The Best American Poetry

'Mad Men' second-season now out on DVD: 'Lunch Poems' vs. 'Meditations In An Emergency'

The second season of Mad Men is released on DVD today. I'm assuming that if you read this blog and you own a TV, you watch this show, to judge from the enthusiasm BAP has shown the 1960s ad-agency series. The DVD set offers a lot of episode commentaries, the most interesting emanating from series creator Matthew Weiner, who's such a stickler for detail (kind phrase for: so obviously a control-freak), you get used to him pointing out a shot in a scene and saying things like, "I won't let the directors [of other episodes] do that, but I was directing this one, so... " (I wouldn't be surprised if Weiner not only told the actors how to say their lines, but also wiped down the water-stains left by the martini glasses on Roger Sterling's desk.

Of note to readers of this blog is Weiner's commentary remarks about the use of Frank O'Hara's Meditations In An Emergency, which Don Draper reads in the season premiere and which serves as the title for the season finale. Weiner reveals he really wanted to use Lunch Poems in the first scene (Don was, after all, drinking his lunch in a bar, as you'll recall), but, meticulous researcher that he is, Weiner learned that Lunch Poems hadn't yet been published at the time that particular episode was set.

The new season of Mad Men starts Aug. 16. 

'Hung' and the gluten-free Neruda cranberry-walnut bread

Tonight, HBO will premiere Hung, its latest attempt at a half-hour sitcom since it forgot Eastbound & Down was as good as Sex and the City. Hung is about Ray, a high-school athletics coach, a middle-aged divorced dad, most of whose house has recently burned down. He's strapped for cash, his kids and ex-wife more or less hate him. Desperate, Ray attends a make-your-dreams-come-true motivational speech in which he's urged to find his essential talent to achieve success. Or in the words of the speaker, to "identify your own tool." If you take that phrase and the show's title, are you surprised when I say the show is about Ray and his gigantic penis?

Yes, this is the essentially one-joke premise of Hung. Ray becomes, in the words of one character, a "man-whore," servicing women for money. But that character is more interesting than Ray. She's Tanya, a poet. A poet who's also in the identify-your-tool class, and whose own get-rich-tediously idea is something she calls "lyric bread": "a croissant folded around Maya Angelou's 'Phenomenal Woman', or a raisin loaf with Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' swirled in." She also suggests a "gluten-free Neruda cranberry walnut bread." Says the motivational leader: "Food for the body, food for the soul: I like it!" Ray, who is dubious, advises her to "laminate the poems" so they don't melt in the bread. 

Tanya and Ray unite because Tanya, who had a one-night fling with Ray some time ago, knows his "tool" truly is something special, and says she's "hoping to give women more than they've been seeing for centuries." In other words, says Ray, you "want to be my pimp." Correct, says Tanya.

Tanya is played by the wonderful Jane Adams, whom you may recall as one of Niles' girlfriends on Frasier. Adams has huge eyes and a low voice and redeems a lot of the lousy penis jokes. Looking at advance reviews of Hung, I find my Entertainment Weekly review leaves me in the minority. Other reveiwers are more impressed with the show, and find in it metaphors for and comparisons to a deflated economy.

It occurs to me that the ideal reviewer for Hung may be Nin Andrews, who would bring her own special talent to bear on Hung. It would also be interesting to hear how other poets react to Tanya and her poetry bread. Let me know if you watch. And if you'd buy "lyric bread." 

--Ken Tucker

Paradise Lost at the cineplex

The Hollywood Reporter has a story saying not one, but two, films of Paradise Lost are in, as they say, development. The first adaptation of John Milton was done by the writer John Collier (yes, the late author of "His Monkey Wife" and other fine short stories). What's that, you say? Collier died in 1980? Ah, the magic of Hollywood: producer Martin Poll has maintained the option on that script lo these many years, and has now found financial backing from a group of Philadelphia-based investors who usually make Bollywood extravaganzas. ("I tell ya, Marty, we keep the poetry but re-title it Slumdog Satan!")

