"There's Poetry Everywhere": The "Heartfelt Emotion" of George Jefferson

P&PC Heroes: Till Gwinn & His Personalized Poem Business

A year and a half back, in August of 2010, P&PC was playing tour guide for parents visiting Portland's famously crafty and idiosyncratic Saturday Market, and we happened upon a Personalized Poem service (pictured here) that even Don Draper couldn't have failed to love. "Complete with a menu ranging from a $1.00 haiku to a $5.00 slam poem and performance," we wrote on this blog shortly thereafter, "this mobile, briefcase-sized start-up may not be making any IPO's soon, but it's got our vote for best new business in town."

The woman sitting against the wall in the picture wasn't the brains behind the project, however. We waited around a bit in hopes of meeting the poet-typist-owner, but he or she never showed. At first, we thought maybe this absence was meant to be a clever statement about the death of the author, but then we figured, hey, maybe even personalized poem services are governed by federal regulations mandating regular breaks in the working day. So, lured by the promise of knick-knacks like blown glass ornaments, funky handmade hats, and flower vases made out of things like test tubes, we moved on, resolved to the fact that we might never meet the face behind the operation.

Imagine our surprise, then, a year and a half later and during a casual conver- sation with a couple of students in the WU campus coffee shop about the public profile of poetry, in discovering that P&PC actually knows the entrepreneur behind the operation. Here's how it happened. We were sitting with two English majors (Angela and Till) and mentioned, in a sort of offhand way, the Personalized Poem service we'd seen in PDX a few years earlier. Till (guy holding the ukulele in the picture here) got an odd look on his face and said it was funny—he himself did a Personalized Poem service in PDX for a while, and how weird it would be if someone had stolen his idea. Next thing you know, the laptop gets opened and P&PC's August 2011 posting is pulled up on screen and, wouldn't you know it, we're looking at a picture of what turns out to be Till's own business! Not only did P&PC know the person who started the biz, and not only was he a student at Willamette, but he was our own student too—a creative writing major who'd been in our English 332 (Intermediate Poetry Writing) class two years before and who's part of this semester's section of English 441 (Poetry of the Pacific Northwest)!

It took a day or two for all of us to find our more-than-metrical footing after that unlikely discovery, but then things pretty much returned to normal. Nevertheless, P&PC sent out one of its office interns to catch up with Till—a native of Oregon City, a current member of the Bearcat rowing team, and already no stranger to poetic controversy—and ask how his business, carrying on a tradition suggested by the picture here, is going. Here's what he had to say:

P&PC Intern: So how's business going?

Till Gwinn: Pretty well: on an average summer day I'll type up 10 to 20 poems. That brings in around $40 if I set up before noon and stay until around 5.

P&PC: What's it like being a poetry vendor? Do you need (ahem) a poetic license?

TG: It's pretty fun though overwhelming at times: when you have a line of folks waiting for poems on a wide variety of subjects, it gets tough to focus. The only people who disapprove are security guards and event staff who are picky about where I set up. I have been asked if I have a license to sell poetry and was subsequently moved out of the designated vending area at Saturday Market.

P&PC: How do people react to seeing your set up?

TG: They're usually pretty happy. Even if they don't buy a poem, I get delighted smiles all day long.

P&PC: Tell me about your menu. How did you arrive on a price breakdown?

TG: The menu is a hybrid of poetic forms that I'm familiar with and those I assumed people would want. The pricing is based on the ease of writing each form: free verse is 25 cents a line, heroic couplets are $2, sonnets (I quickly learned) are under-priced at $4 each, and a slam poem is $5. I want to change the menu around in the future though: jack up the price of traditional metrical forms and add a children's poem.

P&PC: How did you come up with the idea of selling poems in the first place? And why set up in Portland and not at the markets in Salem?

TG: Like with all good poetry, I stole the idea. I saw a girl selling "Poems of the Day" at the farmer's market in Arcata, California. I set up in Portland because I figured tourists would be most interested in buying poetry, and the Saturday Market seemed to have the highest density. As soon as the weather improves, I'll give Salem a shot.

P&PC: Do you have investors? I imagine there could be, uh, verse ways to spend money these days.

TG: Not really. The only expenses I have are bus fare, paper, and ink ribbons. So far I've only made a profit one day, but I figure more time means more business.

