"Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem": Bonus Features & Extra Extras

If you pick up your copy of the January 2015 issue of Poetry magazine, you'll find in the monthly "Comment" section an essay titled "Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem"—a piece that P&PC was asked to write in part to reflect on the total coolness of Catherine Robson's great new(ish) book Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, which tracks the history and literary and cultural impact of poetry memorization and recitation in British and American schools. You might recall that one of P&PC's favorite writers (and recent National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship recipient) Melissa Girard reviewed Heart Beats in these very, uh, pages a year and a half ago.

To think about Robson's book in a different but related way for the Poetry article, we took a little bit of The Outsiders and a little bit of Robert Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" at Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, mixed both with some thoughts about the oral/aural experiences of poetry in non-print media formats, and came up with a piece about how we value poems in relation to what Robson calls "the particular circumstances of [their] assimilation into a culture"—that is, whether we encounter and experience them orally, aurally, in print, or via other media. In an age where poems are circulated and remediated by film, tv, audio formats, and digital platforms of all types in addition to print, the effects of media on poetry—and poetry's effects on media and its audiences—is a conversation in which we love to take part. A particular hallmark of popular verse (and of verse encountered in popular contexts) is, after all, its refusal to stay obediently on the printed page of the book or little magazine, and if we're invested in assessing the cultural impact of poetry on a broad scale, we'd do well to extend our attention (and in some cases our admiration) to what poetry is doing in and for non-print media and what non-print media are doing for (and to) poetry. We know you all know this, or that you've at least heard us say it before, so forgive us if we sound a little bit like the metaphorically-apt but nonetheless dated broken record; we're just taking our cues from the larger media landscape and trying to make it new, dig?

One of the things that Poetry noted when first contacting P&PC about reviewing Heart Beats was the fact that in 2013—a year after Robson's study appeared—Caroline Kennedy published Poems to Learn by Heart, a kid-friendly collection issued by Disney's Hyperion Press and featuring colorful watercolors by Jon J. Muth. Was this book a sign, Poetry wondered, that poetry memorization was on an upswing? That some cultural nostalgia for days long past was finding new expression? That the age of the internet—fueled in part by things like Disney's "A Poem Is..." video series that premiered during National Poetry Month in 2011 featuring celebrities like John Leguizamo, Jessica Alba, and Owen Wilson reciting poems—was perhaps, unexpectedly and surprisingly, participating in if not prompting this upswing?

Unbeknownst to Poetry, Girard was already writing her P&PC piece and had also made the same connection between the Robson and Kennedy books, so how could we ignore that correspondence, coincidental or not, when writing our essay? That's when we thought of John F. Kennedy's inauguration and how, flustered by high winds and bright sun, Robert Frost was unable to read the verse he'd composed specially for the event and, instead, recited from memory "The Gift Outright"—perhaps the most famous recitation of a poem in U.S. history and a moment when the values of the memorized poem trumped the values of the printed or written poem on a national stage. Born in 1957, Caroline Kennedy—the only living child of President Kennedy and current U.S. ambassador to Japan—wouldn't have even been four years old at the time. (That's Jackie reading to Caroline in the picture here, taken before 1961 but published by Time on the occasion of Kennedy's inauguration.) But is it possible that something from that day about the durability and reliability of the memorized poem stuck with her?

It's hard to say for sure (we haven't yet contacted Caroline's people to ask), but there's no denying Caroline's advocacy for poetry and especially the incorporation of poetry into children's lives where it is often memorized. She has published The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (2001); A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry for Children (2005); A Family Christmas, which incorporates poems (2007), and She Walks in Beauty—A Woman's Journey Through Poems (2011), in addition to Poems to Learn By Heart. She hasn't been especially shy about this either. For example, check out her 2013 appearance on The Colbert Report where she plugged Poems to Learn By Heart, explained why one would memorize poems, defended the merits of poetry in the age of Twitter as "the language of the human heart," and along with Colbert did a tag-team recitation of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" as well as a thoroughly entertaining memorized-poem back-and-forth tennis match with him.

Lest ye think that poetry is a recent, new-millennial interest of Kennedy's, check out the curious book (pictured here) that the P&PC interns got their hands on recently: The Caroline Kennedy First Lady Dress-Up Book, published by Rolton House Publishers in 1963. Illustrated by Charlotte Jetter (whom we think did lettering for Marvel comics in the 1960s and 70s), the book features colored drawings of Caroline dressing up in period-appropriate First Lady attire accompanied by extensive runway-like captions about those costumes. "When I make-believe I am Martha Washington," the first caption in the book explains, "I wear a beautiful eighteenth century gown. It is made of finest taffeta with a big full skirt and a tight-fitting bodice which laces down the back. The material was purchased in London and it is salmon pink in color. The dress is hand-painted with white ribbon chains all over it. Violets, buttercups, daisies and morning-glories are embroidered beside ladybugs, wasps and grasshoppers. I wear a lace cap on my head, lace mitts on my hands and a lace shawl over my shoulders. Don't you think Martha Washington is pretty? I do."

