"When you read page 73, think of me": Robert Frost on The Golden Girls (Season 6, Episode 15 [January 19, 1991])

Rhymes, Jingles, and Little Poems: The World War II Rumor Project Collection in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress

"Rumor," wrote Shakespeare in Henry IV, Part 2, "is a pipe / Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures / And of so easy and so plain a stop / That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still-discordant wavering multitude, / Can play upon it." We here at P&PC don't know about all of that, but we've certainly had our fair share of rumor-related surmises and conjectures of late, all stemming from our recent forays into the World War II Rumor Project Collection in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Our time in the nation's capital is quickly coming to an end, but now that the lion's share of our proposed research about Edna St. Vincent Millay's World War II-era poem The Murder of Lidice is done, we just couldn't pass up an opportunity to find out what folks on the street were saying sotto voce around the same time. And you know what? It turns out that many of them were talkin' poetry.

The World War II Rumor Project Collection is exactly what it sounds like it is. Worried that Axis agents were infiltrating the U.S. and spreading false rumors with the goal of damaging national morale and the unity of the war effort, a certain Dr. Eugene Horowitz working for the Office of War Information did a pilot study coordinating the collection of rumors for analysis and counteraction. He collected them in two main ways: via designated, already well-placed individuals (hair stylists, cab drivers, etc.) who reported what they were hearing in their communities; and via teachers and students at a select number of high schools and colleges.

Much of the project's collection consists of rumor reports obtained via the first method, and this was the material we initially targeted, thinking how awesome it would be to go back home to Oregon with a  handful of the juiciest, choicest rumors that grandmas and grandpas in the Beaver State were passing along. Well, it turns out that Oregonians didn't have much of a taste for rumor or (what's more likely) the federal government—or perhaps they couldn't get their ground game up and running in time. Because we found a grand total of two Oregon-generated rumors. That's right. Two.
 

We were about ready to sigh, pack it all up, and move on to something else, but that's usually the sort of moment when something happens for us. Indeed. Just to be thorough and make sure our bases were covered, we decided to check out the student responses—all contained in the last three narrow boxes of the collection. And what do you know. There, right at the start, we found a template "speech" that each teacher was asked to give when administering a "standardized" rumor collection in class—you know, the "always use a #2 pencil" type of thing—and part of that speech instructed students to "write down five jokes, anecdotes, puns, rhimes [sic], or 'cracks' about the war." Rhimes? You can imagine our ears pricking up, and not just because of the unconventional spelling. And sure enough, later on, the speech reminds students to write down "any kind of story, joke, pun, toast, or jingle about the war." Jingle? Now you're talking. And wouldn't you know it, the entire instructional concludes with yet another reference to poetry. "If you can't remember the exact words of a little poem or jingle, give it as near as you can. Please write these down now—let's not take too long over it."

Rhimes, jingles, and little poems? Who today would even think to ask for rhimes, jingles, and little poems when trying to assess "what passes by word of mouth ... things which often fail to appear in print"? So, we started reading, and you know what? There were rhimes, jingles, and little poems all over the place, from rhyming slogans ("Pay your taxes to beat the Axis") to full-on, multiple-stanza verses about everything from Hitler's nether regions to sugar and shoe rationing.

But wait, there's more—there always is. Each student response is anonymous (the study never asked for names), but at Dr. Horowitz's instruction, each form (almost each, at least) contains a notation identifying the respondent's year in school, gender (M or F), and race (W or C/N [Colored/Negro]). And as we first read through—quickly, without method or clear goal—we started to feel like the African American students reported rhimes, jingles, and little poems more frequently than white students. How very interesting, we thought. What little archive have we stumbled upon? How can we tally up the numbers? How do we crunch and analyze them, and what might they reveal to us? It turns out that Dr. Horowitz's project never got beyond the pilot stage, but could we, almost seventy-five years later, use the data he collected to say something about the relative importance or unimportance of popular poetry to African American and white students nearing mid-century and thus, presumably, to the communities from which they came? How would we then map gender onto this? How about age? And how would all of this data intersect with the poems themselves? Might there be discernible patterns in who reported what types of poems?

