Guest Posting: "Searching for Edgar Guest," by Victor Hess

Editor's Note: The following posting—about one person's thirty-year-long quest for a single poem—comes from our old acquaintance Victor Hess (pictured here) of Slidell, Louisiana. Before you read about Hess's search, though, let us first fill you in on a little backstory. Nearly a decade ago, P&PC was an eBay junkie, buying up almost every old poetry scrapbook we could get our hands on as we went about assembling the archive that would form the basis for Chapter One of Everyday Reading. (You may remember some of our meditations on our purchases here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) 

Back then, we were in graduate school, and we were poor. That was okay, though, because at the time no one was much interested in poetry scrapbooks, and we could land 'em easily with little or no competition and frequently for less than a five-spot—with one exception. Every now and again, the same someone would bid against us (this was back when eBay bidders were publicly identified by their user names), upping the bid beyond what a poor li'l ol' grad student could afford and leaving us sad and empty-handed but most of all curious. Who was this mysterious collector? Was there someone else writing about poetry scrapbooks? Had we found a potential new friend and colleague? So we did what any poor li'l ol' grad student would do. We sent an email asking who, why, and why not. Read on, dear readers, for the rest of the story.

Searching for Edgar Guest

by Victor Hess

My best friend Alan unfolded an old newspaper clipping in our seventh grade science class. "Read this," he said.

It was a poem. I read the title. "Stick to the Job."

"It was my Dad's favorite."

It was about never giving up, not compromising for the easy dollar. It was about finishing your work and working hard because there may be someone out there working harder. I liked the poem and handed it back to Alan. "That’s cool."

"Keep it. You should have it."

"Naww. This is yours. Your Dad gave this to you."

"It's okay. He gave me other stuff. You keep it."

I didn't have the first thing from my dad. He lived fifteen miles away from us and visited me all of twice a year. Here I was feeling special about a newspaper clipping some other dad gave his son who wasn't me. This poem was special.

I kept it in my billfold like a treasure. In the following years of my careers as a paper boy, a grocery clerk, a real estate clerk, a college student, and a poverty worker, it was there. Sometimes I even followed its advice.

But in 1969 Uncle Sam drafted me into the army, and my poem became missing in action. After the army, I became a realtor, married, had children, moved from Xenia, Ohio, to New Orleans, stayed in sales, watched my kids grow, and then moved to Dallas, and, for twenty years, the poem was out of my mind.

I can't tell you why, but when my sons were twelve and thirteen, I wanted to share that poem with them. I couldn't remember most of it. I could only remember how it made me feel when I was their age.

I did recall three lines: "Keep this in mind from day to day, / Success is just as close to you / As to some toiler far away." I couldn't remember the title any longer, but the poet was Edgar Guest. I stayed awake at night trying to recall the rest of the poem. It meant so much then, and now its absence was magnifying its worth. It had its hold on me. I needed to find that poem.

My search started at Half Price books where I found a small book written by Guest called Harbor Lights of Home. The store clerk told me Guest was syndicated in over 200 newspapers and had written over 11,000 poems. The book I bought had 129 poems in it—but not my poem.

"Good luck," he said.

During the next two decades, I purchased every Guest book I could find through book stores and eBay and Ex Libris and AbeBooks and then started buying people's scrapbooks if they included clippings of Guest's poetry.

I would read some of the poems like "Success" or "Time" or "It Takes a Heap o' Livin' to Make a House a Home" at the dinner table. "That’s nice, Dad," the boys would say as they left the table rolling their eyes.

My wife Melva and I moved back to Louisiana once the kids were grown, and in 2006 I received an email from a guy bidding against me on one of the scrapbooks on eBay. "I don’t want the scrapbook," he wrote. "I just want to scan it. I'm studying how poetry has become embedded in everyday American life and culture."

I agreed to send him all my scrapbooks to scan. I told him the details of my twenty-year quest for this one particular poem, and he said he would keep a lookout for it.

When he returned the scrapbooks, he included a DVD full of scans of not just my scrapbooks but others he had managed to borrow or buy.

He had found so many scrapbooks that it took weeks for me to study his scans, but my poem was not there. It was hopeless. After all, who spends thirty years of his life looking for a stupid poem? I gave up.

