Organic Form: Locally Sourced Haiku at the Farmers' Market in Salem

On the Subject of Soap, Poetry, Psychology Today, Blackness and Beauty

Some of you may have heard about—or been enraged by—the recent blog posting by Satoshi Kanazawa that ten or twelve days ago appeared on, then quickly disappeared from, the website of Psychology Today. Kanazawa, a scholar of evolutionary psychology and self-styled "Scientific Fundamentalist" affiliated with the London School of Economics, wrote there that black women are "objectively less physically attractive than other women." What has been called a firestorm of a response to the posting, oftentimes casting Kanazawa as an outlier, fringe thinker, or wingnut, has given P&PC some pause. We're not sure he's a wingnut or outlier. In fact, he may be the most recent mouthpiece for a logic (one might say a psychology) that's been driving corporate rhetoric—and producing corporate poetry—for well over a century now and that's not only visible in the historical record but in current advertisements for Dove soap being published by the hundreds of thousands in recent women's magazines.

Back in the 19th century, there were two products that drove advertising— and advertising innovation—in the U.S.: patent medicines (snake oils) and soaps. Both products relied on, and helped to popularize, a before-and-after logic that contributed to the power and mystification of the commodity item more generally. Losing your hair? Our new snake oil will make it grow back. Feeling dirty? Our soap will make you clean. Feeling depressed? Take some time out for "retail therapy," and the very act of going shopping will make you feel more like yourself again. Ad formats, like the metamorphic trade card featured on P&PC about a year ago, were even designed to teach this before-and-after logic in consumers' hands. Patent medicines and soaps were even more reliant on advertising than other products because, while there were hundreds of different brands (just about anyone could make them cheaply), there was, in actuality, very little difference between the finished products themselves—maybe Nostrum A had 95% alcohol while Nostrum B had 97%—and so artificial distinctions had to be created. Enter advertising, which found any number of ways, realistic or not, to distinguish one product's superiority to another.

One common way of demonstrating the purifying power of soap, believe it or not, was to show its formidable cleaning powers at work not just in making dirty skin shine or diseased skin healthy or soiled laundry clean, but making black or colored skin white. Dreydoppel Soap ("No Finer Made") for example, used a twelve-page pamphlet titled "Light and Shade" (cover pictured at top) to chronicle, in verse, a little minstrel figure's endeavor to lighten his complexion. That poem began:

A mite of queer humanity,
As dark as a cloudy night,
Was displeased with his complexion,
And wished to change from black to white.

He sampled all the medicine
That was ever made or brewed,
And tried to pale his color
By eating little food.

Frustrated in his attempts, he comes upon a billboard reading "Dreydoppel Soap Will Do the Work" and decides to give it a try:

So to the grocery store he hied,
Without a moments rest,
And bought a box of Dreydoppel Soap
And gave it a careful test.

One trial was all he needed;
Realized was his fondest hope;
His face was as white as white could be;
There's nothing like Dreydoppel Soap.

Such ads linked a discourse of moral and bodily purity—Ivory Soap billed itself as "99 and 44/100% pure" during a time when the Cleanliness Movement was gaining steam and popularizing the notion that cleanliness is next to Godliness—to a dream of racial purity as well, simultaneously fueling a fantasy of a white-washed America and casting colored skin as unclean and thus undesirable. This fantasy wasn't limited to blackness either, as soaps were shown washing Indian skin white and reforming the ethnic tempers and skin colors of Middle Easterners. One give-away premium for Larkin Soaps, for example (pictured here), told the tale of three Turks and three "white Caucasian maids":

Three Turks whose skin
Was brown, would win
Three white Caucasian maids;
Each maiden fair,
With courage rare,
Spoke to their kingly blades—
"Alas! Alack!
We turn our back,
Because our skin is white;
What good your crown if you are brown—
They'd laugh at us throughout the town—
They'd sneer and frown, and call us down,
And well they'd have the right."

Threatened with death by the ill-tempered, sword-brandishing Turks, the women ask for a final request—to wash the Turks' faces with Larkin's Sweet Home Soap:

And straight to work
Upon each Turk,
That lately they had snubbed,
Each maid did cope,
With SWEET HOME SOAP,
And scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed;
Their features bright
Grew milky white,
And light as sunny day—
Instead of mad and being sad,
The Turks and maids were both so glad,
That to this tale we need but add—
They married right away!

