Putting the Ale in Salem

From noon to 10 pm this coming Saturday, September 25th, Gilgamesh Brewing and Wandering Aengus Cider Works will be hosting Salem's first Beer & Cider Festival at the Mission Mill Museum located at 1313 Mill Street, just a hop (ahem), skip and a jump from the campus of Willamette University. The P&PC Office is excited. Sure, we took a field trip to the 24th annual Oregon Brewers Festival this past July where we sampled our fair share of the more than 80 craft beers that were on tap in that well-established, world-renowned frothy juggernaut of a fest. But there's something particularly special about Salem's startup, and not just because it's taking place, somewhat audaciously, in the shadow of Portland's hipster paradise and in a capital city that gets short shrift in all the guidebooks. Maybe—just maybe—it also has to do with a certain poetic element that's been in the Salem beer mix, along with all those locally-grown hops, going on for nigh 100 years.

Take the acrostic pictured to the left, for example: a May, 1911 advertisement issued by the Salem Brewery Association, which came across our desktops via a mysteriously anonymous blogging friend (and purveyor of the fascinating and arcane) over at Capital Taps. It's a clever bit of acrostic puffery in which the vertically-oriented phrase "Salem Beer" becomes the grammatical subject of virtually every line even as its component letters begin those lines. That is, the letters in "Salem Beer" are being put to three separate uses: as (ahem) the capital beginning each line, as the aggregate subject of each statement about beer's healing powers, and as a sort of bold-faced neon light for "Salem Beer" that signifies independent of the poem as it's printed vertically down the page. This is how an acrostic is supposed to work, right? It's a poetic form that exploits the tendencies of language to serve multiple purposes simultaneously and, in revealing embedded texts and encoded messages, encourages us to read against the page's grain if not between the lines.

Once licensed to read this way, readers will find the "Salem Beer" ad to be an unex- pectedly rich verbal habitat. For example, who can mistake that the first word one comes to when reading down the page is the "Sale" going on in "Salem"—a perfectly appropriate description of the result that the ad seeks to effect? In fact, the very alcoholic bevvie which is the subject of the local market transaction—ale—is itself embedded in the city's name, so that by the time the "M" in Salem finally comes around, the Salem Brewery Association has more or less encapsulated its core message in five letters: it's a sale on ale in Salem. Mind you, this sort of creative play in which meanings melt—or should it be malt?—into one another isn't unique to this ad. A more recent local movement to "Keep Salem Lame" has more or less read the city's name in the same way but to different results; just as the Brewery Association saw its product inherent in Oregon's capital, so some locals see the city's true identity there as well.

What we like even more about this ad, however, is the homonym for "ale"—that is, "ail"—which the acrostic poem itself takes up as the very problem for which Salem Beer is a purported remedy. Once we begin reading horizontally through the acrostic—with the grain—we come upon the healing powers that Salem Beer supposedly has: it invigorates, lends strength to the weak and wearied physique, is a cure for the nervous ills of life, restores people to full strength, etc. In short, Ale is the cure for what Ails you. It might strike some as a crazy claim for the Brewery Association to make, but in an age when alcohol was the primary ingredient in most patent medicines and snake oil cures, the mythical healing powers of alcohol were well embedded in the cultural psyche, not just in the word "Salem."

There's at least one more, likely uncon- scious, effect that the Brewery Associ- ation's acrostic would have had on its 1911 audience, however. As Leon Jackson reminds us in his awesome study The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (2008), acrostics were a popular "if juvenile, form of courtship poetry" in the antebellum U.S. It's no surprise, for example, that the 19th century advertising trade card pictured here—showing a dashing lad wooing his beloved by handing her a packet of B.T. Babbitt's soap—contains an acrostic on back (see below) constructed via the name of the company's flagship product "BT Babbitts Soap." That acrostic, titled "The Man" and extolling the virtues of the esteemed Mr. B.T. Babbitt himself, begins:

B right golden day, that ever gave
T he world a man who cared to save
B etimes the toil of womankind;
A man with an ingenious mind,
B estows a real gift to us,
B ecause experience proves it thus.

Capitalizing on the cultural association of acrostic poetry with courtship— an association that the illustration on the card is designed to trigger—Babbitt's Soap effectively casts the producer-consumer relationship as a romantic one and the act of shopping as a lovemaking endeavor more broadly. It may seem a stretch to say that the Salem Brewery Association is following in Babbitt's acrostic footsteps by sexing up the prospective buyer of Salem beer. But in its promise of "restor[ing] man to fulness of strength and activity," doesn't this beer ad sound a bit too much like a male sexual enhancement product to dismiss the notion out of hand?

Mind you, we here in the P&PC Office aren't saying that this weekend's beer festival promises anything of the sort. We're going simply for the "wholesome beverage" and "good fellowship." Why don't we all continue the conversation there?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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