Stealing Poetry in North Platte, Nebraska

The P&PC Office has been a little bit ... let's say ... irregular in the frequency of its postings of late, but there's good reason for that, dear reader: we've been in the process of temporarily relocating our offices to Washington, D.C., where we'll spend the Fall 2015 semester doing research at the Library of Congress thanks to the generosity of a five month-long Kluge Fellowship and, of course, Willamette University, which granted us a semester-long leave. (You'll no doubt hear more about the nature of our research in the coming weeks, but you can get the gist of it here, in a posting we wrote while doing preliminary research on site last Fall.) So, the past month or so has been full of details details details having to do with the move: staffing the office in Oregon, finding new digs in D.C., and embarking on a six-day, five-night, 2,800-mile road trip with a (rented) minivan full of essentials, non-perishables, and the two P&PC Office cats. It was a long ride—kind of like doing the Oregon Trail in reverse but without all the wagons, dysentery, and barrels of salted pork—featuring stops in Boise (Idaho), Rock Springs (Wyoming), North Platte (Nebraska), Iowa City (Iowa), and Bowling Green (Ohio) and made somewhat more bearable by the fact that we've been watching Hell on Wheels and, for much of the trip, riding along the route of the transcontinental railroad including passing Golden Spike National Historic Site in Utah. But now we're finally in D.C., settled in to our awesome pad across the street from Lincoln Park in Capitol Hill, and more or less installed at our work space in the Kluge Center. The picture of the capitol you see above is the last sight on our daily commute before we disappear into the Library to work.

While stopping in the booming metropolis of North Platte on the way here, we had the pleasure of staying at America's Best Value Inn, an independently owned, 1950s-style motel that we'd recommend to anyone passing by not just because of its cleanliness, affordability, and level of hospitality, but because of the poem "Have You Earned Your Tomorrow?" (pictured here) that they've got tacked to the wall in each of the motel's 33 rooms. Here's the text of that verse:

Is anybody happier because you passed his way?
     Does anyone remember that you spoke to him today?
The day is almost over, and its toiling time is through;
     Is there anyone to utter now a kindly word of you?
Can you say tonight, with the day that's slipping fast,
     That you helped a single brother of the many that you passed?
Is a single heart rejoicing over what you did or said;
     Does the man whose hopes were fading, now with courage look ahead?
Did you waste the day, or lose? Was it well or sorely spent?
     Did you leave a trail of kindness, or a scar of discontent?
As you close your eyes in slumber, do you think that God will say,
     "You have earned one more tomorrow by the work you did today." 

If you Google the poem, you'll find several versions of it in circulation (this is a shortened version), and you'll also find that there's some dispute as to its author and title. The America's Best Value Inn version attributes it to John Hall. It's been attributed to John Kendrick Bangs. It's been credited to "anonymous" and has oftentimes appeared with no byline at all. To P&PC ears, it sounds exactly like the "people's poet" Edgar Guest (pictured here), and, indeed, it's most frequently attributed to him directly or metonymically via Guest's publisher the Detroit Free Press. (For more on Guest's amazing and ongoing presence in popular culture, see P&PC postings here, here, here, here, and here.) Over the years, it's appeared as "The Day's Results," "The Day's Work," "At Day's End," "Is Anybody Happier," and "Consider Today." In the world of popular poetry, such authorial confusion, editing, and re-titling is a common thing; see, for example, the poetry of Rod's Steakhouse upon which we, uh, ruminated several years ago.

In our estimation, "Have You Earned Your Tomorrow" is most likely by Guest, and while we haven't found the issue of the Detroit Free Press in which it perhaps originally appeared, it most likely dates to 1916 or 1917, and its publication history is a miniature portrait of just how widely such verse circulated. In January of 1917, it appeared in The Journal of Zoophily, "published monthly under the auspices of the American Antivivisection Society, combined with the Women's Pennsylvania Society for the Preservation of Cruelty of Animals." The Lather, put out by the Wood, Wire, and Metal Lathers International Union, printed it in 1918. The Los Angeles School Journal and The Bessemer Monthly (put out by the Bessemer Gas Engine Company) printed it in 1919. The Gospel Messenger, The Sabbath Recorder, and the Southern Telephone News printed it in 1920. The Chamber of Commerce and State Manufacturers Journal of Scranton, Pennsylvania, printed it in 1921, The Plasterer in 1922, Vision: A Magazine for Youth in 1932, The Railroad Trainman in 1935, and American Flint in 1950. It continues to be reproduced in books and on web sites today.

You get the idea: the poem going by the title "Have You Earned Your Tomorrow?" has appealed to a wide audience—labor unions, religious folk, youth, animal lovers, civic stakeholders, etc.—for a long time. All the same, after leaving North Platte, and as mile after mile of blacktop ran beneath the dignity of our (rented) minivan, we began to wonder if the version of the poem at America's Best Value Inn tell could tell us anything more about how popular the poem continues to be and how audiences today respond to verse that moves them. So when we got to D.C., we gave the Inn a jingle and talked for a while with the owner Dave.

Dave opened the Inn in 1988 and almost immediately posted copies of "Have You Earned Your Tomorrow?" in each of the motel's 33 rooms. He doesn't remember where he found the poem, and he doesn't know anything about the author, and neither of those things seem to matter much to him. But he did tell me that, over the years, the motel has sustained an average annual occupancy rate of 60-70%. So, you can do the math by yourself at home: at an average of 22 rooms per day (65% occupancy), that means that at least 8,000 motel guests (a conservative estimate of only one person per room) have the opportunity to encounter the poem in a single year. Calculate that number over the 27 years the hotel has been open under Dave's management (the "poem era"), and you discover that more than 216,000 people have seen "Have You Earned Your Tomorrow?" just in the rooms of  America's Best Value Inn alone.

But—we began to think halfway through our conversation with Dave—just because someone in a hotel room has the opportunity to read a poem doesn't mean he or she has actually read it, or read it with any semblance of seriousness, right? That's when Dave spoke up, as if anticipating our question. Once or twice a day, he said, people walk in to the main office and ask for a copy of the poem; he's got a stack of them behind the desk to give out for free. What's more surprising than that—especially considering the poem's content—is that every day poems go missing from one to two of the motel's rooms, so frequently that the maid carts carry stacks of replacement poems alongside shampoo bottles and tissue boxes. So, once again, let's do the math. If someone steals a poem from the hotel room every day, that's 365 copies stolen over the course of the year—or nearly 10,000 copies that have been stolen since the beginning of the poem era at America's Best Value Inn! Combine those 10,000 copies with the 10,000 or more that Dave has given away at the front desk during that time, and you've got 20,000 copies of "Have You Earned Your Tomorrow?" that people have read and considered closely enough in their motel rooms to take certain and definitive action. How's that for concrete evidence of the poem's continued appeal?!

