The Best American Poetry

Elizabeth Samet: Obama and the View from West Point

Elizabeth Samet, professor of English at the United States Military Academy, attended the speech President Obama gave at West Point on Tuesday evening. Here is an excerpt from her report for The New Republic:
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Cadets are gathered together not infrequently in one of various auditoriums to listen to statesmen, generals, pundits, or performers. But presidents are a special case. “Two presidents in two years!” I overheard one cadet say to another with a kind of wonder as he recollected that then-President Bush had visited only last December.Over the years, the rhetoric directed at the Corps of Cadets has ranged from the lofty to the earthy. At the 1962 commencement, President Kennedy addressed Cold War anxieties: “I know that many of you may feel ... that in ... the nuclear age, when war may last in its final form a day or two or three days before much of the world is burned up, that your service to your country will be only standing and waiting. … Many serve, all applaud, and the tide of patriotism runs high. But when there is a long, slow struggle, with no immediate visible foe, your choice will seem hard indeed.” Would the cadets in my poetry class have recognized the allusion to Milton?

President Truman’s remarks at a Mess Hall luncheon ten years earlier had a decidedly different tone: “I try my level best to make people feel that they do not have to be afraid of the President, because he is only interested in the welfare of the whole country. He has nothing else to do but to see that the country runs as it should, and to see that we keep our friends in the world, so we won’t have a third world war, and so you won’t have to go and be cannon fodder. I hope you will remember that.” How could they forget?

Yet oratory, presidential or otherwise, occupies a peculiar place in military culture, where action is king. Cadets are accustomed to being exhorted, and they become adept at responding with an automatic enthusiasm. But they are even better, when given the chance (as I think they were last night), at thinking seriously about responsibility.
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Click here for the rest of Samet's piece, "A Lonely Kind of Courage."

When the Banjo Stops (by Elizabeth Samet)

That's when the trouble starts in Bonnie and Clyde. My students noted this when we watched the film a few weeks ago. When the banjo stops, bad things happen: “I killed a man back there,” Clyde seethes in the back of a movie theater after the getaway from their first fatal job. Like moviegoers everywhere, my students are deluged by onscreen violence. However, because they are preparing to become military officers, their response to it has a clear-eyed sense of the stakes. It is the antithesis of Clyde’s childlike, dangerous naiveté. The film’s final scene, in which Bonnie and Clyde are riddled with bullets, had an especially powerful impact on us. It doesn’t look like the violence typical of most action movies today. Its horror unfolds in slow motion, and it tells us something about ourselves that the supercharged gore of contemporary cinema does not. It isn’t only the slow motion, of course, but also the preceding series of quick cuts between Bonnie and Clyde, who, having realized what is in store for them by the side of that country road, search out each other’s eyes. Watching it this time, what I found most powerful was Clyde's broken sunglasses (one lens has popped out) and untucked shirttail—the hapless disarray of his life crystallized in an instant.

Great Songs of Cinema (by Elizabeth Samet)

What do you think of first? “Over the Rainbow,” “As Time Goes By,” “Singin’ in the Rain”? Win, place, and show on the AFI’s “Top Movie Songs of All Time” list. My pick, Judy Garland’s devastating “The Man That Got Away,” from A Star is Born, comes in at #11. It was another Garland song, “Get Happy,” the triumphant final number in Summer Stock, that launched what became a feature in my film class this semester: “Movie Song of the Day.” This innovation was inspired by some extremely music-savvy students in the class—astonishingly well versed in everything from Alternative Country to Tin Pan Alley, nearly impossible to stump, able to hum obscure covers of obscurer originals. Lately, owing to their tutelage, I find myself with a rather eclectic mix on the iPod.... It is one wild ride to work in the morning. After Garland, I brought in everything from Fred Astaire’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (Blue Skies) to The Rolling Stones’ “Monkey Man,” one of the many songs featured in that magnificent montage toward the end of Goodfellas. One morning I played The Doors’ “Peace Frog,” featured in, of all movies, The Waterboy—a fact one member of the class announced even before Morrison had time to warm up. My students also began to bring in their favorites: Bobby Bare’s cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” (Midnight Cowboy), Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” (Nashville), Citizen Cope’s “Bullet and a Target” (Alpha Dog).

Listening to "The Man from Laramie" (by Elizabeth Samet)

The first thing you have to know is that the opinions I express as a guest blogger this week on the Best American Poetry site are my own and do not reflect those of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense. The second thing you have to know is that I've been teaching a film course this semester. One of my favorite things about this class is that it allows me to see old films in new ways. One of the several films my students and I screened together was Anthony Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955), with James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, and Donald Crisp. David Thomson is exactly right when he suggests in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film that what fuels The Man from Laramie as well as the other Westerns Stewart did with Mann are “the suppressed neuroses” of “the adventurer hero.” Some of my students were a bit surprised at Stewart's anguished character and at the film’s open-endedness. They expected less ambiguity in a movie from the 1950s. Perhaps part of what helped to create that expectation was the obligatory title song, “The Man from Laramie,” which, like the songs that begin High Noon and so many other Westerns of the period, digests the whole messy business into a straightforward ballad. The experience of seeing Laramie again got me thinking about music in Westerns in general and about the music from a very different kind of Western: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Jonny Greenwood’s score for that recent film is a world away from “The Man from Laramie.” Blood, however, like certain older films, is as remarkable for its silences as for its sounds. I admire Anderson’s willingness to let the picture speak for itself. He clearly trusted the image (and the acting of Daniel Day Lewis). Today going to the movies can be a deafening experience--especially the previews. Quiet movies are increasingly rare, as are filmmakers who permit long periods of silence. Remember the prairie bus stop scene in North by Northwest? Silence on the screen; I’d like to hear a little more of that.