"Def Poet's Society": The Poetry of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" (Season 1, Episode 7 [October 1990])

First Day of Issue: April 21,2012

"The number of books published each year in America has been steadily increasing, and poetry is more popular than ever" the USPS writes, adding that "The ten great writers honored on the Twentieth-Century Poets stamp pane [pictured above and due out in April 2012] ... surely deserve part of the credit."

We here at P&PC aren't really sure that there's a firm link between poetry's popularity and the increasing number of books being published each year, and we would have preferred to see actual poems or quotations from poems printed on these new Forever stamps, but we're not going to complain too loudly. (Can you imagine the USPS quoting from Paterson, Book I: "And clerks in the post- / office ungum rare stamps from / his packages and steal them for their / children's albums"?) After all, as suggested by the 1960 edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Collected Lyrics pictured here—in which the cancellation mark on the 1981 stamp neatly picks up the decorative flourish motif of Millay's name—poems, books, and stamps will find each other one way or another.

P&PC Book Review: Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture, by Marsha Bryant

Fact: These days, the most exciting academic work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry is being done by women critics and scholars like Maria Damon, Melissa Girard, Virginia Jackson, Meredith Martin, Meredith McGill, Adalaide Morris, Catherine Robson, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Angela Sorby. (N.B. As anyone who attended the 2008 “Lifting Belly High” conference that focused on twentieth-century women’s poetry will attest, that’s hardly a complete list, but it’s not a bad start.) The most recent example of such scholarship comes from P&PC hero and University of Florida English professor Marsha Bryant, who is the author of the new book Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) that we get to talk about here.

Fact: Collectively, the books, essays, and digital projects by these and other women scholars are pushing frontiers of how to read, understand, and study poetry, breaking down outdated binaries like “raw” and “cooked,” “oppositional” and “quietist,” lyric and non lyric. They are studying poetries in the plural (not Poetry) as cultural forces and as ways of thinking linked both to the everyday and the ideal, with sources in mass, popular, and counter cultures, computers and archives, transnational circuits of exchange, and public and political spheres. They are finding poetry in schoolrooms, diaries, letters, magazines, radios, cafes, movies, nature field guides, civic events, art centers, handbooks, slams, and digital pixels, as well as in books and little magazines. For them, “poetry” refers to a diverse set of historical phenomena ranging from what Damon calls fugitive “micropoetries” to intentionally epic-length works like Helen in Egypt, one of the texts that Bryant (pictured here) examines at length in Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture.

Fact: P&PC knows some of these people personally, and some of them we’ve never met. But to a one (and at risk of sounding cheesy) we’re inspired by them all.

Back in 1989, Susan Lanser published “ ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Politics of Color in America”—an essay that used the example of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s now-canonical short story to praise how feminist literary criticism changed and opened up the practice of literary studies and yet had its own blind spots; in focusing solely on the liberation of the imprisoned women in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Lanser claimed, feminist scholars “may have stopped short, and our readings … may have reduced the text’s complexity to what we need most: our own image reflected back to us.” In revealing the limits of feminism’s “relentless pursuit of a single meaning”—a pursuit that initially freed readers from a patriarchal canon and critical method even as it was threatening to become restrictive insofar as it approached texts as primarily about gender from a white, middle-class perspective—Lanser studied the yellowness of the yellow wallpaper, a central detail of the story that, amazingly, had escaped all but the most marginal commentary by critics.

As one reads Lanser’s essay today, it is almost possible to imagine the lightbulb moment when Lanser asked herself “But why is the wallpaper yellow—and not red, or purple or green?” Lanser’s subsequent re-reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is superb and superbly challenging, as she ties the color yellow to discourses of race and immigration in America at the time of the story’s writing (the late nineteenth century)—discourses that used the word “yellow” as a pejorative, catch-all description to refer to non-Nordic peoples including African Americans, Chinese, Jewish, Irish, and Italians. Putting the racial connotations of “yellow” in conversation with Gilman’s own complicated politics—Gilman was a socialist and feminist who nevertheless took anti-immigration and pro-eugenics stances and imagined "yellow" peoples as inherently more patriarchal and less capable of personal improvement than Nordic ones—Lanser reveals the woman trapped in and behind the yellow wallpaper to have a complicated ethnic-female identity with which the story’s narrator is simultaneously repulsed and seeking to free. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Lanser claimed, is not a story about woman’s predicament in a male dominated world generally speaking, but one about that predicament as it intersects with the ambivalences and contradictions of race and ethnicity.

In Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture, Bryant pursues something of the same approach as Lanser—examining the limits that feminist literary criticism has set up in the process of challenging the traditional literary canon and methods of literary scholarship—by taking on the oft-held feminist assumption that the woman poet always writes as an outsider and is thus primarily seeking, and engaged in, activities of transgression, subversion, parody, and critique. Scholars tend to assume, Bryant claims, “that women poets set out to subvert the mainstream” and therefore always offer “an oppositional aesthetic, a counter-discourse” when, in reality, they may write as cultural insiders as well. “The wide scope of women’s poetry does not conform to the contours of loyal opposition,” Bryant writes. “Even the signature styles of our key figures are more vested in the mainstream than we think.”

Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture thus revisits and rereads the work of several "key figures" in relation to their respective connections to the mainstream—sustained connections or motifs that Bryant calls their “signature styles”—and for how they claim the cultural center and write as cultural insiders rather than as outsiders. Chapter One focuses on the “CinemaScope poetics” of H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, a book that appeared the same year that Warner Brothers released the movie Helen of Troy (1956) and that borrows from the “cinematic ruptures of popular film and postwar geopolitics.” Chapter Two argues that the innovation in Stevie Smith’s funky illustrated poems (such as the one pictured here) was made possible in part by well-established practices in children’s literature. Chapter Three explores how the “cross-racial inspection” of Gwendolyn Brooks’s postwar poetry that “make[s] whiteness visible” owes a debt to the strategies of Ebony magazine and thus becomes “not simply a counter-discourse, but central to the national conversation about race” at the time. Indeed, Bryant writes, “Racial politics and popular culture contribute as much as modernist influences to the much-remarked difficulty of Brooks’s postwar poetry.” Chapter Four finds that many of the strange or surreal images in Sylvia Plath’s poetry pull directly from images of domesticity appearing in 1950s women’s magazines. And Chapter Five argues that the famous (and famously creepy) persona poems of Ai and Carol Ann Duffy—poems that resist confessional modes of communicating the “feminine” self in favor of creating portraits of serial killers and child abusers—have direct analogues if not sources in a “mainstream extreme” frequently encountered in sensational journalism and TV shows such as America’s Most Wanted.

In a paragraph seemingly included to answer just the sort of question that the P&PC office interns might consider raising, Bryant explains that Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture focuses on canonical or near-canonical poets—rather than on the many, now forgotten women poets who wrote with mass audiences in mind and regularly published in newspapers and mass-circulation magazines—for three main reasons: (1) because studying “established poets allow[s] for a reorientation of the field” since the field values them and calibrates itself in relationship to them; (2) because they are widely available in anthologies and thus don’t require recovery projects or archives to access; and (3) because many of these poets “prove difficult to position as cultural outsiders” in the first place, given how they’ve been lauded and honored in literary culture; they are prize winners, poet laureates, and even (especially in the case of Plath) figures recognized in and by the mass media. We here at the P&PC office can understand all that and, now that Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture has opened up the subject of women writing as insiders and not solely as members of a "loyal opposition," we hope that other scholars will check out the careers of poets who aren’t held in such high esteem today—poets like Anne Campbell, Grace Noll Crowell, 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winner Phyllis McGinley (pictured here on the cover of Time), Nancy Byrd Turner, Helen Welshimer, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, for example—and who made not just their poetry but, in some cases, their livings from positions writing inside mainstream popular and mass culture.

If this is one doorway that Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture opens up for other scholars, then there’s another that P&PC sees as maybe a bit more dicey but all the more provocative for being so. All of the poets showcased by Bryant take popular and mass cultural resources and turn them into opportunities for good art and innovative, usually progressive ends; that is, even though they operate as cultural insiders rather than outsiders, these poets still (inevitably?) produce politically or artistically progressive poetry. H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, for example, “calls into question the privileged masculinity of Homeric epic” even as it replicates some of the strategies of Warner Brothers. Smith’s poetry is read in relation to the mainstream but is celebrated for “the counterintuitive innovations” that result from Smith’s engagement with that mainstream. In her “artful forms,” Brooks (pictured here) perceptively and intentionally “pressured the rigid dualities of US racism.” Plath (Bryant calls her “a poet of Madison Avenue”) “did not just write domestic poetry; she reinvented it … by tapping the rich ambiguities and strange images of the everyday” and by making “poetry a form of cultural analysis.” All of which is to say that once Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture has broken apart the assumption that women poets are by default outsiders, it risks replacing that assumption with another: that when women poets do write as insiders, they generally succeed, innovate, transform, and write progressive poetry. In a postscript titled “Key Notes: Manifesto for Women’s Poetry Studies,” Bryant writes:

Too many of us still believe that a woman’s poem must resist popular culture to be successful. But we have seen that it offers poets aesthetic inspiration as well as an ideological sounding board. As artful consumers, poets open their signature styles to the graphic and the glossy, the screen and the scene. Modern and contemporary women poets take popular culture into their work, and readers must take it into fuller account.

To the end of more fully accounting for this overlooked feature of twentieth-century women’s poetry, we here at P&PC think it would also be worth having examples of scholarship that don’t cast women’s writing from the center as an almost uniformly successful activity, but as one entailing various sets of compromises and perhaps even failures as well. That is to say, Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture is so successful at what it does—making the links between women’s poetry, popular culture, and the cultural mainstream indisputable—that some more ambivalent or even negative examples would be worth including in the mix. Bryant has shown us how the center offers a set of resources for writers who then successfully use them, but where did other attempts to engage or write from the center limit or disable women writers, and how? Where did they fall short or go wrong, and why? Where and why do the forces of the market or insider positions (ideological or otherwise) curtail or confine them (one might even say get them to “sell out”), and how might those examples round out our sense of the dynamic intersection that Bryant has challenged us to map? It’s not an impossible task. To do so in regard to women’s poetry, however, would mean stretching feminist literary theory in yet another unconventional direction—one that would critique or call out, in addition to praising, showcasing, or representing for the poetry—and thus ensure that our operating assumptions as readers and critics don’t become as entrenched as they were before people like Bryant took them to task.

Poetry & the Movies: The Hot Tub Rhyme Machine

Regular P&PC readers might have surmised by now that someone in the P&PC office has an abiding interest in Hollywood's ongoing relationship with poetry. Not only are there lots of movies explicitly about poets and poetry, but film after film—ranging from Citizen Kane to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Long Hot Summer, Groundhog Day, and Fight Club (just to name a few)—makes use of poetry as a plot device, as shorthand for one type of character development or another, or (seemingly) as an almost entirely gratuitous detail.

Think back to Woody Allen's 1977 masterpiece Annie Hall, for example. Alvy Singer (Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) have just met while playing tennis. She gives him a harrowing ride home, weaving in and out of traffic on New York's narrow streets, and ultimately invites him to her place for a glass of wine. There—on what is more or less their first date—Alvy peruses Annie's bookshelves and pulls out a copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel. Here's that exchange:

Alvy: Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.

Annie: Oh yeah. Right. Well, I don’t know. I mean, some of her poems seem neat.

Alvy: Neat?

Annie: Neat, yeah.

Alvy: I hate to tell you, this is 1975, you know? Neat went out, I would say, at the turn of the century.

Predictable? Maybe in Annie Hall. But what about Steve Pink's 2010 comedy Hot Tub Time Machine in which three unhappy friends—Adam (John Cusack), Lou (Rob Corddry), and Nick (Craig Robinson)—are transported, along with Adam's teenage nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), back to "Winterfest '86" which was a pivotal weekend in all of their lives. Caught between the need to recreate the past exactly (so that the future is unaffected and Jacob still gets born) and an understandable desire to change the events that led to their current unhappiness, the three are forced in hilarious fashion to re-live and/or revise some of their most humiliating moments: Lou gets abandoned by his friends and beaten up by the psychotic head of the ski patrol; Nick gets a second chance to rock the house at what was an otherwise uninspiring concert the first time around; and Adam gets a second shot at finding the woman of his dreams.

