Cheeni Rao's "In Hanuman's Hands"

Here's a hilarious excerpt from "In Hanuman's Hands: A Memoir of Recovery and Redemption" by Srinivas (Cheeni) Rao, in the process of being published by HarperOne (an imprint of HarperCollins) and soon to make its way to a bookstore near you:

"So, rather than waste my time going to classes ... I spent most of my time getting high and playing poker. I would walk in on the days of the tests for my premed classes, scribble my answers down as fast as possible, then race out to find something better to do with my time. I was also taking a poetry-writing class, but I'd been writing for a long time before I came to college as a way of dealing with my internal chaos, and so though the poems I created were sorry jumbles of cliche, they at least showed an understanding of basic poetic forms. The instructor was perpetually grumpy, either pissed that getting tenure didn't excuse him from having to teach poetry to a bunch of hacks, or that people only recognized him as the weirdo who had somehow gotten a poem with the last lines 'Put down your flamethrower, honey / you know I always loved you' into the Norton anthology. Since a couple of the students felt it was a class requirement that they talk more than the professor, even if it was only a monologue about the secret meaning of the poem they had scribbled before class, I soon stopped going to that class too."

Now who out there in our home audience can identify the author of "Put down your flamethrower, honey / you know I always loved you"?

Whatever You Wish To Give (Part 2): An Inglorious Milton?

Written and distributed by James Boon Cheatham around 1880, this 20-stanza carrier's address ("Sympathize with the Blind!") incorporates some of the same rhetorical strategies as "A Railroad Boy's Appeal" and "The Wounded Soldier's Appeal" which I've highlighted below: an expressed (though frustrated) desire to labor for one's living as able-bodied Americans do, and appeals to not only Christian charity but to earning one's place in the afterlife. The railroad boy, for example, ends his poem "by-and-by may all we meet / In realms just over there," punning on the word "just" to indicate not only the proximity of that afterlife but the justice he expects to experience when distinctions between abled and disabled are no longer operative. If things are "just over there," then the poem implies that things are not so just over here and that a small donation will help—at least in the short term—to remedy that; the acts of earning capital and earning salvation are parallel if not overlapping endeavors. Indeed, as a quotation in the upper right-hand corner of Cheatham's broadside explains, "Lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven."

In the poem, Cheatham—after imploring his reader "to buy this poem, every line"—explains:

But I'm blind, I cannot see
The beauty of your loving face,
Be true and grateful and He will be
A loving Saviour of His grace.
But there is a day God's saints shall see
And God will give me light,
When Christian friends shall meet above
Where the blind receive their sight.

As with "A Railroad Boy's Appeal," this poem appeals to ideas of justice and equality in the afterlife in order to encourage people on earth to acts of charity. Cheatham relies on the poetic form to impress this as well, using the linebreak in line three to remind people of the reciprocity in the Christian, not-by-faith-alone, contract for salvation: "Be true and grateful and He will be [as well]". Even more interesting is the implication that able-bodied people are rewarded with salvation for leading good lives while the blind are rewarded with sight; there are two sets of rewards. For the able-bodied, faith alone is not good enough to get one into heaven, but for the disabled, faith—and the pain of enduring the world without sight which that faith makes possible—is enough (especially if they serve as town criers for God). Indeed, Cheatham makes this distinction later in the poem when he writes:

I love my Saviour's welcome voice
His word is my delight;
In early life make him our choice
And battle for the right.

A moral compass, the blind person ("I") can hear and delight in the Saviour's "voice"—an act of revelation that privileges sound over sight—but it's the sighted person who has the responsibility (and power) to "make him our [collective] choice" and lead the "battle for the right." The contractual nature of salvation differs depending on one's physical abilities, and the corresponding cultural economics of ability—at least as they are rhetorically positioned—are in the end more complex and more morally entangled than simply flipping two bits to a blind guy.

The prevalence of poems like "Sympathize with the Blind," "A Railroad Boy's Appeal" and "The Wounded Soldier's Appeal" in the 19th century popular print landscape would seem to offer the field of disability studies a rich entryway into that period's discourses about ability and disability and the ways that disabled individuals harnessed not just a genre but an entire rhetorical constellation in surviving an inhospitable world via their wits and linguistic capacities. It should also offer literary critics another way to think about how poetry was used within popular culture; it was not just easy reading.

Poetry for Sale

In writing about the culture of tipping surrounding 19th century carriers' addresses, I was reminded of this photo of "Poetry for Sale" that I snagged off of eBay some time back. I didn't win the auction, but did find that "Curly Shingles" and "Tramp Star" were pseudonyms for Methodist minister Carl Wilson of Brown County Indiana. In 1941, Tramp Starr wrote what is now his most noted work—a volume titled "Population 359" which is set in the town of Milan, Indiana, home to the Milan High School basketball team of the 1986 movie Hoosiers.

Whatever You Wish To Give: The Popular Culture of Carriers' Addresses in the 19th Century

When people refer to "carriers' addresses," they usually mean the 19th century New Year's poem-greetings delivered to people's doorsteps by newspaper printers' devils—apprentices who usually were not paid for their work—who were seeking a tip to help pay their room and board for the coming year. These were (typically) clever, sometimes fairly lengthy poems summarizing the previous year's events, often authored by the printers' devils themselves, and frequently ended with an appeal to the homeowner such as the following from an 1870 address "To the Patrons of The Daily Picayune" in New Orleans:

From the fulness of your cheer,
Give to him a little share,
To lighten burdens he must bear—
And may those blessings held most dear,
Be yours throughout the glad New Year,
Gladdening your days forever here,
the Carrier prays.

For more carriers' addresses, see the very nice exhibit hosted by Brown University at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/carriers/index.html. Also check out Leon Jackson's "We Won't Leave Until We Get Some: Reading the newsboy's New Year's address" at http://www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-02/reading/.

But in the 19th century, printers' devils weren't the only ones carrying poems around. Take, for example, the postcard reproduced above: "A Railroad Boy's Appeal." Crippled in an accident, the card's bearer is now selling his "song" to sympathetic passengers or passers-by. The poem concludes:

And now, dear friends, I'm as you see
Poor, helpless and alone;
No other way to buy a limb—
Will you please buy my song?
And may God bless you all,
This is my heart-felt-prayer;
And by-and-by may we all meet
In realms just over there.

Signed "C.E.H.," the postcard has a footer that reads "PRICE.—Whatever you wish to give."

In the more elaborate broadside pictured to the left, "The Wounded Soldier's Appeal," bearer David Gingry, Jr. relates how he was permanently wounded while fighting for the Confederate side in the Civil War. Lest there be any misinterpretation while reading the poem, however, the piece begins with a little prose testimony: "The undersigned, a brave soldier of the army of the Potomac, asks the aid of the people to enable him to support A WIFE AND FIVE CHILDREN, who have no other means of subsistence. He lost his left hand at Petersburg, besides being wounded in his other arm, in his right leg and in the head. Being so crippled, therefore, he is unable to do the day's work of an ordinary laboring man, and the only means left to him to make an honorable living is in selling the following original poem, which he hopes all will be kind enough to buy. He is commended to the generosity of the public generally."

That "original poem" reads, in part:

And, shot in arm, in leg, in head,
In that most fearful, bloody fray,
And left upon the field for dead,
Was he who asks your aid to-day.

But, thanks to God! he lives to see
His wife and children once again,
Though to that wife and children he
Is more a burthen than a gain.

His hand is gone; and thus to aid
Those loved ones in their day of trial,
He sells this little serenade,
And hopes to meet with no denial.

Printed in Altoona, Pennsylvania, the broadside is priced "Ten Cents Each Side." The reverse, in a humorous gesture at a little con, is blank.

