Little Count Teddy: Dealer in Lecturers, Laughs, Recitals, Poems, Witty Satire, Laughology

Remembering The New Northwest, Part III: Samuel L. Simpson's "The Beautiful Willamette"

Poor Samuel Leonidas Simpson (1845-1899). He was six months old when his family moved from Missouri to the Willamette Valley via the Oregon Trail. His mother reportedly taught him the alphabet by drawing letters in the fireplace ashes. Despite having minimal schooling, he earned a law degree from Willamette University in 1867 and was admitted to the Oregon Bar, but—according to the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest—his law practice failed and he took to newspapers, poetry, and drink; one biographer called him "the most drunken poet, and the most poetical drunkard that ever made the Muses smile or weep." In 1868, a year after completing his law degree, he published "The Beautiful Willamette" in the State Rights Democrat of Albany, Oregon. Forty years later, the Democrat would call that verse "the finest poem ever written in this state."

The "sweet singer of Oregon's beauty" hasn't fared so well in more recent accounts, however, as striving Oregon poets, hot on the trail of modernist literary credibility in the early 20th century, made Simpson a sort of whipping boy for what they thought the region's earlier poetry lacked. James Stevens and H.L. Davis wrote off 19th-century Oregon poetry en toto as nothing but an "avalanche of tripe"; three-quarters of a century later, the University of Washington's John Findlay has pretty much agreed, using Simpson's "The Beautiful Willamette" as the quintessentially bad starting point for the region's literary history. From that beginning, Findlay argues, Pacific Northwest poetry had nowhere to go but up, and, in his estimation, it's done nothing but improve ever since. (See Findlay's essay "Something in the Soil: Literature and Regional Identity in the 20th-Century Pacific Northwest" in the Fall 2006 issue of the Pacific Northwest Quarterly.) We suppose, though, that "Beautiful Willamette" fans don't really have that much to complain about. Unlike other popular poets, at least Simpson made it onto the map, even if his position there is only to signify the dark ages of Oregonian verse that are necessary in the staging of a modernist Renaissance .

Here—before we move on to the 1871 convergence of Simpson's verse and Abigail Scott Duniway's poetry-lovin' suffragist newspaper The New Northwest—is "The Beautiful Willamette":

The Beautiful Willamette

From the Cascades’ frozen gorges,
Leaping like a child at play,
Winding, widening through the valley,
Bright Willamette glides away;
Onward ever,
Lovely river,
Softly calling to the sea;
Time that scars us,
Maims and mars us,
Leaves no track or trench on thee.

Spring’s green witchery is weaving
Braid and border for thy side;
Grace forever haunts thy journey,
Beauty dimples on thy tide;
Through the purple gates of morning
Now thy roseate ripples dance,
Golden, then, when day's departing
On thy waters trails his lance.
Waltzing, flashing,
Tinkling, splashing,
Limpid, volatile, and free—
Always hurried
To be buried
In the bitter, moon-mad sea.

In thy crystal deeps, inverted
Swings a picture of the sky,
Like those wavering hopes of Aidenn,
Dimly in our dreams that lie;
Clouded often, drowned in turmoil,
Faint and lovely, far away—
Wreathing sunshine on the morrow,
Breathing fragrance round to-day.
Love would wander
Here and ponder.
Hither poetry would dream;
Life’s old questions,
Sad suggestions,
"Whence and whither?" throng thy stream.

On the roaring wastes of ocean
Soon thy scattered waves shall toss;
‘Mid the surge’s rhythmic thunder
Shall thy silver tongues be lost.
Oh! Thy glimmering rush of gladness
Mocks this turbid life of mine!
Racing to the wild Forever
Down the sloping paths of Time!
Onward ever,
Lovely river,
Softly calling to the sea;
Time that scars us,
Maims and mars us,
Leaves no track or trench on thee.

So, okay, the description of the Willamette river as "Waltzing, flashing, / Tinkling, splashing, / Limpid, volatile, and free" didn't exactly make the P&PC interns jump for joy when they read it for the first time either. But then they thought a bit more about what it might have meant for readers who encountered it in the pages of The New Northwest on Friday, July 14, 1871. Simpson wasn't a total stranger to The New Northwest; in fact, despite his reputation as a drinker (Duniway's paper was part of the temperance as well as women's suffragist movement), another poem of his, "The Fate of Mississip'," had appeared in the paper just a few weeks before.

