P&PC at MLA: Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism

P&PC is busy getting its parkas and long underwear out of storage in preparation for everyone's favorite-slash-least-favorite event of the year—the Modern Language Association's annual convention, being held at the end of this week (Thursday-Sunday) in balmy downtown Chicago where thermometers currently read a Windy-City-bracing negative nine degrees Fahrenheit. 

Things stand to warm up a little bit, though, especially on Saturday, January 11, when P&PC will be part of a panel titled "Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism," scheduled for 5:15-6:30 pm in the O'Hare conference room of the downtown Chicago Marriott. Unlike many conference activities, which require an official badge and paid-up elbow patches for entry, "Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism" is being made free and open to the public. Liesl Olson of Chicago's Newberry Library will be moderating and commenting, and the panel's speakers include Erin Kappeler and Sarah Ehlers, both of whom should be familiar voices to faithful P&PC readers. If you're in town, why not escape the cold and ice and stop on by? Here's a preview of what's in store.

The panel's first paper, Erin Kappeler's "Harriet Monroe's Museum," reconsiders the canonization of modern poetry by examining how Monroe's curatorial practices extended beyond the poetry she published to the readers Poetry addressed. In Poetry’s promotional materials, Monroe argued that the art form lacked an audience because it had no organized institutional support, but Poetry's editorial files tell a different story. In a series Monroe labeled her "museum" files, she singled out correspondence from lay readers and disgruntled would-be contributors not as evidence of poetry's missing audience but, rather, as evidence of the outmoded aesthetic paradigms Monroe intended Poetry to replace. The sheer volume and diversity of these letters show that, far from bringing poetry to readers who had been ignoring it, Monroe sought to discipline readers out of their promiscuous habits of consumption. This paper focuses especially on Monroe's gendered response to these "bad" readers to consider how modernist ideals of print circulation shaped the presentation of modernism to popular audiences in the 1910s and 1920s.

In "Set Vivid Against the Little Soft Cities: Outsourcing Chicago Modernism," Mike Chasar uses the relationship between Poetry magazine and poetic communities in Portland, Oregon, to argue that Poetry's early success depended upon the production of new verse around the country. Just as the railroads brought livestock to Chicago, so Poetry routed regional new verse movements through the city and used that verse to forward Chicago's profile as a modern center. Like a venture capitalist, Monroe visited Portland in 1926, establishing relationships with an active and coordinated modern poetry scene that was working out what modernism meant for the Pacific Northwest. Tracing circuits between Portland and Chicago, and following the new verse as it circulated far outside the sphere of Poetry in unexpected places such as church bulletins and funeral home brochures, Chasar argues that focusing on Poetry as a product of Chicago's modernism obscures how widespread the new verse movement was.

Building on Chasar's consideration of Chicago and Poetry's relationship to other geographic sites, Sarah Ehlers's "The Harriet Monroe Doctrine: Poetry's Interwar Internationalism" contextualizes changes in Poetry during the 1930s by looking at two significant archival sources: Monroe's unpublished letters and journals from the 1936 P.E.N Conference in Buenos Aries, and the collection of unpublished letters, tributes, and elegies sent to the Poetry office after Monroe's untimely death in South America. While at the conference, Monroe was consistently annoyed that conversations about poetry turned to "politics and split-hair metaphysics," and her responses to debates about poetry at the international writers conference provide insight into how she framed transnational literary histories of modern poetry in relation to U.S. cultural institutions. The events of the P.E.N. conference also reveal how discourses about the role of art amidst global political turmoil relate to how Poetry was conceived in Depression-era Chicago.

In "A Chicago Institution: The Harriet Monroe Collection and the Rise of the Modern Poetry Archive," Bart Brinkman compares Monroe's initial fundraising venture for Poetry to the formation of the Harriet Monroe Collection, willed to the University of Chicago upon Monroe's death in 1936. When Monroe initially sought funding for what would become Poetry, she pitched the magazine to potential donors as a Chicago cultural institution, not unlike a museum or an opera house. This institutionalization of Poetry would become more tangible upon Monroe's death. The Monroe Collection provides a detailed portrait of poetic modernism from the perspective of one of its key figures, housing thousands of rare books and magazines along with corrected proofs and strings of correspondences that illuminate authorial and editorial intention. Beyond having particular importance for investigating Poetry's role in modern poetry, the collection also illuminates the institutionalized collecting of modern poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century more generally. 

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday!

Happy New Year from P&PC

Pausing on Christmas Eve

Back in the old days, when the senior members of the P&PC office staff were growing up in small-town Ohio, it was customary to give what we then called the mailman a Christmas gift—usually a little bit of walking around money left in the mailbox in the way of a tip to acknowledge how neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night had stayed him from the swift completion of his appointed rounds during the preceding year. This was undoubtedly an extension of, and eventually became a companion practice to, tipping the newspaper boy who, dating back to the 1700s, used New Year poems called carriers' addresses to remind readers in a more polite way than John Cusak's nemesis in Better Off Dead to, well, shell out some change. In whatever poetic style they took, such poems usually concluded with a reminder in one form or another of the social obligation to remember the poorest member of the newspaper staff. "[D]oubtless he is poor, and you / And I tonight can something do / To make his Christmas bright," concludes one long poem from 1897 about a newspaper staff sharing their life stories with each other on Christmas Eve and eventually emptying out their pockets for "the little lad" who "deserves it." (For a great archive of carriers' addresses and accompanying essays, btw, check out the online collection at Brown University's Center for Digital Scholarship.)

As the holiday card pictured here indicates, the tipping of postal carriers was also accom- panied by poetry, though it was not as directly purposed to reminding people to fork over some dough as carriers' addresses were. Here, on the left inside panel, the Reverend John Holland of WLS Radio—Holland led the Little Brown Church of the Air for twenty-two years beginning in 1933 and also published eight books including John Holland's Scrapbook of poems and other quotable morsels—is pictured reading at a microphone, the ostensible text of his broadcast printed above. And the right inside panel pictures a Christmas tree with a slit cut into it just wide enough to accommodate and anchor a folded bill (as pictured above) and maybe even a silver dollar. Here's the poem Holland is "reading":

The bells that chime at Christmas time

Bring gladness and good cheer;

Their joy was meant for sacrament

To last throughout the year.

To make the day a time for play,

And then, next day forget,

Is but to stage a sacrilege

And fill life with regret.

Only as love, sent from above,

Abides throughout our days,

Can we begin to enter in

To joy that always stays.

So let's extend the praise we send,

To God on Christmas night,

All through the year, to calm our fear,

And crown our heart's delight.

"Christmas all the Year" is a funky little poem—and not just because it starts with a line that appears to have been cribbed from an advertisement that appeared in the Roswell Daily Record on Christmas Eve in 1928 ("The bells that chime / At Christmas time / Wish you what's fine — / As in Auld Lang Syne"), or because the P&PC interns can't turn up any record of it via Google Books or a general Google search. No, we at P&PC think it's a funky little poem because of how it alternates between (on the one hand) very readable, easily-consumed, sing-songy passages without caesurae (pauses or stops in the middle of the line signaled in prosodic notation by a "//," as in the example shown above) and (on the other hand) passages in which caesurae are extremely prominent, not only interrupting the poem's established rhythm and drastically changing the syntactic style, but interrupting that rhythm almost gratuitously. Do we need the commas around "next day forget" in line six, for example? Not at all. Do we need them around "to calm our fear" in the penultimate line? Nope. Heck, we could even make an argument that the poem's other, more reasonably-used caesura (middle of line nine, the first line of stanza two) could be eliminated without hardly anyone noticing.

So—to use language appro- priate to the holiday and the purpose of the greeting card alike—what gives? Why all these apparently extraneous commas? Why all these unnecessary pauses? It is possible, we suppose, to argue that these are simply marks of poor writing that, intentionally or unintentionally, give "Christmas all the Year" a folksy, amateur quality entirely consistent with WLS Radio, which was known as "The Prairie Farmer Station." That is, just as President George W. Bush cultivated a down-home, aw-shucksness in his unique, uh, vernacular to purposely dim the sheen of his Yale education and thus blend in with the folk, so "Christmas all the Year" might be said to be professionally written greeting card verse in drag.

