Guest Posting: The Poetry of Patchwork

Reading between the lines of text and textile, Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Adam Bradford writes in about mid-19th-century mourning poetry and the poetic wrap (not rap) that Eliza Howells quilted to help stave off the chills of death and grief.

When Mark Twain set about lampooning what he felt was an overly-morbid 19th-century culture of mourning, he did so (in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) via the character of Emmeline Grangerford. As folks in the Poetry & Popular Culture office may recall, Emmeline was known for her “crayons” (hand-drawn pictures of people mourning at the tombs of their deceased) and “tributes” (poems depicting the deceased “sport[ing] aloft in the realms of the good and the great”). Twain’s satire gained traction because some of the age's “popular” poets like Lydia Sigourney and Julia Moore had made their reputations (not to mention a respectable sum) filling best-selling books such as 1847's The Weeping Willow with line after line of “consolation verse.” Consider, for example, Sigourney’s “The Consenting Mother":

"I see the green fields, and glowing flowers;
I see bright streamlets flow,
Sweet voices call to glorious bowers;
Dear Mother! Let me go.”
His cheek grew pale. Had hasting death
Dealt the last final blow?
List! List! Once more the fainting breath,
“Oh Mother! let me go.”
How could her love the soul detain,
That struggled to be free?
Or, leaguing with that tyrant Pain,
Obstruct its liberty?
“Lord! Not my will,” she said, “but Thine,”
And high her darling soar’d,
And from the skies that ever shine
An angel’s descant pour’d.

Sigourney’s poem may strike contem- porary readers as trite or contrived, but for many people in 19th century America — people such as Eliza Howells, whose quilt square appears to the left—such poetry was an important tool for dealing with grief. Sometime in the 1840s, Eliza Howells began accumulating a number of quilt squares as gifts from family and friends. Largely commemorative, these squares mark important events in Eliza’s life such as her wedding in 1843 and her Grandmother’s death in 1845. The same grandmother whose death is commemorated on one square, in fact, produced the square celebrating Eliza’s marriage.

Eliza produced the central, "capstone" square of the quilt herself. The images she penned here—the heavy curtains, the urns with emerging flowers, the clock, the dark dress—are all contemporary symbols of mourning, and the voice she gives the object is, perhaps fittingly for the time, a rather poetic one that testifies to the power of this rather curious text-ile and provides insight into how it became meaningful for Eliza. Together, the poems show that the quilt connected her in two ways to a “spiritual community” of loved ones whose physical presence she no longer enjoyed. The first, which seems the most “memorial” of the two, is entitled “Friendship” and reads:

In Vain—in different paths we tread—
And though no more mayest soothe or cheer;
Yet we have those hours of friendship shed,
A sweetness that still lingers here;
Thy form & look, in memory’s glass,
I still distinctly see;
Thy voice and words, in fancy’s ear
Are whispering still to me.

"Friendship" is followed by the second, more consolatory piece entitled “Eternity":

When the dream of life is fled,
When its wasted lamp is dead,
When in cold oblivion’s shade,
Beauty, power, wealth are laid;
Where immortal spirits reign,
There may be all we meet again;
On the tree of life eternal
Man, let all the hope be staid
Which alone, for ever vernal,
Bears a leaf that shall not fade.

Together, these poems suggest how the quilt enlivens the people who helped produce it while simultaneously prefiguring Eliza's reunion with them in the "ever vernal" afterlife. Crafted as it was by hand (or hands), it quite literally served as a site where Eliza could stitch, bind, and tie herself to those, like her grandmother, who had not only helped produce the blanket's other squares but who were commemorated there as well. Morbid? Maybe. But for Eliza, who could wrap herself in the combination of image, text, and material—and perhaps for more than just a few people in our current day—it was one way to keep warm against chills borne of gale or grief.

Adam Bradford writes in from the University of Iowa where he is finishing a dissertation on the literature of 19th century American mourning practices.

Christmas 1921: Fred & Myrtle's Scrapbook

For Christmas in 1921, Myrtle Eckert of Skykomish, Washington, wanted to give her eldest son Fred something special. Born in 1896 or 1897, Fred was in his early 20s and would be getting married soon and perhaps moving away from home. He was from a working family. Myrtle worked in town as a maid and housekeeper. Fred's father George was a nightwatchman for the railroad. Skykomish was the Western terminus of a 7.8 mile-long tunnel beneath Stevens Pass, and every train had to stop there to switch from a steam to electric engine or back again; there was thus a lot of railroad work to be had. Fred and his brother Vern found work in the region's other major industry, however: timber. In 1921, Fred was likely working at the local shingle mill, and Vern (born in 1899) was running the donkey at the mill pond.

