not coincidental that during the very year that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Gioia’s now-famous takedown of poetry as a “professional subculture” located only (like Leftist political thought, perhaps) on university campuses opens its call for a reactivated culture of American poetry by motivating that era’s language of containment. Its second sentence minimizes poetry as a security threat by calling it “the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated [i.e., contained] group.” Nor is it coincidence that Gioia concludes by alluding to “The Star-Spangled Banner” in order to reanimate the pre–Cold War history of what may be the most famous American poem and thus herald the dawning of a new geopolitical era. “Let’s build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us,” he writes, as if he had witnessed the Cold War’s plagiarized poem plotline unfold one too many times on his Zenith television set—“and watch the ancient, spanglefeathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.”17 One can almost hear the song “America the Beautiful” playing in the background of this ending just as it did as Jim Anderson led his reunited family in prayer on Thanksgiving Day in 1954.

160 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

MADE FOR TV

When Jim learns of Kathy’s award on Father Knows Best, he erupts into a poetic celebration, joyfully exclaiming from memory the first six lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”). His secretary joins the fun, picking up where Jim leaves off by reciting lines seven and eight before adding “William Shakespeare.” Were it not for her, however, the poem might very well have gone without authorial attribution, for, as we see in later scenes, Jim has a tendency to quote poetry without identifying his sources. When he comes home from work, for example, he begins quoting from Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” but does not mention its author. And when he sits Kathy down a bit later and quotes to her from “Sweet Are the Thoughts that Savour of Content,” he does not tell her that it is by Robert Greene. Jim is not a plagiarist—or is he? Were he a student reciting at school or quoting the poems in an essay, he would be expected to cite the author and title and would be penalized if not deemed a plagiarist for not doing so. But within popular culture—which sustains an alternative poetic proprietary system that oftentimes imagines the use to which a poem is put as a sort of authorship in its own right—he is not. He has probably listened to or sung songs (hymns at church, patriotic tunes at civic events) whose original writers are unknown or go unnamed and that are instead performed—much like Jim’s recitations of Shakespeare, Scott, and Greene—for their content, symbolic or other communicative value, or social effects. He has more than likely put his signature beneath poetic passages on greeting cards (where authors’ bylines would typically go), thus “authorizing” their sentiments. If his mother, Louise, were anything like my maternal grandmother, she might have included unattributed and untitled excerpts from Richard Monckton Milnes’s “The Brookside” in letters sent to her husband stationed in the South Pacific during World War II. Jim might well have known Ethel Romig Fuller’s poem “Proof?,” which was reprinted so frequently in newspapers, funeral home brochures, and newsletters and on church signs that the New York Times once called it “the most quoted poem in contemporary English literature.” However, he likely would have found it under a different title, in a different format, and printed without byline (a constant source of frustration for Fuller, who regularly sought to have her authorial credit restored).18 If Margaret and Betty Anderson kept poetry scrapbooks

161 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

as many people did, they likely would have felt no guilt in cutting off bylines, copyright notices, and publication information. Like one real-life scrapbooker, they might even have marked those poems with handwritten notes such as “Esther sent me this 1946” and “This was often quoted by Mrs. Pine,” thus employing personal or alternate bibliographical systems where the cultural capital of bourgeois literary culture’s bibliographic standards does not necessarily prevail.19 In short, whether or not Jim is a plagiarist depends largely on the implicit rules that govern what Joseph Harrington has called the “presentation contexts” in which he recites.20 Given the example that Jim sets for her in the home (he knows best, after all), it is understandable that Kathy might be reluctant to claim authorship of “Thanksgiving Day” and would privilege, instead, the poem’s content, its value as what Harrington calls “a mode of sympathy,” or how it “functions [to] serve not just the individual but also a community of readers bound by sentiment and convention.”21 It is also understandable why she might be confused by his sudden attention to her poem’s origin. Thus, when the family asks about her verse, she calls it “not much—just an old poem,” playing down the subject of authorship and giving it, instead, the legitimacy of sentiment, convention, and age that Jim so clearly values in the poetry he recites. Likewise, when Jim holds up a paper copy that he extols as “the original manuscript,” Kathy again directs attention away from its provenance and what Walter Benjamin would call its “aura” by saying, “It’s a poem, daddy.”22 And later, when explaining why she failed to recite more than the first line on TV, Kathy says she was upset because “Daddy didn’t think it was any good,” again speaking about the verse in terms that orient its value in relation to something other than the source of its creation (here, its social life and its failure to adequately serve a community of readers). The fact that Kathy neither claims nor denies having written “Thanksgiving Day” may not, after all, be the sign of suspicious or surreptitious behavior that TV.com, “Bernie” on the Internet Movie Database, and I have all suggested it might be, and for which the history of similar plotlines since that episode’s 1954 broadcast might encourage us to look. Rather, it might be a sign that she is having difficulty negotiating between different poetic proprietary value systems that, up until this point in her life, have remained discrete: one, represented by her father, that would have her imagine poems as a sort of public property or resource that acquires meaning via its circulation, use, and familiarity (“just an old poem”); and another, represented

162 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

by school and its prizes but suddenly, weirdly, also by her father, that values them in terms of individual accomplishment, originality, and other aesthetic qualities adherent to the bourgeois idea of literature. Indeed, it is not until Jim stops focusing on what he earlier calls the “great moment . . . in an author’s life when talent is recognized” and reembraces the values of sentiment and convention by quoting and agreeing with the first and perhaps the most banal line in Kathy’s poem (“Thanksgiving is a happy day”) that he returns to his former self and the story moves toward resolution. In the end, then, “Thanksgiving Day” may well be a story that buries, suggests, or reveals evidence of Kathy’s plagiarism, but it is also a story about how Jim temporarily becomes someone he is not and how that deviation from one set of aesthetic and proprietary values to another rips at the fabric of the family he heads. Kathy’s failure to recite on TV is an especially telling moment in the relationship history between television and poetry, because that scene displaces onto her poetry-related crisis television’s own fear that it may, like Kathy’s poem, be trafficking too much in the conventional, banal, or cliché (“Thanksgiving is a happy day”) and may, like Kathy, be left with nothing to say and unable to perform on screen. Television’s seemingly unending and growing demand for more content must have time and again raised the prospects that, unless its writers relied on formulas or clichés, stole from other shows, or were sly enough to find occasions to repeat themselves (as Mike did with his poem in All in the Family), they might simply run out of material. In this respect, the presence of the plagiarized poem plot in the history of television might be read as a kind of therapeutic metaphor figuring the industry’s own predicament. That is, like Beaver, Kelly, and Blair, all of whom wait until the night before their poems are due at school, television writers necessarily, because of the pressures of producing ever more material under deadline, wait until the last moment to write and, in looking for “inspiration,” perhaps inevitably end up cribbing their stories from someone or somewhere else.23 One can almost imagine them pulling at their hair and saying “I need a phony poet tonight,” just as Will Smith does on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air when forced at the last moment to produce his fictional poet Raphael de la Ghetto for a school reading. They therefore copy out other stories in their own handwriting and add their own bylines (as Beaver and Ben Walton do, or as Charles does when he reads Sarah’s poem and claims it as his own). They lift content from other sources and

163 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

change the title, like Kelly replacing the town of “Brookhurst” with “Mayfield.” They update old material just as Chet Kincaid updates Thomas Lodge’s “Rosalind” in the love poem he wrote for Rosemary, or the way that Gomez Addams and Al Bundy riff on Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St.  Nicholas” in their respective episodes of The Addams Family (1964) and Married . . . with Children (1989). Or they simply “change a few lines, you know, to give it the Blair touch.” If the plagiarized poem plot figures television’s anxiety that it is perpetually at risk of committing one form of plagiarism or another—therein becoming a boob tube doomed to the artistic fraudulence of kitsch that Daniel Tiffany describes as “the abject substance of automation and monotony”—then it, and the popular poetry dynamics at its center, offer a way to justify or excuse that fraudulence and even own, redeem, and champion it as a guiding if not authentically mass aesthetic.24 Poetry’s proprietary history within popular culture (as a literary form available to all and not fundamentally linked to its byline or the values that accumulate around “individuality”) legitimizes or serves as a precedent for the copycat mentality essential to television’s content needs. It also aligns television with, and allows it to appeal to popular and mass cultures’ aesthetics of the conventional, frequently repeated, everyday, or cliché rather than with the bourgeois values of individuality and originality. That is, an aesthetic and even social worldview inherent to television’s “plagiarism” (one associated with poetry more than novels, short stories, plays, or other art forms) offers, as John Guillory has written, a pleasure that is “not the pleasure of the individual’s recognition of his or her individuality; rather, it takes the form of identification with a social body expressed or embodied in the common possession of writer and reader, a common language.”25 If, as Tiffany argues, “the loss of originality” inherent to the emergence of kitsch “would allow poetry to become—via the traits of its reproducibility—the impersonal and allegorical expression of millions of souls,” then television found in the fakery, apparent triviality, childlike affectation of characters, and mass appeal of kitsch’s poetic (i.e., popular) history a way to broker a distinctive place in the larger media landscape and set in place one of the pylons of its aesthetic while also substantiating a much broader claim to being the new vox populi.26 But not entirely or exactly. Given the Cold War’s anxieties about sexual and social imposture—and inheriting an American tradition of affirming

164 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

and celebrating the individual and what Jim Anderson calls “our freedom and our personal rights to worship and think and speak as we choose”— television also had to find a way to become the personal and allegorical expression of the sovereign individual or single soul, not just, as with kitsch, “the impersonal and allegorical expression of millions of souls.” As much as the braided subjects of poetry and fraudulence offered an opportunity to dramatize the social and aesthetic permission to copy, they also offered an analogue, in a way that pairing plagiarism with other literary forms could not, for how the personal and impersonal might meet, or how individuality and cliché might go hand in hand. Indeed, just as Jim’s recitations of Shakespeare, Scott, and Greene are different from anyone else’s because they are mediated by his voice and choice of presentation contexts, so too are television’s cribbed and clichéd plotlines not in fact the “automation and monotony of kitsch” but the product of a dialectical relationship between repetition and originality that sometimes feels aesthetically adjacent to the “repetition with a difference” that marks the art of “signifyin(g)” that Henry Louis Gates Jr. and others have found in the African American vernacular and literary traditions.27 When Beaver claims his father’s poem “The Bear” as his own because “I wrote it. And I put my name on it,” for instance, he is not wrong, because the very act of copying it out in his handwriting and handing it in for school makes it—via his choice of topic, the personal medium of its transmission, and the presentation context he has authored for it—new and unique. Certainly the words sound and mean differently in his mouth than they do in Ward’s. Like Jim’s “cover” versions of Shakespeare, Scott, and Greene, Beaver’s aesthetic is grounded in what would later become the media dynamics and social appeal of American karaoke. This mark of originality—someone’s ideas or words remediated by someone else’s individual handwriting, voice, or choice of presentation contexts—does not track with the values of originality or “quality” in bourgeois arts and letters. In fact, it frequently embraces or affirms aesthetic badness in favor of other values, eschewing individualism in favor of individuality, with resourcefulness, sympathy, cliché, community adhesion, or flair trumping training and talent and proudly affirming, even as it might grate harshly on the ears, the unrefined vox of the populi. That aesthetic, one of original and individual roughness or badness performed against and in relation to the common language of cliché, emerges from the plagiarized poem plot line and is, unsurprisingly, most on display in the TV poems

165 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

themselves—poems that are neither art nor kitsch and that would, because they are “born televised” and occur within the framework of television’s particular aesthetic, be much less likely to appear in print, film, radio, and other media. Take, for example, Kathy’s “Thanksgiving Day.” The poem proceeds from one impersonal cliché to the next until its final lines. Recycling what Guillory calls the “common language” of holidays, it even suggests via its use of cliché (that is, at the level of poetic language rather than content) that the very comfort or happiness of which it speaks is produced not by original ways of celebrating holidays but by the predictable “automation and monotony” or “sentiment and convention” that marks social celebrations. The poem begins with the most common of holiday terms—the “happy” of “Happy Thanksgiving,” “Happy New Year,” “Happy Birthday,” “Happy Halloween,” etc.—and stitches together stock figures and phrases such as “for all the girls and boys,” “the day of rest,” and “grey and murky” that effectively produce what Tiffany describes as “an art without qualities.” Formulaic, derivative, superficial, humble in its preoccupation with toys and bunnies, the kitsch qualities of “Thanksgiving Day” make it, as Kathy explains, “just an old poem,” marked on any number of levels by its lack of originality and revealing, as Tiffany writes, “historical bonds of collective identity, which suspend, or supersede, the domain of the personal.”28 And yet it is not entirely impersonal. Although it begins by emphasizing collective identity (“all the girls and boys”), it gradually shifts to a second person address (“your parents,” “your birthday”) and then to the first-person—a movement that not only situates the individual in relation to collective and common language, but creates the conditions for the poem’s display of personal, individual, or original, rather than formulaic “badness” that occurs in its final line, “the drumstick of a turkey.” That last line’s effect is the product of many things, but it is not solely the effect of cliché. The surprise of its badness is contingent upon the expectations raised (or lowered, to be more exact) by the preceding clichés. It is contingent upon the word “murky,” which telegraphs the impending arrival of “turkey” (even though we want to believe that Kathy will not go there), and which also—by virtue of appearing in the most “poefied” line of the poem (“Though skies are grey and murky”)—provides a point of contrast between the exalted language of poetic aspiration and the banality of a drumstick. The shock of Kathy’s sudden expression of personal desire and appetite is the result of

166 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

an otherwise disembodied and impersonal poem-world where gifts are given but desire is otherwise unacknowledged and unsated. And it is contingent upon the last “day” in the poem’s list (Sunday), in which the lofty, abstract, and conventional religious cliché (“the day of rest”) provides a point of contrast that showcases the specific carnal experience that makes Kathy so personally happy on Thanksgiving Day. Even though it relies upon the poem’s cultivation of cliché and thus the specter or promise of kitsch for its effects, the final line of “Thanksgiving Day” is not itself cliché or kitsch; it is not “the impersonal and allegorical expression of millions of souls” but, rather, Kathy’s own original expression marked as especially or authentically original not by virtue of any bourgeois literary quality it displays or aspires to, but by the quality of its badness, which becomes most visible, perhaps, in the context of kitsch. As I have suggested, this relationship between the cliché and the originally bad is foundational to the poetics of TV poetry and essential to television insofar as it serves as a metaphor for TV writing from sitcoms to soap operas and game shows. Thus, Ward’s poem on Leave It to Beaver harnesses the kitsch effects of “gay and happy,” “free from care,” and “That’s the life like no other” to set up—just as “Thanksgiving Day” does via “murky”—the surprising moment of personal or original badness exhibited in his poem’s most remarkable line, “climbing trees with my mother.” So, too, does Archie Bunker’s poem for Edith begin with cliché or poetic kitsch (e.g., blue skies and rain) and move to a display of individual badness: “So please remember me, dear Edith, / When safe at home these lines thou readeth.” And in “Def Poet’s Society,” Jazz saves Will’s cliché-ridden poem from being unremarkable by, well, Jazz-ing it up or adding his version of “the Blair touch.” Will writes, “My love for you is like a river, / Like a summer breeze that makes my soul shiver. / One look from you is more precious than gold.” Unlike Kathy, Ward, and Archie, Jazz rejects the rhyming possibilities hovering on the linguistic horizon via the word “gold”—all of which would seem to railroad him into a cliché (“old,” “cold,” “hold,” etc.)—and refuses in his own way to deal in what Tiffany calls “the exalted phrases of the poetic tradition” by ending with the “bad” but undeniably original line of verse, “Let’s go get some barbeque and get busy.” This dynamic of TV poetry is fueled by the clichés of poetic form as well. The conventional, well-worn, easily cited, quickly identifiable rhyming and metrical formulaics of the poetic tradition thus serve, in ways that the forms

167 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

of newer, less prescriptive literary genres could not, to deepen the metonymic relationship between the copycat aesthetics of popular poetry and the copycat aesthetics of the formulaic thirty-minute television episode with its particular scenic pacing and regularly-spaced commercial breaks. Conventional television favors the rhyming and metered poem above all verse forms because of the readymade kitsch value that comes with it and for the way that it sets the conditions for the dynamic between the conventional and the original. We have seen this at work to some extent in the noteworthy rhymes that Kathy, Ward, Archie, and Jazz decide to use or not use. It is frequently conducted via what Davidson called the two- or four-line “‘Roses are red, violets are blue’ formula” that Percy Dovetonsils often used in the 1950s. The first line of Archie’s poem for Edith (“When skies are blue, I think of you”) explicitly evokes this formula via the color “blue” to establish the kitschy bass line against which his bad original rhyme will solo. Ward’s poem consists of two four-line tetrameter stanzas, but we never hear both stanzas read in sequence; Blair’s selection of Emily Dickinson is a quatrain; only four lines of Kelly’s rip-off of “Brookhurst” are ever revealed; and George Jefferson’s “Ode to a Steam Press” and “Ode to the Cancellation of Hawaii Five-0” follow or gesture to this pattern. The first poem quoted in “The Poet” episode of The Bill Cosby Show is by a high school jock who responds to a poster asking for “original poetry” by saying, “Roses are red, violets are blue. / Sugar is sweet, and so are you.” “Roses are red” variants appear on Sanford and Son (1975), Sanford (1980), That ’70s Show (2002), and probably many other shows. Perhaps nowhere else is the rhetorical and formal facilitation of this cliché/individual interplay—to say nothing of its aesthetic kinship with signifyin(g)—more on display than when Carlton and Will play a version of the dozens via “Roses are red” verses in “Def Poet’s Society.” “Roses are red, violets are blue,” Carlton teases, “Pansies are poets. Will, tell me it isn’t true.” Will shoots back, “Roses are red, violets are blue. / Jazz and I are black, but Carlton, what are you?” As the repetition of flowers (roses, violets, pansies) and colors (red, blue, black) in the aforementioned poems suggests, TV poetry involves more than the repetition of clichés, stock phrases, and other poetic formulas in establishing the conditions for original or personal badness and thus individual expression. It also motivates a poetic diction—a shared and often “corny” (old or outdated) lexicon that is less available to the novel, short story, or other literary forms—toward this same end.29 As Tiffany writes

168 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

of the particularly compatible fit of poetry and kitsch, “the lyric tradition is infused with a redundant, idiosyncratic vocabulary” that is “archaic or markedly ‘poetic,’ ” and the “replicative nature” of that diction offers yet another level of precedent for television’s own aesthetic of repetition with a difference, one that, like kitsch, functions as “a reaction against polite letters” not too different from the athlete’s “Roses are red . . .” reaction to the pretention to polite letters in the poster on The Bill Cosby Show.30 Thus the “odes” of Ward Cleaver and George Jefferson, and thus the pansies of Percy Dovetonsils, Carlton, and “The Reluctant Rose,” which Charles “borrows” from Sarah on Charles in Charge (“If only I were free to be the butterfly I want to be,” she writes, “to flit through flaming fields of daisies, daffodils, and pansies . . .”). Thus the “autumn wood,” “grace,” “scarlet hue,” and “snow refining heaven” of Chet Kincaid’s poems; the “grey and murky” sky of Kathy’s poem; the “river,” “shiver,” “soul,” “summer breeze,” “precious,” and “gold” of Will’s poem on The Fresh Prince; the “heaven above,” “sheer delight,” and “desire” of Mike’s poem to Gloria; the “fiery downpour” and “nature’s snow blankets” of Kelly’s “Mayfield”; the “tree” that Ward feels he needs to use “to try and make it sound like a nature ode”; the dancing echoes of the poem Sam steals on Cheers; the dancing sonnets and smiling eyes of the poem Elaine receives on Taxi, and so on. In fact, when sleazy dispatcher Louie tries to convince Elaine that he is the author of the poems she has been receiving, she calls him out by asking him to recite, and in some ways his improvised poem does not hit as far from the mark as her response (“That is the most disgusting poem”) would suggest. “Cascading, cascading waterfall,” he intones, “clouds, lots of them, white and puffy, you know, clouds, and flowers covered with dew, and trees hanging over, and you and me naked on a rock.” As with the stock phrases and forms of the poetic tradition, this “archaic or markedly ‘poetic’ ” (i.e., kitsch) diction not only further tropes and justifies the recycled subject matter of TV writing but provides an occasion to administer “the Blair touch” that, in all of its badness, allows for individual expression without capitulating to the pretension of polite letters. Will’s “shiver,” “soul,” and “summer breeze” make even more possible the originality of Jazz’s concluding line, “Let’s go get some barbeque and get busy.” Kathy’s “grey and murky” puts the individuality of “turkey” in clear and striking relief. And the clichéd, archaic diction of poetic history enables the rhyme between “readeth” and the strikingly original if cringe-worthy

169 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

“Edith” in Archie’s verse. Following a formula and thus eminently reproducible, such poems or poetic moments have become a sort of shorthand or symbol—possibly, by now, a stock phrase or cliché—in the language of television as it continues to allegorize its own aesthetic. In “Foot Chase” from Season Four of Justified (2013), career criminal Boyd Crowder and his hired muscle break into the home of local banker Dale Haywood seeking proof that Dale is not Drew Thompson (a man who faked his death twenty years earlier and absconded with a crime boss’s drugs). Were Boyd and his sidekick more versed in the dynamics of TV poetry, they would understand by reading his verse that Dale is not the particular fraud they suspect him to be. (Not surprisingly given the relationship history between television and poetry that I discussed earlier in this chapter, ample material suggests that Dale is a closeted gay man.) In the house, Boyd and his thug pull from a box of mementos a poem handwritten on a piece of folded-up, wide-ruled notebook paper that proves nothing to them but that so bears the mix of cliché and original badness that I have been charting here that it cannot but signal that Dale is not Drew: And as I watch her kiss Curt, my heart fills with hurt, my soul fills with sorrow, the size of Kilimanjaro.

Displaying the subject matter, stock phrases, metrical characteristics, rhyme scheme, and diction of poetic kitsch, the first three lines of Dale’s typical TV-length, four-line poem suggest that he is, in fact, “one of us,” but his use of “Kilimanjaro” is so originally bad that there is no way that he can, at the same time, be anyone other than himself. INTERESTING

With the end of the Cold War, with the emergence of auteur television (arguably beginning with Twin Peaks in 1990, a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union), and, more recently, with the dawning of internet TV, television’s relationships with poetry would change. Indeed, a string of twenty-first-century shows from the United States and the U.K. connecting poetry and killers and especially serial killers—Twin Peaks, Criminal

170 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

Minds (2005), Psych (2009), Luther (2010), Bletchley Circle (2012), The Fall (2013), The Following (2013), and Breaking Bad (2008–2013)—suggests that that relationship’s reconfiguration is proceeding well apace.31 But given television’s long emergence in and overlap with the Cold War and the entrenched logics I have outlined in this chapter, contemporary television has hardly given up the poem as sign or marker of social fraudulence or imposture. That its writers are well aware of the history of this symbolic language and the cultural stakes of “poetry” that it helped to create and sustain is perhaps nowhere more on display than in the references to poetry that bookend Season Two (2008) of AMC’s historical Cold War drama Mad Men. In the season’s premiere (“For Those Who Think Young”), advertising executive and agency creative director Don Draper goes out for lunch and sits at a diner counter next to a younger man who is reading Frank O’Hara’s 1957 collection Meditations in an Emergency. Don inquires, “Is it good?” and, skeptical of Don’s corporate look, the man replies, “I don’t think you’d like it.” Later in the episode, though—after Don “fails to perform” with his wife, Betty, on Valentine’s Day; after his rival coworker Duck Phillips begins a youth movement to help reenergize the company’s creative department; and after Don becomes frustrated with his team’s ideas—we see him sitting in his office reading O’Hara’s book. Then, as the episode concludes, we see him again with Meditations. He recites in voiceover the last section of “Mayakovsky,” packages the book with a note reading “Made me think of you,” and drops it in the mailbox. We do not know Don’s intended recipient, but as the season unfolds, we discover it is bound for Anna Draper, the wife and widow of the original Don Draper, whose identity Don (at that time going under his birth name, Dick Whitman) assumed during the Korean War. As the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolds in the season’s finale (“Meditations in an Emergency”), Don returns from a business trip to California, where he also visited Anna Draper, and discovers that, in his absence, not only have his firm’s partners voted to sell out to a London group, but Duck has been appointed its new president. Unwilling to follow Duck’s company vision, which shifts attention away from the creative department, Don storms out of a meeting with his former partners and London representatives, indignantly exclaiming in a diva-like show of vocational purity, “I sell products, not advertising!” The episode concludes with several scenes that,

171 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

like the season premiere, braid the subjects of creativity and sexual secrecy: Don learns that Betty is pregnant but not that she considered an abortion, and Peggy reveals to Pete that he fathered the baby she gave up for adoption. But the season’s other poetry-related bookend happens just after Don walks out of that meeting. Attempting to ease the shock of the departure, Duck says to everyone remaining, “Let him go. It’ll take a second to find some kid who can write a prose poem to a potato chip.” I will return to the unexpected connections between O’Hara and that “prose poem to a potato chip” in a moment. What I want to note first, however, is how the constellated subjects of poetry, sexual secrecy or deviance, communism, and other acts of fraudulence are central to the period specificity with which Mad Men remembers Cold War America, or at least the televised version of that America that it inherits. As we have seen, poetry cues the subject of imposture in general. It helps to keep the story of Don’s fraudulent identity in the foreground—it connects him to Anna Draper, and he does not look like someone who would “like it” even though he does. Via the epithet “prose poem,” it also serves as a mechanism to call into question the legitimacy of Don’s work (i.e., he writes prose that masquerades as poetry). As we have also seen, poetry signals the subjects of queerness and dramas of sexual secrecy and revelation: Peggy reveals her secret pregnancy; Betty hides from Don that she considered an abortion; and the combination of Don’s sexual restlessness, inability to perform with Betty, and interest in a gay poetic icon is more than enough to have fed Lavender Scare anxieties. Titled as it is for the Russian Leninist whom Stalin called “the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch,” O’Hara’s poem and the final episode’s backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis further connect poetry to communism and the Red Scare. In fact, when the erstwhile Dick Whitman reads aloud “Mayakovsky,” the entangled or intertwined subjects of poetry, fraudulence, queerness, and communism come into nearly perfect alignment, making for a shrewd, historically informed analysis on the part of Mad Men’s series creator, Matthew Weiner, who wrote “For Those Who Think Young” and cowrote and directed “Meditations in an Emergency.” I like to think that somewhere in Weiner’s archives there is a deleted scene from “For Those Who Think Young” in which Don reconsiders the question he asks of O’Hara’s poetry (“Is it any good?”) and instead follows Mark W. Van Wienen to ask “good for what?”32 For, as Don’s apparent

172 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

moment of self-recognition in “Mayakovsky” indicates, he and O’Hara have more in common than his question’s pretension to the aesthetic value system of polite letters might suggest. Both are navigating a New York in the 1950s and 1960s and a nation anxious about sexual and social imposture. Both strive in some sense to, as O’Hara put it, “bring forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial.”33 Both aim for their work to have a replicatory appeal; like Baudelaire, Don aims to “invent a cliché,” and O’Hara in the New York school sought a poetic language created out of what Tiffany calls “idiomatic speech” and “verbal samples, produced through an endless process of appropriation, replication, and collaboration”—a process not entirely unlike the one in the creative department Don directs.34 Just as Duck accuses Don of writing fraudulent poetry (a “prose poem to a potato chip”), so Clement Greenberg tried to dismiss O’Hara’s verse along similar lines, calling it “pseudopoetry.”35 And both of them—Don originally, and O’Hara after the fact— were made for TV. For Tiffany, kitsch doesn’t just become “a reaction against polite letters” and “the bourgeois affinities of literature,” but also—as the unexpected kinship between Don and O’Hara suggests—bridges or mediates between popular and “elite” or avant-garde poetic traditions, both of which are united by their mutual opposition to polite letters and by valuing “depersonalized forms of public language.” He writes, “This orientation—shared by poetic traditions at opposite ends of the social spectrum (and opposing the middle ground of literary values, which favor originality)—draws attention to the rich potential of the verbal cliché, or formula, as a basis of poetic composition.” Thus, as he notes in passing, “advertising copy” (such as a prose poem to a potato chip) and portions of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and poetry by the New York school are linked by “an evolving aesthetic of kitsch” anchored in a “collective process” and “collectivist formation.” That is not to say, Tiffany continues, “that one’s experience of an Ashbery cento, or catalogue-poem, is identical to reading a poem by a naïve poet who unconsciously repeats the clichés of a thousand other lyric poets,” but that kitsch may “offer an unprecedented reconciliation—overstepping the middle ground of literature—between elite and vernacular traditions.”36 As the passage from “Mayakovsky” that Mad Men adds to the corpus of television’s clichéd, plagiarized, queer-signaling, Red-related, mass cultural

173 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

poetry indicates, however, reading the vernacular and the elite also might not be as different as one might expect. Here is the passage Don reads: Now I am quietly waiting for The catastrophe of my personality To seem beautiful again And interesting, and modern. The country is grey and Brown and white in trees, Snows and skies of laughter Always diminishing, less funny Not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of The year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.

In order for the speaker’s personality to seem beautiful, interesting, and modern (indeed, in order to feel as though it is possible to become “myself again”), O’Hara’s speaker must first—like Kathy seeking to express her personal experience at the end of “Thanksgiving Day”—work through a passage saturated with the diction and imagistic clichés of the poetic tradition and thus the voice of the collective. The “darker” and “grey” skies of O’Hara’s poem echo and repeat the “grey and murky” sky of Kathy’s “old poem” as well as the “clouds, lots of them” from Louie’s parody of TV poetry on Taxi. The “snow-refining heaven” and “snow blankets” from the poems Chet and Kelly plagiarize reappear as the “snows” of “Mayakovsky,” and the “eyes . . . smiling” in one of the poems written for Elaine on Taxi become O’Hara’s “skies of laughter.” O’Hara’s grey, brown, and white more than recall the reds, blues, whites, scarlets, and golds of other TV poems. Dale’s “sorrow” is reconfigured—or perhaps prefigured—as “less funny.” Will Smith’s poetic “summer breeze that makes my soul shiver” becomes the chills of O’Hara’s “coldest day.” And here, too—perhaps inevitably?—are the clichéd “trees” of the popular tradition: the “trees hanging over” from

174 I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

Louie’s parody, the “autumn wood” from Chet’s poem, and, of course, the “trees” that Ward uses to make his poem “sound like a nature ode.” As with “Thanksgiving Day” and so many other TV poems, the speaker in “Mayakovsky” must inhabit, pay homage to, or otherwise replicate and thus sustain the impersonal voice of the collective before moving on to personal or individual expression. The power and condition of writing in relation to that collective is so strong that, even at the end, it is difficult for O’Hara’s speaker to disentangle what “he” thinks from “what [I] do,” and, as the conditional “if I do” suggests, O’Hara’s speaker—like the rest of us— never fully will. My pointing out this television-friendly dynamic in O’Hara’s poem is not to say that it was written for broadcast as Kathy’s poem was, or that our reading of it, as Tiffany cautions, should be identical to reading a poem by someone like Kathy who unconsciously repeats the clichés of a thousand other lyric poets. It is to argue, however, that, knowingly or unknowingly moved by the television history that the show inherits, Weiner or other Mad Men writers somehow recognized this excerpt from O’Hara’s poem as particularly compatible with TV. Whatever else they may or may not be good for, both “Thanksgiving Day” and “Mayakovsky” make for especially compelling TV. I, for one, think that, via the mediation of cable and satellite TV, Netflix, internet streaming, and especially Don’s voiceover recitation, Mad Men grants the speaker’s wish in “Mayakovsky” to be made “beautiful again” and “modern,” though crankier home audiences might deem it a catastrophe or even “sacrilege”—the word that came to Mary Ruefle’s mind when she heard O’Hara’s fellow New York School poet John Ashbery explain that the experience of reading his book Three Poems “was a lot like watching tv— you could open the book anywhere and begin reading, and flip around the book as much as you wanted to.”37 Most of all, however, I hope that here at the end of this chapter it becomes—like the third part of the speaker’s wish for his own personality, like television’s ongoing relationship with poetry, and like the remediation of poetry by other nonprint media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—deeply interesting.

