Poetry on the T.V.

TV shows are using poetry to give episodes a little something something.

In the last season of Breaking Bad, an episode entitled, "Ozymandias" had everybody googling the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem and what it said about kings and empires falling did not bode well for Walter White. Mad Men titled an ep after Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus" to echo the show's themes of recreating oneself and rising from the dead (Don, Draper, anyone?). Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency" also tent-poled an episode and thematically returned later in season 2.

  And I just finished watching a Homeland episode entitled "A Red Wheelbarrow" in which pregnant-ass Carrie got shot and Saul found Brody in Venezuela strung out on heroin; it even had a William Carlos Williams reference.  Characters tended to say "it depends" a lot.  Last week's episode was called "Gerontion" after T.S. Eliot's poem about an old man who realizes he's wasted his life.

Apparently, an M.F.A. in poetry does a body good in Hollywood writing rooms.

People watch T.V. in a different way nowadays. I've noticed I don't watch anything that I can't follow on Twitter for live-tweeting action. There's something about sharing the snark with other people who are watching that makes the experience more enjoyable. Then, I read episode recaps, listen to podcasts, and join in the hunt for the Easter eggs the writers hide in the script. So an episode named after a poem is another clue into the deeper meaning of the show that adds to my overall enjoyment of the watching.

It almost makes you curious about the poems that inspire the writers of such awesome shows. (Well, Homeland kinda sucks this season, but still.) Titling eps after poems helps me see poetry in a different light. It makes poetry seem fresher and a little more relevant to have the direct link between the poem and a fictional life I care about pointed out to me.

Huh, I'm being introduced to poems by cable television.

Steve Roggenbuck

This is always my question: what is "good" poetry? Just like someone told me to say "isn't" instead of "ain't" somewhere there is someone who wrote down what makes a poem a poem ( a play a play, a novel a novel, etc.). I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that, because if you teach someone the rules, they might break them in a fascinating way. Like Nadia Comaneci.

Man, I was obsessed with her when I was a kid. I was fat, Black and, still, I signed up for gymnastics like Bela Karolyi was gonna ready me up for the next Olympics. Anyway, Nadia followed the exact same rules and regulations that, say, Cathy Rigby did, but she blew the sport out of the water with her perfection and personality. No one said, "I don't know, Nadia, what does a round-off look like to you?" They said, "Point your foot like this!" (and  Bela probably cussed her out a time or two) and she came up with something amazing.

That said, here comes Steve Roggenbuck.  He's got Justin Beiber hair, big grey/blue eyes, and a heap of 26 year-old energy and passion. He was in an M.F.A. program and his professor read one of his pieces and told him to "save it for his blog." So he quit the program and took to the You Tubes with his slam/rant/exultation poetry words.

Now, this is America. And this boy is young, cute, and media savvy enough to catch Gawker and The Atlantic's attention. He's got a good fifteen minutes coming to him. But what if that prof had said, "Here, try this. I know, at first, you're going to be copying [very important poet] but see where these rules meet your passion."  Maybe he'd be a celebrated poet. Maybe he'd be a fifth grade English teacher in Flint, Michigan (not a bad thing).  Maybe he will really stick to it and come up with a new form of poetry. Maybe he'll end up the new Chocolate Rain guy.

I was just thinking.