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.

The Poetry of Extortion: The City Cab Co. of Hays, Kansas, & The 21 Club of Buffalo, NY

In his essay "Business and Poetry," Dana Gioia wonders why "[t]here have been many important American poets who supported themselves—either by necessity or choice—by working in business, but none of them has seen it as an experience fit to write about." T.S. Eliot didn't write about Lloyd's Bank of London. Wallace Stevens didn't write much about insurance. A.R. Ammons didn't write about being a salesman. James Dickey didn't write about working in advertising. Richard Hugo didn't write about working at Boeing, and Archibald MacLeish didn't write about his time as editor of Fortune. Gioia goes looking for office cubicles, interest rates, and quarterly profits, and when he doesn't find them, he concludes that "Business does not exist in the world of poetry."

Poetry & Popular takes umbrage with this notion, since a huge number of writers—ranging from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Tillie Olsen, Muriel Rukeyser, Philip Levine and Robert Pinsky—have, in fact, written about business and money in America. Much of this poetry belongs to an American protest tradition that explores the lives of workers and trades, class inequalities, the exploitation of workers by business, and the business-based divides between rich and poor. We have ground that specific axe elsewhere and long ago, however. Here, we want to claim that a whole other realm of American poetry is also concerned with the business of making, getting, and spending money. Money—one of what Gioia calls the central "concerns of the average man"—is central to the world of popular poetry.

Money is so central to popular poetry—think of the enormous amounts of poetry that have been written for, or incorporated into, advertisements, for example—that it's impossible to cover all of its various manifestations and permutations in this one little posting. (If you're interested or can't get enough of advertising poetry, though, check out our previous postings focusing on Levi's, corsets, Blatz beer, Chocolove, Ex-Lax, and thread.) So here, for a moment, as Halloween approaches, we want to dwell on the poetry of extortion—the poetry of blackmail.

Consider the poem printed at the top of this posting, which appears on the back of a business card for the City Cab Company of that great metropolis, Hays, Kansas. Poems were commonly printed on business cards (see, for example, the business cards of Dr. C.B. Weagley, Veterinary Surgeon, or C.G. Blatt's Photographic Emporium), but this one is extra special for the threat it humorously levels against the passenger/client:

The taxicab driver sits in his car
And waits for calls from near and far;
He knows all the crooks and he knows all the rooks;
He knows all the bad roads; he knows all the nooks;
He knows our sorrows; he knows our joys;
He knows all the girls who are chasing the boys;
He knows all our troubles; he knows all our strife;
He knows every man who ducks from his wife;
If the taxicab driver told half that he knows,
He would turn all our friends into foes;
He would sow a small breeze that would soon be a gale;
Engulf us in trouble—land us in jail;
He would start forth a story, which gaining in force;
Would cause half our wives to sue for divorce;
He'd get all our homes mixed up in a fight;
And turn our bright days into sorrowing nights
In fact, he could keep the whole town in a stew,
If he told half of the things he knew.
So here we are—just pay us our fees,
We won't know a thing but our ABC's.

For Poetry & Popular Culture, this semi- colon-happy poem is not just a facetious reminder to pay up—an excessively verbose argument about the value of silence. It's also a poem in the tradition of wassailing and other extortionary lyrics that Leon Jackson illuminates in his great essay, "We Wont' Leave Until We Get Some: Reading the Newsboy's New Year's Address." For Jackson, poems like the carriers' addresses of 18th and 19th century America were not dominated in their distribution "by a single, market-based economy" but "were disseminated through a number of different economies—charity, patronage, gift-exchange, credit network, competitive writing, and so on," some of which carried threats of retribution or violence that challenged the way that money typically organized class relations. One of the examples he offers is the tradition of wassailing where "a group of poorer men would 'invade' a home at Christmas time, sing songs or perhaps perform a brief play, and then demand money or food. The wassailers would refuse to leave until they had been recompensed, and if they were forcibly ejected they would undertake a campaign of sabotage and destruction that often lasted for months at a time." Every act of wassailing thus contained an implicit threat: pay up, or face occupation.