Chapter Six

FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

Before we turn to the present, let us revisit the past. In her essay “Destroyed by Poetry: Alice Corbin and the Little Magazine Effect,” Elizabeth Barnett posits that along with the popularization of free verse and the attendant opening up of poetic form in the 1910s and 1920s came the figure of an increasingly activist editor whose “surge in authority” precipitated a sort of identity crisis among certain of what came to be called the “new” poets.1 Innovations in both style and subject matter, Barnett argues, made “the status of poetry”—not only what could be deemed good or not good, but also what could be deemed poetry in the first place— “less certain,” and little magazine editors were increasingly charged with the task of “differentiating experimentation from nonsense.” Granted that authority, and working with open forms with various moving parts that did not conform to “established formal markers of completion and mastery,” those editors, in turn, “became more involved in revising poems,” in the process taking opportunities to “cut and move lines” and make other changes rather than merely selecting material for publication.2 To the famous examples of Ezra Pound heavily reworking T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Harriet Monroe cutting and rearranging the sections of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” Barnett adds Hart Crane’s “The Wine Menagerie,” which editor Marianne Moore accepted and then reworked for The Dial, eliciting Crane’s complaint that Moore so “chang[ed] it around and

176 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

cu[t] it up” that “you would not even recognize it.”3 Writing from the perspective of an indignant poet on the receiving end of such treatment, Poetry magazine’s founding associate editor, Alice Corbin Henderson, echoed Crane’s frustration and extended his cutting-and-pasting metaphor. “It takes skill to be a poet!” Henderson wrote, “But an editor? A pair of shears, a blue pencil, a paste-pot?” 4 This shift in prestige, authority, and editing practices, Barnett contends, significantly affected poets’ standing or perceived self-standing in the broader field of cultural production. This, in turn, affected their writing, as poets increasingly sought to claim the modernist editor’s cut-and-paste authority by composing texts that were themselves cut and pasted from other source texts. This perspective sheds new light on the “fragmentation and collage” effects often associated with modernist poetry, which can be read not solely as the innovations of individual talents but as a defensive response to another force in the field of cultural production. For Barnett, it also helps to explain the “racial appropriation via folk and ethnographic quotation” in some modern poetry. “Outsourcing composition itself, the editorial poetics of racial appropriation redefines authorship, which becomes more about tasteful selection than creation,” Barnett writes. “The skills of the editor become that of the poet, the duties of the poet relegated to the colonized.”5 If the rise of the little-magazine editor so challenged the poet’s status in the field of cultural production that it in fact “changed poets’ relation to their own voices,” then it is worth considering how poets working within the much larger multimedia landscape that I have been investigating over the course of this book might have felt, experienced, understood, or otherwise registered the increased or multiple pressures produced by the involvement of more than one editor figure or stakeholder.6 As I related in chapter 2, for example, when Edna St. Vincent Millay set out to work on The Murder of Lidice, she found herself—just as many other writers working with the Writers’ War Board (WWB) must have—faced with and writing in relation to not just one activist editor but a whole stable of them across a range of different media and media platforms, each seeking, as Pierre Bourdieu put it in his description of the “cultural businessman,” to “[exploit] the labour of the ‘creator’ . . . by putting it on the market, by exhibiting, publishing, or staging it” and, in the process, “consecrat[ing] a product which he has ‘discovered’ and which otherwise would remain a mere ‘natural resource.’ ”7

177 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

Indeed, with just over two weeks to go before its national broadcast on NBC radio, Millay and WWB point-person Clifton Fadiman were still corresponding about adding material to Murder, ordering the poem’s parts, and what Fadiman (raising the specter of what Henderson would have called the editorial “shears”) referred to as the “most delicately considered cuts” needed to fit the poem into NBC’s half-hour time slot.8 (“Naturally, it is all up to the networks,” Fadiman commented about something that was not natural at all.)9 Eventually, the poem was cut to 292 lines and divided into seven sections for its first print appearance in the Saturday Review of Literature. It was cut in different ways for the four-hundred-line version in Life that later moved Millay’s husband, Eugen Boissevain, to complain that the magazine’s editors failed to note the poem was appearing in abridged form. Millay’s editor at Harper assured Boissevain that the press would make central to its advertising campaign the fact that the twenty-six-part book version of Murder was uncut and that “the full text can be had only in book form.” All told, in its magazine, radio, and book versions, Murder would be given two different beginnings and three different endings on top of its assorted internal variations. And on more than one occasion, the “cultural businessmen” in charge of such changes would indeed consecrate and take credit for having brought Murder to full fruition. As if the poem were, in Bourdieu’s words, a “mere ‘natural resource’ ” until processing and refinement by NBC, for instance, broadcast production manager Wynn Wright would claim that the poem “came to us at NBC to be made real and immediate through the power of the human voice.”10 Tied to little-magazine culture both professionally and personally, having previously written poetry and prose for a variety of mass media outlets, and as an experienced playwright and librettist, Millay was more prepared than most to anticipate and face the multimedia editorial demands of her work’s publication and broadcast. As a result, Murder bears the marks of a text reflecting— even designed to accommodate—the new editorial pressures to which Barnett argues little-magazine poets were responding and that I am suggesting intensified in the multimedia landscape. Hedging against the possible impact that NBC’s “delicately considered cuts” might have on the overall narrative, Murder’s twenty-six parts anticipate an editor’s shears by offering a set of prefabricated units seemingly designed to be moved or removed; section XX’s seventeen lines, which depart briefly from the focalizing narrative to relate the killing of the village priest, for

178 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

instance, could be removed without disrupting the story of the central family and its primary figure: the eldest daughter, Byeta. In keeping with the authors whom Barnett highlights—and at the encouragement of Fadiman, who from the start promised that he had “plenty of material on hand” for Millay to work with and incorporate “if you feel compelled”—she also appropriated and reworked material that was not original to her.11 If, as Barnett argued, poets began imitating editorial practices in order to create the effect of an “authentic originality” subject to the poet’s “tasteful” arrangement rather than “creation,” then Millay cultivates that effect (and thus her own poetic authority) by setting Murder in a premodern time, thereby allowing for the modernist poem’s effect of “folk and ethnographic quotation.” “It was all of six hundred years ago, / It was seven and if a day,” the Teller of the Tale begins, collapsing nearly six centuries of historical change, “That a village was built which you may know / By the name of ‘Lidice.’ ” In Millay’s hands, Lidice appears to have gone unchanged from the time of its founding. It is an isolated, pure, primitivized village centered around a town mill and a church in which residents “shrive their souls.” It has stone roads. Its residents follow an unmechanized, communitarian agrarian lifestyle based around seasonal cycles of “planting and sowing” and “haying and hoeing.” And it is not until the installation of a “high bill-board” promising a reward for information leading to the capture of Heydrich’s killers, along with the arrival of a Nazi officer whose clothes are “tailored well” (i.e., modern), that modernity begins to disrupt Lidice’s authentically original folkways.12 What is especially remarkable about Murder, however, is how, even as it bears the marks of a poem constructed with modern editorial and authorial practices in mind, it simultaneously spins a tale critiquing those practices by allegorizing the fate of the authentic, original, creating poet who is appropriated and “colonized” by modernist poets and managed as a natural resource by the cultural businessman, as Barnett describes. Building on the authentic originality and purity of Lidice described in the previous paragraph, Millay begins this allegory by casting the village as fecund and female, relying on the “recurrent metaphors of sexuality and reproduction” that Barnett sees modern poets using as “obvious stand-ins for the poets and editors who control the power to create.”13 Lidice is clearly gendered female and creative, its agricultural fertility (it is “rich in grain,” cherry trees, nut trees, and sugar beets) reflected in and reinforced by other aspects of

179 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

town life: women’s handiwork (making lace, mending clothes); the children in the central family (four daughters and one son who, if it were not for his short hair, “might pass for a limber lass”); and the poem’s focus on Byeta, her engagement to be married, and the interruption of that reproductive or creative narrative by Nazi forces.14 Even before the reader or listener encounters this material, Millay signals the town’s gender and foreshadows Byeta’s fate by alluding at the very start to the beginning of one of the most recognizable poems in American literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Here are the opening lines of Poe’s poem: It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;

And here, again, are the Teller of the Tale’s: It was all of six hundred years ago, It was seven and if a day, That a village was built which you may know By the name of “Lidice.”

Metrically, syntactically, and semantically drawing on “Annabel Lee”—a type of folk quotation in its own right, perhaps—Millay encourages readers and listeners to substitute the town name “Lidice” for the character name “Annabel Lee” and the word “village” for “maiden.” Both exchanges lay the groundwork for the poem’s later characterization of Lidice in terms of female and reproductive creativity. And as the poem comes to a close, Millay hearkens back to the biblical “seven” of this opening to leave the reader with yet another image reinforcing the gender and authentic, pure creativity of Lidice. “The whole world holds in its arms today,” she writes, appealing to the post-crucifixion image of the Pietà, “The murdered village of Lidice, / Like the murdered body of a little child.”15 Millay’s embodiment of Lidice’s purity and interrupted creative potential—the poem’s Annabel Lee, as it were—is the main character of Byeta, a newly engaged “pretty maid” affiliated with “the blossoming

180 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

cherry-tree” who, fertile and full of reproductive potential, also serves as the narrative’s authentically original poet figure, a vatic, Cassandra-like medium who hears the murdered Heydrich “howl[ing] in his tomb” and whose nightmares predict the town’s destruction. Byeta’s editorial adversary comes in the form of the Nazi officer, in whom Millay combines the cultural businessman and the modern poet, both aiming—like the Nazis who ship Lidice’s women and children to Germany “in truck and cart” to become “the slaves of German men”—to exploit and profit from the labor of the colonized. The officer’s clothes are “tailored well.” He is “jaunty and smart.” No poet himself, his “voice is harsh and his words are false,” and he is metonymically linked to the commercial marketplace via the aforementioned billboard. Moreover, he is twice described as having a “sabrecut on his cheek,” a mark associating him with the editorial cuts and “shears” against which Boissevain, Henderson, and Crane would protest and that identify him—both victim and now perpetrator—with the modern or new poet whose compositional strategies and search for authentic voices changed, as Barrett argues, with the rise of the modern little-magazine editor.16 When Millay’s synthesis of cultural businessman and modern poet comes to Byeta’s house, it is therefore not to kill her but to take her by the mouth, the medium of her visionary, original, authentic, mediumistic creative power. “Beautiful, proud,—and mine to tame!” he exclaims in an act of both editorial judgment (“beautiful”) and natural resource management (“mine to tame”). “Come, now,—a kiss, my beautiful maid.” Just as Barnett suggested that Henderson once connected “the appropriation of female subjectivity by male poets to the subjection of female bodies by patriarchal society,” so does Millay, and her Byeta refuses to cooperate.17 Reaching for the very tool wielded by the modernist editor and poet, Byeta “struck her throat with a scissors-blade,” taking her own life and thereby choosing, in a final act of self-determination, to destroy the medium of her expression (her throat) rather than suffer the creative power of her body and voice to be colonized, appropriated, exploited, or put on display.18 It is not that difficult to see a similar impulse behind Millay’s own wish—after having experienced the cuts and changes that the various versions of Murder entailed, after having received little or no remuneration from NBC, and after having seen her book sales fall short of her hopes—that Murder “should be allowed to die along with the war which provoked it.”19 The significance of this moment in the poem was not lost on at least one of Millay’s readers.

181 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

When my grandmother clipped out of the newspaper a photo showing the 1946 execution of Karl Hermann Frank, she inserted it between pages 28 and 29 of her copy of the book, the exact point in the poem where Byeta takes her life (figure 2.1). In its production, distribution, various afterlives, form, and content, Murder both memorializes and eulogizes a moment in history when— shown a future made possible by the twentieth century’s increasingly multimedia and transmedial landscape—much of what we typically think of when we think of American poetry turned away from the possibilities of that future and chose, instead, to remain anchored in print for the primary source of its definition and legitimacy. But what if some things had been different? What if poets like Millay, Stevens, or Crane did not have to depend on, submit to, or have their work sanctioned and managed by editors and cultural businessmen to find their publics? What forms might Murder have taken, for example, if Millay did not have to rely on Life or Harper to provide the initial capital for paper, printing, binding, mailing, illustration, and advertising, but had as an option to self-publish via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing? What if, instead of working with point-men like Fadiman and production manager Wynn Wright, and instead of relying on audiences to tune in to NBC at a set time, Millay had been able to podcast or post on YouTube? What if Murder had not been limited by Life’s subscriber base of three million and the WWB’s top-down marketing campaigns, but could have reached her enthusiastic letter-writing, poetry-writing audiences via social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, or Facebook? What sort of global reach might the poem have found? How would the finances have worked out? How would audiences have responded as they encountered the poem in any number of its textual, audio, illustrated, excerpted, linked digital formats on their computers, tablets, and smartphones at work, at home, in the car, on the train, while walking, ironing, or gardening? How many “Likes” might Murder have received? How many shares might it have had? What if Millay’s audiences had had the power to highlight passages from the poem via their Kindles and then organize, export, share, and publish them? What would Murder as a cultural touchstone have gone on to become? How would it have been received differently by critics and popular audiences? Would people have chosen to save it for fifty years? Would Millay have disowned it? Would Byeta have killed herself in the way that she did? Would she have killed herself at all?

182 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

To say that the media landscape has changed dramatically since the publication of Murder is to risk making a gross understatement. While the little-magazine editor and cultural businessman have not disappeared, profound changes in creative and reproductive technologies—not just in terms of the various machines themselves, but also their affordability, ease of use, systems of mentorship, and other dynamics central to what Henry Jenkins and others call “participatory culture”—have shifted their place in the broader field of cultural production. The barriers to global audiences are lower. The potential audiences are seemingly larger than ever. The most relevant or prominent platforms can change with remarkable speed. And with platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram only ten to fifteen years old, we are only beginning to be able to assess or understand the nature of those changes in general, let alone their impact on poetry in particular. Had I written this chapter a few years earlier, in fact, I would have had to include MySpace on the list in the previous sentence; as of 2008, this was the world’s largest social networking site but is today in seemingly permanent decline. As durable as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram may appear to us in 2020, it is uncertain what their status may be a decade from now. That said, both on and off the record, readers and writers alike are curious—and sometimes thrilled and sometimes apprehensive—about how such changes are affecting or have affected poetry in terms of the numbers of poets at work, the numbers of poems in circulation, and the nature of that work. These are not historically new concerns, and, as this book has aimed in part to illustrate, they rarely reflect the state of poetry on the ground (or, as it were, the state of poetry as projected via magic lanterns, broadcast on radio, adapted to and incorporated into film, and made part of television shows). As John Timberman Newcomb reveals, some people at the end of the nineteenth century fretted that poetry as a genre might disappear entirely in the wake of the American Fireside Poets’ deaths.20 At nearly the same time, however, and before the founding of Poetry magazine, Arthur Davison Ficke saw a vastly different picture. “Just now,” he wrote in 1911, “there appear to be more writers of verse than there have been at any time in the history of literature.”21 A decade later, in her 1921 New York Times article “Poetry as a Major Popular Sport,” Helen Bullitt Lowry observed, “Not only gentlefolk are now urged to compose their own [poetry], but shoe clerks and manicurists, school teachers and bootblacks, policemen,

183 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

reformers and flappers.”22 Five years after that, Iowa novelist Ruth Suckow constructed her own catalogue in the American Mercury, explaining that her state’s literary culture was “snatched at by everybody—farmer boys, dentists, telegraph editors in small towns, students, undertakers, insurance agents and nobodies.”23 And in 1931, assessing what he saw to be a shrinking audience for poetry brought about by the chilling effects of modernism, H. L. Mencken would remember the decade of the 1910s with hyperbole and nostalgia, calling it “the last heyday of the craft” when people “bought poetry so copiously that a new volume of it often outsold the latest pornographic novel.”24 Had Mencken only turned on the radio and paused to consider the copious amounts of amateur and literary poetry being broadcast daily, he might have reconsidered. So much of it was on the airwaves that, just a year earlier in her editorial “The Radio and the Poets,” Harriet Monroe had lamented that “the poets of quality and standing are not being broadcast, while numerous impossibles are reading their maudlin verses to invisible audiences of millions.”25 Today, the digitally empowered equivalents of Lowry’s shoe clerks, manicurists, school teachers, bootblacks, policemen, reformers, and flappers are eliciting a similar set of conflicted responses. Concerned about the proliferation of degree-granting creative writing programs as well as a corresponding “surfeit of small presses . . . to say nothing of all the Web Zines,” for instance, Marjorie Perloff wonders, “What happens when everyone is a poet?” and argues that “the sheer number of poets now plying their craft inevitably ensures moderation and safety.”26 Stephanie Burt frets, “I think I can keep up with [poetry] books, more or less, which are countable, finite sets of things . . . but if the proliferating, ramifying, exciting discourse about poetry now takes place in a million web journals at all hours of the day and night, I’m not sure I can keep up with them.”27 Julie R. Enszer asks, “Are too many people writing poetry?” and concludes “Perhaps,” but avoids answering by shifting her concern to how supposedly “not enough people are reading poetry.”28 In his 2006 Poetry magazine contributor note, X. J. Kennedy informs readers that the following year “he will add two books to the poetry glut,” borrowing a term used nearly twenty years earlier, in 1990, by Charles Bernstein, who borrowed it himself from Brian Lee, who had used it two decades before that, in 1973.29 Not everyone is fretting about the perceived surpluses of poetry, however. Francesca Beard celebrates the increased access made possible by digital

184 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

and social media, explaining, “It’s complete bullshit, this old model of one person disseminating culture to the masses, and then a small circle around them being the crucial approvers or gatekeepers. Now everyone has the potential to be creative. It’s not feudal anymore.”30 Indeed, writes Radhika Jani, “With the advent of easy-to-understand literature made easily spreadable through social media, traditional models of poetry are dismantled, notions of the traditional poetry reader challenged, and the definition of poetry itself up for radical reconsideration.”31 The “status of poetry,” as Barnett put it, is once again—still—uncertain. And one can almost hear in the mental background of these writers the type of catalogue being built— shoe clerks manicurists school teachers bootblacks policemen reformers flappers farmer boys dentists telegraph editors students undertakers insurance agents nobodies numerous impossibles and invisible audiences of millions— that Lowry, Suckow, and Monroe put together less than a century ago. As of the writing of this chapter, however, such discussions are not focusing on the “million web journals” that Burt worried she could not keep up with reading in 2011, or “all the Web Zines” that Perloff mentioned in 2012. Rather, more and more attention is centered on an increasing number of multimedia, multiplatform writers who have come to be called Instapoets and who—following the type of model that Millay imagined for the success of Murder—are converting their popular, often illustrated Instagram-, Facebook-, Tumblr-, Pinterest-, and Twitter-distributed poems into remarkably high book sales.32 These poets, mostly in their 20s and 30s, have agents, and the majority, Alexandra Alter reports in the New York Times, “have never been in a graduate writing workshop.”33 They circumvent the cultural businessman and editor by entrepreneurially harnessing social media and other self-publishing mechanisms. Their work is posted and shared by celebrities, if not exactly performed by them as Murder was. Their readings and public appearances draw large crowds of fiercely loyal fans. And as far away as they might seem to be from Poetry magazine, official verse culture, and the “little magazine effect” that Barnett argues “changed poets’ relation to their own voices” in the 1910s and 1920s, these Instapoets nevertheless inherit, emerge from, respond to, resist, reconfigure, and prolong that history in ways that Stevens, Crane, Millay, and others could only have dreamed of. In so doing, they are once more changing poets’ relations to their own voices.

185 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

Currently, no Instapoet has a higher profile than Rupi Kaur, the Punjabiborn Sikh Canadian whom Rolling Stone has called the “queen of Instapoets” and Fashion Magazine the “pop star of poetry.”34 “Indeed,” wrote the Toronto Star the week that Kaur’s second collection, the sun and her flowers, was released, “the ‘InstaPoet’ phenomenon arguably originated with Kaur.”35 Nearly 2,000,000 Instagram followers, 425,000 Facebook followers, and 175,000 Twitter followers helped Kaur’s first, initially self-published CreateSpace book milk and honey sell over 2.5 million copies in 30 languages and spend over 75 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller list. In 2017, the  sun and her flowers debuted at the top of the Times paperback fiction list and launched to a sold-out crowd of 900 people who paid $75 to $100 per ticket to see her at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in New York. Even though The Economist has admired her savvy branding, “socialfriendly graphics,” and “very Apple way of doing things,” Kaur’s credibility— especially as someone writing about women’s bodies, trauma, and healing— is strong, buoyed partly by a wave of publicity and support she received in 2015 when she used Facebook and Tumblr to protest Instagram’s removing from her page a fully-clothed self-portrait photograph that showed her lying on her bed with menstrual blood soaking through her sweatpants and staining the bedsheets.36 Citing Instagram’s tacit acceptance of photos in which women are “objectified. pornified. and treated less than human,” Kaur railed against the stigmatization of women’s periods and biological reproductivity in “a misogynist society that will have my body in an underwear [sic] but not be okay with a small leak.” She added, “This just goes to show who is sitting behind the desk and whose [sic] controlling the show. Whose [sic] controlling the media and who is censoring us.”37 Regularly pairing the subjects of bodily and artistic creativity and reproductivity, Kaur not only reanimates the “recurrent metaphors of sexuality and reproduction” that Barnett argues modern poets use as “obvious standins for the poets and editors who control the power to create,” but then retrofits them for a digital age. Kaur has at her poetic disposal a set of media technologies and reproductive dynamics and therefore potential metaphoric logics and associations that Millay and others in the pre-web era did not: widespread access to user-friendly, low-cost, portable digital media with a global reach that no longer keep the artist subordinate to the cultural businessman or his equivalent who is “sitting behind the desk” and determining

186 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

which postings should be “cut.” And she finds in the relative autonomy of that mechanical or media reproductivity a newly meaningful metonym for and example of its bodily and artistic corollaries. That is, just as women have more power to independently access and control the mechanical means of reproduction and distribution, so, too, should they be empowered to reclaim control of their bodies as sites of erotic, aesthetic, and biological production and reproduction. And as artists freed from the modernist editor’s cutting and pasting, they can once again speak wholly and authentically. Kaur makes this tripartite liberation—media, body, and poetry—central to her poetics in the first Frequently Asked Question on her web site (“how did you self publish?”) when she recounts being told that “to surpass the gatekeeper would be looked down upon by my literary peers.” For her, however, “creative control was most important. i didn’t want a publisher to come in and control the art. i wanted to design the cover. i wanted to lay the book out. it was my heart on paper.” She goes on to anatomize her poems beyond the conventional image of her “heart on paper”; of the experience of publishing poems individually in the “literary journals, magazines, and anthologies” of the modernist tradition rather than as “one body,” for instance, she explains, “it felt like i was cheating on my work—i was doing a disservice to the entire body of work by plucking an eyelash there and a nail here.”38 In milk and honey proper, poems and drawings follow suit, keeping the reproductive potential of the physical body aligned with the work of art and the mechanical media of reproduction and distribution. The words of the diamond-shaped third (untitled) poem, for example, appear in lieu of or superimposed over the genital region in a drawing of a nude woman sitting with open legs; designed as such, the text is simultaneously poem, visual artwork, gateway, medium, offspring, site of biological reproductive activity, site of pleasure, and site of violation. Another poem (also untitled) shows the profile of a standing pregnant woman who carries a poem rather than a fetus in utero.39 In a similar vein, publicity photos for Kaur’s second book, the sun and her flowers, reinforce the synergy of bodily, visual, poetic, and medial creative control by featuring a portrait of Kaur posing nude with the book’s cover painted on her back. Kaur is hardly unique in associatively triangulating the body, poem, and media or media conditions. Fellow self-publisher Walt Whitman, for instance, individualized and authenticated books with photos and autographs to support his idea that, as he writes in “So Long,” “This is no book;

187 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

/ Who touches this, touches a man.” But in motivating today’s social and self-publishing media platforms to circumvent gatekeepers and exercise new levels of expressive immediacy or authenticity, Kaur motivates—indeed, rekindles—that set of associations as Millay and others could not have done given their subordinate position of power in relation to the cultural businessman, the little-magazine editor, and media forms in the field of cultural reproduction. For Kaur and other writers in the digital age, therefore, liberating the artist from the cultural businessman and the magazine editor figures an aesthetic recovery and healing as well as a road to recovery and healing from systems of misogyny and sexual violence. In keeping with Barnett’s description of a modern literary economy in which the “duties of the poet [were] relegated to the colonized,” it also figures the liberation of the colonized from the colonizer. “We know sexual violence intimately,” Kaur writes in her eighth and final FAQ (“what prompted you to write about sexuality and abuse?”). “We experience alarming rates of rape. from thousands of years of shame and oppression. from the community and from colonizer after colonizer. But we also challenge that narrative every single day. and this poetry is just one route for doing that.” Via this performance of intersectionality—as poet, publisher, woman, and colonial subject—Kaur not only inherits the position that Byeta occupied seventy-five years earlier, but, at at least one point, appears to be channeling Millay’s dead poet and even bringing her back to life. In her 2016 TEDx Talk “I’m Taking My Body Back,” Kaur’s discussion of recovering from assault uses as its extended metaphor the readjustment of living in a house after “you broke into my home,” thus revisiting both the setting and circumstances of Byeta’s death. Murder asks us repeatedly to picture Byeta wearing white—in the lace wedding dress her mother makes, in the “shroud so pretty and white” that she takes for her death wrap after one of her nightmares, and in the “white blouse” she wears when the German arrives at her house and she kills herself—and Kaur performs in a white dress. Eyes for the most part closed, Kaur vatically half-intones and half-channels her poem, seemingly moved, like Byeta and her dreams, by a source not entirely of her rational making or control (figure 6.1). Rotating her hands and arms, she evokes dance moves associated with the Indian subcontinent and thus a folk-ethnic identity parallel with Byeta’s. And if Byeta silences herself by cutting her own throat with a pair of scissors, Kaur—who admits in her talk to having contemplated suicide as well—expresses her own experience

188 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

FIGURE 6.1 Screenshot of Rupi Kaur delivering her TEDx Talk “I’m Taking My Body Back.”

with the trauma of assault in similar terms, repeating Millay’s focus on the throat. “My voice jumped over the edge of my throat,” Kaur says, “landed at the bottom of my belly and hid for months.” Unlike Byeta, Kaur does not stay silenced, but has come, she explains, to “reclaim my body.” However, despite her emphasis on creative control and its analogues, she does not start that process entirely on her own. She is motivated—somewhat paradoxically, and somewhat in the manner of Byeta and her nightmares—by a persistent, collective, authentic, inextinguishable, primitive, precolonial poetic and artistic urge, what she calls “a guttural response” that uses her body as a medium. “Like a robot,” she recounts, “I got up. I walked to the closet. I found some charcoal. I found some paper. And I sat and I drew for hours. What I ended up with was a picture of a woman, and in the corner of the page I’d written a poem.” The impulse behind this form of automatic writing, Kaur continues to explain, does not come from her as an individual talent or an artist making it “new”—she appears to not even be aware of what she is making until after the fact—but, rather, from a “tradition” of poetry “constructed by the languages of nomads and warriors and mystics.” That verse, she says, was “on

189 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

the lips of my mother as she rocked me to sleep.” Before that, it was “on the lips of her mother, whose own mother rocked her to sleep as they traveled [in] an ox cart”—a form of transport uncannily evoking the very “truck and cart” by which the Nazi soldiers relocate Lidice’s women and children in Millay’s poem—“through the carnage and pillage of the South Asian partition.” 40 In fact, by tracing her multimedia poetic project’s source to the 1947 Partition, Kaur begins her autobiography at nearly the exact moment in history when Nazi forces annihilated Lidice, when Murder was written and went global, when Millay’s Byeta died by suicide, and when Millay wished her own poem dead. In effect, Byeta—and all the Byeta figures of that time—help to bring Kaur and her voice back to life, and Kaur does the same for them. As I have been arguing, Kaur’s poetics are a reaction to and a product of the media conditions of the long twentieth century: a reaction, on the one hand, to the editorial practices and cultural businessman of the little magazine and the magnified force of those effects in the larger mass-media landscape; and a product, on the other hand, of the relative decolonization of “the poet” made possible by digital media and that has as its parallels the struggle for autonomy and self-determination of the feminist and postcolonial subject. Those same forces also affect the style of her poetry. Just as Barnett argues that media and other publication conditions “changed poets’ relation to their own voices” in the first half of the twentieth century, so the changing conditions of the digital, web-based age are shaping Kaur’s relation to her own voice and, by extension, other poets’ relations to their voices. To understand how and why these relations are both a culmination of and break from the little-magazine effect and its parallels, it is helpful to return to the relationship between “authentic originality” and appropriation that Barnett sees in the new poetry of the 1910s and 1920s. For Barnett, writers began appropriating and manipulating source texts not just to experiment with new literary effects, but also “to become editors of their own poems” and thus, by “composing editorially” and “mimicking” editorial practices, reclaim some of the prestige or authority lost or ceded to editors with the advent of the new verse. “The poet,” that is, “becomes the one who takes, who marks, who cuts.” Using Alice Corbin Henderson as a guiding example, Barnett pairs this impulse with the practice of racial and cultural appropriation in modernist primitivism, wherein authors and artists “locate source texts not encumbered by traditional

190 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

authorship”—African American spirituals, Native American songs, cowboy ballads, and so on—and, via “the bibliographic framing and legitimacy” of the little magazine, convert those raw materials into a “poetry” that recaptures or “promise[s] a return to an authentic originality.” 41 Hence, in a passage that I previously cited, “The skills of the editor become that of the poet, the duties of the poet relegated to the colonized.” Writers of color, Barnett rightly notes, pushed back against such appropriative practices in the 1920s as they push against related ones now; see, for example, the well-publicized and high-profile reactions to Kenneth Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown” in 2015 and Vanessa Place’s Twitter and print Gone With the Wind series that included the poem “Miss Scarlett,” which appeared in Poetry in 2009. As I have argued here, Millay also pushed back against, or at least allegorized this creator–editor dynamic in her own way via the specifics of Byeta’s death in Murder. Despite the apparent gulf between that literary history and poets like Kaur, a lot of Instapoetry, as well as the source of its respective appeal or disgust for readers, stems from this same matrix of impulses—the desire to recapture an authentic originality and to locate and curate source texts that are unencumbered by traditional authorship—while shedding the colonialist approach to composition and related acts of racial or cultural appropriation. To accomplish that, Instapoetry deals in cliché, a type of language so old as to be original and “authentic” and so commonly owned that it bears no identifiable origin or mark of authorship and thus cannot be appropriated because it belongs to no one or to everyone. Such language does not adhere to the modernist slogan to “make it new,” but rather is passed down in prefabricated units, as Kaur puts it, from “nomads and warriors and mystics” and mothers and their mothers somewhat in the manner, as Daniel Tiffany argues in My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch, of the epic, which singers compose by “arrang[ing] and rearrang[ing]” the “poetic formulae, epithets, and commonplace phrases” of tradition out of “fidelity to collective rather than individual experience.” 42 We see both Millay and Kaur reaching for that collective experience of the colonized female subject and thus, with “little need for poetic originality,” reaching for a primitive or “authentic” language that, in Barnett’s words, consists of “borrowed images of borrowed images,” such as the invaded house, the ox-cart, the maiden, or the poet’s throat.43

191 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

Indeed, for both professional poets and critics, as well as readers leaving comments and reviews on sites such as Amazon.com, the cliché may well be the chief feature of Instapoetry. Once again I take Kaur as my main but not only example, in no small part because she makes the subject of decolonization (of the poet, media, body, cultures) so explicit. “I am floored that this book has been so celebrated,” writes one milk and honey reader, who explains via Amazon review, “It is simply a bunch of tired clichés, lame metaphors, and angsty teenage diary entries.” Other readers agree, remarking that milk and honey “reminded me of the stuff you’d see on a high schooler’s tumblr feed,” “reads like a 15 year old’s angsty journal,” and “seems to be a series of extremely cliché sentiments . . . chopped up to look like poetry.” Of Tyler Knott Gregson’s chasers of the light, one disappointed reader sums things up as, “this is just poorly written clichés.” Poet Danez Smith more politely explains of the phenomenon as a whole, “A lot of the things I’ve read in the Instagram poetry movement—I don’t even know if it’s right to call it a movement—haven’t felt fresh or new. They feel like recycled bits I’ve heard in many poems, or things I’d tell my students to take out of the work.” 44 Smith’s comments recall Perloff’s remarks about the “direction the language of appropriation has taken” in contemporary avant-garde poems: “In recent years,” she observes, “we have witnessed a return to the short lyric, but now a lyric that depends for its effect on the recycling of earlier poetic material.” 45 As Tiffany reveals—and as chapter 4 of the present book fleshes out in regard to the representation of poetry by Cold War–era television— the connections between popular poetry, the avant-garde, cliché, fraudulence, recycled language, and plagiarism have a long and complicated history, one to which Kaur and other Instapoets have been joined by virtue of cultivating the effects of cliché. Such “recycling of earlier poetic material” accounts in part for why Tumblr and Instagram poet Nayyirah Waheed has publicly called on Kaur to account for the “extreme hyper similarity” between some of their poems.46 Readers leaving comments on Amazon.com have followed suit. One describes milk and honey as “completely unoriginal and plagiarized garbage.” Another writes, “It seems like a bunch of quotes stolen from Instagram or Pinterest strung together.” A third, Darrell Tyler, says, “You can find a similar depth of thought on Pinterest, where most of it seems to be plagiarized from,” and a fourth identified as “Bree” agrees,

192 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

explaining that “some of the one liners I’m sure I’ve seen from other people on photo captions—so basic that it’s difficult to call it original material.” Claiming that Kaur “has now stolen from 9 poets and counting,” Janet Coleon calls her “the biggest plagiarist in poetry history, next to Najwa Zebian [another Instapoet]” and explains, “All you have to do is compare her work in an online plagiarism checker and many poets published before her will show up.” For one of Gregson’s disappointed readers, one needs only to look at the poems themselves to see their dubious originality, as most of the pieces in chasers of the light “seem to be minimally different versions of the same love poem.” Gregson, in other words, like Mike in All in the Family, is guilty of plagiarizing himself. When one finds readers describing Kaur’s poetry as “angsty teenage diary entries” and then hears poet and critic Rebecca Watts call Hollie McNish a “faux-naïve author” guilty of “faux-humility,” it is difficult to not also hear the voice of Babette Deutsch speaking to us from 1942, not only saying that parts of Murder “read like a schoolgirl’s translation of second rate verse” and are “jejeune in conception,” but calling out the “false feelings and false thinking” behind them as well.47 And yet, then as now, what feels cliché if not outright fraudulent to some readers can feel quite “authentic” to others. No doubt some of that authenticity effect (or the “immediacy and honesty” that journalist Roger Cox attributes to McNish’s Plum) is produced by the hypermediation that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin identify as central to remediation and that Instapoets reach for in their work by integrating social media interfaces, combining text and image, creating a sense of spontaneity via spelling errors or unconventional punctuation or mechanics, and so on.48 Automatic-writing backstories like Kaur’s TEDx talk or Gregson’s introduction to chasers of the light further cultivate that feeling of immediacy. Of the first poem in his series, for instance, Gregson writes, “I typed it in the store, standing up near the entrance. . . . I typed it without thinking, without planning, and without the ability to revise anything.”49 That authentic, unmediated character registers with amateur readers, too. “The authenticity of this book [chasers of the light] is amazing,” writes Gabriella in her online reader comment. Likewise, Hector G calls Kaur’s poetry “raw and authentic,” and fellow online reviewer nicole lincoln agrees, praising it for being “powerful and authentic”; Varnessa Fontus similarly gushes, “The authenticity of Rupi Kaur is so intense that each poem feels it is written just for you.” The Economist attributes much of

193 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

Kaur’s appeal to the “authenticity” of her “direct, uncluttered phrases,” and the Boston Globe goes so far as to credit the “authentic, performative quality” of such verse with “the revitalization of poetry among American youth.”50 Following the model it used to promote the “very authentic” work by fellow Instapoet Lang Leav, Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kaur’s current publisher, makes her “honest, authentic voice” a central part of its marketing campaign.51 If we can hear Deutsch speaking through time via Instapoetry’s detractors, we can also hear another set of voices speaking through the words of Instapoetry’s fans—voices like that of Ruth Mills Carr of Fulton, New York, who wrote to Millay to say that the broadcast of Murder brought her “into such contact with the people of the village of Lidice that I imagined myself speaking as they spoke,” or Poetry’s Eastern business representative, Amy Bonner, who called Murder “true in its integrity,” or Otto Asherman, whose family was from Czechoslovakia and who, in a letter to Millay’s sister Norma, praised the poem’s “deeply-felt, true atmosphere of the locale.”52 There is more than enough in these and the preceding remarks to make me feel uncomfortably as if we have traveled back in time to 1942: a moment when the futures of poetry as a multimedia or multimedia-friendly genre were more than ever before being put on display; a moment when the possibilities of those futures were being demonstrated by a woman poet writing about female creativity and circumventing traditional literary gatekeepers or tastemakers to leverage the transmedial resources and logics of the multimedia landscapes and reach audiences of millions around the globe; a moment when that work was received with praise for its authenticity and disdain for its fraudulence; and a moment when the potential nuance or complexity of that work went overlooked. Do we want to rehearse this moment in history? I, for one, do not, and I hope that this book offers a starting point or a series of them by which to begin moving beyond that moment. As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, the relationships between poetry and new, nonprint media in the long twentieth century—a long set of backstories to what we frequently paint or find painted as the singular conditions of our present moment and its digital revolution—are many and various, replete with archives that, in many cases, are largely unstudied but that can help us do more than repeat the past when considering the present. Poetry has helped in many ways to shape the dynamics of new and emergent media forms and their places in

194 FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

the larger media landscape. Those media have and are continuing to shape the writing of poetry and the place of poetry as well as the idea of poetry in the culture at large. Now more than ever, we have the critical and technological tools and historical perspective by which to more fully assess those relationships and their dynamics. If we are to understand how those dynamics are shaping our present moment and our future, it is incumbent upon us to better understand and more deliberately consider the past. With more poetry and poetry-related commentary being written, published, circulated, and recirculated than ever before—via Craigslist haiku forums, song lyric websites, poetry sites, video games, network and cable television, social media platforms, Netflix, the movies, YouTube, reader comments and product reviews on Amazon, and, yes, still in a wide range of print and oral formats—it is more important than ever to recall Harriet Monroe’s words of celebration and frustration that “poetry travels more easily than any other art.” Let’s continue to see where it has gone, and where it goes.

AFTERWORD

Imagine, for a moment, that the year is 1550. Roughly a hundred years have passed since Gutenberg invented a printing press designed to use movable type. Since that time, in what we now know as the first century of mass communication, perhaps a hundred million books have been printed, in addition to pamphlets, broadsides, and other forms of paper ephemera. Some of those materials contain poetry, and you get curious about them. Few people have written about the impact of this “new” technology on poetry, so you decide to write a book about it. You sit down at your writing table, pounce pot at the ready. Your goose-quill pen is poised and wetted with iron-gall ink. The taper beside you flickers gently. Now, where do you choose to begin, and why? Welcome, in many ways, to the happy predicament of Poetry Unbound. To my knowledge, this book contains the first concerted effort to study poetry written for, designed for, or remediated by the magic lantern, sound film, and television, and it extends what are only a handful of studies that examine poetry in silent film, radio, and digital social media. As analyses of print-based poetry regularly show, it is commonplace to devote entire books to a single author, a single theme, a single timeline or location, or a single print platform. Poetry Unbound does not choose such an approach. Instead, hoping to make the topic of poetry in newer, nonprint media a

196 AFTERWORD

compelling frontier or set of frontiers for poetry and media scholarship more broadly, it takes a far more panoramic approach. As a result, although it is enchanted by the material it studies, Poetry Unbound is also haunted by relevant material that could not fit into the preceding chapters. It is haunted, as well, by chapters both written and unwritten that did not find a home in this book at all: one on poetry and sound recording, for example; another about video games and poetry; the chapter about the mediation of song lyrics that I hope will become my next book-length project. Time and again, however, I have tried to return to the ways that a genre of writing that people often assume to be a marginal art form with little popular appeal helped to establish or broker the cultural position of new or emergent mass media forms, and how those media in turn affected poetry. My hope is that, by progressing from one miniature study to another across multiple media forms, the material that I do include in Poetry Unbound will invite others to continue with some of the same energy, nuance, and dedication commonly extended to print-based poetry. This manuscript’s initial readers expressed a desire to know and read more. They wondered about the history of nonprint poetry in countercultural, subcultural, or avant-garde contexts, and they wondered about the mainstream media’s responses to and relationships with those “oppositional” types of poetry and their usually more limited-circulation economies. They were curious about the treatment of poetry in specific genres— science fiction, superhero movies, various “geek” or cult products, Westerns, period pieces, biopics. They were curious to know more about the subjects of race, class, and gender in relation to poetry across these media forms, and they expressed a desire to see more about how poets themselves imitated, learned from, or responded to nonprint media in their work. They wanted to know more about a long list of things, including Dead Poets Society, Henry Fool, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, rap and hip-hop music, the persistent remediation of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus,” and the multiple, sometimes-overlapping poetry worlds of the last century and a half. And if I were in their place, I would want the same. I would want to know more about Janet Jackson’s great turn as Justice in Poetic Justice and more about the superb flyting scene featuring Paul Bettany’s Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale. I would want to know about the sustained treatment of poetry in Francis Ford Coppola films (Patton, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders, Peggy Sue Got Married, Tetro) and how and

197 AFTERWORD

why critics continue to use analogies with poetry to describe films by directors such as Coppola and Spike Lee. I would certainly be throwing up my hands and wondering—and here is a sentence, dear reader, that you probably never expected to hear uttered in the halls of academe—where, oh, where is the love for Rod McKuen, whose orchestration of print poetry, recorded spoken-word poetry, and song lyrics in the 1960s and ’70s resulted in international television appearances, live performances, and the sales of over sixty million books and one hundred million records? If you, too, have found yourself wanting more, then Poetry Unbound has done part of its job. One hundred and twenty-five years after the magic lantern helped put into motion the history of screen reading via the projection of poetry, and a century and a half after Thomas Edison opened the age of sound recording by reciting from Sarah Josepha Hale’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” we need to account more fully for how changes in mass communication have affected and are affecting poetry. We owe it to poetry, too, to better acknowledge how it helped to shape—and continues to shape— the histories of those newer media. And we owe it to the lived experience of poetry’s audiences (which are far larger than most of us have ever imagined) to do so as well. Just as the scholar in the scenario I imagine at the beginning of this afterword is both excited and daunted by the enormous amount of material awaiting consideration, so is Poetry Unbound. I invite you, therefore, to sit at your writing desk and open your laptop. As the screen glows blue and white, as mine does, and as your fingers hover over the keyboard, where do you choose to begin, and why?

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: POETRY UNBOUND 1. Harriet Monroe, A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 117. 2. Ann Massa, “ ‘The Columbian Ode’ and ‘Poetry, A Magazine of Verse’: Harriet Monroe’s Entrepreneurial Triumphs,” Journal of American Studies 20, no. 1 (April 1986): 58. 3. Massa, “Columbian Ode,” 54. 4. Harriet Monroe, “Note,” in The Columbian Ode (Chicago: W. Irving Way, 1893), np. 5. “Chicago’s Great Day,” Evening World, October 21, 1892 [Brooklyn Last Edition]: 1. 6. Monroe, “Note”; see G. W. Chadwick and Harriet Monroe, Ode for the Opening of the World’s Fair Held at Chicago, 1892 (Cincinnati, OH: John Church Co., 1892). 7. Liesl Olson, Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 50. 8. Monroe subsequently printed a “souvenir edition” containing illustrations by Will H. Bradley and meant to be sold at the Fair itself, but sales of that version were also disappointing. She then added the poem under the title “Commemoration Ode” to her second edition of Valeria and Other Poems and included it in The Difference, and Other Poems, Including the Columbian Ode. 9. Press Pub. Co. v. Monroe, 73 F. 196 (2nd Cir. 1896). 10. Massa, “Columbian Ode,” 61. 11. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 7. 12. Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 131; Monroe, handwritten draft of a letter to Howard Elting. 13. See Harriet Monroe, “The W. Cabell Greet Recordings: Reading at Columbia University on January 29, 1932,” PennSound, http://writing.upenn.edu /pennsound /x /Monroe-Harriet.php. Among others, Vachel Lindsay, James Weldon Johnson, T. S.

200 INTRODUCTION

Eliot, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were recorded for this series. 14. William E. Colby, quoted in Sierra Club, “Harriet Monroe,” The John Muir Exhibit. 15. Harriet Monroe, “The Radio and the Poets,” Poetry 36, no. 1 (April 1930): 32. 16. Harriet Monroe, You and I (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 11. 17. “The World’s Fair,” The Hub 35, no. 3 (June 1893): 200. 18. On Craigslist’s use of haiku and other snippets of verse, see Gary Wolf, “Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess,” Wired, August 24, 2009; and Mike Chasar, “Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: An Interview with Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist,” Poetry & Popular Culture (blog), September 10, 2009. On the relationship between poetry and the novel, see Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 19. On PayPal poetry, see Alex Goldman, “Free Valentine’s Day Poems from PayPal,” WNYC, February 7, 2014. On propaganda poems being dropped from specially designed bombs, see Cary Nelson, “The Vexed History of the Wartime Poem Card,” American Literary History 16, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 263–89; and Mike Chasar, “Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 305–11. On current-day poetry bombings carried out by the Chilean art collective Casagrande, see http://loscasagrande.org /rain-of-poems/. 20. I borrow the term “incidental” poetry from Lisa K. Schwartz, Lisbeth Goble, Ned English, and Robert F. Bailey, Poetry in America: A Review of the Findings (Chicago: Poetry Foundation, 2006), for example, pp. 68–73. 21. Bartholomew Brinkman, “Making Modern Poetry: Format, Genre, and the Invention of Imagism(e),” JML: Journal of Modern Literature 32, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 20. “Slender volume” or “slim volume” are used extensively to describe single-author books of poetry. For example, the front jacket panel for T. S. Eliot’s first American book, Poems (1920), reads in part, “The occasional appearance of his poems in the magazines has led to an insistent demand for them in book form and here in this slender volume are gathered the very best of them.” Five or ten minutes’ searching on the internet brings up “slender volume” in relation to books by a range of writers including Gwendolyn Brooks, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. DuBois, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Donald Justice, Philip Larkin, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Claude McKay, Marianne Moore, George Oppen, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, Kay Ryan, Gary Snyder, Charlie Sheen, Suzanne Somers, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Margaret Walker, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. 22. As Jesse Zuba has shown, career anxieties stemming from an emphasis on print and especially book publication have had profound effects on poets’ psyches, affecting both the form and content of their work; see Jesse Zuba, The First Book: TwentiethCentury Poetic Careers in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 23. The Pickling Poet, Poetry: Brine, May 21, 2018. 24. Norman Bradburn, Kathleen Parks, and Michael Reynolds, Poetry in America: A Summary of the Study (Chicago: Poetry Foundation, 2006), 8. 25. Monroe, A Poet’s Life, 131. 26. William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Columbia University Press, [1968] 1992), 101. For more on

201 INTRODUCTION

Guest’s popularity, see Mike Chasar, “A Surprise Guest,” Arcade: Literature, the Humanities, and the World, October 3, 2013; for more on Campbell, see Mike Chasar, “High, Low, and Somewhere In-Between: Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America,” in A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry, ed. Linda A. Kinnahan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 202–21. It’s worth noting that, the very year Charvat was writing, Rod McKuen’s poetry books sold more than a million copies, fueled in part by the success of McKuen’s spoken-word albums, one of which (Lonesome Cities) won a Grammy that year (see Ben Steelman, “Rod McKuen, R.I.P,” StarNewsOnline, February 18, 2015). As eventful as 1968 was for McKuen, he would have an even more eventful 1969 when he released three books and two spoken-word albums, published The Songs of Rod McKuen, did a half-hour performance on NBC television, and composed three film scores, two of which (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and A Boy Named Charlie Brown) received Academy Award nominations. 27. Janice Radway and Perry Frank, “Verse and Popular Poetry,” in Handbook of American Popular Culture, ed. M. Thomas Inge (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 299. 28. Jed Rasula, “A Potential Intelligence: The Case of the Disappearing Poets,” Boundary 2 44, no. 3 (August 2017): 166. Newcomb likewise turns to “the collective efforts of hundreds of people involved in the New Verse movement between 1912 and 1925” to assess how American poetry “survived” the passing of nineteenth-century literary lions such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 1. Rasula and Newcomb study books and little magazines, respectively. But if we consider poets publishing just in newspapers and mass-market periodicals, it becomes clear that poetry’s diversity and survival didn’t hinge on the little magazines or commercial book publishers. See, for instance, the examples of Ethel Romig Fuller and Anne Campbell in Chasar, “High, Low, and Somewhere In-Between.” 29. Rasula, “A Potential Intelligence,” 180, 191, 181, 180. 30. For a rather telling example of the glacial pace at which modern poetry scholarship has proceeded over the past thirty years, it’s worth noting that Rasula’s opening question—“What do we actually know of the history of American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century?” (165–66)— essentially reformulates the statement with which Cary Nelson opened Repression and Recovery (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992, 4): “[W]e no longer know the history of the poetry of the first half of this century; most of us, moreover, do not know that the knowledge is gone.” Indeed, even some of the most catholic and provocative work investigating the larger spectrum of poetry is ultimately directed toward canonical concerns. Thus, the history of nursery rhymes and forgeries that Daniel Tiffany tells in My Silver Planet leads to readings not of Edgar Guest but of Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara. Virginia Jackson uses Georgina M. Wright’s poetry scrapbook to shed light not on popular practices but on Emily Dickinson in Dickinson’s Misery. Even though it opens with the example of Percy Dovetonsils, Michael Davidson’s Guys Like Us leads to the Black Mountain poets, the Black Arts Movement, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop, not to Rod McKuen. I can also speak from personal experience about the pressure to direct popular culture research toward understanding a limited number of canonical writers. When writing my

202 INTRODUCTION

dissertation and first monograph, Everyday Reading, I was strongly advised to have a chapter on a canonical poet; hence my chapters on scrapbooked, radio, and advertising poetries lead to a chapter on William Carlos Williams. 31. Gitelman, Always Already New, 7. 32. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 7. 33. On the subject of poetry as a sonic or “vocal art,” or as an art mediated to greater or lesser extent by audio or acoustical technologies, see all or part of: Raphael Allison, Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014); Adam Bradley, The Poetry of Pop (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002); Derek Furr, Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Meta DuEwa Jones, The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Marit J. MacArthur, “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies,” PMLA 131, no. 1 (January 2016): 38–63; Adalaide Morris, ed., Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Urayoán Noel, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014); Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Lytle Shaw, Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); and Lesley Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 34. Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture, 10th Anniversary Ed. (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002), xviii. 35. Most studies of acoustically mediated poetry focus on canonical poets or recognized professional poets or poetry scenes. Furr, for example, has chapters focusing on Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anne Sexton, and James Weldon Johnson. Shaw devotes chapters to Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Amiri Baraka. And Wheeler has chapters on Millay, Langston Hughes, collaborations involving James Merrill, David Jackson, Denise Duhamel, and Maureen Seaton, and academic readings and the National Poetry Slam. 36. Given the lipstick writing, how both episodes take place in California, how both shows have characters named Spencer, how both episodes end with characters going on dates, and how both episodes reconfigure the “needle in a haystack” cliché in the same way (as a needle in a pile of needles), it’s not unreasonable to see “An Evening with Mr. Yang” riffing specifically on “Plain Sight.” Criminal Minds and Psych are not the first shows to feature killers who write poetry in lipstick, however. In a 1970 episode of Hawaii Five-O, for instance, yet another Pacific-Rim killer writes verse in lipstick, this time on his victims’ legs. 37. The first item Johannes Gutenberg printed in movable type was likely a German poem. The earliest broadsides featured poems. The first book William Caxton

203 INTRODUCTION

produced in England was an edition of The Canterbury Tales, and the first book printed in what would become the United States, the Bay Psalm, was in “English metre.” Henri Maillardet’s 1805 automaton wrote three decorated poems, and Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph captured two fragments of poetry in 1860. The first words Thomas Edison recorded on his tinfoil phonograph were from “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” his first public phonograph demonstration included poetry, and the first commercial and homemade wax-cylinder recordings include recorded poetry. Elias Gray and his technician sent each other bits of verse on the day in 1890 when they first managed to transmit moving handwriting via telautograph. According to Helen Fessenden, radio’s first broadcast on December 24, 1906 included “someone . . . reading a poem” (quoted in Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966], 20). As chapter 1 of this book illustrates, the first texts projected by magic lantern were poems and song lyrics. As chapter 2 shows, early silent films adapted poems to the screen via both story and intertitle on a regular basis, and an early two-reel movie was an adaptation of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden. The first feature-length film with a synchronized sound system, Don Juan (1926), was inspired by Lord Byron’s poem, and the first feature-length talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), was a musical with rhyming lyrics by a number of writers including Irving Berlin. Bob Brown invited poets to compose “readies” for the spool-tospool reading machine that he theorized in 1930 to replace the “antiquated, worddribbling book” (“Appendix,” 168). 38. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 202. 39. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), 23–24; Regis Debray, Transmitting Culture, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 27. 40. See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7–10. See also N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, eds., Comparative Textual Media: Transforming Humanities in the Postprint Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 41. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 13, 6, 8. “Poems,” Ramazani writes, “come into being partly by echoing, playing on, reshaping, refining, heightening, deforming, inverting, combating, hybridizing, and compressing extrapoetic forms of language” (6). Such “[i]ntergeneric dialogue,” he continues, “has been an especially pronounced feature of poetry in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when media spectacle and mass-reproduced or digitally circulated texts, sounds, and images have increasingly permeated the private spaces once thought to be poetry’s preserve” (10). While Poetry and Its Others focuses on the genres named in the second half of its title, it could have also focused—as has some other poetry criticism—on poetry’s dialogue with or imitation of new, nonprint media such as its incorporation or imitation of filmic fades, montages, or jump cuts; radio station-switching; television channel-flipping; record album and mix-tape formats; internet search engine returns; and the like. 42. Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film, trans. Harsha Ram (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 81.

204 INTRODUCTION

43. See, for example, Strachan, who calls advertising’s incorporation of poetry “elevation by association,” or Prins, who sees D. W. Griffith’s filmic adaptation of Robert Browning’s “Pippa Passes” as “an obvious attempt to give moral authority and cultural prestige to early cinema.” John Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); 14; Yopie Prins, “Robert Browning, Transported by Meter,” in The Traffic in Poems: NineteenthCentury Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith L. McGill (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 225. 44. Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 14. 45. Gitelman, Always Already New, 1. 46. Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy from Radio to the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xii. 47. Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals; William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 7. 48. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 75, 79. 49. For a digitized version of the wax-cylinder version, see “America” in “Pictures and Sound,” The Walt Whitman Archive, https://whitmanarchive.org /multimedia/. For the Wieden+Kennedy advertisement, see “Levi’s—America (Go Forth) Commercial,” YouTube, June 30, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdW1CjbCNxw. 50. Mary Ruefle, “I Remember, I Remember,” Poetry, July 2, 2012, para. 39. 51. “Poetry Sales Increase Again in 2017,” BookNet Canada, March 7, 2018. 52. Quoted in Sunil Iyengar, “Taking Note: Poetry Reading Is Up,” Art Works Blog, National Endowment for the Arts, June 7, 2018. 53. Danielle Groen, “How Rupi Kaur Became the Voice of Her Generation,” Flare, November 11, 2017; Erin Spencer, “Rupi Kaur: The Poet Every Woman Needs to Read,” HuffPost, January 1, 2015; “Insta Iambs: Rupi Kaur Reinvents Poetry for the Social-Media Generation,” Prospero, The Economist, November 1, 2017. 54. Priya Khaira-Hanks, “Rupi Kaur: The Inevitable Backlash Against Instagram’s Favorite Poet,” The Guardian, October 4, 2017; Chiara Giovanni, “The Problem with Rupi Kaur’s Poetry,” BuzzFeed, August 4, 2017; Lindsey Adler, “Instagram Poet Rupi Kaur Seems Utterly Uninterested in Reading Books,” The Concourse, October 4, 2017.

1. LETTERS OF FIRE 1. For Holmes’s best-known pieces of media theory, see “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly 3, no.  20 (June  1859): 738–49; “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture,” Atlantic Monthly 8, no. 45 (July 1861): 13–29; and “Doings of the Sunbeam,” Atlantic Monthly 12, no. 69 (July 1863): 1–15. 2. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., “The Professor at the Breakfast Table,” Atlantic Monthly 4, no. 26 (December 1859): 766. 3. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 19, 11.

205 1. LETTERS OF FIRE

4. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 19. 5. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 21. 6. Tom Gunning, “Introduction,” in The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, by Laurent Mannoni, trans. and ed. Richard Crangle (Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2000), xxvii. 7. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 64. In Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2004), Catherine Gudis quotes early motorists who describe reading billboards via automobile as an “affront to delicate nerves of eyes” and an act of “seizing the eye against one’s will” (193) that produced an uncomfortable “state of distraction” (68). For more on automobile reading and the poetic invention it inspired, see chapter  4 (“The Spin Doctor”) of Mike Chasar, Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 155–87. 8. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 202. 9. For recent studies of poetry’s “survival,” see Newcomb’s pair of books Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), and How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 10. On efforts to isolate poetry from other media forms, see, for example, Bartholomew Brinkman, “Making Modern Poetry: Format, Genre, and the Invention of Imagism(e),” JML: Journal of Modern Literature 32, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 20–40. 11. Herbert Booth, “British Progress,” All the World 6, no. 8 (December 1891): 475–76. 12. Quoted in John Barnes, “The History of the Magic Lantern,” in Servants of Light: The Book of the Lantern, ed. Dennis Crompton, Richard Franklin, and Stephen Herbert (London: Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain, 1997), 30. 13. Steve Humphries, Victorian Britain Through the Magic Lantern (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989), 9. 14. Humphries, Victorian Britain, 131. As Eileen Bowser explains, early film experiences built on the variety-show tradition by using illustrated song slides, live performers, and audience participation activities to transition between short films. “It was a poor show house,” she writes, “that did not supply a singer between the reels while the projectionist threaded up the one projector” (15). 15. Quoted in Humphries, Victorian Britain, 140. 16. Quoted in David Robinson, “Magic Lantern Shows,” in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (London: Routledge, 2005), 406–7. 17. Fiftieth Annual Report of the Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1919), 15. 18. Quoted in Humphries, Victorian Britain, 140. A detailed history of text-based slides (how many were there? how common were they? when, where, and how were they developed and used?) remains to be written and cannot be written here. Because histories of the lantern have focused primarily on its use in projecting images, the text-based slide has been long overlooked. Laurent Mannoni writes, for example, that “lanternists at the end of the nineteenth century were spoilt for choice: 11,000 subjects were available from Molteni, over 100,000 from Mazo . . . In London the choice was even wider: 150,000 subjects in the catalog of W. & F. Newton, 200,000

206 1. LETTERS OF FIRE

in that of E. G. Wood. The majority of these were photographic slides, but there were also plenty of mass-produced printed subjects, chromolithographs, and moving slides” (Great Art, 289). Despite the “thousand hymns in stock” at Newton & Company, one would never know from Mannoni’s catalog of image and subject types that they and other text-based slides even in fact existed. 19. Joseph Harrington, Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 24. 20. Because the generic distinction between “poem” and “song” was and remains so blurry, I am not rigidly distinguishing between them here. Poems were put to music and sung. Songs were printed without music and read—or sung inwardly, as Holmes suggested. Poems were read and sung nearly simultaneously via hymnals and lantern slides. Parsing or debating the relationship between “poem” and “song”—which has more to do with presentation, publication, or medium of transmission than with inherent features of the text—must, out of space and focus constraints, be left to another time. 21. Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 9. 22. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, 9. 23. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, 12. 24. Quoted in Laurent Mannoni, Donata Presenti Campagnoni, and David Robinson, eds., Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture 1420–1896 (Gemona, Italy: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1995), 42. In spite of the device’s other uses, lantern historians frequently privilege the link between early projection, lantern technology, and “the lantern of fear.” At the beginning of Light and Movement, Mannoni makes the two terms synonymous, writing of “the ‘lantern of fear’ or magic lantern” (33). In another work, he starts his prehistory of cinema by describing a camera obscura projecting “a dancing devil . . . sending terror through the room” (Great Art, 3) and sees the fear elicited by the phantasmagoria not as a new development in projection history but as “a reconnection with the sulphurous past of the first projections by the camera obscura” (135); he also describes illustrated lanternslide scenes from the 1860s in phantasmagoric terms (267). Similarly, in Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), Simon During sees the “magic discourse for the new technology [of the lantern]” as “firmly slot[ting] the lantern into the baroque imagination of a gothic sensibility” well into the nineteenth century (266). 25. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 75. 26. Kittler, Optical Media, 78, 80. 27. Quoted in Mannoni, Campagnoni, and Robinson, Light and Movement, 44. 28. Quoted in Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 238. Originally in Étienne- Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires: Récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques, vol. 1. (Paris: Chez l’auteur et à la Librairie de Wurtz, 1831–1833), 145. 29. Quoted in David Robinson, Stephen Herbert, and Richard Crangle, eds., Encyclopedia of the Magic Lantern (London: The Magic Lantern Society, 2001), 321. 30. David Robinson, ed., Lantern Image: The Iconography of the Magic Lantern, 1420– 1880 (Nutley, UK: Magic Lantern Society, 1993), 80.

207 2 . R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

31. Vachel Lindsay, The Progress and Poetry of the Movies: A Second Book of Film Criticism by Vachel Lindsay, ed. Myron Lounsbury (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995), 183. 32. Kittler, Optical Media, 80. 33. A quick search in hymn databases for applicable terms reveals just how thoroughly these metaphors saturate the discourse of Christian hymns. My search at www .hymnary.org, for example, produced over 18,000 returns for “light,” 4,000 for “sun,” and 2,400 for “fire.” Likewise, “night” returns 8,200 results and “darkness” 7,500. 34. Newcomb, How Did Poetry Survive?, 20, 30, 21. 35. Lindsay, Progress and Poetry, 303. 36. Quoted in Charles F. Andrews, Mahatma Gandhi: His Life and Ideas (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2007), 51. 37. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 14. 38. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 14. 39. Bob Brown, “Appendix,” in Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, ed. Bob Brown (Cagnes-sur-Mer, France: Roving Eye Press, 1931), 174, 168. 40. Kittler, Optical Media, 79. 41. Kittler, Optical Media, 78–79. 42. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 8. 43. Quoted in Humphries, Victorian Britain, 139.

2. RECEIVING MILLAY 1. Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Murder of Lidice (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), 32. On June 9, 1942, following false intelligence linking the June 4 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi deputy and acting Reich-protector of Bohemia and Moravia, to people in Lidice and Ležáky, Nazi forces destroyed Lidice. They burned the town, leveled the ruins, executed the town’s men, transported the women and children to concentration and work camps, and slaughtered all the animals. Ležáky was also burned and all of its residents killed. In Lidice, the Germans were so intent on erasing the town from history that they dug up the cemetery and destroyed its remains, afterward boasting that German reprisal was so thorough that even “the name of the village was immediately abolished” (Willkie 363). Because at least five significantly different versions of Murder were circulating during the war, it is difficult to offer a one-size-fits-all summary or description of the poem. Most of the versions are narratives that to different extents incorporate dialogue and multiple speakers. Except for the shortest one (Saturday Review of Literature), Murder focuses on Lidice’s destruction primarily as it is experienced by a local family. The Saturday Review of Literature version is three pages and nearly three hundred lines long and divided into seven sections. The Life version is seven pages and four hundred lines long and not divided into sections. The NBC script version (in Adventure in Radio) is seventeen pages long. The Harper version is thirtytwo pages long and divided into twenty-six numbered sections.

208 2 . R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

2. Edna St.  Vincent Millay, letter to Cass Canfield, October  1947, Letters of Edna St.  Vincent Millay, ed. Allan Ross Macdougall (Westport, CT: Glenwood Press, [1952] 1972), 338. 3. Jonathan Vincent, “A Peculiar Sovereignty: Antifascist US Literature and the Liberal Welfare State,” American Quarterly 66, no. 2 (June 2014): 367. 4. Franklin P. Adams, “Introduction,” Saturday Review of Literature, October 17, 1942: 3. Harper’s version was not in fact “substantially the same” as NBC’s: it was 230 lines longer and had a completely different ending. 5. Susan Schweik writes in A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), “In the text as it was printed by Harper & Brothers the aim and power of ‘sacred vengeance’ is given to a moral mother,” whereas in the radio script version “the final word is given to a (male) Lord [the ‘Teller’ of the tale]. This closure effaces Millay’s inscriptions of specifically feminine knowledge and action” (79–80). It is worth noting that the Teller was not always male. In the typewritten “complete, uncut version” sent by the WWB to Harper, the Teller is female. However, an unsigned handwritten note at the top of a later version of the manuscript reads, “man preferred.” From that point on, the Teller would be cast as male. (These manuscript versions of Murder can be found in the Writers’ War Board Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, box 54, folder 5.) 6. Placing the NBC (radio) and Life (periodical) versions in the same category as I do here and throughout this chapter may seem counterintuitive, but I do so because both versions elicited the same types of responses and because they were—not coincidentally, as I will explain—the most highly mediated versions of the poem. I mainly describe the NBC version, because it received the most hype, but Life’s was highly mediated as well: spread over seven not-always-sequential pages, it was accompanied by drawings and a photo of Millay and juxtaposed with a variety of often war-themed advertisements for corsets, pies, Dixie cups, whiskey, and air filters, as well as an article about fighter planes. Thus, the NBC and Life versions are linked not by a shared medium but by the fact that both exploited particular media strategies and thereby elicited similar responses. 7. See, for example, Mike Chasar, Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); and Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 8. Radio was firmly established as a news and entertainment medium by 1942. The first broadcast is generally held to have been on December 24, 1906; individuals and amateurs used radio in the 1910s; and the first commercial stations in the United States were launched in the early 1920s. However, it is worth remembering that The War of the Worlds and the panic that purportedly ensued as a result of its broadcast happened in 1938. Thus, while mainstream in many ways, radio and its effects and uses were not by any means “old” by the time Murder aired on NBC. 9. Writers’ War Board, foreword to The Murder of Lidice by Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), v. 10. Richardson Wright to Franklin P. Adams, Berton Braley, Russel Crouse, Howard Dietz, Margaret Fishback, Ira Gershwin, Alan Green, Edgar A. Guest, Oscar Hammerstein, Newman Levy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Phyllis McGinley, Ogden Nash,

209 2 . R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

Cole Porter, Frank Sullivan, E. B. White, and Margaret Widdemer, April 10, 1944, Writers’ War Board Records, 60, unnumbered folder titled “11–34 O.W.I.” 11. Theodore Roethke, “Florist’s Root Cellar,” Poetry 63, no. 2 (November 1943): 16. For more on Victory Garden propaganda poetry, see Mike Chasar, “Field Notes: Writers at War,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 22, 2016. 12. Clifton Fadiman to Elmer Davis, September 11, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, 54, unnumbered folder titled “Lidice Committee Reports”; Fadiman to Louis Adamic, July 1, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, 53, unnumbered folder titled “Lidice Lists and Letters.” 13. Fadiman to George A. Sanderson, October 21, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, 55, unnumbered folder titled “Miscellaneous Wires & Correspondence.” 14. Lidice Lives Committee, “Report of the Lidice Committee,” June 26, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, 54, unnumbered folder titled “Lidice Committee Reports.” 15. Fadiman to Edna St. Vincent Millay, June 26, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, 54, 5 (untitled folder). 16. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger, vol. 1, Autobiography and Literary Essays (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 345. 17. Derek Furr, Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 91. For more on Millay and radio, see Furr, “Authenticity and Audience: Millay, Sexton, and Vocal Connections,” chapter 3 in Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception, and Lesley Wheeler, “Edna St.  Vincent Millay’s Performance of Presence,” chapter  2 in Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 18. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 19. 19. Wynn Wright, “Production Note,” in Adventure in Radio, ed. Margaret Cuthbert (New York: Howell, Soskin, 1945), 237. 20. See, for example, “Miss Millay’s Message on Lidice Massacre to Be Short-Waved round the World by NBC,” press release, October  6, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, Box OV2, scrapbook titled “Lidice Lives.” 21. Adams, “Introduction,” 3. 22. Rebecca Stelzer, “ ‘The White Cliffs’: Literature and War in the Days of Radio,” How2 2, no. 3 (Spring 2005). 23. Writers’ War Board, foreword to They Burned the Books by Stephen Vincent Benét (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942), v. 24. Writers’ War Board, foreword, They Burned the Books, vi. 25. National Broadcasting Corporation, “All Americas to Hear ‘The Murder of Lidice’ Through Complicated Triple Control System,” NBC Trade News, October 15, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, Box OV2, scrapbook titled “Lidice Lives.” 26. “Enthusiastic Listeners Praise NBC for Presenting ‘Murder of Lidice,’ ” NBC Daily News, October 28, 1942, 1. 27. National Broadcasting Corporation, “All Americas”; “Miss Millay’s Message on Lidice Massacre.” 28. Fadiman to Millay, September 11, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, 54, 5 (untitled folder).

