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Reviewed by:
  • Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America by Mike Chasar
  • Rhonda Pettit
Mike Chasar. Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 302 pages. $84.50 (cloth). $27.50 (paper).

For individual readers and would-be authors of literature who grew up in the mid- to late-twentieth century, literary modernism has two primary readings: (1) it comprised the canon of essential (i.e., “good”) literature to know, learn from, and be influenced by; and (2) it became the canon of biases, gaps, and negative space of ignored voices, texts, and experiences. Mike Chasar’s Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America falls into, and eagerly embraces, the second category.

Like the studies of popular poetry that preceded it and from which he draws (Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery and Joan Shelley Rubin’s The Uses of Poetry in America to name but two), Chasar is concerned with poetries rather than Poetry, rejecting the reductionist binaries of “high” and “low” or “modern” and “genteel” literature. Thus, he is not interested in making aesthetic comparisons regarding the value of either type. His concern is how and why millions of Americans read, heard, or otherwise experienced poetry from a range of provocative sources, and how those practices in turn influenced popular culture.

Chasar examines the poems collected and presented in scrapbooks, radio broadcasts, advertising, and billboards, as well as the brief intersection between the Iowa Writers Workshop and Hallmark Cards, Inc. His time period is the modern era, roughly 1900 through World War II, after which the public sites and appetites for poetry began to decline with the coming of popular music, television, and the expansion of college and university education in which all poems not popular [End Page 73] would find a home—provided they were written, for the most part, by white men. Chasar draws on several cultural studies icons (Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, Roland Barthes, and Stuart Hall) to justify the value of the popular or mainstream literary texts that the earlier critics who helped establish the modernist canon ignored. Although the postmodern critique of literary modernism is now well-covered territory, it is the necessary background to Chasar’s project; he weaves it into various discussions as needed rather than giving us the lump sum. Additionally, Chasar’s poetry sources and what these suggest about reading and interpretative practices by American anyones are what make his study compelling.

Each of Chasar’s five chapters focuses on a poetry source, rather than on any one point of his overall argument, but each chapter addresses to some extent each of his points: (1) that ordinary readers of popular poetry were not the inept readers that critics and some poets assumed they were; (2) that such readers consumed a variety of poetic texts; (3) that popular, noncanonical verse influenced now-canonical writers; and (4) that popular verse influenced popular culture generally. The aura of capitalism also lurks in and among the points of his argument as an influence shaping reading and as a source of tension among readers and texts.

Chapter one, aptly titled “Saving Poetry,” examines the American scrapbook phenomenon and its relationship to poetry from the Civil War through World War II. Chasar offers analysis of selected scrapbooks from a collection he has been accumulating over the years, what he claims are representative samples. Scrapbooks were created by men and women, adults and children, African Americans and whites, immigrants and the native born, as well as by students, professionals, and independent learners. Their sources were mundane—newspapers, magazines, greeting cards, church bulletins, among others—but their product is surprising. These are not just thoughtless repositories of poems and other items. Instead, many people juxtaposed “high” and “low” forms of verse or arranged items with particular themes that imply a critical appraisal or ambivalence about social or political events. The scrapbook as text, long written off as a feminine endeavor drenched in personal sentiment and sentimental verse, becomes a revealing and complex document. Chasar’s claim that scrapbooks serve as material evidence for a new understanding of how Americans read poetry seems valid, although...

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