Lullaby Logics: P&PC Reviews Daniel Tiffany's "My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch" for Poetry Magazine

P&PC comes to you this week from the pages of the May issue of Poetry magazine, where, under the title "Lullaby Logics," we've reviewed Daniel Tiffany's great book My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Johns Hopkins University Press). Here's a teaser:

In Brian Selznick's 2007 Caldecott-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the orphaned main character, Hugo, spends his time trying to repair a broken automaton in the hope that, restored to working order, it will transcribe a message from his dead father. "I'm sure that if it were working," Hugo's father once explained, "you could wind it up, put a piece of paper on the desk, and all those little parts would engage and cause the arm to move in such a way that it would write out some kind of note. Maybe it would write a poem or a riddle. But it's too broken and rusty to do much of anything now."

Hugo's father was right—sort of.

To find out how Hugo's father was sort of right—and to find out what Selznick's novel and automaton poetry have to do with the history of kitsch, check out the rest of "Lullaby Logics" here.

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Report: P&PC at Critical Margins

Yes, P&PC has been a little slow to keep up with our usual schedule of weekly postings this summer, and we apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment that has caused along the way. But there have been good reasons for our delays and postponements. Sure, our intern budget got cut back. And sure, Polly the Paper Shredder and Sally the Stenographer surprised us all by eloping and tying the knot—legally—in Oregon. But then came the two-week trip to Rome and Venice, where (among other things), we visited the graves of John Keats, Percy Shelley, Gregory Corso, and Ezra Pound and fell head over heels for Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture in Rome and Tintoretto's paintings in Venice. (That's Tintoretto's The Miracle of the Slave pictured above, btw.) And then came a trip to Iowa City where we worked, visited with old friends, and ate George's cheeseburgers for nearly four weeks. As you can probably imagine, it can be difficult to keep up the pace when out of the office, missing interns, and fielding happy pictures and texts from Polly and Sally as they do their cross-country trip honeymoon.

But that doesn't mean we've been entirely missing in action. In fact, the time away from the office gave us a chance to complete a long interview for Critical Margins about Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America and matters relating to, well, poetry and popular culture more generally. That interview went live this week, and we loved the chance to talk about the book, poetry in the media, our time writing advertising poetry, our students' work, and the book project that we've got in the works. In the way of a teaser, here's one question from the interview and our answer:

Critical Margins: What is your favorite example in the last year of popular poetry?

P&PC: I'd have to say Season Four, Episode Six ("Foot Chase") of the FX Network's show Justified. (Okay, Season Four ran in 2013, but I watched it in 2014.) There's a scene where career criminal Boyd Crowder and his hired muscle break into the home of local banker Dale Haywood, whom they think might really be Drew Thompson—a man who, twenty years earlier, faked his death to escape testifying against a Detroit crime boss and then made off with a load of the crime boss's drugs. Hoping to collect a ransom if they find and deliver the real Drew Thompson, Boyd and Colt hold Haywood hostage until he can prove he is in fact who he says he is and not Drew Thompson. Searching for evidence one way or another, Boyd and Colt discover a box of souvenirs and mementos in Haywood's house, and they pull out a piece of lined notebook paper with a handwritten poem on it. Boyd reads it aloud, then we get a chance to read it for ourselves on screen. Here's the poem:

This is a fascinating little TV moment, isn't it? Why make Dale a poet (or at least someone who has written a poem)? Why make it such a bad poem? And why have it read aloud and shown to the audience when it doesn't end up proving anything one way or another (for Boyd, at least) about Dale's true identity?

It's also a fascinating little poem—precisely, I think, because of the nature of its badness. It begins with cliché, right? The kitschy abstractions like "my heart," "my soul," "my hurt," and "sorrow," plus the rhymes and meter of an amateur love poem, anchor it in unoriginal language, thus making for bad verse. But it's not uniform in its badness from beginning to end. Pushed by the need to find a rhyme for "sorrow," Dale's final metaphor ("the size of Kilimanjaro") is so not cliché that I can only describe it as truly original work—work, one might say, that reaches new, perhaps incomparable, heights of original badness. (He could have rhymed with "tomorrow," couldn’t he?) I suspect that, on some level, this verse dramatizes—in a way that "good" poetry might not be able to do—the scene's focus on whether Dale is actually Dale or an impostor masquerading as Dale. Is he the undercover Drew Thompson pretending to be someone else (the way cliché is "pretending" to be poetry), or is he really Dale (not pretty, but as original as his metaphor)?

