Poemulations: Emily Dickinson, James Metcalfe & Chum Frink

On October 17, 1851—as Virginia Jackson notes in her great book Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading—Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to her brother Austin that ended with a "poem" that Dickinson did not cut into standard poetic lines but that she presented, instead, as rhyming prose. So far as Poetry & Popular Culture can discern from the facsimile in Jackson's book, that poem read:

"There is another sky, Ever serene and fair, and there is another sun-shine, tho it be darkness there—Never mind faded forests, Austin, never mind silent fields—Here is a little forest, whose leaf is ever green; here is a brighter garden, where not a frost has been; in its unfading flowers I hear the bright bee hum; prithee, my brother, into my garden come!"

Editors of Dickinson's work, Jackson goes on to note, published "There is another sky" as prose in 1894, 1924, and 1931, but beginning with Thomas H. Johnson's The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts (1955) it began to be printed in conventional lines:

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields—
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,

Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum;
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

The history of "There is another sky" raises a number of questions for Jackson about when the poem in fact became a poem. "Was it never ... a poem," she wonders at one point, "since it was never written as verse? Was it always ... a poem, because it could always have been read as verse? Or was it only ... a poem after it was printed as verse?" Later on, she continues with related questions: "In view of what definition of poetry would Dickinson's brother have understood the end of his sister's letter to him as a poem? Did it only become a poem once it left his hands as a letter? According to what definition of lyric poetry did Dickinson's editor ... understand a lyric poem to be if it was not the passage at the end of the 1851 letter? Can a text not intended as a lyric become one? Can a text once read as a lyric be unread? If so, then what is—or what was—a lyric?"

These and similar questions drive Jackson's inquiry into the historicity of the "lyric" as a sub-genre of the genre of poetry; people in the 19th century, she reveals, didn't understand the genre of the lyric anywhere near the way they do now, and we can gain a greater understanding of Dickinson's verse if we in fact recover what people thought about the lyric "back then" rather than imposing we what we've come to think of as the lyric over the course of the 20th century. The Poetry & Popular Culture office likes Jackson's line of questioning a lot, although, as always, we'd prefer to start off with a different question: "What, if anything, does a study of popular poetry have to tell us about Dickinson and verses like 'There is another sky'?" As it turns out—betcha couldn't see this coming—it can tell us quite a bit.

A look at popular verse forms supports the Poetry & Popular Culture position that Dickinson never intended for "There is another sky" to be cut into lines and that, moreover, Dickinson's brother Austin would have recognized full well that his sister's writing was, in fact, meant to be read as a type of poem in its own right—as what Sinclair Lewis would later call a "poemulation." It was not at all uncommon for newspapers to print rhyming prose just like "There is another sky." We've seen such poems saved in poetry scrapbooks and would turn the reader's attention, for an example, to a little booklet of poems by James Metcalfe, titled Portraits (pictured to the left), which collects verses that Metcalfe published in a column of the same name that appeared daily in The Times (billed as "Chicago's Picture Newspaper") in 1946. We cite "Going Out" here as a sample of Metcalfe's writing which is printed as prose with ellipses substituted for linebreaks:

When we get ready to go out ... It is not long before ... My hat is in my hand and I ... Am standing at the door ... I call my wife and she declares ... That she is nearly through ... And in another minute now ... She will be ready too ... So I go out and start the car ... And get all set to go ... But after while it seems my spouse ... Is just a little slow ... I honk the horn and she replies ... That it will only be ... A tiny second more until ... She will be joining me ... But seconds pass and minutes fade ... I feel my patience snap ... And shutting off the motor I ... Decide to take a nap.

You may be asking yourself round about now, Well just how "not uncommon" was this sort of verse? It's hard to say for sure, but it was common enough for novelist Sinclair Lewis to capitalize on it in his portrayal of T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink, the poet in Babbitt (1922) and "the author of 'Poemulations,' which, syndicated daily in sixty-seven leading newspapers, gave him one of the largest audiences of any poet in the world." When we first meet Chum, in fact, his work is explicitly described as "lyric" poetry, though Lewis was likely using "lyric" in a more general and expansive sense than the specific sub-genre of poetry that interests Jackson in Dickinson's Misery. "Two hours before [meeting Babbitt]," Lewis writes, "Frink had completed a [Prohibition Era] newspaper lyric beginning:

