Poetry & Popular Culture Goes West

Lured by the promise of pinot noir, trout fishing, whale watching, and the spirit of poets like Gary Snyder and William Stafford, Poetry & Popular Culture hits the Oregon Trail this week and permanently heads out west to its new home in Salem, Oregon, and the Willamette River valley. Moving from Iowa City has not been unemotional (goodbye Foxhead, goodbye Prairie Lights), but verses like the one pictured on the postcard to the left reassure us that poetic treasures aplenty await us in the Pacific Northwest as well as in the Heartland. Framed by two images (a panoramic view of the river valley, and someone canoeing in front of Mount Hood), "Sunset on the Willamette" reads:

The sun sinks downward thru the silver mist
That looms across the valley, fold on fold,
And sliding thru the fields that dawn has kissed,
Willamette sweeps, a chain of liquid gold.

Trails onward ever, curving as it goes,
Past many a hill and many a flowered lea,
Until it pauses where Columbia flows,
Deep-tongued, deep-chested to the waiting sea.

O lovely vales thru which Willamette slips!
O vine clad hills that hear its soft voice call!
My heart turns ever to their sweet, cool lips,
That, passing, press each rock or grassy wall.

Thru pasture lands, where mild-eyed cattle feed
Thru marshy flats, where velvet tulles grow,
Past many a rose tree, many a signing reed,
I hear those wet lips calling, calling low.

The sun sinks downward thru the trembling haze
the mist flings glistening needles higher and higher.
And thru the clouds—O fair beyond all praise!
Mt. Hood leaps, chastened, from a sea of fire.

"Sunset on the Willamette" is by Ella Higginson (1861-1940) who, like William Stafford, was born in Kansas and later moved to Oregon and (after marrying) Washington. A poet and short story writer whose work appeared in publications like McClures, Harper's Monthly, and Colliers, Higginson was made poet laureate of Washington State in 1931 and served as campaign manager for the first woman elected to the Washington State House of Representatives (Frances C. Axtell in 1912). Her poem "Four-Leaf Clover" was especially popular, appearing (among other places) in Edmund Clarence Stedman's An American Anthology from 1900. If you want to learn more about Higginson, head on over to the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at Western Washington University which has 18 boxes of her writing, scrapbooks, and other materials available for scholarly research.

Laura Bush Visiting Crater Lake

Appeared in the Oregon Statesman-Journal on July 15, 2009 and the Iowa City Press-Citizen on July 20, 2009

Now unemployed, she walks and thinks
and tries to enjoy the view,
yet something there is about the place
that feels like deja vu.

The mountain, she learns, was solid once,
but blew up from inside—
a mass of fire and brimstone making
a depression miles wide

and unregulated lava flows
as far as the eye could see
reducing to ashes what was once
a thriving economy.

The thought of such destruction here
causes her to swallow,
for if it happened once like this,
how many more might follow?














Other Good Bad Poetry:

"Writing Good Bad Poetry"
"My Poetic License"
"The Ballad of Ben Canon and House Bill 2461"
"Last Voyage for Keeper of the Hubble"
"U.K. Mailman Delivered Pot with Bottles of Milk"
"Laura Bush Unveils George W. Bush State China"
"At the Foxhead on Election Night"
"OMG! Buddhist Nun Texting Novel"
"Dinosaur Descendant to be Dad at 111"
"Cat Chasing Mouse Leads to 24 Hour Blackout"
"Man Faces Jail for Smuggling Iguanas in His Prosthetic Leg"
" 'Lingerie Mayor' Vows to Stay in Office"
"O.J. Simpson Questioned in Vegas Incident"

Still Popular After All These Years: Walt Whitman, Levi's, and Sleeves of Grass

Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent and Walt Whitman geek Eric Conrad sounds his own barbaric yip this second week of July with some ruminations on the Good Gray Poet's recent association with the likes of Levi's Jeans and $59 t-shirts. Spending for vast returns? Waiting somewhere at a cash register for you? Conrad takes us there with his up-to-the-minute "clothes reading" of W.W. in the 2009 marketplace.

For all those Walt Whitman-geeks out there—whose annual patriotic picnics lost their luster when the symbolic 4th of July, 1855, release of Leaves of Grass proved to be a myth—there is finally some good news. Thanks to Levi’s jeans and the marketing minds of Wieden+Kennedy Portland, Whitman finally yawped his way into our pants this Independence Day after over a hundred and fifty years of trying.

Wondering how you’ll fit that Kosmos in your dungarees? Two TV and cinema spots at the core of Levi’s new “Go Forth” campaign hope to assuage the inevitable doubts. The first ad, entitled “America” (directed by Cary Fukunaga of Sin Nombre fame), appeared on the 4th and featured black and white images of San Francisco and New Orleans set to a wax cylinder recording of Whitman reading from his late poem “America.” (Scroll down here to view that ad.) Levi’s forthcoming complement to Fukunaga’s commercial is M Blash’s colorful spot “O Pioneer!” (due to hit screens July 24th) which incorporates a Smithsonian Folkways recording of Will Geer (yes, the guy from The Waltons) reading a few stanzas of Whitman’s “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

Though very sexy and very sleek, these ads trade on Whitman’s bardic brand name in the obvious ways. Both “America” and “O Pioneer!” ask Generation-O to equate their fastidiously faded denim with a poet who recognized “the potential for greatness that lies in each of us.” Surprise, surprise: the spots due their best to contain the Whitmanian multitudes—Fukunaga by playing with light and shadow in a post-Katrina landscape and M Blash by embracing the homoerotic undertones of America’s “youthful sinewy races.” Though props go out to any ad that might counter Prop-8, in terms of Levi’s branding itself via Whitman (even in terms of Whitman and clothing), the “Go Forth” campaign is more hype than innovation.

While the marketing machine at Levi’s has bloggers abuzz, it might come as a surprise that some boutique clothing designers in New York’s Bowery section beat the jeanswear giant to the punch with their own line of Whitman- inspired fashion. You’ll remember that when Whitman appears arms akimbo, shirt unbuttoned, and hat defiantly cocked to the side in the 1855 Leaves of Grass frontispiece (pictured here), he brands himself with a Bowery Boy-image that precedes even his name as author of that strange volume. So perhaps it’s fitting that in 2009 (well before the launch of Levi’s much touted “Go Forth” campaign) a new generation of New York’s Bowery Boys returned the favor by branding themselves through Whitman’s image. These designers at NYC’s Barking Irons are calling their latest collection—wait for it—“Out of the Cradle.”

Visit Barking Iron’s website and you’re immersed in a Bowery bravado reminiscent of Whitman’s 1855 preface. (Barking Iron boasts, for example, of their “buttery soft vintage- quality garments” distinguished by “an authentically American style that is both steeped in forgotten traditions … and brazenly anew!”) It is easy to see why the company's founders, brothers Daniel and Michael Casarella, turned to Whitman as the face of their own “gritty, unpretentious styling.” The Casarellas look to corner a market with their hipster-chic threads. And though their shirts blur the lines between dandy and rough as W.W. did, at $59 a-pop, “Out of the Cradle” tees (for “Gents” only, mind you) are still best tailored not for Whitman’s masses but for wallets packed with hopeful green stuff swollen.

Eric Conrad is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Iowa where he works part-time for the Walt Whitman Archive.

The Other Side of Pin-Up Poetry

About a year ago, Poetry & Popular Culture spent some time thinking about the fact that poetry was oftentimes printed on pin-up posters like the Vargas-girl centerfolds that were a standard feature of Esquire magazine in mid-century America. Esquire wasn't unique in printing verse next to airbrushed, half-clad hotties, however. Poetry was a regular part of girly-picture culture more generally, escorting co-eds on postcards, ink blotters, playing cards, arcade cards, and matchbooks (such as the one pictured to the left)—a fact that intrigues Poetry & Popular Culture for a bunch of relatively compelling reasons which, if you take a journey back to last year's posting, you can discover for yourself.

Crucial to our curiosity, though, is the fact that the poetry accompanying the leggy lassies and sexy schoolmarms oftentimes seems to trouble the heteronormative masculine subject position that we assume these pin-ups both appealed to and helped to reinforce. It's almost as if, under the cover of ogling some busty babe—a sort of elaborate, Cold War-inspired drag performance of all-American maleness—guys found a freedom to explore alternate sexualities and sexual subject positions. And it was the poetry that was absolutely crucial to this queering of male sexuality, as from one pin-up to the next, the American male found the nature of his relationship to the image recast or re-rhymed in a variety of different ways.