P&PC: What can you tell us about the type of poetry people want?

TG: Most people want Portland poems, poems about their kids or significant others, and poems about nature in general. The oddest, and probably my favorite, request came from a couple of teenage boys who wanted a heroic couplet about Zombraham Lincoln.

P&PC: Can you give us a free sample?

TG: Unfortunately I don't keep any copies. It makes me sad because I've written some (like the Zombraham Lincoln piece) that are pretty good on their own. At the same time though, I like how each piece goes out into its own universe separate from me.

P&PC: Um, where'd you get the typewriter? I didn't think anyone under 40 could use one.

TG: I found it in House of Vintage off of Hawthorne. Some folks are surprised I own one, being so young, but I think the more media one uses, the more one can find in his or her writing.

P&PC: So, what's the future have in store?

TG: More poems. I'm going to keep setting up at Saturday Market primarily, but by the time summer rolls around, anywhere with sun and a poetically appreciative populous is a viable space.

A Hankie for V-Day

By "V-Day," P&PC doesn't mean Victory Day— although it might have meant that to the "sweetheart" owner of the hankie envelope pictured here—but, rather, Valentine's Day, perhaps the day of the year that people most regularly associate with great bad poetry of all sorts ranging from clever, be-mine schoolroom rhymes to the little classic "Mother" that we find printed on the cover of a 1920s Artstyle Chocolates tin (pictured below) and that probably served double duty for Mother's Day (first recognized in the U.S. in 1914):

Every age and every tongue
Of Mother love has fondly sung
And from my heart I want to add
A glowing tribute just as glad
For never could love more wonderful be
Than you, dear Mother, have given me

If all this bad, tear jerking poetry makes you want to cry and get away from it all, though, your hankies—or handkerchiefs from the first half of the twentieth century, at least—wouldn't necessarily provide you any respite. In fact, as the "Sweetheart" poem printed on the decorated, World War II-era hankie envelope pictured at the top of this posting indicates, they might very well be a source for even more bad poetry:

I thought that you would
like to know
That some one's thoughts
go where you go;
That some one never can forget
The hours we spent since first we met
That life is richer, sweeter far
For such a sweetheart as you are
And now my constant
prayer will be
That God may keep you
safe for me.

As the actual hankie pictured here indicates, if the bad poetry of V-Day sent you to "Sweetheart," then "Sweetheart" might very well have sent you to yet another bad poem—one printed on the hankie stored inside in the hankie envelope, what is effectively a poem wrapped in the arms of another poem. Like the way I wrap my arms around my sweetheart, right? Or how I hug my Valentine? Or, as a standard little rhyme from a schoolroom Valentine greeting card puts it—a rhyme seemingly illustrated across the years by the entwined lovers pictured on the hankie here (see detail below)—"Wrap these hands around you whenever I'm away / so you can have a hug from me anytime of day"?

What P&PC finds most freaky about poem hankies (and their living-room cousins, the poem pillows), however, is the brutal way they consistently wrap the experience of romantic love in the patriotic arms of war:

When war clouds hover o'er the land we read of heroes brave.
Our officers on land and sea, o'er them we fairly rave;
The real defenders are forgot, the men who fire the gun.
'Tis they who'll shield the Stars and Stripes,
God bless them ev'ry mother's son!
He may be wealthy, college bred, perhaps a son of toil,
He volunteers to fight or die, he loves his native soil;
No fame or glory be his, though through him battles are won.
Old Glory will never cease to wave while we have men to fire the gun!

In the illustration to this poem, not only are the two lovers wrapped in each others' arms, but they are then wrapped in the icons of the very history—the Revolutionary War and the Great War—that would have in fact split them up, sending him to war and her, presumably, to the bitter substitute of her hankie poem. Over and over, these poems make the argument that the fulfillment of romantic love is in sacrificing that love to the dogs of war—the occasion when V-Day (Valentine's Day) and V-Day (Victory Day) become expressions of each other, concepts sinisterly wrapped together in the discourse of love like ... well, like a poem inside of a poem.

Amazingly, the poetry of American handkerchiefs does not stop at the hankie envelope or the hankies stored inside—or at the intimate moment of solitude and reflection when one presses one's flushed face to the verses printed therein. As the 1913 postcard pictured here indicates, poetry also structured what we can only call the larger hankie economy itself. Advertising a Handkerchief Bazaar being held at the Webster City U.B. Church in Webster City, Iowa, this five-stanza poem, written, we believe, specially for the fundraising event, was sent by Tressie Dale to Mrs. L. C. Dale, presumably a relative also living in Webster City. "Was given these cards," Tressie writes, "to help our church and so will send you one. And if you can send one it will be appreciated very much. Just send it to me." Of course, in asking Mrs. Dale to "send one," Tressie is repeating the "plea in brief" that stanzas four and five of the poem on the other side spell out:

To be without a handkerchief
You know is quite distressing;
From every State let one be sent,
'Twill surely be a blessing.

If a handkerchief you can make,
That handkerchief we will surely take;
But if you can't, then buy us one.
We'll thank you till your race is run.

If that poetry distresses you this Valentine's Day—maybe it's even bad enough to make you cry?—well, won't you please let P&PC offer you a handkerchief to dry your tears?

First Day of Issue: April 21,2012

"The number of books published each year in America has been steadily increasing, and poetry is more popular than ever" the USPS writes, adding that "The ten great writers honored on the Twentieth-Century Poets stamp pane [pictured above and due out in April 2012] ... surely deserve part of the credit."

We here at P&PC aren't really sure that there's a firm link between poetry's popularity and the increasing number of books being published each year, and we would have preferred to see actual poems or quotations from poems printed on these new Forever stamps, but we're not going to complain too loudly. (Can you imagine the USPS quoting from Paterson, Book I: "And clerks in the post- / office ungum rare stamps from / his packages and steal them for their / children's albums"?) After all, as suggested by the 1960 edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Collected Lyrics pictured here—in which the cancellation mark on the 1981 stamp neatly picks up the decorative flourish motif of Millay's name—poems, books, and stamps will find each other one way or another.

P&PC Anecdote: "The Heart of the Apple"

Two years ago, P&PC offered continuing, if sporadic, coverage of a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class that was being taught in the English Department at Willamette University—a class that field tripped to the annual Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, and that delved into microfilm archives to read and study poetry that was published in The New Northwest, a Portland-based, suffragist newspaper edited in the latter part of the nineteenth century by Oregon women's rights leader Abigail Scott Duniway. Another instantiation of that class is being offered this semester, and a P&PC representative will drop in from time to time to see what's up, especially since the archival work in The New Northwest is so timely this year, what with 2012 marking the centennial of women's suffrage in Oregon and all. Our sources tell us that there are interesting interdisciplinary activities afoot this semester, and we will bring coverage of those activities as we get it.

For the moment, however, we wanted to share a brief and humorous exchange that occurred in "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" regarding the funky piece of advertising pictured here—a 5x7-inch poetry postcard issued around 1914 by the Commercial Bank & Trust Company (billed as "The Bank that Helps the Man Who Helps Himself") of Wenatchee, Washington. It's got a blank back side and a poem on front by Viola Adella Gill who was married to Major Edwin S. Gill and died August 28, 1922, in Chambers Prairie, Washington, just outside of Olympia. (Wenatchee, btw, is about 140 miles due East of Seattle.)

Having just read Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse's introduction to Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture, the class—which had already read work investigating the relationship between literature and region by the 12 Southerners, Mary Austin, Eric Sundquist, June Howard, and Richard Brodhead—was especially attuned to Fetterley and Pryse's notions that (a) regionalism is a discursive phenomenon and not a natural, geographic one, and (b) since regionalist writing is alert to the power relationships of place, the best of such writing is also concerned with the ways that those place-based power relationships affect gender roles and identities, especially in the nineteenth century when the "separate spheres" ideology located men and women in particular places that were presumed to be most natural for them (women in the home, men in public). It was no surprise, then, when the class keyed in on the phrase "each in its place, united" that is the penultimate line of Davis's "The Heart of the Apple":

There's music in the laughter
Of a child like this above;
There's health, content, and plenty,
In the valley that we love;
The apples catch the gorgeous tints
Of Autumn's evening skies,
The people's hearts are kind and true
Warm greetings in their eyes.
Schools and churches are close at hand,
To uplift mind and soul,
Each in its place, united,
Helps to form a Perfect Whole.

The poem, one student quickly and rightly remarked, naturalizes the notion that people have an organic relationship with—and even become an expression of—the land. The "Heart of the Apple" in the poem's title, for example, mirrors the "kind and true" hearts of the people in line 7, as the soil in the "valley that we love" is imagined to produce human beings and fruit that, in the abstract at least, have similar anatomies. And the expression "each in its place," another student observed, recalls the "separate spheres" rhetoric of the nineteenth century—men do things in certain places, women do things in certain other places (as satirized in the cartoon here)—while applying that rhetoric to commercial ends as well, as money, the advertisement argues, belongs in its place too: in the vaults at the Commercial Bank & Trust Company. Not a bad analysis, right?

So here comes the punchline of this anecdote, at least as reported by our P&PC johnny-on-the-spot:

Professor: If each thing has "its place," then what do we make of the baby's face being located in the middle of the apple—seemingly out of place from where we'd normally see it?

Student #1: Actually, the logic of the overlap works perfectly, suggesting that we raise our children just as we raise our produce. In the "Perfect Whole," they do occupy the same "place" conceptually speaking.

Professor: What are the implications of a logic that imagines the raising of human children to be the same type of activity as the cultivation of apples?

[Dramatic pause]

Student #2 [wittily]: We get to eat the children once they're ripe!

That's the news from "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest," where Jonathan Swift is looking on, where all the students are above average, all the professors are good looking, and all the children are, well, the apples of our eyes.

P&PC Book Review: Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture, by Marsha Bryant

Fact: These days, the most exciting academic work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry is being done by women critics and scholars like Maria Damon, Melissa Girard, Virginia Jackson, Meredith Martin, Meredith McGill, Adalaide Morris, Catherine Robson, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Angela Sorby. (N.B. As anyone who attended the 2008 “Lifting Belly High” conference that focused on twentieth-century women’s poetry will attest, that’s hardly a complete list, but it’s not a bad start.) The most recent example of such scholarship comes from P&PC hero and University of Florida English professor Marsha Bryant, who is the author of the new book Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) that we get to talk about here.

Fact: Collectively, the books, essays, and digital projects by these and other women scholars are pushing frontiers of how to read, understand, and study poetry, breaking down outdated binaries like “raw” and “cooked,” “oppositional” and “quietist,” lyric and non lyric. They are studying poetries in the plural (not Poetry) as cultural forces and as ways of thinking linked both to the everyday and the ideal, with sources in mass, popular, and counter cultures, computers and archives, transnational circuits of exchange, and public and political spheres. They are finding poetry in schoolrooms, diaries, letters, magazines, radios, cafes, movies, nature field guides, civic events, art centers, handbooks, slams, and digital pixels, as well as in books and little magazines. For them, “poetry” refers to a diverse set of historical phenomena ranging from what Damon calls fugitive “micropoetries” to intentionally epic-length works like Helen in Egypt, one of the texts that Bryant (pictured here) examines at length in Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture.

Fact: P&PC knows some of these people personally, and some of them we’ve never met. But to a one (and at risk of sounding cheesy) we’re inspired by them all.

Back in 1989, Susan Lanser published “ ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Politics of Color in America”—an essay that used the example of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s now-canonical short story to praise how feminist literary criticism changed and opened up the practice of literary studies and yet had its own blind spots; in focusing solely on the liberation of the imprisoned women in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Lanser claimed, feminist scholars “may have stopped short, and our readings … may have reduced the text’s complexity to what we need most: our own image reflected back to us.” In revealing the limits of feminism’s “relentless pursuit of a single meaning”—a pursuit that initially freed readers from a patriarchal canon and critical method even as it was threatening to become restrictive insofar as it approached texts as primarily about gender from a white, middle-class perspective—Lanser studied the yellowness of the yellow wallpaper, a central detail of the story that, amazingly, had escaped all but the most marginal commentary by critics.

