Making It New: Creating an Audience for Poetry
JASON GURIEL
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Graduate Program in English York University Toronto, Ontario
May 2012
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Throughout its history, scholars have celebrated Poetry as an important site for modernist and contemporary poetry. Ezra Pound, in particular, has received much praise for serving as the magazine’s Foreign Correspondent in its early years and championing poets such as T. S. Eliot and H. D. Yet its founding editor, Harriet Monroe, has been assailed for her efforts to pay the magazine’s poets and enlarge its readership, policies which tend to be dimissed as commercial and compromised ambitions. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Mikhail Bakhtin, however, I argue that Monroe’s relatively progressive vision, which the current editors of Poetry have in part revived, conceives of the magazine as a “refuge-gallery” and suggests that poets are historically situated agents who require financial and cultural support.
My dissertation constitutes a four-chapter analysis of Poetry, each section centered on a key figure. In the first chapter, I show that Monroe’s genteel background provided her with substantial social capital, enabling her to envision the possibility of a different kind of “little magazine”: the first periodical in the American literary field that was devoted to poetry and one that would neither cater to a mass audience nor address itself merely to a coterie. In the second chapter, I demonstrate that William Carlos
Williams’s attacks on Monroe’s project and his own relationships with modernist magazines reflect a post-Romantic ideology that locates poets outside of economic relations. My final two chapters focus on how the careers of contemporary figures like Kay Ryan and Samuel Menashe as well as their dialogic poems have been shaped by the poets’s respective relationships with Poetry.
At different yet crucial moments in its existence, Poetry has attempted to alter the structure of the American and trans-Atlantic literary fields by working to materialize what
Monroe imagined: a substantial and hitherto unsustainable readership for “serious” and
“complicated” poetry (Wiman). Demonstrating how and why the magazine is a materialist space in which poets’s careers and identities have been forged, this dissertation recovers a “subjugated” history of Poetry. For Sonya Tomas
and
in memory of
Ciprian Guriel (1922-2011)
and
Samuel Menashe (1925-2011) V
Acknowledgments
I want to thank my dissertation committee, Dr. Lesley J. Higgins (co-supervisor), Dr.
Andy Weaver (co-supervisor), and Dr. Susan Warwick. Dr. Higgins’s tireless dedication and rigorous intelligence have had a major impact on my development as a teacher and scholar. I am indebted to her. Dr. Weaver’s sharp insights and humour have meant a lot to me, as has his wonderful example as an educator. Dr. Warwick’s keen eye, generous knowledge, and warmth made a difference.
I want to thank my family, including my remarkable mother, Shirley Guriel, to whom I offer my love. My sister Natalie Guriel has been a tremendous and loving support throughout this process, as has her husband, Craig Vaughan. My father, Ciprian Guriel, passed away before I completed this work, but his kindness and music continue to inform my efforts.
I also want to thank Maria Tomas, Armindo Tomas, Carla Tomas, and Will Perreira for their generosity and encouragement.
Dr. Richard Teleky has been a great teacher and friend throughout the years. To him, I offer my gratitude. Dr. Rishma Dunlop provided valuable advice and guidance. Belal Khallad,
Terence Kelsey, Evan Jones, Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein, and Robert Lotz have also been supports throughout this process.
It was an honour to interview Samuel Menashe, on whom my last chapter is focused.
Samuel was more than a masterful poet; he was a friend. I will always cherish our discussions and the gift of his anecdotes, handwritten poems, and exuberant energy.
Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my wonderful wife, Sonya Tomas, to whom this work is dedicated. Without her love, patience, support, and wisdom, this dissertation - and much else besides - would not have been possible. I owe her more than I can calculate. vi
Table of Contents
Abstract ii
Dedication iv
Acknowledgments v
Table of Contents vi
List of Abbreviations viii
Introduction 1 1. Scholarly Contribution 4 2. Methodology and Chapter Breakdown 10
Chapter One: “Our magazine-gallery”: Making an Editor and an Audience 21 1. “The first in the field”: Poetry in Relation to Other Magazines 26 2. The Chicago of Possibles: Monroe in the Literary Field 34 3. Refuge and Gallery: Constructing Poetry 41 4. “An ever-increasing public”: Imagining an Audience 73 5. Conclusion 90
Chapter Two: “I swear never to be successful”: Making a Poet of Little Magazines 92 1. “It must be a person who does it”: Defining the Little Magazine 99 2. “Gulfs and grottos”: Playing the (American Literary) Field 104 3. “No one had any money”: Capitalizing on the Little Magazine 113 4. “A poetic stock yard”: Williams and Poetry 138 5. Conclusion 159
Chapter Three: “Outsider Art”: Making Kay Ryan 165 1. Poetry Professionals: Redrawing the American Literary Field 170 2. “[T]hey gouge and hatch”: Manufacturing the Outsider 177 3. “I marvelled at how generally I was aided”: Ryan in the Magazines 200 4. “I love introductions”: Dialogism in the Poems of Ryan 216 5. Conclusion 242
Chapter Four: “My aftermath”: Making a Neglected Master 245 1. “Outside the walls”: Menashe in the Gaps of the Literary Field 251 2. At the Window Sill: The Importance of Space 271 3. “The niche narrows”: Locating Menashe 290 4. “Wake up late,” Out of the Wilderness: Menashe and Poetry 301 5. Conclusion 318 Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited and Consulted viii
List of Abbreviations
“ABH” Samuel Menashe, “A Bronze Head” “ACP” Samuel Menashe, “At Cross Purposes” “A f’ Samuel Menashe, “All my friends are homeless” “AI” Kay Ryan, “An Interview” “ALI” Kay Ryan, “A Lyrical Intellect” “ANM” David Orr, “A ‘Neglected’ Master” APL Harriet Monroe, A Poet’s Life “AS” Samuel Menashe, “At a Standstill” “ASP” William Carlos Williams, “Announcement and Sample Poem” Auto William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography o f William Carlos Williams “Auto” Samuel Menashe, “Autobiography” “AWC” William Carlos Williams, “A Word about Our Contributors” “AWOR” Harriet Monroe, “A Word to Our Readers” “AWP” Kay Ryan, “I Go to AWP” “AWS” Kay Ryan, “Almost Without a Surface” “BCD” Kay Ryan, “Blue China Doorknob” “BKR” Poetry Foundation, “Biography: Kay Ryan” “BSS” William Carlos Williams, “A Beginning on the Short Story (Notes)” “BT” Samuel Menashe, “The Bare Tree” “BW” Harriet Monroe, “The Bigness of the World” “CaG” Robert McAlmon, “Contact and Genius” “CC” Samuel Menashe, “Captain, Captive” “CPM” Dana Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter?” CPI William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems I “CS” Kay Ryan, “Cooling the Surface” “CV” Samuel Menashe, “Curriculum Vitae” “DKR” Dana Gioia, “Discovering Kay Ryan” DN Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel “EMW” William Carlos Williams, “The Editors Meet William Carlos Williams” “ER” Anonymous, “Elephant Rocks” “EWHM” Harriet Monroe, “The Enemies We Have Made” “FA” William Carlos Williams, “Further Announcement” “FC” Harriet Monroe, “The Fight for the Crowd” “FD” Samuel Menashe, “Forever and a Day” “FM” Harriet Monroe, “The Future of the Magazine” “FS” Samuel Menashe, “Family Silver” “GDD” Samuel Menashe, “Giving the Day Its Due” “GHR” Harriet Monroe, “Give Him Room” “GN” Jason Guriel, “Going Negative” HMPR Ellen Williams, Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance “HTI” Harriet Monroe, “Hard Times Indeed” ix
“HW” Samuel Menashe, “Heat Wave” “HWA” Nicholas Bims, ‘“He walked in awe’: The Poetic Task of Samuel Menashe” “IG” Nicholas Bims, ‘“I am where I go’: The Poetry of Samuel Menashe” “IM” Samuel Menashe, “In Memoriam” “IMD” Samuel Menashe, “In My Digs” “ISM” Samuel Menashe, “Interview: Samuel Menashe” “IWCW” William Carlos Williams, “An Interview with William Carlos Williams' “KR” Kay Ryan, “Kay Ryan” LMHB Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography LMM Suzanne Churchill, Little Magazines and Modernism “MC” Kay Ryan, “Marin County, Sort o f’ “MM” Harriet Monroe, “The Motive for the Magazine” “NB” Harriet Monroe, “The New Beauty” “OC” Various, “Our Contemporaries” “OD” Harriet Monroe, “The Open Door” “PA” William Carlos Williams, “Portrait of the Author” PfJ Reed Whittemore, William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey PR Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason “PS” Jason Guriel, “The Pigheaded Soul” “PSM” Various, “The Poets on Samuel Menashe” “QP” Harriet Monroe, “The Question of Prizes” RHW Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World RL Kay Ryan, Rev. ofThe Selected Letters o f Marianne Moore “RLr Harriet Monroe, “Review of The Lyric Year” RoA Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules o f Art RP Kay Ryan, Rev. ofThe Poems o f Marianne Moore “RT” Kay Ryan, “Rats’ Tails” “SaE” Harriet Monroe, “Sobriety and Earnestness” “SCSC” William Carlos Williams, “Sample Critical Statement: Comment” “SL” Samuel Menashe, “Still Life” “SM” Dana Gioia, “Samuel Menashe” “ST” William Carlos Williams, “Sub Terra” “ST1” Samuel Menashe, “Story Teller” “SU” Anonymous, “Say Uncle” “TA” Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, “The Audience” “TaN” Harriet Monroe, “Then and Now” “TD” Kay Ryan, “The Double” “TFY” Harriet Monroe, “These Five Years” “TH” Samuel Menashe, “The Host” TI Samuel Menashe, Telephone Interview “TL” Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures” “TPSM” Donald Davie, “The Poetry of Samuel Menashe” “TR” Kay Ryan, “Tenderness and Rot” “TSA” Samuel Menashe, “The Stars Are” “Tss” Samuel Menashe, “These stone steps” UF Jane Mead, The Usable Field “VWCW” William Carlos Williams, “A Visit with William Carlos Williams' “WB” Kay Ryan, “William Bronk” “WOW” Samuel Menashe, “Windows: Old Window” Introduction
Established in 2002 after a historic private donation of roughly $200,000,000 to
Poetry magazine, the Poetry Foundation promotes itself as “an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience”
(“About” 16). The current president of the Foundation, John Barr (b. 1943), in a speech entitled “American Poetry and the New Century” (2006), argues that contemporary poets
- many of whom work in academia and publish in university-based literary journals that have limited circulation - need to change the way they live; living more “broadly” (that is, ranging beyond the classroom) will furnish poets with fresh experiences, enabling them to write “boldly” and acquire for their poetry “its largestintended audience” (438,
440; italics his). Barr does not want poets to ‘“dumb down’ poetry for the masses,” but he does suggest that many of the “[formal] innovations that followed those of Modernism
(projective verse, Language poetry, concrete poetry)” have been exhausted (435). Poetry, according to Barr, should now be “addressed to and energized by the general audiences of its time” (441; emphasis added). In 2003, poet and critic Christian Wiman (b. 1966) was appointed editor of Poetry. Since that time, and supported by the resources of the
Poetry Foundation, Wiman has increased the readership of Poetry dramatically.1 Among his many editorial decisions and initiatives, which have helped to remake the magazine,
Wiman published Barr’s provocative speech in the September 2006 issue. In a recent article for the New Yorker, Dana Goodyear suggests that the Poetry
Foundation’s mandate is, for the most part, at odds with the original vision of Poetry.
According to Goodyear, Harriet Monroe (1860-1936), who founded Poetry in 1912, “was
motivated by distaste for the mainstream” and conceived of Poetry as a magazine in
which content would not be dictated by popular tastes. In an early circular designed to
generate support for the magazine Monroe insisted that potential contributors and
subscribers to Poetry would have ‘“a chance to be heard in their own place, without the
limitations imposed by a popular magazine’” (qtd. Goodyear). With the editorial help of
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) - whose phrase “make it new”2 would be used to help brand and
summarize the modernist movement - the magazine would go on to publish the “new” work of poets such as William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), H. D. (1886-1961),
Marianne Moore (1887-1972), and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965); it would become “an emblem of high modernism” and, in particular, formal innovation (Goodyear). But Goodyear’s account - which echoes other narratives that focus on Monroe’s successes (and failures) as a steward of the “new” in American poetry - papers over a complex picture. Monroe always conceived of Poetry as a different kind of “little magazine”: the first American periodical devoted to poetry, and, more interestingly, a periodical that would neither cater to the mass audience of the popular magazine nor address itself merely to a limited coterie.3 Although the size and composition of the audience that Monroe intended to cultivate for Poetry is unclear, she seems to have imagined a potential readership that would be literate enough to appreciate innovative forms of poetry but also large enough to 3 sustain the magazine and support its contributors.4 One might call this readership, for the purposes of this dissertation, a “larger audience.”
In the early years ofPoetry, Monroe was often criticized for her efforts to enlarge the audience for poetry. Indeed, she had an ongoing debate about the need for an expanded readership with Pound, Poetry's Foreign Correspondent, who believed that a poet’s “great audience” was rather more ethereal than some “‘rabble’” and took the form of “‘the spirits of irony and of destiny and of humor, sitting with [the poet]”’5 (HMPR
161). Similarly, and since Ruth Lily’s 2002 donation, the magazine and its Foundation have been attacked for their efforts to connect poetry to its “largest possible audience.”
Many critics have viewed these efforts as crass concessions to some sort of popular taste, which debase poetry by tainting it with money (Goodyear). But, as Goodyear notes, albeit in passing, “Barr’s call for something new [is], in a narrow sense, consistent with the magazine’s radical origins.” Goodyear does not define what she means by “radical,” and seems to use the term as a general synonym for “innovative” when, in fact, it is often applied to a specific kind of avant-garde poetry.6 She does, however, suggest that both
Monroe and Barr, in defining their respective mandates, announce a break with some status quo, rejecting a particular mode of American poetry in favour of “something new.”71 would argue that in the discourses of both Monroe and Barr, to be new is not merely to write poems that are formally or thematically experimental; it is to be read by a larger audience, from which, Barr argues, poets have withdrawn; to be new is to reconnect poetry to readers, a point which Wiman echoes.8 It can be argued that Poetry, at different moments in its existence, has sought to define and claim for itself the symbolic 4
capital9 of the new - has sought to undertake (or enjoy the appearance of having
undertaken) a new project on behalf of the “health” of American poetry. But it can also be
argued that Poetry, at different moments, has been attempting to alter the structure of the
literary field by working to materialize what Monroe imagined: a substantial readership
for what Wiman terms “serious” and “complicated” poetry (Wiman).
Through an analysis of the work of different editors and poets who have been associated with the magazine, including Monroe, Williams, Kay Ryan (b. 1945), and
Samuel Menashe (1925-2011), my dissertation argues that the attempt to connect poetry to a larger audience, beyond the academy or a coterie, is not necessarily a commercial gesture that compromises a supposedly pure discourse; rather, this attempt (however theoretical or even mythical) is one that takes a “new” position - a position which has been there all along and which others have failed to perceive - in what Pierre Bourdieu
(1930-2002) calls the “space of possibles”: a position that does not so much connect poets to a mass audience as dare to acknowledge that poets are socially and culturally situated agents whose identities, texts, and careers are shaped by magazines like Poetry and, more generally, the different forms of capital that position agents in the literary field, including educational, social, cultural, and symbolic.
1. Scholarly Contribution
My dissertation contributes to existing scholarship on Monroe and the “little magazine” in the United States of the early twentieth century by analyzing Monroe’s conceptions of Poetry and its audience - as revealed in her editorials for the magazine - 5
by the light of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the structure of the literary field. Much of the
scholarship on Monroe, as it stands, is organized (if not limited) by two opposing
readings of the editor: she is viewed either as a steward of the new, and accordingly
praised, or as not enough of a steward, and duly dismissed. For example, Hoffman, Allen,
and Ulrich, in their landmark 1946 study, The Little Magazine: A History and a
Bibliography, praise Monroe as an editor “who did so much to encourage the revolution
in American verse” and who was eventually abandoned by many of the figures whom she
helped launch (39,42). “If it is the role of the little magazine to initiate, to act as the
advance guard for a new movement,” they write, “then it may be argued that Poetry had
served its function, that the natural cycle of the magazine had been completed when the
Chicago group moved East” (41-42). Later critics, such as John Timberman Newcomb,
go further by aligning Monroe’s support of “poetic radicals” more explicitly with that of
an “avant-garde activist model” (16). To this day, the much-visited Poetry Foundation web site continues to sustain a popular understanding of Monroe as a steward of the new
in American poetry.10
Others, however, take Monroe to task for not being enough of a supporter of
innovative poetry.11 Even the balanced and complex accounts12 that split the difference and see Monroe as a forward-thinking editor with limitations - a “modem Victorian,” to borrow a term that has been applied to the novelist May Sinclair (Raitt) - are still, in a sense, dictated by dichotomy. These accounts locate Monroe in the middle of a spectrum that still only takes the measure of the editor’s success as an advocate for the new. In other words, they implicitly favour those poetries of Monroe’s time that are now typically 6 associated with the new: Futurist, Imagist, modernist, etc. Monroe’s legacy, these accounts imply, is mostly a matter of the extent to which she, acting with the capacities of the self-determining individual, supported certain poetries perceived to be novel, by publishing them with as little editorial interference as possible in her magazine.
Ellen Williams is the rare critic who frees Monroe from this critical cul-de-sac - from having to appear to be sufficiently supportive of the new - by arguing that Monroe
did not create Poetry to be the triumphant vehicle of a new movement, of a
Poetry Renaissance, which it quickly became.Poetry began as the vehicle
of embattled idealism, developed out of Miss Monroe’s refusal to accept
the logic of her own literary career, and the universal judgment that
American poetry was too thin and too derivative to merit serious attention.
(“Harriet Monroe” 79)
As Williams suggests, Monroe did not set out to spearhead the innovative poetry with which she became associated. Williams, however, does not challenge the usefulness of the term “renaissance.”13 Moreover, she is hardly laudatory in suggesting that the founding of Poetry was, at heart, Monroe’s last-ditch attempt to salvage a “literary career,” masquerading as an idealistic and patriotic venture. Williams goes on to conclude that “[sjince the new movement terminated in a poetry which is notoriously inaccessible to the man in the street, Harriet Monroe’s aspirations for her audience seem ironically absurd today” (79). Williams, writing in 1971, could not have known that the twenty- first-century incarnation of Poetry would revive “Monroe’s aspirations for her audience.”
But Williams’s attempt to correct the critical impulse that would measure Monroe by the extent to which she supported the new ultimately has the effect of making Monroe appear
“absurd,” someone who refuses “to accept... logic.”
Pierre Bourdieu, however, supplies a critical framework and discourse that enables a different reading of “aspirations” that some might dismiss as “absurd.”
Although critics have attempted to situate Monroe in her specific historical context,14 my dissertation uses Bourdieu’s theory of the structure of the literary field to present an alternative account of Monroe’s particular achievements. More specifically, my account frees Monroe from the limiting dichotomy (regrettably traditional/heroically new) in which many scholars locate her by focusing on how her specific social context enabled her to conceive of, and attempt to create, a larger audience for poetry where none had apparently existed. In doing so, my account contributes to recent scholarship on women and periodicals,15 and recovers from oblivion what Michael Foucault (1926-1984) would call a “subjugated” knowledge (81). Monroe, I argue, is not a heroic individual whose legacy should be measured by the extent to which she supported the new (by, for example, taking the editorial advice of Pound); nor is she a passive object of historical forces. Instead, she is a historically-situated agent operating within the American literary field of the early twentieth century and, because of the various forms of capital which her upbringing and education afforded her, is therefore positioned to perceive, in the space of possibilities, a hitherto unrealized potentiality: a magazine devoted to new American poetry and aimed at a critical mass of readers, which is to say an audience large enough to sustain the magazine and those poets who would contribute to it. Monroe’s aspirations, as outlined in her editorials for Poetry, may be capitalist in the sense that they aim for poets to be, like painters, compensated by the marketplace; but her goal was not to turn Poetry into a “money-maker.”16 Indeed, her efforts reflect a far more idealistic desire to better
American society by providing an outlet for some of its more marginalized artists.
Monroe’s project, then, can be understood in relation to those of a few other editors of her time who boldly sought a larger audience for the contributors to their seemingly “little” magazines.17 In fact, as I demonstrate, it is more productive to think of Poetry in more general terms: as an enduring periodical and cultural site rather than the rickety little magazine wherein the experimental modernists published.
My dissertation contributes to scholarship on William Carlos Williams by exploring Williams’s tumultuous relationship with Monroe and Poetry, a relationship that has received far less scholarly attention than Monroe’s interactions with Pound. It also explores, more generally, Williams’s interactions with other little magazines and his complex conceptions of audiences, in general. Williams was an often enthusiastic supporter of little magazines18 and famously observed that “without [them], I myself would have been early silenced” {Auto 266). But his feelings about Poetry were rather more ambiguous. From 1913 until his death in 1963, Williams appeared in Poetry 99 times and received its Guarantor’s Award in 1924, suggesting that the magazine, at the very least, strongly supported his work and considered it worth disseminating (241). Yet, despite Williams’s support of little magazines (and Poetry's support of Williams), he often criticized the magazine under Monroe’s editorship. Making matters more unclear, he barely mentions Monroe and Poetry's extensive support of his work in his memoir, The Autobiography o f William Carlos Williams (1951). He could take Poetry, it seems, and leave it.
My dissertation uses Bourdieu’s theory of the structure of the literary field to show how Williams - through his relationship with Poetry and other little magazines, as well as in certain of his poems, prose, correspondence, and interviews - sought to attain symbolic capital by constructing an identity for himself as a socially marginalized poet who, in appearing to pay no heed to the needs of an audience or commercial concerns in general, embodies a humanist ideology and appears to exist outside of economic relations.
I expand on recent studies of Williams’s attempts to promote his work to readers19 by demonstrating conclusively how the doctor-poet aligned himself with those artists who, according to Bourdieu, “owe their prestige, at least negatively, to the fact that they make no concessions to the demand of the ‘general public’” ( RoA 217).
My alternate accounts of Monroe’s original aspirations for Poetry, as well as
Williams’s complicated relationships with Poetry, other little magazines, and audiences in general provide a much-needed historical context in which to consider the activities of the magazine’s current editors and the Poetry Foundation perse. These activities, far from being incongruous with Monroe’s aspirations, can be read as attempting to make her goals material, drawing on resources that Monroe, who struggled to make Poetry financially stable, could only imagine. In other words, this study, in making a new contribution to the way in which scholars read Monroe-era Poetry, will enable a clearer understanding of the present-day magazine, which has been too easily criticized for pursuing “the largest possible audience” for poetry (“About” 16). The activities of the 10 present-day magazine, it will be shown, are of a piece with Monroe’s progressive (even socialist) aspirations.
My project also makes a significant contribution to scholarship on contemporary
American poetry by devoting chapters to Kay Ryan and Samuel Menashe, who struggled for years to attain a readership and who have been supported by Poetry. Ryan and
Menashe - neither of whom have been the subjects of major studies - represent poets whose work aims to address a larger audience of readers without making the artistic or intellectual compromises that are often attributed to the sort of poetry that seeks a readership beyond a coterie. More specifically, the poems address a general reader but also strike a bold middleground between a humanist poetry (exemplified by the confessional, representational lyric poem) and a postmodernist poetry (exemplified by the self-reflexive language poem) - arguably, the two dominant modes of contemporary
American poetry. Monroe detected, in the literary field of her day, a hitherto-unrealized position for a periodical devoted to the efforts of American poets - a position which, although not fully realized during Monroe’s life, is currently being explored, with some material success, by the Poetry Foundation and the current editors of Poetry. My dissertation argues that the work of poets like Ryan and Menashe belongs to this productive space.
2. Methodology and Chapter Breakdown
I draw on the theories of Bourdieu and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) to analyze the activities of Monroe, Poetry, and Williams as well as the work of poets associated with the present-day magazine such as Kay Ryan and Samuel Menashe. Bourdieu’s
theory of the structure of the literary field helps situate Monroe and Williams in their
respective social, cultural, and historical contexts at the beginning of the twentieth
century. The literary field is defined as an objective space in which various agents - such
as editors like Monroe and poets like Williams - are distributed according to the various
forms of economic and symbolic capital which they possess. Agents who find themselves
in close proximity tend to share what Bourdieu terms a “habitus,” a kind of sensibility
that predisposes them to share particular values and take particular positions - for
example, the position of “a writer of hit plays or that of an avant-garde poet” (RoA 232).
“Position-takings” like “works, political manifestors or demonstrations” can be thought of
as the texts and activities that the agents produce. Yet, as Bourdieu insists in The Rules of
Art: Genesis and Structure o f the Literary Field (1992, 1996),
[t]he relationship among positions and position-takings is by no means a
relationship of mechanical determination. Between one and the other, in
some fashion, the space of possibles interposes itself, that is to say, the
space of position-takings actually realized, as it appears when it is
perceived through the categories of perception constitutive of a certain
habitus, that is, as an oriented space, pregnant with position-takings
identifiable as objective potentialities, things “to be done,” “movements”
to launch, reviews to create, adversaries to combat, established position-
takings to be “overtaken” and so forth. (234-35) 12
The literary field, then, is not a space of “absolute freedom” (235); rather, the milieu in which Monroe is positioned by the forms of capital that she has accumulated, at the start of the twentieth century, presents a “finite universe of freedom under constraints and objective potentialities...: problems to resolve, stylistic or thematic possibilities to exploit, contradictions to overcome, even revolutionary ruptures to effect” (RoA 235).
My dissertation recognizes Poetry as one of the aforementioned “reviews to create” and Monroe’s search for a larger audience as one of the “problems to resolve.”
Monroe could perceive the need to found Poetry because of her affluent origins, which my dissertation will explore and which, Bourdieu theorizes, “favour dispositions like audacity and indifference to material profit, or a sense of social orientation and the art of foreseeing new hierarchies...” (262). Williams is similarly positioned by his background and so acquires the social and cultural capital necessary to participate in the literary world and publish in magazines like Poetry. Williams, however, also defines himself against
Monroe’s effort, staking out a position in the literary field as an anti-establishment figure—albeit one with an eye on future success in the form of readers and awards, ironically enough. Moving forward in time, I explore how Ryan was enabled by the prestige she gained from publishing in magazines like Poetry even as other critics constructed her in terms of the outsider. I then consider how Poetry created a space and identity for Menashe by publishing his work and naming him a “Neglected Master.” In general, my dissertation suggests thatPoetry is not the little magazine of yesteryear, as imagined by celebratory histories of modernism; it is not the ephemeral expression of some courageous, forward-thinking, individual editor but, in fact, a cultural site that shapes the identities and careers of those poets who are pulled into its orbit. Poetry, however, should not be regarded as the exception to the idea that periodicals are the products of individual editors; the magazine, as conceptualized by Monroe and its current editors, provides a productive critique of this idea.
Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic nature of utterances also provides the dissertation with some additional theoretical framework. Writing is not the expression of an essence that transcends history, Bakhtin’s work suggests; rather, writing is a social discourse grounded in history, which is to say it is shaped by “a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment” (D N 1202). As Bakhtin suggests,
[t]he word is bom in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is
shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the
object. A word that forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way.
But this does not exhaust the internal dialogism of the word. It
encounters an alien word not only in the object itself: every word is
directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the
answering word that it anticipates. (DN 1205)
Although Bakhtin argues that the poem is monologic and, as a result, inferior to the more obviously dialogic novel, his ideas can be applied to poetry productively. Indeed, in her editorials for the magazine, Monroe recognizes that poets do not work in vacuums but, rather, exist in relation to other poets - even if some, like Williams, persist in celebrating the poet as a humanist figure of self-determination. As I demonstrate, the poems of Ryan and Menashe call attention to the dialogic nature of language: they themselves constitute 14 responses to prior utterances, such as cliche expressions, unusual quotations, and the poetry of others.
Chapter One, “Our magazine gallery”: Making an Editor and an Audience
Chapter One presents an alternate account of Monroe’s founding of, and aspirations for, Poetry. With the help of Bourdieu, I argue that Monroe’s genteel background provided her with social capital, enabling the editor to perceive in the “space of possibles” a different kind of magazine that would not only devote itself to American poetry, but also attempt to address itself to an as-yet-unrealized audience. Monroe, in my account, is not the failed poet who founded Poetry to secure a legacy for herself. Nor, as implicitly or explicitly anti-feminist critics would suggest,20 is she the dowdy editor who was not avant-garde enough, the woman who should have listened more to her Foreign
Correspondent, Pound, the talent scout with a sharper eye. Nor is she the heroic entrepreneur who transcends her historical circumstances and acts with self- determination, as implied by critics like Massa. Ultimately, Monroe was positioned to perceive the need for Poetry and to take advantage of the resources made available by her energetic social context: tum-of-the-century Chicago.
I also offer a revisionist account of Poetry itself. The magazine Monroe came to edit has too often been grouped with other little magazines of its day when, in fact,
Monroe conceived of Poetry as a different kind of periodical. Surveying the major studies of Poetry and, more generally, little magazines,21 I argue that Monroe’s magazine always was intended to occupy a different position in the literary field of the early twentieth century than the one in which it has been typically slotted by the existing criticism, which tends to measure Poetry's success by the extent to which it resembles a little magazine - in other words, the extent to which it celebrates the new in American poetry and aspires to cater to nothing larger than a group of a thousand readers or so.22 I then examine the editorials and correspondence through which Monroe fashioned Poetry as a periodical that would not only be financially sustainable, but would address itself to a large
American audience of unspecified size and composition. Although she aimed to position her publication against the poetry of the late Victorian and Georgian periods and, in general, the poetry of “popular magazines,” Monroe actually sought to construct and expand the audience for poetry in America: a relatively novel and progressive ambition for her time that locates Monroe among other editors who actively sought out a public. I will also problematize Monroe’s conception of audience by drawing attention to how little attention she gave its composition, despite her support of female poets. Who is included in this potential readership? Does her conception of audience address differences of race, class, gender, and sexuality, among other categories? Monroe’s vision, I conclude, was limited by an idealistic, Emersonian faith in poetry - especially its newer
American strains - to conjure up a larger American readership. And it fails to account for the reader’s ability to read and appreciate poetry, which depends, to a large extent, on his or her own educational capital. Chapter Two, “I swear never to be successful”: Making a Poet of Little Magazines
The second chapter explores how William Carlos Williams was shaped by his relationship with little magazines, even though he himself defined such publications in humanist terms as precarious, personal propositions that afford “an absolute freedom of editorial policy” {Auto 266). For Williams, the poet is a loner who cannot compromise himself to an audience and who must not be encumbered by the demands of an editor or a readership. Looking at his early life, however, I demonstrate that Williams was enabled by his education and social relationships, which brought him into contact with the artists and ideas of his time. Yet, in poems, prose, interviews, and correspondence, the doctor- poet tended to construct himself as an outsider poet who, in his pursuit of the new, cannot be seen to accommodate his work to “most who read”; an outsider who, in Williams’ decisive words, “cannot wait until the public catches up. And if it doesn’t, it’s too damned bad” (Tooker 28). I look at Williams’s relationship with the magazine Others (1915-
1919) as well as his editorship of Contact (1920-1923, 1932), a short-lived little magazine that aimed to bring American art into greater contact with its local conditions. I then consider his vexed relationship with Monroe’s own periodical. Unsurprisingly,
Williams’s attacks on the editor’s agenda, as well as the poems he published in Poetry, reflect a liberal humanist ideology that locates poets outside of economic relations. By appearing to transcend these circumstances, Williams secured symbolic capital and, in time, the readers and commercial rewards he originally spumed. 17
Chapter Three, “Outsider Art”: Making Kay Ryan
Leaping forward several decades, my third and fourth chapters explore how
Poetry and, more generally, the literary field have shaped the careers of two contemporary American poets who, like Williams, are often characterized as “outsiders.”
Chapter Three looks at Kay Ryan, the former Poet Laureate whom recent critics tend to locate in opposition to the academy. I begin by considering the limited body of scholarship on Ryan, which consists mostly of reviews and essays in non-academic periodicals like Poetry and The New York Review o f Books. Ryan, I argue, is celebrated to the extent that she appeals to general audiences and appears at odds with the institutionalized world of creative writing programs, wherein a majority of American poets make their careers. Although Ryan would seem to differ from Williams, a modernist who lived at a time when to resist general audiences and commercial considerations earned an artist prestige, both poets have tended to benefit from the humanist perception that they elude the taint of the economic sphere, be it the mass culture of Williams’s time, or the moneyed universities of Ryan’s.
As I argue, however, Ryan has received valuable support from educators, friends, and editors. She also banked the considerable cultural capital that comes when a poet publishes in prominent magazines. She has certainly been a fixture in Poetry, particularly since the Poetry Foundation revived Monroe’s mandate of reaching a large audience.24
But unlike Williams, Ryan does not romanticize her career or identity. In fact, a practical savviness about the vagaries of publishing pervades her essays and interviews. Moreover, although her poems address a general reader in that they do not abandon - as, for 18 example, language poetry does - what Perloff calls a “perfectly lucid” syntax (xi), they do not perpetuate the myth of the self-determining individual. To be sure, her work sometimes leans on a stable lyric “I,” which anchors much poetry in the liberal humanist tradition. Most of the time, however, her texts complicate that “I” by rejecting the confessionalist impulse and by engaging in dialogue with other, earlier utterances. Just as
Ryan lives and breathes in an ecosystem that confers symbolic capital on its agents through such things as magazines, so too do her poems exist in a larger cultural and historical context that makes them possible.
