The Other Side of Pin-Up Poetry

About a year ago, Poetry & Popular Culture spent some time thinking about the fact that poetry was oftentimes printed on pin-up posters like the Vargas-girl centerfolds that were a standard feature of Esquire magazine in mid-century America. Esquire wasn't unique in printing verse next to airbrushed, half-clad hotties, however. Poetry was a regular part of girly-picture culture more generally, escorting co-eds on postcards, ink blotters, playing cards, arcade cards, and matchbooks (such as the one pictured to the left)—a fact that intrigues Poetry & Popular Culture for a bunch of relatively compelling reasons which, if you take a journey back to last year's posting, you can discover for yourself.

Crucial to our curiosity, though, is the fact that the poetry accompanying the leggy lassies and sexy schoolmarms oftentimes seems to trouble the heteronormative masculine subject position that we assume these pin-ups both appealed to and helped to reinforce. It's almost as if, under the cover of ogling some busty babe—a sort of elaborate, Cold War-inspired drag performance of all-American maleness—guys found a freedom to explore alternate sexualities and sexual subject positions. And it was the poetry that was absolutely crucial to this queering of male sexuality, as from one pin-up to the next, the American male found the nature of his relationship to the image recast or re-rhymed in a variety of different ways.

Poetry & Popular Culture has just come into possession of a perfect example of this: the matchbook advertising Gosh's Burr Oaks "Modern Cabins" pictured above that has a poem printed down the length of its inside. On the front, the clever double entendre "Ready to Serve" plays right into the sort of masculine fantasy we expect pin-up pictures to cater to and reproduce. But when we turn to the inside, this is the poem we find:

If in this world there were but two,
And all the world were good and true,
And if you know that no one knew—
Would you?

If you dreamed in Pajamas Blue
Of two strong arms embracing you,
And if you really wanted to—
Would you?

If all the world were nice and bright,
And if I stayed with you all night,
And if I turned out all the lights—
Would you?

If we were in a certain place,
And we were sleeping face to face,
Nothing between us but a little lace—
Would you? Kiss me Good-Night!

Sure, by the end of the poem we realize (via that "little lace") that the poem's speaker is most likely a woman, but until then Poetry & Popular Culture feels that the verse clearly cultivates the fantasy of a male-male union and "of two strong arms embracing you." It's not an understatement, I think—given the hypothetical questions and the unrealistic world that is described (where all are "good and true," where no one would know, where you 'fessed up to wanting to, etc.)—to describe this scene as utopian. Of course, by returning the reader to the female and normative heterosexuality at the end, the poem reveals all of this speculation to be, in fact, precisely the fantasy that it is. But until then, the verse's vague language, conditional tense, and unidentified speaking voice let the American male drift from the moorings of his conventional masculinity and explore another side—not just of a matchbook, but of his desire.

Very Moving Poetry

If Corn Flakes and Michael Phelps are concerned with ingesting and inhaling (see "What's in Your Bowl Today?"), then what of this matchbook advertisement for America's most notorious source of "gentle, dependable overnight relief"? Clearly, Ex-Lax is also intimately related to interiority—from tummy to tush, someone less cultivated might say—as the poem here indicates:

In days of old
when knights were bold,
Tummies, perhaps, had tin sides.
But folks these days
like milder ways.
Ex-Lax befriends their insides

Not surprisingly, Ex-Lax relates to interiority as it has to do with, well, exteriority. Here, the poem's historical move from the coarser and less-refined "days of old" to modern times and "milder ways" serves as an analogue for the desired gastronomical movement from inside to outside, and discomfort to comfort, which the laxative is designed to facilitate. Not only is Ex-Lax positioning itself as part of historical innovation and improvement, but that discourse of progress figures the personal progress one hopes to experience with the aid of "the ORIGINAL chocolated laxative." In this context of fluidity—which leaves out of all history between the middle ages and the 1950s—is it too much to argue that Ex-Lax's poetics of movement extends to the form of the poem itself, with the indented lines performing or demonstrating the effects of the drugstore item?

Lest one remain unconvinced of this (ahem) poo-etics, he or she need only open the matchbook, which has not only been emptied of its fire-starters—and which is designed to be emptied—but which also contains some "suggestions" from the local police department about how to best, most safely, and most efficiently move, both in car and on foot. By following the traffic lights ("Let the traffic lights be your guide"), we are told, one avoids creating a "jam" which no doubt tropes the very constipation Ex-Lax relieves and which the no-good law-breaking jaywalker instigates. Joining the movement of history, from difficult days to milder ones, with an urban landscape designed to move in particular ways, Ex-Lax in fact hitches its chocolatey cart to the ideals of modern America, all on the space of a piece of paper half the size of an index card. If that isn't a smooth move, then I don't know what is.

