Top Ten Roadside Rhymes

During its 2,200-mile relocation from Iowa City to Salem, Oregon—a cross- country trip that took us through Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington—the Poetry & Popular Culture office was once again struck by how inspirational the open road can be. As "Muse Road" which we had the pleasure of crossing in Connell, Washington, suggests, the American highway constantly gives rise to a poetry unlike any other—and we're not just talking about the phonemically and phonetically inventive moments in the tradition of the "Dew Drop Inn" that has spawned hotel names like the "SleepInn," "Snooze Inn," or even the "C'mon Inn" of Bozeman, Montana (pictured above). Nor are we talking about the entertaining slogan or frightening non-sequitor—like the message "Class A Unstable" we saw handwritten on the side of a rusted dumpster being carted overland by a semi truck with bright "Radioactive" signs affixed to its rear bumper.

No, on this trip West, we were struck by how much of the American roadside rhymes. Even though the great era of Burma-Shave billboard advertising is behind us, the open road and the commercial strip alike still manage to sustain an entire genre of micro-poetic communicative moments displaying a type of genius and banality all its own. Poetry & Popular Culture isn't the first to notice this ingenuity, of course. In Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, for example, Garrett Stewart notes the linguistic invention at the heart of highway-related business names such as FASTOP and automobile slogans that claim, for instance, to put the "'oomph!' back in the Triumph" sports car. Add to Stewart's examples other beauts such as car air fresheners scented "Vanillaroma," evangelical bumper stickers reading "JESUSAVES," and once-popular products such as Shellubrication, and we are easily reminded that the actual practice of America's highway poets has preceded its analysis by historians and critics by decades.

To shine a light on this art—and on this cast of restless rhymers pitching their wares to drivers speeding by at 65, 75, or 85 miles per hour— Poetry & Popular Culture has compiled a Top 10 list of the best and most interesting poetic moments it observed on its seven-state journey west. Over the next several days, we'll be ranking and posting about the poetry of tractors and testicles, campgrounds and convenience stores. To get things started, though, here are numbers 10-6. Tune in later for the P&PC-certified top five.

10. "Click it or Ticket" (nationwide).

Yes, it's familiar. Yes, it's a rhyme employed in the politics of restriction—both the belt strapping you in and the threat of the ticket forcing you to comply—but you've got to admit that the onomatopoeic double rhyme is superb, especially as the first of that double rhyme is accomplished via two words ("click it") while the second is realized by one word ("ticket"). P&PC is also fond of how the phonemic play (Stewart would call it "transegmental drifting") between "click it" and "or" creates a beast particular to the highway: the Clickitor. Arnold may be the Terminator, but you, dear driver driving safely, are the Clickitor.

9. "Gentle Dental" (Salem, Oregon).

It wasn't all hometown bias that landed this brand number 9 instead of 10. While "Gentle Dental" displays some of the same alveolar consonants as "Click it or Ticket," it also puns on that precise phonetic event (the t-sound), which is often mistakenly called "dental" since the tongue appears to touch the teeth. That meta-linguistic pun salvaged an otherwise weak or predictable rhyme, not to mention the misinformation campaign that any dental work can in fact be considered gentle.

8. Ditch Witch (Nebraska).

Not only a memorable phrase, Ditch Witch is an entire brand of "digging system" products ranging from trenchers and plows to piercing tools and rod pushers. ("It'll suck the whatever right out of the whatever," one slogan claims.) While "Click it or Ticket" offers a warning and "Gentle Dental" a description, "Ditch Witch" gets a bit more sophisticated, as the word "ditch" can be initially heard as an imperative verb or as a modifier for "witch." Moreover, the double signification of "ditch" encourages us to hear the "which" in "witch," making for a sonically rich two syllables that "won't stop working until you do."

