Slam, Spoken Word, and the Democratization of Poetry: Melissa Girard Reviews "The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry"

Melissa Girard is currently teaching at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, just a short train ride south of the windy city where slam was born.

Academics are anxious about the state of poetry. That anxiety, however, takes very different forms. Some of us—I count myself as part of this first group—worry that poetry is becoming too minor. We want poetry on billboards, in bubble gum machines, on candy bar wrappers, in the hands of union activists, in the hearts of accountants, and on the lips of Hollywood starlets. We read Poetry & Popular Culture with glee.

But another kind of anxiety is perhaps more common: a fear that poetry is spreading itself too thin. Harold Bloom epitomizes this perspective. He bemoans, for instance—in the Spring 2000 issue of The Paris Review—the growing popularity of poetry slams:

I can’t bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn’t even silly; it is the death of art.

Susan B.A. Somers-Willett’s recent study, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (Michigan, 2009), opens amid these debates over poetry’s place in contemporary U.S. culture. Slam poetry, Somers-Willett rightly shows, lies at the heart of our anxieties.

Fighting over poetry’s cultural relevance is hardly new, but these debates did reach a fever pitch in the late 1980s and early 90s. A series of provocative—and polarizing—essays by Joseph Epstein (“Who Killed Poetry?”), Dana Gioia (“Can Poetry Matter?”), and Donald Hall (“Death to the Death of Poetry”) galvanized public interest in poetry’s popular or not-so-popular lives. Poets and critics alike began investigating poetry’s contemporary audiences: Who was reading poetry? Where? Why?

It was at this precise moment that slam poetry was born. Somers- Willett provides an excellent intro- duction to slam poetry which clarifies a number of common misconceptions. First and foremost, slam poetry was not invented at the Nuyorican Poets Café on New York’s Lower East Side, as many people mistakenly believe. Since the early 1990s, the Nuyorican has been almost synonymous with slam: the landmark 1994 anthology, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the 1996 documentary, SlamNation, which featured Nuyorican poets prominently, helped introduce slam to mainstream America. Moreover, figures affiliated with the Nuyorican Poets Café, including Miguel Algarin—who founded the Nuyorican along with Miguel Piñero in the early 1970s—Bob Holman, Edwin Torres, Willie Perdomo, and Saul Williams, have all contributed in vital ways to the development of the art form.

However, it was Chicago, not New York, which gave rise to slam. In 1986, Marc Smith, a white construction worker- turned-poet, began hosting competitive poetry events at the Green Mill, a Chicago jazz club. The format proved extremely popular among locals, and the Uptown Poetry Slam soon evolved into a regular Sunday night attraction. As Somers-Willett explains, to forget that slam poetry emerged in the late 1980s in Chicago is also to obscure slam's white, working-class roots.

By shifting our focus away from the Nuyorican Café and toward Chicago, Somers-Willett is able to provocatively illuminate the cross-racial dynamics of slam poetry. As many observers have noted, slam poets tend to be younger and far more diverse—in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and educational background—than their more traditional poetic counterparts. However, this diversity is not at all true of slam poetry’s audiences. On a national level, the typical audience for a poetry slam continues to be overwhelmingly white, liberal, and middle class. As Somers-Willett explains, the Nuyorican Poets Café is a noteworthy exception to this rule—it is perhaps the only high-profile slam venue that attracts a diverse audience as well as diverse poets.

This attention to slam poetry’s predominantly white, national audience represents the most distinct and important aspect of Somers-Willett’s research. Like most commentators on slam, she argues that racial politics are essential to understanding its cultural and aesthetic value. However, unlike most of those critics, she also claims that slam poetry is not a simplistically expressive or identitarian form. She highlights, as evidence of slam poetry’s racial complexity, poems like Patricia Smith’s "Skinhead.” In this vicious monologue, a neo-Nazi bares his repulsive soul, while also laying claim to “our” America:

“I’m your baby, America, your boy,
drunk on my own spit, I am goddamned fuckin’ beautiful.

And I was born

and raised

right here.”

If slam poetry has an urtext, then “Skinhead” is likely it. It is not only a powerful poem but also one which is transformed utterly by the embodied presence of Patricia Smith—African American woman, poet, performer. (If you haven’t seen Smith perform, get to YouTube posthaste.)

