Nature's Own Pleasant Remedy: The Poetry of Jarvis Blackberry Brandy

Lost Masterpieces: A-Corn Salve's "Listen to This Wail of Toe"

Thoughts on Purina, Puffery, and Other Matters, Such as the Poetics of Inflation and the Advertising Poetry of Friskies Crispies Cheese Flavor Puffs

In Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge UP, 2007), Northumbria University English professor John Strachan repeatedly reminds us that the term "puff" was once (and to some extent still is) regularly used to describe not a type of delectable, creamy pastry or profiterole, but an advertising technique. In 1836, for example, the English poet and novelist Horace Smith described "puffing" as "a species of cozenage and trickery much resorted to by the vendors of quack medicines, [shoe] blacking, novels, and other trash, for the purpose of gulling the public and cajoling them into a purchase of their wares." Quack medicines, blacking, novels, and other trash, right?

The "puff" as a sort of exaggerated or over-inflated product claim had such currency in nineteenth-century Englnd, in fact, that the Irish poet Gerald Griffin imagined it coming to life as Puff, not a magic dragon but the Spirit of Advertising itself. Of "The Prayer of Dullness" (taken from that 1843 classic The Works of Gerald Griffin), Strachan writes, Griffin "envisages the goddess of [Alexander Pope's] The Dunciad revisiting London, only to find, much to her horror, that the age of dunces has been superseded by a literary golden age: towering poets (Byron, [Thomas] Moore and [Thomas] Campbell) have supplanted her poetasters and Walter Scott has displaced her hack novelists.... Dullness prays for 'Some ally in my hour of care' to restore the empire of 'bad taste on earth.' Salvation arrives in the malign form of Puff, the personification of advertising, who blows 'a thrilling blast' on his 'brazen trumpet.'" Consider Puff's entrance:

My name is Puff—the guardian sprite,
     And patron of the dull and shameless,
Things born in shades, I bring to light,
     And give a high fame to the nameless.
Me modest merit shuns to meet,
     His timid footsteps backward tracking,
The worthless all my influence greet,
     From —'s books—to Turner's blacking.

Even the Thomas Moore referenced by Griffin and pictured here got in on the act, penning "Thoughts on Patrons, Puffs and Other Matters" from which the following comment on authorial puffery is taken:

Instead of bartering, in this age,
Our praise for pence and patronage,
We authors, now, more prosperous,
Have learn'd to patronize ourselves;
And since all-potent Puffing's made
The life of song, the soul of trade,
More frugal of our praises grown,
We puff no merits but our own.

Partially as a result of its long connection to the practice of advertising, "puff" has acquired a whole set of undesirable connotations that the Oxford English Dictionary can track for you: the empty or idle boast, a person or thing regarded as insubstantial, a person puffed up with pride or vanity, something inflated or swollen, a type of journalism (the puff piece), and even a sexual personality. Putting the profits in the profiterole (one might say), puffery is thus all about air—hot air, we might typically think, but air nonetheless.

All of this allows us to better understand the history and poetics informing Purina's Friskies Crispies Cheese Flavor Puffs and the three-stanza verse "Fun Is In The Air" printed in an appropriately airy white text on the back of the 2.1-oz. package of cat treats pictured here. Hard to read but guaranteeing good taste for your favorite feline (instead of the "empire of 'bad taste on earth'" that Griffin imagined Puff helping to restore in "The Prayer of Dullness"), "Fun Is In The Air" reads as follows:

Friskies Crispies are crispy!
     They're fluffy with air.
They're irresistibly puffy.
     It's a new love affair.

Not crunchy. Not tender.
     Not expected. Not boring.
Airy is merry!
     A new treat worth exploring.

So tasty! So cheese-y!
     Every bite's a delight.
Crisp it up anytime.
     Perfect morning, noon and night.