But the Dress-Up Book is more than just a fashion show: it's also an anthology of children's poems! Many are little ditties about presidents; others (some written by Alene Dalton) appear to have nothing to do with fashion but are almost cut-and-pasted, scrapbook-like, into the book. Take, for example, the page-spread pictured here: a picture of Caroline dressing up as Florence Harding, a poem written about "Warren Harding," and three poems ("The Grasshoppers," "The Chickens," and "The Apple Tree" that are linked to each other in theme but that appear to have little or no connection to the roaring twenties, Harding, or a time when "clothes were tight and hats were high." It's kind of a bizarre assemblage—one that connects dress-up play, sanitized versions of history ("We danced and played without a care / Laughter and joy were everywhere," reads "Warren Harding"), and rhymes and metered language. P&PC comes away from it all feeling like childhood, history, and poems are all exercises in pretending and, in the process, poetry emerges from this mix as the language of childhood naivete. Far from the memorized poem, which the grown-up Caroline values for its durability and longevity in the human mind, the verse in the Dress-Up Book appears to feed a discourse in which poetry is the language of childhood—something precious, yes, but ultimately something that we leave behind for the more serious (and prosaic) endeavors of adulthood and "reality." Most of the Dress-Up Book, in fact, is about the past: past presidents, past first ladies, American history, and a fantasy world rooted in farms, apple trees, and ponies.

For this reason, the most interesting page of the Dress-Up Book is the last one, which pairs "The Old Frontier" (about Columbus, who "sailed and found our land, / The one we love 'cause it's so grand") with "The New Frontier" (pictured here and featuring a little space-person pointing up at, what, the moon? the sun? some other heavenly body?). That final poem in the book reads as follows:

When history books open up
In future years
They will show that Kennedy's plans
Were called The New Frontiers.

Astronauts blasted off
In shining silver missiles
Sounding like explosions
From a billion giant whistles.

And, who can deny it?
Maybe one day soon
We may see a New Frontier
Staked out upon the moon.

This is the most "adult" poem in the book, one where the activity of dressing-up takes on new and different implications. Here, history is in the making. Evoking the space race admits into the Dress-Up Book for the first time the subject of the Cold War, as does the comparison of rockets to "silver missiles" in line six—a line that, months removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, couldn't be read as naive or innocent. Anticipating the moon landing—line 9 even seems to anticipate conspiracy reports denying the landing ever took place—makes this poem about the future, not the past. And even the dress-up taking place here is different; it's a gender-neutral space suit freed from the taffeta, satin, and ruffles of earlier pictures in which all markers of gender are disguised. Boy or girl, you can imagine yourself inside that suit, and it's a moment that caps off a narrative of American history by looking forward from childhood, beyond the corsets of bygone eras, and into new frontiers where pretending (like pretending to be an astronaut) is still in play but leads to actualization—to history making. Even the voice of the poem is different; while retaining the rhyme and meter of previous poems, line 9 contains the only unanswered question in the entire book.

There's a much darker side to the history in which the Dress-Up Book is embedded, of course. It was published in 1963, and Caroline's father would be shot and killed in November of that same year—a moment so seared into the American memory that we here at P&PC can't but imagine it in some type of relationship with the history of the memorized poem, the decline of memorizing poems in American classrooms that Robson pegs to the 1960s, the made-up histories in the Dress-Up Book, the loss of American innocence that many people attribute to the moment of Kennedy's assassination, and Caroline's advocacy of poetry memorization now. As Frost demonstrated at Kennedy's inauguration, and as Caroline argues in Poems to Learn by Heart, the memorized poem is always with you and something that—for better or worse—you can't forget.

The Rise of Creative Reading: Melissa Girard Reviews Catherine Robson's "Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem"

Almost immediately after receiving its copy of Catherine Robson's Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem from Princeton University Press, P&PC sent it back across the country to Melissa Girard (pictured here), a longtime P&PC contributor and intern favorite whose reviews of What Poetry Brings to Business and The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry continue to be some of the most popular postings in P&PC history. In what follows, Girard—an Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University Maryland whose essays and articles have appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, the Journal of Modern Literature, and The Chronicle of Higher Education—uses the publication of Robson's book to wonder, "What are we teaching students when we ask them to memorize and recite poetry? Are our intentions better, different, or purer than our nineteenth-century counterparts?" and "What is the heart beat of twenty-first century poetry?" We here at P&PC heart what she has to say, and we think you will too.

The recent publication of Caroline Kennedy's Poems to Learn by Heart has people talking about the "lost" art of memorizing and reciting poetry. Throughout the nineteenth century, rote learning was a common feature of both American and British classrooms. Anxious schoolboys, eager to please—and, eventually, schoolgirls too—memorized and recited just about everything, not only poems but also Bible passages, speeches, and, indeed, the vast majority of their "lessons." As pedagogies advanced, rote learning fell out of educational favor. By 1920 in Britain and 1950 in the U.S., the practice of memorizing and reciting poems had ceased to be a mandatory or routine aspect of literary study.

In an interview with NPR's Neal Conan, Kennedy says, "'By rote' has sort of a negative connotation. I don't even know why."

Catherine Robson has a very good explanation for Kennedy. In her sweeping, interdisciplinary study, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem, Robson charts the rise and fall of this once-dominant pedagogical practice. Heart Beats significantly deepens our understanding of the memorized poem, bringing clarity and rich historical detail to a topic that is often shrouded in a haze of cultural nostalgia.

