Things to Think (At Work)

Poetry, the Law, and Me

There’s an urban legend that poetry is no longer relevant—that only scarf wearing, tweed sporting, rheumatic leftist white humanities profs of a certain age bother with the stuff (see, for example, Patton Oswalt’s plea to be named Poet Laureate, here).  While poetry collections may not top the bestsellers lists these days, you can’t go to a movie, read a book, or watch an advertisement without running into some verse. 

Or, for that matter, brush up on your copyright law.  I had to do a bit of just that after my video post (below) was identified by YouTube as containing copyrighted content.  Through the magic of technology, YouTube had managed to sniff out my less-than-thirty-second clip of Sugarland’s “Something More” that appeared at the end of the video.  I naively assumed that this little snippet fell within “fair use” in the United States (where YouTube runs its servers, and therefore where its content is subject to law).

Silly me.  Any use of recorded music on YouTube, even by an amateur user, it turns out, is subject to copyright law.  What would have made an appropriate musical selection?  Apparently anything prior to 1923, the last year in which creative content entered the public domain.  Be warned, next time you might have to watch me “cut a rug” to “Toot Toot Tootsie” or “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” (both hits that year).

Copyright is continually being extended by the American Congress.  It was most recently in 1999 with the Sonny Bono Copyright Copyright Term Extension Act.  That law could have been struck down in the 2003 Supreme Court case, Eldred v. Aschcroft.  It was a case that turned on the publication of, you guessed it, poetry.

The plaintiff, Eric Eldred, had wanted to publish Robert Frost’s collection New Hampshire online in his continuing effort to promote literacy by making literary classics available to the masses for no cost (other that your internet connection).  New Hampshire’s copyright was to expire, but the Bono Act ensured that the long-dead Frost would receive royalties for another twenty years (he died in 1963).  Eldred defied the extension and published anyway.  Court cases ensued.  Eldred lost them all.

I’m not sure how much money I owe Frost for publishing some of his poems on this blog.  You’d think he just might like the publicity.  Wouldn’t you want your work to still be published without censure when you’re dead?  How are we supposed to make something new when we’re cut off from the past?

Lawrence Lessig, Harvard professor and Eldred’s lawyer, asks that question in his book from 2008, Remix: Making Art And Commerce Thrive In the Hybrid Economy (available in paperback, via Amazon, here).  Lessig worries about the erosion of the public domain.  He writes that in 1923 the average copyright was held for 28 years.  Today, the average copyright is forever—seriously, all current copyrights are enforced and can theoretically be extended ad infinitum just as the Bono Act extended them in 1999.

Imagine, Lessig asks, if we still had a 28 year copyright?  I wouldn’t have to get by with Al Jolson numbers.  I could rock out to “What Kind of Fool,” or “Morning Train.”  And really, wouldn’t that be amazing?  Or course, Barry Gibb and Sheena Easton would renew their copyrights and those particular songs wouldn’t be in the public domain.  But think of all the great music that would be: the whole Lennon catalogue, for example.

But what’s really important (my rocking out certainly isn’t) is creating copyright law that encourages creativity, not limiting it in the name of profits.  That’s why copyright was created in the first place.  The full title of the first copyright law, the 1709 Statute of Anne (pictured above), is “An Act for the Encouragement of learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.”  Copyright was for a renewable term of 21 years.

My story has a happy ending.  The copyright holder of my song decided not to wipe my audio track (I had that happen when I ran afoul of the Golden Girls theme some months ago), but rather to post an ad encouraging listeners to buy the song.  What a brilliant solution.  It doesn’t penalize amateur users, and encourages the sale of the product and the creative interpretation of that product.

So thank you, Universal Music Group, for your enlightened stance on copyright.  I got to promote poetry, and you got to promote your band.  Now, if only every company decided to “Act for the encouragement of learning” in addition to acting in the name of profits.  This little episode has me heartened that the two are not mutually exclusive.

Totally Inappropriate Person

Poker Face

This Saturday I’m heading to the Met HD broadcast of Carmen.  The new production, directed by Richard Eyre, got a rave review by Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times.  He particularly lauded the direction of the final scene, which he wrote was

executed with such stunning realism, a dangerous mingling of sex, rebellion and violence: the very essence of “Carmen.”

Carmen caused a scandal when it was first performed in 1875.  But in the past century-and-a-quarter it’s netted a number of high-profile admirers.  Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Debussy—many contemporary composers were quick to declare their love.  Hell, even Nietzsche thought Bizet had saved music with the opera. 

Ever since, it’s been fashionable to like Carmen for all sorts of PC reasons: its musical merit, its exploration of class, its feminism, its realism.  But let’s be real.  Tommasini is right.  Carmen is compelling because it is lurid, sexy, and ends with a good stabbing. 

Feminists of course always get upset with that last one.  If Carmen were a man, would he have to pay for his sins with his life? Of course.  That’s the plot of Don Giovanni.  At the very least he would be assaulted in his SUV with a nine iron.

But women are always more compelling than men.  Don Giovanni would be no fun without Elvira.  And Carmen would be a total snooze with just Don Jose.  In fact, it would be a bit like an extended poem by Matthew Arnold.  I’ve never been much a fan of his most famous, “Dover Beach.”

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night

 

As if to prove women are more interesting, Anthony Hecht wrote this brilliant parody entitled “The Dover Bitch.”

