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 like 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. For me, poetry is a means of self-expression, but it's a powerful communicative and analytical tool as well.

Research Interests

I study the culture of popular poetry in the U.S. and especially how ordinary readers use that poetry in their lives. ("What poems do you have on your Facebook profile?" he asks.) My current book project, Everyday Reading: U.S. Poetry and Popular Culture 1880-1945 examines how Americans collected and maintained poetry in scrapbooks, how they listened to it 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 typically assumed.

For the past several years, I've also been writing what I call "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 how poetry can engage public discussions about local and national politics in similar venues once again. You can keep up with how other people and I are thinking about these and other intersections of poetry and popular culture at my cryptically-titled blog, "Poetry & Popular Culture."