Chapter Four, “My aftermath”: Making a Neglected Master
The final chapter considers the case of Samuel Menashe, a poet who spent most of his life in obscurity, and whose career was revived by Poetry, which created an award for him (the Neglected Masters Award, worth $50,000) and arranged to have his New and
Selected Poems (2005) edited by Christopher Ricks and published by the prestigious
Library of America series (a major institution that, up until the publication of Menashe, had only dealt in the work of deceased poets). Although many critics have idealized
Menashe’s marginal status - including his precarious publishing history and lack of readers - the poet himself has resisted such celebrations, expressing instead a desire to occupy more fully a space in American culture. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his apartment poems, about which little has been written, obsess about the importance of space in honing the self. 19
But if his poems have dwelt on space, then they have also fallen through the cracks. These hard-to-classify-texts have divided the few critics and reviewers they have drawn, making Poetry's intervention all the more urgent. Accordingly, in the final section of the chapter, I analyze the ways in whichPoetry has attempted to shape an identity for
Menashe as a Neglected Master, thus securing for him the symbolic capital associated with the obscure poet who lacks a readership even as Poetry, at the very same time, has worked to create an audience for Menashe. With the help of the work of Jerome
McGann, I will examine the presentation and marketing of Menashe in a number of contexts, including especially his appearances in Poetry. Menashe’s late poems may be self-reflexive commentaries on the condition of the neglected poet, but they also avoid self-pity. If anything, they lampoon the figure of the self-sufficient poet even as they situate themselves within a larger history, including that of Poetry. Indeed, Menashe’s poems, like Ryan’s, aim to address a larger audience, thus satisfying the magazine’s mandate, not to mention Monroe’s original aspiration to offer sanctuary to those
American artists who have been ignored by the culture. Throughout the chapter, I draw on interviews which I conducted with Menashe over the course of many months in 2008 and
2009.
Conclusion
The conclusion summarizes my dissertation and considers the activities of the magazine as it enters its anniversary year as well as the recent opening of its new dedicated space - a building located at 61 West Superior Street in Chicago. The 20 conclusion also briefly considers a recent protest in the building and relates it to
Williams’s rejection of stable spaces and, more generally, the rebel’s distrust of money.
Future directions for research on the Poetry Foundation are suggested. Its website, which houses many resources including a blog, audio files, and digital copies of the magazine’s contents, deserves scholarly attention. 21
Chapter One
“Our magazine-gallery”: Making an Editor and an Audience
In a 2005 article, John Timberman Newcomb takes issue with the way in which
Ezra Pound and others have depicted Harriet Monroe, the founding editor of Poetry: A
Magazine o f Verse, as “an unimaginative bluestocking who was merely in the right place at the right time” (7). Newcomb goes on to conclude that, “[c]ontrary to derogations of her as a fortunately situated genteel poetaster, Harriet Monroe was exactly the person to originate and run a magazine devoted to reconstructing the value of poetry within early twentieth-century modernity” (20; emphases added). In the process of offering an otherwise positive account of Monroe as a “full-fledged, pioneering modernist,” however,
Newcomb obscures the importance of the pioneer’s social context, and suggests that
[tjhe unusual trajectory of Monroe’s literary career made her acutely aware
of the problematic material economies of modem poetic endeavor. Bom in
1860 into a socially prominent but not wealthy Chicago family, she
achieved fleeting fame in her early thirties through her “official” ode for
the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In the next few years, she sustained all
the way to the Supreme Court a judgment against the New York World for
an unauthorized and botched printing of the ode, a suit that helped to
establish legal precedent for the rights of American authors to control their
work. For nearly two decades thereafter, she struggled with only
intermittent success to make a life connected to poetry in a culture that 22
seemed increasingly to admit no place for the genre. Then in 1912, at the
age of fifty-two, with no significant editorial experience, she embarked on
her remarkable quarter-century as a modernist editor. She died at seventy-
six while on a trip across Peru to visit Inca ruins, still deeply engaged in
the world. (8, 9)
Newcomb’s telescoping of Monroe’s “literary career” enables him to describe the career’s “trajectory” as being “unusual.” It also has the effect of suggesting that Monroe, the editor, emerged from nowhere. He singles out only the most newsworthy event in
Monroe’s early experiences as a poet and playwright: her creation of a poem for the 1893
Columbian Exposition in Chicago. 'yft More problematically, he collapses “nearly two decades” of her life as a journalist, art critic, lecturer, and active member of various cultural communities in Chicago, before pivoting, by way of the word “Then,” to the founding of Poetry in 1912. Monroe might not have had “significant editorial experience,” but she had significant ties to the world of newspapers and periodicals; during the supposedly lost weekend, she wrote regularly for the Chicago Tribune, the
Atlantic, the New York Sun, the ChicagoEvening Post, and other national publications
(HMPR 9). Although he goes on to suggest that Monroe’s “immersion in modem styles and conceptions of verse-writing long predated her founding of Poetry and her acquaintance with Pound,” who served as Foreign Correspondent for Poetry, Newcomb glosses over thespecific ways in which Monroe’s background and social context enabled her to conceive of Poetry (9). In short, Newcomb implies that the editor possesses the capacities of the self-determining individual who struggles against, and succeeds in spite 23 of, her material conditions. (Even her death is invested with a sense of pioneering adventure: Monroe, exploring “Inca ruins,” is “still deeply engaged in the world,” as opposed to enjoying a vacation.)
Newcomb is not alone; critics who celebrate Monroe tend to characterize her as a heroic individual who shaped her own destiny. Profiling the then-recently deceased
Monroe in their influential survey of 1946, The Little Magazine: A History and a
Bibliography,27 Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich record that
[fjriends [of Monroe] miss the sight of her small figure out in a back alley,
brewing coffee over an open fire for her tea guests. They miss her presence
on festive nights when poets read verses, talk late, and eat handsomely.
They miss the fear of being rushed across dangerous boulevards by the
tugging hand of Harriet, who always crossed with head bent low, refusing
to glance either way. (34)
Hoffman and colleagues characterize Monroe as an eccentric and literally forward- looking “presence” who, in refusing to “glance” at the surrounding traffic, appears to stand apart from her immediate social environment. They proceed to argue that
“[i]ndubitably there were few persons in the America of 1912 better qualified to lead the fight for a new poetry,” implying that Monroe, without a doubt, was close to one-of-a- kind (39). In a 1973 biography of Monroe, Daniel J. Cahill goes further, arguing that,
“[a]s an editor, her single-handed efforts were prophetic in stirring the latent talents of the
Midwest and in shaping a movement in verse that was both modem and revolutionary”
(15; emphases added). More than a decade later, Ann Massa celebrates Monroe less as a 24 prophet and more as an entrepreneur who, struggling to make a place for her poetry in the
1893 Columbian Exposition, “learned and showed her winning qualities: determination, entrepreneurial flair, a commitment to Chicago’s culture and the ability to enhance it.
Then, and again in 1911 [when she sought funding for Poetry], she was able to sell her sponsors two products: poetry and herself’ (52). Later, using italics to isolate Monroe, the discrete entity, from her editorial colleagues at Poetry, Massa observes that “the wisdom and the skill of [Monroe’s] policy and her choice proved manifest. And it was her policy, her choice, though a series of able assistant editors - Alice Corbin Henderson, Yvor
Winters, Morton Zabel, Elder Olson - acted as first readers, and she occasionally handed
Poetry over to a guest editor” (69). It may be that Massa, by investing Monroe with the characteristics of the self-determining individual, offers an over-corrective to the sexist accounts that award Pound all of the points and diminish the significance of Monroe’s contribution to Poetry,28 Nevertheless, the critic, however well-intentioned, perpetuates the myth of the liberal humanist subject who transcends history.
In fact, accounts that portray Monroe as being “in the right place at the right time” would not be incorrect if they were not also writing her off for the purpose of exalting a figure like Pound or exempting him from having to belong to the sort of cultural context that has a hand in making poets. In other words, those accounts that portray Monroe as being “in the right place at the right time” must also include everyone else - every last
Pound - among what Newcomb calls the “fortunately situated.” With reference to Pierre
Bourdieu (1930-2002) and his theory of the structure of the literary field, I argue that
Monroe’s material conditions - specifically, the various forms of economic, educational, 25 social, and cultural capital which her upbringing, education, and social context afforded her - position the editor and enable her to perceive, in the space of possibles, a hitherto unrealized potentiality: a financially stable magazine devoted to American poetry and aimed at a critical mass of readers, which is to say an audience large enough to help sustain the magazine and pay those poets who would contribute to it.
In the first part of the chapter, I downplay the individual achievement of Monroe and demonstrate instead how Poetry aggressively defines itself againstother magazines in a cultural realm: the American literary field of the early twentieth century. In the second part, I consider how the distribution of different forms of capital equips figures like Monroe with the luxury of audacity required to launch specialized publications such as poetry magazines. (I use ‘figures ” because Monroe, far from being “exactly the person to originate and ran” Poetry, was one of at least several persons who could have founded a magazine like it.) In the third and largest part of the chapter, which focuses on the initial five years of the journal (its first distinct period of financial stability), I argue that Poetry
- in editorials, columns, and other texts - constructs itself as neither a popular magazine
(that addresses a mass audience) nor as the ephemeral “little magazine” (that devotes itself to the new and limits itself to a coterie), but as a different kind of periodical relative to others in the field at the time: a stable and relatively progressive cultural institution that challenges the idea of the poet as a self-determining individual by working to create a space for reading and a readership, both of which aim to support poetic discourse. The fourth part of the chapter explores how Poetry imagines its readership in vague terms, as 26 mythically expansive, and in more specific terms, as a collaborative body that is heterogeneous in terms of race and gender.
1. “The first in the field”:Poetry in Relation to Other Magazines
In the summer of 1912, Monroe - who was readying Poetry for launch in
November - found herself, all of a sudden, in a kind of arms race (Ellen Williams, HMPR
26). As she recalls in her autobiography, A Poet’s Life (1938),
I suffered a scare in the circular of a projected Boston poetry magazine
which threatened to use our title and to begin publication in October, a
month or two earlier than the date I had announced. Boston had the
advantage of Chicago in any literary enterprise, and I feared that the
efforts of the three Bostonians - Edmund Brown, Edward J. O’Brien, and
William Stanley Braithwaite - in conjunction with the Four Seas
Company, a small publishing concern, might prove devastating to our
plans; for... I had pre-empted the title Poetry in the circular issued in
April.... To protect our title and maintain our precedence in the new field,
it would evidently be necessary to antedate the Bostonians, so I made
secret plans to begin with an October issue, trusting that the rival would be
delayed beyond his announced October date. (284-85)
“[Sjuffered,” “threatened,” “advantage,” “feared,” “devastating,” “plans,” “pre-empted,”
“protect,” “precedence,” “field,” “secret plan,” “rival” - what is striking about Monroe’s recollection of the founding of Poetry and its Boston “rival,” Braithwaite’s Poetry Journal (1912-1914), is her urgent, militaristic vocabulary. In Monroe’s words, she and
Braithwaite are less competing editors launching magazines than competing generals launching missiles. Inadvertently, she brings to mind (the contemporary mind) the tropes of late-twentieth-century theorists whom she had not read, such as Bourdieu and Michel
Foucault (1926-1984). Poetry, she implies, was not the product of some transhistorical god who declares, let there be light; it did not spiral out of a void like the T. S. Eliot who,
Pound famously wrote to Monroe on 30 September 1914, “actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own” (“To Harriet” 40). Poetry was a response to a cultural problem that preceded it; Monroe sought to address a pre-existing gap in the American literary “field.” Her attempt to publish a first issue before Poetry Journal embodies a desire to exercise power and occupy a position in what Bourdieu (describing the literary field and inadvertently echoing Monroe) calls a “field of competitive struggles” ( RoA
232). Poetry appeared in October, becoming the first American magazine devoted to poetry. Braithwaite’sPoetry Journal did not come out until December and, after that,
“made only sporadic appearances,” dying off in 1914 and allowing Monroe to claim the spoils: what Cahill calls the “right of precedence to her title,” which, more significantly, can be exchanged for symbolic capital - in this case, the privilege of being first (Kenny
Williams 521; Cahill 49). But being first in a field implies the existence of a series. In other words, the claim of being first relies on the existence of others who will occupy later positions in the series. Poetry needs Poetry Journal - the magazine it beat to the finish line - in order to be first. 28
In the years to come, as Monroe emphasized Poetry's symbolic capital privately and publicly, she often did so at the expense of little magazines such as Others and, of course, Poetry Journal, inadvertently drawing attention to the field in which her publication exists and on which it depends to define itself. In a letter to Alfred
Kreymborg, editor ofOthers , she states, “Please make it very clear that we [atPoetry ] were the first in the field and the beginning of the present Renaissance” ( HMPR 150; emphases added). More publicly, Poetry asserts its precedence through advertising that provoked the magazine’s competitors. Indeed, in the September 1915 issue of Poetry,
Monroe defiantly notes that
Mrs. Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff, who has recently become one of the
editors of the Boston Poetry Journal, asks us to delete from our
advertisements the phrase “The only magazine devoted exclusively to this
art.” The suggestion is timely - we shall try to remember to oblige her.
Indeed, this field, this wilderness, in which we were so recently a lonely
pioneer, will soon be dotted with shacks, perhaps even with palaces.
Almost from the first the Poetry Journal offered us the high honor of
imitation; indeed, we had to hasten our first number in order to protect our
title from the Bostonian invader. (“OC” 315)
Although Monroe recognizes that, for the sake of accuracy, Poetry should relinquish its title as “‘[t]he only magazine devoted exclusively to [poetry],’” she nevertheless reminds readers that until “recently” her magazine was a “lonely pioneer,” troubled only by the odd barbarian in the form of a “Bostonian invader.” The following spring, Monroe acknowledges the existence of other magazines - “evidence of the renaissance” [sic] -
but cannot resist asking, “Is it possible that only three and a half brief years ago we were
alone in the field? Now a new organ of the art strikes its chord every few months, and the
air is a-quiver with projects still untuned?” (“Down East” 86) Still later, in an October
1917 editorial, Monroe recounts the Braithwaite episode again, emphasizing that the first
issue of Poetry appeared “about September twenty-third” of 1912 and “antedated the
Poetry Journal by nearly two months and made our long-announced title secure” (“TFY”
39-40). By drawing on such different historical phenomena as the Renaissance and the
founding of the American frontier - both of which marked seemingly “new” ventures for
Europe and the United States, respectively - Monroe further invests her magazine with
the symbolic capital of being first. But she ignores the fact that a “renaissance” implies a
rebirth, which is to say aprior existence; and she overstates the loneliness of a “pioneer”
who would not be so “lonely” if Monroe would only regard others - the “Bostonian”
invader,” for one - as “pioneer[s]” in their own right.
In addition to asserting that it is the first American poetry magazine, Poetry, in its
early years, also emphasizes that it is the first American institution to compensate poets in
the form of financial prizes, thus stockpiling more symbolic capital for itself. But once
again a claim is made at the expense of another institution, inadvertently reinforcing the
social and competitive nature of the literary field. In one editorial, Monroe notes that the
American poet “competes for no scholarships, and for no prizes but POETRY’s” (“The
Poet’s Bread and Butter” 196). In another, an unnamed author, speaking on behalf of
Poetry, affirms that “[pjoets...receive no prizes except ours; no university or other institution, so far as we are aware, offers a scholarship for excellence in [poetry]”
(“Announcement” 94). Both of these texts take aim at the American Academy in Rome by claiming that it does not open “its richly gilded doors” to the poet; that it does not offer
“bed, board, and a liberal income” (196; 94). Later, in a 1917 editorial, Monroe refers to the Academy as “an over-luxurious endowment” for the “other arts” (“TFY” 34). The
American editor’s terms - “richly gilded,” “over-luxurious” - constitute a subtle code for the Academy’s decadence. In short, in a number of texts, Monroe works to brand Poetry as a one-of-a-kind, pragmatic, and home-grown American institution - a branding campaign that requires, ironically enough, an opposing institution against which to define it.
Nevertheless, as the field of American literary magazines - described by Monroe as a “wilderness” - grows more crowded with “shacks” and “palaces,” Poetry, the previously “lonely pioneer,” preserves its earlier, militaristic stance, remaining on high alert for potential threats. In a May 1914 editorial, “The Enemies We Have Made,”
Monroe surveys various responses, from so-called “friends” and “enemies,” to the first year and a half of Poetry (61). The very title of Monroe’s editorial seizes power for her magazine, which has “[m]ade” its own “[e]nemies.” (It also echoes the combative language of Wyndham Lewis, who had fashioned a “hostile ‘Enemy’ persona” for himself as early as 1913 [Meyers 35].) Following this, Monroe attempts to validate the centrality of the magazine by acknowledging the “salutations” that Poetry has received from figures of varying nationalities, levels of prestige, and, apparently, aesthetic and political temperaments: “[f]rom France, Italy and England, from India, China and New Zealand, and even from our next-door neighbors... from poets laurelled and obscure, from editors and critics, classicists and radicals” (“EWHM” 61). Having suggested that
Poetry can be all things to all people around the world - or, at least, all people in the poetry world - Monroe goes on to address the magazine’s “enemies,” whom, she writes,
“are not so numerous or important,” including disgruntled readers, the poet Ella Wheeler
Wilcox, and the magazine the Dial,30 which Monroe characterizes as an “orthodox neighbor” that does not take “chances” (61, 63). The editorial ends with a battle-cry, positioning the Dial as yet another competitor in the “field of competitive struggles”
(Bourdieu, RoA 332): the “[c]olorless correctness” of the Dial “must not be ignored, but fought, if our art is ever to be free” (64). A year and a half later, on the occasion of
Poetry's third birthday, Monroe publishes an unnamed editor’s “compliment” -
‘“POETRY has a fighting edge’” - and agrees with it, affirming that her magazine
“should keep the edge polished, since art.. .needs to carry a sword for her enemies” (“Our
Birthday” 30). On the magazine’s fourth birthday, Monroe concludes that poetry “was in need of, not only a defender but an aggressive spokesman...” (“FM” 33; emphases added).
Another mechanism by which the newly-founded Poetry asserted itself was through a column entitled “Our Contemporaries,” which appeared sporadically at the back of the magazine from February 1914 to August 1923, and surveyed the poetry- related activities of other magazines and anthologies in the American literary field. (After the summer of 1923, this occasional round-up of literary and arts magazines was subsumed under the “News Notes” section of Poetry.) Some of the “Our Contemporaries” columns feature the by-line of Monroe; others, that of Alice Corbin Henderson (1881-
1949), Poetry's first associate editor. (Some columns have no by-line and are now credited to the Poetry Foundation.) But regardless of the specific author, the “Our
Contemporaries” column speaks for Poetry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first instalment, written by Henderson for the February 1914 issue, begins by mocking Braithwaite and, more specifically, his own survey for the BostonEvening Transcript, an annual analysis of poetry in American magazines. Henderson reports that Braithwaite has “heroically read all the verse in ‘the seven leading magazines,’ mostly those solemn standpatters [sic] which print a little verse as a decorative incident” (187). Using evident irony, Henderson takes issue with the seven poems (whittled down from 211 contenders) which
Braithwaite, a “cheerful critic,” presents as the best of the year (188). “POETRY
[magazine] would like to present these seven masterpieces as a Bostonian exhibit,” writes
Henderson, emphasizing that five of the “masterpieces... represent current magazine poetry in its most banal mood of mediocrity” (188). Seizing on Braithwaite’s critical commentary - specifically, his comparison of a sonnet by one Mahlon Leonard Fisher to
Keats’ “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” - Henderson drops the mask of irony and wonders, “If this kind of opinionating [sic] passes for criticism in Boston, what can be expected of the shadowy region beyond the Alleghenies?” (188). Poetry would continue to criticize its Bostonian rival, directly and indirectly, in the months and years to come.31 The magazine, then, does not just claim the “right of precedence,” the symbolic capital of being the first in its field; the magazine also appears to claim the power to survey and define the field. Throughout the 1910s, but especially in 1915, the “Our Contemporaries” column locates Poetry in a social context, in relation to other periodicals, sometimes through attacks, sometimes through praise. For example, in the August 1915 instalment, not-too- subtly subtitled “Our Friend the Enemy,” Henderson scrutinizes the Dial for having published a negative review of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1915). “It is a sad commentary on the present state of criticism,” observes Henderson, “that it should be recorded of The D ial.. .that it recognizes merit onlyafter the fact. For the initial recognition, genius must look to other tribunals,” which presumably include Poetry (261).
But the “Our Contemporaries” column also shored up Poetry's position in the United
States by identifying and championing magazines in other countries that share, along with
Monroe’s publication, a similar mission. The February 1915 column, written by Monroe, acknowledges “with deep regret... the suspension of Poetry and Drama, the interesting quarterly which has been spokesman for the art in England, as POETRY is in America”
(246). The June instalment celebrates the Mercure de France — a French magazine focused on “all that is most vital in modem literature” - for resuming publication (156).
“Our Contemporaries” also singles out new magazines for encouragement, thus emphasizing Poetry's power to anoint contenders while defining its position relative to these publications. In March 1915, it offers “[congratulations to Miss Margaret C.
Anderson, editor of The Little Review , upon the completion of the first year of her high- stepping charger!” (300) In May of the same year,The New Republic, which was then in its infancy, is described as a “new weekly” that “gives promise of competent criticism of art and letters,” and “has, in one or two instances, followed some of POETRY’s 34
‘leads..( 9 9 ) . (In other words, Monroe suggests that the “new weekly” is most
“competent” when at its most imitative.) In the September instalment, Monroe celebrates a number of “little magazines,” positioning Poetry as a happy middle ground between what she calls the “conservative” Poetry Journal and the newly-founded and “perhaps more radical” Others (316, 315). (Chapter Two analyzes the role of William Carlos
Williams in supporting Others.) Yet, the unsigned “Our Contemporaries” from August
1923 suggests thatPoetry has grown lax in defining the field. “It is high time we were noticing our contemporaries again,” the column begins, “for they are noticing us with a vengeance” (286). Calling attention to criticisms of Poetry by other magazines, including
The Fugitive (1922-1925), the column inadvertently reminds one that the power of
Monroe’s magazine is not inherent, not a substance that can be possessed; power, as
Foucault argues, “is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised, and.. .only exists in action” (“TL” 89). If Poetry does not exercise its power, the column implies, some other magazine will.32
2. The Chicago of Possibles: Monroe in the Literary Field
There is no way to know what would have happened if Braithwaite’s Poetry
Journal had launched its first issue before Poetry. (For example, there is no way to know if “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which appeared in the June 1915 issue of
Poetry, would have ended up in Braithwaite’s magazine or if Poetry Journal would have become the site for Imagism.) But it helps merely toimagine that figures like Monroe and
Braithwaite have what Bourdieu terms ‘“counterparts’ in other possible worlds in the 35
form of the ensemble of people each could have been if the world had been different”
(235). It helps to imagine a Monroe who does not catch wind of Braithwaite’s plans (and,
therefore, does not move up Poetry's release date), if only to remind oneself that the
outcomes of literary history do not originate in individuals; they originate in the
opportunities (the news of rivals’ actions, for example) made available to these
individuals by their social, economic, and literary relations.
Moreover, the very fact that therewas a face-off between editors reminds one that
Monroe’s seemingly individual achievement was a potentiality, perceivable by others. It
does not matter that, as Monroe “felt,” Braithwaite’s magazine “was an impudent
appropriation of her idea” (HMPR 26). And yet it also does not matter that Monroe may
have been the “impudent” editor, encroaching on the Bostonian’s turf. Even if there had
not been a contest at all, or, for that matter, a Braithwaite, Monroe’s seemingly private
idea for a poetry magazine can still be regarded as a social one, latent in the American
literary field of the early twentieth century. Monroe herself observes, in a 1914 editorial,
that the idea to do more for American poetry could have been recognized by at least one
other magazine, if only it had had the vision required to recognize the chance. “Not only has [the Dial] failed to grasp a great opportunity,” suggests Monroe, “ - it has been utterly blind and deaf to it, has never known the opportunity was there” (“EWHM” 64).
Poetry, Monroe suggests, was waiting to be conceived. Indeed, as Bourdieu argues,
[f]or bold strokes of innovation or revolutionary research to have some
chance of even being conceived, it is necessary for them to exist in a
potential state at the heart of the system of already realized possibles, like 36
structural lacunae which appear to wait for and call for fulfilment, like
potential directions of development, possible avenues of research.
Moreover, they must have some chance of being received, meaning
accepted and recognized as “reasonable,” at least by a small number of
people, the same ones who would no doubt have been able to conceive of
them. (RoA 235-36)
But, of course, it was so “‘reasonable’” for someone other than Monroe to conceive of an
American poetry magazine and a potential audience for it that someone other than
Monroe did in fact conceive of it - Braithwaite. Monroe also had an international peer. In
England, in 1912, the coincidentally named poet and editor Harold Monro (1879-1932) founded Poetry Review, which still exists, and would go on to found the short-lived
Poetry and Drama34 (1913-1914). As Mark S. Morrison notes, Monro sought to make verse recitation popular, and regarded his magazines “not as elitist coterie organs, but as exactly the opposite - organs for the popularization of poetry. Monro shared with other early modernist writers an optimism about reaching new audiences within the urban masses” (54, 69). Like his near-namesake in Chicago, Monro sought to connect poets to a larger audience than they had at the start of the twentieth century by creating a stable space for poetry - in Monro’s case, the Poetry Bookshop, also known as the Poetry
House, which sold volumes of poetry, held readings, provided “cheap lodgings for artists and poets,” and was, from 1912 to 1935, “the most famous centre for poets in the
English-speaking world”35 (Hibberd 116, 113). Interestingly, Dominic Hibberd’s description of how Monro has been misperceived - “a minor Georgian who failed to 37 appreciate Eliot” - echoes misperceptions of his American counterpart (3). A more comprehensive account of Poetry's founding, then, should re-imagine Newcomb’s isolated and individual Monroe, the “pioneering modernist,” on Bourdieu’s slightly more populated “field of competitive struggles,” vying with those who, possessing the same kinds and quantities of capital, find themselves in close proximity and predisposed to a similarly adventurous sensibility. (A more comprehensive account should also take issue with Monroe’s own characterization of the magazine as a “lone adventurer into a new field” [“FM” 33].)
But which kinds and what quantities of capital are required to orient people towards unrealized areas of investigation? Bourdieu concludes that, “[i]n a general manner, it is the people who are richest in economic capital, cultural capital and social capital who are the first to head for new positions (a proposition which seems to be confirmed in all fields, in the economy as well as in sciences)” (RoA 262; emphases added). Yet he also notes that
the literary field is so attractive and so welcoming to all those who possess
all the characteristics of the dominants minus one: to “poor relations” of
the great bourgeois dynasties, aristocrats ruined or in decline, members of
minorities stigmatized or rejected from other dominant positions, and in
particular from high public service, and those whose uncertain and
contradictory social identity predisposes them in some way to occupy the
contradictory position of dominated among the dominants. (RoA 227) 38
Both Monroe and Braithwaite can be characterized as occupying this “contradictory position of dominated among the dominants.” Both came from “genteel poverty” and
‘“cultured surroundings,’” which is to say once-thriving families that had fallen into decline but had nevertheless afforded the two editors the education, opportunities, and connections that enabled each to become a journalist and published poet36 (Kenny
Williams 518). In other words, their backgrounds invested them with significant quantities of educational capital, which, by becoming journalists and poets, they
T-T converted into social and cultural capital. Indeed, the very funding that made Poetry possible depended on Monroe’s social connections, which gave her access to what she calls “men prominent in the commercial and professional life of the greatest inland city”
(“TFY” 35). Gender and race further entrench Monroe (a woman) and Braithwaite (an
African-American) as being “dominated among the dominants,” predisposing them to search for untapped sources of cultural capital. As Bourdieu suggests, the relative lack of positions available to “members of minorities stigmatized or rejected from other dominant positions” encourages those “members” who do have resources (RoA 227) - in this case, a woman and an African American - to realize positions of their own. The
“unusual trajectory of Monroe’s literary career,” as Newcomb has it, proves to be not so unusual after all.
In short, impresarios like Monroe have the economic, educational, and cultural capital needed not only to be aware of, and productively participate in, the literary field but also, crucially, to perceive the positions that have been occupied and, more importantly, the potential (and risky) positions that may yet be occupied. To put this 39 another way, editors do not conjure up ideas for new magazines out of thin air. Indeed, what may appear, to outsiders, to be rarefied air is actually what Bourdieu calls the “space of possibles”: “an oriented space, pregnant with position-takings identifiable as objective potentialities, things ‘to be done,’ ‘movements’ to launch, reviews to create, adversaries to combat, established position-takings to be ‘overtaken’ and so forth” (RoA 235). And what Monroe is positioned to discern, in the American literary field at the start of the twentieth century, is a “finite universe of freedom under constraints and objective potentialities.problems to resolve, stylistic or thematic possibilities to exploit, contradictions to overcome, even revolutionary ruptures to effect” (RoA 235). Poetry was one of the aforementioned “reviews to create”; the need to find an audience for poets, one of the “problems to resolve.”
The impetus to create a review and audience for poetry would have presented itself to the well-placed impresario as being “ripe” for realization because, in the early twentieth century, American poets had relatively few reliable outlets in which to publish verse (LMHB 34). No magazine existed - or had existed - in the United States that was focused solely on poetry (Massa 51). Popular magazines with large, national print runs that did publish poetry tended to marginalize it, using sentimental verse with38 fixed rhyme and meter to fill out leftover column space. For example, in their survey of “the so- called quality magazines for the months immediately previous to Poetry's appearance,” including The Atlantic, Scribner’s, and H arper’s, Hoffman and colleagues note that “the periodicals which most persons thought of as ‘good’ magazines... carried from two to five verse tidbits a month, generally of a highly vapid character” (34). TheAtlantic comes off 40 the worst in their survey: “[a]lmost completely blind to new talent, The Atlantic exhibited during 1912 only one piece of verse by a poet (Amy Lowell) new to the American literary scene” (34). Ellen Williams lists “the Century, the Atlantic, the North American Review,
Harper's, Scribner’s, Lippincott’s, the Forum, [and] the Bellman” among early-twentieth- century magazines that used poetry as “convenient filler” ( HMPR 5).
In terms of the immediate environment in which Monroe lived and worked as a journalist and poet, Chicago made little space for poetry and was known as a “graveyard for little magazines” (51). Yet Chicago, at the turn of the century, was also a growing and lively cultural site and not without resources to commit to the arts,39 even if, to Monroe’s frustration, they were not being marshalled on behalf of the cause of poetry. Indeed,
Monroe considered the well-endowed Art Institute of Chicago (which received public money and supported painters and sculptors) as an example of the sort of institution which poets needed.40 In addition, the city was especially supportive of the cultural work of women.41 Monroe first came to significant public attention when she successfully lobbied for the inclusion of poetry (her own) at the aforementioned 1893 Columbian
Exposition. On several occasions, then, the space of possibles in tum-of-the-century
Chicago confronted the woman-joumalist-poet with unrealized possibilities for the then- neglected discourse of poetry. Founding Poetry, a magazine dedicated to and respectful of poetry, constituted one of these possibilities. 3. Refuge and Gallery: ConstructingPoetry
Although Monroe’s writings define Poetry against the popular magazine that has little space for poetry, they also constructPoetry as something other than the unstable underdog which we have come to think of as the little magazine, despite the fact that influential histories and critics usually include Poetry as a notable example.42 Hoffman,
Allen, and Ulrich define the little magazine as “a magazine designed to print artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses” (2). They go on to note that
[s]uch periodicals are... non-commercial by intent, for their altruistic ideal
usually rules out the hope of financial profit. No doubt little magazine
editors would welcome a circulation of a million or two, but they know
that their magazines will appeal only to a limited group, generally not
more than a thousand persons. And so, financially limited, editors
generally caution contributors to banish all thought of remuneration, to be
satisfied with payment ‘in fame, not specie.’ When there is money for
contributors, promises of payment are made triumphantly, always as
though such payment is to be made in spite of, rather than because of, the
bourgeois system of values. (LMHB 2; emphasis added)
Little magazines usually do not last beyond a first issue and “usually come into being for the purpose of attacking conventional modes of expression and of bringing into the open new and unorthodox literary theories and practices” (LMHB 4). This definition persists; as Scott McCracken notes, “Tittle magazines’ are destined for ruin, failure, and defeat; 42 but like a momentary fashion or a passing style in architecture the magazines only become historically legible at the point of their obsolescence.... It is, therefore, their incompleteness rather than their coherence that signals the ways in which they contribute to a broader cultural history” (599). A little magazine, then, is a periodical with limited resources, circulation, readership, and lifespan, in which new writers and new forms of writing are offered provisional sanctuary and symbolic capital in lieu of payment.
