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Rethinking Poetic Innovation at the Modernist Studies Association Conference

Earlier this month, P&PC had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference held this year at the Hyatt Regency in the nearly post-apocalyptic downtown of Buffalo, NY. Themed around "The Structures of Innovation," there were your fairly predictable panels ("make it new," right?) on Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, DADA artwork, avant-garde little magazines, and the Paris and New York art and literary scenes. There was also a "roundtable" discussion, organized by Marsha Bryant and Alan Golding, that focused on the subject of "Rethinking Poetic Innovation" and had at least one person buzzing afterwards.

MSA roundtables are a pretty fun format in which, rather than droning on in sequence with extensive prepared remarks, five or six invited speakers offer short position papers then open the floor for discussion with each other and the event's attendees. Imagine our pleasure and surprise when, this past spring, Bryant approached and entered into negotiations with the P&PC home office about P&PC's participation! Now imagine our lone P&PC representative sitting in front of an audience of seventy-five modernists (including keynote speaker Michael Davidson, Lynn Keller, Jed Rasula, and Dee Morris) and among the roundtable's cast of Bryant, Golding, Bob Perelman, Steven Yao, Elizabeth Frost, and Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux—all tenured profs, all well published, some of whom certain members of the P&PC home office staff started reading in graduate school lo these many years ago. Hands somewhat a-tremble, our stomach feeling more like a Kurt Schwitters collage (example presented above) than the proverbial nest of butterflies, but bolstered by the presence of a younger, up-and-coming, somewhat iconoclastic generation of modernist scholars including Meredith Martin and Bartholomew Brinkman, here's the perspective on "Rethinking Poetic Innovation" that P&PC offered. (N.B. If you're a regular P&PC reader, well, bless you; the following is nothing you haven't heard from our offices before. We're posting it not for your benefit but for those at the conference—get this—who admitted to having never before heard the name of Edgar Guest.)

In the late nineteenth and early twentietth centuries, Americans regularly assembled and maintained poetry scrapbooks—personal verse anthologies that edited together poems cut out of newspapers, magazines, church bulletins, advertisements, greeting cards, and other print sources, oftentimes sampling in news articles, pictures, photographs, die cuts, or other items. Well known writers like Anne Sexton, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore kept such albums. Over the past six or eight years, I have assembled and studied an archive of 150 or so poetry scrapbooks produced by ordinary or less celebrated readers. The photocopy I’ve distributed here today (pictured above) is a page spread from one of those albums—a 230 page-long, 300-poem collection kept in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Doris Ashley, an unmarried sawyer’s daughter in her early 20s who was living just south of Boston.

It’s an interesting document, as Ashley puts four “modern” poems, including the now iconic poems by Pound (“In a Station of the Metro,” located at the bottom of the second page) and H.D. (“Oread,” located in the middle of the first page), in conversation with two popular poems and a news report on H.L. Mencken’s late-life marriage to Sara Haardt (a published writer who, in the 1910s, was a prominent voice lobbying the Alabama state legislature to ratify the nineteenth Amendment). The juxtapositions are compelling and represent a vernacular cut and paste analogue to, if not precedent for, modernist practices of bricolage or collage, as Ashley reads across or through a highbrow-lowbrow divide and very compellingly pairs up the Pound and H.D. poems, which are frequently combined in our histories of modern poetry but which her original source book, Louis Untermeyer’s 1925 edition of Modern American Poetry, did not print together.

If Ashley recognizes the shared poetics of “In a Station” and “Oread,” she is not limited by them. In fact, what most connects the six poems here is the image of the tree—the pear tree in Millay’s poem, the pines in “Oread,” the maple tree in Anne Campbell’s poem, the “wet, black bough” in “In a Station,” and the rain of Stanton’s “A Rain Song” that waters them all. This arboreal conceit extends thematically to the newspaper article—the seasons, gardens, plants, and flowers offer an appropriate landscape in which to read about Haardt’s latish marriage (she was 31); astonishingly, this conceit extends sonically, as well, as the “wet, black bough” of Pound’s poem echoes the subtitle of the Mencken article: “Noted American Bachelor Finally Bows to Cupid.” (Note: Ashley, an aspiring writer, would, like Haardt, remain unmarried until her late 20s, and P&PC reads this page spread, in part, as an articulation of how and why Ashley justified remaining single as a life choice that was more deliberate than prevailing images of spinsterhood would suggest.)

