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The P&P summer interns have been knee-deep in the 1910s of late, as P&PC has been assembling and studying archives for an essay that editor and Northern Illinois University English professor Mark W. Van Wienen has asked us to write on "Popular Verse" from 1910-1920 for Cambridge University Press's decade-by-decade American Literature in Transition series. We're discovering that the 1910s were a special time in the world of popular poetry, a decade when everyone—including the Packers Fertilizer Company of Cincinnati—seemed to be reading and writing poetry. The Packers promotional notebook you see pictured here was bookended by calendars for 1911 and 1912 and contained the poem "Packers Fertilizer (By Almost Truthful James)" in which the "tall" fence posts of the final stanza gesture to the "tall tale" genre which the poem is clearly channeling: You crowbar your potatoes out, This fact you won't be doubtin, Your very fence po...

Everyone knows about the Kitchen Debate between then-U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow on July 24, 1959. But who knew that the Cold War American kitchen was also full of poetry? About two years ago, we introduced P&PC readers to a wooden ring holder and a "Pinkerstink" cocktail glass, both of which had poetry on them. And now we have the pleasure of bringing you our latest find—the "Mighty-Maurice Pot-Holder" produced by Gilner Potteries, a company that operated out of Culver City, California from 1948-1957 and claimed to be "California's Largest Art Ware Manufacturers." Unfortunately, our recent acquisition is only the box, but even though we don't have the pot-holder or the pottery, we're happen to at least have its poetry—two stanzas of self-introduction straight from Mighty Maurice's mouth: For neatness in your kitc...

P&PC comes to you this week from the pages of the May issue of Poetry magazine, where, under the title "Lullaby Logics," we've reviewed Daniel Tiffany's great book My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Johns Hopkins University Press). Here's a teaser: In Brian Selznick's 2007 Caldecott-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret , the orphaned main character, Hugo, spends his time trying to repair a broken automaton in the hope that, restored to working order, it will transcribe a message from his dead father. "I'm sure that if it were working," Hugo's father once explained, "you could wind it up, put a piece of paper on the desk, and all those little parts would engage and cause the arm to move in such a way that it would write out some kind of note. Maybe it would write a poem or a riddle. But it's too broken and rusty to do much of anything now." Hugo's father was right—sort of. To find out how ...