clair094

On Wednesday of this week, P&PC was thrilled to learn that Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America has been nominated for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award , and we would have celebrated by sending the office interns home early, except that they had already gone home early for Thanksgiving festivities with family and friends. Alone in the office, a single light bulb glowing from its chain in the middle of the room, the rain of the Oregon winter coming down on the dark streets, and a turkey awaiting our ministrations at home, we turned, as we not infrequently do in times of meditation, to one of the 175 or so old poetry scrapbooks that form the archive we consider in Chapter One of Everyday Reading , that are representative of a widespread American practice of cutting and pasting poems between the Civil War and World War II, and that we've written about from time to time on this blog ( here , here , here , here , here , and here ). It's one o...

We here at the P&PC Home Office like to call it the four hundred million dollar poem—and not just because its first stanza appears on the back of the Canadian $10 bank note , a fact that, all by itself, may very well make " In Flanders Fields " the most reprinted and most widely circulated poem, like, ever. No, we call John McCRae's World War I-era verse the four hundred million dollar poem because, shortly after it appeared in the December 8, 1915 issue of Punch magazine, the Canadian government made it the central piece of its p.r. campaign advertising the sale of the first Victory Loan Bonds, printing it, or excerpts from it, on billboards and posters like the one pictured above. According to Canadian Veterans Affairs , the campaign was designed to raise $150,000,000 but ended up netting—wait for it—over $400,000,000. Whoever said that "poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper...