Poetry & Popular Culture's 2010 Year-End Report

In previous years, year-end reports from Poetry & Popular Culture have been private affairs sent almost exclusively to our investors. Things are proceeding differently for the 2010 year-end report, however. Acting in concert with our marketing consultant (who hopes to see P&PC land on as many "Best of 2010" lists as possible), the P&PC Board of Directors has mandated that the 2010 year-end report be made available to the public. In the interest of transparency and accountability, then, the following document is hereby released.

During the 2010 calendar year, Poetry & Popular Culture not only experi- enced certain milestones—including our 45,000th unique visitor and our 70,000th page view—but saw a marked increase in site traffic from the previous year: 29,374 unique visitors accessed P&PC in 2010, compared with 20,280 in 2009. Accordingly, individual page views went up as well, from 26,710 in 2009 to 39,653 in 2010. Stated in terms of percentage increase, P&PC experienced a 44.8% increase in unique visitors from 2009 to 2010, and a 48.4% increase in page views. Some of this increase can be attributed to the current culture-wide craze for zombies and, therefore, also for zombie haiku (see below). However, this does not explain the sudden growth entirety. While consumer confidence in the retail marketplace remained lethargic, confidence in P&PC appears to have gone up. We do not think the correspondence is an incidental one.

Much of P&PC's success in 2010 can be attributed to guest opinions and guest postings. (That's Edgar Guest pictured to the left, though he has yet to do any guest posting for P&PC.) While contributions from P&PC's home office in Salem, Oregon, remained popular and clearly played an important part in sustaining reader interest and attention, some of the year's most successful postings came from P&PC correspondents around the country including Ce Rosenow, Melissa Girard, and Angela Sorby, to whom the entire P&PC organization remains grateful. The top 10 most visited postings in 2010 were:

1. The Book of the Undead, Part One: Ce Rosenow Reviews Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku
2. Assassins and Outsiders: The Obscurity of Popular Poetry
3. Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: An Interview with Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist
4. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Asshole, and the Haiku of Fight Club
5. Slam, Spoken Word, and the Democratization of Poetry: Melissa Girard Reviews The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry
6. A Picture of Our Poets
7. Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: Firefly, Sci-Fi, & the Latterday Chronicles of Lewis Turco
8. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and John Keats
9. Robert Frost's Christmas Cards
10. Herman Munster, Pragmatic Beatnik: A Guest Posting by Angela Sorby

Next, in moving beyond the quantitative aspect of this report, we would like to present a series of more subjective and even anecdotal pieces of praise and critical acclaim that P&PC received this year. These items are not meant to be an exhaustive account of such correspondence but a sampling:

"The only legitimate poetry blog around." — Ernest Hilbert, author of Sixty Sonnets and former editor of Contemporary Poetry Review

"My first stop for the news that stays news!" — Meredith Martin, Princeton University

"Almost all of the posts on Poetry & Popular Culture are things I skim with plans to go back and read when I have the time." — Ryan Mecum, author of Zombie Haiku, Vampire Haiku, and Werewolf Haiku

"I'm glad to know about this blog/site." — Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate and founder of the Favorite Poem Project

"This is the most positive ad-verse environment I've ever worked in!" — Sally the Stenographer

"One of my new favorite poetry bloggers." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University

"I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of Poetry & Popular Culture. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that Mike Chasar has yet contributed." — Angela Sorby, author of Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917

"It made me more popular just reading it." — Bartholomew Brinkman, co-editor of The Modern American Poetry Site

"Everybody should be reading the newsy and fun P&PC." — Desperately Seeking Salem

Finally, we would like to conclude with an expression of thanks to all who wrote, researched, read, oversaw, audited, guided, photocopied, paper shredded, designed, litigated, marketed, promoted, computed, and otherwise worked to make P&PC the success that it was in 2010. The Board is grateful for your ongoing and generous involvement and wishes you even more success in 2011.

Oregon Grapes, Alpaugh's Wine

Poetry & Popular Culture doesn't normally make a habit of sending you elsewhere via hot links like so many other blogs do. Why in the world would we want you to leave when there are tons of tasty treasures to explore here together—treasures like the postcard pictured above, for example, which features a drawing of the second Oregon State Capitol building, built in the 1870s to replace the first which burned down in 1855. This second capitol suffered the same fate as the original, however, burning down in 1935. Thanks to WPA funding, though, yet another capitol was built and opened just three years later, in 1938 (see the new building pictured below). It's kind of funny to stroll by the place today—there are some great Depression-Era murals painted inside—and think about how all of Oregon's present-day tax-haters are pursuing their tea party agendas inside of a building that likely wouldn't have happened without $2.5 million in federal funding.