Embodying its central conceit in that wonderful sonic slippage between "love affair" and "love of air," Purina's poem is a sort of attempt to reclaim puffiness from its history of negative connotations. But in order to do that, "Fun Is In The Air" must embrace (and sell) the very excess (too much insubstantial airiness) that led the character of Andrugio in J. Marston's Elizabethan play The History of Antonio and Mellida (c. 1599) to describe how "blown up" an imprudent king might get "with the flattering puffs / Of spongy sycophants." Purina's bard of cat-tasting (rather than poetasting) therefore not only embeds the sound of "air" in "love affair" and "merry," but then embarks on the task of convincing the consumer that it's the very insubstantiality of air that's responsible for its opposite: its substantial crispiness. In other words, "Fun Is In The Air" identifies as the product's special, key ingredient the very thing that makes puffery puff, that inflates the zip-lock package of cat treats, and that, like the "darkness" of Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man," surrounds all of us. "Fun Is In The Air" doesn't have as its only goal making modestly inflated claims for Crispies' crunchiness or tenderness, but audaciously inflated claims for the very source of inflation, as well, and even the act of inflation itself!

This poetics of inflation structures the rest of the packaging too: the individual cat treats soar up into the sky and off of the plastic pouch like helium balloons, and those images themselves are inflated in size compared to the actual treats, as the admission "Treats Shown Are Not Actual Size" on the reverse informs us. If that isn't enough, a magnified "blow up" of a single Crispie pictured on the back and captioned "there's air in there!" inflates that Crispie even more, as if putting it under a microscope lens. The rhetoric of the poem and surrounding language is equally inflated, puffed up with redundancy and contradiction that embrace the "emptiness," "inflation of style," and "showy adornment" that the OED uses in one of its definitions of "puff." The first lines of the poem, for example, needlessly tell us that "Crispies are" (wait for it) "crispy" and that "They're fluffy with" (of all things) "air." Making liberal use of exclamation marks to puff things up still more, the poem moves to stanza two, which begins not by making additional claims for the product itself, but claims for what it isn't (it's not crunchy, not tender, etc.); essentially, as with the hype it gives the product's key ingredient that we can't see and that Purina doesn't make (air), the poem also makes claims for Crispies based on qualities that the product doesn't have.

If stanza one pursues a poetics of inflation via redundancy (Crispies are crispy) and stanza two via negativity (what Crispies are not, rather than what they are), then the poem's final stanza does so via hyperbole, telling us in the last two lines to "Crisp it up anytime. / Perfect morning, noon and night"—advice that other verbiage about "Feeding Instructions" on the package tells us we should not in fact take: "Feed as a treat to your adult cat. This product is a treat and is not intended to be fed as a meal. The caloric intake from treats should not exceed 10% of a cat's daily caloric requirement. If treats are given, the amount of food should be reduced accordingly..." In other words, you really shouldn't crisp it up anytime, as there are lots of times when Crispies aren't perfect. Among other things, what we learn from this mixed message and clash of discursive registers is that, when it comes to the language of truth and statistics and Fluffy's real-life health and dietary concerns, Purina goes to prose, and when it comes to making (and getting consumer permission to make) artificial claims (i.e., puffery), it goes to poetry. In other words, truth-in-advertising equals prose, while false or misleading information equals poetry.

But maybe this prose=realism/ poetry=puffery logic isn't entirely bad—just the victim of an unfortunate contrast and set of mass cultural associations about the power of poetry marshaled here. If you think that Friskies Crispies makes poetry seem showy, unreliable, ill-suited for practical matters, bombastic, inflated, and empty (like the holes in the crisps that we're asked to buy for their air), then wouldja just let your capitalist self take a look at that loveable cat on the packaging? He reaches up toward the sky not for the solid realness of the Crispies, but for the air inside of them, the air that surrounds us, the air that we can never fully grasp or see but on which our lives depend. When we want to reach for the stars (check out how little white starbursts in an otherwise daytime sky on the product's packaging rhyme with the sun toward which the hand reaches in the picture here), or when we leap as Friskies' Fluffy does for the Platonic ideal of the Crispie floating across the heavens, our chief resource isn't prose, it's poetry—even puffery. That is, when "the darkness surrounds us," as Creeley writes in "I Know a Man," we don't write expository paragraphs; instead, we "buy a goddamn big car" and start plunging ahead via the poetics of inflation—redundancy ("because I am always talking"), hyperbole (goddamn big car), and contradiction (telling ourselves at one moment to "drive" and the next to "look / out where yr going"). If Puff, Griffin's Spirit of Advertising, is the patron of the dull and shameless that brings overshadowed things to light and that gives fame to the nameless, well, then maybe that's just the thing we should do against the powers of darkness.

N.B. P&PC made several attempts to contact Purina about the poem on this package of cat treats, but neither our emails nor phone messages were returned.

The Cutting Edge of Advertising Poetry?