210 2 . R E C E I V I N G M I L L AY

29. Fadiman to Anthony Hyde, September 11, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, 54, unnumbered folder titled “Lidice Committee Reports.” 30. Fadiman to Millay, October 2, 1942, Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers, Library of Congress, 93.9. 31. Eugen Boissevain to Henry Luce, October 27, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9. 32. Boissevain to The Saturday Review of Literature, October 26, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9. 33. Eugene F. Saxton to Boissevain, November 18, 1942, Millay Papers, 91.6. 34. Poetry Foundation, “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” n.d., para. 24. 35. Babette Deutsch, “The Poet and the War,” New Republic 107, no. 23 (December 7, 1942): 742. 36. “Lidice Lives, by Committee,” New Republic 107, no. 19 (November 9, 1942): 593. 37. Deutsch, “The Poet and the War,” 743. 38. Quoted in Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Random House, 2002), 470. 39. “Miss Millay’s Lidice,” Newsweek, October 26, 1942: 72. 40. M. R., “The Murder of Lidice,” The Billboard 54, no. 44 (October 31, 1942): 7–8. 41. Harriet Van Horne, “A Milestone in Radio: The Murder of Lidice Given Powerful Reading,” World-Telegram, October 20, 1942, newspaper clipping, Writers’ War Board Records, Box OV2, scrapbook titled “Lidice Lives.” 42. Alexander Drogichen to Millay, October 20, 1942; Amy Bonner to Millay, October 19, 1942; Theda Evans to Millay, October 17, 1942; Walter J. Pyka to Millay, October 20, 1942; Anne Brennan postcard to Millay, October 20, 1942; all in Millay Papers, 93.9. 43. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 29. 44. J. P. Bemmington to Millay, October 26, 1942, Millay Papers, 87.5; Drogichen to Millay. 45. Evans to Millay. 46. Alfred F. Brewster, “Sequel to a Murder,” in Brewster to Millay, October 19, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9. 47. Ethel E. Jones to Millay, October 19, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9. 48. Julia Naylor to Millay, October 19, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9. 49. Mrs. Joseph L. Chase to Millay, n.d. (circa October 19, 1942), Millay Papers, 93.9. 50. NBC’s version included a similar warning (“[H]ear what we say, / Who and wheresover [sic] ye be . . . / Unless ye would die as we!”) and ended by calling listeners to act along with “Vengeance, mighty angel of the Lord,” who “[d]raws now his sword.” Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Murder of Lidice, in Adventure in Radio, ed. Margaret Cuthbert (New York: Howell, Soskin, 1945), 253–54. 51. Evans to Millay. 52. Pyka to Millay. 53. Ruth Mills Carr to Millay, October 16, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9. 54. Rolf Ranay to Millay, October 18, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9. 55. Thelma Leal to Millay, October 23, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9. 56. Pyka to Millay. 57. Frances Baker to Millay, November 4, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9; Peter and Virginia to Millay, October 20, 1942, Millay Papers, 87.5. 58. Mildred C. Drake to Millay, n.d. (circa late October 1942), Millay Papers, 93.9. 59. Brewster, “Sequel to a Murder.”

211 3. “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

60. Pyka to Millay; Brennan to Millay. 61. Bonner to Millay. 62. Pyka to Millay. 63. Evans to Millay. 64. Willis Eberman, “The Spirit of Lidice,” letter to Millay, November 19 (incomplete date, circa November 19, 1942), Millay Papers, 87.5. It is quite possible that this Willis Eberman was the twenty-four-year-old Oregon poet of that name (1917–1979), who, nine years after writing this letter to Millay, would publish Lines to Be Left in the Earth (1951), his first collection of poems and one of at least twelve books that he would publish between 1951 and 1977. 65. Drogichen to Millay. 66. Saxton to Boissevain, September 28, 1942, Millay Papers, 91.6. 67. Saxton to Millay, June 26, 1942, Millay Papers, 91.6. 68. Saxton to Boissevain, November 11, 1942, Millay Papers, 91.6. 69. Figuring in the Life and Saturday Review of Literature fees, Millay made an inflationadjusted $27,000 from Murder in 1942. 70. For more on the subject of marginalia, see H. J. Jackson’s book of that name (2001). 71. For a parallel study of clipping, war, and memory, see Ellen Gruber Garvey’s work on U.S. Civil War scrapbooks in Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 72. Writers’ War Board, foreword, Murder of Lidice, vi. 73. This edited draft of the foreword is housed in the Millay Papers, 91.6. 74. Millay, Murder of Lidice (New York: Harper and Brothers), 32. 75. Bob Brown, appendix to Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, ed. Bob Brown (Cagnessur-Mer, France: Roving Eye Press, 1931), 168; Bob Brown, The Readies, ed. Craig Saper (Baltimore, MD: Roving Eye Press, [1930] 2014), 1, 40.

3. “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER” 1. As Eileen Bowser explains, this process did not happen overnight. “The illustratedsong slides remained in most theaters as late as 1913, and even later in some,” she writes. “Only with the rise of the feature film did the performances begin to disappear, or rather, to be subsumed in the song film, which continued into the twenties and thirties with the ‘bouncing ball’ audience participation films.” The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915, vol. 2 of History of the American Cinema, ed. Charles Harpole (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 15. 2. The founding text of adaptation theory is generally held to be George Bluestone’s 1957 Novels into Film. Except for briefly examining Griffith’s The Unchanging Sea and Enoch Arden, the majority of Thomas Leitch’s Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From “Gone with the Wind” to “The Passion of the Christ” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) centers on nonpoetic sources, including novels, video games, comic books, board games, stand-up comedy, and even theme parks. Tom Gunning’s D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991, 35) cites the importance of “[c]omic strips, magic-lantern narratives, illustrated song slides, stereographs, newspaper accounts, and illustrations of current events, popular songs, and political cartoons,” but not

212 3. “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

poetry. Similarly, explaining that “audiences frequently viewed a film in relation to a narrative they already knew,” Charles Musser, in Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), cites a wide range of source materials, including newspapers, popular songs, vaudeville acts, editorial cartoons, comic strips, and travelogues, but again, not poetry. Perhaps the chief exception to this neglect is Griffith’s work, which is often singled out and made to seem unique for its adaptation or incorporation of verse by Robert Browning, Kingsley, Tennyson, and Walt Whitman. 3. “Talking Shorts,” Variety 92, no. 2 (July 25, 1928): 14. 4. See William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), which investigates how filmmakers sought to gain cultural respectability by affiliating film with “high” art, by finding topics that had consensus appeal across social classes, and by presenting subject matter associated with moral, educational, or social uplift or reform. 5. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 29; Frank E. Woods, “D. W. Griffith,” Moving Picture World 25, no. 2 (July 10, 1915): 256. 6. Biograph Films, advertisement for The Eavesdropper, Variety 14, no. 8 (May 1, 1909): 33; “Comments on the Films,” Moving Picture World 13, no. 13 (September 28, 1912): 1277; Jas.  S. McQuade, “Chicago Letter,” Moving Picture World 19, no.  4 (January  24, 1914): 419; F. J. Finn, “Correspondence,” Moving Picture World 7, no. 15 (October 8, 1910): 819; Eclair Film Co., advertisement for The Raven, Moving Picture World 12, no. 3 (April 20, 1912): 191. 7. McQuade, “Chicago Letter,” 418. 8. A 1909 version of “Hiawatha” (William V. Ranous), for example, was praised for using only “brief extracts from the poem, which are thrown on the screen,” and a 1929 version of Evangeline (Edwin Carewe) was similarly lauded for having “no talk except one brief line at the finish” (“First Release of ‘Imp’ Films, Oct. 25th,” Moving Picture World 5, no. 17 (October 23, 1909): 563; “Talking Shorts,” Variety 96, no. 3 (July 31, 1929): 17. 9. On the common practice of poetry memorization from this time, see Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), especially 107–64. 10. Mutual Master-Pictures, advertisement for Enoch Arden, Motion Picture News 11, no. 14 (April 10, 1915): 25. 11. Louis Reeves Harrison, review of Avenging Conscience, Moving Picture World 21, no. 7 (August 15, 1914): 936. 12. The Poem-o-Graph Company of Cleveland, Ohio, similarly specialized in making “films illustrating poems recited by actors,” including George Sims’s “Christmas in the Workhouse” and Hugh d’Arcy’s “The Face on the Barroom Floor” (which would be remade loosely as a 1914 film starring Charlie Chaplin); “Moving Picture News and Reviews,” Variety 9, no. 8 (February 1, 1908): 11. 13. Rex Motion Picture Masterpiece Co., advertisement for Love’s Four Stone Walls, Moving Picture News 5, no. 12 (March 23, 1912): 19.

213 3. “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

14. Poets and poems include Lady Anne Barnard (“Auld Robin Gray”), Ethel Lynn Beers (“Which Shall It Be”), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (“The Cry of the Children”), Robert Browning (“A Blot in the ’Scutcheon,” “James Lee’s Wife,” “Pippa Passes,” “Youth and Art”), Robert Burns (“Auld Lang Syne”), Wilhelm Busch (“Max and Maurice”), Lord Byron (“Mazeppa”), Will Carleton (“Betsy and I Are Out”), Dante (Inferno), Hugh Antoine d’Arcy (“The Face on the Barroom Floor”), Frank Desprez (“Lasca”), Thomas Dunn English (“Ben Bolt”), Eugene Field (“Little Boy Blue”), William S. Hart (“Pinto Ben”), Bret Harte (“Her Letter, His Answer And Her Last Letter”), John C. Hay (“Banty Tim,” “Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle,” “Little Breeches”), Heinrich Heine (“The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar”), Thomas Hood (“The Bridge of Sighs,” “The Song of the Shirt”), Francis De Haes Janvier (“The Sleeping Sentinel”), John Keats (“La Belle Dame sans Merci”), Charles Kingsley (“The Three Fishers”), Rudyard Kipling (“Gunga Din,” “The Vampire”), Edwin Locke (“Portuguese Joe”), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Children’s Hour,” “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” “The Sicilian’s Tale; King Robert of Sicily,” “The Theologian’s Tale; The Legend Beautiful”), Owen Meredith (Lucille), Thomas Moore (“Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” “The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls,” “You Remember Ellen”), Con T. Murphy (“Little Meg and I”), Kate Putnam Osgood (“Driving Home the Cows”), John Howard Payne (“Home, Sweet Home”), Edgar Allan Poe (“The Raven”), Adelaide Anne Procter (“The Lost Chord”), Miriam Bode Rasmus (“The Cross”), Hal Reid (“Jim and Joe”), James Whitcomb Riley (“An Old Sweetheart of Mine,” “The Old Swimming Hole”), Walter Scott (“Lochinvar,” “The Lady of the Lake”), Robert Service (“My Madonna,” “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” “The Song of the Wage-Slave,” “The Spell of the Yukon”), George Sims (“Christmas Day in the Workhouse,” “ ’Ostler Joe”), Alfred, Lord Tennyson (“Break, Break, Break,” “Dora,” Enoch Arden, “Godiva,” “Lady Clare,” “Launcelot and Elaine,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade”), John Townsend Trowbridge (“Dorothy in the Garret,” “The Vagabonds”), John Greenleaf Whittier (“Barbara Frietchie,” “Maud Muller,” “Mogg Megone,” “The Barefoot Boy,” “The Bay of Seven Islands”), and Ella Wheeler Wilcox (“Divorced,” “The Price He Paid,” “The Two Glasses”). See also Alan Goble, The Complete Index to Literary Sources in Film (London: Bowker-Saur, 1999). 15. Louis Reeves Harrison, review of Sixty Years a Queen, Moving Picture World 19, no. 1 (January 3, 1914): 51. 16. Louis Reeves Harrison, review of Lincoln the Lover, Moving Picture World 19, no. 5 (January 31, 1914): 523; “Manufacturers Advance Notes,” Moving Picture World 19, no. 10 (March 7, 1914): 1249; “Manufacturers Advance Notes,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 10 (September 5, 1914): 1387. 17. Hanford C. Judson, review of Frou Frou, Moving Picture World 19, no. 3 (January 17, 1914): 277; “Comments on the Films,” Moving Picture World 19, no. 5 (January 31, 1914): 543; Lynde Denig, review of The Little Dutch Girl, Moving Picture World 25, no. 9 (August 28, 1915): 1491. 18. W. Stephen Bush, review of It’s No Laughing Matter, Moving Picture World 23, no. 5 (January 30, 1915): 679; “Comments on the Films,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 4 (July 25, 1914): 572.

214 3. “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

19. Selig Polyscope Company, advertisement for The Story of the Blood-Red Rose, Moving Picture World 22, no. 5 (October 31, 1914): 723; Selig Polyscope Company, advertisement for The Story of the Blood-Red Rose, Moving Picture World 22, no. 6 (November 7, 1914): 863; Selig Polyscope Company, advertisement for The Story of the Blood-Red Rose, Moving Picture World 22, no. 7 (November 14, 1914): 1011. 20. Harrison, review of Avenging Conscience, 936. 21. Louis Reeves Harrison, review of Old Year Stupidity, Moving Picture World 23, no.  2 (January  9, 1915): 192. Others have continued Harrison’s analogy relating poetic meter and rhythm to film. In his unpublished second book of film criticism, Vachel Lindsay praised Monsieur Beaucaire (Sidney Olcott, 1924) for having “a sense of rhythm in the action which is far more exhilarating than anything . . . in Addison or Pope” (The Progress and Poetry of the Movies: A Second Book of Film Criticism by Vachel Lindsay, ed. Myron Lounsbury [Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995], 313). Gunning in D. W. Griffith describes the shot sequencing of parallel editing with the same “a-b-a-b” notation used to describe rhyme schemes (95). Commenting on Hiawatha (1909), Bowser writes, “The use of Longfellow’s lines here, like the use of Charles Kingsley’s lines in Griffith’s The Sands of Dee (July 1912), adds greatly to the rhythmic pacing” (The Transformation of Cinema, 142). While “considering cinema as a metrical form,” Yopi Prins argues that Griffith’s Pippa Passes; or, The Song of Conscience “retains the metrical trace of Browning’s poetry” in the “polyrhythmic effect” of the film’s lighting (“Robert Browning, Transported by Meter,” in The Traffic in Poems: NineteenthCentury Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith L. McGill [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008], 223, 227). And Ruth Abbott suggests that the rhythm of the waves at the end of The Unchanging Sea “is that rhythm to which the verse intertitles first sensitize our hearing” (“D. W. Griffith, Victorian Poetry, and the Sound of Silent Film,” in Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies, ed. Sean Pryor and David Trotter [London: Open Humanities Press, 2016], 93). 22. In addition to the films mentioned in this chapter, see also “An Affair of Dress,” episode 3 of Dolly of the Dailies (Walter Edwin, 1914), The Fable of the Author and the Dear Public and the Plate of Mush (Essanay Studios, 1914), How the Earth Was Carpeted (Ashley Miller, 1914), Just out of College (George Irving, 1915), Poet and Peasant (Arthur V. Johnson, 1915), Silent Trails (Rollin S. Sturgeon, 1914), The Wood Nymph (E.H. Calvert, 1915), Vampires of the Night (Greene’s Feature Photo Plays, 1914), and a set of four films (The Oubliette, The Higher Law, Monsieur Bluebeard, and Ninety Black Boxes) titled as The Adventures of François Villon (Charles Giblyn, 1914). 23. Lubin Manufacturing Company, advertisement for The Persistent Poet, Moving Picture World 5, no. 27 (December 31, 1909): 982. 24. “Licensed Film Stories,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 8 (February 20, 1915): 1184. 25. Vitagraph Company of America, advertisement for A Disciple of Plato, Motion Picture News 12, no. 5 (August 7, 1915): 86. 26. “Feature Film Stories,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 9 (February 27, 1915): 1360. 27. “It’s No Laughing Matter,” Motography 8, no. 5 (January 30, 1915): 162. 28. Bush, review of It’s No Laughing Matter, 679. 29. “Comments on the Films,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 8 (August 22, 1914): 1100; “Comments on the Films,” Moving Picture World 22, no. 1 (October 3, 1914): 66. 30. “Stories of the Films,” Moving Picture World 4, no. 14 (April 3, 1909): 413. 31. “Independent Film Stories,” Moving Picture World 19, no. 7 (February 14, 1914): 876.

215 3. “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

32. “Independent Film Stories,” Moving Picture World 23. no. 1 (January 2, 1915): 134. 33. “Feature Film Stories,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 5 (August 1, 1914): 752. 34. World Film Corporation, advertisement for One of Millions, Moving Picture World 22, no. 5 (October 31, 1914): 601. 35. Sargent, “The Photoplaywright,” Moving Picture World 25. no. 3 (July 17, 1915): 480; Sargent, “The Photoplaywright,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 4 (July 25, 1914): 565. 36. Sargent, “The Photoplaywright,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 12 (March 20, 1915): 1758. 37. “Henry J. Vernot,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 7 (August 15, 1914): 971. 38. “Notes from the Trade,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 8 (August 22, 1914): 1112; George Blaisdell, “R. Henderson Bland, Actor,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 10 (September 5, 1914): 1355. 39. F. H. Richardson, “Projection Department,” Moving Picture World 23, no. 8 (February 20, 1915): 1137. 40. Hanford C. Judson, review of Frou Frou, Moving Picture World 19, no. 3 (January 17, 1914): 277. 41. “Princely Christmas Gift for Picture Men,” Moving Picture World 19, no. 1 (January 3, 1914): 29. 42. “Enoch Arden: A Fine Two-Reel Visualization of Tennyson’s Beautiful Poem,” Moving Picture World 8, no. 24 (June 17, 1911): 1358. 43. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: The Modern Library, [1915] 2000), 9–10. Lindsay was the poetry world’s biggest film advocate, working to bequeath poetry’s inheritance to film in a range of ways but perhaps nowhere as grandly as when he updated Whitman’s famous claim that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” to read “the United States is a great movie” (The Progress and Poetry of the Movies, 275). 44. Sarah Berry, “Rethinking Intertitles: The Voice and Temporality of Lyric Intertitles in The Cry of the Children,” Literature-Film Quarterly 42, no. 4 (December 2013): 595. 45. Mikhail Iampolski contends, “Griffith was first able to realize the device of parallel montage” in these films (The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film, trans. Harsha Ram [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 93). Maureen Turim argues that the technique of crosscutting “is transformed” in Enoch Arden (“Griffith and the Victorian Sea,” University of Hartford Studies in Literature 22, no. 1 [1990]: 27). 46. Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Griffith Project: Volume 4 (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 69. 47. “Views of a Prominent Renter on the Statement Issued by the Manufacturers,” Moving Picture World 4, no. 1 (January 2, 1909): 6. 48. “What Every Woman Should Know: Christmas Revels for Those Who Play—If You Are in Doubt About Entertaining Young Folk,” New York Times, December 15, 1912: X13. 49. “Enoch Arden: A Fine Two-Reel Visualization,” 1358. 50. “Comments on the Films,” Moving Picture World 8, no. 25 (June 24, 1911): 1454. 51. Quoted from the Biograph Bulletin (June 12, 1911) in Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Griffith Project: Volume 5 (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 47. 52. “Comments on the Films,” Moving Picture World 21, no. 8 (August 22, 1914): 1100; Gray Strider, “Looking Them Over—With Gray Strider,” Moving Picture World 79, no. 1 (March 6, 1926): 18; “Reviews of New Films,” The Film Daily 93, no. 21 (January 30, 1948): 5. For more on the remediation and influence of Enoch Arden, see

216 3. “OVERLOOK THE POEM, BUT LOOK THE PICTURE OVER”

Turim, “Griffith and the Victorian Sea,” as well as P. G. Scott, Tennyson’s Enoch Arden: A Victorian Best-Seller (Lincoln, UK: The Tennyson Society, 1970). 53. Quoted in Turim, “Griffith and the Victorian Sea,” 25. 54. “In the Educational Field,” Moving Picture World 8, no. 26 (July 1, 1911): 1498. 55. Edison Manufacturing Co., advertisement for The Night Before Christmas, New York Clipper 53, no. 42 (December 9, 1905): 1140. Verse “teasers” were not uncommon in advertisements and served purposes other than the one I suggest here. Prins, for example, contends that a quotation from Browning’s “Pippa Passes” in a Biograph Bulletin plot summary for Griffith’s Pippa Passes “prepares the audience for ‘reading’ the film and provides a moral to the story as well” (“Robert Browning, Transported by Meter,” 225). 56. Some of my initial thoughts about The Night Before Christmas and Enoch Arden appear in Mike Chasar, “Popular Verse: Poetry in Motion,” in American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920, ed. Mark W. Van Wienen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 244–65. 57. Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 340. 58. William F. Van Wert, “Intertitles,” Sight and Sound 49, no. 2 (1980): 105. 59. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (Fall 1986): 64. 60. Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, 15. Bowser describes not only how illustrated song slides in early theaters encouraged audience participation, but how live music performance did so as well. “When the singer at the motion-picture show sang the chorus,” she writes, “the audience was frequently invited to join in and happily did so. They were accustomed to being asked during the old variety show and they continued to participate in the community singing long after the song slides were replaced by the song film” (15). In the same vein, Abbott argues that a sheet-music intertitle putting a snippet of Robert Browning’s verse to music in Pippa Passes four years after The Night Before Christmas not only functioned “as a prompt for audiences to start singing themselves” but may have also encouraged “exhibitors who could manage it to have a singer performing . . . at appropriate moments, and encouraging audiences to join in” (“D. W. Griffith, Victorian Poetry, and the Sound of Silent Film,” 89). 61. Gunning, D. W. Griffith, 118. 62. James W. Hood, “Tennyson, D. W. Griffith, and Victorian Pneumatography,” Victorians Institute Journal 25 (1997): 67. 63. Turim, “Griffith and the Victorian Sea,” 27. 64. Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, 45. 65. Aaron Sultanik, Film: A Modern Art (New York: Cornwall Books, 1986), 90; “The Influence of the Picture,” Moving Picture World 8, no. 27 (July 8, 1911): 1565. 66. Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias, 69. 67. Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith, ed. Kevin Brownlow (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 30, 36–37. For more on Griffith’s personal “lifelong interest in poetry,” see Abbott, 85–87. 68. The fifth intertitle condenses stanza seventeen: Enoch rose, Cast his strong arms about his drooping wife, And kiss’d his wonder-stricken little ones;

217 4 . O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

But for the third, sickly one, who slept After a night of feverous wakefulness, When Annie would have raised him Enoch said “Wake him not; let him sleep; how should this child Remember this?” and kiss’d him in his cot. But Annie from her baby’s forehead clipt A tiny curl, and gave it: this he kept Thro’ all his future; but now hastily caught His bundle, waved his hand, and went his way. to the following: Enoch kissed his Wonder-stricken Little ones and Went his way 69. The original passage reads: O God Almighty, blessed Saviour, Thou That didst uphold me on my lonely isle, Uphold me, Father, in my loneliness A little longer! aid me, give me strength Not to tell her, never to let her know. 70. Jonathan Culler, “Reading Lyric,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 99. 71. This intertitle quotes Tennyson nearly word for word. The passages are identical except that Griffith changes the first line’s first word “And” to “He” to allow the excerpt to stand alone. 72. As a preliminary reader for JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies observed, some surviving versions of Enoch Arden do have an intertitle quotation of Enoch’s final words. It is difficult to know which version Griffith wanted to circulate. However, their coexistence—one allowing poetry to utter its last words, and one taking them away—provocatively figures the ambivalence that one can imagine this aspiring-poet-turned-filmmaker experienced in working so consistently with poetic source material. 73. Quoted in Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 46. 74. P. Adams Sitney, Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 53.

4. ONCE MORE INTO THE FRAY 1. “Timely Topics,” Film Daily 50, no. 56 (December 5, 1929): 4. 2. Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film, trans. Harsha Ram (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 85. Iampolski writes: “Cinema has evolved along a path dictated by narrative genres, to the point of being popularly perceived as analogous to the novel. As an evolutionary intertext the novel displaced poetry that, in turn, has become, like songs, a form of dead stock.

218 4 . O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

Dickens has taken the place of Tennyson. An intertext’s repression can happen, therefore, not only within an individual text but equally within the confines of an entire genre or form of art, within the framework of an architext” (85). 3. Stacey Harwood, “Poetry in Movies: A Partial List,” Academy of American Poets, January 19, 2007. 4. “My late husband was a great lover of poetry,” M explains before quoting from the poem, “and, um, I suppose some of it sunk in, despite my best intentions.” 5. Indeed, film has regularly used poetry to function as a trigger, symptom, or sign of criminal behavior, imagining it at the same time to be an expressive form especially well-suited to criminal communication and activity. Consider, for example, the transformative effects of poetry on Jekyll, who, in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931), recites two lines by John Keats, only to then morph involuntarily into Hyde and go on a killing spree that ends with a police chase through London and his death. Other films in this vein include The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicholas Gessner, 1976), in which murderous teenager Rynn Jacobs changes the subject of conversation with Officer Miglioriti to poetry in order to distract him and thus keep him out of the house and basement where her mother and Mrs. Hallet are buried. Kurtz reads T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). In The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983), Johnny Cade and Ponyboy Curtis flee to the country because Johnny knifed and killed a boy in a gang fight, and, while they are there, Ponyboy expresses his sadness at having to return and face justice by reciting Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” The terrorist narrator of Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) writes haiku. Sociopath Lisa Row quotes Dorothy Parker’s “Résumé” in Girl, Interrupted (James Mangold, 1999). Hannibal Lecter recites from a Dante sonnet in Hannibal (Ridley Scott, 2001), and when criminal villain Dr. Octopus talks to Peter about how to woo Mary Jane in Spider Man 2 (Sam Raimi, 2004), he advises, “feed her poetry.” Captured assassin Frank Carden recites poetry to distract the father and son who have captured him and are trying to deliver him to law enforcement officials in The Contract (Bruce Beresford, 2006). And young Isabelle successfully fends off the interrogations of train-station inspector Gustave Dasté in Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011) by talking about her cat, named after Christina Rossetti, and reciting four lines of Rossetti’s verse. 6. Since completing this chapter, I have discovered two new movies that offer poetry for audiences to read. The science fiction thriller Anon (Andrew Niccol, 2018) opens with a three-line quotation from Robert Browning’s Paracelsus that appears on screen phrase by phrase (“I give the fight up: let there be an end; / A privacy, an obscure nook for me. / I want to be forgotten even by God”). And Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson, 2018) offers two haiku. 7. “Timely Topics,” The Film Daily 70, no. 6 (July 8, 1936): 9. 8. Don Ashbaugh, “Evangeline: A Perfect Super-Scenic,” Motion Picture News 39, no. 24 (June 15, 1929): 2096. 9. “The Shadow Stage: A Review of the New Pictures,” Photoplay 39, no. 6 (May 1931): 56. 10. “The Shadow Stage: A Review of the New Pictures,” Photoplay 41, no. 4 (March 1932): 49; RKO-Radio Pictures, advertisement for The Gay Divorcee, Film Daily 66, no. 123 (November 23, 1934): 5.

219 4 . O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

11. “What the Picture Did for Me,” Motion Picture Herald 130, no. 7 (February 12, 1938): 63; “Travel de Luxe,” advertisement for Japan—In Cherry Blossom Time, Motion Picture Herald 119, no. 11 (June 15, 1935): 50. 12. Martin Quigley Jr., “Screen Poetry,” Motion Picture Herald 141, no. 7 (November 16, 1940): 40. 13. “Short Subject Reviews,” Film Daily 68, no. 139 (December 13, 1935): 11; Ernest W. Fredman, “New Illumination Process in London,” Film Daily 41, no. 43 (August 21, 1927): 14. 14. “Short Subject Reviews,” Film Daily 73, no.  83 (April  11, 1938): 7; “The Camera Reports,” Motion Picture Herald 107, no. 2 (April 9, 1932): 16. 15. Rouben Mamoulian, “Timely Topics: Importance of Rhythm to the Screen,” Film Daily 65, no. 61 (March 15, 1934): 3; A. Consiglio, “Timely Topics: Why the Film Director Is the Industry’s Dictator,” Film Daily 68, no. 152 (December 30, 1935): 6. 16. Quoted in Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 46. 17. “Words and Wisdom,” Film Daily 70, no. 129 (December 1, 1936): 19. 18. Cal York, “Love! Marriage! Divorce! Laughter! Tears! Hollywood Life Is Stranger than Pictures: Cal York’s Monthly Broadcast from Hollywood,” Photoplay 40, no. 6 (November 1931): 46. 19. York, “Love! Marriage!,” 86. 20. Reginald Taviner, “The Gamest Girl in Hollywood,” Photoplay 43, no. 5 (April 1933): 101. 21. Sara Hamilton, “The Imp They Call Janet,” Photoplay 44, no. 6 (November 1933): 97; Elizabeth Wilson, “Claudette Colbert’s Real Life Story,” Screenland 30, no. 5 (March 1935): 73. 22. “Brawn Brains,” Photoplay 45, no. 2 (July 1934): 45. 23. Joseph Henry Steele, “Portrait with a French Accent,” Photoplay 52, no. 7 (July 1938): 73. 24. “The Camera Speaks,” Photoplay 52, no. 8 (August 8, 1938): 27; “They’re Talking About—,” Photoplay 53, no. 3 (March 1939): 68. 25. Caroline Lejeune, “Dollars to Donat,” Photoplay 53, no. 8 (August 1939): 61; Margaret Lindsay, “Doing Anything Tonight?,” Photoplay 18, no. 2 (January 1941): 70; Charles Dunn, “The Loves and Hates of Carmel Myers,” Screenland 19, no. 1 (May 1929): 109; Faith Service, “I Will Be a Career Wife!,” Silver Screen 10, no. 7 (May 1940): 68. 26. “Their Pet Vanities,” Photoplay 39, no. 2 (January 1931): 12; Gladys Hall, “The Foibles of Fontaine,” Screenland 41, no. 4 (August 1940): 34. 27. Sara Hamilton, “Round Up of Pace Setters,” Photoplay 18, no. 2 (January 1941): 73; Ida Zeitlin, “What Is Their Romantic Future?,” Photoplay 19, no. 3 (August 1941): 85; Hamilton, “Round-Up of Pace Setters,” Photoplay 20, no. 1 (December 1941): 81; Grace Simpson, “That Passion for Things,” Silver Screen 7, no. 9 (July 1937): 65; Cal York, “Announcing the Monthly Broadcast of Hollywood Goings-On!,” Photoplay 42, no. 2 (July 1932): 95; Cal York, “Announcing the Monthly Broadcast of Hollywood Goings-On!,” Photoplay 39, no. 5 (April 1931): 114. 28. James R. Quirk, “Why Women Go Crazy About Clark Gable,” Photoplay 40, no. 6 (November 1931): 67, 67, 67, 67, 102, 67, 67. 29. “Gilmore’s Gag,” Motion Picture Herald 110, no. 8 (February 18, 1933): 56.

220 4 . O N C E M O R E I N T O T H E F R AY

30. Elsie Loeb, “Theatres of Cleveland Are Community Centers,” Motion Picture Herald 125, no. 3 (October 17, 1936): 78. 31. “Pacific Northwest,” Film Daily 70, no. 25 (July 30, 1936): 12. 32. “Members Report on Mother’s Day,” Motion Picture Herald 139, no.  8 (May  25, 1940): 71. 33. “Showmanship—Fifteen Years Ago!,” Motion Picture Herald 103, no. 3 (April 18, 1931): 80. 34. “M-G-M Celebrates Dressler Birthday,” Motion Picture Herald 113, no. 6 (November 4, 1933): 55. Poetry-writing contests were not unique to movie theater advertising, but were used to produce jingles and generate consumer interest in nearly every product in the U.S. marketplace, from shaving cream to automobiles. For an excellent look into this aspect of midcentury American life, see Terry Ryan’s memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). 35. “Regional News from Correspondents,” Motion Picture News 36, no.  3 (July  22, 1927): 228. 36. Benjamin de Casseres, “Film and Star ‘Bound for Studio,’ ” Motion Picture Herald 117, no. 8 (November 24, 1934): 55. 37. “Opinions on Pictures,” Motion Picture News 39, no. 22 (June 1, 1929): 1892; “Opinions on Pictures,” Motion Picture News 40, no. 25 (December 21, 1929): 38. 38. “Showmen’s Reviews,” Motion Picture Herald 113, no. 1 (September 30, 1933): 38; “Showmen’s Reviews,” Motion Picture Herald 114, no. 1 (December 30, 1933): 32; Gus McCarthy, “In the Cutting Room,” Motion Picture Herald 113, no. 4 (October 21, 1933): 38. 39. “Showmen’s Reviews,” Motion Picture Herald 121, no. 7 (November 16, 1935): 66. 40. Columbia Pictures, advertisement for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Motion Picture Herald 123, no. 1 (April 4, 1936): 49. 41. Roger Ebert, review of He Got Game, Rogerebert.com, May 1. 1998. 42. For films featuring or about poets, see A Knight’s Tale (Brian Helgeland, 2001), Barfly (Barbet Schroeder, 1987), Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009), Howl (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 2010), If I Were King (Frank Lloyd, 1938), Il Postino: The Postman (Michael Radford, 1994), Love Jones (Theodore Witcher, 1997), Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (Alan Rudolph, 1994), Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016), Piñero (Leon Ichaso, 2001), Poetic Justice (John Singleton, 1993), Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998), Slam (Marc Levin, 1998), Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003), The Bad Lord Byron (David MacDonald, 1949), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Sidney Franklin, 1934), Tom & Viv (Brian Gilbert, 1994), Total Eclipse (Agnieszka Holland, 1995), and Wilde (Brian Gilbert, 1997). Recent film adaptations of poems include Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007), Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995), For Colored Girls (Tyler Perry, 2010), Horton Hears a Who (Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino, 2008), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Ron Howard, 2000), and Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004). 43. Walter J. Ong, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1991), 101. 44. If my description of this moment recalls Marshall McLuhan’s famous proposal that the “content of any medium is always another medium,” then remember that Woody Allen directed McLuhan playing himself as a character nearly ten years earlier in Annie Hall (1977).

221 5. I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

45. Iampolski not only notes the parallel between “Kubla Khan” ’s Xanadu and Kane’s Xanadu, but then also observes, “Kane’s very name seems to recall ‘Khan,’ and the film is filled with motifs taken from the Coleridge poem. The River Alph (cf. alphabet) becomes the stream of newspapers owned by the press magnate Kane; the singing Abyssinian maid is parodied in the figure of Kane’s second wife, a singer by the name of Susan Alexander who performs an ‘oriental opera’ in the film; the construction of the palace out of song and music is reflected in the building of the opera house for Susan; and the paradisial garden surrounding Xanadu is echoed by Kane’s gigantic zoo” (The Memory of Tiresias, 44). 46. As with the Porter and Griffith films discussed in chapter 3, Welles also quotes the poem incorrectly, neglecting to hyphenate “pleasure-dome” and punctuating with two dashes instead of a colon. 47. Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias, 42. 48. Sarah Berry, “Rethinking Intertitles: The Voice and Temporality of Lyric Intertitles in The Cry of the Children,” Literature-Film Quarterly 42, no. 4 (December 2013): 604. 49. Interview with Ian Watson, Moon Milk Review, April 21, 2010, https://www.eckle burg.org/author-talk-ian-watson-2/. 50. The poem’s scrolling lines recall the scrolling frames of a film strip and especially the “text crawl” of contemporary film, thereby bringing into conceptual alignment poetry, the technology of film, and the ability to dream or imagine that the digital Dr. Know cannot compute. Recalling the intertitle writers I quoted in the previous chapter, George Lucas has described the famous text crawl at the beginning of the Star Wars movies in poetic terms, explaining that “the crawl is such a hard thing, because you have to be careful that you’re not using too many words that people don’t understand. It’s like a poem.” 51. Kenneth Turan, “Enough Said Says Just Enough,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2013.

5. I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT 1. Michael Davidson, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 55; 54–55, 56; 56–57. 2. To understand this episode of Father Knows Best in its 1954 Cold War context, it is worth remembering that the height of House Un-American Activities Committee blacklisting occurred from 1952–1956, and that Senator Joseph McCarthy served as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee during the very year “Thanksgiving Day” was released. In other words, it first appeared at the height of the Red and Lavender Scares. 3. Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 3. 4. To the episodes of All in the Family, Taxi, The Jeffersons, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that I turn to later in this chapter, we can also add Rescue Me (2004) and The Get Down (2016). In the former, Lieutenant Ken Shea conceals the fact that writing poetry helps him manage his PTSD, at one point preferring his wife to think he’s on the computer watching porn instead. And to avoid the embarrassment of

222 5. I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

being singled out from the rest of his English class in the latter, Zeke Figuero escapes having to recite by claiming that he plagiarized his award-winning poem. 5. Aspiring poet Philip Paisley, for example, tries to curry his rich Aunt Virginia’s favor by pretending to be a medium channeling her dead son’s poetry in “The Case of the Meddling Medium” on Perry Mason (1961). Joanie on Happy Days wonders if her brother Richie’s new poetry-writing friend Deirdre is an authentic Beatnik because “she uses soap” (1974). Mallory Keaton’s skeezy college professor on Family Ties (1982) falsely praises her verse in the hopes of inflating her ego and getting her into bed, and Mallory eventually realizes that by writing poetry she was herself pretending to be someone she is not. “I wanted to be that person so badly,” she explains, “I was just ready to turn my back on who I am.” Dorothy Parker’s poem “Résumé” is painted on the wall of the secret headquarters in 21 Jump Street (1987), where undercover police posing as high-school and college students are conducting sting operations. When asked to name his favorite poet on Seinfeld (1996), George Costanza, worried that Wyck Thayer of the Susan Ross Foundation holds him accountable for Susan’s death, fakes one by muttering “Flavin.” Walter White—the chemistry teacher, father, and secret meth kingpin Heisenberg on Breaking Bad—deflects the suspicion of his DEA agent brother-in-law and temporarily maintains his cover by claiming the initials “WW” on a confiscated piece of Heisenberg’s paper probably stand for “Walt Whitman.” And in Mad Men, Dick Whitman escapes his past by swapping dog tags with a soldier killed next to him during the Korean War, assuming his identity as “Don Draper” and going on to a career writing poetic advertising copy. 6. “Thanksgiving Day” plot summary, Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb .com/title/tt1113159/plotsummary?ref_+tt_ov_pl. 7. “Thanksgiving Day” episode summary, TV.com, http://www.tv.com/shows/father -knows-best/thanksgiving-day-19178/. 8. A club woman tries to recite from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha during the intermission of Lucy’s play on I Love Lucy (1952), and Lucy herself recites from the poem to impress Ricky a year later (1953). In Have Gun—Will Travel, Paladin eulogizes fallen cavalry by reciting Edwin Markham’s “Lincoln, the Man of the People” (1959). Robert Browning and Longfellow are quoted in two separate 1959 episodes of Wagon Train. Kitty recites Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” to imagine an escape from the harshness of prairie life in Gunsmoke (1960). Barney threatens to resign when he thinks that Opie wrote a limerick impugning his lack of lawenforcement skills in The Andy Griffith Show (1960). For a school assignment, Mark McCain on The Rifleman is tasked with memorizing “Casabianca” by Felicia Hemans (1960). While helping his friend Maynard learn a love poem, Dobie decides to go on a hunger strike to win Thalia’s heart on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1960). John Milton is quoted on The Untouchables (1960). In Perry Mason, poet Ben Nicholson quotes from E. A. Robinson’s “Richard Cory” (1961). Feeling “real down, and beat,” the talking horse Mister Ed runs away from home to join a colony of beatnik artists, where he writes poetry (1962). Gomez Addams reads a “traditional” Halloween poem (a riff on “A Visit from St. Nicholas”) on The Addams Family (1964). Major Croft quotes Francis Thompson’s “Daisy” to Mrs. Peel on The Avengers, and she replies by quoting Robert Herrick’s “The Rose” (1964). Herman Munster recites his version of beatnik poetry on The Munsters (1965). Mrs. Howell recites Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” for the talent portion of a beauty contest on Gilligan’s Island (1965). Hoss hires a ranch hand who

223 5. I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

turns out to be a famous poet on Bonanza (1966). The episodes “Who Mourns for Adonais?” (1967) and “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” (1968) of Star Trek allude to poems by Percy Shelley and John Keats, respectively. Samantha comes down with a virus that makes her speak in nothing but rhyme in Bewitched (1969). Scott recites a poem for Kathy on Lassie (1969). Margaret is disappointed to be paired with Ernie rather than Roger for a poetry recitation on My Three Sons (1969). A killer writes poetry in lipstick on the legs of his victims in one episode of Hawaii Five-O (1970), and Mr. Talbot and Detective Steve McGarrett quote from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man in another (1973). Mike and Greg perform a hilarious version of Longfellow’s “The Day is Done” at Westdale High School’s “Family Frolics” night on The Brady Bunch (1972). Radar O’Reilly reads from Rupert Brooke’s “The Channel Passage” and “Love” to woo Lieutenant Louise Simmons on M*A*S*H (1974). Kojak rhymes “If I ever see you near me / or any of my family, / I’m gonna scatter your brains / from here to White Plains” on Kojak (1974). Edith Bunker and the plumber recite Edgar Guest poems to each other on All in the Family (1975). Uncle Woodrow recites a “roses are red” dinner invitation poem on Sanford and Son (1975), and five years later Fred finds a “roses are red” love poem that Cal wrote to Katie on the show’s sequel Sanford (1980). Tommy opens a copy of poetry by e.e. cummings that his mother had purchased and inscribed for him before she died on Eight Is Enough (1977). The Sweathogs recite Christmas poems on Welcome Back, Kotter (1978). Columbo exchanges and composes limericks with Irish poet and terrorist Joe Devlin on Columbo (1978). Alex gives advice to Elaine by quoting Rudyard Kipling’s “If ” on Taxi (1980). Wojo quotes Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” on Barney Miller (1980). Laverne and Shirley have been sharing poems and writing them for each other since at least the eighth grade on Laverne and Shirley (1980). Phil’s eulogy for Marv on Hill Street Blues includes a poem that Marv once wrote (1981). Jake the mad archer is a security guard who quotes poetry on Charlie’s Angels (1981). Ricky writes a love poem for a girl at school on Silver Spoons (1982). Alex attends a poetry reading on Family Ties (1985). Bull the bailiff is made fun of for writing poetry on Night Court (1985). T. C. quotes Emily Dickinson’s “For each ecstatic instant” on Magnum, P.I. (1985). Directed to read Hugo Ball’s 1916 DADA sound poem “Karawane” from a cue-card poster on Ripley’s Believe It or Not, then co-host Marie Osmond surprised everyone by putting the card aside, looking directly into the camera, and reciting the poem from memory (1985). Crockett and Tubbs are charged with protecting a poet who comes to the United States for asylum in Miami Vice (1986). Face quotes the Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa on The A-Team (1986). Dr. Westphall tries to help an alcoholic poet he once admired on St. Elsewhere (1986). Justin gives Adrienne a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese on Days of Our Lives (1987). Simone sends her verse to a poet (who doesn’t like it) and then reads it at his funeral (where everyone likes it) on Head of the Class (1987). Larry and Balki discover that a famous poet once lived in their Chicago apartment and that an unpublished poem of his might still be hidden there in Perfect Strangers (1989). Darlene is embarrassed when her poem wins a school prize on Roseanne (1989). On Quantum Leap, Sam cites but cannot entirely remember a passage from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats (1989). Angela’s college sweetheart, a poet, comes back to town and falls back in love with her on Who’s the Boss? (1989). Dick judges a local poetry and pastry contest and belittles his wife’s poetry on Newhart (1989).

224 5. I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

In Thirtysomething, Gary (who teaches poetry at a local college) gets a dream visit from Emily Dickinson (1990). Dwayne Wayne is visited by the ghost of Shakespeare who has been “roused from my sleep, sleep that knits the raveled sleeve of care, to, uh, discuss your apathy toward poetry” in A Different World (1990). Maggie recites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 at a funeral on Northern Exposure (1991). Miles leaves Rose a copy of Robert Frost’s “Reluctance” to remember him by on The Golden Girls (1991). Screech, Lisa, and Kelly read poems in front of class, and Miss Simpson makes Zack and Kelly recite Elizabeth Barrett Browning to each other on Saved by the Bell (1991). Kevin helps Denise understand Jonathan Swift’s “Cadenus and Vanessa” for English class on The Wonder Years (1991). Jesse recites Walt Whitman’s “Oh Captain! My Captain!” on Full House (1992). Al Bundy recites a parody of “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” to a group of kids in a shoe store on Married . . . with Children (1996). Fox Mulder reads Robert Browning’s “The Field Where I Died” on The X-Files (1996). The captain of the space cruiser on The Light Brigade recites a portion of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to the ship’s crew before they set out to strike aliens with a new subatomic bomb (1996). Julio reads Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and gives a poem to Monica on Friends (1997). Walt Whitman visits Dr. Mike on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1997). Arnold “Poet” Jackson writes and performs poetry on Oz (1997). Carrie writes a poem for Miranda’s interior decorator’s wedding on Sex and the City (1999). In ER, Gabriel Lawrence recites “The Peace of Wild Things,” saying it was written by William Blake when in reality it’s by Wendell Berry (1999). In The West Wing, President Bartlet comments on the iambic verse of The Fables of Phaedrus while Christmas shopping in a bookstore (1999) and, in a subsequent episode, an aging Chief Justice of the Supreme Court provokes suspicions about his mental state when he begins writing opinions in verse forms including trochaic tetrameter and a cinquain (2003). On That ’70s Show, Hyde insults Jackie with a haiku (“My heart aches with pain / When I see you I vomit / Die away from me”), and Leo gives Kitty flowers with a poem attached: “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Milk, eggs, coffee” (2000, 2002). Cindy recites her poetry at a yearbook meeting in Freaks and Geeks (2000). In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike reveals that prior to becoming a vampire he was a poet whose verse was so bad that one listener proclaimed he’d rather have a spike driven through his head than listen to it (apparently his nickname “William the Bloody” comes from the fact that he wrote “bloody” awful poetry); in a flashback to the 1880s, someone snatches a poem from William’s hands and reads it aloud to public mockery (2000). Shepherd reflects on the warrior-poet Shan Yu in Firefly, a show in which characters regularly abbreviate the “universe” to “the ’verse” (2002). Debra reveals a poem that a former suitor wrote to her years ago on Everybody Loves Raymond (2002). In Angel, a drunken Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer reads aloud the same poem that got him ridiculed in the 1880s and finds that contemporary audiences enjoy it (2004). Jess steals Rory’s copy of Howl and leaves notes in its margins in The Gilmore Girls (2001). David Aceveda quotes Mary Elizabeth Frye’s “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” at Crowley’s funeral in The Shield (2002). A portion of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is read aloud at a funeral service on Six Feet Under (2002). Niles recites verse by Robert Burns in Frasier (2003), and Frasier recites from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” in the show’s season finale (2004). Lisa helps bartender Moe publish his poetry on The Simpsons (2006). Waverly quotes Robert

225 5. I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

Hayden’s “Full Moon” on Friday Night Lights (2007). Meadow helps A. J. with an essay about Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in The Sopranos, and, later in that same season, A. J. recites William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” shortly before attempting suicide (2007). Mohinder Suresh recites “The Second Coming” in Heroes (2008). Adama recites Emily Dickinson’s “There Is a Langour of the Life” in Battlestar Galactica (2009). The pilot episode of Nurse Jackie opens with the first three lines of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (2009). While Pam is giving birth on The Office, Ryan tries to distract her by reading some of his poetry (2010), and in a later episode he writes a love poem for Kelly (2012). On 30 Rock, Jack recites a poem in German (2010) and later quotes from William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” (2011). Ted recites Dante at a party on How I Met Your Mother (2010), and Season 9, Episode 11 of the show (“Bedtime Stories”) is done in rhyme (2013). Piper lectures Taystee about the meaning of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” on Orange Is the New Black (2013). Dana Brody recites the beginning of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” to her boyfriend on Homeland (2013). Retired sheriff Lucian Connally participates in the “Absaroka County Cowboy Poetry Slam,” and Walt Longmire quotes from The Iliad in the same episode of Longmire (2013); in a later episode, two treasure hunters follow clues in a poem in the hopes of finding a hidden fortune (2016). (Poet Tony Tost wrote regularly for Longmire.) Gareth Lestrade makes up a limerick while waiting for a mugger to return home on Elementary (2014). Shay quotes Pablo Neruda to Cosima, and Ethan’s coded numbers translate into a nursery rhyme in Season 3 of Orphan Black (2015). William Blake’s “The Little Girl Lost” is a clue that detective John Marlott follows in trying to solve the disappearance of Alice Evans in The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015). Poet Yusef Komunyakka plays a Liberty Island guard who recites Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” to Prairie Johnson on The OA (2016). On Madam Secretary, speech writer Matt Mahoney quotes “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (2016); President Dalton quotes from Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (2016); fictional Poet Laureate Roland Hobbs reads a poem at Dalton’s second inauguration (the name Hobbs alludes to former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, an allusion underscored by the poem Hobbs writes, which recycles the title of Hass’s “Privilege of Being” in a line reading, “In the majesty of the quantum world, in the beauty of building blocks, in the tiniest of elements, I glimpse the privilege of being”) (2017); and after pulling a copy of it out of his wallet, Jay Whitman reads Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” to help his colleagues cope with recent State Department failures (2017). In Godless, Alice Fletcher’s son Truckee practices reading by reading aloud Christina Rossetti’s “Boats Sail on the Rivers”; the recently deceased head of the Quicksilver Limited Mining Company is reputed to have written sonnets; Frank Griffin anachronistically misquotes a line from a Burma-Shave advertisement; and the newly-arrived minister recites a poem in the final episode’s cemetery scene (2017). Vijay reveals to Penny that he wrote a poem while his spaceship was crashing on Lost in Space (2018). In The Crown, King George VI and his attendant trade limericks; a voiceover recites a portion of Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” after Philip is made prince; and when they first meet at a dinner party, Princess Margaret and Tony recite a verse by John Betjeman. Many episodes of Grimm (2011–2017) begin with a featured quotation in verse, and more than

226 5. I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

twenty of the opening and closing quotations of Criminal Minds (2005–2017) are from poets including Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Longfellow, T. S. Eliot, Lizette Reese, Philip Larkin, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Mary Oliver. Also, let’s not forget that Suzanne Somers, who played Chrissy Snow on Three’s Company from 1977–1981, would go on to publish Touch Me: The Poems of Suzanne Somers (1980). 9. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 44. 10. Davidson, Guys Like Us, 2. 11. Davidson, Guys Like Us, 2. 12. Mike Chasar, Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 99. Malone’s creator, Frank Alden Russell, initially worried that he would be viewed as a “sissy” by virtue of hosting a poetry show, hence his adoption of the pseudonym (John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 82]). For more on Malone, see chapter 2 of Everyday Reading, which focuses on old-time poetry radio shows. 13. Consider, for instance, the poem that Quirt spontaneously composes for Elly May about her pet raccoon: “I like the raccoon because he is so filled with goodness and generosity. Well look at how he gives us his skin for use in our garments and other apparel. In addition, raccoons act natural and don’t put on airs, as do skunks and old turnips.” 14. Prior to 1964, Gibson had recited poetry on The Jack Paar Tonight Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show. While Gibson’s poems don’t foreground gender and sexuality as frequently as Percy’s do, the following stanzas from “The Alligator”—which encode queer relationships and the ejaculatory protein of oral sex via the hyperbole of interspecies “friendships”—suggest that Gibson nevertheless registered in his character a Percy-like cleverness and a queer “wink and flirt”: The alligator is my friend. He likes to wink and flirt. I’d rather have him as my friend Than wear him on my shirt. The alligator ate my friend. He can eat your friend too If only you would understand That he needs protein too. 15. Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 44, 45. 16. Perhaps not surprisingly, Molly’s character would be written out of the show after Season 2. 17. Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture, 10th anniversary ed. (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002), 9, 16, 1, 21. 18. See Mike Chasar, “High, Low, and Somewhere In-Between: Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America,” in A History of Twentieth-Century American

227 5. I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

Women’s Poetry, ed. Linda A. Kinnahan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 202–21. 19. See Mike Chasar, “Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 305–11. For more on poetry scrapbooking practices, see “Saving Poetry,” chap. 1 in Chasar, Everyday Reading. 20. Joseph Harrington, Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 24. 21. Harrington, Poetry and the Public, 24, 23. 22. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 221. 23. A nice poetry-related example would be the stock story in which a TV character temporarily becomes or plays at being a Beatnik. See note 8 for several examples. 24. Daniel Tiffany, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 12. 25. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 92–93. 26. Tiffany, My Silver Planet, 32. 27. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 28. Tiffany, My Silver Planet, 13, 27. 29. TV characters regularly use the word “corny” to signal or identify a particular type of poetic kitsch or cliché. Wally on Leave It to Beaver says Ward’s poem is “corny.” A fellow teacher in The Bill Cosby Show calls Chet’s poem “corny.” And of her excitement at having received poems from her secret admirer, Elaine on Taxi says, “The whole thing is just so stupid and corny and high school. And worst of all is it’s getting me hot.” Diane on Cheers uses the word “hackneyed” to convey much of the same, and the connotations of “corny” float just under the surface of characters who note the age of the poems with which they are working. Thus Kathy’s comment that hers is “just a old poem”; Kelly’s self-defense that the poet she plagiarized “wrote that poem two hundred years ago”; and Blair’s justification that “I’m just borrowing a poem from a woman who died in 1886. I mean, it’s not like I’m copying from the girl in front of me.” Kathy, Kelly, and Blair all suggest that the older a poem is, the more corny it is likely to be, and thus, functioning as cliché, is part of a shared common language or vernacular. 30. Tiffany, My Silver Planet, 35, 35, 30. 31. In the first season of Twin Peaks, Killer BOB and murderer MIKE are associated with the cryptic rhyme “Through the darkness of future’s past, / The magician longs to see. / One chants out between two worlds / ‘Fire walk with me.’ ” In the show’s second season (1990–91), evil genius Windom Earl (who claims to have killed Agent Cooper’s wife and who attempts to take Cooper’s soul) identifies his three prospective “queens” by ripping Percy Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy” into three parts and sending them to Audrey, Donna, and Shelly, respectively. In Series 1, Episode 3 of Luther, DCI John Luther visits an art gallery and marvels at the price tag attached to “a poem hand-illustrated by the Yorkshire Ripper.” Malcolm Crowley, the killer

228 5. I NEED A PHONY POET TONIGHT

in Series One (“Cracking a Killer’s Code”) of Bletchley Circle quotes Ovid, and in Series One of The Fall, serial killer Peter Spector writes quotations from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” in his journal. The Following features as its serial-killer cult leader a former literature professor and Edgar Allan Poe expert, Joe Carroll; Season One, Episode Three is titled “The Poet’s Fire,” and the show’s protagonist, former FBI agent Ryan Hardy, publishes a memoir about pursuing Carroll titled The Poetry of a Killer. Breaking Bad makes regular reference to Walt Whitman; Gus recites the entirety of “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” and both the initials “W. W.” and a copy of Leaves of Grass serve as clues leading Hank to suspect that Heisenberg is in real life Walter White. See also the episodes of Criminal Minds and Psych described in this book’s introduction. 32. Mark W. Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 24. 33. Allen, The New American Poetry, 420. 34. Tiffany, My Silver Planet, 23, 196. 35. Clement Greenberg, “How Art Writing Earned Its Bad Name,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, by Clement Greenberg, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 144. 36. Tiffany, My Silver Planet, 15, 201, 238, 201, 238, 200–201, 200, 15. 37. Mary Ruefle, “I Remember, I Remember,” Poetry, July 2, 2012, para. 39.

6. FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY 1. Elizabeth Barnett, “Destroyed by Poetry: Alice Corbin and the Little Magazine Effect,” Modernism/Modernity 24, no. 4 (November 2017): 669. 2. Barnett, “Destroyed by Poetry,” 668–69. 3. Barnett, “Destroyed by Poetry,” 669. 4. Alice Corbin Henderson, “Of Editors and Poets,” Poetry 8, no. 6 (September 1916): 308. 5. Barnett, “Destroyed by Poetry,” 668–69, 670. 6. Barnett, “Destroyed by Poetry,” 670. 7. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 76. 8. Clifton Fadiman to Edna St. Vincent Millay, October 2, 1942, Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers, Library of Congress, 93.9. 9. Fadiman to Millay, September 11, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 54.5 (untitled folder). 10. Wynn Wright, “Production Note,” in Adventure in Radio, ed. Margaret Cuthbert (New York: Howell, Soskin, Publishers, 1945), 237. 11. Fadiman to Millay, June 26, 1942, Writers’ War Board Records, 54.5 (untitled folder). 12. Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Murder of Lidice (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), 3, 3, 4, 13. 13. Barnett, “Destroyed by Poetry,” 669. 14. Millay, The Murder of Lidice, 3, 21. 15. Millay, The Murder of Lidice, 31. 16. Millay, The Murder of Lidice, 8, 14, 25, 13, 13, 17. 17. Barnett, “Destroyed by Poetry,” 672.

229 6. FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

18. Millay, The Murder of Lidice, 28. 19. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, ed. Allan Ross Macdougall (Westport, CT: Glenwood Press, [1952] 1972), 338. 20. See John Timberman Newcomb, Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). 21. Arthur Davison Ficke, “The Present State of Poetry,” North American Review 194, no. 670 (September 1911): 429. 22. Helen Bullitt Lowry, “Poetry as a Major Popular Sport,” New York Times, August 14, 1921: 40. 23. Ruth Suckow, “Iowa,” American Mercury 9, no. 33 (September 1926): 44. 24. H. L. Mencken, “Market Report: Poetry,” American Mercury 24 (1931): 152. 25. Harriet Monroe, “The Radio and the Poets,” Poetry 36, no. 1 (April 1930): 32. 26. Marjorie Perloff, “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric,” Boston Review, May/ June 2012. 27. Stephanie Burt, “It’s Too Much,” Harriet blog. Poetry Foundation, April 22, 2011. 28. Julie R. Enszer, “Are Too Many People Writing Poetry?,” Huffington Post, July 8, 2014. 29. X.  J. Kennedy, Contributor Note, Poetry 188, no.  4 (July–August  2006): 376. See Charles Bernstein, “Time Out of Motion: Looking Ahead to See Backward,” in Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry, ed. James McCorkle (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 427; and Brian Lee, “Carcanet Press,” Minnesota Review 1 (Fall 1973): 165. See also Mike Chasar and Jed Rasula, “Glut Reactions: The Demographics of American Poetry,” Boston Review, November 28, 2012. 30. Quoted in Stephen Moss, “What Is the Future of Poetry?,” The Guardian, June 18, 2010. 31. Radhika Jani, “Your Guide to ‘Instapoet’ Rupi Kaur,” Dazed, October 3, 2017. 32. As of December 2017, Tyler Knott Gregson’s 260,000 Tumblr followers and 185,000 Instagram followers helped his first book sell over 100,000 copies; his second book had a first printing of 100,000. Lang Leav has nearly 900,000 Facebook followers, over 400,000 Instagram followers, and nearly 400,000 Twitter followers, and over 300,000 copies of her books are in circulation. R. M. Drake has more than 1,000,000 Instagram followers and over 160,000 book sales. Nayyirah Waheed has nearly 450,000 Instagram followers and two books. Christopher Poindexter and Cleo Wade each have over 300,000 Instagram followers, and Nikita Gill has nearly as many. 33. Alexandra Alter, “Web Poets’ Society: New Breed Succeeds in Taking Verse Viral,” New York Times, November 7, 2015. 34. Shannon Carlin, “Meet Rupi Kaur, Queen of the ‘Instapoets,’ ” Rolling Stone, December 21, 2017; Samantha Edwards, “How Instapoetry Is Changing the Way We Read Look at Poems,” Fashion Magazine, December 18, 2017. 35. Tara Henley, “Rupi Kaur: Style Meets Verse to Inspire a Generation,” Toronto Star, October 7, 2017. 36. “Insta Iambs: Rupi Kaur Reinvents Poetry for the Social-Media Generation,” Prospero, The Economist, November 1, 2017. 37. Rupi Kaur, Facebook post, March 25, 2015, https://www.facebook .com /rupikaur poetry/posts/821304554630489. 38. Rupi Kaur, “Frequently Asked Questions,” Rupikaur.com. 39. In another sign of Kaur’s desire to maintain control of the distribution and circulation of her poems, her publisher denied me permission to reproduce these two drawings

230 6. FROM MURDER TO MILK AND HONEY

and poems in this book. As Andrews McMeel representative Melissa Merciez explained in an email to me on May 14, 2019, “Rupi feels her work should stay in her platforms and her voice.” The poems’ short size works toward this end as well, as they are difficult to quote following fair-use guidelines. That said, as a quick Google search reveals, Kaur’s work—including the two pieces I had hoped to include here—is widely reproduced online and apparently without permission. 40. “I’m Taking My Body Back,” YouTube video, 18:37, Rupi Kaur TedxKC Talk, posted by TEDxTalks, September 2, 2016. 41. Barnett, “Destroyed by Poetry,” 668, 684, 668, 670, 668–70. 42. Tiffany, My Silver Planet, 152. 43. Barnett, “Destroyed by Poetry,” 676. 44. Quoted in Reid Kurkerewicz, “Danez Smith on Success, Critique, and the ‘CoMisery’ of Madison,” Tone, December 4, 2017. 45. Perloff, “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric.” 46. Quoted in Una Dabiero, “Did Rupi Kaur Plagiarize Parts of ‘Milk & Honey’ from This Tumblr Poet?,” Babe, July 24, 2017. 47. Rebecca Watts, “The Cult of the Noble Amateur,” PN Review 44, no. 3 (January– February 2018); Babette Deutsch, “The Poet and the War,” New Republic 107, no. 23 (December 7, 1942): 742, 742, 743. 48. Roger Cox, “Book Review: Plum, by Hollie McNish,” The Scotsman, July 5, 2017. 49. Tyler Knott Gregson, Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series (New York: Perigee, 2014), 1. 50. “Insta Iambs,” 9; Sonia Rao, “Few Read Poetry, But Millions Read Rupi Kaur,” Boston Globe, October 11, 2017. 51. Alison Flood, “Poet Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey Sells More Than Half a Million Copies,” The Guardian, September  13, 2016; Claire Kirch, “AMP Reissues SelfPublished Book of Poems,” Publishers Weekly, October 11, 2013. 52. Ruth Mills Carr to Millay, October 16, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9; Amy Bonner to Millay, October 19, 1942, Millay Papers, 93.9; Otto Asherman to Norma Millay, November 15, 1954, Millay Papers, 69.6.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FILM A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Steven Spielberg. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2001. Citizen Kane. Orson Welles. RKO Pictures, 1941. Enoch Arden. D. W. Griffith. Biograph Co., 1911. Enough Said. Nicole Holofcener. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013. Fight Club. David Fincher. 20th Century Fox, 1999. G.I. Jane. Ridley Scott. Hollywood Pictures, 1997. The Grey. Joe Carnahan. Open Road Films, 2011. Love Jones. Theodore Witcher. New Line Cinema, 1997. The Night Before Christmas. Edwin S. Porter. Edison Manufacturing Co., 1905. The Outsiders. Francis Ford Coppola. Warner Bros., 1983. Skyfall. Sam Mendes. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2012. The Unchanging Sea. D. W. Griffith. Biograph Co., 1910.

TELEVISION The Addams Family. “Halloween with the Addams Family.” Season 1, Episode 7. Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Written by Keith Fowler and Phil Leslie. ABC, October 30, 1964. All in the Family. “Archie Goes Too Far.” Season 3, Episode 17. Directed by Bob LaHendro and John Rich. Written by Austin Kalish and Irma Kalish. CBS, January 27, 1973. The Beverly Hillbillies. “A Man for Elly.” Season 2, Episode 15. Directed by Richard Whorf. Written by Paul Henning and Mark Tuttle. CBS, January 1, 1964.

232 BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Bill Cosby Show. “The Poet.” Season 2, Episode 13. Directed by Ivan Dixon. Written by Art Wallace. NBC, December 20, 1970. Charles in Charge. “Poetic License.” Season 4, Episode 13. Directed by Scott Baio. Written by Janice Pieroni and Bruce Teicher. CBS, May 6, 1989. Cheers. “Everyone Imitates Art.” Season 5, Episode 10. Directed by James Burrows. Written by Heide Perlman. NBC, December 4, 1986. Criminal Minds. “Plain Sight.” Season 1, Episode 4. Directed by Matt Earl Beesley. Written by Edward Allen Bernero. CBS, October 12, 2005. The Facts of Life. “Emily Dickinson.” Season 1, Episode 6. Directed by John Bowab. Written by Stan Dreben. NBC, March 14, 1980. Family Ties. “Higher Love.” Season 5, Episode 15. Directed by Debbie Allen. Written by Susan Borowitz. NBC, January 22, 1987. Father Knows Best. “Thanksgiving Day.” Season 1, Episode 8. Directed by William D. Russell. Written by Dorothy Cooper. CBS, November 21, 1954. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. “Def Poet’s Society.” Season 1, Episode 7. Directed by Jeff Melman. Written by John Bowman. NBC, October 22, 1990. The Jeffersons. “Poetic Justice.” Season 9, Episode 11. Directed by Bob Lally. Written by Lou Messina and Diane Messina Stanley. CBS, December 19, 1982. Justified. “Foot Chase.” Season 4, Episode 6. Directed by Peter Werner. Written by Dave Andron and Ingrid Escajeda. FX, February 12, 2013. Leave It to Beaver. “Beaver’s Poem.” Season 2, Episode 1. Directed by Norman Tokar. Written by Joe Connelly, Dick Conway, Bob Mosher, and Roland MacLane. ABC, October 2, 1958. Mad Men. “For Those Who Think Young.” Season 2, Episode 1. Directed by Tim Hunter. Written by Matthew Weiner. AMC, July 27, 2008. ——. “Meditations in an Emergency.” Season 2, Episode 13. Directed by Matthew Weiner. Written by Matthew Weiner and Kater Gordon. AMC, October 26, 2008. Married . . . with Children. “It’s a Bundyful Life Part One.” Season 4, Episode 11. Directed by Gerry Cohen. Written by Michael  G. Moye and Ron Leavitt. Fox, December 17, 1989. The New Leave It to Beaver. “Bad Poetry.” Season 2, Episode 15. Directed by Jan DeWitt. Written by Cindy Begel, Michael J. Di Gaetano, Lawrence Gay, and Lesa Kite. TBS, December 15, 1986. Psych. “An Evening with Mr. Yang.” Season 3, Episode 16. Directed by Mel Damski. Written by Andy Berman and James Roday. USA Network, February 20, 2009. Taxi. “Elaine’s Secret Admirer.” Season 2, Episode 12. Directed by James Burrows. Written by Barry Kemp. ABC, December 4, 1979. Veronica Mars. “Drinking the Kool-Aid.” Season 1, Episode 9. Directed by Marcos Siega. Written by Russell Smith. UPN, November 30, 2004. The Waltons. “The Chicken Thief.” Season 2, Episode 6. Directed by Ralph Senensky. Written by Richard Carr. CBS, October 18, 1973.

BOOKS, ESSAYS, ETC. Note: Unless otherwise noted, citations of Film Daily, Photoplay, Motion Picture Herald, Motion Picture News, Motography, Moving Picture World, Screenland, and

233 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Variety, were accessed via Media History Digital Library (http://mediahistoryproject .org /). Abbott, Ruth. “D. W. Griffith, Victorian Poetry, and the Sound of Silent Film.” In Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies, ed. Sean Pryor and David Trotter, 84–105. London: Open Humanities Press, 2016. Adams, Franklin P. “Introduction.” Saturday Review of Literature, October 17, 1942: 3. Adler, Lindsey. “Instagram Poet Rupi Kaur Seems Utterly Uninterested in Reading Books.” The Concourse, October 4, 2017. https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/insta gram-poet-rupi-kaur-seems-utterly-uninterested-in-1819153164. Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 [1960]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Allison, Raphael. Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. Alter, Alexandra. “Web Poets’ Society: New Breed Succeeds in Taking Verse Viral.” New York Times, November 7, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/business/media /web-poets-society-new-breed-succeeds-in-taking-verse-viral.html. Andrews, Charles F. Mahatma Gandhi: His Life and Ideas. Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2007. Armour, Robert A. “Effects of Censorship Pressure on the New York Nickelodeon Market, 1907–1909.” Film History 4, no. 2 (1990): 113–21. Ashbaugh, Don. “Evangeline: A Perfect Super-Scenic.” Motion Picture News 39, no. 24 (June 15, 1929): 2096. http://archive.org/stream/motionpic39moti#page/n1099/mode /2up. Barnes, John. “The History of the Magic Lantern.” In Servants of Light: The Book of the Lantern, ed. Dennis Crompton, Richard Franklin, and Stephen Herbert, 8–33. London: Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain, 1997. Barnett, Elizabeth. “Destroyed by Poetry: Alice Corbin and the Little Magazine Effect.” Modernism/Modernity 24, no. 4 (November 2017): 667–693. Barnouw, Erik. A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Benét, Stephen Vincent. They Burned the Books. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 217–51. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Bernstein, Charles. “Time Out of Motion: Looking Ahead to See Backward.” In Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry, ed. James McCorkle, 420–30. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Berry, Sarah. “Rethinking Intertitles: The Voice and Temporality of Lyric Intertitles in The Cry of the Children.” Literature–Film Quarterly 42, no. 4 (December 2013): 594–608. Biograph Films. Advertisement for The Eavesdropper. Variety 14, no. 8 (May 1, 1909): 33. http://archive.org /stream/variety14–1909–05#page/n31/mode/2up. Blaisdell, George. “R. Henderson Bland, Actor.” Moving Picture World 21, no. 10 (September 5, 1914): 1355–56. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor21newy#page /1354/mode/2up.

