If the Great Poets Wrote Valentine's Day Verse: More Vintage Valentines from P&PC

Emily Dickinson:

Paul Laurence Dunbar:

 

Wallace Stevens:

Ezra Pound:

Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Gertrude Stein:

William Carlos Williams:

T.S. Eliot

Walt Whitman:

Rethinking Poetic Innovation at the Modernist Studies Association Conference

Earlier this month, P&PC had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference held this year at the Hyatt Regency in the nearly post-apocalyptic downtown of Buffalo, NY. Themed around "The Structures of Innovation," there were your fairly predictable panels ("make it new," right?) on Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, DADA artwork, avant-garde little magazines, and the Paris and New York art and literary scenes. There was also a "roundtable" discussion, organized by Marsha Bryant and Alan Golding, that focused on the subject of "Rethinking Poetic Innovation" and had at least one person buzzing afterwards.

MSA roundtables are a pretty fun format in which, rather than droning on in sequence with extensive prepared remarks, five or six invited speakers offer short position papers then open the floor for discussion with each other and the event's attendees. Imagine our pleasure and surprise when, this past spring, Bryant approached and entered into negotiations with the P&PC home office about P&PC's participation! Now imagine our lone P&PC representative sitting in front of an audience of seventy-five modernists (including keynote speaker Michael Davidson, Lynn Keller, Jed Rasula, and Dee Morris) and among the roundtable's cast of Bryant, Golding, Bob Perelman, Steven Yao, Elizabeth Frost, and Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux—all tenured profs, all well published, some of whom certain members of the P&PC home office staff started reading in graduate school lo these many years ago. Hands somewhat a-tremble, our stomach feeling more like a Kurt Schwitters collage (example presented above) than the proverbial nest of butterflies, but bolstered by the presence of a younger, up-and-coming, somewhat iconoclastic generation of modernist scholars including Meredith Martin and Bartholomew Brinkman, here's the perspective on "Rethinking Poetic Innovation" that P&PC offered. (N.B. If you're a regular P&PC reader, well, bless you; the following is nothing you haven't heard from our offices before. We're posting it not for your benefit but for those at the conference—get this—who admitted to having never before heard the name of Edgar Guest.)

In the late nineteenth and early twentietth centuries, Americans regularly assembled and maintained poetry scrapbooks—personal verse anthologies that edited together poems cut out of newspapers, magazines, church bulletins, advertisements, greeting cards, and other print sources, oftentimes sampling in news articles, pictures, photographs, die cuts, or other items. Well known writers like Anne Sexton, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore kept such albums. Over the past six or eight years, I have assembled and studied an archive of 150 or so poetry scrapbooks produced by ordinary or less celebrated readers. The photocopy I’ve distributed here today (pictured above) is a page spread from one of those albums—a 230 page-long, 300-poem collection kept in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Doris Ashley, an unmarried sawyer’s daughter in her early 20s who was living just south of Boston.

It’s an interesting document, as Ashley puts four “modern” poems, including the now iconic poems by Pound (“In a Station of the Metro,” located at the bottom of the second page) and H.D. (“Oread,” located in the middle of the first page), in conversation with two popular poems and a news report on H.L. Mencken’s late-life marriage to Sara Haardt (a published writer who, in the 1910s, was a prominent voice lobbying the Alabama state legislature to ratify the nineteenth Amendment). The juxtapositions are compelling and represent a vernacular cut and paste analogue to, if not precedent for, modernist practices of bricolage or collage, as Ashley reads across or through a highbrow-lowbrow divide and very compellingly pairs up the Pound and H.D. poems, which are frequently combined in our histories of modern poetry but which her original source book, Louis Untermeyer’s 1925 edition of Modern American Poetry, did not print together.