It's our contention here at P&PC that while such overt claims slowly disappeared from soap advertising, the racist logic established by those ads—and by the poetry in those ads—has persisted, finding voice in blog posts like Kanazawa's and underwriting soap ads like the one for Dove's "Visible Care" pictured here. Using the conventional before-and-after format, Dove associates dark skin with unclean, untreated, and unbeautiful skin; the woman on the left, superimposed on the close-up of untreated skin, has the darkest skin of the three women pictured, has black hair, has the largest hips of the three, and has an exaggerated black posture which is our age's version of minstrel cartooning. As one proceeds right through the image, the women become whiter and thinner (and their posture less distinctive), demonstrating—before our very eyes!—the very process of magical soap transformation that fueled 19th century soap ads and that culminates in a thin, white, blonde woman who gets associated with good, clean, pure, and thus beautiful skin. As if we miss the fantasy being acted out, Dove fills us in, its caption "Visibly more beautiful skin" being little more than a version of Kanazawa's claim that black women are "objectively less physically attractive than other women."

Poetry is not always on the side of the angel. In the case of 19th- century soap advertising, it not only spelled out and celebrated in a culturally prestigious and entertaining form a racist logic that was prevalent at the time, but it established a mode of racist advertising that Dove is continuing to capitalize on and profit from today. When Kanazawa assaults the beauty of black women, then, he is not just speaking for himself as an outlier or minority opinion on Psychology Today. He is voicing a view that is much more part of the psychological mainstream than many of us want to think and that continues to underwrite what people buy, how they buy, and what they consider clean and beautiful, and that thus helps to fuel a fantasy of what their world should look like—a view that hasn't come all that far from the 19th century, baby.

P&PC's Favorite Advertising Poem of the Month

First Look: Poetry After Cultural Studies

The University of Iowa Press has just released its Fall 2011 catalog of new titles which features, among other things, Poetry after Cultural Studies (pictured to the left)—a collection of eight essays which "showcases the unexpectedly rich intersection of cultural studies theory and current poetry scholarship," which "reflects on what poetry can accomplish in the broadest social and cultural contexts," and which is glossed near the bottom of the catalog page in the following manner:

Edward J. Brunner on James Norman Hall
Alan Ramon Clinton on Sylvia Plath
Maria Damon on the pleasures of mourning
Margaret Loose on Chartism
Cary Nelson on postcards of WWI
Carrie Noland on Edouard Glissant
Angela Sorby on birding in America
Barrett Watten on poetry, music, and political culture

James Norman Hall? Plath and electricity? The pleasures of mourning? Birding in America? We here at P&PC thought you might like a little more to go on than that. So, relying on our connections in the biz, calling in a few favors, and greasing the palms of a slightly less than confidential informant, we've managed to score an exclusive preview of this collection which examines a wide variety of poetry in Europe, the U.S. and the Caribbean from the past 150 years. Doing his repartee and his shuffle and breakdown, our shifty-eyed C.I. mentioned newspapers, postcards, protest music, field guides and cross-stitches before vanishing with his rhymes into the good night from which he came. It was a fast sneak-peek, yes, but we managed to scribble down a few fugitive sentences of each essay to tempt your aesthetic taste buds and give you something to mark down for your holiday reading and gift lists. Here's what we know:

Edward Brunner, Writing Another Kind of Poetry: James Norman Hall as Fern Gravel in Oh Millersville!

"The fact that Hall himself has no reputation as a poet and is known primarily through his collaboration with James Nordhoff on the best-selling trilogy Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Pitcairn's Island (1934), and Men against the Sea (1934) has not helped enable Oh Millersville!'s circulation. Yet in its time, Hall's stunt was a virtuosic feat that deceived book reviewers in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Des Moines (Iowa) Register, and dozens of other publications, all of which ignored such giveaway moments as the startling rhyme of "Whittier's / this verse" to celebrate the disinterment of a forgotten cache of Americana."

Alan Ramón Clinton, Sylvia Plath and Electracy

"Coin- cidentally, [Plath's collection] The Colossus bears the same name as the computer [Alan] Turing built in 1943 to decode German war transmissions, although Turing's machine remained so secret that the American ENIAC (1946) held the undisputed title as the world's first digital computer until the 1970s. Nevertheless, Plath finds herself, in the volume's title poem (CP 129–130), facing a problem similar to the one faced by the narrator of 'Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,' an archive that can only be properly implemented and accessed via digital means: 'I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.'"

Maria Damon, Pleasures of Mourning: A Yessay on Poetries in Out-of-the-Way Places

"My own multiple positioning (as poetry scholar, sometime producer of micropoetries, witness/participant, friend, and human-facing-mortality) is not experienced (by me) as disjunct, but I struggle, not to write but to conform, to move from one register of discourse to another in the essay in ways that don't alienate a scholarly readership; however, rather than smoothing out signs of these formal and processual disjunctions in the completed work, I prefer to let the awkwardnesses stand as a way of embodying the messy puzzlement, the unfinishedness, the ephemeral nature of micropoetries, and any human life-course, remembrance of which is then the object of elegiac activity."

Margaret A. Loose, Poetic, Popular, or Political? Chartism and the Fate of Political Poetry

"[Ernest] Jones, who had only recently emerged from his two-year incarceration for Chartist agitation, includes with the advertisement [for his recent book] a statement describing the harsh conditions of the poems' composition and affirming that 'upon them I stake my reputation as an author, and my character as a man' ('Ernest Jones' 64). Given the significance that the agonizing circumstances of their writing would confer on them, his explicit reliance on them as the proof of his authorship and character, and his advertising them in the hope of a large readership, this paragraph near the end of the announcement comes as a rather startling surprise: 'These will, probably, be among the last of my poetical works, for harder and sterner toils now call me to the field. The age has passed, when nations can be SUNG into liberty: perhaps it is well—for enthusiasm is the child of an hour—conviction is the father of centuries' ('Ernest Jones' 64)."

Cary Nelson, Only Death Can Part Us: Messages on Wartime Cards

"I have assembled an archive of wartime popular poems—on over 10,000 cards, postcards, envelopes, and miniature broadsides designed for personal exchange rather than public display—to gain access to the roles poetry played in the lives of the mostly lower-class and middle-class people who provided battlefield cannon fodder and home-front victims of modern war. These documents often include a preprinted poem and a holograph message. The poems vary widely in length, with some folding cards printing poems of thirty to forty lines, but the largest number of cards with messages have short verses of two to four lines."

Carrie Noland, Édouard Glissant: A Poetics of the Entour

"[T]he nature of one's relationship to land- scape—not just flora and fauna but also hillside ('morne'), river, and sea—is an issue of particular concern to inhabitants of the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean for whom reference points, coordinates for the construction of maps, are fragile and therefore vulnerable to destabilization. Édouard Glissant, the Martiniquan poet, novelist, playwright, and theorist who is the focus of this essay, remains characteristic in this regard; like [Henri] Stéhlé, Glissant is intrigued by the question of a people's relation to landscape, or what he calls—significantly for our purposes—their 'entour.' For him, as for the geographers who have studied the Caribbean, it is clear that Martinique, the place, is a historical construction, the product of imperialist phantasms that have carved up terrain, decimated and replaced populations, and forged intercontinental relationships that have little relation to the island's previous human history."

Angela Sorby, The Poetics of Bird Defense in America, 1860–1918

"[P]oems [about birds] came to adjudicate between romanticism and realism, enabling readers to think about nature both metaphorically (as a reflection of the self or the divine) and scientifically (as a mutable and potentially endangered ecosystem). As they circulated, American bird poems became part of a cultural conversation about conserving the natural world, while also bridging the gap between metaphorical reading and concrete scientific—or even political—action."

Barrett Watten, On the Advantages of Negativity: Avant-Garde Poetry, New Music, and the Cultural Turn

"My second moment of the public life of innovative poetry took place when Language poet Bruce Andrews stood up to Bill O'Reilly on The O'Reilly Factor (November 2, 2006). While Andrews is known for his deployment of the material signifier in his work, his debate with O'Reilly focused not on his opaque and contestatory Language writing, but on his teaching of Robert Sheer's polemic The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq in political science classes at Fordham University—in the current political climate of academic-cum-Red baiting carried out by David Horowitz and his allies.... [I]t is precisely Andrews's being 'called up' before the House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC) vestigial organ as Fox News talk show that conditions the kind of negativity he can bring to the dismantling of false positives."

Poetry after Cultural Studies is available in December 2011. Reserve your copy today, and stay tuned to this blog for exclusive extra features as that date approaches!

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Nightlife

The P&PC office never rests from its mission to find and document the poetic in the popular, which is why we we were quick to notice this leather jacket late one night (early one morning, actually) at the Westside Station in West Salem—just before last call, pint of warmish PBR in hand, and the denizens of Salem's nightlife slowly circling each other and the karaoke mic like so many wasps at the end of summer. The jacket's owner (Alex, if we remember correctly) kindly let us photograph his artwork captioned in stylized handwriting with the final lines of Dylan Thomas' famous villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night." Karaoke fans, listen to Thomas reading his poem and eat your hearts out.

The Poetry of Scrooge McDuck & Disney Comics: A Guest Posting by Brian Greggs

Facing certain graduation and an uncertain job market, Seattle native and Willamette University American Studies major Brian Greggs (pictured here) takes a moment to reflect on his first encounters with poetry which came via Scrooge McDuck and Disney comics. If we here at the P&PC Office are right in detecting more than a touch of wistfulness in Greggs’ tour through the reading of his youth—introducing us to the comic renditions of Robert Service, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Dante—then there’s only one cure we can think of: this sounds like dissertation material!

