By Stuart Mitchner

I’ve always been interested in poetry and poets that show up in unexpected places. And, as happened recently with another national recognition month, I’d forgotten that April was National Poetry Month. Even so, given my sense of poetry as a gift not necessarily confined between the covers of a book, I inadvertently signaled the subject this month with pieces featuring a great poet named Charlie Chaplin (who W.C. Fields, a poet himself, called a “ballerina”); a lesser known “disappearing” poet (Weldon Kees); and the greatest of them all, on the stage or the page or in the air, William Shakespeare. The one sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s I know by heart is from his essay “The Poet”: “The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.”

Tony Soprano a Poet?

Before poetry surprised me on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times with a squib on Charlotte Brontë’s “A Book of Rhymes,” I was well into an article about being haunted by the actors, characters, and situations of 21st-century television series like David Chase’s The Sopranos, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, and Graham Yost’s Justified.

David Chase’s shocking cut-to-black never-ending ending of The Sopranos qualifies as poetry if only because it’s sudden and enigmatic, like a line of verse that keeps you wondering. Tony and Carmela and their kids A.J. and Meadow have met for a dinner out, Tony has set Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” playing “on and on and on” on the jukebox, as Meadow hurries in late after a clumsy parking job, adding a touch of everyday angst to the life-or-death tension that the family-meal atmosphere is already pulsing with, an undercurrent of dread thanks to mass audience apprehension energized and intensified by the song, as Steve Perry sings the words “Don’t stop” and James Gandolfini’s Tony gazes into the dark unknown.

Don Draper a Poet?

Gandolfini died suddenly in Rome half a decade later at 51, and so was spared the sort of post-glory-years humiliation suffered by Mad Men’s Jon Hamm in the new Apple TV+ series Your Friends and Neighbors. The repellent rich folk he’s stealing from, with their showcases of fabulously expensive watches, sports trophies, and $300 K bottles of wine, strike me as the sort of smug entitled people Tony and Carmela might have hung out with if they’d survived into their “golden years.”

The Mad Men scene that still haunts me with its poetry is the Season One finale in which Hamm’s Don Draper delivers his slide projector sales pitch to Kodak, dimming the conference room lights for a slide show composed of images from happier days with his family, from whom he’s becoming estranged. As the images flash and fade, he tells his clients what they’re selling isn’t technology but memory. “This device isn’t a spaceship; it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.”

We already know that Draper’s genius for creating the slogan that sticks is a form of poetry based on his visceral understanding of Emerson’s trope, that the public that thinks it hates poetry is actually unknowingly in love with it. The poetry of Draper and Soprano comes and goes in a place touched on in the song from Damn Yankees, “You gotta have heart,” “miles and miles” of which Mad Men stored up in the carousel season finale, as did The Sopranos, in the Season One finale wherein Tony, Carmela, A.J. and Meadow find shelter on a stormy night in a family friend’s restaurant, a calm, civilized, candlelit refuge from the wind and rain. After dinner, wine is poured, and the poet in Tony offers a toast to his family. “If you’re lucky, you’ll have families of your own one day,” he says, Gandolfini feeling each word, “and you’ll remember the little moments like this, that were good.” After an episode rocked with violence, death and desperation, wordplay and wild humor, what you remember and what sets you up for the black-out series finale is the way the heart of the show lives in the voice of an inspired actor speaking some simple, beautifully felt words.

The Poetry of Passion

Graham Yost’s FX series Justified casts a long, haunting shadow, but no one scene from that show follows me around the way Walton Goggins does. For this actor, “haunting” doesn’t really say it. He is, for lack of a better term, not like anybody else on the planet as he moves from his unforgettable portrayal of Shane Vendrell in The Shield to the sheer genius of his many-leveled creation of the demon poet Boyd Crowder in Justified. Consider his uninhibited response on collider.com about playing Vendrell in Shawn Ryan’s FX series on rogue cops in the LAPD. Referring to the ending [Vendrell kills his wife and his little boy, putting a bouquet of flowers he just bought on his wife’s body and a new toy on his son’s before shooting himself in the head]: “For me, it almost broke my heart when that happened because I love him very much, not from a friend standpoint. I just want to hug him.”

Goggins in “White Lotus”

Goggins probably also loves the fascinating monster he and Yost created in Justified’s Boyd Crowder, with his scathing wit, explosiveness, and lines like “I am an outlaw and this is my world.” It’s because of Walton Goggins, his fire, his unpredictability, that my wife and I stuck with the third season of Mike White’s White Lotus, a series we’d given up on after cringing our way through the pilot. Though the presence of actor-poets like Carrie Coons and Parker Posey helped keep us watching, Goggins was the main attraction, the Baudelaire at the spa. Even then we hesitated because he was rarely mentioned in the usual chatter ahead of what sounded like another cringe fest among the rich and mildly infamous. From his first moment as Rick Hatchett, Goggins was almost audibly glowering, like the hiss of a lit fuse. It’s painful to recall how much really abysmal television we endured waiting for him to explode, which he does, after setting free a cage full of cobras. The wildly romantic last shot is like a lunatic revision of the Shield’s murder-suicide. With his dead lover in his arms, killed in a crossfire he instigated, Rick is shot in the back, the first kill for a gentle Thai cop who, after much prompting (“Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”), finally fires showrunner Mike White’s version of Chekhov’s gun.

On the Poetry Trail

My favorite stretch of the D&R Greenway Poetry Trail is from the Pattiann Rogers bench to the C.K. Williams bench. Last week I sat down long enough to read Rogers’s posted “The Family Is All There Is,” which ends:

“The family — weavers, reachers, winders and connivers, pumpers, runners, air and bubble riders, rock-sitters, wave-gliders, wire-wobblers, soothers, flagellators — all brothers, sisters, all there is. Name something else.”

It’s a moderately uphill walk to the C.K. Williams poem “The Garden,” which is posted for the world to read in a shady spot, and which ends as something alights on the poet’s hand and, startled, he instinctively, inadvertently flinches it off only to see “a warbler, gray, black, yellow, in flight already away. It stopped near me in a shrub, though, and waited, as though unstartled, as though unafraid, as though to tell me my reflex of fear was no failure, that if I believed I had lost something, I was wrong, because nothing can be lost, of the self, of a lifetime of bringing forth selves.”

Closet Poet

Writing about Don Draper during the first season of Mad Men, I asked, “Who else but a closet poet would notice someone in a bar reading Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency and be curious enough to lay hands on it? Like its hero, Mad Men is open to everything, so why not have Jon Hamm reading from Frank O’Hara’s “Mayakovsky” in voiceover, “Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”