In the difficult moment of the poetry slam, an audience member is forced to negotiate, uncom- fortably, a black woman channeling a white racist—to witness her mouthing his rhetoric of hate, spitting his words as her own. When it is successful (and in Smith’s case, it is very successful), slam poetry enables new modes of racial identification and dis-identification; it both creates and utterly unsettles our racial sympathies.

Moreover, because this is slam poetry, each audience member is called upon not only to witness this spectacle, but also to participate actively within it. Slam poetry, Somers-Willett reminds us, is a live, competitive event. In the face of “Skinhead,” an audience is called upon to judge—to reward or to punish—the complexly racial performances on display. At a poetry slam, a select number of audience members serve as official judges, assigning the poets scores, while others are free to boo, hiss, applaud, hoot, and holler throughout to make their pleasure or displeasure known. (Poetry slams, unlike poetry readings, are notoriously rowdy events). Some of the most thought-provoking passages in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry dwell on the dynamics of this uncomfortable system of racial reward.

For example, Somers- Willett notes that audiences have rewarded Patricia Smith’s performances of “Skinhead” lavishly. However, when Taylor Mali—a popular and accomplished slam poet in his own right, but also a white man—performed the poem in tribute to Smith, the audience “balked.” Somers-Willett explores these reactions in detail, even connecting slam poetry’s cross-racial exchanges to nineteenth-century minstrelsy. Which performances of race and racial politics appeal to white, middle class audiences today, she asks—and why? And when audiences cheer for “Skinhead,” who or what exactly are they cheering for?

Anyone looking for an introduction to slam poetry will find Somers-Willett to be a knowledgeable, clear-headed guide. The book is scholarly, but its interdisciplinary approach makes it appropriate for non-specialists and undergraduate students alike. (I will definitely be assigning portions of this work the next time I teach slam poetry.) However, literary critics and, in particular, poetry specialists, will likely be unsatisfied with The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry. There are no significant missteps, but the thinness of the volume shows. There is, for instance, a surprising lack of poetry contained within this study, and I found myself craving more—and more varied—examples of slam poetry at almost every turn.

Somers-Willett also leaves substantial questions about the values and goals of slam poetry wholly unanswered. Is slam poetry a genre or a media? Because it's a live event, what are the best ways to study and/or teach it? How are recordings of poetry slams—like those in wide circulation now on YouTube—different from live events? What is new—and what is distinctly borrowed—within these developing forms?

This is a tentative study—a first step toward addressing the increasingly embarrassing dearth of academic work on slam. But if Somers-Willett is right about the important cultural stakes of this poetry—and I wholeheartedly believe that she is—then literary scholars need to begin addressing these and other difficult questions. We need to bring slam poetry into our classrooms, our critical studies, and, ultimately, our canons.

Slam poetry was born in an age of intense poetic anxiety. It should come as no surprise, then, that slam poets are competing for their audiences—fighting for their survival. It is the perfect embodiment of—and, perhaps, the perfect remedy for—our anxious condition. Why aren’t academics watching?

The Amazing Poet-Bot

William Stafford's Birthday

During January of 2010, more than 40 events across the United States—and 22 in the Portland area alone— commem- orated the birthday of poet and longtime Lake Oswego resident William Stafford (January 17, 1914-August 28, 1993). Organized primarily by various Friends of William Stafford, these events featured poetry readings, lectures, recollections and—in Lake Oswego, at least, where Poetry & Popular Culture was invited to take part in the fun emceed by Oregon poet and urban planner Scot Siegel—carrot cake and punch.

P&PC gave what Siegel called a "mini sermon" titled "William Stafford's Evergreens" about some of the poetry that Stafford published in newspapers over the course of his life, especially "The War Season" which he wrote in 1945 while doing alternative service work as a Conscientious Objector in Elgin, Illinois. Here is "The War Season":

The birds that winter blew past our yard
feathered along so young
that only the trees could follow their wings
or understand their tongue.

The north wind blew. Limbs bent down.
Leaves fell over the lawn.
The birds one day were young in the sky;
the next day they were gone.

