Given that a runaway best seller in the poetry world today clocks in at around a thousand copies, can we say with any certainty that there was once a golden era in American culture when people across class and gender lines read poetry as enthusiastically as we now play Xbox? Mike Chasar says yes:

Chasar organizes Everyday Reading around four overriding theses. First, he argues that “ordinary readers of popular poetry were more self-aware, discerning, creative, and socially engaged than literary critics and historians have typically assumed” (9). Second, “the actual poetry such audiences consumed was not only more various but more aesthetically and culturally complex (and perhaps even more pleasurable) than mainstream literary histories would suggest” (11). The third and fourth major points revolve around the argument that “the culture of popular verse was not self-contained but influenced the work of now-canonical modernist writers and the development of popular culture more broadly” (13).

Whether “T. S. Eliot's ‘The Waste Land’ is a better poem than a Burma-Shave advertising jingle, or whether either or both should be included in the next big poetry anthology” (8), are questions Chasar pretty much dismisses out of hand to make larger points about populist works lost to literary history and criticism. This might prove frustrating to many readers. After all, if an advertisement or random poetry scrapbook is treated as soberly as one might treat a “real” poem, who's to say we aren't living in a golden age of poetry right now, where literally millions of people across the globe memorize and mouth rhyming advertisements, hip-hop lyrics, and related media that borrow ingredient's from poetry's cupboard? Given that Chasar organizes his theses on a body of evidence including over 150 scrapbooks he bought on Ebay, popular national poetry radio programs, and advertising copy, can we not find counterparts today in Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion, Robert Pinsky's “Favorite Poem Project,” and the Poetry Slam phenomenon?

Chasar anticipates such complaints and dispenses with them convincingly. Beginning with an unprecedented reading of poetry scrapbooks – essentially notebooks filled with poetry clippings lifted from newspapers, journals, and the like – Chasar argues that these objects were produced by ordinary members of the American public in such numbers as to warrant serious historical and critical attention. In one of the scrapbooks Chasar reads, there is a wild juxtaposition of magazine and newspaper clippings including Edna St. Vincent Millay's “The Pear Tree,” H.D.'s “Oread,” Jean Starr Untermeyer's “Old Man,” Frank Stanton's “A Rain Song,” Anne Campbell's “And So Are You,” Ezra Pound's “In a Station of the Metro,” and “a newspaper article reporting on H. L. Mencken's marriage to Sara Powell Haardt” (31). This scrapbook, organized by “Dottie” Ashley in the 1930s, is a text which is read as deeply by Chasar as, say, a poem by T. S. Eliot might be read by Denis Donoghue. Reading creatively, Chasar is inspired by the variousness of Ashley's associations to make some astonishing claims, including the suggestion that “the collage and quoting techniques of modernist poetry [might be] rooted in popular scrapbooking or album-keeping practices” (32).

To some extent, such assertions might seem questionable given the randomness inherent in basing them on a collection of scrapbooks mined off Ebay rather than, say, a collection from quantifiable groups (say, inhabitants of specific regions that cross regional, race, class and gender lines). However, Chasar goes far in illustrating how scrapbooking was widespread. Drawing on sources including James Agee, Ezra Pound and Willa Cather, Chasar illustrates beautifully that “poem clippings and scrapbooks” were common cultural practice throughout mainstream American life.

Perhaps the most interesting thread that runs through the book as a whole is Chasar's claim that poetry scrapbooking in its various forms actively worked to resist an increasingly technocratic and consumer-oriented political and commercial culture. Thus succeeding chapters analyse and define daily radio poetry shows as aural “scrapbooks” whose collagist aesthetic worked in part against the interests of capital; how Burma-Shave's highway poetry campaigns were eventually abandoned given that the public's affection for the poetry threatened to overshadow the actual product the poetry was in the service of promoting; even how filling-station signs were détourned by poets including Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Creeley.

Everyday Reading goes far in illustrating how poetry played a much larger role in most Americans' lives than it does today. Chasar paints a picture of a more various and ultimately dissident American public than most might have expected, a public for whom poetry was a crucial part of an overall strategy to counter the dominant political, economic, and social paradigms of their era. Written beautifully and researched meticulously, Popular Reading will prove an important resource for political and cultural historians, literary scholars, and anyone else interested in how poetry transcends the page and becomes an active part of how we spend our days.