Popular Poetry: The Little Magazine

For years now, P&PC has desperately wanted to find a modernist-era little magazine to call its own. You know, something like Others, Blast, The Egoist, or Seven Arts except not devoted to the avant garde or Ezra Pound. Something that might help put the world of popular poetry on the radar screens of modernist studies scholars who do so looooove their little magazines. Something—and why not?—that might even get digitized by and included in the awesome Modernist Journals Project, which has as its slightly overstated tagline "modernism began in the magazines."

Well, it's possible that we've finally found it. After lo these many years of searching, we recently came across this single, solitary issue (Volume 1, Number 8) of Popular Poetry, issued out of Cincinnati, Ohio, in March of 1931 by the people who were at that time already bringing Writer's Digest to the world. We don't know much about Popular Poetry yet; an initial query to Writer's Digest revealed that current editorial staff don't know anything about it and don't have any idea whether or not there's a company archive boxed up in some warehouse somewhere that could shed some light on who started it, why, how, and what eventually came of it once the 1930s—the decade during which what Joseph Harrington called the "poetry wars" established a serious split between "high" and "low" in the world of American verse—came to a close.

Until we find those answers, we'll be repeatedly reading this issue, which bills itself as being "modern without being modernistic and mid-way between the classic and the popular." True enough: from the poems "City Streets" and "Traffic in Hearts" listed on the cover, to the little editorial "Poetry Offshoots: The Commercial Side of Verse" pictured here, Popular Poetry does not appear to have been a throwback to the nineteenth century's genteel dreams of the fireside and family homestead but, like the New Verse more generally, incorporates and engages with the spirit of modernity. We dig Ruth Rukin's "Poetry Offshoots" a lot, which tries to find a home "for a rhyme with reason" that isn't "a page of formless verse in jerky ecstatics," on one hand, and that doesn't "[die] a horrible death on the battle-field of technique" on the other. "Standardization is the very last and least thing wanted in verse," Rukin writes, "but compromise with the needs of your market is desirable—if you're writing to sell."

What Rukin ultimately advises aspiring writers is what teachers still tell their students hoping to publish today: study the publications to which you're sending before you go sending your poems out. She makes her case by quoting, of all things, Tristan Tzara's Dadaist poem "Toto Vaca" and explaining that poems like it have a place in the "artistic journal, published for the sole purpose of encouraging new forms of literature" but not necessarily in the mainstream press. Here is Tzara's verse (and that's TT pictured here):

TOTO VACA

          I

ka tangi te kivi
kivi

ka tangi te moho
moho

ka tangi te tike
ka tangi te tike

tike

he poko anahe
to tikoko tikoko
 
heare i te hara
tikoko

k ote taoura te rangi
kaouaea

me kave kivhea
kaouaea

a-ko te take
take no tou

e haou
to ia

to ia ake te take
take no tou

What's kinda compelling about this example is how Tzara's avant-garde poem—which, according to Rukin, first appeared in "the lately suspended transition, an American-English magazine published in Paris"—is finding new audiences via Popular Poetry, which reprints it without irony and with full awareness of the editorial state of transition as a peer-level journal; in other words, Popular Poetry is situating itself in a world of modernist literary magazines not only without disparaging the competition but by educating the audience of Popular Poetry about it as well. "The reading aloud of this poem may give you some hint of its purpose," Rukin writes. "The syllabic arrangement is very musical and rhythmic when intoned." Once we find specific circulation figures for Popular Poetry, we'll let you know how many readers Tzara's poem reached and then think more coherently about the possible debts that the avant garde little magazines might owe to the world of popular poetry!

