Finding Edith Granger

Regular readers of this blog will remember how, half a year back, we did an interview with Tessa Kale, current editor of the Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry—the standard library reference guide to poetry that was first published more than a century ago, in 1904, by Chicago's A.C. McClurg Publishing Company, one of the nation's premier book sellers which was also the first publisher for The Souls of Black Folk and the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. One of the more interesting things that P&PC discovered while doing that interview is that virtually no one has any idea who the real-life Edith Granger actually was. Apparently, the woman who not only created the index that became part of almost every library's holdings—and that is now in its 13th edition and going strong—but who also loaned her name to its title, has virtually disappeared from our historical record. One reference we consulted even speculated that the person of Granger was actually a fiction created by McClurg to sell books!

Well, after months of digging around, and making phone calls, and consulting census reports, and gathering documents, and making trips to Chicago and California, P&PC is proud to report that we have finally found Edith Granger. She was most certainly not a fiction but a very real human being who was born in Illinois, who attended Smith College, who worked for A.C. McClurg in Chicago, and then—for reasons we have yet to discover—moved to California. There, she married William Hawkes at age 39, had a daughter, divorced, ran a prune farm, worked as the Fulton County postmistress, and—as the obit attached to the cemetery index card above indicates—stayed involved with writing partly via the League of American Pen Women.

For much of her time in California, Granger lived in Sonoma county, but, after retirement, she moved to West Sacramento—probably to be near her daughter, Eleanor H. Eggersgluess, who had married and was living there. Edith lived at 125 13th Street (presumably in the small house that stands on the property pictured above). Granger died on September 17, 1957, in a hospital in Yolo County. Following a funeral at the George L. Klumpp Funeral Home, she was cremated and her remains placed in the wall pictured here, at the East Lawn Memorial Park, located at 4300 Folsom Blvd. in Sacramento. Edith's in the second row up from the bottom, in the third niche from the left. We here at P&PC like to think she's perfectly at rest, properly cataloged and indexed on the shelves there in Sacramento, almost like one of the poems she helped to organize, catalog, and index earlier in her life.

As the lack of flowers at her niche suggests, however, Granger has indeed been forgotten—not just by poets, literary critics and librarians, but by her relatives as well. It is for this reason that P&PC suggests that the English departments of two nearby universities—California State University in Sacramento, and University of California in Davis—might take upon themselves the task of remembering Granger more fully. Given the historical recovery work regularly done by English Departments, and given their imperative to chart and remember the many and overlooked contributions that women have made to literary history, a flower now and then—perhaps a poem—doesn't seem much to ask.

When the Cat's Away, the Mice Read Poetry: The Case of The Long Hot Summer

In the 2006 Bruce Beresford flick The Contract, Ray Keene (played by John Cusack) is an unsuc-cessful father who, out on a camping trip with his son, encounters escaped hit man Frank Carden (played by Morgan Freeman) and tries to win his son's admiration by bringing Carden back to civilization and justice. Carden tries to warn Keene against playing the hero, and during the hike back, Keene and son are pursued by Carden's paramilitary team, shot at, attacked via helicopter, and subjected to Carden's psychological assaults. They run, they talk, they scale cliffs, they sweat. There are attempted escapes and explosions and moments of unanticipated bonding, and Carden does everything he can to slow the group's progress—including quoting poetry. P&PC can't remember the exact poem he tries to recite before Keene shuts him up, but we think it was part of "The Road Not Taken." Not entirely sure. For our purposes here, though, the specific poem doesn't matter as much as the fact that the movie seems to identify poetry in general as a force that impedes forward progress and threatens efficiency—something that slows our hikers and runs counter to the endgame Keene has in mind. Aligned with the African-American killer Carden and set up as contrary to the forces of fatherhood, whiteness, law, and justice, poetry is thus—in the world of The Contract at least—a criminal undertaking.

This isn't exactly the case in The Long Hot Summer—Martin Ritt's extremely entertaining 1958 film which is based on a couple of Faulkner stories—but it's not that far off. The film features Orson Welles as rich, Mississippi plantation owner Daddy Varner, Joanne Woodward as Varner's unmarried schoolteacher daughter, Clara, and Paul Newman as the Machiavellian, bootstrapping, six-packed stranger whom Varner picks out as a perfect mate for Clara. Daddy sorely wants grandchildren. He wants a virile family. Especially now that his health is growing suspect, he doesn't want Clara to dilly dally with her mama's-boy of a suitor; he wants a quick, efficient, direct way to manufacture descendants. Most of the movie, as such, has to do with how Clara learns to appreciate and accept the crass Ben Quick (played by Newman). But The Long Hot Summer is also a love story between Daddy Varner and Quick, as Varner manages his attraction to the younger man via his daughter's bedroom instead of his own.

As with The Contract, The Long Hot Summer identifies poetry as a force impeding the efficient execution of patriarchal and legal powers. In The Long Hot Summer, however, that force is wielded not by an African-American male criminal postponing his submission to the criminal justice system, but by a white woman postponing her submission to the patriarchal sex-gender system of marriage and pregnancy. Check out the following passage from early in the movie when Daddy Varner returns from an out-of-town operation and ruthlessly belittles everyone—especially his only son Jody—for not doing enough in his absence. After he thoroughly lays into Jody, this is the exchange between Daddy Varner and Clara that follows:

Daddy Varner: I'm my old self again. Them doctors down in Jefferson, they gutted me, and they took away just about every organ they thought I could spare, but they didn't pare my spirit down none. Thank you, Jody, for your kindly inquiry as to my health. [Jody didn't ask.]

Clara: Next!

Daddy: All right, sister. You're on.

Clara: What do you want to know, Papa?

Daddy: You still fixin' to get yourself known as the best-looking, richest old maid in the county, or have you seen any young people lately? Any young people seen you? At any parties, any picnics, any barbeques, any church bazaars? Have you mingled? Have you mixed? Or you kept yourself up in that room all this time reading them poetry books? Huh?

Clara: I hope this doesn't come as a shock to your nervous system, Papa, but when you're away, I do what I please.

Daddy: Well, I'm back!

Clara: Welcome home.

This passage is brilliantly done, in part for how it reverses the expec- tations of conven- tional story lines; when the cat's away in The Long Hot Summer, the mice don't play—they read poetry. And that's exactly what infuriates Daddy Varner, as he associates poetry with, and thus conflates, a combination of things including female independence, sterility, solitude, onanism, and (most likely) rhyme. Unlike the stereotypical over-protective father, he wants his daughter to go mix and mingle, but she does what she pleases while she's alone in her bedroom; for her (and for her father), poetry is a form of birth control. That Clara's aware of the threat her poetry reading poses to the dominant sex-gender system Daddy Varner represents is clear, as her reference to his personal "nervous system" no doubt implicates the larger systemic forces she feels bearing down on her as well.

Of course, The Long Hot Summer falls on the side of order, justice, law, fatherhood, patriarchy, etc., as Clara eventually partners up with Quick. For some reason, we don't remember the end of The Contract, but we suspect the same is true there as well—that Carden is caught or killed, that poetry is equally domesticated or disciplined, and that Hollywood perpetuates its strange, low-level, but ongoing smear campaign against poetry. Nevertheless, these two films remain intriguing to P&PC because they don't suggest that some poetry is oppositional and some is not (as many people claim), but that, in the American cultural imagination, at least, all poetry—in the woods, or between the sheets—is somehow associated with forces that challenge dominant orders. Carden and Clara are both criminals for reading it. Who knows if maybe you are too?

Something to Chew On: Scary Babies, Big Tobacco

Poetry & Popular Culture came across this goody the other day and initially planned to save it for later. Impatience has gotten the best of us, though, and so here it is—a 19th-century advertising trade card for Duke's Durham tobacco that features two of the scariest babies we've ever seen. One of the most popular forms of advertising in the Gilded Age, trade cards advertised everything from soap and coffee to sewing machines and patent medicines—Harvard's Baker Library has a collection of 8,000 of them which you can search here if you're looking for something special—and were collected, individually and in series, in the scrapbooks and albums which Ellen Gruber Garvey studies in Chapter One of The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture 1880s to 1910s (1996). If you know anything about baseball cards, then you know they, too, like the card pictured here, were also used to advertise tobacco and, in some cases—as with the famous 1910 T206 Honus Wanger—are worth a lot of dough today.

