Epic Rap Battles of History: Dr. Seuss vs. William Shakespeare

By now you've probably seen Hulk Hogan vs. Kim Jong-il, and you know all about Albert Einstein vs. Stephen Hawking, right? Or Abe Lincoln vs. Chuck Norris? Well, maybe you haven't yet taken in Epic Rap Battles of History #12 in which Dr. Seuss (assisted by Things 1 & 2) tries to take down William Shakespeare. If you're not one of the 7.2 million viewers who've watched it in the two weeks since its posting, head on over to Youtube right now to view the latest in this entertaining series by Nice Peter who is, according to his Facebook profile, "one guy, with one guitar, with one red lightning bolt strap."

Scraps of Literature: Poetry & Popular Culture's Back to School Edition

In his recent London Review of Books essay on Anne Carson's latest book Nox—a scrapbooky, fold-out accordion collage poem assembled in memory of her late brother Michael—Stephen Burt rightly notes that Carson's compositional method recalls the fanzines of the 1980s and 1990s and has a clear historical precedent in the poetry scrapbooks that many people assembled and maintained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We here at the P&PC home office are grateful for Burt's connections—and for the shout-out he gave P&PC in recommending the Review's readers to check out the examples of such scrapbooks that have appeared from time to time in this blog's postings and that, back when our home offices were located in Iowa City, we began making available at Poetry Scrapbooks: An Online Archive.

Given Burt's blurb and the fact that this is back-to-school season for many people, we thought it timely and appropriate to offer an example of another such album—this one assembled by a young reader, likely for a school project, and probably in the 1920s or 1930s. Titled "Scraps of Literature" and running about one hundred pages long, the collection is bound with two metal rings and contains over 130 (printed, handwritten, or typewritten) poems, assorted articles about their authors and subjects, and many illustrations cut out of magazines that the assembled poems are frequently used to gloss, caption, or otherwise engage.

There's no name in the inside cover to identify who put this album together, but the practice of making poetry scrapbooks part of—or even out of—schoolwork wasn't uncommon. Teachers kept personally-made poetry anthologies as sourcebooks for classroom reading. Children regularly converted their used composition books into poetry collections. Some people even turned their out-of-date textbooks into albums by pasting directly over the printed material of the published page; P&PC owns an old geography textbook that has been transformed in this way, making us wonder if perhaps even Elizabeth Bishop had this practice in the back of her mind when putting together Geography III. Educators were advised to harness the skills evident in such activity—finding, selecting, organizing, "publishing," and otherwise editing material—to make learning a fun and individualized endeavor.

In the process—as the album presented here perhaps suggests—poetry became part of an inter-disciplinary method of learning, as students could combine Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" with articles and pictures about Abraham Lincoln, or Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Old Ironsides" with historical accounts of the navy battle in which Ironsides participated. In the process, students not only learned about poetry and history, but also about the variety of ways poetry engaged and responded to the world around them. On a leaf not pictured in this posting, the maker of "Scraps of Literature" pastes a picture of Old Ironsides next to Holmes' poem and a newspaper article on how schoolchildren contributed to the Save "Old Ironsides" Fund, creating in the process a little triangular relationship in which it becomes visible that poetry not only matters but, contra Auden, helps to make things happen. (Holmes' verse is frequently credited with helping to save the ship from being decommissioned.)

This activity of collecting poems is not entirely a thing of the past; if you think back far enough, you can probably remember a teacher or two who made it an assignment for you to assemble an anthology of verse important to your life. During the past year, P&PC has found out that both Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass (both former poet laureates) have made this a regular part of their teaching over the years—an activity that isn't necessarily centered on, or motivated by, close, analytical readings of poems themselves for the objective values they might exhibit, but, instead, on those poems' relations to people's subjective experiences of being in the world. Reading old poetry scrapbooks today can be a frustrating experience because there is no key or record to how people paired poems up, or why they combined them with the pictures they caption, or how they mattered to their lives. It's clear that the process was frequently an analytical one, but most of what we have to go on today is the material end product of that process. When we hold Carson's Nox in our hands, we read it as a complex text in part because of her literary reputation and the fact that it was published with obvious care by New Directions, but also because of the personal experiences and relationships that motivate that care in the first place. Why shouldn't we give the benefit of the doubt to books like "Scraps of Literature" as well?

N.B. Following are a few sample pages from "Scraps of Literature" and not the entire collection, which is too long to feature here. If you are interested in helping to make this scrapbook, and many others like it, available for public reading in online or other formats, please contact P&PC with your ideas and suggestions. This public service announcement brought to you by Arbiters of Paste—Just Glue It.

Out of the Taxi and into the Office: Melissa Girard Reviews "What Poetry Brings To Business"

Melissa Girard—whose review of The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry by Susan B.A. Somers-Willett continues to be one of the most regularly accessed postings in the P&PC archive—returns this week to assess Clare Morgan's 2010 curiosity What Poetry Brings to Business. Now on the English Department faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Girard (pictured here) specializes in modernist American poetry and regularly taught business and professional writing at the University of Illinois. That background—not to mention some first-hand experience working in the advertising industry—makes her our go-to consultant to tell us how much stock we should place in Morgan's study.

Writing about Wallace Stevens in the New York Review of Books in June 1964, Marianne Moore said, “He did not mix poetry with business.” Although Stevens (pictured here) worked for more than five decades at various law firms and insurance companies—notably, Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he spent nearly forty years—his thoughts and feelings about business never entered his poetry. As Moore recounts, “Phrases sometimes came to him on his way to the office in a taxi ... but you may be sure that ‘Frogs eat butterflies, snakes eat frogs’ was not written in the office.”

Dana Gioia, himself a former businessman and, from 2003 to 2009, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), wondered, if Stevens had written about business, what would he have said? In one of the more provocative essays in Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992), Gioia notes that Stevens’ silence on the topic, while perplexing, is hardly unusual. Countless modern poets have worked in all aspects of business over the last hundred and fifty years, and, yet, unlike novelists, who have left behind a rich, fictional record of modern office life, we have only a scattering of stanzas from poets. Modern American poets, Gioia points out, have written superbly about everything from bicycles and baseball cards to incest and pedophilia and, yet, somehow, “this same poetic tradition has never been able to look inside the walls of a corporate office and see with the same intensity what forty million Americans do during the working week.” Gioia concludes, “American poetry has defined business mainly by excluding it. Business does not exist in the world of poetry, and therefore by implication it has become everything that poetry is not—a world without imagination, enlightenment, or perception. It is the universe from which poetry is trying to escape” (114).

It has been nearly twenty years since Gioia challenged poets and poetry critics to follow him into the belly of the beast—to go where even our greatest modern poets could or would not take us. The recently published What Poetry Brings to Business (2010) by Clare Morgan with Kirsten Lange and Ted Buswick is one of the first, sustained critical attempts to answer Gioia’s call. Morgan and company have finally taken poetry out of the taxi and into the cubicle.

What Poetry Brings to Business is difficult to classify. Equal parts memoir, poetry textbook, and academic study, it is not a manuscript per se, but a manuscript-about-a-manuscript. Morgan, a literary critic, fiction writer, and director of the graduate creative writing program at the University of Oxford, cleverly frames the text around what is, undeniably, one hell of a story. Seemingly out of nowhere, Morgan was approached by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world’s leading business consultancies, and asked to submit a proposal for a project exploring the relationship between poetry and strategic thinking. Specifically, Morgan was invited to contribute to The Strategy Institute, a kind of think tank within BCG devoted to enhancing executive thinking. They approached Morgan because they were concerned that business and management strategy were too often being reduced to a narrow, toolbox approach (“5 Steps to Enhance Your Creativity,” etc.) and thought that poetry might be able to offer a richer, more lasting means of transforming executives’ decision-making capacity.

What Poetry Brings to Business is not the book that Morgan was asked to write for BCG. If you’re like me, you’ll make this discovery slowly and with some disappointment. I still want to know exactly what Morgan would say to an audience of business executives in Tokyo. I want to see PowerPoint slides! What Poetry Brings to Business is not this. Instead, Morgan has written a book about the process of writing that BCG book. This is no management guide, but a book pitched to people exactly like me: poetry teachers, poetry critics, and poets who would like to follow Morgan as she begins to discover ways to begin this long overdue conversation. The chasm between business and poetry is so great, the book seems to suggest, that we need this preparatory exercise.

