"Thus you in Chouder always must begin": From the Poetry & Popular Culture Mailbag

Kevin Lindamood of Healthcare for the Homeless in Baltimore and an amateur poetry sleuth in his own right writes in:

Saw this poem re-printed from the Sept. 23 1751 edition of the Boston Evening Post and thought of you. Doesn't this fit with your thesis in some way? Earlier time period to be sure, but still, it proves your point.





THE ORIGINAL FISH CHOWDER
Published in the Boston Evening Post
September 23, 1751

Meant to educate and delight, this poem was the first recipe for chowder to appear in this country. Its musicality and rhyming may have made it easy to remember, as many colonists never learned to read.

First lay some Onions to keep the Pork from burning,
Because in Chouder there can be no turning:
Then lay some Pork in Slices very thin,
Thus you in Chouder always must begin.
Next lay some Fish cut crosswise very nice
Then season well with Pepper, Salt and Spice;
Parsley, Sweet-Marjoram, Savory and Thyme,
Then Biscuit next which must be soak'd some Time.
Thus your Foundation laid, you will be able
To raise a Chouder, high as Tower of Babel:
For by repeating o're the Same again,
You may make Chouder for a thousand Men.
Last bottle of Claret, with Water eno' to smother 'em
You'll have a Mess which some call Omnium gather 'em.

Poetry & Popular Culture Responds:

With its fourteen lines of rhyming couplets, this fishy sonnet is indeed a delight, although "Poetry & Popular Culture" has its suspicions about any poem claiming to be "the original" or "the first" of anything. However, more than one history of chowder cites the poem as originary, so I'll not, ahem, stew over that aspect of the recipe for now.

What intrigues me about "The Original Fish Chowder" is its print history. To begin with, I wonder why the recipe needed to be printed by the Boston Evening Post in the birthplace of chowder in the first place. Was there a chowder duel that this poem attempted to resolve? A longstanding feud about to boil over? Was some chowdery flash-in-the-pan marketing his or her new brand of soup and thus threatening to eclipse the original? Indeed, by harnessing the Augustan heroic couplets of poet-essayist Alexander Pope (who died seven years before the recipe was published), the poet of "The Original Fish Chowder" affords this particular recipe a certain authority it wouldn't perhaps have in prose.

Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that "The Original Fish Chowder" has been reprinted in Martha Stewart Living of all places—a fact that you, dear correspondent, neglected to mention in your missive to "Poetry & Popular Culture." Why did you clam up so? Were you ashamed to admit that you've been dallying in these pages? Why the hush, puppy? It appears that Martha's in touch with our favorite side of American literary history, and for that, I hoist a tall one in her name.

Pedestrian Poetry

A few weeks back, my friends over at Vowel Movers were crowing about a perfect pair of poetry pumps from Nine West that went perfectly with their Sylvia Plath dresses. Ever on the lookout for new and interesting footwear, "Poetry & Popular Culture" is happy to call attention here to the "Poetic License" brand line featuring lyrically trendy styles such as "Romance," "Tranquility," "Venom," and the "Breathless" Mary Jane pictured to the left. Hopefully now, Vowel Movers, you'll finally be able to work those Gertrude Stein slacks—or your Elizabeth Barrett Browning hoop skirt, or that Edna St. Vincent Millay twin-set, or even your Beowulfian bodice—into a complete outfit to take on the town. Carrie Bardshaw, eat your heart out.

While "Poetry & Popular Culture" is hardly in the business of dispensing advice on matters sartorial, it nevertheless can offer a poetry pamphlet, "The Shoe Day of Judgment," in the way of a gentle cautionary tale. Produced in 1900 by the St. Louis Wertheimer-Swarts Shoe Company, manufacturers of Clover Brand Shoes (not Joshua Clover Brand Shoes), the pamphlet is a warning for those who might all-too-casually slip "Venom" or "Romance" onto their hoofers and go about their daily lives, wearing those shoes hither and thither, willy-nilly through sleet and snow and city and countryside with little consideration for the well-being, care, and feeding of the shoes themselves.

"The Shoe Day of Judgment" begins with a short preface, "Abuse of Shoes," explaining the man- ufacturer's complaint and appealing for "some sense": too many people hold a shoemaker responsible not for flaws in workmanship but for the consumer's irresponsible misuse. "There is nothing," Wertheimer-Swarts proposes, "that clothes mankind so much abused, and yet is so unreasonably expected to continue Perfect in Fit, Style, Workmanship and Service, as are its Shoes. We appeal to a fair-minded, thinking public to give a few facts their consideration. No two persons wearing the same grade and make of shoes will realize the same service. Leather will wear out. Gritty soil, briars, rocky and rough surfaces, Scuff and Peel soft, velvety uppers. Fine mellow tannages of leather in footwear exposed to extremes of weather, to Heat and Cold, to Mud and Slush, will crack. Seams put to such tests Rip. Failure to care properly for your shoes, by frequent cleaning, oiling and dressing, exposes them to rapid destruction and decay."

"Such abuses," the shoe company goes on, "are the burden of our song." And what a song it is! In 35 ballad stanzas, "The Shoe Day of Judgment" tells of a shoemaker who falls asleep and dreams of a day when shoe-abusers get their comeuppance for unfairly holding manufacturers responsible for every crack, rip, or tear caused by misuse. A farmer who puts his shoes against the fire and redeems them for a new pair the following day is sent to hell. A boy who tears his shoes on "gravel, brick and stone" is sentenced to twelve months of study without vacation. A teamster—not yet part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters—has his "foolish head" soaked. Another man is sent to a thousand years in jail because he returned his shoes:

I bought them small, I must confess,
To make my feet look smaller,
Yet soon returned them by express,
Marked 'C.O.D. $1.00.'"

While calling attention to the particular pleasure of rhyming "smaller" with "$1.00," "Poetry & Popular Culture" also wishes to direct attention to the similar fate of the maid, which may be of special interest to those smiling yet careless misses seeking out Nine West's Poetry pump or any of the Poetic License products currently on the market:

Then came a maid, a smiling miss,
Whose action naught condones,
Who careless ran, that way and this,
And walked on glass and stones.

Back to the dealer with an air
Of injured worth she went:
"I'll have to have another pair;
These are not worth a cent!"

Oh, when the Judge encountered this,
His mien was most severe.
"You'll have to go, my careless miss,
Barefooted for a year!"

While "The Shoe Day of Judgment" may be a harrowing tale, its use of poetry as both a tool for advertising and instruction in the consumer marketplace is not unusual, as virtually every product was hawked via verse at one time or another during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Back then, poems were employed for their prestige or entertainment values. Nowadays, though, at least to judge from Nine West and Poetic License, the title of Poetry is grafted directly onto the product itself, because what can be more reassuring in our uncertain age than knowing that what we buy—indeed, even the very act of buying—is where, in fact, the poetry's at.

At the Foxhead on Election Night

Appeared in the Press-Citizen November 7, 2008

How to say it except to say it straight?
I saw things on Tuesday night that I
never expected to see and which I’ll try
to tell to my grandkids, who’ll say I exaggerate:
the first black man elected president
amidst fears of war and economic depression;
McCain delivering a genuinely touching concession;
a white man from Alaska, his head bent,
crying after hearing Obama speak;
Chicago’s million-strong all-nighter;
and, to cap off a night of dreaming, a writer
walking into the bar as usual, except this week
his date was a life-size doll of Uncle Sam,
and he was giddy and smiling, and it wasn’t a sham.









More on Good Bad Poetry:

"Writing Good Bad Poetry"
"My Poetic License"
"OMG! Buddhist Nun Texting Novel"
"Dinosaur Descendant to be Dad at 111"
"Cat Chasing Mouse Leads to 24 Hour Blackout"
"Man Faces Jail for Smuggling Iguanas in His Prosthetic Leg"
" 'Lingerie Mayor' Vows to Stay in Office"
"O.J. Simpson Questioned in Vegas Incident"

At the Border with William Carlos Williams

'Twas New Year's Day in 2005. I'd spent a great Christmas in Vegas, had seen and hiked the Grand Canyon for the first time, and had driven down through Arizona to visit friends in and around Tucson, falling in love with the landscape and the saguaro cacti. Preparing to cross from the U.S. into Mexico at Nogales, Arizona, with my wife and two friends on January 1—my first time south of the border—I came to stand before this marble monument etched with an excerpt from the poem "At Night" by William Carlos Williams:

The stars, that are small lights—
now that I know them foreign,
uninterfering, like nothing
in my life—I walk by their sparkle
relieved and comforted.

Mind you, the border at Nogales is not easy on the eyes, nor is its landscape a particularly poetic one—at day or night. A huge corrugated steel fence topped with razor wire runs as far as the eye can see up the hill in both directions, decorated on the Mexico side with artistic memorials for those who've died trying to make the cross.

Not easy on the eyes. Not easy on the soul. And not easily poeticized. Indeed, what sort of relationship between the U.S. and Mexico was the U.S. border guard trying to enact by erecting the excerpt from "At Night" (first published in Matthew Josephson's avant garde magazine Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts in 1923)? How are we supposed to read the stars of the poem—"foreign, / uninterfering"—in this border context? Is it supposed to be descriptive of Mexico? Is it a fantasy about the way the U.S. would like Mexico to be? Is it comparing the idealized stars, "like nothing / in my life," to the actual state of border politics which is anything but uninterfering? Is the focus on the stars rather than on real circumstances a wish to wash away the reality of border violence? It's not entirely clear how we're supposed to read "At Night" in this borderland, but "Poetry & Popular Culture" can't help but find the desire to be "relieved and comforted" a fatuous one on the part of U.S. border police.

This is made all the more confusing by the fact that Williams has been chosen as this border's bard. As we all know, the Good Doctor was born in, and lived most of his life in, New Jersey—far from the Mexico/Arizona border. While Hispanic in origin, the "Carlos" in his name does not come from Mexico as the monument's placement suggests, but from Puerto Rico where his mother was born. Despite the bilingual English/Spanish translation of the marbleized poetry, Williams's Hispanic roots themselves have little to do with Mexico or this part of the U.S.

As a poetic ambassador intended to ease—or get people to ignore—the pains of the border fence and the separation of families and loss of lives that that fence represents, this monument is as grotesque a failure as the corrugated steel and razor wire itself. Leave it up to the politicos to not only attempt to beautify or distract us from the ugliness of their policies, but to then confuse the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico with the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico—lumping all Spanish speakers into one idealized "foreign, / uninterfering" group of people! The Good Doctor must be rolling in his grave.

In Search of the Bad Poetry File at the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County

Earlier this week, "Poetry & Popular Culture" received a tip from Stephen Headley—Manager of the Magazines & Newspapers Department at the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County—who said that a "bad poetry file" existed somewhere in the depths of that library's collection. Headley put me in touch with Bruce Sherwood, a reference librarian and 30-year veteran of the library, who confirmed that said archive does in fact exist but under the name of the "Auxiliary Poetry File," known as APF for short.

Sometimes, Sherwood told me, those with somewhat less appreciation for the cultural importance of popular poetry than "Poetry & Popular Culture" has, called the APF the "Awful Poetry File." I asked Sherwood if said negative elements had been purged from the library, but he didn't comment. Instead, he sent me this official description of the collection, which consists of an amazing 55 boxes of index cards:

INDEXES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

APF: Auxiliary Poetry File (ca. 1900-1950)

A unique, home-grown index comprised of fifty-five boxes of yellowed index cards with author/title citations to poems culled from selected magazines, newspapers and grade school readers in the early part of the twentieth century. Presumably intended to augment Granger's Index to Poetry, this covers lesser poets or, "bards not sublime," published in non-literary periodicals such as Life and Stars and Stripes and includes many full-text poems from local newspapers -- hand cut and pasted by librarians on three-by-five cards.

Although limited in time and scope, this is an irreplaceable resource because there is no known index to newspaper and textbook verse. Selection is heavy on World War I-era patriotic verse. The APF is especially treasured by those of an earlier generation who wish to recall poems they once memorized from their McGuffey readers.

