Chocolove: From the Poetry & Popular Culture Mailbag

Thinking about poetry and popular culture is an infectious activity. This week, Ernest Hilbert (editor a few brows higher over at the "best damn poetry review online") writes in about a sweet discovery he made while picnicking with friends over the most recent Memorial Day weekend. As usual, a response from the Poetry & Popular Culture office follows.

Dear Poetry & Popular Culture,

On Memorial Day, my wife Lynn and I, along with our friend Keith, an NPR-affiliate DJ, had a modest picnic on the Brandywine Battlefield just outside of Philadelphia. The battle, a decisive victory for the Red Coats, took place in September, 1777, and sent the still-gangly colonial army, under the command of George Washington, scattering for dear life over the hills while abandoning most of their cannons. Afterward, the Continental Congress gave up on Philadelphia as a capital, and, on September 26, 1777, British forces marched into the city of brotherly love unopposed.

We enjoyed some Negronis (gin, Campari, and grapefruit juice in place of vermouth), German beers, whiskey, blueberries, strawberries, five cheeses, prosciutto, smoked mackerel, kalamata olives, four kinds of hummus, and salami. To top it all off, we shared a bar of "Cholocove"—a candy bar with a poem printed on the inside wrapper. Ours (pictured here) was a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (XII from Sonnets from the Portuguese). I was immediately delighted by the notion of a poem in a candy bar. The bar in question was loaded with crunchy orange peels and arrived in squares, each bearing an impression in the shape of a small heart. I immediately thought of Poetry & Popular Culture and snapped some photos for the P&PC office.

Luv,

Ernest


Dear Ernest,

How sweet of you to think of Poetry & Popular Culture! We were so taken by the image of you unwrapping canonical poetry on a battlefield where canons were once abandoned that, in an effort to repay your kindness, we've been trying to contact Chocolove in the hopes of discovering more about that company's, um, poetic tastes. There are lots of things we'd like to know: When did Chocolove start using poems? How many have they used? Is there an in-house editorial board? What qualities does a poem have to display in order to be deemed worthy of Chocolove endorsement, and is there a process by which individual poems are paired with individual chocolate flavors? Why, for example, did ChocoLove select Browning's Sonnet XII to pair with that particular bar?

But, alas. Despite a couple of emails and phone calls, we've received not a single calorie in the way of an answer from Chocolove headquarters, and so we're left for the moment with what we can find on Chocolove's web site, which raises even more questions. In the site's "Frequently Asked Questions" section, for example, we find the query "Can I submit poetry to Chocolove?" followed by the answer: "We do not take poetry submissions but we appreciate your interest. Our poetry has to be in the public domain, which is free and clear of any rights. We have fairly narrow parameters for what we print and we do not use any modern day poetry."

Poetry & Popular Culture can't help but wonder how many queries the company received from would-be ChocoLorcas before it felt moved to make this a FAQ? Did would-be ChocoLarkins send in poems, and what were those poems like? That is, what pool of poetic talent is going untapped by ChocoLove's decision to use only poems in the public domain, and what does it suggest about the relationship between chocolate and poetry that it's so easily disrupted by the inconvenience of copyright restrictions? Doesn't chocolate—like love—know no such bounds, and is there anything else about "modern day poetry" that, as a whole, wouldn't fit the unstated but nonetheless "fairly narrow parameters" of the company's editorial rubric? That is, are modern love and modern poetry in some way fundamentally incompatible?

However, Ernest, we at the Poetry & Popular Culture office don't want to send you away entirely empty-handed, for there is something of a tradition of wrapping together poetry and chocolate that isn't immediately evident in ChocoLove's packaging. Take, for example, the "For Mother" poem pictured to the left which adorns the front of an undated cardboard candy box issued by Schrafft's Chocolates of Boston, Massachusetts—a city which, like Brandywine Battlefield, saw its own share of Revolutionary War activity. Like the "poemulations" of Emily Dickinson, Chum Frink, and James Metcalfe, this is rhyming poetry printed as prose with linebreaks signaled by little designs and ornamented capital letters.

Or consider the tin box pictured here, which was probably manu- factured by the Artstyle Chocolate company— also of Boston—a bit later in the 20th century. Both boxes offer poems to mother, but the Artstyle poem does Schrafft's one better by including a byline; this is verse by Mary Grey Robinson, about whom P&PC knows very little except that she wrote the words for a 1920 songbook titled Babykin. Her poem "Mother" reads:

Every age and every tongue
Of Mother love has fondly sung
And from my heart I want to add
A glowing tribute just as glad
For never could love more wonderful be
Than you, dear Mother, have you given to me.

Both of these items are clearly products of an American culture of "Momism" that saw similar verse printed on pillows, plates, table runners, wall hangings, letter purses, and handkerchiefs—possibly even on picnic baskets like the one you no doubt took to Brandywine Battlefield. What is the connection, you might be wondering about now, between these pro-mother poems from earlier in the century and the romantic poem inside the ChocoLove bar which you shared with your wife? That depends, Ernest. How do you feel about your mother?

Sincerely,

Poetry & Popular Culture

The Ballad of Ben Cannon and House Bill 2461

Appeared in the Oregon Statesman-Journal on June 3, 2009

In the Twinkling Star, your neighborhood bar,
Ben Cannon sat down with a stranger—
a guy from Missouri who seemed in a hurry
and who reeked of political danger.

“Now Ben,” the man said, “your reputation has spread.
You’re young, good-looking, and smart.
And I’m happy to say I’ve come all this way
to tell you it’s only a start—

that I think you’re put here like the froth on a beer
to finish a well-poured draw.
I can help your career if you lend me your ear
and consider a possible law.”

And the man from Anheuser said from Portland to Keizer
Oregonians were lushes and sots,
so addicted to hops they just couldn’t say stop
and who gulped every beer that they bought.

“Just one little tax,” said the man sitting back,
“could treat ’em and sober ’em right.
What’s a penny or two on the cost of a brew
on this—this Michelob Light—

compared to the aid you’d get back in trade
to cure all of OR-ee-GONE?”
Then cracking his neck, he picked up the check
and left without stifling a yawn.

And the very next day, with no shades of grey,
Ben Cannon set out to win—
to tax every flaw, be it keg, can, or draw.
“Love the sinner,” he said, “Tax the sin.”

So that’s how the lobbyist ran out the hobbyist,
how Ben Cannon’s bill shed its blood.
That’s why Oregon’s brews are now singing the blues—
why the Twinkling Star serves just Bud.

What's Good About Bad Poetry? The Case of Patrick the Starfish

Check out Michael Leong's beautiful take on the stinky poetry of Patrick the Starfish from SpongeBob SquarePants. An excerpt:

"A pessimist might observe that SpongeBob and Patrick’s dispersal of bad poetry lowered the aesthetic standards of the town.... A similar pessimist might make the case that bad poetry should stay private, that Bigshot Records— much like vanity presses—lures subpar writers with the illusive promise of fame and recognition. Yet, to me, there is a performative exuberence in Spongebob and Patrick’s blaring, gum-attached gramophone that makes it seem like an ultimately salutary, and even revolutionary, gesture for Bikini Bottom—that it shocked the town out of its rigid aesthetic categories. I want to optimistically think that at the very moment when that fish thought “You know—It’s not that bad,” some kind of aesthetic recalibration occurred, that Patrick’s poem redefined his notions of what art can be."

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: John Strachan

Just when Poetry & Popular Culture thought it knew every poetry superstar who walked down the red carpet of popular culture, along comes John Strachan, professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sunderland and author of Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period. Okay, so we knew that Strachan was out there writing. A few years ago, we had occasion to talk about the comparative tonsorial poetics of early 19th-century England and mid 20th-century America, discovering the "barberous" verse connections between P&PC fave Burma-Shave and the British, Romantic-Era, New York City-based barber, poet, and master of self-promotion J.R.D. Huggins. And not too long ago we learned of Strachan's fondness for the poetry of late 18th-century pugilism. So he was on the office radar.

But nothing could have prepared us for Advertising and Satirical Culture in which Strachan walks seemingly straight out of the Romantic Era with the poetry of shoe blacking in one hand and the verse of bear-fat hair oil in the other. Bringing advertising jingles, parodies, and elaborate mock epics together with poetry and puffs written by the age's more recognizable literary figures—Byron, Coleridge, Crabbe, Dickens, Lamb, Wordsworth, and others—Strachan reconstructs an entire sphere of literary activity created and sustained not just by resourceful and ingenious copy writers but by canonical ones as well. Along the way, he manages to argue that some of what literary critics have long identified as the defining characteristics of "Romantic" writing—a focus on the individual, creativity, genius, originality, etc.—are, in fact, also defining characteristics of the age's advertising poetry. Popular poetry, he reveals, didn't have a monopoly on the commercial. And literary poetry, in turn, didn't have a monopoly on genius.

To go about showing this, Strachan spends two chapters surveying the landscape of advertising poetry and the responses it elicited among the literati. Advertisers not only quoted literary poetry in their puffs, but they imitated it, parodied it, and wrote all sorts of verses of their own as well. In turn, literary writers not only parodied advertising poetry to critique the excesses of commercial culture, but they found in such puffery what Strachan calls a set of "formal models for satire aimed elsewhere." That is, they borrowed the familiar, catchy, poetic discourse of advertising—and the figure of the shameless ad man—to critique a wide range of targets. Take, for example, Thomas Moore's 1826 squib lampooning two Tory figures (Poet Laureate Robert Southey and the editor of The New Times) by comparing them to snake oil salesman Dr. Eady (who hawked a surefire cure for syphilis):

Though many great Doctors there be,
There are three that all Doctors o'ertop,
Doctor Eady, that famous M.D.,
Doctor S-th-y, and dear Doctor Slop.
The purger—the proser—the bard—
All quacks in a different style;
Doctor S-th-y writes books by the yard,
Doctor Eady writes puffs by the mile!
Doctor Slop, in no merit outdone
By his scribbling or physicking brother,
Can dose us with stuff like the one,
Ay, and doze us with stuff like the other.

If Chapters 1 & 2 paint a picture of literary England in which advertising drove the writing of literature and literature drove the writing of poetic ads, then the remaining chapters in Strachan's book focus on advertising campaigns for individual products—shoe blacking, the national lottery, hair oils, and tonsorial services—and the responses those campaigns elicited. These are totally fun, sometimes hilarious chapters about the minutia of Romantic-Era life, but they also open a number of windows onto the politics (and poetics) of everyday life inherent in the most unassuming of consumer goods. Who would've thought, for example, that the period's great crinicultural debate—whether to use vegetable-fat hair oil or bear-fat hair oil—came about because of an emergency wartime tax on hair powder levied by William Pitt the Younger? To protest the tax, Pitt's political opponents began wearing their hair unpowdered, which understandably necessitated a need for some sort of gel, cream, spray, or mousse to help manage out-of-control locks. Hence the emergence of the hair-oil industry (and the eventual dissolution of the hair powder business) accompanied by an entire sub-genre of related verse. Consider Thomas Spence's "An Address to Mr. Pitt Accompanied by a Crop of Human Hair" which, Strachan explains, "defiantly declares that he is proud to wear his hair unpowdered, that he will be no 'guinea pig' (as those who paid the guinea tax were dismissively labeled) and that he hopes Pitt will slit his throat while shaving":

O Heaven-born minister of state,
This tail from off my swinish pate,
Most humbly I present it;
For since no powder may we wear,
Determin'd I've cut off my hair,
And to your honour sent it.

Know then vile Tory, I'm a Whig,
And will not be a Guinea pig,
To satisfy your craving;
Oh! that your razor would but slip
Three inches underneath your lip,
When you yourself are shaving.