We're a long way from answering all those questions, dear reader, but by now much of the data has been recorded for transport back to Oregon. We couldn't have gotten this far without further support from folks at the Kluge Center, who loaned us a real-live intern to help: Cooper Kidd (pictured here), a sociology major at Montgomery College who's just returned from a summer studying social responses to AIDS in San Francisco, and who's spending the Fall semester doing LoC research on poverty and trans women of color. Pretty much side by side in the Folklife Center for the past three or so weeks, we've been making spreadsheets, talking through what we've been finding, and sharing more than just a few rhimes, jingles, and little poems with each other.

Really, we don't have much data to make public at this point, but we can dangle this little morsel in front of you (and in front of all of you granting foundations out there): of the 2,250 responses we've recorded, about half are from African American students, and half are from white students. (We think this is statistically sound.) The percentage of African American students who report rhimes, jingles, and little poems is 28%, and much higher than white students, who report poems 14% of the time. Our initial hypothesis confirmed, we now prepare to move on—Cooper back to school, P&PC back to Oregon, and both of us deeper into the data. Please wish us safe travels, and make sure to check back for more breaking news—well, breaking as of 1943, at least—about "the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still-discordant wavering multitude."

P&PC in Beantown

P&PC is thrilled to be heading to Boston tomorrow for a busy four days at Framingham State University and the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference. The trip to Framingham has a particularly sentimental edge, as we return to the city of our birth—Dad C. was stationed there in the Army—to deliver "From Baraka to Rihanna: Legacies of the Black Arts Movement" as part of Framingham State University's "Stasis & Change" lecture series. After that, on Thursday, we head downtown to serve as chair for the panel "Feeling Revolutionary/Revolutionary Feeling: Sentiment and Affect in Feminist Poetry," which features three of our favorite scholars in the world: Melissa Girard, Linda Kinnahan, and Dee Morris. Then, on Friday, we deliver a paper alongside Donal Harris and Loren Glass as part of the panel "After the Program Era." (Check out the whole MSA program here.)

It's all a wonderful convergence of P&PC networks. You know Girard from her P&PC posts here, here, and here. You know Glass from his P&PC post here. The Morris effect is everywhere in our world, as she chaired our dissertation back in the day at the University of Iowa. Kinnahan is editor of A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry forthcoming from Cambridge and including an article on popular women's poetry by P&PC staff members. The Framingham visit is being coordinated by longtime P&PC friend but not-yet-contributor Bart Brinkman, and on Saturday we get to spend the day with Heidi Bean, our dear friend and co-editor of Poetry after Cultural Studies. Were it not for the fact that, living on the West Coast most of the time, we don't get to see these people in person very often, we might be a little nauseated by all the good (if not revolutionary) feeling. (Um, yeah, did we mention that we also have social plans with P&PC contributors Marsha Bryant and Erin Kappeler?) But after living in the cold and unforgiving Library of Congress archives for the past three or four months, we're going to give in and enjoy it. Why don't you come join us?

"Now You're Gonna Hear Some Real Talkin": Lord Tennyson and the Poetry of Our Gang (from "Two Too Young" [1936])

The Poetry of Dave the Potter

If P&PC has seemed a bit distant of late, well, that's because it's true. We admit it. We've been negligent, distracted, and otherwise occupied, turning our attention primarily to several longer-form projects that haven't lent themselves as easily as we might have liked to postings of this ilk. Those projects have been fun and sometimes frustrating. Some are finished and in the mail. Some are still in progress. Some are new—like, as of this very week. And given the limited amount of time we've got at the Library of Congress, we've pretty much buried our noses in the materials here. But that doesn't mean you're not on our mind, dear readers. We thought of you the other day, for example, when, as we went strolling through the National Museum of American History's "American Stories" exhibition, we discovered the work of poet-potter David Drake, whose story and work have somehow managed to escape our notice until now.