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.

Carmen must have been the perfect antidote to Arnold’s brooding—and chaste—Victorianism.  A woman who refuses to love only one man?  Arnold would have definitely thrown himself off those white cliffs.

Luckily we don’t live in such a bleak and bland world as Arnold.  We have our very own Carmens, like Lady Gaga.  As silly as the lyrics to “Poker Face” are, it’s hard not to admire Gaga’s take on a well-worn conceit.  Instead of the “rebellious bird” of Bizet’s “Habanera,” Gaga goes for the poker table.  Timely, clever, and catchy.

Can't read my,
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(She's got to love nobody)
Can't read my
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(She's got to love nobody)

P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)

I won't tell you that I love you
Kiss or hug you
Cause I'm bluffin' with my muffin
I'm not lying I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunning

I can’t wait to watch Carmen do some bluffin’ with her muffin—in high def no less—this weekend on the big screen.

Perloff v. Bishop

More Poetic Advertising

Readers of this blog will have already taken notice of my considerable love for Walt Whitman.  If you ever feel blue, just pick up some Whitman and you immediately feel better.  It’s like feeling the sun on your face—Whitman just makes you feel like glad to be alive.

A couple of posts ago I griped about a few of the advertisements in the Toronto subway.  I never thought I’d actually get to post about poems IN advertising, but that’s exactly what I’m about to do.

Levi’s has a new campaign which combines three of my favourite things: Whitman, jeans, and sentimentality.  The new “go forth” ad (below) uses an amazing montage of scenes of youthful revelry in a post-Katrina New Orleans and pits them against scenes of financial scandal in post-Lehman Brothers New York.

The whole thing is actually narrated by Walt Whitman, using an extremely rare recording of him reading an excerpt from “America” (the recording is available online, via the American Academy of Poets, here).

The wax cylinder recording, like the commercial, leaves out the last two lines of the full poem.

America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, 
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, 
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

The ad seems to be going for Obama’s call for “renewing America’s promise.”  I’ve never been so stirred by an ad before.  The fireworks are exciting.  And Whitman’s ghostly voice, echoing across the “adamant of Time,” is thrilling.  I think Levi’s did an amazing job of it.  It doesn’t feel like they’ve resurrected Whitman for nefarious corporate purposes (unlike the recent Direct TV Chris Farley ad).   

But I must confess: after watching it I wanted to read some Whitman—or advocate for fiscal reform—not go out and buy pants.

On Naples

When I was a kid we used to have Neapolitan ice cream in the fridge. It came in a box and was really messy to open up because you got it all over your fingers. But you got to lick them afterwards—in three flavours no less!

For a long time that’s all I knew of Naples: it made great ice cream. Many poems have been written about Naples. None to my knowledge about its ice cream. This is probably because Italians don’t eat ice cream like that any more (it evolved from Spumano, a 19th century dessert). They now indulge in gelato, a denser, creamier cousin to North America’s frozen confection.

Naples has an uneven reputation. It’s one of those love-it-or-hate-it places. I will always remember reading the first line of Ralph Kirkpatrick’s 1955 book on Domenico Scarlatti: “In 1685, Naples was as populous, as dirty, and as noisy as it is now.” Ouch.

Poets not surprisingly look on Naples slightly differently. Percy Bysshe Shelley called Naples home for a short time in 1818. He wrote two poems about the place. The first is happily titled “Lines written in dejection, near Naples.” He juxtaposes the beauty of the city against his current state, in which he has neither “hope nor health.” I don’t know what was bugging him that day, but it seems that the Naples of 1818 was a bit quieter than Ralph Kirkpatrick would have us believe: its voice is “soft like Solitudes’s.”

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The city's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.

Two years later Shelley wrote a poem reminiscing about the great time he had there and praising the townfolk for creating a constitutional monarchy after the revolt of July 1820. One of the striking lines is the second, in which he refers to the sun as the “lidless eye of heaven.” This was an image popular a couple centuries before: Shakespeare famously used it in Sonnet 18 (the “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” one), and Spenser used it before him in The Faerie Queene (I, iii, 4).

Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest
Naked, beneath the lidless eye of Heaven!
Elysian City, which to calm enchantest
The mutinous air and sea! they round thee, even
As sleep round Love, are driven!
Metropolis of a ruined Paradise
Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!
Bright Altar of the bloodless sacrifice
Which armed Victory offers up unstained
To Love, the flower-enchained!
Thou which wert once, and then didst cease to be,
Now art, and henceforth ever shalt be, free,
If Hope, and Truth, and Justice can avail,—
Hail, hail, all hail!

One of the earliest poems about Naples was by the poet Statius, who was born there. His Silvae, written in the first century AD, were lengthy songs of praise. 2.2 was for a villa of Pollius Felix. No one has yet written a rhymed translation of these Latin poems, so it’s not much fun to quote. Suffice it to say he thought that Naples was pretty great.

It seems then that the poets love Naples. People who write books are a different matter. Mark Twain, like Raph Kirkpatrick, didn’t think so much of the place when he visited. He wrote that Neapolitans “crowd you -- infest you -- swarm about you, and sweat and smell offensively, and look sneaking and mean, and obsequious.”

I guess when it comes to Naples we praise in verse but complain in prose.