So, Dave's inn has poems on the walls, poems on the maid carts, and poems at the front desk. He's given or lost 20,000 copies of that poem over the past 27 years, and over the phone he seems more than okay with it all, though he does say that, from time to time, someone will call or approach him because they've been offended by "Have You Earned Your Tomorrow?," thinking that Dave was in some way prejudging them and telling them to be better hotel guests. But Dave says he's not judging them—not even the folks who steal copies, it seems. Rather, he says the poem's title isn't a judgment or warning but a question, just the way it reads. "I'm wanting them to ask it themselves," he says in that matter-of-fact way that Midwesterners have, like it's meat and potatoes for dinner again. Meat, potatoes, and poetry.

P&PC Heroes: An Interview with Erik Noftle about the Life and Legacy of Rod McKuen

When "mega-selling poet" Rod McKuen died at age 81 on January 29 of this year, the P&PC Office found itself at a complete and utter loss. What could we say in memoriam for the best-selling, critically-maligned poet and cat lover (pictured here) who published over thirty volumes, who wrote more than 1500 songs, and whose books, according to the Associated Press, sold more than 65 million copies—over one million in 1968 alone, when, according to the Huffington Post, McKuen also released four poetry collections, eight songbooks, the soundtracks to Miss Jean Brodie and A Boy Named Charlie Brown, and at least ten other albums?

Born in a charity hospital, McKuen ran away from home at age eleven to escape an abusive alcoholic father. He did a lot of odd jobs and hung out with and read alongside the Beats in San Francisco. He appeared in three films. He won a Best Spoken Word Grammy for Lonesome Cities in 1968. He was endorsed by W.H. Auden, who said, "Rod McKuen's poems are love letters to the world, and I am happy that many of them came to me and found me out." At one point McKuen was on tour 280 days per year, and his songs—covered by the likes of Johnny Cash, Barbra Streisand, Madonna, Dolly Parton, and Frank Sinatra—have reportedly accounted for the sale of over 100 million albums worldwide and were twice nominated for Academy Awards.

Netting millions, McKuen lived the latter part of his life in a 15,000-square-foot Beverley Hills mansion that housed his collection of more than 100,000 CDs and 500,000 records. Called "the King of Kitsch" by Newsweek, McKuen found no love from the critics. U.S. Poet Laureate Karl Shapiro said, "It is irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet," and Julia Keller described his work as "silly and mawkish, the kind of gooey schmaltz that wouldn't pass muster in a freshman creative-writing class." As far as P&PC knows, no reputable literary history of American poetry even mentions McKuen (or, for that matter, his female counterpart from the 1960s and 70s, the best-selling and multimillionaire poet and greeting card entrepreneur Susan Polis Schutz). One of the best signs of the massive gap that continues to exist between popular and academic histories of American poetry, McKuen was a postwar version of Edgar Guest, who, in his own time, found similar popular success in print, sound, film, and spoken-word formats, who was a constant target of critics' scorn, and who also gets scant mention in histories of American poetry. (Like McKuen, Guest had a best-selling female counterpart as well, the prolific newspaper poet Anne Campbell.)

At a loss for how to justly and appropriately mark McKuen's passing and the significance of his career, P&PC thus stayed uncomfortably silent, but then we began to hear rumors on campus about psychology professor Erik Noftle (pictured on the right in the photo here). Word was that Noftle—who helped found Portland's community radio station XRAY FM and who every Friday night from 7:00-8:00 pm (Pacific Time) assumes the nom de guerre DJ Ed and hosts the disco radio show Discovery—was a fan of McKuen. Word was that Noftle had a collection of McKuen records. Word was that he owned forty of them, that he'd been carting them as he moved back and forth across the country for years (from Iowa to North Carolina, California, and Oregon), and that his collection is in fact still growing. 

What better way to remember McKuen, we thought, than by tracking Noftle down and separating rumor from fact—not by going to newspaper obituaries reporting on McKuen's death, but by finding out how America's "mega-selling poet" continues to live on. So we found Noftle and got him talking. In addition to spectacularly recreating the cover of Bob Dylan's 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home with all McKuen-themed references and album covers (pictured above; the P&PC interns insisted we include the Dylan image, pictured here, for easy comparison), here's what Noftle had to say.

P&PC: Um, do you really own forty Rod McKuen records?

Noftle: Not quite—I'm at twenty-eight by my last count. But I think I only own more records by Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, and The Fall.

P&PC: You realize that not many people would 'fess up to that, don't you?

Noftle: Well, not too many people are in a position to boast of that fact. Then again, McKuen apparently released over 200 records (including at least 125 albums), so I need to remember to be more modest. My collection is still in its infancy, and there must be other people who could reasonably argue that I'm a neophyte. With so many albums he must be one of the top 100 best-selling U.S. recording artists of the twentieth century! But his onetime popularity has clearly waned. I checked iTunes recently and they have a couple dozen McKuen tracks but none of his albums. I don't think many have even appeared on cd.

P&PC: So, how did your collection begin?

Noftle: I first was turned on (if that's the right word) to Rod McKuen through a friend and former housemate of mine in Davis, California: Tony. Tony's a record collector like myself and introduced me to lots of odd, obscure gems he'd find digging through record bins, often at charity-based thrift stores like Davis' SPCA. Tony moved to the Bay Area about a year later and I found myself wanting to hear McKuen again, and also hoping to play him for others. So I started being on the lookout for his albums when out on record-buying sprees. I found that once you were looking for them, McKuen records popped up a lot, and they usually were pretty cheap, ranging from about twenty-five cents to a few dollars. So I snapped them up when I found them, and I discovered he had a lot of records. Probably the largest contributor to my McKuen collection was K St. Records in Sacto (now on Broadway). But when I tried to play the records for other people I found that people weren't always so receptive.

P&PC: When did you realize this was a long-term thing?

