The Poetry of the Road
Back to the primal scene: the roads from Champaign, Illinois, to St. Louis, Missouri. Roads paved . . . with poetry.
I don’t just mean the poetry at the end of the road, a dollop of T. S. Eliot at the end of the rainbow of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch: I’m talking about that quintessential Midwestern “populist” art form, roadside poetry.
It all started, of course, with the famous Burma Shave ads of the 1920s: sequential advertising that exploiting the moving audience of the automobile. Movie and television advertisements, of course, move past a stationary viewer; Burma Shave devised to have a stationary commercial message deploy itself for consumption by the consumer, driving by at the speed of modern life. They’re four- or five-line poems, with, say, 100 yards of roadside where the line break would be: “Victory Gardens / Will Help Us Win / But Don’t Grow Spinach / On Your Chin.” And then the unvarying tag: Burma Shave.
The last of the Burma Shave roadside installations disappeared in the 1960s; part of their legacy is the fact that far more people today know the ads than are familiar with the product (which is, btw, still on the market).
And the legacy lives on in the Midwest: the genre has been appropriated by soybean producers, ethanol suppliers—and most pointedly, most insistently, by gun rights advocates.
Having spent nine years teaching in Illinois, I’m as suspicious of ethanol as I am of “clean coal”: both seem like well intentioned bad science. But I’m no scientist: I don’t want to start an argument I’m unqualified to participate in, and my suspicion might have more to do with Illinois politics than with the economics of growing corn to produce ethanol to add to gasoline. But the ethanol lobbying continues strong on Illinois’ roadways, you’ll be happy to know: “From Illinois’s Soybean Fields / To America’s Roads / Soy Biodiesel / www.ilsoy.org.” “Not quite poetry,” I hear you thinking? How about this one: “Our country / Our crops / Our ethanol and biodiesel / A message from Zahnd Farms.” Yeah, OK: the ethanol lobby hasn’t yet found its Carl Sandburg.
But clichéd lefty that I am, it was the gun lobby’s signs that had me most disturbed. I remember these from back in the day; I’m not sure why they seemed more disturbing to me this time around—maybe, quite literally, it was because I was driving to a meeting devoted to Eliot’s poetry? Maybe the context was determinative?
Be that as it may (or may not), here are some of the gun-totin’ poems I read on my way to St. Louis, and on my way back to my daughter’s house:
Another crook
Is sad but wiser
My mother kept
Her gun beside her.
gunssavelives.com
Gun control
Every time
Only increases
Violent crime.
gunssavelives.com
You get the idea. With an emphasis on “idea”: there’s not much poetry in this poetry, only breaking up a pretty ham-fisted piece of propaganda into bite-sized signs. I mean, how do you scan “Only increases”? If you’d like many more examples of these “poems,” check out http://www.gunssavelife.com/Burma.html—which also provides a short history of the campaign.
But for obvious reasons, these were the verses that most completely captured my attention:
Young thugs
Don’t Dare Attack
If a Teacher
Might Shoot Back
Yep, that settles it: from here on out, I’m packin’. Hear that, all y’all Pomona College Young thugs? Forewarned is forearmed.
As Lyle Lovett put it:
And the lights of L.A. County
Look like diamonds in the sky
When you’re driving through the hours
With an old friend at your side
[Very good song, by the way. Worth having a listen]
Space is big/
Space is dark/
There isn’t any/
Place to park/
Burma Shave
(Favorite poster at the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry)