Herman Munster, Pragmatic Beatnik: A Guest Posting by Angela Sorby

A while back, one of P&PC's summer research interns happened upon the following choice clip from the popular 1960s CBS TV show The Munsters in which "jolly green giant" Herman Munster (played by Fred Gwynne) is called on to recite some beatnik poetry while hosting a totally rad shin dig at his pad with a bunch of cool wanna-be beatnik cats. Unsure what to make of his performance, we dropped a line to Angela Sorby (pictured here), Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and author of the P&PC "highly recommended" study Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917. Take a gander at the clip here, then check out Sorby's commentary below.



Dear Angela,

So, like, what's the deal with Herman Munster's performance?

The P&PC Office

***************************************

Dear P&PC,

In August of 1965, Marie Jordan wrote to Negro Digest magazine, objecting to the Beat poet LeRoi Jones's Afrocentric vision; Jordan insisted that “the first duty of any writer, be he black, white, or green, is to be continually striving to develop and improve his craft and artistic skill.” Jordan's letter does not acknowledge that at least one green poet emerged from the crucible of the Civil Rights era: Herman Munster, whose verdant hue enabled him to register anxieties about integration—and about poetry—on network TV. Like The Addams Family and The Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters depicts awkward social mixing within neighborhoods, and Munster's green skin enables him to act as a racialized other while ducking the politics of black and white.

Literary histories of the 1960s, such as Conrad Aiken's Twentieth-Century American Poetry (1963), tend to be chrono- logical, nationalistic, and largely white. But Munster's performance offers a pop counterdiscourse that is fluid, transnational, and multicultural, including an anonymous sixteenth-century British rhyme (“Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary”); a bit of nineteenth-century didacticism (Sarah Josepha Hale's “Mary's Lamb”); a phrase from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “Psalm of Life” (“Life is real! Life is earnest!”); a snippet from Rudyard Kipling (“Fuzzy Wuzzy”) and some snatches from the R & B star Louis Jordan (“That chicken's not too young to fry”). And, of course, the whole poem is recited to the beat of an African drum, recalling Allen Ginsberg's “Negro Streets” of Harlem. Munster's poem, then, is a compressed précis of verses that circulated orally and that are understood as available for use by non-elite speakers. Indeed, his final trope on Longfellow (“If you're cold / turn up the furnace”) recasts Longfellow's romanticism as pragmatism, and sums up Munster's implicit ars poetica: do what works.

And his poem does work, at least for his TV audience —and this is a rare moment. Ordinarily, poetry on TV is a source of embar- rassment and discomfort, and indeed in the beginning, Munster's wife Lily says apprehensively, “I think he's going to recite.” However, Munster does not recite, exactly; rather, he channels fragments of popular poetic history, recombining them into a kind of monster mashup that makes the familiar new—without making it unpalatable or threatening. By the end, one bearded spectator enthuses, “Man! That cat is deep.” But Munster succeeds, not because he is deep, but because he is practical and syncretic. The point of Munster's poem is not to express his romantic self-identity (despite his genealogical relation to Mary Shelley), but rather to establish a social comfort zone—a green space, neither black nor white—where the oral tradition can thrive, and where poetry is, at least potentially, a popular art, grounded in the practice(s) of love and theft.

Yours,

Angela Sorby

Be Kind to Animals: Bookmarks, George Comings & Barry the St. Bernard

George Comings (pictured here) was born in Vermont in 1848, one year before John Muir's family would move to the U.S. and start Fountain Lake Farm near Portage Wisconsin. In 1870, at the age of 22—two years before the creation of the world's first national park (Yellowstone) and four years after the foundation of the American Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals—Comings moved with his parents to Michigan to help them establish and maintain a fruit farm.

Thirty years later, in 1900, as Louis Lassen went about his work paving the way for McDonald's and Burger King by inventing the modern hamburger in Connecticut, Comings moved to Muir's Wisconsin where he would start and run a dairy farm and breed Holstein cattle. Shortly after the institution of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, he served two terms (1921-1925) as Wisconsin's Lieutenant Governor and made an unsuccessful run for Governor, losing in the 1924 primaries to fellow Republican John J. Blaine. (Milwaukee had a socialist mayor at the time, btw.) Well-known as a lecturer on agricultural topics, Comings then began working for the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture and was made a state humane officer in 1928—a post he held until his retirement in 1939, the year that famous vegetarian and Humanitarian League founder Henry Stephens Salt passed away.

A year before Comings retired—and one year after the Atlantic Monthly accepted Rachel Carson's essay "The World of Waters" for publication—Comings oversaw the creation and distribution of a series of "Be Kind to Animals" bookmarks that mixed prose and poetry from various sources in asking readers to reconceptualize their relationship with our furry and feathered friends. On the front of the marker pictured above and to the left, for example, we have the story of Barry the St. Bernard, a quotation by one-time Missouri Senator and Yellowstone champion George Graham Vest, and three stanzas by the much maligned but extremely popular poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox who was born on a farm in—you guessed it—the badger state. In fact, it is Wilcox who gets the most column inches of anyone quoted on the bookmark, front or back:

I am the voice of the voiceless;
Through me, the dumb shall speak;
Till the deaf world's ear be made to hear
The cry of the wordless weak.

And I am my brother's keeper,
And I will fight his fight,
And speak the word for beast and bird,
Till the world shall set things right.

For he who would trample kindness
And mercy into the dust—
He has missed the trail, and his quest will fail;
he is not the guide to trust.

Wilcox's "Voice of the Voiceless" went on to become part of the animal rights movement beyond Wisconsin as well; the official journal of the Animal Liberation Front (Voice of the Voiceless) takes its title from her verse. In the specific context of the bookmark, however, Wilcox's words mix with those of Seneca, Abraham Lincoln, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others to create a multicultural, cross-Atlantic, historical coalition of individuals lobbying under the slogan "Every Day in Every Way Be Kind to Animals." And the poetry is a central part of this effort: the rhyme in the slogan helps us remember the motto; the verses by Wilcox (pictured here) and Coleridge tie sympathetic human emotion to animal rights in ways that the genre of prose cannot; and because of the longstanding link between birds and poets in the cultural imagination—Wilcox rhymes "word" and "bird" in line 7 for a reason—the figure of the poet lends an even greater authority to the discourse of animal rights than simply his or her status as curator of moral emotion generally speaking.

What we here at the P&PC Office really appreciate about Comings's campaign, however, is how the medium of the bookmark synchronizes with, or materially tropes, the Humane Agent's political message. Beginning with the story of Barry, the famous dog who "saved the lives of forty-one Alpine travelers," the bookmark itself, as an object, is all about the act of salvation as well—it's designed to save one's place in a book. Through an associational logic that connects Barry saving Alpine travelers to bookmarks saving readers, the "Be Kind to Animals" project transforms the everyday act of marking one's place in a text, making it into an extension of an animal rights agenda. By using the bookmark, an individual participates in—even rehearses—the type of ethical activity he or she is encouraged to practice "every day in every way" in regards to animals. In its vertical orientation, the bookmark may even figure the "beautiful monument erected" in Barry's honor in Paris—itself a marker—thus making three acts of remembrance (of Barry, of one's place in the book, of one's ethical responsibility) simultaneously possible. It's an accomplishment, we think, that should give us, er, paws.

Just What Poetry's Spin Doctor Ordered: A Review of The Poetry Foundation's New iPhone Application

The P&PC Office has just downloaded the Poetry Foundation's cool iPhone app, and we love it. In the Foundation's words, the new app means "you can now take hundreds of poems by classic and contemporary poets with you wherever you go," but we're less interested in this portability—which simply extends a long tradition of pocket editions and pocket anthologies into the digital age—than we are in how the application itself is structured around traditionally popular ways of poem reading instead of the Modernist ones that first gave Poetry its street cred.