I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and wunk, and groaned, 'There still are boobs, alack, who'd like the old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and smelly old saloon!' I'll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as any babe new-born!" (Italics in the original)

Later in the novel, as Babbitt is speaking before the dinner of the Zenith Real Estate Board, he incorporates one of Frink's poemulations into his talk and situates it among other popular poets and popular reading practices of the time. Babbitt prefaces Frink's verse by saying, "I always like to remember a piece that Chum Frink wrote for the newspapers about his lecture-tours. It is doubtless familiar to many of you, but if you will permit me, I'll take a chance and read it. It's one of the classic poems, like 'If' by Kipling, or Ella Wheeler Wilcox's 'The Man Worth While'; and I always carry this clipping of it in my note-book." Like Frink's lyric cited above, the poem Babbitt quotes is composed entirely in the rhyming, metered verse that both Metcalfe and Dickinson use in their own work.

Dickinson, as Jackson and other scholars have observed, collected all manner of artifacts from print culture of her time, sending clippings to friends, composing on scraps of paper, and perhaps even incorporating this material into the surround or various "backstories" of her poems. How possible is it, then, that Dickinson was in fact writing a prose-poetry, newspaper-style lyric or "poemulation" to her brother Austin in October of 1851? Very possible, say we in the Poetry & Popular Culture office. Very possible indeed.

A Gallery of Suffragist Poetry

For the work of a day,
For the taxes we pay,
For the Laws we obey,
We want something to say.





















This is pretty heavy work,
But I'll never, never shirk.





















I think we'll get them if we try.
And we shall try until we die.











If I can vote, why not propose?
If I am bold you must excuse me.
I've loved you ages, goodness knows!
And don't you dare, Sir, to refuse me.

















A Suffragette you're going to wed
and after you've been quite well dead
your friends will gather round and say:
"A nice 'enuff fellow in his henpecked way,"
But you'll chip up with "Well! Well! Well!
This ain't so bad, this place called H........"

Thai Firefighter Dresses Up as Spiderman to Coax Eight-Year-Old Boy Off Window Ledge

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on March 27, 2009

Hero is a word I don’t use lightly.
He didn’t grab ahold of me but took
the arm of something from a comic book
while I climbed down the ladder, held on tightly,
and set him on the ground. I didn’t write
the story or mix the ink to burn like fire.
I perhaps did a fair impression of Tobey Maguire,
but I didn’t direct the movie, or delight
millions of kids, or even bring the ladder there.
I didn’t sew the suit or drive the truck
but simply hoped for a little bit of luck
as I put on the costume I was brought to wear.
Who should get the credit? Don’t ask me:
maybe the folks know better at A.I.G.

Casey at the Hoop?

Try as it might to resist the media frenzy surrounding the annual NCAA basketball tournament, Poetry & Popular Culture can't help but feel a little bit seduced by March Madness and the strange poetry—or poetic justice—that somehow underwrites the science of "bracketology" even if the poetry of March hasn't been as celebrated as the poetry of October has. It was with the joy of serendipity, then, that folks in the Poetry & Popular Culture office happened across Season 4, Episode 2, of Northern Exposure which originally aired October 5, 1992 under the title "Midnight Sun."

In this episode, the town's doctor—Joel Fleischman, a New York-trained Jewish physician who gets stuck paying back his med school bills by serving in the small Alaska town of Cicely—experiences 24 hours of sun for the first time and goes "light looney" when his biological clock can't adjust to the absence of night. Randy and manic, Joel takes over the head-coaching duties for Cicely's woeful community basketball team, the Quarks. One "night" when everyone else is asleep, he sits behind the microphone of the town's radio station KBHR and, with the music of John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" playing in the background, announces he's begun writing basketball's long-awaited epic, which he's titled "Casey at the Hoop." Here's the text of that scene, spoken as the station's regular host Chris dozes in the corner:

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying our nation is consumed by lethargy or enamored of the status quo, but why not ask a few hard questions of our legislators? For instance, "Why, sirs, is it engraved in steel that baseball is our national pastime?" Now, I understand the need to perpetuate exemptions from our antitrust laws. I mean, it serves the selfish interests of a few Steinbrennerish elitists, but why should hundreds of millions of citizens be deprived of a new and better candidate? The answer, my friends? Basketball! That’s the true American sport. Oh, and I’m not saying that baseball doesn’t have a claim on our collective psyche. After all, it had a half century jump on basketball, which was invented in 1891 by James Naismith in Springfield, Mass, site of the Basketball Hall of Fame, and which you should all visit as I did with my Uncle Nat and Cousin Lenny when I was 14. I loved it.

