More Muppet Poetry: Two Poems by Rowlf

Forget the turkey, mashed potatoes, and football. We're on a Muppet kick here in the P&PC Office. Doesn't the first clip below—of Rowlf reading "Silence"—remind you of Season 4, Episode 7 of The Brady Bunch (1972) where Mike reads Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Day Is Done" as part of the Westdale High School's Family Night Frolics? And might that be Walt Whitman's famous cardboard butterfly coming to life in "The Butterfly," Rowlf's second poem below? Both "Silence" and "The Butterfly" are from Season One (1976) of The Muppet Show. Happy viewing!

The Poetry of The Brady Bunch (1972: Season 4, Episode 7)

Whistful Memories: Poetry Playing Cards

Is it possible that popular poetry's most companionable print platform from the modern era is not the book or little magazine but the card—the greeting card (more here), business card (more here and here), postcard, calling card, game card, stereoview card (more here and here), remembrance card, funeral card, cabinet card, arcade card, and advertising trade card (another here), all of which forms regularly featured poems ranging from sappy holiday wishes and elegies to self-promotional verses and, in the case of arcade cards and some business cards, naughty rhymes? Last week, P&PC brought you a set of poetry trading cards from the 1920s, and this week we're happy to present the "Game of Poems," an attractively illustrated deck of 52 playing cards issued by the Fireside Game Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1898.

From 1895 to 1905 or so, the Fireside Game Company (and its successor, the Cincinnati Game Company) issued more than 35 educational card games, most modeled on the game of whist, aimed at students and teachers seeking to mix pedagogy and play. Deck themes ran the gamut, featuring everything from "Wild Animals" to "Strange People" and "Fractions," and including a heavy nationalistic bent in sets like "Our National Life," "The Mayflower," "In the White House," "In Dixie Land," and "Trip Through Our National Parks." The "Game of Poems" is no exception in this latter respect, as players collect tricks based on whether or not they compile, over the course of the game, complete "books" of poets representing America, Ireland, England, and Scotland, each nation being composed of thirteen card-poems featuring verse by four of the "standard poets" of that respective nation plus one "National" card. Class A (America), for example, gets Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Eugene Field and Rodman Drake's "The American Flag"; Class B (Ireland) gets Thomas Moore, Thomas Davis, Samuel Lover, Samuel Ferguson, and William Drennan's "Erin"; Class C (England) gets Thomas Hood, Tennyson, Byron, Gray, and James Thompson's "Rule, Britannia"; and Class D (Scotland) gets Burns, Scott, Thomas Campbell, Robert Tannahill, and James Hogg's "Caledonia."

You can play this game just as you would any other trick-collecting game—detailed instructions are included in the leather carrying case—but P&PC likes the Fireside Game Company's suggestions for how to add a "literary feature" or type of "progressive play" to "the evening's enjoyment." Here's what the instructions describe:

Rules for playing in the progressive method can readily be adopted, the addition of a literary feature adding to the evening's enjoyment. A short programme of readings or recitations, made up of selections from the poets, or of gems from current literature, may be arranged, and its rendition expected at the hands of the players winning the least number of points in any particular play.

In other words, the loser's fate is to be subjected to the public recitation of poetry! This isn't a suggestion made once, but again in regard to the "fateful thirteen"—the odd card out, which won't be collected into a set of four and thus "will eventually remain in the hands of the loser." "To add to his misfortune," the instructions explain, the loser "may be required to recite the National Ode of the particular nation he is known to favor the least." Take that, Catherine Robson!

In the growing game industry of the turn of the century, the Fireside Game Company occupied—was perhaps even the leader in—a market niche devoted to what The School Journal called "education by play." Noting in 1902, that "unless innocent and useful pleasures be given children, they may find harmful ones for themselves," for example, The Educator-Journal praised the Fireside Game Company's products:

In recognition of this fact, The Fireside Game Company, several years ago, published a line of beautifully illustrated Educational Home Games. About twenty-five of these, covering various subjects, were issued. They had a wide distribution for home use, and a great many teachers also employed them in their schools. The play rules were generally those of the old game of Authors.

Some of the card sets—like the "Wild Animals" series created by Louis M. Schiel, Principal of the 23rd District School in Cincinnati—were designed by teachers, and Fireside reached out to both teachers and students, pitching its set of "52 beautiful illustrations of the most popular poems" and asking people to write to the company of their game-playing experiences. Fireside sponsored a contest awarding $200 in prizes to the four best essays written by teachers on the subject of education games "as exemplified by the games copyrighted by the Fireside Game Company" and also offered free decks of cards to the first five hundred students who "write us the best reasons for liking their favorite game." That free deck, btw, would have saved a student two bits—the equivalent, accounting for inflation, of six or seven bucks today.

So what do you say to a "Game of Poems" night at the P&PC Office one of these days? The interns have promised to hitch up your horses, fire up the gas lights, have popcorn and whiskey at the ready, and "suitable souvenirs" for all who attend (as recommended by the game's instructions). If you're not frightened off at the prospect of having to recite your least favorite national poem in front of the entire group, then give us a call!