The rhetoric of the City Cab Co. business card works in a similar way, revealing the cabbie to have a monopoly on a town's dirty laundry and blackmailing the customer into forking over some dough. When read in this context (and in a tradition of extortionary verse rooted in carriers' addresses, handbills circulated by people with disabilities, and the like), the second image above—a poem on the inside of a matchbook for the 21 Club, "The Finest Club in Buffalo"—reveals itself to be working in much the same way. Here, "The Bartender Knows" rehearses much of the same material as "The Taxicab Driver" and, at times, is a word-for-word repetition of the City Cab Company's business card, sans the excessive punctuation. This repetition is, btw, way intriguing for the P&PC office; we sometimes lie awake at night wondering about the original "source" poem from which these verses were cribbed.

The most significant difference between the two versions, however, is the fact that "The Bartender Knows" makes the threat of exposure implicit. So tight-lipped is the well-paid bartender, in fact—or so the logic of the poem goes—that even the activity of his blackmail goes unstated. Modern readers may read the poem's conclusion

So when out on a party
And from home you steal
Drop in for a drink
THE BARTENDER WON'T SQUEAL

as a gesture of friendship, solidarity, or male bonding, but contemporary verses such as "The Taxicab Driver" help us see that that is not the case at all. Don't be fooled. Friendship, solidarity, and male bonding are secondary developments of what is, first and foremost, an economic relationship grounded in an information economy where extortion—not your pint of Guinness—is the order of the day.

Lines Encountered at the New Moon Restaurant in Olympia, Washington

If you came upon a chinchilla in Chile
And shaved its beard willy-nilly,
You could honestly say
That you've just made
A Chilean chinchilla's chin chilly.
















More about the New Moon Cafe here, chinchillas here, Chile here, and a little about Roberto Ampuero (cute as a chinchilla and from Chile) here.

Is That a Poem in Your Pocket?

We submit for your contemplation this week two little men. One (pictured to the left) is a rosy-cheeked U.S. sailor produced in 1941 by Calambra Products of Alhambra, California. The other (pictured below) is a drop-drawered "Bull Clinton" made and distributed as part of the "Meanies" satirical doll collection. One says "Hello." Saith the other, perhaps, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." They've been propped up on the P&PC Office coffee maker for awhile now, and so we share them with you.

With an Edgar Guestian folksiness even Clinton himself might admire, Joe Sailor reads:

I'd like to be with you awhile
And hear about the folks,
I'd like to sit and see you smile
At the same old jokes,
But since you are so far away
I cannot hope to go,
I'll just send this little token
Just to say—HELLO!

Joe Sailor's weren't the only wartime greetings expressed in poetry, of course, as verses long and short, complicated and not-so-complicated, crisscrossed the oceans on and in postcards, pin-up girly pictures, letters, souvenir pillows, handkerchiefs, chapbooks, newspaper clippings, and the like. Frank Capra's Private Snafu military training videos were narrated in verse. Cary Nelson has reminded us how propaganda poems were shot across enemy lines in capsules specially made to open, mid-air, in order to shower enemy combatants with poetry. Even the Communist Party got in on the action, publishing Victory Verses for Young Americans (pictured above). In Partisans & Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War, Mark W. Van Wienen records the many uses to which poetry was put during World War I. P&PC is waiting for someone to write a companion book about the political work of poetry in World War II.

The specter of poetry's various applications has dogged Bill Clinton, too, especially in the wake of news reports tracking how he once greeted Monica Lewinsky by giving her a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. He isn't the only one that the Meanies series has lampooned in verse; one wonders what history of the 1990s could be written via the limericks attached on each doll's tag:

Bull Clinton is "full of it" they say.
His "staff" couldn't get out of the way.
He's in and out of courts
Cause of his fallen shorts.
He leans to the left, so they say.