Curiously, while Stafford noted in his manuscript records of "The War Season" that the poem was "Published in The Oregonian in about 1948," none of the P&PC interns can actually find it there, making us wonder about the sad fact that "The War Season" could be relevant in 1945 before World War Two ended, in 1948 three years after the war had ended, and today. Here's what we concluded:

We are always, as the poet Barrett Watten has said in his book Bad History, living in "the era between two wars," and so the evergreen poem, "The War Season," is always timely. Whether it's 1945, 1948, or 2010, it's always War Season, and the fact that Stafford's verse could have been perfectly relevant during the war, after the war in the "era between two wars," or today, is "The War Season"'s sadness, tragedy, and, ultimately, the moral and ethical critique the poem is after. Stafford, the Conscientious Objector, knew—feared, protested—the fact that it's always War Season. And so the date that he wrote on his manuscript copy of "The War Season"—the date that threw librarians, archivists, and myself off track—is not only not wrong, but perhaps not right enough, as it could have been published in The Oregonian "in about 2010" as well. This is one of the reasons—an unfortunate reason, yes, but one nonetheless—why Stafford stays relevant to us today.

For more on Stafford, check out the William Stafford Archives at Lewis and Clark College. See you around the punch bowl in 2011?

Getting the News from Citizen Kane

As written and played by Orson Welles in the 1941 classic that many people judge to be the greatest movie ever made, the life of Charles Foster Kane begins and ends with poetry. The first and probably most memorable instance comes in the newsreel coverage of Kane's death that follows the film's opening "Rosebud" sequence, where Kane's estate is compared to Xanadu of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Coleridge's lines, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree," appear onscreen a la title card and are followed by a series of scenes of Kane's luxurious estate with a voice-over reading:

Legendary was the Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. Today, almost as legendary is Florida's Xanadu, world's largest private pleasure grounds. Here on the deserts of the Gulf Coast, a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built...

What's interesting about this "News on the March" voice-over is that the narrator actually misquotes the original "Kubla Khan," untangling the inverted syntax of Coleridge's line ("a stately pleasure dome decree") only to replace it with the inverted syntax of the news ("Legendary was the Xanadu"). This spectacular moment not only has the effect of turning the news into poetry and poetry into prose—a totally fitting twist for the newspaperman's obituary—but also, in introducing two ways of saying the Coleridge poem, figures the conflicted narratives at the center of Kane's tragic life: a man who could afford to buy anything but who wanted what money couldn't buy; a man who was a success in business but not in life, etc.

We encounter poetry a second time when we first meet Kane at the beginning of his career—a young man, played by Welles, in the office of the New York Inquirer, that feisty, rag-tag daily which gave Kane his start in the newspaper biz. In this scene (pictured below), Kane is no longer the young boy (Buddy Swan) playing in the snow out West and being removed to parts East for a proper upbringing, but a cocksure, idealistic underdog using his paper, in good Progressive-Era muckraking fashion, to root out corporate fraud and advocate on behalf of the poor. Kane's former guardian, Walter Thatcher (George Coulouris) of the legal firm Thatcher & Company, comes to see Kane to protest what he sees as the Inquirer's unfair coverage of these and other items and, while Thatcher's there, Kane is brought a telegram by personal business manager, Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane). Bernstein doesn't want to read the cable aloud, but Kane insists. Here's that passage:

Kane: We have no secrets from our readers, Mr. Bernstein. Mr. Thatcher is one of our most devoted readers. He knows what's wrong with every copy of the Inquirer since I took over. Read the cable.

Bernstein (reading): GIRLS DELIGHTFUL IN CUBA STOP COULD SEND YOU PROSE POEMS ABOUT SCENERY BUT DONT FEEL LIKE SPENDING YOUR MONEY STOP THERE IS NO WAR IN CUBA. Signed Wheeler. Any answer?

Kane: Yes: "Dear Wheeler, You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war."

Bernstein: That's fine, Mr. Kane.

Kane: Yes, I rather like it myself.