There's another aspect of this that's interesting, too. Dale has hidden his poem away, and, in finding it, Boyd essentially "outs" Dale as a poet—a drama that doesn't just offer a nice foil to the "outing" Drew Thompson plot but that also recalls similar moments in other shows. There's a 1973 episode of All in the Family in which Archie Bunker outs his hippie son-in-law Mike as a poet—what Archie calls "a regular Edgar Allan Poe-lock." There's a 1982 episode of The Jeffersons in which George is outed as having once written love poetry for Louise. There's the plotline in the first season of Rescue Me (2004) where macho New York firefighter Lt. Kenny "Lou" Shea is afraid that people will find out he's been writing poetry to cope with his feelings in the aftermath of 9/11. All of these scenes associate poetry with the closet and thus with queerness—as if our culture needed yet another reason to think that a dude writing poetry might be queer. (In fact, Shea's story is paralleled by a plot line involving rumors that some of his fellow firefighters are gay.) Even in Justified, the scene sets up Dale to be read as queer: he's downstairs late at night and not upstairs in bed with his wife, and in mentioning "Curt" rather than the name of the "her" in the verse, Dale's poem suggests, ever so slightly, that the "hurt" expressed in the poem comes from the pain of seeing Dale's secret beloved Curt kissing a girl and thus knowing that Curt is unavailable.

There's more, too. This plot motif goes all the way back to the 1950s when ground-breaking TV comedian Ernie Kovacs debuted his character of Percy Dovetonsils—an effeminate poet in a zebra-striped smoking jacket who used a daisy as a swizzle stick, wore glasses that made him look bug-eyed, and lisped while reciting poems like "Cowboy":

O cowboy so lean,
O cowboy so tall,
You sit there straight as an arrow.
But side-saddle you ride,
Instead of astride.
Are you perhaps a gay ranchero? 

Dovetonsils, Kovacs once claimed, was based on none other than Ted Malone of Between the Bookends radio fame, whom audiences had only ever heard—a voice incriminated by its association with poetry that Kovacs, via the new medium of TV, was able to "out" as queer, thus making a case for the reliability or truth-telling power of TV over and against radio.

I've come a long way from Justified, haven't I? Maybe you now see a bit more clearly the types of vantage points that can open up via poetry in popular culture; it can be much more complex than it initially appears, with implications—in this case—for how we understand the taxonomies of poetic "badness," for how poetry has gotten linked to (indeed, how it's been presented as a symptom of) queer sexualities and thus has become a repository for cultural anxieties about homosexuality, and how it serves as an occasion by which changing media hierarchies are conducted. Kind of amazing, no? 

Please head over to Critical Margins for the rest of the interview? We hope you do.

Meeting Alice Corbin Henderson (1881-1949) at Willamette University's Zena Farm

One of our favorite parts of Willamette University is Zena Farm—a five-acre, student-operated farm that is part of a larger, 305-acre property that includes a forest and a small observatory located in the Eola Hills about ten miles west of Salem proper. (Pretty awesome, right? How many other liberal arts universities do you know that can boast both a farm and a forest?) Overseen and managed by W.U.'s Sustainability Institute, the farm is a laboratory for all sorts of cool learning experiences. It sells tasty eats at the campus farm stand on Jackson Plaza during the school year. And it's also the site of the Summer Institute in Sustainable Agriculture—a residential, credit granting program that mixes hands-on learning with field trips, independent projects, and academic study in the theories and philosophies of sustainable agriculture.

We were out at the farm yesterday having lunch with students (including Shayna and Lori from last semester's Introduction to Creative Writing class) and the summer program leader Jennifer Johns, and we happened to notice the handwritten poem (pictured here) tacked to the side of the refrigerator. It's called "Kristen's Grace" and reads:

The silver rain, the shining sun
The fields where scarlet poppies run
And all the ripples of the wheat
Are in the bread that we now eat.

And when we sit at every meal
And say our grace we always feel
That we are eating rain and sun
And fields where scarlet poppies run.

For us, the poem's "scarlet poppies" immediately recalled John McCrae's famous World War I poem "In Flanders Fields," and so, intrigued by the apparent distance between World War I and what's going on at Zena, we set the office interns to work. Who was "Kristen," and was this her poem or her grace—or both? Might the poppies really link back to McCrae and World War I? And, if so, how does that affect how we read the poem today, especially in relation to the farm's mission? Well, we haven't found out who Kristen is, but the interns have discovered that while this is her grace, Kristen isn't the actual author of the poem. Indeed, it's a verse not uncommonly cited and used by sustainable foodie types—and sometimes by feminist types who see in the scarlet poppies a figure for menstruation—and it's usually titled "The Harvest" and attributed to Alice Corbin Henderson.

