The Poetry of Seinfeld: George's Favorite Poet

Breaking News

News items of immediate concern to the P&PC reader:

NASA lets poets / send haiku to Red Planet / on a MAVEN's wings

"Poets, take note: NASA is looking for a few good haiku to send to the Red Planet aboard its Maven orbiter this fall.... An online public vote will be conducted beginning July 15 to select the top three haiku poems."

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New Jersey Mayor Wrote Hilariously Unromantic Poetry to Mistress

"During the affair, he would write the assistant, Corletta Hicks, romantic poetry that wonderfully mixes the lofty and mundane."

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Johnny Depp is Heard over heels in love again

"The actress [Amber Heard] had vowed to stay single after her split from the Hollywood star but crumbled after he sent her a handwritten poem and a bouquet of roses every day through September."

Back to The New Northwest: Suffragist Poetry in the Gold Man Review

Regular P&PC readers will remember our ongoing interest in the poetry published in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in The New Northwest—a weekly suffragist newspaper published out of Portland by Abigail Scott Duniway, a leading voice in the fight for Oregon women's suffrage. Between 2010 and 2012, we did a four part series on this poetry, which oftentimes appeared on the paper's front page, which was frequently written by Willamette Valley writers long before folks like William Stafford put Oregon on the national poetry map, and which was sometimes sourced or cut-and-pasted from other newspapers around the country (a common practice in an age when poets and their publishers didn't seem to care about regulating the circulation of verse via copyright laws). Then, in 2012 and 2013, we collated a set of these poems for use in the development of Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon, an original and experimental script produced at Willamette University earlier this year in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage.

Now Salem's start-up literary magazine, the Gold Man Review, has joined in the fun, reprinting a portfolio of seven suffragist poems from The New Northwest in its second issue—the one with the snazzy cover pictured above, which puns on the design characteristics of mass market women's magazines to transform the Gold Man pioneer who currently tops the state's capitol building into a Gold Woman pioneer. Themed around the "pioneer spirit," the issue joins the work of nineteenth-century poets with over twenty-five pieces by people writing in Oregon today, and it's also got a long interview with P&PC about The New Northwest, the history of women's suffrage in Oregon, the situation of American poetry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the poems P&PC selected for reprinting in Gold Man with the assistance of students in a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class we taught last Spring.

When you get a chance, pick up a copy of Gold Man Review for yourself. In the meantime, we're giving you a small taste of our interview here—a portion that we think displays some of the best of what an interdisciplinary liberal arts college can offer students: experience working with and using archives, in-class study, cross-departmental collaboration, research into the historical forms and genres of poetry, and engagement with social and community endeavors. We here at P&PC don't talk about the pedagogical possibilities of popular poetry all that frequently, but here's an example of what we do when we're not running the office and bringing you your weekly fix.

Gold Man Review: Why did you and your class decide to pick these poems [for republication in Gold Man Review]?

Mike Chasar: In addition to studying the poems, the most recent instantiation of my "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class also partnered with an experimental scriptwriting class in the Theatre Department that wanted to create a play about the history and legacy of women's suffrage in Oregon as one way to mark and commemorate 2012 as the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage. (See Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote 1912-2012 for other such events.) As part of the experimental nature of the script, the Theatre class thought it would be cool to start with a bunch of poems from The New Northwest, using them as raw material to collage, break up, or interlace through the script in funky and innovative ways. It can sometimes be difficult to figure out what to "do" with archival materials other than, well, archive them and study them; so we thought it would be interesting to motivate them in another way, too—toward the creation of a new piece of art.

So, our first goal was to select poems to present to that class, and toward that end we had two main priorities: 1) select poems that surveyed the different types of arguments being made at the time for extending the vote to women; and 2) select poems with varying poetic strategies, rhetorical components, and performance possibilities. We thought the former would gesture to some of the political complexities of that historical moment that get lost in a debate framed simply as "for" or "against" women’s suffrage. (As with the debate about healthcare today, people aren't just for or against it, but have different reasons for being for or against it, or partly for it and partly against it—you get the idea.) And we thought the latter would shine a light on the diversity of styles and poetic techniques of popular verse, which oftentimes gets characterized as entirely "sentimental" and generally homogenous in style, format, rhetoric, etc.; in actuality, the poetry is pretty diverse—song lyrics, persona poems, narrative poems, lyric poems, satire, dialect, etc.—so we wanted to honor that aspect of the writing.