Both of these pieces are "carriers' addresses" of a different sort than the ones originating with newspapers; instead of recounting the events of the past year, they recount the bearer's story. Both types stand to remind us of the popular portability that poetry offered before the "slim volume" and "little magazine" became default media for poems. Is there an equivalent today?

Chick Lit?

I recently watched Anthony Russo's 2006 movie "You, Me and Dupree" which stars Owen Wilson, Kate Hudson, and Matt Dillon. In the film, Wilson's character - Dillon's loveable but messy, reckless, fly- by-the-seat-of-his-pants best friend and best man - loses his job and moves in with newlyweds Hudson and Dillon only to introduce all manner of potty-humor and relationship chaos into the young lovers' household. Not exactly an art film. The narrative then follows Wilson's gradual reformation into a person of some refinement and charater and Dillon's corresponding descent into disorder, jealousy, and paranoia. Defending Wilson's improvements one night to her husband, Hudson reveals that Wilson has, in fact, been writing poetry - a revelation that Dillon reacts to by calling Wilson "a fag."

Dillon's reaction is part of a long and familiar Anglo-American history of associating poetry - which is presumably in touch with all the gooey emotional and sentimental sides of human existence - with effeminacy and homosexuality. Dino Franco Felluga's 2005 SUNY study "The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius" traces how discourses of poetry, melancholia, genius, and sexual pathology (including masturbation) converged in the nineteenth century. (In "You, Me and Dupree, in fact, poet-to-be Wilson is caught "in the act" one night by Hudson as she goes downstairs for a drink, suggesting the link between poetry and onanism is not entirely a thing of the past.) In "A Retrospect" from 1918, Ezra Pound states his desire to produce a new, masculine poetry that is "harder and saner," "nearer the bone," and "free from [the] emotional slither" that, in his estimation, characterized the effeminate verse of the genteel nineteenth century.

In post-Cold War America, perhaps no figure has dramatized the stereotypical synchronicity between gayness and poetry more humorously than Percy Dovetonsils, one of the most remembered characters created by t.v. comedian Ernie Kovacs. Kovacs's Dovetonsils appeared as a "poet laureate" who spoke with a lisp, wore a zebra-patterned smoking jacket and coke-bottle glasses, and sipped a drink which had a daisy for a swizzle stick. Not able to abide the homosexual resonances of this long history on Wilson's poetry writing, "You, Me and Dupree" eventually clarifies Wilson's heterosexuality by informing us that he was, in fact, writing love poetry in order to win back the affections of a girl he lost earlier in the film.

Despite this history of effeminacy, "real men" actually did read poetry for much of the twentieth century, and that poetry - which decorated the pin-up posters stuck on the walls of their basements and garages - was intended (or thought to be) a clear demonstration of their masculinity. Poetry was a regular part of girly pictures, appearing on postcards, arcade cards, playing cards, ink-blotters, matchbooks and, most famously, the Vargas-girl Esquire centerfold pull-outs and pin-ups. A fair amount of attention has been paid to the visual aspects of these idealized female images, but most commentators focus purely on the airbrushed visuals and the problematic images of the girl next door without investigating the constant presence of the poetry that accompanied those visuals and that, by association, must have had an impact on shaping American masculinity. Some of these poems, such as this one from an ink blotter picturing a busty showgirl in feathers and short skirt -

Showgirls have a philosophy
Expressed in the lines of this verse:
"To let a fool kiss you is stupid,
To let a kiss fool you is worse."

- are clever, epigrammatic rhymes wherein the mastery over the language seems to figure the masculine desire for mastery over the female. Other poems, such as this one from a platinum-blonde, head-and-shoulders, Vargas pull-out pin-up from the May 1942 issue of Esquire, are longer and more elaborate:

Song for a Lost Spring

That was another Spring when we were gay ...
And I remember everything so well ...
The purpled dusk ... the streets that lost their way ...
The lazy hours that held us in their spell;
The songs we sang were lovelier than before,
The violins were sweet against the night ...
And yet the shadows on the tavern floor
Foretold a time of panic and of flight;

And so when lightning raced along the sky
I knew that vows and pleadings would be vain,
You were not meant to watch enchantment die
Nor hear the soft and treacherous hiss of rain;
That was another Spring that we two shared ...
And One was wise ... and there was One who cared!