Noftle: Over the next few years, I moved around a lot—to a different house in Davis, out to my post-doc in North Carolina, and back out to the west coast again when I got a faculty position in Oregon. This meant I moved my ever-increasing record collection multiple times and thus had the opportunity to reorganize it several times. I settled on a loose organization by genre—including a large rock section, a disco section, an old country section, a French section, a jazz section, and an experimental section, among others. Well, I also ended up with a Rod McKuen section.

P&PC: And when did you realize you had a problem?

Noftle: When I first brought home a McKuen album and found out I already owned it. That happened a few times, actually. I'd accumulated so many I couldn't remember which I owned. Sometimes they had vastly different cover art, but sometimes not. Also, as I learned more about his catalog, I became aware of albums that didn't show up regularly in the cheap bins of record stores—records that I became very curious about. I ended up buying a couple online for $20 or so, including his gently satirical send-up of hippies, Rod McKuen Takes A San Francisco Hippie Trip (pictured above). I still haven't sought out Beatsville (pictured here), his earlier send-up of beat poets, a scene he was connected with to some extent.

P&PC: Can you describe a typical Rod McKuen album for us?

Noftle: Quite odd. I have a few of his classical albums, but my collection is mostly dedicated to his vocal work. His typical vocal album consists of a combination of his own spoken poetry with musical accompaniment, his own songs, and a cover or two—often a Jacques Brel song. He was the most prolific translator of Brel's songs into English and apparently spent a lot of time in Paris with Brel. Across his catalog, perhaps the modal musical style is orchestral in the style of Sinatra or even Lawrence Welk, but McKuen covers a lot of ground; many backings are minimalist and range from jazz to country to folk to soft rock and even to a sort of easy listening-style disco. When he reads his poetry, his tone is typically a whisper or at least quite soft. When he sings, his voice is gentle and crooning but with a certain gruffness. I've never heard McKuen's vocal style repeated. It's as though he's somehow the offspring of Mister Rogers and Tom Waits. It's not really gravelly. It's more that it sounds husky and slightly strained.

P&PC: Which one is your favorite?

Noftle: I have at least two. One is Lonesome Cities from the late 60s (pictured above). It's a great mix of spoken word and songs, a few of which were tackled by Frank Sinatra on his McKuen covers album A Man Alone. (Yes, you read that correctly—Sinatra did an album of McKuen covers [pictured here].) Another is Slide...Easy In, McKuen's disco-era album that includes a protest song called "Don't Drink the Orange Juice." This track is an enjoyable jab at Anita Bryant who was a spokesperson for Florida Orange Juice and outspoken against gay rights. McKuen resisted labels and as far as I know never came out as gay or bisexual but certainly was a lifelong advocate within and for the queer community.

P&PC: What does your spouse think about all this?

Noftle: Jess has predicted that one day I will come home and she'll tell me, "Oh no, honey, someone broke in to our house but all they stole was your Rod McKuen albums!" She clearly agrees that I'm sitting on quite a treasure trove.

P&PC: If someone liked McKuen, what else would you recommend they listen to?

Noftle: I have lots of recommendations but I'll limit myself to one: the singer Scott Walker (not the Wisconsin politician). Walker (pictured here) is a generation younger than McKuen but had a similar admiration for Brel. Scott first found fame as a member of the not-actually-fraternally-related The Walker Brothers, a 60s pop group. Walker left the band in 1967 and released a series of astounding orchestral pop solo albums that shared a dark, sardonic tone (Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3, and—you guessed it—Scott 4). "Scott" started out with a mix of Brel tunes, other 60s-era pop and folk covers, and a few of his own compositions. By the time of Scott 4, all the songs were written by him and were peppered with an unholy cast of characters including a fading duchess, a soldier returning from Vietnam, Stalin, and even Death—straight out of Bergman's The Seventh Seal. The songs explored themes of romantic dissolution, decay, and existential crisis but were beautifully sung by Walker and arranged by Wally Stott. Not surprisingly, his teenybopper fan base quickly dried up across the course of those albums and Walker disappeared into schmaltz in the 1970s. But in the decades that followed he began releasing stranger and stranger albums that are very difficult to classify—they're kind of like a marriage between Puccini and post-rock. His current work features a deep soaring baritone, intriguing, obscurist lyrics about topics such as Elvis's stillborn twin and recent genocides in the Balkans, and the musical backings include some very odd percussive elements like the sound of a bag of meat being punched. His most recent album is a collaboration with drone metal outfit Sunn 0))). Far out stuff.

P&PC: Twenty-eight albums means a lot of cover art. Anything especially noteworthy?

Noftle: Yes. The aforementioned Slide..Easy In album's outer gatefold (pictured here) is a muscular, hairy, man's arm reaching down into a vat of Crisco whose "Cr" has been changed to a "D" to read "Disco." Very clever. Oddly, it was released with an alternative cover featuring a blonde lady in silver lame pants (pictured below). Um, I have both versions. The album Rod McKuen Takes a San Francisco Hippie Trip both lampoons and perfectly captures the day-glo popular at the time. It's a real wonder. But there are several gems. 

P&PC: Your faculty profile says you're a personality psychologist and that you're interested in questions like "How do individuals differ psychologically from one another?", "How consistent are those differences across situations and time?", and "What meaning do these differences have for people in their actual lives—for achievement, relationships, and happiness and well-being?" What perspective does this give you on McKuen?

Noftle: I'm not sure—personality psychologists rarely do case studies these days. But I would say that from the standpoint of his music and spoken word, McKuen appears to be remarkably consistent; despite his genre exercises, he has a certain style and personality and worldview that are captured in that style, and those things don't seem to change much. But people are remarkably complex, and I can't say that I know enough about McKuen to say much more about who he is. His 1972 Pickwick album About Me (pictured here) suggests he lived a really interesting life full of adventure and wonder and hardship. It turns out I have two copies—I'll loan you one.

P&PC: Quick McKuen quotation analysis: "I had a pet raccoon that took my toothbrush once, / But only to another room."

Noftle: I'll follow McKuen's lead. "What I have to say about this album is on the record—I hope you like it.—Rod McKuen, London, June 1968" (liner notes on the back of The Single Man, RCA, 1968).

P&PC: Touché! Where does your collection go from here?