I made the selections for Gold Man keeping these two elements in mind as well, so that we have inspir- ational song lyrics ("Campaign Song"), two very different dramatic monologues that make different arguments about women and the vote ("The Perplexed Housekeeper" and "'Siah’s Vote"), a serious narrative with children as main characters ("Reasons"), a humorous narrative ("Wife Versus Horse"), a romance ("Katie Lee and Willie Grey"), and a lyrical extended metaphor ("My Ship").

In addition to the generic diversity— all are also part of a culture of poetry that lent itself to oral delivery or performance—the poems also make a pretty wide variety of arguments for how and why women should get the vote: "The Perplexed Housekeeper" suggests that women are already excellent multi-taskers and won't be burdened with the additional responsibilities of voting; "'Siah’s Vote" argues that women already participate in voting via the advice they give to their menfolk; "Campaign Song" says women will help clean up a corrupted culture of voting, but also makes the problematic claim that "John Chinaman" can now do the work once done by women and thus free women up for public life; and "The Ship" shows us a character abandoned and forlorn because what must be the "ship of state" mentioned in Duniway's poem never comes for her. That's just a quick overview, but you get the idea: poets are using different poetic strategies to make different types of arguments about the political enfranchisement or disenfranchisement of women.

The Poetry of Al Bundy and Married... with Children

Communism for Kids: Martha Millet, the New Pioneer, and the Popularity of the Old Left—A Guest Posting by Sarah Ehlers

P&PC is thrilled to introduce our new South Dakota correspondent Sarah Ehlers (pictured here), an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Dakota who teaches and writes about modern poetry and poetics. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly, Paideuma, and Contemporary Literature, and she is completing a book titled Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics. In the following posting about the poetics of radical children's verse, Ehlers hints at what Left of Poetry has in store and how the development of modern poetics—at least in some spheres of American life—had more to do with nineteenth century verse cultures than folks generally assume. If you want to know how communist poetry, Little Miss Muffet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mother Goose, and even the poetry of Robert Southey could come together to make poetry "modern," dear reader, then read on.

Now relatively unknown, Martha Millet was heartily involved in Left literary institutions from the 1930s through the 1950s. A card-carrying communist, she worked as a labor journalist and published politically themed verse in The New Masses, Daily Worker, and Masses and Mainstream, as well as in the 1944 volume Seven Poets in Search of an Answer, which also featured poems by Langston Hughes. In the early 1940s, she wrote political tracts and pamphlets for the New York City Central Committee of the International Workers Order. In the 1950s, she published two volumes of original poetry (Thine Alabaster Cities: A Poem for Our Times [1952] and Dangerous Jack: A Fantasy in Verse [1953]) and edited The Rosenbergs: Poems of the United States (1957). And some of her verses were published in Poetry magazine. Despite this poetic output, Millet remains relatively unknown, even among scholars of the Depression-era Left, and it's worth wondering what narrative of U.S. Left poetry—and of U.S. poetry in general—might surface if we were to take as starting points Millet's engagements with children's verse and her belief in the "popularity" of Popular Front poetry.

At age fourteen, Millet published one of her first poems, "Pioneer Pied Piper," in New Pioneer, the official magazine of the communist children's organization, the Young Pioneers. The poem—which occupied a full two-page spread in the magazine's May 1933 issue—tells how a band of gluttonous Boy Scouts took over the peaceful community of Children's Town. The Scouts forced the town's children to labor in mills and on farms with barely enough food to fill their stomachs, and the newly inducted Boy Scout mayor and his council grew fat on oysters and butter. So things went until the arrival of the "Pioneer Pied Piper"—a young man clad in a blue uniform with a red hammer and sickle sewn on the shirt pocket and a bugle hanging by his side. Immediately, the Piper announced to the Mayor of Children's Town that he had come, "To set these wretched children free." In reversing the "Pied Piper of Hamelin" legend, Millet's "Pioneer Pied Piper" uses his bugle music to organize, and ultimately liberate, the youthful working-class masses. His bugle blast sets the children on a march that forces the ruling-class Scouts out of town and to their deaths. (As the Scouts flee, the bridge they are crossing collapses, and they all drown in a river.) Finally free, the citizens of Children's Town stay to rebuild their community as a "Pioneer Commune," home to a "happy race" of "folks" bursting with "carefreeness and mirth."

In Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, Julia Mickenberg describes how the "variety of stories, articles, pictures, jokes, puzzles, book and film reviews, and letters to the editor" published in the New Pioneer worked "toward serving the goals of the Communist children's movement" (67). Through story, rhyme, and illustrations by Marya Morrow, the published version of "Pioneer Pied Piper" in May of 1933 exemplifies what Mickenberg describes as the New Pioneer editors' careful efforts "to combine child appeal with political content" (67). But while the poem survives as a significant artifact from the communist children's movement, I think it also begs to be read as something more.

When considered in the context of Old Left discourses about poetics—especially those surfacing in The New Masses readers' letters and editorials—Millet's children's rhyme might be taken seriously as (at least one version of) an ideal radical Depression-era poem. If one scans the numerous editorials, commentaries, letters, debates, etc. published in Left literary magazines during the interwar period, one sees that many readers demanded a certain type of poem—a poem that was accessible to a wide audience; simple, direct, and easy to memorize; and immediately usable for political activities like union meetings, picket lines, and May Day parades. Over and over, readers of publications like The New Masses denigrated the poetry being produced in "wastelands" (a jab at T.S. Eliot, perhaps?) and "tired intellectual towers," and they pitted a "difficult," "cerebral," or "despairing" modernist aesthetic against a more "straightforward," "populist," or "optimistic" one. In a letter to the editor, one subscriber to The New Masses, R.W. Lalley, wrote that he liked "simple, direct little verses" and disliked "the amorphous type" by writers such as Muriel Rukeyser. Millet herself penned a letter to The New Masses in 1938 ("Is Poetry Dead?"). In it, she urged that, for Popular Front poetry to stay "popular," it would have to "mean more to more Americans" and, therefore, it "should, even when representative of the Left, not be confusedly ornate, pretentiously intellectual, and 'cerebrally dull.'"

Of course, these opinions re-inscribe simplistic divides between the difficult and accessible, obtuse and direct, despairing and hopeful, modernist and not. Scholars of the U.S. literary and cultural Left like Alan Wald, Cary Nelson, Paula Rabinowitz, James Smethurst, and Al Filreis have variously parsed Left writers' complicated relationships to experimental literary modernism. And the archive of radical poems composed and produced for children returns us to historical debates about the relationship of radical poetry to modernist experimentation that raged on the Left during the 1930s, allowing us to see them from a fresh perspective that enables a new narrative of U.S. poetry to surface. This new narrative stresses the continuities—not breaks—between nineteenth- and twentieth-century verse cultures, and it resists a tendency to view the tensions between popular and modernist poetry through a focalization on the latter.

At first glance, the poetry written for young readers picking up New Pioneer seems to exemplify the ideal of an accessible political poem chock full of communism's "good news." After all, what could be more easy to read than a rhyming poem written for a child? What kind of poem is more widely understood than a nursery rhyme, even if that rhyme puts a starving Little Miss Muffet on the picket line, as in this excerpt from Harry Alan Patamkin's "Mother Goose on the Breadline":

Little Miss Muffet
Ate such vile stuff, it
Made her feel rotten inside
Black coffee, stale bread—
Miss Muffett saw Red!
She joined with the workers and cried:
"Don't Starve, Fight!
Don't Starve, Fight!"

In drawing on such popular forms, New Pioneer contributors also re-purposed popular nineteenth-century texts, versifiers, verse genres, and verse presentation contexts in order to construct a poetry that could reach a wide audience and have an immediate impact. Millet's "Pioneer Pied Piper," for instance, doesn't just adapt a familiar text but is also formatted in a way that recalls the print conventions of the ballad broadside as well as nineteenth-century newspaper verse.

Along these lines, the February 1931 issue of New Pioneer featured a poem titled "Old Father William" by Alice Hayes, which owes debts to both Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "You are Old, Father William" (1865) and the poem Carroll parodied, Robert Southey's didactic verse "The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them" (1799). All three poems begin with a youth telling Father William, "You are old, Father William," and then proceed with a dialogue in which the youth questions the older man about this condition. Carroll's poem turns Southey's Father William on his head, transforming a pious elder who always "thought of the future" and "remember'd my God" into a rotund, quick-tongued man who turns somersaults and balances an eel on his nose. (That's Carroll's illustration pictured here.)

Hayes's New Pioneer version of "Father William" ostensibly forgoes Carroll's nonsense and returns the poem to its original didacticism. However, while Southey's Father William was able to preserve his youth, Hayes's Father William loses his to a life of hard labor. When asked about his age, Hayes's Father William explains: 

"In my youth," the old fellow replied to the lad,
"I slaved every day for the boss
And while I turned out some perfect machines
My own health is totally lost."

In the subsequent dialogue, the youth slowly loses his ideals about the work world. At first, he assumes that Father William must have been paid a "handsome wage" because he worked so efficiently. When he learns this wasn't the case, the youth figures, "surely the boss has given a dole" to the old man. But Father William closes the poem with a more difficult truth:

"Well, to tell you the truth, I've been working right on
Till a stronger man for less pay
Has come to the factory to end up like me
And I just got kicked out today.

In the end, Hayes reverses the moral of Southey's poem. In the nineteenth-century original, Father William shows the youth that, if one takes care of oneself and thinks always of the future, then one can be comfortable in old age. Hayes's Father William never had such luxuries, however, and has been prematurely aged by factory work. The ultimate lesson is that, unless there is a fundamental socioeconomic change, these conditions are bound to continue and the youth is doomed to suffer the old man's fate. In addition to engaging Southey, Hayes also imparts this lesson by referencing Carroll's more familiar version of Old Father William. The last line of Hayes's "Father William" ("And I just got kicked out today") is a play on the last line of Carroll's "Father William" ("Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!").

The New Pioneer's recirculation of nineteenth-century verse culture did not go un-theorized. Mickenberg explains that, in general, "the New Pioneer's stories and articles tended to be more factual than fanciful, with a heavy emphasis on historical and scientific themes" (68). Every issue featured historical fiction, biographical essays on revolutionary figures, and series like "American History Told in Pictures," which retold major events in U.S. history from a Left perspective. The history of U.S. poetry was also recast from the standpoint of Left politics and aesthetics, as the magazine's editors and contributors ransacked the nineteenth century for a "usable past" for poetry, one that would illuminate a long tradition of "popular" poems written for the "common people." For instance, a short piece on revolutionary poet Philip Freneau by Millet, aptly subtitled "An American Poet of All the Peoples," suggests that Freneau's poetry reached a large number of citizens because it addressed important political issues of the time. According to the article, Freneau wrote about slavery and oppression "almost a hundred years before the slave issue grew into Civil War" and penned "fierce poetry with which he lashed out against the oppressive rule of the British king"; he became a national figure by writing "fiery songs" that gave "new power to popular issues."

Millet's little sketch of Freneau says a lot about how the 1930s communist Left's prescriptions for poetry were read back into earlier American poetic cultures. Left interpretations of nineteenth-century verse culture assume that poems written in the voice of the "common people" were, to borrow from Virginia Jackson, "made to be read … as if reading were self-evident," as if their artifices "were really a transparent language" ("Longfellow’s Tradition," 472). Such readings serve as productive misreadings, lending fact to the fiction that the most effective revolutionary poetry need not be read at all, for a poem's rhyme and melody would directly transmit its meanings to its readers and their lives. Children's poems—deliberately constructed, but in forms so familiar they seem natural—illuminate the slippage between the Left ideal of the ultimately accessible poem and the historical reading practices on which this ideal relies.