Two years later, on November 20, 2008, I received another email from the guy who had scanned the scrapbooks: "Hi Vic, I'm still keeping a lookout for the poem you want to find. Recently I happened to ask a librarian in Cincinnati if he'd look for your poem. He did, and his results suggest the poem may have been published in the Lincoln Star in 1930 or the Connellsville Courier in 1964. Perhaps this is a lead you can use. Hoping you're well. Best, Mike Chasar." I had given up, but Mike had not.

Within minutes, I had subscribed to newspaperarchives.com, and found my poem (see below). I sent an email back to Mike, thanking him. Then I sent one to my sons, who were in their 30s, repeating to them the story I've just told here.

My sons don’t keep that poem in their billfold, but maybe they passed it on to someone else—just like my friend Alan did over fifty years ago.

Back to School with Anne Campbell

A little less than a year back, P&PC wrote a piece about Edgar Guest, the longtime poet of the Detroit Free Press who published a poem in that paper seven days a week for thirty years. The national syndication of his verse made Guest (pictured here) a household name, got him dubbed the "people's poet," turned him into a popular speaker, and made him a very rich man even if it didn't secure him a place in scholarly histories of American poetry. Indeed, after mentioning Guest as part of a Modernist Studies Association panel a few years back, a P&PC affiliate happened to run into a prominent poet-critic in the airport and, in making small talk about the panel while waiting for their flights, said poet-critic confessed that, until our affiliate's talk, he'd never even heard of Guest. (By contrast, our P&PC affiliate's mother-in-law owned several of Guest's books before she moved out of the family house and into a retirement home; when our affiliate opened them while helping with the move, other poems by Guest that she'd clipped from newspapers and magazines and stored between the pages came fluttering out.)

If the poet-critic just mentioned had never heard of Guest, it's probably safe to say that he's never heard of Anne Campbell either—the poet whom the Detroit News hired in 1922 to better compete with the Free Press. Called "Eddie Guest's Rival" by Time and "The Poet of the Home" by her publicity agents, Campbell would go on to write a poem a day six days a week for twenty-five years, producing over 7,500 poems whose international syndication reportedly earned her up to $10,000 per year (that's about $140,000 adjusted for inflation, folks), becoming a popular speaker in her own right, and proving that neither the Free Press nor Guest could corner the market on popular poetry. Indeed, a 1947 event marking her silver anniversary at the News drew 1,500 fans including Detroit's mayor and the president of Wayne State University.

We've been thinking a lot about Campbell lately. For starters, P&PC has been working on an essay about women's poetry and popular culture for the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, and Campbell's clearly a central part of that history. Then we had the awesomely good fortune of meeting Campbell's granddaughter, who's been very helpful in sketching out some of the details of Campbell's life. Anne was born in rural Michigan on June 19, 1888, possibly finished high school, married the Detroit News writer and future Detroit city historian George W. Stark when she was twenty-seven, had three children, performed and recorded regularly with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra doing readings during intermissions in the 1930s, read on local and national radio, was active with the March of Dimes, and with George was a fixture of Detroit's cultural life and friends, of course, with Guest. She published her first poem (where else, right?) in the Free Press when she was ten, won a state prize for a Memorial Day story and poem when she was fourteen, was first paid for her poetry when she was seventeen, gave a popular talk called "Everyday Poetry" on the Lyceum circuit, and published at least five books of poems (one co-written with George). (For a bunch of blurbs and publicity materials about her, check out the pamphlets here and here.) She died in 1984.

But we've also been thinking about Campbell because it's back-to-school season, and, along with a new Trapper Keeper, new gym shoes, and a spectacular new pencil box, we just purchased the card pictured here, which features Campbell's poem "Visitin' the School" and is identified as "A Souvenir of Anne Campbell's Visit to Your School, Compliments of The Detroit News." (The back of the card is blank, btw, but it has glue marks on its four corners, suggesting that someone saved it in his or her poetry scrapbook; in fact, we've seen entire poetry scrapbooks dedicated to collecting nothing but Campbell's poems.)

Here's "Visitin' the School":

Oh, dear, I feel like sich a fool
When folks come visitin' the school.
I never git my problems well,
An' jist can’t read an' write and spell.

When teacher asts me to recite,
Although I try with all my might,
I feel the red burn in my cheek,
An' my throat swells so I can't speak.

My both knees shake an' sweat rolls down.
An' nen when I see teacher's frown,
I git so scared, I wish fur fair
That I was any place but there.

When I git big an' have a boy
I' goin' to make his life all joy.
No matter what the teacher's rule,
I'll not go visitin' the school! 