Noftle: Onward and upward—and if Jess has anything to say about it, it might float away in a hot air balloon.

P&PC: This was fun. In McKuen's words, "Thank you for the sun you brought this morning / even though the sky was full of clouds."

Noftle: Yes indeed, but I also feel like I've just gone through something. I will return the favor: "Soft. Listen to the warm. The night is almost gone. We can listen to the warm" (McKuen, Listen to the Warm, RCA, 1967).

Editor's Note: Noftle's McKuen-themed homage to the cover of Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home pictured near the beginning of this posting was made possible in part by P&PC contributor and organic chemistry consultant, Drew Duncan, who served as photographer.

"Why Women's Poetry Now?": P&PC at the 2014 Modernist Studies Association Conference in Pittsburgh

P&PC spent November 6-9 at the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference, held this year in Pittsburgh and hosted in all of its Iron City glory by Duquesne University with the co-sponsorship of the University of Pittsburgh. We had a chance to catch up with P&PC favorites like Marsha Bryant, Melissa Girard, and Erin Kappeler. We went to the exquisite Andy Warhol Museum where, among other things, we discovered Warhol's rhyming alphabet book ("A was a lady who went shopping at Sacks / ... C was her coat styled well front and back") as well as Warhol's childhood fondness for Ogden Nash. And we presented with Bryant, Steve Evans, Elisabeth Frost, Jeanne Heuving, and Lisa Sewell as part of a roundtable panel discussion titled "Why Women's Poetry Now?" Since most of you weren't able to join us in The 'Burgh, we thought you might like to hear the "position paper" we gave as part of that panel—the 5-7-minute talk that each invited panel member was asked to deliver as fodder for a larger discussion between panelists and audience members. Here, then, is the two cents that we had to add:

I’ve been thinking and writing about a trio of modern women poets that most people here today probably do not recognize: Anne Campbell, Evelyn Ryan, and Ethel Romig Fuller. All were amazingly prolific. All had huge audiences. All had careers writing poetry. All made money with poetry. And all to some extent suggest some answers to “Why women’s poetry now?”

Anne Campbell published a poem a day in the Detroit News for twenty-five years straight, serving as that newspaper’s answer to the Detroit Free Press poet Edgar Guest, who published a poem a day in the Free Press for thirty years. Campbell was born on a Michigan farm in 1888 and married a guy who also wrote for the News. She wrote from home in order to be near her children, and over the course of her career published more than 7,000 poems, at one point making $10,000 per year—well over $100,000 when adjusted for inflation—from her national syndication and speaking engagements. She was probably the most successful and well-known woman newspaper poet in the United States.

The subject of Terry Ryan’s memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, Evelyn Ryan may have been the most successful freelance advertising poetry writer, like, ever. Enduring an abusive alcoholic husband who spent the lion’s share of his paycheck on booze, Evelyn was a high school valedictorian. She wrote at her ironing board and made beaucoup bucks by entering and winning jingle-writing contests. She won a Triumph sports car, a jukebox, coffeemakers, frying pans, a deep freeze, refrigerator, washer, dryer, blenders, toasters, radios, roller skates, basketballs, footballs, a bicycle, sleeping bags, blankets, televisions, shoes, tools, and a shopping spree that netted $400 worth of groceries (the equivalent of about $5,000 today). When the landlord didn’t renew the lease on the house the family was renting, Evelyn won $5,000 that allowed them to purchase a home. And when the bank later threatened to repossess that house because her husband failed to keep up with payments on a second mortgage he took out without her knowledge, she won another contest—writing the fifth line of a limerick advertising Dr. Pepper—that awarded nearly $3,500 plus a new Mustang and a trip to Switzerland, both of which she sold in order to keep the house.

Ethel Romig Fuller began writing poetry at age thirty-eight when her two children were in their teens, renting office space in downtown Portland where she wrote every day. She made her first $10 (the equivalent of $130 today) selling a poem to Garden Magazine in 1924, and in the next five to six years published fifteen poems in Poetry magazine and many others in places like Out West Magazine, Life, College Humor, Good Housekeeping, Wee Wisdom, the American Mercury, the New York Times and other newspapers. Her New Verse poem “Proof?” was so widely reprinted after its 1927 appearance in Sunset magazine that the New York Times called it “the most quoted poem in contemporary English literature.”

The most successful woman newspaper poet. The most successful advertising poet. The author of the most quoted poem in contemporary English literature. These are only thumbnail sketches, yes, but they are compelling nonetheless. When we look at them from the perspective of gender, we see a number of things:

• We see how gender affected access to authorship—when in their lives women came to write poetry, how they trained to do it, and the conditions under which they wrote. Those factors affected what poems they wrote and why. 

• When we orient via women authors like these (Campbell, Ryan, and Fuller rather than, say, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens), we see a very broad and different history of modern poetry: a history where poets made money from their writing, where audiences were large, where poetry was not a culturally marginalized genre, and where women were major players. 

• We see how publication opportunities and the needs of those publications, their reward systems, and their audiences affected the types of verse women wrote. 

• We see different economic factors affecting what got written and how. By writing for popular spheres, women could acquire a degree of financial independence or autonomy perhaps unavailable to them otherwise. Writing for the little magazines or publishing books was a privileged endeavor that not all people had; when we focus on the little magazine or the book in our scholarship, we are to no small extent replicating and reinforcing class and gender hierarchies of the era we study. 

• That said, we also see, as with Fuller, that poets were writing for both literary and popular spheres and thus how the lines dividing those spheres were more porous than we tend to think. In the case of Fuller—had I time to go into it—we would see how the New Verse was written for and circulated in little magazines like Poetry but also newspapers and mass market magazines like Sunset. We would see how the New Verse was not solely or even primarily the invention or province of the literary, and we would see how women writing for popular venues extended the reach of the New Verse and how the New Verse thus owes some of its legacy to popular culture. 

• We gain a more complex understanding of periodization—not one based on the features of poetry itself but on media, social conditions, market conditions, and so on. All these women wrote before the Cold War and are “modern” poets not by virtue of a shared aesthetic but by virtue of conditions external to their writing: how a woman could come to and train for poetry; what media were available to her; what motivational and reward systems were in place, and so on. 