So who, you might be wondering, is Alice Corbin Henderson? Well, if it's the Alice Corbin Henderson we think it is, "Winter Harvest" not only links us to McCrae but also to Poetry magazine, where Henderson (1881-1949) was an editor and close associate of Harriet Monroe in the magazine's early years, co-editing with Monroe three editions (1917, 1923, 1932) of The New Poetry anthology. Henderson graduated from high school in Chicago and entered the University of Chicago, but due to her susceptibility to tuberculosis, she relocated to Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans for the completion of undergraduate school. (Henderson's mother died of tuberculosis when Alice was three.) Upon graduation, Alice moved back to Chicago where she took classes at Chicago's Academy of Fine Arts, in the process meeting and subsequently marrying William Penhallow Henderson, an instructor at the Academy and a notable Arts and Crafts artist who, among other things, was working on Frank Lloyd Wright's Midway Gardens Project. Alice worked with Poetry and she also wrote poetry (her first book Linnet Songs was published in 1898 when she was seventeen years old).

Because of Alice's persistent health concerns, however, the Hendersons relocated to the more lung-friendly climes of New Mexico, where they settled in Santa Fe, becoming central figures in the area's art scene that included Witter Bynner, D.H. Lawrence, and eventually Georgia O'Keeffe. By 1925, at least, poets were meeting weekly at the Henderson residence to read and discuss their work, and it's quite likely that Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, and W.H. Auden dropped by for one or more of these meetings over the years; we'd bet a considerable sum that on his cross-country travels—some on foot—Vachel Lindsay did too. (As we know, New York and Chicago weren't the only centers of modern art activity in the U.S.)

Alice continued to work for Poetry from Santa Fe, but that work—and her own poetry—became less and less the focus of her attention, as she and William became increasingly interested in Native and Chicano cultures and histories. She and William were cofounders of the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs (1922) and the Indian Arts Fund (1925). Many native artists visited their home. William produced and acted in plays to support Indian drought relief efforts in the 1920s. Alice helped organize the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, and she became a librarian and curator for the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art—housed in a building designed by William. (Alice, btw, was also the editor of New Mexico: Guide to the Colorful State [1940], one of the American Guide series books sponsored by the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression.)

That's all very interesting stuff, you might be thinking to yourself, but what about those scarlet poppies in "The Harvest"? Well, we can not only make a good argument that Henderson's poppies do, indeed, directly reference the poppies that McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" made synonymous with World War I, but that this reference also makes "The Harvest" a stunning poem about our relationship to food sources and one of the most surprising poems that we've come across in a while. During World War I, Alice worked as publicity chair for the Women's Auxiliary of the State Board of Defense and, like many poets whom we don't typically view as "political" today (Sara Teasdale most immediately comes to mind), Alice wrote about the war as well. Here is her poem "A Litany in the Desert," for example, which first appeared in the April 1918 issue of the Yale Review:

I.

     On the other side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains there is a great welter of steel and flame. I have read that it is so. I know nothing of it here.
     On the other side of the water there is terrible carnage. I have read that it is so. I know nothing of it here.
     I do not know why men fight and die. I do not know why men sweat and slave. I know nothing of it here.

II.

     Out of the peace of your great valleys, America, out of the depth and silence of your deep canyons,
     Out of the wide stretch of yellow corn-fields, out of the stealthy sweep of your rich prairies,
     Out of the high mountain peaks, out of the intense purity of your snows,
     Invigorate us, O America.
     Out of the deep peace of your breast, out of the sure strength of your loins,
     Recreate us, O America.
     Not from the smoke and the fever and fret, not from the welter of furnaces, from the fierce melting-pots of cities;
     But from the quiet fields, from the little places, from the dark lamp-lit nights—from the plains, from the cabins, from the little house in the mountains,
     Breathe strength upon us:
     And give us the young men who will make us great.

From one perspective, it's kind of amazing to think that the same person who wrote "The Harvest" also wrote "A Litany in the Desert" and that a "modern" poet was moving back and forth between the rhyming quatrains of the former verse and the long, Whitman-like, Sandburg-like lines of the latter. But the spirit linking them—the faith in the local (what Vachel Lindsay called "the new localism"), the connection between the social and environmental, the suspicion that modern urban life separates the human being from her food source and leads to environmental and social catastrophe—comes from something of the same place, does it not?