Hey, did I mention that baseball is sneaky? Yeah, very sneaky, see. 'Cause it uses poetry to invade our brains and stick to the walls of our unconscious. You take "Casey at the Bat": clever advertising campaign disguised as farmers' doggerel. Well, how is basketball supposed to fight such a folksy appeal to the hearts and minds of the American people? Well, up to last night it couldn’t. But now there is a new weapon. If I may, I would like to recite a few words written at midnight last night. Herewith a sample of an epic to come:

And so, the rubber spheroid arced beneath the brilliant lights
Headed for a hoop of dreams he’d dreamt of all those nights.
The crowd gasped as the ball descended. Would it grant their fondest wish?
There was no doubt in Casey’s mind: he knew it was a swissssh!

"Midnight Sun" ends, of course, when Joel—who has been wide awake for several days—involuntarily falls asleep and misses Cicely's big game, when the Quarks get crushed (as they do every year) by the neighboring town. In returning to his normal sleeping schedule, he also, apparently, never got around to finishing "Casey at the Hoop." Anyone out there want to, well, give it a shot?

Guest Posting: The Poetry of Patchwork

Reading between the lines of text and textile, Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Adam Bradford writes in about mid-19th-century mourning poetry and the poetic wrap (not rap) that Eliza Howells quilted to help stave off the chills of death and grief.

When Mark Twain set about lampooning what he felt was an overly-morbid 19th-century culture of mourning, he did so (in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) via the character of Emmeline Grangerford. As folks in the Poetry & Popular Culture office may recall, Emmeline was known for her “crayons” (hand-drawn pictures of people mourning at the tombs of their deceased) and “tributes” (poems depicting the deceased “sport[ing] aloft in the realms of the good and the great”). Twain’s satire gained traction because some of the age's “popular” poets like Lydia Sigourney and Julia Moore had made their reputations (not to mention a respectable sum) filling best-selling books such as 1847's The Weeping Willow with line after line of “consolation verse.” Consider, for example, Sigourney’s “The Consenting Mother":

"I see the green fields, and glowing flowers;
I see bright streamlets flow,
Sweet voices call to glorious bowers;
Dear Mother! Let me go.”
His cheek grew pale. Had hasting death
Dealt the last final blow?
List! List! Once more the fainting breath,
“Oh Mother! let me go.”
How could her love the soul detain,
That struggled to be free?
Or, leaguing with that tyrant Pain,
Obstruct its liberty?
“Lord! Not my will,” she said, “but Thine,”
And high her darling soar’d,
And from the skies that ever shine
An angel’s descant pour’d.

Sigourney’s poem may strike contem- porary readers as trite or contrived, but for many people in 19th century America — people such as Eliza Howells, whose quilt square appears to the left—such poetry was an important tool for dealing with grief. Sometime in the 1840s, Eliza Howells began accumulating a number of quilt squares as gifts from family and friends. Largely commemorative, these squares mark important events in Eliza’s life such as her wedding in 1843 and her Grandmother’s death in 1845. The same grandmother whose death is commemorated on one square, in fact, produced the square celebrating Eliza’s marriage.

Eliza produced the central, "capstone" square of the quilt herself. The images she penned here—the heavy curtains, the urns with emerging flowers, the clock, the dark dress—are all contemporary symbols of mourning, and the voice she gives the object is, perhaps fittingly for the time, a rather poetic one that testifies to the power of this rather curious text-ile and provides insight into how it became meaningful for Eliza. Together, the poems show that the quilt connected her in two ways to a “spiritual community” of loved ones whose physical presence she no longer enjoyed. The first, which seems the most “memorial” of the two, is entitled “Friendship” and reads:

In Vain—in different paths we tread—
And though no more mayest soothe or cheer;
Yet we have those hours of friendship shed,
A sweetness that still lingers here;
Thy form & look, in memory’s glass,
I still distinctly see;
Thy voice and words, in fancy’s ear
Are whispering still to me.

"Friendship" is followed by the second, more consolatory piece entitled “Eternity":

When the dream of life is fled,
When its wasted lamp is dead,
When in cold oblivion’s shade,
Beauty, power, wealth are laid;
Where immortal spirits reign,
There may be all we meet again;
On the tree of life eternal
Man, let all the hope be staid
Which alone, for ever vernal,
Bears a leaf that shall not fade.