As one reads Lanser’s essay today, it is almost possible to imagine the lightbulb moment when Lanser asked herself “But why is the wallpaper yellow—and not red, or purple or green?” Lanser’s subsequent re-reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is superb and superbly challenging, as she ties the color yellow to discourses of race and immigration in America at the time of the story’s writing (the late nineteenth century)—discourses that used the word “yellow” as a pejorative, catch-all description to refer to non-Nordic peoples including African Americans, Chinese, Jewish, Irish, and Italians. Putting the racial connotations of “yellow” in conversation with Gilman’s own complicated politics—Gilman was a socialist and feminist who nevertheless took anti-immigration and pro-eugenics stances and imagined "yellow" peoples as inherently more patriarchal and less capable of personal improvement than Nordic ones—Lanser reveals the woman trapped in and behind the yellow wallpaper to have a complicated ethnic-female identity with which the story’s narrator is simultaneously repulsed and seeking to free. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Lanser claimed, is not a story about woman’s predicament in a male dominated world generally speaking, but one about that predicament as it intersects with the ambivalences and contradictions of race and ethnicity.

In Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture, Bryant pursues something of the same approach as Lanser—examining the limits that feminist literary criticism has set up in the process of challenging the traditional literary canon and methods of literary scholarship—by taking on the oft-held feminist assumption that the woman poet always writes as an outsider and is thus primarily seeking, and engaged in, activities of transgression, subversion, parody, and critique. Scholars tend to assume, Bryant claims, “that women poets set out to subvert the mainstream” and therefore always offer “an oppositional aesthetic, a counter-discourse” when, in reality, they may write as cultural insiders as well. “The wide scope of women’s poetry does not conform to the contours of loyal opposition,” Bryant writes. “Even the signature styles of our key figures are more vested in the mainstream than we think.”

Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture thus revisits and rereads the work of several "key figures" in relation to their respective connections to the mainstream—sustained connections or motifs that Bryant calls their “signature styles”—and for how they claim the cultural center and write as cultural insiders rather than as outsiders. Chapter One focuses on the “CinemaScope poetics” of H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, a book that appeared the same year that Warner Brothers released the movie Helen of Troy (1956) and that borrows from the “cinematic ruptures of popular film and postwar geopolitics.” Chapter Two argues that the innovation in Stevie Smith’s funky illustrated poems (such as the one pictured here) was made possible in part by well-established practices in children’s literature. Chapter Three explores how the “cross-racial inspection” of Gwendolyn Brooks’s postwar poetry that “make[s] whiteness visible” owes a debt to the strategies of Ebony magazine and thus becomes “not simply a counter-discourse, but central to the national conversation about race” at the time. Indeed, Bryant writes, “Racial politics and popular culture contribute as much as modernist influences to the much-remarked difficulty of Brooks’s postwar poetry.” Chapter Four finds that many of the strange or surreal images in Sylvia Plath’s poetry pull directly from images of domesticity appearing in 1950s women’s magazines. And Chapter Five argues that the famous (and famously creepy) persona poems of Ai and Carol Ann Duffy—poems that resist confessional modes of communicating the “feminine” self in favor of creating portraits of serial killers and child abusers—have direct analogues if not sources in a “mainstream extreme” frequently encountered in sensational journalism and TV shows such as America’s Most Wanted.

In a paragraph seemingly included to answer just the sort of question that the P&PC office interns might consider raising, Bryant explains that Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture focuses on canonical or near-canonical poets—rather than on the many, now forgotten women poets who wrote with mass audiences in mind and regularly published in newspapers and mass-circulation magazines—for three main reasons: (1) because studying “established poets allow[s] for a reorientation of the field” since the field values them and calibrates itself in relationship to them; (2) because they are widely available in anthologies and thus don’t require recovery projects or archives to access; and (3) because many of these poets “prove difficult to position as cultural outsiders” in the first place, given how they’ve been lauded and honored in literary culture; they are prize winners, poet laureates, and even (especially in the case of Plath) figures recognized in and by the mass media. We here at the P&PC office can understand all that and, now that Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture has opened up the subject of women writing as insiders and not solely as members of a "loyal opposition," we hope that other scholars will check out the careers of poets who aren’t held in such high esteem today—poets like Anne Campbell, Grace Noll Crowell, 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winner Phyllis McGinley (pictured here on the cover of Time), Nancy Byrd Turner, Helen Welshimer, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, for example—and who made not just their poetry but, in some cases, their livings from positions writing inside mainstream popular and mass culture.

