Guest Posting: On Flappers and Mother Goose

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Catherine Keyser writes in about lingerie, nursery rhymes, and the new women writers that the decade of the roaring '20s, well, engendered.

Mother Goose, the “mythical matriarch,” may seem a far cry from the short-skirted, martini-mixing flapper, but popular women poets of the 1910s and 20s used her verse in particular to announce the sexuality of modern women. Dorothy Parker, for instance, adapted a Mother Goose rhyme for this saucy, gotta-have-it lingerie caption in Vogue: “There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with frothy Valenciennes lace.”

The 1916 Rand McNally edition of Mother Goose sported illustrations by Blanche Fisher Wright that depicted apple-cheeked children in old-fashioned dress—not flappers in silk slips. A 1921 McNally ad appealed to a related set of family values, promising “memories of boyhood and girlhood days rose-tinted with recollections of precious hours ‘when Daddy read’” and delivering appropriately “clean, wholesome texts.” This nostalgia for a pre-sexual girlhood contrasted with flapper liberty and coital confession. Parker mocked flapper “innocence” in a 1923 Saturday Evening Post article when, tongue firmly in cheek, she wrote: “there are few things sweeter and more wholesome than the girl of today’s attitude toward sex. She just looks unflinchingly at the thing with those widely advertised clear eyes of hers.”

The flapper poet wasn't the first feminist to take on the nursery rhyme. In 1915, for instance, newspaper columnist Alice Duer Miller published a Book of Rhymes For Suffrage Times to educate her audience to support the vote for women. But in the turn away from overt feminist politics in the 1920s, nursery rhymes by popular female poets offered a form by which to make flirtatious commentaries on women’s bodies rather than predictably didactic messages. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s famous poem “First Fig," for example, is a retelling of the Mother Goose riddle “Nanny Etticoat”:

Little Nanny Etticoat
In a white petticoat
And a red nose;
The longer she stands
The shorter she grows.
What Is She?

In "First Fig," Millay compares her body to a candle—the correct answer to the "Nanny Etticoat" rhyme—but strips off the petticoat:

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,
It gives a lovely light.

Incidentally, word on the street indicates this sexual license wasn't just a posture for Millay. Edmund Wilson recorded in his journal that, one evening, Millay offered the top half of her body to one partner and the other half of her body to him.

These poets enlisted Mother Goose as an unsuspecting partner in the flappers' crimes against old-fashioned femininity. But these rhymes also remind us that the flapper herself was often rendered innocuous through such infantilization; though they were modern women, flappers were oftentimes cast (and sometimes cast themselves) as “little girls” trying on big girls’ clothing. Millay, for example, pokes fun of her celebrity persona and supposedly debauched lifestyle in her poem “Grown-Up”:

Was it for this I uttered prayers
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half past eight?

By 1928, Parker mocks the flapper’s pretense to childhood in the New Yorker, describing herself “buying garments from the Junior Misses’ Department ... of so extreme a style, they gave me a doll’s tea-set with it.” Given this frustration with the identification of modern women with children, it is perhaps no wonder that when faced with Winnie the Pooh, Parker—riffing on her signature New Yorker byline "Constant Reader"—reported: “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”

Catherine Keyser is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina where she is completing a book titled "Girls Who Wear Glasses:" New York Women Writers and the Gender of Smartness.

Where Be the Linebreaks? Notes on the Second Inaugural Poem

Now that the hubbub about Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem "Praise Song for the Day" has subsided a bit—and now that Graywolf Press has slated the verse for a no-doubt lucrative press run of 100,000 copies—it's perhaps time to wonder whether anyone else noted the second poem at Barack Obama's inauguration: the poetry that framed the benediction offered by the Rev. Joseph Lowery. Long after the polite applause for Alexander's prosy free verse waned, Lowery's rhymes came unexpectedly and did nearly everything an inaugural poem should do—and perhaps more. Where, one might wonder, is his contract with Graywolf? If that's too bold a question, one might instead simply wonder, "Where are the linebreaks?" for most transcripts of the benediction in fact render Lowery's poetry as prose.