P&PC in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture

Between 1860 and 1920, advertising strategies for two products almost singlehandedly changed the face of consumer culture in the United States—or so Cary Nelson and P&PC claim in "American Advertising: A Poem for Every Product," which is Chapter 7 in the newly-released, 700-page tome U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920 (Volume 6 of Oxford's History of Popular Print Culture series). At $160, the book's no cheapie (maybe Oxford needs a jingle or two to help advertise it?), but Nelson and P&PC offer ten images from their private collections and lots of great verse to show how poetry—a genre that many people associate with anticapitalist endeavors—fueled the development of the advertising industry and paved the way for a myriad of advertising techniques we're familiar with today.

In "A Poem for Every Product," Nelson and P&PC argue that, while poems were used to pitch everything from galoshes to carriages, two consumer items in particular—patent medicines and soap—deserve special credit (or blame) in powering the development and expansion of the American advertising industry and its poetry, as U.S. poets found at that conjunction the possibility for regular incomes and audiences appreciative of their skills. In the writing of this essay, Nelson took on the subject of patent medicines while P&PC picked up on the issue of soap (a topic we've addressed on this blog before), and we found the two products to be intimately related, as soap assumed the dominant place in advertising that patent medicines occupied prior to the Progressive Era's truth-in-advertising movements that culminated, in part, in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The shift from snake oil to soap—two items with simple recipes that needed advertising to differentiate one brand of similar material from another—was complicated and not accomplished overnight, but one of the poets helping it along was the phenomenally successful Canadian writer and artist Palmer Cox. Thus, Cox serves as a sort of fulcrum in "A Poem for Every Product," a moment halfway through the essay when Nelson's argument about patent medicines transitions to P&PC's thoughts about soap. Here, in the way of a preview of that essay, follows an excerpt from the moment in "A Poem for Every Product" when the shady business of advertising starts relying on soap to help, uh, clean up its act:

"In 1890, five years after writing 'Wisdom in Fable' for Pond's Extract, Palmer Cox [pictured here] produced 'A Friendly Turn' to advertise Ivory Soap for Cincinnati's Procter and Gamble Company. There, in four pages of his trademark tetrameter couplets and whimsical pen and ink illustrations, Cox called on his 'Brownies' to spin a tale of Ivory's elfin origin, purity, and medicinal qualities. While not as universal in its application as Pond's—which in 1885 had purported to resolve a range of skin ailments in addition to 'Sore Throat, Rheumatism, Wounds, Catarrh, Hemorrhages, Nose Bleed, Sprains, [and] Swellings'—Ivory is nonetheless credited with the ability to treat people's 'scabby heads,' 'unsightly pimples,' 'scaly crust,' and 'body sore.' Like a miracle cure, the 'pure and perfect' Brownie concoction works its transformative magic almost overnight:

No more were seen the scabby heads,
Or finest garments all in shreds,
No more unsightly pimples rose,
To mar the chaps, or scaly crust,
Made people wish themselves in dust.
For, from the infant on the breast,
To those who neared their final rest,—
For rich and poor, the great and small,
Found Ivory Soap had cleansed them all.

For people suffering, Cox writes, as if pitching the merits of a patent medicine, 'Their sole relief and only hope / Is found in using Ivory Soap.'

"The apparent ease with which Cox moves—or has been moved—between patent medicine advertising and soap advertising is in part an indication of his poetry's general marketability and public appeal, but it's also emblematic of a larger, conceptual shift that took place in American advertising in the last decade of the nineteenth century. That shift—which occurred as the age of patent medicine advertising was coming to an end—saw advertisers seize on and redeploy the curative rhetoric of nostrum advertising in order to market other consumer goods as well. In promoting a transformative power inherent to the commodity item, this new strategy not only contributed to the further fetishization of goods in the new 'modern' consumer economy by further obscuring the labour relations of their production. It also publicized the notion that the commodity item was itself a cure for people's many and varied ills—promising to be not just a physical good with a specific use, but a shortcut to social status, sex appeal, or lifestyle—and that the corresponding act of buying and consuming was a medicinal activity in its own right. That is, in the expansion of patent medicine advertising strategies more broadly at this time, we can see the birth of what we now call 'retail therapy.'