Heart Beats is a massive undertaking, and it's hard not to be drawn in by the sheer audacity of it. Like Joan Shelley Rubin's Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, from which Robson borrows heavily in the U.S.-focused portion of her study, Heart Beats offers a bold, new way to think about the meaning and value of poetry. Traditionally, the field of literary studies has been organized around major authors, historical periods, or national geographies. Robson moves fluidly across time and place, following what she calls "the unbroken line" of poetry memorization and recitation, which remained intact from the late eighteenth century through World War I in the U.K. and World War II in the U.S. As Wordsworth gave way to Whitman and the Victorians bowed to the New Woman, generations of schoolchildren remained united by the shared rhythms of recitation. Heart Beats is a new perspective on literary history, experienced through the beating hearts and sweaty palms of poetry's most assiduous readers.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 offers an institutional history of the memorized poem in British and American public education, and Part 2 provides three case studies in the memorized poem: Felicia Heman's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." Each of these poems featured prominently in school recitations in English-speaking countries for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Afterword also contains short case studies on Rudyard Kipling's "If-" and William Ernest Henley's "Invictus," which, in recent years, have become national favorites in Britain and America, respectively. (Robson has helped me understand why, every semester, at least one of my students begs me to add "Invictus" to our poetry syllabus.)

This institutional focus, alone, is illustrative: Robson dispels some of the nostalgia surrounding the memorized poem by reminding us that it was once a compulsory classroom exercise. To Kennedy and many contemporary proponents of the practice, memorization and recitation are elective or, at least, extra-curricular pursuits. Robson recounts, for instance, how her mother paid her a penny a line to memorize poems when she was young, and, thanks to inflation, Robson paid a friend's child a pound per line to memorize all forty lines of "Casabianca." Such incentives were unavailable in the nineteenth-century classroom.

In its earliest years, poetry's role in the classroom was strictly instrumental: it served, Robson says, as an "unobjectionable" substitute for Scripture. "For many centuries," Robson writes, "verse played only a facilitating role in the learner's progress towards literacy's official goal and its sole true justification, the reading of the Bible" (41).

By the middle of the nineteenth century, in both Britain and America, poetry began to play a more primary and complex role in the "training" of children. One of the most valuable aspects of Robson's work is that she resists the temptation to generalize about the memorized poem. She shows, instead, how elastic this form has been: as pedagogies, educational technologies, students, and teachers changed, we kept coming back to memorization and recitation. They (and now we) keep falling in and out of love with the memorized poem.

Heart Beats assembles a diverse array of materials that document the contradictory experiences people have had memorizing and reciting poetry at school. Robson draws on textbooks, teacher training manuals, educational history and philosophy, students' journals and memoirs, and even classic fictional accounts of memorization and recitation like those in Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Buddenbrooks. These historical materials will be of significant interest to literary scholars, as well as those interested in the history of reading and the history of English education.

Some, like Caroline Kennedy, relish the triumph of learning by heart—of internalizing a poem and making it your own forever. In her recent The Use and Abuse of Literature, Marjorie Garber recounts how we used to speak of someone "having" literature. Samuel Johnson, for instance, said of Milton, "He had probably more than common literature." Johnson doesn't say that Milton wrote great literature, Garber emphasizes, but that he possessed it.

This is not so different from Anne Treneer, a former "scholarship girl" who became a teacher and went on to teach memorization and recitation in her classroom. In her autobiography, School House in the Wind, Treneer remarks, "A child said to me once that she liked poetry because she liked the taste of the nice words in her mouth" (qtd. in Robson 165). Interestingly, Robson argues that positive feelings about the memorized poem are more common in the U.S. than Britain. The two countries have experienced the memorized poem in "nationally distinct fashions," Robson claims, because of unique educational histories, class structures, and the ideology of individualism (234). It is perhaps appropriate, then, that Kennedy—the solitary scion of Camelot—should serve as the current ambassador for the memorized poem in the U.S.

Robson's evocative case study of "Casabianca," a version of which appeared previously in PMLA, is especially sensitive to the aesthetic, bodily pleasures of poetry recitation. Robson writes, "When we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat. We contemporary readers no longer hold poems with regular iambic rhythms at our core" (96). This is one of Robson's key insights about our changing relationship to poetry. When we look back on the nineteenth century, Robson says, it's not that difficult to relate to Victorians' love affair with the novel. We, too, enjoy "satisfyingly fat books" as a form of leisure, an indulgent retreat from our carefully measured working lives (113). However, our connection to nineteenth-century poetry reading (and, hence, readers) is more tenuous:

When we read poetry ... there are few lines connecting us to the memorizing population long ago. Because that particular technology of dissemination fell out of pedagogical favor, we now find it hard to appreciate the special relationship between body and poem that was created by a highly structured set of circumstances. (113) 

"Casabianca," like so many of the poems of the past, felt and meant something different to generations of readers who held its persistent iambic beat, "ti-dum ti-dum," in their "deep heart's core."

Before we get too nostalgic, though, it's worth remembering: we never "lost" or "forgot" the memorized poem. For a variety of complex pedagogical, aesthetic, and political reasons, we—that is, the discipline of English, the field of literary studies, English educators, literary critics, poets, and parents—abandoned it. At least as early as Emerson, thoughtful people, poetry lovers, and committed educators had serious reservations about an institution that practiced students in the art of submission. In "The American Scholar" (1837), Emerson argued against rote memorization and for what he called "creative reading." "One must be an inventor to read well," Emerson writes, and schools, he says, can only serve us "when they aim not to drill, but to create."

At the end of the century, in his "Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal" (1893), John Dewey made a similar argument on behalf of "active" or "volitional" education. Self-realization, Dewey said, "cannot lie in the subordination of self to any law outside itself." Even Ezra Pound, no champion of democracy, to be sure, concurred. As part of his famous break with the metronome of nineteenth-century verse, Pound also argued for an active, engaged educational method. "Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding," Pound writes in his ABC of Reading (84, screaming in all caps original).

For those harboring a romanticized notion of nineteenth-century schoolrooms, of students soaring freely on the "blithe spirit" of poetry, Robson reminds us that rote learning was also a powerful tool of indoctrination. Here, she builds on Angela Sorby's work in Schoolroom Poets: Reading, Recitation, and Childhood in America, 1865-1917, which shows how the recited poem helped to strengthen a culture of the school and nation.

Many students, in fact, didn't even know what the words they were repeating meant; they recited mindlessly, joylessly, desperately. For instance, Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican American "scholarship boy" who attended Berkeley, Stanford, and Columbia, and won a Fulbright fellowship to study English literature in London, has been a harsh critic of the way memorization indoctrinates working class and minority students in particular. In his autobiography, The Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez recounts how he would memorize literature compulsively "to fill the hollow within me and make me feel educated" (qtd. in Robson 184). Dutifully internalizing the words of an English aristocratic canon, Rodriguez grew increasingly alienated from his cultural roots, anxious and displaced.

In her remarkable case study on Gray's "Elegy," Robson places Rodriguez's disillusionment alongside the rage of other scholarship boys (Raymond Williams and Tony Harrison make appearances too), all of whom felt acutely the class dynamics at play in classroom recitations. Gray's famous lines acquired new significance in the minds and mouths of working class students:

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The words of the poem were eventually read and recited by the very "mute inglorious Miltons" that it had rendered silent and unstoried. "Arguably, the twentieth-century grammar school ended up teaching its free-place students more about class than about classics," Robson writes (156).

Today, we tend to think of poetry as a creative, individual, expressive form. Kennedy, for instance, claims that memorization and recitation are creative acts. "When I was growing up, the emphasis was on imitating the style of literary masters," Kennedy writes. "By contrast, today's students are more likely to write about their own lives and challenges" (Poems To Learn By Heart 13).

But Robson's rich, provocative study should make us a bit more skeptical about the creative promise of the memorized poem. (How did I not notice, until now, that Kennedy's Poems To Learn By Heart is published by Disney Press?) I keep thinking about Kamau Brathwaite and all the Caribbean poets he said couldn't get the snow out of their poetry. Part of the experience of colonialism, according to Brathwaite, is a forced poetics—for him, the artificial heart beat of the English iamb. "The hurricane does not roar in pentameter," Brathwaite famously writes.

Robson does not dwell long on the possibility of reinstituting the memorized poem. But, as I read Heart Beats, I found myself wondering if the time is not already upon us. This year, 375,000 American high school students participated in Poetry Out Loud, the national recitation contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. This dynamic, extra-curricular arts program hardly seems like "sheep-herding."

But is it an act of creative reading? What are we teaching students when we ask them to memorize and recite poetry? Are our intentions better, different, or purer than our nineteenth-century counterparts? Are our institutions?

What is the heart beat of twenty-first century poetry?

Out of the Taxi and into the Office: Melissa Girard Reviews "What Poetry Brings To Business"

Melissa Girard—whose review of The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry by Susan B.A. Somers-Willett continues to be one of the most regularly accessed postings in the P&PC archive—returns this week to assess Clare Morgan's 2010 curiosity What Poetry Brings to Business. Now on the English Department faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Girard (pictured here) specializes in modernist American poetry and regularly taught business and professional writing at the University of Illinois. That background—not to mention some first-hand experience working in the advertising industry—makes her our go-to consultant to tell us how much stock we should place in Morgan's study.

Writing about Wallace Stevens in the New York Review of Books in June 1964, Marianne Moore said, “He did not mix poetry with business.” Although Stevens (pictured here) worked for more than five decades at various law firms and insurance companies—notably, Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he spent nearly forty years—his thoughts and feelings about business never entered his poetry. As Moore recounts, “Phrases sometimes came to him on his way to the office in a taxi ... but you may be sure that ‘Frogs eat butterflies, snakes eat frogs’ was not written in the office.”

Dana Gioia, himself a former businessman and, from 2003 to 2009, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), wondered, if Stevens had written about business, what would he have said? In one of the more provocative essays in Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992), Gioia notes that Stevens’ silence on the topic, while perplexing, is hardly unusual. Countless modern poets have worked in all aspects of business over the last hundred and fifty years, and, yet, unlike novelists, who have left behind a rich, fictional record of modern office life, we have only a scattering of stanzas from poets. Modern American poets, Gioia points out, have written superbly about everything from bicycles and baseball cards to incest and pedophilia and, yet, somehow, “this same poetic tradition has never been able to look inside the walls of a corporate office and see with the same intensity what forty million Americans do during the working week.” Gioia concludes, “American poetry has defined business mainly by excluding it. Business does not exist in the world of poetry, and therefore by implication it has become everything that poetry is not—a world without imagination, enlightenment, or perception. It is the universe from which poetry is trying to escape” (114).

It has been nearly twenty years since Gioia challenged poets and poetry critics to follow him into the belly of the beast—to go where even our greatest modern poets could or would not take us. The recently published What Poetry Brings to Business (2010) by Clare Morgan with Kirsten Lange and Ted Buswick is one of the first, sustained critical attempts to answer Gioia’s call. Morgan and company have finally taken poetry out of the taxi and into the cubicle.

What Poetry Brings to Business is difficult to classify. Equal parts memoir, poetry textbook, and academic study, it is not a manuscript per se, but a manuscript-about-a-manuscript. Morgan, a literary critic, fiction writer, and director of the graduate creative writing program at the University of Oxford, cleverly frames the text around what is, undeniably, one hell of a story. Seemingly out of nowhere, Morgan was approached by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world’s leading business consultancies, and asked to submit a proposal for a project exploring the relationship between poetry and strategic thinking. Specifically, Morgan was invited to contribute to The Strategy Institute, a kind of think tank within BCG devoted to enhancing executive thinking. They approached Morgan because they were concerned that business and management strategy were too often being reduced to a narrow, toolbox approach (“5 Steps to Enhance Your Creativity,” etc.) and thought that poetry might be able to offer a richer, more lasting means of transforming executives’ decision-making capacity.

What Poetry Brings to Business is not the book that Morgan was asked to write for BCG. If you’re like me, you’ll make this discovery slowly and with some disappointment. I still want to know exactly what Morgan would say to an audience of business executives in Tokyo. I want to see PowerPoint slides! What Poetry Brings to Business is not this. Instead, Morgan has written a book about the process of writing that BCG book. This is no management guide, but a book pitched to people exactly like me: poetry teachers, poetry critics, and poets who would like to follow Morgan as she begins to discover ways to begin this long overdue conversation. The chasm between business and poetry is so great, the book seems to suggest, that we need this preparatory exercise.

It is certainly true that Morgan, a creative writer and university professor, needed to be convinced that poetry has something to offer business. When initially approached by BCG, she asked,

How many people care about poetry anyway? Isn’t it an old-fashioned mode that deals in airy-fairy utterances? At the beginning of the twenty-first century, isn’t it pretty much an irrelevance unless you are an academic with a vested interest in what Eliot himself called ‘a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion’? Periphrastic: who needs it? (12)

P&PC readers will undoubtedly cringe over such early passages where Morgan reveals her own outdated and outmoded perception of the genre. Equally cringe-worthy is her first stab at defining the relationship between poetry and business strategy. “There is a lot in common between a poem and a marketable product,” she writes,

Here is my output, the poet says. I would like to share it. Poets are interfacing with consumers in terms of reaching a readership. They have to intersect with the prevailing market forces via the publishing industry. They have to grapple with questions of utility, addressing the relationship of the work to the needs of contemporary moment. They have to establish a niche for a particular work through channels that will enable each individual voice, among many competing ones, to be heard. (11)

In my professional writing courses, we call prose like this “businessese,” a term that refers to the specific form of jargon and clichés that infect the language of contemporary business. (“So, will poetry help me ‘think outside the box’?” I found myself asking, facetiously.)

However, after a relatively rocky beginning, What Poetry Brings to Business improves considerably. Each subsequent chapter follows Morgan on her “journey” as she discovers an array of skills and strengths that poetry has to offer. These insights unfold gradually, as Morgan conducts workshops and interviews with a variety of business and poetry professionals, including Gioia, and reads deeply in poetry, poetics, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy, all in search of “tangible” connections between the two enterprises. While we don’t get PowerPoint slides, the book does provide a very useful anthology of at least fifty poems that, Morgan argues, help hone strategic thinking, most of which will be familiar to readers and teachers of modern poetry (Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, John Keats, Lewis Carroll, Billy Collins, William Stafford, Robert Hayden, along with some more surprising choices).

Morgan also provides transcripts of some of the conver- sations she has had with workshop participants over the years. This combination of poetic texts and critical responses creates a valuable pedagogical apparatus. Anyone who teaches introductory poetry courses or conducts poetry outreach will appreciate the veritable lesson plans that the book supplies. It is fascinating, for instance, to read the different ways that a lawyer, engineer, and BCG executive have responded to “The Road Not Taken,” and to then compare them to classroom experiences. (For what it’s worth, these executive-level responses were virtually identical to ones that I have encountered in undergraduate classrooms.)

Because of her focus on process, Morgan wholly avoids the kind of instrumentalization of poetry that one might fear finding in a business management guide. You will not learn the ways that poetry can improve your copy or report writing (“poetry has rhythm!”), nor will you find any epigrammatic wisdom (poetry has no “takeaways”). Instead, Morgan ultimately discovers that there has always been a deep and abiding connection between business strategy and the logic of poetry.

“Poems put down their roots in the no-man’s-land between thinking and feeling,” Morgan writes, “the borderland where logic shades into the non-logical, where a world defined and delineated by language gives way to the more diffuse territory of what psychologists sometimes call ‘the feeling state’” (55). This is the same strange land, she says, in which twenty-first-century business executives routinely find themselves, a world in which facts and data are never enough and there is rarely a right or a wrong answer. Reading, discussing, and thinking about poetry regularly, Morgan claims, can help business professionals become more comfortable with ambiguity, and, as a result, prepare them to be creative, ethical leaders.