If this is one doorway that Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture opens up for other scholars, then there’s another that P&PC sees as maybe a bit more dicey but all the more provocative for being so. All of the poets showcased by Bryant take popular and mass cultural resources and turn them into opportunities for good art and innovative, usually progressive ends; that is, even though they operate as cultural insiders rather than outsiders, these poets still (inevitably?) produce politically or artistically progressive poetry. H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, for example, “calls into question the privileged masculinity of Homeric epic” even as it replicates some of the strategies of Warner Brothers. Smith’s poetry is read in relation to the mainstream but is celebrated for “the counterintuitive innovations” that result from Smith’s engagement with that mainstream. In her “artful forms,” Brooks (pictured here) perceptively and intentionally “pressured the rigid dualities of US racism.” Plath (Bryant calls her “a poet of Madison Avenue”) “did not just write domestic poetry; she reinvented it … by tapping the rich ambiguities and strange images of the everyday” and by making “poetry a form of cultural analysis.” All of which is to say that once Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture has broken apart the assumption that women poets are by default outsiders, it risks replacing that assumption with another: that when women poets do write as insiders, they generally succeed, innovate, transform, and write progressive poetry. In a postscript titled “Key Notes: Manifesto for Women’s Poetry Studies,” Bryant writes:

Too many of us still believe that a woman’s poem must resist popular culture to be successful. But we have seen that it offers poets aesthetic inspiration as well as an ideological sounding board. As artful consumers, poets open their signature styles to the graphic and the glossy, the screen and the scene. Modern and contemporary women poets take popular culture into their work, and readers must take it into fuller account.

To the end of more fully accounting for this overlooked feature of twentieth-century women’s poetry, we here at P&PC think it would also be worth having examples of scholarship that don’t cast women’s writing from the center as an almost uniformly successful activity, but as one entailing various sets of compromises and perhaps even failures as well. That is to say, Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture is so successful at what it does—making the links between women’s poetry, popular culture, and the cultural mainstream indisputable—that some more ambivalent or even negative examples would be worth including in the mix. Bryant has shown us how the center offers a set of resources for writers who then successfully use them, but where did other attempts to engage or write from the center limit or disable women writers, and how? Where did they fall short or go wrong, and why? Where and why do the forces of the market or insider positions (ideological or otherwise) curtail or confine them (one might even say get them to “sell out”), and how might those examples round out our sense of the dynamic intersection that Bryant has challenged us to map? It’s not an impossible task. To do so in regard to women’s poetry, however, would mean stretching feminist literary theory in yet another unconventional direction—one that would critique or call out, in addition to praising, showcasing, or representing for the poetry—and thus ensure that our operating assumptions as readers and critics don’t become as entrenched as they were before people like Bryant took them to task.

Just Published: The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

P&PC curates a bunch of small, idiosyncratic collections—such as the one with nothing in it but advertising poetry about life insurance, for example, or the one containing only books by Edna St. Vincent Millay that have newspaper clippings stored inside of them. The smallest and most idiosyncratic of all, however, may be a set of three wallets or portfolios that somehow over the years, perhaps like the Spotted Elephant and the Charlie-in-the-Box that made it to the Island of Misfit Toys, found their ways to the P&PC home office. All contain important fire-box or safety deposit box documents like marriage licenses, discharge papers from the army, insurance forms, and selective service papers. And, as with the portfolio pictured here—which once belonged to Texas-born Porter K. Mason, a Major in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Army who spent time in India during World War II—they all contain poems. The poem in Mason's wallet (placed on top of the paperwork in the photo and just to the right of the family photograph) is a professionally-printed excerpt from Rudyard Kipling's 1892 poem "The Naulahka"—an excerpt in the way of a cautionary tale that Time magazine reports being widely quoted by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam in the 1960s as well:

Now it is not good for the Christian's health,
To hustle the Aryan brown;
For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles,
And he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased;
And the epitaph drear: A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East.