If you are into the individual talent or the individual masterpiece, this app does give you—via a little window at the top of the screen—the ability to search for specific "poems and poets," but that method of poetry finding takes a distinctly secondary back seat to others: you can more easily browse poems by "mood" or "subject" or, if you press a "spin" button or simply shake your phone, the app randomly cross-indexes moods and subjects to produce a catalog of poems along thematic lines (as in the first image above). We just shook the tax-deductible office iPhone, for example, and came up with a list of poems themed around the intersection of "Optimism" and "Work and Play." A second shake gave us "Passion" and "Nature." A third gave us "Worry" and "Youth." Surprisingly, for a little magazine that has come to be associated with individual talents and poetic personalities, the new app is pretty author-free: as the "spin" results in the image pictured above indicate, moods, subjects and titles are far more crucial to the app's operation and use than the author names that dominate the organization of classroom anthologies like the Norton or even the table of contents for Poetry magazine itself (see Vol. 1 No. 1 pictured below).

The Poetry Foundation apparently knows, however, that author names and specific poem titles often pale in importance to subject matter, theme, or mood among a popular readership and so, in reaching out to that readership via the iPhone app, the Foundation has put on a distinctly popular face—a face that probably has Ezra Pound rolling (if not spinning) in his grave. (Try to imagine, for example, an anthology of Modernist poetry being structured around sections titled "Joy" and "Commitment"!) That is, after nearly a century of standing for modernist quality, taste and discrimination, Poetry has gone thoroughly middlebrow if not downright popular in its ambitions, and it's not the world of the little magazine but digital communication technologies—such as the Poetry Tool on the Foundation's web site and the iPhone app discussed here—that have taken it there.

So, what are the implications of this finding system? For one, the iPhone app appears to completely disregard the importance of style, poetic voice, or school of poetic thought when it comes to poetry reading; the modernist call to originality (Pound's battle cry to "make it new") takes a back seat to an index that trucks in the vague categories that Pound cautioned against in the March 1913 issue of Poetry magazine when he wrote "Go in fear of abstractions." As its transhistorical themes suggest—Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti and Ella Wheeler Wilcox (pictured here) turn up together when our spin results in "Passion" and "Nature," for example—the app also foregoes categorization along the lines of literary periodization, disrupting the oftentimes Hegelian narratives of literary history that Poetry and Modernism depended on for literary cachet; thanks to Apple, AT&T, and the Poetry Foundation, all poetry—to misquote T.S. Eliot—is eternally present.

The depreciation of style, the subordination of the individual talent, and the loss of a linear literary narrative results in a general homogenization of poetic history that might leave Harold Bloom, the avant-garde, the English major, and the M.F.A. student at a loss for what books and dissertations to write next. But with the removal of brow lines, the disappearance of an aesthetic priesthood, and the waning aura of authorship and history alike comes a possible restoration or reconfiguration of the early 20th-century reader whom Joan Shelley Rubin has examined in Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. In the day before scholars took it upon themselves to separate highbrow poetry from lowbrow poetry and genteel poetry from modern poetry, Rubin argues, Americans read eclectically, finding and using poems from various literary traditions and time periods for many different purposes, in the process becoming "repositories of both the high and the popular—aware of, but not constrained by, a shifting boundary between them." If the Poetry Foundation is reaching out to touch someone, this is the reader it's likely got in mind.

Make no mistake, P&PC is not claiming that the Poetry Foundation iPhone app is the new beacon of popular poetry reading, although it does improbably contain eight poems by one Edgar Guest, the "people's poet" of the Detroit Free Press (pictured to the left) who would have never fit with Poetry during his lifetime, although he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Michigan—a school that had bestowed the same honor on Robert Frost. However, we are enthused by the new sets of categories which encourage readers to apply poems to their lives and not just to their term papers and GRE tests, and we like the restoration of affect to poetry reading that this suggests. (We're also very curious, btw, about the process of designing the app.) Combined with the "spin" feature—which makes us think of a disc jockey playing records on a turntable—these aspects of the poetry app make us feel like we're holding and carrying around a sort of portable, poetry mix-tape generator. Maybe that means an audio version will be available soon?

