Popular Poetry: The Little Magazine

For years now, P&PC has desperately wanted to find a modernist-era little magazine to call its own. You know, something like Others, Blast, The Egoist, or Seven Arts except not devoted to the avant garde or Ezra Pound. Something that might help put the world of popular poetry on the radar screens of modernist studies scholars who do so looooove their little magazines. Something—and why not?—that might even get digitized by and included in the awesome Modernist Journals Project, which has as its slightly overstated tagline "modernism began in the magazines."

Well, it's possible that we've finally found it. After lo these many years of searching, we recently came across this single, solitary issue (Volume 1, Number 8) of Popular Poetry, issued out of Cincinnati, Ohio, in March of 1931 by the people who were at that time already bringing Writer's Digest to the world. We don't know much about Popular Poetry yet; an initial query to Writer's Digest revealed that current editorial staff don't know anything about it and don't have any idea whether or not there's a company archive boxed up in some warehouse somewhere that could shed some light on who started it, why, how, and what eventually came of it once the 1930s—the decade during which what Joseph Harrington called the "poetry wars" established a serious split between "high" and "low" in the world of American verse—came to a close.

Until we find those answers, we'll be repeatedly reading this issue, which bills itself as being "modern without being modernistic and mid-way between the classic and the popular." True enough: from the poems "City Streets" and "Traffic in Hearts" listed on the cover, to the little editorial "Poetry Offshoots: The Commercial Side of Verse" pictured here, Popular Poetry does not appear to have been a throwback to the nineteenth century's genteel dreams of the fireside and family homestead but, like the New Verse more generally, incorporates and engages with the spirit of modernity. We dig Ruth Rukin's "Poetry Offshoots" a lot, which tries to find a home "for a rhyme with reason" that isn't "a page of formless verse in jerky ecstatics," on one hand, and that doesn't "[die] a horrible death on the battle-field of technique" on the other. "Standardization is the very last and least thing wanted in verse," Rukin writes, "but compromise with the needs of your market is desirable—if you're writing to sell."

What Rukin ultimately advises aspiring writers is what teachers still tell their students hoping to publish today: study the publications to which you're sending before you go sending your poems out. She makes her case by quoting, of all things, Tristan Tzara's Dadaist poem "Toto Vaca" and explaining that poems like it have a place in the "artistic journal, published for the sole purpose of encouraging new forms of literature" but not necessarily in the mainstream press. Here is Tzara's verse (and that's TT pictured here):

TOTO VACA

          I

ka tangi te kivi
kivi

ka tangi te moho
moho

ka tangi te tike
ka tangi te tike

tike

he poko anahe
to tikoko tikoko
 
heare i te hara
tikoko

k ote taoura te rangi
kaouaea

me kave kivhea
kaouaea

a-ko te take
take no tou

e haou
to ia

to ia ake te take
take no tou

What's kinda compelling about this example is how Tzara's avant-garde poem—which, according to Rukin, first appeared in "the lately suspended transition, an American-English magazine published in Paris"—is finding new audiences via Popular Poetry, which reprints it without irony and with full awareness of the editorial state of transition as a peer-level journal; in other words, Popular Poetry is situating itself in a world of modernist literary magazines not only without disparaging the competition but by educating the audience of Popular Poetry about it as well. "The reading aloud of this poem may give you some hint of its purpose," Rukin writes. "The syllabic arrangement is very musical and rhythmic when intoned." Once we find specific circulation figures for Popular Poetry, we'll let you know how many readers Tzara's poem reached and then think more coherently about the possible debts that the avant garde little magazines might owe to the world of popular poetry!

It would have been interesting to have Rukin weigh in on the conversation that P&PC recently had with Jed Rasula over at the Boston Review ("Glut Reactions: The Demographics of American Poetry"), because Rukin acknowledges late in her article that a poetry "glut"—the jumping-off point for the BR piece—is nothing new in American poetry. As P&PC argued, it in fact "isn’t a glut so much as a fundamental condition of poetry in the long twentieth century, a period when—thanks in part to the emergence and maturation of the culture industries, the development of mass media as well as personal communication technologies, and the expansion of consumer capitalism and the consumer marketplace—more poetry was written, distributed, circulated, and consumed than at any other time in history." Indeed, Rukin writes, "There are, generally speaking, more writers of poetry than markets for it. This naturally overcrowds the usual markets—the magazines—with salable offerings. However, there are certain by-products of poetry in our commercial era of writing for the poet. Among these are song poems, greeting card verses, advertising jingles, and humorous verse. The latter finds markets in such humor journals as Life, Judge, College Humor, Film Fun." We wonder: could that list of journals be a dissertation table of contents in the making?