So here's the kicker. Setting "The Harvest" in its historical context (World War I), authorial context ("A Litany in the Desert"), and philosophical/ethical framework reveals "The Harvest" to be a much more sobering poem than it initially appears, and much less optimistic than "A Litany in the Desert." In fact, it's a downright gruesome couple of quatrains, probably written after the war, about what we eat and where our food comes from. Indeed, Henderson invests the bread of the poem not just with natural phenomena ("rain and sun"), but also—as represented by the "scarlet poppies" that McCrae's verse made so famous—with the blood of modern war. This is not a poem about menstruation. Rather, it is a poem about how the bread that we eat "at every meal" contains the the war's dead, both way back then and in the present moment of the poem in which, as line four says, we "now eat." The "harvest" of the poem's title thus refers to the wheat mentioned in stanza one and to the harvest of death (see Timothy H. O'Sullivan's famous Civil War photo of that same title). If you compare this view of nature with the view of nature and its purifying forces in Whitman's "This Compost," you'll get a sense of just how shocking we find "The Harvest" to be. Indeed, when we now read "The Harvest" in the P&PC Office, we aren't finding ourselves saying grace. Rather, we find ourselves asking for some.

P&PC's New Acquisition: The Poetry of Motorola's TV Trays

The P&PC Office is certainly going to use them to serve hors d'oeuvres and other tasty treats at this weekend's National Poetry Month Black-Tie Benefit, but we wanted to give those of you who won't be on hand a preview of our most recent acquisition: a set of four promotional TV serving trays that were either sold or given away with Motorola televisions, phonographs, and other entertainment devices in the 1950s or 1960s. Each tray is about sixteen inches long with rounded corners, has a wood-grain veneer, features a colorful cartoon scene by commercial illustrator Vernon McKissack, and includes—what else?—a quatrain like the one accompanying the jazz scene pictured here:

Clap your hands and lift your feet
And dance around to that solid beat
This real gone jive that lets you laugh
Sounds groovy too, on a phonograph.

In addition to the simple fact of the poetry printed on 'em, we were initially attracted to these trays for how this particular one incorporates jazz-related slang for commercial purposes and (of course) for that super-spectacular pun on the word "groovy," which is used to describe both an immaterial social vibe as well as the material substance of the vinyl playback format. Listening to jazz is "groovy" in more than one way, ya dig?

While preparing our franks-in-blankets and deviled eggs, though, we've also become increasingly interested in how Motorola is using the trays to stage a media conversation between the phonograph, music, poetry and print, illustration, and even the television itself, as the television is (we think) simulated by the trays' wooden frames. Indeed, the original box pictured here—which has a cut-out television screen window through which one can view the top tray inside—suggests we are intended to read the rounded wooden tray frames as the rounded wooden frames of old televisions. In a sense, then, the "box" of that television ties together word, picture, music, and phonograph—a claim for the power and unique thrill of what was then the newest new medium of the twentieth century.

As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin might describe it in their 1999 book Remediation: Understanding New Media, the jazz scene is characterized by what they call "the twin preoccupations of contemporary media": an interplay between the experience of "immediacy" and the experience of "hypermediacy." On the one hand, the tray (and by extension Motorola's phonograph and television) cultivates immediacy by promising to immerse us in the "live" moment of the improvised jazz performance, thus offering us a "transparent presentation of the real." On the other hand, we are (as Bolter and Grusin say) "challenged to appreciate the integration" of media forms—print, music, image, phonograph, and television—and thus enjoy not the representation but the "opacity of media themselves." That is, not entirely unlike the artist whom the poem tells us is looking "through the window" at the musician playing in the flat next door, we become immersed in the moment by looking through one medium or interface at another. But even here, as the poem explains, the enjoyment of immediate experience hinges on, is accompanied by, or is in a sort of inevitable relationship with a corresponding "opacity" suggested (like the pun on "groovy") by yet another pun: the "fidelity" of the poem's last line, which links the "high fidelity" of the audio playback experience with the authentic experience of live listening. Relying on the pun's cultivation of multiple meanings to direct our attention away from the transparent "content" or "message" and toward the pleasure of multiple media interconnections and media interplay, the tray uses the opacity or thickness of language as a medium to trope the opacity of media more generally, focusing our attention not on the "content" or the "message" being conveyed, but on media itself. (Why else use the triple rhyme of "melody" and "fidelity" if not to call attention to language itself?) Here's that poem:

This master piece will have to wait
Maybe until it's quite too late
Cause who can deny that vibrant melody
Coming through the window with such fidelity.

