Sad as it may be, when poetry shows up on television it's big news. The blogosphere has been in a twitter over the recent appearance of Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency on Mad Men, the Golden Globe-winning drama series on AMC. The July 27 premiere of the second season of the show, which follows a group of men and women in the competitive world of Madison Avenue advertising in 1960s New York, included a scene in which ad man Don Draper is reading a paperback edition of O'Hara's 1957 book. At the end of the episode, Don reads aloud the last section of the poem "Mayakovsky," which begins: "Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern."
The few moments of exposure sent sales of the book soaring. Amazon's stock was diminished, and Advertising Age reported that this year's sales of the 1996 edition of the book, published by Grove Press, were 218 percent above last year's. Grove did not pay for product placement (unlike publishers who took advantage of Pamela Anderson's short-lived sitcom Stacked, which was set in a bookstore).
It wasn't the first appearance of a literary prop on the popular drama. The same week the episode aired on AMC, New York magazine's Logan Hill dissected a scene in which Don Draper stands in front of a row of books (albeit a very small row) that includes the novels Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson and The Hucksters by Frederick Wakeman.