There is certainly more to discuss about this page spread, including the alternative map through the poetry of modern America that it and other such anthologies suggest, as well as its place in the history what Kenneth Goldsmith is calling uncreative writing. (Food for thought: can we call Ezra Pound [pictured here] a “popular poet” when he appears in a scrapbook alongside poems by popular poets Stanton and Campbell? Campbell, by the way, was a poet for the Detroit News who reportedly made $10,000 per year off of the daily publication and syndication of her poetry in the 1920s and 1930s.) I’m presenting these pages here, however, to help forward four ideas that might help us to rethink poetic innovation. Those ideas are as follows:

1. Future work on poetic innovation needs to include more study and theory of innovative reading as well as innovative writing.

2. Innovative reading and writing are not limited to experts in literary spheres but happen within popular culture as well—including, as I’ve argued elsewhere in relation to the old Burma-Shave billboard poems, the commercial marketplace. Innovation is not inherently oppositional and is regularly articulated to, and expressed in terms of, the market. In fact, the very claim to “innovation” itself, in artistic and commercial spheres alike, as well as their overlap, is a form of capital worth studying further.

3. Although Ashley’s scrapbook doesn’t suggest it directly, poetic innovation within popular and mass culture likely intersected with, and affected, the work of “literary” poets more regularly than we think—not just in terms of raw materials, but form, precedent, and logic as well. When we use the French word collage to describe modernist literary practices, for example, we disguise modernism's roots in popular practice and overlook the fact that Pound, H.D., Moore, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot and others were born in, learned to read in, and were educated in an America where scrapbooking was a primary form of reading and thinking and where the word collage did not yet exist.

4. What we call “literary” poetry also affected innovation within mass and popular culture. That is, not only did popular culture provide modernist writers with resources for their art, but, as we see in the case of Doris Ashley, modernist writers provided uncredentialed readers with raw materials for thinking and creating as well.

Thanks for listening.

Note: if you're interested in these and related issues, keep your eyes out for the P&PC-endorsed book-length study Poetry & Popular Culture in Modern America, due out from Columbia University Press in the Fall of 2012.

Walt Meets Walt: Breaking Bad and "I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"

It is Season 3, Episode 6 of AMC's Breaking Bad, halfway through the season in which high-school-chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-maker Walter White (pictured here) gets installed in a state-of-the-art meth lab to cook for drug kingpin Gus, mild-mannered owner of the fast food restaurant chain Pollos Hermanos. Walt's cancer is in remission, but he's trying to salvage his marriage (Skyler wants a divorce and is sleeping with her boss) and his relationship with his son. Walt's brother-in-law Hank is obsessed with finding the source of the blue meth that Walt has made famous, and he's tailing Walt's former partner Jesse Pinkman in hopes of tracking down the RV he (correctly) suspects of being a mobile lab. Pinkman is clean and just out of rehab but is talking with his friends about getting back into the biz as dealers.

That's when Walt meets Gale (pictured here), the lab assistant that Gus has provided. Gale, it turns out, is everything that Pinkman was not—unassuming, respectful, collaborative, trained, and, most of all, as passionate about the chemistry as Walt. Explaining how he ended up in the meth cooking business, Gale thinks back to graduate school and explains, "I was on my way—jumping through hoops, kissing the proper behinds, attending to all the non-chemistry that one finds oneself occupied with. You know that world. That is not what I signed on for. I love the lab—because it's all still magic, you know? Chemistry? I mean, once you lose that...."

Walt agrees. "It is. It is magic," he says. "It still is."

And then, because Breaking Bad can't exactly break into song to express the magical chemistry moment that Walt and Gale are experiencing, Gale breaks into a poem. "And all the while," he tells Walt, "I kept thinking about that great old Whitman poem, 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer.'"

Walt: I don't know it.

Gale: Well, anyway ....

Walt: Well, can you recite it?

Gale [laughing]: Pathetically enough, I could.

Walt: All right, well, come on, come on.

Click the video here to watch Gale's recitation:

The Beantown Beat: Nadia Nurhussein on Fried Clams, Poetry, and the North Shore

You probably remember Nadia Nurhussein—assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and P&PC's chief Beantown correspondent—as the primary force behind The Public Life of Poetry, an exhibition of 19th-century books and ephemera sponsored by the Boston Public Library in late 2010 and early 2011. In the following update from the City of Notions, Nurhussein (pictured here) is still interested in the public lives of poetry but shifts her attention from the library stacks to the state's north shore clam shacks. There, she finds a mediocre fried clam dinner served up with an unexpected helping of poetry and more than a faint whiff of the nineteenth century mingling with the daily catch.

The north shore of Massa- chusetts has long appealed to poets: Charles Olson, of course, is closely associated with Gloucester, but poets as varied as John Greenleaf Whittier, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lowell have all made the north shore their home at one time or another. The Massachusetts Poetry Festival was held in Salem this year. Apparently, like shellfish, poetry thrives in this area.