As we've mentioned before—via the "poem- ulations" of Emily Dickinson, Chum Frink, and James Metcalfe—prose poetry was no stranger to the daily news, but here Welles is actually leaving those poems unwritten; if the movie transformed news into poetry and poetry into prose early on, here it intervenes to prevent poetic composition in the first place, once again rewriting the poet as the newspaper editor, with the exception that both now deal in prose rather than in the verse of "Kubla Khan." Furthermore, it is Kane's news service that's granted power to make and create, able to conjure up wars (or pleasure domes) where none exist—a capability once associated with poetry and of particular concern to "Kubla Khan." In a sense, Kane takes the modernist cry to "Make it new!" and rewrites it as, "Make it news!"

In "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," William Carlos Williams famously wrote, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems..." People have offered all sorts of reasons why that might or might not be the case, but Citizen Kane offers us yet another possibility: that people do in fact get the news from poems, and part of that news is that American newspapers are the new poetry. From the perspective of 2010, by which point in time both poetry and newspapers have been pronounced dead or dying, that's one Xanadu, perhaps, that even Samuel Taylor Coleridge's mythical bard couldn't call back.

Poetry & Pop Culture Heroes: Firefly, Sci-Fi, & the Latterday Chronicles of Lewis Turco

In Joss Whedon's short-lived, much- acclaimed, 2002 TV series Firefly, the show's main characters repeatedly refer to "The Universe" as "The 'verse"—an abbreviation that suggests, to Poetry & Popular Culture at least, that outer space is one big poem and that Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his team of intergalactic space cowboys have set out to read it all.

This overlap of poetry and science fiction isn't new to Firefly, though. While we were browsing the used books section at the local Book Bin, for example, we came across a stack of decrepit old magazines including the issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction from February 1962 pictured below. On taking a look at it, we landed on a poem by Lewis Turco—a University of Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate and prolific author of a bunch of books including eleven poetry collections and The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Turns out, Turco—who also writes under the pseudonym Wesli Court—penned "Excerpts from The Latterday Chronicle" while studying under Paul Engle and Donald Justice at Iowa. This struck the P&PC office interns as kind of odd, for when they think of poets trained at the Writers' Workshop, they don't at all imagine them wanting to publish in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So we caught up with Turco and asked him to explain himself.

Poetry & Popular Culture: Can you explain yourself?

Lewis Turco: Sure. I wasn't "trained" at the Workshop, I was almost entirely self-taught. I was publishing poems in my home-town paper's poetry column all through high school, and when I graduated in 1952, I went into the Navy for four years where I bought and studied prosody books and anthologies of modern poetry. I began publishing in the "little" magazines when I was 19 years old...

P&PC: Wait a minute. What do you mean you wrote for the local paper? Did you write good bad poetry?

LT: You bet. In my teens I was a high school correspondent and cub reporter for the Meriden, CT, Morning Record, and I was the morgue clerk—the "morgue" is the clippings file that newspapers kept of their stories which were clipped out and filed for future reference. I won a local fiction prize in 1949 and that story was my first publication in a local paper. From then on I wrote all sorts of things, including news items and verse for the local papers.

P&PC: Sorry to interrupt. Back to sea.

LT: In the Navy, I was a yeoman—not an English farmer but an office clerk—and sailed around the world (actually) aboard an aircraft carrier, the Hornet. There's nothing for a clerk to do at sea, so I read a lot and wrote a lot—the ship had a good library. By the time I got out of the Navy and went to college, I was already better published than many of my teachers at UConn. In college, after the Navy, besides receiving the G.I. Bill (which is why I'd enlisted), I was awarded two scholarships by the Record newspaper. The reason I got into the Workshop was because of my publication record.

P&PC: "Excerpts from the Latterday Chronicle" (pictured to the left) wasn't the first poem you'd published in Fantasy and Science Fiction either. What did people make of this habit?

LT: While I was a grad student in the Workshop, I submitted two poems to F&SF, which I'd been reading since issue one. Both were accepted, and the first, "A Great Grey Fantasy," was published almost immediately, in January of 1960. "Excerpts" wasn't published until 1962. I don't remember people having any reaction to either poem. The Workshop people would have sneered if they'd known about it, and academics didn't read sci-fi or fantasy then, though they do now.

P&PC: But Engle had just written a libretto for a Hallmark Hall of Fame opera, A Christmas Opera, by Philip Bezanson, which aired in 1960. Would Engle have sneered too?