234 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Booth, Herbert. “British Progress.” All the World 6, no. 8 (December 1891): 474–76. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915. Vol. 2 of History of the American Cinema, ed. Charles Harpole. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990. Bradburn, Norman, Kathleen Parks, and Michael Reynolds. Poetry in America: A Summary of the Study. Chicago: Poetry Foundation, 2006. http://media.poetryfoundation .org/uploads/media/default/0001/15/78500a2ac041960546585a6bda0d5a516cc53382.pdf. “Brawn Brains.” Photoplay 45, no. 2 (July 1934): 45. http://archive.org/stream/photo47chic #page/n47/mode/2up. Brinkman, Bartholomew. “Making Modern Poetry: Format, Genre, and the Invention of Imagism(e).” JML: Journal of Modern Literature 32, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 20–40. Brown, Bob. “Appendix.” In Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine, ed. Bob Brown, 153–206. Cagnes-sur-Mer, France: Roving Eye Press, 1931. ——. The Readies. Ed. Craig Saper. Baltimore, MD: Roving Eye Press, [1930] 2014. Brown, Karl. Adventures with D. W. Griffith. Ed. Kevin Brownlow. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Burt, Stephanie. “It’s Too Much.” Harriet blog. Poetry Foundation, April 22, 2011. https://www.poetryfoundation.org /harriet/2011/04/its-too-much. Bush, W. Stephen. Review of It’s No Laughing Matter. Moving Picture World 23, no. 5 (January 30, 1915): 679. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor23newy#page /678/mode/2up. Butt, Gavin. Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948– 1963. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. “The Camera Reports.” Motion Picture Herald 107, no. 2 (April 9, 1932): 15–16. http:// archive.org /stream/motionpictureher107unse#page/n97/mode/2up. “The Camera Speaks.” Photoplay 52, no. 8 (August 8, 1938): 25–40. http://archive.org /stream/photoplayvolume52chic#page/n127/mode/2up. Carlin, Shannon. “Meet Rupi Kaur, Queen of the ‘Instapoets.’ ” Rolling Stone, December 21, 2017. www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/meet-rupi-kaur-queen-of-the -instapoets-w514035. Chadwick, G. W., and Harriet Monroe. Ode for the Opening of the World’s Fair Held at Chicago, 1892. Cincinnati: John Church Co., 1892. Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Columbia University Press, [1968] 1992. Chasar, Mike. Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. ——. “Field Notes: Writers at War.” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 22, 2016. https:// lareviewofbooks.org /article/field-notes-writers-war/. ——. “High, Low, and Somewhere In-Between: Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America.” In A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry, ed. Linda A. Kinnahan, 202–21. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ——. “Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson, 305–11. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

235 BIBLIOGRAPHY

——. “Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: An Interview with Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist.” Poetry & Popular Culture, September 10, 2009. http://mikechasar.blogspot .com/2009/09/poetry-popular-culture-heroes-interview.html. ——. “Popular Verse: Poetry in Motion.” In American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920, ed. Mark W. Van Wienen, 244–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. ——. “A Surprise Guest.” Arcade: Literature, the Humanities, and the World, October 3, 2013. https://arcade.stanford.edu/ blogs/user/mike-chasar. Chasar, Mike, and Jed Rasula. “Glut Reactions: The Demographics of American Poetry.” Boston Review, November 28, 2012. http:// bostonreview.net /archives/BR37.6/jed_ rasula_mike_chasar_poetry_popular_culture_demographics.php. “Chicago’s Great Day.” The Evening World, October 21, 1892 [Brooklyn Last Edition]: 1. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Columbia Pictures Corporation. Advertisement for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Motion Picture Herald 123, no. 1 (April 4, 1936): 45–50. http://archive.org /stream /motion pictureher1221unse#page/n525/mode/2up. “Comments on the Films.” Moving Picture World 8, no. 25 (June 24, 1911): 1452–62. http://archive.org /stream/moviwor08chal#page/1454/mode/2up. “Comments on the Films.” Moving Picture World 13, no. 13 (September 28, 1912): 1276– 78. http://archive.org /stream/moviwor13chal#page/n1279/mode/2up. “Comments on the Films.” Moving Picture World 19, no. 5 (January 31, 1914): 543–46. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor19newy#page/542/mode/2up. “Comments on the Films.” Moving Picture World 21, no. 4 (July 25, 1914): 571–74. http:// archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor21newy#page/572/mode/2up. “Comments on the Films.” Moving Picture World 21, no. 8 (August 22, 1914): 1099–1102. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor21newy#page/1100/mode/2up. “Comments on the Films.” Moving Picture World 22, no. 1 (October 3, 1914): 63–66. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor22newy#page/66/mode/2up. Consiglio, A. “Timely Topics: Why the Film Director Is the Industry’s Dictator.” Film Daily 68, no. 152 (December 30, 1935): 6. http://archive.org /stream /filmdailyvol ume668newy#page/1578/mode/2up. Cox, Roger. “Book Review: Plum, by Hollie McNish.” The Scotsman, July 5, 2017. https:// www.scotsman.com/ lifestyle/culture/ books/ book-review-plum-by-hollie-mcnish -1-4489970. Culler, Jonathan. “Reading Lyric.” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 98–106. Dabiero, Una. “Did Rupi Kaur Plagiarize Parts of ‘Milk & Honey’ from This Tumblr Poet?” Babe, July 24, 2017. https:// babe.net /2017/07/24/rupi-kaur-plagarize-milk -honey-book-9034. Davidson, Michael. Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Debray, Regis. Transmitting Culture. Trans. Eric Rauth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. de Casseres, Benjamin. “Film and Star ‘Bound for Studio.’ ” Motion Picture Herald 117, no. 8 (November 24, 1934): 55. http://archive.org /stream/motionpictureher117unse #page/n345/mode/2up. D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

236 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Denig, Lynde. Review of The Little Dutch Girl. Moving Picture World 25, no. 9 (August 28, 1915): 1491. https://archive.org/stream/movingpicturewor25newy#page/n1537/mode /2up. Deutsch, Babette. “The Poet and the War.” New Republic 107, no. 23 (December 7, 1942): 741–43. Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Dunn, Charles. “The Loves and Hates of Carmel Myers.” Screenland 19, no. 1 (May 1929): 56, 109. http://archive.org /stream/screenland19unse#page/n99/mode/2up. Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Ebert, Roger. Review of He Got Game. Rogerebert.com, May  1. 1998. https://www .rogerebert.com/reviews/he-got-game-1998. Eclair Film Co. Advertisement for The Raven. Moving Picture World 12, no. 3 (April 20, 1912): 191. https://archive.org /stream /movingpicturewor12newy#page/190/mode /2up. Edison Manufacturing Co. Advertisement for The Night Before Christmas. New York Clipper 53, no. 42 (December 9, 1905): 1088. https://archive.org/stream/clipper53–1905 -12#page/n103/mode/2up. “Edison Touches Popular Chord.” Moving Picture World 19, no. 1 (January 3, 1914): 28– 29. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor19newy#page/28/mode/2up. Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers, 1832–1992. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Edwards, Samantha. “How Instapoetry Is Changing the Way We Read Look at Poems.” Fashion Magazine, December 18, 2017. www.fashionmagazine.com /culture/insta poetry/. “Enoch Arden: A Fine Two-Reel Visualization of Tennyson’s Beautiful Poem.” Moving Picture World 8, no. 24 (June 17, 1911): 1358–59. http://archive.org /stream/moviwor0 8chal#page/1358/mode/2up. Enszer, Julie R. “Are Too Many People Writing Poetry?” Huffington Post, July 8, 2014. https://www. huffingtonpost .com /julie -r- enszer/are -too -many-people -writi _b _5560772. html. “Enthusiastic Listeners Praise NBC for Presenting ‘Murder of Lidice.’ ” NBC Daily News, October 28, 1942: 1–3. “Feature Film Stories.” Moving Picture World 21, no. 5 (August 1, 1914): 750, 752, 754, 756. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor21newy#page/752/mode/2up. “Feature Film Stories.” Moving Picture World 23, no. 9 (February 27, 1915): 1354, 1356, 1358, 1360, 1362. http://archive.org /stream /movingpicturewor23newy#page/1360 /mode/2up. Ficke, Arthur Davison. “The Present State of Poetry.” North American Review 194, no. 670 (September 1911): 429–41. Fiftieth Annual Report of the Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History. New York: AMNH, 1919.

237 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Finn, F. J. Letter to the Moving Picture World. “Correspondence.” Moving Picture World 7, no. 15 (October 8, 1910): 819. http://archive.org /stream/moviwor07chal#page/818 /mode/2up. “First Release of ‘Imp’ Films, Oct. 25th.” Moving Picture World 5, no. 17 (October 23, 1909): 563. https://archive.org /stream/moviewor05chal#page/562/mode/2up. Flood, Alison. “Poet Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey Sells More Than Half a Million Copies.” The Guardian, September 13, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/ books /2016 /sep /13 /poet-rupi -kaurs -milk-and -honey -sells -more -than -half-a -million -copies. Foley, John Miles. How to Read an Oral Poem. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. Fredman, Ernest  W. “New Illumination Process in London.” Film Daily 41, no.  43 (August 21, 1927): 14. http://archive.org /stream/filmdaily4142newy#page/436/mode /2up. Furr, Derek. Recorded Poetry and Poetic Reception from Edna Millay to the Circle of Robert Lowell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. “Gilmore’s Gag.” Motion Picture Herald 110, no. 8 (February 18, 1933): 56. http://archive .org /stream/motionpictureher110unse#page/n657/mode/2up. Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture. 10th Anniversary Ed. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002. Giovanni, Chiara. “The Problem with Rupi Kaur’s Poetry.” BuzzFeed, August 4, 2017. https://www.buzzfeed.com/chiaragiovanni/the-problem-with-rupi-kaurs-poetry. Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Goldman, Alex. “Free Valentine’s Day Poems from PayPal.” WNYC, February 7, 2014. https://www.wnyc.org /story/free-valentines-day-poems-paypal/. Greenberg, Clement. “How Art Writing Earned Its Bad Name.” In The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, by Clement Greenberg, ed. John O’Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Gregson, Tyler Knott. Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series. New York: Perigee, 2014. Groen, Danielle. “How Rupi Kaur Became the Voice of Her Generation.” Flare, November 11, 2017. http://www.flare.com/tv-movies/rupi-kaur-milk-and-honey-the-voice -of-her-generation/. Gudis, Catherine. Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2004. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde.” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (Fall 1986): 63–70. ——. D.  W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. ——. “Introduction.” In The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, by Laurent Mannoni, xix–xxx. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2000.

238 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hall, Gladys. “The Foibles of Fontaine.” Screenland 41, no. 4 (August 1940): 34, 88–90. http://archive.org /stream/screenland41unse#page/n329/mode/2up. Hamilton, Sara. “The Imp They Call Janet.” Photoplay 44, no. 6 (November 1933): 71, 97. http://archive.org /stream/photoplay4445chic#page/n587/mode/2up. ——. “Round Up of Pace Setters.” Photoplay 18, no.  2 (January  1941): 58–60, 72–73. http://archive.org /stream/photoplay118phot#page/n75/mode/2up. ——. “Round-Up of Pace Setters.” Photoplay 20, no. 1 (December 1941): 52–53, 80–81. http://archive.org /stream/photoplay119phot#page/n641/mode/2up. Harrington, Joseph. Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Harrison, Louis Reeves. Review of Avenging Conscience. Moving Picture World 21, no. 7 (August 15, 1914): 936. http://archive.org /stream /movingpicturewor21newy#page /936/mode/2up. ——. Review of Lincoln the Lover. Moving Picture World 19, no. 5 (January 31, 1914): 523. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor19newy#page/522/mode/2up. ——. Review of Old Year Stupidity. Moving Picture World 23, no. 2 (January 9, 1915): 192. https://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor23newy#page/192/mode/2up. ——. Review of Sixty Years a Queen. Moving Picture World 19, no. 1 (January 3, 1914): 51. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor19newy#page/50/mode/2up. Harwood, Stacey. “Poetry in Movies: A Partial List.” Academy of American Poets, January 19, 2007. https://www.poets.org /poetsorg/text/poetry-movies-partial-list. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ——. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Hayles, N. Katherine, and Jessica Pressman, eds. Comparative Textual Media: Transforming Humanities in the Postprint Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Henderson, Alice Corbin. “Of Editors and Poets.” Poetry 8, no. 6 (September 1916): 308. Henley, Tara. “Rupi Kaur: Style Meets Verse to Inspire a Generation.” Toronto Star, October  7, 2017. https://www.thestar.com /entertainment / books/2017/10/07/rupi -kaur-style-meets-verse-to-inspire-a-generation.html. “Henry J. Vernot.” Moving Picture World 21, no. 7 (August 15, 1914): 971. http://archive .org /stream/movingpicturewor21newy#page/970/mode/2up. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr. “Doings of the Sunbeam.” Atlantic Monthly 12, no. 69 (July 1863): 1–15. ——. “The Professor at the Breakfast Table.” Atlantic Monthly 4, no.  26 (December 1859): 751–66. ——. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.” Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (June 1859): 738–49. ——. “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture.” Atlantic Monthly 8, no. 45 (July 1861): 13–29. Hood, James W. “Tennyson, D. W. Griffith, and Victorian Pneumatography.” Victorians Institute Journal 25 (1997): 59–75. Humphries, Steve. Victorian Britain Through the Magic Lantern. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989. Iampolski, Mikhail. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film. Trans. Harsha Ram. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

239 BIBLIOGRAPHY

“I’m Taking My Body Back.” YouTube video. 18:37. Rupi Kaur TedxKC Talk, posted by TEDxTalks, September 2, 2016. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlToQQfSlLA. “Independent Film Stories.” Moving Picture World 19, no. 7 (February 14, 1914): 870, 872, 874, 876, 878, 880. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor19newy#page /876/mode/2up. “Independent Film Stories.” Moving Picture World 23. no. 1 (January 2, 1915): 126, 128, 130– 31, 134–35. http://archive.org/stream/movingpicturewor23newy#page/134/mode/2up. “The Influence of the Picture.” Moving Picture World 8, no. 27 (July 8, 1911): 1565. http:// archive.org /stream/moviwor08chal#page/1564/mode/2up. “Insta Iambs: Rupi Kaur Reinvents Poetry for the Social-Media Generation.” Prospero, The Economist, November 1, 2017. https://www.economist.com/prospero/2017/11/01 /rupi-kaur-reinvents-poetry-for-the-social-media-generation. Interview with Ian Watson. Moon Milk Review, April 21, 2010. https://www.eckleburg .org /author-talk-ian-watson-2/. “In the Educational Field.” Moving Picture World 8, no. 26 (July 1, 1911): 1498. http:// archive.org /stream/moviwor08chal#page/1498/. “It’s No Laughing Matter.” Motography 8, no. 5 (January 30, 1915): 162. http://archive .org /stream/motography13elec#page/162/mode/2up. Iyengar, Sunil. “Taking Note: Poetry Reading Is Up.” Art Works Blog. National Endowment for the Arts, June  7, 2018. https://www.arts.gov/art-works/2018/taking-note -poetry-reading-—federal-survey-results. Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. James, David E. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Jani, Radhika. “Your Guide to ‘Instapoet’ Rupi Kaur.” Dazed, October 3, 2017. http:// www . dazeddigital . com / life - culture /article /37599 /1 /rupi -kaur -the -instapoet -revolutionising-prose. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Jones, Meta DuEwa. The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Judson, Hanford C. Review of Frou Frou. Moving Picture World 19, no. 3 (January 17, 1914): 277. http://archive.org/stream/movingpicturewor19newy#page/276/mode/2up. ——. “Vitagraph Prospects.” Moving Picture World 22, no. 9 (November 28, 1914): 1212. https://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor22newy#page/1212/mode/2up. Kaur, Rupi. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Rupikaur.com. https://rupikaur.com/faq/. ——. milk and honey. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2015. ——. The Sun and Her Flowers. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2017. Kennedy, X. J. Contributor Note. Poetry 188, no. 4 (July–August 2006): 376. Khaira-Hanks, Priya. “Rupi Kaur: The Inevitable Backlash Against Instagram’s Favorite Poet.” The Guardian, October  4, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ books / booksblog /2017/oct/ 04/rupi- kaur-instapoets-the-sun-and-her-flowers. Kilburn, B. W. Stereoview card. “Miss Couthoui Reading Poem at Opening Columbian Exposition.” Littleton, NH: B. W. Kilburn, 1893.

240 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kirch, Claire. “AMP Reissues Self-Published Book of Poems.” Publishers Weekly, October  11, 2013. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/ by-topic/industry-news/publi sher-news/article/59541-amp-reissues-self-published-book-of-poems.html. Kittler, Friedrich. Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999. Trans. Anthony Enns. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Kurkerewicz, Reid. “Danez Smith on Success, Critique, and the ‘Co-Misery’ of Madison.” Tone, December 4, 2017. https://www.tonemadison.com/articles/danez-smith -on-success-critique-and-the-co-misery-of-madison. Lee, Brian. “Carcanet Press.” Minnesota Review 1 (Fall 1973): 164–68. Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From “Gone with the Wind” to “The Passion of the Christ.” Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Lejeune, Caroline. “Dollars to Donat.” Photoplay 53, no. 8 (August 1939): 61, 82. http:// archive.org /stream/photopla15chic#page/n159/mode/2up. “Licensed Film Stories.” Moving Picture World 23, no. 8 (February 20, 1915): 1172–74, 1182, 1184, 1186. http://archive.org /stream /movingpicturewor23newy#page/1184/mode /2up. “Lidice Lives, by Committee.” New Republic 107, no. 19 (November 9, 1942): 593. Lindsay, Margaret. “Doing Anything Tonight?” Photoplay 18, no. 2 (January 1941): 30– 33, 70–71. http://archive.org /stream/photoplay118phot#page/n73/mode/2up. Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: The Modern Library, [1915] 2000. ——. The Progress and Poetry of the Movies: A Second Book of Film Criticism by Vachel Lindsay. Ed. Myron Lounsbury. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Loeb, Elsie. “Theatres of Cleveland Are Community Centers.” Motion Picture Herald 125, no. 3 (October 17, 1936): 77–78, 80. http://archive.org /stream/motionpictureher 1241unse#page/n707/mode/2up. Lowry, Helen Bullitt. “Poetry as a Major Popular Sport.” New York Times, August 14, 1921: 40. Lubin Manufacturing Company. Advertisement for The Persistent Poet. Moving Picture World 5, no. 27 (December 31, 1909): 982. https://archive.org /stream /moviewor0 5chal#page/982/mode/2up. MacArthur, Marit J. “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies.” PMLA 131, no. 1 (January 2016): 38–63. Mamoulian, Rouben. “Timely Topics: Importance of Rhythm to the Screen.” Film Daily 65, no. 61 (March 15, 1934): 3. http://archive.org /stream/filmdaily65wids#page/n551 /mode/2up. Mannoni, Laurent. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Trans. and ed. Richard Crangle. Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2000. Mannoni, Laurent, Donata Presenti Campagnoni, and David Robsinson, eds. Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture 1420–1896. Gemona, Italy: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1995. “Manufacturers Advance Notes.” Moving Picture World 19, no. 10 (March 7, 1914): 1248– 53. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor19newy#page/1248/mode/2up. “Manufacturers Advance Notes.” Moving Picture World 21, no. 10 (September 5, 1914): 1386–91, http://archive.org/stream/movingpicturewor21newy#page/1386/mode/2up. Massa, Ann. “ ‘The Columbian Ode’ and ‘Poetry, A Magazine of Verse’: Harriet Monroe’s Entrepreneurial Triumphs.” Journal of American Studies 20, no. 1 (April 1986): 51–69.

241 BIBLIOGRAPHY

McCarthy, Gus. “In the Cutting Room.” Motion Picture Herald 113, no. 4 (October 21, 1933): 38. http://archive.org/stream/motionpictureher113unse#page/n249/mode/2up. McGann, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet, 1964. McQuade, Jas. S. “Chicago Letter.” Moving Picture World 19, no. 4 (January 24, 1914): 418–19. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor19newy#page/418/mode/2up. “Members Report on Mother’s Day.” Motion Picture Herald 139, no. 8 (May 25, 1940): 71. http://archive.org /stream/motionpictureher139unse#page/n397/mode/2up. Mencken, H. L. “Market Report: Poetry.” American Mercury 24 (1931): 151–53. “M-G-M Celebrates Dressler Birthday.” Motion Picture Herald 113, no. 6 (November 4, 1933): 55. http://archive.org /stream/motionpictureher113unse#page/n513/mode/2up. Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2002. Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ed. Allan Ross Macdougall. Westport, CT: Glenwood Press, [1952] 1972. ——. The Murder of Lidice. In Adventure in Radio, ed. Margaret Cuthbert, 237–54. New York: Howell, Soskin, Publishers, Inc., 1945. ——. “The Murder of Lidice.” Life, October 19, 1942: 90, 92–94, 97–98, 100. ——. The Murder of Lidice. LP. Performed by Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka, chorus. New York: Columbia Records, 1943. ——. The Murder of Lidice. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942. ——. “The Murder of Lidice.” Saturday Review of Literature, October 17, 1942: 3–5. Mill, John Stuart. “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties.” In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Vol. 1, Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger, 341–65. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. “Miss Millay’s Lidice.” Newsweek, October 26, 1942: 72. Monroe, Harriet. The Columbian Ode. Chicago: W. Irving Way, 1893. ——. The Difference, and Other Poems, Including the Columbian Ode. New York: Macmillan, 1925. ——. Handwritten draft of a letter to Howard Elting, c. 1910s. Harriet Monroe/Poetry Papers. Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Box 3, Folder 8. ——. A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938. ——. “The Radio and the Poets,” Poetry 36, no. 1 (April 1930): 32–35. ——. Valeria and Other Poems. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1892. ——. You and I. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914. Morris, Adalaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Moss, Stephen. “What Is the Future of Poetry?” The Guardian, June 18, 2010. https:// www.theguardian.com/ books/2010/jun/18/the-future-of-poetry. “Moving Picture News and Reviews.” Variety 9, no. 8 (February 1, 1908): 11. http:// archive.org /stream/variety09–1908–02#page/n9/mode/2up. M. R. “The Murder of Lidice.” The Billboard 54, no. 44 (October 31, 1942): 7–8. Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

242 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mutual Master-Pictures. Advertisement for Enoch Arden. Motion Picture News 11, no. 14 (April 10, 1915): 25. http://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/motionpicturenew 112unse _0031. Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. ——. “The Vexed History of the Wartime Poem Card.” American Literary History 16, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 263–89. Newcomb, John Timberman. How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. ——. Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. Noel, Urayoán. In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. “Notes from the Trade.” Moving Picture World 21, no. 8 (August 22, 1914): 1112. http:// archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor21newy#page/1112/mode/2up. Olson, Liesl. Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1991. “Opinions on Pictures.” Motion Picture News 39, no. 22 (June 1, 1929): 1887–92. http:// archive.org /stream/motionpic39moti#page/n895/mode/2up. “Opinions on Pictures.” Motion Picture News 39, no. 27 (July 6, 1929): 123–25. http:// archive.org /stream/motionnew40moti#page/n129/mode/2up. “Opinions on Pictures.” Motion Picture News 40, no. 25 (December 21, 1929): 37–39. http://archive.org /stream/motionpicturenew40moti#page/n1055/mode/2up. “Pacific Northwest.” Film Daily 70, no. 25 (July 30, 1936): 12. http://archive.org /stream /filmdailyvolume66970newy#page/812/mode/2up. Perloff, Marjorie. “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric.” Boston Review, May/ June 2012. http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR37.3/marjorie_perloff_poetry_lyric_ reinvention.php. The Pickling Poet. Poetry: Brine, May 21, 2018. https://www.thepicklingpoet.com/poetry. Poetry Foundation. “Edna St.  Vincent Millay.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org /poets/edna-st-vincent-millay. “Poetry Sales Increase Again in 2017.” BookNet Canada, March 7, 2018. https://www .booknetcanada.ca/press-room/2018/3/7/poetry-sales-increase-again-in-2017. Press Pub. Co. v. Monroe, 164 U.S. 105 (1896). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal /us/164/105/. Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. “Princely Christmas Gift for Picture Men.” Moving Picture World 19, no. 1 (January 3, 1914): 29. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor19newy#page/28/mode/2up. Prins, Yopie. “Robert Browning, Transported by Meter.” In The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth- Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith L. McGill, 205–30. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Quigley, Martin, Jr. “Screen Poetry.” Motion Picture Herald 141, no. 7 (November 16, 1940): 40. http://archive.org /stream /motionpictureher141unse#page/n199/mode /2up.

243 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Quirk, James R. “Why Women Go Crazy About Clark Gable.” Photoplay 40, no. 6 (November 1931): 66–67, 102–3, http://archive.org /stream/photo41chic#page/n603 /mode/2up. Radway, Janice, and Perry Frank. “Verse and Popular Poetry.” In Handbook of American Popular Culture, ed. M. Thomas Inge, 299–22. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Rao, Sonia. “Few Read Poetry, But Millions Read Rupi Kaur.” Boston Globe, October 11, 2017. https://www.bostonglobe.com /arts/ books/2017/10/10/few-read-poetry-but -millions-read-rupi-kaur/WhIaCDVOZJHyWfTMX3uojP/story.html. Rasula, Jed. “A Potential Intelligence: The Case of the Disappearing Poets.” Boundary 2 44, no. 3 (August 2017): 165–95. “Regional News from Correspondents.” Motion Picture News 36, no. 3 (July 22, 1927): 225–33. http://archive.org /stream/motion36moti#page/228/mode/2up. “Reviews of New Films.” The Film Daily 93, no. 21 (January 30, 1948): 5. http://archive .org /stream/filmdaily93wids#page/n175/mode/2up. Rex Motion Picture Masterpiece Co. Advertisement for Love’s Four Stone Walls. Moving Picture News 5, no. 12 (March 23, 1912): 19. http://archive.org /stream /moving picturenew05unse#page/n593/mode/2up. Richardson, F. H. “Projection Department.” Moving Picture World 23, no. 8 (February  20, 1915): 1135–38. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor23newy#page /1136/mode/2up. RKO-Radio Pictures. Advertisement for The Gay Divorcee. Film Daily 66, no.  123 (November 23, 1934): 5. http://archive.org /stream/filmdailyvolume666newy#page /1040/mode/2up. Robertson, Étienne-Gaspard. Mémoires: Récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques. Vol. 1. Paris: Chez l’auteur et à la Librairie de Wurtz, 1831–1833. Robinson, David. “Magic Lantern Shows.” In Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel, 404–8. London: Routledge, 2005. ———, ed. Lantern Image: The Iconography of the Magic Lantern, 1420–1880. Nutley, UK: Magic Lantern Society, 1993. Robinson, David, Stephen Herbert, and Richard Crangle, eds. Encyclopedia of the Magic Lantern. London: The Magic Lantern Society, 2001. Robson, Catherine. Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Roethke, Theodore. “Florist’s Root Cellar.” Poetry 63, no. 2 (November 1943): 16. Rubin, Joan Shelley. Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Ruefle, Mary. “I Remember, I Remember.” Poetry, July 2, 2012. https://www.poetry foundation.org /poetrymagazine/articles/69829/i-remember-i-remember. Sargent, Epes Winthrop. “The Photoplaywright.” Moving Picture World 21, no. 4 (July 25, 1914): 564–65. http://archive.org/stream/movingpicturewor21newy#page/564/mode /2up. ——. “The Photoplaywright.” Moving Picture World 23, no. 12. (March 20, 1915): 1757– 58. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor23newy#page/1758/mode/2up. ——. “The Photoplaywright.” Moving Picture World 25. no.  3 (July  17, 1915): 479–80. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor25newy#page/480/mode/2up.

244 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Schwartz, Lisa K., Lisbeth Goble, Ned English, and Robert F. Bailey. Poetry in America: A Review of the Findings. Chicago: Poetry Foundation, 2006. https://www .researchgate.net /profile/ Ned_English/publication/237753145_poetry_in _america _review_of_the_findings. Schwartz, Tony. Media: The Second God. New York: Random House, 1981. Schweik, Susan. A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Scott, P. G. Tennyson’s Enoch Arden: A Victorian Best-Seller. Lincoln, UK: The Tennyson Society, 1970. Selig Polyscope Company. Advertisement for The Story of the Blood-Red Rose. Moving Picture World 22, no.  5 (October  31, 1914): 723. http://archive.org /stream /movingpicturewor22newy#page/722/mode/2up. ——. Advertisement for The Story of the Blood-Red Rose. Moving Picture World 22, no. 6 (November 7, 1914): 863. http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor22newy #page/862/mode/2up. ——. Advertisement for The Story of the Blood-Red Rose. Moving Picture World 22, no. 7 (November 14, 1914): 1011. http://archive.org/stream/movingpicturewor22newy #page/1010/mode/2up. Service, Faith. “I Will Be a Career Wife!” Silver Screen 10, no. 7 (May 1940): 40–41, 68– 69. http://archive.org /stream/silverscreen10unse#page/n467/mode/2up. “The Shadow Stage: A Review of the New Pictures.” Photoplay 39, no. 6 (May 1931): 56. http://archive.org /stream/photo40chic#page/n623/mode/2up. “The Shadow Stage: A Review of the New Pictures.” Photoplay 41, no. 4 (March 1932): 48–51. http://archive.org /stream/photo42chic#page/n303/mode/2up. Shaw, Lytle. Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. “Short Subject Reviews.” Film Daily 68, no. 139 (December 13, 1935): 11. http://archive .org /stream/filmdailyvolume668newy#page/1480/mode/2up. “Short Subject Reviews.” Film Daily 73, no. 83 (April 11, 1938): 7. http://archive.org/stream /filmdail73wids#page/n83/mode/2up. “Showmanship—Fifteen Years Ago!” Motion Picture Herald 103, no. 3 (April 18, 1931): 80. http://archive.org /stream/motionpictureher103unse#page/n433/mode/2up. “Showmen’s Reviews.” Motion Picture Herald 113, no. 1 (September 30, 1933): 38. http:// archive.org /stream/motionpictureher113unse#page/n37/mode/2up. “Showmen’s Reviews.” Motion Picture Herald 114, no. 1 (December 30, 1933): 29, 32, 34. http://archive.org /stream/motionpictureher114unse#page/n37/mode/2up. “Showmen’s Reviews.” Motion Picture Herald 121, no. 7 (November 16, 1935): 63– 67. http://archive.org /stream/motionpictureher121unse#page/n269/mode/2up. Sierra Club. “Harriet Monroe.” The John Muir Exhibit. https://vault.sierraclub.org /john_muir_exhibit/people/monroe.aspx. Simpson, Grace. “That Passion for Things.” Silver Screen 7, no. 9 (July 1937): 20–21, 64– 65. http://archive.org /stream/silverscreen07unse_0#page/n249/mode/2up. Sitney, P. Adams. Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

245 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Somers-Willett, Susan B. A. The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Spencer, Erin. “Rupi Kaur: The Poet Every Woman Needs to Read.” HuffPost, January 1, 2015. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/erin-spencer/the-poet-every-woman-needs -to-read_b_6193740.html. Steele, Joseph Henry. “Portrait with a French Accent.” Photoplay 52, no. 7 (July 1938): 63, 73. http://archive.org /stream/photoplayvolume52chic#page/n77/mode/2up. Steelman, Ben. “Rod McKuen, R.I.P.” StarNewsOnline, February 18, 2015. https://tinyurl .com/y6pmeoxa. Stelzer, Rebecca. “ ‘The White Cliffs’: Literature and War in the Days of Radio.” How2 2, no. 3 (Spring 2005). https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online _archive/v2_3_2005/current /miller_feature/stelzer.htm. “Stories of the Films.” Moving Picture World 4, no.14 (April 3, 1909): 412–14, 16–17. http:// archive.org /stream/moviwor04chal#page/n427/mode/2up. Strachan, John. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Strider, Gray. “Looking Them Over—With Gray Strider.” Moving Picture World 79, no. 1 (March 6, 1926): 18. http://archive.org/stream/movpicwor79movi#page/n23/mode/2up. Suckow, Ruth. “Iowa.” American Mercury 9, no. 33 (September 1926): 39–45. Sultanik, Aaron. Film: A Modern Art. New York: Cornwall Books, 1986. “Talking Shorts.” Variety 92, no.  2 (July  25, 1928): 14. http:// lantern.mediahist.org /catalog /variety91–1928–07_0205. “Talking Shorts.” Variety 96, no.  3 (July  31, 1929): 17. http://archive.org /stream /variety96–1929-07#page/n345/mode/2up. Taviner, Reginald. “The Gamest Girl in Hollywood.” Photoplay 43, no. 5 (April 1933): 49, 100–101. http://archive.org /stream/photo44chic#page/n423/mode/2up. “Their Pet Vanities.” Photoplay 39, no. 2 (January 1931): 12. http://archive.org /stream /photo40chic#page/n17/mode/2up. “They’re Talking About—.” Photoplay 53, no. 3 (March 1939): 68–69. http://archive.org /stream/photoplay53chic#page/n247/mode/2up. Tiffany, Daniel. My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. “Timely Topics.” The Film Daily 50, no. 56 (December 5, 1929): 4. http://archive.org /stream/filmdaily4950newy#page/1442/mode/2up. “Timely Topics.” The Film Daily 70, no. 6 (July 8, 1936): 9. http://archive.org /stream /filmdailyvolume66970newy#page/586/mode/2up. “Travel de Luxe.” Advertisement for Japan—In Cherry Blossom Time. Motion Picture Herald 119, no. 11 (June 15, 1935): 50. http://archive.org /stream /motionpictureher 119unse#page/n693/mode/2up. Trotter, David. Cinema and Modernism. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Turan, Kenneth. “Enough Said Says Just Enough.” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2013. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/18/entertainment/la-et-mn-enough-said -20130918.