"That expansion didn't happen all at once, nor did it happen equally from product to product. Indeed, restructuring the logic of consumption and Americans' relationship to commodity items in this way required a tangible form of what Fredric Jameson would call a 'vanishing mediator'—that entity which 'serves as a bearer of change and social transformation, only to be forgotten once that change has ratified the reality of the institutions.' In the case of American consumer capitalism, that signal mediating product was soap, partly because soap had been included in the patent-medicine industry for a long time [it was oftentimes an ingredient in nostrums], and partly because it provided an outward performance—taking something dirty and making it clean—of the transformative character that advertisers hoped would eventually become linked in the American psyche to every other product....So twinned were the discourses of patent medicine and soap at the end of the nineteenth century that at least one nineteenth-century producer of nostrums—Palmer Cox's patron, Pond's Healing and Pond's Extract—was able to respond to the Pure Food and Drug act by transforming itself almost immediately into a skin-care cleansing specialist, Pond's Cold Cream, which is still on the market today."

For the rest of this essay—including the performance of Dreydoppel's Borax Soap in "The Great Contest!!"—check out Chapter 7 of U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920 from Oxford University Press.

The Economic Lessons of "The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'"

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) wrote "The Deacon's Masterpiece, or The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'" in 1858. Around 1876, the noted Philadelphia carriage builders, D.M. Lane & Son, reprinted the poem inside a small cardboard pamphlet (pictured here) advertising their company's "Large Stock of Light and Heavy Carriages, of the Newest Designs and Finest Finish"—coaches, coupes, rockaways, bretts, phaetons, buggies, drags, and Jenny Lind carriages including the 1876 Centennial Road and Speed Wagon featured on front.

Holmes (pictured here) was nationally known, of course; a physician-professor at Harvard, writer of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table essays that first ran in The Atlantic Monthly, and author of "Old Ironsides," he was one of the six Fireside Poets whose picture graced the hearths of homes around the country. D.M. Lane & Son was no slouch either, as it turns out. If people were setting Holmes's picture on the mantle, then it was likely that many of them sat themselves in vehicles made or designed by the Lane establishment.

After the death of his father "Captain" Lane—who had started out as a blacksmith, had led a group of one hundred men to fight in the Civil War, and who died suddenly in 1882—son Millard (ahem) took the company's reigns and presided over a period of rapid innovation and expansion in carriage construction and design. In 1893, Millard was appointed President of the Carriage Builders' National Association, praised for his progressive attitude and business methods as well as the company's "splendid factory and spacious ware-rooms." "Mr. Lane is a man," Carriage Monthly wrote, "of fine personal appearance, with a measure of dignity in his bearing that does not interfere with his frank and genial manners." Hub magazine agreed. "He is an energetic, painstaking business man, to whom work is a pleasure ... In social life he is equally popular, and his fitness and ability have led to his connection with various local organizations."

Millard would helm the family business until his own death in 1901—the same year that Mr. Ransom Olds opened his first assembly line plant to speed up and streamline the manufacture of the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, the first mass-produced automobile in history. Of course, the carriage industry did not disappear overnight—it would take another ten or fifteen years for Henry Ford to fully refine and harness the potential of the assembly line—but the transition was a remarkably fast one nonetheless. By 1914, cars were coming off of Ford's assembly line so quickly that the painting process caused a bottleneck (only black paint would dry fast enough to keep pace with manufacturing), and the cost of a single automobile dropped to almost half of what it was six or seven years earlier. According to Wiki, by 1914 it was taking only 93 minutes to assemble a car at Ford's factories, and an assembly line worker could purchase a Model T with four months' pay.

In retrospect, then, can we read in Millard's death and the "end of the wonderful one-hoss shay" the fate of D.M. Lane's carriage business writ large—indeed, not just the fate of the particular industry that the Lanes helped to drive, but in relation to every boom-and-bust cycle since? Here are the poem's final two stanzas, in which the parson's carriage—a prescient metaphor for what happens when one puts too much trust in the modern economy's claims to flawlessness and permanence—"went to pieces all at once":

The parson was working his Sunday text—
Had got to fifthly, and stopped perplexed
At what the—Moses—was coming next.
All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet'n'-house on the hill.
—First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill—
And then the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet'n'-house clock—
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!

What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once—
All at once and nothing first—
Just as bubbles do when they burst.—
End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.
Logic is Logic. That's all I say.