The second Paradise Lost (not to be confused with Paradise Regained) is being planned by an even bigger outfit: Warner Bros. Yes, the studio that brought you the Batman movies. Personally, I'm hoping Tim Burton is tapped to direct. Few living souls can "justify the ways of God to men" than the fellow who directed both the first Batman film, Beetle Juice, Mars Attacks!, and Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

Casting suggestions are now open to the floor.

Do you hulu?

Been meaning to ask: Do you use Hulu.com, the online TV website? It's terrific for a couple of reasons. You can catch up on recent episodes of shows you missed/forgot to DVR (Friday Night Lights, Family Guy, Fringe, name-your-poison and those are just under "F"). It also has delightfully random store of old TV shows. Currently I am on an Alfred Hitchcock Presents jag; it's exhilarating to watch crisply acted, tightly-plotted half-hours that remain clever and suspenseful (I highly recommend "Arthur," starring Laurence Harvey as a chicken farmer [!] who murders his girlfriend.)

Hulu offers movies, too, but I find its television library to be far more diverse and enticing. It is the place to go to remind yourself how funny the puns were on Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends, how simultaneously cool and un-cool James Garner was in The Rockford Files, how luminous Elizabeth Montgomery was on Bewitched. You can decide whether you have fond memories of St. Elsewhere or Square Pegs because of lingering nostalgia, or because they were actually good. It's also a site to experience the unknown, and by the unknown, I mean Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot, which truly must be seen to be (dis)believed. And may I recommend The Tick? (The live-action version, not the cartoon.)

Hulu has Arrested Development. Even if you're pleased as punch that you don't own a TV, you owe it to yourself to watch that.
--Ken Tucker

Russell Crowe, poet

Word (in every sense) comes from The Guardian that Russell Crowe composed a poem to read at Sunday night's Empire Film Awards ceremony. After receiving an "actor of our lifetime" award (!) (wouldn't that describe any actor during our, ah, lifetime?), Crowe whipped out this bit of verse:

I am celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo.

Imagine there's no heaven.

I don't know if you're loving somebody. To be a poet and not know the trade, to be a lover and repel all women. Twin ironies by which great saints are made, the agonising pincer-jaws of heaven.

If you can walk with crowds and keep your virtue, walk with kings but not lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;

yours is the earth and everything that's in it and what's more, you'll be a man.

It's only words, and words are all I have, to take your breath away.

Hmm... (This is me back again, not Russell Crowe.) John Lennon, Kipling, and the Bee Gees as quotations; the you/tattoo rhyme, those "pincer-jaws" of heaven... It's only words, and The Guardian wasn't letting on whether they took the audience's collective breath away.

Colleague Viggo Mortensen made reference to Crowe's "unfathomable literay aspirations." But hey, if Michael Madsen can publish a book of poetry, who's going to tell Ye Bearded Phone-Thrower he can't write verse?

Stringer Bell: just another day at 'The Office'

Last night's appearance by Idris Elba on The Office -- the first of a half-dozen or so appearances by the man some of us cherish as the pensive drug dealer Stringer Bell on The Wire -- brought a crisp crackle of energy to the sitcom. The British-born Elba's new character, Charles Minor, is a middle-management-type brought in to tamp down the craziness as well as excess spending in Michael Scott's Dunder Mifflin branch.

