The Poetry of Extortion: The City Cab Co. of Hays, Kansas, & The 21 Club of Buffalo, NY

In his essay "Business and Poetry," Dana Gioia wonders why "[t]here have been many important American poets who supported themselves—either by necessity or choice—by working in business, but none of them has seen it as an experience fit to write about." T.S. Eliot didn't write about Lloyd's Bank of London. Wallace Stevens didn't write much about insurance. A.R. Ammons didn't write about being a salesman. James Dickey didn't write about working in advertising. Richard Hugo didn't write about working at Boeing, and Archibald MacLeish didn't write about his time as editor of Fortune. Gioia goes looking for office cubicles, interest rates, and quarterly profits, and when he doesn't find them, he concludes that "Business does not exist in the world of poetry."

Poetry & Popular takes umbrage with this notion, since a huge number of writers—ranging from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Tillie Olsen, Muriel Rukeyser, Philip Levine and Robert Pinsky—have, in fact, written about business and money in America. Much of this poetry belongs to an American protest tradition that explores the lives of workers and trades, class inequalities, the exploitation of workers by business, and the business-based divides between rich and poor. We have ground that specific axe elsewhere and long ago, however. Here, we want to claim that a whole other realm of American poetry is also concerned with the business of making, getting, and spending money. Money—one of what Gioia calls the central "concerns of the average man"—is central to the world of popular poetry.

Money is so central to popular poetry—think of the enormous amounts of poetry that have been written for, or incorporated into, advertisements, for example—that it's impossible to cover all of its various manifestations and permutations in this one little posting. (If you're interested or can't get enough of advertising poetry, though, check out our previous postings focusing on Levi's, corsets, Blatz beer, Chocolove, Ex-Lax, and thread.) So here, for a moment, as Halloween approaches, we want to dwell on the poetry of extortion—the poetry of blackmail.

Consider the poem printed at the top of this posting, which appears on the back of a business card for the City Cab Company of that great metropolis, Hays, Kansas. Poems were commonly printed on business cards (see, for example, the business cards of Dr. C.B. Weagley, Veterinary Surgeon, or C.G. Blatt's Photographic Emporium), but this one is extra special for the threat it humorously levels against the passenger/client:

The taxicab driver sits in his car
And waits for calls from near and far;
He knows all the crooks and he knows all the rooks;
He knows all the bad roads; he knows all the nooks;
He knows our sorrows; he knows our joys;
He knows all the girls who are chasing the boys;
He knows all our troubles; he knows all our strife;
He knows every man who ducks from his wife;
If the taxicab driver told half that he knows,
He would turn all our friends into foes;
He would sow a small breeze that would soon be a gale;
Engulf us in trouble—land us in jail;
He would start forth a story, which gaining in force;
Would cause half our wives to sue for divorce;
He'd get all our homes mixed up in a fight;
And turn our bright days into sorrowing nights
In fact, he could keep the whole town in a stew,
If he told half of the things he knew.
So here we are—just pay us our fees,
We won't know a thing but our ABC's.

For Poetry & Popular Culture, this semi- colon-happy poem is not just a facetious reminder to pay up—an excessively verbose argument about the value of silence. It's also a poem in the tradition of wassailing and other extortionary lyrics that Leon Jackson illuminates in his great essay, "We Wont' Leave Until We Get Some: Reading the Newsboy's New Year's Address." For Jackson, poems like the carriers' addresses of 18th and 19th century America were not dominated in their distribution "by a single, market-based economy" but "were disseminated through a number of different economies—charity, patronage, gift-exchange, credit network, competitive writing, and so on," some of which carried threats of retribution or violence that challenged the way that money typically organized class relations. One of the examples he offers is the tradition of wassailing where "a group of poorer men would 'invade' a home at Christmas time, sing songs or perhaps perform a brief play, and then demand money or food. The wassailers would refuse to leave until they had been recompensed, and if they were forcibly ejected they would undertake a campaign of sabotage and destruction that often lasted for months at a time." Every act of wassailing thus contained an implicit threat: pay up, or face occupation.

The rhetoric of the City Cab Co. business card works in a similar way, revealing the cabbie to have a monopoly on a town's dirty laundry and blackmailing the customer into forking over some dough. When read in this context (and in a tradition of extortionary verse rooted in carriers' addresses, handbills circulated by people with disabilities, and the like), the second image above—a poem on the inside of a matchbook for the 21 Club, "The Finest Club in Buffalo"—reveals itself to be working in much the same way. Here, "The Bartender Knows" rehearses much of the same material as "The Taxicab Driver" and, at times, is a word-for-word repetition of the City Cab Company's business card, sans the excessive punctuation. This repetition is, btw, way intriguing for the P&PC office; we sometimes lie awake at night wondering about the original "source" poem from which these verses were cribbed.

The most significant difference between the two versions, however, is the fact that "The Bartender Knows" makes the threat of exposure implicit. So tight-lipped is the well-paid bartender, in fact—or so the logic of the poem goes—that even the activity of his blackmail goes unstated. Modern readers may read the poem's conclusion

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

as a gesture of friendship, solidarity, or male bonding, but contemporary verses such as "The Taxicab Driver" help us see that that is not the case at all. Don't be fooled. Friendship, solidarity, and male bonding are secondary developments of what is, first and foremost, an economic relationship grounded in an information economy where extortion—not your pint of Guinness—is the order of the day.

News Flash: Paging Edgar Guest...

In the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon is on record saying, "I myself make no distinction between 'light' verse and—what?—heavy verse."

Muldoon was speaking about Roger Angell's year-end poem "Greetings, Friends", one of the last remaining instantiations of the Carrier's Address—a retrospective ditty distributed by tip-seeking newspaper boys in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

If you want to see examples of Carriers' Addresses done up the old-school way—long, rhyming, stand-alone recaps of the year's events oftentimes penned and printed by newsboys themselves—check out the amazing collection maintained by the Brown University Center for Digital Initiatives.

Whatever You Wish To Give (Part 2): An Inglorious Milton?

Written and distributed by James Boon Cheatham around 1880, this 20-stanza carrier's address ("Sympathize with the Blind!") incorporates some of the same rhetorical strategies as "A Railroad Boy's Appeal" and "The Wounded Soldier's Appeal" which I've highlighted below: an expressed (though frustrated) desire to labor for one's living as able-bodied Americans do, and appeals to not only Christian charity but to earning one's place in the afterlife. The railroad boy, for example, ends his poem "by-and-by may all we meet / In realms just over there," punning on the word "just" to indicate not only the proximity of that afterlife but the justice he expects to experience when distinctions between abled and disabled are no longer operative. If things are "just over there," then the poem implies that things are not so just over here and that a small donation will help—at least in the short term—to remedy that; the acts of earning capital and earning salvation are parallel if not overlapping endeavors. Indeed, as a quotation in the upper right-hand corner of Cheatham's broadside explains, "Lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven."

In the poem, Cheatham—after imploring his reader "to buy this poem, every line"—explains:

But I'm blind, I cannot see
The beauty of your loving face,
Be true and grateful and He will be
A loving Saviour of His grace.
But there is a day God's saints shall see
And God will give me light,
When Christian friends shall meet above
Where the blind receive their sight.

As with "A Railroad Boy's Appeal," this poem appeals to ideas of justice and equality in the afterlife in order to encourage people on earth to acts of charity. Cheatham relies on the poetic form to impress this as well, using the linebreak in line three to remind people of the reciprocity in the Christian, not-by-faith-alone, contract for salvation: "Be true and grateful and He will be [as well]". Even more interesting is the implication that able-bodied people are rewarded with salvation for leading good lives while the blind are rewarded with sight; there are two sets of rewards. For the able-bodied, faith alone is not good enough to get one into heaven, but for the disabled, faith—and the pain of enduring the world without sight which that faith makes possible—is enough (especially if they serve as town criers for God). Indeed, Cheatham makes this distinction later in the poem when he writes:

I love my Saviour's welcome voice
His word is my delight;
In early life make him our choice
And battle for the right.