This sonnet (!) was written by poet laureate of pin-ups, Phil Stack, and no doubt the elaborate verse form and nostalgic tone added a sense of dignity that worked to save the picture from being "just" a girly picture - especially within the context of Esquire's literary and cultural aspirations. Esquire regularly ran such poems alongside their pin-ups and published pin-up calendars with poems on them. To assess the impact of Esquire and the pin-up without accounting in some way for the poetry is an incomplete accounting at best.

It is a curious thing that in the middle of the 1950s "pink scare," Stack should end his first line on the word "gay." For while pin-up poetry, and the act of posting the pin-up on one's wall, worked as a performance of one's masculinity, it was largely a performance of eroticism put on for (and participated in by) other men, and one can't help but think about the homoerotics of two men, or three men, or four men, ogling a pin-up girl. Indeed, when one begins reading this poetry widely, there is a variety among the poems that troubles the heteronormative boy-girl relationship we typically assume that the pictures play to. Sometimes, the verse is spoken by an outside commentator, such as that in the quatrain quoted above. Other times, it's clear that that the woman is speaking the lines. Still other times - as in Stack's sonnet - we're not sure who is speaking the poem or who SHOULD be speaking the poem (the man? the woman? both?) - an ambiguity only enhanced by the verse's use of the first person and played up twice in the last line by the intentionally gender-neutral pronoun "One." Am I the only one to sense that this ambiguity significantly queers the reader's sexual subject position?

Take into consideration the following quatrain from a postcard showing a cartoon redhead whose skirt - a la the famous pic of Marilyn Monroe - is blown up above a steam grate to reveal her stockings and garters:

At last I got around to that line
I said I'd drop
So keep yer shirt on buddy,
ya' needn't blow yer top!

Who is the "I" in this poem supposed to be? Is it a postcard that a woman would send to a man, or a postcard that a man would send to a man, and what are the various subject positions offered to the card's holder - sender or recipient, male or female - by that poem? That is to ask, how does the poem change the erotic relationship depending on whose mouth it is in and who is "speaking" as the sender finally dropping a line? There's certainly a sort of titillating masquerade or poetic drag/burlesque show going on here that is totally worth examining more closely - one not entirely unlike the Renaissance stage where boy actors dressed up like girls and then kissed other men on stage. This vertigo only increases, I think, by knowing that the author of many of these poems is a male - Phil Stack - essentially speaking, like Cyrano, words of love to other men through the mouth of a surrogate, here (in "Song for a Lost Spring") a woman.

I don't have any answers at the moment except to say that pin-up poetry is much more diverse and complex a social and cultural phenomenon than one would be inclined think. Part of American culture for years and especially during the sexually confusing 1950s, it undoubtedly played a role in shaping men's sense of their sexuality, both in relation to the women pictured, and to the men who would read it as it was posted on walls for everyone to see. What sort of sexual identities are being negotiated in this poetry? Does this dynamic change over the course of the twentieth century? How do the various media - from postcard to fold-out pin-up - shape the poetic and (homo)erotic encounter of these images?

For several essays on the Vargas girl pin-ups, written for a 2001 exhibition of Esquire illustrations at the University of Kansas - check out http://www.spencerart.ku.edu/collection/print/vargas/.

My Poetic License - An Introduction

In March of 2006, Iowa City's daily newspaper, The Press-Citizen, began printing poems on its Op-Ed page as part of a regular feature called "Poetic License." Hearkening back to a time 50-150 years ago when American newspapers regularly ran poems that explicitly engaged the day's news, "Poetic License" encouraged its contributors - yours truly among them - to be as topical, occasional and political as the best letters to the editor, and as biting, satiric or humorous as the best editorial cartoons. "Today's news is tomorrow's fish wrap," editor Jeff Charis-Carlson often reminded Poetic License writers - what he called his Deadline Poets - in an attempt to get us to come down from Parnassus and to write quickly and frequently so as to better help fill his page.

