At the Border with William Carlos Williams

'Twas New Year's Day in 2005. I'd spent a great Christmas in Vegas, had seen and hiked the Grand Canyon for the first time, and had driven down through Arizona to visit friends in and around Tucson, falling in love with the landscape and the saguaro cacti. Preparing to cross from the U.S. into Mexico at Nogales, Arizona, with my wife and two friends on January 1—my first time south of the border—I came to stand before this marble monument etched with an excerpt from the poem "At Night" by William Carlos Williams:

The stars, that are small lights—
now that I know them foreign,
uninterfering, like nothing
in my life—I walk by their sparkle
relieved and comforted.

Mind you, the border at Nogales is not easy on the eyes, nor is its landscape a particularly poetic one—at day or night. A huge corrugated steel fence topped with razor wire runs as far as the eye can see up the hill in both directions, decorated on the Mexico side with artistic memorials for those who've died trying to make the cross.

Not easy on the eyes. Not easy on the soul. And not easily poeticized. Indeed, what sort of relationship between the U.S. and Mexico was the U.S. border guard trying to enact by erecting the excerpt from "At Night" (first published in Matthew Josephson's avant garde magazine Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts in 1923)? How are we supposed to read the stars of the poem—"foreign, / uninterfering"—in this border context? Is it supposed to be descriptive of Mexico? Is it a fantasy about the way the U.S. would like Mexico to be? Is it comparing the idealized stars, "like nothing / in my life," to the actual state of border politics which is anything but uninterfering? Is the focus on the stars rather than on real circumstances a wish to wash away the reality of border violence? It's not entirely clear how we're supposed to read "At Night" in this borderland, but "Poetry & Popular Culture" can't help but find the desire to be "relieved and comforted" a fatuous one on the part of U.S. border police.

This is made all the more confusing by the fact that Williams has been chosen as this border's bard. As we all know, the Good Doctor was born in, and lived most of his life in, New Jersey—far from the Mexico/Arizona border. While Hispanic in origin, the "Carlos" in his name does not come from Mexico as the monument's placement suggests, but from Puerto Rico where his mother was born. Despite the bilingual English/Spanish translation of the marbleized poetry, Williams's Hispanic roots themselves have little to do with Mexico or this part of the U.S.

As a poetic ambassador intended to ease—or get people to ignore—the pains of the border fence and the separation of families and loss of lives that that fence represents, this monument is as grotesque a failure as the corrugated steel and razor wire itself. Leave it up to the politicos to not only attempt to beautify or distract us from the ugliness of their policies, but to then confuse the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico with the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico—lumping all Spanish speakers into one idealized "foreign, / uninterfering" group of people! The Good Doctor must be rolling in his grave.

In Search of the Bad Poetry File at the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County

Earlier this week, "Poetry & Popular Culture" received a tip from Stephen Headley—Manager of the Magazines & Newspapers Department at the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County—who said that a "bad poetry file" existed somewhere in the depths of that library's collection. Headley put me in touch with Bruce Sherwood, a reference librarian and 30-year veteran of the library, who confirmed that said archive does in fact exist but under the name of the "Auxiliary Poetry File," known as APF for short.

Sometimes, Sherwood told me, those with somewhat less appreciation for the cultural importance of popular poetry than "Poetry & Popular Culture" has, called the APF the "Awful Poetry File." I asked Sherwood if said negative elements had been purged from the library, but he didn't comment. Instead, he sent me this official description of the collection, which consists of an amazing 55 boxes of index cards:

INDEXES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

APF: Auxiliary Poetry File (ca. 1900-1950)

A unique, home-grown index comprised of fifty-five boxes of yellowed index cards with author/title citations to poems culled from selected magazines, newspapers and grade school readers in the early part of the twentieth century. Presumably intended to augment Granger's Index to Poetry, this covers lesser poets or, "bards not sublime," published in non-literary periodicals such as Life and Stars and Stripes and includes many full-text poems from local newspapers -- hand cut and pasted by librarians on three-by-five cards.

