Bullwinkle's Corner

Reflections on "The Workshop as Phenomenon"

Following last night's keynote address by Marilynne Robinson (pictured below) and this morning's series of panels, the "reunion" marking the Iowa Writers' Workshop's 75th anniversary is now in full swing, and P&PC's Iowa City affiliate has just checked in. Here is one person's take on some of the events of the last 24 hours:

Yesterday evening, following a welcome and introduction by novelist and current Workshop Director Lan Samantha Chang, Marilynne Robinson delivered the reunion's keynote address, "The Workshop as Phenomenon," in Iowa City's historic Englert Theater. Although some notable figures were absent—some were off hearing Greg Brown performing at The Mill, one of Iowa City's historic music venues—it was a packed house that heard Robinson praise the Workshop for setting a precedent by which people would be encouraged to write within the auspices of higher education. Anything that gets people to think and write seriously in an age of rage, worry, half-truths and non-truths, she argued, is a good thing; better to have people writing as teachers and students within the relative freedom of higher ed, she continued, than meeting the expectations of a royal patron, succumbing to the market, or "cranking out dime novels under assumed names." Except for the fact that Workshop graduates have cranked out cheap novels under assumed names to pay the bills, there was little to object to in this thematic strand of her speech which sought to praise what creative writing workshops do well.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Robinson's talk centered on the pivotal role of the University and Iowa City in the history of university and college-level workshops and graciously acknowledged the region's literary culture of writing clubs, workshops, and other such meetings that predated the Workshop's official formation in 1936. While she praised the model of exchanging and critiquing work that the Workshop would inherit and develop, though, and while she offered a long catalog of prominent writers who visited Iowa before the formation of the Workshop, Robinson didn't name any of the people who actually lived and wrote in Iowa themselves—people who were cultivating and caring for the literary soil that would ultimately (even unpredictably) support a publicly-funded institutionalized creative writing program in the Midwest: once nationally-known people like poets Jay G. Sigmund (the Cedar Rapids insurance executive who mentored the Workshop's second director Paul Engle), Arthur Davison Ficke, Floyd Dell, and novelist Ruth Suckow whose gravestone is pictured here. Indeed, the literary scene that helped lay the foundation for the Workshop was capacious and inviting—as populist, if we are to believe the historical record, as the Workshop is exclusive. Here, for example, is how Suckow (writing for H.L. Mencken's American Mercury in 1926) described Iowa's literary culture: "It is snatched at by everybody—farmer boys, dentists, telegraph editors in small towns, students, undertakers, insurance agents and nobodies. All have a try at it."

After the keynote, this correspondent attended a soiree hosted by Workshop M.F.A. and now well-off businessman Glenn Schaeffer (who donated the money to build the Dey House's addition and new library). Lan Samantha Chang, T.C. Boyle, Allan Gurganus, and Ethan Canin were in attendance. We then wandered down to Dave's Foxhead, a favorite Workshop watering hole, which was packed to the rafters with alums including 2010 Pulitzer winner Paul Harding. Sightings early the next morning included Philip Levine, Robert Hass, Z.Z. Packer, Francine Prose, and Edward Hirsch. Despite the thrills of such encounters, this correspondent couldn't help thinking about all the nameless people described in Suckow's description of 1926 Iowa, as well as about the writers who went unmentioned in Robinson's talk but who stoked the fires of the state's literary culture in the first part of the 20th century. Indeed, when I dropped the name Arthur Davison Ficke (pictured here in a photo by Carl Van Vechten, an Iowa native) at Schaeffer's place the night before, the published writer with whom I was talking stared at me for a moment and then asked, "Who?" Who indeed.

The Iowa Writers' Workshop & Popular Culture

From Thursday through Sunday (June 9-12) of this week, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop—the oldest creative writing M.F.A. program in the U.S. (founded in 1936)—is celebrating its 75th Anniversary with a "reunion" featuring talks, panels, lectures, receptions, parties, a softball game, an open mic, box lunches, and even a dance in Iowa City. Fifty writers, including eight Pulitzer Prize winners, will be on hand to pontificate—er, discuss the nuances of their craft and their identity and careers as writers. Hundreds of alums are reportedly headed to Iowa City—the UNESCO-designated World City of Literature that is also home to the International Writing Program, the University of Iowa Center for the Book, the University of Iowa Press, ACT, the Iowa Testing Programs, a Translation Workshop, a Ph.D. in English, and much much more. The Huffington Post will be on hand. The Paris Review and Martha Stewart's Wholeliving will have reporters on site. So what else could P&PC do? We passed the hat and sent a correspondent of our own—a fact that's been reported on in a recent UI press release.

