‘THIS IS A PAID ADVERTISEMENT’: advertising poetics in Yugen

Yugen (1958–1962) is a little magazine edited by Amiri Baraka (at the time LeRoi Jones) and Hettie Cohen. Yugen has been celebrated as an early publisher of authors who now form the canon of avant-garde American poetry – Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gregory Corso and more. But very little attention has been paid to its consistent engagement with advertising. From parodies of soap advertisements, to literary debates, to poetic responses, Yugen’s negotiation with the relationship between poetry and advertising reflects a wider anxiety about advertising’s increasing dominance in mid-twentieth-century American culture. I read across issues of Yugen to demonstrate its consistent engagement with advertising as both a threat to poetry and an opportunity for literary play. I argue that some writers in Yugen focus on the affective impact of advertising as making feelings ‘vacant’. I then read Frank O’Hara’s ‘Personal Poem’, first published in Yugen 6 (1960), to consider the position of ‘liking’ as a commercial affect and demonstrate the more reparative potentials of the relationship between poetry and advertising. While advertising’s affective appeals may associate feeling with purchase, O’Hara shows how advertising can nevertheless become a medium for poetic expression.