Poetry, however, does not quite fit this definition.43 Monroe, to be sure, wanted some sort of new poetry to find a home in Poetry. In the April 1912 circular that was sent out to generate contributors and subscribers, she proposes that Poetry will free poets from what she calls the “limitations imposed by the popular magazine,” which require poets to write short poems with general appeal (APL 251). Without these “limitations” poets would be able to write in some vague new way that would enable Poetry to “appeal to, and it may be hoped... develop, a public primarily interested in poetry as an art, as the highest, most complete human expression of truth and beauty” (251). Monroe also highlights a concern for the “new” when, towards the very end of the circular, she promises that the editors of Poetry “shall read with special interest poems of modern significance...” {APL 252; emphasis added). The idea of the “new” winds through a number of her editorials for Poetry,44 culminating in the introduction to The New Poetry:
An Anthology o f Twentieth-Century Verse in English (1917), edited by Monroe and
Henderson. Monroe insists that “ Poetry, ever since its foundation in October, 1912, has encouraged this new spirit in the art...” (xxxv). Echoing Pound’s description of Imagism, she proceeds to offer a definition of “the new poetry” as that which “strives for a concrete 43 and immediate realization of life; it would discard the theory, the abstraction, the remoteness, found in all classics not of the first order. It is less vague, less verbose, less eloquent, than most poetry of the Victorian period and much work of earlier periods”
(xxxv-vi).
But Monroe’s support of some sort of “modem” or “new” or non-“Victorian” poetry, at least initially, is as much a promotional strategy as it is an endorsement of whichever poetries can be grouped under such broad, inclusive banners. In the very same sentence of the circular in which Monroe declares a “special interest” in “poems of modem significance,” she assures potential contributors that “the most classic subject will not be declined if it reaches a high standard of quality,” thus diffusing the proposed focus on the “modem” and the “new” {APL 252). (Later, in her first editorial for Poetry,
Monroe notes that “[t]he [editorial] test, limited by ever-fallible human judgment, is to be quality alone; all forms, whether narrative, dramatic or lyric, will be acceptable [to the magazine]” (“MM” 28).) Moreover, Monroe’s circular - the very first text publicly to construct Poetry - does not define “modem significance,” thus preserving the elasticity of the term. Indeed, as Suzanne W. Churchill emphasizes, an adjective like “modem” or
“new,” in the 1910s, can mean everything and, therefore, nothing: “the New Woman, the
New Psychology, the New Morality, the New Art, the New Theater, the New Poetry. The term ‘new’ seemed capable of aligning all spheres of thought and activity into a harmonious modem order” (40). Moreover, in the context of early-twentieth-century
America, being “new,” like “being first,” can be read as the sort of “ordinary property” which can be exchanged for symbolic capital; this quality of apparent novelty, when 44
“perceived by social agents endowed with the categories of perception and appreciation permitting them to perceive, know and recognize it, becomes symbolically efficient, like a veritable magical power: a property which, because it responds to socially constituted
‘collective expectations’ and beliefs, exercises a sort of action from a distance, without physical contact” (Bourdieu, Practical Reason 102). Although Poetry, under Monroe’s direction, would eventually (and famously) publish a number of poets who have come to be associated with experimental modernism, such as Ezra Pound, H. D. (1886-1961), and
T. S. Eliot, the concepts the “new” and the “modem” in Monroe’s very early writings about, and for, the magazine remain suggestively vague, accruing symbolic capital for the magazine without committing it to a single aesthetic programme.
More noteworthy than the general and brief reference to “poems of modem significance” is the fact that Monroe’s circular focuses almost all of its word-count on lamenting the ways in which poets are financially marginalized by their society, and on proposing how poets might be better supported through the institution of a poetry- centered periodical (that is competitive in its compensation, relative to other arts) and the creation of a larger audience for these poets. Monroe notes that the “[ljeading publishers of England and America.. .“almost never” publish a book of verse unless the expense of publication is paid by the author when the book is issued” (qtd. in HMPR: 14). She goes on to observe that most magazine editors are constrained to publish short poems of “no more than twenty or thirty lines ‘no matter how meritorious’” and that they must “accept verse from the standpoint of popularity rather than excellence” (14). Poets’ labour is equated with that of other, better remunerated artists when she laments the fact that 45
“[p]rices paid for the few poems accepted [by magazine editors] are less than one-tenth, sometimes scarcely one-hundredth, what a painter or sculptor would receive for an equally successful work requiring an equal amount of ability and time” (14). In short, in the first half of the circular, Monroe maps out the state of the American art world and posits that the typical poet45 occupies a precarious economic position.
Although she does not yet consider how factors like race and gender46 may contribute to the precariousness of some poets, Monroe, in the second half of the circular, outlines how Poetry will provide, to borrow a phrase from Newcomb, a “stable and energetic discursive space” for some sort of universal underclass of poets (7; emphasis added). Poetry will “give the poets a chance to be heard, as our exhibitions give artists a chance to be seen; [it] shall serve as an organ for Poetry [sic], representing its interests, as numerous magazines, often heavily subsidized, represent those of the other arts” (qtd. in
HMPR: 15). Furthermore, Monroe implies that Poetry will offer poets a more permanent space in which to exhibit their work than that of the ephemeral little magazine. But the proposed space will be a flexible one that encourages “poems of greater length... than the other magazines can afford to use” (APL 251). Poetry, Monroe insists, is “not intended as a money-maker but as a public-spirited effort,” and it will pay contributors for poems, with the goal of eventually matching rates paid to artists such as painters and sculptors
(252). The space will also “develop for this art [of poetry] a responsive public,” an “ever- increasing public” (252). The motto that appears on the back of the circular and, later, the front matter of the magazine itself derives from Whitman: “[T]o have great poets there must be great audiences too...” (qtd. in APL 257). What initial readers of the circular would have recognized as being so “new” about Monroe’s proposed magazine, then, is not its very brief aesthetic mandate - a preference for “poems of modem significance” - so much as the magazine’s larger goal of supporting poets by providing a reliable forum devoted to poetry, remuneration that will “increase as the receipts increase,” and a “responsive public” (252). Indeed, even
Pound, who would quickly come to downplay the importance of compensating poets in the form of economic capital,47 appears to have understood what was so different about
Poetry when compared with other kinds of magazines. Responding to the circular in
August of 1912, Pound writes to Monroe (in the first of many letters), “[a]t least you are not the usual ‘esthetic magazine,’48 which is if anything worse than the popular; for the esthetic magazine expects the artist to do all the work, pays nothing, and then undermines his credit by making his convictions appear ridiculous” (“To Harriet” 9). Both Monroe’s and Pound’s respective observations situate Poetry in a new position in the American literary field: between the popular magazine (that shunts poets into leftover column space) and the little magazine (that cannot offer poets a permanent space or the prospect of substantial compensation or readership). Although some critics take Monroe to task for not focusing enough on the specific contents of the magazine during its planning stages and for developing a business plan before an editorial vision,49 Monroe took it upon herself to research, and invite submissions from, a number of poets, including William
Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Amy Lowell (1874-1925), and Pound.50 Moreover, as other critics affirm, Poetry had to be built before it could be filled.51 Poetry, then, is not simply a little magazine; it is not simply a space for the new but, rather, a new kind of space: one 47
that does not simply deliver new poetries but, rather, establishes a reliable mechanism for
delivering a range of poetries (from the “classic” to those “of modem significance”) to a
“responsive public” which American poets lack and which the magazine will help to
“develop” {APL 252).
Monroe’s initial editorial for Poetry, “The Motive for the Magazine” (1912),
which appears in the very first issue, recycles some of the circular’s language and
reinforces the latter’s attempt to claim, on behalf of Poetry, a new position in the
American literary field. It also argues that, because of the social and economic nature of
any cultural discourse, poetry has suffered from a lack of interest on the part of American
society:
Painting, sculpture, music are housed in palaces in the great cities of the
world; and every week or two a new periodical is bom to speak for one or
the other of them, and tenderly nursed at some guardian’s expense.
Architecture, responding to commercial and social demands, is whipped
into shape by the rough and tumble of life and fostered, willy-nilly, by
men’s material needs. Poetry alone, of all the fine arts, has been left to
shift for herself in a world unaware of its immediate and desperate need of
her, a world whose great deeds, whose triumphs over matter, over the
wilderness, over racial enmities and distances, require her ever-living
voice to give them glory and glamour. (“MM” 26)
Although the editorial begins by trumpeting “the huge democracy of our age” - located in the United States - it reflects a materialist ideology by noting that cultural discourses (like “Painting, sculpture, [and] music”) are situated in spaces that bestow symbolic prestige
(such as “palaces in the great cities of the world”). These discourses are not self- sufficient; they are given a voice by “periodicals],” which themselves depend on the capital investment of others (e.g. “some guardian”). Monroe goes further when she observes that “Architecture, responding to commercial and social demands, is whipped into shape by the rough and tumble of life and fostered, willy-nilly, by men’s material needs.” “[M]en’s [sic] material needs,” the editor implies, shape cultural discourses like architecture. Buildings, then, are not the expressions of the individual genius of an architect; buildings constitute responses to external forces: “commercial and social demands.”
Turning her attention to poetry, Monroe argues that the social neglect of this particular cultural discourse can be reversed. She asserts the need for poetry, like other arts, to have “an entrenched place, a voice of power,” and personifies poetry as a woman
“left to shift for herself in a world unaware of its immediate and desperate need of her, a world whose great deeds, whose triumphs over matter, over the wilderness, over racial enmities and distances, require her ever-living voice to give them glory and glamour”
(26). Although her use of the feminine third person provides the editor with an easy and sexist representation of vulnerability - she goes on to describe the “Cinderella comer in the ashes” which popular magazines provide for poets - Monroe suggests that poetry’s lack of “a voice of power” in 1912 is not innate but, rather, a result of social indifference
(27). Indeed, American society can help construct and amplify this voice by supporting a magazine like the one that she proposes, thereby providing the discourse with “an 49 entrenched place.” Once “entrenched,” poetry, like other arts, can then have an impact on the culture by giving an “ever-living voice” to problems like “racial enmities and distances.” She also points out that poetry
is not a miracle of direct creation, but a reciprocal relation between the
artist and his public. The people must do their part if the poet is to tell their
story to the future; they must cultivate and irrigate the soil if the desert is
to blossom as the rose. The present venture is a modest effort to give to
poetry her own place, her own voice. (“MM” 27)
Echoing the circular’s call for “all who love the art” to “subscribe,” Monroe downplays the humanist idea that self-determining individuals bring about works of art through their own agency, “a miracle of direct creation,” and suggests instead that poetry is a form of cultural collaboration. Indeed, its survival - its ability to have its “own place” and “voice”
- depends on the participation of a community of readers who “must do their part” and
“cultivate and irrigate the soil” in which it might “blossom.”
In general, Monroe’s early editorials use organic and spatial metaphors to describe poets and Poetry, respectively, implying that they exist in what Bakhtin terms “a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment” (DN 1202). In addition to suggesting that poets are plants that require the help of others to make them “blossom,”
Monroe, several months after her first editorial, argues that “[t]he masterpiece is always a rarity, and it blooms not in a desert but in the midst of lesser growth” (“NB” 24). Even the greatest work of poetry, Monroe suggests, is not created in the transhistorical vacuum of a
“desert”; its existence depends, to some extent, on the work around it - on its immediate, 50 historical ecosystem. Several years later, in a February 1916 editorial, “The Question of
Prizes,” Monroe takes up the metaphor again. She historicizes figures like Shakespeare
and Raphael by suggesting that “in the great periods of art the artists had their world behind them; they felt it pushing and urging them...” (247). Artists, Monroe suggests,
depend on their audience - the “crowd” - and, by extension, their social context (247). “It
follows that if we want great poetry,” writes Monroe,
we must begin by preparing normal and natural conditions for the poet -
by giving him, not the stone walls and stifling atmosphere of indifference,
but light, air, freedom, neighbors who praise or curse - all things necessary
for healthy growth and conflict. Only thus will the great creative mind, if it
is bom, have a fair chance of attaining powerful maturity; and just as
hundreds of lesser trees must grow and die to enrich the soil for one that
overtops them, so only out of the growth and decay and waste of lesser
creative minds will the master arise. (247-48)
Although one can take issue with her gendering of the poet (“him”) and the Darwinian language she uses to describe the poet’s peers (his “lesser trees”), by comparing the poet to a living plant that requires “light, air, freedom, [and] neighbors” Monroe avoids characterizing the poet as a mythical being who transcends historical circumstances.
Indeed the poet, Monroe implies, is a material being and exists in a dialogic relationship with others who make possible his or her very utterances, which never occur in isolation. Although Bakhtin insists that poetry is monologic and therefore inferior to the more apparently dialogic novel, Monroe suggests otherwise. In an “Our Contemporaries” column of December 1916 - one that appears to have been authored by
Monroe since it echoes the arboreal imagery in “The Question of Prizes” - the names of
Sophocles, Moliere, Goethe, Coleridge, Keats, and others are added to the list of crucial artists, and a number of rhetorical questions ensue:
Was their art a product of the wilderness - a miracle of isolation; or was it
in each case merely the highest tree in a forest - a climactic product of
“cooperative effort,” of the group spirit, its sympathies and rivalries? Did
Dante “love the wilderness” - the spiritual isolation - to which
contemporaries condemned him? did Heine? Bums? Blake? Is there any
proof, or indeed any probability, that the art of these great men was
improved by such isolation? - an isolation which was indeed, in each case,
far from complete, as each one had his few sympathetic admirers.
And those Hebrew prophets... they may have gone into the
wilderness, but did they stay there? They came back hot-footed to shout to
the crowd and quarrel with the prophets of Baal. (160-61)
Two competing environments, the “wilderness” and the “forest,” are presented before the columnist suggests that the more crowded and social one, the “forest,” better describes the context in which “art” is produced. Indeed, even a state of apparent “isolation” is “far from complete.” The most isolated artist always has a “few sympathetic admirers,” which is to say a community. Furthermore, some of Monroe’s more secular language - which dispenses with the “miracle” and favours “proof’ and “probability” - hints at the materialist nature of artistic production. Indeed, the column is almost Marxist in its suggestion that art is “a climactic product of ‘cooperative effort,’ of the group spirit, its sympathies and rivalries”52 (emphases added). Even when using a religious analogy by referring to the work of “those Hebrew prophets” who seem to have laboured in a social vacuum, Monroe points out that these figures inevitably must participate in an almost dialectical “quarrel” with “the crowd.” (Unsurprisingly, this very same “Our
Contemporaries” column records Poetry's, “protest” against those forces “working for the extinction of The Masses,53 perhaps the most stimulating of all the periodicals which stand for radical thinking in politics, sociology and art” (161).) Several months later,
Monroe once again plants the image of the “highest tree” and quarrels with the notion that
‘“the true poet can’t be silenced’” (“HTI” 309, 310). “[T]he trouble is,” she writes, “[the true poet] can be silenced—by starvation of body or soul, song-deafness of his generation, or other obstructions...” (310).
Finally, in September 1917, in an editorial entitled, “Emerson in a Loggia,”
Monroe offers her most explicit characterization of a poet who exists in the material world, a world of “obstructions” in which he remains rooted. Describing her recent rereading of Emerson’s essay “The Poet” (1844), Monroe situates herself “not in a country-house loggia but a city flat; not in idle isolation, but after a rush of poets’ manuscripts” (312). In other words, she locates herself not in the passive “wilderness” in which the Emersonian individual ranges freely, but in a crowded social space, a “city flat” that is noisy with the voices of “poets’ manuscripts.” Beyond the “city flat,” World War
One has been raging for the United States for several months. (In fact, although the
United States did not enter the war until 6 April 1917, it was raging in the pages of Poetry 53 as early as November 1914, when Monroe published a special issue devoted to the war.
Henderson’s editorial for that issue, “Poetry and War,” asserts the magazine’s anti-war position by noting that “[t]he American feeling about the war is a genuine revolt against war, and we have believed that POETRY might help to serve the cause of peace by encouraging the expression of this spirit of protest” [83].) Reading Emerson in a specific environment (a crowded “city flat”) and at a particular moment (months into the
American involvement in World War One) makes Monroe feel “like Tommy - or let us say Sammy - in the trenches saluted by a doctrinaire in a dress-suit” (312). In fact,
Monroe imagines what her “Sammy” would say to an Emerson who is too dressed-up for the “trenches”:
“Hell,” he would say, “what are you giving us! - don’t you see the dead
bodies lying around?”
So Emerson talks about THE POET, but he forgets the dead bodies
- he forgets even the men on the firing-line. His POET is a grand
inaccessible figure.... The general effect of the essay is to make of the poet
a thing apart, a figure ‘enskied and sainted’ upon whom common humanity
must look with awe. Nowhere in it do we find that sense of the poet’s
intense and common humanness - a humanness vulgar as well as fine[.]
(312-13)
Monroe suggests that the poet is not a saintly figure but, rather, a human being “like everybody else” (314). Emerson’s nineteenth-century vision of the transcendent poet - “a 54 thing apart” - cannot admit the terrible, all-too-human fact of “dead bodies,” which the war-time editor of 1917 cannot escape.
Monroe, however, is not entirely exempt from romanticizing the figure of the poet. In seeking to define the typical bard whose interests Poetry will serve, she often turns to the American poet Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) and imagines him as a kind of homeless wanderer or Wandering Jew figure. The “Notes” at the back of the
January 1913 issue of Poetry - the first issue to publish Lindsay’s poetry - present him as
“the vagabond poet who loves to tramp through untravelled [sic] country districts without a cent in his pocket, exchanging ‘rhymes for bread’ at farmers’ hearths. The magazines have published engaging articles by him, but in verse he has usually been his own publisher as yet” (135). Lindsay may have helped to pen the note, as contributors to magazines sometimes do; but the magazine assumes authorship of, and implicitly endorses, the note by assigning no specific author to it. In any event, the use of the definite article - “the vagabond poet” - mythologizes Lindsay, transforming him into an object of folk knowledge. The “Notes” for the July issue sustain the myth-making, characterizing Lindsay’s project as a “tramping crusade” (151). But although he is a cheerful type who “loves to tramp” about, Monroe also suggests that Lindsay is a poet with material needs; he exchanges his poems for food and, because he lacks a “magazine” for his “verse,” must self-publish.54
If the poet is, “like everybody else,” a labourer with material needs, then Poetry, as it is constructed in a number of Monroe’s editorials and other texts, offers a kind of nurturing space, implicitly emphasizing the materialist nature of the magazine. In her first editorial, she describes the need for poetic discourse to have “an entrenched place”
(“MM” 26). Later, in an April 1913 editorial entitled “The New Beauty,” Monroe argues that “POETRY has given space, and will doubtless give more, to voices and fashions more or less reminiscent, convinced that it is only by such trial ventures that some men can discover their true place” (24). The poet, she implies, must have the “space” to feel free to undertake “trial ventures” without having to worry about whether or not they will amount to anything. The following year, in an editorial defending her magazine against the Dial, she boasts that Poetry, unlike its competitor, has “made room for the young”
(“EWHM” 63). A year after that, in May 1915, Monroe prepares an editorial entitled, tellingly, “Give Him Room.” The “place” or “space” or “room,” in Monroe’s discourse, often takes the form of a “refuge”: “We hope to offer our subscribers a place of refuge,” she promises (“MM” 28). And if poets are to have refuge, so, too, will readers; but it will be the same space, the shared space of a magazine in which, presumably, both poets and readers will interact. Of course, in order to be aware of Monroe’s publication, these poets and readers would have to possess already the sufficient amounts of capital that enable people to participate in the literary field. Although she does not point this out, the community Monroe hopes to create can only ever be a sub-community within a society in which capital is not shared equally.
Nevertheless, in her second editorial, “The Open Door” (1912), which appeared in the second issue of Poetry, Monroe extends the metaphor of “refuge” and defends the magazine for democratically welcoming those poets and readers who can participate, including (especially) those who might appear to be insignificant. At the outset, Monroe 56 acknowledges that “[f]ears have been expressed by a number of friendly critics that
POETRY may become a house of refuge for minor poets” (62). But Monroe dismisses these “[f]ears” by observing that American culture already rewards many “minor” artists who are not poets, such as painters, sculptors, actors, and architects. More importantly, she goes on to note that “Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, [and] Bums, [sic] were minor poets to the subjects of King George the Fourth, Poe and Whitman to the subjects of King
Longfellow” (63). In other words, Monroe suggests that poets who might appear to be
“minor” could turn out to be something more, and so deserve sanctuary. The worth of poets, the editorial implies, is determined by people, over time - and critics, first and foremost. Monroe also appeals to the patriotism of her twentieth-century American audience by alluding to the danger of subjecting oneself to a monarch who no longer holds sway, such as a dead British king (“King George the Fourth,” 1762-1830) or a dead
American poet (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882). The democratic “refuge” she is building is a distinctly American one because of its disdain for the very idea of monarchy.
The space is also presented as a welcoming one that helps to shape the poets that it admits. Defining a mandate that is still observed to this day by the current editors of
Poetry, Monroe promises:
The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet
we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample
genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances
with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse 57
which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what
theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its
editorial comments to one set of opinions. Without muzzles and braces this
is manifestly impossible unless all the critical articles are written by one
person. (“OD” 64)
Once again, Monroe seems to be referring to Whitman and, in particular, his poem “Shut
Not Your Doors” (1881), in which the speaker, a literary type, demands, “Shut not your doors to me proud libraries...” (1). Although later critics attack Poetry for being too inclusive and for lacking a more politically focused and progressive editorial policy,55 they betray a preference for avant-garde poetry. Monroedid publish new and influential experiments in free verse and Imagism, but these appeared alongside more traditional work.56 Her stated mandate, after all, was to create a stable and open space that would support no “single class or school” of poets; that would enable poets, even those who might appear to be “minor,” to engage with a larger audience than they might otherwise find in the popular magazine or more ephemeral little magazine.
Monroe’s critics also miss the limited but not insignificant way in which she is politically focused. Although Monroe tends to gender the typical poet, reinforcing, if only implicitly, the masculinity of the liberal humanist subject, she is relatively progressive in her suggestion that Poetry will not “limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions.”
Poetry, she suggests, will be made up of a plurality of voices and not be the product of
“one person.” She is also relatively progressive in her belief that individuals do not create poetry in a vacuum. After all, according to Monroe, the “great poet” depends on forces 58 external to “his ample genius”; he depends on the affirmative action of an “open door.”
Indeed, as Monroe notes a few years later, “POETRY—its policy and prizes—are a detail of preparation, an effort to give the poet his chance of a hearing, his right to a response. It is an effort to gather the ‘great audience’—whether few or many—for whom and through whose aid alone he can sing with his utmost power” (“QP” 248). Like Braithwaite and
Monroe - both of whom were fortunate enough to be endowed with significant amounts of capital - Monroe’s “great poet” is a product of an enabling social context. And her magazine constitutes a part of that context and helps to give the poet “his chance” through a “policy” that is open; a system of “prizes” that compensates the poet and attends to his material needs; and the “aid” of a ‘“great audience’” that amplifies his singing. In other words, in emphasizing the importance of a poet’s social context, Monroe’s editorial suggests that poets are shaped by what Karl Marx (1818-1883) refers to as their “social existence” (11-12). Monroe herself may have been influenced by Shelley; her equation of poets to plants recalls Shelley’s “The Sensitive Plant” (1820), the opening of which reads:
“A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew, / And the young winds fed it with silver dew...” (1-
2). Also, her “refuge” metaphor echoes Shelley’s description of his elegy for Keats,
“Adonais” (1821), as a “refuge for his memory” (446). In total, she invokes Shelley’s name in three of the editorials she wrote for Poetry in its first five years, two o f which describe the Romantic poet as the sort of poet who, in his own time, was regarded as
“minor” and, by implication, could have done with a safe haven like Poetry57 (“OD” 63;
“HTI” 309). 59
In addition to its function as a sanctuary, Monroe often defines Poetry as a kind of gallery space for poets. As early as 1912, in the circular used to promotePoetry ,
Monroe’s expression of a desire to see poets compensated like painters and sculptors aligns poets with visual artists who already have supportive institutions in which to exhibit their work. Later texts published in the magazine continue to draw a similar parallel, asserting the need for all artists, including poets, to receive equal
CO compensation. In an essay on the founding of the Poetry Society of America, in the
February 1913 issue of Poetry, the poet and editor Jessie B. Rittenhouse (1869-1948) argues that “[tjhere seemed no reason why poetry, one of the noblest of the arts, should not take to itself visible organization as well as its sister arts of music and painting, since it was certain that such organization contributed much to their advancement and appreciation” (166). Henderson, for her part, draws on the metaphor of the exhibition when, a year later, in the February 1914 issue, she offers up her sarcastic take on
Braithwaite’s preferred poems of the year: “POETRY [magazine] would like to present these seven masterpieces as a Bostonian exhibit” (“OC” 188). In May 1915, Monroe observes “the narrowness of the field accorded to the poet by conservative public taste, as compared with the freer range granted today, as a matter of course, to other artists,” including architects, painters, and sculptors (“GHR” 81). She goes on to argue that
“POETRY has frankly tried to widen the poet’s range,” implicitly comparing Poetry to the sort of gallery that welcomes various artists (83). Later that year, in the August issue,
Henderson goes even further and implicitly suggests that, in general, the literary magazine that prints criticism should follow the example of an art gallery. Responding to 60
a critique of a negative review that appeared in the Dial, Henderson notes that “[n]o art
gallery - and an art gallery serves the best function of criticism - strives to collect only
the worst examples of a painter’s art” (“OC: Our Friend the Enemy” 261). Finally, in the
December 1916 issue, Monroe makes her most direct connection between gallery and magazine, noting that “the Art Institute [of Chicago]59 opens new galleries - much more
spacious than our magazine-gallery for poets - in which hundreds of painters and
sculptors, from Maine to Oregon, speak for beauty with still voices, stretch out invisible hands appealing for recognition” (“TaN” 142). Like the “much more spacious” galleries dedicated to “painters and sculptors,” Poetry is a “magazine-gallery” with the potential,
Monroe hints, to serve a patriotic function, connecting poets across the nation, “from
Maine to Oregon,” and providing them with an opportunity to receive recognition.
Both Henderson and Monroe, however, acknowledge the limits of the gallery metaphor. In Henderson’s implied description of some ideal gallery that “strives to collect” all of the works of a painter, thus providing the most objective portrait of his accomplishment, her use of the conspicuous verb “strives” tempers her praise. Indeed, it suggests that although the literary magazine should work toward objectivity, it may be impossible to attain. Several months later, in the February 1916 issue, Monroe emphasizes the lack of objectivity of those who preside over the allotment of awards.
Writing about herself in the third person, Monroe reports that
the editor has taken lessons from the sister arts of painting and sculpture,
whose recent development in this country has been due at least partly to
galleries, exhibitions, prizes, scholarships, and other evidences of public 61
interest. This in spite of fallible juries of admission and award....
POETRY’s juries, even though Apollo should appoint them, would no
doubt prove quite as fallible. But however our wise descendants may smile
at our awards, these will have accomplished, in a measure, their object of
honor to the art. As to the individual honoured, he becomes at once the
target for such unflattering comments that his modesty is in little danger,
and the bag of gold he receives is not yet heavy enough to overbalance his
‘artistic integrity.’ At least, Mr. [Carl] Sandburg seems as granite-like as
ever, and Mr. [Vachel] Lindsay goes serenely on his way. (“QP” 248)
Monroe’s suggestion that even a jury appointed by a god like Apollo (who floats above the physical world) “would no doubt prove quite as fallible,” offers a sly reminder that the gallery - and the magazine that would follow its example - is a human-made institution and consequently subject to fallibility. In other words, the decision that determines whether or not a poet like Lindsay or Sandburg should appear in the gallery and receive his minimal award ultimately resides in a necessarily imperfect social realm, thus reflecting a materialist ideology. Furthermore, the response to the decision to give a poet a prize, according to Monroe, is almost always guaranteed to be immediate and negative; a poet’s reward is usually double-edged. (It is also minimal; the aforementioned “bag of gold” is heavy, but only with irony. It can be trusted not to capsize the relevant poet.)
Nevertheless, it can be argued that even negative press regarding the awarding of a monetary prize is good press because it is evidence of what Monroe calls “public 62 interest,” which, according to her, helped with the “development” of “the sister arts of painting and sculpture.”
Although Monroe implicitly acknowledges that poetry is not some sort of pure discourse that transcends the pressures of the material world, she is not pessimistic about poetry’s supposed impurity. Indeed, she seems to understand that, as Bourdieu has it, the literary field in which poetry is produced is only a “relatively autonomous universe
(which is to say, of course, that it is also relatively dependent, notably with respect to the economic field and the political field)” (RoA 141; emphases added). In an August 1914 editorial entitled “The Poet’s Bread and Butter,” she challenges what she identifies to be a publicly-held belief in the need for poets to be insulated from the sort of “[ljarge prizes and high prices” that go to the painter and the architect but “would undermine the precarious vitality of the poet” (195-96). In particular, she takes issue with an article in
The Nation, which insists that the poet ‘“may find various sweet uses in his adversity’” and equates the well-paid labour of a painter with the poorly-compensated labour of a
Yeats (196, 197). In the editorial of February 1916, after noting the unavoidable fallibility of those who would compensate poets, she goes on to observe that “[p]oets are the worst paid of all artists, and we can not see that we would lessen their chance of immortality by lessening their chance of starvation,” once again calling attention to the often difficult, real-world conditions in which poets, far from being mythic beings, grind out their work
(249). She concludes the editorial by reprinting a criticism of Poetry. ‘“ Miss Monroe led us to suppose she was building a cathedral - it now appears that it was a Woolworth
Building,’ says one critic” (249). Monroe then responds: “A cathedral, did I? Modem 63 cathedrals are second-rate - mere imitations. I would rather build a first-rate sky-scraper!
But not the Woolworth Building—the Monadnock, perhaps” (249). Monroe rejects the cathedral, a symbolic site of transcendence, and claims yet one more spatial metaphor for the magazine: Chicago’s Monadnock, which, on completion in 1893, became the largest building on the planet and a symbolic site of capitalist progress.60 Interestingly, the
Monadnock was a “speculative office building,” open to multiple businesses and, not unlike Monroe’s magazine-gallery, “the building was intended to lend the multiple interior functions an exterior appearance of stability and permanence they did not necessarily have” (Merwood-Salisbury 65). Poets, in Monroe’s discourse, need a similarly permanent site in which they can be housed and paid.
Monroe’s choice of the Monadnock over the Woolworth Building (which was completed in 1913) is also appropriate given that the latter was conceived as an especially conspicuous building, the highest of its time and one whose “contradictory architectural hybrid of fanciful Gothic ornamental features... and technologically audacious steel framed engineering calls attention to the jarring discontinuities, startling proximities, and unpredictability of the urban experience” (Fenske 4). Indeed, the architect behind the building, Cass Gilbert (1859-1934), set out consciously “to create a Beaux-Art masterpiece” (Fenske 6). The less-ostentatious Monadnock, on the other hand, constitutes an “example of what may result when individual architectural creativity is removed from construction,” and signifies “the architect restraining his personal creative instincts in favour of pragmatic functionalism” (Merwood-Salisbury 62, 63). It is not surprising, then, that Monroe favoured the Monadnock as a metaphor for Poetry, the Chicago skyscraper 64 did not aim to celebrate individual genius so much as a sense of openness (to different enterprises) and “permanence.”
Nevertheless, despite the acknowledgment of the metaphor’s limits, Monroe still suggests that the “Open Door” should be guarded and her “magazine-gallery” governed by an elite few. In the January 1913 issue, Monroe betrays a preference for special judgments in a review of Ferdinand Earle’s The Lyric Year: One Hundred Poems (1912), an anthology drawn from 10,000 contest entries (Brevda 106). Although she welcomes the anthology as a companion “embarked in the same adventure” as Poetry, Monroe argues that
if this annual is to speak with any authority as a Salon [sic], it should take
a few lessons from art exhibitions. Mr. Earle’s position as donor, editor
and judge, is as if Mr. Carnegie should act as hanging committee at the
Pittsburg show, and help select the prize-winners. And Messrs. Earle,
Braithwaite and [Edward J.] Wheeler, this year’s jury of awards, are not,
even though all have written verse, poets of recognized distinction in the
sense that... other jurymen in our various American Salons, are
distinguished painters. (RLE 131, 130; emphasis added)
Taking a shot at her Bostonian rival Braithwaite as well as Edward J. Wheeler, Board
President of the Poetry Society of America, Monroe suggests that publications that make a space for poetry should, like “art exhibitions,” be governed by people whose competence is determined by “distinction.” In doing so, she endorses a hierarchy in which some are “distinguished” enough to dispense rewards and others lack the sufficient amount of “distinction.” For Monroe, “distinction” constitutes a form of symbolic capital that, according to Bourdieu, “exercises a sort of action... without physical contact” when it is recognized by others(PR 102). By refusing to recognize the “distinction” of the jurors behind The Lyric Year, Monroe implies that the anthology has no real claim on anyone’s attention. Later that year, in the “Notes” for the October 1913 issue, an unnamed author asserts that “[t]he awarding of prizes is a responsibility which the editors of Poetry would willingly have delegated to some higher authority. But at present there is no great poet sitting in judgment, to whom lesser poets may appeal—none, that is, in
America” (34). In lieu of an American poet of the stature of Ireland’s Yeats, “who stands high enough above the crowd to assume that position with dignity,” the unnamed author observes that “the editors and the Advisory Committee of Poetry, who of course will not compete,” will have to determine the prizes for the time being (34-5).
At times, Monroe’s “magazine-gallery,” as she describes it, can seem too authoritative in its attempt to impose a structure - grounded by a fixed center - on what
Monroe herself describes as a “wilderness.” In the January 1914 issue, she critiques the
“elders who sit in judgment” at the National Institute of Arts and Letters (“SaE” 142). But in the very same editorial, she argues in favour of the sort of national capital, like London or Paris, that synthesizes a “discord of conflicting claims” and delivers up a “verdict” that
“goes around the world” (143). The United States, Monroe laments, lacks a “center,” the
“person or group of recognized authority” (143). Chicago and Poetry, by implication, can constitute this “center” that the National Institute of Arts and Letters has failed to provide.
They can also constitute a center that Braithwaite, in his annual verse survey for the Boston Evening Transcript, is not up to providing. Indeed, Henderson, in a January 1915 piece, “applaud[s] Mr. Braithwaite’s valiant attempt to effect a co-ordination of interest between poets and readers, even though one may disagree radically with his standards of selection” (“OC” 194). Poetry, its associate editor implies, can do the better job of organizing what she believes to be “a million readers of contemporary poetry in the
United States,” whose “interest is sporadic and unorganized” (194). The sheer shapelessness of this “sporadic and unorganized” American “wilderness” continues to be a source of anxiety in later editorials, like “The City and the Tower,” in which Monroe, beginning with a quotation from Genesis, describes the Babelian confusion that might drown out the contemporary poet: a “potential audience.. .so large our poet is in danger of losing it altogether.... [N]ow all the poets of a thousand cities are striving to enchant the whole vast English-speaking world; and so that world hears only a confusion of voices, and listens to few or none” (34). Although Monroe believes that editors and judges should have “distinction” and that the American poetry world could use a stable central magazine, it is cynical to suggest that these facts ultimately undermine her “Open Door” policy. The latter, after all, does not guarantee publication, which would be impossible, given the inevitable limitations of space in a print magazine; the policy affirms a spirit of openness to a range of work and viewpoints, which the magazine’s early history bears out.61 Furthermore, given what she felt to be poetry’s relative lack of presence in
American society, it is not unreasonable for the editor to hope that poets might coordinate around her magazine. If anything, her belief in the importance of editors and organization, though it carries a whiff of the authoritarian, underscores her notion that poets are shaped 67 by external social forces. Ultimately, it is useful to think ofPoetry as a hybrid of the two figures that recur in Monroe’s editorials: a refuge-gallery that is both inclusive and exclusive, balancing a Whitmanesque sense of welcome with the practical constraints of a magazine of inevitably limited means.
Nevertheless, in her recent book-length study of Kreymborg’s little magazine
Others, Suzanne W. Churchill presents a somewhat simplistic critique of Monroe’s conception of Poetry as a fixed center that organizes the confusion of the poetry world.
Churchill describes Poetry as a “fortress in a literary wilderness [that] draws strict borders on the free verse field” as opposed to a welcoming gallery (11). Against this “fortress,” she sets the ffee-form Others, which held its editorial “meetings outdoors on grassy meadows” (13). Churchill notes that
Kreymborg instigatedOthers in part out of frustration with Monroe’s
editorial interference, in an effort to give poets free reign to experiment.
As its elegant, dignified cover attested, Poetry was also more
establishment in its aims and commercial in its origins and operations: the
figure of Pegasus, circumscribed by a capital ‘P,’ affirmed that the
magazine was designed to become a classic. In contrast, Others's name
and plain yellow cover flaunted its marginal, anti-establishment status.
Whereas Monroe founded Poetry by soliciting fifty-dollar donations from
Chicago businessmen, Others was funded in its first year by a private
donation from the wealthy art collector Walter Conrad Arensberg, and
thereafter by sporadic donations from poets as diverse as Lola Ridge and 68
Robert Frost. Poetry paid ten dollars a page for contributions and gave
monetary prizes; Others was avowedly anti-commercial, offering its
contributors only what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic capital’ - the
prestige and authority associated with a trade that pays nothing because it
is priceless. (13)
Although Poetry was more established than Others, in that it was three years older,
Poetry was not the “establishment.” The “establishment,” such as it was, was made up of those poets who supplied the popular magazine, like Harper’s, with filler: “two to five verse tidbits a month” ( LMHB 34). “Establishment,” then, is not a useful term to use to describe what was already a relatively marginalized group compared with other artists in the United States. Furthermore, Poetry’s “aims” - among them, to offer an “open door” to
American poets and provide something more than the sliver of space offered by popular magazines - can be read, by Churchill’s own logic, as anti-establishment or, at least, anti status quo. Indeed, if Monroe’s “open door” serves to welcome contributors, then the
“elegant, dignified cover” of Poetry serves to welcome (by appealing to) one of the resources which Monroe felt American poets of the early-twentieth century were in need of: a larger audience of readers. Moreover, a much more precarious little magazine than
Others, such as BLAST (1914-1915), which lasted all of two issues, does not provide
Churchill, who is looking to sharpen the image of Others, with enough of a whetstone.
Even on a visual level, “Others’s name and plain yellow cover” - which “flaunted its marginal, anti-establishment status” and “evokes the notorious British fin-de-siecle journal, The Yellow Book, conjuring associations of decadence” - looks dull next to the 69 garish pink cover of the first issue of BLAST (Churchill 42). For Churchill’s purposes,
Poetry is the better straw man.
In general, Churchill’s use of language in the quotation above withdraws symbolic capital from Poetry and invests it in Others, which is ironic given that she calls attention to how Kreymborg’s cash-strapped little magazine could do little more than pay its contributors with same. By describing Poetry as “more intrusive in its editorial practices than Others” and Monroe’s editing as “editorial interference,” Churchill implies that the integrity of a poet’s utterances must somehow be maintained and that poetry itself is some sort of pure discourse that exists outside of power relations (emphases added). Despite
Kreymborg’s initially “‘austere’ editorial policy,” which stripped, fromOthers, all trace of “manifestos, editorials, advertisements, reviews, and biographical information— everything but the poems,” Churchill later notes that, “[m]uch as Kreymborg hated to admit it, he still supervised the selection of poems and directed the tenor of the magazine”
(12, 44). The editor of Others, it seems, could not help being an editor, a figure of and with authority. Churchill awards additional symbolic capital to Others by describing
Monroe’s fimdraising as solicitation and implying that there is a desirable difference between “donations from Chicago businessmen” and capital that comes from a “wealthy art collector” and poets. Aligning Poetry with the interests of business is ironic given that
Churchill uses Bourdieu, later in her study, to challenge Kreymborg’s attempts “to dissociate [his] magazine from the taint of commercialism, as if economic motivations would defile the chastity of the new poetry” (43). In any event, Monroe’s concern for the material needs of poets suggests a less romantic ideology that refuses to imagine that 70 poetry can be purified of the economic forces that shape it. Moreover, Churchill is wrong to describe Poetry as being “more commercial,” which applies the very “taint of commercialism” that worried Kreymborg;Poetry, although it actually compensated poets for their labour, was not meant to make a profit.63 In any event, as Monroe emphasizes in an editorial of 1917, “never, by word or deed, has any guarantor attempted to influence the editorial policy of the magazine. Indeed, they have been, as a rule, over-fearful of seeming to interfere by the expression even of friendly criticism...” (“TFY” 36).
Indeed, one can argue that despite Monroe’s stated preference for an editorial hierarchy suggested by the American art world, the actual funding of her “magazine- gallery” reflects a relatively progressive belief in what Monroe terms the “reciprocal relation between the artist and his public” (“MM” 27). With the advice of her friend
Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor - in her words, a “novelist, lover of the arts, man of culture, wealth, and social prominence” - Monroe secured an initial five years of funding for
Poetry by soliciting a commitment of 50 dollars a year from 100 individuals, many of whom occupied prominent roles in Chicago’s arts and business communities (APL 243-
48). Beginning with the April 1913 issue (the first number of volume two64), the magazine printed on the front matter of each new volume the heading, “SUBSCRIBERS
TO THE FUND,” and a list of donors and subscribers. Following this list, the magazine, in a couple of early instances, appended a brief obituary that acknowledged the recent death of a donor and identifies the relatives who have taken up his or her subscription or philanthropic commitment. For example, in the October 1913 front matter, one finds:
“The editor of POETRY records with deep sorrow the death of Clarence Buckingham, 71 one of its guarantors and a life-long patron of the arts. His subscription to the Fund is maintained by his sisters.” (Later issues tend just to indicate the fact of a particular donor’s death.) The obituary reminds us that Poetry is not the product of an individual entrepreneur;65 it is the result of a collaborative effort involving a larger community and its individual families.
In other texts printed in the magazine, Monroe emphasizes the collaborative, if not creative, role of Poetry's financial supporters. “Beginning with its guarantors,” she writes in the May 1914 editorial, “The Enemies We Have Made,”
whose pledge of support was an audacious advance vote of confidence:
beginning, that is, at home, where one’s first friends should be made, the
magazine has been hailed from far and near by generous spirits who
sympathize with its ideals, and charitably overlook or forgive its defects,
or who at least criticize these in a mood of constructive encouragement.
(61)
The funding of Poetry, as Monroe has it, is not merely a matter of writing a cheque and retreating to the background: it is “an audacious advance vote of confidence,” which is to say it requires, of the investor, some of the audacity and forward-thinking one might associate with the more obviously creative editor or poet. Furthermore, Monroe suggests that the guarantors are not passive moneymen but, rather, have an active role to play: they
“sympathize,” “charitably overlook or forgive,” and offer “constructive” criticism.
Indeed, in an October 1917 editorial, Monroe, again describing herself in the third person, goes so far as noting that she left the offices of those she solicited for donations “as if on 72 wings, newly inspired for a high purpose; and the whole experience brought home to her the fact that the best and most imaginative minds of the country... have gone largely, perhaps chiefly, into big business” (“TFY” 35). In Monroe’s discourse, the funders of art are themselves artists. As Newcomb affirms, Monroe
mobilized for American poetry the same commitment to high culture as a
form of civic advertising that between 1880 and 1930 endowed the nation
with many of its finest artistic institutions. While other modernist editors
of the 1910s attempted to find a single patron or small moneyed coterie to
subsidize their little magazine activities, Monroe’s fundraising methods
proposed poetry as a form of civic culture, and aspired to involve as many
members of the community as possible....
Various outraged individuals could (and did) withdraw support
from time to time, but this could not destroy Poetry, which was spared the
fate of little magazines dependent on individual patrons, such as Alfred
Kreymborg’sOthers, which went through one short-lived sponsor after
another in its four years of hand-to-mouth existence. (10-11; emphasis
added)
Although Newcomb continues to compare Poetry to the little magazine that, by definition,66 lives a “hand-mouth-existence,” Monroe’s attempts to make Poetry a financially stable and communal institution actually distinguish the magazine as a unique entity within the literary field, an entity which is not easily defined in terms of the little magazine.67 73
4. “An ever-increasing public”: Imagining an Audience
Throughout its early years, and several times on the occasion of Poetry's anniversary, Monroe urges the reader - another kind of investor - to collaborate in the creation of the magazine and its audience by subscribing to it. For example, in “A Word to Our Readers,” a September 1914 editorial that acknowledges the magazine’s completion of its first two years, Monroe addresses the reader directly:
The permanence of the magazine lies not with us, but with you.... [0]ur
labor will not avail for permanence unless we can reach the public for
poetry which must exist in this vast country, and in the wide provinces of
the English-speaking world. And we can not find that public unless you
help us. (246)
On her publication’s fourth anniversary, Monroe amplifies the importance of the reader through capitalization and repeats the appeal, echoing the typography used byBLAST68 and the image of the Uncle Sam that had recently appeared for the first time on the cover of a magazine69: “Will not YOU... become, by contributing ten dollars a year, a
Supporting Subscriber [sic] of POETRY? Thousands of public-spirited citizens in our various cities pay that much, or far more, to support institutions of art, orchestral societies, architectural schools, etc... Will YOU be partners with us?” (“FM” 34). It is tempting to dismiss Monroe’s appeals as crass attempts to secure economic capital in the form of subscriptions: advertisements blared through a megaphone. But in the September
1914 appeal, Monroe goes on to list a variety of other, less obviously profitable ways by which readers can help the magazine achieve its goals, including encouraging local 74 libraries to stock the magazine, and “talk[ing] about the magazine; either praise or blame will indicate your interest” (247). She also suggests that “clubs” - presumably literary
“clubs” - may “select” their own “prize-winners among the poems contributed to the magazine. Givers of prizes, if they prefer, may make their own conditions, subject merely to the editor’s agreement” (248). In these suggestions, Monroe redraws the magazine as a potential site of civic engagement and dialogue (even if the dialogue is negative -
“blame” - and does not directly benefit the magazine). She also invites readers to perform the role of a kind of secondary editor, assigning awards to their favourite poems.
Although this invitation hardly constitutes a dismantling of the magazine’s editorial hierarchy, it encourages readers to play a participatory role in supporting poets. It also subtly reinforces an ideology that views poets less as transcendental beings and more as historically-situated cultural labourers in need of a pay cheque and an audience. As
Monroe suggests, hinting at the social nature of artistic creation, “encouraging the art.. .is of mutual benefit” to both poets and readers (“AWOR” 247; emphasis added).
Monroe is never very specific about the exact size and composition of the audience that she envisions for her magazine-gallery, but it is neither the mass audience of the popular magazine nor the limited coterie of the little magazine. In her circular of
1912, Monroe comments that “while the ordinary magazines must minister to a large public little interested in poetry, [ Poetry] will appeal to, and it may be hoped will develop, a public primarily interested in poetry as an art, as the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty” (qtd. in APL: 251). Although it is endowed with a habitus that enables it to appreciate poetry “as the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty” - to appreciate, Monroe implies, poetry’s superiority to other forms of artistic discourse - the latter “public” is no mere coterie. Indeed, Monroe goes on to describe her target audience as a “responsive public” and an “ever-increasing public”70 (252). By
“responsive public” she seems to mean an audience that is substantial enough to “increase
[the poet’s] earnings.. .to make it possible for poets to practice their art and be heard”
(252). By “ever-increasing” she suggests an audience that constantly expands but somehow never turns into the “large public” that reads “ordinary magazines.” The audience Monroe envisions would seem to be, like Poetry itself, an unrealized potentiality that exists in some sort of latent state and, with the right encouragement, could be activated and enlarged. As early as September 1911, in The Atlantic Monthly (for which she often wrote), Monroe claims to have observed “signs of an awakening” of the
“crowd” that might read poetry (“BW” 374). Later, in a May 1916Poetry editorial,
Monroe discusses the continuing need to help “the public to WAKE UP,” an image that further personifies the public as a sleeping giant71 (“GHR” 83-4).
Poetry's vague characterizations of its audience help the magazine, in its early years, to pursue the idea of obtaining an audience without having to settle on that readership’s exact number, the value of which fluctuates dramatically in various editorials and texts. In other words, they enable Poetry, however sincere in its goals, to enjoy the appearance of developing an audience while targeting no specific number, thus accruing symbolic capital for a magazine that (beyond going out of circulation altogether) cannot really fail in its goal of gathering together a body of readers. In editorials that were published in Poetry throughout 1914 and 1915 - editorials that constitute one half of an 76 ongoing debate with Pound72 - Monroe insists that her target audience is numerically large. The two-part text, “The Audience,” from the October 1914 issue, begins with
Pound’s “protest” against Poetry's use of Whitman’s motto ‘“to have great poets there must be great audiences too’” (30). In “The Audience,” Pound argues that “the great artist has always a great audience,” but this group is made up of “the spirits of irony and of destiny and of humor, sitting within him” (30). The poet’s audience, in Pound’s tongue- in-cheek estimation, is but a trinity of ethereal spirits that exist within as opposed to without, in a social realm. Monroe responds by noting, “Of course, as Mr. Pound says, there is a sense in which a ‘great audience’ may be a very small one. That was hardly
Whitman’s meaning, however, nor is it the hint we intend to convey by our motto” (31).
Wary of, in her words, “magnifying the importance of a coterie,” Monroe has larger and more material numbers in mind (31). Indeed, in March 1915, Monroe reports on a literary event at which an unnamed editor of a successful magazine notes that his “popular” monthly has “two hundred thousand” subscribers (“FC” 281). Monroe’s mind, she tell us, seized on this number and “transformed it, and multiplied by millions it included the vast constituency of all those incredibly popular magazines” (281). Far from being demoralized by the success of this “popular” monthly, Monroe suggests that the poetry editor, for the sake of “a kingdom of heaven on earth,” should not give up on the
“popular” monthly’s “millions” of readers. Instead, she suggests that these “millions” of readers might be turned to poetry.
In the “Our Contemporaries” column for January 1915, Henderson echoes
Monroe’s utopian hopes for “‘a kingdom of heaven on earth,”’ and asks, “Are there, all 77 told, a million readers of contemporary poetry in the United States? I believe there are..
(193). In the May issue, however, Monroe undercuts the earlier hyperbole and notes that
“probably we [atPoetry ] shall go on in this reckless course, whether the public gathers in great numbers or not” (“GHR” 83). Later that year, in the “Our Contemporaries” column for September, Monroe more directly contradicts her Associate Editor when she states that “[t]he great magazines are mostly engaged in the same game - that of getting a million readers,” which, Monroe seems to suggest, is an undesirable goal (316). The following spring, Henderson, thinking smaller, concedes that a “small” audience is still vital and notes that the “gulf between [the poet and his audience].. .is bridged in some sense whenever a poet wins his own particular audience, however small the little clan may be” (302). In August 1917, Henderson returns to the idea of a vast public for poetry but assigns it no number, noting merely that “in this country there is a considerable public for poetry of which no account is taken in the yearly summaries of The Publishers'
Weekly. I mean the public that enjoys and creates folk-poetry in the United States, a public much larger and more varied than we imagine” (“Cowboy” 255). She tells a story of a “cowboy down on his luck who had printed a collection of cowboy songs... and sold enough copies of the little paper-bound volume to set himself up in business again” (255).
The public for poetry exists, Henderson’s anecdote suggests, and is large enough to make an economic impact; it can get the mythic figure of the American “cowboy” back on his feet, even if it remains unquantifiable by journals such as The Publishers ’ Weekly, which report on the business side of the publishing world. Monroe’s and Henderson’s initial ambitions, however, though large, were not out of the realm of possibility; the U. S. 78 population in 1915 was 100,546,000. (By 1920, it had grown to 106,461,000. Also,
7 "^ according to the 1920 census, the city of Chicago had a population of 2,701,705, nearly three times the circulation number that Monroe and Henderson sought [U. S. Census
Bureau; Jeter 21]).
But this public, like the “cowboy” it supports, often takes on a mythic character in
Monroe’s and Henderson’s discourses, becoming “a kingdom of heaven on earth” and, therefore, not unlike Pound’s tongue-in-cheek trinity. Echoing her circular in the first issue of Poetry, Monroe is vague in her description of the public that she is not after:
a public which buys [popular magazines] not for their verse but for their
stories, pictures, journalism, rarely for their literature, even in prose. Most
magazine editors say that there is no public for poetry in America; one of
them wrote to a young poet that the verse his monthly accepted “must
appeal to the barber’s wife of the Middle West,” and others prove their
distrust by printing less verse from year to year, and that rarely beyond
page-end length and importance. We believe that there is a public for
poetry, that it will grow, and that as it becomes more numerous and
appreciative the work produced in this art will grow in power, in beauty, in
significance. In this belief we have been encouraged by the generous
enthusiasm of many subscribers to our fund, by the sympathy of other
lovers of the art, and by the quick response of many prominent poets, both
American and English, who have sent or promised contributions. (“MM”
27-8) 79
In positioning herself against an unnamed magazine editor who ‘“must appeal to the barber’s wife of the Middle West,’” Monroe constructs herself as the more imaginative and trustworthy editor, who can perceive and “believe” in a readership that others cannot see or trust to exist. In a later editorial, Monroe reiterates that this “readership” is a matter of “belief ’ when she insists that a “public for poetry... must exist in this vast country, and in the wide provinces of the English-speaking world” (“AWOR” 246; emphasis added).
But the readership, as Monroe presents it, is just that: a matter of “belief’ and not a material reality.
Indeed, the public in which Monroe believes would seem to constitute a transhistorical phenomenon - a mythic group that spans time and place. The final “Our
Contemporaries” column, in the April 1923 issue of Poetry, notes that “[t]he development of poetic genius in connection with the Greek and Elizabethan Drama is significant. So is the attempt today to give modem poets an audience...” (288). In doing so, the column draws a dubious connection between very different audiences that helped to foster “poetic genius” in very different historical periods: classical Greece, the Elizabethan age, and the early twentieth century. (It may be that the column is taking its lead from recent texts by
Eliot - “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and The Waste Land (1922) - in which the contemporary poet and world, respectively, are understood in relation to the past.) In general, the magazine’s appeals to a past in which figures like Shakespeare and
Raphael “had their world behind them” can seem nostalgic for a kind of unified audience that can not be rallied because it no longer exists, if it ever did (“QP” 247). Indeed, at its most nostalgic, Monroe’s Poetry echoes certain English magazines of the same period, 80 such as the English Review (1908-1937), which Ford Madox Ford founded and briefly edited,74 and the aforementioned Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama, both of which were edited by Harold Monro. In terms of Ford and Monro, Mark S. Morrison argues that
[tjhese early modernists, though espousing a myth of a public sphere in
decline that has not stood up to historical scrutiny, saw the wide
dissemination of vital new literature as a way of rejuvenating the public
sphere. I would argue, too, that this myth of decline gave them a useful
rhetorical enemy (the new commercial mass-market publications) against
which to position their work[.] (9)
Like Ford and Monro, Monroe has a tendency to imagine a public - the “great audience” of her magazine’s slogan - to contrast against the mass audience that reads popular magazines, thus defining Poetry in opposition to contemporary, mass-circulated periodicals.75
Although Monroe sometimes imagines a mythic readership, at other times she sharpens her account of its composition and reflects a relatively progressive vision. In
September 1911, she describes a “huge heterogeneous crowd” for poetry (“BW” 374; emphasis added). Later, in the January 1914 issue of Poetry, Monroe returns to the aforementioned image of the “‘barber’s wife of the Middle West’” - an anonymous magazine editor’s dismissive reference to his readership - and subtly reclaims it as a potential readership for her own magazine (“SaE” 143). Moreover, Monroe goes on to challenge the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which, she argues, has not served this barber’s wife well. The Institute was founded in 1899 but excluded women until 1905, 81 when Julia Ward Howe was admitted, and would exclude African Americans until 1944, when W. E. B. Du Bois was admitted (Lewis 12). The Institute, according to Monroe, is a bureaucracy consisting of “males” who “necessarily protect and perpetuate their own kind by admitting without question the sober and earnest candidate, and rejecting the adventurous and original one” (144, 141). The editor suggests that an individual’s ability to play a role in the arts is determined, to some extent, by larger, structural inequities in organizations like the Institute, against which she implicitly positions Poetry. She also notes that the barber’s wife must be “assisted” by institutions like the National Institute of
Arts and Letters, and she implies that this can be achieved if such institutions do not
“draw the line of sex” (143-4). As Monroe argues,
Either they exist for the benefit and development of American arts and
letters, or they do not. If they do, they are bound to admit to membership
such American artists and men and women of letters as deserve the
recognition, regardless of race, color, sex, or previous condition of
servitude. If they do not exist for such benefit and development, they
deserve neither a charter from Congress nor any other official or popular
sanction. In this case their purpose is... ‘encouragement’... only in those
creations of art which proceed from sober and earnest males. (144)
In one of Monroe’s most avowedly progressive statements, she suggests that the composition of institutions like the National Institute of Arts and Letters needs to be more diverse in terms of race and sex, and that diversity, in turn, will have a positive impact on the barber’s wife. Later that year, Monroe notes that “inter-racial thought,” enabled by 82 modem travel, has helped to “[do] away with Dante’s little audience, with his contempt for the crowd, a contempt which... disregarded the fact that his epic, like all the greatest art, was based upon the whole life of his time, the common thought and feeling of all the people” (“TA” 31). The homogeneous “little audience” - composed, Monroe implies, of a coterie of white men - is untenable in a multiracial world linked by mass communication.
It is also a kind of fiction; the work of an artist like Dante, Monroe argues, has always depended on more than a coterie; it has depended on “the whole life of his time,” on “all the people.” Having historicized Dante, she ends the piece by stating that “nothing can stand alone, genius least of all” (“TA” 32). Paul Durica also points out that Monroe’s
“subscription pitch invited less affluent people to become ‘spectators’ of Poetry. ..”
(“Back Page” 383). Monroe, it seems, hoped to involve different classes.
Although Monroe conceives of a “heterogeneous” audience that is not passive but, in fact, creative - an audience that does not simply collaborate in the creation of the magazine but in the creation of geniuses who cannot “stand alone” - she can be vague on the material form that this collaboration takes. Indeed, she sometimes resorts to hazy scientific language to suggest that there is a rational relationship between poet and audience. As early as September 1911, she insists that “[gjreat art, the highest art, comes only when profound energy of creation meets profound energy of sympathy” (“BW”
374). She repeats a variation of this in January 1914 when she observes that “only when the creative impulse meets an equally strong impulse of sympathy is the highest achievement possible in any department of human effort” (“SaE” 143). She also reiterates the claim made in the first issue of Poetry, the suggestion that poetry “is not a miracle of direct creation, but a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public,” when, two years later, she observes that “[a]rt is not an isolated phenomenon of genius, but the expression of a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public” (“MM” 27; “TA”
32). In fact, prior to noting that “nothing can stand alone, genius least of all,” Monroe observes that “[sjcience is explaining more and more the reactions and relations of nature” (32). Her refutation of “miracles” and her repeated characterizations of abstract
“meetings” of “energy” and “reciprocal relations” serve a function that is similar to the metaphor of the catalyzing mind, as described in Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” (1919), a mind that supposedly synthesizes disparate materials to create poetry: her language appeals to the seemingly objective discourse of science to suggest that poet and audience comprise forces that, when they collide, will produce a result; that the relationship between poet and audience constitutes a verifiable law. These appeals provide Monroe’s argument with authority. Indeed, as Foucault suggests, such a use of scientific language enables a figure like Monroe to “invest” her discourse “with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse” (“TL” 85).
But despite her use of science-laced rhetoric to clarify the relationship between poets and their audience - and accrue the veneer of objectivity - one of the very specific goals of Monroe’s magazine, in its early years, is to educate this audience, which positions Poetry in opposition to the typical little magazine of the time. Writing about the modernist periodical, Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich explain that “[w]hat the word [little] designated above everything else was a limited group of intelligent readers: to be such a reader one had to understand the aims of the particular schools of literature that the magazines represented, had to be interested in learning about Dadaism, vorticism, expressionism, and surrealism” (3). Churchill also reinforces the elect nature of the coterie when she observes that “little magazines appealed to a small, often elite, readership willing to exercise their minds to comprehend Futurism, Imagism, and
Dadaism, or to contemplate anarchism, socialism, and feminism” (9). Monroe’s magazine, however, does not limit itself to a coterie; it strives, instead, to expand its readership by not assuming the readership possesses a shared knowledge - and by not assuming that it does not wish to “exercise [its] mind.” Indeed, Monroe’s theorizing of a
“heterogeneous” readership would seem to necessitate an editorial policy that makes few assumptions about readers. In other words, her Whitmanesque “Open Door” policy, which welcomes a range of poets, can also be seen to welcome a range of readers whose interests and abilities to read poetry are not confined to any one movement. But it should be pointed out that, despite Monroe’s desire to appeal to as many different kinds of readers as possible, these readers can only ever be drawn from a sub-community that possesses the sufficient kinds and amounts of capital that enable people to entertain an interest in poetry, in the first place.
Nevertheless, in addition to introducing special issues of Poetry devoted to topics with which a readership might not be familiar, such as Aboriginal poetry,76 Monroe’s magazine publishes texts that attempt to play an educational role, supplying readers with introductions to potentially challenging movements, like Imagism, and often-confusing subjects, like poetic rhythm. In the March 1913 issue, for example, Monroe appends an “Editor’s Note” to F. S. Flint’s famous short prose note, “Imagisme,” in which Pound had a hand. Monroe’s paratext calls attention to the magazine’s commitment to education: “In response to many requests for information regarding Imagism and the Imagistes, we publish this note by Mr. Flint, supplementing it with further exemplification by Mr.
Pound...” (198). In the note itself, Flint begins by acknowledging that “[sjome curiosity has been aroused concerning Imagisme, and as I was unable to find anything definite about it in print, I sought out an imagiste, with intent to discover whether the group itself knew anything about the ‘movement.’ I gleaned these facts” (198-9). Flint’s apparent ignorance of Imagism and his plain-spoken desire to get a handle on the “facts” constitute a performance; his almost-joumalistic persona on the trail of the Imagists provides the reader with an everyman proxy through which to understand Imagism. At the end of the piece, the proxy reports back:
I found among [the Imagists] an earnestness that is amazing to one
accustomed to the usual London air of poetic dilettantism.... It is true that
snobisme may be urged against them; but it is at least snobisme in its most
dynamic form, with a great deal of sound sense and energy behind it; and
they are stricter with themselves than with any outsider. (“Imagisme” 200)
By emphasizing their “earnestness” and “sound sense,” Flint’s proxy anticipates and attempts to alleviate the concerns of the American reader of Poetry who might feel that the Imagists belong to a snobbish European coterie with which he or she cannot relate.
Flint’s brief note also helps prepare the reader for the longer and arguably more bracing text that immediately follows it, Pound’s famous “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” which 86 outlines in greater detail - and a more confrontational tone - the tenets of Imagism. In other words, the sheer placement of Flint’s and Pound’s texts, when considered in their original context, helps to initiate the uninitiated. Furthermore, texts that are not as famous as Pound’s, such as Monroe’s two-part editorial “Rhythms of English Verse” (1913), function less as introductions to challenging new movements and more as quick primers on habitually misunderstood subjects. “Misconception of [rhythm] is so general,” observes Monroe in the first part of the editorial, “that it may be useful to clear the ground by some consideration of its elements” (61).
By asserting its commitment to educating and developing a larger audience,
Poetry can be positioned relative to its competitors in the field, thus acquiring and asserting symbolic capital. Taking issue with a review by Raymond M. Alden in The
Dial, Henderson, in the August 1915 Poetry, queries, “Is Mr. Alden’s criticism of a type to guide or instruct in any way the professional craft of poets? I do not think so. Its tendency is simply to discourage the public” (“OC” 261). Poetry, by implication, is the magazine that takes upon itself the task of encouraging a public that other magazines have seemingly abandoned.77 Indeed, in its early years and often in the “Notes” section at the back of the magazine, Poetry emphasizes that it has introduced readers to unrecognized
American poets like Vachel Lindsay and important non-American poets, like India’s
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). The “Notes” for the December 1913 issue proclaim that “POETRY having introduced Mr. Tagore’s lyrics to American readers a year ago, is now the first magazine to present his translation of a group of narrative poems” (113; emphases added).78 By calling attention to its introductions in what are essentially 87 paratexts relegated to the back of each issue, Poetry nevertheless continues to advertise and affirm its precedence in relation to the American literary field.
The magazine also claims symbolic capital for itself by offering, in its editorials, anecdotal evidence of an expanding audience for poetry, which would seem to confirm that Poetry is meeting with success in developing its readership. In May 1915, Monroe notes that “[a] certain public—small, perhaps, but choice—is gathering; of that we receive indisputable evidence every day” (“GHR” 83). In another editorial in the very same issue, Monroe recounts a literary event at the Chicago Woman’s Club, during which a professor of history at the University of Chicago, Ferdinand Schevill, gave a speech that describes how he overcame “his early reluctance to subscribe for POETRY” (91-2).
Another speaker, the Irish poet Padraic Colum, provides further praise (92). Monroe merely adds that “[i]n the face of such authoritative praise from the poet and the connoisseur of poetry, the editor need say nothing...” (92). The evidence, she suggests, speaks for itself because it comes from such “authoritative” sources. A year later, in May
1916, Monroe presents further extenuating testimony, this time from unnamed sources. A
“well known” poet describes finding volumes of verse at the front of a Brentano’s bookstore, “in high piles on the foremost table; and moreover crowds of people, three or four deep, were reaching over each other to buy it” (qtd. in “Down East” 86). A “Chicago lover of the art” testifies to finding “a tableful of modem verse placed among the best sellers at McClurg’s, and when I express satisfaction the man replies, ‘Yes, that’s what
Miss Monroe’s magazine has done!”’ (86) In June, Monroe, her ear once again to the ground, notes that “[n]ever before was there so much talk about poetry in this western 88 world.... It may be evidence of that ‘poetic renaissance’ which some of us profess already to be living in; or at least it may initiate that ‘great audience’ which will be ready for the renaissance when it comes” (140; emphasis added). Much of this “talk,” however, is hearsay, and the “‘great audience,”’ Monroe suggests, has yet to arrive. This is not to imply that Monroe is lying, even if her magazine’simmediate impact on the larger culture turns out to have been limited; it79 is to assert that the texts in which Monroe presents anecdotal evidence of a gathering audience do more than offer an account of Poetry's ability to convert readers; they perform a function, constructing the magazine as a successful brand. And the testimonies of the professor of history, the Irish poet, and the anonymous “well known poet” work like blurbs on dust-jackets, investing the magazine with the very cultural capital these figures possess.
