Top 10 Roadside Rhymes: Number 2

2. The Testicle Festival (Rock Creek, Montana)

Danny Heitman of The Baton Rouge Advocate doesn't think there's been much, uh, truck between poetry and automobility in recent years, but we here at Poetry & Popular Culture disagree, and #'s 3-10 of the Top 10 Roadside Rhymes show why. (Just scroll down to find 'em all.) For #2 on that list, we go all the way to the Rock Creek Lodge in Clinton, Montana. There, the folks of Big Sky don't just make up triple rhymes (a pair of dactyls at that!) but they've got, well, the balls to use that rhyme as the name of their annual Mardi-Gras-like event held in celebration of the Rocky Mountain Oyster—the Testicle Festival.

Now, before you turn away in disgust—either at the thought of ingesting a bull's family jewels, or because you think P&PC's got nothing more in the way of cultural taste than Beavis and Butthead—it's important to remember that bawdy rhymes and body parts (or is it body rhymes and bawdy parts?) are always more complex than they first appear. Mikhail Bakhtin would have agreed with us, but it's not necessary to bring in a Russian Formalist's analysis of European social events to tell us about American bull.

The Testicle Festival is, in fact, a modern-day commemoration of the "rendezvous system" of fur trading—a way of exchanging goods that replaced trading posts in the American West around 1825. Rather than hanging out a shingle year-round, fur trappers and their agents and assigns agreed to meet once a year to do their business and buy supplies all at the same time. "The typical rendezvous," Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes writes in The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History, "was a combination fair, circus, and rodeo with opportunity for feasting, drinking, carousing, and contests of skill." That's still pretty much the case at Rock Creek, except that these days—or so a quick look at the 18-and-over portions of the Test Fest's web site reveals—there are different sets of assets put on display.

Intrigued about the derring-do of the triple rhyme—to say nothing of the cajones it took to erect such a stunning pair of dactyls on a sign along I-90—P&PC caught up with event organizer Matt Powers. Here's that conversation.


P&PC: Um, how's it hangin'?

Matt Powers: With a bit of a swing.

P&PC: How did Rock Creek come up with the Festival's rhyming name?

MP: When trying to come up with a party based in Rocky Mountain Oysters, Testy Festy just flowed, so it was used.

P&PC: What were the other options?

MP: There really weren't any. It was the first thing we thought of.

P&PC: Are there any poetry events held at the Test Fest?

MP: There are not, but this year a limerick competition would be a great addition to the contests we hold.

P&PC: You'd have to keep an eye out for dangling modifiers, I suppose. Have a sample limerick for us—or a first line?

MP: I went to the Testy to take a peek / and lost my virtue down by the creek....

P&PC: I hear a lot of bikers attend. What sort of poetry do bikers like?

MP: A lot of bikers attend, but bikers over the last 15 years are not lumped into the same box. You get some bikers that are high school dropouts, who probably don't like any poetry other than music, and some who have Doctorates, who would probably enjoy all forms. That's a question that is best posed to the masses. Sorry.

P&PC: How about cowboys?

MP: It's a well rounded party ... Yuppies, bikers, rednecks, cowboys, fans of Dorothy... Really a true mix.

P&PC: Well I guess I should say "have a ball," right?

MP: Hell, have 2.

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Postscript:

22 August, 2009.
This just in from Dan Vera of White Crane Journal:

Top 10 Roadside Rhymes: Number 3

3. "Everything Deere is Right Here" (Montana)

This sign's clever and catchy rhyme (which we don't have a photo of—don't be misled by the image to the left) is only the latest poetic offering from John Deere, the leading manufacturer of lawnmowers and tractors that has been, um, cutting up lines of prose for at least a half-century now. Could it be that the corporate mind behind Deere's advertising and promotional products knows the etymological synchronicity between farming and poetry—that the term "verse" comes from the Latin word for "turn," which referred to the turn of a plough as well as the turn of a poetic line?

Back in 1959, for example, Deere issued a 15-piece Christmas puzzle showing Santa driving a trademark-green tractor towing a sleigh filled with presents. That image kind of reverses the logic of the tree ornament pictured above. In the ornament, the flying reindeer helps the tractor off the ground, but in the puzzle the tractor doesn't need Rudolph and replaces him entirely as the source of Santa's aeronautic magic. The poem decorating that puzzle began, like so many other seasonal verses, by imitating the 1823 classic "A Visit from St. Nicholas" usually attributed to Clement Clark Moore:

Twas the night before Christmas
And at the north pole
Was a twinkle in the eyes
Of a Merry Old Soul.
He sat straight and proud
On his shiny John Deere.

Deere has issued pop-up Christmas cards with poetry in them as well. And then there's the strange business of printing poems on Deere-decorated placards ready to bear your personalized poems and no doubt of convenient frame size. The image pictured, uh, heere, features a poem on the occasion of "Baby's 1st Picture," but I've seen others on the subject of "Grandpa's Little Man," which reads:

This is [Fill in Name Here], my little man.
He's just as cute as he can be.
He loves to be with Grandpa
And have me bounce him on my knee.
He's not only handsome,
He's also very smart,
And with every day that passes,
He grows closer to my heart.

As with "Baby's 1st Picture," the poem uses a guiding agricultural conceit ("He grows closer to my heart") that makes the presence of John Deere not just crassly coincidental. In these poems, the rhetoric of farming life and its machinery seamlessly overlaps with the machinery of family life, with poetry—the linguistic version of turning the plough—serving as the most appropriate genre to communicate it all.

But what of the roadside rhyme? Poetry & Popular Culture has to give the slogan props for its complexity, for in the space of five words, it not only rhymes "deere" and "here," but its longstanding, trademark pun on "Deere" and "dear" opens into yet another pun, "right here," which signifies geographically (everything's at this location) and critically (everything's A-OK). "Everything Deere is Right Here" can thus—if we want to parse it out—be read in at least four individual ways: John Deere's products are at this location; John Deere's products are OK; everything you hold dear is at this location; and everything you hold dear is OK. Of course, the slogan isn't meant to be parsed in this manner, as the consumer is supposed to "get" all these meanings simultaneously, especially the additional acoustic suggestion that "Everything Dear is John Deere." In fact—and this is the icing on the cake as far as we're concerned—the slogan contains the clue to this acoustic hermeneutics in the word "here." For if we only see the slogan, we don't get the multiple meanings it has to offer. Rather, it is only when we "hear" the language "right here" that we can access its richness, with one exception: We really have to see "Deere" in order to recognize the corporation sponsoring the fun, and somehow it's the seeing of "Deere" in print that gives that corporation its authority and memorability.

And all that, Dear Reader—or Deere Reader, rather—is what lands this rhyme at number 3.

Top 10 Roadside Rhymes: Number 4

4. Frankie Doodle's Restaurant (Spokane, Washington)

So, in the world of roadside rhyming, it's no surprise to find rhyming phrases such as "Shield your Field," "Gentle Dental," "Ditch Witch," "Camp with Pride Nationwide," or "Click It or Ticket"—all of which caught Poetry & Popular Culture's attention and which comprise the first part of this Top 10 list. The poetics of the American pavement is most often realized in phrases like these that one might say rhyme internally with themselves—signs that offer, within the text presented, all the necessary words for catchy end rhymes and even front rhymes (such as "Best Western").

Less common, however, is the phrase or sign that has an exterior rhyme—a slogan that rhymes with language outside of its immediately posted context. Take, for example, the slogan of Oregon's sexy Naked Winery & Orgasmic Wine Company (pictured above), which is "We aim to Tease." Here, in order to work, Naked Winery embarks on, um, some risky textual behavior because it relies on the consumer to supply the missing rhyme. If that consumer doesn't recognize that "We aim to Tease" is a rhyming pun on the reg'lar commercial promise "We aim to Please," then the ad is a bust and no one goes home happy. Before you underestimate the sophistication of the language work required to make "We aim to Tease" function completely, consider for a moment, dear driver, how easily or not easily a non-native English speaker would complete the chain of associations leading to this rhyme in the second or two available while cruising on by at 75 mph.

Other companies put their rhyming fates in the hands— ears, rather—of the consumer. Such is the case (to a somewhat lesser extent than the Naked Winery, we think) with the Java Jive-Thru Espresso of Salem, Oregon, which relies on the commuting, caffeine-deprived customer to supply the phrase "Drive-Thru" in order to complete the rhyme. In compiling this Top 10 list, Poetry & Popular Culture could have gone with "We Aim to Tease" or "Java Jive-Thru," but we've opted for the Spokane, Washington, restaurant "Frankie Doodle's" instead (see picture in previous paragraph). Not only does Frankie Doodle's make a rare if not stunning double (some might say quadruple) external rhyme with "Yankee Doodle," but in punning on a well-known song tune and character type, it evokes a fairly specific soundtrack and generic national image only to immediately contradict that image and tune by raising a set of unexpected questions about "Yankee's" improbable and unimagined backstory. Could there have actually been a Doodle family? Could Yankee have had a brother—and why haven't we heard of him until now? What was the fairy-tale relationship between Yankee, the national East-Coast figure, and Frankie, the uncelebrated restauranter who struck out West? It's the untold Doodle history that this Spokane restaurant conjurs up—in a name that asks us more generally to re-examine the potentially untold histories behind national characters—in combination with the double external rhyme that lands "Frankie Doodle's" at the number 4 spot on our list.