The Poetry Of Detroit Auto

Danny Heitman has a quirkily fascinating op-ed up in the New York Times on the attempt in the mid to late 50s by Ford Motor Company to enlist a poet laureate to help sell its products:

The question is brought to mind by the story of Marianne Moore, the famous American writer, who served for a brief season as the Ford Motor Company’s unofficial poet laureate.

A Ford executive wrote that the company was launching “a rather important new series of cars,” but his team was stumped to think of a name for the latest product line. Could Moore, an icon of American letters, help them out?

Moore embraced the assignment with relish, not surprising for a poet who enjoyed — and whose writing was frequently inspired by — popular culture, whether it be baseball, boxing or bric-a-brac. The correspondence became a cultural fixture of its own after it was published in The New Yorker two years later.

These days, poetry and commerce are rarely on such good speaking terms. Poetry doesn’t sell well, and poets almost never attain the celebrity that touched Moore, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg half a century ago. If some Detroit executive got the bright idea to consult a poet for marketing advice today, one rather doubts he’d know whom to call.

It’s nice to think that the two groups — poets and carmakers — might find new relevance through collaboration, but history is not encouraging.

I share Heitman’s conclusion that such a collaboration is probably not in the offing in today’s society and marketplace. I think, however, Detroit is going to rebound with a different kind of poetry.

Poetry in motion.

If Detroit is to rebound, it will not be from fancy words or catchy phrases to hawk their products; it will be from engineering excellence, desirable design and competitive, if not superlative, production values. They are much further along this path than many people give them credit for being though.

The Ford Fusion and Fusion Hybrid, Ford Focus, Ford Escape and Escape Hybrid, and the new Ford Taurus are all absolutely killer vehicles, both on their own and compared with foreign competitors. These cars are all world class in their segments. Add them to the always top of the segment Ford Truck line, especially the F-150, and you have a company that is here to stay and ready to take on all comers.

Financially, Ford had the jump on the old GM; Ford leveraged themselves and had the cash on hand to ride out the US financial implosion without the bailouts that both GM and Chrysler took to survive. But the lead in products and product development is nowhere near so pronounced, and arguably non-existent. In fact, there is a good argument that the "New GM" is every bit as poised to lead and prosper as Ford as the New GM has been shed (whether you agree with it having been done, it is a fact now) of its major burdens and streamlined in product lines, vehicles and manufacturing capacity.

The New GM sports such products as the Chevrolet Malibu, Chevrolet Camaro, Chevrolet Traverse, GMC Acadia, Cadillac CTS, Cadillac SRX, Buick Enclave and new Buick LaCrosse (Dan Neil says it blows away the Lexus ES350). And of course, the Chevy Volt and Cruze will be arriving in 2010 as well and and both promise to be game changers of the highest order. Throw in the Chevy/GMC truck line and the niche segment Chevy Corvette and you really have a company with cutting edge, world class in segment, vehicles. Like Ford, the New GM is poised for success.

I would argue that not only is Detroit, or at least the Big Two, ready and able to compete with the foreigh competition, but that head to head within segments, they may have more interesting products that are every bit the technological and reliability matches. I think one other point needs to be made for all the naysayers: Every one of the vehicles I just mentioned, which will serve as the renaissance of Detroit Auto if there is to be one (and I think there will) was either in production, or well in the pipeline before the big crash. The Big Two were already changing in a very positive way for the new century when the bottom fell out; in fact, that is one of the biggest reasons they were so exposed when it did. Either way, however, they have the products, both now and in the immediate pipeline, to compete heads up with foreign competition.

If they make their products the poetry, Detroit will recover, live long and prosper. If they don’t, they won’t. It is really that simple.

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21 replies
    • scribe says:

      In the process of moving out of my current digs (the way you eat the elephant – one bite at a time), I was in my storage yesterday and had to deal with the tricycle my grandparents gave me for my first Christmas. It is of that Tailfin Era vintage, and has a kind of Jet-set tailfinny styling twist to it. It’s also made out of that strange material kids’ toys no longer are made from. I had to look it up, but it’s spelled “m-e-t-a-l”.

      I think I’ll keep it. It’s already qualified for classic plates in any jurisdiction….

  1. bobschacht says:

    The automakers might do well to train their assembly-line work to think of their repetitive motions as a kind of dance. Think of the traffic cop who uses that approach to her job.

    Bob in HI

  2. Loo Hoo. says:

    Enterprise is selling cars that have been stripped of safety features.

    Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the nation’s largest private buyer of new cars and seller of used ones, chose to “delete” a standard safety feature from thousands of Chevrolet Impala fleet vehicles, saving millions of dollars.

    After the company rented out those 2006-08 model vehicles, Enterprise and countless dealers nationwide offered them for sale on the open market &mash; minus the side-curtain air bags that have been shown to dramatically reduce highway deaths.

    • bmaz says:

      Wow, that is totally lame. There is going to be a death or serious head injury there somewhere as a result of this and it is going to bite them in the butt.