Bull's toothy smile hearkens back in at least one way to the era of our little sailor, as editorial cartoons often showed F.D.R. with a grin like this one. (There was a fair amount of anti-F.D.R. verse in circulation back then too.) The puns in this poem are most appropriate for Bull, however, as their double meanings parody the political equivocations and doublespeak common in the beltway. Not so for Joe, though, whose boyish charm and blond crew-cut are certified legit by the earnest rhymes and the "little token" that fills at least our hearts.

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: An Interview with Tessa Kale, Editor of The Columbia Granger's Index To Poetry

Perhaps no single book testifies to the vast amounts of poetry produced and consumed in the 20th-century U.S. more than Granger's Index to Poetry. Since its first edition in 1904, Granger's has tracked and charted only a fraction of America's total poetic activity—mostly poetry in books and anthologies—but what a fraction it's been. That 1904 edition included over 30,000 titles culled, editor Edith Granger explained, from "the contents of three hundred and sixty-nine volumes, comprising standard and popular collections of poetry, recitations (both prose and verse), orations, drills, dialogues, selections from dramas, etc." By 1918, Granger's would list 50,000 titles. By 1940 the Index would list 75,000 titles and bill itself as a "Practical Reference Book for Librarians, Teachers, Booksellers, Elocutionists, Radio Artists, Etc." (Note how "Literary Critic" is not on that list.) Now available in electronic formats, The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry is in its 13th edition and offers users access to 250,000 full-text poems and 450,000 citations organized under 6,000 subject headings.

For over a century, Granger's has been a standard reference book on the shelves of libraries small and large across the U.S., but as far as the P&PC Office can tell, there is no history of the book, nor much in the way of information about the woman who lent the book her name. We're keeping our interns busy researching those matters, but we also had a chance to catch up with Tessa Kale, current editor of the Index and author of the novel Daphne Underground. Here's what she had to say.

P&PC: What's the job description for "The Editor" of The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry?

Tessa Kale: The tasks are too numerous to risk boring you by enumerating.

P&PC: Try me.

TK: Keeping vigilant about the best new anthologies coming out is impor- tant when we're not actually indexing them for the next print edition. Then, in order to do that indexing, we have to have all the right machinery in place, which can also handle the work that is done for the web site: this involves a decided slice of time for development of editorial management systems. For the web site, full text of the poems must be found, permission sought, and keyed in XML, and commentaries of the poems and biographies of the poets must be edited with links added throughout to all the many wonderful features on the site.

P&PC: Your talk of "management systems" and "XML" makes me think Granger's has changed a little bit over the years?

TK: The web site is the biggest change. Before that, there were CDs in that time of transition before the web became the way of the world.

P&PC: I write poems for the local newspaper. How can I get my poems indexed in Granger's?

TK: Sorry, our business is to index anthologies.

P&PC: That hasn’t always been the case, has it?

TK: No, for a time we also indexed poems in Collected and Selected Volumes. It was an additional enhancement we thought we'd try out.

P&PC: Why stick to anthologies?

TK: The idea is to help people locate a poem they are looking for, though they may, for instance, not remember the title or the author, but have a sure idea of the first line. So the poem they've got in mind is probably already well-known. That's the business of anthologies—gathering up the best, according to the editors, and making the poems known to an ever-growing readership.

P&PC: How does one measure the success of something like Granger's?

TK: Most likely the same way success is measured elsewhere in publishing: the financial gain.

P&PC: How many copies of the latest edition (the 13th) have been sold?

TK: 2,636 copies so far.

P&PC: How many subscribers does the electronic version have?

TK: We have approximately 500 subscribers through our own platform and reach an additional 100 subscribers through the Ebsco host. It's a little tough to gauge just how many people we reach at major public library systems. New York Public Library, the National Library of Singapore, Chicago Public Library, and the Auckland City Public Library are examples of large subscribers. In 2008, we recorded approximately 237,000 sessions. So far this year, we've recorded over 200,000 sessions. Our daily average has increased from 650 sessions a day to 733.

