Business Bards: Dr. C.B. Weagley, Veterinary Surgeon

"Poetry & Popular Culture" continues to showcase the small-business poets of yesteryear who hawked their services, wares, and—as the example of Dr. C.B. Weagley presented below suggests—even their intimate knowledge of horses' teeth, via poetry. Relying on their bardness to take care of their bidness, these inglorious Miltons participated in the project of America's free enterprise if not the freeing of its verse.















Just click on "The Age of the Horse" to the left for a larger picture and insight into the telling features of the "middle nippers."

Poetry & Popular Culture Expose: Did Paul Engle Write for Hallmark?

Did Paul Engle write poetry for Hallmark? You betcha he did! The longtime director of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop—the guy who shepherded the M.F.A. Program in creative writing to national prominence, who hired Vonnegut, Lowell and Berryman to teach writing in Iowa City, who mentored Flannery O'Connor, Robert Bly, Philip Levine, Donald Justice and others who would go on to spread the good workshop news far and wide—more than once put pen to paper in service of that bastion of literary publishing: Hallmark.

Find out more in "Remembering Paul Engle," on news stands in the current (October/November 2008) issue of The Writer's Chronicle. Excerpt follows:

On December 4-5, 1959, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and Esquire magazine co-sponsored a symposium that brought Ralph Ellison, Mark Harris, Dwight Macdonald, and Norman Mailer to the Iowa City campus, which was then called the State University of Iowa. This was the second such event that Arnold Gingrich—publisher and founding editor of Esquire—had organized. The previous year, he'd arranged for Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Wright Morris, and Dorothy Parker to meet at Columbia University in New York in order to discuss "The Position of the Writer in America Today." A year later, under the somewhat narrowed rubric of "The Writer in a Mass Culture," Gingrich and longtime Writers' Workshop Director Paul Engle welcomed audiences to the prairie, opening an event that had been pitched to the press in functional, decidedly prosaic language. "Four distinct statements of the problem," the release read, "will be made by four widely published writers who have faced the constant issues of art and the marketplace."

In New York, Wright Morris had spoken of the “mindless society” into which he saw United States writers introducing their work, and Mark Harris’s leadoff speech in 1959 picked up where Morris let off, setting the stage early for a wholesale, broad-stroked denunciation of mass culture from the perspective of highbrow art and literature. “Art and mass distribution are simply incompatible,” Harris began. “The writer has no business reaching for a mass audience and the serious reader has no business distracting the writer by discussing with him possible methods of bridging the gulf between the writer and the mass—it cannot be bridged.” Harris went on to make several proposals which he felt would improve the situation of the literary arts in the United States, including a drastic reduction in the number of books published each year, the subsidizing of presses by wealthy foundations, and “the creation of a bureau of pure books and standards, whose role would not be censorship nor repression, but education and clarification.” Nor was Harris above naming names. “Let us declare once and forever ..., ” he implored, “Edgar Guest was never a poet.”

While the symposium would go on to nuance the terms of Harris’s opening remarks, neither Macdonald nor Mailer would challenge his general depiction of mass culture. Macdonald, who published his famous essay “Masscult and Midcult” in the Partisan Review a year later, lamented the lack of a “cultivated class” in the United States which he saw in England and answered that “the serious writer has to ... write for his peers.” Calling mass culture “a dreadful thing,” Mailer went on (as only Mailer himself could have, perhaps) to ratchet up the rhetoric by saying, “I consider it a war, I consider the mass media really as if I were living with a cancerous wife and each day I have to see her all the time and she gives me a bit of her cancer. That is about the way I feel about the mass media.” Only Ellison argued for a more sophisticated position. “A democracy,” he cautioned, “is not just a mass, it is a collectivity of individuals. And when it comes to taste, when it comes to art, each and every one of these people must have the right, the opportunity, to develop his taste and must face the same type of uncertainty which all of us face on this platform.”

In the symposium’s transcript, however, Paul Engle is silent on these matters. On one level, this silence is completely understandable; as moderator, his job was to conduct the speeches, referee the Q&A period that followed, and specifically not inject his own feelings on the subject. On another level, however, his silence is more provocative. For Engle—the man who had been directing the prestigious Writers’ Workshop for seventeen years, who had brought John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Kurt Vonnegut to Iowa City to teach, who would mentor writers like Robert Bly, Philip Levine, Donald Justice, and Flannery O’Connor, and who would go on to lead the program for almost another decade—was not only at that precise moment placing his poetry in publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes & Gardens, and Reader’s Digest magazines. But he was writing poems for Hallmark greeting cards as well.

Guest Posting: The Poetry of October

Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Michael Butterworth sings with broken heart about the joy, verve and poetry that is, was, and might have been, the 2008 season for the Chicago Cubs.

I know very little about poetry, but I do know a great deal about baseball. When the two meet, as they often do, I am ready with two standard references. The first comes from the former literature professor, Yale University president, and baseball commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti. Of the seasonal metaphor commonly ascribed to the national pastime, Giamatti—himself a specialist in Renaissance poetry—wrote that baseball “breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to the face the fall alone.” There is indeed poetry in Giamatti’s words. And truth. For as a devoted, and thus tortured, fan of the Chicago Cubs, this year's post-season has left me feeling quite alone.