  3. Teddy Partridge says:

    Of course, the names Marianne Moore suggested for what eventually became the Edsel were incredibly bizarre: “Utopian Turtletop,” “Pastelogram,” and “Mongoose Civique” per wiki.

    • PJEvans says:

      I thought I remembered reading that she’d suggested a name involving ‘Mongoose’. Couldn’t remember what it was, except that the names she suggested were a bit bizarre.

  4. bmaz says:

    Heh, no kidding. Two things though 1) I rather liked Ford Silver Sword and 2) Crikey, the Edsel couldn’t have sold any worse irrespective of the name. But you are right about all the other names, what was she drinking or taking?

    • fatster says:

      Maybe one look at (what would be) the Edsel was all it took to stimulate her creative juices/muses. On the other hand, perhaps it was gin and absinth.

  5. scribe says:

    When one walks along Manhattan’s 9th Street from lower 6th Avenue (by that funky round-towered brick church and some of the old Village shops) toward 5th and, ultimately, University (Turn up University to get to Union Square and the Greenmarket), in that movie-gorgeous block of townhouses, on the north side one will pass a brass plaque commemorating that Marianne Moore lived in one of the houses there for many years. It notes that she was a poet, and loved baseball. Now I see why she was deemed worthy of a brass plaque.

      • scribe says:

        I can’t think of a pub, qua pub.

        There are a couple of those neighborhood basement joints you see in NYC – in France they’d be a local brasserie – on the opposite side of 9th at the 6th Ave end of the block, but I can’t vouch for their quality. Nothing I can think of on the 5th Ave end of the block, and then there are a bunch of places on University, but up more toward 14th.

        If you’re thinking of coming to NYC and expecting a tour guide, you’d better hurry ’cause I am out of my place most likely by Labor Day. I have a buyer and a contract and the buyer’s getting the mortgage (buyer has a good job and should have no problem there) and then it’s just home inspection, appraisal, clear my liens, and paperwork.

          • scribe says:

            Hit the reset button.

            I’m looking at a couple areas which are a lot cheaper to live in than the present locale. I need to take the time to sort through all the debris that has accumulated in my life, straighten it out, and see where that leaves me. Right now, I am so fed up with the practice of law (As it has evolved in my life, at least) that I don’t care whether I am or am not practicing during this period. In fact, for the first couple months at least, I think I’d rather be stocking shelves at the supermarket or something, just so I can clear my head.

            I’ll probably find a reason to complain about that, when I think about earning a day’s pay there in an hour at the law desk, but we’ll deal with that later.

            The way I see it, I take a year or so and at the end of that time take stock and either come back to this area and dive back in or stay where I went. Or do something else. That’s a year from now, though.

            • bmaz says:

              It is good to get away; been there. The hard part is finding the way to get back in at a level that doesn’t drive you nuts but still provides the income. The recession has put a lot of younger attorneys out of work, and that makes the job even more difficult for people like us that have been around a while. But it is there if you look hard and creatively enough. Best of luck.

  6. Petrocelli says:

    Burnout is common in all fields. My main focus, besides emptying Likker Cabinets, is showing people how to find a balance and achieve their dreams.

    If you are in Toronto, Marcy can provide you with my e-mail addy to contact me. I am not planning on visiting Noo Yawk this year any more unless I find an Agent there.

    The techniques that I can show you might just be the tonic ( with or without Gin ).

  7. bmaz says:

    I am somewhat shocked no one has asked why there is no discussion of Chrysler. For those that haven’t seen that discussion in EW threads before, I just am not convinced exactly how Chrysler as we have known it can survive. They have none of the spiffy products newly on line (except, perhaps, the Challenger and that isn’t enough), don’t have the R & D and new products actively in the pipeline (concepts they could make in a perfect world don’t cut it) and I don’t think selling a bunch of Fiats and a few Alfas in Chrysler showrooms is going to save what we have always known as Chrysler. They, at least as we have known them, are toast.

    • Petrocelli says:

      Somewhat unusual that I do not feel like talking about my third love – automobiles. I’ve had several chats with a Chrysler Exec over the past few months and feel they are hopelessly lost and waiting for some Magic Beans.

      I also had two insightful chats with some of the guys fingered for your housing bubble debacle and am so dazed that I’m going to play video games and listen to classic Rock for a while to clear my head.

      The end of the conversation was like this … if there is justice in America, Greenspan, Bernanke & Paulson should face jail time. Oh and Geithner & Summers suck as bad as Hugh & Ian Welsh say they do.

  8. fatster says:

    For the car people

    Report: Chrysler to build Fiat 500 in Mexico

    Associated Press
    Aug. 17, 2009, 8:57AM

    NEW YORK — “Chrysler Group LLC is planning to build the Fiat 500 small car at a plant in Mexico, according to a report published today.

    “The automaker could also build an engine for the 500 at a plant in Trenton, Mich., and is weighing building another compact car similar to the 500 in the U.S., according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited anonymous sources familiar with the matter.”

    More.

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