it's friday nite & you want to watch a GAP commercial featuring a poet

in the early to mid 1990s GAP was the lowdown cooldown pret-a-porter clothing store around.  the adverts were cool.  & stylish.  & poets were part of the sell.  pics of beat poets allen ginsberg & jack keruoac were part of the GAP print ads for khaki pants.  what!?  yep, they were.  in the early '90s i was a young man figuring out how to live in poetry.  i was not much of a formal studies type of student.  but my heroes, like dylan thomas & hart crane, were either high school drop-outs or barely made it out of high school.  i was dicking around university courses but i spent most of my time in the stacks of the university library, & local libraries, making one marvelous discovery after another.  & our society seemed to value its poets.  like this ad featuring NYC poet max blagg.  the girl in the jeans is the supermodel cindy crawford.  sure, this commercial appears to be contrived from our 21st C perch.  but man!  this commercial was broadcast on national TV!  it was just the evidence that i needed to validate a life lived in poetry.  make no mistake.  i don't think poetry is a career.  you don't/can't retire from it.  poetry is an obsession.  a habit of making & seeing.  it becomes, if we are fortunate, a life.  & sometimes our society will ask a poet to shill jeans.  corporate as fuck, yes, yet we live in a late capitalist society, & commercials that sell us shit can be, at sometimes, art.