In terms of actual numbers, a “‘great audience’” would not arrive in Poetry's early years. For the first ten years of the magazine’s existence, the size of its readership hovered just under 2,000, which was twice that of the typical little magazine, but far from the “millions” of readers about which Monroe and Henderson had allowed themselves to dream. 80 In addition, the magazine, far from being as stable as Monroe would have preferred, would sometimes struggle to stay afloat in the years to come.81 Indeed, as early as 1916, on the occasion of the magazine’s fourth anniversary, Monroe goes as far as noting that “financial independence should not be expected: poetry, like the other arts, deserves and requires not one but many endowments...” (“FM” 34). Nevertheless,
Monroe’s 1917 anthology, The New Poetry: An Anthology o f Twentieth-Century Verse in
English, which included a lot of work that had been published in Poetry, did reach a 89 larger audience than the magazine.82 And the magazine itself did survive, appearing regularly every month and outlasting almost all of the little magazines with which it is now routinely associated. Moreover, it paid poets ten dollars a page, which equates to roughly two hundred dollars in American funds today (Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich 43).
It can be unproductive, however, to focus merely on numbers. In “These Five
Years,” published in October 1917, Monroe both looks back and towards what she calls
“the second period of our history.” Providing a useful summary of the magazine’s achievement, she notes,
We have assumed to be the organ of a great art, the exhibition-place [sic]
for its best current products. We have demanded as the poets’ right, and
spent for their benefit (or at least tried to), over five thousand a year of our
guarantors’ money, besides a smaller amount from subscribers and
advertisers. In so doing we have placed before the people—indeed, we
have uttered with loud voice—the claim of poetry, and the artists who
practice it, to that public recognition of sympathy and financial support
which is granted, unquestioningly and in lavish measure, to the other arts
(33).
Once again, Monroe reiterates the importance of giving poets a space - an “exhibition- place” - and an audience that will nurture poets through “sympathy and financial support.” Returning to and reprinting in full the circular of 1912, Monroe calls it “[a] kind of declaration of principles and purposes” (38). She goes on to list a number of the poets who reached out to Poetry, but makes but a brief mention of Imagism (40). In other 90 words, the focus of her celebration is less on the specific contents of Poetry and more on its function as an inclusive, cultural site.
5. Conclusion
Although many critics take issue with the inclusivity of Monroe’s “exhibition - place,” wishing that it had trained its attention more exclusively and emphatically on
“new” or “modem” poetries - and although the “exhibition-place” could not escape the top-down editorial hierarchy from which other magazines, like Others, aspired to free themselves — Monroe was successful in establishing and maintaining Poetry as a stable cultural institution, modeled on an art gallery: a site that regularly displayed and compensated American poets. In other words, although it does not exactly resemble the adventurous little magazine which some would prefer, an analysis of the many editorials through which Monroe’s magazine constructed and positioned itself reveals that Poetry was always intended to be a different kind of periodical, one that would neither cater to the mass audience of the popular magazine nor address itself merely to a limited coterie.
By devoting itself solely to the publication of poetry and criticism about poetry, Monroe’s magazine differentiated itself from the popular magazines of the day, which rarely gave poetry place of prominence. Yet, by taking care to ensure its financial stability and openness, the magazine strove to be something more than a brief salvo from an ephemeral group.
In focusing on the founding of Poetry and on editorials published in the first five years of the magazine - the period guaranteed by the investors from whom Monroe, 91 exploiting her social capital, solicited donations - 1 have attempted to recover what
Foucault calls a “subjugated” narrative (“TL” 81). If the poems in Poetry did not always reflect the American art form at its newest or most modem, Monroe’s many editorials add up to a relatively progressive vision: they insist that the poet is historically situated and shaped by his or her immediate discursive and social environments. They also insist that the poet’s audience constitutes a collaborator, and ought to be heterogeneous in terms of race and gender. The sheer founding of Poetry, I have argued, embodies this belief.
Poetry is not the invention of a pioneering individual but, rather, a latent possibility, embedded in the American literary field of the early-twentieth century, which Monroe was well-positioned to perceive and realize. And although the magazine fiercely defended its position in the field, often asserting its symbolic capital as the first periodical of its kind, the ideology underpinning the magazine in its early years provides the theoretical basis for the magazine’s current mission to develop the audience that Monroe, lacking resources, could only imagine. 92
Chapter Two
“I swear never to be successful”: Making a Poet of Little Magazines
In a 1950 interview, William Carlos Williams describes the relationship - or lack of one - that an artist has with his community by arguing that
the artist, generally speaking, feels lonely. Perhaps his very recourse to art,
in any form, comes from his essential loneliness. He is usually in rebellion
against the world, I think. I think that’s a rule. I have thought myself that
that’s rather a snide thing to say—here I am living with my wife and
[laughs] child and saying, “I’m lonely.” It merely records afact. (“IWCW”
12; emphases added)
By “it” Williams means his short poem “Danse Russe,” in which a speaker slips away from his “sleeping” family at dawn so that he may dance by himself, “naked, grotesquely
/ before my mirror,” and sing ‘“ I am lonely, lonely. / 1 was born to be lonely, / 1 am best so!”’ (3, 8-9, 12-4). Having stolen a moment to “admire” himself before “drawn shades,” shades that shut out the rest of the world, the patriarch concludes the poem with a rhetorical question: “Who shall say I am not / the happy genius of my household?” (18-9).
Williams’s interview encourages people to read the speaker’s relationship to his family as being symbolic of an artist’s relationship to a sleepy society that might not appreciate a grotesque performance. It also suggests that Williams, the “artist,” is a Romantic figure who “feels, a s opposed to Williams, the interviewee (a different entity altogether), who, reflecting on his earlier, more artistic self, merely “think[s/ ” (emphases added). 93
Figures like Williams are not coherent across time but, rather, an amalgam of different selves: some who feel and some who think.85
An artist’s “essential loneliness,” then, is no “fact”; it is a temporary fantasy at best. Indeed, the question that Williams’s speaker poses at the end of “Danse Russe” is only rhetorical because the others who might answer it - and potentially assert their
“genius,” thus contesting the speaker’s authority - are merely asleep; they will eventually awaken, and the artist will once again inhabit the noisy, social realm of family life.
Indeed, later in the same interview, Williams says that his wife “replied very beautifully” to another poem of his, the note-like “This Is Just to Say,” in which a speaker confesses his selfish consumption of plums which the beloved was “probably / saving / for breakfast” (16, 6-8). “Unfortunately,” says Williams, “I’ve lost [my wife’s reply], I think what she wrote was quite as good as [This Is Just to Say]” (16). But even if he did not have a talented wife, capable of equalling the poet’s notes about plums - capable of reply
- the artist’s isolation is still an illusion; it depends on the existence of a society (the
“sleeping...household”) from which he can isolate himself. In other words, without the sleepy society the artist is a “happy genius” of nothing. But if one has not read Williams’s interview, which encourages one to view the speaker as an artist, the poem still suggests that isolation requires society.
Interestingly, even after his interviewers point out that the doctor-poet, “more than most artists, [is] also living in a community and doing a job in a community,” Williams continues to insist on his “essential loneliness.” Despite the “ordinary work” that takes up some of a person’s time and involves him in a community, he observes that “the essential ‘I,’ the person himself, does his work, but remains - after the work is finished, there he stays” (“IWCW” 12). The “essential ‘I,’” in other words, survives the social world of work unscathed and returns to his poems at the end of a day of writing prescriptions and delivering babies. Although he goes on to marvel at his growing public profile in the town of Rutherford, New Jersey - the result of recent publicity for winning the National Book
Award for Selected Poems (1949) and the third book of Paterson (1949) - Williams returns to the solitary condition of this “T ” several times in the interview, noting that the
“artist finds himself lonely” and, echoing the repetitive speaker of “Danse Russe,” that
“[t]he artist is way ahead of his age in general thought. And so he’s lonely, lonely” (3, 13,
14). It should be no great surprise, then, when Williams, much later in the interview, describes another poem, the early work “Tract,” as “hackneyed now” (24): “Tract,” which offers burial instructions to a community, does not present a happy outsider but, rather, a socially-situated speaker who wishes to address his townspeople - who wants, in short, an alert audience for his grotesque dance. It presents a representation of the self that contradicts Williams’s other, more humanist conceptualization. Two years later, however, in an interview for A. D. magazine, Williams insists that “a writer should not be wilfully obscure, but if he has something to say in his own words he cannot wait until the public catches up. And if it doesn’t, it’s too damned bad” (“EMW” 27).
“Danse Russe” and the interviews of the 1950s are not - as the texts themselves would have one believe - the monologic utterances of some lonely “essential ‘I,’” out
“ahead of his age”; they are theproducts of an age and, more specifically, of what
Mikhail Bakhtin calls “a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment” (DN 1202). The sheer fact of their social and historical nature is ironic since both texts work to construct an identity for the poet as a self-determining, ahistorical outcast who, far from being o/his “particular historical moment” and “socially specific environment,” exists outside of them. Nevertheless, it has been argued that some of Williams’s texts - for example, the long poemPaterson (1946-1958) - pose a challenge to logocentric thought by deconstructing the idea of a poet who is the essential origin of his or her expressions. In his study The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics o f
William Carlos Williams (1974; 1990), Joseph N. Riddel insists that Williams “writes... a poetry about poetry, a poem of history and thus of lost origins” (xviii). J. Hillis Miller argues that Williams “[gave] up the ego” and, by extension, “those dramas of the interchange of subject and object, self and world, which have long been central in
Western philosophy and literature. [Williams’s] resignation puts him beyond romanticism” (31).
Other critics, however, have questioned the extent to which Williams abandons an essentialist conception of the individual. At the beginning of his study Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry o f William Carlos Williams: The Hieroglyphics o f a New Speech
(1969), Bram Dijkstra hints that Williams did not reliably recall the ways in which he was influenced by events in the world of visual arts: “This book attempts to discuss the early years of Williams’ creative activity partly by means of what the poet remembered, and partly by reconstructing the elements of influence which determined the structure of his work during his formative years, but which he later came to, or perhaps wanted to, forget”
(vii). In The Early Politics and Poetics o f William Carlos Williams (1987), David Frail 96 sheds light on Williams’s commitment to essentialism, to a “belief in the existence of words, things, and selves ‘in themselves,’ in a logos constituted prior to social existence”
(8). Frail offers a useful summary of earlier scholarship that explores this line of thought, including the work of Mike Weaver, who describes Williams “as a middle-class ‘egoist’ committed to owning property and himself’86 (1-2). As Frail argues, Williams “was a true believer in American individualism as Alexis de Tocqueville defined it and I use it here: the assumption that one does ‘not belong to a group,’ be it a social class, a tradition- sharing solidarity, or an ancestry, and thus can ‘be considered absolutely alone’” (5). He later concludes that “[a]rt would always be for Williams the expression of ‘genius’ or
‘personality’” (53). In the two decades since Frail’s study, scholars have continued to probe the ways in which Williams’s texts preserve and promote the individual. Daniel
Charles Morris examines how Williams’s short stories and narrative fictions function as
“self-selling artifacts” that “relay the news of his renown to an audience of ordinary readers” (“The costs” 1; Writings 6). In several chapters of a recent dissertation, Sean
Francis considers the ways in which Williams and other poets incorporated strategies of advertising and self-promotion in their work.87
There has been little sustained attention, however, given to how literary magazines helped to construct Williams by offering him a space in which he could define and promote an identity for himself as a self-determining individual. In fact, the body of research on Williams’s interactions with literary magazines is relatively limited.88 But modernist periodicals were important to Williams; as he observes in his Autobiography,
“[t]he little magazine is something I have always fostered; for without it, I myself would have been early silenced” (265). This is a revealing quote; it affirms Williams’s power as an individual who transcends the little magazine by virtue of his ability to “foster it.” But it also implies that other poets are less lonely than Williams would have us believe. Poets exist in a social realm that makes available the material opportunities through which they can be heard (such as literary magazines) and that makes possible language itself.
Although Bakhtin insists that poetry is monologic and therefore inferior to the novel, the aforementioned Williams poem “This Is Just to Say” demonstrates its dialogic nature because it lives within “a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment” and because it is “directed toward an answer,” an answer that includes the reply of the person who was “probably / saving” the plums - the person who shares his language and shapes his poem (just as his poem shares her language and shapes her reply). A literary magazine, among other things, constitutes a specific cultural site that can prompt a poet into speech and within which he or she can orient him- or herself.
Poetry is one of the magazines that prevented Williams from being, as he observes, “silenced,” and instead enabled him to speak; one of the magazines within which he oriented himself. Beginning in 1913, Poetry published 99 of Williams’s texts in his lifetime - including poems, letters, reviews, and essays - and an additional three poems after his death in 1963. Seven successive editors and editorial policies at Poetry supported his work or, at least, considered it worth publishing in their pages. Under
Harriet Monroe’s editorship, the magazine awarded him its Guarantor’s Award in 1924, which he acknowledges in his autobiography (241). Interestingly, this text had its origins in a series of prose pieces which Poetry commissioned and which Williams initially 98 treated as a “joke and a time killer,” according to a letter he sent to his New Directions publisher, James Laughlin, dated 16 September 1948 (160). But, as he acknowledges on the copyright page of his autobiography, “I am grateful to [the editors Poetryof ] for the suggestion that the task be undertaken and for their kind permission to include much of this earlier material [the prose pieces] in the finished work.” Poetry, then, did not just accept and award his work; it also encouraged its creation. In other words, the magazine existed in a dialogic relation to Williams’s writing.
Little research, however, has been done on Williams’s relationship with Poetry.*9
Indeed, despite Poetry's support of Williams, he had ambivalent feelings about the magazine and criticized it during Monroe’s editorship. As I argued in the first chapter,
Monroe sought to make Poetry something other than a precarious little magazine aimed at a coterie; she intended it to be a stable cultural institution with an inclusive, “Open Door” policy. Her various editorials for Poetry, especially in its early years, imagine a large - though not a mass - readership that would help to compensate poets for their contributions. Williams, on the other hand, celebrated the little magazine as an ephemeral, personal proposition that affords “an absolute freedom of editorial policy,” thus reinforcing his belief in the individual who exists outside of his historical moment and social environment, and who, in his pursuit of the new, cannot be seen to accommodate his work to “most who read”; the individual who, in Williams’s decisive words, “cannot wait until the public catches up. And if it doesn’t, it’s too damned bad.”
Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that Williams’s interactions with modernist periodicals and his criticisms of Poetry constitute attempts to construct an 99
identity for himself as a forward-looking and self-determining individual. In the first part
of the chapter, I analyze Williams’s definition of the little magazine and its typical editor, which, I suggest, reflects a liberal humanist ideology that celebrates an essentialist
conception of the self. In the second part of the chapter, however, I build on the useful but ultimately limited scholarly work of Frail and Whittemore; through a framework provided by Bourdieu, I explore how the literary field at the start of the twentieth century had a hand in shaping Williams. In the third part, I consider his specific relationships with modernist periodicals in the 1910s and 1920s - including especially Others and both
iterations of Contact (1920-1923; 1932).90 These publications, I submit, offered Williams a space in which he could define himself as a poet whose opposition to the concerns of an audience, commercial considerations, and, more generally, society serves to position him as an innovative outsider, thus investing him generously with symbolic capital. In the final part of the chapter, I narrow my focus and, through letters, poems, and biographical research, explore Williams’s sometimes-fraught relationship with Poetry, especially in its first decade. In doing so, I expand on some of the recent and aforementioned studies that work to contextualize Williams historically and provide insight into his relationship to specific magazines.
1. “It must be a person who does it”: Defining the Little Magazine
Looking back on the American literary field of the early twentieth century in his
1951 autobiography, Williams offers one of his most substantial meditations on the little magazine. Although it comprises a long passage - nearly three paragraphs in total - it is 100 worth considering in full because it offers Williams’s definition of the little magazine and also provides an insight into the liberal humanist ideology that shaped it. With reference to Robert McAlmon (1896-1956), co-founder and co-editor of Contact, Williams argues that,
If it is not a McAlmon it is some other. He represented the man or woman
with a certain amount of capital at his disposal, or intelligent direction,
who will maintain the attack upon the dry rot which overwhelms writing at
various periods - as it did approaching the advent of the little magazine in
the early part of the century. The little magazines never more than barely
kept going, their five and ten contributions from some semi-submerged
group of five or six young men and women - who mostly want to publish
their own rebellious work - serving, though the hopes are big, to get no
more than a few issues out before they collapse. It is only in the aggregate
that they maintained a steady trickle of excellence, mixed with the bad,
that served to keep writing loose, ready to accept the early, sensitive
acquisition to the art. But at that moment it was a precarious business.
But when, often at the very moment of success, some prominent
support is cut away, nothing for years may get published. Loose ends are
left dangling, men are lost, promises that needed culture, needed protection
and wit and courage to back them simply die. One book, here and there,
gets a preliminary hearing and remains isolated, while the overwhelming
flood of insensitive drivel floods the market. 101
The little magazine is something I have always fostered; for
without it, I myself would have been early silenced. To me it is one
magazine, not several. It is a continuous magazine, the only one I know
with an absolute freedom of editorial policy and a succession of
proprietorships that follows a democratic rule. There is absolutely no
dominating policy permitting anyone to dictate anything. When it is in any
way successful it is because it fills a need in someone’s mind to keep
going. When it dies, someone else takes it up in some other part of the
country - quite by accident - out of a desire to get the writing down on
paper. I have wanted to see established some central or sectional agency
which would recognize, and where possible, support little magazines. I
was wrong. It must be a person who does it, a person, a fallible person,
subject to devotions and accidents. {Auto 265-66)
Williams begins this passage with a subtle statement of anti-individualism of which
Bourdieu himself might have approved. McAlmon, we are told, could just as easily have been “some other.” In fact, the use of the article in the phrase “a McAlmon” suggests that
McAlmons are plentiful (emphasis added). Williams’s McAlmon, then, is not a fully present self; he merely “represented” the general type of the patron or impresario who, possessing a sufficient amount of economic “capital,” finds him- or herself in a position to participate in the literary field and bankroll projects like periodicals. In other words,
Williams’s characterization of McAlmon hints at the role that economic forces play in the creation and distribution of the seemingly unique personalities - like Monroe and 102
Braithwaite - who establish literary magazines and can appear to be self-determined when, in fact, they have merely taken advantage of opportunities made available by their economic, educational, and social capital.
Williams’s characterization of the “precarious” writers themselves - at least at the verybeginning of the above passage - also hints at the importance of money. It should put us in mind of Monroe’s relatively progressive sense of the poet as a material being.
Without “some prominent support” - “a McAlmon,” say - “men are lost, [and] promises that need culture, needed protection and wit and courage to back them simply die.”
Williams’s implicit comparison of writers to plants “that need culture,” which is to say cultivation, echoes Monroe’s often-repeated description of the poet as a tree that depends on being nourished by its surrounding environment, including its lesser neighbours91
(emphasis added). (Like Monroe, he also masculinizes poets: “men are lost” without support.) Furthermore, his suggestion that the little magazine - as an “aggregate” of efforts, some excellent, some not - “served to keep writing loose” echoes Monroe’s second editorial for Poetry, “The Open Door” (1912), which insists that the magazine will remain open toward the seemingly “minor” poet.92 When he asserts that “the little magazine is something I have always fostered; for without it, I myself would have been early silenced,” Williams seems to be implying that there exists, as Monroe has it, “a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public” (“MM” 27). Indeed, as Herbert
Lebowitz, the author of a forthcoming biography of Williams, observes, “Little magazines were his saviors, Williams often said in interviews, because it kept his work before the public” (Leibowitz). The little magazine, Williams implies, is one of the 103 cultural sites that are external to the poet and, like air itself - that most social and circulating of media - help to embody the voice of the poet.
As he continues to articulate a definition of the little magazine, however, Williams comes to endorse a more humanist - and even Emersonian - ideology that ultimately affirms the self-determining individual. He dehistoricizes little magazines; instead of viewing them as discrete publications that exist in a dialogic relationship with one another and, indeed, their social, cultural, and historical moment, Williams treats all little magazines as “one... continuous magazine” that is disconnected from any specific geographical place in “the country” - the United States, presumably - and always embodies the same principles in its “editorial policy” and “proprietorship”: “absolute freedom” and “democratic rule.” In his essay “The American Scholar” (1837), Emerson proposes a transhistorical essence by arguing that “[i]t is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men” (530). In Williams’s
Autobiography, it is as if individual little magazines themselves are (like Emerson’s
“men”) merely temporary instantiations of a single impulse that (like Emerson’s “light” or “soul”) inevitably animates them. (John C. Thirlwall, discussing Williams’s “activities in support of the little magazine,” also describes it in Emersonian terms as a
“phenomenon of advanced writing, which is forever dying and rising again like the
Phoenix. Its name may be Others or Contact or Blues or Pagany or Little Review, but it is the same magazine” [110].) By rejecting a previous desire of his to “see established some central or sectional agency which would recognize, and where possible, support little magazines,” Williams implicitly rejects a conceptualization of the little magazine as a 104 socially supported - and, therefore, socially situated - institution. (It is hard not to think that he is rejecting Monroe’s conceptualization of the little magazine.) “I was wrong,” he insists. “It must be a person who does it, a person, a fallible person, subject to devotions and accidents.” Ellen Williams notes that Williams “tended to define the little magazine as the mere extension of the poet - a ‘free running sewer,’ as he wrote of Others, in which the poet can gain print ‘at will’” (HMPR 218). Indeed, in a 1929 letter to Charles Henri
Ford, who had recently launched his little magazine Blues, Williams declares that “Blues is after all you. You must bear it yourself and make it go, no help to that, though help you must have. There are four or five new quarterlies and what not. Some good, some
(probably) not. Each will be at its best a person, as I see it” (“To Charles” 110). For
Williams, then, the little magazine constitutes the expression of a rebellious individual -
“a person” - who establishes it even though it is sure to be a “precarious business” and, paradoxically, will need “help” to survive. It emerges not because of its social, cultural, and historical contexts but in spite of these contexts.
2. “Gulfs and grottos”: Playing the (American Literary) Field
Williams’s belief in the rebellious individual, ironically, was fomented by the specific social and historical context in which he grew up. According to Frail, Rutherford,
New Jersey, played a key role in shaping Williams’s political views (5, 14). Williams’s hometown - “that new and ironic form of American community, the suburb” - favoured the individual over community (13). It was dominated by Republicans, which forced
Williams, a Democrat, into “the role of the perennial dissenter who can never expect to 105 acquire the power to change things”; he was “socially concerned but not a social activist”
(16, 34). Frail also highlights the enormous impact that Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Soul of
Man under Socialism” (1891) had on Williams’s thinking in the first few decades of the twentieth century, reinforcing his view of the artist as an individual isolated from a herd like public that demands “conformity to what [it] already know[s]” (53).
Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, I argue that “rebellious individual” is also a role proposed by the structure of the American literary field in the early twentieth century. Although Williams came from modest origins - his father “never in his life made more than the barest possible income...” (Auto 50) - Williams’s educational capital gave him access to this field and enabled him to participate and perceive the possible roles which he could play. As he himself observes, “I never went to college. I didn’t have to, for at the University of Pennsylvania they admitted selected men to medical school in those days from certain high schools and I had been to Horace Mann in New York, one of the best; we had been to Europe for a year, besides” (50). Williams’s educational capital - the result of attending “Horace Mann... one of the best” - opened the way to the
University of Pennsylvania, which introduced Williams to a dynamic environment in which he could accrue social capital by interacting with other young poets, one of whom
- Pound - would later promote Williams’s poetry.93 “During these days,” he records, “I met Ezra Pound in my room in the dormitories. 1 met Hilda Doolittle and must have brushed against Marianne Moore also, without meeting her, at Bryn Mawr” (51 -2). As
Frail notes, “In the most important relations Williams had in the early 1910s with other poets - with Ezra Pound, Alfred Kreymborg, and the Others group - he encountered 106 nearly all of the contemporary notions about the relations between the artist and society and art and politics, and he made the best of a limited set of choices” (69). Although Frail does not apply Bourdieu’s methodology, his phrase “limited set of choices” is useful because it recalls Bourdieu’s space of possibles, which presents itself to those persons who are able to participate in the literary field and perceive the positions that can be taken.94 The Pound connection is also important because, according to Whittemore, most of the magazines in which Williams’s early work was published “were Pound-edited or
Pound-nudged” (PfJ 210). Ellen Williams confirms this when she notes that “Pound was instrumental in getting Williams’s work a careful reading” from Monroe at Poetry.
Furthermore, Williams’s definition of the little magazine as an individualistic venture echoes that of Wyndham Lewis. Lewis, in the opening pages of the first issue of BLAST
(1914), one of the little magazines to which Pound contributed, proclaimed that BLAST
“will not appeal to any particular class, but to the fundamental and popular instincts in every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL. The moment a man feels or realizes himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time. Blast [sic] is created for this timeless, fundamental Artist that exists in everybody” (Lewis, “Long” 9).
The University of Pennsylvania enabled Williams to study medicine, which, in turn, promised economic capital and, in Williams’s words, “would make it possible for me to live and write as I wanted to” (Auto 51). It also offered social capital; Williams’s status and position as a doctor put him in touch with many of Rutherford’s citizens and, by extension, the raw subject matter for poems. “[M]y ‘medicine,’” he writes, was the thing which gained me entrance to these secret gardens of the self.
It lay there, another world, in the self. I was permitted by my medical
badge to follow the poor, defeated body into those gulfs and grottos. And
the astonishing thing is that at such times and in such places - foul as they
may be with the stinking ischio-rectal abscesses of our comings and goings
-ju st there, the thing, in all its greatest beauty, may for a moment be freed
to fly for a moment guiltily about the room. In illness, in the permission I
as a physician have had to be present at deaths and births, at the tormented
battles between daughter and diabolic mother, shattered by a gone brain -
just there - for a split second - from one side or the other, it has fluttered
before me for a moment, a phrase which I quickly write down on anything
at hand, any piece of paper I can grab.
It is an identifiable thing, and its characteristic, its chief character is
that it is sure, all of a piece and, as I have said, instant and perfect: it
comes, it is there, and it vanishes. But I have seen it, clearly. (288-89)
In describing this “thing, in all its greatest beauty,” which “may for a moment be freed to fly for a moment guiltily about the room,” Williams presents an epiphany, a heightened moment of awareness that everyday events such as “deaths and births” yield to the perceptive bystander.95 But this “thing,” flying “about the room,” is nevertheless contained by the room, a structure in space that requires a passport - a “medical badge.”
And Williams is no mere bystander. Indeed, as he himself reiterates, he “gained... entrance,” “was permitted,” had “permission”; a larger society - specifically, its 108 educational and medical institutions - has made it possible for Williams to cross thresholds and access these “foul” “places.”
Furthermore, Williams’s reference to “such times... such places” inadvertently echoes Bakhtin’s reference to a “particular historical moment in a socially specific environment” and reminds one that poets are always already situated in time and space.
Williams’s description of “stinking ischio-rectal abscesses” and the “gone brain” recall another Bakhtinian notion: the grotesque body, “a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body”96{ R H W ill). Although Williams presents himself as standing apart from these bodies and capturing, as it flutters about, the “phrase which I quickly write down on anything at hand,” his account inadvertently reveals that he, too, is a material being.
Moreover, it suggests that poetic inspiration does not occur in antiseptic isolation but, rather, necessarily depends on a sometimes messy interaction with a social world - on, for example, “the tormented battles between daughter and diabolic mother.” Moreover, the
“phrase” sometimes “flutter[s]” before Williams, and which he must hurry to capture, would seem to be that of an Other - a kind of found text, tweezered from the air.
In other texts such as “A Beginning on the Short Story (Notes),” Williams separates himself, as a writer of fiction, from a grotesque Other - “the heterogeneous character of the people” - that requires elevation (300). Considering the poor, whom he encountered throughout his career but especially during the Depression, he observes:
I lived among these people. I know them and saw the essential qualities
(not stereotype), the courage, the humor (an accident), the deformity, the 109
basic tragedy of their lives - and the importance of it. You can’t write
about something unimportant to yourself. I was involved....
Nobody was writing about them, anywhere, as they ought to be
written about....
It was my duty to raise the level of consciousness, not to say
discussion, of them to a higher level, a higher plane. Really to tell.
(Williams, “BSS” 300)
James Schevill celebrates Williams for finding the “grotesque,” in this instance, to be
“beautiful” (Schevill 235). Yet, although Williams states that he is “involved” in the grotesque, he ultimately distances himself from it by asserting the “duty” of the artist to write “about” it, from a seemingly removed or elevated position. Moreover, his comments display the tincture of condescension: “these people,” according to his diagnosis, are rather more passive than he is, and require the attention and action of an artist. In addition to his prose, Williams’s poems - especially those that address his townspeople, in the collection Al Que Quiere (To Him Who Wants It) - can grind up the poor, the physical, and the “earthy” into fodder for the insights of a speaker who stands apart (“ST,” CPI 6).
For example, the speaker of “Sub Terra,” the first poem in the collection, is searching for
“grotesque fellows... to make up my band,” a quest that takes him into physical environments like “negro houses / with their gloom and smell!” (CPI 35-6). In another poem, “Pastoral,” an “Older” speaker, who has “[made] something of [himself],”
walk[s] back streets
admiring the houses 110
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel-staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best
of all colors.... (Williams, “Pastoral” 5-19)
“[0]ut of line,” “cluttered,” “gone wrong,” “built of... parts” - the world of “the very poor” is presented as a disorderly and partial place - “heterogeneous,” to borrow
Williams’s earlier phrase. This would not be problematic if the speaker did not present himself as quite so unified and removed a being, an American flaneur. Also, the speaker risks reducing this environment to a fetish object that “pleases”: a source for his voyeuristic pleasure.
Like the “gulfs and grottos” he visited as a doctor, little magazines constituted another site that gave Williams access to the ideas of others. They also offered him a space in which to publish. Camera Work (1903-1917), edited by Alfred Stieglitz, is one of the earliest little magazines that helped to shape Williams’s thinking ( PfJ 108-9).
Camera Work focused on photography, but also published artistic work in other genres.
Over the course of its run, the photographs it published became less impressionistic and more direct; in the final issue, Stieglitz printed eleven pictures by Paul Strand, nine of which were, according to Whittemore, “casual, candid, sharp, and hard - of proletarian figures with distorted expressions. Then there were two close-ups of things, things so close to the camera that their thingness cannot be identified, they are just lines and shapes. All hard and sharp. ‘Brutal’” (PfJ 108). As Whittemore suggests, Camera Work and Stieglitz in particular may have had an impact on Williams’s conception of the image
(110). Gertrude Stein’s verbal “portrait” of Matisse for Camera Work in the August 1912 issue may have had an impact as well, offering Williams “an instance of an experimental writer’s interest in the visual arts as well as an actual example of how that interest took shape in the writing” (Tashjian 30). (Certainly Stein’s use of repetition - “Some said of him that he was greatly expressing something struggling. Some said of him that he was not greatly expressing something struggling” [Stein 330] - calls attention to the materiality or “thingness” of language.) In his study of how the visual arts shaped
Williams, Dijkstra is unequivocal: “ Camera Work was undoubtedly one of the most important forces in American cultural life at that time” (15).
Williams never published his poetry in Camera Work, which Whittemore nevertheless calls “an important fact in the history of WCW’s morale,” emphasizing the significance of the publication to the poet-doctor (110). But those little magazines that did provide an outlet were especially integral to his development. Poetry was the first 112 magazine to do so, in June 1913 ( HMPR 56). Frail notes that Williams “[t]hroughout
1913 got a good deal of support and specific advice from Poetry, the one magazine of the time we are certain he read” (84). Frail suggests that Williams was influenced by
Monroe’s April 1913 complaint that poets were ‘“unaware of the twentieth century,’” and he argues that Ford Madox Ford’s two-part essay “Impressionism— Some Speculations” from the August and September issues of that year, left an impression on the doctor-poet
(84). The essay suggests, among other things, that “poets should leave country lanes and plunge into ‘the Crowd’” and that “the language of poetry should be the language one spoke in life” (84). Frail also points out that Williams was influenced by “the writers he read in Poetry” to change “the form of poetry” as a “way to ‘win through,’ as Harriet
Monroe put it, to an unspecified ‘freedom’” (86).
In terms of other magazines that had an impact on Williams, Alfred Kreymborg’s
Others, in Williams’s words, “saved my life as a writer”97 (Auto 135). Suzanne Churchill states that Others “launched his career as a poet” (101). Even if this is not exactly true - before his first appearance in Others in August 1915, he had already published nine poems and a letter in Poetry - Others became a substantial venue for his publications for the next several years.98 It also offered him an education in the publishing world;
Williams occasionally served as the editor of Others, and states that “I helped as I could” to keep the magazine afloat (Auto 135). In his biography of Williams, Whittemore cites
Others as the doctor-poet’s “first little magazine - that is, the first magazine he was close to, could print his own work in at will and have some measure of control over the policies of - and so it was important to him” (PfJ 127). Whittemore also calls attention to the fact 113 that Williams often contributed to The Little Review and The Dial (57, 167). He goes on to note that
[i]n the Yale files there are letters to WCW from the editors of well over a
hundred little magazines and in few cases was WCW’s connection with
them perfunctory. He would generally send on a poem if the editor wrote
for one.... They were magazines that gave WCW a steady attic outlet not
only for poems and stories but for wisdom and polemic about poems and
stories. {PfJ 238)
Indeed, at his weariest, at a loss for how to promote himself, Williams always returned to little magazines: “[a] 11 he knew was little magazines, having discovered that the literary people in the big publishing places kept insisting on not knowing him. What to do? He went back to his attic” {PfJ 211).
