Everyday Reading is the first full-length critical study of the culture surrounding American popular and commercial poetry in the twentieth century. 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 in different and complex ways. Capturing American poetry's truly diverse forms and appeal, Chasar shows how the genre helped set the stage -- before television, rock music, video games, and the Internet -- for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today. Chasar investigates twentieth-century American poetry's audience of millions and maps its range of aesthetics, cultural uses, relationship to canonical verse, and unexpected presence in many parts of modern life. Far from being a marginal art form read by a select group of educated individuals, poetry was part and parcel of American popular culture, spreading rapidly as the consumer economy expanded and companies such as Burma-Shave exploited the form's profit-making potential.
Poetry also offered ordinary Americans a wealth of opportunities for creative, emotional, political, and intellectual expression, whether through scrapbooking, participation in radio programs, or poetry contests. By reenvisioning the uses of twentieth-century poetry, Chasar enables a richer understanding of the innovations of modernist and avant-garde poets and the American reading public's sophisticated powers of feeling and perception.
Industry Reviews
Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people. -- Cary Nelson, Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry An ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies, and a surprise and a delight. Mike Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, images, and informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links William Carlos Williams's innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers' Workshop to the Hallmark card, and he may change how you see eminent writers' work. More than that, Chasar gets twenty-first-century readers to notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/HAS LOTS TO SAY/IF YOU CAN READ IT/CHASAR'S WAY. -- Stephen Burt, Harvard University Chasar shows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important-really, a necessary-book for anyone interested in modern poetics, the history of reading, and the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance. -- Virginia Jackson, University of California, Irvine A brilliantly written book, startling the reader with his thorough research and analysis of the evolution of poetry through the 20th and 21 centuries. -- Sheila Erwin Portland Book Review Highly recommended. Choice The originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading. -- Lisa M. Steinman The Journal of American History ... Well-documented, thoughtful... The publication of Chasar's book fits our times and provokes futuristic ponderings. Reception Innovative, important, and constantly successful. -- David Levine College Literature The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness--this is what Mike Chasar... has shown in his book Everyday Reading. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie
