Edison Manufacturing Company's "The Night Before Christmas," Directed by Edwin S. Porter (1905)

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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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From the P&PC Archive: Assassins & Outsiders: The Obscurity of Popular Poetry

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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...
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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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