All of Morgan’s insights about the strong interconnections between poetry and business seem completely accurate: that poetry sharpens our strategic-thinking skills, teaches us to be attentive to subtlety and nuance, and prepares us to navigate both linguistic and situational ambiguity. Indeed, what is surprising about What Poetry Brings to Business is not these findings, but the fact that we needed to find them in the first place. I came to What Poetry Brings to Business expecting to find an impassioned missive to the world of business, reminding executives of the myriad ways that poetry still matters. What I found, instead, was a creative writer and Oxford professor who seems herself to have forgotten. The business executives who populate this study are the ones who seem hungry for the new creative energy that poetry might bring to their professional and personal lives. It was BCG, after all, who initiated this new partnership with poetry. They seem more than willing to be convinced of its value. The question is whether the poets are finally ready.

Fiske Matters: P&PC Goes on Tour

In early June, the Poetry & Popular Culture office will be sending a delegate to Fiske Matters: A Conference on John Fiske's Continuing Legacy for Cultural Studies, which is taking place in Madison, Wisconsin, June 11-12.

Our delegate will team up with three other scholars—two of whom you've met at this site before: Catherine Keyser, who in 2009 wrote about lingerie, nursery rhymes, and the new woman, and Melissa Girard, who recently weighed in on the cultural politics of slam poetry—for a panel cryptically titled "Poetry & Popular Culture":

Here is a preview of that panel:

Panel Overview

Linking poetry studies and popular culture studies is not the most intuitive scholarly move, as the two fields rarely seem to overlap and even, at times, appear to have an openly hostile relationship with each other. In the most extreme cases, poetry is presented as an antidote to a debased low or popular culture, and popular culture is offered as a democratic cure to the cartooned elitism of poetry and high culture. However, as we hope to show in this panel, the two fields can do more than simply oppose each other; pairing them can be a provocative and productive endeavor that sheds light on and expands the histories and purviews of both in challenging ways. Indeed, in some cases, poetry is not just a relay point or magnifying glass for issues central to popular culture studies—the culture industries, celebrity, usability, audience participation, reception, etc.—but is a ground upon which popular culture was in fact built.

Poetry has intersected with every medium and facet of popular culture from Hallmark to Hollywood and Vanity Fair to Paris Hilton, and yet, because it is attributed a distinctive identity as a seat of genuine expression, it remains at the same time somewhat separate—a uniquely commodified moment when commodification supposedly gives way to uncommodified utterance. As a historically active site of popular activity, and as a singular discourse within that activity, poetry would seem to be a productive site of critical investigation for scholars of poetry and popular culture alike. This panel offers four examples of what that investigation might look like, each of which draws inspiration for its focus or method from John Fiske’s writing and/or critical legacy.

1) The Arbiters of Paste: Poetry Scrapbooking and Participatory Culture
by Poetry & Popular Culture

John Fiske defined “popular culture” as that culture which “is made by the people at the interface between the products of the culture industries and everyday life.” One of the central challenges that scholars face is in assessing popular culture in this formulation is amassing evidence of that interface—measuring and recording the types of activities consumers actually do, as well as the various ways that audiences transform the largely homogenized materials of mass culture in the course of everyday life. In this paper, I want to present a largely unknown archive of poetry scrapbooks which offers a material record of this process: evidence of how readers in the first half of the twentieth century artistically and critically repurposed mass-produced poems in large albums of verse that not only served as their age’s version of the mix tape, but that helped establish some of the dynamics of participatory culture that mark popular activity today.

Of particular concern to me is the relationship between ideology and resistance in the activity of poetry scrapbooking. On the one hand, in compiling their personal poetry anthologies, people were encouraged to imagine the activity as an accumulation of literary property that led to middlebrow cultural legitimacy; in fact, the textual act of keeping an album was regularly couched in terms of maintaining and keeping a house—both practices that fostered and relied on the centrality of the bourgeois self. At the same time, given the license to repurpose mass-produced poems, readers constructed albums that empowered critical thinking and challenged social conventions in any number of ways. This is especially the case with albums assembled by women readers, who found in their anthologies a freedom and privacy—a room of their own, as it were—in which to experiment with and explore the new subject positions of modernity.

2) Light Verse, Magazines, and Celebrity: Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker
by Catherine Keyser
University of South Carolina

In 1928, Time magazine observed that “for ten years, smart young women have been trying to rival with their versification Edna St. Vincent Millay.” This comment connects reader and poet, public and celebrity, as both use poetry as an emblem of public self-fashioning. John Fiske addressed the contemporary female celebrity and her sexualized body in his essay on Madonna in Reading Popular Culture (1989). The contradictions he recognized in Madonna, a celebrity whose persona conveys both objecthood and agency, resemble the ambiguities that cultural historians trace in the flapper. Emulating Fiske’s attention to traces of domination and resistance in the presentation and reception of celebrities, I analyze poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker as emblems of modern womanhood within mass-market magazines.

With women moving into cities and entering the professions at unprecedented rates, Millay’s light verse about sexuality and mobility became enormously popular in the 1920s. Dorothy Parker cited Millay’s influence on her own career, claiming that she had been “following in the exquisite footsteps of Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.” This language of “exquisite”-ness also suggests the vexed link between body image, fashion choices, and professional autonomy in the magazine fantasy of the urbane modern woman. I examine two magazines, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, that provided readers with a vision of modernity and class mobility. Both magazines featured rhetoric prizing smartness, graphics promising luxury, and light verse presenting sexuality and femininity.