Neither George nor Myrtle finished high school, nor did Fred for that matter, though what they lacked in official education they more than made up for in life experience. Myrtle, for example, was born in Wisconsin in the early 1870s and had first come West, to Idaho, by covered wagon; her house there had a dirt floor, and she'd tell stories later in life of how she'd look up from her day's work to find Indians staring in at her through the house's Isinglass windows. She was accompanied to Idaho—which had become a state in 1890—by her first husband Fred Farnham, who was accidentally poisoned to death a few years later when a doctor gave him iodine to drink instead of cough syrup. George was Myrtle's second husband and father to both her boys, though Fred, her oldest, was likely named after her first husband and likely occupied a special place in her heart because of that.

Probably because of their lack of edu- cation — George, for example, could write only his name— reading and writing held a special place in the family. Fred's nephew Roy, now in his 70s and a retired journalist living in Oregon, remembers "there was great emphasis put on published and written things," and so, when Myrtle wanted to give something special to Fred on Christmas in 1921, she made him a poetry scrapbook, pasting each clipping (so Roy reports) into the album with a homemade paste made from flour and water.

At 5" high, 7" wide, and a half-inch thick, the album is an eminently portable one— perfect for a young man potentially on the move. The inside cover carries a color gift tag with a picture of a candle and poinsettia flowers accompanied by the message "A Merry Christmas." Beneath that message, Myrtle has handwritten her own: "To Fred / From Mother / 1921." Just over fifty clippings follow, all of which impart some sort of life lesson about the value of persistence, work, thrift, honesty and—of course—maintaining a close relationship to mom. "God Bless My Mother!" reads in part:

A little child with flaxen hair,
And sunlit eyes so sweet and fair,
Who kneels when twilight darkens all,
And from those loving lips there fall
The accents of this simple prayer:
"God bless—God bless my mother!"

Myrtle had a particular affection, it appears, for the poet Berton Braley, who is responsible for nearly a third of the poems in the album. Part of Braley's appeal might have been that, like Myrtle, Braley was born in Wisconsin and subsequently went west—to work for newspapers in Montana. He'd eventually go East, however, and to New York, where he'd work as a journalist and a writer for Life Magazine, McGraw-Hill, Funk and Wagnalls, and Collier's. If you want to know more about Braley—he wrote tons of poetry not just for newspapers but for postcards, envelopes, calendars, ink blotters, posters, lithographs and even this blog's favorite advertising campaign, Burma-Shave—check out the Berton Braley Cyber Museum.

Like Edgar Guest (pictured with ping-pong paddle to the left), Anne Campbell, Helen Welshimer and others, Braley is part of a generation or two of poets whose work was regularly syndicated. Myrtle apparently found his poems in the Everett Herald, Seattle Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer where they were sometimes accompanied by drawings or cartoons and calligraphic titles (see the image of "Cleared" below). While Braley is not at all averse to dispensing swell life lessons like the following from "The Good Fellow Route"—

It's brilliant with lights and with laughter and song,
But the song and the laughter don't last very long,
And under the lights in their pitiless glare
Stand Sorrow and Ruin and Woe and Despair;
Blithe friends and companions you'll meet, beyond doubt,
If you journey through life by the Good Fellow Route!

—he doesn't sit still as a writer. In "Cleared," for example (another poem Myrtle included in the collection and pictured to the left), he responds to the 1914 court decision clearing Ownership of any responsibility in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. That poem begins:

"Cleared!" By the word of judge and jury,
Beating in vain at the bolted door,
And the long-drawn wail of the mothers crying,
Shall haunt their memory evermore.
The prison bonds may never bind them,
They walk, free men, in the open air,
But wherever they go their past shall find them,
And haunt them and mock them everywhere.