246 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Turim, Maureen. “Griffith and the Victorian Sea.” University of Hartford Studies in Literature 22, no. 1 (1990): 17–30. Uricchio, William, and Roberta E. Pearson. Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Usai, Paolo Cherchi. The Griffith Project: Volume 4. London: British Film Institute, 2000. ——. The Griffith Project: Volume 5. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Van Wert, William F. “Intertitles.” Sight and Sound 49, no. 2 (1980): 98–106. Van Wienen, Mark W. Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. “Views of a Prominent Renter on the Statement Issued by the Manufacturers.” Moving Picture World 4, no. 1 (January 2, 1909): 5–6. http://archive.org /stream /moviwor 04chal#page/6/mode/2up. Vincent, Jonathan. “A Peculiar Sovereignty: Antifascist US Literature and the Liberal Welfare State.” American Quarterly 66, no. 2 (June 2014): 361–83. Vitagraph Company of America. Advertisement for A Disciple of Plato. Motion Picture News 12, no. 5 (August 7, 1915): 86. http://archive.org/stream/motionpicturenew121unse #page/n645/mode/2up. Watts, Rebecca. “The Cult of the Noble Amateur.” PN Review 44, no. 3 (January– February 2018). http://www.pnreview.co.uk /cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=10090. “What Every Woman Should Know: Christmas Revels for Those Who Play—If You Are in Doubt About Entertaining Young Folk.” New York Times, December 15, 1912: X13. “What the Picture Did for Me.” Motion Picture Herald 130, no. 7 (February 12, 1938): 61–65. http://archive.org /stream/motionpictureher130unse#page/n727/mode/2up. Wheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Willkie, Wendell. “Lidice Lives . . . in This Little Village in Illinois.” In Speeches in World History, edited by Suzanne McIntire, 362-64. New York: Facts on File, 2009. Wilson, Elizabeth. “Claudette Colbert’s Real Life Story.” Screenland 30, no.  5 (March 1935): 30–31, 71–73. http://archive.org /stream/screenland30unse#page/n463 /mode/2up. Wolf, Gary. “Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess.” Wired, August 24, 2009. https://www .wired.com/2009/08/ff-craigslist. Woods, Frank E. “D. W. Griffith.” Moving Picture World 25, no. 2 (July 10, 1915). http:// archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor25newy#page/256/mode/2up. “Words and Wisdom.” Film Daily 70, no. 129 (December 1, 1936): 19. http://archive.org /stream/filmdailyvolume770newy#page/810/mode/2up. World Film Corporation. Advertisement for One of Millions. Moving Picture World 22, no. 5 (October 31, 1914). http://archive.org /stream/movingpicturewor22newy#page /600/mode/2up. “The World’s Fair.” The Hub 35, no. 3 (June 1893): 200–2. Wright, Wynn. “Production Note.” In Adventure in Radio, ed. Margaret Cuthbert, 237– 38. New York: Howell, Soskin, Publishers, 1945. Writers’ War Board. Foreword to The Murder of Lidice, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, v–vi. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942. ——. Foreword to They Burned the Books, by Stephen Vincent Benét, v–vi. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942.

247 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Writers’ War Board Records, 1941–1945. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. York, Cal. “Announcing the Monthly Broadcast of Hollywood Goings-On!” Photoplay 39, no. 5 (April 1931): 42–5, 78, 80, 83, 108, 110, 112–14. http://archive.org /stream /photo40chic#page/n533/mode/2up. ——. “Announcing the Monthly Broadcast of Hollywood Goings-On!” Photoplay 42, no. 2 (July 1932): 36–37, 92–105, 128. http://archive.org/stream/silverscreen07unse_0 #page/n249/mode/2up. ——. “Love! Marriage! Divorce! Laughter! Tears! Hollywood Life Is Stranger than Pictures: Cal York’s Monthly Broadcast from Hollywood.” Photoplay 40, no. 6 (November 1931): 46–47, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90–92, 130. http://archive.org /stream/photo41chic #page/n583/mode/2up. Young, Paul. The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy from Radio to the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Zeitlin, Ida. “What Is Their Romantic Future?” Photoplay 19, no. 3 (August 1941): 34– 35, 85–86, http://archive.org /stream/photoplay119phot#page/n199/mode/2up. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. Zuba, Jesse. The First Book: Twentieth-Century Poetic Careers in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

INDEX

Abbott, Ruth, 214n21, 216n60 Academy of American Poets, 105 Active Life of Dolly of the Dailies, The (film, dir. Edwin, 1914), 85 Adams, David C., 87 Adams, Franklin P., 56 adaptation: adaptation theory, 14, 80, 211n2; for magic lantern, 34; novelistic, 89; for theater stage, 89. See also poetry, film adaptations of Addams Family, The (TV sitcom, 1964), 19, 163, 222n8 Adler, Jacob, 90 advertising, 6, 34, 64, 132, 133, 204n43; Levi’s “Go Forth” television spot (2009), 16; in Mad Men, 170, 172; magic lanterns and, 42; Shadowgraphs pamphlet, 39; verse “teasers” in, 216n55 After Many Years (film, dir. Griffith, 1908), 95, 116 Aherne, Brian, 109 A.I. Artificial Intelligence (film, dir. Spielberg, 2001), 80, 105, 116, 127, 131–36, 132, 221n50. See also “Stolen Child, The” (Yeats)

Aldiss, Brian, 131 Allen, Woody, 115, 220n44 All Eyez on Me (film, dir. Boom, 2017), 113, 116 “Alligator, The” (Gibson), 226n14 All in the Family (TV sitcom, 1973), 141, 150, 162, 192, 223; British show as original version of, 153; Cold War and, 153–55 Allison, Joy, 33 almanacs, 34 Alter, Alexandra, 184 Amazon.com, reader comments and reviews on, 191, 194 “America” (Whitman), 16 American exceptionalism, 74, 75–76 American Fireside Poets, 182 American Graphophone Company, 4 American Museum of Natural History, 32–33 “Ample Make This Bed” (Dickinson), 113 Anderson, Wes, 112, 218n6 Andy Griffith Show, The (TV series, 1960), 222n8 Anglican Church, 53 “Annabel Lee” (Poe), 84, 179

250 INDEX

Annie Hall (film, dir. Allen, 1977), 220n44 Anon (film, dir. Niccol, 2018), 218n6 anthologies, 5 anti-Semitism, 42 Antony and Cleopatra (film, dir. Guazzoni, 1913), 82, 111 Antwone Fisher (film, dir. Washington, 2002), 114 Apocalypse Now (film, dir. Coppola, 1979), 112–13, 196, 218n5 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 16 Armitage, George, 112 Art of the Moving Picture, The (Lindsay, 1915), 87–88, 215n43 Arts and Crafts design, 48 Ashbery, John, 19, 174, 201n30 Asherman, Otto, 193 Astaire, Fred, 107 A-Team, The (TV series, 1986), 223 Atlantic Monthly, 25, 27 Auden, W. H., 80, 114 authorship, 21, 140, 160, 161, 176, 189–90 Avengers, The (TV series), 222n8 Avenging Conscience, The: or “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (film, dir. Griffith, 1914), 84 Bainter, Fay, 108–9 Baker, Frances, 67 Ball, Hugo, 223 Baraka, Amiri, 152, 202n35 Barclay, Paris, 114 Barnett, Elizabeth, 175–76, 178, 184, 185, 189–90 Barney Miller (TV sitcom, 1980), 223 Battlestar Galactica (TV series, 2009), 225 Baudelaire, Charles, 108, 172, 224 Bay Psalm, 203n37 “Beacon Light, The” (Rexford), 46, 47 Beard, Francesca, 183–84 “Beauty crowds me till I die” (Dickinson), 156 Beggs, Lee, 85 Bellamy, Ralph, 62 Bemmington, J. P., 37 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 21, 59, 62, 68

Benjamin, Walter, 161 Beresford, Bruce, 218n5 Berlin, Irving, 203n37 Bernstein, Charles, 5, 183 Berry, Sarah, 125 Berry, Wendell, 224 Betjeman, John, 225 Bettany, Paul, 196 Between the Bookends (CBS radio show), 144 Beverly Hillbillies, The (TV sitcom, 1964), 149, 226n13 Bewitched (TV sitcom, 1969), 223 billboards, 5, 29, 205n7 Bill Cosby Show, The (TV sitcom, 1970), 141, 148, 150, 167, 168, 227n29 Bird, Owen Graystone, 35 Bishop, Elizabeth, 201n30, 202n35 Bispham, David, 90 Black, Frank, 62 Black Arts Movement, 201n30 “black box” fantasy of media, 48–49 Black Mountain poets, 201n30 Blade Runner (film, dir. Scott, 1982), 112 Blake, William, 224, 225 Bland, R. Henderson, 87 Bletchley Circle (TV series, 2012), 170, 228n31 Bluestone, George, 211n2 “Boats Sail on the Rivers” (Rossetti), 225 “Body of Michael Brown, The” (Goldsmith, 2015), 190 Boissevain, Eugen, 64, 69, 177 Bolter, Jay David, 25, 26, 36, 60, 66, 192 Bonanza (TV series, 1966), 222n8 Bonner, Amy, 66, 68, 193 Boom, Benny, 113 Booth, Herbert, 31–32, 34, 42, 50, 51–52 Booth, William, 50 Bosworth, Hobart, 84, 85 bouncing ball, lyrics presented with, 32, 211n1 Bourdieu, Pierre, 176 “Bourrée du célibataire, La” (Brel), 113 Bow, Clara, 109 Bowser, Eileen, 88, 94, 205n14, 211n1, 216n60

251 INDEX

Boyer, Charles, 108 Boy Named Charlie Brown, A (film, dir. Melendez, 1969), 201n26 Bradley, Will H., 199n8 Brady Bunch, The (TV sitcom, 1972), 223 Breaking Bad (TV series, 2008–2013), 19, 20, 170, 222n5, 228n31 Brel, Jacques, 113 Brent, George, 109 Brewster, Alfred F., 37, 67 Bridges of Madison County, The (film, dir. Eastwood, 1995), 112 Brine (literary journal), 5 Brinkman, Bartholomew, 5 Broken Lullaby (The Man I Killed) (film, dir. Lubitsch, 1932), 107 Brooke, Rupert, 223 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 200n21 “Brookside, The” (Milnes), 160 Brown, Robert (Bob) Carlton, 50, 76, 203n37 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 125, 223, 224 Browning, Robert, 86, 204n43, 212n2, 216n60, 222n8; Paracelsus, 218n6; “The Field Where I Died,” 224 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series, 2000), 196, 224 Builders (first Paramount short talking film, 1928), 80 Bull Durham (film, dir. Shelton, 1988), 112, 122 Burger, Ludwig, 111 Burns, Robert, 224 Burt, Stephanie, 183, 184 Bush, W. Stephen, 90 business cards, 34 Butt, Gavin, 151 B. W. Kilburn & Company, 3, 4 Byron, Lord, 203n37 Byron, Walter, 111 Cabanne, Christy, 82 “Cadenus and Vanessa” (Swift), 224 calling cards, 34 camera obscura, 31, 206n24 Campbell, Anne, 6

Campbell, Colin, 84 “Can Poetry Matter?” (Gioia), 159 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 203n37 Cantos (Pound), 172 capitalism, critique of, 155–56 Capra, Frank, 111 Carewe, Edwin, 212n8 Carleton, Will, 106 Carnahan, Joe, 80, 123, 127 Carr, Ruth Mills, 67, 193 Carter, Thomas, 112 “Casabianca” (Hemans), 222n8 Cassavetes, Nick, 112 Catholicism, 15, 50–51, 52 Caxton, William, 202–3n37 Chadwick, George, 2 “Channel Passage, The” (Brooke), 223 Chaplin, Charlie, 59, 64, 212n12 Charge of the Light Brigade, The (film, dir. Curtiz, 1935), 107 Charge of the Light Brigade, The (film, dir. Dawley, 1912), 86 “Charge of the Light Brigade, The” (Tennyson), 80, 103, 152, 224 Charles in Charge (TV sitcom, 1989), 14, 141, 148, 151, 168 Charlie’s Angels (TV series, 1981), 223 Charvat, William, 6, 201n26 Chase, Mrs. Joseph L., 67 chasers of the light (Gregson), 191, 192 Chautard, Émile, 84 Cheers (TV series, 1986), 141, 151, 168, 227n29 Chevalier, Maurice, 111 Chicago World’s Fair (1893), 1–4, 31, 199n8 Christmas, Lee, 114 “Christmas Day in the Workhouse” (Sims), 33, 35, 212n12 Christopher Bean (film, dir. Wood, 1933), 110 Church Army, 53 Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, The (Young), 15 Citizen Kane (film, dir. Welles, 1941), 80, 105, 116, 117–19, 117, 221nn45–46. See also “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge)

252 INDEX

class, social, 196 clichés, 13, 20, 163; in All in the Family, 168–69; in Father Knows Best, 143, 162, 165–66, 174; in Fight Club, 128, 129; individuality and, 164, 167; Instapoetry and, 190, 191; in Mad Men, 172–73; signifying and, 164 Coach Carter (film, dir. Carter, 2005), 112 “Coded Language” (Williams), 12 codex publications, 5–9, 11, 49 Colbert, Claudette, 108 Cold War, 13, 19, 20, 73; All in the Family and, 153–55; end of, 169; Father Knows Best and, 138–41, 159, 221n2; homosexuality and communism as linked menaces, 142, 144, 148, 163; Mad Men and, 170–73 Coleon, Janet, 192 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 80, 225 Collected Lyrics (Millay), 69 “Columbian Ode, The” (Monroe, 1891), 1–2, 4, 6, 12, 31 Columbia Records, Murder of Lidice version of, 54, 71, 73, 74 Columbo (TV series, 1978), 223 comic books, 80, 211n2 communication technologies, 4 communism, 13, 20, 73, 140; homosexuality and communism as linked menaces, 142, 171; television and the Cold War, 153–59. See also Cold War; Red Scare Comparative Media Studies, 12 computer screens, 28, 130 “Congo, The” (Lindsay), 114 Contract, The (film, dir. Beresford, 2006), 218n5 Conversation at Midnight (Millay, 1937), 70 Cooper, Gary, 111 Coppola, Francis Ford, 113, 196–97, 218n5 copyright, 2, 161 Corwin, Norman, 63 Council on Books in Wartime, 62 Counter-Reformation, 15, 40, 51 Cousins, Norman, 64 Couthoui, Jessie, 3

Cox, Roger, 192 Craigslist, 4, 76, 194 Crane, Hart, 175–76, 181, 184 Crawford, Joan, 109 Criminal Minds (TV series, 2005–2017), 9–10, 11, 12, 19, 169–70, 202n36, 226n8 Croffut, William Augstus, 3 crosscutting, 88, 95–96, 97, 102, 215n45. See also parallel editing Crown, The (TV series), 225 “Cry of the Children, The” (Browning), 125 Cry of the Children, The (film, dir. Nichols, 1912), 125 Cuban Missile Crisis, 170, 171 Cullen, Countee, 200n21 Culler, Jonathan, 101 cultural appropriation, 189, 190 cultural studies, 8 culture industries, 8 Cummings, E. E., 115 Cummings, Irving, 107 Curtiz, Michael, 107 Cynara (film, dir. Vidor, 1932), 110 “Daisy” (Thompson), 222n8 Dane, Patricia, 109 Dangerous Minds (film, dir. Smith, 1995), 112 d’Arcy, Hugh, 212n12 Davidson, Michael, 140, 143–44, 152, 153, 201n30 Davis, Elmer, 58 Dawley, James Searle, 86 “Day Is Done, The” (Longfellow), 223 Days of Our Lives (TV series, 1987), 19, 223 Dayton, Frank, 87 Dead Poets Society (film, dir. Weir, 1989), 113, 114, 129, 133, 196 “Death and the Lady” (seventeenthcentury ballad), 9 Debray, Regis, 12, 13 Def Poetry (TV series), 19 De Gray, Sidney, 85 de Havilland, Olivia, 107, 108

253 INDEX

D’Emilio, John, 142, 147 DeMille, Cecil B., 108 Desprez, Frank, 106 “Destroyed by Poetry: Alice Corbin and the Little Magazine Effect” (Barnett), 175–76 Deutsch, Babette, 64–65, 66, 69, 192, 193 Devlin, Paul, 107 Dewitt, Lieutenant General John L., 75 Dial, The (little magazine), 175 Dickens, Charles, 218n2 Dickinson, Emily, 167, 201n30, 224; “Ample Make This Bed,” 113; “Beauty crowds me till I die,” 156; “For each ecstatic instant,” 223; Selected Poems, 113, 115–16; “There Is a Langour of the Life,” 225 Dickinson’s Misery (Jackson), 201n30 Dick Van Dyke Show, The (TV sitcom, early 1960s), 226n14 Different World, A (TV sitcom, 1990), 224 digital media, 8, 12, 13, 131, 136, 183–84; emergence of, 127; global reach of, 185; relationship with print media, 14 Disciple of Plato, A (film, dir. Beggs, 1915), 85 Disney, Walt, 107, 111 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (film, dir. Mamoulian, 1931), 105, 218n5 Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (TV series, 1997), 224 Doherty, Thomas, 141, 153 Donat, Robert, 109 Don Juan (film, dir. Crosland, 1926), 203n37 “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” (Frye), 224 Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (film, dir. Barclay, 1996), 114 Dowson, Ernest, 110 Drake, Mildred C., 67 Drake, R. M., 229n32 drawings, 15, 48, 186, 208n6, 229n39 Dressler, Marie, 110 Drogichen, Alexander, 66, 67, 68 DuBois, W.E.B., 200n21

Duhamel, Denise, 202n35 Duke, Bill, 112 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 7 During, Simon, 206n24 D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (Gunning, 1991), 211n2, 214n21 Dylan, Bob, 16 East of Fifth Avenue (film, dir. Rogell, 1933), 111 Eastwood, Clint, 112, 113 Eberman, Willis, 68, 211n64 Ebert, Roger, 112 e-books/e-journals, 5 Edison, Thomas, 197, 203n37 Edison Manufacturing Company, 88 “Edison Poetry, Pathos and Humor” (Harrison), 83 Edwin, Walter, 85 “Eiffel Tower” (Apollinaire), 16 Eight Is Enough (TV sitcom, 1977), 223 Eigner, Larry, 202n35 Einstein, Albert, 59 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Gray), 112 Elementary (TV series, 2014), 225 Eliot, T. S., 199–200n13, 200n21, 226n8; “The Hollow Men,” 112–13, 218n5, 228n31; “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 37, 225; The Waste Land, 175 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 201n28 Enoch Arden (film, dir. Griffith, 1911), 18, 83, 116, 135, 211n2; film techniques used in, 88, 215n45; Griffith’s intertitle strategy adopted in Citizen Kane, 117; narrative of Tennyson’s poem reworked in, 95; verse intertitles in, 89, 98–102, 99, 101, 216–17n68, 217nn72–73 Enoch Arden (Tennyson), 80, 82, 89, 95, 102, 107, 203n37, 217n69 Enough Said (film, dir. Holofcener, 2013), 136–37 Enszer, Julie R., 183 ER (TV series, 1999), 224

254 INDEX

Essay on Man (Pope), 223 Evangeline (Longfellow), 32, 35, 80, 83, 212n8 Evans, Theda, 66, 68 Everybody Loves Raymond (TV sitcom, 2002), 224 Expendables, The (film, dir. Stallone, 2010), 114 Expendables 2, The (film, dir. West, 2012), 114 Fables of Phaedrus, The, 224 Facebook, 16, 181, 182, 184, 185 “Face on the Barroom Floor, The” (d’Arcy), 212n12 Facts of Life, The (TV sitcom, 1980), 14, 20, 141, 148, 155–59 Fadiman, Clifton “Kip,” 59–60, 61, 62, 63, 177, 178 Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 109 Fair Days (Vitaphone Varieties film, 1929), 111 Fall, The (TV series, 2013), 170, 228n31 Family Ties (TV series, 1982), 222n5, 223 Fantasia (Disney animated film, 1940), 107 Father Knows Best [“Thanksgiving Day” episode] (TV series, 1954), 14, 145, 148, 167, 173; cliché in, 143, 162, 165–66, 174; Cold War and, 138–41, 159, 221n2; plagiarism in, 160–66 faxes/fax machines, 4, 10, 16, 127, 128 feminism, 158, 189 Fessenden, Helen, 203n37 Ficke, Arthur Davison, 65 Field, Eugene, 106 Field, Marshall, 59 “Field Where I Died, The” (Browning), 224 Fight Club (film, dir. Fincher, 1999), 105, 116, 127–31, 132, 218n5; haiku in, 128, 128, 129; on mechanical reproducibility, 135 Fight Club (Palahniuk novel), 127, 128 film, silent, 8, 195, 203n37; “cinema of attractions,” 94; depictions of poets,

18; emergence of, 7; estrangement between film and poetry, 95, 116; film technique innovations, 88, 95–96, 97, 102, 215n45; movie theaters, 79; screened in converted magic-lantern theaters, 47; status as art form, 13, 212n4; variety-show tradition and, 205n14. See also intertitles, film film, sound, 6, 8, 13, 57, 104–8, 195; avant-garde after World War II, 103, 105; malaise toward poets and poetry, 106–7; movie theaters, 110; poetry as vocal phenomenon, 19; poetry liberated from print context, 111–16; print and oral media in allegorically narrativized relationship, 116–36; public’s connection with celebrities, 108–11 Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Leitch), 211n2 Film Daily, The, 104 Fincher, David, 105, 127, 129, 218n5 Firefly (TV series, 2002), 224 Fisher, Antwone, 114 FitzPatrick, James A., 107 “Florist’s Root Cellar” (Roethke), 58 Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire), 224 Flynn, Errol, 107 “Fog” (Sandburg), 223 Following, The (TV series, 2013), 170, 228n31 Fontaine, Joan, 109 Fontanne, Lynn, 60, 61–62 Footloose (film, dir. Ross, 1984), 112 “For each ecstatic instant” (Dickinson), 223 “For My Brother Han and My Sisters, in Holland” (Millay, 1945), 70 Four Weddings and a Funeral (film, dir. Newell, 1994), 80, 114 Frank, Karl Hermann, 55, 74 Frank, Perry, 6 Frankenstein Chronicles, The (TV series, 2015), 225 Frasier (TV sitcom, 2003, 2004), 224 Freaks and Geeks (TV series, 2000), 224 free verse, 175

255 INDEX

Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (TV sitcom, 1990), 20, 141, 148, 151–52, 162, 168 Friday Night Lights (TV series, 2007), 225 Friends (TV sitcom, 1997), 224 “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” (Heber), 37, 38, 45–46, 45, 48–50, 49 Frost, Robert, 200n13, 200n21; “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” 113, 218n5; “Reluctance,” 224; “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” 225; “The Road Not Taken,” 225 Frou Frou (film, dir. Moore, 1914), 84 Frye, Mary Elizabeth, 224 Fuller, Ethel Romig, 160 Full House (TV sitcom, 1992), 224 “Full Moon” (Hayden), 225 “Funeral Blues” (Auden), 80, 114 funeral cards, 34 Furr, Derek, 60, 202n35 Gable, Clark, 108, 109–10 Gandhi, Mahatma, 45 Gasnier, Louis J., 84 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 164 Gay Divorcee, The (film, dir. Sandrich, 1934), 107 Gaynor, Janet, 108 gender, 9, 64, 146, 148, 151, 196, 226n14; Cold War and, 157; gender-based violence, 23; gender inequity, 158; gender transgression, 147; hierarchies of, 116; homophobic stereotypes, 144; in Murder of Lidice, 178, 179, 208n5; nonconforming expression of, 149; poetry and alternative gender positions, 143, 145 Gessner, Nicholas, 218n5 Get Down, The (TV series, 2016), 221–22n4 Giblyn, Charles, 85 Gibson, Henry, 149, 149, 226n14 G.I. Jane (film, dir. Scott, 1997), 12, 105, 116, 119–23, 127; A.I. Artificial Intelligence plot modeled on, 134; “Self-Pity” (Lawrence) in, 8, 11, 120–22, 121 Gill, Nikita, 229n32

Gilligan’s Island (TV sitcom, 1965), 222n8 Gilmore, Eddy, 110 Ginsberg, Allen, 149, 149, 200n21, 202n35 Gioia, Dana, 9, 17, 159 Girl, Interrupted (film, dir. Mangold, 1999), 112, 218n5 Gitelman, Lisa, 2, 7, 14, 16, 52 Godless (TV series), 225 Golden Girls, The (TV sitcom, 1991), 224 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 190 Gone with the Wind series (Place), 190 “Good Bones” (Smith), 225 Good Little Devil, A (film, dir. Porter, 1914), 84 Grand Budapest Hotel, The (film, dir. Anderson, 2014), 112 Grant, Amy, 90 Gray, Elias, 203n37 Gray, Thomas, 33, 112 Great Debaters, The (film, dir. Washington, 2007), 113–14 Greene, Robert, 138, 160, 164 Gregson, Tyler Knott, 6, 191, 192, 229n32 Grey, The (film, dir. Carnahan, 2011), 105, 116, 123–27, 124, 133, 134 Griffith, D. W., 14, 18–19, 81, 84, 126, 204n43, 211n2; directors of sound film in footsteps of, 116; film techniques innovated by, 88, 95–96, 97, 215n45; knowledge of poetic form, 99; verse intertitles used by, 89, 98–101, 117 Griffith, D. W., films of: After Many Years (1908), 95, 116; The Avenging Conscience: or “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (1914), 84; Pippa Passes (1909), 214n21, 216n55, 216n60; The Sands of Dee (1912), 214n21. See also Enoch Arden; Unchanging Sea, The Grimm (TV series, 2011–2017), 225 Grosse Pointe Blank (film, dir. Armitage, 1997), 112 Groundhog Day (film, dir. Ramis, 1993), 113 Grusin, Richard, 25, 26, 36, 60, 66, 192 Guazzoni, Enrico, 82 Gudis, Catherine, 205n7

256 INDEX

Guest, Edgar, 6, 80, 106, 201n30, 223 Guillory, John, 163 Gunning, Tom, 94, 95, 211n2, 214n21 Gunsmoke (TV series, 1960), 222n8 Gutenberg, Johannes, 50, 195, 202n37 Guys Like Us (Davidson), 201n30 haiku, 218nn5–6, 224; on Craigslist forums, 76, 194; in Fight Club, 128, 128, 129 Haldane, Bert, 84 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 197 Hand, David, 111 Hannah and Her Sisters (film, dir. Allen, 1986), 115, 122 Hannibal (film, dir. Scott, 2001), 218n5 Happy Days (TV sitcom, 1974), 222n5 Harlow, Jean, 108 Harper and Brothers, Murder of Lidice book version, 54–57, 63, 64, 207n1; complete version published, 177; Millay’s financial hopes for, 69; reader responses to, 70–71 Harrington, Joseph, 34, 161 Harris, Clarence J., 86 Harris, Val, 111 Harrison, Louis Reeves, 83, 84, 214n21 Harrison, Ted, 53 Hass, Robert, 225 Have Gun—Will Travel (TV series, 1957), 19, 222n8 Hayden, Robert, 224–25 Hayes, Helen, 60 Hayles, N. Katherine, 11, 29 Head of the Class (TV sitcom, 1987), 223 Heart Beats; or, The Useless Crime (Savoia Film, 1914), 86, 101 Heber, Reginald, 37, 45–46, 48, 50 He Got Game (film, dir. Lee, 1999), 112 Heininger, Emily Brown, 86–87 Heinrich, Max, 90 Hemans, Felicia, 222n8 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 176, 189 Henley, William Ernest, 113, 196, 225 Henry Fool (film, dir. Hartley, 1997), 196 Herek, Stephen, 112 Heroes (TV series, 2008), 225

Herrick, Robert, 222n8 heteronormativity, 152 Heydrich, Reinhard, 65, 178, 180, 207n1 Hill Street Blues (TV series, 1981), 223 Hitchcock, Alfred, 108 “Hollow Men, The” (Eliot), 112–13, 218n5, 228n31 Hollywood, 18, 44, 62, 107, 108 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 25–26 Holofcener, Nicole, 136 Homeland (TV series, 2013), 225 homonyms, 40 homosexuality, 145–46, 147, 149; closeted gay characters, 169; implication of susceptibility to blackmail, 148, 156; “pansy” stereotype, 144; as twin menace with communism, 142, 171. See also Lavender Scare; queerness Hood, James W., 95 Hood, Thomas, 106 Hoodlum (film, dir. Duke, 1997), 112 Horace, 129 “horror” shows, 15 How I Met Your Mother (TV sitcom, 2010), 225 Howl (Ginsberg), 224 How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Hayles, 2012), 12 Hughes, Langston, 59, 64, 202n35 Hugo (film, dir. Scorsese, 2011), 218n5 Humphries, Steve, 32 Hutchens, John K., 71 Hutton, Barbara, 109 Hyde, Anthony, 63 hymns, 14–16, 53, 160, 207n33; “A Sun-Day Hymn” (Holmes), 25–28, 27, 30, 36, 37, 42, 46; “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” (Heber), 37, 38, 45–46, 45, 48–50, 49; “Jesus Bids Us Shine” (Warner), 48; “The Beacon Light” (Rexford), 46, 47; “We Have an Anchor” (Owens), 34, 35–36, 36, 37 hypermediacy/hypermediation, 25, 26, 27, 37, 61, 76, 192

257 INDEX

Iampolski, Mikhail, 13, 98, 100, 122, 215n45; on “Kubla Khan” in Citizen Kane, 117, 221n45; on relation of poetry to cinema, 105, 217–18n2 “If” (Kipling), 223 I Give My Heart [later title: The Loves of Madame Dubarry] (film, dir. Varnel, 1935), 111 Iliad, The, 225 illumination, of magic lantern, 16, 26, 28, 30 I Love Lucy (TV sitcom, 1952), 19, 222n8 “I’m Taking My Body Back” (Kaur, TEDx Talk, 2016), 187–88, 188, 192 Ince, Ralph, 84 Inscription, The (film, dir. Jones, 1914), 84 Instagram, 6, 16, 181, 182, 184, 185, 229n32 Instapoets/Instapoetry, 21, 22, 76, 184, 185; cliché and, 190, 191; rising popularity of, 6 Internet, 57 Internet Movie Database, 80, 142, 161 internet TV, 169 Interstellar (film, dir. Nolan, 2014), 112 intertexuality, 14, 15, 133 intertitles, film, 18, 31, 80, 82; Citizen Kane screen texts contrasted with, 118, 119; Enoch Arden (1911), 89, 98–102, 99, 101, 216–17n68, 217nn72–73; The Night Before Christmas (1905), 89, 91–94, 92, 93; structure of films and, 87; The Unchanging Sea (1910), 89, 96–98, 96 Invictus (film, dir. Eastwood, 2009), 113, 122 “Invictus” (Henley), 113, 196, 225 “I Remember, I Remember” (Ruefle), 19 Isle of Dogs (film, dir. Anderson, 2018), 218n6 It’s No Laughing Matter (film, dir. Weber, 1915), 85 Ivory, James, 80 Jack Paar Tonight Show, The (TV series), 226n14 Jackson, David, 202n35 Jackson, Janet, 196

Jackson, Virginia, 36–37, 65, 201n30 James, David E., 81 Jani, Radhika, 184 Japan in Cherry Blossom Time (film, dir. FitzPatrick, 1930), 107 Jazz Singer, The (film, dir. Crosland, 1927), 203n37 Jeffersons, The (TV sitcom, 1982), 141, 150, 167 Jenkins, Henry, 48, 49, 182 “Jesus Bids Us Shine” (Warner), 43, 43, 48 Johnson, James Weldon, 199n13, 202n35 Johnston, Lorimer, 86 Jones, Edgar, 84 Jones, Ethel E., 66–67 Justice, Donald, 200n21 Justified (TV series, 2013), 168 Kalem Company, 83 K‫ک‬lid‫ک‬sa, 223 karaoke, 16, 76, 79, 164 “Karawane” (Ball), 223 Kaufman, Joseph, 85 Kaur, Rupi, 6, 21, 185–93, 229–30n39; “I’m Taking My Body Back” (TEDx Talk, 2016), 187–88, 188, 192; milk and honey, 5, 23, 185–86, 191; the sun and her flowers, 185, 186 Keats, John, 33, 105, 218n5, 223 Keeley Stove Company, 39, 40 Keller, Helen, 59 Kennedy, X. J., 183 Keystone View Company, 33 Kilmer, Joyce, 106 Kindle e-reader, 52, 137, 181 Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, The (1907–1919), 32 Kingsley, Charles, 18, 83, 89, 96, 97, 212n2, 214n21 Kipling, Rudyard, 106, 223 Kircher, Athanasius, 31, 40, 41, 42 Kiskaddon, Bruce, 106 kitsch, 21, 143, 163–68, 172, 227n29 Kittler, Friedrich, 15, 40, 50 Knight’s Tale, A (film, dir. Helgeland, 2001), 196 Kojak (TV series, 1974), 223