It is certainly true that Morgan, a creative writer and university professor, needed to be convinced that poetry has something to offer business. When initially approached by BCG, she asked,

How many people care about poetry anyway? Isn’t it an old-fashioned mode that deals in airy-fairy utterances? At the beginning of the twenty-first century, isn’t it pretty much an irrelevance unless you are an academic with a vested interest in what Eliot himself called ‘a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion’? Periphrastic: who needs it? (12)

P&PC readers will undoubtedly cringe over such early passages where Morgan reveals her own outdated and outmoded perception of the genre. Equally cringe-worthy is her first stab at defining the relationship between poetry and business strategy. “There is a lot in common between a poem and a marketable product,” she writes,

Here is my output, the poet says. I would like to share it. Poets are interfacing with consumers in terms of reaching a readership. They have to intersect with the prevailing market forces via the publishing industry. They have to grapple with questions of utility, addressing the relationship of the work to the needs of contemporary moment. They have to establish a niche for a particular work through channels that will enable each individual voice, among many competing ones, to be heard. (11)

In my professional writing courses, we call prose like this “businessese,” a term that refers to the specific form of jargon and clichés that infect the language of contemporary business. (“So, will poetry help me ‘think outside the box’?” I found myself asking, facetiously.)

However, after a relatively rocky beginning, What Poetry Brings to Business improves considerably. Each subsequent chapter follows Morgan on her “journey” as she discovers an array of skills and strengths that poetry has to offer. These insights unfold gradually, as Morgan conducts workshops and interviews with a variety of business and poetry professionals, including Gioia, and reads deeply in poetry, poetics, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy, all in search of “tangible” connections between the two enterprises. While we don’t get PowerPoint slides, the book does provide a very useful anthology of at least fifty poems that, Morgan argues, help hone strategic thinking, most of which will be familiar to readers and teachers of modern poetry (Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, John Keats, Lewis Carroll, Billy Collins, William Stafford, Robert Hayden, along with some more surprising choices).

Morgan also provides transcripts of some of the conver- sations she has had with workshop participants over the years. This combination of poetic texts and critical responses creates a valuable pedagogical apparatus. Anyone who teaches introductory poetry courses or conducts poetry outreach will appreciate the veritable lesson plans that the book supplies. It is fascinating, for instance, to read the different ways that a lawyer, engineer, and BCG executive have responded to “The Road Not Taken,” and to then compare them to classroom experiences. (For what it’s worth, these executive-level responses were virtually identical to ones that I have encountered in undergraduate classrooms.)

Because of her focus on process, Morgan wholly avoids the kind of instrumentalization of poetry that one might fear finding in a business management guide. You will not learn the ways that poetry can improve your copy or report writing (“poetry has rhythm!”), nor will you find any epigrammatic wisdom (poetry has no “takeaways”). Instead, Morgan ultimately discovers that there has always been a deep and abiding connection between business strategy and the logic of poetry.

“Poems put down their roots in the no-man’s-land between thinking and feeling,” Morgan writes, “the borderland where logic shades into the non-logical, where a world defined and delineated by language gives way to the more diffuse territory of what psychologists sometimes call ‘the feeling state’” (55). This is the same strange land, she says, in which twenty-first-century business executives routinely find themselves, a world in which facts and data are never enough and there is rarely a right or a wrong answer. Reading, discussing, and thinking about poetry regularly, Morgan claims, can help business professionals become more comfortable with ambiguity, and, as a result, prepare them to be creative, ethical leaders.

All of Morgan’s insights about the strong interconnections between poetry and business seem completely accurate: that poetry sharpens our strategic-thinking skills, teaches us to be attentive to subtlety and nuance, and prepares us to navigate both linguistic and situational ambiguity. Indeed, what is surprising about What Poetry Brings to Business is not these findings, but the fact that we needed to find them in the first place. I came to What Poetry Brings to Business expecting to find an impassioned missive to the world of business, reminding executives of the myriad ways that poetry still matters. What I found, instead, was a creative writer and Oxford professor who seems herself to have forgotten. The business executives who populate this study are the ones who seem hungry for the new creative energy that poetry might bring to their professional and personal lives. It was BCG, after all, who initiated this new partnership with poetry. They seem more than willing to be convinced of its value. The question is whether the poets are finally ready.

