Between 1943 and 1945, Warner Brothers animation studios produced a series of black and white, sometimes rhyming instruc- tional shorts for the U.S. Armed Forces that starred Private SNAFU—a bumbling, cautionary tale of a character created by Frank Capra, sometimes written by Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), and voiced by Mel Blanc. Hard to imagine American troops being trained via rhyme? Check out these examples.
From Blatz to bourbon and mead to martinis, a drink or two can loosen the tongue of even the most reluctant rhymer, helping in the process to produce all sorts of non-pragmatic rhythms and language play ranging from dirty limericks to national anthems. 
In a sense, the Norton Anthology of Poetry is not just a collection of great poems but an aviary as well. From Percy Shelley's skylark to John Keats's nightingale, Emily Dickinson's bobolink, Edgar Allan Poe's raven, and William Butler Yeats's falcon, English poetry is part field guide if not tutorial in birdwatching and even the skill of birding by ear. "Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop" calls the hermit-thrush from the pine trees of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." Robert Frost's ovenbird "makes the solid tree trunks sound again." And Gerard Manley Hopkins records the lark's "rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score / In crisps of curl..."
If birdwatching has long inspired poets, who see or hear their own singing more clearly in relation to "the thing with feathers," then it's a pleasure to see poetry—at least on the Magic Song Restorer tin of bird food pictured here—returning the favor. The prose directions on the side of the Depression-Era tin read: "Fill the treat cup daily with this song food. If the canary is run down or feeling out of sort feed this food exclusively in the regular food cup." But the prose isn't where the magic is. The magic, of course, is in the poetry printed on the back of the tin:
Ted Kooser and the subject of poetic "accessibility" have gone hand in hand for a long time. The Poetry Foundation reports, for example, that the former U.S. Poet Laureate (pictured here avec chiens) "is known for his honest, accessible verse." James H. Billington of the Library of Congress has praised Kooser's ability "to touch on universal themes in accessible ways." A reader posting a comment on Amazon admires Kooser "for writing poetry that is accessible, inviting, familiar and ordinary in a most extraordinary way." Even Kooser thinks about himself in this manner; asked in the recent (October/November 2010) issue of The Writer's Chronicle to account for the ongoing sales of his book Delights & Shadows, he explains, "My poems are accessible to a broad general audience."
Here at the P&PC Home Office, we suspect that accessibility is most often measured in the way that Justice Potter Stewart once measured obscenity (i.e., we know it when we see it). But curious nonetheless about the popularity of this yardstick, we decided to put Kooser's accessibility to the test and determine, once and for all, just how accessible his poetry is. So, using the online calculator available here, we subjected the five sample Kooser poems presented alongside his interview in The Writer's Chronicle to three common readability tests: the Flesch Reading Ease Test, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test, and the Gunning fog index.
All three tests measure "reada- bility" by using mathe- matical formulae taking into consi- deration word count, sentence length, and word complexity. On the Flesch Reading Ease Test (and according to Wikipedia), a score of 90-100 indicates a text is "accessible" to the average 11 year-old student; a 60-70 suggests a text is understandable by 13-15 year-old students; and a 0-30 score indicates a text best understood by university graduates. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test articulates the Reading Ease Test in terms of specific grade levels, as does the Gunning fog index. All three tests, while incomplete or limited in design, have social imperatives; if the average newspaper is supposed to be written at the literacy level of an 8th grader, for example, tests like these are supposed to be able to help make news and information available—er, accessible—to as many people as possible.
As you can see, the Gunning Fog test consistently places Kooser's poems at a higher grade level than the Flesch-Kincaid index. Even so, one can't discount the fact that the Flesch-Kincaid test places three of Kooser's poems at, near, or above, twelfth-grade level. That is, Kooser's poems are accessible, but not as accessible as a regular newspaper would be. "Flying at Night" stands out as being especially accessible—a newspaper-level poem—and "Porch Swing in September" stands out as being particularly inaccessible. Go read "Porch Swing in September" and check for yourself; it might be hard to imagine how Kooser could take the topic of a country swing and turn it into a poem that places at the Ph.D. level in both Grade Level metrics, but that's just what he's managed to do.
