Fiske Matters: P&PC Goes on Tour

In early June, the Poetry & Popular Culture office will be sending a delegate to Fiske Matters: A Conference on John Fiske's Continuing Legacy for Cultural Studies, which is taking place in Madison, Wisconsin, June 11-12.

Our delegate will team up with three other scholars—two of whom you've met at this site before: Catherine Keyser, who in 2009 wrote about lingerie, nursery rhymes, and the new woman, and Melissa Girard, who recently weighed in on the cultural politics of slam poetry—for a panel cryptically titled "Poetry & Popular Culture":

Here is a preview of that panel:

Panel Overview

Linking poetry studies and popular culture studies is not the most intuitive scholarly move, as the two fields rarely seem to overlap and even, at times, appear to have an openly hostile relationship with each other. In the most extreme cases, poetry is presented as an antidote to a debased low or popular culture, and popular culture is offered as a democratic cure to the cartooned elitism of poetry and high culture. However, as we hope to show in this panel, the two fields can do more than simply oppose each other; pairing them can be a provocative and productive endeavor that sheds light on and expands the histories and purviews of both in challenging ways. Indeed, in some cases, poetry is not just a relay point or magnifying glass for issues central to popular culture studies—the culture industries, celebrity, usability, audience participation, reception, etc.—but is a ground upon which popular culture was in fact built.

Poetry has intersected with every medium and facet of popular culture from Hallmark to Hollywood and Vanity Fair to Paris Hilton, and yet, because it is attributed a distinctive identity as a seat of genuine expression, it remains at the same time somewhat separate—a uniquely commodified moment when commodification supposedly gives way to uncommodified utterance. As a historically active site of popular activity, and as a singular discourse within that activity, poetry would seem to be a productive site of critical investigation for scholars of poetry and popular culture alike. This panel offers four examples of what that investigation might look like, each of which draws inspiration for its focus or method from John Fiske’s writing and/or critical legacy.

1) The Arbiters of Paste: Poetry Scrapbooking and Participatory Culture
by Poetry & Popular Culture

John Fiske defined “popular culture” as that culture which “is made by the people at the interface between the products of the culture industries and everyday life.” One of the central challenges that scholars face is in assessing popular culture in this formulation is amassing evidence of that interface—measuring and recording the types of activities consumers actually do, as well as the various ways that audiences transform the largely homogenized materials of mass culture in the course of everyday life. In this paper, I want to present a largely unknown archive of poetry scrapbooks which offers a material record of this process: evidence of how readers in the first half of the twentieth century artistically and critically repurposed mass-produced poems in large albums of verse that not only served as their age’s version of the mix tape, but that helped establish some of the dynamics of participatory culture that mark popular activity today.

Of particular concern to me is the relationship between ideology and resistance in the activity of poetry scrapbooking. On the one hand, in compiling their personal poetry anthologies, people were encouraged to imagine the activity as an accumulation of literary property that led to middlebrow cultural legitimacy; in fact, the textual act of keeping an album was regularly couched in terms of maintaining and keeping a house—both practices that fostered and relied on the centrality of the bourgeois self. At the same time, given the license to repurpose mass-produced poems, readers constructed albums that empowered critical thinking and challenged social conventions in any number of ways. This is especially the case with albums assembled by women readers, who found in their anthologies a freedom and privacy—a room of their own, as it were—in which to experiment with and explore the new subject positions of modernity.

2) Light Verse, Magazines, and Celebrity: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker
by Catherine Keyser
University of South Carolina

In 1928, Time magazine observed that “for ten years, smart young women have been trying to rival with their versification Edna St. Vincent Millay.” This comment connects reader and poet, public and celebrity, as both use poetry as an emblem of public self-fashioning. John Fiske addressed the contemporary female celebrity and her sexualized body in his essay on Madonna in Reading Popular Culture (1989). The contradictions he recognized in Madonna, a celebrity whose persona conveys both objecthood and agency, resemble the ambiguities that cultural historians trace in the flapper. Emulating Fiske’s attention to traces of domination and resistance in the presentation and reception of celebrities, I analyze poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker as emblems of modern womanhood within mass-market magazines.

With women moving into cities and entering the professions at unprecedented rates, Millay’s light verse about sexuality and mobility became enormously popular in the 1920s. Dorothy Parker cited Millay’s influence on her own career, claiming that she had been “following in the exquisite footsteps of Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.” This language of “exquisite”-ness also suggests the vexed link between body image, fashion choices, and professional autonomy in the magazine fantasy of the urbane modern woman. I examine two magazines, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, that provided readers with a vision of modernity and class mobility. Both magazines featured rhetoric prizing smartness, graphics promising luxury, and light verse presenting sexuality and femininity.