We think there's a more elegant explanation than that one, however. Almost the entire logic of the card—why not call it the card's poetics?—is geared toward the act of insertion: on the cover, the mailman is putting Christmas gifts into the mailbox; John Holland is broadcasting into your home where the Christmas tree is set up (can't you just imagine the radio in the corner?); and, of course, a dollar is supposed to go into the slot in the card. Given all of this, we'd propose that all of the gratuitous comma usage in "Christmas all the Year" also enacts this very logic at the level of language, where the commas give the appearance of phrases that have been "inserted" into the text as well. That is, via those commas, readers experience on a linguistic plane the very activity the card as a whole is designed to motivate. If at the same time one takes a moment to reflect—shall we say pause?—on the meaning of Christmas and how Christmas shouldn't, as the poem explains, be a one day break but should "last throughout the year," all the better. 

Indeed, the Rev. John Holland has bigger fish to fry than just the delivery of a buck to the mailman or a stack of Christmas gifts to loved ones, for all of this insertion ultimately tropes the spiritual conversion Holland is calling for—one in which, via "love, sent from above," we ourselves "enter in / To joy that always stays." It's no coincidence that that line is the only enjambed line of the entire stanza; when it comes to entering into God's love, neither Holland—outlined in white and glowing like the Christmas tree on the facing panel—nor "Christmas all the Year" is gonna go fooling around with gratuitously used commas and other pauses. Sermon complete. Now can we finally open up those gifts under the tree?

John Denver recites "Alfie the Christmas Tree" on The Muppets (1979)

Singing the Body Electric: The Poetry of Reddy Kilowatt and Free Enterprise

When P&PC's office interns hear the term "political poetry," they typically think of poetry produced by the Left or for leftist causes, but there's a long and largely untold story of political poetry written and distributed to serve conservative political agendas as well. Take, for example, the flier pictured here, which features "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers" as an illustrated poem modeled on Septimus Winner's well-known 1868 song "Ten Little Injuns" and replacing Winner's Indian boys with a parade of workers (doctor, railroader, miner, steelworker, farmer, lawyer, grocer, salesclerk, and reporter) all led by Reddy Kilowatt—the longtime cartoon representative and corporate spokesman for private electricity in the U.S. (Reddy was first created by the Alabama Power Company in 1926.) Here, as the poem relates, Reddy is the first "free worker" to fall victim to American "socialists" seeking to expand the federal government's power (pun intended, right?). One by one and couplet by couplet, "Uncle" (as in Uncle Sam) takes over various private enterprises with the final stanza—seizing on the organizational rhetoric of "working together" across class lines that we might normally associate with leftist rhetoric—summing things up:

Ten little free workers—but they are no longer free.
They work when and where ordered, and at a fixed rate you see,
And it all could have been prevented if they'd only seen fit to agree
And work together instead of saying "it never can happen to me!"

We at the P&PC office appreciate how the flier takes advantage of the poem's stanza breaks for expressive purposes. At the beginning of the poem, as the little free workers march across and thus populate the stanza break, there is essentially no space between couplets, but as the government whittles away at workers' freedoms, the silence of those breaks becomes a more and more powerful representation of disappearing free enterprise. That growing silence or disappearing voice culminates in the final stanza where "the reporter son-of-a-gun" loses his voice or freedom of speech under a tyrannical system that has not only done away with free enterprise but that now won't allow him to "criticize the government" as well.

You'll see that the Otter Tail Power Company has "signed" the poem with a script-like font at the bottom of the flier, but despite the copyright note of 1961, the Minnesota-based company is probably not the author of "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers." The poem was in fact widely reprinted in newspapers across the country, oftentimes as an ad "signed" or endorsed by individual power companies like Paul Smith's Electric and Power Company of Au Sable Forks, New York, the Montana Power Company, the Potomac Light and Power Company of West Virginia, the Iowa Public Service Company, the Carolina Light and Power Company of North Carolina, the Montana-Dakota Utilities Company, Potomac Edison of Maryland, and the Kentucky Power Company. Most of these printings date to the first half of the 1960s, but the P&PC interns have found at least two ads—for the Montana Power Company and the Potomac Light and Power Company—that date to 1950. In other words, this was one heckuva widely distributed poem that, much to its distributors' chagrin, was (a la Ezra Pound) "news that stayed news."

