"A Driver's Life": The Poetry of the 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata

Back to School with Anne Campbell

A little less than a year back, P&PC wrote a piece about Edgar Guest, the longtime poet of the Detroit Free Press who published a poem in that paper seven days a week for thirty years. The national syndication of his verse made Guest (pictured here) a household name, got him dubbed the "people's poet," turned him into a popular speaker, and made him a very rich man even if it didn't secure him a place in scholarly histories of American poetry. Indeed, after mentioning Guest as part of a Modernist Studies Association panel a few years back, a P&PC affiliate happened to run into a prominent poet-critic in the airport and, in making small talk about the panel while waiting for their flights, said poet-critic confessed that, until our affiliate's talk, he'd never even heard of Guest. (By contrast, our P&PC affiliate's mother-in-law owned several of Guest's books before she moved out of the family house and into a retirement home; when our affiliate opened them while helping with the move, other poems by Guest that she'd clipped from newspapers and magazines and stored between the pages came fluttering out.)

If the poet-critic just mentioned had never heard of Guest, it's probably safe to say that he's never heard of Anne Campbell either—the poet whom the Detroit News hired in 1922 to better compete with the Free Press. Called "Eddie Guest's Rival" by Time and "The Poet of the Home" by her publicity agents, Campbell would go on to write a poem a day six days a week for twenty-five years, producing over 7,500 poems whose international syndication reportedly earned her up to $10,000 per year (that's about $140,000 adjusted for inflation, folks), becoming a popular speaker in her own right, and proving that neither the Free Press nor Guest could corner the market on popular poetry. Indeed, a 1947 event marking her silver anniversary at the News drew 1,500 fans including Detroit's mayor and the president of Wayne State University.

We've been thinking a lot about Campbell lately. For starters, P&PC has been working on an essay about women's poetry and popular culture for the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, and Campbell's clearly a central part of that history. Then we had the awesomely good fortune of meeting Campbell's granddaughter, who's been very helpful in sketching out some of the details of Campbell's life. Anne was born in rural Michigan on June 19, 1888, possibly finished high school, married the Detroit News writer and future Detroit city historian George W. Stark when she was twenty-seven, had three children, performed and recorded regularly with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra doing readings during intermissions in the 1930s, read on local and national radio, was active with the March of Dimes, and with George was a fixture of Detroit's cultural life and friends, of course, with Guest. She published her first poem (where else, right?) in the Free Press when she was ten, won a state prize for a Memorial Day story and poem when she was fourteen, was first paid for her poetry when she was seventeen, gave a popular talk called "Everyday Poetry" on the Lyceum circuit, and published at least five books of poems (one co-written with George). (For a bunch of blurbs and publicity materials about her, check out the pamphlets here and here.) She died in 1984.

But we've also been thinking about Campbell because it's back-to-school season, and, along with a new Trapper Keeper, new gym shoes, and a spectacular new pencil box, we just purchased the card pictured here, which features Campbell's poem "Visitin' the School" and is identified as "A Souvenir of Anne Campbell's Visit to Your School, Compliments of The Detroit News." (The back of the card is blank, btw, but it has glue marks on its four corners, suggesting that someone saved it in his or her poetry scrapbook; in fact, we've seen entire poetry scrapbooks dedicated to collecting nothing but Campbell's poems.)

Here's "Visitin' the School":

Oh, dear, I feel like sich a fool
When folks come visitin' the school.
I never git my problems well,
An' jist can’t read an' write and spell.

When teacher asts me to recite,
Although I try with all my might,
I feel the red burn in my cheek,
An' my throat swells so I can't speak.

My both knees shake an' sweat rolls down.
An' nen when I see teacher's frown,
I git so scared, I wish fur fair
That I was any place but there.

When I git big an' have a boy
I' goin' to make his life all joy.
No matter what the teacher's rule,
I'll not go visitin' the school! 

It's an odd little poem, isn't it? It's kitschy in a way that Daniel Tiffany's recent book My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch can help us to understand, and although the second and third stanzas don't disclose the exact content of the recitation, they nevertheless call most readily to our mind the history of poetry memorization and recitation that Catherine Robson takes up in Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem; seen this way, "Visitin' the School" is thus a poem about poetry.

But under the cover of innocence—the kitchiness, the schoolroom, the slightly baby-talk language, the rudimentary rhymes, etc.—we here in the P&PC Office think Campbell's poem's got something more going on. Noteworthy for how it doesn't assign a gender to teacher, student, or classroom visitor (thus making a role in the child's predicament available to all students, teachers, and classroom visitors), "Visitin' the School" is super concerned with the subject of reproduction: 1) whether or not the child's oral expression can be reproduced in print; 2) whether or not the child can faithfully reproduce what "teacher asts me to recite"; 3) how the child will "git big an' have a boy"; 4) and, ultimately, how the child vows to not reproduce the cultural practice of "visitin' the school."

Locating a voice of protest and dissent in the child—the weak, scared, young, and nearly voiceless ("my throat swells so I can't speak") subject put under pressure by multiple forms of surveillance—Campbell's poem becomes unexpectedly politicized, questioning, rather than confirming, the legitimacy of normative educational practices. If we do not hear this protest, it's not because it's not there, but because we who teach and visit classrooms at all levels fail to afford its apparently rudimentary poetic expression—by someone who "jist can't read an' write and spell"—the seriousness it deserves. As school begins, and as many of us may feel moved to lament the poor writing skills our students bring with them, that's a lesson worth keeping in mind.

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.

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?

The Surprise Guest: Thoughts on Edgar A. Guest, Making Money with Poetry, and the Blind Spots of Modern Poetry Studies

So, P&PC just finished reading Edgar A. Guest: A Biography—Royce Howes's very swell, 1953 account of the one-time Detroit Free Press copy boy who went on, in Horatio Alger fashion, to become the most prolific and popular poet in U.S. history. We're certainly no stranger to Guest—check out an Edgar Guest Calendar here, Chrysler's Edgar Guest television spot here, and a scrapbook full of Guest's poetry here—but the biography stunned us nevertheless. Yes, in telling the story of how Guest's "ascent to fame has kept absolute step with Detroit's march from provincial city to industrial capital of the world," Howes is possibly even more saccharine than the "people's poet" himself was, but the facts are simply astonishing. Consider, for example:

• Guest wrote a poem a day seven days a week for thirty years.
• He lived in a mansion "staffed with servants, fine automobiles, the so-handy golf club [and] the big summer place at the Pointe."
• He had radio, motion picture, and television contracts.
• At one point, when his verse was syndicated to 250 newspapers, it was estimated that his poems had a circulation of about 10,000,000.
• At one point, probably after World War II, Guest reported an annual income of $128,000—the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $1.6 million.
• Guest's first two books (Home Rhymes and Just Glad Things) were self-published and printed by Guest's brother Harry in editions of 800 and 1,500 respectively, and on the basis of those books and his newspaper verse, Guest started getting wooed by the agents of Harper, Scribner, and William Randolph Hearst. Eventually, his publisher Reilly & Britton would print his books in editions of 100,000.
• Guest couldn't go out on the streets of Detroit without getting hailed down by enthusiastic readers.
• Guest was good friends with Henry Ford, who regularly gave the poet cars, beginning with a Model T and, many years later, a Lincoln.
• Guest was pegged as a possible replacement for Will Rogers and even set up in Hollywood for $3,500 per week while studios tried to figure out how to use him.
• A copy of Guest's poem "America" once sold for $50,000 as part of a war-bond fundraising event in 1942.

It's no wonder, really, that even though Guest maintains some of his popularity among people of a certain age today, he has been almost entirely written out of histories of modern poetry, because even though his life and career were propelled by the very forces of modernity that modernist studies scholars love to dwell on, his simple presence in a conversation contradicts all sorts of fantasies about the cultural marginalization of poetry in the twentieth century that those same scholars love to perpetuate: that poetry had a small readership; that no one could make money by writing poems; that poetry happened in bohemian enclaves and small cliques involving beret-wearing coffee drinkers and free lovers; that poetry primarily responded to the forces of modernity and consumer culture in an oppositional or counter-cultural way; that poetry was a print-based form inherently at odds with "new" and popular media forms like radio, tv, and film; that even if a poet were to make himself or herself available, consumer and popular culture would have no use for him or her. Yadda yadda yadda.

It's possible, we suppose, to explain away Guest's success as the exception that proves the modernist rule, but if you take even the smallest peek down the rabbit hole he opens up, you start seeing that that's not even the case. Not only was Detroit able to support one famous poet, for example, but it also supported a second: Anne Campbell, sometimes called "Eddie Guest's Rival," who for the crosstown Detroit News wrote a poem a day six days a week for twenty years, producing in the process more than 7,500 poems and making up to $10,000 per year from her poetry's syndication (that's about $140,000 adjusted for inflation, btw). Other poets like Helen Welshimer, Berton Braley, James Metcalfe, Ethel Romig Fuller, Don Marquis, and Walt Mason seemed to have little trouble making money off their verse as well.

Guest is not only compelling in his own right, then, but he's compelling because paying even a smidgen of attention to him opens up a window onto an entire sphere of literary activity that has been all but erased from the history books and that challenges almost every academic assumption about the cultural place and function of poetry in modern America. We look at Guest and see Campbell, Welshimer, Braley and crew, but then we also see that Guest's publisher—based in Chicago right down the street from Poetry magazine, that supposed center of all things modern in modern poetry—was also making a pretty good go of it; Reilly, for example, also issued Tony's Scrap Book, an annual print spin-off of Tony Wons's popular poetry radio show that sold over 225,000 copies in 1932 alone. (Wons, btw, reported making $2,000 per month including royalties from Tony's Scrap Book, which is the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $400,000 per year.)

When we figure in Reilly's activities and Tony's radio show, we start sketching out the parameters of a modern poetry landscape composed of affluent celebrity poets, for-profit poetry publishers, and multimedia distribution—a picture at odds with almost everything we imagine about the workings of poetry in the first half of the century. We here at the P&PC Office are stunned every time we think seriously about this, and we're convinced that, some day, scholars of modern poetry are going to start realizing the stories and archives awaiting them if they just take a moment to tune in.

Poetry Trading Cards

Back in the day, when the differences between Topps, Fleer, and Donruss baseball cards were crucial distinctions for some of us in the P&PC Office, and when were happy to do nothing more than spend hours and hours ordering, reordering, and moving our card collections from one government cheese box to another, a prize of any collection was the tobacco card—the slightly-bigger-than-a-9-volt-battery-sized card, usually from 1909 or 1910, usually with corners rounded from age and handling if not stints in between the spokes of some boy's bike, and originally given away for free with tobacco products.

We all held such cards with reverence, storing them—if we could somehow get our hands on them—between heavy, inflexible pieces of transparent plastic. Not only were they old, but each one tangibly linked us to the story of the T-206 Honus Wagner (pictured here): how the Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Pirate shortstop refused to lend his visage to the tobacco industry, how he righteously demanded that the American Tobacco Company recall all of his cards, and how the few cards that managed to sneak into circulation (some estimate between 50 and 200) went on to become the most rare, famous, and valuable cards in history (one card recently sold for $2.8 million). Every dusty box we came across in every attic or barn was, we never ceased believing, full of abandoned, mint condition tobacco cards. And among those cards was, we were certain, the T-206 Wagner.

Nowadays, when we think of them, those imaginary dusty boxes are more likely full of old books (especially an 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass) than they are baseball cards, but more likely than either of those scenarios is that we might come across something like a mixture between the two: like, for example, the set of 54 "Camera Studies" trading cards produced in 1926 by the British cigarette manufacturer Cavanders Ltd. and pictured here. What's remarkable about these cards is not the full and complete set that we have in our possession, nor the excellent condition they're in, but how each card features a scene from the British countryside on front and—wait for it—a quotation from a famous poet on the back.

Originally based in Manchester, Cavanders was founded in 1775 and lasted until 1961 when it was taken over by the Godfrey Philips cigarette company whose main factory is now in Mumbai. For a time in the early twentieth century, Cavanders was the UK's largest supplier of cigarette cards, issuing forty-one different series including a set of miniature stereoview cards complete with a Camerascope for viewing them. The "Camera Studies" poem series features handpainted photos—which means that every card is unique (think of all the labor that went into that)—paired with quotations on back related to the respective cards' subject matter. There's Shakespeare, Spencer, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Herrick and others. All are British, with a heavy representation of the Romantics, except for two cards that include Longfellow. The quotations are predominantly classic; Swinburne and Rupert Brooke are the only two authors in the set who lived into the twentieth century.

One card captioned "The Placid Stream," for example (pictured here), features a babbling brook paired with an excerpt from Shelley's "A Dream of the Unknown" (image below):

And nearer to the river's trembling edge,
There grew broad flag-flowers, purple prank with white.

Our quick Google searches don't turn up much on Cavanders, let alone anything about how many of these cards were eventually issued or how they were used: Were they traded? Collected in albums like American advertising cards were? Shared by cigarette-smoking men with their wives and children the way cigarette-smoking American men gave tobacco baseball cards to their kids? Is it possible that, in some British clubs, groups of men poured each other brandies, lit up together, and read the poems aloud? Is it possible that they swapped verses hoping to compile a complete set of their own? (Now that's something we want to see on Downton Abbey!)