If Ashley recognizes the shared poetics of “In a Station” and “Oread,” she is not limited by them. In fact, what most connects the six poems here is the image of the tree—the pear tree in Millay’s poem, the pines in “Oread,” the maple tree in Anne Campbell’s poem, the “wet, black bough” in “In a Station,” and the rain of Stanton’s “A Rain Song” that waters them all. This arboreal conceit extends thematically to the newspaper article—the seasons, gardens, plants, and flowers offer an appropriate landscape in which to read about Haardt’s latish marriage (she was 31); astonishingly, this conceit extends sonically, as well, as the “wet, black bough” of Pound’s poem echoes the subtitle of the Mencken article: “Noted American Bachelor Finally Bows to Cupid.” (Note: Ashley, an aspiring writer, would, like Haardt, remain unmarried until her late 20s, and P&PC reads this page spread, in part, as an articulation of how and why Ashley justified remaining single as a life choice that was more deliberate than prevailing images of spinsterhood would suggest.)

There is certainly more to discuss about this page spread, including the alternative map through the poetry of modern America that it and other such anthologies suggest, as well as its place in the history what Kenneth Goldsmith is calling uncreative writing. (Food for thought: can we call Ezra Pound [pictured here] a “popular poet” when he appears in a scrapbook alongside poems by popular poets Stanton and Campbell? Campbell, by the way, was a poet for the Detroit News who reportedly made $10,000 per year off of the daily publication and syndication of her poetry in the 1920s and 1930s.) I’m presenting these pages here, however, to help forward four ideas that might help us to rethink poetic innovation. Those ideas are as follows:

1. Future work on poetic innovation needs to include more study and theory of innovative reading as well as innovative writing.

2. Innovative reading and writing are not limited to experts in literary spheres but happen within popular culture as well—including, as I’ve argued elsewhere in relation to the old Burma-Shave billboard poems, the commercial marketplace. Innovation is not inherently oppositional and is regularly articulated to, and expressed in terms of, the market. In fact, the very claim to “innovation” itself, in artistic and commercial spheres alike, as well as their overlap, is a form of capital worth studying further.

3. Although Ashley’s scrapbook doesn’t suggest it directly, poetic innovation within popular and mass culture likely intersected with, and affected, the work of “literary” poets more regularly than we think—not just in terms of raw materials, but form, precedent, and logic as well. When we use the French word collage to describe modernist literary practices, for example, we disguise modernism's roots in popular practice and overlook the fact that Pound, H.D., Moore, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot and others were born in, learned to read in, and were educated in an America where scrapbooking was a primary form of reading and thinking and where the word collage did not yet exist.

4. What we call “literary” poetry also affected innovation within mass and popular culture. That is, not only did popular culture provide modernist writers with resources for their art, but, as we see in the case of Doris Ashley, modernist writers provided uncredentialed readers with raw materials for thinking and creating as well.

Thanks for listening.

Note: if you're interested in these and related issues, keep your eyes out for the P&PC-endorsed book-length study Poetry & Popular Culture in Modern America, due out from Columbia University Press in the Fall of 2012.

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?

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

Jane Austen has met the zombie. So has Abraham Lincoln. The Poetry & Popular Culture Office has been nearly, uh, dying to know what happens when zombies meet poetry as well. And so, when we discovered Ryan Mecum's two books, Zombie Haiku (2008) and Vampire Haiku (2009), we turned to haiku expert Ce Rosenow (pictured here), hoping to, well, pick her brain about what happens when the living dead (pictured below) turn to seventeen syllables for self-expression. Here, in the first installment of a two-part review of what we can only call Mecum's re-animated body of work, Rosenow fleshes out the hunger for poetry and horror that seems to run (where else?) in our blood.

Part I: Zombie Haiku

Zombie Haiku's blood-spattered pages and zombie photos will resonate with readers who are familiar with typical visual representations of zombies—the lurching gait, outstretched arms and vacant eyes are all present here. In addition to that nod toward iconic zombie imagery, Zombie Haiku also acknowledges the cinematic and literary genre of which it is part. Night of the Living Dead, for example, is present, if understated, in the farmhouse and cornfield sequences that show up in Mecum’s narrative.

However, Zombie Haiku requires that readers overcome two obstacles. First, they must suspend a certain amount of disbelief—and it’s not disbelief about zombies’ existence. No, the disbelief that arises when reading this collection stems from the book's central premise: a reanimated dead person insatiably hungry for human brains and other body parts who chooses to document the search for said parts using, of all things, a poetic form that requires counting syllables. This counting can’t come easy for the zombie. After all, as he becomes increasingly driven in his search for human flesh, he admits in neat, seventeen-syllable sound bites that he has trouble remembering things:

I can't remember
how to open this window
so I'll just stand here.

