Tagging Mary Oliver

The one problem with working at the P&PC home office is that you can never really get all that far away from work. Take Sally the Stenographer, for example. There she was, shopping on her own in downtown Portland, thinking she had the whole day to herself without any interruption from a P or a PC. She needed a raincoat, a couple of sweaters, and maybe a new pair of tights. She wandered here and there from Lucy to REI, keeping in mind one of her favorite stores, Title 9, as her final destination. Sally likes the sporty, casual look at Title 9. She likes their clothes that women can "live in" while "doing their thing." She likes how the catalogs don't show models but picture real employees—sometimes holding chickens, or mountain biking, or rock climbing—accompanied by little interviews with them about what they've got in the fridge or what kind of food they love. Her face lights up when she walks through the door.

Then, as she's blissfully looking through a bunch of sweaters by prAna—the Carlsbad, California, outfit named after an ancient Sanskrit word for "breath, life, and vitality of the spirit"—Sally comes across the hang-tag pictured here where, along with a statement of prAna's company philosophy, there's a quotation from Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day": "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life." Sally paused, admiring the sandstone design and the way it makes the words kind of look like a petroglyph, and for a moment she did wonder, "What am I going to do with my one wild and precious life?" Then she realized she was holding the answer to Mary Oliver's question in her very hands. She bought the sweater, delivered its tag to the P&PC Office, and submitted the receipt for reimbursement as a work-related expense.

From the P&PC Vault: The Great Diagraphic Corset

Check out this great, Victorian-era die-cut advertising sign for "The Great Diagraphic Corset"—a 10" tall, full-color display item that was designed to stand upright with the help of an "easel" leg that once attached to its reverse side. (You can see a remnant of that leg in the second image below.) As much as we here at the Poetry & Popular Culture office love this design concept, we like the punning product-packaging concept even more, as the hourglass shape of the vase tropes the va-va-va-voom hourglass form that the female body will supposedly take on with the help of a little whalebone and some minor shortness of breath. "It is our belief," the makers of The Great Diagraphic Corset state on the reverse side, "that no corset has yet been produced, uniting in so great a degree the qualities of support, ease and beauty."

Beauty indeed. How better to complete the web of cultural associations linking femininity, flowers and fashion than by throwing a poem—or, in this case, part of a poem—into the mix? As is often the case with advertising poetry (see P&PC's recent digressions on Poetry in Lotion or Ex-Lax, for example), it's never quite as simple as just throwing something into the mix, however. The makers of The Great Diagraphic Corset write "Our corset seems to embody the fancy of the Poet" and go on to quote four tetrameter lines witnessing to that fancy:

Now doth her bodice aptly laced
From her fair bosom to her shapely waist
Fine by degrees and beautifully less
The air and harmony of grace express.

If you're saying to yourself right now "Ah-ha! Those couplets ring a bell!" it's probably because you're thinking of "Henry and Emma," a fairly sizable dialogue poem about marital (in)fidelity written by everybody's favorite Augustan poet, Matthew Prior (1664-1721). But if you know your Prior well enough to place that quotation—and if you were able to recognize him as "the Poet" which the language on the die cut was referring to—you probably also know that the makers of The Great Diagraphic Corset are actually misquoting Prior's original text. The original, in fact, reads:

No longer shall the Boddice, aptly lac'd,
From thy full Bosome to thy slender Waste,
That Air and Harmony of Shape express,
Fine by Degrees, and beautifully less...

And, of course, if you recognized that The Great Diagraphic Corset was rewriting Prior, then you probably know that Prior's "Henry and Emma" had—and 'fessed up to having—its own source text: ye olde, anonymous, 15th-century poem, "The Nut-brown Maid." (Incidentally, the "Nut-brown Maid" became especially popular in the mid-18th century after Prior's death, when it was included in Thomas Percy's hit collection of ballads and popular songs, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)—a collection that eventually inspired imitations of popular verse by wanna-be balladeers such as Colderidge and Wordsworth.)

All of this is to say, of course, that a half century of poetry lies behind the four lines printed on the back of The Great Diagraphic Corset advertisement—a seemingly simple puff that reveals itself to be a moment of extraordinary intertextuality in the consumer marketplace. Now that's the sort of literary historical hourglass that catches Poetry & Popular Culture's eye!

Fuzzy's Supper Club, "How to Get to Heaven," & the Case of the Missing "N"

In 1949, Arthur C. "Fuzzy" Rahill—son of Ray and Lillian Rahill who immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon in 1907—went to work for a restaurant located at 1232 Classen Boulevard in Oklahoma City. He bought the business a year later and opened Fuzzy's Supper Club, which he owned and operated until 1983 when he retired and sold the joint to a Mr. Lobb who apparently spent $100,000 remodeling it to feature a "sports motif ... decorated with antique sporting equipment." Then, in a series of events that news reports don't fully explain, Rahill "took the business back through litigation" in 1984. P&PC can't discover when exactly Fuzzy's finally shut its doors—the place was still open in 1987 when people were instructed to go there to buy tickets to the Oklahoma City Golden Gloves amateur boxing tournament—but Rahill died in 2003 at the age of eighty.