JT: I'm sure he would not have. In fact, I was his Editorial Assistant in the Workshop at the time, working on a Hallmark anthology, Poetry for Pleasure, and another for Random House, Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so I may have shown him "A Great Grey Fantasy," though maybe not—he was gone off campus so much.

P&PC: Where's the rest of The Latter Day Chronicle?

LT: There is no more. The "Excerpts" were merely meant to suggest the rest of it.

P&PC: We're used to talking about "genre fiction." What would it mean to talk about "genre poetry" as well? You know, "I read a lot of sci-fi poetry..."

LT: I don't know if it still exists, but there used to be a Science Fiction Poetry Association located in Los Angeles. They published a magazine called Star*Line, and I used to publish there and in their Rhysling Anthology of prize poems. But you know, this idea of "genre" writing annoys the hell out of me. Edgar Allan Poe wrote fantasy poetry, and so have poets throughout history. Anybody ever read Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or "La Belle Dame sans Merci" or The Faerie Queene, or "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," or "A Midsummer Night's Dream"? Gimme a break.

P&PC: Well, what's the future hold for such poetry then?

LT: Last night my wife and I went to see the new movie Avatar. It's a great sci-fi/fantasy flick, the biggest one ever and great fun. I suspect that writers of all kinds are going to keep on writing imaginative literature in every genre. When I was teaching, I used to tell my students, "Writing is writing." There will continue to be good writing in every genre.

P&PC: Live long and prosper, then.

LT: May the force be with you.

Did Dashiell Hammett Hate Poetry?

We here at Poetry & Popular Culture might offer a sawbuck for hard evidence to prove it, because we think he did—hated it like a private dick hates a glass that's half empty or a heart that's too full. And if Hammett didn't hate it, then the hard-boiled Continental Op of Hammett's fictional San Francisco Continental Detective Agency sure did. Which makes sense—as much sense as a skirt in heels and the flatfoot hot on her tail. After all, what use does a private eye have for poetry—the genre that obscures, covers its tracks, revels in riddles, and deals in metaphor? A dick deals in facts, untangles riddles, sorts out mystery. He may have gum on his shoes, but he doesn't need his toenails to twinkle.

Poetry and the P.I., it would seem, are as incompatible as a chili dog and a just-pressed shirt. Exhibit A: Red Harvest from 1929, in which the Continental Op is hired to clean up Personville, a town so corrupt that most people know it as Poisonville. Seems that Personville's original gangsta—Old Elihu Willsson, who owns the bank, newspapers, a senator and the governor—is losing ground in his old age. The Op is reluctant to stick around and do the dirty work, so Old Elihu appeals to the Op's manhood. "I'll talk you your sense," he says. "I want a man to clean this pig-sty of a Poisonville for me, to smoke out the rats, little and big. Its a man's job. Are you a man?"

But the Op retorts:

What's the use of getting poetic about it? If you've got a fairly honest piece of work to be done in my line, and you want to pay a decent price, maybe I'll take it on. But a lot of foolishness about smoking rats and pig-pens doesn't mean anything to me.

In the Op's calculus, the values of money and honesty overlap with clear speaking; foolishness, rats, and pig-pens, on the other hand, line up with poetry.

Exhibit B: The Dain Curse, also from 1929, in which the Continental Op returns to investigate a string of mysterious deaths that follow Gabrielle Leggett wherever she goes. The people using Gabrielle as cover explain to her that her bad luck is the product of a family curse, an explanation Gabrielle buys but which the Op thinks is a bunch of hooey—about as real as a peroxide blonde. Check out this exchange with Fitzstephan, a novelist interested in psychoanalysis who becomes the Op's drinking acquaintance and sounding board:

Fitzstephan drank beer and asked:

"You'd reduce the Dain curse, then, to a primitive strain in the blood?"

"To less than that, to words in an angry woman's mouth."

"It's fellows like you that take all the color out of life." He sighed behind cigarette smoke. "Doesn't Gabrielle's being made the tool for her mother's murder convince you of the necessity—at least the poetic necessity—of the curse?"

"Not even if she was the tool, and that's something I wouldn't bet on."