Together, these poems suggest how the quilt enlivens the people who helped produce it while simultaneously prefiguring Eliza's reunion with them in the "ever vernal" afterlife. Crafted as it was by hand (or hands), it quite literally served as a site where Eliza could stitch, bind, and tie herself to those, like her grandmother, who had not only helped produce the blanket's other squares but who were commemorated there as well. Morbid? Maybe. But for Eliza, who could wrap herself in the combination of image, text, and material—and perhaps for more than just a few people in our current day—it was one way to keep warm against chills borne of gale or grief.

Adam Bradford writes in from the University of Iowa where he is finishing a dissertation on the literature of 19th century American mourning practices.

Christmas 1921: Fred & Myrtle's Scrapbook

For Christmas in 1921, Myrtle Eckert of Skykomish, Washington, wanted to give her eldest son Fred something special. Born in 1896 or 1897, Fred was in his early 20s and would be getting married soon and perhaps moving away from home. He was from a working family. Myrtle worked in town as a maid and housekeeper. Fred's father George was a nightwatchman for the railroad. Skykomish was the Western terminus of a 7.8 mile-long tunnel beneath Stevens Pass, and every train had to stop there to switch from a steam to electric engine or back again; there was thus a lot of railroad work to be had. Fred and his brother Vern found work in the region's other major industry, however: timber. In 1921, Fred was likely working at the local shingle mill, and Vern (born in 1899) was running the donkey at the mill pond.

Neither George nor Myrtle finished high school, nor did Fred for that matter, though what they lacked in official education they more than made up for in life experience. Myrtle, for example, was born in Wisconsin in the early 1870s and had first come West, to Idaho, by covered wagon; her house there had a dirt floor, and she'd tell stories later in life of how she'd look up from her day's work to find Indians staring in at her through the house's Isinglass windows. She was accompanied to Idaho—which had become a state in 1890—by her first husband Fred Farnham, who was accidentally poisoned to death a few years later when a doctor gave him iodine to drink instead of cough syrup. George was Myrtle's second husband and father to both her boys, though Fred, her oldest, was likely named after her first husband and likely occupied a special place in her heart because of that.

Probably because of their lack of edu- cation — George, for example, could write only his name— reading and writing held a special place in the family. Fred's nephew Roy, now in his 70s and a retired journalist living in Oregon, remembers "there was great emphasis put on published and written things," and so, when Myrtle wanted to give something special to Fred on Christmas in 1921, she made him a poetry scrapbook, pasting each clipping (so Roy reports) into the album with a homemade paste made from flour and water.

At 5" high, 7" wide, and a half-inch thick, the album is an eminently portable one— perfect for a young man potentially on the move. The inside cover carries a color gift tag with a picture of a candle and poinsettia flowers accompanied by the message "A Merry Christmas." Beneath that message, Myrtle has handwritten her own: "To Fred / From Mother / 1921." Just over fifty clippings follow, all of which impart some sort of life lesson about the value of persistence, work, thrift, honesty and—of course—maintaining a close relationship to mom. "God Bless My Mother!" reads in part:

A little child with flaxen hair,
And sunlit eyes so sweet and fair,
Who kneels when twilight darkens all,
And from those loving lips there fall
The accents of this simple prayer:
"God bless—God bless my mother!"

Myrtle had a particular affection, it appears, for the poet Berton Braley, who is responsible for nearly a third of the poems in the album. Part of Braley's appeal might have been that, like Myrtle, Braley was born in Wisconsin and subsequently went west—to work for newspapers in Montana. He'd eventually go East, however, and to New York, where he'd work as a journalist and a writer for Life Magazine, McGraw-Hill, Funk and Wagnalls, and Collier's. If you want to know more about Braley—he wrote tons of poetry not just for newspapers but for postcards, envelopes, calendars, ink blotters, posters, lithographs and even this blog's favorite advertising campaign, Burma-Shave—check out the Berton Braley Cyber Museum.

Like Edgar Guest (pictured with ping-pong paddle to the left), Anne Campbell, Helen Welshimer and others, Braley is part of a generation or two of poets whose work was regularly syndicated. Myrtle apparently found his poems in the Everett Herald, Seattle Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer where they were sometimes accompanied by drawings or cartoons and calligraphic titles (see the image of "Cleared" below). While Braley is not at all averse to dispensing swell life lessons like the following from "The Good Fellow Route"—

It's brilliant with lights and with laughter and song,
But the song and the laughter don't last very long,
And under the lights in their pitiless glare
Stand Sorrow and Ruin and Woe and Despair;
Blithe friends and companions you'll meet, beyond doubt,
If you journey through life by the Good Fellow Route!

