Cornelius Eady's "Charlie Chaplin Impersonates a Poet"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

This week The Daily Poem heads to the movies.

Cornelius Eady is the founder of the poetry group Cave Canem and his published collections include Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (Omnation Press, 1986), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (Carnegie Mellon University Press,1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Brutal Imagination (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), a National Book Award finalist; and Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, July 8th, 2004. Today's poem is by Cornelius Eadie, co-founder of the poetry group, a professor at the University of Tennessee, and an all-around delightful human being. And the poem is called Charlie Chaplin impersonates a poet.
0:24.1	A lot of reasons I love this poem that I'll save until I have read it once. So here it is.
0:31.7	The stage is set for imminent disaster. Here is the little tramp standing on a stack of books in order to reach the microphone,
0:40.3	the poet he's impersonating somehow trust and mumbling in a tweed bundle at his feet.
0:45.9	He opens his mouth.
0:47.8	Tra la!
0:49.0	Out comes doves, incandescent bulbs, plastic roses.
0:53.8	Well, that's that, squirmed the young professor
0:56.2	who's coordinated this, no more visiting poets.
0:59.9	His department head groans for the trapdoor.
1:02.8	As it swings away, the tramp keeps on
1:05.2	as if nothing has occurred,
1:07.3	a free arm mimicking a wing.
1:15.1	Okay. a free arm mimicking a wing. Well, it's the dead of summer.
1:17.5	I don't know if you can...
1:18.6	Can you call the middle of summer?
1:21.5	The dead of summer?
1:22.8	The dead of winter makes sense.
1:24.0	Everything is frozen and bare.
1:26.9	But if you live in the south, I think the phrase, the dead of summer maybe makes sense. Everything is frozen and bare. But if you live in the South, I think the
1:30.1	phrase, the dead of summer maybe makes sense to you too. Anyway, it is smack dab in the middle of
1:34.5	summer. It's the time of year that I associate more than any other time with movies, with the
	...

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