The mixture of official documents and poetry in these wallets intrigues us in part because, while the documents would appear to enforce or at least prioritize a standardized, bureaucratic life narrative—birth, marriage, enlistment, discharge from the army, etc.—the poems don't signify as clearly, and they thus testify to aspects of a lived life that are not reducible to paperwork. That is, they add an element of subjectivity or opaqueness to an otherwise objectified or transparently-recorded human existence. It may be impossible to determine exactly why each person included the poems he did—why did Ralph Edmond Baxter (portfolio pictured here) include the newspaper clippings of James Metcalfe's "Portraits" from the Chicago Times (a form of rhyming prose poem called a poemulation in Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel Babbitt) along with his "separation from military service" and incomplete application for membership in the Illinois American Legion, for example?—but the juxtaposition of official and poetic discourses suggests each person's impulse to complicate or augment the bureaucratic structures that reduce their lives to dates, forms, and numbers.

In the recently published Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (2012) edited by University of Illinois poetry scholar and current AAUP President Cary Nelson, P&PC got a chance to ruminate on this topic and other relevant issues in greater length, beginning with a portfolio kept by Paul Fox (1893-1943), a World War I veteran, farmer, and "gas man" for the Logan Gas Company from Ohio. In addition to his military discharge papers, his social security card, marriage license, and insurance paperwork, Fox kept a copy of an anti-FDR poem "Rejected," a piece of political satire in which FDR dies and goes to hell, only to be refused admission by the devil. (That's the poem on top of the paperwork in the picture here; a higher-resolution image can be found below.) What keeping this poem might have meant for Fox, how "Rejected" became one of the most widely circulated poems of the 20th century (teaser: it even featured in Nazi propaganda), and what the saving of poems more generally offered to American readers, is the topic of P&PC's contribution to the Handbook, "Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America."

The Oxford Handbook is a pretty amazing project. At seven hundred pages long, it brings together 25 brand-new essays by some of the best and most accomplished scholars out there and covers nearly every topic you can imagine. (For a complete table of contents, click here.) It should become one of the most definitive resources out there, but at $150 a pop in hardback, P&PC can't expect "ordinary readers" to each pick one up for their private collections. In order for the book to go into a more affordable paperback edition, though, it's got to sell enough copies. So we're encouraging you to contact your favorite libraries and encourage them to buy a copy for their collections. Then, both you and all sorts of other people will be able to learn about Fox's copy of "Rejected," how it circulated in Depression-Era America, how it became part of the Nazi propaganda machine, and how Americans made saving and sharing poetry a routine part of their lives in the twentieth century. (Thanks to our savvy team of negotiators and Oxford's generosity, P&PC even scored approval to include nine pictures in its essay, so reading "Material Concerns" should feel a little bit like reading this blog.)

In the way of a trailer-slash-advertisement for "Material Concerns" and the Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, here are the first two paragraphs of P&PC's essay:

Paul Erwin Fox was born on November 21, 1893, in Ohio's Vermillion township, which is now about a forty-five minute drive from the city of Ashland in the north-central part of the state. Except for two years' military service during World War I (he enlisted in the army on September 23, 1917, participated in the first allied offensive victory of the war at the Second Battle of the Marne, and was discharged on August 9, 1919), Fox lived his entire life in Ashland County, first working as a farmer near the village of Sullivan and then as a "gas man" for the Logan Gas Company and the Ohio Fuel Gas Company. With the Rev. T.T. Buell of the Methodist Episcopal Church of nearby Newark presiding, he married Mary Kathryn McManamay on September 14, 1920, and the pair eventually had one son, Donald. Fox had life insurance through the All American Life and Casualty Company of Park Ridge, Illinois, attended the Dickey Church of the Brethren, and was a member of the American Legion's Harry Higgins Post Number 88. He died on May 19, 1943, two days after suffering a stroke while working on a gas well near Medina and six months before reaching his fiftieth birthday.

When Fox died, he left among his belongings a cluster of official documents stored inside a brown, wallet-sized portfolio originally issued with his discharge papers from the army. Those discharge papers, signed by Major H.B. Karkoff at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio, are still intact: Fox's middle name is misspelled "Irvin." To these documents, Fox would later add his social security card, itself contained in a specially designed, chocolate-colored folder marked "Compliments of the Mansfield Typewriter Company" and dated December 12, 1936, making it one of the thirty million issued when the Social Security Board first began mass-registering people nationwide in late November of that year. And then he'd cap off this encapsulated record of his life by adding a poem that may well have been one of the most widely distributed poems of its time, but which few people remember today.

We hope you enjoy the rest of the book!