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: An Interview with Emily Benson of StarMark Pet Products

A few weeks ago, one of P&PC's poetry scouts wrote in with exciting news: she'd just purchased a bright orange StarMark Everlasting Bento Ball toy for her newly-adopted dog named Ayla (both pooch and product pictured here) and had discovered a little 6-line poem printed on the back of the toy's packaging:

Think you've seen it all?
Nothing like this half a ball...
Twice the fun and super strong;
It's quite a ball—you can't go wrong!
Dental dimples for the cleanest smiles,
Once filled with treats they last for miles.

Panting with anticipation and curious about how and why poetry came to appear in such an unexpected place, P&PC put its sleuthing nose to the pavement and tracked down Emily Benson, Marketing Director for StarMark Pet Products, a retail arm of the Triple Crown Dog Academy which is the largest, most comprehensive training, behavior, and pet-related event center in the world. With a 100,000 square-foot facility, a 200-kennel boarding kennel, and a two-mile training trail located in Austin, Texas, Triple Crown obviously knows man's best friend quite well. But could Benson give P&PC readers something to chew on? Or did the poem have us barking up the wrong tree? Here's what Benson had to say about dogs, cats, poetry, doggerel and the unfortunate fact that the poems are in the process of being phased out.

Poetry & Popular Culture: Poems on chew toys? How did the idea come about?

Emily Benson: Our product line originally started with training items, and then our next generation of products were more along the lines of interactive and treat-dispensing toys. The idea of the poems seemed to fit the fun, whimsical aspect, and simply the joy, of playing with your dog.

P&PC: Who writes them? Like, do you have a poet on staff or something?

EB: I actually wrote the poems. We had a few toys that were being dog-tested around the office and were working on text for the packaging. I came up with the poem for the Foam Ball and ran it by our president as an alternative for the usual packaging claims, and he actually liked it!

P&PC: Last time I wrote poetry on the job, I got reprimanded, so I quit and went to graduate school. What advice would you give other cubicle poets when it comes to making poetry part of their work?

EB: I think allowing for creative thought in the workplace is important, whether it's poetry or any other idea. Poetry itself is a writing form you don't normally see in many industries, but it certainly has a place. If you're not able to express yourself through poetry as you like at work, then it should definitely still be pursued on a personal level.

P&PC: What's your favorite chew-toy poem?

EB: The poem for the Fantastic Foam Ball (pictured here) is my favorite:

With a roll and a bounce
What makes your dog pounce?
What floats in the water
To fetch like an otter?
What's soft in his jaws
And not easily mauled?
It's a fantastic Foam Ball!

It was the first poem I wrote, and the imagery of the otter just seems fun and carefree. Otters always look like they've having a good time.

P&PC: Plus you get to rhyme "otter" and "water." What would you rhyme with "rhinoceros"?

EB: A rhyme for rhinoceros is preposterous!

P&PC: The poems are written from different points of view and for different audiences. The poem for the Everlasting Treat Ball (being gnawed on in the picture here), for example, is from a dog's perspective and addressed to other dogs:

Where is this new toy, this new bringer of joy?
A toy that's soft but still strong is all that I long...
It wobbles and rolls, and what good things it holds—
Filled with food and capped with one treat or two,
This toy it seems is only in my dreams!

The Fantastic Foam Ball, on the other hand, is addressed to dog owners. How much of this is doggone accident—and how much cool calculation?

EB: This was all a purebred accident. It was more a feel for the toy that drove the poems, and perspective evolved after the initial base idea.

P&PC: What sort of test marketing did this require?

EB: It was pretty basic. We mostly passed them around the office with our staff and our trainers to get their input and made edits from there as needed.

P&PC: How have customers responded?

EB: They seem to enjoy them. They fit with the overall look and feel of the packages.

P&PC: So no one's accused you of writing doggerel?

EB: Maybe just a few mixed verses and tales.

P&PC: Um, P&PC has an office cat. What are StarMark's plans for a feline product line?

EB: Our roots are based in dogs, but we're working on product ideas for cats and other animals. We do get feedback about some of our toys, the Everlasting Fun Ball in particular, where people fill them with cat treats or catnip for their cats to play with. We have also heard of them being used by parrot owners, and even big cats and other animals at a handful of zoos.

P&PC: If I'm correct, you've now used poems on three products in addition to the Foam Ball (the Bento Ball, the Treat Ball, and the Everlasting Fire Plug). Can you give us a preview of what's in the works?

EB: We are actually in the process of redesigning all our ball packaging for a more professional look to better reflect our background in training and behavior. So this means the poems are being phased out and in their place is an image of one of our staff or client dogs along with their story.

Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega Reviews Robert Darnton's New Book, Poetry and the Police

Fresh off the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, Kirsten Bartholomew Ortega—an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and a new Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent—gives us her take on Robert Darnton's recent study Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Harvard, 2010). Ortega, pictured here, is completing a book about the figure of the female flaneur in urban-based American poetry and has published articles on June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Gwendolyn Brooks. So what does a study of eighteenth-century French street poetry have to do with the writing and study of popular poetry today? More than you'd initially think. Read on to find out.

What difference can poetry really make in the world? W.H. Auden is oftentimes quoted in the way of an answer for his line "poetry makes nothing happen" (from "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"), but Robert Darnton's Poetry and the Police suggests that, for fourteen men in eighteenth-century Paris, at least, poetry made quite a lot happen. King Louis XV assigned a police investigation into the poems these men exchanged and—wait, it gets better—had the men arrested, imprisoned, and exiled from Paris as a result. Darnton's archival examination of the police records from this "Affair of the Fourteen" suggests that there is a long historical foundation to the popularity of poetry as political activism. Just as the role of politics is hotly debated in poetry discussions, though, Darnton's suggestion pushes uneasily against his reluctance to attribute too much historical impact to poetry. Certainly, the lives of fourteen men were ruined, but the king's social and economic policies—some of which inspired the offending poems—were not altered.

The disconnect between the impact of the poems on the individual versus society as a whole is a problem uniquely presented and exacerbated by city life. Darnton's investigation—he's a historian at Harvard and a towering figure in the field known as the History of the Book—reveals much about urban poetry and its persistent emphasis on the paradox of individuality in urban spaces filled with people. Typically, Baudelaire's nineteenth-century flaneur dominates the historical conversation about the influence of poetry from and of the streets of Paris. The image of Baudelaire's modern, urban stroller—especially as characterized by Walter Benjamin, who is primarily responsible for continuing discussions of flanerie in artistic and intellectual circles—is of the poet as part of the city crowd but not of the people. The flaneur was more akin to the dandy than a political activist.

What makes Baudelaire's poetry so compelling almost two centuries after it was written is his way of engaging with particularly modern city spaces. The flaneur provides a model for the urban perspective: aloof, invisible, capable of overwhelming attraction to other members of the crowd, and intoxicated by the possibilities of experience in the crowd. We continue to struggle with the effects of urban life on humanity in the twenty-first century (see Nicholas Lemann's recent review of new urban studies texts in the New Yorker). And poetry continues to play a significant role in the development of people's creative, political, intellectual, and emotional responses to city life. The surge of popularity of poetry in urban settings at the end of the twentieth-century in the forms of spoken word, slam, and hip-hop poetries—and their tendency to be political—is a testament to this.

Darnton's compelling story of the impact political poetry had in eighteenth-century Paris—nigh on a century before Baudelaire—complicates the image of the flaneur as the sole historical method of poetic response to urban life, though. Poetry and the Police implies that this history needs re-evaluation: whereas Baudelaire's flaneur was individualist, privately involved in public space, and wholly apolitical, the poems that Darnton uncovers in the police files of the "Affair of the Fourteen" are political, social, and have real public repercussions.

In Poetry and the Police, Darnton delves into the archives and discovers a detective story—one in which he is both detective and recorder of detective work. The book is a fast-paced read the way a good detective novel would be, yet Darnton manages to weave his analysis of eighteenth-century police records together with his discoveries and knowledge about oral history and culture, records of eighteenth-century popular songs, the developments of philosophies about "public opinion," and an investigation of how poetry moved through the strict eighteenth-century class structures of Paris.

The police records Darnton examines follow a campaign to stamp out political poems against the king (and against some members of his court, especially a certain despised mistress). As a particularly notorious case, the "Affair of the Fourteen" provided Darnton with extensive material, and his story reveals some surprises: the F.B.I.—I mean the police—kept extensive, detailed records of interviews of prisoners, even requiring prisoners to sign final documents to verify their accuracy; the men contacted the F.B.I.—I mean the police—freely after their exile to complain about the inability to make lives for themselves in the wake of the campaign; each of the men received exceptional punishment for behavior that was otherwise considered commonplace (none admitted to having written any of the original poems themselves, and the sharing of political poetry was apparently rampant); and, finally, the police retained copies of the poems they seized.