3. “No one had any money”: Capitalizing on the Little Magazine
Although Frail and Whittemore provide some useful examples of how his background and his interest in little magazines influenced Williams, their analyses are ultimately limited. (Frail’s larger focus is on Williams’s early politics; Whittemore’s, on
Williams’s biography.) Little magazines, I argue, did not just offer Williams access to the ideas of others and “steady attic outlet[s]” in which to publish; each one also represented a distinct position in the literary field which, when occupied, infused the poet with a specific form and quantity of symbolic capital. In The Rules o f Art (1992, 1996), his study of Flaubert and the art world of the nineteenth century, Bourdieu notes that during the 114
Second French Empire, between 1852 and 1870, “the major journals were closed to
young writers,” creating
a proliferation of small reviews, for the most part doomed to an ephemeral
existence, whose readers are recruited from among the contributors and
their friends. Therefore producers have to accept all the consequences of
the fact that the only remuneration they can count on will be necessarily
deferred - as opposed to “bourgeois artists” who are assured of an
immediate clientele[.] (82)
But artists who publish in poorly paying “small reviews” (or what we might call “little
magazines”) do, in fact, benefit from their apparent resistance to the commercial world or
their work’s lack of commercial appeal. Indeed, from this specific, nineteenth-century
example, Bourdieu extrapolates a general theory of art and proposes that “the artist cannot triumph on the symbolic terrain except by losing on the economic terrain (at least in the
short run), and vice versa (at least in the long run)” (RoA 83). Elsewhere, Bourdieu labels this relationship between the symbolic and the economic “an inverse economy” (RoA
141). According to this economy, an artistic production that “can acknowledge no other demand than one it can generate itself, but only in the long term, is oriented to the accumulation of symbolic capital” (RoA 142). On the other hand, a production “moves closer to the ‘commercial’ pole the more directly or completely the products it offers on the market respond to a pre-existing demand, and in pre-established forms” (142).
Williams’s stance of artistic autonomy, throughout his career and especially in its early years, is embodied in his disinterest in cultivating a large (and especially mass) audience 115 and his interest in associating with little magazines - the more economically precarious the better. His stance earns the poet symbolic capital.
The literary field in the Unites States of the early twentieth century made this stance available to poets. As Frail notes, Williams, the Greenwich Village rebels with whom he associated in the 1910s, and “virtually every artist of the time... shared the assumption that the artist had a special kind of individual autonomy and that the artist’s relation to society was a special sort of freedom” (6). Williams may have absorbed this
“assumption” partly by readingPoetry and through his connection to the editor of
Camera Work. In the case of Poetry, many of the poets whom Monroe published, like
Pound, “spoke the current language of the iconoclastic artist who opposed middle-class morals and the tastes of a ‘commercial’ culture” (Frail 86). In the case of Camera Work,
Stieglitz, in addition to editing the magazine, owned several galleries but “emphatically denied being a commercial art dealer.... Upon his death in 1946 Williams saw him as ‘a profound prophet of real values as opposed to the murderous falsity of cash over everything else’” (Tashjian 90). (The romance with the anti-commercial Stieglitz persisted; discussing the high production values of Camera Work and its support of the then-relatively “unknown” Gertrude Stein in a 1912 issue of the magazine, Dijkstra
(1969) declares, “No one can accuse Stieglitz of having had any motive of financial gain in publishing that special issue” [13].) In other words, the notion that one can stand apart from one’s social context and, in particular, its economic forces is, ironically enough, one with which Williams’s social context supplied him - and one that outlasted the poet. It is, 116 however, a fiction;99 the appearance of standing apart from an economic system still profits the poet - in the coinage of symbolic capital.
Indeed, Williams claims this currency throughout his autobiography, beginning with his decision to become a writer:
First, no one was ever going to be in a position to tell me what to
write, and you can say that again. No one, and I meant no one (for money)
was ever (never) going to tell me how or what I was going to write. That
was number one.
Therefore I wasn’t going to make any money by writing. Therefore
I had to have a means to support myself while I was learning. For I didn’t
intend to die for art nor to be bedbug food for it, nor to ask anyone for
help, not my blessed father, who didn’t have it, nor anyone else. And to
hell with them all.
I was going to work for it, with my hands, which I had been told (I
knew it anyhow) were stone-mason’s hands. I also looked at my more or
less stumpy fingers and smiled. An esthete, huh? Some esthete. (Auto 49)
Williams states that he will not write “for money,” thus positioning himself in opposition to the economic pole in Bourdieu’s inverse economy. (Later, he states that “I knew that the kind of writing I would do would not be for sale” [51].) He also asserts his independence from the expectations of “anyone” other than himself. A line is drawn between the poet and, in his slightly ambiguous words, “my blessed father,” which suggests his biological father, but also another kind of “blessed” patriarch, God - both of 117 whom, in any event, are cast “to hell.” Neither economics, biology, nor religion define the self-reliant individual of Williams’s autobiography; he is both independent and secular, in the Emersonian tradition,100 capable of pulling himself up, through “work,” by his own
“hands.”
The father figure can also be read as a kind of middlebrow audience from which the young poet seeks liberation. Williams recalls a dream he had, shortly after his father’s death, in which his father is “coming down a peculiar flight of exposed steps, steps I have since identified as those before the dais of Pontius Pilate in some well-known painting.
But this was in a New York office building, Pop’s office” (Auto 14). The father’s attention is absorbed by “some business letters,” but after Williams cries, “‘Pop! So, you’re not dead! ’” his father “only looked up at me over his right shoulder and commented severely, ‘You know all that poetry you’re writing. Well, it’s no good.’ I was left speechless and woke trembling. I have never dreamed of him since” (14). The text casts Williams as Jesus and his father as Pontius Pilate; it also associates his father implicitly with the world of business, which, in Williams’s discourse, is anti-bohemian.
The condemnatory “Pop” is characterized as a remorseless general reader whose interest in “business letters” cannot be diverted for long. Williams continues to encourage a view of his father as a kind of negative audience when, later in the autobiography, he describes a scene in which a young Pound reads a poem to the patriarch, a poem that compares “the backs of certain books” to “jewels” {Auto 92). According to Williams, “[i]t wasn’t a bad conceit,” but “Pop couldn’t get it” (92). When Pound explains the conceit, Williams records his father as saying, “‘Of course.. .being books and being precious to you as a 118 student and a poet you treasure them, therefore you call them jewels. That I understand.
But if that’s what you wish the reader to understand, to make an intelligent impression on him, if it’s books you’re talking about, why don’t you say so then?”’ (92). Williams follows this with an ironic observation - “Ezra appears never to have forgotten the lesson” (92) - which seems to be at the expense of Pound and his tendency to be intertextually dense and obscure. Nevertheless, the interchange illustrates the divide between the uncompromising poet and the middlebrow reader who wants clarity and eschews figurative language.
But Williams’s autobiography also seems to admit, if only implicitly, the ultimate impossibility of an artist occupying what Bourdieu calls a “world apart - the artistic or the literary field we know today”(RoA 141). As Bourdieu notes, “this world” is only a
“relatively autonomous universe (which is to say, of course, that it is also relatively dependent, notably with respect to the economic field and the political field)” (141; emphases added). In Williams’s case, his supposed autonomy depends on his ability to
“have a means to support [himself].” Indeed, he seems to recognize that complete autonomy from economics is only possible through death, and he “didn’t intend to die for art.” By poking fun - albeit gently - at the idea of himself as an “esthete,” he implies that the “esthete” is a socially tailored role for which his “more or less stumpy fingers” are not a perfect fit. He goes on to observe that “it was money that finally decided me. I would continue medicine, for I was determined to be a poet; only medicine, a job I enjoyed, would make it possible for me to live and write as I wanted to. I would live: that first, and write, by God, as / wanted to if it took me all eternity to accomplish my design”(Auto 51). Money, then, comes “first”; the need to “live” precedes, and makes possible, the
ability to “write,” thus undercutting the which Williams’s use of italics means to
strengthen, and which seems to be an example of the doctor protesting - proclaiming his
individuality - too much.
In general, the inability of Williams’s writing to generate money and an audience represents both a source of anxiety and a badge of honour throughout his autobiography.
Describing the fate of his collection of stories Knife o f the Times, published by Angel
Flores’s Dragon Press in 1932, Williams observes, “Few books were sold and I never heard of Angel Flores again” (298). A collection of poems is “brought out” in 1936 -
Adam and Eve & The City - “[b]ut still nothing sold” (299). His definition of the little magazine as the ephemeral expression of an individual - “a fallible person, subject to devotions and accidents” - is followed immediately by a remembrance of just such a person: Emanuel Camevali (1897-1942), an Italian-American poet who struggled to make a living in New York and, later, in Chicago, with Poetry magazine, before dying young
(266-69). Camevali’s sole book, A Hurried Man (1925), was published by McAlmon’s
Contact Editions, which shared a name with the magazine that McAlmon and Williams edited. Williams describes A Hurried Man as “a book, a book that is all of a man, a young man, superbly alive. Doomed. When I think of what gets published and what gets read and praised and rewarded regularly with prizes, when such a book as that gets shoved under the heap of corpses, I swear never to be successful, 1 am disgusted, the old lusts revive” (Auto 267). Williams goes on to compare Camevali to the writer John Herrmann
(1900-1959), who also published with Contact Editions: “Both were young, both were 120 born writers, both knew the uncertainties of a truth-teller’s chances in a game where the big money wasn’t interested” {Auto 269). In Williams’s account, Camevali and Herrmann are models of what it means to be an artist: the artist is a “truth-teller” who necessarily opposes “big money,” the economic pole that attracts the sort of book that “gets read and praised and rewarded regularly with prizes....”
At their worst, Williams’s romanticized representations of the autonomous artist take on a sexist edge. As noted earlier, he describes the “foul” “places” into which he, as a doctor, is “permitted” to go, and from which he, as a perceptive poet, seizes his epiphany, “the thing, in all its greatest beauty”(Auto 288, 289). Williams genders these
“foul” places, which play host to “the tormented battles between daughter and diabolic mother, shattered by a gone brain” (288, 289). Almost immediately after this, Williams notes:
The great world never much interested me (except at the back of my head)
since its effects, from what I observed, were so disastrously trivial - other
than in their bulk; smelled the same as most public places. As Bob
McAlmon said after the well-dressed Spanish woman passed us in Juarez
(I had said, Wow! there’s perfume for you!):
“You mean that?” he said. “That’s not perfume, I just call that
whores.” (289)
Once again, Williams genders and distances himself from what he implies to be a foul social sphere - “[t]he great world,” personified as a perfumed “whore.” Elsewhere, he genders and distances himself from his audience, which can be understood to be a part of 121 the social sphere. As Mariani notes, when “[a]sked in his mid-seventies what it was that kept him writing, Williams answered that it was all for the young woman whose eyes he had caught watching him out there in some audience as he read his poems. It was all for lovely Sappho, then, and all for Venus” (Mariani 113). By describing the social sphere in degrading terms - it is either whorish or Sappho-like; in either case, not masculine -
Williams positions himself against it, while emphasizing his own virility over a femininized social sphere. Williams is less obviously sexist, but no less individualistic, when he observes, late in his autobiography, “I don’t care a rap what people are or believe. They come to me. I care for them and either they become my friends or they don’t. That is their business. My business, aside from the mere physical diagnosis, is to make a different sort of diagnosis concerning them as individuals, quite apart from anything for which they seek my advice”(Auto 358). This quote echoes the earlier one, in which Williams is enabled by the medical profession to exploit the illnesses of others for the raw matter of his own poetry.
Williams’s interactions with particular little magazines, as described in his autobiography, do a similar work of investing the poet (who presents himself as being economically marginalized and alienated from his audience) with symbolic capital.
Events for Others often played out at Kreymborg’s house in Grantwood, New Jersey, a gathering place for artists. As Williams notes,
[o]ur parties were cheap - a few drinks, a sandwich or so, coffee - but the
yeast of new work in the realm of the poem was tremendously stirring. 122
I had instinctively avoided a New York City practice just as my son
has done. I simply didn’t want it. I wanted to live a while, to be myself,
and find out what was what. My objectives were long range.
I’d sneak away mostly on Sundays to join the gang, show what I
had written and sometimes help Kreymborg with the make-up. We’d have
arguments over cubism which would fill an afternoon. There was a
comparable whipping up of interest in the structure of the poem. It seemed
daring to omit capitals at the head of each poetic line. Rhyme went by the
board. We were, in short, “rebels,” and were so treated. (.Auto 136)
Williams’s reference to “parties” that were “cheap” but also “tremendously stirring” reminds us that Kreymborg’s magazine, by resisting the economic pole in the inverse economy, could only pay its writers in symbolic capital. Williams asserts his independence from an economic center (New York) and notes that “I wanted to live a while, to be myself....” But it can be argued that he could hardly “be [himself]” - a discrete individual - given, as he notes, the “tremendously stirring” nature of the yeasty
“realm” with which he found himself in touch. And in his desire to reach this “realm,” he is forced to “sneak away” from familial - and, by extension, social - obligations, like the speaker in “Danse Russe,” an escape that proves to be only a temporary fantasy, a field trip on “Sundays.”101 Williams leaves one sub-society (his family) for another
(Kreymborg’s “gang”), enabling him to adopt the appearance of an individualistic stance.
He seems to acknowledge as much when he makes the slightly self-mocking observation that “[i]t seemed daring to omit capitals at the head of each poetic line. Rhyme went by 123 the board. We were, in short, ‘rebels,’ and were so treated.” The quotation marks around
‘“rebels’” are conspicuous and suggest that Williams is aware of the fact that he and the rest of the Others crowd were playing at being ‘“rebels,”’ a pre-packaged role proposed by the literary field. To be sure, the word was in the air: in 1913, Wyndham Lewis founded the shortlived Rebel Art Centre, a site of the Vorticism movement (Meyers 51 -
4); in Autobiography o f Alice B. Toklas (1933) Stein identifies the Impressionists and
Post-Impressionist painters as “rebels” and “outlaws” (34).
A little later in his autobiography, Williams continues to hint at the importance of the yeasty social space in which parties forOthers took place:
Men like Marsden Hartley, the painter, would occasionally join our
parties. No one had any money, but there was excitement and a sense of
the conjunction of all the arts (The Seven Arts [1916-1971] was an
important publication of the moment, as was The Soil [1916-1917] - three
issues - of R. J. Coady, which came later). Each was an unconscious
collaborator in fostering the new spirit. (Auto 147)
Again, a general lack of money is acknowledged, thus crediting the accounts of all in attendance with the symbolic capital of those who attempt to disassociate themselves from the economic sphere and strive for autonomy. And yet Williams’s description of “a sense of conjunction of all the arts” and the typical partygoer as “an unconscious collaborator” suggests a tightly knit and socially-minded group.
Nevertheless, Williams’s response to the collapse of Others reflects and reinforces his romantic conception of the little magazine as being necessarily fragile and ephemeral, 124 a fleeting expression of a masculine individual. He writes in a 1919 letter to Alva Turner, who submitted work to Others, “I simply cannot afford to bring out another issue of
Others. The magazine leads a very precarious existence. It may never appear again, 1 don’t know...” (“To Alva” 45). Later, in his autobiography, Williams notes,
I know Kreymborg, who retired from the editorship of Others after the
first ten or twelve issues or so, thought I had sabotaged it at the end. But it
was finished. It had published enough to put a few young men and women
on their feet - Kreymborg himself, Maxwell Bodenheim, myself—but had
really no critical standards and offered only the scantiest rallying point for
a new movement. It was individually useful to many of us; it gave a
hearing to us in the face of the universal refusal to publish and pay for
available new work by young poets. It helped break the ice for further
experimentation with the line, but that was all. The places at Grantwood
were being abandoned: the First World War was on. (Auto 141; emphasis
added)
Others, Williams implies, is merely one instantiation of what he later calls a “continuous magazine,” which is reinvented over and over, putting a few poets “on their feet.”
Drawing on the language of legal discourse, Williams notes that these poets are given “a hearing,” plus “pay,” but are not subjected to “critical standards,” to a judgment that might last in the long run. Others, like the rickety “places at Grantwood,” had served its purpose: it had provided nomadic squatters with a temporary platform and, as Williams notes, it had been “individually useful” (emphasis added). (Ironically, then, it had given a 125 community of supposedly discrete writers a means by which to promote supposedly their individual agendas.) Williams goes on to note that “ The Dial, with Scofield Thayer’s money back of it, was at the gate,” and he describes Others, in terms seemingly borrowed from Monroe, as “the now aging pioneer,” which suggests that, in Williams’s mind, a little magazine has completed its life cycle - is, in fact, in its senescence - after a mere four years (146). (The image ofThe Dial “at the gate” recalls Monroe’s description of
Braithwaite, in September 1915, as “the Bostonian invader” [ Auto 146; “OC” 315]. In a
“savage” literary field, the other magazine is always the barbarian.) But with reference to another of Williams’s assessments of Others, a letter in a 1915 issue of the Egoist,
Churchill observes that
what [Williams] really objects to is not the magazine’s failure, but its
success. The proposed club house, stock company, and bookstore
contaminate Others with the tincture of establishment, and the abatement
of public outrage portends that the poetic revolution has evolved into a
popular institution. Whenever Williams detects a stable structure, he feels
an irrepressible urge to attack and tear it down. (101)
Others, it seems, was slipping too close to the economic pole in Bourdieu’s inverse economy for Williams’s comfort; it was coming close to having a business plan and even a public, and so had to be disbanded. “We were destroyers,” he observes in his autobiography, “vulgarians, obscurantists to most who read; though occasionally a witty line, an unusual reference, or a wrench of the simile to force it into approximation with experience rather than reading - bringing a whole proximate ‘material’ into view - found 126 some response from the alert” {Auto 148). Others was also involving one too many genders, another reason to pronounce it dead; in the letter to the Egoist, Williams notes that “it was the women who interfered” (“To the Editor” 32; emphasis added). From
Williams’s perspective, it is not just that the world of Others was not precarious enough; it was not homosocial enough, either.
Having abandoned one position - the space of Grantwood but also the figurative refuge of Others itself - Williams sought another position to occupy: yet another ephemeral, anti-commercial magazine that would offer Williams’s poems a temporary shelter and the poet himself an infusion of symbolic capital. But as Williams notes in his autobiography, the magazine that T. S. Eliot edited, The Criterion (1922-1939), “had no place for me or anything I stood for. I had to go on without it” (175). He proceeds to observe that in the early 1920s,
Our poems constantly, continuously and stupidly were rejected by all the
pay magazines exceptPoetry and The Dial. The Little Review didn’t pay.
We had no recourse but to establish publications of our own. For after all,
the outlets being so meagre, we had otherwise far too long a time to wait
between drinks. It was the springtime of the little magazines and there was
plenty for them to do. {Auto 175)
Williams’s characterization of a literary field that has little “place” for him - giving him and his unnamed peers “no recourse but to establish publications of our own” - echoes
Monroe’s description, in September 1915, of “this field, this wilderness, in which [ Poetry was] so recently a lonely pioneer...” (“OC” 315). The trope also provides Williams, the 127 would-be doomed loner, with a romantic aura. Although it is unclear to whom Williams is referring in the phrase “Our poems,” his ambiguity prevents readers from identifying him with any one group. He comes across as every persecuted rebel who has ever been rejected by a magazine.
But much like Monroe, Williams was hardly a “lonely pioneer” (emphasis added).
Shrewdly socially situated, he was able to perceive unrealized positions in the space of possibles that surrounded the positions already occupied by magazines like Poetry (which defined itself as being inclusive by asserting its “Open Door” policy) and The Criterion
(which reflected a more exclusive and European sensibility 1). ( ! ) His friend McAlmon helped him to perceive one such unrealized position; indeed, McAlmon was, in
Williams’s own words, the ‘‘‘'instigator in the Contact idea...” (Auto 175; emphasis added). Contact, the magazine they co-founded and co-edited, lasted from 1920-1923, putting out five issues; it was briefly revived for three issues in 1932. On the first page of the first issue, published December 1920, beneath the masthead and subscription information, Williams offers an editorial in which he positions Contact as a periodical that is unique for, among other things, its focus on the local, on art that is “indigenous of experience and relations...” (Editorial 1). At the end of the issue, he continues to position his magazine by noting that “[w]e find that whatever ‘good taste’ is exhibited now in the one or two decent magazines we have is as a matter of fact extremely poor taste being provincial in the worse sense because wholly derivative and dependent upon nothing that could possibly give it authenticity” (“Further Announcement” 10). The “one or two decent magazines” that nevertheless exhibit “poor taste,” however, are left unnamed. But 128
Contact, during its brief life, would critique the editors of Poetry and The Criterion, respectively, thus refining its identity in relation to its peers.103 And Contact would come, by the second issue, to define itself more sharply as “the first truly representative
American magazine of art yet published,” thus claiming the symbolic capital that comes with being “first” (“Comment” 11). (The last line in the last issue suggests that no other magazines exist when it asks, “Who else prints anything?” [McAlmon, “Critical” 12].) In any event, even if Williams’s initial characterization of Contact is vague, the magazine, he suggests, is better for it. “In the course of the next few months,” he writes, “we will set down fully in these pages what we are proposing as a magazine. It would be idle to attempt to do so now when we have nothing to show but a beginning” (“Comment” 10).
The lack of a fixed identity for Contact - a magazine that is “nothing.. .but a beginning” - suggests that Contact, like Others, is a work in progress. In fact, to have any definite plan for the magazine would be “idle.” The magazine’s very form, at least initially, emphasizes the fact that it is “but a beginning,” lacking polish: the first two issues were typed by hand on letter-size pages and mimeographed (Churchill, LMM). The text of the last three issues, however, was more professionally presented: typeset and printed in columns.
In the pages of Contact, Williams celebrated the self-determining individual by calling attention to those American-bom artists whom he believed were in contact with local experience but also paradoxically isolated from, and superior to, their social context.
“We seek only contact with the local conditions which confront us,” he declares at the end of the first issue (“Further Announcement” 10). But earlier in the issue, he insists, “We are here because of our faith in the existence of native artists who are capable of having, comprehending and recording extraordinary experience...” (Editorial 1; emphasis added). Williams proceeds to note that he and McAlmon are wary of “becoming spokesm[e]n for any movement, group or theory, and as thoroughly dislike a modem traditionalism as any manner of perceiving the arts,” and he goes on to describe artists as
“sophisticated beings” (1). This mission statement is couched in almost religious terms, suggesting that artists are “extraordinary” and “sophisticated beings,” in whom one must have “faith” (1). By disconnecting artists from “any movement, group or theory,” as well as tradition, Williams implies that artists exist in an autonomous sphere with virtually no aesthetic debts or responsibilities. His argument differs greatly from that put forth in many of Monroe’s editorials, which insists that artists cannot stand alone.104 At the end of the issue, he continues to emphasize artistic autonomy when he declares that “[t]here is no money with which to pay for MSS. We want no work that can be sold to other magazines unless the artist sees an advantage in appearing upon these pages that would outweigh all other considerations” (10). It is not just that the coffers of Contact are empty; the magazine is not interested in “work that can be sold to other magazines,” which seems to mean work that can be consumed by a mass audience. Still, the producers of this work, Williams hints, might be interested in the “advantage in appearing upon these pages” - the “advantage” or symbolic capital that comes with an appearance in a non-commercial magazine.
Assertions of the autonomy of Contact - and, by extension, those writers who associate themselves with it - from a larger and often hostile social and economic sphere continue throughout the magazine’s run. Although the cover of the second issue, published in January 1921, makes an appeal for money and manuscripts - “We want subscriptions, subsidy funds, and Ms” [sic] - the sheer nakedness of the appeal suggests that the magazine is hardly allied with the interests of business and is, in fact, at the mercy of the reader’s philanthropy. In the third issue, Williams’s poem “Portrait of the
Author” presents a speaker who is desperate for contact but whose “rooms / are no longer sweet spaces where comfort / is ready to wait on [him] with its crumbs,” and who ultimately inhabits “a cold world” (“PA” 33-5, 43). Between issues two and three, the price of Contact was increased from 25 to 35 cents, but the fourth issue of Contact was once again priced at 25 cents. The fourth issue - which the cover declares to be an
“Advertising Number” - makes light of its commercial ambitions. The cover features several advertisements for Babbitt’s Soap and Nujol, a constipation remedy that was manufactured by the Standard Oil Company in New Jersey. The soap advertisement
(“BABBITT’S SOAP 1836 - 50,” in large black font) is juxtaposed against an artist’s memorial (“HOKUSAI DIED - 1849,” in a smaller hollowed-out font), suggesting that artists perish in the shadow of an indifferent marketplace given over to commodities.
Inside, and beneath the masthead, a brief note from Pound argues that there are “two classes of people...: the financial powers and the men who can think with some clarity”
(Editorial 1). Economics, Pound argues, “are interesting as a gun muzzle aimed at one’s own head is ‘interesting,’ when one can hardly see the face of the gun holder and is wholly uncertain as to his temperament and intentions” (1). An advertisement for
Williams’s work follows: 131
Henceforth the writings of William Carlos Williams will be offered for
sale at prices fixed by the author. Prospective purchasers will apply
through CONTACT which at present is the sole agent. A minimum of fifty
dollars will be charged for all poems, those of most excellence, as in all
commercial exchange, being rated higher in price. Critical essays,
imaginative prose and plays will be offered at prices varying according to
the length and success of the work. The artist will however continue to
contribute his work gratis to whatever publication, in his own opinion,
furthers the interests of good writing in the United States. (“ASP” 2)
A sample poem follows the advertisement, and after it, a review of Kora in Hell (1920) by Marianne Moore, which testifies to Williams’s daring: “Dr. Williams is too sincere to wish to be fashionable...” (8). Whittemore argues that Contact “had turned into a promotional scheme for WCW’s own work” and that the above “paragraph did not itself further the interests of good writing in the United States, the irony being too heavy the
[sic] grapes too sour” (PfJ 170). Sean Francis, however, suggests that although Williams had a “Whitmanic desire for a broad audience,” the advertisement parodied, to some extent, this desire (226). By suggesting that poems are commodities, the mock- advertisement satirizes the world of advertising, subtly drawing a line - however imaginary - between autonomous poet and crass marketplace. “Nobody bought
[Contact]’’'’ was Williams’s blunt assessment, years later (Auto 175).
In addition to rejecting commercial concerns, Williams and McAlmon positioned
Contact to be far more exclusive an institution than Poetry, the magazine-gallery that 132
observed an “Open Door” policy and sought to address a larger audience. Despite the
stated interest in American writing focused on the local, at the end of the first issue,
Williams notes, almost with a sigh, “I suppose I had better add that no one need expect us to publish his things simply because they happen to have been written in United States
[sic]” (“FA” 10). More specifically, McAlmon, in an editorial in the fourth issue of
Contact, describes an array of figures in whose work he is not interested:
Lady lyricists urged to spontaneous and inevitable expression; boys with
gusto; morbid and ecstatic rhapsodists; misery yowlers; grey mediocratists;
tedious realists; tiredly cynical adolescents and Oxfordian but nevertheless
devilishly subtle satyrists.... They are too interested in being poets or
literary figures or keeping the public informed to have time to clarify their
own perception. (“CaG” 16)
“Lady lyricists,” “boys with gusto,” “tiredly cynical adolescents” - McAlmon, echoing
Wyndham Lewis’s manifesto-making,105 demonstrates a sexist aversion to those who are not fully grown men, those who are not associated with reason, and those who are
“spontaneous,” “ecstatic” “yowlers.” He also demonstrates an aversion to the non-
American and decadent; his phrase “Oxfordian but nevertheless devilishly subtle satyrists” would seem to encompass both Eliot, who had attended Oxford years before, in
1914, and Wilde, which adds a homophobic tincture to the editorial. In implicit opposition to a figure like Monroe, who embraced the seemingly minor poet and the idea of a larger audience, McAlmon also critiques those who would keep “the public informed,” thus implying that Contact should be celebrated for addressing something less 133 than “the public,” like a coterie. (He may also be poking fun at the idea of poetry being useful information for the public.) He goes on to blame, among other things, “the quick efflorescence of feminism” for what he believes to be worrying tendencies - such as
“feminine-hysterical fetishism” - in the culture of his time. Williams’s editorial, which immediately follows McAlmon’s, takes aim at inclusivity more explicitly. According to
Williams,
American periodic literature, magazines which represent no position taken
but which offer at best certain snippets in juxtaposition, implying that
when one piece is like the other both are good, this is the worst in the local
environment carried to the logical conclusion. The worst of the anthology
method in magazine making is that, in taking no definite regard to
position, innocent of local effects upon itself, it cannot possibly present
foreign work in anything but a blurred light, on a constantly wavering
screen. (“SCSC” 19)
In attacking “magazines which represent no position taken,” Williams is attacking magazines that lack rigorous standards of evaluation and a uniform aesthetic and/or political stance. He is also thumbing his nose at periodicals that, following “the anthology method in magazine making,” are too open to “foreign work.” Unlike Monroe, who welcomes a range of poets, arguing that “nothing can stand alone, genius least of all,”
Williams goes on to insist, in the final issue of the first iteration of Contact, that “Genius is absolute...” (“TA” 32; “Glorious” 3). The brief revival of Contact for three issues in 1932 - titled, in full, Contact: An
American Quarterly Review and sometimes, by scholars, Contact II - reiterated the original magazine’s interest in American writing, but also its belief in the artist as autonomous individual. This belief is constituted in part by the material elements of the magazine. Texts, as Jerome McGann points out, “are embodied phenomena, and the body of the text is not exclusively linguistic” (McGann 13). For example, the title of the revived Contact occupies two-thirds of the cover of the first issue, the letters in the word
“CONTACT” bold and stretched. Just as emphatically, the reader is informed about the
“EDITOR: WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS,” while below, a smaller, more modest typeface identifies Williams’s collaborators: “Associate Editors: Robert McAlmon and
Nathanael West.” (It is as if the idea of collaboration itself cowers in the shadow of individuality.) The masthead that Monroe ran, however, starting with the fifth volume of
Poetry, sets her name in the same size font as those of the other editors, including
Henderson and Pound. More significantly, the masthead is followed by the Whitman quote “TO HAVE GREAT POETS THERE MUST BE GREAT AUDIENCES TOO” - the capital letters reserved for a relationship as opposed to an individual. The Whitman quote (dropped at the start of volume 78, under Karl Shapiro’s editorship) is followed by a list of the magazine’s financial supporters. In short, the use of font and epigraph in
Monroe’s masthead, as well as its generous commitment to inclusion, emphasizes collaboration over individuality.
The masthead for the first issue of the revived Contact, on the other hand, is followed by a different, more defiant slogan: “Contact [sic] will attempt to cut a trail through the American jungle without the use of a European compass.” Once again,
Williams echoes Monroe’s September 1915 description of the “wilderness, in which
[Poetry was] so recently a lonely pioneer” (“OC” 315). He also echoeshis own description of the “savage” literary field in which The Dial is “at the gate” and Others is
“the now aging pioneer” (.Auto 146). He imagines the American literary field as an unexplored “jungle” and personifies Contact as a forward-looking and distinctly
American explorer. The “jungle,” of course, is far from barren in 1932; the new Contact features advertisements - non-parodic ones - for two rare book dealers, the little magazine Pagany (1930-1933), the Black Sun Press in Paris, and McAlmon’s publishing venture, Contact Editions. It also prints, at the end of each of its issues, “A Bibliography of the Little Magazine: Published in America since 1900,” by David Moss, which, like the “Our Contemporaries” section in early issues of Poetry, serves to remind us of the lineage from which Contact: An American Quarterly Review emerges and the crowded field in which it finds itself. The magazine, then, hints at the larger social sphere that helped to shape Williams as a poet.
Nevertheless, assertions of the autonomy of the individual artist abound in
Contact. The advertisement for Contact Editions declares, “Contact Editions are not concerned with what the public wants. There are commercial publishers who know the public and its tastes. If books seem to us to have something of individuality, intelligence, talent, and a live sense of literature, we welcome them” (Contact). The “public” and the
“commercial” are rejected, “individuality” affirmed. In his opening editorial for the issue,
Williams rejects the notion that “there is only one species of ‘good writing,’ that which 136 can be sold at a profit,” and argues instead for writing that disassociates itself from money and social causes (“Comment” 7, 8). (In the manifesto he wrote for the first issue of Blues
(1929), several years before, Williams called for a poetry that is not commercially viable
[Tracy 27].) He also argues for a magazine that does not aim to address a large audience or an audience at all, noting that “[a] magazine without opinions or criteria other than words moulded by the impacts of experience (not for the depths of experience they speak of but the fulfillment of experience which they are) such [sic] a magazine would be timely to a period such as this. It can never be a question of its being read by a million or by anybody” (9). At the end of the issue, in “The Advance Guard Magazine” (1932), an essay about the little magazine or what he calls the ‘“small magazine,’” Williams lists, in order of their founding, starting with Camera Work, various periodicals that opposed the
“great national monthlies, under which heading all commercial magazines may well be grouped” (86). (It is worth noting that he avoids the French and potentially more decadent formulation “avant-garde” in the title of his essay.) The Papyrus: A Magazine of
Individuality (1903-1912), edited by Michael Monahan, is cited as “an individualistic review”106 (86). Williams also emphasizes “a desire for self-expression” in the United
States of 1908 (87). When he comes to discuss the first iteration of Contact, Williams, describing himself (and his “genius”) in the third person, notes, “Contact [sic] was to exploit the genius of one of its editors but that genius unfortunately for the magazine, led him another way. This was not, however, the end of the venture” (88). He concludes the essay with a definition of the little magazine that anticipates the one offered years later in his autobiography: “In all, the ‘small magazine’ must, in its many phases, be taken as one 137 expression. It represents the originality of our generation thoroughly free of an economic burden” (89-90). Williams’s use of the phrase “[i]n all” dehistoricizes discrete magazines, grouping them together into “one expression” or what he later calls “a continuous magazine.” By disingenuously emphasizing their freedom from “economic burden,” he invests this “one expression” with symbolic capital. The contributors list, at the end of the first issue, emphasizes that Williams “has always been identified with experimental literary movements in America,” thus branding him as a non-commercial artist (“AWC”
109). Perhaps unsurprisingly, when his association with Contact II ended, he blamed moneymen in a 1932 letter to Marsden Hartley: “Concretely I have just ended an editorship of another small magazine ( Contact, revived) with the resolution never to do that sort of thing again. People who have money to put up for such ventures are too slippery for me and my time is too limited” (“To Marsden” 122).
