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A few weeks ago, P&PC featured the poetry of Steve Pink's 2010 comedy Hot Tub Time Machine which co-stars John Cusack as one of three adult losers who get magically transported back to their high school days of 1986 and thus get an existential do-over. There's a great scene in the middle of the movie when Cusack is caught doing bong hits and mushrooms and held accountable for writing teenage angst poetry to the famous Guns N' Roses tune " Sweet Child O' Mine ." While the P&PC Office was aware of at least one more Cusack film that incorporates poetry, we didn't remember (not until Brian Spears pointed it out to us) all of the verse in the the other famous Cusack back-to-high-school flick, 1998's Grosse Pointe Blank , which was directed by George Armitage and co-stars Minnie Driver. In the film, Cusack plays Martin Q. Blank, a hired assassin who goes back to Michigan for his tenth high school reunion and falls in love with high school sw...

If you're in or around Oregon during the next couple of days, make it a goal to hie yourself over to Willamette University's Pelton Theater and catch a showing of Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon —an experimental, group-written and provocative play to which P&PC managed to score opening-night tickets on February 15, a date nicely timed to coincide with Susan B. Anthony's birthday as well as the date of the first woman to register to vote in Oregon, Anthony's friend and leading Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway . (The play's title, btw, comes from lyrics to Duniway's "Campaign Song," written around 1871.) P&PC has been pretty close to this production for a long time now, serving as an unofficial dramaturge because the play started with—and incorporates in a bunch of very funky ways—a collection of poems and songs sourced from The New Northwest , a suffragist newspaper that was started a...

Emily Dickinson: Paul Laurence Dunbar:   Wallace Stevens: Ezra Pound: Edna St. Vincent Millay: Gertrude Stein: William Carlos Williams: T.S. Eliot Walt Whitman:

Fans of Joss Whedon's popular teen television drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer often cite Season 6, Episode 7 (" Once More, with Feeling ")—in which a demon casts a spell on the town of Sunnydale that compels people to break into song—as evidence of the show's innovation and aesthetic complexity. We here at P&PC aren't gonna pick a fight and disagree with the conventional wisdom of Buffy Studies, but we do think it's worth checking out Season 5, Episode 18 of Bewitched —aired more than thirty years earlier, on January 30, 1969—as a possible precedent if not source of inspiration for Whedon's November 6, 2001 production. In "Samantha the Bard," which was co-written by the show's creator Sol Saks (see the videos below), Samantha the witch comes down with a virus that makes her speak in nothing but rhyme. Initially misdiagnosed as Venetian Verbal Virus but later identified as Primary Vocabularyitis and mainly presenting in the form of coup...