You guessed it. In this instant classic, not only does Patrick Swayze make a screen appearance as a dance instructor, but our lithe & sexy hero -- a dance-lovin' Cuban teen -- reads poetry. His blondie American dance partner and lover in this star-crossed romance flees her repressive family order one evening and spends the night at his house. When she wakes, he is there, sitting near her, smouldering with Latin charm, and reading. She asks what it is, and he says it's a book of poems by Jose Marti -- the only book the family was able to save when our hero's father was taken away as a revolutionary.

In the recent movie "Mean Girls," there's the obligatory English classroom scene. In this one, the class is reading Julius Caesar, but a permanent announcement on the chalkboard in the background advertises a "Poetry Reading" -- part of the mythical backdrop of today's high school experience.

I have a stack of letters that my grandmother sent to my grandfather while he was stationed in the Pacific during World War II. I don't think either my grandmother nor my grandfather would consider themselves particularly avid readers or writers of poetry, although the Walker's Rhyming Dictionary I own came from their house. Nevertheless, this stack of letters is not unfrequently punctuated with poems. One of them concludes with a quotation excerpted from Lord Houghton's (1809-85) poem "The Brookside" -- the third of four stanzas, to be exact:

He came not—no he came not;
The night came on alone;
And as it grew still longer,
I did not feel afraid;
For I listened for a footfall,
I listened for a word;
But the beating of my own heart
Was all the sound I heard.

What's interesting is how, in severing this stanza from the poem, it takes on a range of new meanings. Who is the "he" here? The identity of the "he" in the original poem is ambiguous, but in a letter to an absent husband, the "he" takes on new meanings and expresses a level of grief and loneliness the original does not. In the original, the "he" actually shows up at the end in creating a cloyingly sentimental or devotional poem, but my grandmother's revision, during a time of war, strikes me as significant. Not only is she aware of Houghton's poem, but she's using it in a letter to her husband and changing its significance. Does the hint of a return carry over from the original text? Was this a poem they had shared at one point in time? Like Michel de Certeau's poaching reader, she plunders the original text for what is useful to her without regard for the integrity of that original.

From "The Cruise" (page 127 Collected Poems):

Beginning of a voyage, quiet and gay, dancing and games,
deck lectures, visits to polo ponies in the hold,
bulleting, engines, radio operator's important earphones,
poet, barmaid polishing bottles, union man, news,
deck -- conversations, visits to the bridge,
the sailor wit, music and promenade,
scrolls watched in the water, the glaze, the celadon,
high sunrise lustre on the fretted waves.
Persons emerge:
gossip the captain walking with the blonde,
emigrants, pleasure party, financier.


Note the presence of the poet between radio operator and barmaid, a *part* of the cruise landscape. Is the poet a component of the "everyday life" of the cruise, or is the poet a novelty to be cruised past and amused by like polo ponies and earphones? From our perspective in 2004, either seems strange, don't it?

Note the World War II animated cartoons -- production involving Frank Capra and Dr. Seuss plus the voice of Mel Blanc -- from United Productions of America (UPA). Created specifically for the armed forces, these cartoons running from 1943-46, and starring the "goofiest" soldier ever (Private Snafu), address issues of military conduct ranging from weapons maintenance to infantry morale. The cartoons are written in verse -- ballad form -- which, in later shows, becomes song lyrics set to music.

Alongside this example, place Edna St. Vincent Millay's "The Rape of Lidice" broadcast on radio and you have two important examples of "popular" or "mass" poetry during WWII. Add to that the Burma-Shave roadsigns and you have poetry on the air, on the screen, and in the landscape. In "The Obscurity of the Poet," Randall Jarrell wrote: "When I was asked to talk about the Obscurity of the Modern Poet I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don't read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn't understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry. And yet it is not just modern poetry, but poetry, that is today obscure." Clearly, the author/soldier of "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" (1945) wasn't thinking back to screening of Snafu, or Millay, or Burma-Shave, when he was writing this article for Poetry and the Age; while he expands "modern poetry" to "poetry" in general, he still doesn't imagine that these three examples qualify as "poetry" under either of the rubrics he offers.

So, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin argues that the reproduction of visual art has the potential to radically democratize art and culture by destroying the "aura" of the single original and making the image -- production and reproduction -- available to many.

What does this mean in terms of poetry, though? Unlike a painting, poems have always been made to be reproduced -- in books, on broadsides, letters, memorized, recited, and even cross-stitched into panels (or placemats, Allison) for home decoration -- and, as such, the poem-object per se has no appreciable painting-like "aura" to speak of. The tradition locates that aura, instead, not in original objects or pieces but in individual moments of creation -- in "inspiration," in "genius," in the unreproducible singular "voice," the "individual talent" or even the quirky/original personality of the poet. The "spontaneous overflow of emotion," the "singular talent," -- you know what I mean -- is the poem's aura.

But how does one go about reproducing this "aura"? Nice question. Maybe it's not so much an issue of reproducing "aura" as it is destroying it -- by destroying the individual talent. Sure, we can write poems which readers have to assemble themselves as "co-creators" but oftentimes even those poems have distinctive authorial presences -- the ingenuity, the idea -- that might constitute "aura" in residual ways.

What if we begin stressing anonymity and/or collaboration instead? Unmooring the poem from the pier of personality will deliver the text directly into the larger culture to be owned by that larger culture and gaining its meaning by circulation in that larger culture. De-emphasize individual talent; emphasize circulation. Can I call this the theory of Poem-as-Gossip or the Poem-as-Rumor? So what if someone invents a piece of gossip? What matters is not who originated the tasty morsel but the fact that it is passed on, given currency, exchanged and even revised. It is an occasion for social activity and collectivity instead of individuality and privacy.

At the beginning of the third Alien movie, the computer registers the little girl's death as "Negative Capability" or, per J. Keats, "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Is it beauty or truth that's kept Keats kickin' circuitwise into that post-apocalyptic landscape of the film?

This movie is about the politics of noise, right? Rockin' Ramones one one side, evil principal-from-hell on the other, rats exploding from high decibel levels all over the place, the blast of the high school exploding at movie's end, etc. At the center of the film, then, as our main character and top Ramones fan Riff describes Joey Ramone, her crush, she says dreamily, "He looks like a poem." An interesting description, right? One that seems to displace the orality of poetry for a more modern textuality: regardless of all the time she spends killing her eardrums, Riff is a literate gal and imagines poems as written events not -- or not solely -- oral/aural ones. Does she mean that skinny Joey looks like a poem looks -- a skinny WC Williams, poem, a Creeley poem, in all likelihood? Or does she mean that Joey looks like a poem *feels*? Or like a poem sounds? Or like a poem is (supposed to be) profound?

This moment of emotionally romantic synesthesia is really provocative for me, injecting into a movie about noise a certain content about poetry, its allegiances in the struggle between rocker and authority. If Joey looks like a poem, then Riff's putting poetry and punk on the same side of the struggle for student rights to define noise they way they want to. At the same time, the precious nature of the "poem" carried in her wistful tone of voice jars against the ripped jeans, shaggy hair and less-than-operatic voice of the band member she adores. Really, what does she -- and the screenwriter -- want us to understand from this?

While the movie is one about noise, Riff's description of Joey also alerts us to the fact that it's about writing, too. After all, she is a songwriter, seeking to give her (written) lyrics to Joey. When he receives them, the music is scored (on the page) not performed for him out loud. Those lyrics give the movie its title as well as title song. Emphasis on the written -- the visual, the poetry -- is further emphasized when the lyrics of "Teenage Lobotomy" flash across the bottom of the screen as the Ramones perform the song in concert. This double presence of lyrics and music -- unless the lyrics are presented ironically for those who are so unhip that they can't get past the noise -- underscores the textual thematic of the film as well. As we are viewing a film about hearing, we are reminded of the written word. Can it be that this combination of viewing and listening actually dramatizes the experience of the poem, a sort of "phonotext" full of the double presence of the language's visual and aural/oral characteristics as Garrett Stewart might describe it?

Can it be that in the end a movie about noise is equally about poetry?