Although limited in time and scope, this is an irreplaceable resource because there is no known index to newspaper and textbook verse. Selection is heavy on World War I-era patriotic verse. The APF is especially treasured by those of an earlier generation who wish to recall poems they once memorized from their McGuffey readers.

Affectionately referred to by staff as the "Awful Poetry File," perhaps because most of the poems are "awfully" hard to locate and a few are just plain "awful," the APF has been somewhat eclipsed in purpose, if not coverage, by the World Wide Web.

Sherwood then went on to gloss this description for me even further:

"Although the file has been largely supplanted by the Internet, it is also no doubt true that a large percentage of the entries will not be found elsewhere. It is arranged in a Granger's Index style, with entries for authors, titles, subjects, and first lines in one alphabet. Not all of the poems are 'bad,' nor do all of the 3" x 5" cards consist of pasted clippings from newspapers and magazines. Some entries are just locational notes (e.g., 'Wharton, E. -- Hunting song, Literary Digest, Vol 38, p. 816'), and some are cryptic, such as the title listing for 'A Hymn of Hate,' which is attributed to Dorothy Parker and shown as occurring in five nonsequential issues of Life magazine in the early 1920s.

"During my tenure in Literature and Languages and its predecessors (1980-2007), it was used mainly as a last resort in the years before World Wide Web searching became commonplace. That is, after following up all hunches and tediously checking the many volumes of Granger's, a meticulous search required a run through the APF. At that point the exhausted librarian could confidently tell the patron that he or she had searched EVERYWHERE.

"Before Google, the APF was a significant (if incomplete) source for ephemeral verse. In public libraries, poetry texts are frequently requested by the elderly, who are trying to remember a poem learned in the single-digit years. Then there are many who want the 'correct' text of a half-remembered poem they may have seen on a greeting card or wall plaque. If they could remember the first three words of the title or first line correctly, then the APF could sometimes help them."

I can't speak for the readers of "Poetry & Popular Culture," Bruce, but I will go to sleep happier tonight for knowing the APF exists. And I will hope that some affluent reader of this blog comes up with a cool fortune to help the library digitize & make searchable this amazing resource.

Burma-Shave Politics

Many thanks to Angela Sorby, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and author of Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917, for alerting "Poetry & Popular Culture" to a recent tidbit at the Onion. In "McCain Blasts Obama As Out Of Touch In Burma-Shave-Style Billboard Campaign," the Onion depicts this year's Republican presidential candidate as being out of touch via an old-style advertising medium: the serial billboard poem made famous by the Burma-Vita Company's "Burma-Shave" campaign which dotted American highways from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Loved by Americans ranging from my mother-in-law to Gertrude Stein (who, in Everybody's Autobiography wrote "I wish I could remember more of them, they were all lively and pleasing.... I wish I could remember them I liked them so much”), the Burma-Shave signs have been called part of "the national vocabulary" and have been installed in the Smithsonian Institution as relics of our 20th Century past. At the height of the Burma-Shave campaign, over 7,000 sets of signs using 600 individual poems were maintained in 44 states and were seen by untold numbers of drivers. It’s possible that through the 1920s, the Depression, World War II, and the 1950s, Burma-Shave’s poems were the most public, widely read verse in America.

What the Onion doesn't suggest—in cartooning McCain as outta date—is how the model Burma-Vita pioneered is, in fact, still used as part of political campaigns today. Drive through central Illinois, and you'll see signs made by locals lambasting gun-control advocates or promoting soy bio-diesel as an alternative fuel. Four years ago, in my own town of Iowa City, several neighbors along Muscatine Avenue pitched in to post poetic signs in their yards supporting the presidential campaign of Howard Dean. Those signs read:

Feeling Bushed?
Lost your grin?
Cheer up folks:
The Doctor's In.
Caucus for Howard Dean.

And in 1996—so Bill Vossler reports in his history of the advertising campaign Burma-Shave: The Rhymes, the Signs, the Times—rhymster Republicans in Washington, D.C., experimented with serial anti-Clinton billboards to pitch that year's ticket:

If you’re tired of a White House
That’s always smokin’ hemp
Vote for our future
Vote Dole-Kemp!