Some of these trade cards were "metamorphic" in design, featuring folded giveaways that opened and shut, oftentimes to demonstrate and physicalize the "before-and-after" effects of a particular item. With these types of cards, consumers didn't have to imagine the transformative effects that a product would magically have on them but could actually see it happening. Many trade cards included poems and, as with the metamorphic card here, used those poems to narrate the transformation taking place. Closed, the card reads:

Heavens! What will keep these children quiet?
People grow crazy at the riot,
And bring them candy, cakes and pie,
The more they bring, the more they cry.

But, courtesy of the Duke and his long pipe, people have a solution waiting for them at the local general store. Open the card, find the smiling babies clutching their own tins of leafy goodness, and read:

What can have brought from tears relief,
And caused these infants thus to smile,
The reason is in words quite brief,
"DUKE'S DURHAM," will e'en babes beguile.

Over the years, of course, big tobacco has made numerous claims about the restorative, health or beauty-inducing qualities of their product, but P&PC has never seen tobacco producers go so far as to make a play for the nookie market—suggesting chew tobacco as the perfect chew toy to keep your toddler from, well, bawling its lungs out.

Poetry & Popular Culture Hits PMLA

If you've got a little time on your hands and are looking for a bit of extra reading about this blog's favorite subject matter, check out "The Business of Rhyming: Burma-Shave Poetry and Popular Culture" which is in the brand new issue of PMLA (not the issue pictured to the left). The Poetry & Popular Culture office has written about Burma-Shave before, but this new essay contains almost—almost—as much as we have to say on the matter. The fact that we get to say it in PMLA—that bastion of academic criticism—makes it all the more sweet.

So, as a teaser, here's the first paragraph, which follows a quotation from Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography.

[A]nd it was there I first saw the shaving advertisements that delighted me one little piece on one board and then further on two more words and then further on two more words a whole lively poem. 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.

—Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography

The theme of the New York Times Crossword on Wednesday, 30 April 2003, begins with the clue for 17 across: "Start of a roadside verse." That clue and four others—23, 38, 47, and 58 across—link to produce a rhyming answer that staggers through the crossword's grid not unlike the way the Burma-Shave billboards being quoted from were staggered in sets of six along highways in the United States for nearly forty years in the mid-twentieth century, before regulations limiting "visual pollution" helped bring the shaving oeuvre to an end: "THIRTY DAYS / HATH SEPTEMBER / APRIL JUNE AND THE / SPEED OFFENDER / BURMA SHAVE." While the crossword is not exactly what William Zinsser had in mind in 1964 when he claimed that the poems in the then recently discontinued advertising campaign had become part of "the national vocabulary," it is nonetheless a compelling piece of evidence on his behalf. "No sign on the driver's horizon gave more pleasure of anticipation," Zinsser eulogized in the Saturday Evening Post. "Roads are no longer for browsing."

Happy reading.

Oregon Grapes, Alpaugh's Wine

Poetry & Popular Culture doesn't normally make a habit of sending you elsewhere via hot links like so many other blogs do. Why in the world would we want you to leave when there are tons of tasty treasures to explore here together—treasures like the postcard pictured above, for example, which features a drawing of the second Oregon State Capitol building, built in the 1870s to replace the first which burned down in 1855. This second capitol suffered the same fate as the original, however, burning down in 1935. Thanks to WPA funding, though, yet another capitol was built and opened just three years later, in 1938 (see the new building pictured below). It's kind of funny to stroll by the place today—there are some great Depression-Era murals painted inside—and think about how all of Oregon's present-day tax-haters are pursuing their tea party agendas inside of a building that likely wouldn't have happened without $2.5 million in federal funding.

The poem on this postcard reads:

Queen of the Northwest—OREGON,
The ocean coast she reigns upon,
And the emblem of her verdue fair
Is rich wild grape with clusters rare.

