Why?
It began from a sort of antipathy toward “National Poetry Month.” I love poetry, I read it and I write it, but I am suspicious of any “national” day, week, or month. They have proliferated at an unsustainable rate in the last few years: National Crouton Day, National Spa Week, National Bird-Feeding Month. Whose nation is cited in that ambiguous title? Which authorities declared the object to which we are to be so slovenly dedicated? Living in Montréal, Québec, I have a natural respect for the steamé, but I object to the idea that I must celebrate the cooked wiener on a specific date declared “National Hotdog Day.” Who has chosen this fate for us, exactly?
National Poetry Month, arguably, has a more robust reason for existing than National Hotdog Day. Poetry is an art form that, according to the laments of contemporary writers and scholars, appears to be rapidly depreciating in value; there are many things, pleasant and unpleasant, that most individuals would prefer to do instead of reading a poem. Read a Shakespeare sonnet? I’d rather floss. Read a parody of the same by Harryette Mullen? I’ll go for a run. (Personally, I’m reading poetry at a steadier rate than I am flossing or running, but as a poet I’m trying for hyperbole here.)
One of the things we often prefer to poetry is television. I know I watch far more of it than I read poetry. Of course, this is more of a reflection on the sheer amount of television I watch than anything else, for as an English literature instructor who regularly teaches the poetic form, a poet who firmly believes the writer has an absolute responsibility to read widely and often, and a general enthusiast for the lyric, the conceptual, and the otherwise, I also read a fair amount of poetry. What is the purpose, then, of comparing the two pursuits: one associated with leisure (feet up, remote in hand) and one associated with study (back bent, pencil poised)?
So, let’s get to the point: I’m something of a contrarian. It was April and you (and who are you, exactly?) were saying it was National Poetry Month and, during National Poetry Month, we were to celebrate the form. The onus was on poetry lovers, like myself, to share their favourite poems.
Instead, I set about sharing the television I watch when not reading, writing, or teaching poetry. After all, television is also an art form. It has no national month (as far as I know); of course, this may be because it doesn’t require the publicity.
The public list of every television episode I watched was a small practice in humility. Luckily, I have few followers on Twitter, so few people noticed the sheer amount of television I watch and what manner of trash it includes. Part of my identity (part of our identities, all of us, right?) is tied up in the culture I consume: the music, the film, the literature, too, and, yes, the television. What would my students, my colleagues, my friends think of how much [x] I watched last Saturday? (On the subject of numbers, I’ll say here that in April 2021, I watched 115 total episodes of television. This averages out to 3–4 episodes per day which, according to the rate at which I’m currently binge-watching Cougar Town, still seems accurate.)
This year, 2021, I minutely rose the stakes from that
of a public list to that of a creative project. I also wanted to write a
television poem a day. I began without many guidelines, simply setting out to write
a poem in response to one of the shows I or my partner happened to put on. This
included keeping one page of notes (on dialogue, wardrobe, or music cues; along
with an abstract set of responses to the machinations of plot), which once
finished I would transform through selection and lineation into a poem.
In the final version of these poems, I incorporated those original notes in condensed form, now visible on the page in the shape of a square (i.e., the original shape of the “boob tube”). The act of watching is thus visually incorporated in the page of the poem, such that the leisurely pose intrudes on the scholar’s posture. At first, the choice of television episode was arbitrary, but I quickly decided I did not want to repeat a series in my poems. This would enforce further selection on the process, for my partner and I were not watching thirty separate series at a time.
Though I maintain a sense of guilt about my television habit, especially relative to my intake of other artforms, I do think the resulting writing evidences that, despite what screen-phobic parenting guides might say, our thinking does not stop before the television screen. Even formulaic sitcoms can prompt philosophical speculation or, at the very least, a meditation on the colour blue (which, for instance, frequently appears in the attire of televised wives and mothers).
Midway through the month, my television poem-a-day was falling terribly short of its goal. I was still intent on finishing the self-enforced project, perhaps after April had already went by, but, without repeating a series, selecting the right television episode to inspire each day’s poem had become a problem. Then I had an idea.
I would compose the remaining television poems about shows featuring poetry. I crowdsourced a list: releasing my request and receiving suggestions on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Where better to conduct research on the low art form of television than in the sewers of social media? I tracked down where it would be possible to watch these shows: on one of the streaming services I, my partner, or a family member paid for; uploaded for free on YouTube; archived illegally in some back channel of the Internet; or, in a few cases, purchasing the single episode. In the era of streaming television, the leisurely pursuit of watching a specific show can involve a fair amount of labour.
The poems in the chapbook combine responses to both those first episodes, naturally occurring in my day (there are just eight of these) and those sought-out episodes featuring a poem, a poet, or some discussion of poetry. The latter were surprisingly (or not) difficult to ferret out. The full list of “Television Shows Featuring Poetry” I was able to compile is below. If you know of others, I’d be happy to hear from you.