P&PC: Who was this Edith Granger who got the whole thing rolling?

TK: Edith Granger was a stunning, bespectacled redhead who, after graduating from Smith College, worked in a Chicago bookstore and hit upon the brilliant idea of indexing the titles and first lines of poems—for which librarians all over the country will be forever deeply grateful.

P&PC: A stunning, bespectacled redhead?

TK: It's nice to think so. I hear "Edith Granger" and I think Rita Hayworth, with glasses.

Top 10 Roadside Rhymes: Number 1

The Poetry & Popular Culture office has received queries, suggestions, threats, and expressions of both wonderment and dismay about how long it's taken us to reveal what is, in our humble estimation, the Number One Roadside Rhyme in America. Over the past few weeks, as we've constructed our list of the Top Ten Roadside Rhymes, we've parsed the poetry of John Deere and explored the implied rhyming of Frankie Doodle's restaurant. We've debated the ecological implications of what it means to "Shield Your Field." Some of us have scanned, some of us have eaten a little crow, and others have stalked out of the office peeved to no end that billboard rhymes like Chase's new retail campaign

Brand Spanking
New Banking

were not even included in the Top Ten while lewd expressions of popular sentiment like Rock Creek, Montana's, "Testicle Festival" managed to make it all the way to Number 2. We've been contacted by everyday folks and even (true fact) by an editor at a commercial press interested in discovering new ways of talking about the poetry of American life.

All of this interest—all of the furor, anticipation, and controversy—is a sign that folks are paying attention to the very literary ways that presumably debased commercial signage is and has been making itself seen and heard, not to mention how characteristics of literary writing are being used to serve the commercial marketplace. Who can deny the appealingly complex pun of "brand spanking" in Chase's four-word poem? The symmetry of its construction? The ways you can read the poem across, down, and diagonally and have it make sense in each direction, as the intersection of four words trope the intersection of two roads but without all the red lights and green arrows? Who knows if the marketing genius behind "Brand Spanking / New Banking" would trace that slogan's impulse back to a passage from Spring and All by highway poet William Carlos Williams. There—putting more space between the capitalized words and the lower-case ones than the current blog interface will allow us to do—Williams wrote:


THE HORSES black
&
PRANCED white

Now, however, we have reached the end of the Top Ten road, as it were, and we're happy to announce that the Number One Roadside Rhyme in America ...

... is not a rhyme.

You read it correctly. The most literarily dense sign in the U.S. landscape doesn't rhyme at all. It's a complex piece of wordplay, double meaning, and intertextuality. It's more than two words long but not quite three. It's a convenience store division of the Kroger Company that's open 24 hours a day in eight states to best meet your needs. The Number One Roadside Rhyme in America is

Loaf 'n Jug

We here at the Poetry & Popular Culture office have never even been in a Loaf 'n Jug, but consider, to begin with, what the company does with two and one-third words. At first reading, one reads the sign as an announcement—listing two iconographic products of the American convenience store and the bare necessities of bodily nourishment: bread and milk. The sheer fact that the sign communicates "milk" despite the fact that few people buy milk by the "jug" any more suggests how deeply it's tapping into the social fabric of American English.

But Loaf 'n Jug doesn't just pair two nouns together the way a less accom- plished brand name like Kum & Go links two verbs. That's because the word "Loaf" in Loaf 'n Jug can be read as both noun and verb—a measure of bread and a style of relaxation. This is in fact the double appeal and double promise of this highway-based convenience store: it provides food and a break from the weariness of the road. Here, you can buy a loaf, and you can loaf around.