Myrtle's inclusion of "Cleared" is full of significance and mystery for "Poetry & Popular Culture." If the poem was written and published shortly after the 1914 court decision, did Myrtle cut it out at that point and save it another 7 years before pasting it inside the scrapbook for Fred? It's entirely possible she did. If she didn't, though, then may we assume that the poem was reprinted out West long after the East coast event it was written to address had passed? If that's the case, we're left to think about what gives Braley's "occasional" poem its serious legs, a strange ability (in the words aesthetic critics like) to "stand the test of time." No doubt, some of the poem's longevity would have had to do with the moral lesson that the factory fire and court case allows Braley to express: that justice and guilt are not contained within and distributed by courtrooms alone. In the working-class context of Skykomish—no stranger, probably, to Wobbly agitation—the friction between ownership and labor at the center of the court decision would have signified more broadly as well; the event, in this case, becomes a metaphor and even rallying point for laborers everywhere.

In either scenario—if Myrtle saved the poem for 7 years before finding a home for it in the scrapbook, or if Braley's poem had a staying power and cross-continental appeal that we don't typically associate with "occasional" poems—the situation of "Cleared" in the gift that Myrtle made for Fred in 1921 demonstrates how complex things can get when it comes to the world of popular poetry. Not only are working-class readers more sophisticated and socially involved than they've been given credit for being in histories of 20th century literature, but the authors of the poems they read are sophisticated and socially involved as well—a statement uttered with some frequency around the "Poetry & Popular Culture" office, but one which is worth restating nonetheless.

Our gratitude goes out to Roy Webster for taking the time to share some of his family's history with Poetry & Popular Culture for this posting.

Very Moving Poetry

If Corn Flakes and Michael Phelps are concerned with ingesting and inhaling (see "What's in Your Bowl Today?"), then what of this matchbook advertisement for America's most notorious source of "gentle, dependable overnight relief"? Clearly, Ex-Lax is also intimately related to interiority—from tummy to tush, someone less cultivated might say—as the poem here indicates:

In days of old
when knights were bold,
Tummies, perhaps, had tin sides.
But folks these days
like milder ways.
Ex-Lax befriends their insides

Not surprisingly, Ex-Lax relates to interiority as it has to do with, well, exteriority. Here, the poem's historical move from the coarser and less-refined "days of old" to modern times and "milder ways" serves as an analogue for the desired gastronomical movement from inside to outside, and discomfort to comfort, which the laxative is designed to facilitate. Not only is Ex-Lax positioning itself as part of historical innovation and improvement, but that discourse of progress figures the personal progress one hopes to experience with the aid of "the ORIGINAL chocolated laxative." In this context of fluidity—which leaves out of all history between the middle ages and the 1950s—is it too much to argue that Ex-Lax's poetics of movement extends to the form of the poem itself, with the indented lines performing or demonstrating the effects of the drugstore item?

Lest one remain unconvinced of this (ahem) poo-etics, he or she need only open the matchbook, which has not only been emptied of its fire-starters—and which is designed to be emptied—but which also contains some "suggestions" from the local police department about how to best, most safely, and most efficiently move, both in car and on foot. By following the traffic lights ("Let the traffic lights be your guide"), we are told, one avoids creating a "jam" which no doubt tropes the very constipation Ex-Lax relieves and which the no-good law-breaking jaywalker instigates. Joining the movement of history, from difficult days to milder ones, with an urban landscape designed to move in particular ways, Ex-Lax in fact hitches its chocolatey cart to the ideals of modern America, all on the space of a piece of paper half the size of an index card. If that isn't a smooth move, then I don't know what is.

Bob the Bunny

Check out this cute little crafty project offered to the public by The Spool Cotton Company in 1930. One in a series of six barnyard friends including Kitty Cat, Puppy Dog, Hal Horse, Clara Cow and Pete Pig, Bob Bunny is a poetic, Depression-era hare easily assembled with a pair of scissors, a few dabs of paste, and a spool of thread. As the card explains:

This little chap
is BOB the BUNNY;
His ears are long,
his tail is funny.
When Bunny laughs,
he bangs his heels
To show exactly
how he feels.
He always wants
to play with you,
And so he tells
you what to do.
Read his directions
then have fun
With SPOOLS that make
your BOBBY BUN.

As with the business cards offered by The Palace Saloon and Restaurant and the Schenk Publishing Company, part of Bob Bunny's appeal is that he's part of a set that the enterprising consumer can collect—an entire barnyard threaded together, as it were, by their versified introductions. Having grown up with mass manufactured plastic Fisher Price barnyards (complete with their creepy bestiaries and round-headed, disproportionate humans), Poetry & Popular Culture has a particular fondness for the world of Bob and his furry friends. Admittedly, that world has its own element of creep—Why does Bob bang his heels when he laughs? What exactly is a Bobby Bun? Why does Bob want to play with me?—but at least it's creep that comes from poetry, not from polymer.