Firing Up the Muse

Following what is now a national trend, the State of Iowa has for the most part gone smokeless. While our state legislature sees fit to allow smoking in Casinos (and in an isolated American Legion bar here and there), the majority of the state's restaurants and bars are now smoke free, save those establishments which have outdoor beer gardens and which don't serve food; in those cases—like The Picador, Martini's, or Joe's in Iowa City—a patron can (as The Picador advertised on a chalkboard propped outside its front door the day after the smoking ban went into effect) "come in and enjoy a relaxing smoke in our beer garden."

There has been no poetry I know of to celebrate the institution of this new law. Perhaps this is because poetry has, for many years, been on the side of smoking in bars—or at least on the side of having a relaxing smoke during happy hour or while enjoying a nightcap. Printed on matchbooks throughout the midcentury, these poems were funny and oftentimes given away as advertisements for bars and taverns themselves. Drinkers and smokers carried bits of verse around in their pockets or pocketbooks that contained all sorts of free if not useful bits of advice.

Take, for example, a sky-blue matchbook advertising the Trovillion Tavern owned by Glen and Sally of Vienna, Illinois, which provides a barometer by which to measure one's inebriation. Simply titled "Drunk," it reads in call capital letters:

NOT DRUNK IS HE
WHO FROM THE FLOOR
CAN RISE AGAIN AND
DRINK ONCE MORE.

BUT DRUNK IS HE
WHO PROSTRATE LIES
AND CANNOT EITHER
DRINK OR RISE.

The dimiter lines of the Trovillion Tavern's matchbook cast Glen and Sally's no-doubt smoking establishment—or at least the state of drunkenness—as a decidedly male space. They aren't alone in doing so. Consider the poem distributed on the inside of a matchbook advertising Jean and Bob's 21 Club in Buffalo, Wyoming:

The Bartender Knows

He knows all of our sorrows
And all of our joys
He knows every girl
That chases the boys
He knows all of our troubles
And all of our strife
He knows every man
Who ducks out on his wife

If the bartender told
All that he knows
He would turn all of our friends
Into bitterest foes
He would start forth a story
Which, gaining in force
Would cause all of our wives
To sue for divorce

He would get all of our homes
Mixed up in a fight
He would turn all of our bright days
Into sorrowful nights.
In fact he would keep
The whole town in a stew
If he told a tenth
Of all that he knew

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

"The Bartender Knows" is noteworthy for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it's gratuitously printed on the inside of the matchbook, a space usually left blank because it would have required a separate press run to print the poem there and thus would have cost folks like Jean and Bob more money to purchase. Apparently, though, the cost of including "The Bartender Knows" was worth it.

"The Bartender Knows" is not just an advertisement for the 21 Club—"The Finest Club in Buffalo"—but for the culture of male drinking more generally. Establishing a divide between the female space of the home (from which one escapes) and the male space of the bar (where one seeks out the reassuring company of other men), "The Bartender Knows" is not only about a man (the bartender is identified as a "he") but spoken by a man as well ("all of our wives"). It's a paean to the homosocial space of the bar—the space where the average man finds his true confidante in the person of the barkeep. Indeed, the girl who chases the boys in lines 3 & 4 seems mentioned as a token gesture to heteroxexual relationships, one that is then subordinated if not repressed for the rest of the poem. Humorously, the bar becomes a center of Buffalo, Wyoming's information economy, with the bartender himself serving as an amalgam of godfather and Santa Claus—a figure who knows what you've been doing but promises to not punish you for it, a promise that nonetheless doubles as a constant threat of revelation that establishes and maintains the barkeep's seat of power.

The triangulated relationship between smoking, bars, and men opens up questions about how and where women—such as Sally of the Trovillion Tavern, or Jean of the 21 Club, or even the girl who chases boys in "The Bartender Knows"—fit into this homosocial economy. For years, critics of Virginia Slims' "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" ad have railed against how the cigarette company conflates the act of smoking with actual progress in women's rights. Following a chain of associations from cigarette to poetic matchbook to bar, one better understands the significance of that one Virginia Slim smokey treat: it not only represents a breaking of social taboos against women smoking, but it purports to allow women into the masculine discursive space of the tavern with its kept secrets, its inebriation, and its escape from the home. Virginia Slims doesn't just equate smoking with women's rights; it defines equal rights, one can argue, as men's and women's equal access to the smoking and drinking that takes place in the commercial space of the bar.

Of course, this access to the bar is only a conceptual one for, as these poems show, the actual space of the bar remained a masculine place where the "he" at Trovillion Tavern, for example, can fantasize about being out of the emasculating house when he can hoist a glass, lift a cigarette and, full of his manhood, "rise again."