clair094

We've all heard about how poetry serves as a mnemonic device, right? Its meter, rhyme, fixed forms, and other types of patterned language make it easier to remember stuff whether you're a bard charged with reciting the entirety of Beowulf to a bunch of mead-swigging Anglo-Saxons, a child tramping through the woods with the ranger's advice "leaves of three, let them be" ringing in your ears, the Burma-Vita Company seeking a new Burma-Shave billboard jingle to lodge into a consumer's mind, or a student charged with memorizing a poem for class. We remember which months have thirty or thirty-one days not just by compiling and memorizing a boring list of 'em all, but by making a rhyme: Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; Thirty-one the others date, Except in February, twenty-eight; But in leap year we assign February, twenty-nine.  Dad taught us "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" to remember which way to turn a screwdriver or faucet ha...

Editor's Note: In Chapter Two of Everyday Reading , P&PC studies an archive of fan letters written in the 1930s and mailed to the popular, nationally-broadcast poetry radio show Between the Bookends , which received upwards of 25,000 such letters per month at the height of its popularity. These letters are oftentimes movingly (perhaps embarrassingly) confessional, make large and sometimes (it would seem) exaggerated claims for the importance of poetry in listeners' lives, and sound almost bizarre to our ears today for those very reasons.  Who knew that the venerable Poetry magazine also received the same types of letters—and that editor Harriet Monroe didn't just pitch ' em into the trash but collected them in a special file she labeled as her "museum" file? In the following guest posting by one of the most provocative new voices we've encountered on the modernist studies scene, Erin Kappeler —currently a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow ...

This is an exciting couple of weeks for Oregon high school students, teachers, parents, and judges who are partici- pating in the final leg of the state-level Poetry Out Loud competition—the nationally run program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts , the Poetry Foundation , and state art agencies in which students compete for scholarships and other prizes awarded on the basis of excellence in poetry recitation. (That's 2011 Oregon finalist McKinley Rodriguez with Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen pictured here.) P&PC is excited about this for a couple of reasons: not only are we sending a repre- sentative to help judge the Northern Regional Contest taking place tomorrow (Saturday, March 9) from 5-8pm at the Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton, but then the following weekend—Saturday, March 16 from 1-4pm—the State Finals take place in Salem at the Willamette Heritage Center at Mission Mill right across the street from Willamette Univer...