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Here at the P&PC Office, there's a New Year's Eve party in the works. The streamers are up. The kazoos are out. Pointy hats are stacked and at the ready. The bubby's chillin' on ice. Sally the stenographer has got her dancing shoes on and is flirting with Carl the copy guy. And some of the interns have been passing around this goodie from 1939: a promotional calendar issued by the Household Finance Corporation and featuring a year's-worth of poetry by the guy once known as the " people's poet "— longtime bard of the Detroit Free Press, perhaps the most prolific poet of twentieth century America, and a P&PC hero, Edgar A. Guest . "Here," writes Guest on the front of an accompanying folding flier (pictured below), "is my 1939 calendar which you asked me to send you. Both Household Finance and I appreciate your request very much. I hope that you will find the calendar useful and that the poems will give you many pleasant mome...

Now that the P&PC Office has finally finished the last of its holiday shopping, barely managing to escape from the modern retail Hades of malls, long lines, and frantic customers, we thought it only fitting to give you the gift of this little advertising poem: a Christmas-Day dream featuring the Grinch of all Grinches—"a grocer, aged and grey" whose holiday fantasy is told in five eight-line stanzas on the back of a humbly produced, 3x5-inch trade card issued in the 1930s for Helwig & Leitch's "Majestic Sandwich Spread." One in a long line of going-to-hell narratives from the early part of the century—not only did now-canonical poets like Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Sterling Brown follow in the footsteps of Homer, Virgil, and Dante, but so did lots of popular poems (see the image here, for example), which had everyone from the Kaiser to FDR to Hitler going to (or getting kicked out of) the underworld—this poem takes place when...

Nothing dogs the Christmas season at P&PC so much as the clash between the holiday’s com- mercial and non- com- mercial aspects—between shopping and spirit, getting and giving, worldliness and wonderment, materialism and, well, something more. This clash dogs the season’s poetry, too, as the oftentimes utopian (or at least not uniformly materialist) sentiments voiced by the season’s popular verse forms get standardized, mass produced, boxed, wrapped, shipped, and sold in and on any number of greeting cards , ornaments, advent calendars , and novelty items like the funky oversized matchbook from Hallmark pictured here. For every excuse that the season offers to poetically express feelings one might view as suspect or inappropriate the rest of the year—you know, faith in ideals like love, peace, family, compassion, giving, forgiveness, and the pursuit of something other than the cynical status quo—there’s some Grinch waiting to package, market, and profit from it all.  But beca...

Earlier this week, the Boston Review published " Glut Reactions: The Demographics of American Poetry ," a piece that the Poetry Foundation has since called a "(wonderfully) long conversation" between P&PC and University of Georgia English professor Jed Rasula . Responding in a roundabout way to Marjorie Perloff's essay " Poetry on the Brink ," which argued earlier this year that "the sheer number of poets now plying their craft inevitably ensures moderation and safety," Rasula and P&PC bat around some ways to better understand and assess what folks have called the apparently sudden "glut" of poetry, why they've responded as they have, and what new or different perspectives might be brought to bear on the subject. How can one argue, in a world where there are way too many poems out there for any one person to read, that all of those poems are inevitably marked by moderation and safety? Why would lots of poems be a pr...