After studying Kooser via these readability tests, we started to hanker after a larger frame of reference. How would other poets fare when subjected to the same battery of tests? How would Kooser fare in comparison to those poets? What might we learn about American poetry and "accessibility" if we expanded our study to consider a wider segment of the poetry-writing world, and especially poets who are considered to be as inaccessible or as downright obscure as Kooser is considered to be accessible and familiar? So, in search of some answers, we plugged John Ashbery (pictured here) into the three tests, and we were shocked by what we learned.
To keep things as fair or constant as possible, we ran five Ashbery poems— "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape," "The New Higher," "Syringa," "Daffy Duck in Hollywood," and "For John Clare"—through the Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid, and Gunning Fog machines. And the data was, to put it mildly, very surprising, as Ashbery not only scored as more accessible more consistently than Kooser did, but consistently scored below a 9th-grade reading level on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test as well!
This Kooser/ Ashbery experiment is, we imagine, just the start of a new method of assessing and measuring contemporary American poetry via the concept of "accessibility" and according to metrics that other spheres of academia have used for some time. The P&PC Office is thrilled about what lies in store—how we might help to reveal the obscurity of heretofore "accessible" poets like Billy Collins and Mary Oliver and also shed light on the accessibility of "obscure" poets like Charles Bernstein and Jorie Graham. We thank you for your support as we move forward with this endeavor.
As part of its public service imperative, the P&PC office makes an effort to stay current on all things poetic and popular. We spend long hours doing investigative research. We comb the news and chart trends. We network with movers and shakers. And we keep on reading Entertainment Weekly, which recently reported that Jess Walter's "amusing book" The Financial Lives of the Poets—reviewed here ten or so months ago by P&PC correspondent Colleen Coyne—is now out in paperback. To mark that event, we reprint Coyne's review (though not in paperback) here:
Earlier this winter, Chicagoland publisher Sourcebooks, Inc. launched PoetrySpeaks, a website selling text, audio, and video of individual poems for $0.99-$1.99 a pop. (Think iTunes for poetry.) Call me cynical, but as much as I want it to be, poetry is rarely profitable. Despite conventional wisdom, PoetrySpeaks is betting on a huge audience of willing and eager, iPod-toting poetry-purchasers to pony up the big bucks—or at least enough dough to keep 'em afloat.
We first meet 46-year-old Matt, slipper-clad and sleep-deprived, on a midnight 7-11 milk run. He’s out of a job; he’s pretty sure his wife is cheating on him; he’s a caretaker to his two little boys and dementia-ridden father; and he’s a week away from losing his house because of the categorical failure of his “money lit” website. With little time to make everything right, what’s a guy to do? Hook up with some local stoners and become a drug dealer, of course—all in the name of salvaging his marriage, saving his house, and bringing his life back from the brink of ruin.
Matt is responsibility gone rogue, a “creepy old guy” trying to grapple with the lingo and social cues of a totally alien drug subculture. In his most insightful moments, he takes on American entitlement and gluttony, suggests his own complicity in the current sado-masochistic financial kink-fest, and questions our Web-centric need for instant gratification. During a brief hopeful moment, he wonders: “is it possible to fall in love with your own life?” We readers are inclined to say no, having watched so many people over the past year lose jobs and homes. But flawed as our lives can be, we fight for what we want and will do anything—anything—to save ourselves and the people we love. That’s one reason we like our anti-hero—he’s flawed, but he’s a fighter.
And because we like him, we watch Matt’s many dubious decisions with hands half over our eyes, as if we’re watching a slasher flick. (Don’t go through that drug-dealing door, Matt!) He’s surrounded by other characters spanning the hapless spectrum: Chuck, the balding lumber salesman who’s putting the moves on Matt’s wife; Monte, ruler of the local pot plantation (a.k.a. “Piggy, Drug Lord of the Flies”); Dave, futilely cautious lawyer for all major drug transactions; Richard, his financial planner who’s “predictable as coffin shopping”; and a host of others who, like Matt, are desperately trying to make the best of their broken worlds. We can’t bear and yet can’t wait to watch the disaster unfold. Although the story is somewhat predictable—like that slasher flick—it’s told with such wit and insight that we don’t want to put it down.
