Everyday reading : poetry and popular culture in modern America / Mike Chasar ; cover design, Noah Arlow.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Exploring poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives, and Hallmark greeting cards, among other unconventional sources, Mike Chasar casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers. He shows how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and its reception helped set the stage for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today.

Poetry was then part and parcel of American popular culture, spreading rapidly as the consumer economy expanded and companies exploited its profit-making potential. Poetry also offered ordinary Americans creative, emotional, political, and intellectual modes of expression, whether through scrapbooking, participation in radio programs, or poetry contests. Reenvisioning the uses of twentieth-century poetry, Chasar provides a richer understanding of the innovations of modernist and avant-garde poets and the American reading public's sophisticated powers of feeling and perception.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Chasar (Willamette Univ.) differs with Ezra Pound and Randall Jarrell, who said that the common reader was "unused to poetry." Who is to say, the author asks, that only college literature scholars can read poetry? Thus, "everyday reading" of Chasar's title embraces poetry as both concept and everyday object. In considering "highbrow" and "lowbrow," he connects the poetry of William Carlos Williams to Burma-Shave jingles. Alfred Lord Tennyson and Shirley Temple are on the same page in the index. Chasar observes that in the late 19th century and through the Depression and two world wars, one could find sentimental lyrics on the Op-Ed pages of newspapers. Though not complex, the daily poem demonstrated the reader's acquaintance with verse. Popular poetry reached the poor, the rural isolated, the homebound as a means to manage a language of hope and empathy. Whether this work is better suited to cultural anthropologists or students of literature is an open question. There are benefits for both. Including numerous visual examples, the book has an extensive primary and secondary bibliography. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. A. Hirsh emeritus, Central Connecticut State University