“I salivate like a Pavlov dog.”
- Jagger and Richards (Bitch, 1971)
I was 16 when I heard Mick Jagger bark those lyrics. Hmm, I wondered, what’s a Pavlov dog?
Yes, then. Pop culture can and does lead to ‘higher learning’. I did not become a psychologist. I was a copywriter/creative director in advertising. During the intellectual lolling period, a.k.a. pandemic, I wondered (again), could advertising slogans lead to poems?
Yes. Each Mouthful Dripping … is an excerpt from a larger collection of poems from slogans currently underway.
Advertising is a major cultural force. Among its foremost elements is the familiar slogan (from the Gaelic ‘slaughgaiirm’, meaning war cry). Deployed through mass media to influence consumer attitudes and behaviour, some of these phrases have proven especially durable due to their precise word choices, their lyricism, and their capacity for multiple interpretations, i.e., their poetic qualities.
My aim is to shine new light on familiar slogans that have lived in print, on billboards, TV screens, websites and storefronts, to riff on them, to explore what the words could mean, how the sounds could play, where the language could go, what stories could unfold – poems to disrupt a reader’s previously held sense of these sticky turns of phrase.
Many of these slogans have been marinating in
my consciousness since I started in advertising, decades ago. What makes them tick/stick? Sizeable advertising budgets provide
frequency of exposure and that’s part of the answer but there must be more. The poems may feature a playful
tone, deal with contemporary issues or dip into the sadder side of mass
consumerism. The intention is to
have readers pause and ponder how prevalent and persistent advertising slogans
are and how they can be interpreted multiple ways.
Are poetry and advertising literary bedfellows? There are commonalities. One is that they are both widely ignored, either actively (ad blocking software) or passively (few poetry books are bestsellers). Yet both forms can be remarkably potent.
“Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new” is a quote I’d loved for years but was unaware of its source. It’s from Rory Sutherland, noted British advertising executive and author.
Yes, linking advertising slogans to poetry may be a stretch. But stretching is good, isn’t it? Isn’t that why yoga is popular?
Ian FitzGerald’s professional background in advertising led to teaching at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Alberta. He has trifled with poetry since teenage and is getting dangerously close to thinking he should take it seriously, maybe. He is quite keen on poetry and hopes one day that will be requited.
His
poem “Decibels” was published in We Are One – Poems from the
Pandemic, 2020; “Sounding” in Subterrranean Blue Poetry Volume X, Issue
IV, 2021; “Through a Certain Mirror,” Framed
& Familiar: 101 Portraits
(Wet Ink Books 2022); “Ear Drums,” FreeFall Magazine, Fall 2022; “Depth”
and “The Stiffer the Bristle, the Better the Brush (off),” FreeFall Magazine,
Fall 2023 as well as two ‘slogan poems’ accepted for publication in Journal
of Customer Behaviour, Westburn Publishing, U.K. in 2022/2023. His chapbook
Each Mouthful
Dripping… recently appeared from above/ground press.