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. more