clair094

Check out this neat little reward of merit , probably made in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and originally given to Imogene Hayes of Fillmore County, Minnesota, for three months of perfect school attendance. (Go Imogene!) Rewards of merit oftentimes included poems—the verse here is the first stanza of Robert Louis Stevenson's " The Swing "—and were a common vehicle by which connections between poetry, school, childhood, and femininity were positively reinforced around this time, contributing to what Angela Sorby has called "the infantilization of American poetry: poets framed as children, children seen as poets, children posited as readers, children recruited as performers, and adults wishing themselves back into childhood." You can certainly see how this reward of merit posits children as readers and performers of poetry, and no doubt their proud parents looked upon the card and wished for the real or imagined carefree days of swinging in the...

Yes, P&PC has been a little slow to keep up with our usual schedule of weekly postings this summer, and we apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment that has caused along the way. But there have been good reasons for our delays and postponements. Sure, our intern budget got cut back. And sure, Polly the Paper Shredder and Sally the Stenographer surprised us all by eloping and tying the knot—legally—in Oregon. But then came the two-week trip to Rome and Venice, where (among other things), we visited the graves of John Keats, Percy Shelley, Gregory Corso, and Ezra Pound and fell head over heels for Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture in Rome and Tintoretto's paintings in Venice. (That's Tintoretto's The Miracle of the Slave pictured above, btw.) And then came a trip to Iowa City where we worked, visited with old friends, and ate George's cheeseburgers for nearly four weeks. As you can probably imagine, it can be difficult to keep up the pace when out of the...