The Book of the Undead, Part One: Ce Rosenow Reviews Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku

Jane Austen has met the zombie. So has Abraham Lincoln. The Poetry & Popular Culture Office has been nearly, uh, dying to know what happens when zombies meet poetry as well. And so, when we discovered Ryan Mecum's two books, Zombie Haiku (2008) and Vampire Haiku (2009), we turned to haiku expert Ce Rosenow (pictured here), hoping to, well, pick her brain about what happens when the living dead (pictured below) turn to seventeen syllables for self-expression. Here, in the first installment of a two-part review of what we can only call Mecum's re-animated body of work, Rosenow fleshes out the hunger for poetry and horror that seems to run (where else?) in our blood.

Part I: Zombie Haiku

Zombie Haiku's blood-spattered pages and zombie photos will resonate with readers who are familiar with typical visual representations of zombies—the lurching gait, outstretched arms and vacant eyes are all present here. In addition to that nod toward iconic zombie imagery, Zombie Haiku also acknowledges the cinematic and literary genre of which it is part. Night of the Living Dead, for example, is present, if understated, in the farmhouse and cornfield sequences that show up in Mecum’s narrative.

However, Zombie Haiku requires that readers overcome two obstacles. First, they must suspend a certain amount of disbelief—and it’s not disbelief about zombies’ existence. No, the disbelief that arises when reading this collection stems from the book's central premise: a reanimated dead person insatiably hungry for human brains and other body parts who chooses to document the search for said parts using, of all things, a poetic form that requires counting syllables. This counting can’t come easy for the zombie. After all, as he becomes increasingly driven in his search for human flesh, he admits in neat, seventeen-syllable sound bites that he has trouble remembering things:

I can't remember
how to open this window
so I'll just stand here.

They are so lucky
that I cannot remember
how to use doorknobs.

Regardless of the character’s poetic impulses when he was human, the zombie’s existence is all about brains: his own doesn’t work and he’s hungry for others, yet he writes haiku.

Fortunately, such apparent contradictions are easily overlooked in literature. Consider, for example, Samuel Richardson’s heroine in Pamela who ostensibly composed the letters that comprise this 18th-century novel even as she locked herself behind various doors to avoid her employer's sexual advances. Clearly people—even the living dead—will document their lives regardless of trying circumstances. And with the zombie, whose body parts become damaged and sometimes fall off altogether, these circumstances tend to grow increasingly difficult:

My fingernail snaps
ripping off that light switch.
Now I’m down to six.

Looking at my hand,
somehow I lost a finger
and gained some maggots.

Filling the pages of his journal with poems and drawings representing his experiences clearly takes dedication.

After getting past this first obstacle, the reader confronts yet another: zombie haiku are not haiku. Just as a zombie is a shell of a human being without a soul, so the poems in this book replicate the syllabic structure of haiku but lack the content of haiku. Most haiku include some combination of the following: seasonal references, two images, internal comparisons, and a pivot line. While traditional, avant-garde, horror, and science fiction haiku writers typically maintain some connection to the standard characteristics of haiku in their poems, Mecum does not. Additionally, the syllabic structure diligently adhered to by Mecum's zombie is usually not followed by the majority of English-language haiku poets nor by most contemporary Japanese haiku poets.

Haiku, however, are as trendy as zombies, and so the idea to bring the two together is not surprising. Haiku have, for the last three decades at least, been used repeatedly to address popular topics—sports, business, movies, teen angst—and to suggest a cutting edge approach to these topics. They typically ignore most characteristics of literary haiku and focus only on the 5-7-5 syllable count. Mecum’s haiku fit well into this new tradition but raise a question about this new approach in general: why choose haiku at all? In Mecum’s case, why not zombie limericks, zombie sonnets, an occasional zombie sestina? Why reanimate the haiku form yet again for something so far afield from the form’s actual purpose?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that haiku entered American literature as a way to make non-haiku poetry more innovative. In the early 20th century, poets such as Ezra Pound incorporated aspects of haiku into non-haiku poems. As modernists, these poets searched for ways to reinvigorate conventional poetry, and haiku became one means to that end. Contemporary, non-literary uses of haiku may not be intended to reinvigorate poetry, but they might be designed to “make new” the treatment of their various topics nonetheless.