The lack of a question mark at the end of this verse turns query into fact: what comes "through the window"—a phrase that (for us) recalls the cut-out "window" on the box cover and thus also what comes "through the window" of the television screen or the invisible window of the phonograph—has more fidelity to reality (immediacy) than any of the other media taken in isolation. Like the sketches on the studio floor (or so the logic goes), all other media are incomplete or unfinished except for television and phonograph, which have the power to combine previous media in creating the most immediate of immediate experiences.

Based on this interplay between immediacy and hyper- mediacy, Bolter and Grusin argue that "Although each [new] medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads us to become aware of the new medium as a medium." Such is the case with the phonograph and television and Motorola's TV trays. For despite offering TV and the phonograph as more immediate or authentic experiences than the verbal, pictorial, or painterly, Motorola only simulates the phonograph and TV on the TV trays themselves; TV is only figured by, not actually present in, the box's cut-out window and the frame of cheap wood, and the phonograph is only mentioned by name, not pictured. Thus, we become aware of "the new medium as a medium" because of the difficulty of representing the phonograph or TV in any other media but themeselves. Oddly, by choosing this print-based format to "advertise" television and phonograph, Motorola is unable to actually dramatize the newness of those media, whether it be their immediacy or hypermediacy; we don't experience the media that Motorola wants us to buy but, instead, have to imagine them for ourselves—just like the child in the tray pictured here who has to look up and away from the media limitations of the book to imagine the scene it describes.

And maybe this is the whole point of the TV trays and the dynamic between immediacy and hypermediacy that the poems point us to and help to cultivate—not to replicate television or the phonograph, but to get us, as consumers, to imagine what the television and phonograph can do. If advertising is designed not to sell a product but to cultivate in a consumer the desire for a product, then the desire produced by the inability to experience television or phonograph via the simulation of older media (the cut-out window on the box, the wooden frame around the scenes, the puns on "groovy" and "fidelity") has an easy fulfillment: simply "grab a partner and do-ce-do" out to the store to buy the real thing.

P&PC at MLA: Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism

P&PC is busy getting its parkas and long underwear out of storage in preparation for everyone's favorite-slash-least-favorite event of the year—the Modern Language Association's annual convention, being held at the end of this week (Thursday-Sunday) in balmy downtown Chicago where thermometers currently read a Windy-City-bracing negative nine degrees Fahrenheit. 

Things stand to warm up a little bit, though, especially on Saturday, January 11, when P&PC will be part of a panel titled "Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism," scheduled for 5:15-6:30 pm in the O'Hare conference room of the downtown Chicago Marriott. Unlike many conference activities, which require an official badge and paid-up elbow patches for entry, "Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism" is being made free and open to the public. Liesl Olson of Chicago's Newberry Library will be moderating and commenting, and the panel's speakers include Erin Kappeler and Sarah Ehlers, both of whom should be familiar voices to faithful P&PC readers. If you're in town, why not escape the cold and ice and stop on by? Here's a preview of what's in store.

The panel's first paper, Erin Kappeler's "Harriet Monroe's Museum," reconsiders the canonization of modern poetry by examining how Monroe's curatorial practices extended beyond the poetry she published to the readers Poetry addressed. In Poetry’s promotional materials, Monroe argued that the art form lacked an audience because it had no organized institutional support, but Poetry's editorial files tell a different story. In a series Monroe labeled her "museum" files, she singled out correspondence from lay readers and disgruntled would-be contributors not as evidence of poetry's missing audience but, rather, as evidence of the outmoded aesthetic paradigms Monroe intended Poetry to replace. The sheer volume and diversity of these letters show that, far from bringing poetry to readers who had been ignoring it, Monroe sought to discipline readers out of their promiscuous habits of consumption. This paper focuses especially on Monroe's gendered response to these "bad" readers to consider how modernist ideals of print circulation shaped the presentation of modernism to popular audiences in the 1910s and 1920s.

In "Set Vivid Against the Little Soft Cities: Outsourcing Chicago Modernism," Mike Chasar uses the relationship between Poetry magazine and poetic communities in Portland, Oregon, to argue that Poetry's early success depended upon the production of new verse around the country. Just as the railroads brought livestock to Chicago, so Poetry routed regional new verse movements through the city and used that verse to forward Chicago's profile as a modern center. Like a venture capitalist, Monroe visited Portland in 1926, establishing relationships with an active and coordinated modern poetry scene that was working out what modernism meant for the Pacific Northwest. Tracing circuits between Portland and Chicago, and following the new verse as it circulated far outside the sphere of Poetry in unexpected places such as church bulletins and funeral home brochures, Chasar argues that focusing on Poetry as a product of Chicago's modernism obscures how widespread the new verse movement was.

