Nike's poets.

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 shoes or even mention Nike. This is not meant to be a commercial: It is meant to be a showcase for these athletes and your work."

Despite the high-minded rhetoric, the agency admonished the poets: "Keep in mind TV network standards and practices regarding content and language." And it added: "It must be possible for your poem to be read out loud in less than thirty seconds. (Otherwise, we may have to edit your piece for time.) Unfortunately, the mechanics of commerce outweigh the demands of art in this instance."

The agency told Espada to produce the poem in less than three weeks, and offered him $250 for the submission and $2,500 if the company used the poem in a commercial.

Espada sent me a copy of his response.

"I could reject your offer based on the fact that your deadline is ludicrous.... A poem is not a pop tart," he wrote.

"I could reject your offer based on the fact that I would not be free to write whatever I want.... You clearly have no idea what the word `censorship' means. Where, as you put it, `the mechanics of commerce outweigh the demands of art,' then de facto censorship will flourish.

"I could reject your offer based on the fact that you must be totally and insultingly ignorant of my work as a poet, which strives to stand against all that you and your client represent. Whoever referred me to you did you a grave disservice.

"I could reject your offer based on the fact that your client Nike has--through commercials such as these--outrageously manipulated the youth market, so that even low-income adolescents are compelled to buy products they do not need at prices they cannot afford.

"Ultimately, however, I am rejecting your offer as a protest against the brutal labor practices of the company. I will not associate myself with a company that engages in the well-documented exploitation of workers in sweatshops."

Espada told the agency to "take the $2,500 you now dangle before me and distribute that money equally among the laborers in an Asian sweatshop doing business with Nike. The funds would be much more useful to them than to me."

Here is one artist who would not serve as a mechanic for commerce. But watch for those Nike ads that run during the 1998 Winter Olympics so you can pick out the poets who change the oil for the industry of hip consumerism.