So what, you might be asking yourself, does P&PC have to find out by attending panels with, um, uh—how shall we say it?—quaintly 1950s-retro titles like "What Makes Literature Immortal?" and "The Writer as Outsider"? And what in the world might hobnobbing with prize winners and other high-art practitioners and standard-bearers have to offer a blog with a mission to study and document "good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries" and so on? Good questions. Really good questions. It's like we asked them ourselves. So here's something in the way of a provisional answer.

For years, Iowa's program has been held up as the gold standard for M.F.A. programs, employing and educating Pulitzer winners and other beacons of high poetic art from the 1950s on. Robert Lowell? Check. John Berryman? Check. Robert Penn Warren? Check. Donald Justice, Mark Strand, Philip Levine, Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Charles Wright, James Tate, W.D. Snodgrass, Philip Schultz, Karl Shapiro? Check, check, check and double check.

Yet, at the same time that this history's gone down, there's a story that's gone untold—and that one has to do with the Workshop's ongoing and pretty much unacknowledged engagement with popular literature. Take, for example, longtime Workshop Director Paul Engle (pictured here), who not only won the 1932 Yale Series of Younger Poets award for his first book of poetry (Worn Earth) but went on to shepherd the program to national prominence in the 1940s and 50s by hiring Lowell, Berryman, Vonnegut, and Warren and by mentoring the likes of Flannery O'Connor, Donald Justice, and Philip Levine. At the same time that he was doing so, though, Engle was also partnering with Hallmark, Inc. That's right, the greeting card people. He wrote the libretto for a 1960 Hallmark Hall of Fame production Golden Child: A Christmas Opera. He and an Iowa student assistant did the work compiling poems for Hallmark's 1960 anthology Poetry for Pleasure: The Hallmark Book of Poetry. And in the late 1950s, you could have found Engle writing verse for Hallmark greeting cards as well as Poetry magazine. P&PC has seen 17 different Engle-authored greeting cards, and our sources inside Hallmark suggest that some of these sold as many as 30,000 copies.

That history of Iowa-trained writers penning their way to a paycheck via popular culture does not end there. It's a well-known but never-studied fact, for example, that fiction graduates have long supported themselves by writing romance novels. For years, the Iowa Book Doctors has been outsourcing work to M.F.A graduates who have ghost-written thrillers including the Jack Kevorkian bio and soon-to-be movie Between the Dying and the Dead. Famous sci-fi writer Joe Haldeman attended Iowa (later writing two Star Trek novels). Faculty member Chris Offutt has written for Weeds and True Blood as well as comic books. As we reported here about a year and a half ago, poet Lewis Turco got his career started by publishing sci-fi poetry in Fantasy and Science Fiction. More recently, M.F.A. graduate Lucas Bernhardt was elected the poet laureate of the Portland Trail Blazers' premiere fan site, Blazer's Edge.

So you can see where we're going with these examples, can't you? It's the opinion of P&PC that while some Workshop graduates have gone on to win prizes and accolades from the world of refined literary culture, there's another side to the story: Workshop poets and fiction writers have also been feeding the maw of popular culture for years now, and with all the rhetoric of gold-standards and Pulitzers and World City of Literature designations, that fact has been lost. Put another and less decorous way, the Workshop has not only been training writers to succeed at the highest levels of their craft, but it's also been training writers to masterfully and successfully sell out.

You're not going to find that sort of language on the official or pro- motional web sites, of course—nor is it on this weekend's program sandwiched in between "What Makes Literature Immortal?" and "The Writer as Outsider." But our affiliate on location in Iowa City is out to see if the alums have anything to say for themselves about this. Maybe they do, and maybe they don't. But if there's anything to be heard or a scoop to be had, you can be sure that you'll find it here first.

Organic Form: Locally Sourced Haiku at the Farmers' Market in Salem

On the Subject of Soap, Poetry, Psychology Today, Blackness and Beauty

Some of you may have heard about—or been enraged by—the recent blog posting by Satoshi Kanazawa that ten or twelve days ago appeared on, then quickly disappeared from, the website of Psychology Today. Kanazawa, a scholar of evolutionary psychology and self-styled "Scientific Fundamentalist" affiliated with the London School of Economics, wrote there that black women are "objectively less physically attractive than other women." What has been called a firestorm of a response to the posting, oftentimes casting Kanazawa as an outlier, fringe thinker, or wingnut, has given P&PC some pause. We're not sure he's a wingnut or outlier. In fact, he may be the most recent mouthpiece for a logic (one might say a psychology) that's been driving corporate rhetoric—and producing corporate poetry—for well over a century now and that's not only visible in the historical record but in current advertisements for Dove soap being published by the hundreds of thousands in recent women's magazines.

Back in the 19th century, there were two products that drove advertising— and advertising innovation—in the U.S.: patent medicines (snake oils) and soaps. Both products relied on, and helped to popularize, a before-and-after logic that contributed to the power and mystification of the commodity item more generally. Losing your hair? Our new snake oil will make it grow back. Feeling dirty? Our soap will make you clean. Feeling depressed? Take some time out for "retail therapy," and the very act of going shopping will make you feel more like yourself again. Ad formats, like the metamorphic trade card featured on P&PC about a year ago, were even designed to teach this before-and-after logic in consumers' hands. Patent medicines and soaps were even more reliant on advertising than other products because, while there were hundreds of different brands (just about anyone could make them cheaply), there was, in actuality, very little difference between the finished products themselves—maybe Nostrum A had 95% alcohol while Nostrum B had 97%—and so artificial distinctions had to be created. Enter advertising, which found any number of ways, realistic or not, to distinguish one product's superiority to another.

One common way of demonstrating the purifying power of soap, believe it or not, was to show its formidable cleaning powers at work not just in making dirty skin shine or diseased skin healthy or soiled laundry clean, but making black or colored skin white. Dreydoppel Soap ("No Finer Made") for example, used a twelve-page pamphlet titled "Light and Shade" (cover pictured at top) to chronicle, in verse, a little minstrel figure's endeavor to lighten his complexion. That poem began:

A mite of queer humanity,
As dark as a cloudy night,
Was displeased with his complexion,
And wished to change from black to white.

He sampled all the medicine
That was ever made or brewed,
And tried to pale his color
By eating little food.

Frustrated in his attempts, he comes upon a billboard reading "Dreydoppel Soap Will Do the Work" and decides to give it a try:

So to the grocery store he hied,
Without a moments rest,
And bought a box of Dreydoppel Soap
And gave it a careful test.

One trial was all he needed;
Realized was his fondest hope;
His face was as white as white could be;
There's nothing like Dreydoppel Soap.

Such ads linked a discourse of moral and bodily purity—Ivory Soap billed itself as "99 and 44/100% pure" during a time when the Cleanliness Movement was gaining steam and popularizing the notion that cleanliness is next to Godliness—to a dream of racial purity as well, simultaneously fueling a fantasy of a white-washed America and casting colored skin as unclean and thus undesirable. This fantasy wasn't limited to blackness either, as soaps were shown washing Indian skin white and reforming the ethnic tempers and skin colors of Middle Easterners. One give-away premium for Larkin Soaps, for example (pictured here), told the tale of three Turks and three "white Caucasian maids":

Three Turks whose skin
Was brown, would win
Three white Caucasian maids;
Each maiden fair,
With courage rare,
Spoke to their kingly blades—
"Alas! Alack!
We turn our back,
Because our skin is white;
What good your crown if you are brown—
They'd laugh at us throughout the town—
They'd sneer and frown, and call us down,
And well they'd have the right."

Threatened with death by the ill-tempered, sword-brandishing Turks, the women ask for a final request—to wash the Turks' faces with Larkin's Sweet Home Soap:

And straight to work
Upon each Turk,
That lately they had snubbed,
Each maid did cope,
With SWEET HOME SOAP,
And scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed;
Their features bright
Grew milky white,
And light as sunny day—
Instead of mad and being sad,
The Turks and maids were both so glad,
That to this tale we need but add—
They married right away!

