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

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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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P&PC recently spent some time at the University of Oregon's Knight Library digging around the papers of Ethel Romig Fuller —a widely-published (though not well remembered) modern poetry advocate in the Pacific Northwest who was named Oregon's third (and first woman) poet laureate, a position she held from 1957 until her death in 1965. We can guarantee that you will eventually be hearing more about Fuller from P&PC , but this week we thought we'd share something else we came upon at the Knight: a June 6, 1979 letter from Ray Bradbury to William R. Cox, and Cox's response of June 22 later that month, both of which are in the library's William R. Cox papers . Neither Bradbury nor Cox (who wrote stories for the pulps before moving West to write screenplays, television scripts, and 80 novels) are associated with poetry by most stretches of the imagination, and yet, as these letters suggest, poetry was nevertheless part and parcel of the pulpy world they lived i...
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Meeting Alice Corbin Henderson (1881-1949) at Willamette University's Zena Farm

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