Some folks don’t like poetry. As I think about the best-seller lists and the shelves at Barnes and Noble, I admit that, actually, a huge number of people don’t seem to like poetry. Perhaps they’re put off by the stuffy label. In this essay, I weakly argue that they really do like poetry.
I claim that most popular music has lyrics, and lyrics are simply poetry set to music. We know that popular music sells well, because the music industry had a hissy when people shared copyrighted material through peer-to-peer file sharing technologies. I say that somebody must like the stuff or they wouldn’t buy or steal it. Remember, this stuff is largely poetry with a musical score. I admit that even … ugh … rap … is poetry.
During our junior year at Rogers, I learned in Mrs. Frisbie’s English class that poetry doesn’t always rhyme. Free verse she called it. Later, at Michigan State University, I saw that some poetry is considered drivel, but that it can be entertaining. The MSU library (where I met my first-and-still-current wife) once had a huge show window display of drivel. The window contained, among about 50 specimens, The Cremation of Sam McGee, by Robert Service. If that poem was drivel, it suited my dark sense-of-humor anyway: “I didn’t like to hear him sizzle so.”
I believe that we Rogers ’60 mates have been immersed in poetry since we were born and that it has often been accompanied by video to boot. Enter the world of musical TV jingles and old time radio jingles where we supplied our own video to the mind’s eye. Either way, some jingles were free verse; many were poetically rhymed. The technology was new; the production quality was often low.
One of my most enduring earworms is a crude black-and-white line-drawing cartoon bird, standing by a sweeping second hand, selling Kraft Cottage cheese in free verse.
(The clock hand starts moving – fast)
Buy
Kraft Cottage Cheese;
You’ll
love it, love it, love it;
Buy Kraft …
(The hand reaches the six. The bird pushes the hand back one second. “SCREECH”)
Cottage
Cheese!
That was one of my favorites, and most memorable, because the little bird was just trying to make the best of his minuscule time slot. I wish commercials were only six (or seven) seconds long today. I could duplicate that commercial myself in about an hour on my MacBook laptop, but back when, it was probably a big deal to produce.
Next month we’ll discuss a jingle or two that actually rhymed.
-Ed Mauget