Matt's a mediocre poet, but if he were better at it, we probably wouldn't like him as much. We read his blank verse, villanelles, and haikus alongside more familiar, deliciously appropriated bits. Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams all make cameos (“so much depends upon the red Camaro," for example). Matt initially began Poetfolio.com, he tells us, because “investment poetry would…open the door for a literary discussion of the thing that most of us spent so many days thinking about: our money.” Perhaps only in such a discussion could we begin to make sense of the great mess we’ve gotten into and begin to get out of it.It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
The truth is that anything you try to own ends up owning you. We’re all just renting…. The poets were supposed to remind us of this, to regulate the existential and temporal markets (Let be be finale of seem. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.) and to balance real estate with ethereal state (One not need be a chamber to be haunted, / One need not be a house.) Hell, we don’t need bailouts, rescue packages and public works. We need more poets.
In this tale of our current financial crisis and our long and compli- cated relationship with po'try, Jess Walter’s creation is hilarious and poignant, sardonic and wise. While indicting our money-obsessed consumer culture, Walter crafts his characters with empathy and care, and we identify with them at their lowest and highest moments. It’s a story of forgiveness and redemption, of triumph and spirit, balanced with a bit of raunch. Though timely and topical, The Financial Lives of Poets will stick around because the cultural crisis of this book—how to make poetry matter, how to get people to care about their own lives and about each other—is timeless. And despite the despair of Matt’s situation, and our own, Walter provides us with some hope, reminding us that while “the edge is so close to where we live….It’s okay. Just keep moving forward. Don’t look back. It’s okay.” And we believe it.
From noon to 10 pm this coming Saturday, September 25th, Gilgamesh Brewing and Wandering Aengus Cider Works will be hosting Salem's first Beer & Cider Festival at the Mission Mill Museum located at 1313 Mill Street, just a hop (ahem), skip and a jump from the campus of Willamette University. The P&PC Office is excited. Sure, we took a field trip to the 24th annual Oregon Brewers Festival this past July where we sampled our fair share of the more than 80 craft beers that were on tap in that well-established, world-renowned frothy juggernaut of a fest. But there's something particularly special about Salem's startup, and not just because it's taking place, somewhat audaciously, in the shadow of Portland's hipster paradise and in a capital city that gets short shrift in all the guidebooks. Maybe—just maybe—it also has to do with a certain poetic element that's been in the Salem beer mix, along with all those locally-grown hops, going on for nigh 100 years.
Take the acrostic pictured to the left, for example: a May, 1911 advertisement issued by the Salem Brewery Association, which came across our desktops via a mysteriously anonymous blogging friend (and purveyor of the fascinating and arcane) over at Capital Taps. It's a clever bit of acrostic puffery in which the vertically-oriented phrase "Salem Beer" becomes the grammatical subject of virtually every line even as its component letters begin those lines. That is, the letters in "Salem Beer" are being put to three separate uses: as (ahem) the capital beginning each line, as the aggregate subject of each statement about beer's healing powers, and as a sort of bold-faced neon light for "Salem Beer" that signifies independent of the poem as it's printed vertically down the page. This is how an acrostic is supposed to work, right? It's a poetic form that exploits the tendencies of language to serve multiple purposes simultaneously and, in revealing embedded texts and encoded messages, encourages us to read against the page's grain if not between the lines.
