Poetry & Popular Culture on the Radio

On Friday, June 19, Poetry & Popular Culture was invited by Victor Infante—host of the Blog Talk Radio show "The Eclectic Word"—to participate in a roundtable discussion on the topic of "Poetry & Pop Culture." (That's Infante pictured to the left.) Initially, there were some pretty hard feelings in the P&PC office when Mike won the single-elimination limerick-writing tournament to decide who would appear on air along with Scott Woods (President of Poetry Slam Inc.), Robb Telfer of Young Chicago Authors, and Tara Betts. But with the sole exception of some minor in-house sabotage that resulted in a less-than-ideal phone connection with "The Eclectic Word," those fractures in the P&PC family were accounted for and are now—we hope—a thing of the past. What's not past, though, is the roundtable discussion itself, which you can listen to or download here.

The Great Diagraphic Corset

Check out this great, Victorian-era die-cut advertising sign for "The Great Diagraphic Corset"—a 10" tall, full-color display item that was designed to stand upright with the help of an "easel" leg that once attached to its reverse side. (You can see a remnant of that leg in the second image below.) As much as we here at the Poetry & Popular Culture office love this design concept, we like the punning product-packaging concept even more, as the hourglass shape of the vase tropes the va-va-va-voom hourglass form that the female body will supposedly take on with the help of a little whalebone and some minor shortness of breath. "It is our belief," the makers of The Great Diagraphic Corset state on the reverse side, "that no corset has yet been produced, uniting in so great a degree the qualities of support, ease and beauty."

Beauty indeed. How better to complete the web of cultural associations linking femininity, flowers and fashion than by throwing a poem—or, in this case, part of a poem—into the mix? As is often the case with advertising poetry (see P&PC's recent digressions on Poetry in Lotion or Ex-Lax, for example), it's never quite as simple as just throwing something into the mix, however. The makers of The Great Diagraphic Corset write "Our corset seems to embody the fancy of the Poet" and go on to quote four tetrameter lines witnessing to that fancy:

Now doth her bodice aptly laced
From her fair bosom to her shapely waist
Fine by degrees and beautifully less
The air and harmony of grace express.

If you're saying to yourself right now "Ah-ha! Those couplets ring a bell!" it's probably because you're thinking of "Henry and Emma," a fairly sizable dialogue poem about marital (in)fidelity written by everybody's favorite Augustan poet, Matthew Prior (1664-1721). But if you know your Prior well enough to place that quotation—and if you were able to recognize him as "the Poet" which the language on the die cut was referring to—you probably also know that the makers of The Great Diagraphic Corset are actually misquoting Prior's original text. The original, in fact, reads:

No longer shall the Boddice, aptly lac'd,
From thy full Bosome to thy slender Waste,
That Air and Harmony of Shape express,
Fine by Degrees, and beautifully less...

And, of course, if you recognized that The Great Diagraphic Corset was rewriting Prior, then you probably know that Prior's "Henry and Emma" had—and 'fessed up to having—its own source text: ye olde, anonymous, 15th-century poem, "The Nut-brown Maid." (Incidentally, the "Nut-brown Maid" became especially popular in the mid-18th century after Prior's death, when it was included in Thomas Percy's hit collection of ballads and popular songs, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)—a collection that eventually inspired imitations of popular verse by wanna-be balladeers such as Colderidge and Wordsworth.)

All of this is to say, of course, that a half century of poetry lies behind the four lines printed on the back of The Great Diagraphic Corset advertisement—an seemingly simple puff that reveals itself to be a moment of extraordinary intertextuality in the consumer marketplace. Now that's the sort of literary historical hourglass that catches Poetry & Popular Culture's eye!

Chocolove: From the Poetry & Popular Culture Mailbag

Thinking about poetry and popular culture is an infectious activity. This week, Ernest Hilbert (editor a few brows higher over at the "best damn poetry review online") writes in about a sweet discovery he made while picnicking with friends over the most recent Memorial Day weekend. As usual, a response from the Poetry & Popular Culture office follows.