It is fairly common for today's literary critics to imagine the Fireside Poets, including Holmes, to be voices of convention who were intellectually and poetically disabled by their nostalgia for a rural, religiocentric America and intense suspicion of the pace, technological invention, and changing values of modern life. "Ultimately," John Timberman Newcomb explains in Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity, for example, "their refusal to accept the idea that poetry should, or could, grapple with the sources and effects of modern emotional dispossession not only damaged their own reputations, but seriously undermined poetry's place in American life." We here at P&PC aren't going to claim that the Fireside Poets weren't invested in pre-modern values and lifestyles, but maybe—as the bursting bubble that dispossesses the parson of his carriage in "The Wonderful 'One-Hoss Shay'" suggests—they weren't entirely blind to the character of modernity, either, nor did they refuse to have their poetry engage or analyze its dynamics. Holmes's parson, after all, is not unlike many homeowners in today's America—surprised at "the hour of the Earthquake shock" to find himself out in the cold and sitting on a rock. One can only hope he had paid off his carriage before that bubble burst.

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: An Interview with Emily Benson of StarMark Pet Products

A few weeks ago, one of P&PC's poetry scouts wrote in with exciting news: she'd just purchased a bright orange StarMark Everlasting Bento Ball toy for her newly-adopted dog named Ayla (both pooch and product pictured here) and had discovered a little 6-line poem printed on the back of the toy's packaging:

Think you've seen it all?
Nothing like this half a ball...
Twice the fun and super strong;
It's quite a ball—you can't go wrong!
Dental dimples for the cleanest smiles,
Once filled with treats they last for miles.

Panting with anticipation and curious about how and why poetry came to appear in such an unexpected place, P&PC put its sleuthing nose to the pavement and tracked down Emily Benson, Marketing Director for StarMark Pet Products, a retail arm of the Triple Crown Dog Academy which is the largest, most comprehensive training, behavior, and pet-related event center in the world. With a 100,000 square-foot facility, a 200-kennel boarding kennel, and a two-mile training trail located in Austin, Texas, Triple Crown obviously knows man's best friend quite well. But could Benson give P&PC readers something to chew on? Or did the poem have us barking up the wrong tree? Here's what Benson had to say about dogs, cats, poetry, doggerel and the unfortunate fact that the poems are in the process of being phased out.

Poetry & Popular Culture: Poems on chew toys? How did the idea come about?

Emily Benson: Our product line originally started with training items, and then our next generation of products were more along the lines of interactive and treat-dispensing toys. The idea of the poems seemed to fit the fun, whimsical aspect, and simply the joy, of playing with your dog.

P&PC: Who writes them? Like, do you have a poet on staff or something?

EB: I actually wrote the poems. We had a few toys that were being dog-tested around the office and were working on text for the packaging. I came up with the poem for the Foam Ball and ran it by our president as an alternative for the usual packaging claims, and he actually liked it!

P&PC: Last time I wrote poetry on the job, I got reprimanded, so I quit and went to graduate school. What advice would you give other cubicle poets when it comes to making poetry part of their work?

EB: I think allowing for creative thought in the workplace is important, whether it's poetry or any other idea. Poetry itself is a writing form you don't normally see in many industries, but it certainly has a place. If you're not able to express yourself through poetry as you like at work, then it should definitely still be pursued on a personal level.

P&PC: What's your favorite chew-toy poem?

EB: The poem for the Fantastic Foam Ball (pictured here) is my favorite:

With a roll and a bounce
What makes your dog pounce?
What floats in the water
To fetch like an otter?
What's soft in his jaws
And not easily mauled?
It's a fantastic Foam Ball!

It was the first poem I wrote, and the imagery of the otter just seems fun and carefree. Otters always look like they've having a good time.

P&PC: Plus you get to rhyme "otter" and "water." What would you rhyme with "rhinoceros"?

EB: A rhyme for rhinoceros is preposterous!

P&PC: The poems are written from different points of view and for different audiences. The poem for the Everlasting Treat Ball (being gnawed on in the picture here), for example, is from a dog's perspective and addressed to other dogs:

Where is this new toy, this new bringer of joy?
A toy that's soft but still strong is all that I long...
It wobbles and rolls, and what good things it holds—
Filled with food and capped with one treat or two,
This toy it seems is only in my dreams!

The Fantastic Foam Ball, on the other hand, is addressed to dog owners. How much of this is doggone accident—and how much cool calculation?