Uncle Scrooge, the world’s richest duck, is perhaps best known for his appearance as Charles Dickens’s Scrooge in Disney’s Christmas Carol, or from the popular DuckTales animated series. But for most of his life he has resided in Disney’s comic book universe, where he was created in 1947 by Carl Barks. According to Barks, Scrooge was raised in Glasgow in the late 1800s, leaving Scotland at age thirteen in order to earn money to support his family. After traveling the world (Austria, South Africa, etc.) in search of gold and always arriving after the party ends, he finally travels to the Yukon. There, against all odds, he strikes it rich.

It is here, at the moment of Scrooge’s success, that Robert W. Service, the “Bard of the Yukon,” makes an appearance in a 1988 story called “Last Sled to Dawson” written by Don Rosa. I grew up reading Disney comics—in fact learned to read with them—so Rosa’s story marks one of my earliest encounters with poetry of any kind. It is difficult to overstate the impact these comics had on me at the time—though, as a pint-sized nature buff, I was drawn more to the frosty, Arcadian landscapes like those in the bottom panel than to Service’s poem, which I only now realize is doubly appropriate for “Last Sled.” Not only is Service forever linked to the Yukon, where both he and Scrooge would find the material that would make them famous, but Service was himself from Glasgow! What better way to celebrate Scrooge’s Yukon triumph than with verse by his countryman, the Scottish-born bard of the Yukon?

This wouldn’t be the only time a member of the Duck family flock met poetry; in “The Not-so-Ancient Mariner” from 1966 and pictured to the left, for example, Donald wins a poetry recitation contest and later accidentally shoots an albatross.

Though long past their heyday in the U.S., Disney comics have developed a remarkable popularity in Europe, where weekly digests are commonly read by adults and children alike. Their popularity is such that the vast majority of Disney’s comics writers and artists are from Europe or South America, where large publishing houses translate their work for consumption in many different countries. The real pioneers of the format were in Italy, where the magazine Topolino (Mickey Mouse) was founded in 1932; it is still being published today.

Mining for material, many Italian writers turned to epics of the past, crafting adaptations of widely-known classics like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, The Three Musketeers, Treasure Island and others. The Italians have produced no less than four adaptations of Poe’s tales, though none have ever been published in English. In 1949, Guido Martina scripted what may have been the first Disney comics story thus borrowed: Dante’s Inferno, starring Mickey as Dante and Goofy as Virgil. Taking the parody a step further, Martina versified his script in an elegant meter that follows Dante’s terza rima exactly (the panel pictured above comes at the beginning of Canto IV):

Dante: Where the heck are we?
Virgil: In Limbo!

Soon as off the ghostly boat we dared,
A rocky, tight ravine we ventured by,
Where demons swung poor fellas in midair!

As a gust of yawns blew through the sky
We saw the punished were teachers all!
But… schoolmarms, here? I wondered why!

This English translation did not appear until March 2006, in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, #666. Set in Dante’s meter by David Gerstein, it’s less elegantly rendered than Martina’s, but this isn’t entirely surprising since the Italians have long had an entirely different approach to comics than Americans. As Frank Stajano has pointed out:

Martina had a significant impact on the form and linguistic structure of the entire Italian Disney production: in his stories (and, before that, in his translations) the characters always spoke proper Italian, often using sophisticated words outside the normal vocabulary of a teenager. Contrast this with the American strips where, perhaps in deference to a comics tradition that meant to depict the language of its characters with more realism, slang was quite common and characters such as Goofy would never utter a sentence without “eating out” or somehow distorting half of the words. Martina’s Goofy, instead, speaks proper Italian and so do all the other characters, from the most distinguished academics to the lowliest thieves. This important aspect, faithfully preserved in all the stories of the Italian school, probably also contributed to the very wide acceptance of Topolino in Italy: parents were happy to give the comic to their children because it was in some sense educational (expanding their vocabulary and exercising their grammar) without being pedantic or boring.

In part because many Americans—literary critics included—consider the comics to be a low or popular artform, a lot of the European material hasn’t been translated, and a lot of older comic art has fallen out of print. Recently, however, Fantagraphics has begun reclaiming older comic art—Krazy Kat, Peanuts, Popeye, Prince Valiant, etc.—through their reprint program. Fantagraphics has just announced that over the next 15 years they'll be reprinting the entire Disney work of Carl Barks, so it looks like the ducks and their poetry will be coming back. Better yet? I’ll get to read it all as an adult this time.

Brian Greggs will be spending this coming Summer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he hopes to find gainful employment—or strike it rich.

Bill Nye the Science Guy Poetry Contest