It's an odd little poem, isn't it? It's kitschy in a way that Daniel Tiffany's recent book My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch can help us to understand, and although the second and third stanzas don't disclose the exact content of the recitation, they nevertheless call most readily to our mind the history of poetry memorization and recitation that Catherine Robson takes up in Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem; seen this way, "Visitin' the School" is thus a poem about poetry.

But under the cover of innocence—the kitchiness, the schoolroom, the slightly baby-talk language, the rudimentary rhymes, etc.—we here in the P&PC Office think Campbell's poem's got something more going on. Noteworthy for how it doesn't assign a gender to teacher, student, or classroom visitor (thus making a role in the child's predicament available to all students, teachers, and classroom visitors), "Visitin' the School" is super concerned with the subject of reproduction: 1) whether or not the child's oral expression can be reproduced in print; 2) whether or not the child can faithfully reproduce what "teacher asts me to recite"; 3) how the child will "git big an' have a boy"; 4) and, ultimately, how the child vows to not reproduce the cultural practice of "visitin' the school."

Locating a voice of protest and dissent in the child—the weak, scared, young, and nearly voiceless ("my throat swells so I can't speak") subject put under pressure by multiple forms of surveillance—Campbell's poem becomes unexpectedly politicized, questioning, rather than confirming, the legitimacy of normative educational practices. If we do not hear this protest, it's not because it's not there, but because we who teach and visit classrooms at all levels fail to afford its apparently rudimentary poetic expression—by someone who "jist can't read an' write and spell"—the seriousness it deserves. As school begins, and as many of us may feel moved to lament the poor writing skills our students bring with them, that's a lesson worth keeping in mind.

"A Winter Mountain" by Benjamin Walton (1973)

Remembering The New Northwest, Part IV: "Paddy's New Idea"

About two years ago, P&PC ran a three-part series, "Remembering The New Northwest," that spent some time thinking about the poetry published in the suffragist newspaper started in 1871 by Oregon women's rights leader Abigail Scott Duniway. (That's Duniway with a copy of her paper pictured here.) Now digitized, The New Northwest ran poetry—some political, some not so overtly political, some written by Willamette Valley poets, and some sourced from other papers across the United States—in nearly every issue, frequently printing it not as filler between articles but as prominent page-one news (cf. "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower").

Although many people today think of the history of Pacific Northwest poetry more in relation to writers from the second half of the twentieth century like William Stafford, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, and others, the region's poetic tradition goes back much earlier—back, at least, to when Duniway's weekly began offering a way for disparate (and oftentimes anonymous) Northwest voices to find a community of people reading and writing under the paper's motto "Free Speech, Free Press, Free People."

The year 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in Oregon—a centennial being commemorated statewide in events chronicled, sponsored, or otherwise linked to the Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote 1912-2012 project. And so, in helping to mark this anniversary, P&PC has directed its current crop of interns to dip back into the poetic archives of The New Northwest. In 2010, we showcased "The Perplexed Housekeeper" and "Don't Quarrel About the Farm," and we argued that Samuel Simpson's once popular and now much maligned nature poem "The Beautiful Willamette" got converted into a suffragist poem by virtue of its appearance in Duniway's paper.

Now, for the fourth installment of "Remembering The New Northwest," we bring you Stephen Maybell's problematic suffragist poem "Paddy's New Idea," which ran in late January or early February of 1872. (Due to some haphazard records kept by a former P&PC office member, as well as several missing issues in the otherwise spectacular digitized run, we are unable to pinpoint the exact publication date at this time.) Maybell was a regular contributor to the paper, and, we think, one of its most consistently interesting if troublesome voices. Here—in an Irish dialect, in two voices, and referring to the Democratic Party's post-Civil War New Departure political platform as well as to the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870—is "Paddy's New Idea":

PADDY:

"Och! Biddy, did ye hear the news,
How politics has got the blues,
Turned upside down and inside out?
Bedad, one don’t know what he's 'bout
When he goes votin'."

"Shure once 'twas plain Democrisy;
Now 'New Departure' troubles ye.
With Ku Klux Klan and Loyal Laygers,
We're no better than the others
Whin we go votin'."

"Shure things ain't things at all of late;
The Pope and Boney's bald pate;
And, faix, I heard Mullroony say
The Chinese'id take Amerikay
By beatin' us a votin'."

