Report from Victoria

Twice—twice!—at this year's Modernist Studies Association conference in Victoria, British Columbia, P&PC heard people with no official connection to this blog sincerely and with no apparent malicious intent drop the name of the "people's poet" Edgar Guest. Sure, folks dropped it casually and quietly, as if they were testing the waters to see whether it really would disturb the universe if the author of A Heap O' Livin and Just Folks were mentioned in the same breath as Mina Loy and Ezra Pound and the politics of modernist salons. P&PC is happy to report that the universe is in stable condition.

What surprised P&PC more than all this Eddie Guest name-dropping, however, was the complete silence in regard to Robert Service (1874-1958)—the "Bard of the Yukon" and author of such classics as "The Cremation of Sam McGee" and "The Shooting of Dan McGrew." Known as "the Canadian Kipling," Service is perhaps as much an illustration of "Modernist Networks" (the conference theme) as anyone else: he was born in Scotland, moved to Canada at age 21, worked as an ambulance driver and war correspondent during World War I, married a Parisian in France, and fled Europe for the U.S. with the outbreak of World War II. Wouldn't it have been interesting to put his poems about the Boer War ("The March of the Dead") and World War I (Rhymes of a Red Cross Man) into a modernist context and see what happens? Especially for a conference taking place in Canada?

In fact, the only mention of Service we encoun- tered during our three-day stay in B.C. was as we were doing our standard poetry-related research at the local pub and came across this ad for Service Scottish Ale (pictured at the top above) which is locally brewed by the Phillips Brewing Company of Victoria. The poster defines "service" in chiefly economic terms that make us uncomfortable—we'd like to think one could be celebrated for services of a less capitalist nature, for example—but given that the M.S.A. failed to offer much in the way of an alternative, we'll side, at least for the moment with Phillips. Join us for a drink?

MSA 2010: The Networks of Modernism

Later this week, P&PC carpools up I-5 and ferries over the Salish Sea to Victoria, British Columbia, in order to attend the 12th annual Modernist Studies Association conference. This year, the conference is organized around the special theme "The Networks of Modernism," and you can catch P&PC live and in action on Friday morning from 8:30-10 a.m. as part of the panel "Modernist Patronage: Corporate and Academic Evolutions." Here's a preview of that throw-down:

Modernist Patronage: Corporate and Academic Evolutions

Modernism witnessed a revival of traditional literary patronage, but it also saw the development of other patronage systems, ranging from the new network of Carnegie Libraries to women's social clubs and local Rotary clubs. This panel examines corporate and academic evolutions of patronage which created new markets and audiences for modernist creative work, from poetry to photography. These three presentations disclose relationships that were sometimes fraught, but that ultimately benefited both artist and "patron." Further, these presentations trace the development of relationships providing models for later patronage of the arts. All three also demonstrate how modernist work sometimes evolved both in content and style partly due to interactions between author/artist and patron.

Mike Chasar ("From Vagabond to Visiting Poet: Vachel Lindsay and the Prehistory of the Program Era") focuses on the financial and institutional patronage of poets by American universities which culminated after World War 2 in what Mark McGurl has called "The Program Era." Modernism saw the invention of the Writer-in-Residence position, the development of a nationwide university-to-university reading circuit, and the invention of the "Visiting Poet." With assistance from Baylor University English professor A. Joseph Armstrong, the poet Vachel Lindsay began visiting schools in the South and West that other modern poets didn't believe would support their work. Lindsay thus established a circuit that Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg and others would follow, simultaneously dislodging New England as the center of American arts and letters. Lindsay also pioneered a rhetorical justification allowing iconoclastic poets to cultivate relationships with the conservative world of academia without becoming sellouts.

Brenda Helt ("The Making and Managing of American Modernists: Norman Holmes Pearson and the Yale Collection of American Literature") examines the role of Yale professor Norman Holmes Pearson, who used his personal connections with authors like H. D., Bryher, Pound, and Stein to acquire major collections of their work for Yale. Reciprocally, Pearson used his authoritative position to further interest in and obtain publishers for the work of these modernists, securing their reputations for posterity and enabling some of their best work. Based in part on Pearson’s unpublished letters, Helt’s presentation focuses primarily on Pearson’s role as academic patron of H.D. and Pound. Pearson worked tirelessly as H.D.’s tactful editor, as well as her literary advisor and (unpaid) agent, roles that significantly affected the quantity and quality of her late work. Pound’s WW 2 politics and consequential incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s garnered many enemies, but Pearson promoted Pound’s work apart from his political involvements, helping to prevent it from being “disappeared.”

Donal Harris ("On Company Time: Agee in the Office") examines corporate patronage, exploring how Time, Inc. underwrote a vast amount of poetry, literature, photography, and film by bringing novelists and poets into the journalistic fold. He argues that “Time-style”—the idiosyncratic syntactical form that articles in the eponymous journal took—can also describe the process of systematizing how a stable of experimental artists produced their texts. By recasting “Time-style” in terms of modernist patronage, Harris foregrounds the professionalization of certain protocols of modernist aesthetics under the auspices of mass-market journalism. Harris grounds this larger argument in a reading of James Agee's famously strained relationship with Time, Inc. and the publishing history of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, initially an article for Fortune.

Private SNAFU

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.

Rumors (1943)



Spies (1943)



The Chow Hound (1944)

200 Toasts from Mlle. Mixer

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.