Dear Poetry & Popular Culture,

On Memorial Day, my wife Lynn and I, along with our friend Keith, an NPR-affiliate DJ, had a modest picnic on the Brandywine Battlefield just outside of Philadelphia. The battle, a decisive victory for the Red Coats, took place in September, 1777, and sent the still-gangly colonial army, under the command of George Washington, scattering for dear life over the hills while abandoning most of their cannons. Afterward, the Continental Congress gave up on Philadelphia as a capital, and, on September 26, 1777, British forces marched into the city of brotherly love unopposed.

We enjoyed some Negronis (gin, Campari, and grapefruit juice in place of vermouth), German beers, whiskey, blueberries, strawberries, five cheeses, prosciutto, smoked mackerel, kalamata olives, four kinds of hummus, and salami. To top it all off, we shared a bar of "Cholocove"—a candy bar with a poem printed on the inside wrapper. Ours (pictured here) was a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (XII from Sonnets from the Portuguese). I was immediately delighted by the notion of a poem in a candy bar. The bar in question was loaded with crunchy orange peels and arrived in squares, each bearing an impression in the shape of a small heart. I immediately thought of Poetry & Popular Culture and snapped some photos for the P&PC office.

Luv,

Ernest


Dear Ernest,

How sweet of you to think of Poetry & Popular Culture! We were so taken by the image of you unwrapping canonical poetry on a battlefield where canons were once abandoned that, in an effort to repay your kindness, we've been trying to contact Chocolove in the hopes of discovering more about that company's, um, poetic tastes. There are lots of things we'd like to know: When did Chocolove start using poems? How many have they used? Is there an in-house editorial board? What qualities does a poem have to display in order to be deemed worthy of Chocolove endorsement, and is there a process by which individual poems are paired with individual chocolate flavors? Why, for example, did ChocoLove select Browning's Sonnet XII to pair with that particular bar?

But, alas. Despite a couple of emails and phone calls, we've received not a single calorie in the way of an answer from Chocolove headquarters, and so we're left for the moment with what we can find on Chocolove's web site, which raises even more questions. In the site's "Frequently Asked Questions" section, for example, we find the query "Can I submit poetry to Chocolove?" followed by the answer: "We do not take poetry submissions but we appreciate your interest. Our poetry has to be in the public domain, which is free and clear of any rights. We have fairly narrow parameters for what we print and we do not use any modern day poetry."

Poetry & Popular Culture can't help but wonder how many queries the company received from would-be ChocoLorcas before it felt moved to make this a FAQ? Did would-be ChocoLarkins send in poems, and what were those poems like? That is, what pool of poetic talent is going untapped by ChocoLove's decision to use only poems in the public domain, and what does it suggest about the relationship between chocolate and poetry that it's so easily disrupted by the inconvenience of copyright restrictions? Doesn't chocolate—like love—know no such bounds, and is there anything else about "modern day poetry" that, as a whole, wouldn't fit the unstated but nonetheless "fairly narrow parameters" of the company's editorial rubric? That is, are modern love and modern poetry in some way fundamentally incompatible?

However, Ernest, we at the Poetry & Popular Culture office don't want to send you away entirely empty-handed, for there is something of a tradition of wrapping together poetry and chocolate that isn't immediately evident in ChocoLove's packaging. Take, for example, the "For Mother" poem pictured to the left which adorns the front of an undated cardboard candy box issued by Schrafft's Chocolates of Boston, Massachusetts—a city which, like Brandywine Battlefield, saw its own share of Revolutionary War activity. Like the "poemulations" of Emily Dickinson, Chum Frink, and James Metcalfe, this is rhyming poetry printed as prose with linebreaks signaled by little designs and ornamented capital letters.

Or consider the tin box pictured here, which was probably manu- factured by the Artstyle Chocolate company— also of Boston—a bit later in the 20th century. Both boxes offer poems to mother, but the Artstyle poem does Schrafft's one better by including a byline; this is verse by Mary Grey Robinson, about whom P&PC knows very little except that she wrote the words for a 1920 songbook titled Babykin. Her poem "Mother" reads:

Every age and every tongue
Of Mother love has fondly sung
And from my heart I want to add
A glowing tribute just as glad
For never could love more wonderful be
Than you, dear Mother, have you given to me.