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We can be pretty sure Minor makes less than Bell did slinging whatever illegal substances Baltimore got its rocks of on in The Wire. But It's very good to see that, while Steve Carrell's Michael cannot help but make gauche references to Minor's race, the show itself seems to be positioning Minor as a mildly uptight company-man who will countenance no jive from anyone, including himself. Add Charles Minor to the list of businessman-characters -- yes, including those on your beloved Mad Men -- who bear continued watching so that we can see what makes them tick, or, perhaps, crack. -- Ken Tucker

A stream-of-consciousness Sunday [by Ken Tucker]

Reading my friend Logan Hill's excellent New York Magazine movie coverage led me to think about the friend of his he introduced me to a few years ago, the fine critic-editor Ada Calhoun, and her terrific website about kids, Babble (I read it enthusiastically even though my kids are grown), which made me think about the surprise it was to learn that Ada is the daughter of one of my heroes, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who is appreciated so eloquently by another of my heroes, the critic Sanford Schwartz, in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, which made me pull down Schjeldahl’s 1978 collection Since 1964: New & Selected Poems from my shelf and reproduce this poem of his for you this day:

NIGHT AGAIN

The sun goes down
The moon rises
It's night again

Alas, the stars
Shine with frigid
Ferocity

The world, wildly
Beautiful, gets
Worse all the time

We get sadder
No, sadder
Though more refined

Through suffering
And joy, don't we?
At night it's the truth

Paul Harvey... good day! And good night...

Paul Harvey died on Saturday at age 90. He was a remarkably original radio personality. My parents used to listen to his mixture of news and anecdote every day, and, as a child, I became transfixed by Harvey's rumbling-deep voice and strikingly unique phrasing.

Slam poets could have learned a tip or two from Harvey. He'd pause in the middle of sentences for dramatic effect. He'd rush words to get to the end of a story, to convey urgency where none might exist if the copy were read in a more conventional broadcaster's usual, measured manner. Harvey's baritone frequently galloped to the punchline of an anecdote, only to be brought up short, reined in abruptly. He'd wait for so long you thought the radio had gone dead, and then he'd issue his final words in a confidential murmur or a crow of triumph. Then it was on to the next item: "Page two!" he'd bark, his term for changing the subject, and off he was, onto another story, or to a commercial whose copy he read himself and promoted personally. His politics tended toward an innocent reactionaryism, if such a category exists. I tended to listen past the content to the style.

Harvey belonged to the pre-TV generation, but lasted well into the internet age. In recent years, I would hear him only on car trips, around noon wherever I was, on the AM radio dial. He had the gift of making it seem as though he was talking only to you. "Hello, Americans!" he'd greet his listeners with merriment: patriotism never sounded so much fun.

Ernie Kovacs plays games

I was searching YouTube for footage of Ernie Kovacs' character Percy Dovetonsils; I thought the comedian's portrayal of an effete poet might make for an amusing entry here. Turns out there's not much Dovetonsils material available, but what I did find was a small mind-blower: Footage from Kovacs'game show, Take A Good Look, which aired from 1959-61, a year before his death in an auto accident.

Now, I knew Kovacs' work from his startlingly surreal sketch show, but this gimpse of Take A Good Look shows Kovacs in fine, deconstructive form working in the game-show genre:

At the top of the show, Kovacs plays around with the audio in a disorienting, technologically sophisticated way for the era, playfully confusing the home viewer about who's talking. The opening credits verge on abstract art, fracturing famous faces by showing close-ups of only parts of them: noses, chins, ears. Ever genial, ever-puffing on a long cigar, Kovacs greets his panel of celebrity guests, Ceser Romero, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Jim Backus,  doing so in such a blithe, chipper manner, who almost don't catch Kovacs' throwaway insult: "We're going to explain the game to you at home, and to the panel, who aren't particularly bright." He nods to the era's game-show scandals by noting that the prize money is "three hundred dollars--not enough to be crooked."

You get the feeling the game was less important than the way in which the game was presented, a signature of Kovacs' delightfully self-conscious style.

Reaction to the Inaugural Poem from (EW) readers [by Ken Tucker]

Please note the largely negative response to Elizabeth Alexander's poem among the readers of the Entertainment Weekly blog. It surprises me primarily because most posts of this sort at EW--that is, non-pop-cult entries--don't usually provoke as many boldly-stated opinions. Not your typical assortment of literary critics, and interesting for just that reason...