For Findlay, "The Beautiful Willamette" was popular because it represents a 19th-century aesthetic that valued poetry for being "good thoughts happily expressed in faultless rhyme and meter." But we here at P&PC can't shake the language in Simpson's first stanza about Time which "scars us, / maims and mars us." Nor can we ignore the fact that the speaker's dreams, in stanza three, are "drowned in turmoil." Ditto "turbid life of mine" in stanza four. Like, how does all that add up to a happy expression of the human condition? Well, it's doesn't, and the speaker of "The Beautiful Willamette" envies the river because (supposedly) the river isn't subject to the scars, maims, and mars of Time's passing as human beings are. For critics like Findlay, Simpson's poem may appear to be a naively waltzing, tinkling, splashing, and limpid set piece of genteel America, but for us, the poem's scars, maims, mars, turmoil and turbidity loom large. We think the tinkling, splashing waters of "The Beautiful Willamette" run much, much deeper than Findlay would like to think.

As the poem's second stanza indicates, those waters also run "free"—a major keyword for The New Northwest and its readers. Could the "freedom" from the scars, maims, and mars of Time in "The Beautiful Willamette" thus be read as a specific type of freedom—the freedom for women to vote, own property, and hold public office? In other words, do the poem's drowned dreams and turbid life read as a conversation about the fight for women's rights?

We believe so—and a look at the issue of The New Northwest in which "The Beautiful Willamette" appeared in fact backs us up. In that very same issue of Duniway's 4-page paper, Frances H. McDougal has published a re-written version of the song "America" that she has re-titled "Song of Freedom: Written for the Fourth of July, 1871." That the poem equates "freedom" in the U.S. with the universal right to vote is clear. Here is McDougal's poem

Freedom, to thee we sing;
Then let our glad notes ring
O’er land and sea,
Till all our Yankee boys
Leave their rude sport and noise,
To learn the higher joys
Of liberty.

Freedom is ours of right,
Her honor and her might
To us belong.
In all this lovely land
The Mind and Working Hand
Shall swell with triumph grand
Our yearly song.

Freedom to live and grow,
Freedom to think and know,
Our Fathers won:
Then let us claim their dower
By manhood’s noblest power,
And build the loftiest tower
Beneath the sun,

Sacred to Human Right,
The honor and thy might,
Majestic Man!—
Whence our great light shall flow
And set the world aglow
With truth it yet must know
By grace or ban

Out from the present spring
Eagles of bolder wing;
All freedom human
That through the ages pined,
At length restored, refined,
Endowed with heart and mind,
Is crowned by woman.

So shall each rolling year
Bring light more fine and clear,
With nobler law.
Quick, with true human fire,
O, may our souls aspire,
Forever high and higher!—
“Excelsior!”

When we read "The Beautiful Willamette" next to "Song of Freedom" today, the two poems can't but speak to each other, as the swelling, growing, flowing, rolling current of McDougal's freedom—which flows "out from the present spring"—finds an appropriate metaphor in the very river that Simpson writes about, and as the "freedom" that Simpson mentions in turn finds its specific referent in the struggle for women's rights. Strike that last part. Simpson's "freedom" doesn't exactly find its specific referent in the women's movement; rather, it is given a specific referent by editor Duniway, who rearticulates the popular verse of Oregon's "sweet singer" to the cause of women's suffrage. That is, while "The Beautiful Willamette" didn't necessarily start out its circulation history as a suffragist poem, by 1871 it had in fact become one.

So, in the end, the problems with Findlay's approach to Simpson are several. In pre- suming that all 19th- century "genteel" poetry fits into a single aesthetic category (lyric poetry with "good thoughts happily expressed"), he misses the actual ability of the poem to signify ambivalently; that is, he only sees that type of poem because he believes that's the only type of poem to see. Furthermore, in isolating that lyric poem from its print and historical contexts, he prevents us from seeing what else "The Beautiful Willamette" might have been. And in dissing "The Beautiful Willamette," Simpson is also pretty much dissing the ways that poetry contributed to progressive social causes like women's suffrage. We here at the P&PC office realize that he—and many other critics like him—needs to oversimplify the popular and the genteel so that the 20th-century "literary" poetry he champions looks better in comparison. But where's the triumph in that?

Little Known Clauses in Arizona’s New Immigration Law

Appeared in the Salem Statesman-Journal May 2, 2010 and the Iowa City Press-Citizen May 5, 2010

1.1) Redesign the dollar bill
to get the Latin off the rear.
If you can't spend a buck in English
your money's no good here.

1.2) E pluribus unum is out as well
since Latin can't make us one.
1.3) And Mardi Gras is finis too
since anti-English is anti-fun.

1.4) Say hasta la vista to Ricky Martin
for living La Vida Loca.
1.5) And it's au revoir to Starbucks too
for serving café mocha.

1.6) Ban Twain and Hurston from de schools.
Dose di'lects make us skittish.
1.7) And Shakespeare gets the sack of course
for penning his plays in British.

1.8) Sayonara to taekwondo,
sushi, and haiku.
1.9) And say goodbye to "Arizona"—
it needs an English nombre too.

Remembering The New Northwest, Part II: Don't Quarrel About the Farm

In this Part Two of "Remem- bering The New Northwest," the Poetry & Popular Culture office presents another poem from the weekly, Portland-based, suffragist newspaper edited by mother, wife, teacher, dressmaker, and writer Abigail Scott Duniway between 1871 and 1887. If "The Perplexed Housekeeper" (presented last week) catalogs the uncompensated daily work activities of a 19th-century housewife and thus provides support for her critique of the institution of marriage, then today's poem, "Don't Quarrel about the Farm," takes on another aspect of women's economic vulnearability—the subject of women's property rights (or lack thereof).

"Don't Quarrel about the Farm" struck the P&PC office as notable for a couple of reasons: 1) it uses a story with a happy ending to lobby for reforms in the area of women's property rights (other such poems rely on tragedy or worst-case scenarios to make their arguments, as many family disputes weren't resolved as amicably as this one); and 2) the speaker is a persuasive, articulate daughter/sister who wins her brothers' assent, in the process demonstrating that emotion and intellect are not incompatible in the 19th-century woman and prospective voter. It's precisely this mixture, in fact—an emotional, charitable, and rational calm in the face of people driven primarily by their own personal economic interests—that The New Northwest and other suffragist papers claimed that women would bring to the polls and public discourse if granted their right to vote. Today, of course, we recognize the limitations of that essentialist claim. Nevertheless, the rhetorical clinic that Sis puts on for her brothers in "Don't Quarrel about the Farm" is a pretty stunning one. Enjoy.

Don't Quarrel about the Farm
—Anonymous

"No, brothers, don't fall out 'bout it, or quarrel here today,
Be civil toward each other, and listen to what I say:
You know as well as I do that it's wrong this way to speak,
And if you have disputes to make—why, make them in a week.

"Just wait at least, till father's cold, just put it off—pray do,
And what is yours no doubt you'll get; but wait a day or two.
Have more respect for mother, for she's old and weak and ill,
And don't take foul advantage, just because there is no will.

"Now Freddie, you're the oldest! You should good example show;
For what's the good of quarreling, I'd really like to know?
The money's in the bank—there is no reason to complain
Or the paltry share that's in the home from mother try to gain?

"I'm poorer than the poorest one, yet she shall have my part;
I'll work and toil 'mong strangers with a merry, cheerful heart,
If I only live to know that she can call this place her own;
I'd gladly give her all my share that she may have a home.

"I don't know much about the law, for I never went to school.
And you know more about the ways that's followed as a rule;
I think they'll sell the place right out, and and share it so I’m told.
And that would throw out mother, boys, and leave her in the cold.

"Now I can't see how this is right; she earned as much as he;
She paid, I'm sure, those last three notes endorsed by Squire Lee,
And father often told us so. Besides, he always said
He hoped that she would suffer naught when he was with the dead.

"And that's one reason why, I think, he left no will behind—
Because his boys were rich and therefore would be kind:
He did not wish to give offence by willing all to her,
But thought we here, with one accord, would give and not demur.

"Now I know I'm not a scholar, boys; few things I understand;
I don't know much about real estate, or the price of farming land;
Yet this I know, ten acres with a house and barn and ware,
Will not bring much to nine of us, not counting mother's share.

"I'd like any little part of it—a great deal with it too
For I never had the chance to earn that father gave to you;
No! I always had to stay at home and work the livelong day.
And for it got but board and clothes—that's more than you can say!

"And if I am the youngest one with not a cent ahead,
I’ll give my share to mother now! and go and earn my bread;
And you needn't think because I plead that I just want a home;
No! No! I’ll leave—though hard 'twill be for her to live alone.

"This living 'round with the married sons ain't what it's thought to be!
And mother's old, near sixty years, and not as strong as we;
Besides, she ought to have a home—her own—to live in no one's way,
And be protected from harsh words you all might some times say.

"Then let us give the home to her—come, who will follow me?
I give my share to mother, now! My hand is up, you see!
You're losing but a paltry—a little mite of land—
Whoever's willing, as I am, can raise his own right hand!"