What's in Your Bowl Today?: The Poetry of Michael Phelps

It's perhaps a little unfair of Poetry & Popular Culture to bring up the topic of gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps so soon after his recent indiscretion, but we're going to do it anyway, because the poetic box of Corn Flakes with his smiling mug on front is nigh irresistible. Issued not long after his record-setting Olympic performance, the 18 oz. carton pictured to the left includes a 10-line snippet of poetry from the official Olympic Team poem on one side panel (betcha didn't know there was such a thing as an Olympic Team poem in the first place) and the entire 30-line verse, "Amazing Awaits," printed inside. The 10 lines printed on the exterior begin with the title and read:

where we least expect it, or
after training for it all our lives.

it awaits in our Olympians.
in all Americans.
in the honor of victory
and the glory of pursuit.

with a nation behind us,
with a world before us,
and within us all ...

amazing awaits

Mind you, this isn't the first time that the Battlecreek, Michigan, company has used poetry to promote a bowl of its cereal as the cure for the morning munchies. Early in the 20th century, for example, Kellogg's issued illustrated booklets full of rhymes (pictured to the left) serving the interest of the most important meal of the day. Nor is Phelps the only recent Olympian to hitch his athletic cart to this blog's favorite genre. Iowa gymnast Shawn Johnson, for one, includes inspirational poems under the "Get to Know Shawn" portion of her web site. (Poetry & Popular Culture has tried to reach Johnson for comment, but she and her agents have declined to be interviewed.)

The inclusion of "Amazing Awaits" isn't gratuitous, nor does it disrupt the overall rhetoric of Corn Flakes. Kellogg's printed an order form for a free Michael Phelps poster on the inside of the box, so it took little in the way of extra time or money to print the poem there as well. As the order form suggests, the lion's share of the box's rhetoric works to direct the consumer's attention toward the morning goodness inside the carton: the order form is inside, the nutritional information focuses on the contents ("Corn used in this product contains traces of soybeans"), five of the six pictures of Phelps show him in the water, a sentence printed near the tab instructs the hungry breakfaster how to open the box ("To open, slide finger under tab..."), and a little blurb cautions us against accepting poseur cereals: "If it doesn't say Kellogg's on the box, it's not Kellogg's in the box." Kellogg's and Phelps share a predilection for, and particular expertise with, the preposition and prefix "in." Kellogg's is occupied with ingesting. Phelps—the swimmer and recreational user, natch—is in the business of inhaling.

As the genre most associated with interiority, the poetry follows suit if not swimsuit. As the excerpt above suggests, "Amazing Awaits" is taken with the language of inherence, immanence or inspiration. The poem's first stanza—

it awaits in 200 meters,
in a hundredth of a second,
in our courageous first steps,
and with our every last breath

—establishes this focus, and while the rest of poem plays with the various other places where "amazing awaits," it makes sure to end with lines—

with a nation behind us
with a world before us
and within us all

—that repeat the central trope of inspiration illustrated so well by the amphibious Phelps who, in two pictures, is gulping air as he swims. Along the way, of course, Kellogg's is managing to make its product not just a source of Olympic and national inspiration but also a means by which hungry Americans can participate in Olympian endeavors themselves—via, well, whatever bowl they happen to have at the breakfast table.

At the Foxhead On Election Night

Design & Print by Sarah McCoy






















"At the Foxhead on Election Night" originally appeared in The Press-Citizen on November 7, 2008.

U.K. Milkman Delivered Pot with Bottles of Milk

Appeared in The Press-Citizen February 13, 2009

If I weren’t such a well-known prima donna,
and if I were less timid than a mouse,
I’d call this poem “Directions to my House”
and wait for tomorrow’s batch of marijuana—
the little plastic bag, snuggled tight
between the six clinking bottles of skim,
a special delivery to me from him
so I’d be able to start the morning right.
If the tagline weren’t already taken
I’d say “Your Weed—It Does A Body Good”
not to mention the whole neighborhood;
we’d look for you each day when we’d awaken.
Sound like I’m a dreamer? That’s the point
since the milkman’s now—where else?—in the joint.










More on Good Bad Poetry:

"Writing Good Bad Poetry"
"My Poetic License"
"Laura Bush Unveils George W. Bush State China"
"At the Foxhead on Election Night"
"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"