They are so lucky
that I cannot remember
how to use doorknobs.

Regardless of the character’s poetic impulses when he was human, the zombie’s existence is all about brains: his own doesn’t work and he’s hungry for others, yet he writes haiku.

Fortunately, such apparent contradictions are easily overlooked in literature. Consider, for example, Samuel Richardson’s heroine in Pamela who ostensibly composed the letters that comprise this 18th-century novel even as she locked herself behind various doors to avoid her employer's sexual advances. Clearly people—even the living dead—will document their lives regardless of trying circumstances. And with the zombie, whose body parts become damaged and sometimes fall off altogether, these circumstances tend to grow increasingly difficult:

My fingernail snaps
ripping off that light switch.
Now I’m down to six.

Looking at my hand,
somehow I lost a finger
and gained some maggots.

Filling the pages of his journal with poems and drawings representing his experiences clearly takes dedication.

After getting past this first obstacle, the reader confronts yet another: zombie haiku are not haiku. Just as a zombie is a shell of a human being without a soul, so the poems in this book replicate the syllabic structure of haiku but lack the content of haiku. Most haiku include some combination of the following: seasonal references, two images, internal comparisons, and a pivot line. While traditional, avant-garde, horror, and science fiction haiku writers typically maintain some connection to the standard characteristics of haiku in their poems, Mecum does not. Additionally, the syllabic structure diligently adhered to by Mecum's zombie is usually not followed by the majority of English-language haiku poets nor by most contemporary Japanese haiku poets.

Haiku, however, are as trendy as zombies, and so the idea to bring the two together is not surprising. Haiku have, for the last three decades at least, been used repeatedly to address popular topics—sports, business, movies, teen angst—and to suggest a cutting edge approach to these topics. They typically ignore most characteristics of literary haiku and focus only on the 5-7-5 syllable count. Mecum’s haiku fit well into this new tradition but raise a question about this new approach in general: why choose haiku at all? In Mecum’s case, why not zombie limericks, zombie sonnets, an occasional zombie sestina? Why reanimate the haiku form yet again for something so far afield from the form’s actual purpose?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that haiku entered American literature as a way to make non-haiku poetry more innovative. In the early 20th century, poets such as Ezra Pound incorporated aspects of haiku into non-haiku poems. As modernists, these poets searched for ways to reinvigorate conventional poetry, and haiku became one means to that end. Contemporary, non-literary uses of haiku may not be intended to reinvigorate poetry, but they might be designed to “make new” the treatment of their various topics nonetheless.

Another possibility is that haiku is still heavily identified with Japanese culture, so it always adds a sense of difference to its subject matter—often by suggesting the exotic and the foreign. When this approach merges with a lack of seriousness about the form, however, it risks replicating the imperialist point of view of certain American and British writers in the 19th century. W.G. Aston, for example, felt that Japanese poetry had very little value as literature, and his opinion was informed by the perspective that Japan was not a fully developed culture and therefore could not have a fully developed literature.

Finally, if seventeen syllables is all it takes to make a haiku, another possible answer might be that the form is simply an amusing, undemanding way to write. It also matches the ever-decreasing attention span of many readers and accommodates a wide range of topics.

Mecum’s poems revel in the speed and playfulness afforded by the 5-7-5 format and seem to lack any imperialistic impulses—at least at the level of content. True, the zombies are taking over and imposing a new culture of sorts, but there is no collective force or motivation at work. Each zombie follows only one motivational drive: hunger for human brains and human flesh. Mecum’s zombie is so single-minded that, “Walking in the dark / with a stomach full of meat,” he still searches “for meat.” Even when another zombie enters the picture, there is little coordinated effort:

Smelling the same meal,
another of one us joins me
into the darkness.

The other dead guy
stares at me with a blank look
as we softly moan.

Each zombie eventually ends up with his own victim but not through any form of teamwork, and, afterwards, each zombie continues on his own individual quest for more food.

