Poetry & Popular Culture

P&PC Anecdote: "The Heart of the Apple"

2012-01-27T13:26:00.015-06:00

Two years ago, P&PC offered continuing, if sporadic, coverage of a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class that was being taught in the English Department at Willamette University—a class that field tripped to the annual Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, and that delved into microfilm archives to read and study poetry that was published in The New Northwest, a Portland-based, suffragist newspaper edited in the latter part of the nineteenth century by Oregon women's rights leader Abigail Scott Duniway. Another instantiation of that class is being offered this semester, and a P&PC representative will drop in from time to time to see what's up, especially since the archival work in The New Northwest is so timely this year, what with 2012 marking the centennial of women's suffrage in Oregon and all. Our sources tell us that there are interesting interdisciplinary activities afoot this semester, and we will bring coverage of those activities as we get it.

For the moment, however, we wanted to share a brief and humorous exchange that occurred in "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" regarding the funky piece of advertising pictured here—a 5x7-inch poetry postcard issued around 1914 by the Commercial Bank & Trust Company (billed as "The Bank that Helps the Man Who Helps Himself") of Wenatchee, Washington. It's got a blank back side and a poem on front by Viola Adella Gill who was married to Major Edwin S. Gill and died August 28, 1922, in Chambers Prairie, Washington, just outside of Olympia. (Wenatchee, btw, is about 140 miles due East of Seattle.)

Having just read Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse's introduction to Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture, the class—which had already read work investigating the relationship between literature and region by the 12 Southerners, Mary Austin, Eric Sundquist, June Howard, and Richard Brodhead—was especially attuned to Fetterley and Pryse's notions that (a) regionalism is a discursive phenomenon and not a natural, geographic one, and (b) since regionalist writing is alert to the power relationships of place, the best of such writing is also concerned with the ways that those place-based power relationships affect gender roles and identities, especially in the nineteenth century when the "separate spheres" ideology located men and women in particular places that were presumed to be most natural for them (women in the home, men in public). It was no surprise, then, when the class keyed in on the phrase "each in its place, united" that is the penultimate line of Davis's "The Heart of the Apple":

There's music in the laughter
Of a child like this above;
There's health, content, and plenty,
In the valley that we love;
The apples catch the gorgeous tints
Of Autumn's evening skies,
The people's hearts are kind and true
Warm greetings in their eyes.
Schools and churches are close at hand,
To uplift mind and soul,
Each in its place, united,
Helps to form a Perfect Whole.

The poem, one student quickly and rightly remarked, naturalizes the notion that people have an organic relationship with—and even become an expression of—the land. The "Heart of the Apple" in the poem's title, for example, mirrors the "kind and true" hearts of the people in line 7, as the soil in the "valley that we love" is imagined to produce human beings and fruit that, in the abstract at least, have similar anatomies. And the expression "each in its place," another student observed, recalls the "separate spheres" rhetoric of the nineteenth century—men do things in certain places, women do things in certain other places (as satirized in the cartoon here)—while applying that rhetoric to commercial ends as well, as money, the advertisement argues, belongs in its place too: in the vaults at the Commercial Bank & Trust Company. Not a bad analysis, right?

So here comes the punchline of this anecdote, at least as reported by our P&PC johnny-on-the-spot:

Professor: If each thing has "its place," then what do we make of the baby's face being located in the middle of the apple—seemingly out of place from where we'd normally see it?

Student #1: Actually, the logic of the overlap works perfectly, suggesting that we raise our children just as we raise our produce. In the "Perfect Whole," they do occupy the same "place" conceptually speaking.

Professor: What are the implications of a logic that imagines the raising of human children to be the same type of activity as the cultivation of apples?

[Dramatic pause]

Student #2 [wittily]: We get to eat the children once they're ripe!

That's the news from "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest," where Jonathan Swift is looking on, where all the students are above average, all the professors are good looking, and all the children are, well, the apples of our eyes.

P&PC Book Review: Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture, by Marsha Bryant

2012-01-19T09:00:00.004-06:00

Fact: These days, the most exciting academic work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry is being done by women critics and scholars like Maria Damon, Melissa Girard, Virginia Jackson, Meredith Martin, Meredith McGill, Adalaide Morris, Catherine Robson, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Angela Sorby. (N.B. As anyone who attended the 2008 “Lifting Belly High” conference that focused on twentieth-century women’s poetry will attest, that’s hardly a complete list, but it’s not a bad start.) The most recent example of such scholarship comes from P&PC hero and University of Florida English professor Marsha Bryant, who is the author of the new book Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) that we get to talk about here.

Fact: Collectively, the books, essays, and digital projects by these and other women scholars are pushing frontiers of how to read, understand, and study poetry, breaking down outdated binaries like “raw” and “cooked,” “oppositional” and “quietist,” lyric and non lyric. They are studying poetries in the plural (not Poetry) as cultural forces and as ways of thinking linked both to the everyday and the ideal, with sources in mass, popular, and counter cultures, computers and archives, transnational circuits of exchange, and public and political spheres. They are finding poetry in schoolrooms, diaries, letters, magazines, radios, cafes, movies, nature field guides, civic events, art centers, handbooks, slams, and digital pixels, as well as in books and little magazines. For them, “poetry” refers to a diverse set of historical phenomena ranging from what Damon calls fugitive “micropoetries” to intentionally epic-length works like Helen in Egypt, one of the texts that Bryant (pictured here) examines at length in Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture.

Fact: P&PC knows some of these people personally, and some of them we’ve never met. But to a one (and at risk of sounding cheesy) we’re inspired by them all.

Back in 1989, Susan Lanser published “ ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Politics of Color in America”—an essay that used the example of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s now-canonical short story to praise how feminist literary criticism changed and opened up the practice of literary studies and yet had its own blind spots; in focusing solely on the liberation of the imprisoned women in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Lanser claimed, feminist scholars “may have stopped short, and our readings … may have reduced the text’s complexity to what we need most: our own image reflected back to us.” In revealing the limits of feminism’s “relentless pursuit of a single meaning”—a pursuit that initially freed readers from a patriarchal canon and critical method even as it was threatening to become restrictive insofar as it approached texts as primarily about gender from a white, middle-class perspective—Lanser studied the yellowness of the yellow wallpaper, a central detail of the story that, amazingly, had escaped all but the most marginal commentary by critics.

As one reads Lanser’s essay today, it is almost possible to imagine the lightbulb moment when Lanser asked herself “But why is the wallpaper yellow—and not red, or purple or green?” Lanser’s subsequent re-reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is superb and superbly challenging, as she ties the color yellow to discourses of race and immigration in America at the time of the story’s writing (the late nineteenth century)—discourses that used the word “yellow” as a pejorative, catch-all description to refer to non-Nordic peoples including African Americans, Chinese, Jewish, Irish, and Italians. Putting the racial connotations of “yellow” in conversation with Gilman’s own complicated politics—Gilman was a socialist and feminist who nevertheless took anti-immigration and pro-eugenics stances and imagined "yellow" peoples as inherently more patriarchal and less capable of personal improvement than Nordic ones—Lanser reveals the woman trapped in and behind the yellow wallpaper to have a complicated ethnic-female identity with which the story’s narrator is simultaneously repulsed and seeking to free. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Lanser claimed, is not a story about woman’s predicament in a male dominated world generally speaking, but one about that predicament as it intersects with the ambivalences and contradictions of race and ethnicity.

In Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture, Bryant pursues something of the same approach as Lanser—examining the limits that feminist literary criticism has set up in the process of challenging the traditional literary canon and methods of literary scholarship—by taking on the oft-held feminist assumption that the woman poet always writes as an outsider and is thus primarily seeking, and engaged in, activities of transgression, subversion, parody, and critique. Scholars tend to assume, Bryant claims, “that women poets set out to subvert the mainstream” and therefore always offer “an oppositional aesthetic, a counter-discourse” when, in reality, they may write as cultural insiders as well. “The wide scope of women’s poetry does not conform to the contours of loyal opposition,” Bryant writes. “Even the signature styles of our key figures are more vested in the mainstream than we think.”

Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture thus revisits and rereads the work of several "key figures" in relation to their respective connections to the mainstream—sustained connections or motifs that Bryant calls their “signature styles”—and for how they claim the cultural center and write as cultural insiders rather than as outsiders. Chapter One focuses on the “CinemaScope poetics” of H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, a book that appeared the same year that Warner Brothers released the movie Helen of Troy (1956) and that borrows from the “cinematic ruptures of popular film and postwar geopolitics.” Chapter Two argues that the innovation in Stevie Smith’s funky illustrated poems (such as the one pictured here) was made possible in part by well-established practices in children’s literature. Chapter Three explores how the “cross-racial inspection” of Gwendolyn Brooks’s postwar poetry that “make[s] whiteness visible” owes a debt to the strategies of Ebony magazine and thus becomes “not simply a counter-discourse, but central to the national conversation about race” at the time. Indeed, Bryant writes, “Racial politics and popular culture contribute as much as modernist influences to the much-remarked difficulty of Brooks’s postwar poetry.” Chapter Four finds that many of the strange or surreal images in Sylvia Plath’s poetry pull directly from images of domesticity appearing in 1950s women’s magazines. And Chapter Five argues that the famous (and famously creepy) persona poems of Ai and Carol Ann Duffy—poems that resist confessional modes of communicating the “feminine” self in favor of creating portraits of serial killers and child abusers—have direct analogues if not sources in a “mainstream extreme” frequently encountered in sensational journalism and TV shows such as America’s Most Wanted.

In a paragraph seemingly included to answer just the sort of question that the P&PC office interns might consider raising, Bryant explains that Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture focuses on canonical or near-canonical poets—rather than on the many, now forgotten women poets who wrote with mass audiences in mind and regularly published in newspapers and mass-circulation magazines—for three main reasons: (1) because studying “established poets allow[s] for a reorientation of the field” since the field values them and calibrates itself in relationship to them; (2) because they are widely available in anthologies and thus don’t require recovery projects or archives to access; and (3) because many of these poets “prove difficult to position as cultural outsiders” in the first place, given how they’ve been lauded and honored in literary culture; they are prize winners, poet laureates, and even (especially in the case of Plath) figures recognized in and by the mass media. We here at the P&PC office can understand all that and, now that Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture has opened up the subject of women writing as insiders and not solely as members of a "loyal opposition," we hope that other scholars will check out the careers of poets who aren’t held in such high esteem today—poets like Anne Campbell, Grace Noll Crowell, 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winner Phyllis McGinley (pictured here on the cover of Time), Nancy Byrd Turner, Helen Welshimer, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, for example—and who made not just their poetry but, in some cases, their livings from positions writing inside mainstream popular and mass culture.

If this is one doorway that Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture opens up for other scholars, then there’s another that P&PC sees as maybe a bit more dicey but all the more provocative for being so. All of the poets showcased by Bryant take popular and mass cultural resources and turn them into opportunities for good art and innovative, usually progressive ends; that is, even though they operate as cultural insiders rather than outsiders, these poets still (inevitably?) produce politically or artistically progressive poetry. H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, for example, “calls into question the privileged masculinity of Homeric epic” even as it replicates some of the strategies of Warner Brothers. Smith’s poetry is read in relation to the mainstream but is celebrated for “the counterintuitive innovations” that result from Smith’s engagement with that mainstream. In her “artful forms,” Brooks (pictured here) perceptively and intentionally “pressured the rigid dualities of US racism.” Plath (Bryant calls her “a poet of Madison Avenue”) “did not just write domestic poetry; she reinvented it … by tapping the rich ambiguities and strange images of the everyday” and by making “poetry a form of cultural analysis.” All of which is to say that once Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture has broken apart the assumption that women poets are by default outsiders, it risks replacing that assumption with another: that when women poets do write as insiders, they generally succeed, innovate, transform, and write progressive poetry. In a postscript titled “Key Notes: Manifesto for Women’s Poetry Studies,” Bryant writes:

Too many of us still believe that a woman’s poem must resist popular culture to be successful. But we have seen that it offers poets aesthetic inspiration as well as an ideological sounding board. As artful consumers, poets open their signature styles to the graphic and the glossy, the screen and the scene. Modern and contemporary women poets take popular culture into their work, and readers must take it into fuller account.

To the end of more fully accounting for this overlooked feature of twentieth-century women’s poetry, we here at P&PC think it would also be worth having examples of scholarship that don’t cast women’s writing from the center as an almost uniformly successful activity, but as one entailing various sets of compromises and perhaps even failures as well. That is to say, Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture is so successful at what it does—making the links between women’s poetry, popular culture, and the cultural mainstream indisputable—that some more ambivalent or even negative examples would be worth including in the mix. Bryant has shown us how the center offers a set of resources for writers who then successfully use them, but where did other attempts to engage or write from the center limit or disable women writers, and how? Where did they fall short or go wrong, and why? Where and why do the forces of the market or insider positions (ideological or otherwise) curtail or confine them (one might even say get them to “sell out”), and how might those examples round out our sense of the dynamic intersection that Bryant has challenged us to map? It’s not an impossible task. To do so in regard to women’s poetry, however, would mean stretching feminist literary theory in yet another unconventional direction—one that would critique or call out, in addition to praising, showcasing, or representing for the poetry—and thus ensure that our operating assumptions as readers and critics don’t become as entrenched as they were before people like Bryant took them to task.

Just Published: The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

2012-01-12T11:06:00.020-06:00

P&PC curates a bunch of small, idiosyncratic collections—such as the one with nothing in it but advertising poetry about life insurance, for example, or the one containing only books by Edna St. Vincent Millay that have newspaper clippings stored inside of them. The smallest and most idiosyncratic of all, however, may be a set of three wallets or portfolios that somehow over the years, perhaps like the Spotted Elephant and the Charlie-in-the-Box that made it to the Island of Misfit Toys, found their ways to the P&PC home office. All contain important fire-box or safety deposit box documents like marriage licenses, discharge papers from the army, insurance forms, and selective service papers. And, as with the portfolio pictured here—which once belonged to Texas-born Porter K. Mason, a Major in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Army who spent time in India during World War II—they all contain poems. The poem in Mason's wallet (placed on top of the paperwork in the photo and just to the right of the family photograph) is a professionally-printed excerpt from Rudyard Kipling's 1892 poem "The Naulahka"—an excerpt in the way of a cautionary tale that Time magazine reports being widely quoted by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam in the 1960s as well:

Now it is not good for the Christian's health,
To hustle the Aryan brown;
For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles,
And he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased;
And the epitaph drear: A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East.

The mixture of official documents and poetry in these wallets intrigues us in part because, while the documents would appear to enforce or at least prioritize a standardized, bureaucratic life narrative—birth, marriage, enlistment, discharge from the army, etc.—the poems don't signify as clearly, and they thus testify to aspects of a lived life that are not reducible to paperwork. That is, they add an element of subjectivity or opaqueness to an otherwise objectified or transparently-recorded human existence. It may be impossible to determine exactly why each person included the poems he did—why did Ralph Edmond Baxter (portfolio pictured here) include the newspaper clippings of James Metcalfe's "Portraits" from the Chicago Times (a form of rhyming prose poem called a poemulation in Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel Babbitt) along with his "separation from military service" and incomplete application for membership in the Illinois American Legion, for example?—but the juxtaposition of official and poetic discourses suggests each person's impulse to complicate or augment the bureaucratic structures that reduce their lives to dates, forms, and numbers.

In the recently published Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (2012) edited by University of Illinois poetry scholar and former AAUP President Cary Nelson, P&PC got a chance to ruminate on this topic and other relevant issues in greater length, beginning with a portfolio kept by Paul Fox (1893-1943), a World War I veteran, farmer, and "gas man" for the Logan Gas Company from Ohio. In addition to his military discharge papers, his social security card, marriage license, and insurance paperwork, Fox kept a copy of an anti-FDR poem "Rejected," a piece of political satire in which FDR dies and goes to hell, only to be refused admission by the devil. (That's the poem on top of the paperwork in the picture here; a higher-resolution image can be found below.) What keeping this poem might have meant for Fox, how "Rejected" became one of the most widely circulated poems of the 20th century (teaser: it even featured in Nazi propaganda), and what the saving of poems more generally offered to American readers, is the topic of P&PC's contribution to the Handbook, "Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America."

The Oxford Handbook is a pretty amazing project. At seven hundred pages long, it brings together 25 brand-new essays by some of the best and most accomplished scholars out there and covers nearly every topic you can imagine. (For a complete table of contents, click here.) It should become one of the most definitive resources out there, but at $150 a pop in hardback, P&PC can't expect "ordinary readers" to each pick one up for their private collections. In order for the book to go into a more affordable paperback edition, though, it's got to sell enough copies. So we're encouraging you to contact your favorite libraries and encourage them to buy a copy for their collections. Then, both you and all sorts of other people will be able to learn about Fox's copy of "Rejected," how it circulated in Depression-Era America, how it became part of the Nazi propaganda machine, and how Americans made saving and sharing poetry a routine part of their lives in the twentieth century. (Thanks to our savvy team of negotiators and Oxford's generosity, P&PC even scored approval to include nine pictures in its essay, so reading "Material Concerns" should feel a little bit like reading this blog.)

In the way of a trailer-slash-advertisement for "Material Concerns" and the Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, here are the first two paragraphs of P&PC's essay:

Paul Erwin Fox was born on November 21, 1893, in Ohio's Vermillion township, which is now about a forty-five minute drive from the city of Ashland in the north-central part of the state. Except for two years' military service during World War I (he enlisted in the army on September 23, 1917, participated in the first allied offensive victory of the war at the Second Battle of the Marne, and was discharged on August 9, 1919), Fox lived his entire life in Ashland County, first working as a farmer near the village of Sullivan and then as a "gas man" for the Logan Gas Company and the Ohio Fuel Gas Company. With the Rev. T.T. Buell of the Methodist Episcopal Church of nearby Newark presiding, he married Mary Kathryn McManamay on September 14, 1920, and the pair eventually had one son, Donald. Fox had life insurance through the All American Life and Casualty Company of Park Ridge, Illinois, attended the Dickey Church of the Brethren, and was a member of the American Legion's Harry Higgins Post Number 88. He died on May 19, 1943, two days after suffering a stroke while working on a gas well near Medina and six months before reaching his fiftieth birthday.

When Fox died, he left among his belongings a cluster of official documents stored inside a brown, wallet-sized portfolio originally issued with his discharge papers from the army. Those discharge papers, signed by Major H.B. Karkoff at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio, are still intact: Fox's middle name is misspelled "Irvin." To these documents, Fox would later add his social security card, itself contained in a specially designed, chocolate-colored folder marked "Compliments of the Mansfield Typewriter Company" and dated December 12, 1936, making it one of the thirty million issued when the Social Security Board first began mass-registering people nationwide in late November of that year. And then he'd cap off this encapsulated record of his life by adding a poem that may well have been one of the most widely distributed poems of its time, but which few people remember today.