A deadly gash I hope 'twould be,
To end your damn'd hypocrisy,
And rid us of a P-t.
A speedy peace I now pray for,
To finish this unlucky war,
Thus endeth my dull wit.

There's more where those stanzas come from, dear reader, so get your copy of Advertising and Satirical Culture today. Nine out of ten enthusiasts of poetry and popular culture recommend it.

The Poetry of Blatz Beer?

Check out this great 1883 New Year's greeting card and its poetic ad for Blatz beer, all products of the Valentin Blatz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the time of this card's issue, Mr. Blatz was still operating the brewery he'd started in 1850 right down the road from Johann Braun's City Brewery (est. 1846). Upon Braun's death in 1889, the two companies would merge to become the third largest brewer in Milwaukee. In 1959, the Blatz brand label was sold to Pabst, and in 2005-2006, the Valentin Blatz Brewing Company Office Building was converted into condos.










































If you enjoyed the advertising poetry in this posting, you might also enjoy:

Poetry in Lotion
The Poetry of Ex Lax
Bob the Bunny
C.G. Blatt's Photographic Emporium
Dr. C.B. Weagley, Veterinary Surgeon
The Palace Saloon and Restaurant

Football Frolics & Gargling Oil: From the Poetry & Popular Culture Mailbag

The Poetry & Popular Culture office receives a fair amount of correspondence from people interested in the lives that poetry leads outside of college classrooms and other certifiably poetic haunts like cafes and the avant-garde. This week, we bring you a letter from a reader in Salem, Oregon, who asks a fairly common question about the poetry of popular culture. Our response follows.

Dear Poetry & Popular Culture:

What's, like, the relationship between song lyrics and poetry?

Desperately Seeking Salem

Dear Desperately,

Thanks for asking! I suppose there are still some crusty old fogies out there who'd maintain that there's some measurable, qualitative difference between poems written in rhyme and meter and song lyrics written in rhyme and meter, but Poetry & Popular Culture does not number itself among them. After all, a historically- informed reader discovers that the distinction between poetry and song lyrics—indeed, the very need to distinguish between the two—is in fact a relatively recent one and that Americans have long imagined poetry as song lyrics (or potential song lyrics) and vice versa. Let's take a little tour of the subject beginning with a songster put out in 1889 to advertise "Merchant's Gargling Oil" (pictured to the left).

Like the farmer's almanacs of the nineteenth century, this songster contains a number of different elements between its covers. In stating the book's "primary intention of advertising Gargling Oil and Worm Tablets," the product's makers then go on to summarize its other contents: "a calendar for practical use, and for amusement the latest Popular Songs and a concise summary of the principal points upon which the so-called Science of Palmistry is based." Of special note, perhaps, is the fact that the song lyrics are printed without musical notation (pictured to the left). With the exception of the chorus notation, "The Toboggan Slide" thus looks and reads like any ol' poem that might have appeared in a daily paper from the time.

Why, you might ask, is the musical notation left out? Did the folks at Merchant's assume audiences already knew the tune to "The Toboggan Slide"? Would go ahead and make up their own tune? Would sing it to the tune of an already-existing song, replacing that song's original lyrics with the lyrics of "The Toboggan Slide"? Odds are, the regular meter of "The Toboggan Slide" meant that the song (if it wasn't written to music) could be easily adapted to already existing tunes; that is, the tunes of many popular songs became templates on which to graft new lyrics—a form which privileges, say we at the Poetry & Popular Culture office, the content of the individual lyric. This is the general method of the I.W.W. Songbook as well, a twentieth-century, pro-labor songster issued by the Industrial Workers of the World in order "to fan the flames of discontent." Leafing through the book, one encounters lefty lyrics written to well-known tunes such as "Auld Lang Syne," "Onward Christian Soldiers," "Tipperary," and "The Shade of the Old Apple Tree." This not only made it easier for people to learn the songs, but it no doubt parodied the originals as well; could one very well sing the I.W.W's version of "A Little Talk with Jesus," for example—