Affectionately referred to by staff as the "Awful Poetry File," perhaps because most of the poems are "awfully" hard to locate and a few are just plain "awful," the APF has been somewhat eclipsed in purpose, if not coverage, by the World Wide Web.

Sherwood then went on to gloss this description for me even further:

"Although the file has been largely supplanted by the Internet, it is also no doubt true that a large percentage of the entries will not be found elsewhere. It is arranged in a Granger's Index style, with entries for authors, titles, subjects, and first lines in one alphabet. Not all of the poems are 'bad,' nor do all of the 3" x 5" cards consist of pasted clippings from newspapers and magazines. Some entries are just locational notes (e.g., 'Wharton, E. -- Hunting song, Literary Digest, Vol 38, p. 816'), and some are cryptic, such as the title listing for 'A Hymn of Hate,' which is attributed to Dorothy Parker and shown as occurring in five nonsequential issues of Life magazine in the early 1920s.

"During my tenure in Literature and Languages and its predecessors (1980-2007), it was used mainly as a last resort in the years before World Wide Web searching became commonplace. That is, after following up all hunches and tediously checking the many volumes of Granger's, a meticulous search required a run through the APF. At that point the exhausted librarian could confidently tell the patron that he or she had searched EVERYWHERE.

"Before Google, the APF was a significant (if incomplete) source for ephemeral verse. In public libraries, poetry texts are frequently requested by the elderly, who are trying to remember a poem learned in the single-digit years. Then there are many who want the 'correct' text of a half-remembered poem they may have seen on a greeting card or wall plaque. If they could remember the first three words of the title or first line correctly, then the APF could sometimes help them."

I can't speak for the readers of "Poetry & Popular Culture," Bruce, but I will go to sleep happier tonight for knowing the APF exists. And I will hope that some affluent reader of this blog comes up with a cool fortune to help the library digitize & make searchable this amazing resource.

Burma-Shave Politics

Many thanks to Angela Sorby, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University and author of Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865-1917, for alerting "Poetry & Popular Culture" to a recent tidbit at the Onion. In "McCain Blasts Obama As Out Of Touch In Burma-Shave-Style Billboard Campaign," the Onion depicts this year's Republican presidential candidate as being out of touch via an old-style advertising medium: the serial billboard poem made famous by the Burma-Vita Company's "Burma-Shave" campaign which dotted American highways from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Loved by Americans ranging from my mother-in-law to Gertrude Stein (who, in Everybody's Autobiography wrote "I wish I could remember more of them, they were all lively and pleasing.... I wish I could remember them I liked them so much”), the Burma-Shave signs have been called part of "the national vocabulary" and have been installed in the Smithsonian Institution as relics of our 20th Century past. At the height of the Burma-Shave campaign, over 7,000 sets of signs using 600 individual poems were maintained in 44 states and were seen by untold numbers of drivers. It’s possible that through the 1920s, the Depression, World War II, and the 1950s, Burma-Shave’s poems were the most public, widely read verse in America.

What the Onion doesn't suggest—in cartooning McCain as outta date—is how the model Burma-Vita pioneered is, in fact, still used as part of political campaigns today. Drive through central Illinois, and you'll see signs made by locals lambasting gun-control advocates or promoting soy bio-diesel as an alternative fuel. Four years ago, in my own town of Iowa City, several neighbors along Muscatine Avenue pitched in to post poetic signs in their yards supporting the presidential campaign of Howard Dean. Those signs read:

Feeling Bushed?
Lost your grin?
Cheer up folks:
The Doctor's In.
Caucus for Howard Dean.

And in 1996—so Bill Vossler reports in his history of the advertising campaign Burma-Shave: The Rhymes, the Signs, the Times—rhymster Republicans in Washington, D.C., experimented with serial anti-Clinton billboards to pitch that year's ticket:

If you’re tired of a White House
That’s always smokin’ hemp
Vote for our future
Vote Dole-Kemp!