"Shure, Chinese, nagurs and the Injun
All can vote without infringin',
For the new 'mendment gives, 'tis clare,
To everything with skin and hair
The power to go votin'."

BIDDY:

"Spite of all the clergy's prachin',
Spite of all old fogy teachin',
I always knew a woman's head
Held brains, no matter what they said –
Aye, brains enough for votin'."

"Oh, Paddy, darlint, whin wid me
It's then you are sobriety;
It only is when ye're away
Ye go upon the bastely sprae,
Dead blind drunk wid votin'."

"It's brains ye may have in your head,
And wit and all that may be said;
Though kin intelligence vote right
Whin that intelligence is tight?
Whisky doin' the votin'?"

"Last election whiskey won it;
Ye's all drunk upon it;
Your polls were held at whiskey mills,
Your candidates run whiskey stills,
And whisky did the votin'."

"Now, had the ladies been adjacent
Ye'd tried and been a little dacent.
Would it not be the nation’s gains
Were whiskey less and more were brains
To do Columbia’s votin'?"

"So, Paddy, whin we can do so,
We'll arm in arm together go
To cast our vote in freedom's pride,
And say who shall tax our fire-side,
FREE MEN AND FREE WOMEN!"

PADDY:

"Shure, Biddy, this caps all the bother
For maid, wife, sister, mother;
Say, if kind to pagan misters,
Why not kind also to sisters
And let them go votin'?"

"This is liberty's dominion,
The boasted land of free opinion,
And if free men are but true men,
Why not make you a free woman
And let you go, too, to votin'?"

While the dialect-facilitated rhyme of the words "adjacent" and "dacent" is totally pleasing, "Paddy's New Idea" is never- theless a puzzling and complex poem—especially as it depicts the nature of the "lightbulb moment" when Paddy makes the right decision to support women's suffrage but makes that decision for the wrong reasons.

As the slurs in Paddy's catalog of ethnic others ("Chinese, nagurs and the Injun") suggest, the poem serves to remind us that not all progressive political agendas go hand in hand. That much we know and have known, not only generally but specifically in relation to the movement for women's suffrage, which was stressed from the inside by racist rhetoric, agendas, and policies that distinguished between, and divided, white women and women of color.

What "Paddy's New Idea" offers in addition to this, however, is a demonstra- tion of how, at least from the vantage point of history, a progressive political stance can be founded upon a logic that is not, in fact, progressive. That is, while Paddy comes to see the light (that women should vote) in the final two stanzas of the poem, he not only doesn't acknowledge the legitimacy of Biddy's arguments about how women have "brains enough for votin'" and could help reform the drunken culture of voting in the Northwest, but he makes his decision on the basis of a nativist and racist political logic that fears, and seeks to curtail, the new voting power of Chinese, African American, and American Indian men named in stanzas three and four. For Paddy, enfranchising women has less to do with women's rights than with finding a way to come up with extra votes to counter and overwhelm newly enfranchised social groups whom he perceives as threatening to "take Amerikay / By beatin' us a votin'." A similar argument for women's suffrage was used in the American south, where suffragists appealed to white southern men by claiming that larger numbers of white women going to the polls would work to keep black men from gaining power.

We think there's even more at work in "Paddy's New Idea" than this, however —an extra-extra dimension to how Paddy instrumentalizes the women's suffrage movement to accomplish something other than the enfranchisement of women. In fact, that added dimension is suggested all over the poem, right there in the Irish dialect that should remind us how, in the nineteenth-century U.S., the Irish weren't necessarily considered "white" but racially other; that is, many Americans—perhaps cued in part by the drunken stereotype that Biddy evokes in her part of the poem—would would have been inclined to include "Irish" alongside "Chinese, nagurs and the Injun" in Paddy's catalog from stanza four. In her famous essay "The Yellow Wallpaper and the Politics of Color in America," for example, Susan Lanser traces in part how the adjective "yellow" referred in daily discourse not solely to peoples of Asian heritage but to a range of ethnicities and races including the Irish. Consider also the cartoon pictured here (taken from from the mainstream periodical Harper's Weekly), which depicts the Irish (on the left) as more similar to the "Negro" (on the right), with the "Anglo Teutonic" in the middle.

The "whitening" of the Irish is thus a fascinating and complex history that includes, but is hardly limited to, the color of skin, and we here at P&PC think that "Paddy's New Idea" gives us one of the many plot points in that history. For if Maybell's character of Paddy sees women's suffrage as a way to counter the voting power of newly enfranchised people of color, he also finds in its occasion for nativist performance a way to distinguish himself from other people of color and thus affiliate himself with whiteness. That is, in this "lightbulb" moment wherein he embraces one progressive political agenda (women's suffrage) only to simultaneously embrace—and recruit Biddy for—an unprogressive political agenda (the project of white supremacy), Paddy demonstrates solidarity with white America and thus works to whiten the Irish in the process. In a sense, then, we can do worse than to read Paddy's moment of political "enlightenment" as a moment of political "en-whitenment" as well.

We are left, therefore, at the end of "Paddy's New Idea," to wonder what, exactly, the singular "new idea" of the poem's title refers to. That women should have the right to vote? That voting women are a viable political weapon to leverage against the votes of people of color? Or that Paddy can use this occasion to demonstrate, and even establish solidarity with, white America? We here at P&PC are going on record to say that Paddy's Machiavellian new idea is not any one of the above, but that he can do all three at once.

William Stafford's Birthday

During January of 2010, more than 40 events across the United States—and 22 in the Portland area alone— commem- orated the birthday of poet and longtime Lake Oswego resident William Stafford (January 17, 1914-August 28, 1993). Organized primarily by various Friends of William Stafford, these events featured poetry readings, lectures, recollections and—in Lake Oswego, at least, where Poetry & Popular Culture was invited to take part in the fun emceed by Oregon poet and urban planner Scot Siegel—carrot cake and punch.

P&PC gave what Siegel called a "mini sermon" titled "William Stafford's Evergreens" about some of the poetry that Stafford published in newspapers over the course of his life, especially "The War Season" which he wrote in 1945 while doing alternative service work as a Conscientious Objector in Elgin, Illinois. Here is "The War Season":

The birds that winter blew past our yard
feathered along so young
that only the trees could follow their wings
or understand their tongue.

The north wind blew. Limbs bent down.
Leaves fell over the lawn.
The birds one day were young in the sky;
the next day they were gone.

Curiously, while Stafford noted in his manuscript records of "The War Season" that the poem was "Published in The Oregonian in about 1948," none of the P&PC interns can actually find it there, making us wonder about the sad fact that "The War Season" could be relevant in 1945 before World War Two ended, in 1948 three years after the war had ended, and today. Here's what we concluded:

We are always, as the poet Barrett Watten has said in his book Bad History, living in "the era between two wars," and so the evergreen poem, "The War Season," is always timely. Whether it's 1945, 1948, or 2010, it's always War Season, and the fact that Stafford's verse could have been perfectly relevant during the war, after the war in the "era between two wars," or today, is "The War Season"'s sadness, tragedy, and, ultimately, the moral and ethical critique the poem is after. Stafford, the Conscientious Objector, knew—feared, protested—the fact that it's always War Season. And so the date that he wrote on his manuscript copy of "The War Season"—the date that threw librarians, archivists, and myself off track—is not only not wrong, but perhaps not right enough, as it could have been published in The Oregonian "in about 2010" as well. This is one of the reasons—an unfortunate reason, yes, but one nonetheless—why Stafford stays relevant to us today.

For more on Stafford, check out the William Stafford Archives at Lewis and Clark College. See you around the punch bowl in 2011?

Limbaugh to Judge Miss America Pageant

—Appeared in the Salem Statesman-Journal November 1, 2009

The studio is quiet now.
The staff has all clocked out.
The issues have been flogged to death.
There's no room left for doubt.

He turns the "On Air" sign to "Off."
The microphone is too.
Yet he stays in his seat and thinks.
There's still work left to do.

He judges right and wrong all day,
heroically and hurried.
But judging a beauty pageant leaves him,
frankly, rather worried.

For what does he know of beauty—
of fields of stars or flowers?
He is the star, fielding incoming calls
every day for hours.

He deals with pageantry all the time.
He's got some talent there.
He practices his scowl and then
a very studied stare.

Whatever You Wish To Give: The Popular Culture of Carriers' Addresses in the 19th Century

When people refer to "carriers' addresses," they usually mean the 19th century New Year's poem-greetings delivered to people's doorsteps by newspaper printers' devils—apprentices who usually were not paid for their work—who were seeking a tip to help pay their room and board for the coming year. These were (typically) clever, sometimes fairly lengthy poems summarizing the previous year's events, often authored by the printers' devils themselves, and frequently ended with an appeal to the homeowner such as the following from an 1870 address "To the Patrons of The Daily Picayune" in New Orleans:

From the fulness of your cheer,
Give to him a little share,
To lighten burdens he must bear—
And may those blessings held most dear,
Be yours throughout the glad New Year,
Gladdening your days forever here,
the Carrier prays.

For more carriers' addresses, see the very nice exhibit hosted by Brown University at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/carriers/index.html. Also check out Leon Jackson's "We Won't Leave Until We Get Some: Reading the newsboy's New Year's address" at http://www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-02/reading/.

But in the 19th century, printers' devils weren't the only ones carrying poems around. Take, for example, the postcard reproduced above: "A Railroad Boy's Appeal." Crippled in an accident, the card's bearer is now selling his "song" to sympathetic passengers or passers-by. The poem concludes:

And now, dear friends, I'm as you see
Poor, helpless and alone;
No other way to buy a limb—
Will you please buy my song?
And may God bless you all,
This is my heart-felt-prayer;
And by-and-by may we all meet
In realms just over there.

Signed "C.E.H.," the postcard has a footer that reads "PRICE.—Whatever you wish to give."

In the more elaborate broadside pictured to the left, "The Wounded Soldier's Appeal," bearer David Gingry, Jr. relates how he was permanently wounded while fighting for the Confederate side in the Civil War. Lest there be any misinterpretation while reading the poem, however, the piece begins with a little prose testimony: "The undersigned, a brave soldier of the army of the Potomac, asks the aid of the people to enable him to support A WIFE AND FIVE CHILDREN, who have no other means of subsistence. He lost his left hand at Petersburg, besides being wounded in his other arm, in his right leg and in the head. Being so crippled, therefore, he is unable to do the day's work of an ordinary laboring man, and the only means left to him to make an honorable living is in selling the following original poem, which he hopes all will be kind enough to buy. He is commended to the generosity of the public generally."

That "original poem" reads, in part:

And, shot in arm, in leg, in head,
In that most fearful, bloody fray,
And left upon the field for dead,
Was he who asks your aid to-day.

But, thanks to God! he lives to see
His wife and children once again,
Though to that wife and children he
Is more a burthen than a gain.

His hand is gone; and thus to aid
Those loved ones in their day of trial,
He sells this little serenade,
And hopes to meet with no denial.

Printed in Altoona, Pennsylvania, the broadside is priced "Ten Cents Each Side." The reverse, in a humorous gesture at a little con, is blank.

Both of these pieces are "carriers' addresses" of a different sort than the ones originating with newspapers; instead of recounting the events of the past year, they recount the bearer's story. Both types stand to remind us of the popular portability that poetry offered before the "slim volume" and "little magazine" became default media for poems. Is there an equivalent today?

My Poetic License - An Introduction

In March of 2006, Iowa City's daily newspaper, The Press-Citizen, began printing poems on its Op-Ed page as part of a regular feature called "Poetic License." Hearkening back to a time 50-150 years ago when American newspapers regularly ran poems that explicitly engaged the day's news, "Poetic License" encouraged its contributors - yours truly among them - to be as topical, occasional and political as the best letters to the editor, and as biting, satiric or humorous as the best editorial cartoons. "Today's news is tomorrow's fish wrap," editor Jeff Charis-Carlson often reminded Poetic License writers - what he called his Deadline Poets - in an attempt to get us to come down from Parnassus and to write quickly and frequently so as to better help fill his page.

As recently as the 1950s, The New York Times was in the habit of running poems amidst the letters to the editor in its pages, but it's rare to see a poem in such contexts today. In restoring poetry to the Op-Ed page, though, Jeff didn't want to repeat Ted Kooser's nationally-syndicated column "American Life in Poetry" which features a Kooser-approved poem by a recognizably "literary" poet that is then reprinted in paper after paper across the U.S. To the contrary, Jeff wanted "Poetic License" to be an aggressively local feature: written by Iowa City poets for Iowa City audiences and oftentimes taking on topics of such local orientation that "outsiders" need a good deal of background in order to understand where the poems are coming from. The term "Maytag" in "Flood Poem: Almost a Third of CEO's Expect to Cut Jobs" for example, resonantes very differently in Iowa than it does elsewhere, especially since Whirlpool's 2006 acquisition and closure of Maytag manufacturing plants, once the economic center of Newton, Iowa.