Lowery's benediction begins with rhyme, as he quotes the final stanza of James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," signaling to the crowd, as only poetry can, that what's taking place—or what's about to take place—is going to take place outside the realm of ordinary, quotidian speech and thus requires a special discursive register. This ceremonial herald is why, in fact, an inauguration includes poetry and partly why Alexander's loosey-goosey free verse failed to impress so many listeners. Here is that opening, though you may prefer to hear Lowery himself before you read on.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
thou who has brought us thus far along the way,
thou who has by thy might
led us into the light,
keep us forever in the path, we pray,
lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee,
lest our hearts, drunk with wine of the world, we forget thee.
Shadowed beneath they hand
may we forever stand
true to thee, O God,
and true to our native land.

As this suggests, inaugural rhyme doesn't have to be regular, and the lines don't have to be metronomic. In fact, the Lowery/Johnson opening is made all the more engaging by the interplay between the shorter three-beat lines and the longer five-beat lines: we know the rhymes are coming, but we don't know exactly when. Poetry & Popular Culture listens with rapt attention as Lowery's reading of the verse works on two simultaneous but different registers: at the same time that its abstract language of "tears" and "light" and "hearts" leaves room for every listener's imagination, it also resonates on a level more specific to African-American history, as Johnson's verse has long been called the "Black National Anthem." Lines like "God of our weary years, / God of our silent tears" immediately summon into the present moment the religious rhetoric and cadences of African-American survival and struggles for civil rights in the U.S.—only to then marry that rhetoric (and that past) to a statement of national loyalty on the day when the first African-American is sworn in as president, a day when some of those civil rights ideals have, in fact, materialized. Lowery's quotation of Johnson makes not just the voices of Johnson and Lowery present, but all the voices that have sung "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" over the years.

Once the rhyme establishes the sacredness of the moment, Lowery can move into prose for the bulk of his benediction: it's poetic, perhaps, but it's not poetry. Not poetry, that is, until his conclusion which does rhyme and, in so doing, wraps the benediction inside of a poem. Or wraps it between two poems, rather, because the rhyme Lowery leaves us with is nothing like the rhyme that inaugurated this second inaugural poem. Here's his conclusion:

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when:

black will not be asked to get back,
when brown can stick around
when yellow will be mellow
when the red man can get ahead, man
and when white will embrace what is right.

Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

These rhymes recall the political and pop cultural slogans of the 1960s (not to mention the 1966 Donovan hit song), connecting 2009 with the civil rights movement and reminding the crowd—and Obama—of the history that made this day and its benediction possible. At the same time, the slogans resonate differently now than they would have in the 1960s, so that while they connect the civil rights movement to the inauguration, they also illustrate a distinct historical distance from that moment. Like, who can really use "when yellow will be mellow" or "red man get ahead, man" with a straight face in 2009? The fact that the crowd, and Obama himself, responded with laughter after each line suggests they got it as well—that while the sentiment and political ideals of these slogans is still relevant, the rhetoric we use to talk about those ideals has changed for the better. We know we can laugh at the lines—and at the end of a prayer at that!—because we recognize that the current multiracial America being represented by Obama's inauguration is much too complex for the simple categories of "black," "brown," "red," "yellow" and "white" to handle. This is not nostalgia at work; Lowery's lines help us see and feel (and feel thankful for) the distance that the country has come since the 1960s without, at the same time, dismissing the civil rights movement's imperative for social justice in the present day.

Lowery is, Poetry & Popular Culture would submit, signifyin(g) on these 1960s catchphrases in order to simultaneously show us the new ways we think and talk about race (or should think and talk about race), and to remind Obama and the rest of the country of the debts we nonetheless owe to the decade that produced those sorts of catchphrases. At the same time, the fact that this final verse so clearly harnesses the rhythms of African-American music and other popular poetic forms makes us feel like Lowery is signifying on Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" as well. Not only do his rhymes answer Alexander's establishment-friendly free verse with a poem more decidedly African-American, popular, and oral in orientation—that is, something more appropriate for the moment—but in so doing it critiques "Praise Song for the Day" (albeit obliquely) for not owning and making use of these resources more aggressively.