It's a puzzling bit of verse to be sure, and we're not exactly sure how to parse it—especially the quasi Christian, three-in-one logic that seems to unite the sentence's three parallel subjects (the "Oregon" of line one, the "ocean coast" of line two, and the "emblem" of line three) in the image of the official state flower, the "rich wild grape" of line four. Nevertheless, we do have to admire the poem's use of "reigns" in line two, which puns on the dominant meteorological feature of Salem and suggests that legislative power in Oregon runs east-to- west, contrary to the weather, which primarily comes in from the coast, moving west-to-east. And is it just us, or is it possible that "fair" in line three puns on the fact that Salem is not only home to the state capitol but also the Oregon State Fair, started way back in 1858?

The key to this polysemy—or so one of the office interns suggested in a moment of particular clarity—might be in the poem's use of "verdue," which, according to the OED, is an irregular variant of "verdure." Not only does the less frequently used "verdue" seem appropriate in a poem about wild grapes with "clusters rare," but suggests that a fecund landscape marked by a great abundance and variety of plants is also a landscape in which words and meanings proliferate as well. Hence the puns on "reigns" and "fair." Hence the capacity of a single image like the wild grape to have multiple, equally viable referents (the State, the ocean coast, and the emblem).

It's spring here in the Cherry City, however, and so perhaps our reading of these four lines is affected by the amazing number of strange and unusual things growing outside. Everywhere we look, it's flowers, flowers, flowers, moss, moss, moss, and rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. All of this greeny world has us thinking about generation and multiplication more generally, and hence comes our recommendation to check out David Alpaugh's "The New Math of Poetry" which recently appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Here, Alpaugh tries to come to terms with "the astounding number of poems being published today" and writes, "Unfathomable are the countless self-published chapbooks and collections printed each year, to say nothing of the millions of personal Web sites, blogs, and Facebook pages where self-published poetry appears."

We here at the P&PC Office can't say that we agree with many of Alpaugh's suppositions—that this "boom" is a brand new phenomenon (it isn't), or that the next Blake or Dickinson may be lost in the process (not our major concern), or even that the question "Who are the best poets writing today?" is even the most important question to be asking (cuz it ain't)—but we do appreciate the underlying recognition that poetry is happening, and has happened, in many more ways, in many more forms, and among many more writers and readers than histories of the genre typically grant. For Alpaugh, this is something of a nightmare. For us, it's a dream.

Hooked on Fisher Poets

This weekend, the Poetry & Popular Culture office—and six English majors from a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" course being conducted at Willamette University—heads up to Astoria, Oregon, for the 13th annual Fisher Poets Gathering. In advance of our trip, we caught up with one of the festival organizers—fisherman, poet and teacher Jon Broderick, who has been helping to coordinate the event lo these many years.

Poetry & Popular Culture: You were there when the Fisher Poets Gathering started, right? What were you thinking?

Jon Broderick: Yes. I made the first phone calls, and I never found anyone who didn't think it wouldn't be a terrific idea or who didn't want to help. Folks like John van Amerongen of the now defunct Alaska Fisherman's Journal, Hobe Kytr of the Columbia River Maritime Museum, Julie Brown and Florence Sage of Clatsop Community College and, of course, forty friends and poets, contributors to the Alaska Fisherman's Journal over the years, all of whom showed up with their friends and found themselves among kindred spirits who knew when to nod and when to wince when someone read a story about work in the commercial fishing industry.

P&PC: How have things changed since then?

JB: Since our first Fisher Poets Gathering, a movable gathering wandering from the Wet Dog to the Labor Temple and back, we've become four or five concurrent venues over four days. It's grown, but it's kept a casual, democratic feel. It's no contest. It's no slam. Anyone who's worked in the industry is entitled to fifteen minutes at the mike to tell his or her version of events. We pay the sound guy with proceeds from the gate and divvy what remains among the out-of-town readers, favoring those from farthest away. Along the way, we've had to insist now and again, against more ambitious interests, on the Fisher Poets Gathering's inclusive and communitarian roots and purposes. Mostly, we want to enjoy the company of other fishermen and women, tell stories, and see old friends and make a few new ones.