If we better understand the gender-related conditions affecting poetry, we may be less likely to write off certain poetry as “bad” or uninteresting and may instead start employing or developing more diverse critical models for reading and assessing it. Those models will challenge many assumptions currently in place—how culturally marginalized poetry was, how economically viable it was, what the character of “modern” verse is, and whether a “close reading” is the only or even best endpoint of poetry scholarship. And those models will in turn open us up to unstudied authors, archives, media, and modes of writing, not to mention an expanded ethics of poetry scholarship, all of which has the potential to substantially reshape arguments about what poetry is and what it makes and has made happen.

Guest Posting: "Searching for Edgar Guest," by Victor Hess

Editor's Note: The following posting—about one person's thirty-year-long quest for a single poem—comes from our old acquaintance Victor Hess (pictured here) of Slidell, Louisiana. Before you read about Hess's search, though, let us first fill you in on a little backstory. Nearly a decade ago, P&PC was an eBay junkie, buying up almost every old poetry scrapbook we could get our hands on as we went about assembling the archive that would form the basis for Chapter One of Everyday Reading. (You may remember some of our meditations on our purchases here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) 

Back then, we were in graduate school, and we were poor. That was okay, though, because at the time no one was much interested in poetry scrapbooks, and we could land 'em easily with little or no competition and frequently for less than a five-spot—with one exception. Every now and again, the same someone would bid against us (this was back when eBay bidders were publicly identified by their user names), upping the bid beyond what a poor li'l ol' grad student could afford and leaving us sad and empty-handed but most of all curious. Who was this mysterious collector? Was there someone else writing about poetry scrapbooks? Had we found a potential new friend and colleague? So we did what any poor li'l ol' grad student would do. We sent an email asking who, why, and why not. Read on, dear readers, for the rest of the story.

Searching for Edgar Guest

by Victor Hess

My best friend Alan unfolded an old newspaper clipping in our seventh grade science class. "Read this," he said.

It was a poem. I read the title. "Stick to the Job."

"It was my Dad's favorite."

It was about never giving up, not compromising for the easy dollar. It was about finishing your work and working hard because there may be someone out there working harder. I liked the poem and handed it back to Alan. "That’s cool."

"Keep it. You should have it."

"Naww. This is yours. Your Dad gave this to you."

"It's okay. He gave me other stuff. You keep it."

I didn't have the first thing from my dad. He lived fifteen miles away from us and visited me all of twice a year. Here I was feeling special about a newspaper clipping some other dad gave his son who wasn't me. This poem was special.

I kept it in my billfold like a treasure. In the following years of my careers as a paper boy, a grocery clerk, a real estate clerk, a college student, and a poverty worker, it was there. Sometimes I even followed its advice.

But in 1969 Uncle Sam drafted me into the army, and my poem became missing in action. After the army, I became a realtor, married, had children, moved from Xenia, Ohio, to New Orleans, stayed in sales, watched my kids grow, and then moved to Dallas, and, for twenty years, the poem was out of my mind.

I can't tell you why, but when my sons were twelve and thirteen, I wanted to share that poem with them. I couldn't remember most of it. I could only remember how it made me feel when I was their age.

I did recall three lines: "Keep this in mind from day to day, / Success is just as close to you / As to some toiler far away." I couldn't remember the title any longer, but the poet was Edgar Guest. I stayed awake at night trying to recall the rest of the poem. It meant so much then, and now its absence was magnifying its worth. It had its hold on me. I needed to find that poem.

My search started at Half Price books where I found a small book written by Guest called Harbor Lights of Home. The store clerk told me Guest was syndicated in over 200 newspapers and had written over 11,000 poems. The book I bought had 129 poems in it—but not my poem.

"Good luck," he said.

During the next two decades, I purchased every Guest book I could find through book stores and eBay and Ex Libris and AbeBooks and then started buying people's scrapbooks if they included clippings of Guest's poetry.

I would read some of the poems like "Success" or "Time" or "It Takes a Heap o' Livin' to Make a House a Home" at the dinner table. "That’s nice, Dad," the boys would say as they left the table rolling their eyes.

My wife Melva and I moved back to Louisiana once the kids were grown, and in 2006 I received an email from a guy bidding against me on one of the scrapbooks on eBay. "I don’t want the scrapbook," he wrote. "I just want to scan it. I'm studying how poetry has become embedded in everyday American life and culture."

I agreed to send him all my scrapbooks to scan. I told him the details of my twenty-year quest for this one particular poem, and he said he would keep a lookout for it.

When he returned the scrapbooks, he included a DVD full of scans of not just my scrapbooks but others he had managed to borrow or buy.

He had found so many scrapbooks that it took weeks for me to study his scans, but my poem was not there. It was hopeless. After all, who spends thirty years of his life looking for a stupid poem? I gave up.

Two years later, on November 20, 2008, I received another email from the guy who had scanned the scrapbooks: "Hi Vic, I'm still keeping a lookout for the poem you want to find. Recently I happened to ask a librarian in Cincinnati if he'd look for your poem. He did, and his results suggest the poem may have been published in the Lincoln Star in 1930 or the Connellsville Courier in 1964. Perhaps this is a lead you can use. Hoping you're well. Best, Mike Chasar." I had given up, but Mike had not.

Within minutes, I had subscribed to newspaperarchives.com, and found my poem (see below). I sent an email back to Mike, thanking him. Then I sent one to my sons, who were in their 30s, repeating to them the story I've just told here.

My sons don’t keep that poem in their billfold, but maybe they passed it on to someone else—just like my friend Alan did over fifty years ago.

Back to School with Anne Campbell

A little less than a year back, P&PC wrote a piece about Edgar Guest, the longtime poet of the Detroit Free Press who published a poem in that paper seven days a week for thirty years. The national syndication of his verse made Guest (pictured here) a household name, got him dubbed the "people's poet," turned him into a popular speaker, and made him a very rich man even if it didn't secure him a place in scholarly histories of American poetry. Indeed, after mentioning Guest as part of a Modernist Studies Association panel a few years back, a P&PC affiliate happened to run into a prominent poet-critic in the airport and, in making small talk about the panel while waiting for their flights, said poet-critic confessed that, until our affiliate's talk, he'd never even heard of Guest. (By contrast, our P&PC affiliate's mother-in-law owned several of Guest's books before she moved out of the family house and into a retirement home; when our affiliate opened them while helping with the move, other poems by Guest that she'd clipped from newspapers and magazines and stored between the pages came fluttering out.)