I have to admit that I was a little embarrassed at how Alexander's poem was received with a dutiful, classroom-like attention and polite clapping by the crowd in D.C. Surely, I thought, poetry can do better than that. And it did—just a little bit later than I'd expected. Not only did Lowery's versifying establish the gravity of the inaugural moment, but it showed the nation its relationship to the past while making its listeners laugh at the same time. No wonder when Lowery said, "Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen," the crowd answered him several times. Could it be that just one of those amens was meant for the poetry as well?

Guest Posting: A Review of Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song"

Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Jeff Charis-Carlson risks his reputation as a generous reader and publisher of "good bad poetry" by giving Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem a chilly but not Frosty reception.

I really wanted to like Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem "Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration." After all, I’ve been working for three years to encourage local poets to find a broader audience and to comment more directly on the events of the day.

I’m even very forgiving with the poetry that I print on the Press-Citizen’s Opinion page. I’ve been known to occasionally print some poetry that is just "bad," but most of it has lived up to the "good bad poetry" aesthetic my collaborators and I have been cultivating. (Some even might even qualify as “good good poetry.”)

On top of that, I’ve spent far too long on a dissertation about novels and stories set in Washington, D.C. — which means that I’ve forced myself to read a whole lot of bad fiction and to learn to appreciate when it’s bad in new and interesting ways.

But even I lost interest as Alexander read her poem. I can appreciate the difficulty that she was under — the occasional poem is a hard form for literary poets to master — but I found nothing sonorous and very little memorable about the reading. And, because Alexander was following Barack Obama’s speech, she really needed something that came across as more than just prosy — something that would have given people the words they needed to sear the day’s events into their memories.

The closest she came was in her now most quoted line, "Say it plain: That many have died for this day." If Alexander had sent me the poem to edit, I would have suggested that she start with that line and then take her own advice by "(saying) it plain" throughout the rest of the poem.

Maybe Alexander, a professor at Yale, was simply the wrong choice for an inaugural poet.

Maybe Obama should have found a poet — like Maya Angelou or Robert Frost — who had much more experience viewing himself or herself as part of a broader audience.

Or, maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon, and Alexander’s "Praise Song for the Day" will go down in history as a great inaugural poem and will serve as an exemplar for occasional verse for decades to come. After all, the poem is be released as an $8 paperback, 32 pages, on Feb. 6, and its publisher, Graywolf Press, has announced a 100,000 first printing.

But I’d be surprised if it does. And I’d be more surprised if “Praise Song for the Day” manages to outsell its main competition, Angelou’s "On the Pulse of the Morning," which became a million seller after it was recited in 1993 at Bill Clinton’s inaugural.

Aretha Franklin, on the other hand, did a great rendition of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”

Jeff Charis-Carlson writes from Iowa City, IA, where he serves as the Opinion page editor of The Press-Citizen which regularly prints verse commentary about the day's news. Check out Charis-Carlson's piece on the advantages and disadvantages of publishing newspaper poetry at The Masthead. On Inauguration Day, the P-C ran its own inaugural poem, "Yes, We Can," by former Iowa poet laureate Marvin Bell.

Inaugural Doggerel: Obama’s Chrysler 300C Up for Sale on eBay

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on January 19, 2009

You think it’s cool to have a Popemobile?
Try an Audacity of Hopemobile!

I Might, I Would, I Will: Remembering Frost's "The Gift Outright"

As Yale University professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander prepares for the most important poetry reading of her life—on Tuesday, January 20, she'll read at the inauguration of now President-elect Barack Obama—it's worth taking a moment to reconsider what has become in most people's minds the gold-standard for inaugural poets: Robert Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. There, blinded by the sun's glare off of the snow and baffled by high winds, the 86 year-old Frost had to give up on the poem he'd in fact prepared for the occasion ("Dedication") and recited from memory one that he'd written more than 20 years earlier. "The Gift Outright" is now so linked to 1961 that many people assume Frost wrote it for the inauguration itself.