As recently as the 1950s, The New York Times was in the habit of running poems amidst the letters to the editor in its pages, but it's rare to see a poem in such contexts today. In restoring poetry to the Op-Ed page, though, Jeff didn't want to repeat Ted Kooser's nationally-syndicated column "American Life in Poetry" which features a Kooser-approved poem by a recognizably "literary" poet that is then reprinted in paper after paper across the U.S. To the contrary, Jeff wanted "Poetic License" to be an aggressively local feature: written by Iowa City poets for Iowa City audiences and oftentimes taking on topics of such local orientation that "outsiders" need a good deal of background in order to understand where the poems are coming from. The term "Maytag" in "Flood Poem: Almost a Third of CEO's Expect to Cut Jobs" for example, resonantes very differently in Iowa than it does elsewhere, especially since Whirlpool's 2006 acquisition and closure of Maytag manufacturing plants, once the economic center of Newton, Iowa.

Jeff eventually got in the practice of running illustrations - photographs, or sometimes hilariously-done ink drawings by the Press-Citizen's editorial cartoonist - alongside PoLi poems as well, creating provocative text-image conversations. Oftentimes, the poems dialogue clearly with other pieces on the Op-Ed page. This editorial dynamic is impossible to duplicate in this blog, where I'm simply excerpting some of my contributions to PoLi and recording them.

Gannett News Services, which owns the Press-Citizen, has a policy that keeps PoLi poems (like other materials) online for 4 weeks, after which those items vanish. As much as I'd like them to become tomorrow's fish wrap, I also don't want to see them - or the experiment that PoLi is continuing - completely disappear. There are many questions that PoLi has inspired and that are worth thinking through, including:

• How can poems complicate or trouble an Op-Ed page chock-full of otherwise straightforward or transparent declamatory prose?
• What does poetry have to do differently in 2008 to work in a journalistic context that it didn't have to do 100 years ago?
• When poets do come down from Parnassus and embrace the ephemerality of the daily news and the specificity of the local event, what new freedoms do they find?
• What sort of a poetics takes shape under the pressure of a deadline?
• What is the public response to PoLi, and how does one measure and track that response?
• Who decides to write for PoLi and why - a question especially relevant to Iowa City, which boasts the Iowa Writers' Workshop full of poets who have never sent poems to the paper?

Many writers not affiliated with the Workshop have contributed to Poetic License over the past 2+ years, each developing over time a signature style, politics, approach, tone, rhetorical flexibility, etc. (Most recently, for example, I've been using actual news headlines as my poem titles, and after experimenting with various verse forms, I seem to have settled in - improbable as it sounds - to writing sonnets.) Contributors have worked more or less closely with Jeff, who sometimes participates so heavily in the writing process that he might claim co-editorship. In sum, PoLi has become a fascinating laboratory in which to track the possibilities of re-embedding poetry in one aspect of print culture today as thoroughly as it once was for generations of Americans in the U.S.

The following are some of my contributions to this research. Who says you can't get the news from poetry?

Flood Poem: Almost a Third of CEOs Expect to Cut Jobs

Appeared in the Press-Citizen June 21, 2008

The boardroom talk is all about the rising
cost of energy and whether,
if corn and durable goods increase together,
a crest in unemployment is surprising,
merited, excusable, or good
for business in the coming fiscal year,
and how to make this cresting now appear
as natural as a high school textbook would:
history is full of ups and downs,
the nation always—always—comes back stronger
if you sandbag just a little longer
and sacrifice a few Midwestern towns.
For when your Maytag’s lost to the flood’s designs
the boardroom floods as well—with dollar signs.