If the poet-critic just mentioned had never heard of Guest, it's probably safe to say that he's never heard of Anne Campbell either—the poet whom the Detroit News hired in 1922 to better compete with the Free Press. Called "Eddie Guest's Rival" by Time and "The Poet of the Home" by her publicity agents, Campbell would go on to write a poem a day six days a week for twenty-five years, producing over 7,500 poems whose international syndication reportedly earned her up to $10,000 per year (that's about $140,000 adjusted for inflation, folks), becoming a popular speaker in her own right, and proving that neither the Free Press nor Guest could corner the market on popular poetry. Indeed, a 1947 event marking her silver anniversary at the News drew 1,500 fans including Detroit's mayor and the president of Wayne State University.

We've been thinking a lot about Campbell lately. For starters, P&PC has been working on an essay about women's poetry and popular culture for the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, and Campbell's clearly a central part of that history. Then we had the awesomely good fortune of meeting Campbell's granddaughter, who's been very helpful in sketching out some of the details of Campbell's life. Anne was born in rural Michigan on June 19, 1888, possibly finished high school, married the Detroit News writer and future Detroit city historian George W. Stark when she was twenty-seven, had three children, performed and recorded regularly with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra doing readings during intermissions in the 1930s, read on local and national radio, was active with the March of Dimes, and with George was a fixture of Detroit's cultural life and friends, of course, with Guest. She published her first poem (where else, right?) in the Free Press when she was ten, won a state prize for a Memorial Day story and poem when she was fourteen, was first paid for her poetry when she was seventeen, gave a popular talk called "Everyday Poetry" on the Lyceum circuit, and published at least five books of poems (one co-written with George). (For a bunch of blurbs and publicity materials about her, check out the pamphlets here and here.) She died in 1984.

But we've also been thinking about Campbell because it's back-to-school season, and, along with a new Trapper Keeper, new gym shoes, and a spectacular new pencil box, we just purchased the card pictured here, which features Campbell's poem "Visitin' the School" and is identified as "A Souvenir of Anne Campbell's Visit to Your School, Compliments of The Detroit News." (The back of the card is blank, btw, but it has glue marks on its four corners, suggesting that someone saved it in his or her poetry scrapbook; in fact, we've seen entire poetry scrapbooks dedicated to collecting nothing but Campbell's poems.)

Here's "Visitin' the School":

Oh, dear, I feel like sich a fool
When folks come visitin' the school.
I never git my problems well,
An' jist can’t read an' write and spell.

When teacher asts me to recite,
Although I try with all my might,
I feel the red burn in my cheek,
An' my throat swells so I can't speak.

My both knees shake an' sweat rolls down.
An' nen when I see teacher's frown,
I git so scared, I wish fur fair
That I was any place but there.

When I git big an' have a boy
I' goin' to make his life all joy.
No matter what the teacher's rule,
I'll not go visitin' the school! 

It's an odd little poem, isn't it? It's kitschy in a way that Daniel Tiffany's recent book My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch can help us to understand, and although the second and third stanzas don't disclose the exact content of the recitation, they nevertheless call most readily to our mind the history of poetry memorization and recitation that Catherine Robson takes up in Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem; seen this way, "Visitin' the School" is thus a poem about poetry.

But under the cover of innocence—the kitchiness, the schoolroom, the slightly baby-talk language, the rudimentary rhymes, etc.—we here in the P&PC Office think Campbell's poem's got something more going on. Noteworthy for how it doesn't assign a gender to teacher, student, or classroom visitor (thus making a role in the child's predicament available to all students, teachers, and classroom visitors), "Visitin' the School" is super concerned with the subject of reproduction: 1) whether or not the child's oral expression can be reproduced in print; 2) whether or not the child can faithfully reproduce what "teacher asts me to recite"; 3) how the child will "git big an' have a boy"; 4) and, ultimately, how the child vows to not reproduce the cultural practice of "visitin' the school."

Locating a voice of protest and dissent in the child—the weak, scared, young, and nearly voiceless ("my throat swells so I can't speak") subject put under pressure by multiple forms of surveillance—Campbell's poem becomes unexpectedly politicized, questioning, rather than confirming, the legitimacy of normative educational practices. If we do not hear this protest, it's not because it's not there, but because we who teach and visit classrooms at all levels fail to afford its apparently rudimentary poetic expression—by someone who "jist can't read an' write and spell"—the seriousness it deserves. As school begins, and as many of us may feel moved to lament the poor writing skills our students bring with them, that's a lesson worth keeping in mind.

The Surprise Guest: Thoughts on Edgar A. Guest, Making Money with Poetry, and the Blind Spots of Modern Poetry Studies

So, P&PC just finished reading Edgar A. Guest: A Biography—Royce Howes's very swell, 1953 account of the one-time Detroit Free Press copy boy who went on, in Horatio Alger fashion, to become the most prolific and popular poet in U.S. history. We're certainly no stranger to Guest—check out an Edgar Guest Calendar here, Chrysler's Edgar Guest television spot here, and a scrapbook full of Guest's poetry here—but the biography stunned us nevertheless. Yes, in telling the story of how Guest's "ascent to fame has kept absolute step with Detroit's march from provincial city to industrial capital of the world," Howes is possibly even more saccharine than the "people's poet" himself was, but the facts are simply astonishing. Consider, for example:

• Guest wrote a poem a day seven days a week for thirty years.
• He lived in a mansion "staffed with servants, fine automobiles, the so-handy golf club [and] the big summer place at the Pointe."
• He had radio, motion picture, and television contracts.
• At one point, when his verse was syndicated to 250 newspapers, it was estimated that his poems had a circulation of about 10,000,000.
• At one point, probably after World War II, Guest reported an annual income of $128,000—the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $1.6 million.
• Guest's first two books (Home Rhymes and Just Glad Things) were self-published and printed by Guest's brother Harry in editions of 800 and 1,500 respectively, and on the basis of those books and his newspaper verse, Guest started getting wooed by the agents of Harper, Scribner, and William Randolph Hearst. Eventually, his publisher Reilly & Britton would print his books in editions of 100,000.
• Guest couldn't go out on the streets of Detroit without getting hailed down by enthusiastic readers.
• Guest was good friends with Henry Ford, who regularly gave the poet cars, beginning with a Model T and, many years later, a Lincoln.
• Guest was pegged as a possible replacement for Will Rogers and even set up in Hollywood for $3,500 per week while studios tried to figure out how to use him.
• A copy of Guest's poem "America" once sold for $50,000 as part of a war-bond fundraising event in 1942.