In hindsight, this passage becomes even more damning of poetry (not to mention psychoanalysis) when it turns out that Fitzstephan himself is actually the murderer who's been framing Gabrielle. So not only does poetry come up short because it's not the "tangible, logical, and jailable answer" that the Op seeks, but in The Dain Curse it's the very language of criminal activity. Even novelist-criminals speak it!

It's clear that the Continental Op's factual, logic-based approach to solving crime extends to language as well. When he reports in The Dain Curse, for example, that "Her face didn't tell me anything. It was distorted but in a way that might have meant almost anything," he's talking about the act of reading—the inability to read. And regardless of whether he's reading poetry or a suspect's face, distortion and indeterminacy almost always get in his way. The irony of all this, of course, is that the Continental Op's own language is so colorful at times that he himself could be called downright poetic. In fact, one character in Red Harvest calls him on this. "My God!" she exclaims, "for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of." What happens to this truth teller? It's no surprise to P&PC that she ends up dead as a doornail.

"This is a Year for Luck and Joy": New Year's Greetings from Poetry & Popular Culture

We here at the Poetry & Popular Culture Office like New Year celebrations a lot, in part because they make us remember the carrier's greeting or carrier's address—that rhyming summary of the year's events which 18th- and 19th-century newspaper printer's devils composed and handed out in search of some walking around money to take into the new year. If you don't know of this tradition, then you should check out the collection from the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays that Brown University has made available online. As you browse the 900 examples there, be sure to also take in the great introductory essays by Mary T. Russo and Leon Jackson, and consider for a moment how the year-end (Christmas) tip you leave for the people who deliver your newspaper or mail in fact has its roots in practices established more than two centuries ago.

The 1933 carrier's address presented here—an illustrated calendar that people could hang in their homes year-round (to the left)—is worth noting for a variety of reasons. (The month-by-month calendar is under the poem.) First, it suggests that the form, at least in name, extended further into the 20th century than most folks tend to think. The elaborate and sometimes epic accounts of the previous year's news-worthy events got shortened, greetings got more general, and the tip the delivery boy sought got rerouted through the circuits of commercial infrastructure. Greetings increasingly came from from the papers themselves, coming in the form of promotional materials that established the business/company name as the primary point of contact between producer and consumer (and not the names of specific printers' apprentices, once often included on the poems they authored and distributed but obscured here by the generic job title of "Your Carrier Boy").

In the process of this trans- formation, the wide- spread, compar- atively secular practice of sending New Year's greetings gradually got pulled into the orbit of the Christmas holidays, thus making the carriers' seasonal rhymes—and this is a second item of interest to note—part of the prehistory of the 20th-century Christmas card. (American Greetings was founded in 1906 and Hallmark in 1910; along with the automobile, the airplane, the x-ray, the machine gun and the safety razor, the commercially-produced greeting card is pretty much a modern invention.) We here at the P&PC Office see this publishing shift in fact being subtly acknowledged in the phrase "New cards are being dealt" in line five of the poem here.)

At the same time that the carrier's greeting was morphing in this direction, another ubiquitous and poetry-related print item, the farmer's almanac, began to change as well. As more and more people migrated to, or came within the easy reach of, urban centers, they still needed calendars but no longer needed the elaborate apparatus that almanacs usually offered—planting information, cycles of the moon, meteorological information, jokes, home remedies, bits and piece of useful information, etc. As this material dropped away, the poetry and calendar remained. Given the newly shortened form of the carrier's greeting and the simplified almanac—this is our third item of note—it was natural that the two would come together, at least for a time, to produce the sort of hybrid form that the Evening Star circulated. True, this specific greeting still retains its New Year's orientation, but there are others with Christmas-related messages (some of which were being delivered by postal workers who, in addition to delivery boys, were seeking seasonal tips). As the century went on, the two forms would eventually disentangle themselves from each other, leaving us with New Year calendars on one hand and rhyming Christmas cards on the other.

So as you go out and sing "Auld Lang Syne" by Robert Burns tonight, keep in mind the long tradition of American poetry that also ushered in the new year. As the recession carries on, it seems appropriate to look back to 1933 in welcoming 2010:

New cards are dealt, so let us play
Our hands for all they're worth, and say
"This is a year for luck and joy,
God bless us all—
YOUR CARRIER BOY

Happy New Year from the the P&PC Office.