—he doesn't sit still as a writer. In "Cleared," for example (another poem Myrtle included in the collection and pictured to the left), he responds to the 1914 court decision clearing Ownership of any responsibility in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. That poem begins:

"Cleared!" By the word of judge and jury,
Beating in vain at the bolted door,
And the long-drawn wail of the mothers crying,
Shall haunt their memory evermore.
The prison bonds may never bind them,
They walk, free men, in the open air,
But wherever they go their past shall find them,
And haunt them and mock them everywhere.

Myrtle's inclusion of "Cleared" is full of significance and mystery for "Poetry & Popular Culture." If the poem was written and published shortly after the 1914 court decision, did Myrtle cut it out at that point and save it another 7 years before pasting it inside the scrapbook for Fred? It's entirely possible she did. If she didn't, though, then may we assume that the poem was reprinted out West long after the East coast event it was written to address had passed? If that's the case, we're left to think about what gives Braley's "occasional" poem its serious legs, a strange ability (in the words aesthetic critics like) to "stand the test of time." No doubt, some of the poem's longevity would have had to do with the moral lesson that the factory fire and court case allows Braley to express: that justice and guilt are not contained within and distributed by courtrooms alone. In the working-class context of Skykomish—no stranger, probably, to Wobbly agitation—the friction between ownership and labor at the center of the court decision would have signified more broadly as well; the event, in this case, becomes a metaphor and even rallying point for laborers everywhere.

In either scenario—if Myrtle saved the poem for 7 years before finding a home for it in the scrapbook, or if Braley's poem had a staying power and cross-continental appeal that we don't typically associate with "occasional" poems—the situation of "Cleared" in the gift that Myrtle made for Fred in 1921 demonstrates how complex things can get when it comes to the world of popular poetry. Not only are working-class readers more sophisticated and socially involved than they've been given credit for being in histories of 20th century literature, but the authors of the poems they read are sophisticated and socially involved as well—a statement uttered with some frequency around the "Poetry & Popular Culture" office, but one which is worth restating nonetheless.

Our gratitude goes out to Roy Webster for taking the time to share some of his family's history with Poetry & Popular Culture for this posting.

Very Moving Poetry

If Corn Flakes and Michael Phelps are concerned with ingesting and inhaling (see "What's in Your Bowl Today?"), then what of this matchbook advertisement for America's most notorious source of "gentle, dependable overnight relief"? Clearly, Ex-Lax is also intimately related to interiority—from tummy to tush, someone less cultivated might say—as the poem here indicates:

In days of old
when knights were bold,
Tummies, perhaps, had tin sides.
But folks these days
like milder ways.
Ex-Lax befriends their insides

Not surprisingly, Ex-Lax relates to interiority as it has to do with, well, exteriority. Here, the poem's historical move from the coarser and less-refined "days of old" to modern times and "milder ways" serves as an analogue for the desired gastronomical movement from inside to outside, and discomfort to comfort, which the laxative is designed to facilitate. Not only is Ex-Lax positioning itself as part of historical innovation and improvement, but that discourse of progress figures the personal progress one hopes to experience with the aid of "the ORIGINAL chocolated laxative." In this context of fluidity—which leaves out of all history between the middle ages and the 1950s—is it too much to argue that Ex-Lax's poetics of movement extends to the form of the poem itself, with the indented lines performing or demonstrating the effects of the drugstore item?

Lest one remain unconvinced of this (ahem) poo-etics, he or she need only open the matchbook, which has not only been emptied of its fire-starters—and which is designed to be emptied—but which also contains some "suggestions" from the local police department about how to best, most safely, and most efficiently move, both in car and on foot. By following the traffic lights ("Let the traffic lights be your guide"), we are told, one avoids creating a "jam" which no doubt tropes the very constipation Ex-Lax relieves and which the no-good law-breaking jaywalker instigates. Joining the movement of history, from difficult days to milder ones, with an urban landscape designed to move in particular ways, Ex-Lax in fact hitches its chocolatey cart to the ideals of modern America, all on the space of a piece of paper half the size of an index card. If that isn't a smooth move, then I don't know what is.