Mike Chasar

Education

Ph.D., University of Iowa (English and Book Studies)
M.A., Miami University (Creative Writing)
B.A., Valparaiso University (English, Humanities, French)

About Me

For as long as I can remember, I've loved the puns, limericks, cheesy inspirational verses, song lyrics, language games, and advertising jingles of popular culture. For almost as long, I've loved reading, studying, reciting, printing, binding, and collecting canonical or "literary" poetry as well, and my teaching and scholarly interests emerge from this double affection for so-called highbrow and lowbrow poetries. I believe that every instance of poetic language use—from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to Rupi Kaur and Guns N' Roses—is a complicated mixture of social, cultural, and aesthetic forces that merits our close attention and, if we're lucky, our admiration.

Teaching Interests

I teach American literature, creative writing, and cultural studies, and I have a special interest in poetry from the U.S. Civil War to the present. That said, I have also designed and taught seminars on graphic novels, Pacific Northwest literature, and Hamlet, and I find it illuminating and challenging to mix and produce texts that have various aesthetic, cultural, and discursive registers as well as different media formats or instantiations: great poems, popular poems, song lyrics, films, video and audio recordings, performances, and the like. Students in turn have designed and produced podcasts, blog postings, interviews, poetry apps, videos, web sites, museum exhibits, 'zines, and community outreach projects as well as more traditional forms of creative or expository writing. I am curious to follow writing wherever it goes.

Research Interests

Book: Poetry Unbound I study American poetry in public life and popular culture. My most recent book, Poetry Unbound: Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram, focuses on the mediation of poetry by nonprint mass media, asking questions like: What is the relationship between a poem and the medium that transmits it? How do poems become differently meaningful when they're projected via magic lantern, aired on the radio, broadcast on TV, designed for social media, or made the subject matter of films like The Night Before Christmas (1905) or A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)? And what reciprocal effect does the projection, airing, broadcasting, or digitization of poetry have on the respective medium itself?

I am also the author of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, which focuses on poetry largely outside of educational contexts. Everyday Reading showcases and analyzes large and elaborate poetry scrapbooks that people kept between the Civil War and World War II, fan letters they wrote to old time poetry radio shows in the 1920s and 30s, rhyming shaving cream ads that appeared on billboards during the mid-century, the incorporation of popular reading modes by canonical writers, and Hallmark greeting card poetry written by a well-known poet. In 2011, I also published Poetry after Cultural Studies, a collection of eight essays that I co-edited with Heidi R. Bean, and between 2008 and 2016, I kept and maintained the blog "Poetry & Popular Culture."

My next project will be to complete another book, Oh, Ooooh, and Oi: How Three Little Sounds Key the Poetry of Pop Music, which ties artists like Whitney Houston, Bon Jovi, Ke$ha, The Cure, Guns N' Roses, Kanye West, and Beyoncé to the tradition of lyric poetry stretching back to Sappho and ancient Greece.

Publications

Books

Oh, Ooooh, and Oi: How Three Little Sounds Key the Poetry of Pop Music (in progress).

Poetry Unbound: Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram (Columbia UP, 2020).

Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America (New York: Columbia UP, 2012).

Poetry after Cultural Studies, ed. and intr. with Heidi R. Bean (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011).

Selected Articles/Essays

“Literary Sociology, Cultural Studies, and Poetry.” Poetry in the Digital Age: An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Claudia Benthien et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming).

“Reading, Misreading, and Rereading ‘We Real Cool.’” Unsettling Poetry Pedagogy: A Handbook for Anti-Oppressive Teaching. Ed. Caroline Gelmi and Lizzy LeRud (forthcoming).

"The Poem in the Digital Age" in The Cambridge Companion to the Poem, ed. Sean Pryor (UK: Cambridge UP, forthcoming).

"Tune In, Tune On, and Do What You Love." Jambands.com 20 May 2023

"Unacknowledged Legislation: Mark O. Hatfield's Favorite Poem." Hatfield Library News 18 April 2023

Interview with Mike Chasar about Poetry Unbound. Poetry International February 2022.

Rev. of Bookishness: Loving Books In A Digital Age, by Jessica Pressman. The Rumpus 1 December 2021.

Rev. Of Word Of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry, By Chad Bennet, and Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative, By James Phelan. American Literature 92.3 (September 2020).

"'Overlook the poem, but look the picture over': On the History of Poetry and American Silent Film," JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59.1 (Fall 2019).

"Ghosts of American Literature: Receiving, Reading, and Interleaving Edna St. Vincent Millay's The Murder of Lidice," PMLA 133.5 (October 2018).

"Career Windows," Journal of Modern Literature 41.3 (Spring 2018).

"Popular Verse: Poetry in Motion" in American Literature in Transition, 1910-1920, ed. Mark W. Van Wienen (UK: Cambridge UP, 2017).

"From Vagabond to Visiting Poet: Vachel Lindsay and the Institutionalization of American Poetry" in After The Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University, ed. Loren Glass (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2016).

"Field Notes: Writers at War," Los Angeles Review of Books 22 July 2016.

"High, Low, and Somewhere In-Between: Women's Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America" in A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, ed. Linda A. Kinnahan (UK: Cambridge UP, 2016).

"Lullaby Logics," Poetry 206.2 (May 2015).

"Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem," Poetry 205.4 (January 2015).

"Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America" in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Cary Nelson (New York: Oxford UP, 2012).

"American Advertising: A Poem for Every Product" (with Cary Nelson), in U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920, ed. Christine Bold (New York: Oxford UP, 2012).

"The Business of Rhyming: Burma-Shave Poetry and Popular Culture," PMLA 125.1 (January/February 2010).

"The Sounds of Black Laughter and the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes," American Literature 80.1 (March 2008).

"Conches on Christmas," Poetry (September 2005).