Pinks#32: Try a Poem Staple Gun

The online poetry shop that never was

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Satire has a habit of being prophetic.

This week, I learned that the estate of Mary Oliver has launched an online shop selling clothing decorated with popular quotations from the late American poet, such as

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves

— and what soft animal wouldn’t love a Suddenly and Unexpectedly sweatshirt topped with a hat that will have strangers asking if your name is Mary Oliver?

It’s not the first time that poets have been turned into merchandise — here, for example, is a Staffordshire pottery figurine of Lord Byron for your mantelpiece:

And if you search for him on Etsy these days, it turns out the first part of T.S. Eliot stood for “T-Shirts”:

You also really can now buy W.B. Yeats branded “Still Irish Water” — a tribute, perhaps, to the waterjet balancing a pingpong ball in a London shop window that he said inspired “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (the most famous “still Irish” poem of all):

The fact that such things now exist, though, send me back to the days when it was possible just to pretend they did. At its peak in 2015, the Irish Poetry Shop was a prolific online entrepreneur, posting images of unlikely poetry purchases on Twitter. After a brief boom, however, this satirical little start-up seems to have gone bust. Here are a few favourite products, which showcase what a one-stop Photoshop it was.

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Mary Oliver, eat your heart out — the IRS clothing range was really down with (a couple of) the kids:

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They also sold handy snacks to fill that gap between stanzas:

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Practical tools to boost any poet’s career:

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Light canonical reading:

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Not to mention gift ideas for the Yeats fan who has everything:

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And of course, as a global brand, the IRS accepted several currencies, including the American Muldoon:

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So when I wrote a short critical book in a similarly irreverent mood for Rack Press the same year — The Whitsun Wedding Video: A Journey into British Poetry (2015) — I was pleased to get (anonymous) permission to use several Irish Poetry Shop images as illustrations, including this one, featuring a real quote from T.S. Eliot:

— which, in spirit, was not a million miles from this genuine photo I took in my local Waterstone’s:

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You can read an extract from the “Mug’s Game” chapter here:

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Finally, I recently rediscovered another pile of — what else? — unsold copies of The Whitsun Wedding Video. So in the spirit of monetising poetry for all it’s worth, I’d be happy to send one, including postage within the UK, for £5 via Paypal to jnoeltod@hotmail.com. Depending on demand, I may also branch out into baseball caps, porcelain figurines and spring water.

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NOTES

Somehow, when The Whitsun Wedding Video appeared, I completely missed the fact that it improbably featured as runner-up to J.H. Prynne in the Best Critical Book category of the LRB Bookshop Poetry Awards 20215, as prophesied by, erm, Eliot and Ezra Pound (who also had the foresight to make R.F. Langley’s Complete Poems their Book of the Year). John Clegg’s lighthearted tale of an unlikely award ceremony begins:

We were hunkered down in a specially-constructed footnote under the bookshop, illuminated only by the glow of reputations and a single candle.

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/blog/2015/december/christmas-poetry-picks-2015