P&PC: What's a good example of a Fisher Poet poem?

JB: Geno Leech's "Let's Go Take a Look" is one of my favorite poems about the industry. When he recites it, he rocks back and forth on stage with his eyes closed. I don't have a written copy of it here—just on audio. It describes, from a deckhand's point of view, that moment when a skipper decides to go fishing in tough weather that the hands would rather miss. When your skipper says "Let's go take a look," you're in for a long couple of days. But there's nothing to do but pull on your rain gear and hunker down. Every deckhand's been there. Geno's a master at making each word work in his poetry. Part of it goes: "In the sodden, black-blanket night, hung with woodshed fir-pitch musk, I ragged a hole in a fogged up windshield and limped off in a crippled truck. Rain drilled the road with welding-rod drops, porch-lit houses drowned in their sleep, beer cans lay drunk on the fog line. I turned left on Portway Street..."

For me, the experience of participating in the life of the commercial fishing community is more important than the technical quality of anyone's poetry, though. We turn away fine poets and musicians who haven't worked in the fisheries. We get enough fine poetry nonetheless.

P&PC: What happens when cowboy poets meet fisher poets?

JB: Cowboy poets and fisher poets have plenty in common. I wrote an essay for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering a few years ago about the very thing when the cowboys invited some of us to perform there. Both celebrate honest work, a love for the tools and techniques of their trade. Both live close with nature at its best and worst. Both remember the characters they've encountered. Ron McDaniel (not pictured here) is a cowboy from Arkansas who has joined us in cross-cultural exchange every year now for four or five years since some of us met some of them in Elko, Nevada. Ask him when you see him this weekend.

P&PC: What's the new generation of fisher poets like?

JB: An unexpected but durable result of the Fisher Poets Gathering is that it's been an occasion to generate writing about the culture of commercial fishing by folks who wouldn't write about it if the Gathering didn't exist. Fisher poets are more often older than younger, but a number of kids are seeing themselves a part of the tradition they, too, want to celebrate with others. Lots of times, it's families that fish together. My kids have worked hard beside people of all ages. You'll find some young voices to enjoy this weekend. You decide what they're like.

Absorbing Joyce Kilmer: From the Poetry & Pop Culture Mailbag

A few weeks back, P&PC received the following letter from Ernest Hilbert— Phila- delphia- based poet, blogger, and editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review—which pleased us to no end. It's not often that the office gets mail, let alone fan mail, let alone fan mail with photos, let alone fan mail about Joyce Kilmer with photos of the Joyce Kilmer Service Area in New Jersey (pictured here). Talk about making us feel special! Here's that letter and our response.

Hi P&PC,

I am up in Boston for a lecture and reading I gave last night. On the way up, we stopped at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Stop. I always intone "I do not think that I shall ever see / a poem as lovely as a tree" while swooping up the ramp. My wife said, "You should take a picture for Poetry & Popular Culture," and that is what we did. Yours is the only legitimate poetry blog around as far as I am concerned. All best,

Ernie

*********************************************************************************

Dear Ernie,

We're sorry it's taken so long for P&PC to reply to your letter, but your note drove us deep into the office archives in search of some items that might help return your kindness. Rest stops named after poets are not entirely unheard of and, in their own artificially-lit ways, ask us to pull off of the standard literary-critical interstate, grab a Snickers bar, and think seriously about what it would mean to measure poetry as Walt Whitman proposed in the Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass that it might be measured. "The proof of a poet," he wrote there, "is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."

Take the "Hoosier Poet" James Whitcomb Riley, for example, who, if the P&PC office research team is not mistaken, has a rest stop named after him in Indiana. Riley has been left off of most maps of American poetry despite (or because of?) the way he's been absorbed by the rest of America. Did you know, for example, that Riley's 1885 poem "Little Orphant Annie" was not only made into a 1918 movie but then became the inspiration for naming Harold Gray's daily comic strip—itself the subject of more movies, plus radio and tv shows? Pursuing Whitman's standard of measurement, one might say that Riley was so absorbed by his country that he's nigh disappeared.