We hope you enjoy the rest of the book!

Enter the 2011 Poetry & Popular Culture Blurb-Writing Contest Today

2011-12-30T16:24:00.022-06:00

At the end of 2010, in the interest of transparency and accountability where outcomes assessment rubrics and measurements are concerned, the P&PC Office made public its first Year-End Report full of statistics and milestones that we used to reassure the P&PC Board of Directors that all is well, that we don't need a bailout from the federal government, and that the blog's C.E.O., office staff, and national correspondents are earning every last cent of their paychecks.

We are currently in the process of assembling P&PC's 2011 Year-End Report, which will be similarly chock full of information—like how the number of unique visitors increased from 29,300 in 2010 to 36,300 in 2011. Or how postings featuring the poetry of zombies, G.I. Jane, geocaching, and The Expendables led the year's most popular reads (in terms of sheer numbers of visitors). Or how we expect to log our 100,000th unique visitor in early 2012.

All that bodes well for the success of our report, of course, but last year the P&PC Board of Directors responded particularly positively to the anecdotal evidence we provided in the form of blurbs from satisfied readers like former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, Harvard English Professor Stephen Burt, Princeton English Professor Meredith Martin, and Sally the P&PC office stenographer. So this year we'd like to provide the Board with a similar data set—and that's where you come in.

We're having our first-ever blurb-writing contest.

Sure, we expect some cynics out there will view this as a shameless plea for affirmation, or as a crass ploy to artificially inflate and misrepresent the public's interest in poetry and popular culture, or as evidence that P&PC has simply reached a new low generally speaking.

To which we respond with an emphatic "fie!" The culture of popular poetry and popular literature has included poetry-related contests for decades if not centuries now. Leon Jackson studies some of these nineteenth-century contests in his great book The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford, 2007), for example. Near the turn into the twentieth century, Ivory Soap held annual poetry-writing contests that elicited tens of thousands of submissions including Charles S. Anderson's "Farmer Jones" (pictured here) which placed eighth out of 27,388 entries in 1893.

Likewise, the Burma-Vita Company held jingle-writing contests every year to generate the Burma-Shave poems that advertised the company's shaving cream until the 1960s. And if a 1909 promotional flier or ink blotter (pictured here) is any indication, the Hamilton Brown Shoe Makers Company of St. Louis followed the same strategy, announcing, "We will give a watch each to the ten boys and girls who send us, before July 1st, 1909, the best verse about Security Shoes and Security Watches." In fact, it may well be that this contest history is one of the more obscure foundations for today's poetry slam scene, which regularly features competitions and awards ranging from cold hard cash to white elephant prizes.

So it's not just fitting but perhaps imperative for P&C to at least once dovetail itself with this history. And so it is that we announce the 2011 Poetry & Popular Culture Blurb-Writing Contest—in which the best two blurbs praising P&PC will each win a copy of Poetry after Cultural Studies, a "searching" eight-essay collection from the University of Iowa Press that studies "an astonishing range of poetic practices" including wartime postcard poetry, the poetry of the early U.S. environmental movement, political working-class poetry from nineteenth-century England, the verse of MySpace and avant garde music, and the writing of Sylvia Plath, Edouard Glissant, and James Norman Hall.

A $39.95 value, this set of original essays by Edward Brunner, Alan Ramon Clinton, Maria Damon, Margaret Loose, Cary Nelson, Carrie Noland, Angela Sorby, and Barrett Watten has been described by Stephen Burt as "an important part of debates about what poets do, what their poems are good for." We here at P&PC believe no library is complete without it.

So here's the drill:

1) Write the most poetic, creative, inspired, and provocative blurb that you can about P&PC, its value in the world, and/or its general awesomeness. It's not mandatory that your blurb be in poetic form, but it may be if you choose.

2) Then by Friday, January, 13, 2012, submit your blurb about P&PC, its value in the world, and/or its general awesomeness, to P&PC in one of two ways: either post it (and some sort of contact information) in the comments section of this posting, or email it to mchasar@gmail.com.

3) The P&PC Office in Salem, OR, will judge, selecting what we deem to be the two best blurbs to headline our 2011 Year-End Report to the Board of Directors. The writers of those blurbs will each receive a copy of Poetry after Cultural Studies and special feature on the blog.

On behalf of the entire P&PC Office, we wish you all the best in the new year, and we look forward to hearing from you by January 13. Happy blurbing!

Shaving Santa

2011-12-22T11:35:00.006-06:00

Getting Ready for Christmas: An Advent Calendar from Hallmark

2011-12-16T11:14:00.015-06:00

It's not the first poem that P&PC ever encountered—that distinction probably goes to the quirky "I went to the animal fair" verse that dad used to recite—but it's pretty darn close. We're talking about the 24-line holiday poem printed verse by verse behind the 24 doors and windows of three brick houses featured in the tri-fold "Getting Ready for Christmas" Hallmark advent calendar pictured here. (That's panel one you see here; panels two and three follow in sequence below, concluded by a panoramic photo of the card completely opened up.)

Like the Hallmark Christmas card matchbook featured on P&PC about this time last year and pictured here, the advent calendar solicits an unusual amount of reader involvement to get at the poem; but unlike the matchbook, where the reader is invited to dismantle or deconstruct the poem matchstick by matchstick, the advent calendar asks the reader to help build the poem line by line and window by window in an act of constructive reading that runs parallel to, or perhaps even tropes, the houses that were built brick by brick to shelter them.

If you've spent any time around the P&PC office, the accentuated sequential nature of this window-by-window poem probably brings to mind the old rhyming Burma-Shave billboards that delivered poems in line by line (and sign by sign) units along American highways until the 1960s. Burma Shave's billboards awesomely staged the experience of the poetic line break by setting up signs/lines 100 feet apart from one another—thus letting the driver/reader ride in the exaggerated "white space" between individual lines for several moments. The advent calendar does the Burma-Shave poems one better, though. Because one is supposed to open one window or door every day for each of the 24 days leading up to Christmas, it effectively creates line breaks measured not in terms of seconds on the highway but in terms of days; that is, if the poem is read as intended, each line break in "Getting Ready for Christmas" is effectively 24 hours long!

As scholastically appealing as "Getting Ready for Christmas" is (we might go on to ask, for example, what sort of voyeuristic holiday experience Hallmark is asking us to have in opening all of these windows and doors as we let our fingers do the strolling, caroler-like, through the little neighborhood), we at P&PC value it more for reasons external to the card itself—for its family history. According to Mom (née Ann Salvatore), it was first given to her and her brother Jim in Cleveland, probably in the early 1950s. (Ann had it, or large parts of it, memorized if I remember correctly.) Then they sent it to my great-aunt Tillie Boye (née Matilda Danca) and her children in Lincoln, Nebraska, later that decade. Then the Boyes sent it back to Northeast Ohio for Ann to share with with my sister Trish and me (both Chasars) in the 1970s. Then Ann sent it to Tillie's son Alan and his Boye clan, living in Vermont, in 1988. Then Alan sent it back to the suburbs of Cleveland in the 2000s to share with Ann's grandchildren, my niece and nephew, Wayne and Julianna Grindle. Members of the Salvatore, Danca, Boye, Chasar, and Grindle families have thus been "Getting Ready for Christmas" via this poem for well over half a century.

This holiday season, we wish we could send the actual card to you—the extended P&PC family—as well. While we can't do that, we can give you the composite text of the 24-line poem here:

The guests are welcomed at the door
The gifts are piled upon the floor
The cook is making gingerbread
And all are waiting to be fed
The corn is popping almost done
Come and get it everyone!
A taffy pull is in full swing
Cheerful, merry voices ring
The stockings hang all in a row
Outside it has begun to snow
The younger tots have said their prayers
And now are fast asleep upstairs
But one sits by a candlestick to wait awhile for Old St. Nick
The older children laugh with glee and dance and caper 'round the tree
A train for Jack, a doll for Jill, a scarf for Anne and Gloves for Bill
Underneath the mistletoe Jane steals a kiss from her best beau!
Hot things to drink, good things to eat
For every child a special treat
The grown-up folks sit by the grate
The clock says that it's growing late
Everybody stops to spy the Christmas star up in the sky
The Christmas carols now begin
With everybody joining in
And all the doors are opened wide to welcome in the Christmastide!

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Using your imagination, perhaps you can experience something of the thrill this advent calendar poem offered and, in the process, open a few doors and windows onto where P&PC comes from. Happy holidays all.

From the Poetry & Popular Culture Vault: Robert Frost's Greeting Cards (Originally Posted December 24, 2008)

2011-12-09T18:35:00.002-06:00

Like many establishments this time of year, “Poetry & Popular Culture” recently held its annual Christmas office party. Over a couple of pints at our favorite local watering hole, Shakespeare's Bar & Grill, we exchanged seasonal rhymes and reflected on the state of holiday greeting card verse. Indeed, the kitchen table still has a stack of cards waiting to be posted. The poetry in them isn't pretty either, and even "Poetry & Popular Culture" staff members (particularly Polly the Paper Shredder and Carl the Copy Boy) found it hard not to shudder at lines such as these inside an American Greetings card:

Christmas...
the best time to remember
the nicest people
in the warmest way

Or consider this next example, inside a Hallmark card that features a skiing penguin dressed in stocking cap and scarf jumping joyfully off an icy slope:

great joy
good cheer
all yours
all year!

This quatrain isn't entirely unremarkable. We kind of like how lines 1 & 2 are tied together by the alliteration of "great" and "good" just as 3 & 4 are linked by "yours" and "year." Even more, we like how those alliterative couplets get broken by the rhyme of "cheer" and "year" between lines 2 & 4—an abcb rhyming pattern that makes us think of the common measure of many hymns, which is quite appropriate given the season's religious orientation. Nevertheless, the poem left us definitely underwhelmed—not a very common experience here at "Poetry & Popular Culture."

All of this made me think of Robert Frost and printer Joseph Blumenthal. For nearly 30 years (from 1935 to 1962, at least), Frost and Blumenthal partnered up to produce finely-printed, delicately-illustrated Christmas cards featuring Frost's poetry, such as the 1961 card pictured to the left. Blumenthal, who ran the Spiral Press of New York from 1926 to 1971—the press for which the typeface now known as Emerson was first designed—made it a practice to work with well-known writers such as W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers and Franklin Roosevelt. So it was with Frost, though it's probably more accurate to call the Frost-Blumenthal productions holiday "greetings" rather than "cards," since many of them were in fact small, saddle-stapled chapbooks and not cards as such.

Some of the greetings reprinted well-known poems such as "The Wood-Pile" (which first appeared, in book form, in North of Boston [1915]) but many others purported to present "a new poem by Robert Frost." This performance of newness—the unveiling of a new poem just in time for Christmas—must have appealed to the people who bought the cards & sent them out, the patrons of Spiral Press and thus patrons of Frost. For not only did Frost send them to his own friends and family, and not only did Blumenthal send them to express his season's greetings, but the Spiral Press printed them for other parties as well. As you can see from the greeting page to the left, Blumenthal left space so he could personalize each card—here in a different color ink—which was no doubt a major selling point for the consumer, who could claim in a roundabout way partial responsibility for the poem's coming-into-being.

Spiral Press worked with a number of artists over the years, each of whom produced designs that go beautifully with Frost's work despite the frequent disconnection of those designs from overtly seasonal themes (see the very cool atomic motif decorating the cover of "Some Science Fiction" to the left, for example). Nowadays the cards are collectors' items you can find on eBay and elsewhere—$25 a pop for some, up to $500 for others that have been signed. We here at "Poetry & Popular Culture" have seen our fair share of them thanks to the nice collection housed in the Special Collections division of the University of Iowa's Libraries. We look forward to piecing together a more complete history of the cards. Who initiated the collaboration? What was the annual press run? Did the press have a list of subscribers committed to buying a set every year, and how much money did Blumenthal and Frost eventually make off of the limited editions?

There is a special link between Frost and Christmas in the American mind, one that Frost and his publishers weren't afraid to play up. Take, for example, Frost's Snow to Snow, a 1936 chapbook issued by Henry Holt & Company which presents twelve of Frost's well-known verses, each one corresponding to a month of the year and ending with December's Christmassy "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." The singular importance of "Stopping By Woods" is established by a facsimile of the handwritten manuscript placed prior to the table of contents. Thus, while the book ends in Christmas, it also begins there as well.

Did Frost write with the potential marketability of Christmas-related items in mind? The poem "Christmas Trees"—first printed in Mountain Interval (1920) and four years later on the broadside seen just above—suggests maybe so. Interestingly, this broadside version of "Christmas Trees" leaves off the subtitle that Frost appended to the poem: "A Christmas Circular Letter." Indeed, while he may not have been thinking of Christmas cards as early as 1920, this subtitle suggests he was well aware of the special communicative moment that holiday greetings might afford a poet who remained open to its possibilities.

A Different World: The Power of the Pen

2011-12-02T18:09:00.004-06:00

Originally aired on February 18, 1990, this hilarious episode of the Bill Cosby-created show A Different World—in which Dwayne Wayne is visited by the ghost of Shakespeare who has been "roused from my sleep, sleep that knits the raveled sleeve of care, to, uh, discuss your apathy toward poetry"—is a classic in the P&PC television archive.

Breaking P&PC News for Thanksgiving 2011: Edgar Guest Meets Chrysler

2011-11-24T14:28:00.006-06:00

As you're watching today's Lions-Packers game, keep an eye out for the latest video ad (find your preview below) from the Portland-based advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy—the folks who created the engaging, if problematic, pairings of Levi's and Walt Whitman, Levi's and Charles Bukowski, and Nike and Maya Angelou. In their newest project, W+K bring together Chrysler and longtime Detroit-based newspaper poet Edgar Guest (a P&PC fave), all set to a Muddy Waters soundtrack.

The Economic Lessons of "The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'"

2011-11-20T13:18:00.020-06:00

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) wrote "The Deacon's Masterpiece, or The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'" in 1858. Around 1876, the noted Philadelphia carriage builders, D.M. Lane & Son, reprinted the poem inside a small cardboard pamphlet (pictured here) advertising their company's "Large Stock of Light and Heavy Carriages, of the Newest Designs and Finest Finish"—coaches, coupes, rockaways, bretts, phaetons, buggies, drags, and Jenny Lind carriages including the 1876 Centennial Road and Speed Wagon featured on front.

Holmes (pictured here) was nationally known, of course; a physician-professor at Harvard, writer of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table essays that first ran in The Atlantic Monthly, and author of "Old Ironsides," he was one of the six Fireside Poets whose picture graced the hearths of homes around the country. D.M. Lane & Son was no slouch either, as it turns out. If people were setting Holmes's picture on the mantle, then it was likely that many of them sat themselves in vehicles made or designed by the Lane establishment.

After the death of his father "Captain" Lane—who had started out as a blacksmith, had led a group of one hundred men to fight in the Civil War, and who died suddenly in 1882—son Millard (ahem) took the company's reigns and presided over a period of rapid innovation and expansion in carriage construction and design. In 1893, Millard was appointed President of the Carriage Builders' National Association, praised for his progressive attitude and business methods as well as the company's "splendid factory and spacious ware-rooms." "Mr. Lane is a man," Carriage Monthly wrote, "of fine personal appearance, with a measure of dignity in his bearing that does not interfere with his frank and genial manners." Hub magazine agreed. "He is an energetic, painstaking business man, to whom work is a pleasure ... In social life he is equally popular, and his fitness and ability have led to his connection with various local organizations."

Millard would helm the family business until his own death in 1901—the same year that Mr. Ransom Olds opened his first assembly line plant to speed up and streamline the manufacture of the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, the first mass-produced automobile in history. Of course, the carriage industry did not disappear overnight—it would take another ten or fifteen years for Henry Ford to fully refine and harness the potential of the assembly line—but the transition was a remarkably fast one nonetheless. By 1914, cars were coming off of Ford's assembly line so quickly that the painting process caused a bottleneck (only black paint would dry fast enough to keep pace with manufacturing), and the cost of a single automobile dropped to almost half of what it was six or seven years earlier. According to Wiki, by 1914 it was taking only 93 minutes to assemble a car at Ford's factories, and an assembly line worker could purchase a Model T with four months' pay.

In retrospect, then, can we read in Millard's death and the "end of the wonderful one-hoss shay" the fate of D.M. Lane's carriage business writ large—indeed, not just the fate of the particular industry that the Lanes helped to drive, but in relation to every boom-and-bust cycle since? Here are the poem's final two stanzas, in which the parson's carriage—a prescient metaphor for what happens when one puts too much trust in the modern economy's claims to flawlessness and permanence—"went to pieces all at once":

The parson was working his Sunday text—
Had got to fifthly, and stopped perplexed
At what the—Moses—was coming next.
All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet'n'-house on the hill.
—First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill—
And then the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet'n'-house clock—
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!

What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once—
All at once and nothing first—
Just as bubbles do when they burst.—
End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.
Logic is Logic. That's all I say.

It is fairly common for today's literary critics to imagine the Fireside Poets, including Holmes, to be voices of convention who were intellectually and poetically disabled by their nostalgia for a rural, religiocentric America and intense suspicion of the pace, technological invention, and changing values of modern life. "Ultimately," John Timberman Newcomb explains in Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity, for example, "their refusal to accept the idea that poetry should, or could, grapple with the sources and effects of modern emotional dispossession not only damaged their own reputations, but seriously undermined poetry's place in American life." We here at P&PC aren't going to claim that the Fireside Poets weren't invested in pre-modern values and lifestyles, but maybe—as the bursting bubble that dispossesses the parson of his carriage in "The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'" suggests—they weren't entirely blind to the character of modernity, either, nor did they refuse to have their poetry engage or analyze its dynamics. Holmes's parson, after all, is not unlike many homeowners in today's America—surprised at "the hour of the Earthquake shock" to find himself out in the cold and sitting on a rock. One can only hope he had paid off his carriage before that bubble burst.

Remembrance Day & the Case of the $400,000,000 Poem

2011-11-10T20:55:00.021-06:00

We here at the P&PC Home Office like to call it the four hundred million dollar poem—and not just because its first stanza appears on the back of the Canadian $10 bank note, a fact that, all by itself, may very well make "In Flanders Fields" the most reprinted and most widely circulated poem, like, ever. No, we call John McCRae's World War I-era verse the four hundred million dollar poem because, shortly after it appeared in the December 8, 1915 issue of Punch magazine, the Canadian government made it the central piece of its p.r. campaign advertising the sale of the first Victory Loan Bonds, printing it, or excerpts from it, on billboards and posters like the one pictured above. According to Canadian Veterans Affairs, the campaign was designed to raise $150,000,000 but ended up netting—wait for it—over $400,000,000.