We suspect that someone out there could make some interesting arguments about how these cards affected the place of the Romantics—if not poetry in general—in the cultural imagination, as they so closely link Shelley, Wordsworth, et al. with nature and not those authors' radical politics or social concerns. We also think there's something to be said for how Cavanders appealed to almost "timeless" pastoral and agricultural scenes immediately following World War I; the presence of Brooke, who was killed in the war, suggests that these cards may on some level be treating or at least responding to a national trauma by looking backward in time. But as the P&PC Board of Directors hasn't yet approved the addition of a British poetry specialist to our office of Americanists, we can't say for sure.

What we do know, however, is that you don't need a Honus Wagner T-206-like $2.8 mill to get your paws on a set of cards like these. Nor do you have to go searching your attic for an abandoned dusty box. Nope. We checked around in some price books and collector sites online, and the "Camera Studies" series is a lot more affordable. If you head over to eBay today, for example, you can in fact find individual cards listed for less than three bucks a pop (or best offer) as well as a listing for a complete set with a starting minimum bid of U.S. $2.32. Happy bidding.

The Poetry of Northern Exposure (1991: Season Two, Episode 3)

P&PC at Five Years Old

There are streamers hanging from the walls, and silver helium balloons are floating around the P&PC Office today. The interns have their glittery, pointy birthday hats on, the entire P&PC Board of Directors is on hand strutting around with their hands in their vests like they've been the ones to make it all happen, and folks whose jobs have been outsourced or who have otherwise moved on to bigger and better things have come back to town. There's Polly the Paper Shredder. And there's Carl the Copy Guy. And is that really Sally the Stenographer? We love the new look. 

Today, P&PC turns five years old.

Who would've thought, back in 2008 when P&PC started up in Iowa City, that—more than 300 postings later—we'd still be around in 2013? That we'd bring on interns and a bunch of puffed-up suits to serve as our Board of Directors? That we'd move home offices from Iowa to Oregon? That more than 142,000 unique visitors would have found us on the inter-webs? That our most popular postings would be about zombie haiku and the poetry of G.I. Jane, The Expendables, The Grey, geocaching, and Craigslist. Back then, we were "just a blog"; today, doing pretty much the same thing we were doing five years ago, we are sometimes cited as an example of "digital humanities" in action. We've gotten shout outs in dissertations and the London Review of Books. We've been approached by fans at conferences. And we've reminded people that Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America is available for 30% off the cover price if you use the coupon code EVECHA when ordering straight from Columbia University Press.

And when we say "we," we so mean it. Over the past half decade, twenty-two people—twenty-two!—interested in the intersection of poetry and popular culture have contributed guest postings, oftentimes more than once. (Shout outs to Melissa Girard, Catherine Keyser, Jeff Charis-Carlson, Jeff Swenson, Angela Sorby, Erin Kappeler, Jim Sullivan, Eric Conrad, Colleen Coyne, Ce Rosenow, Phil Metres, Liz Jones-Dilworth, Adam Bradford, Brian Greggs, Sarah Ehlers, Loren Glass, Drew Duncan, Nadia Nurhussein, Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega, Rachel Dacus, Steve Healey, and Mike Butterworth.) And we've done interviews with another fourteen people working deliberately or maybe not so deliberately in the realm of popular poultry: Stephanie Renfrow of NASA's MAVEN mission, Jim Buckmaster the CEO of Craigslist, Emily Benson of Star-Mark Pet Products, scholar Angela Sorby, John Broderick of the Fisher Poets Gathering, writer Till Gwinn, writer Lewis Turco, Charlie Seemann of the National Cowboy Gathering, writer Ryan Mecum, Tessa Kale of the Columbia-Granger's Index to Poetry, Irving Toast the Poetry Ghost, Mark Davis (son of poet Frank Marshall Davis), and Lucas Bernhart, the one-time poet laureate of the Portland Trail Blazers.

Needless to say, we no longer feel so alone.

It's hard to predict what the next five years of P&PC will bring, but we're not worrying our heads about that just now. Today is about celebrating five years of fun and sending out huge thank-yous to everyone who's helped to make those years possible. Now it's time to go catch up with Carl the Copy Guy, and, of course, go light the candles on our Edgar Guest birthday cake using—what else?—the vintage book of matches (issued by Hallmark) shown in the first three pictures above.

