The Poetry of "Have Gun—Will Travel" (Season 2, Episode 34 [1959]), in which Richard Boone's Paladin, Eulogizing Fallen Cavalry, Quotes from Edwin Markham's Poem "Lincoln, The Man of the People"
Posts
"Poems Exploding Like Bombs: Casagrande and Poetry's Public Spheres" / A Guest Posting by Marsha Bryant
Editor's Note: In the following guest posting, one of P&PC 's all-time heroes— Marsha Bryant , Professor of English at the University of Florida and author of Women's Poetry and Popular Culture —shines a spotlight on the Chilean art collective Casagrande , which, for more than a decade now, has been dropping millions of poems on cities around the world. In a stark reversal of the World War II practice of bombing soldiers with propaganda poems , Casagrande's helicopters and "poem clouds" reclaim the air as a site and source of cross-cultural communication, wonder, and cultural memory—simultaneous acts, Bryant argues, of remembrance, intervention, and reinvention. Read on, dear reader, to discover what happens when poems fall from the sky. W. H. Auden's birthday is a fitting day to mark how one of our most compelling occasional poets can be occasionally prophetic. Indeed, the most notorious line from Auden's " Spain "—"To-morrow for...
From the P&PC Vault: Hooked On Fisher Poets
The annual meeting of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) is taking place in Seattle two weeks from now (Feb 26-March 1), but the P&PC Office won't be there to hob nob with professional writers and teachers of writing. Instead, we're going to the seventeenth annual Fisher Poets Gathering (FPG has no acronym that we know of), which opens in just a few days (Feb 21-23) in Astoria , Oregon, a city of just under 10,000 people located in the far northwest corner of the Beaver State. Celebrating commercial fishing and its community through story, poetry, and song, this year's Gathering has seventy-eight people scheduled to read or perform at bars and restaurants throughout Astoria. To help get you primed for the event, here's a short interview P&PC did with Jon Broderick—a fisherman, teacher, poet, and one of the event's creators and organizers—back in 2010 when we first attended the Gathering. Poetry & Popular Culture: You were there when the Fisher ...
Of Kingdoms and Carillons: The Poetry of Footloose (1984)
A little over a half hour into the 1984 teen classic Footloose , dance-lovin’, spiky-haired, pug-nosed, Chicago high school student Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon) has to get away from it all: he has just moved with his mother to the no-dance, no-music, no-fun world of small-town Bomont (set in Oklahoma but filmed in Utah), where he stands out not only as the new kid in town but also by refusing the big belt buckles and cowboy hats of most everyone in school in favor of New Wave-inspired skinny ties and sport coats. He’s got a thing for the rebellious Ariel Moore (Lori Singer) and she’s got a thing for him, but there are problems with that too, as she’s dating local boy Chuck Cranston, and her dad (Ariel’s Prospero-equivalent, played by John Lithgow) is the local minister who instituted all of the no-dance, no-music, no-fun rules that now govern Bomont. As we all remember, the movie follows how Ren leads a charge against the town’s puritanical mores (there’s even a book burning at one poin...