I argue that the magazine’s pages demonstrate the iconic roles that Millay and Parker played in the cultural imagination. I use the advertisements and cartoons that variously picture and address the poets’ readers to analyze the kinship proposed between young single women working in the city and modern female poets writing about it. Both Millay and Parker were prominent writers of light verse, a genre found in newspapers and magazines and characterized by formal conventionality, simple diction, and (often) rollicking rhymes. This genre emblematized the energy and insouciance of youth culture, as well as the rebellion and flirtation of the flapper. The simplicity of the genre and its covert aggression—the punch-line or twist at the end of the poem—invited the common reader’s participation and indeed self-invention.

Poetry for Pleasure: Hallmark, Inc. and the Business of Emotion at Mid-Century
by Melissa Girard
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

In the 1960s, Hallmark, Inc., purveyor of greeting cards, entered the book publishing industry. Their diverse offerings went far beyond mere gift books; throughout the decade, they issued a variety of highly readable anthologies focusing on Japanese haiku, African American poetry, popular love poems, limericks, and children’s verse, as well as canonical figures such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot. Hallmark’s capacious vision stood in stark contrast to their New Critical contemporaries, who, at mid-century, were overwhelmingly preoccupied with narrowing the poetic canon. At a moment when the literary academy had abandoned popular poetry and popular readers almost entirely, Hallmark preserved and fiercely defended what they termed a “democratic” poetics. “The way to read a poem is with an open mind, not an open dictionary,” the editors insist in the 1960 anthology Poetry for Pleasure.

My paper takes Hallmark’s poetics seriously as a democratic alternative to the elitism of the mid- century American academy. I am attentive not only to Hallmark’s poetry anthologies but also to their innovative marketing and advertising campaigns, which placed these attractively packaged and affordable books in supermarkets and drugstores. In so doing, I argue that Hallmark played a vitally important, populist role throughout the 1960s, advocating on behalf of poetry and actively attempting to broaden its readership. At the same time, my paper also explores the complex ramifications of Hallmark’s corporate sponsorship of poetry. While Hallmark undoubtedly empowered the average reader, they also sought to strengthen their brand and, concomitantly, to profit from Americans’ increasing poetic literacy. This “emotion marketing,” as Hallmark terms it, belies their “democratic” agenda. My paper recovers this largely forgotten historical struggle between the academy and corporate America for the hearts and minds of poetry readers.

Poetry vs. Paris Hilton: Who’s On Top?
by Angela Sorby
Marquette University

In 2007, Paris Hilton read a poem on Larry King Live that she had supposedly written in prison. The poem, which turned out to be plagiarized from a fan letter, prompted a media scandal that raises implicit questions about how poetry works, or fails to work, as a popular cultural medium. In Understanding Popular Culture, John Fiske argues that, to be popular, a text or commodity must be relevant: it must be functionally available to consumers who make it a meaningful part of their daily lives. In this essay, I will twist Fiske’s thesis to argue that poetry is a functional medium because people are not comfortable using it in their daily lives.

Through an analysis of the Paris Hilton poetry scandal, and of subsequent poems written to (and against) Hilton, I will suggest that precisely because poetry is not “relevant” to most consumers, it arouses strong reactions (disciplinary scorn, passionate defense) when it appears in mass cultural contexts. Poetry, in this case, prompts a breakdown in the ideological unity of an icon such as Paris Hilton, whose popular subjectivity relies on hyper-legibility and relevance.

Slam, Spoken Word, and the Democratization of Poetry: Melissa Girard Reviews "The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry"

Melissa Girard is currently teaching at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, just a short train ride south of the windy city where slam was born.

Academics are anxious about the state of poetry. That anxiety, however, takes very different forms. Some of us—I count myself as part of this first group—worry that poetry is becoming too minor. We want poetry on billboards, in bubble gum machines, on candy bar wrappers, in the hands of union activists, in the hearts of accountants, and on the lips of Hollywood starlets. We read Poetry & Popular Culture with glee.

But another kind of anxiety is perhaps more common: a fear that poetry is spreading itself too thin. Harold Bloom epitomizes this perspective. He bemoans, for instance—in the Spring 2000 issue of The Paris Review—the growing popularity of poetry slams:

I can’t bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn’t even silly; it is the death of art.

Susan B.A. Somers-Willett’s recent study, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (Michigan, 2009), opens amid these debates over poetry’s place in contemporary U.S. culture. Slam poetry, Somers-Willett rightly shows, lies at the heart of our anxieties.

Fighting over poetry’s cultural relevance is hardly new, but these debates did reach a fever pitch in the late 1980s and early 90s. A series of provocative—and polarizing—essays by Joseph Epstein (“Who Killed Poetry?”), Dana Gioia (“Can Poetry Matter?”), and Donald Hall (“Death to the Death of Poetry”) galvanized public interest in poetry’s popular or not-so-popular lives. Poets and critics alike began investigating poetry’s contemporary audiences: Who was reading poetry? Where? Why?