Poetry & Popular Culture has just come into possession of a perfect example of this: the matchbook advertising Gosh's Burr Oaks "Modern Cabins" pictured above that has a poem printed down the length of its inside. On the front, the clever double entendre "Ready to Serve" plays right into the sort of masculine fantasy we expect pin-up pictures to cater to and reproduce. But when we turn to the inside, this is the poem we find:

If in this world there were but two,
And all the world were good and true,
And if you know that no one knew—
Would you?

If you dreamed in Pajamas Blue
Of two strong arms embracing you,
And if you really wanted to—
Would you?

If all the world were nice and bright,
And if I stayed with you all night,
And if I turned out all the lights—
Would you?

If we were in a certain place,
And we were sleeping face to face,
Nothing between us but a little lace—
Would you? Kiss me Good-Night!

Sure, by the end of the poem we realize (via that "little lace") that the poem's speaker is most likely a woman, but until then Poetry & Popular Culture feels that the verse clearly cultivates the fantasy of a male-male union and "of two strong arms embracing you." It's not an understatement, I think—given the hypothetical questions and the unrealistic world that is described (where all are "good and true," where no one would know, where you 'fessed up to wanting to, etc.)—to describe this scene as utopian. Of course, by returning the reader to the female and normative heterosexuality at the end, the poem reveals all of this speculation to be, in fact, precisely the fantasy that it is. But until then, the verse's vague language, conditional tense, and unidentified speaking voice let the American male drift from the moorings of his conventional masculinity and explore another side—not just of a matchbook, but of his desire.

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: ChocoLove

A couple of weeks back, Ernest Hilbert wrote to Poetry & Popular Culture about his Memorial Day encounter with Chocolove, the Colorado- based chocolatier that wraps nearly every scrumptious bar it makes in a poem. The P&PC office recently caught up with Whitney—Chocolove graphic designer, public relations specialist, and all-purpose company spokesperson—who was more than willing to chat about the company's, um, taste in poetry. Here, in an exclusive one-on-one, Whitney gives P&PC readers something to chew on.

Poetry & Popular Culture: So, why did Chocolove start printing poems on the inside of its chocolate bar wrappers?

Whitney from Chocolove: It was the idea of Timothy Moley, Chocolove's owner, who thought poetry would complete the Chocolove package concept, which is inspired by love letters. Since 1994, we've printed over 350 poems and poem excerpts on tens of millions of wrappers.

P&PC: Holy Moley!

W: Yes, I saw that coming.

P&PC: How do you select the poems?

W: We choose poems based on a few criteria. They must be in the public domain, must be about love and romance, and the poem—or at least an understandable portion of it—must fit on the wrapper. The regular-size bar wrappers can contain a sizable poem, but due to the small size of the mini-bar wrapper, the poetic inclusion is limited to a few lines. Most of the poems we've used were originally written in English between the 1600s and early 1900s. We strive to select poems that are uplifting and also understandable, and we hope that people who eat Chocolove will read our poems to their friends after dinner, read 'em to someone they love, put 'em on the refrigerator, or use 'em as bookmarks to provide inspiration time and time again.

P&PC: Is there a Chocolove Editorial Board or Poem Selection Committee?

W: No, there isn't. We're a very small company with six employees in the office. The poems are selected by one person—the owner—and are a reflection of his personal taste. He pairs poems with flavors that he feels represent the poem's essence.

P&PC: Do you ever feel left out of that process?

W: I'm not a huge poetry person, so no. If I had my own company, I wouldn't be asking for too many opinions either. He's the man, so to speak, and I trust his good judgment. I did slip in a Rumi poem that I love one time, though I've yet to see if I got that one by him!

P&PC: What's the poem?

W: "Spring Giddiness." Here it is:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright
reedsong. If it
fades, we fade.

P&PC: I thought you said you weren't a big poetry person! How did you come across this?

W: I told a really great English teacher that I had in high school that I just didn't dig poetry, and he said "fair enough, but I think you'll like Rumi."

P&PC: So, was Moley an English major, or what?

W: No, just a poetry fan.

P&PC: On the Chocolove web site, it says you don't accept submissions of original poetry because of copyright issues. Have people really sent poems to you?

W: We get a ton of submissions, many of them very good. However, as unromantic as it may seem, we simply can't publish them due to copyright laws. I think a lot of people don't realize what a small company we are, and dealing with something like copyright infringement would be a major blow to us and take away from our focus, which is on making the finest, most reasonably priced premium chocolate available. We have faith that the plethora of poetry journals out there will do an excellent job of publishing talented poets.

