Kickflips and Magic Tricks

“No ideas but in things.” William Carlos Williams wrote that. Wallace Stevens has a similar quote, in fact it’s the title of the final piece in his Collected Poems: “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.” Here’s a link to it on the amazing Poetry Foundation website. (Don’t worry, it’s short.)

And you hear a lot of variations on those statements when talking about poetry, it’s a truism by now. I’ve often heard it used to mean, “Show, don’t tell.” Like, “Don’t tell us the soldier was sad, show us the frayed edges of the scratchy green blanket his buddy just died on.” That’s not bad advice, as far as it goes. It’s not good advice, either: it’s the poetry class equivalent of, “Wash your hands before eating finger foods.” It only helps when you haven’t tucked in to the meal yet. 

Speaking of classes, I took one with Pacific Northwest poet David Waggoner a while ago. One of my vivid memories was his admonishing us never to use the word “thing” in a poem. “It’s an empty word, a useless word. It gives you nothing you didn’t already have.” 

But it does, doesn’t it? “It gives you no thing you didn’t already have.”

(“Marvel Comics Superheroes Game Card 04 - Thing” by David Marriott, Jr. is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

I’ve always found “no ideas but in things” to be hypocritical at worst and self-contradictory at best. (Self-contradiction is always better because it’s interesting: hypocrites are inevitably dull.) Neither Wallace nor William actually included things in their poems! They’re not mailing the reader a twig or a copper coin, they’re not including a sprig of holly or a bird feather in the pages of their books. So maybe what they mean is, “No (IDEAS of) ideas but in (IDEAS of) things.” 

There’s this constant imaginative remove taking place, we’re always at least one degree of separation away from things. In some ways, that’s the beauty of it – we’re applying our experience or opinions to the proceedings. It’s never just a sunrise or a bird song or a kiss or a slap or a daffodil or a bell jar. Things are always what we make of them, an interpretive function.

("Der Ding" by James Vaughan is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

And what really flips my lid is that this is happening on both ends of the process! The poet is applying their own skill in composing, their tastes and value judgments, their ideas and opinions and free associations and childhood memories and half-formed logic. And the reader does this, too: taking the raw stuff the poem is made of, the scratches on the page, the spaces and punctuation, the line breaks and stanza breaks, the title and epigram, the margins and font, and using that as grist for their own mill of wonderment and transubstantiation. 

Plenty of academics in the linguistics field marvel at the fact that language can be used to communicate anything at all, given the gulfs that separate any two humans. It is truly strange that poems do what they do: poems have the same kind of appeal to me as a flashy kickflip on a skateboard or a daring stage illusion or a parkour video on YouTube. They’re things that shouldn’t be possible but yet here they are, doing the weird wild subterranean business of jointly creating meaning when it seems hardly likely such a thing could ever happen. 

It’s kind of cheating chaos, making something out of nothing when there really should only be nothing. And to prove my point, I’ll end with a creepy poem that proudly defies Mr. Waggoner’s sage advice. 

Hope things are good on your end.

A Reader’s Companion

Matt Quarterman

Please pay attention.

Read closely.

I have news for you.

You are being watched.

I am watching you

read these very words

even as I write them.

You have felt unafraid

for a very long time,

safe in your careless observation.

But I see you.

I know what you are doing.

Even ceasing to read

will not break my gaze.

Feel free to stop. Look around,

shake off the creeps crawling the skin

in the back of your mind.

Turn around,

turn around turn,

around and turn.

I’ll still be here

doing nothing else

but patiently waiting

to watch you do

whatever things you do

when you read this.

Even if the panic subsides 

and you can forget

the words you read.

Get comfortable.

Get used to it.

I’ve been here a long time.

I’m not going anywhere.

(“Something” by Pat Guiney is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

To Seem Beautiful Again, and Interesting, and Modern: Poetry in Advertising

Nobody loves ads. Oh, sure, there are those commercials with enough cleverness or star power or humor to make you not-quite-resent them. (The Old Spice campaign "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" comes to mind.) 