It's no wonder, really, that even though Guest maintains some of his popularity among people of a certain age today, he has been almost entirely written out of histories of modern poetry, because even though his life and career were propelled by the very forces of modernity that modernist studies scholars love to dwell on, his simple presence in a conversation contradicts all sorts of fantasies about the cultural marginalization of poetry in the twentieth century that those same scholars love to perpetuate: that poetry had a small readership; that no one could make money by writing poems; that poetry happened in bohemian enclaves and small cliques involving beret-wearing coffee drinkers and free lovers; that poetry primarily responded to the forces of modernity and consumer culture in an oppositional or counter-cultural way; that poetry was a print-based form inherently at odds with "new" and popular media forms like radio, tv, and film; that even if a poet were to make himself or herself available, consumer and popular culture would have no use for him or her. Yadda yadda yadda.

It's possible, we suppose, to explain away Guest's success as the exception that proves the modernist rule, but if you take even the smallest peek down the rabbit hole he opens up, you start seeing that that's not even the case. Not only was Detroit able to support one famous poet, for example, but it also supported a second: Anne Campbell, sometimes called "Eddie Guest's Rival," who for the crosstown Detroit News wrote a poem a day six days a week for twenty years, producing in the process more than 7,500 poems and making up to $10,000 per year from her poetry's syndication (that's about $140,000 adjusted for inflation, btw). Other poets like Helen Welshimer, Berton Braley, James Metcalfe, Ethel Romig Fuller, Don Marquis, and Walt Mason seemed to have little trouble making money off their verse as well.

Guest is not only compelling in his own right, then, but he's compelling because paying even a smidgen of attention to him opens up a window onto an entire sphere of literary activity that has been all but erased from the history books and that challenges almost every academic assumption about the cultural place and function of poetry in modern America. We look at Guest and see Campbell, Welshimer, Braley and crew, but then we also see that Guest's publisher—based in Chicago right down the street from Poetry magazine, that supposed center of all things modern in modern poetry—was also making a pretty good go of it; Reilly, for example, also issued Tony's Scrap Book, an annual print spin-off of Tony Wons's popular poetry radio show that sold over 225,000 copies in 1932 alone. (Wons, btw, reported making $2,000 per month including royalties from Tony's Scrap Book, which is the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $400,000 per year.)

When we figure in Reilly's activities and Tony's radio show, we start sketching out the parameters of a modern poetry landscape composed of affluent celebrity poets, for-profit poetry publishers, and multimedia distribution—a picture at odds with almost everything we imagine about the workings of poetry in the first half of the century. We here at the P&PC Office are stunned every time we think seriously about this, and we're convinced that, some day, scholars of modern poetry are going to start realizing the stories and archives awaiting them if they just take a moment to tune in.

Happy New Year from P&PC

Here at the P&PC Office, there's a New Year's Eve party in the works. The streamers are up. The kazoos are out. Pointy hats are stacked and at the ready. The bubby's chillin' on ice. Sally the stenographer has got her dancing shoes on and is flirting with Carl the copy guy. And some of the interns have been passing around this goodie from 1939: a promotional calendar issued by the Household Finance Corporation and featuring a year's-worth of poetry by the guy once known as the "people's poet"—longtime bard of the Detroit Free Press, perhaps the most prolific poet of twentieth century America, and a P&PC hero, Edgar A. Guest. "Here," writes Guest on the front of an accompanying folding flier (pictured below), "is my 1939 calendar which you asked me to send you. Both Household Finance and I appreciate your request very much. I hope that you will find the calendar useful and that the poems will give you many pleasant moments in the days ahead. Best wishes for a happy and prosperous new year."

The calendar begins with "It Couldn't Be Done," one of Guest's most popular and lasting verses and a poem that Poetry Out Loud recommends to students as a potentially successful recitation piece today. (It's also a poem, btw, that makes an appearance in Chapter Two of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, where we speculate on the vagueness of that "it" in the title especially as it functions in an age of "no ideas but in things.") Here is the rest of the year's sequence:

February: "When Father Shook the Stove"
March: "Home"
April: "The Package of Seeds"
May: "Compensation"
June: "The Stick-Together Families"
July: "Out Fishin'"
August: "Ma and the Auto"
September: "It's September"
October: "Autumn"
November: "Courtesy on Departure"
December: "On Going Home for Christmas"

We here at P&PC find "Compen- sation" (which is about looking for a way to pay "my debt to God for life divine") a particularly fitting bridge between Guest and his sponsor, the Household Finance Corporation. After all, the "Doctor of Family Finances"—which was founded in 1878 and by 1939 had branches in 152 cities in the U.S. and Canada—uses the calendar to address the subject of paying back debts as well. "When you are troubled by money problems a visit to your local Household Finance man may prove very helpful," the verbiage at the end of the calendar reads. "He has had years of experience finding ways out of family money worries."

While a reader might not get to that reminder—after all, you've got to flip all the way through the year to find it buried behind December—he or she is not likely to overlook the "How I got a Loan of $200" testimonial (pictured here) printed inside of Guest's introductory wishes for a "prosperous" new year. Our favorite part of this ad? It's gotta be how the homonym for "a loan" ("alone") in the heading previews the thrust of the subheading below it—"without co-signers or endorsers" (i.e., alone)—not to mention how that message is reinforced by the single hero of the poem "It Couldn't Be Done" on the calender who, despite "thousands to prophesy failure," finds success by working alone.

While readers today are likely to find it a little nauseating, the partnership of Guest and Household Finance makes a lot of conceptual sense beyond this discursive synchronicity as well, as they're both more or less in the same line of work: Guest helps us with our metaphysical debts, and Household Finance with our monetary ones. And what better time to bring them together than at the beginning of the new year when, as the month-by-month flipping design of the calendar suggests, we make resolutions to turn over all sorts of new leaves—to pay down the balance on our credit cards, to more responsibly repay the kindnesses we've been shown, and to attend to the bottom lines of our lives in general?