In the mid 1970s, then in his fifties, Rahill extended Fuzzy's to include Arthur's Prime Rib House—an attempt, according to one news story, to provide a "classier" dining experience that offered, among the usual steaks and other gustatory attractions, a Friday night seafood buffet at $14.95 per plate—and, as part of that expansion, he also had printed up a business card (pictured above) that included on back the poem pictured to the left, "How to Get to Heaven":

A man knocked at the gates of heaven,
His face was scarred and old,
He stood before the man of fate,
For entrance to the fold!

What have you done? St. Peter asked,
To gain admission here?
I've slaved away most of my life,
I've been a restaurateur!

The Pearly Gates then opened wide,
St. Peter struck the bell,
Come in, and choose your golden harp,
You've had your share of Hell!

It's impossible to figure what exactly motivated Fuzzy to feature "How to Get to Heaven." Business cards have long included poems (see here and here and here and here, for example), and perhaps Rahill thought that the classed-up Arthur's merited a poem to class up its business card. Or perhaps, we like to think, the ghosts of Rahill's birthplace in Springfield, Illinois, were speaking through him; by the time Fuzzy was born in 1922, "prairie poets" Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay, both from the area, had put Sangamon County on the national poetic map.

As it turns out, "How to Get to Heaven" is an intriguing little poem. It's part of a going-to-heaven or going-to-hell poetic tradition that not only includes famous old epics and modernist masterpieces, but popular texts as well—like the Depression-era poem "Rejected" (pictured here), which tells the story of President Franklin Roosevelt being denied entrance to Hell, or "The Grocer's Dream," which was printed on the back side of an advertising trade card for Majestic Sandwich Spread sometime in the 1930s and that you can check out here. Unlike "Rejected" and "The Grocer's Dream," however, both of which leave their main characters in Hell (one unable to get in, and one unwilling to give up his seat), "How to Get to Heaven" features a protagonist who has already been to Hell and now appears, like Sterling Brown's hero in "Slim Greer in Hell," to converse with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates.

What intrigues us the most about "How to Get to Heaven" is not this narrative in particular, but what the poem appears to have left out. If you look very closely at the word "restaurateur" in the last line of stanza two, you'll see that the kerning (the space between letters) is a little off. There's more space between the "a" and the "t" of "restaurateur" than there is, for example, the "a" and the "t" of "Gates" in the fist line of the third stanza. This is the only time in the poem that the kerning is irregular, and we think it's the somewhat Derridean trace of a change made during the printing process when "restauranteur" (spelled with an "n") was changed to the more proper term "restaurateur" (without the "n").

What effect, if any, does this missing "n" have on the poem? Well, for starters, we think it's the very thing that gets the poem's main character into heaven. By using the correct but less frequently used term "restaurateur" instead of the more common but erroneous "restauranteur" to describe his occupation, the main character proves himself to be what he is in fact claiming to be; he is no pretender or impostor, but the genuine article who knows the difference between "restaurateur" and "restauranteur." Unlike the typical scene at the Pearly Gates, which—like the scene of Roosevelt trying to get into Hell in "Rejected"—involves enumerating why one deserves entrance into Heaven and St. Peter logging or checking those reasons in his giant book, "How to Get to Heaven" has no justification other than the proper vocabulary word. St. Peter would no doubt appreciate the proper terminology, but he would also hear embedded in "restaurateur" the word's origins in the Late Latin restaurator or "restorer" (as opposed to "restauranteur," which is derived from the more mundane word "restaurant"), thus making "restaurateur" an account of one's occupation, a sign of one's legitimacy, and a sort of password, prayer, code, or miniature argument linking the earthly restaurateur to the Restorer for whom St. Peter (the patron saint of bakers, butchers, fishermen, and harvesters, btw) so diligently serves as chief "rateur," if you will.

If that isn't awesome enough for you, then the extra space alerting us to the significance of the missing "n" alerts us to a feature of the poem's acoustic economy, as well, for eliminating the "n" also highlights the "ate" at the center of "restaurateur"—a morpheme that not only serves as a fitting metonym for the protagonist's career, but that echoes throughout the rest of the poem: in the "ate" of "gates" and "fate" as well as in the assonance of "face," "gain," and "slaved." Reading retroactively, in fact, it's hard not to see "How to Get to Heaven" announcing this acoustic theme from the very beginning, as the formatting of line one—which leaves "gates" hanging as a line break even though it's the middle of the poetic line—seems designed to call attention to this precise feature of the poem.

What brings the protagonist's acoustic past to an end, however, is St. Peter himself, whose very name transforms "ate" (past tense) into "eat" (present tense), thus offering the main character the very invitation that a restaurateur spends his life extending to other people. In fact, can we not hear in the sound of the bell St. Peter strikes in line two of the final stanza the sound of a dinner bell calling the poem's hero (and Fuzzy, too, on March 16, 2003) to his just reward: a heavenly feast?

