Poetry Unbound by Mike Chasar;

Author:Mike Chasar;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

FIGURE 5.1  (left) “The Poet” played by Henry Gibson; (right) flower portrait of Allen Ginsberg.

In the first decades of its popularity, television regularly conducted the first steps of its relationship with poetry via naïve children like Kelly, Kathy, the Beaver, and Ben Walton of The Waltons, who at twelve or thirteen years old plagiarizes one of his brother’s poems and wins a contest with it in “The Chicken Thief” (1973). Adults trafficking in poetry are accordingly infantilized, linked by childhood tropes to the verse they read or write or by the nursery-rhyme forms those poems often assume. Ward wants to climb trees with his mother; Quirt is diminutive, with a voice that appears to have not yet broken; the size of the flower that Henry Gibson holds accentuates his Poet’s shortness. Indeed, when, on a 1970 episode of The Bill Cosby Show (“The Poet”), gym teacher Chet Kincaid reveals to an embarrassed poetry-writing jock that he himself once wrote poetry, he goes out of his way to date his poems to a 1955 breakup and goes on to explain repeatedly that his poetry writing—and the act of plagiarism that has returned to haunt him—happened “when I was very young.” The courtship poems George Jefferson of The Jeffersons wrote for his wife Louise and that he finds “embarrassing” years later when she publishes them in a book in “Poetic Justice” (1982), most likely also date to the 1950s. Archie Bunker’s verses, too, hearken back to an earlier, more idealistic or innocent period of life when he wrote to Edith in a rudimentary, childish form and diction, out of which he has since grown, having routinized to the point of parody a performance of cynical adult heterosexual American masculinity. When Edith finishes reading the ending to Archie’s poem and exclaims, “ ‘Thou readeth!’ Oh my, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody talked like that in real life!” Archie can only respond, “No, Edith, it would be dumb.”

Characters like Kelly, Kathy, Beaver, Ben, Ward, Percy, Quirt, and The Poet—and Chet, George, and Archie in their younger years—are not mature enough to understand the ideological stakes of their fraudulence and the crises they unintentionally court. They thus served as object lessons or cautionary or morality tales for Lavender Scare–era home audiences about the security risks of poetry and poetry users as well as the hidden or unseen threats that poetry might invite home. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, TV audiences and characters had grown older: like Beaver, Wally, Chet, George, and Archie, they had learned and routinized the associations between poetry, imposture, gender trouble, and sexual deviance, knowing that if one must traffic in poetry—thereby risking domestic crisis and, by extension, national security—that endeavor is best concealed, carefully managed, rationalized, or kept, as it were, in the family. When Sam Malone of Cheers publishes under his own name a poetic passage from one of Diane’s love letters in “Everyone Imitates Art” (1986), for example, he enjoys the joke that he is playing but tells the drinkers at his bar, “Don’t let it get out, though, that I’m a sensitive guy.

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