My next book is full of pop culture refences — from Wonder Woman and Bionic Woman to Members Only jackets and Nikes with the red swoosh.

I love using reference from the 70s and 80s because it immediately sets a mood. It’s imagery shorthand.

I have a poem I read often where I refrence Steel Magnolias and a Taylor Dayne cassette single. If that doesn’t timewarp you back to the last gasp of the 1980s, nothing will. 🙂

I just realized I spelled reference three different ways in that post. Time for bed.

Maybe it’s because one of the only assigned texts for my Intermed. Poetry course in undergrad was an anthology of pop culture poems, but it seems like a natural partnership to me. Familiar things help ground us in lived experience; familiar things with cultural significance help create and explore meaning, as opposed to having overabundances of ordinary objects just gumming up the poem with lists.

I think clever writing and art of all sorts can subvert culture while enjoying and consuming it. Even the imbalances created by considering frivolities seriously and serious things frivolously are potentially fruitful and challenging.

Umm, if that makes sense. Slightly tired today, and procrastinating mightily to boot!

Collin – more evidence that we are separated at birth! Looking forward to that book!

Felicity – you’ve gotta tell me the name of that pop culture anthology! I could use it to teach with. And good commentary too!

Our entire world is shaped by advertising, even those of us who should know better or who have lived under various rocks in various parts of the world can feel it. I don’t see how art, even so-called “high art”, can maintain its integrity and be completely separate from it. I mean, people are writing making the art, and people live in a world saturated in these references. Besides, the definitions change with each decade and generation anyway, on what is “pop culture” and what is “high art”.

I definitely think our myths get reinvented every so often. Not everything retains the same cultural relevancy with the passage of time, so it’s OK to give it new dress and take it out to a trendy new restaurant sometimes.

Another neat anthology (although a little dated) is titled Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry. This book is about, yep, you guessed it, poetry and music.

Q. What do you think about artists like Denise Duhamel, Bob Hicok, and others who drop pop culture references (from Pepsi to baseball blayers to Barbie) in their poems?

A. I think it’s just fine. This is the culture we live in, love it or leave it. Art cannot help but reflect contemporary life, otherwise it’s artificial.

Q. What role do you think pop culture plays in the “high arts” ie painting, poetry, music, etc?

A. See first Q.

Q. Should it play a role?

A. The question, to me, is not whether it should play a role, by why not?

Q. Has advertising language penetrated our minds and souls?

A. Not our minds and souls, but definitely our cultural radar.

Q. Is there a way to subvert the culture while participating in it?

A. Yes, by living a life of intention that includes free thinking.

Q. Are superheroes the new Greek myths?

A. Yes. Definitely. And perhaps celebrities are, as well.

FUN QUESTIONS!
Tamara

Jeannine,
Thanks for the shout out!

I’m working on a textbook now, and there’s a brief bit on pop culture references in it:

Many people like to think of poetry as the property of high culture and believe that pop culture is an insufficient well to draw from if one wants to write great (or even good) poetry. Others caution that pop culture is here today, gone tomorrow, and that references to it can date poems, rendering them meaningless to future generations (or even to readers who pick the poems up a year or two after they are written). For example, in his textbook, Writing Metrical Poetry: Contemporary Lessons for Mastering Contemporary Forms, William Baer writes: “I suggest that new poets be especially wary of the ever-fading pop culture.” Point taken. But there has also been a move, by New York School poets, Stand Up Poets, and others to use pop culture allusions as a way to try to broaden the audience of poetry and make it more relevant to the larger culture. In his book, In Defense of Ignorance, Karl Shapiro suggests that comic strips, movies, and other pop cultural arts could provide rich material for poets: “It is notable that every art in the twentieth century except poetry has drawn richly from jazz, the movies, advertising, the comic strip, commercial design, and even radio and TV.”

I actually prefer pop culture references to “high culture” references these days, though less so when they start skating into the utterly ephemeral versus the pop-lasting. But still, give me Batman or Peanuts instead of another dry, dusty namedrop of Apollo or Virgil.

Tom’s excerpt notes “Others caution that pop culture is here today, gone tomorrow, and that references to it can date poems, rendering them meaningless to future generations…”

Those others are fools. Writing your poetry with what “future generations” might think of it is a great way to write safe, awful mush that no future generation would want to remember. Besides, anyone who thinks they can predict what future generations will think is delusional.

Some late-to-the-party; what-does-that-geek-know comments:

What do you think about artists…who drop pop culture references …in their poems?

Love them when they do it well. The Barbie poems have moments that couldn’t be achieved as neatly or universally with any other imagery.

What role do you think pop culture plays in the “high arts” ie painting, poetry, music, etc? Should it play a role?

Why should pop culture be any different than any other source, unless it is just a different set of inside jokes meant to isolate the work? Meaning: As long as it isn’t the vehicle that leads the poet to pander to a particular audience (for example, what the less-memorable works featured in the Def Poetry Jams default to), refer to The Odyssey or The Office, as long as it works.

By the way – I’m of two minds of the phrase “high arts” – who’s to say modern classical music requires more craftsmanship than the last Bare Naked Ladies CD?

Has advertising language penetrated our minds and souls?
Is there a way to subvert the culture while participating in it?

Advertising’s not different from any other media stream – information and language come at us so fast today that we cannot help but be penetrated somehow. And there’s no way to avoid participating in the information-age media-driven culture, yet the quantity and availability of differing opinions on ANYTHING grows exponentially.

Are superheroes the new Greek myths?

(Here’s where my ignorance may shine brightest) No, in the sense that the myths provided things to believe in and things to explain the universe. Modern superheroes are much more internal, psychologically-driven explorers who blow things up in their spare time while figuring out how to survive among humanity, rather than survive above it.

By the way, what is the role that TECHNOLOGY (non-media, that is) should play in the arts? And the creation of superheroes, too?

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Dear Anonymous,

I’m drinking a Starbucks coffee right now.
I’m loving it, and how.

I’m not anonymous.
My address is all over the web.
Kick my cat and I’ll kick your ass
and pour my coffee on your head.

An earthquake is Earth’s way of saying hello.

I’ve mostly avoided pop culture references, after reading poetry from previous decades that seems stale now, almost quaint. And yet contemporary cultural references creep into the work, as the world changes faster in the embrace of technology. But for me, if the reference won’t last as long as I hope my poem will, it seems an anchor that might drag the boat down. Of course, work that is based on pop culture references is a different animal. And who’s to say what part of pop culture is destined to be recognized as high culture in decades to come?

The trick is to find the parts of pop culture that will outlast the next Starbuck’s latte. Reading poetry of the 1960s can provide inadvertent humor that way. But then again, some of pop culture becomes history, some becomes the last decade’s hairdos. I’m cautious about including those references, but drawn to them in technology and science. Which is sure to become dated! I still do it.

I didn’t see the advertising question at first. Hmm. I think marketing (not all individual pieces of marketing, but the industry as a whole) is the most anti-progressive force in our culture. It operates on various objectionable bases, including inspiring and profiting from fear and poor self-esteem, enforcing stereotypes about race, gender, and lifestyle. It only slowly catches up with the more complex world it exists in — and most of it still depicts a world of whiteness and heteronormativity. And that’s without getting into our culture of consumption and excess.

So I’d say, it’s GREAT to use advertising in art! As long as you are subverting it and jabbing it in the soft underbelly! 🙂

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Thanks for the great discussion – this has been really helpful and thought-provoking!