It would have been interesting to have Rukin weigh in on the conversation that P&PC recently had with Jed Rasula over at the Boston Review ("Glut Reactions: The Demographics of American Poetry"), because Rukin acknowledges late in her article that a poetry "glut"—the jumping-off point for the BR piece—is nothing new in American poetry. As P&PC argued, it in fact "isn’t a glut so much as a fundamental condition of poetry in the long twentieth century, a period when—thanks in part to the emergence and maturation of the culture industries, the development of mass media as well as personal communication technologies, and the expansion of consumer capitalism and the consumer marketplace—more poetry was written, distributed, circulated, and consumed than at any other time in history." Indeed, Rukin writes, "There are, generally speaking, more writers of poetry than markets for it. This naturally overcrowds the usual markets—the magazines—with salable offerings. However, there are certain by-products of poetry in our commercial era of writing for the poet. Among these are song poems, greeting card verses, advertising jingles, and humorous verse. The latter finds markets in such humor journals as Life, Judge, College Humor, Film Fun." We wonder: could that list of journals be a dissertation table of contents in the making?

One of the more entertaining parts of Popular Poetry is a section called "Borderliners" (pictured here), which contains a list of "poems not acceptable for publication" along with brief, Twitter-like critiques of those poems. Ethel Whipple Crooks of Kansas, for example, has her poem rejected with the editorial comments, "You have a nice, rhythmical sense, but no outstanding ideas behind it." Kinda harsh, right? Mildred Marsh Rankin of Iowa doesn't fare much better; her poetry has "too much dawn-and-pussy-dear sentiment" in it. Grover Wilson Morgan's poetry is "Not quite up to snuff." Edmund Kiernan is "too pedantic." And poor Virginia Brookhart of Pennsylvania: "Your poems stop short of being good." Seriously, this is pretty fun reading—we haven't seen anything like it—and there's five pages of it just in the March number alone!

But what of the poetry in Popular Poetry? We're not ready to comment on all of it yet, but we'll leave you with our favorite so far—Bernice G. Anderson's "Gypsy Fortune Teller":

She was picturesque in her flowered skirt
That puffed at the dust and flipped the dirt,

And her orchid waist was hung with strings
Of coins and coral beads. Bright rings

Adorned each finger; and her tawny head
Was draped with a blazing scarf of red.

I gazed at her while she read my hand,
And I knew she'd far from understand—

Not think it even slightly funny
That I should cross her palm with money

Merely to sit and read her face
There in that rug-hung, mystic place.

If anyone out there knows anything about Popular Poetry, please let us know! We'd love to learn more about our new favorite little magazine.

Tennyson in Chaps? The Poetry of Gunsmoke

Happy New Year from P&PC

Here at the P&PC Office, there's a New Year's Eve party in the works. The streamers are up. The kazoos are out. Pointy hats are stacked and at the ready. The bubby's chillin' on ice. Sally the stenographer has got her dancing shoes on and is flirting with Carl the copy guy. And some of the interns have been passing around this goodie from 1939: a promotional calendar issued by the Household Finance Corporation and featuring a year's-worth of poetry by the guy once known as the "people's poet"—longtime bard of the Detroit Free Press, perhaps the most prolific poet of twentieth century America, and a P&PC hero, Edgar A. Guest. "Here," writes Guest on the front of an accompanying folding flier (pictured below), "is my 1939 calendar which you asked me to send you. Both Household Finance and I appreciate your request very much. I hope that you will find the calendar useful and that the poems will give you many pleasant moments in the days ahead. Best wishes for a happy and prosperous new year."

The calendar begins with "It Couldn't Be Done," one of Guest's most popular and lasting verses and a poem that Poetry Out Loud recommends to students as a potentially successful recitation piece today. (It's also a poem, btw, that makes an appearance in Chapter Two of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, where we speculate on the vagueness of that "it" in the title especially as it functions in an age of "no ideas but in things.") Here is the rest of the year's sequence:

February: "When Father Shook the Stove"
March: "Home"
April: "The Package of Seeds"
May: "Compensation"
June: "The Stick-Together Families"
July: "Out Fishin'"
August: "Ma and the Auto"
September: "It's September"
October: "Autumn"
November: "Courtesy on Departure"
December: "On Going Home for Christmas"

We here at P&PC find "Compen- sation" (which is about looking for a way to pay "my debt to God for life divine") a particularly fitting bridge between Guest and his sponsor, the Household Finance Corporation. After all, the "Doctor of Family Finances"—which was founded in 1878 and by 1939 had branches in 152 cities in the U.S. and Canada—uses the calendar to address the subject of paying back debts as well. "When you are troubled by money problems a visit to your local Household Finance man may prove very helpful," the verbiage at the end of the calendar reads. "He has had years of experience finding ways out of family money worries."

While a reader might not get to that reminder—after all, you've got to flip all the way through the year to find it buried behind December—he or she is not likely to overlook the "How I got a Loan of $200" testimonial (pictured here) printed inside of Guest's introductory wishes for a "prosperous" new year. Our favorite part of this ad? It's gotta be how the homonym for "a loan" ("alone") in the heading previews the thrust of the subheading below it—"without co-signers or endorsers" (i.e., alone)—not to mention how that message is reinforced by the single hero of the poem "It Couldn't Be Done" on the calender who, despite "thousands to prophesy failure," finds success by working alone.

While readers today are likely to find it a little nauseating, the partnership of Guest and Household Finance makes a lot of conceptual sense beyond this discursive synchronicity as well, as they're both more or less in the same line of work: Guest helps us with our metaphysical debts, and Household Finance with our monetary ones. And what better time to bring them together than at the beginning of the new year when, as the month-by-month flipping design of the calendar suggests, we make resolutions to turn over all sorts of new leaves—to pay down the balance on our credit cards, to more responsibly repay the kindnesses we've been shown, and to attend to the bottom lines of our lives in general?

But that's enough cogitation for now—there's a party to prepare, and the interns have started doing the limbo in the other room. It's time, it seems, to welcome in 2013. On behalf of the entire P&PC Office, then, we hope that you find happiness, fulfillment, and the beginning of many new dreams in the coming year.

Happy Holidays from P&PC: The Grocer's Dream

Now that the P&PC Office has finally finished the last of its holiday shopping, barely managing to escape from the modern retail Hades of malls, long lines, and frantic customers, we thought it only fitting to give you the gift of this little advertising poem: a Christmas-Day dream featuring the Grinch of all Grinches—"a grocer, aged and grey" whose holiday fantasy is told in five eight-line stanzas on the back of a humbly produced, 3x5-inch trade card issued in the 1930s for Helwig & Leitch's "Majestic Sandwich Spread."

One in a long line of going-to-hell narratives from the early part of the century—not only did now-canonical poets like Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Sterling Brown follow in the footsteps of Homer, Virgil, and Dante, but so did lots of popular poems (see the image here, for example), which had everyone from the Kaiser to FDR to Hitler going to (or getting kicked out of) the underworld—this poem takes place when an angel of God escorts the grocer to Heaven only to stop along the way for a view of Hades. And that view is the best Christmas present the grocer can get: "It's the hottest place in hell, / Where the ones who never paid you / In torment always dwell."

But instead of getting consigned to hell, or kicked out of hell, or managing to escape the Best Buy fires of Hades like P&PC did, the grocer chooses to stay. He grabs a chair and a fan, sits down, and starts to enjoy the show. The angel bids him go:

But [the grocer] was bound to sit and watch them
As they'd sizzle, singe and burn:
And as his eyes would rest on debtors
Whichever way they'd turn.
Said the angel: "Come on, grocer,
There's the pearly gates to see."
The grocer only muttered:
"This is Heaven enough for me."