7. Tower Power (Wyoming).

This Union Wireless slogan may not have the phonetic ambiguity of a "ditch witch," but its double rhyme and phallic resonance won us over in a close call. Were we to come across "Tower Power" in, say, Rhode Island, it might not even have made this list. But, um, erected as it was in Wyoming—not far from the Grand Tetons—the advertisement seemed to sum up not just the wireless game, but the philosophy of the entire state itself.

6. Kamp Dakota: Camp with Pride Nationwide (Wyoming).

Okay, so "Camp with Pride Nationwide" isn't a particularly awesome bit of poetic innovation unless Kamp Dakota is aligning itself with gay pride and announcing itself as the place to really, well, camp out. But in addition to the ad's delightful, if unintentional, secondary and tertiary meanings, we had to admire (or fear) the mind with enough chutzpah spell the word "camp" two different ways in a single highway announcement. It's almost a self-conscious enough of a move, in fact, to make us believers.

So that's the first five. Tune in tomorrow or the next day for the completion of Poetry & Popular Culture's "Top Ten Roadside Rhymes." And if you have a personal favorite that hasn't made the list? By all means, speed it along.

Burma-Shave Politics

Many thanks to Angela Sorby, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and author of Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917, for alerting "Poetry & Popular Culture" to a recent tidbit at the Onion. In "McCain Blasts Obama As Out Of Touch In Burma-Shave-Style Billboard Campaign," the Onion depicts this year's Republican presidential candidate as being out of touch via an old-style advertising medium: the serial billboard poem made famous by the Burma-Vita Company's "Burma-Shave" campaign which dotted American highways from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Loved by Americans ranging from my mother-in-law to Gertrude Stein (who, in Everybody's Autobiography wrote "I wish I could remember more of them, they were all lively and pleasing.... I wish I could remember them I liked them so much”), the Burma-Shave signs have been called part of "the national vocabulary" and have been installed in the Smithsonian Institution as relics of our 20th Century past. At the height of the Burma-Shave campaign, over 7,000 sets of signs using 600 individual poems were maintained in 44 states and were seen by untold numbers of drivers. It’s possible that through the 1920s, the Depression, World War II, and the 1950s, Burma-Shave’s poems were the most public, widely read verse in America.

What the Onion doesn't suggest—in cartooning McCain as outta date—is how the model Burma-Vita pioneered is, in fact, still used as part of political campaigns today. Drive through central Illinois, and you'll see signs made by locals lambasting gun-control advocates or promoting soy bio-diesel as an alternative fuel. Four years ago, in my own town of Iowa City, several neighbors along Muscatine Avenue pitched in to post poetic signs in their yards supporting the presidential campaign of Howard Dean. Those signs read:

Feeling Bushed?
Lost your grin?
Cheer up folks:
The Doctor's In.
Caucus for Howard Dean.

And in 1996—so Bill Vossler reports in his history of the advertising campaign Burma-Shave: The Rhymes, the Signs, the Times—rhymster Republicans in Washington, D.C., experimented with serial anti-Clinton billboards to pitch that year's ticket:

If you’re tired of a White House
That’s always smokin’ hemp
Vote for our future
Vote Dole-Kemp!

This was not the first time that Bob Dole associated himself with Burma-Shave verse. For the 1990 reissue of Frank Rowsome Jr.'s book The Verse By the Side of the Road: The Story of the Burma-Shave Signs and Jingles (first published in 1965), Dole was asked to write a Foreword that concluded with his own original five-line ditty:

In politics
It's always safer
Not to make waves
It's not my style
I've had some close shaves

Not the best imitation of Burma-Shave poetry, to be sure. But what's worth noting—and what bodes well (or bards well?) for Barack Obama in 2008—is that, despite the billboard poets having their backs, neither Dean nor the Dole/Kemp ticket were successful in their presidential bids. That's not to say that "Poetry & Popular Culture," uh, bristles at the thought of Obama using poetry in his campaign. Just that he shouldn't at this point get cheeky.