This was not the first time that Bob Dole associated himself with Burma-Shave verse. For the 1990 reissue of Frank Rowsome Jr.'s book The Verse By the Side of the Road: The Story of the Burma-Shave Signs and Jingles (first published in 1965), Dole was asked to write a Foreword that concluded with his own original five-line ditty:

In politics
It's always safer
Not to make waves
It's not my style
I've had some close shaves

Not the best imitation of Burma-Shave poetry, to be sure. But what's worth noting—and what bodes well (or bards well?) for Barack Obama in 2008—is that, despite the billboard poets having their backs, neither Dean nor the Dole/Kemp ticket were successful in their presidential bids. That's not to say that "Poetry & Popular Culture," uh, bristles at the thought of Obama using poetry in his campaign. Just that he shouldn't at this point get cheeky.

Writing Good Bad Poetry

As regular "Poetry & Popular Culture" readers may well know, for the past two and a half years I've been writing poems for the Opinion page of Iowa City's daily newspaper, the Press-Citizen. Topical, occasional, oftentimes humorous commentaries on the week's news, these poems are aggressively embedded in specific historical and journalistic contexts and happily go forth into the world eschewing notions of artistic timelessness and universality. Insofar as they do so, they hearken back to the days when newspapers across the U.S. regularly ran poems as part of the daily news—news that sometimes stayed news (newspaper poets actively debated their day's hot-button or wedge issues such as abolition and women's suffrage), but that more often than not ended up as the next day's fish wrapper.

The current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine—buy yours today!—has a longish look back on the 60-plus poems I've written for the Press-Citizen and the virtues and perils of trying to revive the tradition of "good bad poetry" in the present day. Here, to whet your whistle, is an excerpt:

One of the things that sticks in my mind (and in my craw, admittedly) after two years of reading and writing Poetic License poems, however, is a poem that the paper wouldn't print, and the very fact of its nonpublication suggests there are limitations to how good bad poetry can function in public forums like the Press-Citizen. At the time, the University of Iowa was trying to hire a new president, and the Iowa board of regents had, in many people's minds, overstepped its authority by conducting the search in secret without input from faculty, staff, or students. As the faculty senate deliberated how to express its disapproval, I wrote:

It's time for a no-confidence referendum.
The Regents are broken, so let's end 'em.
Let's make the process transparent
and the next search as apparent
as Britney showing the world her pudendum.

I liked the limerick because, like many good poems as well as good bad poems, it cuts two ways. On one hand, it argues for a more open search process. On the other hand, in voicing that opinion via the tabloid example of Britney Spears, the poem begins to sound like a send-up of those arguing for a transparent process: Do we really want the search to be that open?

In the end, [editor] Charis-Carlson returned the poem to me with profuse apologies, explaining that some higher-up at the paper had objected to my use of the word pudendum. I protested, of course. It's an anatomical term most frequently used in clinical contexts. Slate magazine used it in a headline. It's entirely in keeping with the limerick's popular bawdiness, and readers would clearly recognize that. Charis-Carlson said he sympathized but said there was nothing he could do; it was officially too dirty for the paper. So I thought about it and realized that Charis-Carlson's prudish higher-up wasn't necessarily objecting to the word per se so much as to the poem's implication that official university business might in fact occupy the same discursive world as Britney Spears's genitalia—which is kind of dirty. I quickly rewrote the poem to demonstrate the fact and sent it back to the Press-Citizen.

The presidential search is the pits.
The Regents are giving us fits.
Let's make the process transparent
and the next search as apparent
as Britney showing the world her naughty bits.

That verse, it goes without saying, was also returned to me, as well it should have been: It's not nearly as good a good bad poem as the first version was. But in the process, I learned that even Poetic License comes with a few restrictions.

A Few Good Bad Poems:
"OMG! Buddhist Nun Texting Novel"
"Dinosaur Descendant to be Dad at 111"
"Cat Chasing Mouse Leads to 24 Hour Blackout"
"Man Faces Jail for Smuggling Iguanas in His Prosthetic Leg"
" 'Lingerie Mayor' Vows to Stay in Office"
"O.J. Simpson Questioned in Vegas Incident"