Part of Adam's respon- sibility in this process is to recreate his break up with his high school girlfriend Jennie, who stabbed him in the eye for splitting with her the first time around. This time, however, Adam is fraught by second thoughts and delays the break, giving Jennie time to beat him to the punch. (She gives Adam a break-up note but still ends up stabbing him in the eye.) Devastated to have things turn out even worse than they did the first time around (or so he thinks), Adam retreats to his hotel room and gets stoned out of his mind. This is where Jacob finds him: in darkness, wallowing in self-pity while listening to The Cutting Crew's song "(I Just Died) In Your Arms Tonight," and—what else?—writing poetry. Here's that scene:

Jacob: Adam, hey. Thank God you’re back. Awesome. What’s going on here? Where are the guys?

[Cusack hands him the breakup note.]

What’s this?

[Jacob reads] "Dear Adam, you are a super terrific guy, and I love you, which is why this is so hard for me. I cherish our friendship…”

[Jacob laughs]

She broke up with you? And you still fucking got stabbed in the eye?

Adam [while writing]: Leave me alone. Get out of here.

Jacob: What are you doing here? Are you writing poetry?

Adam: Just leave me alone and get out of here. No.

Jacob: You’re writing fucking break-up poetry.

Adam: Alright, I’m writing break-up poetry, ok? … Because my heart hurts.

Jacob [looking around at all the drugs]: What is this shit? You’re wasted!

Adam: I’ve had like two wine kills, Captain Buzzcooler. God!

Jacob: You’re fucked up.

[Jacob picks up Adam's poem and reads]

"Jennie’s eyes,
like a gypsy’s lies,
cut right through the night.
Now those eyes
are another guy’s,
and I’m alone with my pain."

Adam: That was clean!

Jacob: Are you shitting me with this, Adam!?

Adam: Look, you can recite it straight or to the tune of "Sweet Child O’ Mine." It doesn’t matter.

Jacob: Are these mushrooms? Did you eat these mushrooms, Adam?

Adam: I like to eat 'em, you know. A couple of 'em.

Jacob: Holy fuck, man, you gotta stay straight. You’ve got to help me get the guys back.

Adam: You know, it’s not always about my emotional journey. It can be about yours.

Jacob: Put the coke down!

It's a funny, riotous scene in which the grown-up Adam revisits the genre of teenage poetry, and the ridiculousness of the entire endeavor (aside from the Guns N Roses homage, of course) serves to illustrate in miniature why the three adult men can't be entirely held hostage by the past. No matter how much poetry may express longing for a time it can't recover (as in pastoral poetry), or despite poetry's attempt to escape time altogether (as in many conceptions of the lyric), time must move forward and the guys must re-enter and make history. As if suggesting this very thing, the movie interrupts the argument between Adam and Jacob with the arrival of Chevy Chase who plays "the mystical time travel guide guy" come to remind them—as the thunder and lightning of a Romantic poem storm in the background—that the hot tub time portal will be closing soon. To get things done (or to make things happen, as Auden might put it), one needs more than the self-indulgence or reflection that poetry as a genre offers; one needs a plan or a plot to move forward in time (and/or through the pain of a breakup)—the exact thing, or so the movie's logic goes, that Hollywood provides that poetry cannot.

What all these movies have in common— Hot Tub Time Machine, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Groundhog Day, and Fight Club—is their substantial focus on moving through time in one way or another. In Steve Pink's comedy, that movement is backwards and forwards; in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is stuck repeating the same day over and over; in Fight Club and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, characters completely lose sense of time when they change into their alter egos. And Annie Hall and Citizen Kane are about sorting through the past, reflecting on what is now unattainable and what might have been. Thus, at some level, all these films must confront the fact that they are treading on poetry's traditional and culturally-sanctioned terrain, and they solve the resulting rivalry in different ways, all of which end up—no surprise here—privileging the technology of film and leaving P&PC, like Adam in Hot Tub Time Machine, alone with our pain.