It's kind of funny that Helwig & Leitch—a former patent medicine maker that filed federal trademark registration for Majestic on July 25, 1929, just weeks before the stock-market crash—would throw its middleman under the bus like this. According to records, though, Helwig & Leitch described its category of specialty as including the following: food-flavoring extracts, worchestershire sauce, horseradish, spices, vinegar, prepared mustard, mustard and horse-radish, fruit preserves, jellies, peanut butter, cherries in jars, olives, pickles, tomato catsup, mayonnaise dressing, barbecue relish of vegetables, sweet pimiento relish of vegetables, and sandwich spread of oil, eggs, vegetables, salt. In other words, it sounds like they'd mix, boil down, beat to a spreadable pulp, can, and preserve just about anything they could get their hands on—including the neighborhood grocer. Come to think of it, that's just about how P&PC feels after being processed by the mall this week. Here's to hoping that you've fared better than we have. Our best wishes for a happy, restorative holiday.

Jingle All the Way: Saint Nick and the Poetry of Santa's Ring Toss

Nothing dogs the Christmas season at P&PC so much as the clash between the holiday’s com- mercial and non- com- mercial aspects—between shopping and spirit, getting and giving, worldliness and wonderment, materialism and, well, something more. This clash dogs the season’s poetry, too, as the oftentimes utopian (or at least not uniformly materialist) sentiments voiced by the season’s popular verse forms get standardized, mass produced, boxed, wrapped, shipped, and sold in and on any number of greeting cards, ornaments, advent calendars, and novelty items like the funky oversized matchbook from Hallmark pictured here. For every excuse that the season offers to poetically express feelings one might view as suspect or inappropriate the rest of the year—you know, faith in ideals like love, peace, family, compassion, giving, forgiveness, and the pursuit of something other than the cynical status quo—there’s some Grinch waiting to package, market, and profit from it all. 

But because we all know that the com- mercial and non- com- mercial aspects of the holidays aren’t inevitably partnered with each other—that’s not the way is has to be, right?—the marketplace has to continually entangle and re-entangle them, making the contradictions between them seem natural (even at times, like, totally fun), or else so interweaving them that it becomes nigh impossible, as Frank Sinatra sang of love and marriage, to imagine one without the other: “Just try, try, try to separate them.” 

It’s easy, perhaps, to see this logic at work in the big picture (“Welcome to the Spirit of Christmas Online Store!”), but it’s remarkable how much it sometimes governs—to quote Robert Frost, who for nearly thirty years partnered with printer Joseph Blumenthal to make Christmas cards for friends and associates—in a thing so small as the little artifact pictured here: a Santa “ring toss” game issued as a holiday giveaway by Coca-Cola in the 1950s that contains the following poem on its handle: 

I am a Jolly old 
     “SAINT NICK”— 
So, if you want a Kick, 
Be the first to make 
     A “Hit – Smash” 
By swinging the Ring 
That’s on the String 
on Santa’s Mustache 

If you look closely, you’ll see that even though the verse is printed pretty clearly in red ink (it looks over-inked, in fact), some of that ink (especially in lines three and four) has been worn away, because, in order to play the game, one has to hold the handle in such a way that one’s thumb braces the toy just beneath Santa’s beard and thus covers up and, over time, starts rubbing out the poem. This little shell game—where one reads the poem one moment, then covers it up the next—illustrates in miniature how the ring toss operates more generally: look at it one way, and it’s a noncommercial, greeting-card-like wish for a happy holiday (“Seasons’ Greetings from your local Coca-Cola Bottler”); look at it another, and it’s an advertisement. One minute, the scripted logo “Coca-Cola” seems like the signature we expect on a holiday card from a friend, and the next it’s a standard-issue corporate logo. The details signify doubly, as the toy appeals to noncommercial expressive forms of the season to forward its otherwise commercial goal.

