clair094

It's not the first poem that P&PC ever encountered—that distinction probably goes to the quirky " I went to the animal fair " verse that dad used to recite—but it's pretty darn close. We're talking about the 24-line holiday poem printed verse by verse behind the 24 doors and windows of three brick houses featured in the tri-fold "Getting Ready for Christmas" Hallmark advent calendar pictured here. (That's panel one you see here; panels two and three follow in sequence below, concluded by a panoramic photo of the card completely opened up.) Like the Hallmark Christmas card matchbook featured on P&PC about this time last year and pictured here, the advent calendar solicits an unusual amount of reader involvement to get at the poem; but unlike the matchbook, where the reader is invited to dismantle or deconstruct the poem matchstick by matchstick, the advent calendar asks the reader to help build the poem line by line and window by window i...

Nothing dogs the Christmas season at P&PC so much as the clash between the holiday’s commercial and noncommercial 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 because we...

"Rumor," wrote Shakespeare in Henry IV, Part 2 , "is a pipe / Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures / And of so easy and so plain a stop / That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still-discordant wavering multitude, / Can play upon it." We here at P&PC don't know about all of that, but we've certainly had our fair share of rumor-related surmises and conjectures of late, all stemming from our recent forays into the World War II Rumor Project Collection in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress . Our time in the nation's capital is quickly coming to an end, but now that the lion's share of our proposed research about Edna St. Vincent Millay's World War II-era poem The Murder of Lidice is done, we just couldn't pass up an opportunity to find out what folks on the street were saying sotto voce around the same time. And you know what? It turns out that many of them were talkin' poetry. The World War ...