P&PC in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture

Between 1860 and 1920, advertising strategies for two products almost singlehandedly changed the face of consumer culture in the United States—or so Cary Nelson and P&PC claim in "American Advertising: A Poem for Every Product," which is Chapter 7 in the newly-released, 700-page tome U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920 (Volume 6 of Oxford's History of Popular Print Culture series). At $160, the book's no cheapie (maybe Oxford needs a jingle or two to help advertise it?), but Nelson and P&PC offer ten images from their private collections and lots of great verse to show how poetry—a genre that many people associate with anticapitalist endeavors—fueled the development of the advertising industry and paved the way for a myriad of advertising techniques we're familiar with today.

In "A Poem for Every Product," Nelson and P&PC argue that, while poems were used to pitch everything from galoshes to carriages, two consumer items in particular—patent medicines and soap—deserve special credit (or blame) in powering the development and expansion of the American advertising industry and its poetry, as U.S. poets found at that conjunction the possibility for regular incomes and audiences appreciative of their skills. In the writing of this essay, Nelson took on the subject of patent medicines while P&PC picked up on the issue of soap (a topic we've addressed on this blog before), and we found the two products to be intimately related, as soap assumed the dominant place in advertising that patent medicines occupied prior to the Progressive Era's truth-in-advertising movements that culminated, in part, in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The shift from snake oil to soap—two items with simple recipes that needed advertising to differentiate one brand of similar material from another—was complicated and not accomplished overnight, but one of the poets helping it along was the phenomenally successful Canadian writer and artist Palmer Cox. Thus, Cox serves as a sort of fulcrum in "A Poem for Every Product," a moment halfway through the essay when Nelson's argument about patent medicines transitions to P&PC's thoughts about soap. Here, in the way of a preview of that essay, follows an excerpt from the moment in "A Poem for Every Product" when the shady business of advertising starts relying on soap to help, uh, clean up its act:

"In 1890, five years after writing 'Wisdom in Fable' for Pond's Extract, Palmer Cox [pictured here] produced 'A Friendly Turn' to advertise Ivory Soap for Cincinnati's Procter and Gamble Company. There, in four pages of his trademark tetrameter couplets and whimsical pen and ink illustrations, Cox called on his 'Brownies' to spin a tale of Ivory's elfin origin, purity, and medicinal qualities. While not as universal in its application as Pond's—which in 1885 had purported to resolve a range of skin ailments in addition to 'Sore Throat, Rheumatism, Wounds, Catarrh, Hemorrhages, Nose Bleed, Sprains, [and] Swellings'—Ivory is nonetheless credited with the ability to treat people's 'scabby heads,' 'unsightly pimples,' 'scaly crust,' and 'body sore.' Like a miracle cure, the 'pure and perfect' Brownie concoction works its transformative magic almost overnight:

No more were seen the scabby heads,
Or finest garments all in shreds,
No more unsightly pimples rose,
To mar the chaps, or scaly crust,
Made people wish themselves in dust.
For, from the infant on the breast,
To those who neared their final rest,—
For rich and poor, the great and small,
Found Ivory Soap had cleansed them all.

For people suffering, Cox writes, as if pitching the merits of a patent medicine, 'Their sole relief and only hope / Is found in using Ivory Soap.'

"The apparent ease with which Cox moves—or has been moved—between patent medicine advertising and soap advertising is in part an indication of his poetry's general marketability and public appeal, but it's also emblematic of a larger, conceptual shift that took place in American advertising in the last decade of the nineteenth century. That shift—which occurred as the age of patent medicine advertising was coming to an end—saw advertisers seize on and redeploy the curative rhetoric of nostrum advertising in order to market other consumer goods as well. In promoting a transformative power inherent to the commodity item, this new strategy not only contributed to the further fetishization of goods in the new 'modern' consumer economy by further obscuring the labour relations of their production. It also publicized the notion that the commodity item was itself a cure for people's many and varied ills—promising to be not just a physical good with a specific use, but a shortcut to social status, sex appeal, or lifestyle—and that the corresponding act of buying and consuming was a medicinal activity in its own right. That is, in the expansion of patent medicine advertising strategies more broadly at this time, we can see the birth of what we now call 'retail therapy.'