The poetry was insurgent, but also funny. It was valued most by how cleverly the poet could employ poetics: poor rhymes and stilted rhythms were snubbed. In one of his best moments, Darnton describes the poems as "a cacophony of sedition set to rhyme" (11). Most surprisingly for contemporary readers, though, is that the poetry was collective. Darnton explains "it was a case of collective creation": people added to and changed the poems as they were exchanged; some wrote them down; and others exclusively declaimed them publicly from memory. The people involved were rarely "poets"—they were law clerks, priests, students, and philosophers. Darnton also traces evidence that many of the poems originated as political tactics on the part of courtiers themselves, who, evidence suggests, passed their poems down to servants who then spread them beyond the court. The poems are urban in construction, then: the participants assert their individual voices into the development and dissemination of dissent and then disappear into the multitude.

The idea that poetry was having such an impact on social life is exciting for those of us who have been following the teachings of people like June Jordan (pictured here), who suggests that poetry can be the people's voice (e.g., her Poetry for the People project at Berkeley). But Darnton is conscientious about avoiding any claims about the impact of poems exchanged clandestinely. In fact, he has a tendency to undo his own arguments in the book. For example, he takes pains to establish the influence such political poetry had on the king, but then he notes that the king never allowed any of that influence to determine his policy design. In cases like this, Darnton is admirably desirous of historical accuracy, and the book's strength is certainly in its attention to the history of poetry (rather than, say, in its close reading or analysis of those poems). Darnton not only includes multiple versions of the lyrics to songs/poems, but he went even further in the composition of this book and commissioned a singer to record versions of the songs which are available for listening on the Harvard University Press website. Given all this energy, I found myself frustrated that Darnton refused to allow the poems to have the impact that he repeatedly suggests is possible and that the title of his book implies.

Today, Poetry and the Police is suggestive of Ice T, NWA, and other overt attempts of lyricists and poets to use poetry to make real changes to the ways that American police have interacted with inner-city people. Like the poems that Darnton looks at, rap- and hip-hop-related lyrics to songs like "Cop Killer" and "Fuck Tha Police" were subversive and probably exchanged primarily through memorization and underground "transcriptions" through dubbing and sharing. But just as hip-hop- and rap-related lyrics are given short shrift in many academic settings today, Darnton gives little if any attention to the poems themselves in Poetry and the Police. While he repeatedly refers to the poems' rhyme schemes and other formal structures, for example, he rarely analyzes the poems' content or their modes of making arguments.

Maybe this is because even Darnton dismisses their poetic or artistic "value," assuming that what they reveal about politics and eighteenth-century Paris is more important than what the phrases or lines of poetry itself can reveal. Yet one of the most memorable moments in the book occurs when Darnton parses the double entendre in a poem's reference to the king's mistress giving out white flowers at a dinner party: the flowers suggest venereal disease! This is so scandalous that—ooh la la, right?—Darnton tells a whole secondary detective story about the dismissal of the court official implicated in the writing of that poem. There must have been many more such references lost on a contemporary reader like me (who neither reads French nor, zut alors, is fluent in eighteenth-century Parisian slang); treating the poems he studies as worthy of at least some literary analysis would not only have set a good example for other scholars working on similar material, but it would have further sold me on the rich complexities of the era and phenomenon he writes about.

Ultimately, then, Poetry and the Police hints at, rather than really develops, some of the ways that we can rethink poetic history. The book suggests that poetry had real effects on society. Before the Beats warranted police attention, before the FBI started keeping files on American poets like Muriel Rukeyser (download her FBI file here), before poets were called to report to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and before Common's visit to the White House was protested by law enforcement, poetry was already worthy of police surveillance in eighteenth-century France. The poems Darnton shares reveal that poetry, when most powerful, has rarely been as many contemporary readers expect: it was a social and participatory endeavor rather than a solitary one. This is the poetic history that Whitman invested in American poetry: this is urban poetics.

Geocaching: The Beat Poet Vision

So, Poetry & Popular Culture was just in the western suburbs of Chicago visiting family for the July 4 weekend, and we got a chance to hang out for a while with brother-in-law Jim who's an I.T. guy, an amateur astronomer, and really into geocaching—the worldwide treasure-hunting activity, apparently started in the year 2000 by a guy from Beavercreek, Oregon, where people use GPS devices to track down any of the 1.3 million hidden objects secreted by game players in over 100 countries around the globe. Not content to simply give out the coordinates of their caches, some clever geocache hiders, united by the official site Geocaching.com, make the game one step more interesting by requiring players to first solve a puzzle in order to discover the treasure's coordinates. Brother-in-law Jim, who has tracked down any number of caches in and around the Chicago area and elsewhere, saved the following puzzle for P&PC, hoping that our poetry acumen and beatnik-friendly disposition would help him with a hunt in the nearby suburb of Winfield.

Harnessing the associative logic and apocalyptic rhetoric that is stereo- typical of beatnik-style coffee-shop verse—and not entirely unlike the poem that Herman Munster recites in the video clip that Angela Sorby commented on for P&PC about a year ago—the Winfield puzzle encodes the treasure's coordinates. From the slang to the punny language (we especially appreciate the pun on "cool cat" that is "cool cache"), we think it's a little masterpiece. It was written and placed in March of 2010 by someone identified as sgauss, and brother-in-law Jim says we should use the identification tag GC250N1 when mentioning it—itself a little finding mechanism (the registered GC code) for geocachers in the know.

Schooled in the riddles of Anglo- Saxon poetry as well as in the sometimes riddle-like difficulty of modern poetry, P&PC was indeed able to help brother-in-law Jim out with his quest. Every coordinate for every geocache is a string of numbers like the following

N 41° 52.400 W 088° 09.350

and so the suburban Chicago's Beatnik has given us a poem in the following scenario that converts from its associative word salad—and references to both popular poetry and popular culture—to a string of numbers like that. Totally grooving with the hep cat's verse, we hopped in the car, tracked down the location, searched around for a while, and eventually found the cleverly-hidden treasure: a water-proof capsule which contained a little Anglo-Saxon-like scroll on which we wrote our names testifying to the fact that we were there. We got it, man. Can you?

Here's the "Beat Poet Vision" puzzle (GC250N1) as written and posted by sgauss:

Short Description

As the weather has gotten warmer I've thought more and more about hiding a cache, maybe a few. But where should I hide a cache? How could I do something original, creative and fun? I just wasn't inspired by the places I could think of for hiding a cache...

Long Description

And then I had The Vision. I was standing outside, and a voice was saying, "Here, you should hide a cache here, man!"

I looked around and spotted someone who just didn't seem to belong at this spot. I saw him, and I knew he was a beatnik. He was a beatnik, and he was in Winfield. Why was a beatnik in Winfield? Why was he telling me where to hide a cache? As if this beatnik has read my mind he spoke again, "You wanted to know where to hide a cache, and how to hide it. You wanted a cool cache, and I have come bearing answers. Put the cache right here!" And he walked up and pointed out where the cache should go.

I looked where he pointed. I could hide a cache there, but it wasn't really an original hiding place. It would just be a park- and-grab. I thought I had come up with one or two ideas that were a little better. I told the beatnik, "Well, sure I could put a cache there, but I'm not sure how cool that would be."

"You don't think this would be cool? Trust me, man, this will be cool. Because you're not just going to tell people where to find this! It will be a mystery, it'll blow their minds!"

"Oh, you mean a puzzle cache? I've had one or two ideas about logic puzzles, or something with computers..."

Impatiently he interrupted me, "Like, put away the numbers box! I will give you the clues! Listen, and I will lay it on you!" And he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and looked off into the distance as he read the following verse:

Horsemen of the Apocalypse
world is enough
Nickel Helium Mudville!
turkey degrees of Kevin Bacon
crazy is enough
everything means less than
jon & kate plus Stu Sutcliffe
love potion number Air Force

"Umm ... crazy? I'm not sure I get this."

The beatnik looked back at me and said, "It's poetry, man. Free association. Stream of consciousness. Trust me, they will GET it man!" And then he handed me the piece of paper with the poem on it. I looked at the paper, re-read the poem, and flipped it over. On the back were a set of coordinates. I looked at the coordinates, and then flipped the paper over again, and looked at the poem some more.

I looked back up at the beatnik. He said, "You dig?" I nodded, and bongo drums started to play as he turned, started to walk away, and then faded out of sight. Crazy.

If you think you get it, check your answer at Geochecker.com.

Bring your own pen or pencil; an extraction tool is recommended.