Both of these items are clearly products of an American culture of "Momism" that saw similar verse printed on pillows, plates, table runners, wall hangings, letter purses, and handkerchiefs—possibly even on picnic baskets like the one you no doubt took to Brandywine Battlefield. What is the connection, you might be wondering about now, between these pro-mother poems from earlier in the century and the romantic poem inside the ChocoLove bar which you shared with your wife? That depends, Ernest. How do you feel about your mother?

Sincerely,

Poetry & Popular Culture

The Ballad of Ben Cannon and House Bill 2461

Appeared in the Oregon Statesman-Journal on June 3, 2009

In the Twinkling Star, your neighborhood bar,
Ben Cannon sat down with a stranger—
a guy from Missouri who seemed in a hurry
and who reeked of political danger.

“Now Ben,” the man said, “your reputation has spread.
You’re young, good-looking, and smart.
And I’m happy to say I’ve come all this way
to tell you it’s only a start—

that I think you’re put here like the froth on a beer
to finish a well-poured draw.
I can help your career if you lend me your ear
and consider a possible law.”

And the man from Anheuser said from Portland to Keizer
Oregonians were lushes and sots,
so addicted to hops they just couldn’t say stop
and who gulped every beer that they bought.

“Just one little tax,” said the man sitting back,
“could treat ’em and sober ’em right.
What’s a penny or two on the cost of a brew
on this—this Michelob Light—

compared to the aid you’d get back in trade
to cure all of OR-ee-GONE?”
Then cracking his neck, he picked up the check
and left without stifling a yawn.

And the very next day, with no shades of grey,
Ben Cannon set out to win—
to tax every flaw, be it keg, can, or draw.
“Love the sinner,” he said, “Tax the sin.”

So that’s how the lobbyist ran out the hobbyist,
how Ben Cannon’s bill shed its blood.
That’s why Oregon’s brews are now singing the blues—
why the Twinkling Star serves just Bud.

What's Good About Bad Poetry? The Case of Patrick the Starfish

Check out Michael Leong's beautiful take on the stinky poetry of Patrick the Starfish from SpongeBob SquarePants. An excerpt:

"A pessimist might observe that SpongeBob and Patrick’s dispersal of bad poetry lowered the aesthetic standards of the town.... A similar pessimist might make the case that bad poetry should stay private, that Bigshot Records— much like vanity presses—lures subpar writers with the illusive promise of fame and recognition. Yet, to me, there is a performative exuberence in Spongebob and Patrick’s blaring, gum-attached gramophone that makes it seem like an ultimately salutary, and even revolutionary, gesture for Bikini Bottom—that it shocked the town out of its rigid aesthetic categories. I want to optimistically think that at the very moment when that fish thought “You know—It’s not that bad,” some kind of aesthetic recalibration occurred, that Patrick’s poem redefined his notions of what art can be."

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: John Strachan

Just when Poetry & Popular Culture thought it knew every poetry superstar who walked down the red carpet of popular culture, along comes John Strachan, professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sunderland and author of Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period. Okay, so we knew that Strachan was out there writing. A few years ago, we had occasion to talk about the comparative tonsorial poetics of early 19th-century England and mid 20th-century America, discovering the "barberous" verse connections between P&PC fave Burma-Shave and the British, Romantic-Era, New York City-based barber, poet, and master of self-promotion J.R.D. Huggins. And not too long ago we learned of Strachan's fondness for the poetry of late 18th-century pugilism. So he was on the office radar.

But nothing could have prepared us for Advertising and Satirical Culture in which Strachan walks seemingly straight out of the Romantic Era with the poetry of shoe blacking in one hand and the verse of bear-fat hair oil in the other. Bringing advertising jingles, parodies, and elaborate mock epics together with poetry and puffs written by the age's more recognizable literary figures—Byron, Coleridge, Crabbe, Dickens, Lamb, Wordsworth, and others—Strachan reconstructs an entire sphere of literary activity created and sustained not just by resourceful and ingenious copy writers but by canonical ones as well. Along the way, he manages to argue that some of what literary critics have long identified as the defining characteristics of "Romantic" writing—a focus on the individual, creativity, genius, originality, etc.—are, in fact, also defining characteristics of the age's advertising poetry. Popular poetry, he reveals, didn't have a monopoly on the commercial. And literary poetry, in turn, didn't have a monopoly on genius.

