The Poetry of Hogan's Goat Pizza

As you know, P&PC has a vast network of lookouts, helping hands, affiliates, fellow travelers, and owl-eyed spotters scouring the American landscape for material so that we can bring you your weekly fix and simultaneously try, in our own little way, to goad on the members of that school of poetry-think that perpetuates the myth (as William Logan did this past Sunday in the New York Times) that poetry is "loathed by many." Indeed! Well, if we here at P&PC try to goad 'em on, then the menu (pictured here) at Hogan's Goat Pizza of 5222 NE Sacramento in Portland, Oregon, could be said to take a more hircine approach to the issue.

We got the menu (not the pizza and definitely not the goat) hand-delivered from our friend Cheryl before she left Salem for the more enticing climes of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She'd been hanging out with all the hipsters in Portland (many of whom apparently model their facial hair after the billy pictured on the menu). She'd gotten hungry. She stopped by Hogan's Goat Pizza for a pie and, like probably everyone else, wondered who was Hogan and what was a goat pizza.

Well, Cheryl didn't have far to look for a partial answer, as the first panel inside the menu's cover explains that "Hogan's Goat" comes from a nineteenth-century song. (For one version of the song, click here.) Here are the lyrics as the menu (pictured below) presents them, complete with capitalization and punctuation issues:

Old Hogan's Goat ... Was feeling fine ... He
ate my shirts right off the line ... I took a
stick ... And broke his back ... And tied him
to a railroad track ... A speeding train ...
Came speeding by ... Old Hogan's Goat was
sure to die ... He gave a shriek ... A shriek of
pain ... Coughed up the shirts and FLAGGED
DOWN THE TRAIN!'

When we first saw this version of "Hogan's Goat," we didn't think it was a song—right?—since the pizza joint didn't print it, as song lyrics are traditionally printed, in lines and stanzas. Rather, Hogan's Goat Pizza printed it to look like a "poemulation"—the term that Sinclair Lewis used to describe the verses written by fake newspaper poet T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink in the novel Babbitt (1922), verses that were formatted to look like prose but rhymed like poetry. While Lewis may have coined the term, we're pretty sure he didn't invent the form. Among the poemulation's most esteemed and prolific practitioners was James Metcalfe, who, in the 1940s and 1950s (after his career in the FBI), penned hundreds of 'em for Chicago's newspaper The Times. (You can find lots of Metcalfe's poemulations preserved in old poetry scrapbooks.)

Before Metcalfe, and as early as 1912, "Uncle" Walt Mason of Emporia, Kansas, was publishing poemulations as well (many of which also found their way into poetry scrapbooks; you can check out nearly two hundred pages of Mason's poemulations here). And, as we discussed back in 2009 in relation to a discussion in Virginia Jackson's book Dickinson's Misery, it's quite possible that Emily Dickinson could be said to have written in poemulation form before the Civil War—around the same time ... wait for it ... that the lyrics for "Hogan's Goat" were being written.

So what's the upshot of all this? Well, for starters, it's possible that "Hogan's Goat" was a poemulation before it was a song. And if it wasn't a poemulation first, well, it now is—at least in the version that Hogan's Goat Pizza prints in the menu. In fact, when Cheryl delivered the menu to the P&PC Office, she delivered what she thought was in fact a poem; she'd skipped over the restaurant's introductory words that insist on calling it a "song" even though it isn't, and she let the rhyming and lack of musical accompaniment direct her reading of it as the poem—er, poemulation—it is. She may not have loved it as much as the pizza (which she said was excellent, btw). But she certainly didn't "loathe" it as William Logan says poetry is "loathed by many." Nope. We in the P&PC Office suspect that if there's any loathing going on in the poetry world, it's not among non-readers of poetry but among poets and critics like Logan who are bound and determined to imagine that the rest of the world somehow has the spare energy to loathe what they in particular do. Indeed, if they'd just adjust their definition of what a "poem"—even a poemulation—might be, we think they'd be a lot happier. Less narcissistic, perhaps. But happier.

Getting the News from Citizen Kane

As written and played by Orson Welles in the 1941 classic that many people judge to be the greatest movie ever made, the life of Charles Foster Kane begins and ends with poetry. The first and probably most memorable instance comes in the newsreel coverage of Kane's death that follows the film's opening "Rosebud" sequence, where Kane's estate is compared to Xanadu of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Coleridge's lines, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree," appear onscreen a la title card and are followed by a series of scenes of Kane's luxurious estate with a voice-over reading:

Legendary was the Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. Today, almost as legendary is Florida's Xanadu, world's largest private pleasure grounds. Here on the deserts of the Gulf Coast, a private mountain was commissioned and successfully built...

What's interesting about this "News on the March" voice-over is that the narrator actually misquotes the original "Kubla Khan," untangling the inverted syntax of Coleridge's line ("a stately pleasure dome decree") only to replace it with the inverted syntax of the news ("Legendary was the Xanadu"). This spectacular moment not only has the effect of turning the news into poetry and poetry into prose—a totally fitting twist for the newspaperman's obituary—but also, in introducing two ways of saying the Coleridge poem, figures the conflicted narratives at the center of Kane's tragic life: a man who could afford to buy anything but who wanted what money couldn't buy; a man who was a success in business but not in life, etc.

We encounter poetry a second time when we first meet Kane at the beginning of his career—a young man, played by Welles, in the office of the New York Inquirer, that feisty, rag-tag daily which gave Kane his start in the newspaper biz. In this scene (pictured below), Kane is no longer the young boy (Buddy Swan) playing in the snow out West and being removed to parts East for a proper upbringing, but a cocksure, idealistic underdog using his paper, in good Progressive-Era muckraking fashion, to root out corporate fraud and advocate on behalf of the poor. Kane's former guardian, Walter Thatcher (George Coulouris) of the legal firm Thatcher & Company, comes to see Kane to protest what he sees as the Inquirer's unfair coverage of these and other items and, while Thatcher's there, Kane is brought a telegram by personal business manager, Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane). Bernstein doesn't want to read the cable aloud, but Kane insists. Here's that passage:

Kane: We have no secrets from our readers, Mr. Bernstein. Mr. Thatcher is one of our most devoted readers. He knows what's wrong with every copy of the Inquirer since I took over. Read the cable.

Bernstein (reading): GIRLS DELIGHTFUL IN CUBA STOP COULD SEND YOU PROSE POEMS ABOUT SCENERY BUT DONT FEEL LIKE SPENDING YOUR MONEY STOP THERE IS NO WAR IN CUBA. Signed Wheeler. Any answer?

Kane: Yes: "Dear Wheeler, You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war."

Bernstein: That's fine, Mr. Kane.

Kane: Yes, I rather like it myself.

As we've mentioned before—via the "poem- ulations" of Emily Dickinson, Chum Frink, and James Metcalfe—prose poetry was no stranger to the daily news, but here Welles is actually leaving those poems unwritten; if the movie transformed news into poetry and poetry into prose early on, here it intervenes to prevent poetic composition in the first place, once again rewriting the poet as the newspaper editor, with the exception that both now deal in prose rather than in the verse of "Kubla Khan." Furthermore, it is Kane's news service that's granted power to make and create, able to conjure up wars (or pleasure domes) where none exist—a capability once associated with poetry and of particular concern to "Kubla Khan." In a sense, Kane takes the modernist cry to "Make it new!" and rewrites it as, "Make it news!"

In "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," William Carlos Williams famously wrote, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems..." People have offered all sorts of reasons why that might or might not be the case, but Citizen Kane offers us yet another possibility: that people do in fact get the news from poems, and part of that news is that American newspapers are the new poetry. From the perspective of 2010, by which point in time both poetry and newspapers have been pronounced dead or dying, that's one Xanadu, perhaps, that even Samuel Taylor Coleridge's mythical bard couldn't call back.