ABSTRACT
This will be brief. Ten years after Belk argued for poetry’s “contribution to knowledge” about consumer behavior (1986:19), one poem has been published in the journal of record-the Journal of Consumer Research. The poem is Sydney Levy’s “Awash in Ideas,” included in his article, “Stalking the Amphisbaena” (1996:173). In 1993-4, the International Journal of Research in Marketing published four poems, and in 1997 Consumption, Markets, and Culture will publish three poems. The count is more robust in the Journal of Advertising, where nine poems have been published since September 1992. In view of the paucity of items published, submitting this chapter to a scholarly journal would probably invite negative evaluations of the “length to contribution” ratio and the “contribution to disciplinary knowledge” criterion. In addition, the intrusion of poetry in a scientific journal might offend as many readers as the intrusion of a scientific study in a literary publication. As Northrop Frye comments, in one of his rare uncharitable pronouncements, “I understand that there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy’s novels on the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged” (1973:19).