Whoever said that "poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper" clearly wasn't thinking of McCrae's rondeau, which is the centerpiece of Remembrance or Veterans Day (November 11) activities worldwide and turned the red or "Buddy" poppy into the day's icon, manufacture and sale of which has been a regular source of funding for disabled and needy VFW veterans, as well as for the support of war orphans and surviving spouses of veterans in the U.S., since 1923. It is memorized by schoolkids, recited at Remembrance Day events, has elicited all sorts of reply poems and been put to music, and resulted in the restoration of McCrae's birthplace in Guelph, Ontario, as a museum. (That's McCrae pictured above.) Heck, in Ypres, Belgium, there's a museum devoted just to the poem itself! Take that, Joyce Kilmer!

By most accounts, McCrae composed "In Flanders Fields" in 1915, the day after witnessing the death of his 22 year-old friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, though legend has it that McCrae ripped it out of his notebook and cast it aside amongst the blood-red poppies on the battlefield where it was rescued by an onlooker and sent to Punch, which printed it anonymously:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly.
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

By 1917, the Canadian government paired "In Flanders Fields" with the painting of a soldier standing in the poppy fields by British-born Canadian artist Frank Lucien Nicolet and was raising its millions of dollars in Victory Loan Bonds.

In the most famous piece of literary-critical commentary on "In Flanders Fields," Paul Fussell (see The Great War and Modern Memory) doesn't have too many good things to say about the poem, claiming that the "rigorously regular meter" makes the poppies of the poem's first stanza "seem already fabricated of wire and paper." Nevertheless, he finds the verse "interesting" for the way in which it "manages to accumulate the maximum number of [emotion-triggering] motifs and images ... under the aegis of a mellow, if automatic, pastoralism." In the first nine lines alone, Fussell explains, you've got "the red flowers of pastoral elegy; the 'crosses' suggestive of calvaries and thus of sacrifice; the sky, especially noticeable from the confines of a trench; the larks bravely singing in apparent critique of man's folly; the binary opposition between the song of the larks and the noise of the guns; the special awareness of dawn and sunset at morning and evening stand-to's; the conception of soldiers as lovers; and the focus on the ironic antithesis between beds and the graves 'where now we lie.'" But Fussell saves his most damning critique—what he calls "[breaking] this butterfly upon the wheel"—for the poem's final lines which devolve into what he calls "recruiting-poster rhetoric apparently applicable to any war." "We finally see—and with a shock—" he writes, "what the last lines really are: they are a propaganda argument—words like vicious and stupid would not seem to go too far—against a negotiated peace." (For another examination of the poem in relation to McCrae's Canadian national identity and the rondeau form, see Amanda French's paper "Poetic Propaganda and the Provincial Patriotism of 'In Flanders Fields'" first presented at the 2005 SCMLA conference.)

But Fussell's right, isn't he? As the slogan "If ye break faith—we shall not sleep" in the "Buy Victory Bonds" ad pictured at the top of this posting indicates, McCrae's poem was in fact pitch-perfect "recruiting-poster rhetoric," wasn't it? Well, almost. P&PC would submit that it's worth noting how the Canadian government didn't exactly quote "In Flanders Fields" word for word. Instead, it excised the four words ("with us who die") that separate "If ye break faith" from "we shall not sleep" in the original poem—an act that works to repress the war's human costs and thus redirect the expression of faith to its financial ones. That is, in staging itself as an act of remembrance, the Canadian advertisement actually erases the subject of the McCrae's memorial ("us who die"). In this bowdlerized version of the poem—and we use the term bowdlerize on purpose, meaning "to remove those parts of a text considered offensive, vulgar, or otherwise unseemly"—the poster sanitizes the war by silencing the voices of its dead, depicting war as a financial and not human struggle and thus making the "propaganda argument ... against a negotiated peace" that Fussell describes.

But the repressed has a way of returning, just like the dead do. Consider, for example, the awesome item (pictured here) that P&PC got its hands on recently—a used ink blotter with Canada's "Buy Victory Bonds" ad featured on front. On the reverse, the ink stains grimly read like blood stains. And on the front (where the pun asks us to also read it as the battle line of war), the artifact's owner Vivian Hogarth signed her name in the upper right corner and corrected Canada's version of the poem, restoring the phrase "with us who die" and thus—in an act of what we might think of as zombie poetics—effectively writing the dead back into existence. Thank you, Vivian Hogarth. That's the type of memorial we're keeping in mind this Remembrance Day.

Stephen Colbert Recites a Republican Healthcare Haiku

2011-11-01T13:43:00.001-05:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

6/8/11 in :60 Seconds

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

Rethinking Poetic Innovation at the Modernist Studies Association Conference

2011-10-22T14:29:00.007-05:00

Earlier this month, P&PC had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference held this year at the Hyatt Regency in the nearly post-apocalyptic downtown of Buffalo, NY. Themed around "The Structures of Innovation," there were your fairly predictable panels ("make it new," right?) on Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, DADA artwork, avant-garde little magazines, and the Paris and New York art and literary scenes. There was also a "roundtable" discussion, organized by Marsha Bryant and Alan Golding, that focused on the subject of "Rethinking Poetic Innovation" and had at least one person buzzing afterwards.

MSA roundtables are a pretty fun format in which, rather than droning on in sequence with extensive prepared remarks, five or six invited speakers offer short position papers then open the floor for discussion with each other and the event's attendees. Imagine our pleasure and surprise when, this past spring, Bryant approached and entered into negotiations with the P&PC home office about P&PC's participation! Now imagine our lone P&PC representative sitting in front of an audience of seventy-five modernists (including keynote speaker Michael Davidson, Lynn Keller, Jed Rasula, and Dee Morris) and among the roundtable's cast of Bryant, Golding, Bob Perelman, Steven Yao, Elizabeth Frost, and Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux—all tenured profs, all well published, some of whom certain members of the P&PC home office staff started reading in graduate school lo these many years ago. Hands somewhat a-tremble, our stomach feeling more like a Kurt Schwitters collage (example presented above) than the proverbial nest of butterflies, but bolstered by the presence of a younger, up-and-coming, somewhat iconoclastic generation of modernist scholars including Meredith Martin and Bartholomew Brinkman, here's the perspective on "Rethinking Poetic Innovation" that P&PC offered. (N.B. If you're a regular P&PC reader, well, bless you; the following is nothing you haven't heard from our offices before. We're posting it not for your benefit but for those at the conference—get this—who admitted to having never before heard the name of Edgar Guest.)

In the late nineteenth and early twentietth centuries, Americans regularly assembled and maintained poetry scrapbooks—personal verse anthologies that edited together poems cut out of newspapers, magazines, church bulletins, advertisements, greeting cards, and other print sources, oftentimes sampling in news articles, pictures, photographs, die cuts, or other items. Well known writers like Anne Sexton, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore kept such albums. Over the past six or eight years, I have assembled and studied an archive of 150 or so poetry scrapbooks produced by ordinary or less celebrated readers. The photocopy I’ve distributed here today (pictured above) is a page spread from one of those albums—a 230 page-long, 300-poem collection kept in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Doris Ashley, an unmarried sawyer’s daughter in her early 20s who was living just south of Boston.

It’s an interesting document, as Ashley puts four “modern” poems, including the now iconic poems by Pound (“In a Station of the Metro,” located at the bottom of the second page) and H.D. (“Oread,” located in the middle of the first page), in conversation with two popular poems and a news report on H.L. Mencken’s late-life marriage to Sara Haardt (a published writer who, in the 1910s, was a prominent voice lobbying the Alabama state legislature to ratify the nineteenth Amendment). The juxtapositions are compelling and represent a vernacular cut and paste analogue to, if not precedent for, modernist practices of bricolage or collage, as Ashley reads across or through a highbrow-lowbrow divide and very compellingly pairs up the Pound and H.D. poems, which are frequently combined in our histories of modern poetry but which her original source book, Louis Untermeyer’s 1925 edition of Modern American Poetry, did not print together.

If Ashley recognizes the shared poetics of “In a Station” and “Oread,” she is not limited by them. In fact, what most connects the six poems here is the image of the tree—the pear tree in Millay’s poem, the pines in “Oread,” the maple tree in Anne Campbell’s poem, the “wet, black bough” in “In a Station,” and the rain of Stanton’s “A Rain Song” that waters them all. This arboreal conceit extends thematically to the newspaper article—the seasons, gardens, plants, and flowers offer an appropriate landscape in which to read about Haardt’s latish marriage (she was 31); astonishingly, this conceit extends sonically, as well, as the “wet, black bough” of Pound’s poem echoes the subtitle of the Mencken article: “Noted American Bachelor Finally Bows to Cupid.” (Note: Ashley, an aspiring writer, would, like Haardt, remain unmarried until her late 20s, and P&PC reads this page spread, in part, as an articulation of how and why Ashley justified remaining single as a life choice that was more deliberate than prevailing images of spinsterhood would suggest.)

There is certainly more to discuss about this page spread, including the alternative map through the poetry of modern America that it and other such anthologies suggest, as well as its place in the history what Kenneth Goldsmith is calling uncreative writing. (Food for thought: can we call Ezra Pound [pictured here] a “popular poet” when he appears in a scrapbook alongside poems by popular poets Stanton and Campbell? Campbell, by the way, was a poet for the Detroit News who reportedly made $10,000 per year off of the daily publication and syndication of her poetry in the 1920s and 1930s.) I’m presenting these pages here, however, to help forward four ideas that might help us to rethink poetic innovation. Those ideas are as follows:

1. Future work on poetic innovation needs to include more study and theory of innovative reading as well as innovative writing.

2. Innovative reading and writing are not limited to experts in literary spheres but happen within popular culture as well—including, as I’ve argued elsewhere in relation to the old Burma-Shave billboard poems, the commercial marketplace. Innovation is not inherently oppositional and is regularly articulated to, and expressed in terms of, the market. In fact, the very claim to “innovation” itself, in artistic and commercial spheres alike, as well as their overlap, is a form of capital worth studying further.

3. Although Ashley’s scrapbook doesn’t suggest it directly, poetic innovation within popular and mass culture likely intersected with, and affected, the work of “literary” poets more regularly than we think—not just in terms of raw materials, but form, precedent, and logic as well. When we use the French word collage to describe modernist literary practices, for example, we disguise modernism's roots in popular practice and overlook the fact that Pound, H.D., Moore, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot and others were born in, learned to read in, and were educated in an America where scrapbooking was a primary form of reading and thinking and where the word collage did not yet exist.

4. What we call “literary” poetry also affected innovation within mass and popular culture. That is, not only did popular culture provide modernist writers with resources for their art, but, as we see in the case of Doris Ashley, modernist writers provided uncredentialed readers with raw materials for thinking and creating as well.

Thanks for listening.

Note: if you're interested in these and related issues, keep your eyes out for the P&PC-endorsed book-length study Poetry & Popular Culture in Modern America, due out from Columbia University Press in the Fall of 2012.

Walt Meets Walt: Breaking Bad and "I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"

2011-10-12T11:07:00.010-05:00

It is Season 3, Episode 6 of AMC's Breaking Bad, halfway through the season in which high-school-chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-maker Walter White (pictured here) gets installed in a state-of-the-art meth lab to cook for drug kingpin Gus, mild-mannered owner of the fast food restaurant chain Pollos Hermanos. Walt's cancer is in remission, but he's trying to salvage his marriage (Skyler wants a divorce and is sleeping with her boss) and his relationship with his son. Walt's brother-in-law Hank is obsessed with finding the source of the blue meth that Walt has made famous, and he's tailing Walt's former partner Jesse Pinkman in hopes of tracking down the RV he (correctly) suspects of being a mobile lab. Pinkman is clean and just out of rehab but is talking with his friends about getting back into the biz as dealers.

That's when Walt meets Gale (pictured here), the lab assistant that Gus has provided. Gale, it turns out, is everything that Pinkman was not—unassuming, respectful, collaborative, trained, and, most of all, as passionate about the chemistry as Walt. Explaining how he ended up in the meth cooking business, Gale thinks back to graduate school and explains, "I was on my way—jumping through hoops, kissing the proper behinds, attending to all the non-chemistry that one finds oneself occupied with. You know that world. That is not what I signed on for. I love the lab—because it's all still magic, you know? Chemistry? I mean, once you lose that...."

Walt agrees. "It is. It is magic," he says. "It still is."

And then, because Breaking Bad can't exactly break into song to express the magical chemistry moment that Walt and Gale are experiencing, Gale breaks into a poem. "And all the while," he tells Walt, "I kept thinking about that great old Whitman poem, 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer.'"

Walt: I don't know it.

Gale: Well, anyway ....

Walt: Well, can you recite it?

Gale [laughing]: Pathetically enough, I could.

Walt: All right, well, come on, come on.

Click the video here to watch Gale's recitation:

The Beantown Beat: Nadia Nurhussein on Fried Clams, Poetry, and the North Shore

2011-10-01T08:00:00.002-05:00

You probably remember Nadia Nurhussein—assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and P&PC's chief Beantown correspondent—as the primary force behind The Public Life of Poetry, an exhibition of 19th-century books and ephemera sponsored by the Boston Public Library in late 2010 and early 2011. In the following update from the City of Notions, Nurhussein (pictured here) is still interested in the public lives of poetry but shifts her attention from the library stacks to the state's north shore clam shacks. There, she finds a mediocre fried clam dinner served up with an unexpected helping of poetry and more than a faint whiff of the nineteenth century mingling with the daily catch.

The north shore of Massa- chusetts has long appealed to poets: Charles Olson, of course, is closely associated with Gloucester, but poets as varied as John Greenleaf Whittier, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lowell have all made the north shore their home at one time or another. The Massachusetts Poetry Festival was held in Salem this year. Apparently, like shellfish, poetry thrives in this area.

I wasn’t thinking about this when, after six years of living in Boston, I finally made the trip this summer to Woodman’s of Essex, a celebrated clam shack on the north shore of Massachusetts whose claim to fame is the invention of the fried clam. Unfortunately, it was not worth the wait. The mediocre clams, in fact, did not leave nearly as much of an impression on me as the mediocre poetry did.

As odd a pairing as verse and bivalves might seem, an illustrated poem (pictured here) was displayed prominently next to the pick-up window. It was written—actually, it was calligraphied—on artificially aged paper, as if someone had found an old manuscript hidden in a seafaring bottle pulled up with the day’s catch. On the opposite wall, I noticed yet another framed poem: a versified note of thanks from a customer.

To hang poems on the walls of public places like this seemed to me a pleasing throwback. I was reminded of popular poems, like Bret Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James” and John Hay’s “Little Breeches,” that were once publicly displayed on barroom walls. Belonging to a long-running tradition of amateur poetry writing, and confronting all customers coming to pick up their orders of clams, Woodman's verses served as a visible challenge to the notion that people don’t care about or read poetry anymore.

The Woodman’s poem is one of the countless reiterations or parodies of the early nineteenth-century poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” (James Thurber wrote a particularly hilarious one for The New Yorker in the prosaic style of Ernest Hemingway; it is pitch-perfect.) Underlying the narrative in Woodman’s version is the promise that, if we are very, very good, we will be brought sacks of clams instead of sacks of toys. Describing the preparation for a clambake, the poem lists, instead of flying reindeer, members of the “Woodman” family in a kind of roll call:

The clam-baking crews and Dexter called them by name
On Woodman, on Roy, on Johnson and Lane
On MacIntyre, Noonan, Holmes feeling no pain
Dianne, Doucette, Fougere and Fiahlo
Lufkin, Towne, Reed—and their legs are hollow
Boutchie and Soucy Doyle, Leo the Uncle
Good, Frazer, Joseph, Barrett and Kunkel
When what to their wondering eyes should appear
But Jolly St. Deck and two cases of beer
And Dexter did say as the crew came into sight
“My god is no one sober tonight?”

With its rhetorical question, the last couplet above sounds a little like the final couplet of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “On Lending a Punch-Bowl,” whose speaker fears his wife’s reproach after a night of drinking. Appealing to his punch bowl, he says, “And may the cherubs on its face protect me from the sin / That dooms one to those dreadful words,—‘My dear, where have you been?”

As these elements suggest, Woodman’s also shares some character- istics with a type of verse that is far older than "A Visit from St. Nicholas": the drinking song. The insular and provincial camaraderie, the celebration of excessive drinking (as seen in the revelers whose “legs are hollow”), and the slight vulgarity are all here. The difference—and the source of the humor for me—is that the delicacy of the manuscript’s appearance in its calligraphy and age-darkened paper runs counter to the poem’s vulgarisms. Whoever made this artifact thought, on some level, of poetry in general as a something like what Susan Stewart calls a “distressed” genre, one that required the high-brow and antique affectations of yellow paper and highfalutin penmanship, complete with simulated spots of foxing and other damage brought on by the harsh and salty sea-air.

With a little bit of digging, I discovered that this poem was no fluke: Woodman’s of Essex continues to support amateur poetry. This year, the restaurant sponsored a limerick contest for St. Patrick’s Day—with a free lobster dinner for two to the winner! And, since I seem to be falling into impromptu couplets, I may have to try my hand at a Woodman’s limerick next year, too.

The Changing Phiz of Poetry: The Man of a Thousand Faces

2011-09-22T16:46:00.016-05:00

In 1925, the Lakewood Products Co. of Cleveland, Ohio, patented the cute and interactive "Mov-I-Graff" toy pictured here—a postcard-sized piece of cardboard featuring "The Man of a Thousand Faces" in profile. When you gently wiggle or "vibrate" the postcard, a thin chain making up his nose and chin area moves back and forth to create ever new profiles. As an ad for the product in the January 9, 1943, Billboard magazine explained, "It's the Mov-I-Graff Cartoon Greeting Card built around a figure of a person. However, instead of a drawn face, a small chain is attached from the forehead to the neck. By holding the card in one hand and tapping it lightly with the other, the face of the character takes various and odd shapes." If you're dying to see The Man of a Thousand Faces in action, skip ahead to the video at the end of this posting.

It appears that the rights to the Mov-I-Graff were eventually purchased around 1943 by the Weinman Brothers (the Billboard ad quoted above announces the addition to its product line), which was perhaps the same Weinman Brothers that was founded in 1912 and launched a jewelry collection in partnership with Lauren Bacall in 2007. Whether or not the length of chain that makes up the Man of a Thousand Face's profile evolved into a necklace endorsed by Bacall, it is clear the object had commercial appeal. As the version of the toy pictured here indicates, it became a premium give-away advertising item—a sort of business card used by O.A. Brown of New Hampshire to promote his business installing Sunbeam Cabinet Heaters.