This slippage is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the biographical sketch of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that Millet penned for the October 1938 New Pioneer. Millet casts Longfellow (pictured here) as, above all, a social poet enraptured by "the love of literature and writing" and the uses to which such writing could be put. Over the course of the essay, she highlights his interest in the "impoverishment and oppression" of the people of Spain, his "deeper awareness" of Native American culture, and his condemnation of the "criminal institution" of slavery. Millet's narrative of Longfellow's political activism is overly forgiving, if not downright wrong. But it's also canny. In mentioning Spain, the colonization of the American West, and the antislavery movement, Millet refers to the U.S. Left's solidarity with the international anti-fascist front in Spain as well as the anti-imperialist and anti-racist discourses characterizing Popular Front politics. In so doing, she also extracts Longfellow from the conservative schoolroom, where, as Angela Sorby explains in Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, his poems served a "fantasy of universal humanity" rooted in nationalist discourses (11). Millet repurposes Longfellow for the New Pioneer schoolroom, where the ideal of a united "common people" is meant to enact an international and potentially revolutionary political community.

Millet glorifies Longfellow's politics not only so that they match her own, but also so they match what she perceives to be the politics of his poetic form. She highlights how his poems' political messages are conveyed through simple and musical verse that could be enjoyed by all and praises Longfellow as a writer who:

wrote simply and understandably. He will be remembered as the ever-musical poet of simplicity who could make people see the traditions and folklore of the much-abused Indian through his poetry, and who dealt with life and people in a manner that all could enjoy.

Millet's understanding of Longfellow's poetry is symptomatic of prevalent twentieth-century conceptions of his work that privilege its apparent simplicity as well as the promises for reception such simplicity implies. Millet does not, for example, mention Longfellow's use of classical meter (like the trochaic tetrameter lines of "Song of Hiawatha," which she eventually quotes); rather, she describes him as an "ever-musical poet" whose work reached the "people." In Millet's estimation, Longfellow, in a strange way, becomes the ideal radical poet. And, as she suggests through strategic excerpting from "Song of Hiawatha," he advocates peace and solidarity by speaking to children:

O children; my poor children!
Listen to the words of wisdom,
Listen to the words of warning,
From the lips of the Great Spirit,
From the Master of Life, who made you.
…
I am weary of your quarrels,
Weary of your wars and bloodshed,
Weary of your prayers for vengeance,
Of your wranglings and dissensions;
All your strength is in your union,
All your danger is in discord;
Therefore be at peace henceforward,
And as brothers live together.

Capitalizing on the poem's apparent popularity while foregoing its nationalist and imperialist discourses, Millet's short article makes "Song of Hiawatha" read like a Popular Front political vision of "strength in union." Her appropriation of this widely-circulating nineteenth-century poem stands as yet another example of Longfellow's continued popularity, but it also provides insight into the significance of children's poetry for understanding Old Left poetic culture. Millet's own children's poems, as well as her re-readings of popular poems like "Song of Hiawatha," illustrate the complex ways in which poets associated with the Communist and Popular Front Left attempted to make poetry "popular" and "accessible" in forums like New Pioneer as well as in more well-known publications like The New Masses. Read in this context, the radical children's poetry in New Pioneer also archives significant dimensions of Left poetic output during the 1930s. Whether these poems remain obscure (like Millet's own unread verse), and howsoever they represent political appropriations of popular texts, they index the history of a poetic Left involved in the radical re-appropriation of popular poems, generic conventions, and traditional forms. Left poets and readers of Left poetry did more than simply draw on the poetry of the past—they actively re-imagined the history of poetic forms and the discourses about the social uses that those forms might have.

P&PC Broadcasting this Week from the Studios at Columbia University Press

For this week's posting, P&PC is sitting in with the Columbia University Press blog as part of its special National Poetry Month programming. There, you can not only enter to win a six pack of poetry, but you can also read a mini-memoir about how and why one person in the P&PC Office was moved this past year to get part of Robert Creeley's poem "I Know a Man" tattooed on his arms.

