Everyday Reading : : Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America / / Mike Chasar.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Chasar, Mike,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2012]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.) :; ‹B›Halftones: ‹/B›50.

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Poetry and Popular Culture -- 1. Saving Poetry -- 2. Invisible Audiences -- 3. The Business of Rhyming -- 4. The Spin Doctor -- 5. Popular Poetry and the Program Era -- Epilogue: In Memoriam -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index