A Trip to the Stars: Another Vintage Valentine from P&PC


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From the P&PC Vault: The Poetry of Michael Phelps

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Boy, can London do the Olympics right or what? Olympic Park is decorated with permanent poem monuments like the sweet-looking one by Caroline Bird pictured here and the Tennyson one pictured below—3-D verses that are part of the Winning Words initiative run by U.K. National Poetry Day founder William Sieghart who has said he wants to "carpet our nation with poetry." But that's not all. Winning Words has also designed an interactive poetry game to go with the Olympics, and there was an Olympic poetry competition that received over 2,000 entries from kids in London. Furthermore, on July 23, London mayor Boris Johnson recited (in ancient Greek as well as English) "Ode for the London Olympics 2012," a poem commissioned from Oxford scholar Armand D'Angour who composed one for the Athens Olympics back in 2004 as well. Add to all this the Poetry Olympics held in London in late June, and you've got one heckuva Po-lympic scene going on across the pond....
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Heading to Texas: P&PC at MLA's Annual Convention

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The good news is that, after five months of being based at the Library of Congress in the nation's capital, P&PC has finally and safely returned to its home office in Salem, Oregon. It's good to be home, and we're pretty exhausted, but as fortune would have it, we're promptly flying out later this week to attend and take part in the Modern Language Association's annual convention , being held this year in Austin, Texas. Here's what's on the docket: Session 635: Poetry and Its Public(s) Saturday, 9 January, 3:30-4:45 p.m. Room 9A of the Austin Convention Center Presiding: Alan Golding , University of Louisville Speakers: Stephen Burt , Harvard University; Mike Chasar, Willamette University; Evie Shockley , Rutgers University, New Brunswick; Timothy Yu , University of Wisconsin, Madison Session Description: Panelists address the public(s) for poetry, past, present, and future, as a cultural category and a human activity. We imagine a discussion in which ...
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Once More Into the Fray: The Remediation of Poetry in Liam Neeson's The Grey

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