And not a hand remained in place, but up they went as one,
And brothers looked and marveled, and wondered how 'twas done!
All quarrel ceased, the brothers knelt, and found themselves in prayer
For Sis with mother, and the home; and peace came to them there!

Remembering The New Northwest: The Perplexed Housekeeper

May 5 of this year will be the 139th Anniversary of the first edition of The New Northwest—the weekly suffragist and reform-oriented newspaper edited out of Portland, Oregon, for 16 years (1871-1887) by former teacher and dressmaker Abigail Scott Duniway. Over that time and under the motto "Free Speech, Free Press, Free People," The New Northwest published all sorts of news, editorials, advertisements, and entertainment, most of which was related in one way or another to the fight for national and international women's suffrage. Via that four-page weekly, Duniway (pictured here) became the region's most prominent voice advocating for women's rights, and so, when Susan B. Anthony came to the area in 1871, it was Duniway who played host and travel companion. And in 1912, when Oregon became the 7th state in the U.S. to pass a women's suffrage amendment, she was the first woman to register to vote in Multnomah County.

While it's not surprising to learn that The New Northwest published poetry, it is surprising to see just how prominent a place poetry occupied in the paper, as nearly every single issue had a poem or two prominently displayed on the front or back pages. In fact, it is the growing opinion of the Poetry & Popular Culture Office that Duniway's paper should occupy a significant place in the literary, as well as the political, history of the Pacific Northwest, as it provided a regular venue for home-grown or locally-sourced poetic talents—some overtly political, some made political by virtue of their situation in the paper—and published them alongside nationally-known writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, and Bret Harte, thus making early Portland into a crossroads of poetic activity and establishing the Rose City as the region's poetic, if not legislative, center. Long before Woody Guthrie came to the Columbia River basin to write songs promoting the Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams, and long before folks like Theodore Roethke, William Stafford, David Wagoner, and Richard Hugo moved here to teach in university-based creative writing M.F.A. programs, Duniway and The New Northwest provided a vehicle for the region's poets to connect and make their work public.

As of this posting, though—despite the paper's importance to the history and culture of the region, and despite the financial backing that's got to be there in the locally-head- quartered pockets of Nike, Adidas, and Columbia Sportswear (employees, corporations, and foundations alike)—The New Northwest does not yet exist in an easily accessible, searchable, digitalized form. Instead, it's on these wacky, poor-quality, old-school strips of plastic that the librarian calls "microfilm," and so it's difficult and frustrating to access and at times very difficult to read. The filmic reproductions are sooooooooo bad that they won't even print out with much legibility.

These challenges have not prevented six intrepid undergraduate students in a Poetry of the Pacific Northwest course being offered at Willamette University this semester from braving the archive, however. (This is the same group of students who, earlier in the semester, attended the Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon.) Kali Boehle-Silva, Isabella Guida, John McKenzie, Gunnar Paulsen, Jonathan Shivers, and Sarah Spring have been unearthing this poetry, some of which will be showcased here over the next couple of weeks. We begin with this tasty treat from week five (June 2, 1871) of The New Northwest (note the pun on "rights" in line two and the break in meter in the poem's penultimate line):

The Perplexed Housekeeper
by Mrs. F. D. Gage

I wish I had a dozen pair
Of hands this very minute;
I’d soon put all these things to rights—
The very deuce is in it.

Here’s a big washing to be done,
One pair of hands to do it—
Sheets, shirts and stockings, coats and pants—
How will I e'er get through it?

Dinner to get for six or more,
No loaf left o’er from Sunday,
And baby cross as he can live—
He’s always so on Monday.

And there’s the cream, ‘tis getting sour,
And must forthwith be churning,
And here’s Bob wants a button on—
Which way shall I be turning?

“Tis time the meat was in the pot,
The bread was worked for baking,
The clothes were taken from the boil—
Oh dear! the baby’s waking!

Oh dear! if P—— comes home,
And finds things in this bother,
He’ll just begin and tell me all
About his tidy mother.

How nice her kitchen used to be,
Her dinner always ready
Exactly when the dinner bell rung—
Hush, hush, dear little Freddy,

And then will come some hasty word,
Right out before I’m thinking—
They say that hasty words from wives
Set sober men to drinking.

Now isn’t that a great idea,
That men should take to sinning,
Because a weary, half-sick wife
Can’t always smile so winning?

When I was young I used to earn
My living without trouble;
Had clothes and pocket money too,
And hours of leisure double.

I never dreamed of such a fate,
When I, a lass! was courted—
Wife, mother, nurse, seamstress, cook, housekeeper, chambermaid, laundress, dairywoman and scrub generally doing the work of six.
For the sake of being supported.

Cultures of Folk Poetry

This week, the P&PC office took up a collection in order to send a repre- sentative to the 2010 meeting of the Western States Folklore Society taking place at Willamette University from April 15-17. There—suffering some serious jet lag from our 3.5 mile journey and thankful we weren't flying from Europe—we presented one of four papers as part of a panel titled "Cultures of Folk Poetry." Here's what that panel looked like:

1) “Yankee Doodle Dandy”: Popular and Traditional Song in the Early Republic—An 1813 Boston Collection

Dianne Dugaw
University of Oregon

The Isaiah Thomas Collection of ballad broadsides in the American Antiquarian Society offers an eye-opening glimpse of Boston and its people in the first decade of the 19th century. [That's Mr. Thomas pictured here.] As this paper will show, songs in the collection give voice to a formative early phase of the republic for which this seaport played a vital cultural and commercial role. Thomas compiled printed texts and tunes from the stock that printer Nathaniel Coverly had on hand in 1813 to sell to readers and singers in the Boston area. This paper will analyze through examples in this collection the mysterious process by which people create songs within and in response to particular events, influences, and sentiments, and then maintain some of these productions in song traditions remembered and borne along from generation to generation. The Thomas collection brings together vantages and modes—"high" and "low," commercial and traditional—in a unique snapshot glimpse of Yankee popular culture and sentiment in a newly forming United States of America.

2) Getting the News from Poetry

Poetry & Popular Culture

Less than a century ago, readers were accustomed to finding poetry in daily and local newspapers. Questions of abolition and women’s suffrage were hotly debated in verse form. Rival newspapers—like the Free Press and the News in Detroit—conducted their rivalries via their in-house poets (Edgar Guest [pictured avec chien to the left] wrote a poem a day for 30 years for the Free Press, and Anne Campbell wrote a poem six days a week for 20 years for the cross-town News). Some newspaper poets acquired national reputations. But despite its presence in the everyday landscape of modern America, most of this newspaper poetry goes unstudied today. Literary critics don’t study it because it was too popular or too local (Jan Radway and Perry Frank suggested newspaper poetry was, in fact, “a variant of American folk culture”). Folk scholars don’t study it because it was too commercial and oftentimes not local enough since it was often syndicated to papers across the country. This presentation will use a reception studies approach to newspaper poetry in order to suggest the potential for poetry studies within the field of folklore studies. Between the Civil War and World War II, American readers regularly kept poetry scrapbooks, and by presenting highlights from albums originally assembled in the West and Pacific Northwest, I hope to reveal how ordinary people appropriated commercialized or mass-produced poetries and used them—in their scrapbooks—as occasions for local, creative, and critical thought.

3) Logger and Cowboy Poetic Voices

Henry-York Steiner
Eastern Washington University

During the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States, poets appeared in a number of occupations involving physical but skilled labor in dangerous environments and using technology dangerous to its users (e.g., commercial fishing, railroading, mining, ranching, and logging). These dangers were understood by the workers and their families, who composed poems about them, primarily narrative in genre. The vocabularies of the poets are marked by use of the folk speech of the different occupations, making them fully comprehensible only to those who possess the same word-hoard, fellow members of their occupational folk group, which the poems have helped to define and extol. What would be called the values of the poetry favored and read by the formally educated members of the dominant economic and social classes are almost never in evidence in these poems from occupational folk groups. It is poetry of, by, and for the workers in these occupations, their families, and the suppliers of the tools of their trades.

4) "We Shall Overcome" is My New Ringtone

Kristen Grainger
Willamette University

Folk music’s role in American culture has changed over the past 100 years but quite dramatically over the last two decades. Historically, folk music was a central element of community and family cultures that, through the shared experiences of learning and singing songs, maintained connections between generations. Protest songs of early and mid 20th-century America delivered blistering indictments that demanded—and fueled—political activism. Today’s folk genre appears subsumed in the mind-boggling array of global entertainment offerings recently made accessible by mainstream technology. In the din of Twitter and YouTube; with the advent of services like Pandora and Genius that know what songs we will want to hear and buy before we ourselves know; in a culture that largely associates artistic relevance with commercial success, where music is increasingly visual and stylized; and an industry that engineers songs to sound best through a set of headphones, what is folk music for? My presentation explores, through song and narrative, the role and the power of folk music in today’s context; how the folk poetry of modern singer-songwriters continues to shape and influence the American experience, and how the next generation of folk musicians is getting their messages and stories heard above the din.

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.