Communism for Kids: Martha Millet, the New Pioneer, and the Popularity of the Old Left—A Guest Posting by Sarah Ehlers

P&PC is thrilled to introduce our new South Dakota correspondent Sarah Ehlers (pictured here), an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota who teaches and writes about modern poetry and poetics. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly, Paideuma, and Contemporary Literature, and she is completing a book titled Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics. In the following posting about the poetics of radical children's verse, Ehlers hints at what Left of Poetry has in store and how the development of modern poetics—at least in some spheres of American life—had more to do with nineteenth century verse cultures than folks generally assume. If you want to know how communist poetry, Little Miss Muffet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mother Goose, and even the poetry of Robert Southey could come together to make poetry "modern," dear reader, then read on.

Now relatively unknown, Martha Millet was heartily involved in Left literary institutions from the 1930s through the 1950s. A card-carrying communist, she worked as a labor journalist and published politically themed verse in The New Masses, Daily Worker, and Masses and Mainstream, as well as in the 1944 volume Seven Poets in Search of an Answer, which also featured poems by Langston Hughes. In the early 1940s, she wrote political tracts and pamphlets for the New York City Central Committee of the International Workers Order. In the 1950s, she published two volumes of original poetry (Thine Alabaster Cities: A Poem for Our Times [1952] and Dangerous Jack: A Fantasy in Verse [1953]) and edited The Rosenbergs: Poems of the United States (1957). And some of her verses were published in Poetry magazine. Despite this poetic output, Millet remains relatively unknown, even among scholars of the Depression-era Left, and it's worth wondering what narrative of U.S. Left poetry—and of U.S. poetry in general—might surface if we were to take as starting points Millet's engagements with children's verse and her belief in the "popularity" of Popular Front poetry.

At age fourteen, Millet published one of her first poems, "Pioneer Pied Piper," in New Pioneer, the official magazine of the communist children's organization, the Young Pioneers. The poem—which occupied a full two-page spread in the magazine's May 1933 issue—tells how a band of gluttonous Boy Scouts took over the peaceful community of Children's Town. The Scouts forced the town's children to labor in mills and on farms with barely enough food to fill their stomachs, and the newly inducted Boy Scout mayor and his council grew fat on oysters and butter. So things went until the arrival of the "Pioneer Pied Piper"—a young man clad in a blue uniform with a red hammer and sickle sewn on the shirt pocket and a bugle hanging by his side. Immediately, the Piper announced to the Mayor of Children's Town that he had come, "To set these wretched children free." In reversing the "Pied Piper of Hamelin" legend, Millet's "Pioneer Pied Piper" uses his bugle music to organize, and ultimately liberate, the youthful working-class masses. His bugle blast sets the children on a march that forces the ruling-class Scouts out of town and to their deaths. (As the Scouts flee, the bridge they are crossing collapses, and they all drown in a river.) Finally free, the citizens of Children's Town stay to rebuild their community as a "Pioneer Commune," home to a "happy race" of "folks" bursting with "carefreeness and mirth."

In Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, Julia Mickenberg describes how the "variety of stories, articles, pictures, jokes, puzzles, book and film reviews, and letters to the editor" published in the New Pioneer worked "toward serving the goals of the Communist children's movement" (67). Through story, rhyme, and illustrations by Marya Morrow, the published version of "Pioneer Pied Piper" in May of 1933 exemplifies what Mickenberg describes as the New Pioneer editors' careful efforts "to combine child appeal with political content" (67). But while the poem survives as a significant artifact from the communist children's movement, I think it also begs to be read as something more.

When considered in the context of Old Left discourses about poetics—especially those surfacing in The New Masses readers' letters and editorials—Millet's children's rhyme might be taken seriously as (at least one version of) an ideal radical Depression-era poem. If one scans the numerous editorials, commentaries, letters, debates, etc. published in Left literary magazines during the interwar period, one sees that many readers demanded a certain type of poem—a poem that was accessible to a wide audience; simple, direct, and easy to memorize; and immediately usable for political activities like union meetings, picket lines, and May Day parades. Over and over, readers of publications like The New Masses denigrated the poetry being produced in "wastelands" (a jab at T.S. Eliot, perhaps?) and "tired intellectual towers," and they pitted a "difficult," "cerebral," or "despairing" modernist aesthetic against a more "straightforward," "populist," or "optimistic" one. In a letter to the editor, one subscriber to The New Masses, R.W. Lalley, wrote that he liked "simple, direct little verses" and disliked "the amorphous type" by writers such as Muriel Rukeyser. Millet herself penned a letter to The New Masses in 1938 ("Is Poetry Dead?"). In it, she urged that, for Popular Front poetry to stay "popular," it would have to "mean more to more Americans" and, therefore, it "should, even when representative of the Left, not be confusedly ornate, pretentiously intellectual, and 'cerebrally dull.'"

Of course, these opinions re-inscribe simplistic divides between the difficult and accessible, obtuse and direct, despairing and hopeful, modernist and not. Scholars of the U.S. literary and cultural Left like Alan Wald, Cary Nelson, Paula Rabinowitz, James Smethurst, and Al Filreis have variously parsed Left writers' complicated relationships to experimental literary modernism. And the archive of radical poems composed and produced for children returns us to historical debates about the relationship of radical poetry to modernist experimentation that raged on the Left during the 1930s, allowing us to see them from a fresh perspective that enables a new narrative of U.S. poetry to surface. This new narrative stresses the continuities—not breaks—between nineteenth- and twentieth-century verse cultures, and it resists a tendency to view the tensions between popular and modernist poetry through a focalization on the latter.

At first glance, the poetry written for young readers picking up New Pioneer seems to exemplify the ideal of an accessible political poem chock full of communism's "good news." After all, what could be more easy to read than a rhyming poem written for a child? What kind of poem is more widely understood than a nursery rhyme, even if that rhyme puts a starving Little Miss Muffet on the picket line, as in this excerpt from Harry Alan Patamkin's "Mother Goose on the Breadline":

Little Miss Muffet
Ate such vile stuff, it
Made her feel rotten inside
Black coffee, stale bread—
Miss Muffett saw Red!
She joined with the workers and cried:
"Don't Starve, Fight!
Don't Starve, Fight!"

In drawing on such popular forms, New Pioneer contributors also re-purposed popular nineteenth-century texts, versifiers, verse genres, and verse presentation contexts in order to construct a poetry that could reach a wide audience and have an immediate impact. Millet's "Pioneer Pied Piper," for instance, doesn't just adapt a familiar text but is also formatted in a way that recalls the print conventions of the ballad broadside as well as nineteenth-century newspaper verse.

Along these lines, the February 1931 issue of New Pioneer featured a poem titled "Old Father William" by Alice Hayes, which owes debts to both Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "You are Old, Father William" (1865) and the poem Carroll parodied, Robert Southey's didactic verse "The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them" (1799). All three poems begin with a youth telling Father William, "You are old, Father William," and then proceed with a dialogue in which the youth questions the older man about this condition. Carroll's poem turns Southey's Father William on his head, transforming a pious elder who always "thought of the future" and "remember'd my God" into a rotund, quick-tongued man who turns somersaults and balances an eel on his nose. (That's Carroll's illustration pictured here.)

Hayes's New Pioneer version of "Father William" ostensibly forgoes Carroll's nonsense and returns the poem to its original didacticism. However, while Southey's Father William was able to preserve his youth, Hayes's Father William loses his to a life of hard labor. When asked about his age, Hayes's Father William explains: 

"In my youth," the old fellow replied to the lad,
"I slaved every day for the boss
And while I turned out some perfect machines
My own health is totally lost."

In the subsequent dialogue, the youth slowly loses his ideals about the work world. At first, he assumes that Father William must have been paid a "handsome wage" because he worked so efficiently. When he learns this wasn't the case, the youth figures, "surely the boss has given a dole" to the old man. But Father William closes the poem with a more difficult truth:

"Well, to tell you the truth, I've been working right on
Till a stronger man for less pay
Has come to the factory to end up like me
And I just got kicked out today.

In the end, Hayes reverses the moral of Southey's poem. In the nineteenth-century original, Father William shows the youth that, if one takes care of oneself and thinks always of the future, then one can be comfortable in old age. Hayes's Father William never had such luxuries, however, and has been prematurely aged by factory work. The ultimate lesson is that, unless there is a fundamental socioeconomic change, these conditions are bound to continue and the youth is doomed to suffer the old man's fate. In addition to engaging Southey, Hayes also imparts this lesson by referencing Carroll's more familiar version of Old Father William. The last line of Hayes's "Father William" ("And I just got kicked out today") is a play on the last line of Carroll's "Father William" ("Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!").

The New Pioneer's recirculation of nineteenth-century verse culture did not go un-theorized. Mickenberg explains that, in general, "the New Pioneer's stories and articles tended to be more factual than fanciful, with a heavy emphasis on historical and scientific themes" (68). Every issue featured historical fiction, biographical essays on revolutionary figures, and series like "American History Told in Pictures," which retold major events in U.S. history from a Left perspective. The history of U.S. poetry was also recast from the standpoint of Left politics and aesthetics, as the magazine's editors and contributors ransacked the nineteenth century for a "usable past" for poetry, one that would illuminate a long tradition of "popular" poems written for the "common people." For instance, a short piece on revolutionary poet Philip Freneau by Millet, aptly subtitled "An American Poet of All the Peoples," suggests that Freneau's poetry reached a large number of citizens because it addressed important political issues of the time. According to the article, Freneau wrote about slavery and oppression "almost a hundred years before the slave issue grew into Civil War" and penned "fierce poetry with which he lashed out against the oppressive rule of the British king"; he became a national figure by writing "fiery songs" that gave "new power to popular issues."

Millet's little sketch of Freneau says a lot about how the 1930s communist Left's prescriptions for poetry were read back into earlier American poetic cultures. Left interpretations of nineteenth-century verse culture assume that poems written in the voice of the "common people" were, to borrow from Virginia Jackson, "made to be read … as if reading were self-evident," as if their artifices "were really a transparent language" ("Longfellow’s Tradition," 472). Such readings serve as productive misreadings, lending fact to the fiction that the most effective revolutionary poetry need not be read at all, for a poem's rhyme and melody would directly transmit its meanings to its readers and their lives. Children's poems—deliberately constructed, but in forms so familiar they seem natural—illuminate the slippage between the Left ideal of the ultimately accessible poem and the historical reading practices on which this ideal relies.