The preachers, cops and money-kings were working hand in hand,
The boys in blue, with stars and stripes were sent by Uncle Sam;
Still things were looking blue, 'cause every striker knew
That weaving cloth with bayonets is hard to do.
John Golden had with Mr. Wood a private interview,
He told him how to bust up the "I double double U."
He came out in a while and wore the Golden smile.
He said: "I've got all labor leaders skinned a mile."
John Golden pulled a bogus strike with all his "pinks and stools."
He thought the rest would follow like a bunch of crazy fools.
But to his great surprise the "foreigners" were wise,
In one big solid union they were organized.

—without comparing the song's original content with the new one? All in all, this strikes us as a particularly poetic endeavor.

Or consider the item pictured to the left—a four-page announcement advertising a "Football Frolic" held in Detroit, Michigan, probably in the 1940s or 50s (there's no date on the flier). For the grand admission fee of 35 cents—with proceeds apparently going to the Junior Alliance of St. Andrew's Paris—one would get an evening's-worth of probably highly- chaperoned dancing. The three remaining pages of the advertisement are, like the songster distributed by Merchant's Gargling Oil, a mixture of song lyrics and classified ads for local businesses including the Moderne Corset Shop (operated by C.C. Szemborski and located at 7341 Michigan Avenue), Dr. Frank J. Czapski a local dentist, and The Martin Bar ("The Popular Place for your Favorite Drink").

Again, the song lyrics are presented without musical notation, though in some cases readers probably couldn't avoid singing the tunes at least inwardly, as is the case with "Over the Rainbow" written for, and made popular by, The Wizard of Oz in 1939 and pictured here. Still, even with that soundtrack playing in our minds, we can't shake the fact that reading "Over the Rainbow" printed as a poem is a different experience than listening to it. Even if "Over the Rainbow" isn't a poem when broadcast, we contend it certainly becomes one when printed here and that there's a certain kind of interference or static that happens when one is asked to re-adjust one's attention to read what one normally hears—the kind of defamiliarization with language that a lot of modern poetry cultivates.

As much as the ads for Merchant's Gargling Oil and the Football Frolic suggest that song lyrics were printed as poetry, that doesn't necessarily mean that readers actually linked poetry and song in their own minds. For evidence of that, let's turn to our final example—a large, three inch-thick scrapbook of poetry and song lyrics assembled during World War II. Here we do encounter musical notation that differentiates song ("A Sabbath Day's Work") from poem ("The Old Scotch Church"). The album is an interesting one: it contains songs, lyrics, and poems having to do with a range of ethnic and regional identities and includes poems from popular writers as well as "literary" authors like Lord Byron, Robert Burns, Edgar Lee Masters, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

However, the distinction between song and lyric suggested by the page above doesn't hold throughout the collection. Here—a detail from a larger page "themed" around the subject of African-Americans and the American South—the scrapbook's compiler has pasted some of the lyrics to "Dixie" just above a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Perhaps there is a difference between the two, but that difference is a relatively small difference between poetic forms—one poem includes a chorus, one does not—not a substantial difference in genre. Otherwise, both poems are printed in lines, both are metered and rhymed, both give the reader elocutionary cues (one a soundtrack demanding a certain pitch and tune, the other the phonetics of dialect), and both ask the reader to inhabit a first-person person voice that is essentially vicarious in nature (one wishes to get back to Dixie, the other is a dying wish).

So, Desperately Seeking, that iPod you carry—with its mixture of Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, and Duran Duran—is a portable poetry player, a 21st-century version of the scrapbook pictured above. Whether the poetry you listen to is good or not is not for Poetry & Popular Culture to say. But we'll go, well, on the record saying it is, in fact, poetry.