A moral compass, the blind person ("I") can hear and delight in the Saviour's "voice"—an act of revelation that privileges sound over sight—but it's the sighted person who has the responsibility (and power) to "make him our [collective] choice" and lead the "battle for the right." The contractual nature of salvation differs depending on one's physical abilities, and the corresponding cultural economics of ability—at least as they are rhetorically positioned—are in the end more complex and more morally entangled than simply flipping two bits to a blind guy.

The prevalence of poems like "Sympathize with the Blind," "A Railroad Boy's Appeal" and "The Wounded Soldier's Appeal" in the 19th century popular print landscape would seem to offer the field of disability studies a rich entryway into that period's discourses about ability and disability and the ways that disabled individuals harnessed not just a genre but an entire rhetorical constellation in surviving an inhospitable world via their wits and linguistic capacities. It should also offer literary critics another way to think about how poetry was used within popular culture; it was not just easy reading.

Whatever You Wish To Give: The Popular Culture of Carriers' Addresses in the 19th Century

When people refer to "carriers' addresses," they usually mean the 19th century New Year's poem-greetings delivered to people's doorsteps by newspaper printers' devils—apprentices who usually were not paid for their work—who were seeking a tip to help pay their room and board for the coming year. These were (typically) clever, sometimes fairly lengthy poems summarizing the previous year's events, often authored by the printers' devils themselves, and frequently ended with an appeal to the homeowner such as the following from an 1870 address "To the Patrons of The Daily Picayune" in New Orleans:

From the fulness of your cheer,
Give to him a little share,
To lighten burdens he must bear—
And may those blessings held most dear,
Be yours throughout the glad New Year,
Gladdening your days forever here,
the Carrier prays.

For more carriers' addresses, see the very nice exhibit hosted by Brown University at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/carriers/index.html. Also check out Leon Jackson's "We Won't Leave Until We Get Some: Reading the newsboy's New Year's address" at http://www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-02/reading/.

But in the 19th century, printers' devils weren't the only ones carrying poems around. Take, for example, the postcard reproduced above: "A Railroad Boy's Appeal." Crippled in an accident, the card's bearer is now selling his "song" to sympathetic passengers or passers-by. The poem concludes:

And now, dear friends, I'm as you see
Poor, helpless and alone;
No other way to buy a limb—
Will you please buy my song?
And may God bless you all,
This is my heart-felt-prayer;
And by-and-by may we all meet
In realms just over there.

Signed "C.E.H.," the postcard has a footer that reads "PRICE.—Whatever you wish to give."

In the more elaborate broadside pictured to the left, "The Wounded Soldier's Appeal," bearer David Gingry, Jr. relates how he was permanently wounded while fighting for the Confederate side in the Civil War. Lest there be any misinterpretation while reading the poem, however, the piece begins with a little prose testimony: "The undersigned, a brave soldier of the army of the Potomac, asks the aid of the people to enable him to support A WIFE AND FIVE CHILDREN, who have no other means of subsistence. He lost his left hand at Petersburg, besides being wounded in his other arm, in his right leg and in the head. Being so crippled, therefore, he is unable to do the day's work of an ordinary laboring man, and the only means left to him to make an honorable living is in selling the following original poem, which he hopes all will be kind enough to buy. He is commended to the generosity of the public generally."

That "original poem" reads, in part:

And, shot in arm, in leg, in head,
In that most fearful, bloody fray,
And left upon the field for dead,
Was he who asks your aid to-day.

But, thanks to God! he lives to see
His wife and children once again,
Though to that wife and children he
Is more a burthen than a gain.

His hand is gone; and thus to aid
Those loved ones in their day of trial,
He sells this little serenade,
And hopes to meet with no denial.

Printed in Altoona, Pennsylvania, the broadside is priced "Ten Cents Each Side." The reverse, in a humorous gesture at a little con, is blank.

Both of these pieces are "carriers' addresses" of a different sort than the ones originating with newspapers; instead of recounting the events of the past year, they recount the bearer's story. Both types stand to remind us of the popular portability that poetry offered before the "slim volume" and "little magazine" became default media for poems. Is there an equivalent today?