"Thankful for What?": A Scrapbook for Thanksgiving 2008

Between the Civil War and World War II, Americans were fanatical scrapbookers, cutting and pasting their way through all of print culture—magazines, newspapers, trade cards, advertisements, greeting cards, playbills, almanacs, broadsides, booklets, brochures and the like—and archiving any and all material of interest or even potential interest. Families sat down to scrapbook together. Louisa May Alcott said she read "with a pair of scissors in my hand," and her literary brothers and sisters kept pace: Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Jack London, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Amy Lowell, Lillian Hellman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Sandburg, Carl Van Vechten, and Vachel Lindsay all kept scrapbooks of various sizes, stripes and sophistication.

Of course, less celebrated Americans kept scrapbooks as well, and one of the more surprising things to learn about American scrapbooking is that it very often included poetry. Not just included, but centered around, focused on, and devoted itself to good, bad and ugly verse of all kinds. Americans sometimes maintained these personal anthologies for years, sometimes from generation to generation, sometimes working in concert with other scrapbookers. The resulting albums are fascinating artifacts from America's literary past.

Over the past several years, I've managed to collect about 100 such poetry scrapbooks, some of which are beautiful, some of which are falling apart, some of which are 200 or 300 pages long, and some of which I've been able to post online for your viewing pleasure at Poetry Scrapbooks: An Online Archive. As Thanksgiving approaches, however, I thought I'd shine an autumnal light on one poetry scrapbook in particular, a veritable cornucopia of clippings which was likely assembled during the Depression or World War II and which contains the page pictured to to the left and the two pages which follow. (Just click on the images for larger, more readable versions.)

This scrapbook takes the months of the year as its organizing rubric, perhaps borrowing that structure from the farmer's almanacs that had been a regular part of American life since the 1800s. (Think of the almanac in Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Sestina," for example.) It begins with poems about Valentine's Day, then features a page spread on March which is followed by poems about April and a short illustrated narrative in verse titled "An Easter Eggs-ploit." The section on Thanksgiving consists of seven illustrated poems spread out over the space of the three pages seen here.

Even taken out of context, these pages display many of the hallmarks of poetry scrapbooks more broadly speaking. For starters, the material included here crosses literary "brow" lines, ranging from apparently trite or sentimental popular verse to "A Tribute to the Pilgrims," written by then-Poet Laureate of England, John Masefield. Also, poems that appear to be unpolitical or not at all socially engaged oftentimes acquire a degree of social engagement by virtue of their relation to other poems: the piece by Masefield, for example—in which the settling of New England is described as "the sowing of the seed from which the crop of modern America has grown"—pulls the surrrounding poems about farming and nature (such as "Harvest Time," "Sumac," and "Flight South") into a larger discourse about U.S. history and identity. Lastly, as with many scrapbooks put together during the Depression, certain financially-oriented figures of speech such as

Flowers and sunrises, stars and rainbows,
Health and strength and friendship's ties,
Join in balancing life's budget,
For that Roll Call in the skies.

invite particular speculation about how inspirational or sentimental poetry functioned during times of economic crisis to both help people process the nature of that crisis and identify value systems other than capital by which they could orient their lives.

Scrapbooking is undoubtedly a nineteenth- and twentieth-century version of commonplace book-keeping—a literary activity in which people hand-copied passages from books into their own personal journals or ledgers. Over the years, the word "commonplace" has changed in meaning, going from a term that suggested a particular, even extraordinary value to a term that now usually means "ordinary" or even "trivial." At times, the popular verse in poetry scrapbooks—and especially Depression-era poetry scrapbooks—uncannily performs this etymological history in reverse: seizing on the ordinary and promoting it as extraordinary. The poem "Thankful for What?," for example, is a litany of thanks "just for little things" and concludes:

[Let me be thankful] For little friendly days that slip away,
With only meals and bed and work and play,
A rocking-chair and kindly firelight—
For little things let me be glad tonight.

In a sense, this poem asks for the power to be thankful for the commonplaces in life, not just in literature—for the valuable parts of living that have become, like their literary antecedents, ordinary or trivial over time. That is, in a sense, this poem wishes to extend the literacy practice of commonplacing or scrapbooking into a sort of philosophy of living in which the apparent scraps of life have unanticipated or unrecognized value. That's not a bad thing to think about this November 27 as we teeter on the edge of another depression and wonder where, oh where, the next bailout will come from.