This slippage is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the biographical sketch of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that Millet penned for the October 1938 New Pioneer. Millet casts Longfellow (pictured here) as, above all, a social poet enraptured by "the love of literature and writing" and the uses to which such writing could be put. Over the course of the essay, she highlights his interest in the "impoverishment and oppression" of the people of Spain, his "deeper awareness" of Native American culture, and his condemnation of the "criminal institution" of slavery. Millet's narrative of Longfellow's political activism is overly forgiving, if not downright wrong. But it's also canny. In mentioning Spain, the colonization of the American West, and the antislavery movement, Millet refers to the U.S. Left's solidarity with the international anti-fascist front in Spain as well as the anti-imperialist and anti-racist discourses characterizing Popular Front politics. In so doing, she also extracts Longfellow from the conservative schoolroom, where, as Angela Sorby explains in Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, his poems served a "fantasy of universal humanity" rooted in nationalist discourses (11). Millet repurposes Longfellow for the New Pioneer schoolroom, where the ideal of a united "common people" is meant to enact an international and potentially revolutionary political community.

Millet glorifies Longfellow's politics not only so that they match her own, but also so they match what she perceives to be the politics of his poetic form. She highlights how his poems' political messages are conveyed through simple and musical verse that could be enjoyed by all and praises Longfellow as a writer who:

wrote simply and understandably. He will be remembered as the ever-musical poet of simplicity who could make people see the traditions and folklore of the much-abused Indian through his poetry, and who dealt with life and people in a manner that all could enjoy.

Millet's understanding of Longfellow's poetry is symptomatic of prevalent twentieth-century conceptions of his work that privilege its apparent simplicity as well as the promises for reception such simplicity implies. Millet does not, for example, mention Longfellow's use of classical meter (like the trochaic tetrameter lines of "Song of Hiawatha," which she eventually quotes); rather, she describes him as an "ever-musical poet" whose work reached the "people." In Millet's estimation, Longfellow, in a strange way, becomes the ideal radical poet. And, as she suggests through strategic excerpting from "Song of Hiawatha," he advocates peace and solidarity by speaking to children:

O children; my poor children!
Listen to the words of wisdom,
Listen to the words of warning,
From the lips of the Great Spirit,
From the Master of Life, who made you.
…
I am weary of your quarrels,
Weary of your wars and bloodshed,
Weary of your prayers for vengeance,
Of your wranglings and dissensions;
All your strength is in your union,
All your danger is in discord;
Therefore be at peace henceforward,
And as brothers live together.

Capitalizing on the poem's apparent popularity while foregoing its nationalist and imperialist discourses, Millet's short article makes "Song of Hiawatha" read like a Popular Front political vision of "strength in union." Her appropriation of this widely-circulating nineteenth-century poem stands as yet another example of Longfellow's continued popularity, but it also provides insight into the significance of children's poetry for understanding Old Left poetic culture. Millet's own children's poems, as well as her re-readings of popular poems like "Song of Hiawatha," illustrate the complex ways in which poets associated with the Communist and Popular Front Left attempted to make poetry "popular" and "accessible" in forums like New Pioneer as well as in more well-known publications like The New Masses. Read in this context, the radical children's poetry in New Pioneer also archives significant dimensions of Left poetic output during the 1930s. Whether these poems remain obscure (like Millet's own unread verse), and howsoever they represent political appropriations of popular texts, they index the history of a poetic Left involved in the radical re-appropriation of popular poems, generic conventions, and traditional forms. Left poets and readers of Left poetry did more than simply draw on the poetry of the past—they actively re-imagined the history of poetic forms and the discourses about the social uses that those forms might have.

Bullwinkle's Corner

Now at the Boston Public Library: The Public Life of Poetry

From now until January 31, 2011, the Boston Public Library is hosting The Public Life of Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, Longfellow, and Their Contemporaries—an exhibition that pulls together a wide range of 19th-century temperance poetry, abolitionist poetry, broadsides, ephemera, occasional verse, poetry scrapbooks, and books and manuscripts relating to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Because of recent budget cutbacks, P&PC was unable to score a plane ticket and make it to Boston to give you a first-hand report. However, we did get a chance to catch up with Nadia Nurhussein (next picture below), the show’s primary organizer and Assistant Professor of English at University of Massachusetts at Boston. Here’s what she had to say.

Poetry & Popular Culture: How did this exhibition take shape?

Nadia Nurhussein: Last semester, I taught a class on public poetry in the U.S. The students and I met once a week at the Rare Books Room of the Boston Public Library (pictured above), where we would select from among the surprisingly impressive collection’s manuscript and printed poems ones that we wanted to examine closely. After the course was over, we organized some of our more interesting discoveries into this exhibit

P&PC: What’s your favorite part of the show?