EB: This was all a purebred accident. It was more a feel for the toy that drove the poems, and perspective evolved after the initial base idea.

P&PC: What sort of test marketing did this require?

EB: It was pretty basic. We mostly passed them around the office with our staff and our trainers to get their input and made edits from there as needed.

P&PC: How have customers responded?

EB: They seem to enjoy them. They fit with the overall look and feel of the packages.

P&PC: So no one's accused you of writing doggerel?

EB: Maybe just a few mixed verses and tales.

P&PC: Um, P&PC has an office cat. What are StarMark's plans for a feline product line?

EB: Our roots are based in dogs, but we're working on product ideas for cats and other animals. We do get feedback about some of our toys, the Everlasting Fun Ball in particular, where people fill them with cat treats or catnip for their cats to play with. We have also heard of them being used by parrot owners, and even big cats and other animals at a handful of zoos.

P&PC: If I'm correct, you've now used poems on three products in addition to the Foam Ball (the Bento Ball, the Treat Ball, and the Everlasting Fire Plug). Can you give us a preview of what's in the works?

EB: We are actually in the process of redesigning all our ball packaging for a more professional look to better reflect our background in training and behavior. So this means the poems are being phased out and in their place is an image of one of our staff or client dogs along with their story.

P&PC's Favorite Advertising Poem of the Month

Putting the Ale in Salem

From noon to 10 pm this coming Saturday, September 25th, Gilgamesh Brewing and Wandering Aengus Cider Works will be hosting Salem's first Beer & Cider Festival at the Mission Mill Museum located at 1313 Mill Street, just a hop (ahem), skip and a jump from the campus of Willamette University. The P&PC Office is excited. Sure, we took a field trip to the 24th annual Oregon Brewers Festival this past July where we sampled our fair share of the more than 80 craft beers that were on tap in that well-established, world-renowned frothy juggernaut of a fest. But there's something particularly special about Salem's startup, and not just because it's taking place, somewhat audaciously, in the shadow of Portland's hipster paradise and in a capital city that gets short shrift in all the guidebooks. Maybe—just maybe—it also has to do with a certain poetic element that's been in the Salem beer mix, along with all those locally-grown hops, going on for nigh 100 years.

Take the acrostic pictured to the left, for example: a May, 1911 advertisement issued by the Salem Brewery Association, which came across our desktops via a mysteriously anonymous blogging friend (and purveyor of the fascinating and arcane) over at Capital Taps. It's a clever bit of acrostic puffery in which the vertically-oriented phrase "Salem Beer" becomes the grammatical subject of virtually every line even as its component letters begin those lines. That is, the letters in "Salem Beer" are being put to three separate uses: as (ahem) the capital beginning each line, as the aggregate subject of each statement about beer's healing powers, and as a sort of bold-faced neon light for "Salem Beer" that signifies independent of the poem as it's printed vertically down the page. This is how an acrostic is supposed to work, right? It's a poetic form that exploits the tendencies of language to serve multiple purposes simultaneously and, in revealing embedded texts and encoded messages, encourages us to read against the page's grain if not between the lines.

Once licensed to read this way, readers will find the "Salem Beer" ad to be an unex- pectedly rich verbal habitat. For example, who can mistake that the first word one comes to when reading down the page is the "Sale" going on in "Salem"—a perfectly appropriate description of the result that the ad seeks to effect? In fact, the very alcoholic bevvie which is the subject of the local market transaction—ale—is itself embedded in the city's name, so that by the time the "M" in Salem finally comes around, the Salem Brewery Association has more or less encapsulated its core message in five letters: it's a sale on ale in Salem. Mind you, this sort of creative play in which meanings melt—or should it be malt?—into one another isn't unique to this ad. A more recent local movement to "Keep Salem Lame" has more or less read the city's name in the same way but to different results; just as the Brewery Association saw its product inherent in Oregon's capital, so some locals see the city's true identity there as well.

What we like even more about this ad, however, is the homonym for "ale"—that is, "ail"—which the acrostic poem itself takes up as the very problem for which Salem Beer is a purported remedy. Once we begin reading horizontally through the acrostic—with the grain—we come upon the healing powers that Salem Beer supposedly has: it invigorates, lends strength to the weak and wearied physique, is a cure for the nervous ills of life, restores people to full strength, etc. In short, Ale is the cure for what Ails you. It might strike some as a crazy claim for the Brewery Association to make, but in an age when alcohol was the primary ingredient in most patent medicines and snake oil cures, the mythical healing powers of alcohol were well embedded in the cultural psyche, not just in the word "Salem."

There's at least one more, likely uncon- scious, effect that the Brewery Associ- ation's acrostic would have had on its 1911 audience, however. As Leon Jackson reminds us in his awesome study The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (2008), acrostics were a popular "if juvenile, form of courtship poetry" in the antebellum U.S. It's no surprise, for example, that the 19th century advertising trade card pictured here—showing a dashing lad wooing his beloved by handing her a packet of B.T. Babbitt's soap—contains an acrostic on back (see below) constructed via the name of the company's flagship product "BT Babbitts Soap." That acrostic, titled "The Man" and extolling the virtues of the esteemed Mr. B.T. Babbitt himself, begins:

B right golden day, that ever gave
T he world a man who cared to save
B etimes the toil of womankind;
A man with an ingenious mind,
B estows a real gift to us,
B ecause experience proves it thus.

Capitalizing on the cultural association of acrostic poetry with courtship— an association that the illustration on the card is designed to trigger—Babbitt's Soap effectively casts the producer-consumer relationship as a romantic one and the act of shopping as a lovemaking endeavor more broadly. It may seem a stretch to say that the Salem Brewery Association is following in Babbitt's acrostic footsteps by sexing up the prospective buyer of Salem beer. But in its promise of "restor[ing] man to fulness of strength and activity," doesn't this beer ad sound a bit too much like a male sexual enhancement product to dismiss the notion out of hand?

Mind you, we here in the P&PC Office aren't saying that this weekend's beer festival promises anything of the sort. We're going simply for the "wholesome beverage" and "good fellowship." Why don't we all continue the conversation there?

Something to Chew On: Scary Babies, Big Tobacco

Poetry & Popular Culture came across this goody the other day and initially planned to save it for later. Impatience has gotten the best of us, though, and so here it is—a 19th-century advertising trade card for Duke's Durham tobacco that features two of the scariest babies we've ever seen. One of the most popular forms of advertising in the Gilded Age, trade cards advertised everything from soap and coffee to sewing machines and patent medicines—Harvard's Baker Library has a collection of 8,000 of them which you can search here if you're looking for something special—and were collected, individually and in series, in the scrapbooks and albums which Ellen Gruber Garvey studies in Chapter One of The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture 1880s to 1910s (1996). If you know anything about baseball cards, then you know they, too, like the card pictured here, were also used to advertise tobacco and, in some cases—as with the famous 1910 T206 Honus Wanger—are worth a lot of dough today.

Some of these trade cards were "metamorphic" in design, featuring folded giveaways that opened and shut, oftentimes to demonstrate and physicalize the "before-and-after" effects of a particular item. With these types of cards, consumers didn't have to imagine the transformative effects that a product would magically have on them but could actually see it happening. Many trade cards included poems and, as with the metamorphic card here, used those poems to narrate the transformation taking place. Closed, the card reads:

Heavens! What will keep these children quiet?
People grow crazy at the riot,
And bring them candy, cakes and pie,
The more they bring, the more they cry.

But, courtesy of the Duke and his long pipe, people have a solution waiting for them at the local general store. Open the card, find the smiling babies clutching their own tins of leafy goodness, and read:

What can have brought from tears relief,
And caused these infants thus to smile,
The reason is in words quite brief,
"DUKE'S DURHAM," will e'en babes beguile.

Over the years, of course, big tobacco has made numerous claims about the restorative, health or beauty-inducing qualities of their product, but P&PC has never seen tobacco producers go so far as to make a play for the nookie market—suggesting chew tobacco as the perfect chew toy to keep your toddler from, well, bawling its lungs out.

The Great Diagraphic Corset

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: John Strachan

Just when Poetry & Popular Culture thought it knew every poetry superstar who walked down the red carpet of popular culture, along comes John Strachan, professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sunderland and author of Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period. Okay, so we knew that Strachan was out there writing. A few years ago, we had occasion to talk about the comparative tonsorial poetics of early 19th-century England and mid 20th-century America, discovering the "barberous" verse connections between P&PC fave Burma-Shave and the British, Romantic-Era, New York City-based barber, poet, and master of self-promotion J.R.D. Huggins. And not too long ago we learned of Strachan's fondness for the poetry of late 18th-century pugilism. So he was on the office radar.

But nothing could have prepared us for Advertising and Satirical Culture in which Strachan walks seemingly straight out of the Romantic Era with the poetry of shoe blacking in one hand and the verse of bear-fat hair oil in the other. Bringing advertising jingles, parodies, and elaborate mock epics together with poetry and puffs written by the age's more recognizable literary figures—Byron, Coleridge, Crabbe, Dickens, Lamb, Wordsworth, and others—Strachan reconstructs an entire sphere of literary activity created and sustained not just by resourceful and ingenious copy writers but by canonical ones as well. Along the way, he manages to argue that some of what literary critics have long identified as the defining characteristics of "Romantic" writing—a focus on the individual, creativity, genius, originality, etc.—are, in fact, also defining characteristics of the age's advertising poetry. Popular poetry, he reveals, didn't have a monopoly on the commercial. And literary poetry, in turn, didn't have a monopoly on genius.

To go about showing this, Strachan spends two chapters surveying the landscape of advertising poetry and the responses it elicited among the literati. Advertisers not only quoted literary poetry in their puffs, but they imitated it, parodied it, and wrote all sorts of verses of their own as well. In turn, literary writers not only parodied advertising poetry to critique the excesses of commercial culture, but they found in such puffery what Strachan calls a set of "formal models for satire aimed elsewhere." That is, they borrowed the familiar, catchy, poetic discourse of advertising—and the figure of the shameless ad man—to critique a wide range of targets. Take, for example, Thomas Moore's 1826 squib lampooning two Tory figures (Poet Laureate Robert Southey and the editor of The New Times) by comparing them to snake oil salesman Dr. Eady (who hawked a surefire cure for syphilis):

Though many great Doctors there be,
There are three that all Doctors o'ertop,
Doctor Eady, that famous M.D.,
Doctor S-th-y, and dear Doctor Slop.
The purger—the proser—the bard—
All quacks in a different style;
Doctor S-th-y writes books by the yard,
Doctor Eady writes puffs by the mile!
Doctor Slop, in no merit outdone
By his scribbling or physicking brother,
Can dose us with stuff like the one,
Ay, and doze us with stuff like the other.

If Chapters 1 & 2 paint a picture of literary England in which advertising drove the writing of literature and literature drove the writing of poetic ads, then the remaining chapters in Strachan's book focus on advertising campaigns for individual products—shoe blacking, the national lottery, hair oils, and tonsorial services—and the responses those campaigns elicited. These are totally fun, sometimes hilarious chapters about the minutia of Romantic-Era life, but they also open a number of windows onto the politics (and poetics) of everyday life inherent in the most unassuming of consumer goods. Who would've thought, for example, that the period's great crinicultural debate—whether to use vegetable-fat hair oil or bear-fat hair oil—came about because of an emergency wartime tax on hair powder levied by William Pitt the Younger? To protest the tax, Pitt's political opponents began wearing their hair unpowdered, which understandably necessitated a need for some sort of gel, cream, spray, or mousse to help manage out-of-control locks. Hence the emergence of the hair-oil industry (and the eventual dissolution of the hair powder business) accompanied by an entire sub-genre of related verse. Consider Thomas Spence's "An Address to Mr. Pitt Accompanied by a Crop of Human Hair" which, Strachan explains, "defiantly declares that he is proud to wear his hair unpowdered, that he will be no 'guinea pig' (as those who paid the guinea tax were dismissively labeled) and that he hopes Pitt will slit his throat while shaving":

O Heaven-born minister of state,
This tail from off my swinish pate,
Most humbly I present it;
For since no powder may we wear,
Determin'd I've cut off my hair,
And to your honour sent it.

Know then vile Tory, I'm a Whig,
And will not be a Guinea pig,
To satisfy your craving;
Oh! that your razor would but slip
Three inches underneath your lip,
When you yourself are shaving.

A deadly gash I hope 'twould be,
To end your damn'd hypocrisy,
And rid us of a P-t.
A speedy peace I now pray for,
To finish this unlucky war,
Thus endeth my dull wit.

There's more where those stanzas come from, dear reader, so get your copy of Advertising and Satirical Culture today. Nine out of ten enthusiasts of poetry and popular culture recommend it.