The poem on this postcard reads:

Queen of the Northwest—OREGON,
The ocean coast she reigns upon,
And the emblem of her verdue fair
Is rich wild grape with clusters rare.

It's a puzzling bit of verse to be sure, and we're not exactly sure how to parse it—especially the quasi Christian, three-in-one logic that seems to unite the sentence's three parallel subjects (the "Oregon" of line one, the "ocean coast" of line two, and the "emblem" of line three) in the image of the official state flower, the "rich wild grape" of line four. Nevertheless, we do have to admire the poem's use of "reigns" in line two, which puns on the dominant meteorological feature of Salem and suggests that legislative power in Oregon runs east-to- west, contrary to the weather, which primarily comes in from the coast, moving west-to-east. And is it just us, or is it possible that "fair" in line three puns on the fact that Salem is not only home to the state capitol but also the Oregon State Fair, started way back in 1858?

The key to this polysemy—or so one of the office interns suggested in a moment of particular clarity—might be in the poem's use of "verdue," which, according to the OED, is an irregular variant of "verdure." Not only does the less frequently used "verdue" seem appropriate in a poem about wild grapes with "clusters rare," but suggests that a fecund landscape marked by a great abundance and variety of plants is also a landscape in which words and meanings proliferate as well. Hence the puns on "reigns" and "fair." Hence the capacity of a single image like the wild grape to have multiple, equally viable referents (the State, the ocean coast, and the emblem).

It's spring here in the Cherry City, however, and so perhaps our reading of these four lines is affected by the amazing number of strange and unusual things growing outside. Everywhere we look, it's flowers, flowers, flowers, moss, moss, moss, and rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. All of this greeny world has us thinking about generation and multiplication more generally, and hence comes our recommendation to check out David Alpaugh's "The New Math of Poetry" which recently appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here, Alpaugh tries to come to terms with "the astounding number of poems being published today" and writes, "Unfathomable are the countless self-published chapbooks and collections printed each year, to say nothing of the millions of personal Web sites, blogs, and Facebook pages where self-published poetry appears."

We here at the P&PC Office can't say that we agree with many of Alpaugh's suppositions—that this "boom" is a brand new phenomenon (it isn't), or that the next Blake or Dickinson may be lost in the process (not our major concern), or even that the question "Who are the best poets writing today?" is even the most important question to be asking (cuz it ain't)—but we do appreciate the underlying recognition that poetry is happening, and has happened, in many more ways, in many more forms, and among many more writers and readers than histories of the genre typically grant. For Alpaugh, this is something of a nightmare. For us, it's a dream.

Football Frolics & Gargling Oil: From the Poetry & Popular Culture Mailbag

The Poetry & Popular Culture office receives a fair amount of correspondence from people interested in the lives that poetry leads outside of college classrooms and other certifiably poetic haunts like cafes and the avant-garde. This week, we bring you a letter from a reader in Salem, Oregon, who asks a fairly common question about the poetry of popular culture. Our response follows.

Dear Poetry & Popular Culture:

What's, like, the relationship between song lyrics and poetry?

Desperately Seeking Salem

Dear Desperately,

Thanks for asking! I suppose there are still some crusty old fogies out there who'd maintain that there's some measurable, qualitative difference between poems written in rhyme and meter and song lyrics written in rhyme and meter, but Poetry & Popular Culture does not number itself among them. After all, a historically- informed reader discovers that the distinction between poetry and song lyrics—indeed, the very need to distinguish between the two—is in fact a relatively recent one and that Americans have long imagined poetry as song lyrics (or potential song lyrics) and vice versa. Let's take a little tour of the subject beginning with a songster put out in 1889 to advertise "Merchant's Gargling Oil" (pictured to the left).

Like the farmer's almanacs of the nineteenth century, this songster contains a number of different elements between its covers. In stating the book's "primary intention of advertising Gargling Oil and Worm Tablets," the product's makers then go on to summarize its other contents: "a calendar for practical use, and for amusement the latest Popular Songs and a concise summary of the principal points upon which the so-called Science of Palmistry is based." Of special note, perhaps, is the fact that the song lyrics are printed without musical notation (pictured to the left). With the exception of the chorus notation, "The Toboggan Slide" thus looks and reads like any ol' poem that might have appeared in a daily paper from the time.

