Jeannie, Samantha, and Me

Happy Everything takes on marriage in pop culture and IRL: one poem in particular tackles two titans of 1960s television in both form and content.

My first book, Happy Everything, is available for preorder now and will make its way into the world (and into your hands) in February 2024. You can learn more about the book and my journey to publication here.

From time to time as my book nears its due date, I’ll be posting some deep dives into the pop culture references it contains. Want to preorder the book before you dig into this week’s post and support local bookstores at the same time? Look no further than Bookshop.org, a platform that gives back to indie bookstores. I love it:

One poem that appears exclusively in the book, “I Dream of Dick—He Dreams of a Woman in a Bottle,” refers to both Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie: staples of 1960s television with a semi-shared premise. Bewitched, ABC’s smash hit that ran from 1964-1972, incited the creation of rival network NBC’s Jeannie, which aired from 1965-1970.

As an elder millennial, I was raised on 1990s Nick at Nite, which, at that time, aired television classics like I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Taxi, and the shows mentioned above about magical women. My mother was happy enough to have me consume those shows without much supervision, assured that they were “safe” for me to watch. And they were, if by “safe” you mean devoid of graphic sex, violence, or language. But what those shows did contain was a healthy dose of conflicting generational attitudes about women.

Jeannie and Samantha, for example, are strong, supernaturally powered women who see fit to submit to the 1960s housewife paradigm. Jeannie’s situation is invariably worse, as Tony likes to keep her in her bottle rather than allow her to come out and live life as she wishes. Lucy Ricardo, Laura Petrie, Elaine Nardo… all the women in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s shows I watched were badass, but they still largely deferred to men and followed rigid gender paradigms. Their nascent feminism was like a TV on mute. Growing up with this media inspired my poem, particularly in the aftermath of my brief first marriage and subsequent divorce.

I’ve never really been afraid of using pop culture in my work, and I’m even less afraid of using television shows that are 60 or more years old. At this point, sitcoms like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie are as baked into the fabric of American cultural life as Hemingway or Citizen Kane. What’s more, as the idea of a monoculture becomes extinct under the fracturing force of the internet, it feels significant to look back to a time when most of America tuned in to the same programs en masse. Scrutinizing what those magnetic programs said to us can help us think about the kinds of people that were shaped by them. People like me, for example.

“I Dream of Dick” is a concrete poem: a poem whose appearance on the page mimics visual imagery. Concrete poetry is sometimes stereotyped as a form for amateurs or children—a kind of party trick. While it’s true that many students do play with the form and end up with a poem that does nothing more than achieve the visual look they desired without offering much in the way of content, I’m proud of this poem because it paints a picture both visually and in terms of imagery while also respecting the opportunities afforded by the poetic line. The marriage of form and content feels deeply right here, to me.

The poem is arranged visually on the page to take the shape of Jeannie’s bottle: a highly feminized object in the original series. The utterance—the content of the poem—then literally elapses inside the bottle. A major theme of Happy Everything has to do with what Diane Seuss called “the ache of containment” in her praise for the book.

One thing that I believe made the poem successful is the fact that when I began drafting it, it was not a concrete poem. The subject matter and original impulses that led me to the page came first, during a National Poetry Month 30/30 challenge. I set up with some friends (shoutout to writing accountability projects!) After I got partway into the draft, however, I remember feeling a bit intrigued by the idea of a short, and I mean super short, line. Once I started playing around with line lengths, including both short and long, I started to wonder if it might be possible to shape the poem in a certain way. I soon realized the shape I was sketching just might be Jeannie’s bottle.

The lines become longer and longer toward the end of the poem, as the bottle flares out toward its wider base. This worked for me because the utterance of the speaker takes on a more breathless, explanatory, and slightly frustrated tone. What begins as a measured, thoughtful portrait that the speaker draws with great intentionality becomes something much more visceral. It’s a bit like the feeling I experience when I turn away from poetry and toward creative nonfiction to make myself understood, to find more real estate for more complex thoughts and narratives.

Concrete poetry is a very strong spice. An entire book of concrete poems would be insufferable, each poem losing its power by proximity to other poems attempting the same shape, some more successful and integrating form and content than the others. They’re either hits or misses, as the saying goes. I hope what I’ve created here is a hit.

Photo by Bruna Araujo on Unsplash

What do you think? Do you write concrete poetry? Teach it? Were you also raised by Nick at Nite, like I was? Who would win in a fight: Samantha Stevens or Jeannie? Let me know in the comments. I’d really love to hear from you.

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