258 INDEX

Komunyakka, Yusef, 225 Kovacs, Ernie, 144, 149 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 80, 117–19, 117, 221nn45–46, 225. See also Citizen Kane Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (film, dir. West, 2001), 112 Larkin, Philip, 200n21, 226n8 laser printers, 10 Lassie (TV series, 1969), 223 Lavender Scare, 13, 20, 142, 148, 151, 171, 221n2. See also homosexuality Laverne and Shirley (TV sitcom, 1980), 223 Lawrence, D. H., 8, 11, 120–22 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The (Scott), 113, 160 Lazarus, Emma, 225 Leal, Thelma, 67 Leav, Lang, 6, 193, 229n32 Leave It to Beaver (TV sitcom, 1958), 20, 141, 145–47, 148, 164, 166, 227n29 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 20, 228n31 Lee, Brian, 183 Lee, Spike, 112, 197 Leitch, Thomas, 95, 211n2 Le Moyne, Sarah Cowell, 2 Leslie, Amy, 82, 111 Lidice (Czechoslovakia), town of, 193; Cold War and, 73; gendered female in Millay’s poem, 178, 179; Nazi destruction of, 55, 58–59, 73, 75, 207n1; rebuilding of, 72–73. See also Murder of Lidice, The Lidice Lives Committee (LLC), 58–59, 64 Life magazine, Murder of Lidice version in, 54, 55, 207n1, 208n6; as abridged and illustrated version, 62; Boissevain’s criticism of, 64; fees paid to Millay, 69, 211n69; reader responses to, 17, 57 Life Model illustration style, 33 Light and Movement (Mannoni et al.), 206n24 “Lincoln, the Man of the People” (Markham), 222n8 Lincoln the Lover (film, dir. Ince, 1914), 84

Lindsay, Vachel, 42, 44, 52, 94, 199n13, 214n21; on poetry’s inheritance to film, 215n43; The Art of the Moving Picture, 87–88; “The Congo,” 114 Lines to Be Left in the Earth (Eberman, 1951), 211n64 linotype, 4 literacy, 31 literary studies, 8, 14 Little Dutch Girl, The (film, dir. Chautard, 1915), 84 “Little Girl Lost, The” (Blake), 225 Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The (film, dir. Gessner, 1976), 218n5 Little Hiawatha (film, dir. Hand, 1937), 111 little magazines, 5, 177, 201n28; activist editors of, 21, 175–76; “little magazine effect,” 175, 184, 189 Lodge, Thomas, 163 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 30, 32, 33, 106, 201n28, 226n8; Evangeline, 32, 35, 80, 83, 212n8; “Paul Revere’s Ride,” 222n8; “The Day Is Done,” 223; “The Village Blacksmith,” 80, 103. See also Song of Hiawatha, The Longmire (TV series, 2013), 225 Lost in Space (TV series, 2018), 225 “Lotos-Eaters, The” (Tennyson), 222n8 Louvan (Taylor), 26 “Love” (Brooke), 223 Love Jones (film, dir. Witcher, 1997), 114–15 Love’s Four Stone Walls (film, 1912), 83 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The” (Eliot), 37, 225 “Love’s Philosophy” (Shelley), 227n31 Lowell, Amy, 200n21 Lowell, Robert, 200n21 Lowry, Helen Bullitt, 182–83, 184 Lubitsch, Ernst, 107 Lucas, George, 221n50 Luther (TV series, 2010), 170, 227n31 Luther, Martin, 51 lyric reading, 36, 65 M*A*S*H (TV series, 1974), 223 MacKenzie, Donald, 84

259 INDEX

Madam Secretary (TV series, 2016), 225 Madea’s Family Reunion (film, dir. Perry, 2006), 114 Mad Men (TV series, 2007), 19, 20, 170–74, 222n5 magic lanterns, 7, 8, 14, 52–53, 58, 79, 182, 203n37; “A Sun-Day Hymn” (Holmes), 26, 27, 28, 30, 36, 37, 42, 46; “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” (Heber), 37, 38, 45–46, 45, 48–50, 49; imitation of poetic line breaks and stanzas, 13, 30, 34, 130; “Jesus Bids Us Shine” (Warner), 43, 43, 48; “lantern of fear,” 40–42, 41, 79, 206n24; metaphor of Christian religious illumination, 42–52, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51; mutually beneficial relationship with poetry, 18; as “optical lanterns,” 42; precedents for projection of text, 31–32; as reading machines, 7, 13, 15, 28, 37, 52, 79; refashioned as poetryreading machines, 13; religion in history of, 15, 16, 50–52; remediation and, 28, 29, 36, 52, 195; screen reading as new experience, 28–29; text-based slides, 33, 205–6n18; “The Beacon Light” (Rexford), 46, 47; The Song of Hiawatha (Longfellow), 30, 30, 33; ubiquity in late nineteenth century, 32–33; “We Have an Anchor” (Owens), 34, 35–36, 36, 37 Magnum P.I. (TV series, 1985), 223 Maillardet, Henri, 203n37 Make Bright the Arrows (Millay), 61 Malone, Ted, 144, 226n12 Mamoulian, Rouben, 105, 108 Mandela, Nelson, 113 Mangold, James, 112, 218n5 Mannoni, Laurent, 205–6n18, 206n24 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (film, dir. Hitchcock, 1934), 108 Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The (TV sitcom, 1960), 222n8 March, Joseph Moncure, 80 Markham, Edwin, 106, 222n8 Married . . . with Children (TV sitcom, 1996), 163, 224

Martin Eden (film, dir. Hobart, 1914), 85 Martinville, Édouard-Léon Scott de, 203n37 Marx, Karl, 157 “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (Hale), on phonograph, 197, 203n37 masculinity, 144, 151, 154 Massa, Ann, 1 “Maud Muller” (Whittier), 80 “Mayakovsky” (O’Hara), 171–74 McCarthy, Gus, 111 McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 221n2 McGann, Jerome J., 14 McKay, Claude, 200n21 McKuen, Rod, 197, 201n26, 201n30 McLuhan, Marshall, 10, 12, 220n44 McNish, Hollie, 192 mechanical reproduction, 4, 135, 186 media landscape, 13, 18; magic lantern in, 28; media as “second God,” 48, 52; mutual influence with poetry, 24; television in, 21 media studies, 7, 8, 12 Media: The Second God (Schwartz, 1981), 48 mediation, 25, 65, 196 Meditations in an Emergency (O’Hara, 1957), 143, 170 Meistersinger (film, dir. Burger, 1929), 111 Mencken, H. L., 183 Mendes, Sam, 105 Merciez, Melissa, 230n39 Merrill, James, 202n35 MGM studio, 110 Miami Vice (TV series, 1986), 223 milk and honey (Kaur), 5, 23, 185–86, 191 Mill, John Stuart, 60 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 16–17, 108, 184, 200n13, 202n35; antifascist activism of, 17; creator–editor dynamic allegorized by, 178–81, 190; income from Murder of Lidice versions, 57, 69, 211n69; multimedia editorial demands and, 177–78; “For My Brother Han and My Sisters, in Holland,” 70; Writers’ War Board (WWB) and, 54, 176–77

260 INDEX

Millay, Edna St. Vincent, poems of: Collected Lyrics, 69; Conversation at Midnight, 70; Make Bright the Arrows, 61; Second April, 70; There Are No Islands, Any More, 61, 70; Wine from These Grapes, 70. See also Murder of Lidice, The Miller, Alice Duer, 21, 59, 60 Millinery Man, The (film, dir. Kaufman, 1915), 85 Million Dollar Baby (film, dir. Eastwood, 2004), 112 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 160 Milton, John, 108, 222n8 “Miss Millay’s New Poem” (New York Times article), 71 “Miss Scarlet” (Place, 2009), 190 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (film, dir. Capra, 1936), 111 Mr. Holland’s Opus (film, dir. Herek, 1995), 112 Modern Enchantments (During, 2002), 206n24 modernism, 7, 183 modernity, 31, 178 Monroe, Harriet, 1–3, 6, 8, 12, 194, 199n8; on “invisible audience of millions,” 3, 23, 184; poems cut and rearranged by, 175; on poets and radio, 183. See also “Columbian Ode, The” Monsieur Beaucaire (film, dir. Olcott, 1924), 214n21 Monsieur Bluebeard (film, dir. Giblyn, 1914), 85 montage, 123, 135, 203n41, 215n45 Moore, Clement Clarke, 18, 83, 91, 93, 163 Moore, Eugene, 84 Moore, Marianne, 175–76, 200n21 Motion Picture Herald, 111 Motion Picture News, 83, 84 movable type, 10, 202n37 Moving Picture World, The, 83, 84, 86, 87; on Enoch Arden (Griffith, 1911), 96; on The Night Before Christmas (Porter, 1905), 89 Muir, John, 3

multimedia world, 4, 21, 22, 58; “black box” fantasy of, 48–49; editorial demands of, 176–77; shift from single-author book to new media, 57 Muni, Paul, 62 Munsters, The (TV sitcom, 1965), 222n8 Murder of Lidice, The (Millay), 16–17, 21, 77–78, 189, 190, 208n5; as allegory of original poet versus cultural businessman, 178–81; Columbia Records version, 54, 71, 73, 74; critical and audience reception of, 21, 63–69, 70–71, 192, 193; designed for transmedial distribution, 22, 62; interleavings/clippings laid inside copies, 55–56, 55, 69–76, 72, 74, 75; multimedia editorial demands and, 176–78; poetry’s commitment to print culture and, 181–82; wide distribution in different versions, 54–58, 207n1, 208nn4–6; Writers’ War Board (WWB) and genesis of, 58–63. See also Harper and Brothers; Life magazine; NBC Radio; Saturday Review of Literature Murnau, F. W., 107 Murrow, Edward R., 59 music, 26, 28, 65; blurred distinction of song and poem, 206n20; folk genres and cultural appropriation, 189–90; rap and hip-hop, 196; sheet music, 2, 3; song-lyric slides, 32 Musser, Charles, 92 “My Creed” [“My Religion”] (anonymous), 50, 51 Myer, Dillon, 74–75 Myers, Carmel, 109 My Silver Planet (Tiffany), 190, 201n30 MySpace, 182 My Three Sons (TV sitcom, 1969), 223 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 9, 23 National Poetry Slam, 202n35 Naylor, Julia, 67

261 INDEX

NBC Radio, Murder of Lidice version on, 54, 56, 181, 208nn4–6, 210n50; “all-star cast” of, 62–63; audience responses, 17, 57, 66–67, 70; global availability of, 17, 62; Millay’s lack of income from, 69, 180; poem cut to fit radio time slot, 22, 64, 177; trilingual performances, 17, 62, 63, 65 Nelson, Cary, 201n30 Netflix, 135, 194 Newby, Marie, 72–73 “New Colossus, The” (Lazarus), 225 Newcomb, John Timberman, 44, 182, 201n28 Newell, Mike, 80, 114 Newhart (TV sitcom, 1989), 223 New Leave It to Beaver, The (TV sitcom, 1986), 141, 147–48 new media, 10, 52, 79, 193–94; emergence of, 11–12, 29; lived experience of poetry audiences and, 197; poets and mass audiences, 57 New Republic (magazine), 64–65 newspapers, 1, 2, 6, 34 Newton & Company, 32, 33 New Verse, 201n28 New York School, 172, 174 Niccol, Andrew, 218n6 Nichols, George, 125 nickel-in-the-slot machines, 4 nickelodeon, 79 Night Before Christmas, The (Porter, 1905), 83, 88–95, 130; billed as “faithful reproduction” of Moore poem, 90–91; verse intertitles, 91–94, 92, 93 Night Court (TV sitcom, 1985), 223 “Night in State Street” (Monroe, 1914), 3 Noble, Jack, 86 Nolan, Christopher, 112 Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae (Dowson), 110 Northern Exposure (TV sitcom, 1991), 224 Norton, Edward, 128, 130 Notebook, The (film, dir. Cassavetes, 2004), 112

“Nothing Gold Can Stay” (Frost), 113, 218n5 novels, 4, 10, 105, 163 Novels into Film (Bluestone, 1957), 211n2 OA, The (TV series, 2016), 225 “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (Tennyson), 225 Odes (Horace), 129 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 33, 105 Odets, Clifford, 59, 64 Odyssey of the North, An (film, dir. Bosworth, 1914), 84 Office, The (TV sitcom, 2010), 225 Office of War Information (OWI), 58, 62, 63 “official verse culture,” 5, 9, 22, 78 O’Hara, Frank, 20, 143, 170, 171–74, 201n30 “Oh Captain! My Captain!” (Whitman), 224 Olcott, Sidney, 214n21 Oliver, Mary, 226n8 Olson, Charles, 202n35 Olson, Liesl, 2 O’Neill, Eugene, 59 Ong, Walter, 113, 121 Oppen, George, 200n21 Optical Lantern and Cinematograph Journal (1904–1907), 32 Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger, The (1889–1903), 32 orality, 29, 115; acoustic media and “secondary orality,” 113; oral economies, 34, 95; oral recitation, 10, 34, 121, 122 Orange Is the New Black (TV series, 2013), 225 originality: individuality and, 143, 162, 163; loss or lack of, 163, 165; poetic imitation of editorial practice and, 178, 189–90; repetition and, 164. See also plagiarism–poetry association Orphan Black (TV series, 2015), 225 Osmond, Marie, 223

262 INDEX

Our Mutual Girl (film serial, dir. Noble, 1914), 86, 101 Outsiders, The (film, dir. Coppola, 1983), 113, 196, 218n5 Owens, Priscilla Jane, 34 Oz (TV series, 1997), 224 Pakula, Alan J., 113 Palahniuk, Chuck, 127 Paracelsus (Browning), 218n6 parallel editing, 13, 88, 95–97, 102, 214n21. See also crosscutting Paramount studio, 80, 111 Parker, Dorothy, 218n5, 222n5 Patton (film, dir. Schaffner, 1970), 196 “Paul Revere’s Ride” (Longfellow), 222n8 “Peace of Wild Things, The” (Berry), 224 Pearson, Roberta E., 15, 81 Peggy Sue Got Married (film, dir. Coppola, 1986), 196 “Percy Dovetonsils” (fictional character), 144–46, 148, 149–50, 152, 167, 168, 201n30 Perfect Strangers (TV sitcom, 1989), 223 Perils of Pauline, The (film, dir. Gasnier and MacKenzie, 1914 ), 84 Perloff, Marjorie, 183, 184, 191 Perry, Tyler, 114 Perry Mason (TV series, 1961), 222n5, 222n8 Persistent Poet, The (film, dir. Lubin, 1909), 85 phonograph, 3, 4, 203n37 photocopies, 16 photography, 10, 15, 25, 29 Photoplay (magazine), 108, 109 Pichel, Irving, 108 Pienaar, François, 113 Pinkett, Jada, 113 Pinterest, 184, 191 “Pippa Passes” (Browning), 204n43 Pippa Passes (film, dir. Griffith, 1909), 214n21, 216n55, 216n60 Place, Vanessa, 190 plagiarism–poetry association, 13, 20–21; in All in the Family, 141, 150, 153–55,

162, 192; in The Bill Cosby Show, 141, 148, 150, 167, 168; in Charles in Charge, 141, 148, 151, 168; in Cheers, 141, 151, 168; in The Facts of Life, 155–59; in Father Knows Best, 160–66; Instapoets and, 191–92; in Leave It to Beaver, 146, 147–49, 150, 151; in Mad Men, 170–74, 222n5; in The New Leave It to Beaver, 141, 147–48 Plath, Sylvia, 129, 201n30 Plum (McNish), 192 Poe, Edgar Allan, 33, 84, 106, 179, 228n31 Poem-o-Graph Company, 212n12 Poems (Eliot, 1920), 200n21 Poetic Justice (film, dir. Singleton, 1993), 196 poetry: avant-garde after World War II, 191; books and value of, 76–78, 77; convergence with nonprint media technologies, 14; crime associated with, 105–6, 169–70; death of, 18; extrapoetic and nonpoetic genres incorporated by, 13; formal characteristics, 30; free verse, 175; kitsch/cliché/corniness and, 163–68, 227n29; “occasional,” 59, 60, 61, 70; poetry-writing contests, 110, 220n34; popularity of, 6; religious, 29–30; remediation and transmediation of, 4, 11; scrapbooks of, 34, 160–61, 201n30; spectrum of, 7; travels of, 3, 4, 9, 12, 13, 24, 194; uncertain status of, 184; as vocal art, 3, 8, 19; wartime propaganda and, 5, 16–18 poetry, film adaptations of, 18, 80–84, 106–8, 203n37, 204n43, 212n2; celebrities (stars) and, 108–11; cinema as “talking poetry,” 105, 112; film industry as poetry factory, 83–87; intertitles and structure of films, 87–103, 92, 93, 96, 99, 101; poetry associated with criminal behavior, 105–6, 218n5; print and oral media in allegorically narrativized relationship, 116–36; silent reading, 19, 26, 122–23

263 INDEX

Poetry and Its Others (Ramazani, 2014), 203n41 “Poetry as a Major Popular Sport” (New York Times article, 1921), 182–83 poetry criticism, 9, 203n41 Poetry Foundation, 5, 64 Poetry (magazine), 1–3, 68, 176, 190, 193, 199n8; as “little” magazine, 5; modernity and, 31; “poetry glut” and, 183; wartime propaganda in, 58 Poindexter, Christopher, 229n32 Pope, Alexander, 223 pop videos, 32 Porter, Edwin S., 18–19, 83, 84, 85, 116; A Good Little Devil, 84; innovations involving poetry, 88; The Unappreciated Genius, 85–86, 101; verse intertitles used by, 89, 93. See also Night Before Christmas, The Possart, Ernst von, 90 postcards, 5 “Pote Lariat” of the Flying A, The (film, dir. Johnston, 1914), 86, 101 “Potential Intelligence, A” (Rasula, 2017), 6–7 Pound, Ezra, 172, 175, 200n21, 201n30 Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The (film, dir. Neame, 1969), 201n26 primitivism, modernist, 189–90 Prins, Yopie, 204n43, 214n21, 216n55 print, emphasis on, 5, 200n22 printing press, 4, 195 “Privilege of Being” (Hass), 225 “Professor at the Breakfast Table” (Holmes magazine column), 25, 26 “Proof?” (Fuller), 160 propaganda: Counter-Reformation, 40; World War II, 5, 16, 18, 57–58, 66, 71 “Prophecy, The” (Croffut), 3–4 Protestantism, 16, 50, 52 Psych (TV series, 2009), 10–11, 19, 170, 202n36 Pygmalion Stores (Paris), 41–42 Pyka, Walter J., 66, 67

Quantum Leap (TV series, 1989), 223 queerness, 13, 144, 151, 171. See also homosexuality Quigley, Martin, Jr., 107 Quinn, Anthony, 109 Quirk, James R., 109 “Quirt Manly” (fictional character), 149, 226n13 race, 156–57, 176, 196 radio, 3, 6, 8, 14, 57, 182, 195; emergence of, 7; first broadcast (1906), 203n37, 208n8; period of cultural dominance, 144; poems recited on, 58; remediation and, 60; stationswitching, 203n41. See also NBC Radio “Radio and the Poets, The” (Monroe), 183 Radway, Janice, 6 Raimi, Sam, 218n5 Ramazani, Jahan, 13, 203n41 Ramis, Harold, 113 Ranay, Rolf, 67 Ranous, William V., 212n8 Rasula, Jed, 6–7, 8, 14, 201n30 Rathbone, Basil, 73 Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan, 59 Reader’s Digest (magazine), 64 Reality Bites (film, dir. Stiller, 1994), 112 reception studies, 14 Red Scare, 13, 20, 142, 221n2. See also communism Reese, Lizette, 226n8 Reformation, “letter-press monopoly” of, 15–16, 50, 51, 52 “Reluctance” (Frost), 224 remediation, 4, 10, 14, 53, 192; “double logic” of, 25, 37, 60, 61, 66, 71; film and, 81; filmic remediation of printed poem, 11; magic lantern and, 28, 29, 36, 52, 195; originality and, 164 Repression and Recovery (Nelson, 1992), 201n30 Rescue Me (TV series, 2016), 221n4 Resorts and Quaint Towns of the Blue Coast (film, dir. Devlin, 1938), 107

264 INDEX

“Résumé” (Parker), 218n5, 222n5 Rexford, Eben, 47 Rex Motion Picture Company, 83, 88 rhyme, 30, 124, 139, 145, 146, 150, 223; end, 40; hidden, 118; internal, 40; kitsch and, 167, 168, 169; nursery rhymes, 150, 201n30, 225; in pictorial images, 108; slant, 130, 134 Rich, Adrienne, 200n21, 226n8 “Richard Cory” (Robinson), 222n8 Rifleman, The (TV series, 1958), 222n8 Riley, James Whitcomb, 33, 106 Ripley’s Believe It or Not (TV series, 1985), 223 “Road Not Taken, The” (Frost), 225 Robert, Étienne-Gaspard, 40–41 Robinson, E. A., 222n8 Robson, May, 109 Roethke, Theodore, 58 Rogell, Albert S., 111 Rogers, Ginger, 107 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 44, 52 “Rosalind” (Lodge), 163 “Rose, The” (Herrick), 222n8 Roseanne (TV sitcom, 1989), 223 Ross, Barney, 114 Ross, Herbert, 112 Rossetti, Christina, 218n5, 225 Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (TV series, late 1960s), 149 Ruefle, Mary, 19, 174 Russell, Frank Alden, 226n12 Ryan, Kay, 200n21 Salvation Army, 31, 42, 50 Salvatore, Sophia “Danny,” 53, 55 Sandburg, Carl, 223 Sandrich, Mark, 107 Sands of Dee, The (film, dir. Griffith, 1912), 214n21 Sanford (TV sitcom, 1979), 167, 223 Sanford and Son (TV sitcom, 1975), 167, 223 Sargent, Epes Winthrop, 86 Saturday Review of Literature, 17, 54, 55, 56, 71, 207n1; abridged version of

Murder of Lidice in, 62, 177; Boissevain’s letters to, 64, 69; fees paid to Millay, 69, 211n69 Saved by the Bell (TV sitcom, 1991), 224 Saxton, Eugene, 64, 69 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 29 Schwartz, Tony, 48 science fiction films, 218n6 Scorsese, Martin, 218n5 Scott, Ridley, 8, 105, 112, 119, 218n5 Scott, Sir Walter, 33, 106–7, 113, 138, 160, 164 Screenland (magazine), 108, 109 Seaton, Maureen, 202n35 Second April (Millay), 70 “Second Coming, The” (Yeats), 223, 225 Seinfeld (TV sitcom, 1996), 222n5 Selected Poems (Dickinson), 113, 115–16 Selected Poems (Lawrence), 8, 11, 120, 121, 122 “Self-Pity” (Lawrence), 8, 11, 120–22, 121. See also G. I. Jane “Sequel to a Murder” (Brewster), 66, 67 Service, Robert, 107 Set-Up, The (film, dir. Wise, 1949), 80 Sex and the City (TV series, 1999), 224 Sexton, Anne, 202n35, 226n8 sexuality, 146, 172, 178; artistic creativity and, 185; nonnormative, 20; sexual secrecy, 171. See also homosexuality sexual violence, 187 Shadowgraphs pamphlet (Keeley Stove Company), 39–40, 39, 42 Shakespeare, William, 138, 160, 164, 224, 226n8 Shakur, Tupac, 113, 116 Shan Yu, 224 Shape of Water, The (film, dir. Toro, 2017), 112 Shaw, Lytle, 202n35 Sheen, Charlie, 200n21 Shelley, Percy, 223, 227n31 Shelton, Ron, 112 Shield, The (TV series, 2002), 224 short stories, 4–5, 10, 163

265 INDEX

signifying, 164, 167 Silver Screen (magazine), 108, 109 Silver Spoons (TV sitcom, 1982), 223 Simpsons, The (animated TV series, 2006), 224 Sims, George, 33, 212n12 Sitney, P. Adams, 103 Six Feet Under (TV series, 2002), 224 Sixty Years a Queen (film, dir. Haldane, 1913), 84 “Skinhead” (Smith), 12 Skyfall (film, dir. Mendes, 2012), 105, 114 slam poetry, 5, 12 “slender volume,” 5, 200n21 Smith, Danez, 191 Smith, John N., 112 Smith, Maggie, 225 Smith, Patricia, 12 Smith, Will, 162 Snyder, Gary, 200n21 social media, 22, 23, 184, 192, 194, 195 “So Long” (Whitman), 186–87 Somers, Suzanne, 200n21, 226n8 song lyrics, 5, 28, 32, 194, 196, 197 Song of Hiawatha, The (Longfellow): film versions, 80, 111, 212n8, 214n21; magic lantern and, 30, 30, 33; television and, 222n8 “Song of Myself” (Whitman), 224 “Song of the Builder, The” (Guest), 80 Sonnets from the Portuguese (Browning), 223 Sony Sterecorder, 52 Sophie’s Choice (film, dir. Pakula, 1982), 113, 115–16 Sopranos, The (TV series, 2007), 225 Soviet Union, 157, 159, 169 Spider Man 2 (film, dir. Raimi, 2004), 218n5 Spielberg, Steven, 14, 80, 105, 127 “Spirit of Lidice, The” (Eberman), 68 spoken word, 5, 197, 201n26 Stalin, Joseph, 171 Stallone, Sylvester, 114 Star Trek (TV series, 1960s), 19, 222–23n8 Stein, Gertrude, 200n13, 200n21

St. Elsewhere (TV series, 1986), 223 Stelzer, Rebecca, 61–62 stereoscopes, 4, 25 stereoview cards, 3, 4 Stevens, Wallace, 175, 181, 184, 200n21 Stewart, James, 63, 64, 109 Stiller, Ben, 112 Stillman, Albert, 86 “Stolen Child, The” (Yeats), 80, 132–33, 221n50. See also A.I. Artificial Intelligence Stolls, Amy, 23 “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (Frost), 225 Story of the Blood-Red Rose, The (film, dir. Campbell, 1914), 84 Stout, Rex, 58, 64 Strachan, John, 204n43 Strauss, Richard, 90 Stueler, A., 104, 127, 133 Sublime Object of Ideology, The (Çiäek), 66 subtitles, 13, 28 Suckow, Ruth, 184 Sultanik, Aaron, 96 sun and her flowers, the (Kaur, 2017), 185, 186 “Sun-Day Hymn, A” (Holmes), 25–28, 27, 30, 36, 37, 42, 46, 52 “Sunday Morning” (Stevens), 175 “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” (Aldiss short story), 131 Supreme Court, U.S., 2, 59, 224 Swift, Jonathan, 224 Syd’s Love Affair (film, dir. De Gray, 1915), 85 Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (film, dir. Murnau, 1931), 107 Taubman, Howard, 71 Taurog, Norman, 111 Taxi (TV sitcom, 1979), 141, 151, 173, 223, 227n29 Taylor, Estelle, 109 telautograph, 4 telephones, 4 teleprompters, 28

266 INDEX

television, 5, 6, 8, 14, 57, 155–56, 182; auteur television, 169; cable and satellite (1980s–90s), 141, 169–74, 194; channel-flipping, 203n41; Cold War and, 139–40, 141, 153–59, 170, 191; as competition to film industry, 135; internet TV, 169; long and complex relationship with poetry, 19; in middle-class homes, 32; poetry and alternative gender positions, 143–52, 149, 226nn12–14; police procedurals, 9–11, 19, 202n36; Three Network Hegemony era (1960s–70s), 141. See also plagiarism–poetry association “Tell-Tale Heart, The” (Poe), 84 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 14, 18, 107, 203n37, 212n2, 218n2; great-grandson Pen in film industry, 108; magic lantern slides and, 33; poems adapted for film, 80, 83, 211n2 Tennyson poems: “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” 225; “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” 80, 103, 152, 224; “The Lotos-Eaters,” 222n8; “Ulysses,” 105, 114, 196, 224. See also Enoch Arden Tetro (film, dir. Coppola, 2009), 196 text crawls, 28 Textual Condition, The (McGann), 14 That ’70s Show (TV sitcom, 2000, 2002), 167, 224 There Are No Islands, Any More (Millay, 1940), 61, 70 “There Is a Langour of the Life” (Dickinson), 225 They Burned the Books (Benét), 21, 62, 68 30 Rock (TV sitcom, 2010), 225 39 Steps, The (film, dir. Hitchcock, 1935), 108 Thirtysomething (TV sitcom, 1990), 224 Thomas, Theodore, 2 Thompson, Francis, 222n8 Thorpe, Rose Hartwick, 33 “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” (Mill), 60 “Three Fishers, The” (Kingsley), 18, 83, 89, 97. See also Unchanging Sea, The

“Three Modes of History and Culture” (Baraka), 152 Three’s Company (TV sitcom, 1977–1981), 226n8 Three to Get Ready (TV series, 1950s), 144 Tiffany, Daniel, 163, 167–68, 172, 191, 201n30 Till Death Us Do Part (British TV show), 153 Tolson, Melvin, 113–14 Tonight Show (TV talk show), 19 Topsy-Turvy Sweedie (film, 1914), 85 Toro, Guillermo del, 112 Tost, Tony, 225 Touch Me (Somers, 1980), 226n8 transmediation, 17, 21, 22, 76, 181 Tumblr, 76, 181, 182, 184, 191, 229n32 Turan, Kenneth, 136 Turim, Maureen, 95, 215n45 21 Jump Street (TV series, 1987), 222n5 Twin Peaks (TV series, 1990), 19, 169, 227–28n31 Twitter, 76, 181, 182, 184, 185 Tyler, Darrell, 191 typewriters, 4 “Ulysses” (Tennyson), 105, 114, 196, 224 Unappreciated Genius, The (film, dir. Porter, 1908), 85–86, 101 Unchanging Sea, The (film, dir. Griffith, 1910), 83, 88–89, 100, 116, 211n2, 214n21; narrative of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden reworked in, 95; verse intertitles in, 89, 96–98, 96. See also “Three Fishers, The” United Nations, 59, 63 Untouchables, The (TV series, 1960), 222n8 Uricchio, William, 15, 81 Valentine’s Day poems, for PayPal, 4–5, 76 Valeria and Other Poems (Monroe), 2, 199n8 Vallée, Jean-Marc, 112 Van Horne, Harriet, 65

267 INDEX

Van Wert, William F., 93 Van Wienen, Mark W., 171 Variety (trade journal), 83, 84 Varnel, Marcel, 111 Vernot, Henry J., 87 Veronica Mars (TV series, 2004), 141, 148 video games, 137, 194, 196, 211n2 Vidor, King, 110 “Village Blacksmith, The” (Longfellow), 80, 103 Villon, François, 85 Vincent, Jonathan, 56 “Visit from St. Nicholas, A” (Moore), 18, 89, 90, 107, 163, 222n8 Vitagraph, 87 vocal mediation, 15 vocal performance, 60, 73, 90 voiceover, 19, 115, 118, 126, 225; in Apocalypse Now, 112–13; in G.I. Jane, 122, 123; in Hannah and Her Sisters, 115; in Mad Men, 174 Wade, Cleo, 229n32 Waheed, Nayyirah, 191, 229n32 Walker, Margaret, 200n21 Walter Wanger’s Vogues of 1938 (film, dir. Cummings, 1937), 107 Waltons, The (TV series, 1973), 141, 150 Warner, Susan Bogert, 43 Washington, Denzel, 113, 114 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 175 Watts, Rebecca, 192 wax cylinder recordings, 4, 16, 34 Way to Love, The (film, dir. Taurog, 1933), 111 Weber, Lois, 85 “We Have an Anchor” (Owens), 34, 35–36, 36, 37 We Hold These Truths (Corwin), 63 Weiner, Matthew, 171, 174 Weir, Peter, 113 Welcome Back, Kotter (TV sitcom, 1978), 223 Welles, Orson, 14, 63, 80, 103, 105, 108, 116, 126. See also Citizen Kane West, Francis, 41 West, Mae, 108

West, Simon, 112, 114 West Wing, The (TV series, 1999), 224 Wheeler, Lesley, 202n35 “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (Whitman), 228n31 “When the Frost Is on the Punkin” (Riley), 33 White Cliffs of Dover, The (Miller), 21, 59, 60, 61–62, 69 White Men Can’t Jump (film, dir. Shelton, 1992), 112 white supremacy, 156 Whitman, Walt, 200n21, 212n2, 215n43, 222n5; “America,” 16; Leaves of Grass, 20, 228n31; “Oh Captain! My Captain!” 224; “So Long,” 186–87; “Song of Myself,” 224; “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” 228n31 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 80, 107 Who’s the Boss? (TV sitcom, 1989), 223 Wild (film, dir. Vallée, 2014), 112 Wilder, Thornton, 59 Wild Party, The (film, dir. Ivory, 1975), 80 Williams, Robin, 133 Williams, Saul, 12 Williams, William Carlos, 200n13, 200n21, 202n30 Wine from These Grapes (Millay, 1934), 70 “Wine Menagerie, The” (Crane), 175 Wise, Robert, 80 Witcher, Theodore, 114 Withers, Jane, 109 women’s bodies, as subject of Instapoetry, 185–89 Wonder Years, The (TV sitcom, 1991), 224 Wood, Sam, 110 Woods, Frank E., 81 Woollcott, Alexander, 63, 65 Wordsworth, William, 226n8 World War I, 61 World War II, 5, 16–17, 54, 57; Japanese Americans in relocation camps, 74–75; Pearl Harbor attack, 63, 67; Victory Garden campaign, 58

268 INDEX

Wright, Georgina M., 201n30 Wright, Wynn, 61, 177 Writers’ War Board (WWB), 54, 56, 57, 64, 68, 69; Advisory Council, 59; foreword to Murder of Lidice, 71; marketing campaigns, 181; multimedia demands for Murder of Lidice, 176–77; task of, 58 X-Files, The (TV series, 1996), 224

Yeats, William Butler, 14; “The Second Coming,” 223, 225; “The Stolen Child,” 80, 132–33, 132, 221n50 Young, Paul, 15 YouTube, 12, 76, 181, 182, 194 Yurka, Blanche, 73 Zebian, Najwa, 192 Çiäek, Slavoj, 66 Zuba, Jesse, 200n22