"I Know a Lot of Stuff By Heart": Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Days of Our Lives (1987)

The Poetry of General Hospital (c. 2004)

The Surprise Guest: Thoughts on Edgar A. Guest, Making Money with Poetry, and the Blind Spots of Modern Poetry Studies

So, P&PC just finished reading Edgar A. Guest: A Biography—Royce Howes's very swell, 1953 account of the one-time Detroit Free Press copy boy who went on, in Horatio Alger fashion, to become the most prolific and popular poet in U.S. history. We're certainly no stranger to Guest—check out an Edgar Guest Calendar here, Chrysler's Edgar Guest television spot here, and a scrapbook full of Guest's poetry here—but the biography stunned us nevertheless. Yes, in telling the story of how Guest's "ascent to fame has kept absolute step with Detroit's march from provincial city to industrial capital of the world," Howes is possibly even more saccharine than the "people's poet" himself was, but the facts are simply astonishing. Consider, for example:

• Guest wrote a poem a day seven days a week for thirty years.
• He lived in a mansion "staffed with servants, fine automobiles, the so-handy golf club [and] the big summer place at the Pointe."
• He had radio, motion picture, and television contracts.
• At one point, when his verse was syndicated to 250 newspapers, it was estimated that his poems had a circulation of about 10,000,000.
• At one point, probably after World War II, Guest reported an annual income of $128,000—the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $1.6 million.
• Guest's first two books (Home Rhymes and Just Glad Things) were self-published and printed by Guest's brother Harry in editions of 800 and 1,500 respectively, and on the basis of those books and his newspaper verse, Guest started getting wooed by the agents of Harper, Scribner, and William Randolph Hearst. Eventually, his publisher Reilly & Britton would print his books in editions of 100,000.
• Guest couldn't go out on the streets of Detroit without getting hailed down by enthusiastic readers.
• Guest was good friends with Henry Ford, who regularly gave the poet cars, beginning with a Model T and, many years later, a Lincoln.
• Guest was pegged as a possible replacement for Will Rogers and even set up in Hollywood for $3,500 per week while studios tried to figure out how to use him.
• A copy of Guest's poem "America" once sold for $50,000 as part of a war-bond fundraising event in 1942.

It's no wonder, really, that even though Guest maintains some of his popularity among people of a certain age today, he has been almost entirely written out of histories of modern poetry, because even though his life and career were propelled by the very forces of modernity that modernist studies scholars love to dwell on, his simple presence in a conversation contradicts all sorts of fantasies about the cultural marginalization of poetry in the twentieth century that those same scholars love to perpetuate: that poetry had a small readership; that no one could make money by writing poems; that poetry happened in bohemian enclaves and small cliques involving beret-wearing coffee drinkers and free lovers; that poetry primarily responded to the forces of modernity and consumer culture in an oppositional or counter-cultural way; that poetry was a print-based form inherently at odds with "new" and popular media forms like radio, tv, and film; that even if a poet were to make himself or herself available, consumer and popular culture would have no use for him or her. Yadda yadda yadda.

It's possible, we suppose, to explain away Guest's success as the exception that proves the modernist rule, but if you take even the smallest peek down the rabbit hole he opens up, you start seeing that that's not even the case. Not only was Detroit able to support one famous poet, for example, but it also supported a second: Anne Campbell, sometimes called "Eddie Guest's Rival," who for the crosstown Detroit News wrote a poem a day six days a week for twenty years, producing in the process more than 7,500 poems and making up to $10,000 per year from her poetry's syndication (that's about $140,000 adjusted for inflation, btw). Other poets like Helen Welshimer, Berton Braley, James Metcalfe, Ethel Romig Fuller, Don Marquis, and Walt Mason seemed to have little trouble making money off their verse as well.

Guest is not only compelling in his own right, then, but he's compelling because paying even a smidgen of attention to him opens up a window onto an entire sphere of literary activity that has been all but erased from the history books and that challenges almost every academic assumption about the cultural place and function of poetry in modern America. We look at Guest and see Campbell, Welshimer, Braley and crew, but then we also see that Guest's publisher—based in Chicago right down the street from Poetry magazine, that supposed center of all things modern in modern poetry—was also making a pretty good go of it; Reilly, for example, also issued Tony's Scrap Book, an annual print spin-off of Tony Wons's popular poetry radio show that sold over 225,000 copies in 1932 alone. (Wons, btw, reported making $2,000 per month including royalties from Tony's Scrap Book, which is the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $400,000 per year.)

When we figure in Reilly's activities and Tony's radio show, we start sketching out the parameters of a modern poetry landscape composed of affluent celebrity poets, for-profit poetry publishers, and multimedia distribution—a picture at odds with almost everything we imagine about the workings of poetry in the first half of the century. We here at the P&PC Office are stunned every time we think seriously about this, and we're convinced that, some day, scholars of modern poetry are going to start realizing the stories and archives awaiting them if they just take a moment to tune in.

The Poetry of The Brady Bunch (1972: Season 4, Episode 7)