Jeff eventually got in the practice of running illustrations - photographs, or sometimes hilariously-done ink drawings by the Press-Citizen's editorial cartoonist - alongside PoLi poems as well, creating provocative text-image conversations. Oftentimes, the poems dialogue clearly with other pieces on the Op-Ed page. This editorial dynamic is impossible to duplicate in this blog, where I'm simply excerpting some of my contributions to PoLi and recording them.

Gannett News Services, which owns the Press-Citizen, has a policy that keeps PoLi poems (like other materials) online for 4 weeks, after which those items vanish. As much as I'd like them to become tomorrow's fish wrap, I also don't want to see them - or the experiment that PoLi is continuing - completely disappear. There are many questions that PoLi has inspired and that are worth thinking through, including:

• How can poems complicate or trouble an Op-Ed page chock-full of otherwise straightforward or transparent declamatory prose?
• What does poetry have to do differently in 2008 to work in a journalistic context that it didn't have to do 100 years ago?
• When poets do come down from Parnassus and embrace the ephemerality of the daily news and the specificity of the local event, what new freedoms do they find?
• What sort of a poetics takes shape under the pressure of a deadline?
• What is the public response to PoLi, and how does one measure and track that response?
• Who decides to write for PoLi and why - a question especially relevant to Iowa City, which boasts the Iowa Writers' Workshop full of poets who have never sent poems to the paper?

Many writers not affiliated with the Workshop have contributed to Poetic License over the past 2+ years, each developing over time a signature style, politics, approach, tone, rhetorical flexibility, etc. (Most recently, for example, I've been using actual news headlines as my poem titles, and after experimenting with various verse forms, I seem to have settled in - improbable as it sounds - to writing sonnets.) Contributors have worked more or less closely with Jeff, who sometimes participates so heavily in the writing process that he might claim co-editorship. In sum, PoLi has become a fascinating laboratory in which to track the possibilities of re-embedding poetry in one aspect of print culture today as thoroughly as it once was for generations of Americans in the U.S.

The following are some of my contributions to this research. Who says you can't get the news from poetry?

Flood Poem: Almost a Third of CEOs Expect to Cut Jobs

Appeared in the Press-Citizen June 21, 2008

The boardroom talk is all about the rising
cost of energy and whether,
if corn and durable goods increase together,
a crest in unemployment is surprising,
merited, excusable, or good
for business in the coming fiscal year,
and how to make this cresting now appear
as natural as a high school textbook would:
history is full of ups and downs,
the nation always—always—comes back stronger
if you sandbag just a little longer
and sacrifice a few Midwestern towns.
For when your Maytag’s lost to the flood’s designs
the boardroom floods as well—with dollar signs.

Flood Poem II: "Croc Dundee" in Tax Fight

Appeared in the Press-Citizen July 9, 2008

For he can hypnotize a buffalo
and he can tell the time by the course of the setting sun
and while his career, like his taxes, isn’t done
it’s a little sad to see him shuffle so.

Why the evasion, Paul? At sixty-plus,
you should be enjoying your golden years,
staging a comeback like Indy with smoke and mirrors.
It’s not too hard entertaining us,

so why the sudden Al Capone routine
instead of a simple fight, the bread and circus?
We’re tired of seeing the favorites who used to work us
hide their heads in the sand and lose their sheen

making a token gesture at the best
like an Aussie quip, or a visit to the wet midwest.

Cat Chasing Mouse Leads to 24 Hour Blackout

Appeared in the Press-Citizen May 25, 2008

—4,079 and counting

And after the parties of interest are sought and found,
quieted, questioned, detained and disappeared,
and after we’re told it wasn’t as bad as we feared,
and after the circuits are determined sound
and all the power’s properly restored,
then come the commissions, committees, and decrees,
the whatifs, never agains, and you-should-sees,
the whys, the how tos, and it-should-be-ignoreds.
We learn that no one really dropped the ball,
that the incident was isolated
and its importance grossly overstated.
And then before you know it, after it all,
some grinning, dirty dog named Spot or Rover
is shaking your hand and claiming the war is over.

How Evel Got to Heaven

Appeared in the Press-Citizen, December 2007

in memorium
Evel Knievel, 1938-2007

More than the fire and brimstone downward pouring,
it was Charon’s ferry, paddled safe and swell,
that made Knievel see he’d gone to hell
and worse—that hell was downright boring.
In life, he’d seen his likeness in a doll,
broken sixty bones, jumped over canyons,
and fended off both upstarts and also-rans,
but nothing prepared him for this brutal fall.
No fountains, no jumpsuits, no crowds to cheer him on,
everything painfully slow and on the level:
eternal doldrums fashioned by the devil
and tended without a dare by Satan’s spawn.
How could he escape? What could he do for kicks?
Then Evel looked behind him: the River Styx.