Here is the text of the poem Frost read in 1961, as recorded by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum:

The land was ours before we were the land’s
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she will become.

"The Gift Outright" had a pretty long and interesting history before 1961, however. It first appeared in the Spring 1942 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, although Frost claimed he had written it six or seven years earlier—smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression. As VQR notes in its history of "The Gift Outright," Frost soon thereafter revised the poem's last line for publication in The Witness Tree (1942), changing it from "Such as she was, such as she might become" to "Such as she was, such as she would become." Indeed, this is the version (pictured to the left) that the Library of Congress presents as the 1961 inaugural manuscript, even though this manuscript version contains a note in the upper right-hand corner that reads "Three War Poems II" and is identified in the bottom left as being from The Witness Tree in 1942. Clearly—as will become even more evident in a moment—this handwritten manuscript is a version of the poem Frost read in 1961, but it's not the actual poem he recited.

In addition to using "The Gift Outright" in The Witness Tree (which won him his fourth Pulitzer Prize, in 1943), Frost also used the poem on his Christmas card for 1942 (pictured here). Late in 2008, "Poetry & Popular Culture" showcased some of the Christmas cards which Frost produced in collaboration with Spiral Press printer Joseph Blumenthal. What's particularly interesting to "Poetry & Popular Culture" at the present moment, however, is how Frost—sending his holiday wishes a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor—politicizes the Christmas holiday by greeting friends with one of his "war poems." For a poet whom many people assume to be pretty darned unpolitical, this is a pretty political move.

So the history of "The Gift Outright" was a fairly complex and political one before 1961 even rolled around—a history in which Frost repeatedly situated the poem in relation to the world he was living in and even changed its wording to serve as a sort of barometer for how he was currently feeling about the U.S. VQR in fact points this out, arguing that "The substitution of 'would' for 'might' makes the poem more optimistic, more assured of America’s future glory. The version published in VQR seems to reflect a deep and perhaps healthy uncertainty about the nation’s future trajectory." It makes sense that, writing in the middle of the Depression, Frost would articulate his sense of the nation's future in less certain terms than he would on the eve of World War II when calls for patriotism demanded stronger language on all fronts, poetic fronts included. If Edna St. Vincent Millay could be convinced into writing a book-length propaganda poem (The Murder of Lidice) at the bequest of the Writer's War Board, then certainly Frost could be moved to change a verb from "might" to "would."

What VQR's history of "The Gift Outright" doesn't tell, however, is that Frost would go on and change the poem and its final verb another time, just as the poem's political stakes were at an all-time high. If the Kennedy Museum's transcript is in fact correct—and it is only partly so, as my postscript to this entry explains—it reveals that in 1961 Frost ended with the line "Such as she was, such as she will become." If VQR's argument about the significance of the verb changes holds water, then what are we to make of this move—from "might" to "would" to "will"? If the shift from conditional Depression-Era "might" to definitive Wartime "would" reflects Frost's changing levels of optimism, then how are we to interpret the postponement of American success implied in the shift to the future tense "will become" used at Kennedy's inauguration? Was the 86 year-old Frost tapping into and reinforcing the forward-looking and progressive rhetoric of the 35th and youngest American President? Or was Frost audaciously tempering his enthusiasm for the nation and qualifying his Cold War endorsement of Kennedy by shifting tenses from "would" to "will"?

In the way of a conclusion to this history, it's interesting to sit and listen to In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry—a four-CD anthology of 79 poets reading their poems aloud—which includes what sounds like Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" in 1961. Rather than play up the most poetically ambivalent moment of "The Gift Outright," its final line, the recording tapers off at this exact moment and blends into Robert Graves beginning "To Juan at the Winter Solstice" so that the listener can barely hear in the overlap of the two voices whether Frost is in fact saying "might" or "would" or "will" (though I believe it's "will"). Many people prize these sorts of recordings for the sense of authenticity they seem to add to poems; hearing a poet read in his or her own voice (as the anthology's title suggests) supposedly restores something that the poem otherwise lacks. "Poetry & Popular Culture" isn't going to agree or disagree with that assessment (not now anyway), so much as it wants to stress that even the recording of poets reading their work is an act of literary interpretation. Here, the sound people of In Their Own Voices actually obscure what might in fact be the most interesting verb-iage in "The Gift Outright." Presenting itself as documentary evidence, the recording nonetheless erases the most contentious—and perhaps the most political—part of Frost's poem.

