Buy this book. Give a copy to a friend. Make it required reading for your classes. A book review isn’t usually a “pitch,” but Steve Zeitlin’s latest book inspires rethinking our genres of communication; it encourages us to attend to the forms we think with and to integrate our practices of observation and documentation. Among many other forms of aesthetic and poetic practice in everyday life, Zeitlin discusses his work with the carnival pitchmen who sold remedies as part of medicine shows through the first part of the twentieth century. Can a book review look like a carnival pitch? And might they be the same?
Zeitlin revisits many of the people whose lives intertwined with his in the course of ethnographic research, teaching, and living. Anyone who has read those books or seen his films will find some of these people familiar, but here he views them through the lens of the poetry of living, dying, sickness, homelessness, loving, sexuality, selling folk remedies, and playing ping pong, just to name a few. The poet Bob Holman who wrote the preface describes the book as “a how-to book for everyone...where language becomes a way of life” (xi). In this book Zeitlin merges his folklore and poetry practices; it’s not a matter of using a poet’s lens to look at folklore or an ethnographer’s eye to find the poetry in everyday life. Rather, Zeitlin regards these two practices as the same, both engaged with creativity and both to be found in the most ordinary of experiences.
In part to counter the gloomy, sometimes frightening political times we are living in, I assigned this book to my undergraduate folklore class. The Poetry of Everyday Life engages with difficult topics through stories about real people and their multiple, poetic, ways of communicating about their lives. Zeitlin does not argue that aesthetic communication is a means of representing what might be otherwise unrepresentable in people’s struggles. Aesthetics in folklore is not a mode of repair. Instead, aesthetics is the bedrock of folklore research. Early in the book, he writes, “In my work, I’ve fallen in love with carnival pitches, children’s rhymes, family stories, ancient cosmologies, and oral poetry traditions from around the world. The job of the folklorist is to ensure that great artistry doesn’t slip through the cracks of other disciplines” (5).
The Poetry of Everyday Life is not a treatise on theory and yet it addresses core theoretical issues of folklore theory. The poetic is a practice of the everyday; art is not separate from everyday life. Importantly, Zeitlin does not differente between the aesthetic and the ethical, or the aesthetic and the political, as separate regimes.
The organization of the book further destabilizes any narrowing of poetry as part of a limited sphere of artistic practice, or to put it positively, the book documents the existence of poetry in multiple, sometimes surprising, places. Some of these places will be familiar to the folklorist, for example in rites of passage, in family folklore, foodways, and play. Others describe the deliberate production of poetry, not as a biproduct of cultural production. For example, Zeitlin reports that in his creative writing courses, he asked students to write “I am from…,” originally inspired by the George Ella Lyaon poems in which “students revealed their distinctive origins and backgrounds, evoked in resonant detail” (194). I tried this exercise with my folklore class, resulting in a range of poems from the starkly confessional to the humorous and absurd, and the students reported that it was a transformative moment in the class, a collective and individual practice that served as a turning point in their understanding of folklore as a practice, built on form and offering possibilities for creative performance.
Folklorists have always recognized the centrality of poetry in traditional cultural performance, from epics to laments. Zeitlin extends his inquiry beyond these familiar sites to explore poetry in his personal life, his work, and his scholarship; The Poetry of Everyday Life moves easily between his personal insights and memories and larger questions.
At points, Zeitlin’s claims are grandiose. Like the carnival pitchmen, the “kings of hyperbole,” Zeitlin makes big claims for finding poetry everywhere. The grandiose does not prevail, however, and the book is about opening inquiry rather than about making pronouncements. The suggestion to do folklore like a poet is an invitation to listen for language, everywhere. ,The Poetry of Everyday Life reads like a conversation Zeitlin has had with the many people he has met in fieldwork, with his friends, family, ping-pong partners, and scholars who inform his thinking. Likewise, we find ourselves in conversation with poets, scholars, community members, his family, and others, all of whom are equal participants. The book prompts me to question my own language in writing this review when really, how do I review a book that made me think differently, that brought me to tears, and that changed how I teach? I could offer a poem, but I’ll end with a pitch: buy this book.
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[Review length: 836 words • Review posted on January 23, 2020]