This was not the first time that Bob Dole associated himself with Burma-Shave verse. For the 1990 reissue of Frank Rowsome Jr.'s book The Verse By the Side of the Road: The Story of the Burma-Shave Signs and Jingles (first published in 1965), Dole was asked to write a Foreword that concluded with his own original five-line ditty:

In politics
It's always safer
Not to make waves
It's not my style
I've had some close shaves

Not the best imitation of Burma-Shave poetry, to be sure. But what's worth noting—and what bodes well (or bards well?) for Barack Obama in 2008—is that, despite the billboard poets having their backs, neither Dean nor the Dole/Kemp ticket were successful in their presidential bids. That's not to say that "Poetry & Popular Culture," uh, bristles at the thought of Obama using poetry in his campaign. Just that he shouldn't at this point get cheeky.

Writing Good Bad Poetry

As regular "Poetry & Popular Culture" readers may well know, for the past two and a half years I've been writing poems for the Opinion page of Iowa City's daily newspaper, the Press-Citizen. Topical, occasional, oftentimes humorous commentaries on the week's news, these poems are aggressively embedded in specific historical and journalistic contexts and happily go forth into the world eschewing notions of artistic timelessness and universality. Insofar as they do so, they hearken back to the days when newspapers across the U.S. regularly ran poems as part of the daily news—news that sometimes stayed news (newspaper poets actively debated their day's hot-button or wedge issues such as abolition and women's suffrage), but that more often than not ended up as the next day's fish wrapper.

The current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine—buy yours today!—has a longish look back on the 60-plus poems I've written for the Press-Citizen and the virtues and perils of trying to revive the tradition of "good bad poetry" in the present day. Here, to whet your whistle, is an excerpt:

One of the things that sticks in my mind (and in my craw, admittedly) after two years of reading and writing Poetic License poems, however, is a poem that the paper wouldn't print, and the very fact of its nonpublication suggests there are limitations to how good bad poetry can function in public forums like the Press-Citizen. At the time, the University of Iowa was trying to hire a new president, and the Iowa board of regents had, in many people's minds, overstepped its authority by conducting the search in secret without input from faculty, staff, or students. As the faculty senate deliberated how to express its disapproval, I wrote:

It's time for a no-confidence referendum.
The Regents are broken, so let's end 'em.
Let's make the process transparent
and the next search as apparent
as Britney showing the world her pudendum.

I liked the limerick because, like many good poems as well as good bad poems, it cuts two ways. On one hand, it argues for a more open search process. On the other hand, in voicing that opinion via the tabloid example of Britney Spears, the poem begins to sound like a send-up of those arguing for a transparent process: Do we really want the search to be that open?

In the end, [editor] Charis-Carlson returned the poem to me with profuse apologies, explaining that some higher-up at the paper had objected to my use of the word pudendum. I protested, of course. It's an anatomical term most frequently used in clinical contexts. Slate magazine used it in a headline. It's entirely in keeping with the limerick's popular bawdiness, and readers would clearly recognize that. Charis-Carlson said he sympathized but said there was nothing he could do; it was officially too dirty for the paper. So I thought about it and realized that Charis-Carlson's prudish higher-up wasn't necessarily objecting to the word per se so much as to the poem's implication that official university business might in fact occupy the same discursive world as Britney Spears's genitalia—which is kind of dirty. I quickly rewrote the poem to demonstrate the fact and sent it back to the Press-Citizen.

The presidential search is the pits.
The Regents are giving us fits.
Let's make the process transparent
and the next search as apparent
as Britney showing the world her naughty bits.

That verse, it goes without saying, was also returned to me, as well it should have been: It's not nearly as good a good bad poem as the first version was. But in the process, I learned that even Poetic License comes with a few restrictions.