"That expansion didn't happen all at once, nor did it happen equally from product to product. Indeed, restructuring the logic of consumption and Americans' relationship to commodity items in this way required a tangible form of what Fredric Jameson would call a 'vanishing mediator'—that entity which 'serves as a bearer of change and social transformation, only to be forgotten once that change has ratified the reality of the institutions.' In the case of American consumer capitalism, that signal mediating product was soap, partly because soap had been included in the patent-medicine industry for a long time [it was oftentimes an ingredient in nostrums], and partly because it provided an outward performance—taking something dirty and making it clean—of the transformative character that advertisers hoped would eventually become linked in the American psyche to every other product....So twinned were the discourses of patent medicine and soap at the end of the nineteenth century that at least one nineteenth-century producer of nostrums—Palmer Cox's patron, Pond's Healing and Pond's Extract—was able to respond to the Pure Food and Drug act by transforming itself almost immediately into a skin-care cleansing specialist, Pond's Cold Cream, which is still on the market today."

For the rest of this essay—including the performance of Dreydoppel's Borax Soap in "The Great Contest!!"—check out Chapter 7 of U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920 from Oxford University Press.

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

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 current 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!

First Look: Poetry After Cultural Studies

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!

Is That a Poem in Your Pocket?

We submit for your contemplation this week two little men. One (pictured to the left) is a rosy-cheeked U.S. sailor produced in 1941 by Calambra Products of Alhambra, California. The other (pictured below) is a drop-drawered "Bull Clinton" made and distributed as part of the "Meanies" satirical doll collection. One says "Hello." Saith the other, perhaps, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." They've been propped up on the P&PC Office coffee maker for awhile now, and so we share them with you.

With an Edgar Guestian folksiness even Clinton himself might admire, Joe Sailor reads:

I'd like to be with you awhile
And hear about the folks,
I'd like to sit and see you smile
At the same old jokes,
But since you are so far away
I cannot hope to go,
I'll just send this little token
Just to say—HELLO!

Joe Sailor's weren't the only wartime greetings expressed in poetry, of course, as verses long and short, complicated and not-so-complicated, crisscrossed the oceans on and in postcards, pin-up girly pictures, letters, souvenir pillows, handkerchiefs, chapbooks, newspaper clippings, and the like. Frank Capra's Private Snafu military training videos were narrated in verse. Cary Nelson has reminded us how propaganda poems were shot across enemy lines in capsules specially made to open, mid-air, in order to shower enemy combatants with poetry. Even the Communist Party got in on the action, publishing Victory Verses for Young Americans (pictured above). In Partisans & Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War, Mark W. Van Wienen records the many uses to which poetry was put during World War I. P&PC is waiting for someone to write a companion book about the political work of poetry in World War II.

The specter of poetry's various applications has dogged Bill Clinton, too, especially in the wake of news reports tracking how he once greeted Monica Lewinsky by giving her a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. He isn't the only one that the Meanies series has lampooned in verse; one wonders what history of the 1990s could be written via the limericks attached on each doll's tag:

Bull Clinton is "full of it" they say.
His "staff" couldn't get out of the way.
He's in and out of courts
Cause of his fallen shorts.
He leans to the left, so they say.

Bull's toothy smile hearkens back in at least one way to the era of our little sailor, as editorial cartoons often showed F.D.R. with a grin like this one. (There was a fair amount of anti-F.D.R. verse in circulation back then too.) The puns in this poem are most appropriate for Bull, however, as their double meanings parody the political equivocations and doublespeak common in the beltway. Not so for Joe, though, whose boyish charm and blond crew-cut are certified legit by the earnest rhymes and the "little token" that fills at least our hearts.