NN: One of the exhibit’s most exciting cases is devoted to Longfellow parodies. My favorite is Bret Harte’s “Excelsior”—an 1877 versified advertisement for the popular Sapolio soap brand. As Gary Scharnhorst has pointed out, Harte (pictured here) turned to advertising when his famed literary career was collapsing, selling “Excelsior” to Enoch Morgan’s Sons for $50. Unlike Longfellow’s hero, who carries a banner and summits a mountain with “Excelsior!” as his motto, Harte’s “youth…bore, through dust and heat / A stencil-plate, that read complete—‘SAPOLIO!’” He finds space to hawk Sapolio on crowded fences, alongside similar ads for Bixby’s Blacking and Mustang Liniment.

P&PC: If only he could have put up billboards like Burma- Shave did.

NN: That wouldn’t have been good enough for him. He is so thoroughly a product of late 19th-century advertising that, with stencil in hand, he comically defaces even the natural landscape with the language of commerce. Not satisfied with fences, he manages to get paint to stick to a snow bank and paints every rock on White Mountain, where tourists “to their dismay, / …read that legend strange, always—‘SAPOLIO.’ Finally, he even paints the tourists’ luggage when they get to the top of the mountain!

P&PC: That doesn’t seem to be the best p.r. campaign for the advertising industry, does it?

NN: It’s incredible that Enoch Morgan’s Sons would use a poem that deplores the ubiquity and inescapability of advertising. But, then again, Harte’s “Excelsior” wasn’t permitted to stand alone. Alternating with Harte’s poem are pages of more straightforward advertising, including the imperative to “SCOUR POTS, KETTLES, PANS AND ALL BRASS AND COPPER UTENSILS WITH SAPOLIO.”

P&PC: Were there other Longfellow parodies?

NN: The most parodied Longfellow poem was probably The Song of Hiawatha—and Longfellow was well aware of the parodies. In an 1877 letter addressed to Karl Knortz (who translated Hiawatha into German), Longfellow replies to Knortz’s request for the titles of Hiawatha parodies with which he is familiar. Knortz initially names four parodies, but Longfellow comes up with two more.

P&PC: Why Hiawatha?

NN: Hiawatha’s easily recognized meter (modeled after the Finnish epic The Kalevala) probably inspired amateurs to imitate it. One parodist admits as much, claiming that “already afloat upon the rhythmical flow of the Hiawathan verse, his thoughts yielded to the alluring current and took ‘the form and pressure’ of the occasion.” James W. Ward’s 1868 parody, The Song of Higher-Water (pictured to the left) was written only three days after Hiawatha was published. One review accurately describes The Song of Higher-Water as “just such a brochure as a clever writer might readily throw off for the amusement of a circle of friends; it is scarcely adapted to the dignity of print.” It is, the reviewer concludes, “an excellent work to give away.” In fact, Ward himself claimed that the poem was “chiefly issued for private distribution” and was published only because “some person, from motives, the rectitude of which is not self-evident, has surreptitiously published an imperfect edition of it, which, I am informed, he is selling for his own account.”

P&PC: Tell me about the poetry scrapbooks in the show. (The page pictured here is from Anne Sexton's scrapbook.)

NN: There are some amazing scrapbooks at the BPL. One of my students found one by a man named Julius L. Brown. There was no further information about him in the card catalog, but my research leads me to believe that he was the same Julius L. Brown whose father was Joseph E. Brown, an unpopular governor of Georgia during the Civil War, when this scrapbook was compiled. He was an eccentric graduate of Harvard Law School and was described by the New York Times as a "collector of the rare in all things."

Another interesting scrapbook, elaborately bound and formally titled Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill 1775-1875, was compiled by Mellen Chamberlain, a 19th-century BPL librarian. As the title suggests, he was interested in collecting material related to Revolutionary War battles, including poetic treatments of these battles by Holmes, Whittier, and Emerson (pictured below). We are displaying a fair copy of Emerson's "Concord Hymn," accompanied by a letter by Chamberlain explaining how he came into possession of the manuscript. He writes that Mrs. Charles Porter, Emerson's cousin, offered to "prevail upon Mr Emerson to transcribe his battle hymn into the volume" if Chamberlain would travel with her to Concord. Chamberlain also notes that Emerson, whose "health was considerably broken," died soon after.

P&PC: What do you mean by occasional verse? Does "Concord Hymn" qualify?

NN: "Concord Hymn" does qualify as occasional verse: it was written and performed at the dedication of an obelisk erected to commemorate the battles at Lexington and Concord. The Mellen Chamberlain manuscript is in the scrapbook case, but the occasional verse case includes a print copy of the poem (donated to the library by the family of William Lloyd Garrison) that was circulated at the event apparently for the purpose of audience participation.

Another interesting bit of occasional verse is a poem written by Holmes for the laying of the cornerstone of the BPL's McKim Building in 1888. On the underside of the cornerstone, two pieces were cut out to accommodate copper boxes that served as time capsules commemorating the ceremony, and Holmes's poem was one of several items placed inside.

P&PC: When I think of Dickinson, I don’t necessarily think “public.” How does she fit into the show?

