AD HOCKED POEMS

Dispatches from the Dumbing Down

Generation Z is notoriously hard to nail down for advertisers. How do you market to young people when they don’t watch TV and they don’t have the patience for an ad that isn’t amateurish, 7 seconds long, and inserted between a doomscroll video of a “talking” cat and a woman acting out both sides of a conversation at the DMV?

The answer is to put ads in the one place 20-somethings are required to buy and possibly even look at at least once every six months: their college textbooks.

And so a deal was struck between The American Beer Council and a certain omnipresent college textbook company to insert ads in the form of poems that mimic, but are not legally identical to, classical poetry.

I was hired to write these poems. Below are three examples of my work:

BUDWEIZYMANDIUS

I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said: “A vast and tapless keg of stone
Does stand in the desert… Near it on the sand
Half sunk, a crumpled Solo red cup,
With broken lip, and faded brand,
Tell that its owner, onc…