Lost Masterpieces: "Ode To a Potato Bug"

Whitman's Grandchildren: Becoming and Unbecoming Walt Whitman

The January 2013 issue of PMLA has a pretty cool article ("Whitman's Children") by Bowdoin College English Professor Peter Coviello (pictured here) that takes as its starting point a couple of babies born after the U.S. Civil War that were named Walt—a nominal tribute that two veterans paid to Walt Whitman after receiving Whitman's care during the war. William H. Millis, for example, wrote to Whitman more than a decade after the war to say, "We have not forgotten you & want to hear more from you. We have had a son borned since we heard from you & We call him Walter Whitman Millis in honer to you for Love for you." And in 1868 Benton H. Wilson wrote to tell Whitman that his (Wilson's) once-rocky marriage worked out and that, "My little baby Walt is well & Bright as a new dollar."

This is suggestive, Coviello argues, because while Whitman didn't have any biological children, the pair of baby Walts bearing his name should prompt us to think about the nature of reproduction and parenthood more generally and especially about the model of "queer generation" that Whitman—as a surrogate parent to the men he nursed and as the baby Walts' namesake—might have imagined. During a war that split a nation and its families—pitting North against South and brother against brother—Coviello wonders if Whitman worked in his writing and caregiving to "restore carnality, in its world-making force, to family and especially to parenthood" as a way to produce the future, or to at least "wonder...if a future can be something you parent, with and through sex but not heterosexual reproduction." Embodying the roles of lover, brother, father, mother, uncle and comrade—all roles that meet at the bedside that Whitman so frequently occupied while working as a nurse during the war—Whitman imagined a "sexually saturated sociability" that didn't police human tenderness or caregiving by making desire "the province of one exclusive set of attachments" (like husband and wife), but that instead turned sex into what Coviello calls "a mode of relation." In a time when the nation was "a nuclear family turned violently against itself," he argues, Whitman was after a "recast familial structure" as well as "the prospect of a mode of generation that is sexual, though not quite normatively heterosexual nor normatively reproductive."

As is the case with much of our favorite academic scholarship, we like and admire Coviello's piece a lot but nevertheless wonder how it might shed light on, and/or become more complex via its relationship to, certain aspects of popular culture. When one looks, for example, there are more baby Walts out there than just the real-life sons of Civil War veterans Millis and Wilson. These other Walts are fictional Walts, yes, but Walts that possibly indicate the persistence or reach of Whitman's "queer generation" (at least as realized in the literary or artistic realm). Take, for example, Don Draper, the poetically-simmering advertising executive and lead character of AMC's award-winning television show Mad Men. (That's Draper reading Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency pictured above; you can watch the scene in which he recites O'Hara's verse in voiceover here.) As fans of the show know, "Don Draper" was not in fact Draper's birth name; it's the name of a soldier shot and killed next to Draper during the Korean War whose identity Draper adopted (or stole) by switching identification papers in hopes of escaping his past. Draper's birth name was—you got it—Dick Whitman. So, even though the real Don Draper died in the war, his name lived on, and the name Dick Whitman went into history as KIA. It's as if Dick Whitman were born one of the baby Walts mentioned in Coviello's article except that, instead of carrying on the Whitman family line, he chose to scrap it (during another war that split another country in half, mind you) in order to do his own act of re-imagining the future.

Coviello works through the range of Walt Whitman's wartime relations by tracing a "dialectics of substitution and supplement" in which Walt appears to comfort patients "by becoming them" and by becoming surrogates for their family members, embracing, in the process, "an unresolving, generative play of identity and difference, or multiplying differences." In Mad Men, though, Don Draper doesn't embrace this play; once (as Dick Whitman) he has committed an initial act of substitution for self-serving purposes ("becoming" Don Draper), he seeks to hide if not repress that act in his endeavor to become the single, stable, coherent identity that he wants to be: successful ad exec, hyper-hetero womanizer, and normative Cold War parent who reproduces in normative heterosexual ways. But the fact is that, even though he was officially KIA, Dick Whitman won't stay hidden (because he's still alive; because he has become Don Draper), and much of Mad Men is a return-of-the-repressed story in which the ghost of his former self comes back to haunt Draper in any number of ways. One might say that Dick Whitman thought he was out-Whitmaning Coviello's Whitman by using Walt's "dialectics of substitution" to escape his identity as Whitman's grandchild in order to become a normative parent, only to then discover that the play of identity and difference that he thought promised him liberation and stability is not a one-time deal but, as Coviello puts it, "unresolving." That lack of resolution in what should have been a stable real life identity eats at Draper and the Cold War America he represents in any number of ongoing ways, and it is soothed only, perhaps, by the writing of poetic advertisements, an act (at least as the show presents it) that entails Draper inhabiting the mindset of, or "becoming," the psychologically wounded American consumer—oftentimes via proximity to Dick Whitman—to whom goods and services will be marketed. Don is most fully himself, that is, when he is simultaneously marketer, consumer, Whitman, and Draper.