Ernie Kovacs as Percy Dovetonsils, Poet Laureate (circa 1955)

The Book of the Undead, Part Two: Ce Rosenow Reviews Ryan Mecum's Vampire Haiku

This past April, P&PC turned to haiku expert Ce Rosenow to get her take on Ryan Mecum's 2008 collection Zombie Haiku. Now—and just in time for the season three premiere of a little HBO series called True Blood—Rosenow returns with a review of Mecum's follow-up volume, Vampire Haiku (2009). What's her verdict on the 400-year love story and bloody romp through American history featuring cameos by Emily Dickinson and J.D. Salinger? It's something to hang a fang in—but not for the reasons you think.

Part II: Vampire Haiku

Vampire Haiku, the second book in Ryan Mecum’s Horror Haiku series, basically follows the same recipe as his earlier volume, Zombie Haiku. The humor, book design, and references to popular culture adapt the basic formula of Zombie Haiku to accommodate the experiences of Vampire Haiku's main vampire, William Butten. Also like the first book, the poems in Vampire Haiku sustain a narrative and are presented as entries in the protagonist’s haiku journal. Unlike the first book in the series, however, Vampire Haiku has a serious subtext that distinguishes it from Zombie Haiku and perhaps gives the reader something more to, well, sink her teeth into. It suggests that American history and culture, from colonial times on, is inextricably linked to violence.

The narrative begins in 1620 England with young William composing in his haiku journal: “red sunlight burns through / with the approaching new dawn. / Time for me to go.” This anachronistic opening—the haiku only became a poetic form decades later with the work of Matsuo Basho and others, and the form itself didn’t find its way from Japan to England until the 19th century—emphasizes that Mecum isn’t interested in creating an accurate version of haiku history. In addition, as discussed in my review of Zombie Haiku, he isn’t interested in maintaining the formal characteristics of literary haiku either. Instead, Mecum is interested in using a love story to comment on American history.

First, the love story. William Butten and Katherine Carver were English travelers on the Mayflower. Vampire Haiku imagines that they meet on board, a la Kate and Leo in Titanic, and locates their love story in the New World. Using the names of actual passengers on the Mayflower for these vampire characters begins the book’s critique because it suggests a lack of essential humanity in America’s founders. Katherine turns William into a vampire, and William then kills Katherine’s vampire husband (John Carver, the Governor at Plymouth) so that nothing impedes the blossoming relationship: “If you are in love / with a married vampire girl, / make her a widow.” Unfortunately for the new couple, the murder brings too much attention. Katherine leaves to spend several centuries evading capture, while William searches through those centuries for his lost beloved: “I know she was here. / The paper had a story / about some odd deaths.” Although Katherine occasionally resurfaces, she always disappears again.

During William’s quest to find Katherine, he participates in—and feasts at—an array of significant historical events, including the Revolutionary and Civil Wars:

A revolution
that leads to war and bloodshed
is like one long meal.

My country at war:
When 600,000 die,
eating gets easy.

William also participates in the Battle of the Alamo, turning Davy Crockett into a vampire who later returns as David Koresh of the Branch Davidian religious sect, and he appears at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Massacre at Wounded Knee, as well. William’s presence at these events helps sustain the synchronicity between American history and violence that runs throughout the book. Certainly vampires would show up at events with significant carnage; however, constructing an American history comprised largely of events that create such carnage also characterizes that history as one rife with brutality.