It's our contention here at P&PC that while such overt claims slowly disappeared from soap advertising, the racist logic established by those ads—and by the poetry in those ads—has persisted, finding voice in blog posts like Kanazawa's and underwriting soap ads like the one for Dove's "Visible Care" pictured here. Using the conventional before-and-after format, Dove associates dark skin with unclean, untreated, and unbeautiful skin; the woman on the left, superimposed on the close-up of untreated skin, has the darkest skin of the three women pictured, has black hair, has the largest hips of the three, and has an exaggerated black posture which is our age's version of minstrel cartooning. As one proceeds right through the image, the women become whiter and thinner (and their posture less distinctive), demonstrating—before our very eyes!—the very process of magical soap transformation that fueled 19th century soap ads and that culminates in a thin, white, blonde woman who gets associated with good, clean, pure, and thus beautiful skin. As if we miss the fantasy being acted out, Dove fills us in, its caption "Visibly more beautiful skin" being little more than a version of Kanazawa's claim that black women are "objectively less physically attractive than other women."

Poetry is not always on the side of the angel. In the case of 19th- century soap advertising, it not only spelled out and celebrated in a culturally prestigious and entertaining form a racist logic that was prevalent at the time, but it established a mode of racist advertising that Dove is continuing to capitalize on and profit from today. When Kanazawa assaults the beauty of black women, then, he is not just speaking for himself as an outlier or minority opinion on Psychology Today. He is voicing a view that is much more part of the psychological mainstream than many of us want to think and that continues to underwrite what people buy, how they buy, and what they consider clean and beautiful, and that thus helps to fuel a fantasy of what their world should look like—a view that hasn't come all that far from the 19th century, baby.

P&PC's Favorite Advertising Poem of the Month

First Look: Poetry After Cultural Studies

The University of Iowa Press has just released its Fall 2011 catalog of new titles which features, among other things, Poetry after Cultural Studies (pictured to the left)—a collection of eight essays which "showcases the unexpectedly rich intersection of cultural studies theory and current poetry scholarship," which "reflects on what poetry can accomplish in the broadest social and cultural contexts," and which is glossed near the bottom of the catalog page in the following manner:

Edward J. Brunner on James Norman Hall
Alan Ramon Clinton on Sylvia Plath
Maria Damon on the pleasures of mourning
Margaret Loose on Chartism
Cary Nelson on postcards of WWI
Carrie Noland on Edouard Glissant
Angela Sorby on birding in America
Barrett Watten on poetry, music, and political culture

James Norman Hall? Plath and electricity? The pleasures of mourning? Birding in America? We here at P&PC thought you might like a little more to go on than that. So, relying on our connections in the biz, calling in a few favors, and greasing the palms of a slightly less than confidential informant, we've managed to score an exclusive preview of this collection which examines a wide variety of poetry in Europe, the U.S. and the Caribbean from the past 150 years. Doing his repartee and his shuffle and breakdown, our shifty-eyed C.I. mentioned newspapers, postcards, protest music, field guides and cross-stitches before vanishing with his rhymes into the good night from which he came. It was a fast sneak-peek, yes, but we managed to scribble down a few fugitive sentences of each essay to tempt your aesthetic taste buds and give you something to mark down for your holiday reading and gift lists. Here's what we know:

Edward Brunner, Writing Another Kind of Poetry: James Norman Hall as Fern Gravel in Oh Millersville!

"The fact that Hall himself has no reputation as a poet and is known primarily through his collaboration with James Nordhoff on the best-selling trilogy Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Pitcairn's Island (1934), and Men against the Sea (1934) has not helped enable Oh Millersville!'s circulation. Yet in its time, Hall's stunt was a virtuosic feat that deceived book reviewers in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Des Moines (Iowa) Register, and dozens of other publications, all of which ignored such giveaway moments as the startling rhyme of "Whittier's / this verse" to celebrate the disinterment of a forgotten cache of Americana."

Alan Ramón Clinton, Sylvia Plath and Electracy

"Coin- cidentally, [Plath's collection] The Colossus bears the same name as the computer [Alan] Turing built in 1943 to decode German war transmissions, although Turing's machine remained so secret that the American ENIAC (1946) held the undisputed title as the world's first digital computer until the 1970s. Nevertheless, Plath finds herself, in the volume's title poem (CP 129–130), facing a problem similar to the one faced by the narrator of 'Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,' an archive that can only be properly implemented and accessed via digital means: 'I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.'"