All of this history, of course, was made possible by the serendipitously bad weather which forced Frost off script in 1961 and burned the poem he wrote in the 1930s into the popular imagination. Let's hope—as the temperatures in Iowa City threaten to plunge to -15 tonight—that Elizabeth Alexander might have similar luck when she reads this year.

Postscript: The history of "The Gift Outright" and its final line grows ever more complex the more one listens and looks. As the actual transcript of Frost's reading reveals, Frost did end the 1961 inaugural poem with "will become" but worked his way up to that ending by first sifting through a number of other verb tenses: was, would, and hath. As Frost notes, he uses the future tense "will become" expressly "for this occasion"—a reminder from one of our most "timeless" poets that not only are all poems occasional poems, but that occasional poems (not to mention their recordings and transcriptions) are political poems as well.

Laura Bush Unveils George W. Bush State China

Appeared in the Press-Citizen January 10, 2008

Some might wonder, in an economy this unstable,
about the First Lady’s departing wishes
to leave the White House with a set of dishes
that isn’t even microwavable.
Drapes, perhaps. Maybe knick-knacks or doodads
to decorate a shelf or windowsill,
but 320 plates for a cool half mil?
Some might react with surprise, oh-nos, egads,
and what-in-the-world-was-Laura-Bush-thinking?
But not me. I don’t want Sarkozy sitting there
mocking the presidential tupperware
or having to use a styrofoam cup for drinking.
Besides, the china isn’t all that bold:
the plates she chose are only rimmed with gold.







Update: Interestingly, the public appears to have some, er, appetite for the subject of Presidential China, if not for "good bad" poetry itself. Over the weekend, both the Tallahassee Democrat and the San Francisco Chronicle picked "Laura Bush Unveils George W. Bush State China" off of the wire and used it—one in print, one online.

More on Good Bad Poetry:

"Writing Good Bad Poetry"
"My Poetic License"
"At the Foxhead on Election Night"
"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"

Dear Reader: Get a Set of the Palace Cards!

"Poetry & Popular Culture" continues to showcase the small-business poets of yesteryear—such as Dr. C.B. Weagley Veterinary Surgeon and C.G. Blatt's Photographic Emporium—who hawked their services, wares, and varying levels of expertise 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.

About a month ago, "Poetry & Popular Culture" introduced readers to The Palace Saloon and Restaurant of Hagerstown, Maryland, which issued a series of bawdy poem cards around the turn of the century in order to promote the fine dining and drinking establishment. This month—after fielding several requests from eager readers asking for more—we are happy to present poem number 13, "Ladies Favorite," for your reading pleasure. In addition to the double entendre that drives the verse and its casual use of rhyming fourteener couplets hearkening back to the 16th century, "Poetry & Popular Culture" is especially pleased by how "Ladies Favorite" evokes in its penultimate line the "dear reader" of Victorian convention:

Ladies Favorite

Ladies like it in the morning, some prefer it at night,
Some love it Oh! how dearly, and for it they would fight;
Some love to gently play with and feel its silken hair,
To see it sweet with passion and spit up in the air,
Some take it in their little hand and stroke its little head,
Some take it in the cellar, some take it in the bed;
Some gently rub it up and down, with soft and tender hands,
And so dearly do they love it—they quickly make it stand;
Some take it on the housetop—on the comet to gaze,
And others toward the twinkling star make its bull head raise.
Many have been sorely bitten by the naughty little thing,
And then give to others so they may feel its sting;
Forgive me my dear reader I forgot to tell you that—
The subject of my little poem is nothing but a Cat.

Grab your teacups, folks, give that parasol a turn, and gather up your petticoats indeed!