Building on Chasar's consideration of Chicago and Poetry's relationship to other geographic sites, Sarah Ehlers's "The Harriet Monroe Doctrine: Poetry's Interwar Internationalism" contextualizes changes in Poetry during the 1930s by looking at two significant archival sources: Monroe's unpublished letters and journals from the 1936 P.E.N Conference in Buenos Aries, and the collection of unpublished letters, tributes, and elegies sent to the Poetry office after Monroe's untimely death in South America. While at the conference, Monroe was consistently annoyed that conversations about poetry turned to "politics and split-hair metaphysics," and her responses to debates about poetry at the international writers conference provide insight into how she framed transnational literary histories of modern poetry in relation to U.S. cultural institutions. The events of the P.E.N. conference also reveal how discourses about the role of art amidst global political turmoil relate to how Poetry was conceived in Depression-era Chicago.

In "A Chicago Institution: The Harriet Monroe Collection and the Rise of the Modern Poetry Archive," Bart Brinkman compares Monroe's initial fundraising venture for Poetry to the formation of the Harriet Monroe Collection, willed to the University of Chicago upon Monroe's death in 1936. When Monroe initially sought funding for what would become Poetry, she pitched the magazine to potential donors as a Chicago cultural institution, not unlike a museum or an opera house. This institutionalization of Poetry would become more tangible upon Monroe's death. The Monroe Collection provides a detailed portrait of poetic modernism from the perspective of one of its key figures, housing thousands of rare books and magazines along with corrected proofs and strings of correspondences that illuminate authorial and editorial intention. Beyond having particular importance for investigating Poetry's role in modern poetry, the collection also illuminates the institutionalized collecting of modern poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century more generally. 

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday!

Singing the Body Electric: The Poetry of Reddy Kilowatt and Free Enterprise

When P&PC's office interns hear the term "political poetry," they typically think of poetry produced by the Left or for leftist causes, but there's a long and largely untold story of political poetry written and distributed to serve conservative political agendas as well. Take, for example, the flier pictured here, which features "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers" as an illustrated poem modeled on Septimus Winner's well-known 1868 song "Ten Little Injuns" and replacing Winner's Indian boys with a parade of workers (doctor, railroader, miner, steelworker, farmer, lawyer, grocer, salesclerk, and reporter) all led by Reddy Kilowatt—the longtime cartoon representative and corporate spokesman for private electricity in the U.S. (Reddy was first created by the Alabama Power Company in 1926.) Here, as the poem relates, Reddy is the first "free worker" to fall victim to American "socialists" seeking to expand the federal government's power (pun intended, right?). One by one and couplet by couplet, "Uncle" (as in Uncle Sam) takes over various private enterprises with the final stanza—seizing on the organizational rhetoric of "working together" across class lines that we might normally associate with leftist rhetoric—summing things up:

Ten little free workers—but they are no longer free.
They work when and where ordered, and at a fixed rate you see,
And it all could have been prevented if they'd only seen fit to agree
And work together instead of saying "it never can happen to me!"

We at the P&PC office appreciate how the flier takes advantage of the poem's stanza breaks for expressive purposes. At the beginning of the poem, as the little free workers march across and thus populate the stanza break, there is essentially no space between couplets, but as the government whittles away at workers' freedoms, the silence of those breaks becomes a more and more powerful representation of disappearing free enterprise. That growing silence or disappearing voice culminates in the final stanza where "the reporter son-of-a-gun" loses his voice or freedom of speech under a tyrannical system that has not only done away with free enterprise but that now won't allow him to "criticize the government" as well.

You'll see that the Otter Tail Power Company has "signed" the poem with a script-like font at the bottom of the flier, but despite the copyright note of 1961, the Minnesota-based company is probably not the author of "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers." The poem was in fact widely reprinted in newspapers across the country, oftentimes as an ad "signed" or endorsed by individual power companies like Paul Smith's Electric and Power Company of Au Sable Forks, New York, the Montana Power Company, the Potomac Light and Power Company of West Virginia, the Iowa Public Service Company, the Carolina Light and Power Company of North Carolina, the Montana-Dakota Utilities Company, Potomac Edison of Maryland, and the Kentucky Power Company. Most of these printings date to the first half of the 1960s, but the P&PC interns have found at least two ads—for the Montana Power Company and the Potomac Light and Power Company—that date to 1950. In other words, this was one heckuva widely distributed poem that, much to its distributors' chagrin, was (a la Ezra Pound) "news that stayed news."