Maria Damon, Pleasures of Mourning: A Yessay on Poetries in Out-of-the-Way Places

"My own multiple positioning (as poetry scholar, sometime producer of micropoetries, witness/participant, friend, and human-facing-mortality) is not experienced (by me) as disjunct, but I struggle, not to write but to conform, to move from one register of discourse to another in the essay in ways that don't alienate a scholarly readership; however, rather than smoothing out signs of these formal and processual disjunctions in the completed work, I prefer to let the awkwardnesses stand as a way of embodying the messy puzzlement, the unfinishedness, the ephemeral nature of micropoetries, and any human life-course, remembrance of which is then the object of elegiac activity."

Margaret A. Loose, Poetic, Popular, or Political? Chartism and the Fate of Political Poetry

"[Ernest] Jones, who had only recently emerged from his two-year incarceration for Chartist agitation, includes with the advertisement [for his recent book] a statement describing the harsh conditions of the poems' composition and affirming that 'upon them I stake my reputation as an author, and my character as a man' ('Ernest Jones' 64). Given the significance that the agonizing circumstances of their writing would confer on them, his explicit reliance on them as the proof of his authorship and character, and his advertising them in the hope of a large readership, this paragraph near the end of the announcement comes as a rather startling surprise: 'These will, probably, be among the last of my poetical works, for harder and sterner toils now call me to the field. The age has passed, when nations can be SUNG into liberty: perhaps it is well—for enthusiasm is the child of an hour—conviction is the father of centuries' ('Ernest Jones' 64)."

Cary Nelson, Only Death Can Part Us: Messages on Wartime Cards

"I have assembled an archive of wartime popular poems—on over 10,000 cards, postcards, envelopes, and miniature broadsides designed for personal exchange rather than public display—to gain access to the roles poetry played in the lives of the mostly lower-class and middle-class people who provided battlefield cannon fodder and home-front victims of modern war. These documents often include a preprinted poem and a holograph message. The poems vary widely in length, with some folding cards printing poems of thirty to forty lines, but the largest number of cards with messages have short verses of two to four lines."

Carrie Noland, Édouard Glissant: A Poetics of the Entour

"[T]he nature of one's relationship to land- scape—not just flora and fauna but also hillside ('morne'), river, and sea—is an issue of particular concern to inhabitants of the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean for whom reference points, coordinates for the construction of maps, are fragile and therefore vulnerable to destabilization. Édouard Glissant, the Martiniquan poet, novelist, playwright, and theorist who is the focus of this essay, remains characteristic in this regard; like [Henri] Stéhlé, Glissant is intrigued by the question of a people's relation to landscape, or what he calls—significantly for our purposes—their 'entour.' For him, as for the geographers who have studied the Caribbean, it is clear that Martinique, the place, is a historical construction, the product of imperialist phantasms that have carved up terrain, decimated and replaced populations, and forged intercontinental relationships that have little relation to the island's previous human history."

Angela Sorby, The Poetics of Bird Defense in America, 1860–1918

"[P]oems [about birds] came to adjudicate between romanticism and realism, enabling readers to think about nature both metaphorically (as a reflection of the self or the divine) and scientifically (as a mutable and potentially endangered ecosystem). As they circulated, American bird poems became part of a cultural conversation about conserving the natural world, while also bridging the gap between metaphorical reading and concrete scientific—or even political—action."

Barrett Watten, On the Advantages of Negativity: Avant-Garde Poetry, New Music, and the Cultural Turn

"My second moment of the public life of innovative poetry took place when Language poet Bruce Andrews stood up to Bill O'Reilly on The O'Reilly Factor (November 2, 2006). While Andrews is known for his deployment of the material signifier in his work, his debate with O'Reilly focused not on his opaque and contestatory Language writing, but on his teaching of Robert Sheer's polemic The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq in political science classes at Fordham University—in the current political climate of academic-cum-Red baiting carried out by David Horowitz and his allies.... [I]t is precisely Andrews's being 'called up' before the House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC) vestigial organ as Fox News talk show that conditions the kind of negativity he can bring to the dismantling of false positives."

Poetry after Cultural Studies is available in December 2011. Reserve your copy today, and stay tuned to this blog for exclusive extra features as that date approaches!