Other companies took a page out of Brown's playbook. Kingan Meats of Indianapolis used the Mov-I-Graff to advertise its "reliable" hams and bacon. Marion Power Shovel Company of Marion, Ohio, dug its own niche in the market the same way. And Goodyear advertised a lawn hose and golf balls via the Man with the Thousand Faces as well. As the Mitchner Investment Company's use of the Mov-I-Graff (pictured above) suggests, companies asking potential customers to shift brand loyalties no doubt found an appealing and even instructional figure for the nature of that change in the shifting profile of El Hombre himself. "You can't change your face," Mitchner's card reads, "But you can change your fortune."

The subject of change- ability is at the center of a poetic version of the Mov-I-Graff card (pictured here) that the P&PC Acquisitions Department had the good fortune of obtaining via eBay recently. Via the poem, this card transforms the Man of a Thousand Faces into a 1920s hipster bohemian—a satiric male version of the decade's New Woman, perhaps, complete with blush on his cheek, hipster attire, and a bobbed haircut:

They christened me the Mov-i-graff—
Because, they said, I made them laugh
I do not know just why it is
Unless it is my changing phiz.

I always try to look my best
And am polite in any test;
The latest things in duds I wear—
I even bob my lovely hair.

Certainly, this version of the card works to discredit the New Man of the 1920s, casting him as effeminate, queer, clueless, and—as the chain forming his profile perhaps dramatizes—delicate, droopy and unreliable; he's a man of a thousand faces, not a model of masculine consistency exemplified by what in the 1950s would become his cultural opposite, the Marlboro Man, who also wears a hat and shirt with collar, who we also frequently see in profile, and whose high cheekbones seem to preclude any fashionable or girly changing of his phiz.

The interns at the P&PC office are quite taken with that word—phiz—and not just because they discovered it for the first time two or three months ago on the back of a photo from the nineteenth century's Jersey Shore. In the present context, they've pointed out, phiz combines with other colloquial words such as duds and bob to create a neat little record of 1920s slang. (Note: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word bob was first applied to women's haircuts in 1918 when Punch noted the "alarming speed of bobbing.") Reading the card today, they're not only struck by how language changes (where, oh where, has phiz gone?), but also how, in this context, the Mov-I-Graff discredits popular linguistic innovation—and thus the changing nature of language more broadly—by associating it with the effeminate, dandy-esque Man of a Thousand Faces. That is, like the chain that forms his phiz, the language he uses is fluid, changing, dynamic, queer, effeminate, and probably, by extension, downright un-American. The Marlboro Man—repository of constant manliness, firmness, tradition, and a man of few words—would never be caught talking like that!

We think our interns are onto something, don't you? While change in one sphere of people's activity—switching from one brand to another brand in the consumer marketplace—is encouraged, changing the way we speak and thus challenging the authority of established language practices (see English-only debates, for example, or the history of gender-inclusive language) is not. In fact, in the context of this poem, the etymologies of both bob and duds suggest as much. Originally from the Old French and Middle English, bob has also been used to mean "to befool, mock, deceive" and "to cheat." Similarly, dud (of unknown origin) has been used to describe "a counterfeit thing applied to any useless or inefficient person or thing." In the very fabric of its poem, then, this Mov-I-Graff postcard indicts the Man of a Thousand Faces as a fool, a cheat, and a counterfeit; his character reveals itself not just in what he wears, but in the very slanguage he speaks.

But that's how the "they" of the poem—a they that represents itself as the voice of common sense, convention, and social norms—wants us to view Mr. Man. We here at P&PC want to view him more sympathetically. In his bob, his duds, and his changing phiz, the Man of a Thousand Faces is not himself a fool (except in the Shakespearean sense, perhaps) but is in fact mocking, fooling, cheating, deceiving, unsettling and revealing as counterfeit mainstream values of standard language use and gender identity; indeed, insofar as it is nearly impossible for him to have the same face twice, he disrupts what Judith Butler would call the interability of gender identity—that "regularized and constrained repetition of norms" on which normative gender identities depend. In his "lovely" bobbed hair and blushing phiz, then, the Man of a Thousand Faces may well be one of the first drag queens of American poetry. Is it possible, then, that his popularity in the mid-twentieth century tells us more about the American public's desire than first meets the eye?

MOV-I-GRAFF - L'homme aux centaines de visages by heeza

Highbro/Lowbro: Peter Klaven Reviews Brian McGackin's "Broetry"

2011-09-13T10:59:00.020-05:00

Maybe Brian McGackin's book Broetry caught your attention after National Public Radio did a lame and unwarranted feature on it back in July of this year. Maybe you were one of the P&PC faithful who wrote in to the home office with protests like, "This man gives poetry in popular culture a bad name. Please find a way to destroy him." Or maybe you're just a connossieur of the portmanteau word and are fed up from seeing your favorite figure of speech corrupted by the supposedly subversive wordplay of commercially manufactured guy culture (cf. bromance, guyliner, and manorexia). In any case, some sort of response from P&PC to what you might call McGackin's small literary bropus certainly seems in order. We therefore sucked it up, got a copy of the book, and sent it out for review to one of our favorite bros. Here's what he had to say.

I wish I could take a page from Dale Peck and crown Brian McGackin the worst poet of his generation, but Broetry isn’t hatchet job material; its hollowed-out trunk of a conceit—poetry, for bros!—wouldn’t stand up to a short, swift kick, let alone a sharpened critical axe.

So before I go any further, let me make myself absolutely clear: Do not buy Broetry. Do not, as I mistakenly did after McGackin’s book caught the attention of NPR, mention it to anyone with even a remote interest in poetry. Broetry is diseased; I haven’t been this self-conscious reading a book in public since I was a twenty-two year old high school teacher reading Lolita in the faculty lounge.

If it’s mediocre verse you want, I’m sure there’s plenty out there more deserving of your dollar. Broetry is schlock of the most dangerous variety: an anti-intellectual, misogynist screed with cartoon accompaniment—a book that pretends language is impotent entertainment, and, worst of all, that bro culture is a breath of fresh air, not a noxious cloud of Axe body-spray hovering around us. But where, Broetry asks, are “regular guys” supposed to turn with all these “contemporary poets [singing] the glories of birds, birch trees, and menstruation”? To this “stunning debut from a dazzling new literary voice”? Let’s hope not.

I’ve welcomed Paul Rudd into my life enough times not to shudder at a ‘bro’ port- manteau, but we won’t see ‘broetry’ creeping into Webster’s anytime soon. Unlike the ‘bromance,’ Broetry—littered though it is with popular references to Star Wars, World of Warcraft, Harry Potter, hentai, Taylor Swift, and the George Foreman Grill—has zero cultural traction. McGackin’s audience is still a mystery to me, and I’ve had the misfortune of reading the book twice. I’d like to say that, at the very least, Broetry accomplishes its most basic premise—to deliver the poetry bros want—but not even that much seems true.

Sure, the mindless sexism of classics like “I’ll Take ‘Crazy Bitches’ for $200, Alex” and “Whorecrux” serve up a broetic sensibility, but the book jacket just plain confuses me ... and I've known some bros. The cover features an untitled, line-for-line parody of William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say,” replacing the undertones of sexual conquest latent in WCW’s “sweet,” and “delicious” plums with the baldly broetic: cold beer used to entertain a “hot” girl. You would think that the allusion to Williams winks at a reader more than casually acquainted with the Norton Anthology of American Poetry, a person capable of recognizing WCW’s poem and smirking at the broetic simplification of the original. This reader might even be tempted to approach Broetry as satire, convinced the joke was in fact on the bro, the guy who took WCW at his word and wrote a whole book “just to say.” If Broetry was solely a book of parodies, I might even be just such a schmuck. However, aside from some warmed over Frost (“Stopping by Wawa on a Snowy Evening,” “The Road Unable to Be Taken…”) and one nod to Whitman (“O Captain! My Captain America!"), all you get are poems too weighed down with sulky angst for the diehard ‘bro’ and too misogynist for any rational human.

You want broetry that badly? Go read Stephen Dobyns’s “Desire.” The speaker in Dobyn’s poem isn’t entirely sym- pathetic either, but the core of the poem speaks to the frustration lurking behind McGackin’s broems. “Why have men been taught to feel ashamed / of their desire . . . Why must men pretend to be indifferent as if each / were a happy eunuch engaged in spiritual thoughts?” Even if, like me, you resist Dobyns’s sentiment, at least a poem like “Desire” mines the nuances of sexuality. As a rule, Broetry only recycles trite cliché, miserably troped to perfection in “Not Another Teen Movie,” a poem entirely constructed out of Hollywood film titles. McGackin would probably roll his eyes at the bird Dobyns flips in the fourteenth stanza, but he could learn a thing from someone like Dobyns—a poet capable of thinking with two heads at once.

Epic Rap Battles of History: Dr. Seuss vs. William Shakespeare

2011-09-05T21:10:00.008-05:00

By now you've probably seen Hulk Hogan vs. Kim Jong-il, and you know all about Albert Einstein vs. Stephen Hawking, right? Or Abe Lincoln vs. Chuck Norris? Well, maybe you haven't yet taken in Epic Rap Battles of History #12 in which Dr. Seuss (assisted by Things 1 & 2) tries to take down William Shakespeare. If you're not one of the 7.2 million viewers who've watched it in the two weeks since its posting, head on over to Youtube right now to view the latest in this entertaining series by Nice Peter who is, according to his Facebook profile, "one guy, with one guitar, with one red lightning bolt strap."

Scraps of Literature: Poetry & Popular Culture's Back to School Edition

2011-08-28T11:58:00.026-05:00

In his recent London Review of Books essay on Anne Carson's latest book Nox—a scrapbooky, fold-out accordion collage poem assembled in memory of her late brother Michael—Stephen Burt rightly notes that Carson's compositional method recalls the fanzines of the 1980s and 1990s and has a clear historical precedent in the poetry scrapbooks that many people assembled and maintained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We here at the P&PC home office are grateful for Burt's connections—and for the shout-out he gave P&PC in recommending the Review's readers to check out the examples of such scrapbooks that have appeared from time to time in this blog's postings and that, back when our home offices were located in Iowa City, we began making available at Poetry Scrapbooks: An Online Archive.

Given Burt's blurb and the fact that this is back-to-school season for many people, we thought it timely and appropriate to offer an example of another such album—this one assembled by a young reader, likely for a school project, and probably in the 1920s or 1930s. Titled "Scraps of Literature" and running about one hundred pages long, the collection is bound with two metal rings and contains over 130 (printed, handwritten, or typewritten) poems, assorted articles about their authors and subjects, and many illustrations cut out of magazines that the assembled poems are frequently used to gloss, caption, or otherwise engage.

There's no name in the inside cover to identify who put this album together, but the practice of making poetry scrapbooks part of—or even out of—schoolwork wasn't uncommon. Teachers kept personally-made poetry anthologies as sourcebooks for classroom reading. Children regularly converted their used composition books into poetry collections. Some people even turned their out-of-date textbooks into albums by pasting directly over the printed material of the published page; P&PC owns an old geography textbook that has been transformed in this way, making us wonder if perhaps even Elizabeth Bishop had this practice in the back of her mind when putting together Geography III. Educators were advised to harness the skills evident in such activity—finding, selecting, organizing, "publishing," and otherwise editing material—to make learning a fun and individualized endeavor.

In the process—as the album presented here perhaps suggests—poetry became part of an inter-disciplinary method of learning, as students could combine Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" with articles and pictures about Abraham Lincoln, or Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Old Ironsides" with historical accounts of the navy battle in which Ironsides participated. In the process, students not only learned about poetry and history, but also about the variety of ways poetry engaged and responded to the world around them. On a leaf not pictured in this posting, the maker of "Scraps of Literature" pastes a picture of Old Ironsides next to Holmes' poem and a newspaper article on how schoolchildren contributed to the Save "Old Ironsides" Fund, creating in the process a little triangular relationship in which it becomes visible that poetry not only matters but, contra Auden, helps to make things happen. (Holmes' verse is frequently credited with helping to save the ship from being decommissioned.)

This activity of collecting poems is not entirely a thing of the past; if you think back far enough, you can probably remember a teacher or two who made it an assignment for you to assemble an anthology of verse important to your life. During the past year, P&PC has found out that both Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass (both former poet laureates) have made this a regular part of their teaching over the years—an activity that isn't necessarily centered on, or motivated by, close, analytical readings of poems themselves for the objective values they might exhibit, but, instead, on those poems' relations to people's subjective experiences of being in the world. Reading old poetry scrapbooks today can be a frustrating experience because there is no key or record to how people paired poems up, or why they combined them with the pictures they caption, or how they mattered to their lives. It's clear that the process was frequently an analytical one, but most of what we have to go on today is the material end product of that process. When we hold Carson's Nox in our hands, we read it as a complex text in part because of her literary reputation and the fact that it was published with obvious care by New Directions, but also because of the personal experiences and relationships that motivate that care in the first place. Why shouldn't we give the benefit of the doubt to books like "Scraps of Literature" as well?

N.B. Following are a few sample pages from "Scraps of Literature" and not the entire collection, which is too long to feature here. If you are interested in helping to make this scrapbook, and many others like it, available for public reading in online or other formats, please contact P&PC with your ideas and suggestions. This public service announcement brought to you by Arbiters of Paste—Just Glue It.

Out of the Taxi and into the Office: Melissa Girard Reviews "What Poetry Brings To Business"

2011-08-16T11:00:00.005-05:00

Melissa Girard—whose review of The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry by Susan B.A. Somers-Willett continues to be one of the most regularly accessed postings in the P&PC archive—returns this week to assess Clare Morgan's 2010 curiosity What Poetry Brings to Business. Now on the English Department faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Girard (pictured here) specializes in modernist American poetry and regularly taught business and professional writing at the University of Illinois. That background—not to mention some first-hand experience working in the advertising industry—makes her our go-to consultant to tell us how much stock we should place in Morgan's study.

Writing about Wallace Stevens in the New York Review of Books in June 1964, Marianne Moore said, “He did not mix poetry with business.” Although Stevens (pictured here) worked for more than five decades at various law firms and insurance companies—notably, Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he spent nearly forty years—his thoughts and feelings about business never entered his poetry. As Moore recounts, “Phrases sometimes came to him on his way to the office in a taxi ... but you may be sure that ‘Frogs eat butterflies, snakes eat frogs’ was not written in the office.”

Dana Gioia, himself a former businessman and, from 2003 to 2009, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), wondered, if Stevens had written about business, what would he have said? In one of the more provocative essays in Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992), Gioia notes that Stevens’ silence on the topic, while perplexing, is hardly unusual. Countless modern poets have worked in all aspects of business over the last hundred and fifty years, and, yet, unlike novelists, who have left behind a rich, fictional record of modern office life, we have only a scattering of stanzas from poets. Modern American poets, Gioia points out, have written superbly about everything from bicycles and baseball cards to incest and pedophilia and, yet, somehow, “this same poetic tradition has never been able to look inside the walls of a corporate office and see with the same intensity what forty million Americans do during the working week.” Gioia concludes, “American poetry has defined business mainly by excluding it. Business does not exist in the world of poetry, and therefore by implication it has become everything that poetry is not—a world without imagination, enlightenment, or perception. It is the universe from which poetry is trying to escape” (114).

It has been nearly twenty years since Gioia challenged poets and poetry critics to follow him into the belly of the beast—to go where even our greatest modern poets could or would not take us. The recently published What Poetry Brings to Business (2010) by Clare Morgan with Kirsten Lange and Ted Buswick is one of the first, sustained critical attempts to answer Gioia’s call. Morgan and company have finally taken poetry out of the taxi and into the cubicle.

What Poetry Brings to Business is difficult to classify. Equal parts memoir, poetry textbook, and academic study, it is not a manuscript per se, but a manuscript-about-a-manuscript. Morgan, a literary critic, fiction writer, and director of the graduate creative writing program at the University of Oxford, cleverly frames the text around what is, undeniably, one hell of a story. Seemingly out of nowhere, Morgan was approached by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world’s leading business consultancies, and asked to submit a proposal for a project exploring the relationship between poetry and strategic thinking. Specifically, Morgan was invited to contribute to The Strategy Institute, a kind of think tank within BCG devoted to enhancing executive thinking. They approached Morgan because they were concerned that business and management strategy were too often being reduced to a narrow, toolbox approach (“5 Steps to Enhance Your Creativity,” etc.) and thought that poetry might be able to offer a richer, more lasting means of transforming executives’ decision-making capacity.

What Poetry Brings to Business is not the book that Morgan was asked to write for BCG. If you’re like me, you’ll make this discovery slowly and with some disappointment. I still want to know exactly what Morgan would say to an audience of business executives in Tokyo. I want to see PowerPoint slides! What Poetry Brings to Business is not this. Instead, Morgan has written a book about the process of writing that BCG book. This is no management guide, but a book pitched to people exactly like me: poetry teachers, poetry critics, and poets who would like to follow Morgan as she begins to discover ways to begin this long overdue conversation. The chasm between business and poetry is so great, the book seems to suggest, that we need this preparatory exercise.

It is certainly true that Morgan, a creative writer and university professor, needed to be convinced that poetry has something to offer business. When initially approached by BCG, she asked,

How many people care about poetry anyway? Isn’t it an old-fashioned mode that deals in airy-fairy utterances? At the beginning of the twenty-first century, isn’t it pretty much an irrelevance unless you are an academic with a vested interest in what Eliot himself called ‘a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion’? Periphrastic: who needs it? (12)

P&PC readers will undoubtedly cringe over such early passages where Morgan reveals her own outdated and outmoded perception of the genre. Equally cringe-worthy is her first stab at defining the relationship between poetry and business strategy. “There is a lot in common between a poem and a marketable product,” she writes,

Here is my output, the poet says. I would like to share it. Poets are interfacing with consumers in terms of reaching a readership. They have to intersect with the prevailing market forces via the publishing industry. They have to grapple with questions of utility, addressing the relationship of the work to the needs of contemporary moment. They have to establish a niche for a particular work through channels that will enable each individual voice, among many competing ones, to be heard. (11)

In my professional writing courses, we call prose like this “businessese,” a term that refers to the specific form of jargon and clichés that infect the language of contemporary business. (“So, will poetry help me ‘think outside the box’?” I found myself asking, facetiously.)