One of the more entertaining parts of Popular Poetry is a section called "Borderliners" (pictured here), which contains a list of "poems not acceptable for publication" along with brief, Twitter-like critiques of those poems. Ethel Whipple Crooks of Kansas, for example, has her poem rejected with the editorial comments, "You have a nice, rhythmical sense, but no outstanding ideas behind it." Kinda harsh, right? Mildred Marsh Rankin of Iowa doesn't fare much better; her poetry has "too much dawn-and-pussy-dear sentiment" in it. Grover Wilson Morgan's poetry is "Not quite up to snuff." Edmund Kiernan is "too pedantic." And poor Virginia Brookhart of Pennsylvania: "Your poems stop short of being good." Seriously, this is pretty fun reading—we haven't seen anything like it—and there's five pages of it just in the March number alone!

But what of the poetry in Popular Poetry? We're not ready to comment on all of it yet, but we'll leave you with our favorite so far—Bernice G. Anderson's "Gypsy Fortune Teller":

She was picturesque in her flowered skirt
That puffed at the dust and flipped the dirt,

And her orchid waist was hung with strings
Of coins and coral beads. Bright rings

Adorned each finger; and her tawny head
Was draped with a blazing scarf of red.

I gazed at her while she read my hand,
And I knew she'd far from understand—

Not think it even slightly funny
That I should cross her palm with money

Merely to sit and read her face
There in that rug-hung, mystic place.

If anyone out there knows anything about Popular Poetry, please let us know! We'd love to learn more about our new favorite little magazine.

"This is a Year for Luck and Joy": New Year's Greetings from Poetry & Popular Culture

We here at the Poetry & Popular Culture Office like New Year celebrations a lot, in part because they make us remember the carrier's greeting or carrier's address—that rhyming summary of the year's events which 18th- and 19th-century newspaper printer's devils composed and handed out in search of some walking around money to take into the new year. If you don't know of this tradition, then you should check out the collection from the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays that Brown University has made available online. As you browse the 900 examples there, be sure to also take in the great introductory essays by Mary T. Russo and Leon Jackson, and consider for a moment how the year-end (Christmas) tip you leave for the people who deliver your newspaper or mail in fact has its roots in practices established more than two centuries ago.

The 1933 carrier's address presented here—an illustrated calendar that people could hang in their homes year-round (to the left)—is worth noting for a variety of reasons. (The month-by-month calendar is under the poem.) First, it suggests that the form, at least in name, extended further into the 20th century than most folks tend to think. The elaborate and sometimes epic accounts of the previous year's news-worthy events got shortened, greetings got more general, and the tip the delivery boy sought got rerouted through the circuits of commercial infrastructure. Greetings increasingly came from from the papers themselves, coming in the form of promotional materials that established the business/company name as the primary point of contact between producer and consumer (and not the names of specific printers' apprentices, once often included on the poems they authored and distributed but obscured here by the generic job title of "Your Carrier Boy").

In the process of this trans- formation, the wide- spread, compar- atively secular practice of sending New Year's greetings gradually got pulled into the orbit of the Christmas holidays, thus making the carriers' seasonal rhymes—and this is a second item of interest to note—part of the prehistory of the 20th-century Christmas card. (American Greetings was founded in 1906 and Hallmark in 1910; along with the automobile, the airplane, the x-ray, the machine gun and the safety razor, the commercially-produced greeting card is pretty much a modern invention.) We here at the P&PC Office see this publishing shift in fact being subtly acknowledged in the phrase "New cards are being dealt" in line five of the poem here.)

At the same time that the carrier's greeting was morphing in this direction, another ubiquitous and poetry-related print item, the farmer's almanac, began to change as well. As more and more people migrated to, or came within the easy reach of, urban centers, they still needed calendars but no longer needed the elaborate apparatus that almanacs usually offered—planting information, cycles of the moon, meteorological information, jokes, home remedies, bits and piece of useful information, etc. As this material dropped away, the poetry and calendar remained. Given the newly shortened form of the carrier's greeting and the simplified almanac—this is our third item of note—it was natural that the two would come together, at least for a time, to produce the sort of hybrid form that the Evening Star circulated. True, this specific greeting still retains its New Year's orientation, but there are others with Christmas-related messages (some of which were being delivered by postal workers who, in addition to delivery boys, were seeking seasonal tips). As the century went on, the two forms would eventually disentangle themselves from each other, leaving us with New Year calendars on one hand and rhyming Christmas cards on the other.