P&PC: I have a neat love poem that would be perfect for Chocolove. Are you sure you couldn't make an exception—just this once?

W: Well, since you asked so nicely...

P&PC: Um, no offense, but why do I get to talk to you and not the owner?

W: Our owner is incredibly busy. At the moment, he's creating several new bars and running an every-growing company.

P&PC: Yum. What's your favorite Chocolove poem?

W: I like all of the Shakespeare poems that we publish.

P&PC: Parting is such sweet sorrow?

W: Yes, something like that.

Poetry & Popular Culture on the Radio

On Friday, June 19, Poetry & Popular Culture was invited by Victor Infante—host of the Blog Talk Radio show "The Eclectic Word"—to participate in a roundtable discussion on the topic of "Poetry & Pop Culture." (That's Infante pictured to the left.) Initially, there were some pretty hard feelings in the P&PC office when Mike won the single-elimination limerick-writing tournament to decide who would appear on air along with Scott Woods (President of Poetry Slam Inc.), Robb Telfer of Young Chicago Authors, and Tara Betts. But with the sole exception of some minor in-house sabotage that resulted in a less-than-ideal phone connection with "The Eclectic Word," those fractures in the P&PC family were accounted for and are now—we hope—a thing of the past. What's not past, though, is the roundtable discussion itself, which you can listen to or download here.

The Great Diagraphic Corset

Check out this great, Victorian-era die-cut advertising sign for "The Great Diagraphic Corset"—a 10" tall, full-color display item that was designed to stand upright with the help of an "easel" leg that once attached to its reverse side. (You can see a remnant of that leg in the second image below.) As much as we here at the Poetry & Popular Culture office love this design concept, we like the punning product-packaging concept even more, as the hourglass shape of the vase tropes the va-va-va-voom hourglass form that the female body will supposedly take on with the help of a little whalebone and some minor shortness of breath. "It is our belief," the makers of The Great Diagraphic Corset state on the reverse side, "that no corset has yet been produced, uniting in so great a degree the qualities of support, ease and beauty."

Beauty indeed. How better to complete the web of cultural associations linking femininity, flowers and fashion than by throwing a poem—or, in this case, part of a poem—into the mix? As is often the case with advertising poetry (see P&PC's recent digressions on Poetry in Lotion or Ex-Lax, for example), it's never quite as simple as just throwing something into the mix, however. The makers of The Great Diagraphic Corset write "Our corset seems to embody the fancy of the Poet" and go on to quote four tetrameter lines witnessing to that fancy:

Now doth her bodice aptly laced
From her fair bosom to her shapely waist
Fine by degrees and beautifully less
The air and harmony of grace express.

If you're saying to yourself right now "Ah-ha! Those couplets ring a bell!" it's probably because you're thinking of "Henry and Emma," a fairly sizable dialogue poem about marital (in)fidelity written by everybody's favorite Augustan poet, Matthew Prior (1664-1721). But if you know your Prior well enough to place that quotation—and if you were able to recognize him as "the Poet" which the language on the die cut was referring to—you probably also know that the makers of The Great Diagraphic Corset are actually misquoting Prior's original text. The original, in fact, reads:

No longer shall the Boddice, aptly lac'd,
From thy full Bosome to thy slender Waste,
That Air and Harmony of Shape express,
Fine by Degrees, and beautifully less...

And, of course, if you recognized that The Great Diagraphic Corset was rewriting Prior, then you probably know that Prior's "Henry and Emma" had—and 'fessed up to having—its own source text: ye olde, anonymous, 15th-century poem, "The Nut-brown Maid." (Incidentally, the "Nut-brown Maid" became especially popular in the mid-18th century after Prior's death, when it was included in Thomas Percy's hit collection of ballads and popular songs, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)—a collection that eventually inspired imitations of popular verse by wanna-be balladeers such as Colderidge and Wordsworth.)

All of this is to say, of course, that a half century of poetry lies behind the four lines printed on the back of The Great Diagraphic Corset advertisement—an seemingly simple puff that reveals itself to be a moment of extraordinary intertextuality in the consumer marketplace. Now that's the sort of literary historical hourglass that catches Poetry & Popular Culture's eye!