His final editorial for Contact II, which expresses sympathy for communism, would seem to move away from individualism. But what he appreciates in communism is the spirit of rebellion it encourages. Dehistoricizing this spirit, he suggests that all great poets, throughout time, have been communists. “They have all been rebels,” he writes,
against nothing so much as seism [sic] that would have the spirit a lop
sided [sic] affair of high and low. The unchristian sweep of Shakespeare,
the cantless, unsectarian bitterness of Dante against his time, this is what is
best in communism. The same for the words of St. Francis. The spirit is
one. It is also one with the imagination. It will not down [sic] nor speak its
piece to please, not even to please ‘communism.’ (“Comment” 131) 138
By the end of the passage, Williams has gone from welcoming communism to praising a transhistorical essence (the “spirit,” the “imagination”) that does not compromise itself to ideological systems like “‘communism,’” which Williams leaves under the suspicion of quotation marks.107
Ultimately, Williams’s associations with Others and both iterations of Contact- magazines that paid little and reached few readers - placed the poet in opposition to the economic pole in Bourdieu’s inverse economy. Consequently, he made little in the way of the economic capital that can result from writing for a larger audience. But he earned plenty of symbolic capital for being recognized, by others in the literary field, to be occupying the position of the anti-commercial and individualistic rebel. And this symbolic capital was not merely abstract. As Bourdieu notes, such capital “exercises a sort of action from a distance, without physical contact” when it is “perceived by social agents endowed with the categories of perception and appreciation permitting them to perceive, know and recognize it” (PR 102). In short, because other agents in the literary field saw value in Williams’s anti-commercial gestures, the poet accrued a kind of
“magical power” (102). The exchange between this “magical power” and the more material “power” of actual money will be discussed toward the end of the chapter.108
4. “A poetic stock yard”: Williams and Poetry
Williams’s celebration of the “unsectarian bitterness of Dante against his time” stands in marked contrast with Monroe’s critique, in 1914, of Dante’s “contempt for the crowd, a contempt which.. .disregarded the fact that his epic, like all the greatest art, was 139 based upon the whole life of his time, the common thought and feeling of all the people”
(“TA” 31). Williams stands with the bitter artist; Monroe, with the objects of the artist’s
“bitterness” - the “crowd” and “the whole life of his time.” This difference in their respective conceptualizations of the artist’s relationship to society reveals itself on a number of occasions in which Williams and Monroe clashed. Nevertheless, despite their differences, Monroe’s magazine Poetry was the one constant periodical in Williams’s publishing life - the one cultural site - on which he could depend, outlasting Others,
Contact, The Dial, The Little Review, and other magazines with which Williams had strong ties. As already noted, Poetry printed 99 texts by Williams in his lifetime - including poems, letters, reviews, and essays - and an additional three poems after his death in 1963. Under Harriet Monroe’s editorship, the magazine published 60 texts by
Williams, and awarded him its Guarantor’s Award in 1924.
Yet, although Poetry offered Williams an outlet for his work, it also presented him with a straw man against which to position and define an identity for himself. Monroe, in many of her early editorials, constructed Poetry as a magazine-gallery that does not, like mass magazines, marginalize poets by using their work as filler; rather,Poetry, through its “Open Door” policy, offers refuge to a range of poets. Unlike many little magazines, however, Poetry was not intended to court a coterie; it aimed to address a larger audience than the typical modernist periodical could. Indeed, because of Monroe’s careful financial planning, Poetry was designed to last and, moreover, compensate poets for their contributions. This conceptualization of the magazine reflected a relatively progressive understanding of the poet as socially situated; poets, Monroe argued in many of her editorials, required stable institutions that could nourish and encourage them. Her review of Camevali’s A Hurried Man in the January 1926 issue of Poetry suggests a concern about the need for social support for the sort of stand-alone genius - Camevali - whom
Williams praises in his autobiography. Indeed, Monroe calls Camevali’s genius “futile and unorganized” and notes that “he floundered among [the hard terms of life] like a horse caught in barbed wire, with as little sense of purpose or direction and with as rebellious a sense of injury” (211). Camevali was meant to work for Poetry in an editorial capacity but wound up, as Monroe notes at the end of her review, “in a sanatorium in
Italy, and we may hope that the careful treatment he is receiving will restore his health and give his baffled genius another chance” (215). Poets, Monroe reminds us, need social support. They also sometimes need editing. Monroe, as an editor, often made suggestions on manuscripts, some of which are discussed ahead. But then it could be argued that even the poet who has not been subjected to editing is still not an autonomous figure; the poet’s appearance in a magazine’s pages always already reflects a prior editorial decision and the poet’s situatedness within larger social structures. Indeed, the very desire to be published in a magazine (as opposed to a single-author book) indicates a desire to engage, and be read in concert, with others.
Williams’s much more romantic conceptualization of the little magazine as the ephemeral expression of a rebellious individual, out ahead of his society, differed greatly from Monroe’s vision of a socially stable magazine-gallery, which welcomed a range of poets but also subjected them to the possibility of editing and (as I will argue later) dialogue with other texts that comprise a context for conversations. This difference becomes apparent in early correspondence between the proprietor of the periodical and the aspiring artist, to which Ellen Williams calls attention in Harriet Monroe and the
Poetry Renaissance. On accepting Williams’s first four poems for the June 1913 issue of
Poetry - “Proof of Immortality,” “Postlude,” “Sicilian Emigrant’s Song,” and “Peace on
Earth” - Monroe invites Williams to change the titles of “Proof of Immortality” and
“Peace on Earth” ( HMPR 57). She also encourages Williams to address the meter of
“Proof of Immortality,” which she finds to be lacking a syllable, and suggests that
Williams capitalize the names of constellations mentioned in “Peace on Earth” (57).
Williams makes some of the changes - the capitalization, for one - and the poems duly appear in the magazine (57). Nevertheless, he writes to Monroe on 5 March 1913 and notes that, “I had looked upon Poetry as a forum wherein competent poets might speak freely, uncensored by any standard of rules. Poetry seemed to me a protest against the attitude of every other periodical in American publication in this respect” (“To Harriet”
23). Later, in the same letter, Williams elaborates on the reason why he needs to be free:
“I’m afraid I am open to the accusation of being out of touch with my public - that’s isolation - I know my trend - but if Poetry does not open freely to me, in my absolute egotism, how am I to grow?” (25; emphasis added). Monroe responded by insisting that
“Poetry, I assure you, is free as the air” (qtd. in HMPR: 58). But Williams would continue to insist on the need for what he calls, in a letter dated 10 October 1913, a “free forum”: one that cannot admit room for the editorial suggestions of another, suggestions which could be read as a kind of collaboration but which Williams equates with censorship (“To 142
Harriet” 25). For Williams, the little magazine is a vehicle for the “absolute egotism” of the individual artist.
In subsequent letters to Monroe, however, Williams contradicts his earlier desire for Poetry to be something like a “free forum,” and challenges the openness of the magazine and its apparently unseemly interest in compensating its contributors. On 1
March 1916, acknowledging that his wife “is a sincere believer” in Monroe’s
“openmindedness” [sic], Williams implies that the “Open Door” policy is a feminine one and, therefore, inferior (HMPR 178). He goes on to state,
My frank opinion is that ‘Poetry’ [sic] pays too much for its verse and that
it is too anxious to be inclusive.
Less money and a more defined policy would keep away many a
foolish rhymster [sic]. Of course you want them all ‘to come unto’ you but
if the policy of a periodical of poetry is of any less steely fiber than that of
the best verse the result will be disastrous. (HMPR 178)
Although Williams had hoped earlier that Poetry could be “a forum wherein competent poets might speak freely, uncensored by any standard of rules,” he now questions its inclusiveness and demands a “‘standard’”: “‘a more defined policy’” of a “‘steely fiber.’”
Given his mention of his wife’s sympathy for Monroe’s aims, it is hard not to hear in
Williams’s call for a policy of a “steely fiber” a sexist endorsement of some kind of more rigidly masculine approach to magazine editing.109 His observation that Poetry “pays too much for its verse” - that “[l]ess money” needs to be involved in the publication of poetry 143
- further attempts to disparage Monroe’s magazine (and drain it of symbolic capital) by
aligning it with lucre.
Williams is most critical of Poetry in a letter of 11 April 1916. After inviting
Monroe to come and stay with his wife and himself, he writes to the editor:
Two things I want to say to you now however: 1 Verse doesn’t pay and no
boosting by ‘Poetry’ [sic] will ever make it pay - quit trying or you’ll
strangle yourself. 2 Print the better folk oftener and quicker.
Why so much Christliness? Why try to help the poor artist - what
help can you give the poor artist (the poor, poor artist) other than Harriet
Monroe’s personal understanding of him? Is ‘Poetry’ a poetic stock yard?
For God’s sake let’s have more Harriet and less ‘Poetry.’ I despise
‘Poetry.’ There never was a more stupid commercial magazine than
‘Poetry’ - come to life, let’s have what Harriet likes (if she likes anything)
and not what she thinks is helpful for us. Good night if you don’t listen to
me. (HMPR 177)
Williams attacks Poetry, once again, for its inclusiveness, which reduces the magazine to the status of “poetic stock yard” - an indiscriminating space that welcomes all manner of beasts. He also calls for Poetry - a “stupid commercial magazine” - to disassociate itself from the goal of remunerating poets and, in so doing, to disassociate itself from the economic sphere, with which it has gotten itself mixed up. He goes on to romanticize the
“poor, poor artist” whom, he implies, is always already necessarily disassociated from the economic sphere and therefore incapable of being helped with economic capital. In fact, 144 he implies that the artist can only be paid with “personal understanding,” a more abstract
form of coinage, reserved for the courageous individual who strikes out on his own and
shuns the Christ-like charity of others. Indeed, Williams suggests that Poetry could be more like this individual; could be more of an expression of an individual’s - which is to say its editor’s - sensibility. “[M]ore Harriet and less ‘Poetry,’” he demands, implicitly reinforcing a belief in the little magazine as the expression of “a person, a fallible person, subject to devotions and accidents” (.Auto 267).
Although he would not always be so critical of Poetry - and although he would continue to publish in it - Williams, in later (and more public) texts, tends to associate the magazine with the establishment, exacting symbolic capital from Monroe’s periodical. In the June 1920 issue of Poetry, for example, Monroe prints a letter by Williams that takes her magazine to task:
Dear Miss Monroe: Provided you will allow me to use small letters at the
beginning of my lines, I submit the following excellent American poem to
you for publication in your paying magazine:
SPIRIT OF ’76
Her father
built a bridge
over
the Chicago River
but she
built a bridge over the moon.
This, as you will at once recognize, is an excellent poem and very
American. I sincerely hope that no prehistoric prosodic rules will bar it
from publication. Yours, W. C. Williams[.] (Letter 173)
The letter, dripping with sarcasm, challenges Monroe’s “prehistoric” (or non-modernist)
standard for lines of poetry to be capitalized and, by extension, her definition of what
constitutes an “excellent American poem.” The very title, “SPIRIT OF ’76,” which alludes to the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution,
implies that there is something fundamentally “American” in the act of revolting against
“prosodic rules.” (More generally and implicitly, it takes issue with the very idea that a poem should be edited by anyone other than the poet.) It also tars Poetry with the economic brush by calling it a “paying magazine.” The poem implies that Monroe has not followed in the footsteps of the men who preceded her; she has not built something of utility and permanence (“a bridge / over / the Chicago River”) but, rather, has engaged in a fanciful, feminine lark (symbolized by the “bridge / over the moon”). (Interestingly,
Monroe’s father was a lawyer who made a name for himself by winning a lawsuit for a
“prominent businessman” against a doctor [APL 18-9].) After Williams’s letter, Monroe printed an anonymous “communication” in the form of a poem, which might have come from an associate of Williams. The letter-poem addresses an unnamed “you,” which is likely meant to be Monroe or Poetry itself, and implores the “you” to “be wise and giggle away / Some of your wisdom” (Letter 2, 4-5). Referring to the “beauty” of the unnamed beloved, the anonymous writer commands, “don’t cultivate it into / A starched maturity” 146
(6, 7-8). Translation: Monroe ox Poetry needs to loosen up. Of course, Monroe’s printing of the letter works shrewdly to embarrass Williams and demonstrate that the magazine is more open than the poet’s letter would have us believe.
Later texts by Williams, not published in Poetry, continue to criticize the magazine. In his round-up of little magazines for the first issue of the second iteration of
Contact, Williams once again takes issue with the openness of Poetry when he notes that
“Miss Harriet Monroe, in Chicago, inaugurated her magazine of verse, Poetry [sic], which proved, however, a little later, almost too generous a venture for the burden it had to carry” (“The Advance Guard Magazine” 87; emphasis added). He also refers to many short-lived magazines of the early twentieth century that were, like Poetry, too commercial: “there were the serious, anthology types (imitating the worst features of
Poetry [sic]) the ‘it’s everywhere’ type. Sometimes they even achieved a small sale, if they were bad enough” (88). A few years later, in his mostly positive review of Monroe’s autobiography,A Poet’s Life (1938), Williams argues that she “was not a great poet; she was more successful as an instigator to poetry than as a writer of it.... Others did the best of the writing but she did much of the work of establishment” (“Harriet” 375). Although he praises Monroe as a “devoted woman,” he writes, of her young self, that she was
“[f]ull of repression, dreading the genius male” (375, 376). Years later, in his autobiography, Williams’s description of the “cheap” parties of Others and the
“tremendously stirring” work associated with the magazine contrasts with the less than fiery social gatherings hosted byPoetry. “Harriet Monroe would on occasion offer a staid party, but, in general, it was the local gang [from The Dial] that kept up the fireworks 147
(136; 171). Poetry, in short, is portrayed as being too strict, too inclusive, too commercial, too genteel - too feminine.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Williams’s texts appeared in Monroe’s magazine - gallery in its early years, they often championed the masculine individual who resists and even overcomes his social context. As already noted, his first poems in Poetry appeared in the June 1913 issue. But the issue also printed a letter by Williams, in the form of a poem, which offered a critique of Ferdinand Earle’s The Lyric Year: One Hundred Poems
(1912), an anthology consisting of poems selected from 10,000 contest entries by a jury
(Brevda 106). The epistolary-poem in couplets - entitled “On First Opening ‘The Lyric
Year’” and later included in his Collected Poems (1986) - reads in full:
It is a certain satisfaction to overlook a cemetery,
All the little two-yard-long mounds that vary
So negligibly after all. I mean it brings on a mood
Of clear proportions. I remember once how I stood
Thinking, one summer’s day, how good it must be to spend
Some thousand years there from beginning to the end,
There on the cool hillside. But with that feeling grew the dread
That I too would have to be like all the other dead.
That unpleasant sense which one has when one smothers,
Unhappy to leave so much behind merely to resemble others.
It’s good no doubt to lie socially well ordered when one has so long to lie,
But for myself somehow this does not satisfy. (113-114) 148
Months before, in the January issue of Poetry, Monroe took issue with what she believed to be the jurors’ relative lack of objectivity and “distinction” (RLY 130). The Lyric Year, she suggested, “should take a few lessons from art exhibitions” (130). Nevertheless, she ultimately ended the review by welcoming the anthology as a companion “embarked in the same adventure” as Poetry (131). For Monroe, the curator of a gallery of her own, the question was not whether or not poets deserve a stable social space in which to display their work, such as a periodical like Poetry or an anthology like The Lyric Year, the question was who should run the space (people with “distinction”) and how (objectively).
Williams’s epistolary-poem, however, is far less positive than Monroe’s review. The
Lyric Year is not an “art exhibition” that requires better stewardship; it is a cemetery that obliterates artistic individuality. (The cemetery metaphor seems to allude to, and amplify, burial imagery that is provided by Monroe’s original review, which notes that two of the featured poems “must have been measured by some academic foot-rule dug up from the eighteenth century” [128]. The choice of Pope-esque couplets may also have been inspired by the review.) Williams’s speaker’s fear that he “too would have to be like all the other dead” reflects a wariness of those standards of conformity, external to the poet, that result in a “well ordered” society [sic]. The final line affirms the speaker’s individuality: “But for m yself somehow this does not satisfy” (emphasis added).
In Williams’s next publication in Poetry, a suite of poems entitled “Root Buds” that appeared in the May 1915 issue, the poem “Sub Terra” emphasizes the exclusivity of a speaker who, despite a desire for society, is too exacting in his “tastes” to find any society with which he can connect (6). (The Latin title announces such an exclusivity.) 149
The poem begins by asking, “Where shall I find you— / You, my grotesque fellows /
That I seek everywhere / To make up my band?” (1-4) The sheer fact of the question would seem to suggest that the speaker wants to open a dialogue with others. His goal is to assemble a “band,” if only one that is made up of the “grotesque,” those who presumably defy conventional standards of beauty. (In the second verse paragraph, he reveals that the “beauties” he is addressing are “seven-year locusts,” a reference to cicadas with biblical undertones [12, 10].) But almost as soon as he poses the question, he answers it himself, thus shutting down the prospect of dialogue: “None, not one / With the earthy tastes I require: / The burrowing pride that rises / Subtly as on a bush in May”
(5-8). The speaker cannot find “one” other who shares his “earthy” aesthetic sensibility.
In the final verse paragraph, he repeats a desire for a
You to come with me
Poking into negro houses
With their gloom and smell!
In among children
Leaping around a dead dog!
Mimicking
Onto the lawns of the rich!
You! (34-41)
But no one else - no “You” - ultimately possesses the speaker’s self-determination, embodied in his free-ranging and unfettered mobility, which enables him to pass from social space to social space: from “negro houses” to “the lawns of the rich”; from scenes of life (symbolized by “children”) and death (symbolized by “a dead dog”). “Sub Terra” anticipates Williams’s own description of himself as a doctor who is “permitted by my medical badge to follow the poor, defeated body into... gulfs and grottos” {Auto 288).
(And the “gloom and smell” of the “negro houses” recalls that of the “gulfs and grottoes” as well as the urban spaces visited by other male modernists.110) The poem, however, does not acknowledge the forms of capital with which individuals come to be invested and which permit them the illusion of passing freely over different social realms; it celebrates the autonomy of a lyric “I,” circulating with the freedom of a natural force.
The poem also anticipates Williams’s so-called “Townspeople Poems” of the late
1910s - a selection of which appeared in the November 1916 issue of Poetry - which help to reinforce Williams’s vision of the poet as an individual who stands at a remove from the very social context he wishes to address.111 “What have I to say to you? / When shall we meet?” asks the speaker of “Love Song,” the very first poem in the selection, the first three of which are preserved in the same order in the Collected Poems (1 -2; CPI 53-
6). Although the text can be read as a love lyric, its grouping with other “Townspeople
Poems” suggests that the speaker is addressing much more than a beloved; he is addressing other citizens. His questions, however - “What have I to say to you? / When shall we meet?” - imply a distance between speaker and community, a distance that the poem ultimately affirms. Indeed, the speaker goes on to conclude, “I am alone,” a solitary sentence that occupies all of the poem’s nineteenth line. Later, the speaker commands his beloved-community “See me!” (24). The poem ends with another query - “How can I tell
/ If I shall ever love you again / As I do now?” - which leaves the speaker’s ultimate 151 relationship with his community in question (31-3). (Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the later, revised version of “Love Song,” Williams drops the opening questions and starts the poem with the line “I lie here thinking of you” [CPI 1], In other words, an invitation to dialogue, however much a rhetorical gesture, is discarded in favour of the statement of an individual acting on a beloved.)
In “Naked,” the next selection from the November issue, the relationship between speaker and townspeople is clarified. The first verse paragraph poses a series of questions to no one in particular:
What fool would feel
His cheeks bum
Because of the snow?
Would he call it
By a name, give it
Breasts, features,
Bare limbs?
Would he call it
A woman?
(Surely then he would be
A fool.) (1-11)
According to the speaker, the person who uses personification to describe snow as a naked woman - the person who is a poet - would “[sjurely” be a “fool.” But that
“[sjurely” is slightly ironic; in the second verse paragraph, the “fool” goes on to “see her, 152
/ Warmed with the cold, / Go upon the heads / Of creatures / Whose faces lean / To the
ground” (12-17) In other words, the “fool” sees what others do not “see” because their
“faces lean / To the ground.” In fact, in the third verse paragraph, the speaker observes that the “fool” is more sensitive because he can see “compassion” in the snow which, like
a woman’s “eyes,” “turn” in different directions (19, 20, 23). The fourth verse paragraph
finally clarifies the Other to which the questions have been posed all along: “I ask you— /
I ask you, mytownspeople, / What fool is this?” (29-31; emphasis added) The use of the em-dash - “I ask you— / 1 ask you, my townspeople” - creates an emphatic pause; the speaker corrects course and restarts his question, wishing to be specific about whom he is addressing. But the repetition of the word “fool” puts an edge on the speaker’s irony; the
“fool” who keeps his head up while others leave it “To the ground” - the poet - is no
“fool” who will forget / The sight of / His mother and / His wife / Because of [the snow]”
(32-6). “What!” the speaker goes on to wonder, with mock-exclaim,
Would he see a thing
Lovelier than
A high-school girl,
With the skill
O f Venus
To stand naked—
Naked on the air? (40-7)
Although the speaker notes that the poet should not be considered a social outcast, he nevertheless upholds the latter as a figure who has the ability to “see a thing / Lovelier 153 than / A high-school girl.” The speaker’s ironic tone of voice - “What!” - creates a further distance between poet and society; it suggests that the poet is, in fact, superior to the society that would think him a “fool.” It might be argued that the sheer fact of the speaker addressing - if not attacking - his townspeople implies an ambition to be socially minded. But as Whittemore notes: “in placing the attacks in little poems that would appear in little magazines that [the townspeople of Rutherford] would never read he was showing them nothing; he wasn’t even talking to them but to his fellow revolutionaries on
14th Street. Addressing the townspeople in the poems was a pose merely” (133).
The third poem in the selection, the four-line and overtly sexist “Marriage,” emphasizes that male and female identities are discrete and essential:
So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field. (1-4)
Although the colon might suggest a merger of masculine and feminine in the figure of the
“stream,” the word “different” encourages us to read the “man” as “stream” and the
“woman” as “field.” Moreover, the seminal imagery of a “stream” sowing its “field” suggests the existence of an essential masculine identity that imprints on a prostrate, feminine one. (A similar poem, “Stroller,” from the March 1919 issue of Poetry, associates the ambiguous nature of women’s speech with the changing colour of “hills” that are sometimes “blue” and sometimes “purple” [1-2].) Given his dismissive treatment of Monroe in other texts, including letters and reviews, the sexist tendencies of the poems 154 he sent to her magazine (and which, remarkably, she considered worth publishing) should come as no surprise.
The fourth poem from November 1916, however, suggests that society does have a hand in shaping the poet. (In terms of ordering, it does not follow the other three in the
Collected Poems.) In “Apology,” the speaker asks why he writes and finds an answer in the faces of African American women:
Why do I write today?
The beauty of
The terrible faces
O f our nonentities
Stirs me to it:
Colored women
Day workers.... (1-7)
The speaker is “stirred” to “write” by those around him, which suggests that poems are in part a product of their social context. Nevertheless, the poem is troubling in that it finds nothing problematic about the fact that the speaker is privileged enough to observe, and make poetry out of, the “Colored women / Day workers” - “nonentities” with no power.
The poem exploits its African American labourers for poetic inspiration. It draws on the resources of a feminized social sphere to enrich the individual masculine speaker.
Although the speaker of “Man in a Room,” a poem from Poetry's March 1919 issue, refers to himself as “not so lonely I,” in the July issue of that year, Williams would 155 publish an essay, “Notes from a Talk on Poetry,” that sets out his vision of the artist as a rebellious individual and seems to mark a culmination in the first phase of his tumultuous relationship with Monroe’s magazine (13). Indeed, shortly after publishing the essay, he
“withdrew” his poems from Poetry (HMPR 275). His next publication would be the letter of June 1920, which attacks Monroe for her “paying magazine” and its “prehistoric prosodic rules.” The first issue of Contact would come out in December of that year
(Letter 173).
Interestingly, Monroe precedes “Notes from a Talk on Poetry,” Williams’s first extended prose piece to be featured in her magazine, with an essay of her own that counterbalances his conceptualization of the poet. As I will demonstrate, her gesture reminds us that an editor can have an impact on a text’s meaning by placing it in a particular order among other texts. Monroe’s essay, “A Year After,” uses the occasion of the recent end of World War One to reflect on the role that art can play in the unsettled, postwar lives of men and women. Monroe suggests that it will not “be enough to give back ‘their old jobs’ to these boys with the new vision, these girls with the new hope”
(210). “[Ejvery human soul,” she argues, “is a potential artist” (210). She goes on to insist that
each humblest joyous effort at creation is, in its degree, an art enterprise.
Every farm-boy gaily whittling out an animal or drawing a head in chalk...
these are the true revolutionists who will create the new world.
Will they create great art, great poetry? Who knows?—that is in the
hands of the whimsical god who scatters at his will the seeds of genius. 156
But at least they may prepare and enrich the soil, so that the seed may not
fall on rocky or barren ground; and they may give the sapling a fair chance
at healthy growth. A masterpiece of art, or poetry, or science, or
business— the Reims [sic] cathedral, Hamlet, the Loening monoplane,
Marshall Field’s store—is never an isolated magic miracle, but the
response of genius to the cumulative will of the immediate world. (“A
Year” 210-11)
Although she suggests that “the seeds of genius” are “in the hands of [a] whimsical god,” the “god” is lower-case and the suggestion tongue-in-cheek; art, she goes on to observe,
“is never an isolated magic miracle” but a “response”; the artist, in other words, is always already socially situated and exists in dialogic relation to others. But Monroe’s comparison of poets to plants, which she has relied on before,112 takes on an especially political, anti-war meaning in the context of an essay about post-WWI life. All of the soldiers returning from war are “potential artists” who need to be nurtured, even if they only turn out to be minor poets. Monroe, then, implicitly rejects the militaristic language of the avant-garde. Art is not the combative expression of an elite, advance guard, out ahead of the rest; it is the product of collective labour - labour that prepares the ground for “healthy growth” as opposed to unhealthy destruction. “[G]reat energy of creation,” she insists, must meet “great energy of sympathy” (211).
Monroe’s essay, however, does not prepare the ground for a sympathetic understanding of Williams’s essay “Notes from a Talk on Poetry,” which begins, “The poet goes up and down continually empty-handed. To tear down, to destroy life’s lies, to keep the senses bare, to attack; to attack for the nakedness he achieves, the sense of an eternal beginning and end - that is his job, in lieu of getting into the game on a fair footing” (211). “[T]ear down,” “destroy,” “attack” - Williams’s insistence that the poet maintain a destructive stance is all the more conspicuous for appearing immediately after
Monroe’s anti-war essay. But the poet is not just a demolisher, “one [who] must continually break down what oneself has accomplished”; the poet is a rebel who emits
“rebellious laughter” (212). Although Monroe argues that the “farm-boy gaily whittling out an animal” is the “true revolutionist” - that the “potential” to be a poet is in all of us -
Williams draws a strict line between poets and the rest of society. “Poets have no quarrel with anyone,” he insists. “Especially not with the ‘regular fellow.’ In tired moments we must envy him—the sport, the game guy. I see him laugh at life; I’ve seen him fling it aside for a glass of beer. I love these fellows—perhaps I wish I could be like them. I remember their names.... But I’m not blind as they were” (212). Like the “fool” in his poem of November 1916, “Naked,” Williams’s poet is no “blind,” ‘“regular fellow’”; indeed, he sees more than those others whom he sometimes envies for their innocence - but only in “tired moments.” The essay is subtly classist and condescending in its “envy” o f- but, ultimately, pity for - this “‘regular fellow.’” Moreover, his use of the past tense suggests that Williams, unlike the “‘regular fellow,”’ has what it takes to evade the grind of history and survive into the future.
As well, it is also finally a rebuke to Monroe’s own line of thought and, in particular, her notion that art is a “response of genius to the cumulative will of the immediate world.” Williams argues that art is the expression of an individual and not the 158 society that had a hand in shaping the individual: “I must write, I must strive to express myself. I must study my technique, as a Puritan did his Bible, because I cannot get at my emotions in any other way. There is nothing save the emotions: I must write, I must talk when I can. It is my defiance; my love song: all of it” (213). He later adds that “[p]oetry is a language of the emotions” and “there is no importance in anything save the emotion”
(215, 216). The essay ends emphatically: “We have said what it is in our minds to say”
(216). Poetry, for Williams, is an expression of the rebellious poet, separate from a society whose values he attacks. Nevertheless, Monroe, it seems, gets the last word in the issue by staging a counterattack:113 she follows Williams’s piece by printing a review of
Siegfried Sassoon’s war poems, Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918). The reviewer,
Eunice Tietjens, praises Sassoon’s poems, noting that “[t]here is no refusal to face facts here, no mitigating of the essential fact that war is a degenerating thing in every way and blights all it touches” (217). Through the sheer ordering of the issue’s contents, Tietjens’s firm critique of war has the effect of subtly condemning Williams’s essay, in particular its use of a militaristic vocabulary (a vocabulary that, it should be noted, Monroe herself utilized in her discussion of usurping her Bostonian rival, Braithwaite).114 The episode demonstrates how an individual text, far from being a discrete entity, can be shaped by its context in a particular issue of a periodical.
It may be that Monroe’s essay provoked Williams to write “The Farmer” (1923), in which the poet, echoing the editor of Poetry, describes the “artist figure of / the farmer”
(17-8). But unlike Monroe’s farmer-artist, who is, in part, a product of “the cumulative 159 will of the immediate world,” Williams’s farmer-artist, “deep in thought,” ranges freely across a much more passive landscape: “his blank fields” (1,3). As the poem records:
On all sides
the world rolls coldly away:
black orchards
darkened by the March clouds—
leaving room for thought. (9-13)
Williams’s farmer-artist “looms” over his “world,” self-sufficiently (17). Furthermore, his surroundings do not irrigate or cultivate his thoughts; rather, they “leav[e] room for thought,” as if opening a vacuum around the “pacing” farmer-artist (2). This vacuum is described variously as “blank,” “cold,” “black” - a chilly surface across which the self determining figure moves, un-acted upon (7). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the poem ends with the word “antagonist”; like Monroe’s “farm-boy,” Williams’s farmer is a kind of
“revolutionist” (211). But Williams does not represent his figure as being especially responsive to his world - an ironic fact given that Williams likely read Monroe’s essay, since both his work and hers shared space in the same issue.115
5. Conclusion
Williams, the rebel, would come to make peace with Poetry, the “stupid commercial magazine.” His rebellious ardour would cool and he would return to the fold, contributing work under the editorship of Monroe and others. Perhaps in rejecting Poetry and embracing little magazines as seemingly autonomous sites of personal expression, he 160 had accumulated enough symbolic capital. In fact, late texts by Williams seem to suggest some greater understanding of the inverse economy and how it works over time - or, at least, how it worked for him. Symbolic capital, according to Bourdieu, only pays off in a material sense - only becomes economic capital - down the road, when social institutions like the “education system” have helped to consecrate writers (in particular, those who assumed unrealized positions in the literary field and suffered for it) by preparing an audience for them (RoA 147). Indeed, in his autobiography, after describing his self- imposed exile from New York (a site associated with economic capital) and his attendance at parties for Others (a site associated with symbolic capital), he declares, “My objectives were long range” (Auto 136). In the interview for A. D. magazine, Williams, after noting that “a writer... cannot wait until the public catches up,” is described by the interviewer as focusing “on the distant literary horizons toward which his writing has always aimed” (“EMW” 27). Echoing his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Williams goes on to observe that “so much depends upon the passage of time. The world goes on at its pace and if a man is ahead - well, he stays ahead until the world catches up” (qtd. in
“EMW”: 27). Williams is still celebrating individual accomplishment - that of “a man” who is “ahead” - but his interview hints at the larger role that time plays in a culture’s consecration of an artist. As he notes toward the end of the interview,
The whole future of letters is in youth. That’s why literary quarterlies are
important, why I always try to help youngsters like you two when I think
you have a good thing. Keep that in mind with your editorial work. Try to
take a chance on the kids around. Lean over backwards to give them a 161
break. They are the ones who will be doing the writing of the future, and
they have to get a start. Keep them going and let them be heard.... A. D.
and all the other quarterlies have a big job to do. (34-5)
“[LJiterary quarteries,” by which term Williams seems to mean “little magazines,” feed the future by providing certain writers - specifically, those ‘“kids’” who resist the economic pole - with symbolic capital, in anticipation of a long-term pay-off.