It's no surprise, therefore, to come upon an anthology like 200 Toasts—the little 4 x 6 paperback pictured to the left and copyrighted by Mlle. Mixer in 1917. Here are some highlights from the Mix Mistress so that you're not left tongue-tied at your next soiree:

34

God made man as frail as a bubble,
God made love, and love made trouble,
God made wine, and is it a sin
For a man to drink wine to drown trouble in?

43

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brains
With grammar and nonsense and learning.
Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,
Gives learning a better discerning.

79

The Frenchman loves his native wine,
The German loves his beer;
The Englishman loves his 'alf and 'alf
Because it brings good cheer.
The Irishman loves his whiskey straight
Because it gives him dizzyness;
The American has no choice at all,
So he drinks the whole d--- business.

89

Laugh at all things, great and small,
Sick or well, at sea or shore.
While we're quaffing, let's have laughing,
Who the d--- cares for more?

108

While beer brings gladness, don't forget
That water only makes you wet.

132

Here's to we two and you two; if you two love we two,
As we two love you two, then here's to we four;
But if you two don't love we two, as we love you two,
Then here's to we two, and no more!

137

Here's to our wives and sweethearts;
May they never meet.

140

The world is filled with flowers,
The flowers are filled with dew;
The dew is filled with love,
For you, and you, and you.

145

Beggars who walk, princes and queens who hide,
In skull-and-bone land saunter side by side.

146

Here's lovers two to the maiden true,
And four to the maiden caressing;
But the wayward girl, with lips that curl,
Keeps twenty lovers guessing.

150

There is a riddle most abstruse,
Canst read the answer right?
Why is it that my tongue grows loose
Only when I grow tight?

160

If on my theme I rightly think
There are five reason why men drink;
Good wine, a friend, because I'm dry,
Or lest I should be, by and by,
Or any other reason why.

198

Love is sweet, but oh! how bitter
To love a girl and then not git her.

A Magic Song Restorer

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:

Magic cures him when he's sick
Magic cheers him when he's well
Makes his feathers smooth and slick
And his voice just like a bell

A little chant or incantation calling forth the forces of healing and recovery in a way that prose cannot, this quatrain also visualizes the canary getting better, narrating a process of recovery—curing, cheering, smoothing feathers—which is signaled as complete by (what else?) birdsong.

This Just In: John Ashbery More Accessible than Ted Kooser

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.

So you're no doubt wondering by now, how did Kooser's poetry fare when plugged into these tests? Well, it turns out that Kooser is a fairly accessible poet but—in receiving grade-level scores that range from 5th grade through advanced graduate school—the poems are not nearly, completely, or constantly as accessible as Kooser himself and others would have us believe (not based on the results of our limited 5-poem set at least). Here are the scores for the five pieces:

"The Very Old"
Reading Ease Score: 73.7
Grade Level: 8.1
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 11.2

"After My Grandmother's Funeral"
Reading Ease: 72.6
Grade Level: 11.1
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 15

"Flying at Night"
Reading Ease: 80.2
Grade Level: 5.3
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 7

"There is Always a Little Wind"
Reading Ease: 72.1
Grade Level: 12.4
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 15.9

"Porch Swing in September"
Reading Ease: 54.9
Grade Level: 19.3
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 22.7

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.

John Ashbery is more accessible than Ted Kooser.

Hands down.

It's not even close.

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!

Here are the scores for Ashbery's poems:

"Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape"
Reading Ease: 78.5
Grade Level: 6.2
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 9.4

"The New Higher"
Reading Ease: 92.2
Grade Level: 3
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 6.4

"Syringa"
Reading Ease: 75.4
Grade Level: 7.4
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 10.5

"Daffy Duck in Hollywood"
Reading Ease: 67.7
Grade Level: 8.4
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 12.1

"For John Clare"
Reading Ease: 83.3
Grade Level: 6.3
Gunning Fog Grade Level: 9.5

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.

From the Poetry & Popular Culture Vault: The Financial Lives of the Poets

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.

Only a fool would take that wager. But in Jess Walter’s latest novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets, former business journalist Matt Prior has done just that, literally betting the whole house on his pipe-dream Poetfolio.com, a website that delivers financial news via poetry—with disastrous and hilarious consequences.

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.

Beyond his characters, Walter’s strength is the novel’s form. Much as Matt himself lives multiple lives, The Financial Lives of the Poets takes on multiple generic and formal conventions, sliding from sitcom territory to the realm of crime thrillers as lists, screenplay dialogue, and poetry all work in concert to reveal the hidden, ignored complexities of everyday life and the challenge of conveying them through literature. If there is a major fault in The Financial Lives of the Poets, it may be that the premise is completely unconvincing. How could a man who made his living as a business reporter think that Poetfolio.com would be a fiscally sound investment? He’d be either incredibly dumb or incredibly naïve (and evidence for both abounds). Or perhaps it's too great a leap of faith. Can either Matt or Watler really believe this is what poetry can or should do?

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.

While reading The Financial Lives of the Poets, I couldn’t help but think of Williams’s famous lines

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Matt’s downfall is triggered partly by a lack of interest in poetry—really, a lack of interest in humanity—and Matt continually reminds us how important poets and poetry are in these fragmented, implosive times:

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.

Amen to that.

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.

And for those of you lit-entrepreneurs who’ve been thinking “Financial poetry? Brilliant! I could do that...”? Well, Matt’s ill-fated domain, Poetfolio.com, is still available. Snatch it up and live the dream.

Colleen Coyne writes in from Minneapolis where she is completing an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Minnesota.