Nike's poets.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Nike recruits political poet Martin Espada for Olympics TV ads and poet rejects offer - Brief Article - Editorial

This is our "Best Books of the Year" issue, a favorite of mine. We all get to make our picks, and I enjoy the holiday assortment.

One delicacy I could not quite fit into the box was Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool (University of Chicago Press). Frank is the editor-in-chief of The Baffler, an irregular magazine of cultural criticism. In this book, he talks about how advertisers coopt radical politics and art--how what is "hip" can so easily serve the bottom line.

"Hip consumerism," he writes, is "a cultural perpetual-motion machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption."

During the 1960s, there was a revolution in advertising, Frank argues. Corporations decided that they could sell more products not by stressing some comparative advantage in the goods themselves, but by selling the notion that consuming those goods was an act of individual protest against the system that produces them.

"Now products existed to facilitate our rebellion against the soul-deadening world of products, to put us in touch with our authentic selves, to distinguish us from the mass-produced herd, to express our outrage at the stifling world of economic necessity," he writes.

I thought about Frank's theory recently when I received a letter from Martin Espada, a great political poet and a member of our editorial advisory board. Espada, it turns out, was being recruited by Nike, one of the kings of cooptation.

Espada sent along a copy of the recruitment letter from Nike's ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners of San Francisco.

It was "a proposal to a few select poets for the Nike Poetry Slam." Poetry slams are competitions usually held in a coffee house or bar. Each poet reads a piece, and the audience whoops it up. The poet who gets the loudest whoops wins.

Nike, ever vigilant on the cultural front, wants to capitalize on this fad. "We are developing a series of four commercials, which will be aired on national television during the 1998 Winter Olympics," the agency told Espada. "Each commercial will feature an outstanding and inspiring female athlete, sponsored by our client, Nike. We hope these short films will celebrate the poetry of competition and athletics by using your own words."

Here was the pitch: "You are free to write anything you want. We will not censor your thoughts or opinions or feelings. You don't have to write about...