"The Story of Ten Little Free Workers" wasn't Reddy Kilowatt's first or only appearance in poetry, however. As the comic panel pictured above illustrates, Reddy also talked in rhyme: "My name is Reddy Kilowatt! / You'd be surprised at all I've got / and all the things that I can do / if put to work by men like you!" It's as if, in singing his own body electric, Reddy's language generates more power via the dynamics of resistance and flow in poetic form. While we in the P&PC office can be many things to many people, we're not electricians, but we bet that an electrician could explain how the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance might map quite fittingly (syntax, line break, rhyme?) onto the poetics of Reddy's speech. Consider, if you will, the poem "Reddy Says," printed on the reverse side of a late 1950s or early 1960s package containing a glow-in-the-dark Reddy Kilowatt business card holder:

I'm a real live wire—
and I never tire,—
Yes Sir! I'm a
red hot shot.
I can cook your meals,—
turn the fact-ry wheels
'cause I'm
REDDY KILOWATT!

When you toast your toast—
or you roast your roast,—
it is I who makes 'em hot.
I'm in your TV set—
with ev-ry show you get,—
'cause I'm
REDDY KILOWATT!

I wash and dry your clothes,—
play your radios,—
I can heat your coffee pot.
I am always there—
with lots of pow'r to spare,—
'cause I'm
REDDY KILOWATT!

Were it not for the fact that he can "turn the fact-ry wheels," Reddy seems like the perfect little homemaker, doesn't he? He cooks, makes coffee, does the laundry, and makes sure that home appliances are up to snuff. But what intrigues us about "Reddy Says" more than its content is all the extra punctuation (the comma followed by a dash) at the line breaks as well as the elided letters in "pow'r," "ev-ry," and "fact-ry" that not only add a pleasing vernacular to Reddy's speech but also lend it a certain extra charge consistent with Reddy's self description as a "live wire." Are we crazy, or can we read Reddy's poetic lines as power lines as well? All those dashes certainly look like live wires to us.

From newspaper ad and flier, to business card holder and (see the image just above) souvenir stick-pin, Reddy's place in mid-century American life was brokered by poem after poem. To understand just how consistently this was the case, one only has to look at an April 18, 1947, bill for the Public Service Company of New Hampshire (pictured here) in which Reddy comes out of a wall socket to explain the "charge" for his services:

One full month I've labored
And this is all my pay
Divide this sum by thirty—
See how cheap I worked each day.

By portraying Reddy as a laborer, this rhyme in a sense returns us to the political agenda of "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers" presented earlier. Freed from the "fixed rate" imposed by the "socialist" government in "The Story of Ten Little Free Workers," Reddy demonstrates for Don Draper-types and their neighbors not just the benefits of private power companies and their cheap labor (Reddy makes about twenty cents per day) but also just how darn happy people can be when working for mere pennies a day. Of course, as we all know, converting the physical phenomenon of electricity into the jolly humanoid worker Reddy works to obscure all of the real people working at power plants and the subject of how much they actually get paid. For most of us, that tactic is not a surprise. What might be more, uh, shocking is the role that poetry played in the process.

More Muppet Poetry: Two Poems by Rowlf

Forget the turkey, mashed potatoes, and football. We're on a Muppet kick here in the P&PC Office. Doesn't the first clip below—of Rowlf reading "Silence"—remind you of Season 4, Episode 7 of The Brady Bunch (1972) where Mike reads Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Day Is Done" as part of the Westdale High School's Family Night Frolics? And might that be Walt Whitman's famous cardboard butterfly coming to life in "The Butterfly," Rowlf's second poem below? Both "Silence" and "The Butterfly" are from Season One (1976) of The Muppet Show. Happy viewing!

"Sugar is sweet and I love moo": Sesame Street's "Sons of Poetry" (2013)