"Put Readings on YouTube"

Here's the skinny on what's been happening literature-wise in Iowa City of late. After several years of application-making, bell-ringing, and horn-tooting, Iowa City was named a UNESCO "world city of literature," joining Edinburgh, Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia as the only other cities in the world with that designation. Check out the press release yourself here. Way to go, Iowa City.

At the same time, as it was becoming clear that Iowa City would indeed achieve "world city of literature" status, Iowa Public Radio announced that it would be dropping "Live From Prairie Lights" from its programming schedule. For as long as most people remember, "Live From Prairie Lights" has broadcast visiting poets and fiction writers reading, well, live from Prairie Lights Bookstore in downtown Iowa City. Apparently, though, a number of forces conspired to drive listeners away. The show's host was boring. The readers (like many readers) didn't perform their work with any particular flair. And the show ran once or twice on air which, as you and I both know, simply ain't gonna fly in an age of YouTube and podcasts. Are you gonna rearrange your schedule, wait until 8 pm, then tune in your crystal set to listen to a boring reading followed by an even more boring set of questions? "Poetry & Popular Culture" sure isn't.

But the old-time codgers here in Iowa City—many of whom haven't listened to "Live From Prairie Lights" in ages (and many of whom would privately admit that the show actually is pretty boring)—have been lamenting the passing of the wireless torch and the demise of the radio show. How horrid, they say, that on the eve of being designated the world's third city of literature Iowa City should strip away its literary radio programming. Some heavies like former Iowa Poet Laureate and Writers' Workshop teacher Marvin Bell and current Iowa Poet Laureate Robert Dana have weighed in on the controversy.

And what follows is Mike Chasar's take on the topic, a view officially endorsed by "Poetry & Popular Culture."

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on November 25, 2008

Put Readings On YouTube

Congratulations, Iowa City, for being designated UNESCO's third City of Literature. Via the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the International Writing Program and other innovative and historically significant literary efforts, you have changed the way writing happens in the United States and around the world.

It is now time to remember that history, stop lamenting the disappearance of "Live from Prairie Lights" from Iowa Public Radio and seize on that disappearance as an opportunity to reimagine what such broadcasts might look and sound like in a digital age where podcasts and YouTube reach a much larger audience than WSUI and Julie Englander ever could.

Radio poetry history

Literature has long been a part of public and commercial radio programming. In the 1920s, poetry radio shows emerged as popular parts of the media landscape. Some shows -- like Ted Malone's "Between the Bookends" and Tony Wons's "R Yuh Listenin'?" -- were broadcast nationwide and had large, avid audiences who not only waited by their sets to hear poems read aloud to live organ music, but who flooded the studios with fan mail as well.

At the height of his popularity in the 1930s, Malone's show received more than 20,000 fan letters per month. Much as I hesitate to mention that other state university north of Ames, you can go there and read some of these fan letters yourself, which are now in the Arthur B. Church Papers in the Special Collections Department of that university's Parks Library.

Malone and Wons weren't the only ones to dazzle first generation radio audiences with poetry. A.M. Sullivan's "New Poetry Hour" on WOR (New York) strove to broadcast poetry of only the highest literary quality. Eve Merriam's Out of the Ivory Tower on WQXR (New York) featured Leftist poets reading their work. Ted Malone was known for showcasing "amateur" poetry sent in by his listeners, but he also read poetry by Shakespeare, Keats, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot.

And on the eve of World War II -- when radio was the major source of up-to-the-moment news for many Americans -- NBC broadcast Edna St. Vincent Millay's book-length propaganda poem "The Murder of Lidice" to a nationwide audience of millions. It was performed by Hollywood actor and two-time Academy Award nominee Basil Rathbone and was accompanied by a chorus of singers. Not only was that broadcast shortwaved to England and Europe, but the poem was translated into Spanish and Portuguese and beamed to South America as well.

Finding today's audiences

Those days may be over, but audiences still await -- though they're not sitting in Prairie Lights, nor, apparently, are they sitting by their radios diligently tuning in to Iowa Public Radio.

Instead, they are online watching "The Daily Show" and Tina Fey impersonate Sarah Palin on YouTube. They are downloading podcasts. They tune in at their convenience, but they do so in enormous numbers.

"Live from Prairie Lights" should find a model in President-elect Barack Obama, who recently gave the weekly Democratic radio address not just on radio, but also for the first time on YouTube.

If, as one university official claimed, "Live from Praire Lights" is a "standard-bearer" for Iowa City's literary culture, then it should not be constrained by the time tables of either a bookstore or a public radio schedule. It should be recorded in video and audio formats. It should be posted online for listeners to access at their convenience -- at a coffee shop, at work, or even (anachronistic as it might sound) at a fireside.

