Mike Chasar
3rd-year Ph.D. student, English

In his work as a poet and a critic, Mike Chasar excels in the juxtaposition of (seemingly) unrelated ideals. Poetry and everyday America. High culture and pop culture. Conches and Christmas.

“It’s the poetry no one writes about but which all of us see and read in our everyday lives: greeting cards, advertisements, on tombstones, on billboards, in movies.” —Mike Chasar on poetry's place in American life

Chasar’s poem Conches on Christmas was published in the September 2005 issue Poetry magazine, one of the nation’s most prestigious poetry publications. Since its humble beginnings in 1912, Poetry’s associations with accomplished artists reads like a who’s-who in the field: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and many others have published in the magazine. Chasar’s work is published online, as well. He was one of four “Featured Poets” on Poetry Magazine’s website in September, alongside such current notables as C.K. Williams and Pattiann Rogers.

Conches on Christmas demonstrates Chasar’s knack for bringing two competing ideologies into conversation – in this case, the natural phenomena of conch shells arriving via wind and water versus the manufactured consumerism and individualism of the holiday season. After discovering a Christmas-time “gift” of conch shells at his beach-house door (and “no receipt by which I could redeem them”), the poem’s narrator asserts that

all twenty-four
must have lugged those preassembled bodies here
sans Santa, sleigh, and eight little reindeer,
to my drasty stretch of shore.

Blending of Styles
The poem also defies traditional stylistic boundaries. Composed in a ballad-like stanza—an oral and repetitious structure that is the basis of popular music genres like blues or rock ‘n’ roll—while not limiting itself to the conventions of that form, Conches on Christmas demonstrates Chasar’s ability to pull from various poetic traditions. Clearly pleased with the results, Chasar characterizes the style of Conches on Christmas as “a wonky ballad.”

Breaking down barriers between “high” culture and pop culture—the elite and the mass—also reveals itself in Chasar’s academic interests. His focus in the English department is 20th century American poetry and culture. “It’s the poetry no one writes about but which all of us see and read in our everyday lives: greeting cards, advertisements, on tombstones, on billboards, in movies,” he explains. By recognizing and studying these popular, everyday expressions as poetry, Chasar hopes to shed light on poetry’s place in daily American existence.

He says examples of popular stanzas in society are widely found in our market-driven economy. Perhaps the most compelling example for Chasar is the Burma-Shave rhyming billboards that promoted brushless shaving cream from the 1920s to the 1960s. The small billboards were placed at intervals along roadways, four to six at a time. The Burma Shave billboard series became fixtures on America’s highways. Their ad campaigns went beyond advertising, spawning a pop-culture phenomenon that has long outlasted the product. Of the attraction, Chasar simply says, “Even non-poets dig rhyme and dig meter.” It’s this assumption, and its exploration, that is at the heart of his work.

Personal and Background
Chasar has just completed his comprehensive exams, and is beginning work on his dissertation, tentatively titled “The Poetry of Everyday Life / The Everyday Life of Poetry.” In addition, he co-edited the Winter 2006 issue of the Iowa Journal of Cultural Sciences. The issue’s theme is “Poetries,” and it emphasized and investigated the plural forms of the genre and the variety of ways it appears and is used in culture. Upon graduation, he aspires to teach at the university level, though would also consider working for a cultural, political, or social-service non-profit organization.

A recipient of a Presidential Graduate Fellowship at Iowa, Chasar notes the many benefits of this honor: the ability to devote to full-time study during the first year, financial assistance to engage in additional research and the connections with other top campus scholars from other disciplines. He holds an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from Miami University (Ohio) and a B.A. from Valparaiso University, and spent time working at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

To view Conches on Christmas, click here.