I wasn’t thinking about this when, after six years of living in Boston, I finally made the trip this summer to Woodman’s of Essex, a celebrated clam shack on the north shore of Massachusetts whose claim to fame is the invention of the fried clam. Unfortunately, it was not worth the wait. The mediocre clams, in fact, did not leave nearly as much of an impression on me as the mediocre poetry did.

As odd a pairing as verse and bivalves might seem, an illustrated poem (pictured here) was displayed prominently next to the pick-up window. It was written—actually, it was calligraphied—on artificially aged paper, as if someone had found an old manuscript hidden in a seafaring bottle pulled up with the day’s catch. On the opposite wall, I noticed yet another framed poem: a versified note of thanks from a customer.

To hang poems on the walls of public places like this seemed to me a pleasing throwback. I was reminded of popular poems, like Bret Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James” and John Hay’s “Little Breeches,” that were once publicly displayed on barroom walls. Belonging to a long-running tradition of amateur poetry writing, and confronting all customers coming to pick up their orders of clams, Woodman's verses served as a visible challenge to the notion that people don’t care about or read poetry anymore.

The Woodman’s poem is one of the countless reiterations or parodies of the early nineteenth-century poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” (James Thurber wrote a particularly hilarious one for The New Yorker in the prosaic style of Ernest Hemingway; it is pitch-perfect.) Underlying the narrative in Woodman’s version is the promise that, if we are very, very good, we will be brought sacks of clams instead of sacks of toys. Describing the preparation for a clambake, the poem lists, instead of flying reindeer, members of the “Woodman” family in a kind of roll call:

The clam-baking crews and Dexter called them by name
On Woodman, on Roy, on Johnson and Lane
On MacIntyre, Noonan, Holmes feeling no pain
Dianne, Doucette, Fougere and Fiahlo
Lufkin, Towne, Reed—and their legs are hollow
Boutchie and Soucy Doyle, Leo the Uncle
Good, Frazer, Joseph, Barrett and Kunkel
When what to their wondering eyes should appear
But Jolly St. Deck and two cases of beer
And Dexter did say as the crew came into sight
“My god is no one sober tonight?”

With its rhetorical question, the last couplet above sounds a little like the final couplet of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “On Lending a Punch-Bowl,” whose speaker fears his wife’s reproach after a night of drinking. Appealing to his punch bowl, he says, “And may the cherubs on its face protect me from the sin / That dooms one to those dreadful words,—‘My dear, where have you been?”

As these elements suggest, Woodman’s also shares some character- istics with a type of verse that is far older than "A Visit from St. Nicholas": the drinking song. The insular and provincial camaraderie, the celebration of excessive drinking (as seen in the revelers whose “legs are hollow”), and the slight vulgarity are all here. The difference—and the source of the humor for me—is that the delicacy of the manuscript’s appearance in its calligraphy and age-darkened paper runs counter to the poem’s vulgarisms. Whoever made this artifact thought, on some level, of poetry in general as a something like what Susan Stewart calls a “distressed” genre, one that required the high-brow and antique affectations of yellow paper and highfalutin penmanship, complete with simulated spots of foxing and other damage brought on by the harsh and salty sea-air.

With a little bit of digging, I discovered that this poem was no fluke: Woodman’s of Essex continues to support amateur poetry. This year, the restaurant sponsored a limerick contest for St. Patrick’s Day—with a free lobster dinner for two to the winner! And, since I seem to be falling into impromptu couplets, I may have to try my hand at a Woodman’s limerick next year, too.

The Changing Phiz of Poetry: The Man of a Thousand Faces

In 1925, the Lakewood Products Co. of Cleveland, Ohio, patented the cute and interactive "Mov-I-Graff" toy pictured here—a postcard-sized piece of cardboard featuring "The Man of a Thousand Faces" in profile. When you gently wiggle or "vibrate" the postcard, a thin chain making up his nose and chin area moves back and forth to create ever new profiles. As an ad for the product in the January 9, 1943, Billboard magazine explained, "It's the Mov-I-Graff Cartoon Greeting Card built around a figure of a person. However, instead of a drawn face, a small chain is attached from the forehead to the neck. By holding the card in one hand and tapping it lightly with the other, the face of the character takes various and odd shapes." If you're dying to see The Man of a Thousand Faces in action, skip ahead to the video at the end of this posting.

It appears that the rights to the Mov-I-Graff were eventually purchased around 1943 by the Weinman Brothers (the Billboard ad quoted above announces the addition to its product line), which was perhaps the same Weinman Brothers that was founded in 1912 and launched a jewelry collection in partnership with Lauren Bacall in 2007. Whether or not the length of chain that makes up the Man of a Thousand Face's profile evolved into a necklace endorsed by Bacall, it is clear the object had commercial appeal. As the version of the toy pictured here indicates, it became a premium give-away advertising item—a sort of business card used by O.A. Brown of New Hampshire to promote his business installing Sunbeam Cabinet Heaters.

Other companies took a page out of Brown's playbook. Kingan Meats of Indianapolis used the Mov-I-Graff to advertise its "reliable" hams and bacon. Marion Power Shovel Company of Marion, Ohio, dug its own niche in the market the same way. And Goodyear advertised a lawn hose and golf balls via the Man with the Thousand Faces as well. As the Mitchner Investment Company's use of the Mov-I-Graff (pictured above) suggests, companies asking potential customers to shift brand loyalties no doubt found an appealing and even instructional figure for the nature of that change in the shifting profile of El Hombre himself. "You can't change your face," Mitchner's card reads, "But you can change your fortune."

The subject of change- ability is at the center of a poetic version of the Mov-I-Graff card (pictured here) that the P&PC Acquisitions Department had the good fortune of obtaining via eBay recently. Via the poem, this card transforms the Man of a Thousand Faces into a 1920s hipster bohemian—a satiric male version of the decade's New Woman, perhaps, complete with blush on his cheek, hipster attire, and a bobbed haircut:

They christened me the Mov-i-graff—
Because, they said, I made them laugh
I do not know just why it is
Unless it is my changing phiz.

I always try to look my best
And am polite in any test;
The latest things in duds I wear—
I even bob my lovely hair.

Certainly, this version of the card works to discredit the New Man of the 1920s, casting him as effeminate, queer, clueless, and—as the chain forming his profile perhaps dramatizes—delicate, droopy and unreliable; he's a man of a thousand faces, not a model of masculine consistency exemplified by what in the 1950s would become his cultural opposite, the Marlboro Man, who also wears a hat and shirt with collar, who we also frequently see in profile, and whose high cheekbones seem to preclude any fashionable or girly changing of his phiz.

The interns at the P&PC office are quite taken with that word—phiz—and not just because they discovered it for the first time two or three months ago on the back of a photo from the nineteenth century's Jersey Shore. In the present context, they've pointed out, phiz combines with other colloquial words such as duds and bob to create a neat little record of 1920s slang. (Note: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word bob was first applied to women's haircuts in 1918 when Punch noted the "alarming speed of bobbing.") Reading the card today, they're not only struck by how language changes (where, oh where, has phiz gone?), but also how, in this context, the Mov-I-Graff discredits popular linguistic innovation—and thus the changing nature of language more broadly—by associating it with the effeminate, dandy-esque Man of a Thousand Faces. That is, like the chain that forms his phiz, the language he uses is fluid, changing, dynamic, queer, effeminate, and probably, by extension, downright un-American. The Marlboro Man—repository of constant manliness, firmness, tradition, and a man of few words—would never be caught talking like that!

We think our interns are onto something, don't you? While change in one sphere of people's activity—switching from one brand to another brand in the consumer marketplace—is encouraged, changing the way we speak and thus challenging the authority of established language practices (see English-only debates, for example, or the history of gender-inclusive language) is not. In fact, in the context of this poem, the etymologies of both bob and duds suggest as much. Originally from the Old French and Middle English, bob has also been used to mean "to befool, mock, deceive" and "to cheat." Similarly, dud (of unknown origin) has been used to describe "a counterfeit thing applied to any useless or inefficient person or thing." In the very fabric of its poem, then, this Mov-I-Graff postcard indicts the Man of a Thousand Faces as a fool, a cheat, and a counterfeit; his character reveals itself not just in what he wears, but in the very slanguage he speaks.

But that's how the "they" of the poem—a they that represents itself as the voice of common sense, convention, and social norms—wants us to view Mr. Man. We here at P&PC want to view him more sympathetically. In his bob, his duds, and his changing phiz, the Man of a Thousand Faces is not himself a fool (except in the Shakespearean sense, perhaps) but is in fact mocking, fooling, cheating, deceiving, unsettling and revealing as counterfeit mainstream values of standard language use and gender identity; indeed, insofar as it is nearly impossible for him to have the same face twice, he disrupts what Judith Butler would call the interability of gender identity—that "regularized and constrained repetition of norms" on which normative gender identities depend. In his "lovely" bobbed hair and blushing phiz, then, the Man of a Thousand Faces may well be one of the first drag queens of American poetry. Is it possible, then, that his popularity in the mid-twentieth century tells us more about the American public's desire than first meets the eye?


MOV-I-GRAFF - L'homme aux centaines de visages by heeza

Highbro/Lowbro: Peter Klaven Reviews Brian McGackin's "Broetry"

Maybe Brian McGackin's book Broetry caught your attention after National Public Radio did a lame and unwarranted feature on it back in July of this year. Maybe you were one of the P&PC faithful who wrote in to the home office with protests like, "This man gives poetry in popular culture a bad name. Please find a way to destroy him." Or maybe you're just a connossieur of the portmanteau word and are fed up from seeing your favorite figure of speech corrupted by the supposedly subversive wordplay of commercially manufactured guy culture (cf. bromance, guyliner, and manorexia). In any case, some sort of response from P&PC to what you might call McGackin's small literary bropus certainly seems in order. We therefore sucked it up, got a copy of the book, and sent it out for review to one of our favorite bros. Here's what he had to say.

I wish I could take a page from Dale Peck and crown Brian McGackin the worst poet of his generation, but Broetry isn’t hatchet job material; its hollowed-out trunk of a conceit—poetry, for bros!—wouldn’t stand up to a short, swift kick, let alone a sharpened critical axe.

So before I go any further, let me make myself absolutely clear: Do not buy Broetry. Do not, as I mistakenly did after McGackin’s book caught the attention of NPR, mention it to anyone with even a remote interest in poetry. Broetry is diseased; I haven’t been this self-conscious reading a book in public since I was a twenty-two year old high school teacher reading Lolita in the faculty lounge.

If it’s mediocre verse you want, I’m sure there’s plenty out there more deserving of your dollar. Broetry is schlock of the most dangerous variety: an anti-intellectual, misogynist screed with cartoon accompaniment—a book that pretends language is impotent entertainment, and, worst of all, that bro culture is a breath of fresh air, not a noxious cloud of Axe body-spray hovering around us. But where, Broetry asks, are “regular guys” supposed to turn with all these “contemporary poets [singing] the glories of birds, birch trees, and menstruation”? To this “stunning debut from a dazzling new literary voice”? Let’s hope not.

I’ve welcomed Paul Rudd into my life enough times not to shudder at a ‘bro’ port- manteau, but we won’t see ‘broetry’ creeping into Webster’s anytime soon. Unlike the ‘bromance,’ Broetry—littered though it is with popular references to Star Wars, World of Warcraft, Harry Potter, hentai, Taylor Swift, and the George Foreman Grill—has zero cultural traction. McGackin’s audience is still a mystery to me, and I’ve had the misfortune of reading the book twice. I’d like to say that, at the very least, Broetry accomplishes its most basic premise—to deliver the poetry bros want—but not even that much seems true.

Sure, the mindless sexism of classics like “I’ll Take ‘Crazy Bitches’ for $200, Alex” and “Whorecrux” serve up a broetic sensibility, but the book jacket just plain confuses me ... and I've known some bros. The cover features an untitled, line-for-line parody of William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say,” replacing the undertones of sexual conquest latent in WCW’s “sweet,” and “delicious” plums with the baldly broetic: cold beer used to entertain a “hot” girl. You would think that the allusion to Williams winks at a reader more than casually acquainted with the Norton Anthology of American Poetry, a person capable of recognizing WCW’s poem and smirking at the broetic simplification of the original. This reader might even be tempted to approach Broetry as satire, convinced the joke was in fact on the bro, the guy who took WCW at his word and wrote a whole book “just to say.” If Broetry was solely a book of parodies, I might even be just such a schmuck. However, aside from some warmed over Frost (“Stopping by Wawa on a Snowy Evening,” “The Road Unable to Be Taken…”) and one nod to Whitman (“O Captain! My Captain America!"), all you get are poems too weighed down with sulky angst for the diehard ‘bro’ and too misogynist for any rational human.

You want broetry that badly? Go read Stephen Dobyns’s “Desire.” The speaker in Dobyn’s poem isn’t entirely sym- pathetic either, but the core of the poem speaks to the frustration lurking behind McGackin’s broems. “Why have men been taught to feel ashamed / of their desire . . . Why must men pretend to be indifferent as if each / were a happy eunuch engaged in spiritual thoughts?” Even if, like me, you resist Dobyns’s sentiment, at least a poem like “Desire” mines the nuances of sexuality. As a rule, Broetry only recycles trite cliché, miserably troped to perfection in “Not Another Teen Movie,” a poem entirely constructed out of Hollywood film titles. McGackin would probably roll his eyes at the bird Dobyns flips in the fourteenth stanza, but he could learn a thing from someone like Dobyns—a poet capable of thinking with two heads at once.

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."