However, after a relatively rocky beginning, What Poetry Brings to Business improves considerably. Each subsequent chapter follows Morgan on her “journey” as she discovers an array of skills and strengths that poetry has to offer. These insights unfold gradually, as Morgan conducts workshops and interviews with a variety of business and poetry professionals, including Gioia, and reads deeply in poetry, poetics, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy, all in search of “tangible” connections between the two enterprises. While we don’t get PowerPoint slides, the book does provide a very useful anthology of at least fifty poems that, Morgan argues, help hone strategic thinking, most of which will be familiar to readers and teachers of modern poetry (Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, John Keats, Lewis Carroll, Billy Collins, William Stafford, Robert Hayden, along with some more surprising choices).

Morgan also provides transcripts of some of the conver- sations she has had with workshop participants over the years. This combination of poetic texts and critical responses creates a valuable pedagogical apparatus. Anyone who teaches introductory poetry courses or conducts poetry outreach will appreciate the veritable lesson plans that the book supplies. It is fascinating, for instance, to read the different ways that a lawyer, engineer, and BCG executive have responded to “The Road Not Taken,” and to then compare them to classroom experiences. (For what it’s worth, these executive-level responses were virtually identical to ones that I have encountered in undergraduate classrooms.)

Because of her focus on process, Morgan wholly avoids the kind of instrumentalization of poetry that one might fear finding in a business management guide. You will not learn the ways that poetry can improve your copy or report writing (“poetry has rhythm!”), nor will you find any epigrammatic wisdom (poetry has no “takeaways”). Instead, Morgan ultimately discovers that there has always been a deep and abiding connection between business strategy and the logic of poetry.

“Poems put down their roots in the no-man’s-land between thinking and feeling,” Morgan writes, “the borderland where logic shades into the non-logical, where a world defined and delineated by language gives way to the more diffuse territory of what psychologists sometimes call ‘the feeling state’” (55). This is the same strange land, she says, in which twenty-first-century business executives routinely find themselves, a world in which facts and data are never enough and there is rarely a right or a wrong answer. Reading, discussing, and thinking about poetry regularly, Morgan claims, can help business professionals become more comfortable with ambiguity, and, as a result, prepare them to be creative, ethical leaders.

All of Morgan’s insights about the strong interconnections between poetry and business seem completely accurate: that poetry sharpens our strategic-thinking skills, teaches us to be attentive to subtlety and nuance, and prepares us to navigate both linguistic and situational ambiguity. Indeed, what is surprising about What Poetry Brings to Business is not these findings, but the fact that we needed to find them in the first place. I came to What Poetry Brings to Business expecting to find an impassioned missive to the world of business, reminding executives of the myriad ways that poetry still matters. What I found, instead, was a creative writer and Oxford professor who seems herself to have forgotten. The business executives who populate this study are the ones who seem hungry for the new creative energy that poetry might bring to their professional and personal lives. It was BCG, after all, who initiated this new partnership with poetry. They seem more than willing to be convinced of its value. The question is whether the poets are finally ready.

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: An Interview with Emily Benson of StarMark Pet Products

2011-08-09T10:23:00.036-05:00

A few weeks ago, one of P&PC's poetry scouts wrote in with exciting news: she'd just purchased a bright orange StarMark Everlasting Bento Ball toy for her newly-adopted dog named Ayla (both pooch and product pictured here) and had discovered a little 6-line poem printed on the back of the toy's packaging:

Think you've seen it all?
Nothing like this half a ball...
Twice the fun and super strong;
It's quite a ball—you can't go wrong!
Dental dimples for the cleanest smiles,
Once filled with treats they last for miles.

Panting with anticipation and curious about how and why poetry came to appear in such an unexpected place, P&PC put its sleuthing nose to the pavement and tracked down Emily Benson, Marketing Director for StarMark Pet Products, a retail arm of the Triple Crown Dog Academy which is the largest, most comprehensive training, behavior, and pet-related event center in the world. With a 100,000 square-foot facility, a 200-kennel boarding kennel, and a two-mile training trail located in Austin, Texas, Triple Crown obviously knows man's best friend quite well. But could Benson give P&PC readers something to chew on? Or did the poem have us barking up the wrong tree? Here's what Benson had to say about dogs, cats, poetry, doggerel and the unfortunate fact that the poems are in the process of being phased out.

Poetry & Popular Culture: Poems on chew toys? How did the idea come about?

Emily Benson: Our product line originally started with training items, and then our next generation of products were more along the lines of interactive and treat-dispensing toys. The idea of the poems seemed to fit the fun, whimsical aspect, and simply the joy, of playing with your dog.

P&PC: Who writes them? Like, do you have a poet on staff or something?

EB: I actually wrote the poems. We had a few toys that were being dog-tested around the office and were working on text for the packaging. I came up with the poem for the Foam Ball and ran it by our president as an alternative for the usual packaging claims, and he actually liked it!

P&PC: Last time I wrote poetry on the job, I got reprimanded, so I quit and went to graduate school. What advice would you give other cubicle poets when it comes to making poetry part of their work?

EB: I think allowing for creative thought in the workplace is important, whether it's poetry or any other idea. Poetry itself is a writing form you don't normally see in many industries, but it certainly has a place. If you're not able to express yourself through poetry as you like at work, then it should definitely still be pursued on a personal level.

P&PC: What's your favorite chew-toy poem?

EB: The poem for the Fantastic Foam Ball (pictured here) is my favorite:

With a roll and a bounce
What makes your dog pounce?
What floats in the water
To fetch like an otter?
What's soft in his jaws
And not easily mauled?
It's a fantastic Foam Ball!

It was the first poem I wrote, and the imagery of the otter just seems fun and carefree. Otters always look like they've having a good time.

P&PC: Plus you get to rhyme "otter" and "water." What would you rhyme with "rhinoceros"?

EB: A rhyme for rhinoceros is preposterous!

P&PC: The poems are written from different points of view and for different audiences. The poem for the Everlasting Treat Ball (being gnawed on in the picture here), for example, is from a dog's perspective and addressed to other dogs:

Where is this new toy, this new bringer of joy?
A toy that's soft but still strong is all that I long...
It wobbles and rolls, and what good things it holds—
Filled with food and capped with one treat or two,
This toy it seems is only in my dreams!

The Fantastic Foam Ball, on the other hand, is addressed to dog owners. How much of this is doggone accident—and how much cool calculation?

EB: This was all a purebred accident. It was more a feel for the toy that drove the poems, and perspective evolved after the initial base idea.

P&PC: What sort of test marketing did this require?

EB: It was pretty basic. We mostly passed them around the office with our staff and our trainers to get their input and made edits from there as needed.

P&PC: How have customers responded?

EB: They seem to enjoy them. They fit with the overall look and feel of the packages.

P&PC: So no one's accused you of writing doggerel?

EB: Maybe just a few mixed verses and tales.

P&PC: Um, P&PC has an office cat. What are StarMark's plans for a feline product line?

EB: Our roots are based in dogs, but we're working on product ideas for cats and other animals. We do get feedback about some of our toys, the Everlasting Fun Ball in particular, where people fill them with cat treats or catnip for their cats to play with. We have also heard of them being used by parrot owners, and even big cats and other animals at a handful of zoos.

P&PC: If I'm correct, you've now used poems on three products in addition to the Foam Ball (the Bento Ball, the Treat Ball, and the Everlasting Fire Plug). Can you give us a preview of what's in the works?

EB: We are actually in the process of redesigning all our ball packaging for a more professional look to better reflect our background in training and behavior. So this means the poems are being phased out and in their place is an image of one of our staff or client dogs along with their story.

Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega Reviews Robert Darnton's New Book, Poetry and the Police

2011-07-25T18:14:00.028-05:00

Fresh off the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega—an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and a new Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent—gives us her take on Robert Darnton's recent study Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Harvard, 2010). Ortega, pictured here, is completing a book about the figure of the female flaneur in urban-based American poetry and has published articles on June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Gwendolyn Brooks. So what does a study of eighteenth-century French street poetry have to do with the writing and study of popular poetry today? More than you'd initially think. Read on to find out.

What difference can poetry really make in the world? W.H. Auden is oftentimes quoted in the way of an answer for his line "poetry makes nothing happen" (from "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"), but Robert Darnton's Poetry and the Police suggests that, for fourteen men in eighteenth-century Paris, at least, poetry made quite a lot happen. King Louis XV assigned a police investigation into the poems these men exchanged and—wait, it gets better—had the men arrested, imprisoned, and exiled from Paris as a result. Darnton's archival examination of the police records from this "Affair of the Fourteen" suggests that there is a long historical foundation to the popularity of poetry as political activism. Just as the role of politics is hotly debated in poetry discussions, though, Darnton's suggestion pushes uneasily against his reluctance to attribute too much historical impact to poetry. Certainly, the lives of fourteen men were ruined, but the king's social and economic policies—some of which inspired the offending poems—were not altered.

The disconnect between the impact of the poems on the individual versus society as a whole is a problem uniquely presented and exacerbated by city life. Darnton's investigation—he's a historian at Harvard and a towering figure in the field known as the History of the Book—reveals much about urban poetry and its persistent emphasis on the paradox of individuality in urban spaces filled with people. Typically, Baudelaire's nineteenth-century flaneur dominates the historical conversation about the influence of poetry from and of the streets of Paris. The image of Baudelaire's modern, urban stroller—especially as characterized by Walter Benjamin, who is primarily responsible for continuing discussions of flanerie in artistic and intellectual circles—is of the poet as part of the city crowd but not of the people. The flaneur was more akin to the dandy than a political activist.

What makes Baudelaire's poetry so compelling almost two centuries after it was written is his way of engaging with particularly modern city spaces. The flaneur provides a model for the urban perspective: aloof, invisible, capable of overwhelming attraction to other members of the crowd, and intoxicated by the possibilities of experience in the crowd. We continue to struggle with the effects of urban life on humanity in the twenty-first century (see Nicholas Lemann's recent review of new urban studies texts in the New Yorker). And poetry continues to play a significant role in the development of people's creative, political, intellectual, and emotional responses to city life. The surge of popularity of poetry in urban settings at the end of the twentieth-century in the forms of spoken word, slam, and hip-hop poetries—and their tendency to be political—is a testament to this.

Darnton's compelling story of the impact political poetry had in eighteenth-century Paris—nigh on a century before Baudelaire—complicates the image of the flaneur as the sole historical method of poetic response to urban life, though. Poetry and the Police implies that this history needs re-evaluation: whereas Baudelaire's flaneur was individualist, privately involved in public space, and wholly apolitical, the poems that Darnton uncovers in the police files of the "Affair of the Fourteen" are political, social, and have real public repercussions.

In Poetry and the Police, Darnton delves into the archives and discovers a detective story—one in which he is both detective and recorder of detective work. The book is a fast-paced read the way a good detective novel would be, yet Darnton manages to weave his analysis of eighteenth-century police records together with his discoveries and knowledge about oral history and culture, records of eighteenth-century popular songs, the developments of philosophies about "public opinion," and an investigation of how poetry moved through the strict eighteenth-century class structures of Paris.

The police records Darnton examines follow a campaign to stamp out political poems against the king (and against some members of his court, especially a certain despised mistress). As a particularly notorious case, the "Affair of the Fourteen" provided Darnton with extensive material, and his story reveals some surprises: the F.B.I.—I mean the police—kept extensive, detailed records of interviews of prisoners, even requiring prisoners to sign final documents to verify their accuracy; the men contacted the F.B.I.—I mean the police—freely after their exile to complain about the inability to make lives for themselves in the wake of the campaign; each of the men received exceptional punishment for behavior that was otherwise considered commonplace (none admitted to having written any of the original poems themselves, and the sharing of political poetry was apparently rampant); and, finally, the police retained copies of the poems they seized.

The poetry was insurgent, but also funny. It was valued most by how cleverly the poet could employ poetics: poor rhymes and stilted rhythms were snubbed. In one of his best moments, Darnton describes the poems as "a cacophony of sedition set to rhyme" (11). Most surprisingly for contemporary readers, though, is that the poetry was collective. Darnton explains "it was a case of collective creation": people added to and changed the poems as they were exchanged; some wrote them down; and others exclusively declaimed them publicly from memory. The people involved were rarely "poets"—they were law clerks, priests, students, and philosophers. Darnton also traces evidence that many of the poems originated as political tactics on the part of courtiers themselves, who, evidence suggests, passed their poems down to servants who then spread them beyond the court. The poems are urban in construction, then: the participants assert their individual voices into the development and dissemination of dissent and then disappear into the multitude.

The idea that poetry was having such an impact on social life is exciting for those of us who have been following the teachings of people like June Jordan (pictured here), who suggests that poetry can be the people's voice (e.g., her Poetry for the People project at Berkeley). But Darnton is conscientious about avoiding any claims about the impact of poems exchanged clandestinely. In fact, he has a tendency to undo his own arguments in the book. For example, he takes pains to establish the influence such political poetry had on the king, but then he notes that the king never allowed any of that influence to determine his policy design. In cases like this, Darnton is admirably desirous of historical accuracy, and the book's strength is certainly in its attention to the history of poetry (rather than, say, in its close reading or analysis of those poems). Darnton not only includes multiple versions of the lyrics to songs/poems, but he went even further in the composition of this book and commissioned a singer to record versions of the songs which are available for listening on the Harvard University Press website. Given all this energy, I found myself frustrated that Darnton refused to allow the poems to have the impact that he repeatedly suggests is possible and that the title of his book implies.

Today, Poetry and the Police is suggestive of Ice T, NWA, and other overt attempts of lyricists and poets to use poetry to make real changes to the ways that American police have interacted with inner-city people. Like the poems that Darnton looks at, rap- and hip-hop-related lyrics to songs like "Cop Killer" and "Fuck Tha Police" were subversive and probably exchanged primarily through memorization and underground "transcriptions" through dubbing and sharing. But just as hip-hop- and rap-related lyrics are given short shrift in many academic settings today, Darnton gives little if any attention to the poems themselves in Poetry and the Police. While he repeatedly refers to the poems' rhyme schemes and other formal structures, for example, he rarely analyzes the poems' content or their modes of making arguments.

Maybe this is because even Darnton dismisses their poetic or artistic "value," assuming that what they reveal about politics and eighteenth-century Paris is more important than what the phrases or lines of poetry itself can reveal. Yet one of the most memorable moments in the book occurs when Darnton parses the double entendre in a poem's reference to the king's mistress giving out white flowers at a dinner party: the flowers suggest venereal disease! This is so scandalous that—ooh la la, right?—Darnton tells a whole secondary detective story about the dismissal of the court official implicated in the writing of that poem. There must have been many more such references lost on a contemporary reader like me (who neither reads French nor, zut alors, is fluent in eighteenth-century Parisian slang); treating the poems he studies as worthy of at least some literary analysis would not only have set a good example for other scholars working on similar material, but it would have further sold me on the rich complexities of the era and phenomenon he writes about.

Ultimately, then, Poetry and the Police hints at, rather than really develops, some of the ways that we can rethink poetic history. The book suggests that poetry had real effects on society. Before the Beats warranted police attention, before the FBI started keeping files on American poets like Muriel Rukeyser (download her FBI file here), before poets were called to report to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and before Common's visit to the White House was protested by law enforcement, poetry was already worthy of police surveillance in eighteenth-century France. The poems Darnton shares reveal that poetry, when most powerful, has rarely been as many contemporary readers expect: it was a social and participatory endeavor rather than a solitary one. This is the poetic history that Whitman invested in American poetry: this is urban poetics.

Geocaching: The Beat Poet Vision

2011-07-15T11:45:00.020-05:00

So, Poetry & Popular Culture was just in the western suburbs of Chicago visiting family for the July 4 weekend, and we got a chance to hang out for a while with brother-in-law Jim who's an I.T. guy, an amateur astronomer, and really into geocaching—the worldwide treasure-hunting activity, apparently started in the year 2000 by a guy from Beavercreek, Oregon, where people use GPS devices to track down any of the 1.3 million hidden objects secreted by game players in over 100 countries around the globe. Not content to simply give out the coordinates of their caches, some clever geocache hiders, united by the official site Geocaching.com, make the game one step more interesting by requiring players to first solve a puzzle in order to discover the treasure's coordinates. Brother-in-law Jim, who has tracked down any number of caches in and around the Chicago area and elsewhere, saved the following puzzle for P&PC, hoping that our poetry acumen and beatnik-friendly disposition would help him with a hunt in the nearby suburb of Winfield.

Harnessing the associative logic and apocalyptic rhetoric that is stereo- typical of beatnik-style coffee-shop verse—and not entirely unlike the poem that Herman Munster recites in the video clip that Angela Sorby commented on for P&PC about a year ago—the Winfield puzzle encodes the treasure's coordinates. From the slang to the punny language (we especially appreciate the pun on "cool cat" that is "cool cache"), we think it's a little masterpiece. It was written and placed in March of 2010 by someone identified as sgauss, and brother-in-law Jim says we should use the identification tag GC250N1 when mentioning it—itself a little finding mechanism (the registered GC code) for geocachers in the know.

Schooled in the riddles of Anglo- Saxon poetry as well as in the sometimes riddle-like difficulty of modern poetry, P&PC was indeed able to help brother-in-law Jim out with his quest. Every coordinate for every geocache is a string of numbers like the following

N 41° 52.400 W 088° 09.350

and so the suburban Chicago's Beatnik has given us a poem in the following scenario that converts from its associative word salad—and references to both popular poetry and popular culture—to a string of numbers like that. Totally grooving with the hep cat's verse, we hopped in the car, tracked down the location, searched around for a while, and eventually found the cleverly-hidden treasure: a water-proof capsule which contained a little Anglo-Saxon-like scroll on which we wrote our names testifying to the fact that we were there. We got it, man. Can you?

Here's the "Beat Poet Vision" puzzle (GC250N1) as written and posted by sgauss:

Short Description

As the weather has gotten warmer I've thought more and more about hiding a cache, maybe a few. But where should I hide a cache? How could I do something original, creative and fun? I just wasn't inspired by the places I could think of for hiding a cache...

Long Description

And then I had The Vision. I was standing outside, and a voice was saying, "Here, you should hide a cache here, man!"

I looked around and spotted someone who just didn't seem to belong at this spot. I saw him, and I knew he was a beatnik. He was a beatnik, and he was in Winfield. Why was a beatnik in Winfield? Why was he telling me where to hide a cache? As if this beatnik has read my mind he spoke again, "You wanted to know where to hide a cache, and how to hide it. You wanted a cool cache, and I have come bearing answers. Put the cache right here!" And he walked up and pointed out where the cache should go.

I looked where he pointed. I could hide a cache there, but it wasn't really an original hiding place. It would just be a park- and-grab. I thought I had come up with one or two ideas that were a little better. I told the beatnik, "Well, sure I could put a cache there, but I'm not sure how cool that would be."