A Few Good Bad Poems:
"OMG! Buddhist Nun Texting Novel"
"Dinosaur Descendant to be Dad at 111"
"Cat Chasing Mouse Leads to 24 Hour Blackout"
"Man Faces Jail for Smuggling Iguanas in His Prosthetic Leg"
" 'Lingerie Mayor' Vows to Stay in Office"
"O.J. Simpson Questioned in Vegas Incident"

Business Bards: Dr. C.B. Weagley, Veterinary Surgeon

"Poetry & Popular Culture" continues to showcase the small-business poets of yesteryear who hawked their services, wares, and—as the example of Dr. C.B. Weagley presented below suggests—even their intimate knowledge of horses' teeth, via poetry. Relying on their bardness to take care of their bidness, these inglorious Miltons participated in the project of America's free enterprise if not the freeing of its verse.















Just click on "The Age of the Horse" to the left for a larger picture and insight into the telling features of the "middle nippers."

Poetry & Popular Culture Expose: Did Paul Engle Write for Hallmark?

Did Paul Engle write poetry for Hallmark? You betcha he did! The longtime director of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop—the guy who shepherded the M.F.A. Program in creative writing to national prominence, who hired Vonnegut, Lowell and Berryman to teach writing in Iowa City, who mentored Flannery O'Connor, Robert Bly, Philip Levine, Donald Justice and others who would go on to spread the good workshop news far and wide—more than once put pen to paper in service of that bastion of literary publishing: Hallmark.

Find out more in "Remembering Paul Engle," on news stands in the current (October/November 2008) issue of The Writer's Chronicle. Excerpt follows:

On December 4-5, 1959, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and Esquire magazine co-sponsored a symposium that brought Ralph Ellison, Mark Harris, Dwight Macdonald, and Norman Mailer to the Iowa City campus, which was then called the State University of Iowa. This was the second such event that Arnold Gingrich—publisher and founding editor of Esquire—had organized. The previous year, he'd arranged for Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Wright Morris, and Dorothy Parker to meet at Columbia University in New York in order to discuss "The Position of the Writer in America Today." A year later, under the somewhat narrowed rubric of "The Writer in a Mass Culture," Gingrich and longtime Writers' Workshop Director Paul Engle welcomed audiences to the prairie, opening an event that had been pitched to the press in functional, decidedly prosaic language. "Four distinct statements of the problem," the release read, "will be made by four widely published writers who have faced the constant issues of art and the marketplace."

In New York, Wright Morris had spoken of the “mindless society” into which he saw United States writers introducing their work, and Mark Harris’s leadoff speech in 1959 picked up where Morris let off, setting the stage early for a wholesale, broad-stroked denunciation of mass culture from the perspective of highbrow art and literature. “Art and mass distribution are simply incompatible,” Harris began. “The writer has no business reaching for a mass audience and the serious reader has no business distracting the writer by discussing with him possible methods of bridging the gulf between the writer and the mass—it cannot be bridged.” Harris went on to make several proposals which he felt would improve the situation of the literary arts in the United States, including a drastic reduction in the number of books published each year, the subsidizing of presses by wealthy foundations, and “the creation of a bureau of pure books and standards, whose role would not be censorship nor repression, but education and clarification.” Nor was Harris above naming names. “Let us declare once and forever ..., ” he implored, “Edgar Guest was never a poet.”

While the symposium would go on to nuance the terms of Harris’s opening remarks, neither Macdonald nor Mailer would challenge his general depiction of mass culture. Macdonald, who published his famous essay “Masscult and Midcult” in the Partisan Review a year later, lamented the lack of a “cultivated class” in the United States which he saw in England and answered that “the serious writer has to ... write for his peers.” Calling mass culture “a dreadful thing,” Mailer went on (as only Mailer himself could have, perhaps) to ratchet up the rhetoric by saying, “I consider it a war, I consider the mass media really as if I were living with a cancerous wife and each day I have to see her all the time and she gives me a bit of her cancer. That is about the way I feel about the mass media.” Only Ellison argued for a more sophisticated position. “A democracy,” he cautioned, “is not just a mass, it is a collectivity of individuals. And when it comes to taste, when it comes to art, each and every one of these people must have the right, the opportunity, to develop his taste and must face the same type of uncertainty which all of us face on this platform.”