NN: The exhibit focuses mainly on the marketing of Dickinson immediately after her death. Some of the correspondence between Dickinson editors Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd surrounding the first and second "series" of Poems is displayed, along with the books themselves. One of these letters talks about the cover illustration of an Indian Pipe—a rare white flower that seems to have been chosen to evoke the sense of reclusiveness that was already associated with Dickinson. Her strangeness and reclusiveness were part of the marketing strategy; the preface to Poems, for example, calls her "a recluse by temperament and habit, literally spending years without setting foot beyond the doorstep."

The "public" Dickinson is also reflected in two poems published during her lifetime, probably without her permission: "The May-Wine" (known as "I taste a liquor never brewed") in The Springfield Republican, and "Success" (known as "Success is counted sweetest") in A Masque of Poets. Both were published anonymously. The exhibit also includes a letter from Lavinia Dickinson, thanking Higginson for "giving Emilies wonderful letters to the world"—in other words, for making her public.

P&PC: If you were to do a companion exhibit on the public life of 20th-century poetry, where would you start?

NN: That's a good question! This exhibit actually does extend a bit into the early 20th century, with a case of dialect poetry that includes James Whitcomb Riley's 1908 Orphant Annie book and Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1901 Candle-Lightin' Time. (That's Dunbar pictured to the left.) But, of course, the popularity of dialect poetry didn't last very far into the century. There are also three mid-century photographs related to 19th-century poets. One depicts an event at the Longfellow House for the 1957 sesquicentennial of his birth. Over 2,000 visitors gathered there, and there was even a live television broadcast. (It's hard to imagine such a turnout to celebrate, for instance, Robert Frost, less than 150 years after his birth.)

Perhaps a companion exhibit could begin with the Beat movement, which I think penetrated popular culture in a way that no other 20th-century poetry movement did. I remember watching cartoons that made fun of "beatnik" readings. And apparently Herman Munster was a Beat poet, as Angela Sorby wrote about for P&PC! Even today, the depictions of poetry readings in popular culture usually correspond to those stereotypes of Beat readings.

P&PC: What’s the feedback been like so far?

NN: I've heard from the staff at the BPL that visitors to the exhibit seem to be spending more time looking around than they have with exhibits in the past, which is encouraging to hear. Susan Glover, who holds the title of Acting Keeper of Prints, Rare Books, Manuscripts and Archives at the BPL, suggested that I try to include more visual materials, and I suspect that that has made a difference. Even people interested in books don't necessarily want to look at cases and cases of print! So, items like the broadside of Whittier's "Our Countrymen in Chains!," with its striking wood engraving of a supplicant slave captioned "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" (the central image of the anti-slavery movement), show how verse and images were integrated—in this instance, to make the strongest possible argument against slavery. The exhibit will be up until the end of January, so I hope that P&PC readers who have plans to be in Boston during the holidays will stop by!

Herman Munster, Pragmatic Beatnik: A Guest Posting by Angela Sorby

A while back, one of P&PC's summer research interns happened upon the following choice clip from the popular 1960s CBS TV show The Munsters in which "jolly green giant" Herman Munster (played by Fred Gwynne) is called on to recite some beatnik poetry while hosting a totally rad shin dig at his pad with a bunch of cool wanna-be beatnik cats. Unsure what to make of his performance, we dropped a line to Angela Sorby (pictured here), Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and author of the P&PC "highly recommended" study Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917. Take a gander at the clip here, then check out Sorby's commentary below.



Dear Angela,

So, like, what's the deal with Herman Munster's performance?

The P&PC Office

***************************************

Dear P&PC,

In August of 1965, Marie Jordan wrote to Negro Digest magazine, objecting to the Beat poet LeRoi Jones's Afrocentric vision; Jordan insisted that “the first duty of any writer, be he black, white, or green, is to be continually striving to develop and improve his craft and artistic skill.” Jordan's letter does not acknowledge that at least one green poet emerged from the crucible of the Civil Rights era: Herman Munster, whose verdant hue enabled him to register anxieties about integration—and about poetry—on network TV. Like The Addams Family and The Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters depicts awkward social mixing within neighborhoods, and Munster's green skin enables him to act as a racialized other while ducking the politics of black and white.

Literary histories of the 1960s, such as Conrad Aiken's Twentieth-Century American Poetry (1963), tend to be chrono- logical, nationalistic, and largely white. But Munster's performance offers a pop counterdiscourse that is fluid, transnational, and multicultural, including an anonymous sixteenth-century British rhyme (“Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary”); a bit of nineteenth-century didacticism (Sarah Josepha Hale's “Mary's Lamb”); a phrase from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “Psalm of Life” (“Life is real! Life is earnest!”); a snippet from Rudyard Kipling (“Fuzzy Wuzzy”) and some snatches from the R & B star Louis Jordan (“That chicken's not too young to fry”). And, of course, the whole poem is recited to the beat of an African drum, recalling Allen Ginsberg's “Negro Streets” of Harlem. Munster's poem, then, is a compressed précis of verses that circulated orally and that are understood as available for use by non-elite speakers. Indeed, his final trope on Longfellow (“If you're cold / turn up the furnace”) recasts Longfellow's romanticism as pragmatism, and sums up Munster's implicit ars poetica: do what works.