The readings of Iowa City's writers and visiting writers should be posted on YouTube where people not just in Iowa City, but around the world, can access them. Imagine the global audiences who might tune in to hear participants in the International Writing Program read from their work.

If "Live from Prairie Lights" really is the "gem" that people say it is, then why not share that wealth with as many people as possible? That would not only be a move in keeping with Iowa City's leadership and innovation in arts and letters, but the mark of a true world city of literature as well.

Firing Up the Muse

Following what is now a national trend, the State of Iowa has for the most part gone smokeless. While our state legislature sees fit to allow smoking in Casinos (and in an isolated American Legion bar here and there), the majority of the state's restaurants and bars are now smoke free, save those establishments which have outdoor beer gardens and which don't serve food; in those cases—like The Picador, Martini's, or Joe's in Iowa City—a patron can (as The Picador advertised on a chalkboard propped outside its front door the day after the smoking ban went into effect) "come in and enjoy a relaxing smoke in our beer garden."

There has been no poetry I know of to celebrate the institution of this new law. Perhaps this is because poetry has, for many years, been on the side of smoking in bars—or at least on the side of having a relaxing smoke during happy hour or while enjoying a nightcap. Printed on matchbooks throughout the midcentury, these poems were funny and oftentimes given away as advertisements for bars and taverns themselves. Drinkers and smokers carried bits of verse around in their pockets or pocketbooks that contained all sorts of free if not useful bits of advice.

Take, for example, a sky-blue matchbook advertising the Trovillion Tavern owned by Glen and Sally of Vienna, Illinois, which provides a barometer by which to measure one's inebriation. Simply titled "Drunk," it reads in call capital letters:

NOT DRUNK IS HE
WHO FROM THE FLOOR
CAN RISE AGAIN AND
DRINK ONCE MORE.

BUT DRUNK IS HE
WHO PROSTRATE LIES
AND CANNOT EITHER
DRINK OR RISE.

The dimiter lines of the Trovillion Tavern's matchbook cast Glen and Sally's no-doubt smoking establishment—or at least the state of drunkenness—as a decidedly male space. They aren't alone in doing so. Consider the poem distributed on the inside of a matchbook advertising Jean and Bob's 21 Club in Buffalo, Wyoming:

The Bartender Knows

He knows all of our sorrows
And all of our joys
He knows every girl
That chases the boys
He knows all of our troubles
And all of our strife
He knows every man
Who ducks out on his wife

If the bartender told
All that he knows
He would turn all of our friends
Into bitterest foes
He would start forth a story
Which, gaining in force
Would cause all of our wives
To sue for divorce

He would get all of our homes
Mixed up in a fight
He would turn all of our bright days
Into sorrowful nights.
In fact he would keep
The whole town in a stew
If he told a tenth
Of all that he knew

So when out on a party
And from home you steal
Drop in for a drink
THE BARTENDER WON'T SQUEAL

"The Bartender Knows" is noteworthy for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it's gratuitously printed on the inside of the matchbook, a space usually left blank because it would have required a separate press run to print the poem there and thus would have cost folks like Jean and Bob more money to purchase. Apparently, though, the cost of including "The Bartender Knows" was worth it.

"The Bartender Knows" is not just an advertisement for the 21 Club—"The Finest Club in Buffalo"—but for the culture of male drinking more generally. Establishing a divide between the female space of the home (from which one escapes) and the male space of the bar (where one seeks out the reassuring company of other men), "The Bartender Knows" is not only about a man (the bartender is identified as a "he") but spoken by a man as well ("all of our wives"). It's a paean to the homosocial space of the bar—the space where the average man finds his true confidante in the person of the barkeep. Indeed, the girl who chases the boys in lines 3 & 4 seems mentioned as a token gesture to heteroxexual relationships, one that is then subordinated if not repressed for the rest of the poem. Humorously, the bar becomes a center of Buffalo, Wyoming's information economy, with the bartender himself serving as an amalgam of godfather and Santa Claus—a figure who knows what you've been doing but promises to not punish you for it, a promise that nonetheless doubles as a constant threat of revelation that establishes and maintains the barkeep's seat of power.

The triangulated relationship between smoking, bars, and men opens up questions about how and where women—such as Sally of the Trovillion Tavern, or Jean of the 21 Club, or even the girl who chases boys in "The Bartender Knows"—fit into this homosocial economy. For years, critics of Virginia Slims' "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" ad have railed against how the cigarette company conflates the act of smoking with actual progress in women's rights. Following a chain of associations from cigarette to poetic matchbook to bar, one better understands the significance of that one Virginia Slim smokey treat: it not only represents a breaking of social taboos against women smoking, but it purports to allow women into the masculine discursive space of the tavern with its kept secrets, its inebriation, and its escape from the home. Virginia Slims doesn't just equate smoking with women's rights; it defines equal rights, one can argue, as men's and women's equal access to the smoking and drinking that takes place in the commercial space of the bar.

Of course, this access to the bar is only a conceptual one for, as these poems show, the actual space of the bar remained a masculine place where the "he" at Trovillion Tavern, for example, can fantasize about being out of the emasculating house when he can hoist a glass, lift a cigarette and, full of his manhood, "rise again."

My Poetic License - An Introduction

In March of 2006, Iowa City's daily newspaper, The Press-Citizen, began printing poems on its Op-Ed page as part of a regular feature called "Poetic License." Hearkening back to a time 50-150 years ago when American newspapers regularly ran poems that explicitly engaged the day's news, "Poetic License" encouraged its contributors - yours truly among them - to be as topical, occasional and political as the best letters to the editor, and as biting, satiric or humorous as the best editorial cartoons. "Today's news is tomorrow's fish wrap," editor Jeff Charis-Carlson often reminded Poetic License writers - what he called his Deadline Poets - in an attempt to get us to come down from Parnassus and to write quickly and frequently so as to better help fill his page.

As recently as the 1950s, The New York Times was in the habit of running poems amidst the letters to the editor in its pages, but it's rare to see a poem in such contexts today. In restoring poetry to the Op-Ed page, though, Jeff didn't want to repeat Ted Kooser's nationally-syndicated column "American Life in Poetry" which features a Kooser-approved poem by a recognizably "literary" poet that is then reprinted in paper after paper across the U.S. To the contrary, Jeff wanted "Poetic License" to be an aggressively local feature: written by Iowa City poets for Iowa City audiences and oftentimes taking on topics of such local orientation that "outsiders" need a good deal of background in order to understand where the poems are coming from. The term "Maytag" in "Flood Poem: Almost a Third of CEO's Expect to Cut Jobs" for example, resonantes very differently in Iowa than it does elsewhere, especially since Whirlpool's 2006 acquisition and closure of Maytag manufacturing plants, once the economic center of Newton, Iowa.

Jeff eventually got in the practice of running illustrations - photographs, or sometimes hilariously-done ink drawings by the Press-Citizen's editorial cartoonist - alongside PoLi poems as well, creating provocative text-image conversations. Oftentimes, the poems dialogue clearly with other pieces on the Op-Ed page. This editorial dynamic is impossible to duplicate in this blog, where I'm simply excerpting some of my contributions to PoLi and recording them.

Gannett News Services, which owns the Press-Citizen, has a policy that keeps PoLi poems (like other materials) online for 4 weeks, after which those items vanish. As much as I'd like them to become tomorrow's fish wrap, I also don't want to see them - or the experiment that PoLi is continuing - completely disappear. There are many questions that PoLi has inspired and that are worth thinking through, including:

• How can poems complicate or trouble an Op-Ed page chock-full of otherwise straightforward or transparent declamatory prose?
• What does poetry have to do differently in 2008 to work in a journalistic context that it didn't have to do 100 years ago?
• When poets do come down from Parnassus and embrace the ephemerality of the daily news and the specificity of the local event, what new freedoms do they find?
• What sort of a poetics takes shape under the pressure of a deadline?
• What is the public response to PoLi, and how does one measure and track that response?
• Who decides to write for PoLi and why - a question especially relevant to Iowa City, which boasts the Iowa Writers' Workshop full of poets who have never sent poems to the paper?

Many writers not affiliated with the Workshop have contributed to Poetic License over the past 2+ years, each developing over time a signature style, politics, approach, tone, rhetorical flexibility, etc. (Most recently, for example, I've been using actual news headlines as my poem titles, and after experimenting with various verse forms, I seem to have settled in - improbable as it sounds - to writing sonnets.) Contributors have worked more or less closely with Jeff, who sometimes participates so heavily in the writing process that he might claim co-editorship. In sum, PoLi has become a fascinating laboratory in which to track the possibilities of re-embedding poetry in one aspect of print culture today as thoroughly as it once was for generations of Americans in the U.S.

The following are some of my contributions to this research. Who says you can't get the news from poetry?

Flood Poem: Almost a Third of CEOs Expect to Cut Jobs

Appeared in the Press-Citizen June 21, 2008

The boardroom talk is all about the rising
cost of energy and whether,
if corn and durable goods increase together,
a crest in unemployment is surprising,
merited, excusable, or good
for business in the coming fiscal year,
and how to make this cresting now appear
as natural as a high school textbook would:
history is full of ups and downs,
the nation always—always—comes back stronger
if you sandbag just a little longer
and sacrifice a few Midwestern towns.
For when your Maytag’s lost to the flood’s designs
the boardroom floods as well—with dollar signs.