The Cubs began 2008 with the hope that springs from every team’s pre-season training camp. And with a roster that showed early and often that it was the best in the National League, that initial hope eased into confidence in the full bloom of summer. But the coldest autumn winds are those for which you—despite the lines of so many poets—are least prepared. And all the assurances earned during a summer of dominance expired in three short gusts of a Shelleyian west wind from Los Angeles. Almost before they began, the playoffs were over for the Cubs and their long-suffering fans.

We have been here before, we Cubs fans. We know the cruelty of billy-goat curses, black cats, and Bartman. But this year was different. This year we expected to win. Yet the best team does not always win in baseball. Just two years ago, the 83-win St. Louis Cardinals won a World Series championship; five years earlier, the record-setting Seattle Mariners were bounced from the American League playoffs in spite of their 116 regular season wins. Losing, then, is always possible. And it is even tolerable—so long as your team plays with poetry.

All of this brings me to the second of my standard references: Bull Durham. It is a movie full of wonderful metaphors, surely the most famous of which is the “church of baseball.” Through the character of Annie Savoy, baseball is more than a church however; it is what rhetorical critic Kenneth Burke would call “equipment for living.” Baseball, Annie insists, guides and inspires us, and its aesthetic disposition is essentially poetic. Mid-way through the film, in fact, Annie confirms this fact for us when she rejoices at the newfound spirit of her hometown team, declaring that “for one extraordinary June and July, the Durham Bulls began playing baseball with joy, and verve, and poetry.”

The trick, of course, is to capture this poetic essence in October. To their credit, the Los Angeles Dodgers did this masterfully. The Chicago Cubs, meanwhile, appeared to have lost their collective will and spirit. Consumed, it appears, by the weight of an epic 100-year drought, Cubs players looked withdrawn, apprehensive, and afraid to seize the day. As a consequence, their season came to an abrupt halt as the team across the diamond demonstrated the joy and verve that would have made Annie Savoy proud.

Poetry is no substitute for talent, mind you. The Dodgers also won because they possess stellar pitching and a reinvented lineup that now features one of the game’s all-time great right-handed hitters. But even the most casual of fans would acknowledge that the Cubs gave themselves little hope. At the end of the day, what does our success matter if we cannot run and laugh and scream a little along the way? What good are 97 wins if we cannot express, exalt, and emote? These things I know about baseball; this is what we talk about when we talk about baseball. And I suspect they give me a little knowledge of poetry, after all.

Michael Butterworth writes from Bowling Green University in Ohio, where he is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication Studies and keeper of The Agon, a blog that takes on the "Rhetorical Contests of Sports, Politics, and Culture" at http://theagon.blogspot.com/.

Sudsy Politics: Then & Now

Awash in campaign ads, anticipating its share of the $700 billion bailout, and looking forward to tonight's town-hall debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, "Poetry & Popular Culture" looks backward more than a century to the presidential campaign of Republican Benjamin Harrison, who served one term as President from 1889-1893. Without radio or tv at his disposal, Harrison found an unlikely poetic campaign ally and endorsement from Snow & Silver Soaps manufactured by Thompson & Chute of Toledo, Ohio, which—on the trade card pictured above—plugged Harrison's campaign with a little ditty titled "Victory":

Election day is near at hand,
To choose the President of our land—
One of honor, strength and hope,
Who uses SNOW and SILVER soap.

In every place, from every mouth,
From east to west, from north to south,
The people's voice will sure attest,
That SNOW and SILVER are the best.

The wrappers, too, will bring a treasure,
Which gives unbounded joy and pleasure.
Mail twenty in to our address,
A gift most rare you will possess.

Forgive "Poetry & Popular Culture" for being a little bit cynical in noting that Snow & Silver soaps fail to mention Harrison by name in their advertising poem, relegating his likeness to the reverse side of the card. I wouldn't be surprised to find a similar card published by Snow & Silver that has Grover Cleveland—Harrison's Democrat opponent and then-incumbent president—pictured on it as well. Indeed, like Big Oil or any industry seeking a lobbying presence in D.C. today, Snow & Silver soaps is playing two sides at once (literally), possibly even using the same vague poetic endorsement to promote both candidates. After all, as their poem indicates, the soaps' desire is more to ensure their own commercial success than to endorse any particular candidate or platform.

Indeed, Snow & Silver is positioning itself not just as an equal opportunity endorsement, but as a purer expression of American democracy than the election! Buoyed by "the people's voice" and available to one and all, the soaps offer—at the minor inconvenience of sending in a couple of wrappers—"a gift most rare" to any American seizing the chance. Characteristically vague in this respect as well, the ad withholds what, exactly, that gift will be: a $10 gas card? A new hybrid? An oil slick in Alaska?

