Collecting Culture
Ekphrasis for the Masses: Art and the Literary
Annuals
Theresa Adams,
theresaabadams@yahoo.com
Literary annuals were a popular, middlebrow entertainment during the late-Romantic period. Aimed at female readers and designed to achieve a large circulation, these lavish productions were sometimes enjoyed more for their engravings than the poems that accompanied them. In this paper, I will look at how poets who published in the annuals (particularly the Forget Me Not and the Literary Souvenir) dealt with the visual by translating the conventions of ekphrasis, an elevated literary genre, for their middle-class, female audience. I will suggest that these poems educated readers by teaching them to “read” artwork, while also reshaping ekphrasis itself, assimilating it to some of the annuals’ favorite themes and concerns. For example, the annuals were steeped in the conventions of sensibility, and the engravings and their companion poems focused on portraits, where the intimate and personal emotions of subject, poet, and reader could be explored. While these poems diverge from canonical Romantic ekphrasis, there are some surprising continuities, since an awareness of the reader’s gender and class was a general influence on poets’ representations of the visual during this period.
‘Slithery’
Mike Chasar,
michael-chasar@uiowa.edu
In his 1929 anthology How to Read, which continued to formulate a masculine poetics of sharp edges, sculptured precision, original talent and proper cultural taste, Ezra Pound derided popular poetry as verse that “Aunt Hepsy liked.” This poetry was oftentimes trite, sentimental stuff—Pound used the term “slithery” to describe it—but American poetry readers like Aunt Hepsy consumed it in droves and spent hours clipping it from magazines and newspapers to assemble into their own personal anthologies, the poetry scrapbooks that would become the twentieth century’s commonplace book.
Like commonplace books of other periods, these scrapbooks served many roles in women’s lives: they variously witness to a culture of self-improvement, they contain texts that were circulated among readers, they were mnemonic catalogs of religious, patriotic, domestic and popular subject matter, and they provided opportunities to experiment with different and modern subjectivites. And most of them had more in common with modernist goals and interests than Pound would have liked to admit: a focus on juxtaposed texts and discontinuous reading practices, a concern with multiple voices and shifting subject positions, an active interest in the relationship between word and image, and an intensely foregrounded materiality that appears to delight in the possibility for interpretive play.
Despite this widespread cultural practice, there has been little, if any, acknowledgment of these commonplace poetry scrapbooks in academic circles, and this presentation will hope to open up the subject by surveying the range of things that we can learn about “low” and/or middlebrow literary culture and discourse in the modern period. For starters, we learn that there was not only a vast audience for poetry but that this audience was an active, judicious, even “critical” one and not at all the passively consuming one that folks like Pound have tried to make it out to be. Once we open up these books, we see that “high” cultural notions of authorship weren’t consistent with middlebrow or low ones, we see that the category of “popular” verse isn’t nearly as unified as it’s been made out to be, and—judging from the amount of cartoons, pictures, film news and other popular culture material included in these anthologies—we see that poetry during the modern period wasn’t as antithetical to mass culture as we tend to assume.
I will have growing collection of poetry scrapbooks and will have examples of these scrapbooks on-hand for audience members to see and consider.
Collecting and
Democracy: Walt Whitman and Andy Warhol
Mary Titus,
titus@stolaf.edu
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass can be fruitfully linked to 19th century lyceum collections and museum development—the poem as collection/ collection
catalogue, presenting a version of democratic accumulation that responds to the elite high culture goals of much American museum building. A poem
like Whitman’s “Song of Occupations” can be compared to Andy Warhol’s 1969 Raid the Icebox exhibit, where he turned a museum’s accumulated storage
into the catalogued material, rejecting any formal distinctions except juxtaposition. Both artists used collection as a language through which
to express a vision of democratic art and to criticize a high culture art/literary establishment. This essay will discuss the folllowing:
theoretical approaches to museums/collecting as part of the creation and perpetuation of high/low cultural distinctions; 19thC lyceum collections
& democratic education; 19thC museum building; Whitman's poetry as a form of collection; Warhol's Icebox exhibit and museum collection
politics/economics of value; Warhol's multiple pop culture images as ironic replication that comments on hierarchies of value; Warhol's
collecting (cookie jars, etc.) in relation to democracy and high/low culture (and if there's time sexuality).