In fact, the whole idea of a ring toss itself seems designed to give us practice combining things that we normally wouldn’t think of combining, doesn’t it? In a sense, by doing what the poem tells us to do—“By Swinging the Ring / on Santa’s mustache”—we get to play around in a nonthreatening way with joining things that usually wouldn’t go together (a wreath on Santa’s mustache? C’mon), thereby experiencing the entanglement of the holiday’s commercial and noncommercial aspects as a game, not as the work of ideology. This is why P&PC thinks the ring toss instructions have to be in rhyme: pairing words based on what are really arbitrary acoustic similarities between them is a linguistic variation of the game as a whole: bringing “Ring” and “String” together in a playful, low-stakes way is another version of landing the wreath on Santa’s mustache. Both let the user simulate and view as natural the larger ideological project of entangling the commercial and noncommercial aspects of the holiday season. 

Not quite, uh, buying this yet? We could cite other aspects of the ring toss that combine seeming opposites in a similar manner. Note, for example, the sexual game of landing the (female) ring on Santa’s (phallic) mustache; or the toy’s contrasting images of floppiness (Santa’s hat) and rigidity (the tongue-depressor handle design); or even the invitation to get a “Kick” via one’s hands, not via one's feet, as line three suggests. But the most amazing pairing of disparities might be there in the poem’s use of the name “Saint Nick.” As we all know, “Nick” or “Old Nick” is actually a Christian nickname for the Devil dating back to the 1600s (possibly a shortened version of the word “iniquity,” and possibly informing the use of “nick” as British slang for stealing). In combining “Saint” and “Nick,” then, the larger Christmas tradition of which the ring toss is part has entangled the forces of good and evil that the toy puts in our hands and that the poem tells us in all capital letters is not Santa Claus or Kris Kringle, but—keeping with the overall logic of making contradictions seem, well, not contradictions at all—is SAINT NICK. (Is it possible, too, that "up to scratch" on the ninth match in the first picture above also conjures up the devil, long referred to as "Old Scratch" as well as "Old Nick"?) From the toy’s design that lets us physically practice reconciling the season’s contradictions, to the rhyme that invites and instructs us how to do so, all the way down to the oxymoronic name of its patron devil-saint, Coca-Cola’s ring toss so intertwines opposing forces in the service of partnering the commercial and the noncommercial that try, try, try as we might to separate them, it seems nigh impossible to do so. 

And yet, despite this conundrum, there’s a flaw or contradiction in Coca-Cola’s ring-toss—just as there is in every product of ideology— and that’s in the playing of the game itself. The P&PC interns have been passing it around the office for several days now, but do you know how often they’ve actually managed to get that wreath on Santa’s mustache and thus successfully resolve the clash between the holiday’s commercial and noncommercial aspects as Coca-Cola hopes? You got it—hardly ever. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.

"She only wants to know who wrote the poem because she doesn't know who wrote the poem": The Poetry of Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, and Taxi

Say What? A Poetry Glut?

Earlier this week, the Boston Review published "Glut Reactions: The Demographics of American Poetry," a piece that the Poetry Foundation has since called a "(wonderfully) long conversation" between P&PC and University of Georgia English professor Jed Rasula. Responding in a roundabout way to Marjorie Perloff's essay "Poetry on the Brink," which argued earlier this year that "the sheer number of poets now plying their craft inevitably ensures moderation and safety," Rasula and P&PC bat around some ways to better understand and assess what folks have called the apparently sudden "glut" of poetry, why they've responded as they have, and what new or different perspectives might be brought to bear on the subject.

How can one argue, in a world where there are way too many poems out there for any one person to read, that all of those poems are inevitably marked by moderation and safety? Why would lots of poems be a problem, and for whom? What happens to Official Verse Culture, the avant-garde, and other institutions of poetry when all of a sudden we start seeing poetry as P&PC tends to do—as a form that's been proliferating, not vanishing, over the course of the long twentieth century in so many ways and media, in the hands of millions of readers, and oftentimes in apparent cooperation with the expanding consumer economy, that it's impossible to fully track in terms of insides and outsides? Who is reading and writing and writing all of this poetry, why, and in what ways? Heck, what does "poetry" even mean in such a world?

If these questions intrigue you, find yourself an hour or so out of your busy day and head on over to BR to check out "Glut Reactions." Then go write or read another poem.