Sincerely,

Poetry & Popular Culture

Write 'em Cowboy: Lovin' the Lariat Laureates

You may have missed it—maybe you were distracted by the fuss that the Academy of American Poets kicks up about National Poetry Month out on the east coast each year—but April 19-25 was Cowboy Poetry Week to folks out West. It has been since April 11, 2003, in fact, when the U.S. Senate, led by a bipartisan group of Senators from Kansas, Montana, Nevada and Utah, unanimously passed a resolution recognizing "National Cowboy Week." Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican and one of the resolution's sponsors, explained, "Many think cowboys are a thing of the past, but I can tell you otherwise. In many western states like Montana, cowboys gather around a campfire and swap stories just as frequently as they did one hundred years ago. This oral tradition is now captured in written form as well, and several websites are dedicated solely to preserving and disseminating cowboy poetry and its history. My resolution will recognize the contribution of cowboy poetry to our history of the West, but also to mark it as a thriving tradition that continues even today."

Senator Burns is not just, uh, horsing around here, though that doesn't mean one can't wonder at the same time how much his soaring rhetoric calibrates with everyday life. Y'all might ask, for example, exactly how "thriving" is the thriving tradition of cowboy poetry that Burns extols and how, precisely, has this poetry really shaped the history of the West? Or, alternately, ya might query whether today's cowpokes really gather round campfires as often as they did a century ago—or whether they actually turn, instead, to their PC's and PowerMacs to make the range a little more like home? How, in other words, has trading in barbed wire for FireWire changed the way people out west rustle up their verse?

But one thing Senator Burns is not is wrong: cowboy poetry is alive—not just at highly-staged festivals, in the U.S. Senate chambers, or around century-old campfires burning a mixture of nostalgia and anachronism. Take, for example, the Rosebud-Treasure County Brand Book (pictured to the left), a spiral-bound book published in 1983 that records the various marks and brands of livestock owners from two adjacent counties in Burns's home state of Montana. The publication is not strictly a reference book, though. More like one of the farmer's almanacs from the 18th or 19th centuries which combined calendars with facts, figures, tasty morsels of historical advice, and—of course—lots of poetry, this Brand Book mixes together verse, anecdotes, jokes, stories, and even a glossary defining once-colloquial terms such as "dally," "kack," "slick fork," and "town hole." In other words, the Rosebud-Treasure County Brand Book is not just a handy-dandy reference guide designed to identify, record, and sort out the American West's ideogrammatic language of private property ownership, but it's also a sourcebook containing the markings—linguistic and otherwise—of a region's cultural property as well.

And crucial to this cultural property is poetry, and specifically (at least for folks in Rosebud and Treasure counties) the verse of Bob Fletcher, which the Brand Book features at length (pictured to the left). Poems like "The Trail of an Old Timer's Memory" and "The Big Sissies" are funny, self-conscious takes on what the east oftentimes assumes is an unquestioned desire on the part of westerners to get back to the good old days when men were men, women were women, and governments were smaller than they are now. In fact, however, "The Big Sissies" makes fun of this regressive 'tude by hilariously voicing an old-timer's scorn for "this new culture stuff" which includes airplanes, autos, records, radio, and even modern, uh, facilities that have "softened the old human herd." "Now, pardner," the poem's speaker explains:

...these toilets, for instance,
They fix 'em in all sorts of shape
With colored glazed tile
And puttin' on style
With rolls of this yere fancy crepe.

Why I've seen the day not so distant
When you welcomed a hole in the ground
With just a peeled rail
Supportin' your tail
And a catalog lyin' around.

Or I can go back a step further
Ere even the old rail was there,
When you'd squat on the hoof
With the sky for a roof
And then reach for a prickly pear.

Poetry & Popular Culture can't say for sure whether Senator Burns would cite "The Big Sissies" as evidence that cowboy poetry is thriving, but he could do worse, we think, than rope this one into the conversation. Whether and how it, and other poetry like it, contributes to the history of the west and the maintenance of a system of property that isn't just private is another question—and one, say we, that is definitely worth askin'. Like, totally, dude.