1. Dawson’s Creek S2E14, “To Be or Not to Be”
2. Breaking Bad S5E8, “Gliding All Over”
3. Fresh Prince of Bel-Air S1E7, “Def Poets Society”
4. Transparent S2E3, “New World Coming”[1]
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer S5E7, “Fool for Love”
6. Gilmore Girls S2E5, “Nick & Nora/Sid & Nancy,”
7. Star Trek: The New Generation S6E5, “Schisms,”[2]
8. Parks and Recreation S6E2, “London: Part Two”
9. Roseanne S2E10, “Brain-Dead Poets Society”
10. West Wing S3E17, “The US Poet Laureate”
11. ER S6E6, “The Peace of Wild Things”
12. Mad Men S2E13, “Meditations in an Emergency”
13. Dickinson S1E1, “Because I Could Not Stop,”[3]
14. The Simpsons S3E2, “Treehouse of Horror”
15. The Leftovers S1E8, “Cairo”
16. Little Fires Everywhere S1E1, “The Spark”[4]
17. Lovecraft Country S1E9, “Rewind 1921”
18. Sex and the City S2E7, “The Chicken Dance”
19. Taxi S2E22, “Art Work”
20. Inside No. 9 S4E1, “Zanzibar”
21. Avatar and the Last Airbender S2E15, “The Tales of Ba Sing Se”
22. The Get Down S1E1, “Where There Is Ruin, There Is Hope for Treasure”
Thank you to the many dear friends and Internet acquaintances who helped me compile this list. In sharing it here, I mean to ask a question about how we value art. Is television a “lower” art form than poetry? Is poetry a more “undervalued” art form than television? What happens when these two, seemingly dissimilar, art forms are married?
Composing the notes for these poems while watching (or, in many cases, rewatching) these episodes required a peculiar mode of attention: simultaneously heightened, in order to catch details I might otherwise ignore, and divided, as I was pursuing a separate project while the episode played out. These are ekphrastic poems that challenge our definitions of art and art appreciation. The poems are fiercely visual and caught up in questions about what we see and how we see. “Blue is in the eye of the beholder,” begins one poem — a response to the series Taxi, reruns of which often played in the background of my parents’ home when I was a child. Watching the familiar actors as an adult involved a recalibration of television’s nostalgic function. This was similarly the case for that ironizing siren call of my generation — The Simpsons. Rewatching a “Treehouse of Horror” in the springtime as an adult led to the lines:
See
the iron gate is
the remotest possibility
but the
familiarity of the setting
is the finger
against the blade.
Many of these poems interrogate the function of the home, at the center of which the “idiot box” so often sits. I had been watching Better Things at the beginning of this project and I was (and remain) moved by Pamela Adlon’s use of the television show to provide a loving representation of unconventional yet tightly-bound family connection:
Mother upends a
cherry cheesecake
in her daughter’s
lap.
What is seen?
Love.
Back in my parents’ home, when I was a child, television was an escape from the rural life of Prince Edward Island, from the petty dramas of middle school, from the self-deprecations of a neurotic teenage girl. I am tempted to write of poetry, too, as an escape, but it is instead a method of close looking.
Despite having closely examined my television habit for this chapbook, I’m left largely unchanged: still collapsing on the couch at the end of a teaching day and asking the question, “What should we watch?” It’s a deferral of other possibilities (i.e., continued productivity or outside socializing), until it’s not — notebook held up to record the mind’s response, mouths working over the shared reactions of us two, my partner and I, the viewers. Watching Laura Dern in West Wing, I wrote: “The entrance into the world / is the end of things.” Like any good ending (the closing sequence of an episode, the final pages of a book), this is also a beginning.
This sort of thinking, through an art form such as television, is not new. Kate Durbin writes poetry inspired by reality television (the “lowest” of the low!) and Joel Allegretti edited an entire anthology of “TV Poems” (Rabbit Tears: TV Poems). When I complete an Internet search for the terms “poem” and “television,” however, the top result is Roald Dahl’s “Television,” in which the children’s writer is less than enthusiastic about the inspiring powers of the boob tube or idiot box:
IT ROTS THE SENSE
IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS
IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND
CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
So, as a final word on the subject (for now), I’ll just say: I hope you enjoy the rot and clutter of my above/ground chapbook Television Poems.
[1] The full third season of Transparent features an extended storyline about a poet, modelled on Eileen Myles (who was then dating the show’s creator) and played by Cherry Jones. This is the first introduction to that storyline.
[2] There are likely other Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes featuring poetry, given Captain Picard’s penchant for Shakespeare. I tried, however, not to repeat a series in this chapbook. Repetition does occur twice: for The Simpsons and Sex and the City. Ultimately, this feels like an honest reflection of my television habit, given I have watched and continue to watch both shows frequently.
[3] The entirety of the available two seasons, as implied by the title Dickinson, are about the poet Emily Dickinson. This is an inspired, millennial take on the isolated “poetess” and her relationship to fame.
[4] The full first season of Little Fires Everywhere, already based on a piece of literature (the novel of the same title by Celeste Ng), features allusions to Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck,” which are threaded throughout each episode as a motif.