Another possibility is that haiku is still heavily identified with Japanese culture, so it always adds a sense of difference to its subject matter—often by suggesting the exotic and the foreign. When this approach merges with a lack of seriousness about the form, however, it risks replicating the imperialist point of view of certain American and British writers in the 19th century. W.G. Aston, for example, felt that Japanese poetry had very little value as literature, and his opinion was informed by the perspective that Japan was not a fully developed culture and therefore could not have a fully developed literature.

Finally, if seventeen syllables is all it takes to make a haiku, another possible answer might be that the form is simply an amusing, undemanding way to write. It also matches the ever-decreasing attention span of many readers and accommodates a wide range of topics.

Mecum’s poems revel in the speed and playfulness afforded by the 5-7-5 format and seem to lack any imperialistic impulses—at least at the level of content. True, the zombies are taking over and imposing a new culture of sorts, but there is no collective force or motivation at work. Each zombie follows only one motivational drive: hunger for human brains and human flesh. Mecum’s zombie is so single-minded that, “Walking in the dark / with a stomach full of meat,” he still searches “for meat.” Even when another zombie enters the picture, there is little coordinated effort:

Smelling the same meal,
another of one us joins me
into the darkness.

The other dead guy
stares at me with a blank look
as we softly moan.

Each zombie eventually ends up with his own victim but not through any form of teamwork, and, afterwards, each zombie continues on his own individual quest for more food.

Mecum’s book is also filled with humor and irreverence, and both characteristics depend largely on the incongruous use of haiku to convey a zombie’s narrative:

I loved my momma.
I eat her with my mouth closed,
how she would want it.

It is hard to tell
who is food and who isn’t
in the nursing home.

The book parades this incongruity throughout the text. The most notable instance occurs in the following depiction of the zombie’s obsession with brains and syllables:

brains, brains, brains, brains, brains
brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains
brains, brains, brains, brains, brains.

Ultimately, Zombie Haiku is an innovative book that will appeal to anyone interested in all things zombie. As a graphic novel in which short poems propel the narrative, it is also a unique addition to zombie fiction and to the ever-expanding number of popular uses for haiku.

Coming Soon: Part II of the "The Book of the Undead" when Rosenow sinks her teeth into the world of Mecum's Vampire Haiku. If you have a moment in the meantime, check out Rosenow's Mountains and Rivers Press located in Eugene, Oregon.

Poetry Outlaws: Black Bart, the P o 8

Two weeks ago, P&PC spent some time thinking about how the films The Contract and The Long Hot Summer cast poetry as a criminal activity. No sooner had we sent the piece off to the proofreading department than we remembered the case of the nigh-pacifist, gentleman outlaw poet Black Bart (real name Charles Bolles), a Civil War veteran who robbed stagecoaches in the 1870s, leaving his signature—"Black Bart, P o 8"—at the scene of the crime, twice accompanied by poems. According to the folks over at the Black Bart: California's Infamous Stage Robber site, the great P o 8 penned the following beauts:

I've labored long and hard for bread,
For honor and for riches,
But on my corns too long you've tread,
You fine-haired sons-of-bitches.

and

Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the coming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat
And everlasting sorrow.
Yet come what will, I'll try it once,
My conditions can't be worse,
And if there's money in that box
'Tis money in my purse.

Bart was eventually caught and sentenced to prison at San Quentin for over 25 robberies. Upon his release in 1888, after a little more than four years behind bars, Bart was asked if he planned a return to a life of crime, and he said he was through. Another reporter then asked if Bart was going to write any more poems. "Young man," Bart replied, "didn't you hear me say I would commit no more crimes?"

However, in November of 1888, what Wiki calls a "lone bandit" held up another Wells Fargo stagecoach and left behind the following poem:

So here I've stood while wind and rain
Have set the trees a-sobbin',
And risked my life for that damned box
That wasn't worth the robbin'.

Apparently, Wells Fargo detective James Hume, who had first collared Bart, was called in to investigate but, after comparing handwriting samples, he concluded the crime and the poem the work of a copycat criminal. There are no reports that a literary critic was consulted. As for Bart? He was never seen again.

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.