"Whatever happened to 'Hickory Dickory Dock'?": The Poetry of Family Ties (Season 3, Episode 20 [1985])

Back to School with Anne Campbell

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

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

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

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

Here's "Visitin' the School":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seventeen Syllables from Progressive Insurance

P&PC's New Acquisition: First Thoughts

Check out this neat little reward of merit, probably made in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and originally given to Imogene Hayes of Fillmore County, Minnesota, for three months of perfect school attendance. (Go Imogene!) Rewards of merit oftentimes included poems—the verse here is the first stanza of Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Swing"—and were a common vehicle by which connections between poetry, school, childhood, and femininity were positively reinforced around this time, contributing to what Angela Sorby has called "the infantilization of American poetry: poets framed as children, children seen as poets, children posited as readers, children recruited as performers, and adults wishing themselves back into childhood."

You can certainly see how this reward of merit posits children as readers and performers of poetry, and no doubt their proud parents looked upon the card and wished for the real or imagined carefree days of swinging in the air so blue. But where, one might ask—as one of our interns did—is the child seen as a poet? That's one of the beautiful things about this card: not only is it a reward of merit, but it's an ink blotter as well—a reward that hails the student not just as a reader of poetry but as writer of poetry too. Add in the American flag motif of the child's dress (as she swings freely "o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave"), and you've got a potent little piece of ephemera linking the values of poetry, childhood, education, and American patriotism. Who knew that just three months of perfect attendance could come with so much extra baggage?

Summer Report: P&PC at Critical Margins

Yes, P&PC has been a little slow to keep up with our usual schedule of weekly postings this summer, and we apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment that has caused along the way. But there have been good reasons for our delays and postponements. Sure, our intern budget got cut back. And sure, Polly the Paper Shredder and Sally the Stenographer surprised us all by eloping and tying the knot—legally—in Oregon. But then came the two-week trip to Rome and Venice, where (among other things), we visited the graves of John Keats, Percy Shelley, Gregory Corso, and Ezra Pound and fell head over heels for Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture in Rome and Tintoretto's paintings in Venice. (That's Tintoretto's The Miracle of the Slave pictured above, btw.) And then came a trip to Iowa City where we worked, visited with old friends, and ate George's cheeseburgers for nearly four weeks. As you can probably imagine, it can be difficult to keep up the pace when out of the office, missing interns, and fielding happy pictures and texts from Polly and Sally as they do their cross-country trip honeymoon.

But that doesn't mean we've been entirely missing in action. In fact, the time away from the office gave us a chance to complete a long interview for Critical Margins about Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America and matters relating to, well, poetry and popular culture more generally. That interview went live this week, and we loved the chance to talk about the book, poetry in the media, our time writing advertising poetry, our students' work, and the book project that we've got in the works. In the way of a teaser, here's one question from the interview and our answer:

Critical Margins: What is your favorite example in the last year of popular poetry?

P&PC: I'd have to say Season Four, Episode Six ("Foot Chase") of the FX Network's show Justified. (Okay, Season Four ran in 2013, but I watched it in 2014.) There's a scene where career criminal Boyd Crowder and his hired muscle break into the home of local banker Dale Haywood, whom they think might really be Drew Thompson—a man who, twenty years earlier, faked his death to escape testifying against a Detroit crime boss and then made off with a load of the crime boss's drugs. Hoping to collect a ransom if they find and deliver the real Drew Thompson, Boyd and Colt hold Haywood hostage until he can prove he is in fact who he says he is and not Drew Thompson. Searching for evidence one way or another, Boyd and Colt discover a box of souvenirs and mementos in Haywood's house, and they pull out a piece of lined notebook paper with a handwritten poem on it. Boyd reads it aloud, then we get a chance to read it for ourselves on screen. Here's the poem:

This is a fascinating little TV moment, isn't it? Why make Dale a poet (or at least someone who has written a poem)? Why make it such a bad poem? And why have it read aloud and shown to the audience when it doesn't end up proving anything one way or another (for Boyd, at least) about Dale's true identity?