"The Story of Ten Little Free Workers" wasn't Reddy Kilowatt's first or only appearance in poetry, however. As the comic panel pictured above illustrates, Reddy also talked in rhyme: "My name is Reddy Kilowatt! / You'd be surprised at all I've got / and all the things that I can do / if put to work by men like you!" It's as if, in singing his own body electric, Reddy's language generates more power via the dynamics of resistance and flow in poetic form. While we in the P&PC office can be many things to many people, we're not electricians, but we bet that an electrician could explain how the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance might map quite fittingly (syntax, line break, rhyme?) onto the poetics of Reddy's speech. Consider, if you will, the poem "Reddy Says," printed on the reverse side of a late 1950s or early 1960s package containing a glow-in-the-dark Reddy Kilowatt business card holder:

I'm a real live wire—
and I never tire,—
Yes Sir! I'm a
red hot shot.
I can cook your meals,—
turn the fact-ry wheels
'cause I'm
REDDY KILOWATT!

When you toast your toast—
or you roast your roast,—
it is I who makes 'em hot.
I'm in your TV set—
with ev-ry show you get,—
'cause I'm
REDDY KILOWATT!

I wash and dry your clothes,—
play your radios,—
I can heat your coffee pot.
I am always there—
with lots of pow'r to spare,—
'cause I'm
REDDY KILOWATT!

Were it not for the fact that he can "turn the fact-ry wheels," Reddy seems like the perfect little homemaker, doesn't he? He cooks, makes coffee, does the laundry, and makes sure that home appliances are up to snuff. But what intrigues us about "Reddy Says" more than its content is all the extra punctuation (the comma followed by a dash) at the line breaks as well as the elided letters in "pow'r," "ev-ry," and "fact-ry" that not only add a pleasing vernacular to Reddy's speech but also lend it a certain extra charge consistent with Reddy's self description as a "live wire." Are we crazy, or can we read Reddy's poetic lines as power lines as well? All those dashes certainly look like live wires to us.

From newspaper ad and flier, to business card holder and (see the image just above) souvenir stick-pin, Reddy's place in mid-century American life was brokered by poem after poem. To understand just how consistently this was the case, one only has to look at an April 18, 1947, bill for the Public Service Company of New Hampshire (pictured here) in which Reddy comes out of a wall socket to explain the "charge" for his services:

One full month I've labored
And this is all my pay
Divide this sum by thirty—
See how cheap I worked each day.

By portraying Reddy as a laborer, this rhyme in a sense returns us to the political agenda of "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers" presented earlier. Freed from the "fixed rate" imposed by the "socialist" government in "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers," Reddy demonstrates for Don Draper-types and their neighbors not just the benefits of private power companies and their cheap labor (Reddy makes about twenty cents per day) but also just how darn happy people can be when working for mere pennies a day. Of course, as we all know, converting the physical phenomenon of electricity into the jolly humanoid worker Reddy works to obscure all of the real people working at power plants and the subject of how much they actually get paid. For most of us, that tactic is not a surprise. What might be more, uh, shocking is the role that poetry played in the process.

Fuzzy's Supper Club, "How to Get to Heaven," & the Case of the Missing "N"

In 1949, Arthur C. "Fuzzy" Rahill—son of Ray and Lillian Rahill who immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon in 1907—went to work for a restaurant located at 1232 Classen Boulevard in Oklahoma City. He bought the business a year later and opened Fuzzy's Supper Club, which he owned and operated until 1983 when he retired and sold the joint to a Mr. Lobb who apparently spent $100,000 remodeling it to feature a "sports motif ... decorated with antique sporting equipment." Then, in a series of events that news reports don't fully explain, Rahill "took the business back through litigation" in 1984. P&PC can't discover when exactly Fuzzy's finally shut its doors—the place was still open in 1987 when people were instructed to go there to buy tickets to the Oklahoma City Golden Gloves amateur boxing tournament—but Rahill died in 2003 at the age of eighty.

In the mid 1970s, then in his fifties, Rahill extended Fuzzy's to include Arthur's Prime Rib House—an attempt, according to one news story, to provide a "classier" dining experience that offered, among the usual steaks and other gustatory attractions, a Friday night seafood buffet at $14.95 per plate—and, as part of that expansion, he also had printed up a business card (pictured above) that included on back the poem pictured to the left, "How to Get to Heaven":

A man knocked at the gates of heaven,
His face was scarred and old,
He stood before the man of fate,
For entrance to the fold!