In the symposium’s transcript, however, Paul Engle is silent on these matters. On one level, this silence is completely understandable; as moderator, his job was to conduct the speeches, referee the Q&A period that followed, and specifically not inject his own feelings on the subject. On another level, however, his silence is more provocative. For Engle—the man who had been directing the prestigious Writers’ Workshop for seventeen years, who had brought John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Kurt Vonnegut to Iowa City to teach, who would mentor writers like Robert Bly, Philip Levine, Donald Justice, and Flannery O’Connor, and who would go on to lead the program for almost another decade—was not only at that precise moment placing his poetry in publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes & Gardens, and Reader’s Digest magazines. But he was writing poems for Hallmark greeting cards as well.

Guest Posting: The Poetry of October

Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Michael Butterworth sings with broken heart about the joy, verve and poetry that is, was, and might have been, the 2008 season for the Chicago Cubs.

I know very little about poetry, but I do know a great deal about baseball. When the two meet, as they often do, I am ready with two standard references. The first comes from the former literature professor, Yale University president, and baseball commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti. Of the seasonal metaphor commonly ascribed to the national pastime, Giamatti—himself a specialist in Renaissance poetry—wrote that baseball “breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to the face the fall alone.” There is indeed poetry in Giamatti’s words. And truth. For as a devoted, and thus tortured, fan of the Chicago Cubs, this year's post-season has left me feeling quite alone.

The Cubs began 2008 with the hope that springs from every team’s pre-season training camp. And with a roster that showed early and often that it was the best in the National League, that initial hope eased into confidence in the full bloom of summer. But the coldest autumn winds are those for which you—despite the lines of so many poets—are least prepared. And all the assurances earned during a summer of dominance expired in three short gusts of a Shelleyian west wind from Los Angeles. Almost before they began, the playoffs were over for the Cubs and their long-suffering fans.

We have been here before, we Cubs fans. We know the cruelty of billy-goat curses, black cats, and Bartman. But this year was different. This year we expected to win. Yet the best team does not always win in baseball. Just two years ago, the 83-win St. Louis Cardinals won a World Series championship; five years earlier, the record-setting Seattle Mariners were bounced from the American League playoffs in spite of their 116 regular season wins. Losing, then, is always possible. And it is even tolerable—so long as your team plays with poetry.

All of this brings me to the second of my standard references: Bull Durham. It is a movie full of wonderful metaphors, surely the most famous of which is the “church of baseball.” Through the character of Annie Savoy, baseball is more than a church however; it is what rhetorical critic Kenneth Burke would call “equipment for living.” Baseball, Annie insists, guides and inspires us, and its aesthetic disposition is essentially poetic. Mid-way through the film, in fact, Annie confirms this fact for us when she rejoices at the newfound spirit of her hometown team, declaring that “for one extraordinary June and July, the Durham Bulls began playing baseball with joy, and verve, and poetry.”

The trick, of course, is to capture this poetic essence in October. To their credit, the Los Angeles Dodgers did this masterfully. The Chicago Cubs, meanwhile, appeared to have lost their collective will and spirit. Consumed, it appears, by the weight of an epic 100-year drought, Cubs players looked withdrawn, apprehensive, and afraid to seize the day. As a consequence, their season came to an abrupt halt as the team across the diamond demonstrated the joy and verve that would have made Annie Savoy proud.

Poetry is no substitute for talent, mind you. The Dodgers also won because they possess stellar pitching and a reinvented lineup that now features one of the game’s all-time great right-handed hitters. But even the most casual of fans would acknowledge that the Cubs gave themselves little hope. At the end of the day, what does our success matter if we cannot run and laugh and scream a little along the way? What good are 97 wins if we cannot express, exalt, and emote? These things I know about baseball; this is what we talk about when we talk about baseball. And I suspect they give me a little knowledge of poetry, after all.

Michael Butterworth writes from Bowling Green University in Ohio, where he is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies and keeper of The Agon, a blog that takes on the "Rhetorical Contests of Sports, Politics, and Culture" at http://theagon.blogspot.com/.