To go about showing this, Strachan spends two chapters surveying the landscape of advertising poetry and the responses it elicited among the literati. Advertisers not only quoted literary poetry in their puffs, but they imitated it, parodied it, and wrote all sorts of verses of their own as well. In turn, literary writers not only parodied advertising poetry to critique the excesses of commercial culture, but they found in such puffery what Strachan calls a set of "formal models for satire aimed elsewhere." That is, they borrowed the familiar, catchy, poetic discourse of advertising—and the figure of the shameless ad man—to critique a wide range of targets. Take, for example, Thomas Moore's 1826 squib lampooning two Tory figures (Poet Laureate Robert Southey and the editor of The New Times) by comparing them to snake oil salesman Dr. Eady (who hawked a surefire cure for syphilis):

Though many great Doctors there be,
There are three that all Doctors o'ertop,
Doctor Eady, that famous M.D.,
Doctor S-th-y, and dear Doctor Slop.
The purger—the proser—the bard—
All quacks in a different style;
Doctor S-th-y writes books by the yard,
Doctor Eady writes puffs by the mile!
Doctor Slop, in no merit outdone
By his scribbling or physicking brother,
Can dose us with stuff like the one,
Ay, and doze us with stuff like the other.

If Chapters 1 & 2 paint a picture of literary England in which advertising drove the writing of literature and literature drove the writing of poetic ads, then the remaining chapters in Strachan's book focus on advertising campaigns for individual products—shoe blacking, the national lottery, hair oils, and tonsorial services—and the responses those campaigns elicited. These are totally fun, sometimes hilarious chapters about the minutia of Romantic-Era life, but they also open a number of windows onto the politics (and poetics) of everyday life inherent in the most unassuming of consumer goods. Who would've thought, for example, that the period's great crinicultural debate—whether to use vegetable-fat hair oil or bear-fat hair oil—came about because of an emergency wartime tax on hair powder levied by William Pitt the Younger? To protest the tax, Pitt's political opponents began wearing their hair unpowdered, which understandably necessitated a need for some sort of gel, cream, spray, or mousse to help manage out-of-control locks. Hence the emergence of the hair-oil industry (and the eventual dissolution of the hair powder business) accompanied by an entire sub-genre of related verse. Consider Thomas Spence's "An Address to Mr. Pitt Accompanied by a Crop of Human Hair" which, Strachan explains, "defiantly declares that he is proud to wear his hair unpowdered, that he will be no 'guinea pig' (as those who paid the guinea tax were dismissively labeled) and that he hopes Pitt will slit his throat while shaving":

O Heaven-born minister of state,
This tail from off my swinish pate,
Most humbly I present it;
For since no powder may we wear,
Determin'd I've cut off my hair,
And to your honour sent it.

Know then vile Tory, I'm a Whig,
And will not be a Guinea pig,
To satisfy your craving;
Oh! that your razor would but slip
Three inches underneath your lip,
When you yourself are shaving.

A deadly gash I hope 'twould be,
To end your damn'd hypocrisy,
And rid us of a P-t.
A speedy peace I now pray for,
To finish this unlucky war,
Thus endeth my dull wit.

There's more where those stanzas come from, dear reader, so get your copy of Advertising and Satirical Culture today. Nine out of ten enthusiasts of poetry and popular culture recommend it.

The Poetry of Blatz Beer?

Check out this great 1883 New Year's greeting card and its poetic ad for Blatz beer, all products of the Valentin Blatz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the time of this card's issue, Mr. Blatz was still operating the brewery he'd started in 1850 right down the road from Johann Braun's City Brewery (est. 1846). Upon Braun's death in 1889, the two companies would merge to become the third largest brewer in Milwaukee. In 1959, the Blatz brand label was sold to Pabst, and in 2005-2006, the Valentin Blatz Brewing Company Office Building was converted into condos.










































If you enjoyed the advertising poetry in this posting, you might also enjoy:

Poetry in Lotion
The Poetry of Ex Lax
Bob the Bunny
C.G. Blatt's Photographic Emporium
Dr. C.B. Weagley, Veterinary Surgeon
The Palace Saloon and Restaurant