Mike Chasar
Assistant Professor of English
Eaton 201
503-370-6233
Fax: 503-370-6944
mchasar@willamette.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Home Page

Mike Chasar

Education

Ph.D., University of Iowa
M.A., Miami University
B.A., Valparaiso University

About Me

For as long as I can remember, I've loved the puns, cheesy inspirational verses, dirty limericks, 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 to Snoop Doggy Doggerel—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 and creative writing with a special focus on poetry from the U.S. Civil War to the present. I subscribe to Walt Whitman's notion that "To have great heroic poetry we need great readers—a heroic appetite and audience," and so my writing classes are great reading classes, and my reading classes do heroic writing. I find it illuminating and challenging to mix texts that have various aesthetic, cultural, and discursive registers so that, for example, we might read a combination of great poems, popular poems, song lyrics, and advertising jingles in a single semester in order to better understand the many ways that poetry shapes and is shaped by our encounters with the world around us. In my classes, we approach poetry not only as a means of self-expression, but as a powerful communicative and analytical tool as well.

Research Interests

I study the culture of American popular poetry and especially how ordinary readers use that poetry in their lives. ("What poems do you have on your Facebook profile?" he asks.) I am coeditor of Poetry after Cultural Studies, a collection of eight essays published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011, and author of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, a full-length study due out from Columbia University Press in 2012. Everyday Reading examines how Americans collected and maintained poetry scrapbooks, how they listened to poetry on old-time radio shows, how they encountered it on billboards advertising shaving cream, and how canonical writers engaged and were engaged by the culture of popular poetry more regularly than scholars have assumed. The research and writing for this book were made possible by the support of many individuals and institutions including, most recently, the National Endowment for the Humanities.

As a creative component of this research, I've also been experimenting with writing in popular literary forms. For a number of years, for example, I wrote what I describe as "good bad poetry" about current events for newspaper Op-Ed pages. Back in the day, newspapers printed topical poems on a regular basis, but that practice tailed off after World War II; I'm curious, then, about what poetry can bring to public discussions about local and national politics in similar venues today. More recently, I've been risking my soul and public reputation by writing advertising poetry for an insurance company, trying my hand at the verse forms that people composed to pitch all sorts of products and services in the late nineteenth and early-mid twentieth centuries (see my articles "The Business of Rhyming" and "American Advertising: A Poem for Every Product" listed below). You can keep up with how other people and I are thinking about these and many other intersections of poetry and popular culture at my blog "Poetry & Popular Culture."