Pedestrian Poetry

A few weeks back, my friends over at Vowel Movers were crowing about a perfect pair of poetry pumps from Nine West that went perfectly with their Sylvia Plath dresses. Ever on the lookout for new and interesting footwear, "Poetry & Popular Culture" is happy to call attention here to the "Poetic License" brand line featuring lyrically trendy styles such as "Romance," "Tranquility," "Venom," and the "Breathless" Mary Jane pictured to the left. Hopefully now, Vowel Movers, you'll finally be able to work those Gertrude Stein slacks—or your Elizabeth Barrett Browning hoop skirt, or that Edna St. Vincent Millay twin-set, or even your Beowulfian bodice—into a complete outfit to take on the town. Carrie Bardshaw, eat your heart out.

While "Poetry & Popular Culture" is hardly in the business of dispensing advice on matters sartorial, it nevertheless can offer a poetry pamphlet, "The Shoe Day of Judgment," in the way of a gentle cautionary tale. Produced in 1900 by the St. Louis Wertheimer-Swarts Shoe Company, manufacturers of Clover Brand Shoes (not Joshua Clover Brand Shoes), the pamphlet is a warning for those who might all-too-casually slip "Venom" or "Romance" onto their hoofers and go about their daily lives, wearing those shoes hither and thither, willy-nilly through sleet and snow and city and countryside with little consideration for the well-being, care, and feeding of the shoes themselves.

"The Shoe Day of Judgment" begins with a short preface, "Abuse of Shoes," explaining the man- ufacturer's complaint and appealing for "some sense": too many people hold a shoemaker responsible not for flaws in workmanship but for the consumer's irresponsible misuse. "There is nothing," Wertheimer-Swarts proposes, "that clothes mankind so much abused, and yet is so unreasonably expected to continue Perfect in Fit, Style, Workmanship and Service, as are its Shoes. We appeal to a fair-minded, thinking public to give a few facts their consideration. No two persons wearing the same grade and make of shoes will realize the same service. Leather will wear out. Gritty soil, briars, rocky and rough surfaces, Scuff and Peel soft, velvety uppers. Fine mellow tannages of leather in footwear exposed to extremes of weather, to Heat and Cold, to Mud and Slush, will crack. Seams put to such tests Rip. Failure to care properly for your shoes, by frequent cleaning, oiling and dressing, exposes them to rapid destruction and decay."

"Such abuses," the shoe company goes on, "are the burden of our song." And what a song it is! In 35 ballad stanzas, "The Shoe Day of Judgment" tells of a shoemaker who falls asleep and dreams of a day when shoe-abusers get their comeuppance for unfairly holding manufacturers responsible for every crack, rip, or tear caused by misuse. A farmer who puts his shoes against the fire and redeems them for a new pair the following day is sent to hell. A boy who tears his shoes on "gravel, brick and stone" is sentenced to twelve months of study without vacation. A teamster—not yet part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters—has his "foolish head" soaked. Another man is sent to a thousand years in jail because he returned his shoes:

I bought them small, I must confess,
To make my feet look smaller,
Yet soon returned them by express,
Marked 'C.O.D. $1.00.'"

While calling attention to the particular pleasure of rhyming "smaller" with "$1.00," "Poetry & Popular Culture" also wishes to direct attention to the similar fate of the maid, which may be of special interest to those smiling yet careless misses seeking out Nine West's Poetry pump or any of the Poetic License products currently on the market:

Then came a maid, a smiling miss,
Whose action naught condones,
Who careless ran, that way and this,
And walked on glass and stones.

Back to the dealer with an air
Of injured worth she went:
"I'll have to have another pair;
These are not worth a cent!"

Oh, when the Judge encountered this,
His mien was most severe.
"You'll have to go, my careless miss,
Barefooted for a year!"

While "The Shoe Day of Judgment" may be a harrowing tale, its use of poetry as both a tool for advertising and instruction in the consumer marketplace is not unusual, as virtually every product was hawked via verse at one time or another during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Back then, poems were employed for their prestige or entertainment values. Nowadays, though, at least to judge from Nine West and Poetic License, the title of Poetry is grafted directly onto the product itself, because what can be more reassuring in our uncertain age than knowing that what we buy—indeed, even the very act of buying—is where, in fact, the poetry's at.