So as you go out and sing "Auld Lang Syne" by Robert Burns tonight, keep in mind the long tradition of American poetry that also ushered in the new year. As the recession carries on, it seems appropriate to look back to 1933 in welcoming 2010:

New cards are dealt, so let us play
Our hands for all they're worth, and say
"This is a year for luck and joy,
God bless us all—
YOUR CARRIER BOY

Happy New Year from the the P&PC Office.

In Search of the Bad Poetry File at the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County

Earlier this week, "Poetry & Popular Culture" received a tip from Stephen Headley—Manager of the Magazines & Newspapers Department at the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County—who said that a "bad poetry file" existed somewhere in the depths of that library's collection. Headley put me in touch with Bruce Sherwood, a reference librarian and 30-year veteran of the library, who confirmed that said archive does in fact exist but under the name of the "Auxiliary Poetry File," known as APF for short.

Sometimes, Sherwood told me, those with somewhat less appreciation for the cultural importance of popular poetry than "Poetry & Popular Culture" has, called the APF the "Awful Poetry File." I asked Sherwood if said negative elements had been purged from the library, but he didn't comment. Instead, he sent me this official description of the collection, which consists of an amazing 55 boxes of index cards:

INDEXES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

APF: Auxiliary Poetry File (ca. 1900-1950)

A unique, home-grown index comprised of fifty-five boxes of yellowed index cards with author/title citations to poems culled from selected magazines, newspapers and grade school readers in the early part of the twentieth century. Presumably intended to augment Granger's Index to Poetry, this covers lesser poets or, "bards not sublime," published in non-literary periodicals such as Life and Stars and Stripes and includes many full-text poems from local newspapers -- hand cut and pasted by librarians on three-by-five cards.

Although limited in time and scope, this is an irreplaceable resource because there is no known index to newspaper and textbook verse. Selection is heavy on World War I-era patriotic verse. The APF is especially treasured by those of an earlier generation who wish to recall poems they once memorized from their McGuffey readers.

Affectionately referred to by staff as the "Awful Poetry File," perhaps because most of the poems are "awfully" hard to locate and a few are just plain "awful," the APF has been somewhat eclipsed in purpose, if not coverage, by the World Wide Web.

Sherwood then went on to gloss this description for me even further:

"Although the file has been largely supplanted by the Internet, it is also no doubt true that a large percentage of the entries will not be found elsewhere. It is arranged in a Granger's Index style, with entries for authors, titles, subjects, and first lines in one alphabet. Not all of the poems are 'bad,' nor do all of the 3" x 5" cards consist of pasted clippings from newspapers and magazines. Some entries are just locational notes (e.g., 'Wharton, E. -- Hunting song, Literary Digest, Vol 38, p. 816'), and some are cryptic, such as the title listing for 'A Hymn of Hate,' which is attributed to Dorothy Parker and shown as occurring in five nonsequential issues of Life magazine in the early 1920s.

"During my tenure in Literature and Languages and its predecessors (1980-2007), it was used mainly as a last resort in the years before World Wide Web searching became commonplace. That is, after following up all hunches and tediously checking the many volumes of Granger's, a meticulous search required a run through the APF. At that point the exhausted librarian could confidently tell the patron that he or she had searched EVERYWHERE.

"Before Google, the APF was a significant (if incomplete) source for ephemeral verse. In public libraries, poetry texts are frequently requested by the elderly, who are trying to remember a poem learned in the single-digit years. Then there are many who want the 'correct' text of a half-remembered poem they may have seen on a greeting card or wall plaque. If they could remember the first three words of the title or first line correctly, then the APF could sometimes help them."

I can't speak for the readers of "Poetry & Popular Culture," Bruce, but I will go to sleep happier tonight for knowing the APF exists. And I will hope that some affluent reader of this blog comes up with a cool fortune to help the library digitize & make searchable this amazing resource.

Business Bards: C.G. Blatt's Photographic Emporium

Projected Verse

Long before Charles Olsen wrote "Projective Verse" (1950), Americans were projecting their own poetry onto walls, sheets, movie screens, and other backdrops via magic lantern projectors and glass slides such as the one shown here. These lanterns and slides were precursors to the projectors that kept us hostage to family vacation shows in our childhoods or art history courses in undergraduate school; instead of hot-burning bulbs, they ran on kerosene lamp oil and an open flame, but the technology was otherwise fairly similar, offering an in-home or portable quasi-cinematic experience. In some cases, the slides were industrially manufactured, and in other cases people were encouraged to make them at home by sandwiching transparencies between two pieces of glass. "By carefully following the directions," an instruction manual from 1882 reads, "your Magic Lantern will give you much pleasure."