Draper's not the only character that popular culture has associated with Walt Whitman, however. There's also Walter White—the high school chemistry teacher turned drug manufacturer in AMC's other award-winning show Breaking Bad. (Given the Whitman connection between them, one can't help but wonder if AMC used the same writers for both.) The connection between Walter White and Walt Whitman is suggested not just by their shared initials and shared first name, but by several moments in the show's plot—one where White's laboratory assistant Gale recites "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" in full (watch it here), and another when Walt deflects the suspicion of his DEA agent brother-in-law by claiming that the initials "WW" on a piece of confiscated paper probably stand for "Walt Whitman" and thus make for a misleading or specious clue in his investigation.

Even though he claims to not know "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," more connects Walter White and Walt Whitman than just their names. Like Whitman and Draper, White assumes a second identity (that of meth cook) during wartime (both the war on drugs and the wars between dealers), and his character revolves around the performance of his multiple identities and especially how those identities affect his status as parent; not only is he a biological father (the economic pressures of his son's physical disability plus an unexpected pregnancy drive him out of the classroom and into the drug trade) portrayed as an artist (also like Whitman and Draper) creating new material all the time, but he is also a surrogate parent for his assistant Jesse Pinkman. In their choice of careers, physical appearance, mentoring relationship, and shared trauma, Walt and Jesse in fact seem more like father and son than Walt and his biological son do. (Ironically, Walt's biological son is named Walter Jr., making him a great-grandchild of Walt Whitman, perhaps). Over the course of the show, Walt is many things—father, friend, lover, uncle, comrade, teacher, and so on, oftentimes playing nurse to the frequently wounded Jesse—in a distinctly Whitman-like way. What is remarkable about this is how Walt feels so much more alive in his non-normative context (away from the nuclear family) than he does at home, and the show's topic of drug addiction is really a trope for how he has become addicted to what we might, following Coviello, call the queer generativity of his other life (the science, the production, the parenting and care-giving roles), so that even when he has a chance to walk away, he can't bring himself to do it; the "carnality" or "world-making force" that Coviello sees in Whitman is too powerful to let him return to heteronormative life. Like Coviello's Whitman "laboring" to create a future for the family and the nation that he one day won't be alive to see, Walter White is also busy trying to make a future he won't be part of—laboring under a cancer diagnosis to provide financial security for his biological family in the event of his death.

If Don Draper of AMC's Mad Men knows that he is a grandchild of Walt Whitman and denies that lineage only to be haunted by it forever after, Walter White of AMC's Breaking Bad doesn't know that he is Whitman's grandchild, but the force of that ancestry propels him into the "unresolving, generative play of identity and difference" that is his birthright and inheritance. Whereas Draper can never fully become an authentic self once he opts out of Family Whitman, White finds himself to be most fully himself in the "multiplicity ... the multitudinousness" of non-normative, carnally-driven identities. One might say that if Walt Whitman comforted others by "becoming them" in a dialectics of substitution and supplement, then Walter White, in becoming Walt Whitman, also becomes himself. That most of this happens in contexts outside the law and hidden from the nuclear family suggests that Whitman's "style of queer world making and queer future making" is what history has oftentimes made queer world making out to be: the source of good stories but ultimately illegal—a criminal act.

We're not totally sold on our overall assessment here—hey, we're busy enjoying cherry and raspberry season in Oregon—but we do think it's pretty interesting that Dick Whitman and Walter White join Walter Whitman Millis and Walt Wilson on the extended Whitman Family Tree, and we'd love to see what Coviello would make of it all and how he might go about bridging the real-life historical Walts and the fictional, contemporary ones imagined by folks at AMC. Can we in fact read the television side of the family as Whitman's children and grand-children—and thus as evidence that the "future for sex" that Coviello says Whitman imagined has in fact come to be (or at least lived on) more than Coviello suggests in his essay? What of Whitman do they (or we) thus inherit, and what has the Whitman family become? And are they, like Allen Ginsberg in "A Supermarket in California," also walking all night through solitary streets dreaming of a lost America of love?