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Regardless of how you feel about the particular narratives in his histories of American poetry—and for P&PC they can be a bit of a mixed bag, as we'll explain in a moment—you've gotta love John Timberman Newcomb's research strategy. Maybe that's not the most flattering way to open a review, but it's totally true. His sequenced books— Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity (2006) and How Did Poetry Survive? The Making of Modern American Verse (2012)—look past the oversimplified narratives and supposedly "key" texts and movements constructed to explain and package American poetry and find in the process huge archives of interesting material that everyone seems to have forgotten and that, when brought to light, complicate the stories and party lines by which poets and literary historians have been navigating for, like, ever. That is, while most scholars are looking one way—picking, for example, over the corpses (er, we mean...

P&PC recently spent some time at the University of Oregon's Knight Library digging around the papers of Ethel Romig Fuller —a widely-published (though not well remembered) modern poetry advocate in the Pacific Northwest who was named Oregon's third (and first woman) poet laureate, a position she held from 1957 until her death in 1965. We can guarantee that you will eventually be hearing more about Fuller from P&PC , but this week we thought we'd share something else we came upon at the Knight: a June 6, 1979 letter from Ray Bradbury to William R. Cox, and Cox's response of June 22 later that month, both of which are in the library's William R. Cox papers . Neither Bradbury nor Cox (who wrote stories for the pulps before moving West to write screenplays, television scripts, and 80 novels) are associated with poetry by most stretches of the imagination, and yet, as these letters suggest, poetry was nevertheless part and parcel of the pulpy world they lived i...

Check out the story behind this 1950s-era promotional matchbook for El Fenix Cafe —currently (according to El Fenix) the oldest Mexican restaurant chain in the United States. Today, El Fenix has something like twenty-two locations in Texas and Oklahoma, but it began as a one-man operation, the Martinez Cafe, started by Miguel Martinez in 1916, five years after Martinez left Mexico at the start of the Mexican Revolution . At the beginning, "Mike" Martinez—who, as a seven year-old child, worked for two cents a day as a silver-mine mule-train driver, and who would marry fellow immigrant Faustina Porras in 1915 and with her go on to raise eight children—only offered Anglo dishes, but he slowly began integrating Mexican food and, in 1918, opened El Fenix which focused entirely on Mexican cuisine. In the 1930s—not looking back on the business deal that might have been (when he sold a tortilla machine to Herman Lay, eventual founder of Frito-Lay, for two hundred dollars)—Miguel anne...