"You don't think this would be cool? Trust me, man, this will be cool. Because you're not just going to tell people where to find this! It will be a mystery, it'll blow their minds!"

"Oh, you mean a puzzle cache? I've had one or two ideas about logic puzzles, or something with computers..."

Impatiently he interrupted me, "Like, put away the numbers box! I will give you the clues! Listen, and I will lay it on you!" And he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and looked off into the distance as he read the following verse:

Horsemen of the Apocalypse
world is enough
Nickel Helium Mudville!
turkey degrees of Kevin Bacon
crazy is enough
everything means less than
jon & kate plus Stu Sutcliffe
love potion number Air Force

"Umm ... crazy? I'm not sure I get this."

The beatnik looked back at me and said, "It's poetry, man. Free association. Stream of consciousness. Trust me, they will GET it man!" And then he handed me the piece of paper with the poem on it. I looked at the paper, re-read the poem, and flipped it over. On the back were a set of coordinates. I looked at the coordinates, and then flipped the paper over again, and looked at the poem some more.

I looked back up at the beatnik. He said, "You dig?" I nodded, and bongo drums started to play as he turned, started to walk away, and then faded out of sight. Crazy.

If you think you get it, check your answer at Geochecker.com.

Bring your own pen or pencil; an extraction tool is recommended.

Jimmy Stewart: Tonight Show Poet Laureate?

2011-07-07T15:07:00.008-05:00

(For the shaggy dog story ending with the Lake Barengo poem featured in the following clip, click here.)

The Poetry of the Jersey Shore

2011-07-01T10:35:00.011-05:00

So, take a moment and check out this 19th-century Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi who—down even to the brash and colloquial nature of her poetry—was apparently making the local culture of the Jersey Shore something to behold more than a century ago. Given the careful position and flirtatiously phallic droop of the parasol in the photo, our interns here at the P&PC office have suggested that the saucy poem on the reverse may have been written for Michael "The Situation" Sorrentino himself:

When soon at home
Your thoughts will roam
Awhile to Jersey Shore
When then you see
This phiz of me
You'll think: "O, never more"
"That bad old maid"
"Whom I so hate"
"On me her scoldings pour."

If you know anything about Snooki and her MTV cast mates, it's that they're a group of, um, creative wordsmiths who are constantly doing their own type of shuffle and breakdown with the English language. ("A crow comes in and starts quacking at us," Snooki once quipped.) The same goes for their 19th century predecessor (named Laura Hays, if we make out the handwriting correctly) whose poem reminds us of the great word phiz—meaning a facial expression or countenance and dating back, the OED tells us, to 1687 when Henry Higden wrote in his Modern Essay on the Tenth Satyr of Juvenal, "Oh had you then his Figure seen, / With what a rueful Phis and mein...."

A rueful phis and mein? We like it, and we think Snooki (pictured here) might appreciate it too, but we like William Schwenck Gilbert's use of phiz in "Only a Dancing Girl" even more. In the slightly less-than-romantic verse from the 1860s, Gilbert describes his "unpoetical" title character as a "tawdry, tinselled thing" with "ungrammatical lips" and—you guessed it—a "painted, tainted phiz." A painted, tainted phiz? Like, so off the hook, right? That said, the older and measurably more fusty contingent at P&PC likes Helen Keller's 1903 use of the word best of all. In Story of My Life, Keller describes one of her favorite bull terriers as having "a long pedigree, a crooked tail and the drollest 'phiz' in dogdom." The drollest phiz in dogdom? In a Jersey Shore world where crows come in and start quacking, why the heck not?

Bullwinkle's Corner

2011-06-22T18:12:00.003-05:00

Reflections on "The Workshop as Phenomenon"

2011-06-10T13:57:00.017-05:00

Following last night's keynote address by Marilynne Robinson (pictured below) and this morning's series of panels, the "reunion" marking the Iowa Writers' Workshop's 75th anniversary is now in full swing, and P&PC's Iowa City affiliate has just checked in. Here is one person's take on some of the events of the last 24 hours:

Yesterday evening, following a welcome and introduction by novelist and current Workshop Director Lan Samantha Chang, Marilynne Robinson delivered the reunion's keynote address, "The Workshop as Phenomenon," in Iowa City's historic Englert Theater. Although some notable figures were absent—some were off hearing Greg Brown performing at The Mill, one of Iowa City's historic music venues—it was a packed house that heard Robinson praise the Workshop for setting a precedent by which people would be encouraged to write within the auspices of higher education. Anything that gets people to think and write seriously in an age of rage, worry, half-truths and non-truths, she argued, is a good thing; better to have people writing as teachers and students within the relative freedom of higher ed, she continued, than meeting the expectations of a royal patron, succumbing to the market, or "cranking out dime novels under assumed names." Except for the fact that Workshop graduates have cranked out cheap novels under assumed names to pay the bills, there was little to object to in this thematic strand of her speech which sought to praise what creative writing workshops do well.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Robinson's talk centered on the pivotal role of the University and Iowa City in the history of university and college-level workshops and graciously acknowledged the region's literary culture of writing clubs, workshops, and other such meetings that predated the Workshop's official formation in 1936. While she praised the model of exchanging and critiquing work that the Workshop would inherit and develop, though, and while she offered a long catalog of prominent writers who visited Iowa before the formation of the Workshop, Robinson didn't name any of the people who actually lived and wrote in Iowa themselves—people who were cultivating and caring for the literary soil that would ultimately (even unpredictably) support a publicly-funded institutionalized creative writing program in the Midwest: once nationally-known people like poets Jay G. Sigmund (the Cedar Rapids insurance executive who mentored the Workshop's second director Paul Engle), Arthur Davison Ficke, Floyd Dell, and novelist Ruth Suckow whose gravestone is pictured here. Indeed, the literary scene that helped lay the foundation for the Workshop was capacious and inviting—as populist, if we are to believe the historical record, as the Workshop is exclusive. Here, for example, is how Suckow (writing for H.L. Mencken's American Mercury in 1926) described Iowa's literary culture: "It is snatched at by everybody—farmer boys, dentists, telegraph editors in small towns, students, undertakers, insurance agents and nobodies. All have a try at it."

After the keynote, this correspondent attended a soiree hosted by Workshop M.F.A. and now well-off businessman Glenn Schaeffer (who donated the money to build the Dey House's addition and new library). Lan Samantha Chang, T.C. Boyle, Allan Gurganus, and Ethan Canin were in attendance. We then wandered down to Dave's Foxhead, a favorite Workshop watering hole, which was packed to the rafters with alums including 2010 Pulitzer winner Paul Harding. Sightings early the next morning included Philip Levine, Robert Hass, Z.Z. Packer, Francine Prose, and Edward Hirsch. Despite the thrills of such encounters, this correspondent couldn't help thinking about all the nameless people described in Suckow's description of 1926 Iowa, as well as about the writers who went unmentioned in Robinson's talk but who stoked the fires of the state's literary culture in the first part of the 20th century. Indeed, when I dropped the name Arthur Davison Ficke (pictured here in a photo by Carl Van Vechten, an Iowa native) at Schaeffer's place the night before, the published writer with whom I was talking stared at me for a moment and then asked, "Who?" Who indeed.

The Iowa Writers' Workshop & Popular Culture

2011-06-09T17:24:00.015-05:00

From Thursday through Sunday (June 9-12) of this week, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop—the oldest creative writing M.F.A. program in the U.S. (founded in 1936)—is celebrating its 75th Anniversary with a "reunion" featuring talks, panels, lectures, receptions, parties, a softball game, an open mic, box lunches, and even a dance in Iowa City. Fifty writers, including eight Pulitzer Prize winners, will be on hand to pontificate—er, discuss the nuances of their craft and their identity and careers as writers. Hundreds of alums are reportedly headed to Iowa City—the UNESCO-designated World City of Literature that is also home to the International Writing Program, the University of Iowa Center for the Book, the University of Iowa Press, ACT, the Iowa Testing Programs, a Translation Workshop, a Ph.D. in English, and much much more. The Huffington Post will be on hand. The Paris Review and Martha Stewart's Wholeliving will have reporters on site. So what else could P&PC do? We passed the hat and sent a correspondent of our own—a fact that's been reported on in a recent UI press release.

So what, you might be asking yourself, does P&PC have to find out by attending panels with, um, uh—how shall we say it?—quaintly 1950s-retro titles like "What Makes Literature Immortal?" and "The Writer as Outsider"? And what in the world might hobnobbing with prize winners and other high-art practitioners and standard-bearers have to offer a blog with a mission to study and document "good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries" and so on? Good questions. Really good questions. It's like we asked them ourselves. So here's something in the way of a provisional answer.

For years, Iowa's program has been held up as the gold standard for M.F.A. programs, employing and educating Pulitzer winners and other beacons of high poetic art from the 1950s on. Robert Lowell? Check. John Berryman? Check. Robert Penn Warren? Check. Donald Justice, Mark Strand, Philip Levine, Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Charles Wright, James Tate, W.D. Snodgrass, Philip Schultz, Karl Shapiro? Check, check, check and double check.

Yet, at the same time that this history's gone down, there's a story that's gone untold—and that one has to do with the Workshop's ongoing and pretty much unacknowledged engagement with popular literature. Take, for example, longtime Workshop Director Paul Engle (pictured here), who not only won the 1932 Yale Series of Younger Poets award for his first book of poetry (Worn Earth) but went on to shepherd the program to national prominence in the 1940s and 50s by hiring Lowell, Berryman, Vonnegut, and Warren and by mentoring the likes of Flannery O'Connor, Donald Justice, and Philip Levine. At the same time that he was doing so, though, Engle was also partnering with Hallmark, Inc. That's right, the greeting card people. He wrote the libretto for a 1960 Hallmark Hall of Fame production Golden Child: A Christmas Opera. He and an Iowa student assistant did the work compiling poems for Hallmark's 1960 anthology Poetry for Pleasure: The Hallmark Book of Poetry. And in the late 1950s, you could have found Engle writing verse for Hallmark greeting cards as well as Poetry magazine. P&PC has seen 17 different Engle-authored greeting cards, and our sources inside Hallmark suggest that some of these sold as many as 30,000 copies.

That history of Iowa-trained writers penning their way to a paycheck via popular culture does not end there. It's a well-known but never-studied fact, for example, that fiction graduates have long supported themselves by writing romance novels. For years, the Iowa Book Doctors has been outsourcing work to M.F.A graduates who have ghost-written thrillers including the Jack Kevorkian bio and soon-to-be movie Between the Dying and the Dead. Famous sci-fi writer Joe Haldeman attended Iowa (later writing two Star Trek novels). Faculty member Chris Offutt has written for Weeds and True Blood as well as comic books. As we reported here about a year and a half ago, poet Lewis Turco got his career started by publishing sci-fi poetry in Fantasy and Science Fiction. More recently, M.F.A. graduate Lucas Bernhardt was elected the poet laureate of the Portland Trail Blazers' premiere fan site, Blazer's Edge.

So you can see where we're going with these examples, can't you? It's the opinion of P&PC that while some Workshop graduates have gone on to win prizes and accolades from the world of refined literary culture, there's another side to the story: Workshop poets and fiction writers have also been feeding the maw of popular culture for years now, and with all the rhetoric of gold-standards and Pulitzers and World City of Literature designations, that fact has been lost. Put another and less decorous way, the Workshop has not only been training writers to succeed at the highest levels of their craft, but it's also been training writers to masterfully and successfully sell out.

You're not going to find that sort of language on the official or pro- motional web sites, of course—nor is it on this weekend's program sandwiched in between "What Makes Literature Immortal?" and "The Writer as Outsider." But our affiliate on location in Iowa City is out to see if the alums have anything to say for themselves about this. Maybe they do, and maybe they don't. But if there's anything to be heard or a scoop to be had, you can be sure that you'll find it here first.

Organic Form: Locally Sourced Haiku at the Farmers' Market in Salem

2011-06-03T16:11:00.005-05:00

On the Subject of Soap, Poetry, Psychology Today, Blackness and Beauty

2011-05-25T11:23:00.026-05:00

Some of you may have heard about—or been enraged by—the recent blog posting by Satoshi Kanazawa that ten or twelve days ago appeared on, then quickly disappeared from, the website of Psychology Today. Kanazawa, a scholar of evolutionary psychology and self-styled "Scientific Fundamentalist" affiliated with the London School of Economics, wrote there that black women are "objectively less physically attractive than other women." What has been called a firestorm of a response to the posting, oftentimes casting Kanazawa as an outlier, fringe thinker, or wingnut, has given P&PC some pause. We're not sure he's a wingnut or outlier. In fact, he may be the most recent mouthpiece for a logic (one might say a psychology) that's been driving corporate rhetoric—and producing corporate poetry—for well over a century now and that's not only visible in the historical record but in current advertisements for Dove soap being published by the hundreds of thousands in recent women's magazines.

Back in the 19th century, there were two products that drove advertising— and advertising innovation—in the U.S.: patent medicines (snake oils) and soaps. Both products relied on, and helped to popularize, a before-and-after logic that contributed to the power and mystification of the commodity item more generally. Losing your hair? Our new snake oil will make it grow back. Feeling dirty? Our soap will make you clean. Feeling depressed? Take some time out for "retail therapy," and the very act of going shopping will make you feel more like yourself again. Ad formats, like the metamorphic trade card featured on P&PC about a year ago, were even designed to teach this before-and-after logic in consumers' hands. Patent medicines and soaps were even more reliant on advertising than other products because, while there were hundreds of different brands (just about anyone could make them cheaply), there was, in actuality, very little difference between the finished products themselves—maybe Nostrum A had 95% alcohol while Nostrum B had 97%—and so artificial distinctions had to be created. Enter advertising, which found any number of ways, realistic or not, to distinguish one product's superiority to another.

One common way of demonstrating the purifying power of soap, believe it or not, was to show its formidable cleaning powers at work not just in making dirty skin shine or diseased skin healthy or soiled laundry clean, but making black or colored skin white. Dreydoppel Soap ("No Finer Made") for example, used a twelve-page pamphlet titled "Light and Shade" (cover pictured at top) to chronicle, in verse, a little minstrel figure's endeavor to lighten his complexion. That poem began:

A mite of queer humanity,
As dark as a cloudy night,
Was displeased with his complexion,
And wished to change from black to white.

He sampled all the medicine
That was ever made or brewed,
And tried to pale his color
By eating little food.

Frustrated in his attempts, he comes upon a billboard reading "Dreydoppel Soap Will Do the Work" and decides to give it a try:

So to the grocery store he hied,
Without a moments rest,
And bought a box of Dreydoppel Soap
And gave it a careful test.

One trial was all he needed;
Realized was his fondest hope;
His face was as white as white could be;
There's nothing like Dreydoppel Soap.

Such ads linked a discourse of moral and bodily purity—Ivory Soap billed itself as "99 and 44/100% pure" during a time when the Cleanliness Movement was gaining steam and popularizing the notion that cleanliness is next to Godliness—to a dream of racial purity as well, simultaneously fueling a fantasy of a white-washed America and casting colored skin as unclean and thus undesirable. This fantasy wasn't limited to blackness either, as soaps were shown washing Indian skin white and reforming the ethnic tempers and skin colors of Middle Easterners. One give-away premium for Larkin Soaps, for example (pictured here), told the tale of three Turks and three "white Caucasian maids":

Three Turks whose skin
Was brown, would win
Three white Caucasian maids;
Each maiden fair,
With courage rare,
Spoke to their kingly blades—
"Alas! Alack!
We turn our back,
Because our skin is white;
What good your crown if you are brown—
They'd laugh at us throughout the town—
They'd sneer and frown, and call us down,
And well they'd have the right."

Threatened with death by the ill-tempered, sword-brandishing Turks, the women ask for a final request—to wash the Turks' faces with Larkin's Sweet Home Soap:

And straight to work
Upon each Turk,
That lately they had snubbed,
Each maid did cope,
With SWEET HOME SOAP,
And scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed;
Their features bright
Grew milky white,
And light as sunny day—
Instead of mad and being sad,
The Turks and maids were both so glad,
That to this tale we need but add—
They married right away!

It's our contention here at P&PC that while such overt claims slowly disappeared from soap advertising, the racist logic established by those ads—and by the poetry in those ads—has persisted, finding voice in blog posts like Kanazawa's and underwriting soap ads like the one for Dove's "Visible Care" pictured here. Using the conventional before-and-after format, Dove associates dark skin with unclean, untreated, and unbeautiful skin; the woman on the left, superimposed on the close-up of untreated skin, has the darkest skin of the three women pictured, has black hair, has the largest hips of the three, and has an exaggerated black posture which is our age's version of minstrel cartooning. As one proceeds right through the image, the women become whiter and thinner (and their posture less distinctive), demonstrating—before our very eyes!—the very process of magical soap transformation that fueled 19th century soap ads and that culminates in a thin, white, blonde woman who gets associated with good, clean, pure, and thus beautiful skin. As if we miss the fantasy being acted out, Dove fills us in, its caption "Visibly more beautiful skin" being little more than a version of Kanazawa's claim that black women are "objectively less physically attractive than other women."

Poetry is not always on the side of the angel. In the case of 19th- century soap advertising, it not only spelled out and celebrated in a culturally prestigious and entertaining form a racist logic that was prevalent at the time, but it established a mode of racist advertising that Dove is continuing to capitalize on and profit from today. When Kanazawa assaults the beauty of black women, then, he is not just speaking for himself as an outlier or minority opinion on Psychology Today. He is voicing a view that is much more part of the psychological mainstream than many of us want to think and that continues to underwrite what people buy, how they buy, and what they consider clean and beautiful, and that thus helps to fuel a fantasy of what their world should look like—a view that hasn't come all that far from the 19th century, baby.

P&PC's Favorite Advertising Poem of the Month

2011-05-17T13:51:00.004-05:00

First Look: Poetry After Cultural Studies

2011-05-09T10:37:00.025-05:00

The University of Iowa Press has just released its Fall 2011 catalog of new titles which features, among other things, Poetry after Cultural Studies (pictured to the left)—a collection of eight essays which "showcases the unexpectedly rich intersection of cultural studies theory and current poetry scholarship," which "reflects on what poetry can accomplish in the broadest social and cultural contexts," and which is glossed near the bottom of the catalog page in the following manner:

Edward J. Brunner on James Norman Hall
Alan Ramon Clinton on Sylvia Plath
Maria Damon on the pleasures of mourning
Margaret Loose on Chartism
Cary Nelson on postcards of WWI
Carrie Noland on Edouard Glissant
Angela Sorby on birding in America
Barrett Watten on poetry, music, and political culture

James Norman Hall? Plath and electricity? The pleasures of mourning? Birding in America? We here at P&PC thought you might like a little more to go on than that. So, relying on our connections in the biz, calling in a few favors, and greasing the palms of a slightly less than confidential informant, we've managed to score an exclusive preview of this collection which examines a wide variety of poetry in Europe, the U.S. and the Caribbean from the past 150 years. Doing his repartee and his shuffle and breakdown, our shifty-eyed C.I. mentioned newspapers, postcards, protest music, field guides and cross-stitches before vanishing with his rhymes into the good night from which he came. It was a fast sneak-peek, yes, but we managed to scribble down a few fugitive sentences of each essay to tempt your aesthetic taste buds and give you something to mark down for your holiday reading and gift lists. Here's what we know:

Edward Brunner, Writing Another Kind of Poetry: James Norman Hall as Fern Gravel in Oh Millersville!

"The fact that Hall himself has no reputation as a poet and is known primarily through his collaboration with James Nordhoff on the best-selling trilogy Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Pitcairn's Island (1934), and Men against the Sea (1934) has not helped enable Oh Millersville!'s circulation. Yet in its time, Hall's stunt was a virtuosic feat that deceived book reviewers in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Des Moines (Iowa) Register, and dozens of other publications, all of which ignored such giveaway moments as the startling rhyme of "Whittier's / this verse" to celebrate the disinterment of a forgotten cache of Americana."

Alan Ramón Clinton, Sylvia Plath and Electracy

"Coin- cidentally, [Plath's collection] The Colossus bears the same name as the computer [Alan] Turing built in 1943 to decode German war transmissions, although Turing's machine remained so secret that the American ENIAC (1946) held the undisputed title as the world's first digital computer until the 1970s. Nevertheless, Plath finds herself, in the volume's title poem (CP 129–130), facing a problem similar to the one faced by the narrator of 'Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,' an archive that can only be properly implemented and accessed via digital means: 'I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.'"

Maria Damon, Pleasures of Mourning: A Yessay on Poetries in Out-of-the-Way Places

"My own multiple positioning (as poetry scholar, sometime producer of micropoetries, witness/participant, friend, and human-facing-mortality) is not experienced (by me) as disjunct, but I struggle, not to write but to conform, to move from one register of discourse to another in the essay in ways that don't alienate a scholarly readership; however, rather than smoothing out signs of these formal and processual disjunctions in the completed work, I prefer to let the awkwardnesses stand as a way of embodying the messy puzzlement, the unfinishedness, the ephemeral nature of micropoetries, and any human life-course, remembrance of which is then the object of elegiac activity."

Margaret A. Loose, Poetic, Popular, or Political? Chartism and the Fate of Political Poetry

"[Ernest] Jones, who had only recently emerged from his two-year incarceration for Chartist agitation, includes with the advertisement [for his recent book] a statement describing the harsh conditions of the poems' composition and affirming that 'upon them I stake my reputation as an author, and my character as a man' ('Ernest Jones' 64). Given the significance that the agonizing circumstances of their writing would confer on them, his explicit reliance on them as the proof of his authorship and character, and his advertising them in the hope of a large readership, this paragraph near the end of the announcement comes as a rather startling surprise: 'These will, probably, be among the last of my poetical works, for harder and sterner toils now call me to the field. The age has passed, when nations can be SUNG into liberty: perhaps it is well—for enthusiasm is the child of an hour—conviction is the father of centuries' ('Ernest Jones' 64)."

Cary Nelson, Only Death Can Part Us: Messages on Wartime Cards

"I have assembled an archive of wartime popular poems—on over 10,000 cards, postcards, envelopes, and miniature broadsides designed for personal exchange rather than public display—to gain access to the roles poetry played in the lives of the mostly lower-class and middle-class people who provided battlefield cannon fodder and home-front victims of modern war. These documents often include a preprinted poem and a holograph message. The poems vary widely in length, with some folding cards printing poems of thirty to forty lines, but the largest number of cards with messages have short verses of two to four lines."

Carrie Noland, Édouard Glissant: A Poetics of the Entour

"[T]he nature of one's relationship to land- scape—not just flora and fauna but also hillside ('morne'), river, and sea—is an issue of particular concern to inhabitants of the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean for whom reference points, coordinates for the construction of maps, are fragile and therefore vulnerable to destabilization. Édouard Glissant, the Martiniquan poet, novelist, playwright, and theorist who is the focus of this essay, remains characteristic in this regard; like [Henri] Stéhlé, Glissant is intrigued by the question of a people's relation to landscape, or what he calls—significantly for our purposes—their 'entour.' For him, as for the geographers who have studied the Caribbean, it is clear that Martinique, the place, is a historical construction, the product of imperialist phantasms that have carved up terrain, decimated and replaced populations, and forged intercontinental relationships that have little relation to the island's previous human history."

Angela Sorby, The Poetics of Bird Defense in America, 1860–1918

"[P]oems [about birds] came to adjudicate between romanticism and realism, enabling readers to think about nature both metaphorically (as a reflection of the self or the divine) and scientifically (as a mutable and potentially endangered ecosystem). As they circulated, American bird poems became part of a cultural conversation about conserving the natural world, while also bridging the gap between metaphorical reading and concrete scientific—or even political—action."

Barrett Watten, On the Advantages of Negativity: Avant-Garde Poetry, New Music, and the Cultural Turn

"My second moment of the public life of innovative poetry took place when Language poet Bruce Andrews stood up to Bill O'Reilly on The O'Reilly Factor (November 2, 2006). While Andrews is known for his deployment of the material signifier in his work, his debate with O'Reilly focused not on his opaque and contestatory Language writing, but on his teaching of Robert Sheer's polemic The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq in political science classes at Fordham University—in the current political climate of academic-cum-Red baiting carried out by David Horowitz and his allies.... [I]t is precisely Andrews's being 'called up' before the House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC) vestigial organ as Fox News talk show that conditions the kind of negativity he can bring to the dismantling of false positives."

Poetry after Cultural Studies is available in December 2011. Reserve your copy today, and stay tuned to this blog for exclusive extra features as that date approaches!

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Nightlife

2011-05-01T12:03:00.007-05:00

The P&PC office never rests from its mission to find and document the poetic in the popular, which is why we we were quick to notice this leather jacket late one night (early one morning, actually) at the Westside Station in West Salem—just before last call, pint of warmish PBR in hand, and the denizens of Salem's nightlife slowly circling each other and the karaoke mic like so many wasps at the end of summer. The jacket's owner (Alex, if we remember correctly) kindly let us photograph his artwork captioned in stylized handwriting with the final lines of Dylan Thomas' famous villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night." Karaoke fans, listen to Thomas reading his poem and eat your hearts out.

The Poetry of Scrooge McDuck & Disney Comics: A Guest Posting by Brian Greggs

2011-04-23T12:00:00.011-05:00

Facing certain graduation and an uncertain job market, Seattle native and Willamette University American Studies major Brian Greggs (pictured here) takes a moment to reflect on his first encounters with poetry which came via Scrooge McDuck and Disney comics. If we here at the P&PC Office are right in detecting more than a touch of wistfulness in Greggs’ tour through the reading of his youth—introducing us to the comic renditions of Robert Service, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Dante—then there’s only one cure we can think of: this sounds like dissertation material!

Uncle Scrooge, the world’s richest duck, is perhaps best known for his appearance as Charles Dickens’s Scrooge in Disney’s Christmas Carol, or from the popular DuckTales animated series. But for most of his life he has resided in Disney’s comic book universe, where he was created in 1947 by Carl Barks. According to Barks, Scrooge was raised in Glasgow in the late 1800s, leaving Scotland at age thirteen in order to earn money to support his family. After traveling the world (Austria, South Africa, etc.) in search of gold and always arriving after the party ends, he finally travels to the Yukon. There, against all odds, he strikes it rich.

It is here, at the moment of Scrooge’s success, that Robert W. Service, the “Bard of the Yukon,” makes an appearance in a 1988 story called “Last Sled to Dawson” written by Don Rosa. I grew up reading Disney comics—in fact learned to read with them—so Rosa’s story marks one of my earliest encounters with poetry of any kind. It is difficult to overstate the impact these comics had on me at the time—though, as a pint-sized nature buff, I was drawn more to the frosty, Arcadian landscapes like those in the bottom panel than to Service’s poem, which I only now realize is doubly appropriate for “Last Sled.” Not only is Service forever linked to the Yukon, where both he and Scrooge would find the material that would make them famous, but Service was himself from Glasgow! What better way to celebrate Scrooge’s Yukon triumph than with verse by his countryman, the Scottish-born bard of the Yukon?

This wouldn’t be the only time a member of the Duck family flock met poetry; in “The Not-so-Ancient Mariner” from 1966 and pictured to the left, for example, Donald wins a poetry recitation contest and later accidentally shoots an albatross.

Though long past their heyday in the U.S., Disney comics have developed a remarkable popularity in Europe, where weekly digests are commonly read by adults and children alike. Their popularity is such that the vast majority of Disney’s comics writers and artists are from Europe or South America, where large publishing houses translate their work for consumption in many different countries. The real pioneers of the format were in Italy, where the magazine Topolino (Mickey Mouse) was founded in 1932; it is still being published today.

Mining for material, many Italian writers turned to epics of the past, crafting adaptations of widely-known classics like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, The Three Musketeers, Treasure Island and others. The Italians have produced no less than four adaptations of Poe’s tales, though none have ever been published in English. In 1949, Guido Martina scripted what may have been the first Disney comics story thus borrowed: Dante’s Inferno, starring Mickey as Dante and Goofy as Virgil. Taking the parody a step further, Martina versified his script in an elegant meter that follows Dante’s terza rima exactly (the panel pictured above comes at the beginning of Canto IV):

Dante: Where the heck are we?
Virgil: In Limbo!

Soon as off the ghostly boat we dared,
A rocky, tight ravine we ventured by,
Where demons swung poor fellas in midair!

As a gust of yawns blew through the sky
We saw the punished were teachers all!
But… schoolmarms, here? I wondered why!

This English translation did not appear until March 2006, in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, #666. Set in Dante’s meter by David Gerstein, it’s less elegantly rendered than Martina’s, but this isn’t entirely surprising since the Italians have long had an entirely different approach to comics than Americans. As Frank Stajano has pointed out:

Martina had a significant impact on the form and linguistic structure of the entire Italian Disney production: in his stories (and, before that, in his translations) the characters always spoke proper Italian, often using sophisticated words outside the normal vocabulary of a teenager. Contrast this with the American strips where, perhaps in deference to a comics tradition that meant to depict the language of its characters with more realism, slang was quite common and characters such as Goofy would never utter a sentence without “eating out” or somehow distorting half of the words. Martina’s Goofy, instead, speaks proper Italian and so do all the other characters, from the most distinguished academics to the lowliest thieves. This important aspect, faithfully preserved in all the stories of the Italian school, probably also contributed to the very wide acceptance of Topolino in Italy: parents were happy to give the comic to their children because it was in some sense educational (expanding their vocabulary and exercising their grammar) without being pedantic or boring.

In part because many Americans—literary critics included—consider the comics to be a low or popular artform, a lot of the European material hasn’t been translated, and a lot of older comic art has fallen out of print. Recently, however, Fantagraphics has begun reclaiming older comic art—Krazy Kat, Peanuts, Popeye, Prince Valiant, etc.—through their reprint program. Fantagraphics has just announced that over the next 15 years they'll be reprinting the entire Disney work of Carl Barks, so it looks like the ducks and their poetry will be coming back. Better yet? I’ll get to read it all as an adult this time.

Brian Greggs will be spending this coming Summer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he hopes to find gainful employment—or strike it rich.

Bill Nye the Science Guy Poetry Contest

2011-04-22T14:25:00.001-05:00

Breaking News: Did Former Republican Senator Rick Santorum Crib Campaign Slogan from Communist Poet Langston Hughes?

2011-04-17T20:43:00.015-05:00

The former Republican and famously anti-gay Senator from Pennsyl- vania says he "had nothing to do with" the choice of his own campaign's slogan, "Fighting to Make America America Again," which was intended (see the pic above) to help launch his exploratory committee for a 2012 Presidential run.

Apparently, though—or so folks are saying—Santorum's aides must've studied Langston Hughes in college and realized the veracity, but not the ironic re-use, of Hughes's poem "Let America Be America Again" which first appeared in the July 1936 issue of Esquire magazine. The poem begins:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

For more on this news—including the irony of Republican anti-gay crusader Santorum cribbing from the pro-gay, pro-union, once- communist civil rights activist Hughes (pictured here)—see the great Think Progress video interview which broke the story, the LA Times, and Salon.com. Or see the Wiki page for the Hughes poem, which has already included this detail along with the curious note that Democrat John Kerry also used the poem's title in his 2004 Presidential campaign.

In response to Think Progress's question about his poetic tastes, Santorum said, "I’m not a big poetry guy so I can’t say I have a favorite poet, sorry." Sorry indeed. John McCain 'fessed up to liking William Ernest Henley's "Invictus." Joe Biden reads Seamus Heaney. Barack Obama was friends with Frank Marshall Davis. If Santorum can't even muster a half-hearted "Shel Silverstein," there's no way he's coming close to an endorsement by P&PC.

Rhyming with Salem

2011-04-14T11:41:00.029-05:00

Hey, everyone, check out all the poetry-related business in Salem, where the capitol's cherry trees are a-bloomin', where the lilacs are being bred from the not-so-dead ground, and where verse (and a fair amount of drizzle) is in the spring air.

From bilingual English/ Spanish readings at the Public Library, to Emily Dickinson set to music, an open-mic night of peace poetry, a couple of fisher poets reading at Willamette University, and contest and publication opportunities, the second half of this month is full of regular and not so regular poetry-related events. Do your soul—and your city—a favor by checking 'em out.

Crowned in Song
Sunday, April 17, 3-4:30 pm
Loucks Auditorium, Salem Public Library—Free to the Public

Willamette University professor of music and women's studies, Marva Duerksen, brings musical settings of poems by Emily Dickinson to the stage.

Poems for Peace
Sunday, April 17, 7-9 pm
Clockworks Cafe & Cultural Center—Free

Bring your own poem about peace to read, or come to hear others at this all-ages, open-mic event in downtown Salem.

Monthly Meeting of the Third Thursday Poets
Thursday, April 21, 5:30 pm
Gallery 205, Reed Opera House, Downtown Salem

For the past seven years, the Third Thursday Poets have been meeting to hear and share poetry by Oregon and non-Oregon poets alike. With plans for 501c(3) designation in the works and the creation of Brigadoon Books in the Opera House, TTP is setting the groundwork for another seven years.

High Seas in the Valley: A Reading by Fisher Poets Moe Bowstern & Geno Leech
Thursday, April 21, 7 pm
Eaton Hall, Room 209
Willamette University—Free to the Public

For the past twenty years Moe Bowstern has been known to fish for shad on New York's Hudson River, shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico, and salmon in Kodiak, Alaska. Geno Leech started fishing for crabs, shrimp, and albacore off the coast of Washington in 1979, but most of his ocean experience comes from working on merchant and salvage ships pulling other boats and barges out of wrecks off the beach. Both participate in the annual Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, and both appear in the award-winning 2005 documentary Fisher Poets.

La Voz de la Poesia/The Voice of Poetry Bilingual Poetry Reading
Thursday, April 21, 7 pm
Salem Public Library—Free to the Public

Efrain Diaz-Horna and Juan Marcos Cervantes will each do a 20-minute bilingual poetry reading followed by a Q&A and reception. Diaz-Horna, a native of Talara, Peru, has published poetry in Expreso, the Oregonian, the Hispanic News, the National Catholic Reporter, and in the book The Many Faces of Love. Morales, from Oaxaca, Mexico, was awarded the 2010 Proyeccion Latina for first place in poetry; he has recently published El Jardin del Eden.

Poetry Potluck
Saturday, April 23, 6 pm
Undisclosed location that changes month to month

Every month, a group of poetry-lovin' organic farmers and their patrons and fans gather to read poetry and eat good food.

The 5th Annual National Poetry Month Contest for Children & Adults
Deadline: 5:00 pm, Friday, April 29th,
Sponsored by the Willamette Store & the Salem Public Library

In celebration of National Poetry Month, celebrity judges will give awards in three categories (Best Rhymed Poem, Best Unrhymed Poem, Haiku) for four different age groups (grades 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, adult). For complete contest guidelines as well as information on the May 14th awards ceremony and reading at the Salem Public Library, go here.

New Salem-Based Literary Journal—the Gold Man Review

Named after the pioneer statue on top of the Oregon capitol building in Salem—not for the investor who teamed with Mr. Sachs—the Gold Man Review is accepting email submissions of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art, and photography until May 1. Dedicated to featuring work by Salem-area residents, Gold Man pitches itself as, ahem, a pioneer in promoting the local arts.

The Blood Orange Review

One third of the editorial board for this online lit mag is located in Salem—poet Stephanie Lenox who recently received a grant from the Oregon Art Commission and who is looking forward to the issue of her first full-length book with the Willamette Valley's poetry publisher, Airlie Press. Blood Orange Review has just come out with its new number.

Why the United States is Destroying its Education System

2011-04-12T13:50:00.003-05:00

Check out "Why the United States is Destroying its Education System" by Chris Hedges. Here's the beginning of his essay:

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point.

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: The Pint-Sized Edition

2011-04-07T22:31:00.004-05:00

The Poetry of "Candee" Rubbers

2011-03-31T17:34:00.007-05:00

Apparently, Connecticut born Leverett Candee (1795-1863) left the dry-goods racket in 1833—he needed a change from the business he'd been in for so long—and moved from the Constitution State to New York where he lost a bunch of money on start ups that never amounted to much. By 1842, more or less broke and, uh, stretched rather thin, he started messing around with elastic in, well, the hopes of a rebound. First it was suspenders. Then, when Charles Goodyear licensed his vulcanization process, Candee became the first person in history to start manufacturing rubber footwear. By 1894, his New Haven, Connecticut, factory was on, um, such good footing that it employed over 2,000 people and was, according to the New York Times, "one of the largest factories in the country."

Like many manufacturers, Candee's products were advertised via trade cards, like the rather thin and flimsy one pictured here, which oftentimes incorporated snippets of poetry or advertising verse. We here at the P&PC Office think this particular card must have been one of a set; titled "Autumn," it begs "Spring," "Summer" and "Winter" accompaniment. Here are the four lines of verse printed in gold lettering beneath a gold embossed picture of two figures celebrating the season's agricultural bounty:

In the cool, dark days of autumn
When the earth is damp and cold,
We should wear our "Candee" rubbers;
They are "worth their weight in gold."