If all this sounds eerily familiar, consider that we were talking a lot about the Cleveland/Harrison election a few years ago when Al Gore won the popular vote and our beloved W won the electoral vote. Indeed, it was the 1888 election that saw the Democrat Cleveland win the popular vote while sudsy-slick Republican Harrison took the electoral vote. Karl Rove or no Karl Rove, it's clear that, a century later, political endorsements, campaign ads, and the U.S. electoral system have yet—soap or no soap—to clean up their acts.

Postscript: In the time since the foregoing entry was posted, I had occasion to contact University of Illinois professor of English Cary Nelson, who has assembled a very large archive of 19th- and 20th-century advertising poetry. Nelson has confirmed my suspicions that, yes indeedy—you guessed it—Snow & Silver did in fact issue a trade card with the likeness of Cleveland on one side and the same "Victory" poem (pictured above) on the other. Pick a card, any card: it's business as usual.

OMG! Buddhist Nun Texting Novel

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on September 30, 2008

Cn u c hr, reachng out 2 the nxt
genration of rdrs via cel,
renvntng how 2 read nd spel?
Nd as the kids dvour al hr txt
I cn hear the critix strt 2 db8
if this travsty shld b aloud
(cn u hear the rdrs lol?)
nd if the bk cn qualify as gr8.
The nun is 86 bt avant gard
nd if, when 2mrws rainbos snt 2 u,
u feel a lttle shok, well, thts the nu
nd the nu cn b a lttl hard.
2 me, these qs nvr seem 2 nd—
like whats the snd of 1 hand prssing snd?

Guest Posting: Poetry from the Prairie

Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent James Sullivan breezes in to report on poetry, festival broadsides, and the winds of change a-blowin' in the Land of Lincoln.

My small town of Delavan, Ilinois—near the middle of the state, on the wide open and wind-swept prairie—has a festival every Labor Day weekend, and I picked up a poetry broadside at one of the booths this year. This booth was staffed by people from Rail Splitter Wind Farm, a proposed but controversial wind farm project that will be going up soon within sight of town. The broadside takes a passage of a speech by Lincoln and chops it into verse:

Farming the Wind

‘Of all the forces of nature
the wind contains the largest amount
of motive power—

that is, power to move things.
Take any space of the earth’s surface—
for instance, Illinois—

and all the power exerted
by all the men, and beasts,
and running water,

and steam, over and upon it,
shall not equal the one hundredth part
of what is exerted

by the blowing of the wind
over and upon the same space.
And yet it has not,

so far in the world’s history,
become proportionably valuable
as a motive power.

As yet the wind is an untamed
and unharnessed force;
and quite possibly one

of the greatest discoveries
hereafter to be made
will be the taming
and harnessing
of the wind.’

The broadside they set up at their booth was 3’ by 4’, and the one I obtained from them is 8½” by 11”. It has, in the upper right, a reproduction of an old illustration of young Abe a-splittin’ rails; below that, the wind farm’s logo—propellers at the end of an ax handle; and a citation of the source at the bottom—a speech in Bloomington, IL, April 8, 1858.

Rail Splitter Wind Farm, LLC, is owned, though the broadside doesn’t mention this, by Horizon Wind Energy, LLC, of Houston, TX, which is in turn owned by Energias de Portugal (EDP), SA, the biggest utility in Portugal and a major player in the international renewable energy business.

Interesting little bit of propaganda in my hands here. While I am a proponent of wind power, myself, some of my neighbors dislike the idea of the view and (they fear) the sound. To mitigate the fear of technological progress and its impact on the life of our small town, this enormous international corporation turns, of course, to poetry.

As poetry, “Farming the Wind” has the flat-footedness of Edgar Lee Masters or Carl Sandburg at their most prosaic. That’s no coincidence. These are some of the local literary heroes in this part of Illinois. There’s nothing romantic and luscious about this sort of poetry. Spoon River Anthology, after all, took a clear-eyed view of small-town life, without sentiment or nostalgia. This is not some pretty, lilting evocation of sunset over the corn, but a vision of power. In fact, they bold and italicize several words—“motive power,” “valuable,” “untamed,” and “unharnessed”—that might add to the testosterone appeal of the text. The verse, then, in its stylistic evocation of local writers, suggests that the wind farm is not an imposition—some huge corporation descending upon us from Houston and beyond and forcing its will upon our beloved landscape—but rather a fulfillment of the potential inherent in the local.

And then there’s the other and stronger Central Illinois connection, one more evocative than any other: Lincoln. Ah, what a visionary! He saw and believed in this project before it had ever been conceived! Surely we must finish this work to which he called us!

James Sullivan is the author of On the Walls and in the Streets: American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s. He teaches English at Illinois Central College and, among other things, raises llamas in Delavan.

Main Street Blues

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on September 24, 2008

Why is it when I
get into debt
no one buys me out
(at least not yet),

and my doctor friend
(hear how she groans)
wouldn't get their sympathy
if she failed her loans,

but the second we hear
executives shout,
George Bush and the Feds
go bail them out

with billions and billions
of taxpayer loot
and the only thing golden
is their parachute?