But what of your Joyce Kilmer (pictured in uniform here here)—the New Jersey poet of "Trees" who was 31 years old and considered the leading Catholic poet of his generation when he was killed at the Second Battle of the Marne in World War One? Like Riley, Kilmer is not remembered for being a strangely modern writer—Riley came after most of the Fireside poets and during the late 19th-century advertising boom, and Kilmer was included in all sorts of "modern" poetry anthologies—so much as the source of a small jingle or two, especially that 1913 ditty you yourself intone on the way to the rest stop that now bears Kilmer's name:

Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

There's not only a rest stop named after Kilmer, but schools, a forest, and even Camp Kilmer in New Jersey which, according to Wikipedia, was "activated" in 1942 and became the largest "processing center" for U.S. troops heading out to, and returning from, Europe during World War II. We here at P&PC find it especially despicable that, as the matchbook pictured to the left and above indicates," "Trees" was pressed into propagandistic service of these military activities. Here, via the arboreal imagery on the booklet's cover and the Kilmer poem printed inside, Camp Kilmer is not at all being presented as the site for massive military operations that it actually was, but as a sort of poetic summer camp instead.

Camp Kilmer's matchbook edition of "Trees" makes us think about the various complications of that 1855 Whitman quotation, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Not all Americans used "Trees" as deceptively as the U.S. military did, however, as the poem was printed over and over in newspapers, magazines, school textbooks, anthologies, and church booklets. It was cut out and saved in poetry scrapbooks, like the one pictured here; "Trees" is at the bottom of the middle column. (If, by the way, you look at this page up close, you'll see that the album is not made out of a commercially-issued blank book but was, curiously enough, put together on the "blank" pages of a braille book. Go figure, right?)

Back in the day, though, lots of poets wrote poems praising trees, and poems were frequently read at Arbor Day or tree- planting celebrations all around the U.S. In 1927, for example, graduating high school student and future director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop Paul Engle would himself pen "Dedication Poem Read at the Planting of the Cedar by the Class of 1927." (A copy of that poem is included in Engle's papers at the University of Iowa Special Collections, so you can check it out for yourself the next time you're in Iowa City.) And, if you take a closer look at the upper left-hand corner of the braille-scrapbook page (pictured here), you'll find yet another tree poem—this one a translation of a poem first written in Norwegian by 1903 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Apparently, the market for tree poems was so robust around the turn of the century that the U.S. began importing them! If you want to be even more convinced of this tree-poem phenomenon, check out all the verse in the 1896 "Annual Program for the Observance of Arbor Day in the schools of Rhode Island" which includes—you better believe it!—the very Bjornson poem collected in this scrapbook alongside Kilmer's "Trees."

If these examples suggest how "Trees" was part of an entire genre of leafy poems—not unlike Whitman's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," perhaps—that were fully and continually absorbed into U.S. culture, then the album page pictured here (taken from a different scrapbook altogether) indicates the singular importance of Kilmer's "Trees" to that genre. Take a look at the item pasted on the left-hand side of this scrapbook page, for instance, where the album's editor has placed an article about the "breath-takingly beautiful" royal poinciana tree. Not only does that article take its title from Kilmer's "Trees," but it then quotes the last two lines of the poem as the definitive word on metaphysical dendrology. "The royal poinciana," the author writes, "is so radiantly lovely and so flamingly vivid and gorgeous that one can scarcely bear to take one's eyes off it. The sight of this tree in its springtime robe brings to mind Joyce Kilmer's appreciative and immortal words: 'Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.'"

So, we've come a long way from that New Jersey rest stop, Ernie, but we hope it's been worth the ride and that we've convinced you that a school of criticism taking Whitman as its source is not only a viable, but also a valuable, way of tracking how our literary heritage speaks through our culture—just as Kilmer spoke through you between Interchanges 8 and 9 on the New Jersey Turnpike. Make sure your lights are on, and drive safely.

Yours,

The Only Legitimate Poetry Blog Around