But in the end, nobody likes paying for things, especially when they have no choice in the matter. You've probably had that experience of loading up a video to show a group of people, only to have an interminable, unskippable ad play first while you chuckle awkwardly and wait out those 30 seconds that feel like eternity.

But between the ridiculousness of advertising and the sublime of poetry, there's a middle ground. (Ridiculime? Subculousness?) Presented for your consideration:



This is a video from Levi's "Go Forth" campaign from about 2009. It featured some well-photographed snippets of pretty young people mostly doing pretty young people things over pretty, nostalgic instrumental music. So far, so whatever.

But this campaign used spoken excerpts from work by American poets (all white, all male) like Walt Whitman and Charles Bukowski as their ad copy. The ads were created by Wieden+Kennedy and  here they are. Incidentally, one of the branches of Wieden+Kennedy also created the aforementioned Old Spice campaign.

I love that they even use one of the existent Walt Whitman phonograph recordings to score one ad spot. Because the audio is so scratchy and unintelligible, they provide subtitles to make the message clear:



I think what I love about these ads are how they subconsciously link a quintessential product of American capitalism like blue jeans with a litany of ideals, symbols and images that are shorthand for American identity. It makes buying denim seem patriotic, a re-affirmation of our existence in this space and time. There's a yearning at the heart of these videos, and that yearning can be easily assuaged by a run to Target.

It's not just jeans. Here's one from a pharmaceutical conglomerate that uses a stanza of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night":



I don't think this one is that great, honestly. (It kind of looks like the creators of "House M.D." needed to turn in a video essay for a poetry class.) But it does at least show the range of products and services employing poetry to do their work for them.

For my money, the best use of poems in commercials are reaching out for something larger and more ineffable. I think especially of this recent Apple ad using Maya Angelou's "The Human Family":



What works for me is that it's less about a product than about being a human in the world. The poem's emphasis on the joy of diversity and our essential common humanity drives home the marketing message that we're all people, we all love seeing ourselves and our loved ones represented in still and moving images. So why not embrace your humanity and buy an iPhone?

And then my most-least-favorite use of poetry in ads comes courtesy of this Infiniti car commercial in which Kit Harrington drives fast while reciting William Blake's "The Tyger" like an English teacher who's decided to break bad:



Everything about this is so hilariously tone-deaf: why the hell did they cast Jon Snow? Why the hell did they choose this weird, famous poem to shill for their car? Why did they direct the actor to sing-song faster and faster in an increasingly frenetic tone? And why for God's sake did they decide to end with the actor giving his best Keanu Reeves "Whoah"?! 

It's delightfully nonsensical, and I love watching it every time.

This trend of poems in ads hasn't gone unnoticed  There are quite a few articles remarking on, decrying or defending the rise of poetry in advertising. I feel that almost all of them miss the point: ads are going to happen. If not the lifeblood of capitalism, commercials are at least the respiratory system. And if advertising is an inescapable facet of contemporary life, we can at least demand that it do more than one thing at a time.

Sure, sell me your car insurance and dating sites and fast food and Shake Weights. But you're going to have to work at it – you can't just keep giving us CG animals saying some lame catch phrase. Give us poetry, some thought and attention to detail and craft and art. 

So I'll end with the defining example of my obsession with advertising and poetry: Don Draper reading Frank O'Hara's poem "Mayakovsky." (Note: there is a commercial before the video plays.)



The best ads make me feel something. And isn't that the point of poetry?

Old Movie Credits

Old Movie Credits
Matt Quarterman

The fanfare swells no matter who
lives or who dies, what explodes
or is contained, red wire blue
she jumps, she's caught, he's dead
but she's not and neither
were really who we thought but
still the strings and horns clash,
tied at the wrist and locked
until someone submits and usually
it's us because finally
we can be told the hidden truth
we'd been waiting for without
knowing what it was and there
it is in terrifying flame,
ninety feet high to tell us
this is the end The End THE END.