And his poem does work, at least for his TV audience —and this is a rare moment. Ordinarily, poetry on TV is a source of embar- rassment and discomfort, and indeed in the beginning, Munster's wife Lily says apprehensively, “I think he's going to recite.” However, Munster does not recite, exactly; rather, he channels fragments of popular poetic history, recombining them into a kind of monster mashup that makes the familiar new—without making it unpalatable or threatening. By the end, one bearded spectator enthuses, “Man! That cat is deep.” But Munster succeeds, not because he is deep, but because he is practical and syncretic. The point of Munster's poem is not to express his romantic self-identity (despite his genealogical relation to Mary Shelley), but rather to establish a social comfort zone—a green space, neither black nor white—where the oral tradition can thrive, and where poetry is, at least potentially, a popular art, grounded in the practice(s) of love and theft.

Yours,

Angela Sorby

A Picture of Our Poets

Awhile back, one of the P&PC office interns was reading Cane—the 1923 Jean Toomer book that mixes poems and prose to become what many people would call a "novel" but which we're going to call a collection of poems interspersed with prose—and wondered about a detail in part three of the "Bona and Paul" section (Chapter 28) where Art Carlstrom plays the piano.

In that scene, Art and his friend Paul (who is not only "cool like the dusk, and like the dusk, detached" but also the story's point of view) are picking up Helen and Bona for a double date in Chicago. While they wait for the girls, Art is asked to play the piano. Here is that passage:

"Come right in, won't you? The young ladies will be right down. Oh, Mr. Carlstrom, do play something for us while you are waiting. We just love to listen to your music. You play so well."

Houses, and dorm sitting-rooms are places where white faces seclude themselves at night. There is a reason...

Art sat at the piano and simply tore it down. Jazz. The picture of Our Poets hung perilously.

What in the world, our intern wondered, is "the picture of Our Poets"? Is it possible that at one point in U.S. history people actually purchased and displayed pictures of American poets in their homes? Or is Toomer making some sort of metaphor here—exercising some sort of, well, poetic license?

We can't say whether or not Toomer had one himself—it's not visible in the office scene above, at least—but we can say that yes, at one point in U.S. history people actually purchased and displayed pictures of American poets in their houses. In fact, we finally purchased one (pictured here) for the P&PC Home Office! It's small—just over a foot long and five inches high—and features (left to right) little oval portraits of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The existence of "Our Poets" doesn't mean that Toomer wasn't using the framed piece of home or dormitory sitting-room decor just literally, though, for when Art tears it down at the piano, the sounds of a modern African American art are enough to make the foundations of white American literary history tremble (even when—or especially when?—played by Paul's "red-blooded Norwegian friend"). And is it just us, or is Walt Whitman implicated here as well, as Toomer's "Houses and dorm sitting-rooms" sounds like a jazz riff on "Houses and rooms are full of perfumes" from the beginning of Whitman's "Song of Myself"? All in all, it's a part of Cane that makes us want to dance.

Corny Verse?

Given my recent focus on the Fireside Poets Longfellow and Holmes—and given the time of year here in Iowa, when the corn is rolling in and the huskers are hard at work (at the farmers markets and the ethanol plants)—how could I not post this little gem? It's a stereoview card with an excerpt from fellow Fireside Poet John Greenleaf Whittier's "Song of the Huskers" printed on back, beginning with:

Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard!
Heap high the golden corn!
No richer gift has Autumn poured
From out her lavish horn!

Note the torn paper on the back of the card: no doubt an indication that someone pasted it inside a scrapbook somewhere along the way. Read in connection with the magic lantern slide with Holmes's "Lord of all being, throned afar" on it (see "Projected Verse" below), the Whittier stereoview card is further evidence of a 19th century multi-media poetry that anticipates the radio and digital poetries of the 20th century. Thoughts on this early 3-D poetry?

Freaking Out about "Freaked"

This has been a freaky week for your favorite Poetry & Popular Culture blog, which accidentally helped to create what one reader called a "media frenzy" around J.T. Dutton's forthcoming novel "Freaked." I highlighted Dutton's book on August 9 because the novel—like many other novels in 20th century American literature—incorporates poetry, including Grateful Dead song lyrics, on a number of levels. For Dutton, this incorporation was made, um, more difficult than she expected because the copyright owner for the Dead songs (Ice 9) wouldn't allow Dutton to quote as extensively as she wanted to do.

University of Iowa Communications Professor Kembrew McLeod—a specialist in the politics of copyright and proud owner of the trademark for "Freedom of Expression"—sent an excerpt from my post on Dutton's book to Boing Boing, which ran it under the somewhat sensational headline, "Grateful Dead lyrics cannot be quoted in children's book." That posting quickly created a furor. From fans claiming Ice 9 was betraying the Dead's legacy by restricting use of the band's lyrics, to folks advocating for copyright protection of artists' work, people responded passionately to the behind-the-scenes copyright issues of Dutton's book. You can see that discussion here: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/12/grateful-dead-lyrics.html. "Poetry & Popular Culture" registered this energy as well, with a massive spike in site traffic: thanks to McLeod and Boing Boing, there were 676 visits to "Poetry & Popular Culture" on August 14, up from 30 the day before; there were 665 views of the post on Dutton's book; 84% of visitors were new to the site.