It was at this precise moment that slam poetry was born. Somers- Willett provides an excellent intro- duction to slam poetry which clarifies a number of common misconceptions. First and foremost, slam poetry was not invented at the Nuyorican Poets Café on New York’s Lower East Side, as many people mistakenly believe. Since the early 1990s, the Nuyorican has been almost synonymous with slam: the landmark 1994 anthology, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the 1996 documentary, SlamNation, which featured Nuyorican poets prominently, helped introduce slam to mainstream America. Moreover, figures affiliated with the Nuyorican Poets Café, including Miguel Algarin—who founded the Nuyorican along with Miguel Piñero in the early 1970s—Bob Holman, Edwin Torres, Willie Perdomo, and Saul Williams, have all contributed in vital ways to the development of the art form.

However, it was Chicago, not New York, which gave rise to slam. In 1986, Marc Smith, a white construction worker- turned-poet, began hosting competitive poetry events at the Green Mill, a Chicago jazz club. The format proved extremely popular among locals, and the Uptown Poetry Slam soon evolved into a regular Sunday night attraction. As Somers-Willett explains, to forget that slam poetry emerged in the late 1980s in Chicago is also to obscure slam's white, working-class roots.

By shifting our focus away from the Nuyorican Café and toward Chicago, Somers-Willett is able to provocatively illuminate the cross-racial dynamics of slam poetry. As many observers have noted, slam poets tend to be younger and far more diverse—in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and educational background—than their more traditional poetic counterparts. However, this diversity is not at all true of slam poetry’s audiences. On a national level, the typical audience for a poetry slam continues to be overwhelmingly white, liberal, and middle class. As Somers-Willett explains, the Nuyorican Poets Café is a noteworthy exception to this rule—it is perhaps the only high-profile slam venue that attracts a diverse audience as well as diverse poets.

This attention to slam poetry’s predominantly white, national audience represents the most distinct and important aspect of Somers-Willett’s research. Like most commentators on slam, she argues that racial politics are essential to understanding its cultural and aesthetic value. However, unlike most of those critics, she also claims that slam poetry is not a simplistically expressive or identitarian form. She highlights, as evidence of slam poetry’s racial complexity, poems like Patricia Smith’s "Skinhead.” In this vicious monologue, a neo-Nazi bares his repulsive soul, while also laying claim to “our” America:

“I’m your baby, America, your boy,
drunk on my own spit, I am goddamned fuckin’ beautiful.

And I was born

and raised

right here.”

If slam poetry has an urtext, then “Skinhead” is likely it. It is not only a powerful poem but also one which is transformed utterly by the embodied presence of Patricia Smith—African American woman, poet, performer. (If you haven’t seen Smith perform, get to YouTube posthaste.)

In the difficult moment of the poetry slam, an audience member is forced to negotiate, uncom- fortably, a black woman channeling a white racist—to witness her mouthing his rhetoric of hate, spitting his words as her own. When it is successful (and in Smith’s case, it is very successful), slam poetry enables new modes of racial identification and dis-identification; it both creates and utterly unsettles our racial sympathies.

Moreover, because this is slam poetry, each audience member is called upon not only to witness this spectacle, but also to participate actively within it. Slam poetry, Somers-Willett reminds us, is a live, competitive event. In the face of “Skinhead,” an audience is called upon to judge—to reward or to punish—the complexly racial performances on display. At a poetry slam, a select number of audience members serve as official judges, assigning the poets scores, while others are free to boo, hiss, applaud, hoot, and holler throughout to make their pleasure or displeasure known. (Poetry slams, unlike poetry readings, are notoriously rowdy events). Some of the most thought-provoking passages in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry dwell on the dynamics of this uncomfortable system of racial reward.

For example, Somers- Willett notes that audiences have rewarded Patricia Smith’s performances of “Skinhead” lavishly. However, when Taylor Mali—a popular and accomplished slam poet in his own right, but also a white man—performed the poem in tribute to Smith, the audience “balked.” Somers-Willett explores these reactions in detail, even connecting slam poetry’s cross-racial exchanges to nineteenth-century minstrelsy. Which performances of race and racial politics appeal to white, middle class audiences today, she asks—and why? And when audiences cheer for “Skinhead,” who or what exactly are they cheering for?

Anyone looking for an introduction to slam poetry will find Somers-Willett to be a knowledgeable, clear-headed guide. The book is scholarly, but its interdisciplinary approach makes it appropriate for non-specialists and undergraduate students alike. (I will definitely be assigning portions of this work the next time I teach slam poetry.) However, literary critics and, in particular, poetry specialists, will likely be unsatisfied with The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry. There are no significant missteps, but the thinness of the volume shows. There is, for instance, a surprising lack of poetry contained within this study, and I found myself craving more—and more varied—examples of slam poetry at almost every turn.

Somers-Willett also leaves substantial questions about the values and goals of slam poetry wholly unanswered. Is slam poetry a genre or a media? Because it's a live event, what are the best ways to study and/or teach it? How are recordings of poetry slams—like those in wide circulation now on YouTube—different from live events? What is new—and what is distinctly borrowed—within these developing forms?

This is a tentative study—a first step toward addressing the increasingly embarrassing dearth of academic work on slam. But if Somers-Willett is right about the important cultural stakes of this poetry—and I wholeheartedly believe that she is—then literary scholars need to begin addressing these and other difficult questions. We need to bring slam poetry into our classrooms, our critical studies, and, ultimately, our canons.

Slam poetry was born in an age of intense poetic anxiety. It should come as no surprise, then, that slam poets are competing for their audiences—fighting for their survival. It is the perfect embodiment of—and, perhaps, the perfect remedy for—our anxious condition. Why aren’t academics watching?