In some ways, it's difficult to say something about the incredible Drake that hasn't already been said—to much acclaim, we might note, by Leonard Todd, and also by folk and decorative arts scholars like those who contributed to I Made This Jar: The Life and Works of the Enslaved African-American Potter Dave—but maybe this posting can get get you to check out what they and others have written so far. (Be sure to also pick up Laban Carrick Hill's award-winning "picturebook poem" Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave.) Born around the year 1800, Drake was a talented, enslaved South Carolina ceramicist who, in addition to frequently signing his name "Dave," also inscribed his pots with short poems—a remarkable and daring move at a time when slave literacy was illegal and when South Carolina was enacting particularly harsh laws punishing slaves who read or wrote. (Here's a collection of Dave's extant verses.) We here at P&PC are particularly taken with the two-line poem on the jar featured in the "American Stories" exhibition, the last one Dave inscribed in 1862 before emancipation:

I—made this Jar all of cross
If you don't repent, you will be lost.

Among other things, we like the couplet's gnomic character; the relationship drama staged in slant rhyme between the "I" and the "you"; the poetic contract or blackmail; the slightly Emily Dickinsonian character of the dash and the capital letter "J"; the ways that words like "Jar" and "cross" resonate with various meanings that "cross"-fertilize and increase the poem's density; and especially how the association of "cross" with wood—how does one make a jar "all of cross"?—asks for a reading of the poem that pressures the relationship between Christ's (wooden) cross and Dave's (clay) jar as analogous sites of suffering.

Thus far, we haven't turned up any literary types who have studied Dave's verses seriously and at length as poems. (The enslaved poet George Moses Horton, also from South Carolina, has gotten more ink.) Most people—those not particularly trained in the mysterious and magical ways of literary critics—read Dave's poems as biographical markers or as small windows onto slave life. That is, they read the poems as informational pieces, rather than as the valuable literary or poetic pieces of art they are. And when we say they're valuable, we're not joking. The Smithsonian paid something like $40,000 for its jar, and we bet that other major museums like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, both of which have Dave's pots in their collections, ponied up similar sums.

We here at P&PC oftentimes wonder about the value of poetry in non-artistic terms—remember the case of the $400,000,000 poem?—and a $40,000 jar starts raising a number of such questions. How much of that $40,000 can be attributed to the poem, for example, and how much to the jar? In other words, if the poem weren't on the jar, how much would the jar sell for, and is the difference between that and $40,000 one way of figuring out the "value added" contribution of Dave's poem? We don't think that would be a horrible approach, though we will admit that, minus the jar, the poem itself probably wouldn't sell for much, so the poetic value and the ceramic value reinforce one another. But we also think that a $40,000 price tag on a jar produced by an enslaved poet-potter should also raise the larger and less theoretical question as to who is continuing to profit off of Dave's uncompensated labor? Dave didn't see a dime from his pots when he made them, of course, let alone the cool $40 G's that the Smithsonian's pot-poem went on to fetch. And the poem-pot wasn't returned to him after emancipation to sell or otherwise do with as he wished.

We in the P&PC Office are not in any way experts on the subject of reparations, but Dave's poem-pots seem like a perfect example of how and where the logics of reparations make easy and total sense. Dave made the pot. Dave wrote the poem. Dave deserves a significant chunk of the profit restored to him. We would like to think that the person or group who sold the pot to the Smithsonian did in fact turn around and give the profit it made to organizations focusing on some aspect of African American literacy or the arts. Did they? P&PC doesn't have the slightest idea how to find out. Did the Smithsonian—or the Philadelphia Museum, or the Museum of Fine Arts—make its purchase contingent on just such an agreement? We have no idea how to find that out, either. But perhaps the uncomfortable nature of such questions is one reason why people don't read or "value" Dave's poetry as carefully or as seriously as they might. To read it is to hear within the physical object a voice reminding us not only of the human labor that went into it as well as the conditions of that labor—"I made this Jar all of cross"—but of the still unfulfilled conditional in line two: "If you don't repent, you will be lost." Did Dave mean for these words to ring true 150 years later? We think so. Why else would he have put them in stone?

Happy Halloween from P&PC: Roto-Rooter Covers "The Raven" (1979)

Happy Halloween from P&PC: Sir Christopher Lee Reads "The Raven"