Dutton herself eventually weighed in on the issue, clarifying that her relationship with Ice 9 was amicable and explaining Ice 9's concerns with allowing extensive use of the band's lyrics. Here's what Dutton wrote:

Hi,
I am the author of Freaked and here is my perspective on this story. I had no legal battles or even conflict with Ice 9. I contacted them for permissions and they offered me some, but not all of what I wanted. Usually money changes hands when writers ask for permissions. In my case, Ice 9 gave me the use of what lyrics I did use for free.

Their hesitation about giving the full amount had to do with the feeling that allowing me to use too much would seem to be an endorsement of my work. Getting their endorsement would be huge--as one commenter put it, a money vein. Of course they have to be careful about what they lend. I wrote about the Dead because I happen to love their music, and using their lyrics was part of telling this story.

Yours,
J. T. Dutton

For a while, Dutton's posting put a stop to the argument on Boing Boing. Without the saga of a legal battle to propel the matter, and with Dutton's report of her compromise with Ice 9, people backed off and the discussion stalled. What I see as a central issue with "Freaked" went no further: no matter how amicable the compromise with Ice 9, the legalities of copyright—and the economic power Ice 9 leveraged to grant or refuse permission—forced Dutton to change the book and compomise her original vision. The book that your bookstore will carry is not the book Dutton entirely wanted; in the end, for better or worse, economics trumped the art.

I'm bringing this up now because the passion unleashed by Boing Boing's headline—a passion which demonstrates the proprietary interests that consumers, music listeners, and readers have in the texts they hear and support—has its roots in the popular culture of poetry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We're familiar with the fan's sense of ownership over, and participation in, the rock and roll song and its success—see your mix tapes, your fan zines, the Boing Boing commenters who claim to carry on the Dead's communitarian spirit in an era when their works are copyright protected, etc. But this passion, and this way of engaging with texts (be they read or heard) is not unique to rock and roll culture.

We only have to look at a book like Meredith McGill's "American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) to realize that the controversy stretches back nearly 200 years. In this book, McGill reports on the formation of copyright law in the early nineteenth century U.S. and how many Americans perceived copyrighting to be downright anti-American—more a legacy of British aristocratic culture than an expression of America's democracy and equal availability and ownership of texts once they were made public, purchased, and owned.

This was (and is, if the controversy over the Dead lyrics is any indication) especially the case with poetry, which was short, easily excerpted and reprinted, easily clipped and saved in poetry scrapbooks, easily slipped into and out of what Joseph Harrington calls new and different "presentation contexts." (See his book "Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics" [Wesleyan UP, 2002].) Poems by Longfellow and Poe were reprinted word for word with impunity in this pre-royalties age, and not just on brochures for noble civic and educational events, but in advertisements as well. When American readers clipped poems from newspapers and magazines for their scrapbooks, they regularly cut off the author's name and bibliographical information; for many individuals, those things meant far less than they do now. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a byline is positioned underneath the title or headline today—rather than being printed at the end of a poem or article—because it makes cutting the author's name off much more difficult than if it appeared at the end). As the 19th century scrapbook art in the image to the left illustrates, this is the age in which the collage ethic of popular culture was born.

There are many examples that illustrate the recirculation and cutting and pasting of poetry that characterized American culture and provides us with a historical understanding for the Boing Boing discussion surrounding the Dead Lyrics. I'll close by briefly highlighting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" which appears on the back of a 1944 Christmas dinner menu for the U.S.S. Lynx, pictured here. (How much you want to bet that no one asked Longfellow or his heirs or assigns for permission?)

"I Heard the Bells" was written during the Civil War in 1864 and was put to music in 1872. Like the Dead lyrics in Dutton's book, it is both poetry and song lyric. Here's the poem as Longfellow originally wrote it:

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

Till ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound the carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn, the households born
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

But check out the redacted version of the poem that appears on the U.S.S. Lynx menu, in which stanzas 3, 6, and 7 have been cut entirely to form a new 4-stanza poem. Not only is the Lynx using Longfellow's verse as if it's a sort of common national resource that people can appropriate into different presentation contexts at will, but it shows no particular faithfulness to the original. In fact, the Lynx not only removes "I Heard the Bells" from its Civil War context, but it transforms a pretty depressing original poem (in which the households born of peace are made forlorn) into a little inspirational after-school-special in which the forces of God and right triumph over despair:

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Considering the drastic changes that the U.S.S. Lynx has made to the poem, it's a wonder that the ship nevertheless felt moved to print Longfellow's name as author at the same time. While, yes, Longfellow did write the words that appear on the menu, there really isn't any way to say he authored the actual poem that the Lynx has come up with for its Christmas meal.

I realize I've come a long way from the stir that Dutton's book elicited on Boing Boing, but the history of "I Heard the Bells" provides an interesting point of comparison: an artifact from a day when copyright ownership worked differently than it does today, and from a time when readers—at home with their scrapbooks or at sea on Christmas day—felt just as licensed to cut up, recirculate, or otherwise own poetry and song lyrics as they do now. Only nobody got as freaked out about it as they do today.