Angela Sorby

"Poetry vs. Paris Hilton: Who’s On Top?"

In 2007, Paris Hilton read a poem on Larry King Live that she had supposedly written in prison. The poem, which turned out to be plagiarized from a fan letter, prompted a media scandal that raises implicit questions about how poetry works, or fails to work, as a popular cultural medium. In Understanding Popular Culture, John Fiske argues that, to be popular, a text or commodity must be relevant: it must be functionally available to consumers who make it a meaningful part of their daily lives. In this essay, I will twist Fiske’s thesis to argue that poetry is a functional medium because people are not comfortable using it in their daily lives.

Through an analysis of the Paris Hilton poetry scandal, and of subsequent poems written to (and against) Hilton, I will suggest that precisely because poetry is not “relevant” to most consumers, it arouses strong reactions (disciplinary scorn, passionate defense) when it appears in mass cultural contexts. Poetry, in this case, prompts a breakdown in the ideological unity of an icon such as Paris Hilton, whose popular subjectivity relies on hyper-legibility and relevance.