But that's enough cogitation for now—there's a party to prepare, and the interns have started doing the limbo in the other room. It's time, it seems, to welcome in 2013. On behalf of the entire P&PC Office, then, we hope that you find happiness, fulfillment, and the beginning of many new dreams in the coming year.

Everyday Reading Outtakes: The Bealor Family Poetry Scrapbook

On Wednesday of this week, P&PC was thrilled to learn that Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America has been nominated for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award, and we would have celebrated by sending the office interns home early, except that they had already gone home early for Thanksgiving festivities with family and friends. Alone in the office, a single light bulb glowing from its chain in the middle of the room, the rain of the Oregon winter coming down on the dark streets, and a turkey awaiting our ministrations at home, we turned, as we not infrequently do in times of meditation, to one of the 175 or so old poetry scrapbooks that form the archive we consider in Chapter One of Everyday Reading, that are representative of a widespread American practice of cutting and pasting poems between the Civil War and World War II, and that we've written about from time to time on this blog (here, here, here, here, here, and here).

It's one of our regrets that Everyday Reading didn't give us enough space to focus on every one of our favorite poetry scrapbooks, because many of them are really provocative and moving. Take, for example, an album started by Minnie R. Shaw Bealor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 29, 1926—almost exactly eighty-six years ago. Between 1926 and 1938, Minnie would collect over seventy poems in her anthology, most of them cut out from newspapers but a few written longhand. A high concentration of poems from Edgar Guest's syndicated "Just Folks" newspaper column suggests that Minnie was a particular fan of the "people's poet"; she even pasted a picture of Guest on the album's inside front cover (pictured here). But we find others as well, like "In Flanders Fields" and "From an Oldtime Flapper" (see the next picture below) that also anchor Minnie in the modern world of World War I, the nineteenth amendment, the Roaring 20s, and the era of the New Woman. Here's "From an Oldtime Flapper" (a sonnet written in couplets by someone identified only as "Diana"):

I was a flapper in nineteen-two,
Big Pompadour and a big hat, too;
Habit-back skirts were then in date
And suited alluring out-curves great.
We smoked cigarets [sic] on the strict Q. T.,
And a cocktail or two never worried me!
Now I am a cheery blithe old dame,
While the habits of youth are just the same—
They devil their elders and kick their heels.
Old Fate smiles on as their doom she seals
With a ring and a book and a bridal veil,
A Harlem flat and an infant's wail—
Jazz along, girls, here's luck to you
From an old-time flapper of nineteen-two!

Was Minnie herself meditating on the "doom" of marriage, motherhood, and domestic life that Diana sees linking successive generations of women: "Old Fate smiles on as their doom she seals / With a ring and a book and a bridal veil / A Harlem flat and an infant's wail"? We think it's very likely. The first poem Minnie pastes in the album, for example, is "Our Mother" by children's author and poet Josephine Pollard, which concludes:

Better for us to be faithful and kind
To mother dear, while she is living;
Better for us when we bear in mind,
Kisses and sympathy giving,
Than after her presence is missed from the home,
And she's gone from this world to another,
To weep and lament, and with anguish repent
Of the way we neglected our mother.

Minnie uses several Guest poems—"The Good Wife," "My Wife and I," "Ma and I," "Picking Up After Him," "Ma and the Auto," "She Mothered Five," and "Babies"—to extend her theme, offering evidence not only of how scrapbooking provided readers with a way to meditate in an extended way on a topic, but also how important Guest might be to studies of women's poetry and twentieth-century women readers as well.

What's so moving about this scrapbook is not just Minnie's reflection, but that it witnesses to her death as well. About halfway through the album, Minnie has dated (Oct. 29, 1936), handwritten, and signed a poem of her own (pictured here)—the only time she includes her own verse. Here it is:

Where are all the thoughts we think and then forget?
They surely cannot melt away and never leave a trace.
Perhaps I'll find in later years they're close around me yet—
At least I'll find their history is written in my face.

Minnie's final words—which we can't help but read as an epitaph retooling Keats's famous line, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water"—are followed by a blank page and then a full-page notation (pictured here) handwritten and signed a year and a half later by Minnie's daughter, Margaret Jane Bealor: "This Scrap Book continued in Loving Memory of my Mother, Minnie Rebecca Shaw Bealor, This Twenty-fourth day of March, in The Year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Thirty Eight."

Margaret would go on to include 35 pieces of her own selection—poems and passages about grief and existential need such as "Consolation," "What Is Life About?," Kipling's "If We Only Understood" "The Lonely Road," "Is Life Worth Living?," "Fear," "Resolve," and "Courage." Was Margaret continuing her mother's album as a way of working through the anguish that Pollard identifies at the end of "Our Mother" quoted above—as an act of repentance? Had Margaret discovered, upon her mother's death, Minnie's private, twelve-year wrestle with the subject of motherhood and married life? Had she recognized the "doom" that they shared but likely never talked about—and was she now processing it in private, via the scrapbook, just as her mother had done? Was Margaret possibly thinking of her own daughter, or her future daughter, and how—as in "From an Oldtime Flapper"—she would live to see women's doom repeat itself at midcentury?

The silence—of the individual reader, but also the silence between mother and daughter—that themes the two parts of this album is moving, but it's not as moving as the horrible silence that ends it. Margaret's additions to the scrapbook end, like her mother's section, with a handwritten, epitaph-like passage beginning, "One reason our Lord gives for not worrying about the future is that we have nothing to do with it." Then, repeating the transitional motif she established halfway through the album upon the occasion of her mother's death, Margaret skips a page and writes:

September 3, 1939
     War in Europe Begins
December 7, 1941
     Japan attacked Pearl Harbor
December 8, 1941
     We entered the war against Japan, Germany + Italy.
May 7, 1945
     The War in Europe ended.
August 6, 1945
     The first Atomic Bomb was dropped by the U.S. in Japan
August 14, 1945
     The War ended.

The rest of the scrapbook—sixty pages—is entirely blank. P&PC flips page after page looking for something—some word, some gesture, some voice, some recovery from the war, some continuation of any type, but it's like there's nothing to say or do after the dropping of the atom bomb, no possible answer any longer to the question "Is Life Worth Living?" that the earlier poem of that title posed. It's a nuclear holocaust as figured by the scrapbook, a test pattern that is nothing but white on white. Margaret probably wouldn't have known who Theodor Adorno was, but it's her version of Adorno's famous statement, "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."