Even better than all of that, however, is how, for a limited time, you can take advantage of CUP's Spring Sale to score a 50% discount on Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America. If you're a customer in the U.S. or Canada, just enter the coupon code SALE in your shopping cart, click "apply," and your half-off savings will be calculated. Why not take a moment out of your National Poetry Month festivities and head on over today?

Panoptic Poetry & Everyday Life: Thoughts on the Poetry of Cold War Ring Holders & Cocktail Glasses

We've all heard about how poetry serves as a mnemonic device, right? Its meter, rhyme, fixed forms, and other types of patterned language make it easier to remember stuff whether you're a bard charged with reciting the entirety of Beowulf to a bunch of mead-swigging Anglo-Saxons, a child tramping through the woods with the ranger's advice "leaves of three, let them be" ringing in your ears, the Burma-Vita Company seeking a new Burma-Shave billboard jingle to lodge into a consumer's mind, or a student charged with memorizing a poem for class. We remember which months have thirty or thirty-one days not just by compiling and memorizing a boring list of 'em all, but by making a rhyme:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
Thirty-one the others date,
Except in February, twenty-eight;
But in leap year we assign
February, twenty-nine. 

Dad taught us "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" to remember which way to turn a screwdriver or faucet handle. Old Salt the Sailor taught us, "Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky in morning, sailor's warning." And to this day, even the interns at the P&PC Office can tell the difference between a red, yellow, and black king snake and a red, yellow, and black coral snake (pictured above) not because we're some troop of field biologists, but because we once learned the old rhyme, "Red touches yellow, dangerous fellow. Red touches black, friend to Jack."

This feature of poetry starts to explain the two relatively bizarre items that P&PC has gotten its hands on recently—the spooky wooden clown ring holder pictured to the left, and the frosted cocktail glass pictured below. Both items and their respective poems are designed to address common predicaments involving memory or the lapse thereof. Rings are particularly fraught sites where memory is concerned, because, while they are oftentimes meant to help us remember things (like the fact that we're married), we oftentimes need to remove them (like "While you wash the dishes, / While you wash the clothes") and thus we put ourselves at risk of forgetting where we put the thing meant to help us remember. And if you've ever had a party—and then taken off your rings when you wash up all the dishes after that party, natch—you know that one skill in entertaining is to encourage people to drink a bit and thus forget their concerns for a while while at the same time remembering where they put their glasses and which glasses are theirs. A couple of quandaries from la vie quotidienne, no? You might say that when it comes to rings, we risk forgetting what we need to remember and, with drinking, we risk not remembering where we put the thing that we want to help us forget.

We here at P&PC think that both of these items, like the rest of la vie quotidienne, are more complex than they initially appear and that a lot of that complexity has to do with their use in the home and their connection to domestic chores and responsibilities. Why, one might be moved to ask, is there a clown of all things pictured on the ring holder and not, for example (as one P&PC intern suggested), a unicorn? And why do we put a ring on the phallic wooden knob of his oversized nose? In a sense, perhaps, the clown helps turn the removal and retrieval of one's ring into a little circus trick or a carnival ring-toss game—a kind of fun-yet-scary variation on the Fort/Da (Gone/There) game that Freud noticed his grandson playing, with the ring's circular shape troping the child's pleasurable "o-o-o-o" expressed upon discovering items he'd thrown away. Considering the site of the clown ring holder (the kitchen or laundry room in the 1950s), rather than the site of the child's Fort/Da game (the nursery), we can speculate on the nature of this process for the Cold War housewife in particular. In taking off her ring, leaving it on the clown's nose, and finding it later, is she mastering a painful experience of some sort (of being married? of losing the sign and thus status of her marriage?) by reproducing it herself? Or, as other Freudian analysts have suggested of the Fort/Da game, is she responding to a painful experience of some sort (marriage? housework?) by redirecting her anger onto the ring and the clown's woody phallic knob which in some way represent that experience? And to what extent is the grotesque figure of the clown and his Pinocchio nose a stand-in, cartooned version of the male husband and father, whose knob has been made ridiculously large and whose hat has been made ridiculously small? Given how the poem both licenses and instructs the housewife to distance herself from the physical sign of her marriage while doing housework (take off your rings to do your chores, dearie), to what extent does this item thus reveal or manage an anxiety that doing housework over and over (which—as dishes pile up, then get cleaned, only to pile up again—is its own sort of Fort/Da activity) is like getting unmarried over and over again as well? Or that, in order to do housework in the first place, one has to symbolically get unmarried, turning oneself, in an ongoing drama of domestic schizophrenia, from a spouse to a maid, and back again