I argue that the magazine’s pages demonstrate the iconic roles that Millay and Parker played in the cultural imagination. I use the advertisements and cartoons that variously picture and address the poets’ readers to analyze the kinship proposed between young single women working in the city and modern female poets writing about it. Both Millay and Parker were prominent writers of light verse, a genre found in newspapers and magazines and characterized by formal conventionality, simple diction, and (often) rollicking rhymes. This genre emblematized the energy and insouciance of youth culture, as well as the rebellion and flirtation of the flapper. The simplicity of the genre and its covert aggression—the punch-line or twist at the end of the poem—invited the common reader’s participation and indeed self-invention.

Poetry for Pleasure: Hallmark, Inc. and the Business of Emotion at Mid-Century
by Melissa Girard
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

In the 1960s, Hallmark, Inc., purveyor of greeting cards, entered the book publishing industry. Their diverse offerings went far beyond mere gift books; throughout the decade, they issued a variety of highly readable anthologies focusing on Japanese haiku, African American poetry, popular love poems, limericks, and children’s verse, as well as canonical figures such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot. Hallmark’s capacious vision stood in stark contrast to their New Critical contemporaries, who, at mid-century, were overwhelmingly preoccupied with narrowing the poetic canon. At a moment when the literary academy had abandoned popular poetry and popular readers almost entirely, Hallmark preserved and fiercely defended what they termed a “democratic” poetics. “The way to read a poem is with an open mind, not an open dictionary,” the editors insist in the 1960 anthology Poetry for Pleasure.

My paper takes Hallmark’s poetics seriously as a democratic alternative to the elitism of the mid- century American academy. I am attentive not only to Hallmark’s poetry anthologies but also to their innovative marketing and advertising campaigns, which placed these attractively packaged and affordable books in supermarkets and drugstores. In so doing, I argue that Hallmark played a vitally important, populist role throughout the 1960s, advocating on behalf of poetry and actively attempting to broaden its readership. At the same time, my paper also explores the complex ramifications of Hallmark’s corporate sponsorship of poetry. While Hallmark undoubtedly empowered the average reader, they also sought to strengthen their brand and, concomitantly, to profit from Americans’ increasing poetic literacy. This “emotion marketing,” as Hallmark terms it, belies their “democratic” agenda. My paper recovers this largely forgotten historical struggle between the academy and corporate America for the hearts and minds of poetry readers.

Poetry vs. Paris Hilton: Who’s On Top?
by Angela Sorby
Marquette University

In 2007, Paris Hilton read a poem on Larry King Live that she had supposedly written in prison. The poem, which turned out to be plagiarized from a fan letter, prompted a media scandal that raises implicit questions about how poetry works, or fails to work, as a popular cultural medium. In Understanding Popular Culture, John Fiske argues that, to be popular, a text or commodity must be relevant: it must be functionally available to consumers who make it a meaningful part of their daily lives. In this essay, I will twist Fiske’s thesis to argue that poetry is a functional medium because people are not comfortable using it in their daily lives.

Through an analysis of the Paris Hilton poetry scandal, and of subsequent poems written to (and against) Hilton, I will suggest that precisely because poetry is not “relevant” to most consumers, it arouses strong reactions (disciplinary scorn, passionate defense) when it appears in mass cultural contexts. Poetry, in this case, prompts a breakdown in the ideological unity of an icon such as Paris Hilton, whose popular subjectivity relies on hyper-legibility and relevance.

Johnny Be Good: The Poetry of 21 Jump Street

Poetry & Popular Culture takes a break from the poetry of American highways today and turns its attention, instead, to the poetry of another street—21 Jumpstreet, the late 80's FOX t.v. drama that "focused on a squad of youthful-looking undercover police officers investigating crimes in high schools and other teenage venues." It turns out the show was more than just a vehicle for Johnny Depp; it was a vehicle for poetry as well.

Now, P&PC is making this judgment based only on the two episodes that follow the pilot, "America, What a Town" and "Don't Pet the Teacher." That's as far as we've gotten to this point. But go back and watch them yourselves. Near the beginning of "America, What a Town," as Depp goes off about the evils of automobile insurance, you'll find the words to Dorothy Parker's poem "Resume" written in red paint on the walls of Jump Street Chapel, secret headquarters of the big-haired, baby-faced Tommy Hanson (Depp) and crew:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

The rest of Jump Street Chapel's walls are covered in posters of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Jimi Hendrix, but Parker's verse fits right in, especially as it appears to have been written by hand in all capital letters—a script that recalls the graffiti font of the show's title and that to some extent casts poetry reading as an outsider or undercover activity.

The real treat, however, comes in the next episode, "Don't Pet the Teacher," in which the undercover Depp falls for Miss S. Chadwick, the hottie 20-something high school English teacher at South Central High. Chadwick, it happens, is also the object of attention for a couple of more nefarious characters who are vandalizing the school and scalping tickets to see Van Halen. Later in the show, in fact, one of those suspects sends Miss Chadwick a love note misquoting Lord Byron—or so Miss Chadwick informs us without revealing either the source poem or the nature of the mistake. When we first see her in action—hear her in action, rather—it is from Depp's point of view as he walks down the hall to class on the first day of his undercover assignment. Chadwick is in the middle of a lecture on, of all things, contemporary poetry. Her voice echoes through the halls as she describes, in fits and starts that sound as much like linebreaks as they do rhetorically effective pauses, the work of an unnamed poet:

"...and his imagery and rhythms are still considered today some of the most urgent in contemporary poetry. So take a few minutes now to read this short work, and read it a couple of times, paying specific attention to his layers of imagery and how those images collectively build to their own inner conclusions..."

At this point, Depp shows up at the classroom door and puts a temporary stop to Miss Chadwick's lesson. Later on, we see the names of Ezra Pound (pictured to the left) and Carl Sandburg (not pictured to the left) written on the chalkboard, and we see what appear to be poems written on, and tacked above, the chalkboards. What a classroom! In the end, as befits a crime drama, we find out who's been stalking Miss Chadwick and who's been vandalizing the school. Miss Chadwick finds out that Depp's really working undercover and is thus an eligible suitor. But despite the urgency of his imagery and rhythms, we never do find out the name of the poet whom Chadwick is describing in her lecture. In the end, it seems, poetry is the only place with any mystery left.

Guest Posting: On Flappers and Mother Goose

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Catherine Keyser writes in about lingerie, nursery rhymes, and the new women writers that the decade of the roaring '20s, well, engendered.

Mother Goose, the “mythical matriarch,” may seem a far cry from the short-skirted, martini-mixing flapper, but popular women poets of the 1910s and 20s used her verse in particular to announce the sexuality of modern women. Dorothy Parker, for instance, adapted a Mother Goose rhyme for this saucy, gotta-have-it lingerie caption in Vogue: “There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with frothy Valenciennes lace.”

The 1916 Rand McNally edition of Mother Goose sported illustrations by Blanche Fisher Wright that depicted apple-cheeked children in old-fashioned dress—not flappers in silk slips. A 1921 McNally ad appealed to a related set of family values, promising “memories of boyhood and girlhood days rose-tinted with recollections of precious hours ‘when Daddy read’” and delivering appropriately “clean, wholesome texts.” This nostalgia for a pre-sexual girlhood contrasted with flapper liberty and coital confession. Parker mocked flapper “innocence” in a 1923 Saturday Evening Post article when, tongue firmly in cheek, she wrote: “there are few things sweeter and more wholesome than the girl of today’s attitude toward sex. She just looks unflinchingly at the thing with those widely advertised clear eyes of hers.”

The flapper poet wasn't the first feminist to take on the nursery rhyme. In 1915, for instance, newspaper columnist Alice Duer Miller published a Book of Rhymes For Suffrage Times to educate her audience to support the vote for women. But in the turn away from overt feminist politics in the 1920s, nursery rhymes by popular female poets offered a form by which to make flirtatious commentaries on women’s bodies rather than predictably didactic messages. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s famous poem “First Fig," for example, is a retelling of the Mother Goose riddle “Nanny Etticoat”:

Little Nanny Etticoat
In a white petticoat
And a red nose;
The longer she stands
The shorter she grows.
What Is She?

In "First Fig," Millay compares her body to a candle—the correct answer to the "Nanny Etticoat" rhyme—but strips off the petticoat:

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,
It gives a lovely light.

Incidentally, word on the street indicates this sexual license wasn't just a posture for Millay. Edmund Wilson recorded in his journal that, one evening, Millay offered the top half of her body to one partner and the other half of her body to him.

These poets enlisted Mother Goose as an unsuspecting partner in the flappers' crimes against old-fashioned femininity. But these rhymes also remind us that the flapper herself was often rendered innocuous through such infantilization; though they were modern women, flappers were oftentimes cast (and sometimes cast themselves) as “little girls” trying on big girls’ clothing. Millay, for example, pokes fun of her celebrity persona and supposedly debauched lifestyle in her poem “Grown-Up”:

Was it for this I uttered prayers
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half past eight?

By 1928, Parker mocks the flapper’s pretense to childhood in the New Yorker, describing herself “buying garments from the Junior Misses’ Department ... of so extreme a style, they gave me a doll’s tea-set with it.” Given this frustration with the identification of modern women with children, it is perhaps no wonder that when faced with Winnie the Pooh, Parker—riffing on her signature New Yorker byline "Constant Reader"—reported: “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”

Catherine Keyser is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina where she is completing a book titled "Girls Who Wear Glasses:" New York Women Writers and the Gender of Smartness.