Bronze Fonz in Milwaukee?

Appeared in the Press-Citizen October 1, 2007

Rust belt brewer, metropolis of kegs,
city of knock and brat and cheddar wursts,
we’ve always looked to you to quench our thirsts
and not to give us public art with legs.
Every famous city has its Thinker
but did you really—really?—have to settle
on transforming Mr. Leather into metal
and giving Milwaukee a statue of Henry Winkler?
But metal, I guess, befits a man of cool:
Philly has Rocky, Chicago’s got M.J.,
and it would be a less than happy day
if Bob Uecker got his own reflecting pool.
So raise your mug or glass or plastic cup;
Let’s give the Fonzie project two thumbs up.

O.J. Simpson Questioned in Vegas Incident

Appeared in the Press-Citizen September 17, 2007

I can see him, even now, flying
with the greatest of ease and the grace of the finer arts
over the airport counters and baggage carts,
and I hear, down through the years, the Hertz lady crying
“Go, O.J. Go!” And then a decade later
with the Juice still running—this time in a white S.U.V.
and brought to the nation live on network tv—
we shouted “Go, O.J. Go,” for no one was greater
at legging it into the spotlight, leaping the charges
like a few lousy bags, and landing on his feet.
Now he’s in Vegas, as at home on the strip as at a meet-n-greet.
Questioned and searched yet again, his legend enlarges.
“Go, O.J. Go!” we think as we hear the Law swear:
“We don’t believe he’s going anywhere.”

The Case of the $54 Million Trousers

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on July 1, 2007

I drop my five-spot on the bar and Bill,
local P.I.—Pants Investigator—
tells me last night’s scores can wait for later
as he’s got something from the rumor mill:
a suit about a suit, an alteration
altercation, a case of missing slacks,
a judge who thought he had a hand of jacks,
and a brief submitted and heard ’round the nation.
“The beltway’s abuzz,” Bill says. “I’ve been in the biz
long enough to deal with in-betweeners,
but this guy taking his cleaner to the cleaners
is meaner than a pirate in pantaloons is.
It could go either way, I guess, but here’s to hopin’
that when he stands for the verdict, his barn door’s open.”

Mars Being Fed

Appeared in the Press-Citizen June 28, 2007

By pipelines, by tankers, he stuffs himself with crude,
reclines like the Roman god he is to feast,
perceiving the world as his private source of food,
his head in Alaska, his feet in the Middle East.
The more he eats, it seems, the more he’s fed,
his arterial highways long past clogged.
He orders his empty-handed servants flogged
and every barrel turns him a brighter red.
And he grows fat. His belly swells with gas.
He knows the oil has ruined his complexion
and will not dare to look at his reflection.
He’s too bushed to limit the habits he has.
He appears on posters captioned “Mars wants you.”
In the picture he’s red, but he dresses in white and blue.

Coyotes Thriving in Suburbs

Appeared in the Press-Citizen June 11, 2007

At first—before their S.U.V.’s and middle-
class complaints about the price of fuel
and the costs of sending the pups to private school—
their moving here was something of a riddle.
Were they in flight? Or were they on the trail
of achieving the Americanine dream,
pushed by the pack, by the need for self-esteem,
and by faith in the Horatio Alger tale?
And if they’re thriving—on Atkins, trash t.v.,
Wild Hogs and Wii—then what of the census
that now reports the rates of poverty
are higher within than without their picket fences?
Will they howl with their pack at the full-moon sky,
or just order a latte and let sleeping dogs lie?

Whale Watching on the Sacramento River

Appeared in the Press-Citizen June 4, 2007

They nearly came ashore—out of the sea,
into the bay, up the river, under
the bridges, and far enough to make us wonder
if they were trapped or looking to be free.
And so a convoy met them—canoes and kayaks
full of TV crews and Coast Guard staff—
to drum up a story of a mother and calf,
misguided, lost, wounds across their backs,
who should not go where they felt called to go,
be that Berkeley or the Golden Gate.
Now, it appears, our efforts have set them straight;
they’ve turned around and headed back, slow
to consent, as our recording of their song
broadcasts where they do and don’t belong.