Given the psychosocial drama incited by Mr. Clown, it's no wonder that Betty Draper might want a cocktail or two. But inviting the neighbors over, passing around the spiked punch, and using drink to help forget one's double identity as a spouse and maid would invite its own set of memory-related issues as the little cocktail glass pictured here suggests. It's a lot like the clown ring holder, actually, isn't it? It, too, is a kitchen-related item from the 1950s. It, too, features a man with a curly mustache. That man wears a particularly noteworthy hat—one that's oversized, this time, not undersized. He, too, has a larger-than-life appendage of some sort (the magnifying glass) that, as it appears to protrude from below the belt of his mackinaw trench coat, also seems to associate with the phallus. (The pun on "knob" and "woody" suggested by the clown's nose even finds its witty partner in the "cock" of the cocktail glass.) And to top it all off, the glass also includes a rhyme that provides crucial information about the object's use:

There isn't a drink snatcher
This side of _ _ _ _
That this little gent
Will fail to smell
Note your name and
Note your drink
And leave the rest to
PINKERSTINK!

For all that the two items have in common, though, they differ significantly from each other in that the poems printed on them are addressed to two different audiences: the clown poem is addressed to the woman doing household chores, while the cocktail glass poem is addressed to the person drinking, not to the person who will be doing the chores. In fact, the poem on the glass seems to channel the voice of the housewife herself: "Note your name and / Note your drink [so that I don't have to wash more dishes than I already have to wash!]"

What's so clever about this effort at dish-washing damage control is not just the direct message it sends from hostess to guest, but how, beyond that message, it schools the guest in a self-discipline or self-supervision that Michel Foucault (pictured here) might appreciate. Indeed, since the hostess can't be everywhere watching everyone all the time, she has to establish a sort of cocktail party panopticon in which individual guests surveil themselves in the absence of her authority. This happens in part by linking together the drinker (the potential offender) and Pinkerstink (the figure of law enforcement), as both hold glasses (the former is holding a cocktail glass, the latter a magnifying glass); the criminal and the policeman are thus, in this scenario, two sides of the same coin, as the material glass's cylindrical circuit between the picture of Pinkerstink on one side and his written name on the other might dramatize.

The party's panoptic regime is more fully established, however, by what doesn't appear on the glass at all: by the letters that would fill in the four blank spaces in the poem's second line. As Loren Glass explained in his P&PC posting last September, moments of "censorship" like these give readers the thrill of silently hearing dirty words even though those words have been suppressed by print. The reader, he writes, can "have it both ways: one submits to the censorship of print while evading it in (silent) speech." In the case of the Pinkerstink glass, then, drinkers, too, have it two ways that result in the self discipline the hostess needs her guests to exercise: they are both the offender (saying the dirty word or forgetting one's glass) and the enforcer (leaving the letters blank and thus monitoring one's own behavior and remembering one's glass).

If the picture of the panopticon in the previous paragraph looks vaguely familiar in the context of this posting, it might be because it recalls the clown's nose on the ring holder; indeed, if you set the ring holder flat on its side, the clown's nose projects up from the center of the object just like the tower in the prison's center does—or just like the cocktail glass in a drinker's hand. Incredibly, all three rely on the same physical shape to establish discipline and thus enforce particular behaviors—in prison, in the kitchen, and in one's hand. In the case of the ring holder and cocktail glass, though, that power is further reenforced by the power of poetry to help us remember how things are done, because, outside the clink, ideology needs to do more than in if it would have us act like prisoners in our daily lives as well.