Mecum’s book is also filled with humor and irreverence, and both characteristics depend largely on the incongruous use of haiku to convey a zombie’s narrative:

I loved my momma.
I eat her with my mouth closed,
how she would want it.

It is hard to tell
who is food and who isn’t
in the nursing home.

The book parades this incongruity throughout the text. The most notable instance occurs in the following depiction of the zombie’s obsession with brains and syllables:

brains, brains, brains, brains, brains
brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains, brains
brains, brains, brains, brains, brains.

Ultimately, Zombie Haiku is an innovative book that will appeal to anyone interested in all things zombie. As a graphic novel in which short poems propel the narrative, it is also a unique addition to zombie fiction and to the ever-expanding number of popular uses for haiku.

Coming Soon: Part II of the "The Book of the Undead" when Rosenow sinks her teeth into the world of Mecum's Vampire Haiku. If you have a moment in the meantime, check out Rosenow's Mountains and Rivers Press located in Eugene, Oregon.

Chick Lit?

I recently watched Anthony Russo's 2006 movie "You, Me and Dupree" which stars Owen Wilson, Kate Hudson, and Matt Dillon. In the film, Wilson's character - Dillon's loveable but messy, reckless, fly- by-the-seat-of-his-pants best friend and best man - loses his job and moves in with newlyweds Hudson and Dillon only to introduce all manner of potty-humor and relationship chaos into the young lovers' household. Not exactly an art film. The narrative then follows Wilson's gradual reformation into a person of some refinement and charater and Dillon's corresponding descent into disorder, jealousy, and paranoia. Defending Wilson's improvements one night to her husband, Hudson reveals that Wilson has, in fact, been writing poetry - a revelation that Dillon reacts to by calling Wilson "a fag."

Dillon's reaction is part of a long and familiar Anglo-American history of associating poetry - which is presumably in touch with all the gooey emotional and sentimental sides of human existence - with effeminacy and homosexuality. Dino Franco Felluga's 2005 SUNY study "The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius" traces how discourses of poetry, melancholia, genius, and sexual pathology (including masturbation) converged in the nineteenth century. (In "You, Me and Dupree, in fact, poet-to-be Wilson is caught "in the act" one night by Hudson as she goes downstairs for a drink, suggesting the link between poetry and onanism is not entirely a thing of the past.) In "A Retrospect" from 1918, Ezra Pound states his desire to produce a new, masculine poetry that is "harder and saner," "nearer the bone," and "free from [the] emotional slither" that, in his estimation, characterized the effeminate verse of the genteel nineteenth century.

In post-Cold War America, perhaps no figure has dramatized the stereotypical synchronicity between gayness and poetry more humorously than Percy Dovetonsils, one of the most remembered characters created by t.v. comedian Ernie Kovacs. Kovacs's Dovetonsils appeared as a "poet laureate" who spoke with a lisp, wore a zebra-patterned smoking jacket and coke-bottle glasses, and sipped a drink which had a daisy for a swizzle stick. Not able to abide the homosexual resonances of this long history on Wilson's poetry writing, "You, Me and Dupree" eventually clarifies Wilson's heterosexuality by informing us that he was, in fact, writing love poetry in order to win back the affections of a girl he lost earlier in the film.

Despite this history of effeminacy, "real men" actually did read poetry for much of the twentieth century, and that poetry - which decorated the pin-up posters stuck on the walls of their basements and garages - was intended (or thought to be) a clear demonstration of their masculinity. Poetry was a regular part of girly pictures, appearing on postcards, arcade cards, playing cards, ink-blotters, matchbooks and, most famously, the Vargas-girl Esquire centerfold pull-outs and pin-ups. A fair amount of attention has been paid to the visual aspects of these idealized female images, but most commentators focus purely on the airbrushed visuals and the problematic images of the girl next door without investigating the constant presence of the poetry that accompanied those visuals and that, by association, must have had an impact on shaping American masculinity. Some of these poems, such as this one from an ink blotter picturing a busty showgirl in feathers and short skirt -

Showgirls have a philosophy
Expressed in the lines of this verse:
"To let a fool kiss you is stupid,
To let a kiss fool you is worse."