Neither of the figures in the picture appear to be wearing Candee's product, though; the figure in the hat wears shoes that have highlighted-red bows on them, and the figure in back appears to be wearing heels. Why didn't Candee, uh, give 'em the boot? Probably because rubbers aren't the most attractive items to begin with. Knowing it's kind of hard to sex up a pair of galoshes, no matter how practical they are, Candee gives us a poem instead—one that's dense in alliteration (its w's, c's and d's give us something to chew on) and that diverts our attention to the proposed relationship between the value of warm feet and the value of gold that the "cold/gold" rhyme presses. Combined with the shiny gold-embossed design, the card does a pretty good job of compensating for the unattractive product it's hawking, even if its math is, well, a bit of a stretch.

Poetry On the Ropes: An Interview with Charlie Seemann, Director of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering

2011-03-24T08:00:00.005-05:00

The 27th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering—a week-long "celebration of life in the rural West" featuring poetry and music by working cowboys and ranchers young and old—came to a close on January 29 in the town of Elko, Nevada (pop. 16.980), which has played host to the event and its tens of thousands of participants and visitors lo these many years.

Shortly before the first worker's voice was heard this year, U.S. House Republicans introduced a 2011 government spending bill that proposed increasing Defense spending by two percent (up $7 billion to a total of $533 billion) and paying for that increase in part by the complete elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities ($171 million) and the National Endowment for the Arts ($161 million)—two organizations that have helped support the Gathering and cowboy poets for many years and whose combined budgets make up such a tiny fraction of the Defense budget that the P&PC office accountant can't even do the math. The P&PC interns, who have been following the Wisconsin legislature's efforts to eliminate collective bargaining (and the Maine Governor's erasure of a mural depicting Maine's labor history) are convinced that this is yet another way the Republican party is finding to silence the voices of American workers.

With this year's gathering over, however, P&PC finally got a chance to catch up with Western Folklife Center executive director Charlie Seemann (pictured here) who, for the past thirteen years, has been instrumental in organizing and sponsoring the event. Here's what he had to say.

Poetry & Popular Culture: How did the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering get its start?

Charlie Seemann: A group of folklorists interested in the oral tradition of cowboy poetry got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to do fieldwork in the western states to identify and locate cowboys who still wrote and/or recited cowboy poetry. Folklorists at various state arts councils participated in that effort, and this led to the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering in 1985 in Elko. It was intended to be a one-time event, but everyone had such a good time they decided to do a second one. Next thing you know we've been doing it for 27 years.

P&PC: How has it changed over the years?

CS: It has gotten bigger, and the audience—made up mostly of ranching people early on—now comprises folks from all walks of life and parts of the country, people who like the authenticity of the event, the camaraderie and the values represented in the poetry and music.

P&PC: What makes it authentic?

CS: Participants are selected by peer committees of cowboy poets and musicians taking into consideration the applicants' ranching and/or cowboy backgrounds and connections.

P&PC: What surprised you about this year's Gathering?

CS: It was good to see more young folks participating, like the Marshall Ford Swing band from Austin, Texas.

P&PC: What qualifies someone to be a "cowboy poet"?

CS: According to legendary cowboy singer Glenn Ohrlin (pictured to the left), first you have to see how well someone rides. It's pretty straightforward: first you have to be a cowboy, and then you have to write poetry about being a cowboy and cowboy life. [P&PC note: Ohrlin was a 1985 NEA Heritage Fellow]

P&PC: How about cowgirls? Do they write poetry too?

CS: Of course! There are some great women poets, like Linda Hussa, Doris Daley (first picture below), Yvonne Hollenbeck, Linda Hasselstrom (second picture below).

P&PC: Can you give me an example of a good cowboy poem?

CS: Buck Ramsey's "Anthem." (Listen to "Anthem" here.) [P&PC note: Ramsey was named a National Heritage Fellow by the NEA in 1995.]

P&PC: Awesome! What, for you, is the difference between hearing a poem aloud and reading it on the page?

CS: The personal connection with someone reciting is much more immediate and intense.

P&PC: What's the younger generation of cowboy and cowgirl poets like?

CS: There are young ranch kids and young working cowboys from local and regional ranches. Their tastes in poetry and especially music differ from older generations and are more influenced by popular culture.

P&PC: What happens to the Gathering if it loses Congressional funding through the NEH?

CS: That would be unfor- tunate, but that funding comprises only about 1.9% of our total organ- izational budget, so the Gathering would continue but we would need to increase fundraising from other sectors to make up for the loss.

P&PC: Um, if I plan on attending next year, do I have to wear spurs?

CS: Not unless you want some real cowboy to kick your ass.

Happy St. Patrick's Day from Poetry & Popular Culture

2011-03-16T14:17:00.013-05:00

Here's a cool little postcard poem wishing you all the luck o' the Irish for St. Patty's Day 2011. Printed to look as if it were written out by hand, "Four-Leaf Clover" is signed by its author, poet and short story writer Ella Higginson (1861-1940) who was born in Kansas, grew up in Oregon, married in Portland, and later moved to Washington state where she became active in civic and political affairs. On the subject of divorce, she wrote, for example, the "real evil was not that divorce was too easy, but that marriage was too easy, and that there should be a law preventing marriage before the age of thirty." Higginson was named Poet Laureate of Washington State in 1931, a post that was apparently eliminated sometime thereafter but officially brought back to life in 2011 with the appointment of Samuel Green following passage of Washington Substitute House Bill 1279. Higginson's papers—18 boxes of them at least, all awaiting scholarly investigation—are now at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies located at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

We here at P&PC like the look of this postcard for a number of reasons, starting with its appearance of having been personally handwritten by Higginson herself (pictured here), whose facsimile autograph stands in lieu of a commercially printed byline and copyright notice. This handwritten front, we think, encourages the postcard's user to view the writing of his or her own personal handwritten message on reverse as poetic in orientation as well—an invitation that this particular postcard's (unidentified) user seems to have accepted. "This is a beautiful thought," he or she writes in pen to an unnamed recipient, "and I want you to just try out this thought for yourself, and don't get nervous or to [sic] tired, 'for quietness and confidence shall be your strength.'"

Those of you who read your Bible don't need to be told that the phrase "for quietness and confidence shall be your strength" is from Isaiah 30:15; what's kind of cool, though, is how the sender is perhaps motivated to quote scripture by Higginson's own allusion to 1 Corinthians 13 in "Four-Leaf Clover" ("One leaf is for hope, and one for faith / And one is for love, you know"). As both writers sample and thus personalize Biblical passages, we have a really funky bit of communication in which the sender uses his or her own Biblical reference (Isaiah) in conjunction with Higginson's poem and its Biblical reference (Corinthians) to encourage the recipient to "try out this thought for yourself," which is pretty much an extension of the invitation we think the handwritten look of the postcard presented in the first place.

It is fair to say that "Four-Leaf Clover" got around. According to one source (1911's Studies in Reading by James William Searson and George Ellsworth Martin), "no other little gem of the language has been more widely appreciated and more warmly loved." Apparently, it was written in 1890 and published in Portland's West Shore magazine. Then it was published in McClure's (1896), The Outlook (1898), the Northwest Journal of Education (1898), Friends' Intelligencer and Journal (1898), American Cookery (1899), Oregon Teachers' Monthly (1902), the Journal of Education (1911), and Sunset (1918). Higginson included it in her book of poems When the Birds Go North Again (1899), and it was reprinted in Annie Russell Marble's Nature Pictures by American Poets (1899), Edmund Clarence Stedman's An American Anthology (1900), The Listening Child (1903), Robert Haven Schauffler's Arbor Day (1909), The Home Book of Verse (1912), and a range of school readers and publications for educators. It was also, Searson & Martin report, put to music "by at least fifty composers."

This is what happens when you don't copyright a poem: it goes viral. May you be so lucky this St. Patrick's Day.

Dignify the Breath—with Poetry?

2011-03-08T08:00:00.001-06:00

Last October, P&PC brought to you the Magic Song Restorer, a 1930s-era tin of bird food and poetry designed to help nurse your under-the-weather feathered friend back to health. Who knew such poetic magic came in a pocket-sized tin for humans as well? If you're looking to fool "the wifey's sniff," then Breethem's "breath neutralizer" (three images following) might be just the thing....

LeBron James and the Poetry of "I Rise": A Guest Posting by Liz Jones-Dilworth

2011-02-28T08:00:00.009-06:00

Back in October 2010, as the shadow cast by the huge middle finger of LeBron James still darkened most of greater Cleveland, Nike aired a 90-second commercial (watch it just below) meant to both capitalize on, and rehabilitate, the King's image as he settled into cozy South Beach alongside Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. Alluding in its title "I Rise" to Maya Angelou's famous poem "Still I Rise," the commercial features LeBron trying on a number of different personae including—at just over the 1:09 point—that of a beatnik soul poet (pictured here). Mind you, this wasn't the only link connecting LeBron and poetry from around this time. Not to be outdone by Nike, the Miami Herald held a much-publicized LeBron poetry contest which interested the P&PC office very much. We tried to give you an inside report on that event, but our requests for an interview with contest judge and sports writer Dan Le Batard were repeatedly ignored. Who knows why—maybe he found out that some of us on staff are from Cleveland.

Still, despite the Lake Erie-sized chip on our shoulder, we remained curious about this poetic streak in what we can only call LeBronsville. So we turned for some answers to Liz Jones-Dilworth (pictured here, bio at the end of this posting), who completed her dissertation on 21st-century performance poetry at the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. Jones, who is now the VP of Operations for a public relations firm, was more than happy to weigh in. Here (following the video) is what she had to say.

Just ask Homer: a poem is a pretty good way to make a hero. Nike’s “I Rise” commercial, featuring basketball star LeBron James, uses a variety of poetic techniques—from old-school anaphora, refrain, rhyme, and allusion to contemporary hip hop samplings and multi-track, multi-voiced layering. Perhaps wondering what in the world to do with their $90 million James contract after he was declared the sixth most-hated sports personality in September 2010, Nike ultimately chose a poetic strategy to redeem him.

The poetic structure of the commercial, which does not resemble a typical advertising jingle, lends weight and seriousness to James’s character. The ever-repeating “should I?” gives us the sense that the speaker is a complicated man wrestling with existential questions of identity and modern morality. And, on the surface, the poem-within-the-poem moment seems in tune with that message. James introduces the segment by asking, “Should I read a soulful poem?” He’s dressed all in brown, from brown sunglasses to a narrow-brimmed hat to his turtleneck. He stands in front of a brown stage curtain and reads to a silent off-camera audience. He holds a single white piece of paper.

Then, we see a man playing bongos to accompany him, and hear a smattering of polite applause.

Wait a second, you may be saying. What are the bongos doing in there? Bongos haven’t been in style in the spoken word scene now for a good, what, fifty years?

Suddenly, James’s “soulful” poem seems suspect. What's going on here? Is the commercial making fun of poems? Imagine someone who knows little about poetry refusing to go to a poetry performance. Are they imagining someone just like this—playing bongos? And what, if anything, is James-as-poet meant to reveal about who he “really” is?

The poetry James reads is an excerpt from Maya Angelou’s 1978 “Still I Rise":

. . . shoot me with your words
[ . . . ]
You may cut me with your eyes,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

In its attachment to Nike and LeBron, the power of Angelou's original poem is diminished if not entirely undercut. "Shoot" and "cut" acquire basketball and advertising connotations (shoot a basketball, shoot a commercial, cut across court, cut to a closeup) that reduce the social and gendered violence of "shoot me with your words" and "cut me with your eyes" to simple trash talk and gamesmanship. Similarly, "air" becomes a brand name, an act of commercial broadcasting, and a basketball style, not a figure for woman's survival and triumph. Admittedly, the ad is a really savvy, thought-out deployment of Angelou's poem; Nike obviously has a poetry critic (albeit a cynical one) on staff. But one nevertheless can't help wondering, how can the poem be soulful if it’s really all about basketball and shoes?

James is portrayed not just as a poet, but as a television personality, an actor, an ad man, a student, a basketball player, and a construction worker. And really, none of these roles are taken very seriously—he acts in silly westerns and cop shows, and there aren’t too many real-life construction workers who’d tear up a basketball court with a loader while people were standing on it. As a brand, Nike creates heroes—performer-athletes with strong personalities. Nike is the poet, not LeBron.

The pink suits and fat doughnuts, squeaky microphones and bongos may invite us to laugh at the absurd, ever-changing faces of James. Yet when he says, “Maybe I should just disappear” and the screen blacks out, the impulse seems suicidal—and possibly reminiscent of Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," which ends "Or does it explode?" The relentless “should, should, should” from the hero worshippers is tinged with a hatefulness that possibly threatens James’s career, his identity, and his soul. Ultimately, though, it's the commercial (or the poem) that brings or sings James back to life—back to the screen and the court where he (supposedly) belongs. Paradoxically, while Nike argues for allowing LeBron to be his own man, it does not present a clear image of who that man is other than a basketball player.

As Nike keeps bringing LeBron's complex human individuality back to the court and to the subject of advertising, it doesn't treat him any differently than it does the vocabulary of Angelou's poem; everything comes back to basketball and commercials. Thus, even though both Angelou and LeBron are presented as poets, neither is given a byline in "I Rise." That distinction is reserved for the poet—the maker of heroes and the maker of meaning, Nike itself, which signs off with an autograph everyone knows: the swoosh.

Liz Jones-Dilworth currently lives in Austin, Texas, where she is the VP of Operations at Jones-Dilworth, Inc., a PR firm specializing in start-up tech firms (a.k.a., the poetry of spreadsheets). Her dissertation, The Role of the Poet: The Performance of Poetry at the Beginning of the 21st Century, discusses the public roles and performance styles of Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Beau Sia, and Patricia Smith and grew out of her own experiences performing, coordinating, and publicizing poetry in a variety of venues. For her take on writing a dissertation and completing graduate school, check out Becoming Doctor Jones.

Madison About You

2011-02-23T02:11:00.012-06:00

It's no secret that folks at the P&PC home office love the language let loose by signs. We've covered the poetry of anti-Palin rallies in Alaska, driven through the jingles on Burma-Shave billboards, and counted down the top ten roadside rhymes we encountered on a road trip out West back in 2009. So here's a small gallery of the puns, witticisms, spoonerisms, and various other linguistic twists and turns on display in Madison, Wisconsin, over the past week and a half. Before you scroll down, though, check out these other links:

Call for Poems about the Wisconsin Protests
Poems about the Protest
Protest Poetry Slam
Poetry in Madison
Wisconsin Poets
Berton Braley Cyber Museum
Wisconsin, Poetry, & Animal Rights
Carl Sandburg, Badger & Socialist by Choice
Lorine Niedecker
Kenneth Patchen
Wisconsin State Ballad
Council for Wisconsin Writers
Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets
Wisconsin Book Festival
Wisconsin Center for the Book
Jawbreaker Poetry
and
"The Poetry of Revolt" by Elliott Colla

G.I. Jane & D.H. Lawrence

2011-02-12T01:56:00.029-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, P&PC noticed that The Expen- dables—Sylvester Stallone's 2010 testos- terone-filled vehicle for a fraternity house of fading action heroes— unexpectedly ends with a poem. Well, wouldn't you know it: right after that post went up, the P&PC Office interns were having their annual Demi Moore film festival, and they came back to report that Moore's 1997 flick G.I. Jane ends with a poem too. Early in the movie (see clip #1 below) Navy SEAL Master Chief John Urgayle recites D.H. Lawrence's "Self-Pity" while inspecting his recruits:

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Then, sort of like a Chekhovian gun, Lawrence's poem reappears in the film's final scene—after Moore has shaved her head, after she's endured brutal hazing and abuse during training, and after she's distinguished herself in action in part by saving Urgayle's life—where it becomes part of a gift that, along with the Navy Cross, Urgayle gives to Moore as an expression of gratitude and apology (clip #2 below).

We're proud of the interns for noticing this, of course, but we're even more proud for what they had to say about it. The gift, they argued, is obviously meant to signal the transformation that's taken place in Urgayle—he's accepted a woman into the masculine world of the SEALS, is now a bigger and better person, and is apologizing for the abuse Moore suffered at his hands—but that transformation is expressed not simply because Lawrence's poem is present but because Urgayle interprets it differently than he did earlier in the film. That is, his transformation is visible not only because he acts (and promises to act) differently than before, but because he reads (and promises to read) differently as well.

Early in the film, Urgayle uses "Self-Pity" to model soldier comportment by comparing human activity to that of the animal kingdom; soldiers, he suggests—drawing a one to one correspondence between humans and the poem's wild things—should be like animals and not feel sorry for themselves. But as the camerawork in the final scene indicates, however, Urgayle's changed self reads the poem in reverse—that human beings are capable of emotional and communicative heights that the animal kingdom of "Self-Pity" is not. We see this especially when the camera, under Ridley Scott's direction, focuses in on Urgayle's marked-up copy of "Self-Pity" and especially on the repeated word "sorry." While the camera doesn't quite cut off the poem's final two words ("for itself"), it certainly comes close, centering our attention instead on the apology Urgayle is using the poem to express. Wild things, the camera helps us understand, don't feel sorry, but human beings like Urgayle do. In the process of becoming a different human being, the movie suggests, Urgayle's become a different reader too.

The P&PC interns liked the look of Urgayle's heavily-marked paperback; both the ballpoint underlining of "The Mosquito Knows" and the red pencil circling of "Self-Pity" suggest he's read and thought about the poems many times. What stood out for them, therefore, was how his final reading of the poem went unmarked by pen. He could, they argued, have very easily circled the word "sorry" in order to make his new interpretation clear. What ultimately "underlines" the text, however, is the camera, so that if this final scene is in fact an act of literary interpretation, that activity is not conducted on the page by Urgayle himself, but, instead, by the filmmaker for the benefit of the viewer. (Could we therefore read G.I. Jane not as a movie about women in the military but as an English Department lecture about how to read Lawrence's poem?) In the process, the pencil markings on the page (and the act of handwriting marginalia) become remnants of Urgayle's earlier and reprehensible self, while the acts of seeing and filming are linked to his later, more sophisticated and certainly more human self. So, while the end of G.I. Jane is designed to demonstrate Urgayle's transformation, the movie uses that narrative cover to wage a sort of smear campaign against the page and the power of the pen, casting them as remedial and less human technologies when compared to the more sophisticated interpretive and emotional technology of film. At the end of the day, it's Hollywood—not Urgayle, not Moore, and not even your English teacher—who is the most credible literary critic.

See what you think about this by watching the two clips here. Sorry about the low quality of the second one, but it's the only version of the film's final scene we could find.