This pleasure included poetry as well. In an age where poetry was read aloud at home, recited in school, encountered on the lecture and Chautauqua circuits, and performed regularly as part of civic events, it's no surprise to learn that a technology enabling people to project it textually would be popular as well. The lyrics to popular songs were projected so people could follow along; cartoon verses preceded feature attractions in movie theaters; some magic lantern slide sets contained only the illustrations for poems—sometimes ballads, sometimes nursery rhymes—presuming the text itself would be read aloud. The 1882 manual I've referenced above ("Home Entertainments, or Evenings with the Magic Lantern") includes, for example, a poem called "The Lazy Ant," and another called "Crossing the Ferry." The instructions for "Crossing the Ferry" read: "Our next picture will show you a ferry scene, and while we are crossing we will relate to you the conversation between the little lovers before us. (Here let a little girl and boy take the part of the young lovers, and recite the poem.)" What would Walt Whitman say to that?!

That same brochure has a page titled "Five Popular Poets" and explains, "I will now show you the pictures of five of our most popular poets." The page no doubt served as a sort of script, containing biographical information on, and excerpts from, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and Alfred Lord Tennyson—a core of Fireside Poets that drove American poetry in the 19th century and who were familiar faces in the American home. Indeed, when Jean Toomer in "Bona and Paul" from Cane (1923) writes "Art sat on the piano and simply tore it down. Jazz. The picture of Our Poets hung perilously," he is referring to the portraits of Fireside Poets that Americans hung on the walls at home.

The Magic Lantern slides remind us that poems are not just produced, but are always used for one thing or another—for family entertainment, advertising, preaching, etc.—as well. That is, the "life" of a poem doesn't stop when the author publishes it. In fact, a poem's social life may become more interesting once it leaves the author's desk and begins to socialize with other poems on magazines pages, in anthologies, on web sites, as it gets excerpted, quoted, reviewed, so on and so forth. Take, for example, the slide I've included here: a poem written in 1848 by one of "Our Poets," Oliver Wendell Holmes, who then published it in the December 1859 Atlantic Monthly as part of his "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" column—a role he'd reprise later as Professor at the Breakfast Table and Poet at the Breakfast Table. (Holmes was not only a physician who coined the term "anesthesia" and the popular author of "Old Ironsides" [1830], but he developed what would become the most popular design for the stereoscope as well—an interest in entertainment technology that must have made him pleased to have his verse become part of magic lantern culture.) This poem concluded Holmes's contribution for December 1859, and he introduced it with the following words:

"And so my year’s record is finished. Thanks to all those friends who from time to time have sent their messages of kindly recognition and fellow-feeling. Peace to all such as may have been vexed in spirit by any utterance the pages have repeated. They will doubtless forget for the moment the differences in the hues of truth we look at through our human prisms, and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light we all need to lead us and the warmth which can make us all brothers."

No matter how much Holmes (1809-1894) wanted his readers to join him in "singing (inwardly)" this hymn, American audiences did just the opposite: they proceeded to put it to music and sing it outwardly! In so doing, they made it one of the most popular hymns of the 19th and 20th centuries. Says the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, the resulting hymn "belongs to the slender anthology of sacred songs that are indubitable poetry."

I purchased the slide shown here at Kensington's Portobello Market in London, pulling it from a collection once owned by a British church that had no doubt found it necessary to update its technology. Most of the slides were pictures—in fact, most magic lantern slides are pictures, with no more than a small percentage containing song lyrics and poems—but there were 6-8 hymns that were probably projected in front of the congretation in lieu of hymnals. (You can see cues in the margins directing certain parts of the congregation—men and women, women, chorus, pastor—when to sing.) I picked out "Lord of all being, throned afar" as a souvenir. It struck me as important, not just for the combination of poetry and singing there, but for the fact that I was finding it in England. Usually, when we think of the 19th century, we think of America importing British poetry (Tennyson especially) not the other way around, but the Holmes slide suggests how the literary trade routes ran both ways.

Magic lantern poetry seems important to me—and relevant to our current age—for another reason as well, as it helped to transition Americans' reading and entertainment practices away from from the human and domestic scene of the fireside and toward a piece of projection technology and its script. This transition heralds the age of the cinema, radio and tv, an age which would see the replacement of the 19th century hearth by projection and broadcast technologies on a colossal scale. Poetry—and especially the revered poetry of "Our Poets"—helped to provide a sense of continuity for readers encountering and no doubt struggling with the new ways of relating to each other that the new technologies required. With Our Poets at the helm, though, how could this transition be bad?