It's also a fascinating little poem—precisely, I think, because of the nature of its badness. It begins with cliché, right? The kitschy abstractions like "my heart," "my soul," "my hurt," and "sorrow," plus the rhymes and meter of an amateur love poem, anchor it in unoriginal language, thus making for bad verse. But it's not uniform in its badness from beginning to end. Pushed by the need to find a rhyme for "sorrow," Dale's final metaphor ("the size of Kilimanjaro") is so not cliché that I can only describe it as truly original work—work, one might say, that reaches new, perhaps incomparable, heights of original badness. (He could have rhymed with "tomorrow," couldn’t he?) I suspect that, on some level, this verse dramatizes—in a way that "good" poetry might not be able to do—the scene's focus on whether Dale is actually Dale or an impostor masquerading as Dale. Is he the undercover Drew Thompson pretending to be someone else (the way cliché is "pretending" to be poetry), or is he really Dale (not pretty, but as original as his metaphor)?

There's another aspect of this that's interesting, too. Dale has hidden his poem away, and, in finding it, Boyd essentially "outs" Dale as a poet—a drama that doesn't just offer a nice foil to the "outing" Drew Thompson plot but that also recalls similar moments in other shows. There's a 1973 episode of All in the Family in which Archie Bunker outs his hippie son-in-law Mike as a poet—what Archie calls "a regular Edgar Allan Poe-lock." There's a 1982 episode of The Jeffersons in which George is outed as having once written love poetry for Louise. There's the plotline in the first season of Rescue Me (2004) where macho New York firefighter Lt. Kenny "Lou" Shea is afraid that people will find out he's been writing poetry to cope with his feelings in the aftermath of 9/11. All of these scenes associate poetry with the closet and thus with queerness—as if our culture needed yet another reason to think that a dude writing poetry might be queer. (In fact, Shea's story is paralleled by a plot line involving rumors that some of his fellow firefighters are gay.) Even in Justified, the scene sets up Dale to be read as queer: he's downstairs late at night and not upstairs in bed with his wife, and in mentioning "Curt" rather than the name of the "her" in the verse, Dale's poem suggests, ever so slightly, that the "hurt" expressed in the poem comes from the pain of seeing Dale's secret beloved Curt kissing a girl and thus knowing that Curt is unavailable.

There's more, too. This plot motif goes all the way back to the 1950s when ground-breaking TV comedian Ernie Kovacs debuted his character of Percy Dovetonsils—an effeminate poet in a zebra-striped smoking jacket who used a daisy as a swizzle stick, wore glasses that made him look bug-eyed, and lisped while reciting poems like "Cowboy":

O cowboy so lean,
O cowboy so tall,
You sit there straight as an arrow.
But side-saddle you ride,
Instead of astride.
Are you perhaps a gay ranchero? 

Dovetonsils, Kovacs once claimed, was based on none other than Ted Malone of Between the Bookends radio fame, whom audiences had only ever heard—a voice incriminated by its association with poetry that Kovacs, via the new medium of TV, was able to "out" as queer, thus making a case for the reliability or truth-telling power of TV over and against radio.

I've come a long way from Justified, haven't I? Maybe you now see a bit more clearly the types of vantage points that can open up via poetry in popular culture; it can be much more complex than it initially appears, with implications—in this case—for how we understand the taxonomies of poetic "badness," for how poetry has gotten linked to (indeed, how it's been presented as a symptom of) queer sexualities and thus has become a repository for cultural anxieties about homosexuality, and how it serves as an occasion by which changing media hierarchies are conducted. Kind of amazing, no? 

Please head over to Critical Margins for the rest of the interview? We hope you do.

"Henry Horseworth Longfellow": The Poetry of Mister Ed (Season 2, Episode 23)

Note: In this episode—"The Beachcomber," aired on April 1, 1962—Mister Ed feels rejected, "real down, and beat," and runs away from home to join an artist colony full of beatniks. There are three poems for your viewing and listening pleasure: the first is at 10:25 in Part One (a poem by a beatnik about rejection); the second is at 1:25 in Part Two (Mr. Ed's poem about rejection); and the third is at 11:25 in Part Two (Mr. Ed's poem about how good his life is). Happy viewing!