Once licensed to read this way, readers will find the "Salem Beer" ad to be an unex- pectedly rich verbal habitat. For example, who can mistake that the first word one comes to when reading down the page is the "Sale" going on in "Salem"—a perfectly appropriate description of the result that the ad seeks to effect? In fact, the very alcoholic bevvie which is the subject of the local market transaction—ale—is itself embedded in the city's name, so that by the time the "M" in Salem finally comes around, the Salem Brewery Association has more or less encapsulated its core message in five letters: it's a sale on ale in Salem. Mind you, this sort of creative play in which meanings melt—or should it be malt?—into one another isn't unique to this ad. A more recent local movement to "Keep Salem Lame" has more or less read the city's name in the same way but to different results; just as the Brewery Association saw its product inherent in Oregon's capital, so some locals see the city's true identity there as well.
What we like even more about this ad, however, is the homonym for "ale"—that is, "ail"—which the acrostic poem itself takes up as the very problem for which Salem Beer is a purported remedy. Once we begin reading horizontally through the acrostic—with the grain—we come upon the healing powers that Salem Beer supposedly has: it invigorates, lends strength to the weak and wearied physique, is a cure for the nervous ills of life, restores people to full strength, etc. In short, Ale is the cure for what Ails you. It might strike some as a crazy claim for the Brewery Association to make, but in an age when alcohol was the primary ingredient in most patent medicines and snake oil cures, the mythical healing powers of alcohol were well embedded in the cultural psyche, not just in the word "Salem."
There's at least one more, likely uncon- scious, effect that the Brewery Associ- ation's acrostic would have had on its 1911 audience, however. As Leon Jackson reminds us in his awesome study The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (2008), acrostics were a popular "if juvenile, form of courtship poetry" in the antebellum U.S. It's no surprise, for example, that the 19th century advertising trade card pictured here—showing a dashing lad wooing his beloved by handing her a packet of B.T. Babbitt's soap—contains an acrostic on back (see below) constructed via the name of the company's flagship product "BT Babbitts Soap." That acrostic, titled "The Man" and extolling the virtues of the esteemed Mr. B.T. Babbitt himself, begins:
Capitalizing on the cultural association of acrostic poetry with courtship— an association that the illustration on the card is designed to trigger—Babbitt's Soap effectively casts the producer-consumer relationship as a romantic one and the act of shopping as a lovemaking endeavor more broadly. It may seem a stretch to say that the Salem Brewery Association is following in Babbitt's acrostic footsteps by sexing up the prospective buyer of Salem beer. But in its promise of "restor[ing] man to fulness of strength and activity," doesn't this beer ad sound a bit too much like a male sexual enhancement product to dismiss the notion out of hand?
About two weeks ago, Ryan Mecum's Werewolf Haiku—the third installment in a series of illustrated "horrorku" volumes including Zombie Haiku and Vampire Haiku—hit bookstores around the nation. Earlier this year, Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Ce Rosenow reviewed the first two collections which you can find here and here, but to mark the coming of Werewolf Haiku, we thought it about time to track down Mecum himself. Whether or not the new book is exactly to your lycan—er, liking—we think you'll find something to chew on in the following conversation. 
RM: Without a doubt, he upped the game of zombie fiction. I consider Seth Grahame- Smith to be my ultimate nemesis. I see his creativity as a direct threat to mine. I actually had the chance to attack him last summer at Comic-Con, but he escaped through the crowd. A bystander was able to snap a photo of the carnage (presented here). Seth Grahame-Smith, if you are reading this blog, consider this an OFFICIAL INVITE to fight to the death and then keep fighting until we are just nubs and stumps.
RM: My training was mainly a steady diet of zombie comics and Frankenberry cereal. I did study under some wonderful poetry professors while at the University of Cincinnati, but I'm sure they'd rather I not mention them by name (right, John Drury and Andrew Hudgins?). I'm sure they wouldn't remember me, but they were both highly influential on my falling for poetry. I grew up finding poetry difficult and annoying. These teachers both introduced me to poems that were instantly fun. So, to answer your question, none.
P&PC: Can you describe the process of putting the books together?
P&PC: How are audiences responding to all of this grossness?
P&PC: Why do you think people are so obsessed with zombies, vampires and werewolves at the current time?
P&PC: Is the series, uh, dead, or is there another installment on the way?
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