- are clever, epigrammatic rhymes wherein the mastery over the language seems to figure the masculine desire for mastery over the female. Other poems, such as this one from a platinum-blonde, head-and-shoulders, Vargas pull-out pin-up from the May 1942 issue of Esquire, are longer and more elaborate:

Song for a Lost Spring

That was another Spring when we were gay ...
And I remember everything so well ...
The purpled dusk ... the streets that lost their way ...
The lazy hours that held us in their spell;
The songs we sang were lovelier than before,
The violins were sweet against the night ...
And yet the shadows on the tavern floor
Foretold a time of panic and of flight;

And so when lightning raced along the sky
I knew that vows and pleadings would be vain,
You were not meant to watch enchantment die
Nor hear the soft and treacherous hiss of rain;
That was another Spring that we two shared ...
And One was wise ... and there was One who cared!

This sonnet (!) was written by poet laureate of pin-ups, Phil Stack, and no doubt the elaborate verse form and nostalgic tone added a sense of dignity that worked to save the picture from being "just" a girly picture - especially within the context of Esquire's literary and cultural aspirations. Esquire regularly ran such poems alongside their pin-ups and published pin-up calendars with poems on them. To assess the impact of Esquire and the pin-up without accounting in some way for the poetry is an incomplete accounting at best.

It is a curious thing that in the middle of the 1950s "pink scare," Stack should end his first line on the word "gay." For while pin-up poetry, and the act of posting the pin-up on one's wall, worked as a performance of one's masculinity, it was largely a performance of eroticism put on for (and participated in by) other men, and one can't help but think about the homoerotics of two men, or three men, or four men, ogling a pin-up girl. Indeed, when one begins reading this poetry widely, there is a variety among the poems that troubles the heteronormative boy-girl relationship we typically assume that the pictures play to. Sometimes, the verse is spoken by an outside commentator, such as that in the quatrain quoted above. Other times, it's clear that that the woman is speaking the lines. Still other times - as in Stack's sonnet - we're not sure who is speaking the poem or who SHOULD be speaking the poem (the man? the woman? both?) - an ambiguity only enhanced by the verse's use of the first person and played up twice in the last line by the intentionally gender-neutral pronoun "One." Am I the only one to sense that this ambiguity significantly queers the reader's sexual subject position?

Take into consideration the following quatrain from a postcard showing a cartoon redhead whose skirt - a la the famous pic of Marilyn Monroe - is blown up above a steam grate to reveal her stockings and garters:

At last I got around to that line
I said I'd drop
So keep yer shirt on buddy,
ya' needn't blow yer top!

Who is the "I" in this poem supposed to be? Is it a postcard that a woman would send to a man, or a postcard that a man would send to a man, and what are the various subject positions offered to the card's holder - sender or recipient, male or female - by that poem? That is to ask, how does the poem change the erotic relationship depending on whose mouth it is in and who is "speaking" as the sender finally dropping a line? There's certainly a sort of titillating masquerade or poetic drag/burlesque show going on here that is totally worth examining more closely - one not entirely unlike the Renaissance stage where boy actors dressed up like girls and then kissed other men on stage. This vertigo only increases, I think, by knowing that the author of many of these poems is a male - Phil Stack - essentially speaking, like Cyrano, words of love to other men through the mouth of a surrogate, here (in "Song for a Lost Spring") a woman.

I don't have any answers at the moment except to say that pin-up poetry is much more diverse and complex a social and cultural phenomenon than one would be inclined think. Part of American culture for years and especially during the sexually confusing 1950s, it undoubtedly played a role in shaping men's sense of their sexuality, both in relation to the women pictured, and to the men who would read it as it was posted on walls for everyone to see. What sort of sexual identities are being negotiated in this poetry? Does this dynamic change over the course of the twentieth century? How do the various media - from postcard to fold-out pin-up - shape the poetic and (homo)erotic encounter of these images?

For several essays on the Vargas girl pin-ups, written for a 2001 exhibition of Esquire illustrations at the University of Kansas - check out http://www.spencerart.ku.edu/collection/print/vargas/.