In addition to historical events, William also encounters many famous historical figures during his quest. Some, like Amelia Earhart, are already vampires; others, such as Emily Dickinson and J. D. Salinger, are turned by William. These cameos are typically humorous: “It wasn’t the crash. / Amelia Earhart was killed / because of sunlight.” Nevertheless, they also suggest that America’s icons were, beneath their famous personae, monsters; the best writers and adventurers that America can produce are inhuman, which signals—or so Mecum's logic goes—an inherent lack of humanity within America itself.

Other figures are even more disturbing in their connections to real-life acts of violence. Consider this haiku about the serial killer, Son of Sam:

So he worked for me.
I didn’t tell him my name
but he called me Sam.

And again the cult leader, David Koresh:

He felt safe in forts.
This one was Alamo-like,
except filled with girls.

While it might be amusing to think about Amelia Earhart as a vampire, the two instances above reference individuals charged with serial murder, child abuse, and statutory rape. Such references suggest that the brutality of American history exists not only in large-scale events like colonization or war, but also in the American individual.

As a vampire, William consistently treats human tragedies with irreverent humor which lessens the sense that these experiences are in any way lamentable in a violent culture. Note his response to the difficult years of the Great Depression:

The Great Depression.
Great for making more homeless;
not too depressing.

Flimsy little homes,
which some folks call Hoovervilles,
I call lunchboxes.

William also views mining disasters as a chance for feasting:

Sometimes I would cause
coal mining caves to collapse;
me inside with them.

To time it just right,
drink your last dying miner
as help shovels through.

William’s irreverence emphasizes that these events are less preventable or avoidable calamities than simply characteristics of human existence and opportunities for (in)human predators.

A haiku about MySpace, takes William’s indifference for human life one step further. The poem itself is funny: “Checking the menu, / officially called MySpace, / for a bite to eat.” When read against the accompanying illustration of a MySpace page filled with young girls, one of whom is circled in pen, it becomes much more disturbing. The reader moves away from associating the poem and image with a fictional vampire and toward the reality of young girls falling victim to predators they meet online.

In the end, the relationship between vampire and human violence is the book’s most interesting achievement. Overlapping the fictional realm of vampires with the brutality of war or the deprivations of the Great Depression, and weaving together the acts of American serial killers, cult leaders, and online sexual predators with the vampire identities of famous people, undercuts the belief that instances of shocking individual cruelty belong to a small group of extremists. Anyone, Vampire Haiku suggests, can become a monster, including the average citizen and America’s revered icons.

Reading vampire violence against American violence suggests that the inhuman actions of the vampire are actually all too human and ultimately American. Mecum's narrative does not abandon this suggestion as it concludes its love story with a reference to American television history. A vampire slayer (not Buffy, but I won’t spoil the surprise) kills Katherine, and William must endure eternity without her. At first he contemplates suicide-by-sunlight but then realizes, “She created me / and her creation will live / with her memory.” He discards his haiku journal and moves from America’s past into America’s present with the same haiku that begins the narrative: “Red sunlight burns through / with the approaching new dawn. / Time for me to go.” In other words, the bloodshed will continue.

Ce Rosenow founded Mountains and Rivers Press in Eugene, Oregon, and is current president of the Haiku Society of America. For a recent interview with her, check out "Fast Five with Ce Rosenow."

Right On—But What About Khalil Gibran?

Check out this groovy artifact which the P&PC Office interns unearthed the other day—a far out Kodak moment from the 1970s when, as the inscription on back records (see the picture below), "The wind was the poetry & the waterfalls the music."

We don't know who these two unshorn hippie love children are. Nor do we know where it was in the wide world that they found the wind's cool verse and the water's tinkling melody. Nor, for that matter, do we know why the nature of the wind and water are reserved for a postscript of all things—as if we, the dearly beloved of their gaze, could ever forget that day.

However, we would be willing to bet that Khalil Gibran was there in some form or fashion (though probably not in a tux) armed with passages like:

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.

You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.

Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of heaven dance between you.