But that double appeal and the double signification of "loaf" as it functions simultaneously as noun and imperative verb causes linguistic trouble for the rest of the sign, for once we read "loaf" as a verb, we're encouraged to read "jug" as a verb as well—only to realize that we can't in fact "jug." That is, the sensical, parallel linking of two nouns ("loaf" and "jug") implicitly promises that we can similarly link the verb "loaf" with the verb "jug," only to then break that promise by the almost avant-garde non-sense of "jug." Attempting to make sense of what "jug" means as a verb (is it past tense of "do a jig"? the past tense of some imaginary verb "jag"?) proves increasingly frustrating, which may in fact be part of the point. The store, which aims to keep us (and our wallets) inside as long as possible, initiates that process of entrapment by getting us tangled up in the hermeneutics of its sign before we even hit the parking lot. If you doubt the viability of this reading, go check out your Oxford English Dictionary, which informs us that in the latter half of the 1800s "jug" was, in fact, used as a verb. What did it mean? It was slang for "To shut up in jail; to imprison." Fishermen know the term jig in this sense as well, as it's a method of catching fish.

But that's not all. What landed the non-rhyming "Loaf 'n Jug" at the position of Number One Roadside Rhyme is not just the poetics of linguistic entrapment by highway "convenience" stores, but the literary history it also pulls into its orbit, beginning with that most American of loafers, Walt Whitman, who very nearly begins "Song of Myself" with the lines

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

We here at Poetry & Popular Culture are particular fans of those lines, and so, admittedly, we are predisposed to see them in more places than many other readers are. What cemented our belief that this sign is in conversation with the history of American poetry, however, is that second word "jug," for like "loaf," "jug" has particularly strong literary associations. After its dominant meaning as a measure of milk (or whiskey), "jug" may be most familiarly understood as the sound a nightingale makes—a sound we know most from T.S. Eliot's modernist epic The Waste Land. Consider lines 100-104, for example:

... yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.

And just about one hundred lines later (203-206) we come across:

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.

Some words appear in poems and go on to have happy social lives almost completely separate from those poems, but the words "loaf" and "jug" are not two of them. Like "urn," "brigade," "metro," or "deferred," we can't use "loaf" and "jug"—especially in conjunction with each other and in such a way that calls attention to how densely they signify—without that literary history being present as well. Using that history, Loaf 'n Jug creates a universe for itself and beckons us to enter, promising milk and bread for the body, relaxation for the mind, and poetry for the soul. Once we're inside, the restrooms are dirty, the light is artificial, the bread is stale, and the milk is overpriced. If that's not a modernist epic—even if it's only two and one-third words long—then we don't know what is.

Postscript — Added October 13, 2009

Poetry & Popular Culture is back to report that the nets of intertextuality cast by Loaf 'n Jug spread much further than we first thought! Over the past week, we've been contacted by two separate people on two separate occasions—Rachel Blau DuPlessis over at Temple, and Gail Eifrig, this writer's favorite English teacher from undergraduate school—both of whom have tracked "Loaf 'n Jug" beyond the modernist pale of T.S. Eliot and into the popular consciousness via Edward Fitzgerald's English translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In Section 11 of Fitzgerald's first edition, we read:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Fitzgerald tinkered with the stanza, however, and by the fifth edition, it read (as Section 12):

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Thanks, Rachel and Gail, for taking P&PC further into this Wilderness. If only Loaf 'n Jug were Paradise enow!

Man Wanted for Using Counterfeit Bills at State Fair

—appeared in the Statesman-Journal October 1, 2009

Why is it whenever I go to the fair
with a twenty-dollar bill
and lose it all at the softball toss,
it's called a "game of skill"?

Why when I pay a buck or two
to see The Human Snake
and it's just two bodies sewn together
is it called a "genuine fake"?

And why when I buy a bunch of knives
that cut a can to size
but never get them to work at home
is it called "free enterprise"?

But when I print a dollar or two
to have some fun at the fair?
I'm arrested and called a danger to others
and am taken away from there.