The Poetry of Hogan's Goat Pizza

As you know, P&PC has a vast network of lookouts, helping hands, affiliates, fellow travelers, and owl-eyed spotters scouring the American landscape for material so that we can bring you your weekly fix and simultaneously try, in our own little way, to goad on the members of that school of poetry-think that perpetuates the myth (as William Logan did this past Sunday in the New York Times) that poetry is "loathed by many." Indeed! Well, if we here at P&PC try to goad 'em on, then the menu (pictured here) at Hogan's Goat Pizza of 5222 NE Sacramento in Portland, Oregon, could be said to take a more hircine approach to the issue.

We got the menu (not the pizza and definitely not the goat) hand-delivered from our friend Cheryl before she left Salem for the more enticing climes of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She'd been hanging out with all the hipsters in Portland (many of whom apparently model their facial hair after the billy pictured on the menu). She'd gotten hungry. She stopped by Hogan's Goat Pizza for a pie and, like probably everyone else, wondered who was Hogan and what was a goat pizza.

Well, Cheryl didn't have far to look for a partial answer, as the first panel inside the menu's cover explains that "Hogan's Goat" comes from a nineteenth-century song. (For one version of the song, click here.) Here are the lyrics as the menu (pictured below) presents them, complete with capitalization and punctuation issues:

Old Hogan's Goat ... Was feeling fine ... He
ate my shirts right off the line ... I took a
stick ... And broke his back ... And tied him
to a railroad track ... A speeding train ...
Came speeding by ... Old Hogan's Goat was
sure to die ... He gave a shriek ... A shriek of
pain ... Coughed up the shirts and FLAGGED
DOWN THE TRAIN!'

When we first saw this version of "Hogan's Goat," we didn't think it was a song—right?—since the pizza joint didn't print it, as song lyrics are traditionally printed, in lines and stanzas. Rather, Hogan's Goat Pizza printed it to look like a "poemulation"—the term that Sinclair Lewis used to describe the verses written by fake newspaper poet T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink in the novel Babbitt (1922), verses that were formatted to look like prose but rhymed like poetry. While Lewis may have coined the term, we're pretty sure he didn't invent the form. Among the poemulation's most esteemed and prolific practitioners was James Metcalfe, who, in the 1940s and 1950s (after his career in the FBI), penned hundreds of 'em for Chicago's newspaper The Times. (You can find lots of Metcalfe's poemulations preserved in old poetry scrapbooks.)

Before Metcalfe, and as early as 1912, "Uncle" Walt Mason of Emporia, Kansas, was publishing poemulations as well (many of which also found their way into poetry scrapbooks; you can check out nearly two hundred pages of Mason's poemulations here). And, as we discussed back in 2009 in relation to a discussion in Virginia Jackson's book Dickinson's Misery, it's quite possible that Emily Dickinson could be said to have written in poemulation form before the Civil War—around the same time ... wait for it ... that the lyrics for "Hogan's Goat" were being written.

So what's the upshot of all this? Well, for starters, it's possible that "Hogan's Goat" was a poemulation before it was a song. And if it wasn't a poemulation first, well, it now is—at least in the version that Hogan's Goat Pizza prints in the menu. In fact, when Cheryl delivered the menu to the P&PC Office, she delivered what she thought was in fact a poem; she'd skipped over the restaurant's introductory words that insist on calling it a "song" even though it isn't, and she let the rhyming and lack of musical accompaniment direct her reading of it as the poem—er, poemulation—it is. She may not have loved it as much as the pizza (which she said was excellent, btw). But she certainly didn't "loathe" it as William Logan says poetry is "loathed by many." Nope. We in the P&PC Office suspect that if there's any loathing going on in the poetry world, it's not among non-readers of poetry but among poets and critics like Logan who are bound and determined to imagine that the rest of the world somehow has the spare energy to loathe what they in particular do. Indeed, if they'd just adjust their definition of what a "poem"—even a poemulation—might be, we think they'd be a lot happier. Less narcissistic, perhaps. But happier.