Were these "winds of heaven" the poetry that Betsy and Michael felt on that day in the woods oh so long ago? Probably so. And as the P&PC Office is on the verge, this very week, of celebrating 12 years of being hitched, there's really only one thing we can say: Right On.

Putting the Man in Manicule: A Guest Posting by Eric Conrad

In this handy posting from the resident Whitmaniac at P&PC's Midwestern outpost, Eric Conrad looks back at the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass and finds the Good Gray Poet pointing the way toward 21st-century corporate branding techniques.

Last summer, Levi’s enlisted Walt Whitman for its highly publicized “Go Forth” campaign, an ambitious set of promotions that appropriated Whitman poetry, photography, and even the sole surviving recording of Whitman's voice. Naturally, this got hearts at the Poetry & Popular Culture home office all aflutter, but not everyone shared the love. Slate’s Seth Stevenson undoubtedly spoke for multitudes when he lamented that Whitman’s appearance as Levi’s “involuntary spokes-celebrity” could easily be considered a “desecration of all [Whitman] stood for.” Stevenson praised Cary Fukunaga’s 60-second film as a “small artistic gem” but ultimately felt it was ruined by “that Levi’s logo at the end.” The critical consensus was clear: branding a bard bordered on blasphemy.

Would Whitman have been so quick to point the same finger? Maybe not. A look back 150 years to the 1860 Leaves of Grass—the third and most aggressively promoted edition of Whitman’s poetry—shows Whitman himself going forth with his own revolutionary blend of poetry and publicity. That year, in fact, the Whitman brand was born—and I’m not talking about chocolates. In and on this edition (and on Leaves of Grass Imprints, a 64-page pamphlet printed to advertise Whitman’s new poems) is, for the first time, the Whitman logo: a butterfly resting on an outstretched index finger. Whitman would revisit and re-enact this image multiple times throughout his life (see the well-known photograph at the end of this posting, for example), but it's the 1860 birth of the butterfly brand that is possibly most striking.

The image has been interpreted in various ways (e.g., a joining of man and nature, a promise of spiritual rebirth), but what folks have so far missed is precisely what would have been most obvious to 19th-century readers—and what would be most disturbing to anyone determined to “save” Whitman and poets from the vagaries of advertising today. Whitman’s butterfly icon that would eventually become nigh synonymous with Whitman himself was first and foremost a manicule, one of the ubiquitous little pointing hands of the marketplace—the most common print and manuscript symbol of the 19th century, and the very appendage of advertising. By 1860, these little hands were pointing their fingers at anything and everything you might want to buy, including Leaves of Grass. The American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking (1894) defines the function of a “Fist” (the most common name for a manicule produced by a printing press) as “[serving] to call attention to the words following.” In 1860, Whitman aligned his role as a poet with this function of the manicule: both he and the pointing hand transfer value onto what follows them.

The last poem of the 1860 Leaves, “So Long!,” and the manicule that accompanies it, emphasize the ephemeral and contingent nature of Whitman’s poetic project. Here, Whitman admits that all he knows “at any time suffices for that time only—not subsequent time.” “[L]et none be content with me,” he writes, “I myself seek a man better than I am, or a woman better than I am.” The manicule becomes Whitman’s advertisement for “what comes after” his poetry—a finger pointing to a blank page and even beyond the book to “a hundred millions of superb persons” who have yet to exist and to the millions of American promises yet to be fulfilled. With his butterfly adorned-index finger, Whitman turned the most common advertising symbol of the age into a logo for Leaves of Grass.

So, for anyone convinced that Whitman would have given the finger to Levi’s re-branding of his name, remember that in 1860 it was Whitman himself who pointed the way.

Eric Conrad is the new managing editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and member of the Walt Whitman Archive staff. His most recent publication, “Am I Not a Man and a Poet?: A Recently Recovered Whitman Caricature,” appears in the Winter 2010 WWQR.