What have you done? St. Peter asked,
To gain admission here?
I've slaved away most of my life,
I've been a restaurateur!

The Pearly Gates then opened wide,
St. Peter struck the bell,
Come in, and choose your golden harp,
You've had your share of Hell!

It's impossible to figure what exactly motivated Fuzzy to feature "How to Get to Heaven." Business cards have long included poems (see here and here and here and here, for example), and perhaps Rahill thought that the classed-up Arthur's merited a poem to class up its business card. Or perhaps, we like to think, the ghosts of Rahill's birthplace in Springfield, Illinois, were speaking through him; by the time Fuzzy was born in 1922, "prairie poets" Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay, both from the area, had put Sangamon County on the national poetic map.

As it turns out, "How to Get to Heaven" is an intriguing little poem. It's part of a going-to-heaven or going-to-hell poetic tradition that not only includes famous old epics and modernist masterpieces, but popular texts as well—like the Depression-era poem "Rejected" (pictured here), which tells the story of President Franklin Roosevelt being denied entrance to Hell, or "The Grocer's Dream," which was printed on the back side of an advertising trade card for Majestic Sandwich Spread sometime in the 1930s and that you can check out here. Unlike "Rejected" and "The Grocer's Dream," however, both of which leave their main characters in Hell (one unable to get in, and one unwilling to give up his seat), "How to Get to Heaven" features a protagonist who has already been to Hell and now appears, like Sterling Brown's hero in "Slim Greer in Hell," to converse with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates.

What intrigues us the most about "How to Get to Heaven" is not this narrative in particular, but what the poem appears to have left out. If you look very closely at the word "restaurateur" in the last line of stanza two, you'll see that the kerning (the space between letters) is a little off. There's more space between the "a" and the "t" of "restaurateur" than there is, for example, the "a" and the "t" of "Gates" in the fist line of the third stanza. This is the only time in the poem that the kerning is irregular, and we think it's the somewhat Derridean trace of a change made during the printing process when "restauranteur" (spelled with an "n") was changed to the more proper term "restaurateur" (without the "n").

What effect, if any, does this missing "n" have on the poem? Well, for starters, we think it's the very thing that gets the poem's main character into heaven. By using the correct but less frequently used term "restaurateur" instead of the more common but erroneous "restauranteur" to describe his occupation, the main character proves himself to be what he is in fact claiming to be; he is no pretender or impostor, but the genuine article who knows the difference between "restaurateur" and "restauranteur." Unlike the typical scene at the Pearly Gates, which—like the scene of Roosevelt trying to get into Hell in "Rejected"—involves enumerating why one deserves entrance into Heaven and St. Peter logging or checking those reasons in his giant book, "How to Get to Heaven" has no justification other than the proper vocabulary word. St. Peter would no doubt appreciate the proper terminology, but he would also hear embedded in "restaurateur" the word's origins in the Late Latin restaurator or "restorer" (as opposed to "restauranteur," which is derived from the more mundane word "restaurant"), thus making "restaurateur" an account of one's occupation, a sign of one's legitimacy, and a sort of password, prayer, code, or miniature argument linking the earthly restaurateur to the Restorer for whom St. Peter (the patron saint of bakers, butchers, fishermen, and harvesters, btw) so diligently serves as chief "rateur," if you will.

If that isn't awesome enough for you, then the extra space alerting us to the significance of the missing "n" alerts us to a feature of the poem's acoustic economy, as well, for eliminating the "n" also highlights the "ate" at the center of "restaurateur"—a morpheme that not only serves as a fitting metonym for the protagonist's career, but that echoes throughout the rest of the poem: in the "ate" of "gates" and "fate" as well as in the assonance of "face," "gain," and "slaved." Reading retroactively, in fact, it's hard not to see "How to Get to Heaven" announcing this acoustic theme from the very beginning, as the formatting of line one—which leaves "gates" hanging as a line break even though it's the middle of the poetic line—seems designed to call attention to this precise feature of the poem.

What brings the protagonist's acoustic past to an end, however, is St. Peter himself, whose very name transforms "ate" (past tense) into "eat" (present tense), thus offering the main character the very invitation that a restaurateur spends his life extending to other people. In fact, can we not hear in the sound of the bell St. Peter strikes in line two of the final stanza the sound of a dinner bell calling the poem's hero (and Fuzzy, too, on March 16, 2003) to his just reward: a heavenly feast?