Why, you might ask, is the musical notation left out? Did the folks at Merchant's assume audiences already knew the tune to "The Toboggan Slide"? Would go ahead and make up their own tune? Would sing it to the tune of an already-existing song, replacing that song's original lyrics with the lyrics of "The Toboggan Slide"? Odds are, the regular meter of "The Toboggan Slide" meant that the song (if it wasn't written to music) could be easily adapted to already existing tunes; that is, the tunes of many popular songs became templates on which to graft new lyrics—a form which privileges, say we at the Poetry & Popular Culture office, the content of the individual lyric. This is the general method of the I.W.W. Songbook as well, a twentieth-century, pro-labor songster issued by the Industrial Workers of the World in order "to fan the flames of discontent." Leafing through the book, one encounters lefty lyrics written to well-known tunes such as "Auld Lang Syne," "Onward Christian Soldiers," "Tipperary," and "The Shade of the Old Apple Tree." This not only made it easier for people to learn the songs, but it no doubt parodied the originals as well; could one very well sing the I.W.W's version of "A Little Talk with Jesus," for example—

The preachers, cops and money-kings were working hand in hand,
The boys in blue, with stars and stripes were sent by Uncle Sam;
Still things were looking blue, 'cause every striker knew
That weaving cloth with bayonets is hard to do.
John Golden had with Mr. Wood a private interview,
He told him how to bust up the "I double double U."
He came out in a while and wore the Golden smile.
He said: "I've got all labor leaders skinned a mile."
John Golden pulled a bogus strike with all his "pinks and stools."
He thought the rest would follow like a bunch of crazy fools.
But to his great surprise the "foreigners" were wise,
In one big solid union they were organized.

—without comparing the song's original content with the new one? All in all, this strikes us as a particularly poetic endeavor.

Or consider the item pictured to the left—a four-page announcement advertising a "Football Frolic" held in Detroit, Michigan, probably in the 1940s or 50s (there's no date on the flier). For the grand admission fee of 35 cents—with proceeds apparently going to the Junior Alliance of St. Andrew's Paris—one would get an evening's-worth of probably highly- chaperoned dancing. The three remaining pages of the advertisement are, like the songster distributed by Merchant's Gargling Oil, a mixture of song lyrics and classified ads for local businesses including the Moderne Corset Shop (operated by C.C. Szemborski and located at 7341 Michigan Avenue), Dr. Frank J. Czapski a local dentist, and The Martin Bar ("The Popular Place for your Favorite Drink").

Again, the song lyrics are presented without musical notation, though in some cases readers probably couldn't avoid singing the tunes at least inwardly, as is the case with "Over the Rainbow" written for, and made popular by, The Wizard of Oz in 1939 and pictured here. Still, even with that soundtrack playing in our minds, we can't shake the fact that reading "Over the Rainbow" printed as a poem is a different experience than listening to it. Even if "Over the Rainbow" isn't a poem when broadcast, we contend it certainly becomes one when printed here and that there's a certain kind of interference or static that happens when one is asked to re-adjust one's attention to read what one normally hears—the kind of defamiliarization with language that a lot of modern poetry cultivates.

As much as the ads for Merchant's Gargling Oil and the Football Frolic suggest that song lyrics were printed as poetry, that doesn't necessarily mean that readers actually linked poetry and song in their own minds. For evidence of that, let's turn to our final example—a large, three inch-thick scrapbook of poetry and song lyrics assembled during World War II. Here we do encounter musical notation that differentiates song ("A Sabbath Day's Work") from poem ("The Old Scotch Church"). The album is an interesting one: it contains songs, lyrics, and poems having to do with a range of ethnic and regional identities and includes poems from popular writers as well as "literary" authors like Lord Byron, Robert Burns, Edgar Lee Masters, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

However, the distinction between song and lyric suggested by the page above doesn't hold throughout the collection. Here—a detail from a larger page "themed" around the subject of African-Americans and the American South—the scrapbook's compiler has pasted some of the lyrics to "Dixie" just above a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Perhaps there is a difference between the two, but that difference is a relatively small difference between poetic forms—one poem includes a chorus, one does not—not a substantial difference in genre. Otherwise, both poems are printed in lines, both are metered and rhymed, both give the reader elocutionary cues (one a soundtrack demanding a certain pitch and tune, the other the phonetics of dialect), and both ask the reader to inhabit a first-person person voice that is essentially vicarious in nature (one wishes to get back to Dixie, the other is a dying wish).

So, Desperately Seeking, that iPod you carry—with its mixture of Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, and Duran Duran—is a portable poetry player, a 21st-century version of the scrapbook pictured above. Whether the poetry you listen to is good or not is not for Poetry & Popular Culture to say. But we'll go, well, on the record saying it is, in fact, poetry.

Sincerely,

Poetry & Popular Culture