Another late interview, given to one Walter Sutton in 1960, offers a capsule history of Williams’s shift toward mainstream acceptance by larger audiences. Sutton asks Williams about “the alienation of the poet” in the early twentieth century and, specifically, to comment on the “change in the status of the poet... over the past fifty years” (“VWCW” 49). After commenting on the role that women have played in bringing more recognition to poetry - a shift away from earlier, sexist comments - Williams notes that,
[w]hen I first attempted to read poetry thirty-five or forty years ago, at
church functions, or club functions, they always wanted to hear me say
something shocking. Now, I wanted to shock them by reading some of the
shocking poems I had attempted to write - and I did write - and they
would burst into raucous cheers when I would say anything shocking, and
that was being a poet, to be careless of what other people say. And that
was taken up by the Beatniks. They attempt to show they don’t care about
the conventions by using vulgar words and cursing - They want to appear
tough. (“VWCW” 50) 162
Williams’s observation that his audiences are no longer shocked reflects the extent to which his work has come to be accepted. (In a Partisan Review interview of 1939,
Williams described a small but growing audience of readers of his work in Rutherford, who “surreptitiously go to the public library and (when no one is looking) sneak my awful books out under their coats...” [“On Audience” 63].) Moreover, his use of the past tense - “that was being a poet, to be careless of what other people say” - suggests that he no longer occupies the role of the rebel in the literary field (or that the definition of a poet has changed). Indeed, the role has been “taken up by the Beatniks” who “want to appear tough.” After Sutton asks if “this battle is largely in the past,” Williams replies, “Yes, the reception of poetry by the general public is very much better than it used to be. It used to be that.. .any man who dealt with poetry must be effeminate. And therefore he must compensate. But that’s entirely in the past. I’m accepted by the ordinary people I know, my friends, in my town” (50). Interestingly, Williams, in this interview of 1960, seems to offer an implicit critique of his own attempts to “compensate” for a perceived lack of masculinity by coming across as an aggressive rebel. To be sure, his earlier conceptions of the little magazine as an ephemeral operation that must, after a time, be destroyed come couched in militaristic terms - the language of patriarchy. Ironically, though, after noting that poetry of his sort is now on high school curricula and that he receives “letters from high-school kids,” Williams continues to identify with the “gesture” of the “outcast” and the “reprobate,” as if he is uncomfortable with the fact that the attention of “high- school kids” might mean that his poetry is now a part of the mainstream (50, 54). “[T]he artist,” he insists, “can’t bother about what people are thinking” (54). But then, 163
contradicting this point and taking a more conservative position, he critiques the Beats for
their seemingly destructive behaviour - in their case, an excessive use of drugs and sex -
and he notes that he is “disgusted with [Allen Ginsberg] and his long lines,” despite an
earlier (and now famous) endorsement of Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) (55, 56). In fact, in a
prior interview, he worries about homosexuality and appears to be homophobic: “The
present trend toward homosexuality in literature is dangerous.... I’d say that when a work
becomes so immersed in it as to spoil literary values, you should omit it. Today it’s
overdone, too much spread around” (“EMW” 32-3).
It is arguable that Williams, by this point in his life and with mixed feelings, had
come to occupy the establishment position with which he once identified Poetry and
against which he once defined an identify for himself: he had achieved a larger audience
than a coterie, was now published by prominent commercial presses like Random House,
and could be found on high school curricula. It is arguable, too, that the “gesture” of the
“outcast” or the “reprobate” is always just that: a “gesture,” a performance, a predetermined role to play in the literary field. Little magazines offered Williams social
spaces in which he could play the role of the rebellious individual who, ironically, appears to be out ahead of his time, disconnected from social and economic forces, an
“essential ‘I.’” And by guaranteeing him little more than a small audience and no compensation, little magazines made available symbolic capital; the more impoverished the magazine, the greater the coffers. Still, on at least one occasion, he appears to have been dissatisfied with the reward. “There is no real desire for united effort,” a frustrated
Williams wrote after the second iteration of Contact folded (PfJ 244-45). “Never has been. We shit away every chance we have by putting out little piddling magazines here and there” (245). But this “desire for united effort” - a desire which Monroe’s editorials for Poetry make manifest - requires compromise, and the role of the rebellious individual leaves little room for that. As Frail notes, “[t]he poet in the bourgeois world has not been able to overcome his interindependence [sic] with the world from which he declares himself free and which in return declares him banished from power” (197). Williams was one such a poet whose declarations of independence only served to inscribe him further in an inverse economy that rewards, in the long-term, those who claim to be above all rewards. 165
Chapter Three
“Outsider Art”: Making Kay Ryan
Over the course of the last decade, as the American poet Kay Ryan (b. 1945) has drawn more and more attention, literary critics and journalists have often described her as an outsider. In the very first essay on Ryan, which was published in the Winter 1998/1999 issue of The Dark Horse magazine, Dana Gioia observes that, “Ryan is an outsider to the institutionalized world of contemporary American poetry” (“DKR” 138). In a 2004 profile, the Christian Science Monitor also describes Ryan as an “outsider” (Lund). A few years later, on the occasion of Ryan becoming the Poet Laureate of the United States, the
New York Times titled a piece “Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet
Laureate.” In the article itself, Patricia Cohen observes that, despite Ryan’s achievements,
“she has remained something of an outsider” (Cohen). Following the appearance of the
Times piece, the online magazine Slate published its own profile of the new Poet
Laureate, entitled “The Outsider Artist,” which notes that Ryan “has been described as an
‘outsider,’” thus reaffirming the earlier descriptions (O’Rourke). More recently, Adam
Kirsch, in the New Yorker, underscores the characterization: Ryan “has been a kind of outsider to the literary world” (Kirsch). In its standing blurb for the poet, the Poetry
Foundation Web site points out that “Ryan’s surprising laureateship capped years of outsider-status in the poetry world” (“Biography: Kay Ryan”).
The meaning of the word “outsider,” of course, depends on its context. The title of
Ryan’s poem “Outsider Art,” from her 1996 collection Elephant Rocks, alludes to a term 166 coined by Roger Cardinal to describe art that is made outside of official institutions and
“that is not subservient to the cultural norm” (12). According to Cardinal, those who create this work include “three broad types of artist - schizophrenics, mediums and [sic] innocents...” (35). On first glance, this term would seem to apply to the work of Ryan. As
Gioia observes, Ryan
did not emerge from a writing program or the New York arts world. She is
entirely the product of California but not the glamorous state of
Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Ryan was raised in the Mojave Desert and
the small, dusty, working-class towns of the San Joaquin Valley.... Ryan
studied literature in college but never took a creative writing course. For
over twenty years she has taught remedial English in a public junior
college. (“DKR” 138)
For Gioia himself, a Califomia-bom poet and critic of creative writing programs,116 the
“outsider” is the “self-taught” innocent who exists beyond New York and academia,
“outside the reputation-making institutions of literary life” (138, 136). She is an autonomous individual who has little or no truck with the cultural institutions on which many others depend.
In a recent piece for the New York Review of Books, however, Helen Vendler seems to question Ryan’s status as an “outsider,” but only because the word, for Vendler, connotes an “incompetent” amateur (Vendler). “Ryan’s work might be considered outside the mainstream,” writes Vendler, “and she (as someone who began outside the realm of privilege) feels she ought to stand up, as a matter of principle, for ‘outsider art.’ But like 167 any aesthete, she is repelled by incompetent creation; and for all her well-wishing she draws back.” Vendler goes on to analyze Ryan’s poem “Outsider Art,” which is both a celebration and indictment of non-mainstream creations. (“Most of it’s too dreary / or too cherry red,” run the first two lines of the poem.) The critic concludes that
Ryan is, despite her desert beginnings, a lover of Satie, a reader of
Brodsky and Bishop; she cannot disavow her own talent and taste, her
intelligence and achievement....
Ryan occupies the uneasy, and frequent, rank of the self-made
American writer, growing up with no “background” that could help with
the rise to mastery of language, with no money to buy select education
from kindergarten on, doing an ill-paid job not offering much public
recognition. (Vendler; emphasis added)
Ultimately, then, Vendler ratifies the conventional, if not romantic, and also all-American view of Ryan as the individual who transcends history by shaking off her humble origins and manufacturing her own destiny.
It is an irony worth noting, however, that a critic who characterizes a poet as being self-made is also, at one and the same time, actively constructing an image of the poet as self-made. Moreover, the characterization is likely to endure to the extent that the magazine in which it appears possesses significant cultural capital. The New York Times,
Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Review o f Books - these and other influential mainstream periodicals have played a role in shaping Ryan’s identity as an outsider and making that identity stick. They have also played a role in encouraging the poet’s career. In an interview, Ryan describes her “first real success” as having two poems accepted by
Poetry magazine in May 1984 (“ALI”). When the interviewer notes that “of course, May
2004 is when you won the Ruth Lily Award from the Poetry Foundation, which publishes
Poetry magazine,” Ryan concurs: “That’s right. It was such a perfect circle.” She goes on to point out that Copper Beech Press, the publisher of her first trade book, Strangely
Marked Metal (1985), “saw [the two poems in Poetry, “Marianne Moore Announces
Lunch” and “The Egyptians”] and invited me to send a manuscript. Which was a thrill.”
In other words, a specific appearance in Poetry, a magazine with cultural capital, proved to be the catalyst for Ryan’s first trade book. In the years to come - and long before she came to be labelled an “outsider” - her poems would be published in other prominent magazines like The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Yale Review,
The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The American Scholar. (The poem “Outsider Art,” for one, would appear in the distinguished and now-defunct magazine Partisan Review. It would later turn up in The Best American Poetry 1995 and eventually The Best o f the Best
American Poetry, 1988-1997 [1998], the latter edited by Harold Bloom. These are not venues known for curating the sort of outsider art that Cardinal has in mind. The dissemination of such work tends to be fraught, and its reception, insubstantial.)"7 In short, by the time Gioia branded Ryan an “outsider” in 1999, she was very much a socially- and culturally-situated poet, publishing her work in, and being granted prestige by, many of the most well-known literary magazines of the day. To date,Poetry alone has published 50 of her poems and eight of her essays. 169
This is not to suggest that it is possible not to be culturally-situated if only one were more completely reclusive; in other words, this is not to suggest that some more skittish version of Ryan, who refuses to send out her work to magazines, can steer clear of the culture and be declared a purely autonomous individual. Poets who do not publish much in their lifetimes - such as Emily Dickinson, another relative “outsider” to whom
Ryan is often compared - still exist in relation to their culture;118 they - and their words - are always already personally and discursively situated within what Bakhtin calls “a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment” (DN 1202).
Nevertheless, using theoretical frameworks provided by Bourdieu and Bakhtin I would argue that Kay Ryan’s poetry and prose constitute an especially conspicuous example of a body of work that actively calls attention to its own dialogic relationship to history, culture, and society. In the first part of this chapter, I discuss how the migration of American poets into the academy - specifically, creative writing programs - throughout the latter half of the twentieth century has been attacked by certain high- profile literary critics, who align universities with what Bourdieu would call the economic sphere. In the second part of the chapter, I analyze the ways in which other critics and journalists, implicitly accepting this critique of academia as a given, have constructed an image of Ryan as a cranky, pragmatic outsider to the university, thus investing her with a special kind of symbolic capital. My principle texts for analysis will include essays, reviews, and profiles that have been written about the poet and her work. In the third part of the chapter, and through a reading of Ryan’s interviews and prose, much of which has been written for Poetry, I complicate this portrait of Ryan-as-outsider by showing how 170 her relationships with teachers, friends, and literary magazines like Poetry has helped to situate her within the literary field and shape her work. In part four, I focus particular attention on Ryan’s remarkable poems, especially those published in Poetry, and demonstrate the ways in which they call attention to their dialogism - not just their debt to earlier texts but also their relationship to the magazines at which they orient themselves. I also discuss a few poems that did not appear in Poetry, I cite them as they appear in Ryan’s first career retrospective, The Best o f It: New and Selected Poems
(2010).
1. Poetry Professionals: Redrawing the American Literary Field
As I discussed in the second chapter, with reference to the theoretical work of
Bourdieu, a poet earns symbolic capital to the extent that he or she is perceived to be someone like William Carlos Williams: a rebel who rejects a mass audience and avoids enterprises that have been supposedly tainted by commerce, such as the “stupid commercial magazine,” which was Williams’s take on Harriet Monroe’s Poetry (qtd. in
HMPR: 177). In recent years, a number of critics have identified the university-based creative writing department - a post-World War II phenomenon that first took root in the
University of Iowa, employing and paying poets for their teaching services119 - as one such tainted enterprise. Writing about the culture’s distrust of the academic poet, in the mid-1990s, Ann Lauterbach observes, “persons who wish to become poets in this culture must make a kind of promise or vow, like St. Francis, in which they agree to a kind of economic obscurity, at least in relation to the writing of poems” (Lauterbach). Other 171 critics have also called attention to a romantic view of artistic production that continues to pervade American culture and fuel attacks on creative writing programs,120 attacks that often come from outside of the academy121 and, as a result, are less hostile to general readers than those by a modernist like Williams, for example, who “cannot wait until the public catches up” (“EMW” 27). Nevertheless, critics of creative writing programs worry that the process of institutionalization corrupts an otherwise “pure art” form by encouraging an insular, careerist mindset in poets; they worry, like Williams, about money getting mixed up with poetry.
For example Joseph Epstein, writing for Commentary in 1988, argues that a glut of creative writing programs in the United States is lowering standards and churning out too many poets. Epstein identifies “250 universities with creative-writing programs” and notes that many of the graduates are winding up as teachers in programs very similar to the ones that produced them (14). According to Epstein, university-subsidized readings, presses, and journals provide a platform to work in which non-academic audiences have little interest, as evinced by low attendance, sales, and circulation (15). Epstein, however, distinguishes the university-based poet from his or her predecessors by alluding to Eliot,
Stevens, and Williams (16). In their early years, these poets also had small audiences and jobs - but the jobs had nothing to do with their poetry; they were professionals but they were not “poetry professionals]” (16). Still, even if there are many more poets making a living that is directly related to poetry than there were in the early twentieth century, I would argue that the non-academic jobs of poets like Eliot, Stevens, and Williams only had the appearance of having nothing to do with their poetry. As Bourdieu reminds us, 172
the literary field is but a “relatively autonomous universe (which is to say, of course, that
it is also relatively dependent, notably with respect to the economic field and the political
field)” (RoA 141; emphases added). In other words, paycheques certainly helped sustain
the aforementioned poets; in fact, in Williams’s case, the examining room provided
readymade subject matter for verse. Moreover, the poetry of these modernists could be
more obviously quarantined from their careers, whereas in the case of university-based
poets - Epstein’s so-called “poetry professional[s]” - the career can be seen to be
corrupting the poetry. “They publish chiefly in journals sheltered by universities,”
remarks Epstein, “they fly around the country giving readings and workshops at other
colleges and universities. They live in jeans yet carry a curriculum vitae.... Well, it’s a
living” (16).
Citing the influence of Epstein’s article and its “acrimonious” reception by
academics, Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” - which was published in The
Atlantic in 1991 and subsequently provided the title for a collection of essays that has
gone through several editions - also conjures the spectre of the commercial in critiquing
the university-based “poetry subculture” (“CPM?” 4, 1). “Like their colleagues in other
academic departments,” suggests Gioia, “poetry professionals must publish, for the
purposes of both job security and career advancement. The more they publish, the faster
they progress. If they do not publish, or wait too long, their economic futures are in grave jeopardy” (8). Gioia goes on to describe how, “Like subsidized farming that grows food
no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers
and not the consumers” (8). He even applies a short Marxist reading to suggest that 173
“changes in a class’s economic function” - the class being that of poets - “eventually transforms its values and behaviour” (9).
The Marxist reading is somewhat ironic given that critics of creative writing programs like Epstein and Gioia are often politically conservative in temperament.
(Epstein is a frequent contributor to conservative magazines such as Commentary, Gioia served as a vice-president of General Foods and was later appointed by George W. Bush to be the head of the National Endowment for the Arts.) Although John Barr, the current head of the Poetry Foundation and a former businessman, has written positively about creative writing programs, he also observes that
these programs carry pressures to succumb to the intimidations implicit in
a climate of careerism.... They are sustained by a system of fellowships,
grants, and other subsidies that absolve recipients of the responsibility to
write books that a reader who is not a specialist might enjoy, might even
buy.
The MFA experience can confuse the writing of poetry, as a career,
with the writing of a poem as a need or impulse. The creation of art is not a
matter of fellowship. Writing a poem is a fiercely independent act. It is the
furthest thing from mentors, residencies, and tenure.... Will the next
Whitman be an MFA graduate? Somehow it seems hard to imagine. (436)
Barr’s desire to keep “the writing of poetry, as a career” separate from “the writing of a poem as a need or impulse” implies that poetry can be purified of economics and, by extension, larger historical pressures. Ironically, this desire contradicts his implicit belief 174 in the market as the prime mechanism for distributing awards to poets. It is the poet’s
“responsibility,” he suggests, “to write books that a reader who is not a specialist might enjoy, might even buy.” But a poet has neither a responsibility to be clear nor a responsibility to be obscure.
More generally, Barr’s characterization of writing as “a fiercelyindependent act” and his worries about “the next Whitman” reflect an Emersonian belief in the value of the individual who goes it alone so that he or she can serve as a model for, and even a leader of, the masses (emphasis added). As Emerson insists in his iconic essay “The American
Scholar” (1837), the individual “learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.... The poet in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in ‘cities vast’ find true for them also” (528). But there is a contradiction in a humanist ideology that celebrates “a fiercely independent act” to the extent that it reflects and benefits the larger society. (How “independent” is such an “act” ultimately?) As
Lauterbach points out, in a piece that predates Barr’s,
The history of the embedded relation between poverty and poetry is not
just a romance but is linked to the history of spiritual resistance, a
resistance which characterized the initial founding of America, sometimes
with dire consequences, and which finds its greatest secular expression in
Emerson’s Self-Reliance [sic]. People are disturbed when poets make a
decent living as professors; they think it is a sort of bad joke (but of course
newsworthy) when Allen Ginsberg sells his archive to a major university 175
for big bucks, as if some breach of decorum had been committed.
(Lauterbach)
Lauterbach traces the cultural distrust of poets who earn their living by teaching to one of
Emerson’s other important essays, “Self-Reliance” (1841), which is, ironically, a
foundational text of American individuality and, by extension, capitalism. (Indeed,
although Emerson warns of the dangers of materialism - for example, “the reliance on
Property” - he also worries about “the reliance on governments which protect it” and
argues that the individual must avoid “all external support” because “a man [is] better
than a town” - a market-friendly position that elevates the interests of the capitalist actor
over those of the larger society [549].) Thus, when a critic like Barr notes that “it seems
hard to imagine” that “the next Whitman” will come out of a creative writing program, it
is worth remembering that Whitman was not some sort of purely solitary self, untouched
by capital or the teachings of others; he, too, was situated in a literary field that gave him
access to the writings of Emerson, which proved to be influential on his own work, as
well as Emerson himself. Emerson promoted Leaves o f Grass vigorously, lending the
book the prestige attached to his name. As the author and abolitionist Moncure Conway
noted, “‘Emerson had been for many years our literary banker; paper that he inspected,
coin that had been rung on his counter, would pass safely anywhere’” (Kaplan 203). The
I weight of Emerson’s name could open doors. The champion of self-reliance even wrote
letters on Whitman’s behalf to high-ranking government officials - the secretary of the treasury and the secretary of state - to try to help Whitman obtain a job (Loving 18). 176
It should also be emphasized that the historical conditions that made it possible for some critics to celebrate the unadulterated genius of Whitman have changed. As McGurl argues at the end of his recent study of creative writing programs,
we can only measure literary excellence on our own terms, and the task of
elevating individual authors high above their numerous accomplished
peers has become increasingly difficult. This may have produced, as with
the disappearance of the .400 hitter in professional baseball, a kind of
optical illusion of encroaching mediocrity: being the dominant figure in
Shakespeare’s or even Pound’s time was, by comparison today, easy as
pie. (McGurl 410)
In other words, it is easy to attack creative writing programs for producing more poets than ever before and making it difficult for the culture to identify the “dominant figure[s].” But the historical conditions of mid-century prosperity that made possible the spread of creative writing programs are radically different than the nineteenth-century conditions that made possible the idea of power hitters like Whitman. The population increase alone, between 1840, shortly after the publication of “The American Scholar,” and 1940, shortly after the first Iowa workshop took place, dramatically expanded the pool of potential poets (University of Iowa). In 1840, the U. S. population stood at
17,069,453; in 1940, it had risen to 132,122,446 (U. S. Census Bureau). Ill
2. “[T]hey gouge and hatch”: Manufacturing the Outsider
Because of the sustained attack on creative writing programs in the late twentieth-
and early twenty-first centuries, it is possible for a poet like Kay Ryan to be perceived as
a rebel to the extent that she appears to resist an academic mill that is too much entangled
with economics. In fact, many critics and journalists writing for magazines that operate
outside of academia have seized on the example of Ryan, investing her with the symbolic
capital that comes with being an individualistic rebel. Before being infused with such
capital, however, Ryan had to contend with the charge that she was anything but an
individual: she had to contend with the charge that she was a poet who existed all too obviously in a lineage that extends back, through Marianne Moore, to include Emily
Dickinson, the Brontes, even Hippocrates. In the first major review of a Kay Ryan book, published in Library Journal in August of 1994, Christine Stenstrom observes that
Ryan’s “poems are marked with the powerful but idiosyncratic influence of Marianne
Moore, whose unique style is echoed in Ryan’s elliptically compressed syntax and high- toned ironic stance...” (Stenstrom 91; emphasis added). The book under review -
Flamingo Watching (1994), Ryan’s second trade book and third volume of poems - certainly reflects the “influence” of Moore and not just through “syntax” and “stance”; two of Ryan’s poems deploy quotations by Moore as epigraphs and many others reflect the modernist’s interest in underdog animals.124 But although Stenstrom associates Moore with the “idiosyncratic” and the “unique,” she describes Ryan’s style as having only
“echoed” Moore’s. Despite acknowledging some “clever charm in her descriptions,”
Stenstrom concludes that Ryan’s “poems are derivative and lacking in substance” (91). 178
Although one may take issue with the negative spin which Stenstrom places on
“derivative” - how can poetry not help but derive from other, earlier examples? - it is
worth noting that this first (and little-cited) review does not celebrate, as Gioia does, a
“genuinely original poet” who exists on the fringes of the American literary field (“DKR”
135). Rather, Stenstrom’s review includes no biographical information about Ryan at all.
If anything, it locates the poet’s workin relation to that of a stylistic predecessor.
Other early critics, though more positive on the whole, would follow this lead,
treating Ryan, about whom little was known, less as a discrete personality - an “outsider”
- and more like a poet among other poets. In the next review of a Ryan book - a brief
piece on the poet’s fourth collection, Elephant Rocks (1996), which appeared on 18
March 1996 in Publisher's Weekly - an anonymous reviewer notes the “unique” nature of
Ryan’s poetry but goes on to observe that “[h]er work recalls Dickinson’s in substance as
in directness” and that “at times her terse, rhyming verses have the patness of nursery rhymes” (“ER” 67). Moreover, a reference to the fact that Ryan’s work constitutes “a meditation on a quirky, quixotic natural world full of animal-shaped rocks and other oddities” gestures toward the aforementioned Moore “influence.” Reviewing Elephant
Rocks for Booklist in April, Elizabeth Millard alludes to Dickinson’s poem “There’s a certain Slant of Light” when she notes that “Ryan is remarkably dexterous at slanting the poetic light upon common places to disclose previously unknown contours” (Millard
1340; emphasis added).
Later that same year, inAntioch Review, in yet another brief take, Daniel
McGuiness devotes nearly twenty percent of his review - 65 of a scant 329 words - to a 179
Stevie Smith quote: ‘“Poetry is like a strong explosion in the sky. She makes a mushroom shape of terror and drops to the ground with a strong infection. Also she is a strong way out. The human creature is alone in his carapace. Poetry is a strong way out”’
(McGuiness 496). Although McGuiness seems to use the quote merely to conjure Smith in the reader’s mind, the passage nevertheless hints at the social nature of poetry, which offers a “strong way out” of individualism, of the “human creature.. .alone in his carapace” (496). He proceeds to make another allusion to Smith when he notes, “Ryan’s poems have been far out all her life, and not feeling but thinking,” echoing Smith’s “Not
Waving but Drowning,” in which a speaker confesses “I was much too far out all my life /
And not waving but drowning” (11-2). (The implication is that Ryan’s non-passionate poems, unlike Smith’s symbolically flailing speaker, are “far out” in a positive, cerebral way.) Ryan is compared further to “Hippocrates making little pills of pithiness” and her poems to “those little books the Brontes wrote for their dolls,” “haiku with punch lines, prescriptions not meant for the pharmacist” (496). John Skelton and Dickinson are also summoned to suggest that Ryan’s poems are less original expressions than unrealized hybrids: “If John Skelton had been Emily Dickinson’s tutor instead of Jane Scrope’s, these poems would not surprise us” (496). The review ends with a suggestion that Ryan’s poems have assumed a “miniaturized size [that] fits a recent trend in New Yorker poems”
(496). Although one might dismiss McGuiness as a cynic for his suggestion that Ryan has compromised her poetry to suit the spatial requirements of The New Yorker, he is not wrong to hint at the role that a magazine can play in shaping the poetry that is submitted to it. 180
It is worth commenting on the sheer brevity of these first reviews of Ryan’s early trade books. Although it is not surprising that a poet who has yet to make a name for herself commands but a capsule review, one of the inadvertent benefits of this form is that it can encourage the reviewer, when faced with a relatively unknown poet, to avoid biography - and, by extension, myth-making - and concentrate on the work itself, not to mention the other works it resembles. (On average, these first four capsule reviews cede
33% of their word count to quotations from Ryan’s poems. 1 )“) SMoreover, the mere evocation of an established name - from a list that includes Hippocrates, Dickinson,
Skelton, Scrope, Moore, Smith, and the Brontes - in the cramped quarters of a brief review can have the somewhat positive effect of under-emphasizing the individuality of the poet under examination. On the other hand, these references may also serve a more practical commercial purpose, providing consumers with a quick impression of the sort of poetry Ryan’s is like. In any event, what one takes away from these necessarily limited reviews, for good and bad, is a sense of Ryan’s lines - and their linkages to the lines of others - as opposed to the life behind them.
The view of Ryan as an individualistic outsider, however, begins to emerge in the first mention of her work to appear in Poetry, Andrew Frisardi’s May 1997 review of
Elephant Rocks. Interestingly, Frisardi’s review - the longest consideration of Ryan up to that point, at 531 words - also contains the least amount of quoted poetry: 21 words, which works out to 4% of the review’s entire word count. Instead of offering exemplary lines, Frisardi celebrates the persistence of the human in a world degraded by postmodern theory, the latter being subtle and strategic coding for the contemporary academic world. 181
(To disparage postmodern theory is to disparage by extension those most invested in it: academics.) Frisardi begins the review by noting,
Post-structural theory notwithstanding, there are still plenty of writers who
see themselves primarily as human beings addressing other human beings
- potters (to borrow Antonio Machado’s metaphor) who make pots
without worrying too much about not being able to make clay. It is as if
such writers are conscious of a distinction between negative capability and
nihilism. Their awareness of subjectivity, social conditioning, and the
limitations of their medium does not prevent them from trying simply to
share with the reader, as vividly and engagingly as possible, fresh ways of
seeing perennial experiences. Kay Ryan is one contemporary poet whose
work exemplifies the old humanist notion that poetry can both delight and
instruct. (101)
Frisardi dismisses “Post-structural theory” and suggests that Ryan is a “humanist” - and an earthy one at that. I want momentarily to table a critique of the argument that Ryan is a
“potter... who make[s] pots without worrying too much about not being able to make clay.” (The last section of my chapter argues against this and suggests how Ryan’s poetry is, in fact, self-reflexive in the way that it meditates on its medium and, more generally, the limitations of reason and communication.) Instead, I want to point out that Frisardi’s review risks a romantic characterization of his subject. To be fair, Frisardi suggests that
Ryan belongs to a cohort of writers who are aware of “subjectivity, social conditioning, and the limitations of their medium” He also suggests that her poetry is the result of “a 182 hybrid of Emily Dickinson and [Far Side cartoonist] Gary Larsen [sic],” thus locating her work in relation to that of others (102). (Gary Larson [b. 1950] created the single-panel
Far Side cartoon series, which appeared daily in international newspapers from 1980 to
1995.) But he goes on to celebrate Ryan as being “uncannily gifted”: to read Elephant
Rocks is to be “in the presence of an unusually subtle, keenly observant, moral sensibility” (101, 102; emphasis added). Towards the end of the review, he positions
Ryan as an outsider whose “poems challenge hypocrisy, institutionalized brutality, and general human myopia with deceptive ease, much as the child did who announced the emperor wasn’t wearing clothes” (Frisardi 102). Ryan, he implies, exists outside of institutions like academia, as does her work, which balances the canonical (Dickinson) with the pop cultural (Larson). She is like a “child,” an innocent who has not yet been corrupted and, therefore, can call out the powers that be - i.e., the “emperor,” the university - for their excesses. Although this characterization is meant to celebrate Ryan, it also infantilizes her, however unintentionally. (It is hard to imagine a male poet like
Williams being described as a child opposing the naked emperor.) Ryan’s next review in
Poetry would augment the child-like aura around the poet, describing the experience of reading her work as the equivalent of “arm wrestling with the scrawny kid in the schoolyard who pins you before you know what’s happened,” a statement that, interestingly, was repurposed as a blurb on the back cover of Ryan’s 2005 collection The
Niagara River (Yezzi, Rev. 104). Both of these characterizations betray a distinctly
American ideology: they cheer on the scrappy, youthful underdog who stands up to authority - be it the decadent (and presumably European) “emperor” or the more 183 generalized and implicit figure of the bully, which is to say the less “scrawny kid in the schoolyard.”
Gioia’s aforementioned essay, which was published a year later, sharpens one’s sense of Ryan as individualistic outsider. Indeed, it was the first essay to incorporate substantial biographical information about the poet. Near the beginning of the piece,
Gioia notes that, “Despite all the fashionable blather about individual voices, most poets use and reuse the common parlance of the age with only a slight personal accent. One can read most new poets quite easily. But a genuinely original poet requires some recalibration of our ear and eye - both inner and outer” (“DKR” 135). Unlike most poets of her “age,” Ryan’s voice is “individual” and the poet herself, “genuinely original”
(135). Gioia attributes some of this to the fact that Ryan is a “West Coast writer who worked outside the reputation-making institutions of literary life,” a “product” of “the hot, rural landscapes of interior California,” and a “daughter of a well-driller” (136, 138).
Although he risks the classist assumption that Ryan’s working-class background had to be overcome, he seems to make the relatively progressive suggestion that Ryan’s relatively marginal position in the American literary field of the late twentieth century - a position determined by geography (“hot, rural landscapes”) and economics (“daughter of a well- driller”) - had a hand in shaping her work and distinguishing it from that of other, more centrally situated poets.
He also hints, however unintentionally, at a larger cultural apparatus that lends a hand in the formation of a career. Gioia notes that Ryan’s “poems have recently begun to appear in the New Yorker” and that one of her four books came out with “a New York 184 house” (136). But even before New York came calling, others had already taken an interest. Her first book, Gioia tells us, “was privately printed in California by a subscription of friends” and her second, by “Copper Beech Press of Rhode Island - a small publisher from America’s smallest state with a knack for discovering talent” (136).
The title of Gioia’s essay, “Discovering Kay Ryan,” begins to take on an unintended irony since the poet has already been “discovered” and extended a considerable measure of help by friends as well as by a perceptive publisher. Gioia’s essay itself is a part of the larger cultural apparatus, and its endorsement of Ryan lends the poet cultural capital, especially since Gioia is a well-known poet and a vocal critic of the institutionalized poetry of creative writing programs.126 (The essay was reprinted in Gioia’s collection
Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End o f Print Culture [2004], which was put out by
Graywolf Press, a prominent publisher of poetry and criticism.) It also lends Gioia cultural capital since it helps to construct Gioia as a tastemaker who is ahead of the curve in his valuation of Ryan.
Nevertheless, Gioia ultimately veers away from a materialist analysis when he concludes that Ryan is “self-taught... an outsider to the institutionalized world of contemporary American poetry” (138). He ends his discussion of her background by adding monastic shading to Ryan’s isolation: “Ryan studied literature in college but never took a creative writing course. For over twenty years she has taught remedial English in a public junior college” (138). The fact that Ryan teaches basic grammar to students who need to improve their grades is well-chosen; it draws a line between Ryan, who works in the trenches, and the rarefied world of privileged creative writing departments. In short, 185
after describing Ryan as “the product of California, but not the glamorous state of
Hollywood and Silicon Valley,” Gioia’s essay aligns his rugged, almost rural poet with
the previously cited - and rather earthier - “potters,” thus constructing his outsider in
terms of class and demographics (138; emphasis added).
Elizabeth Lund’s 2004 profile for the Christian Science Monitor also dwells on a
kind of working class hero. Occasioned by Ryan’s recent receipt of the Ruth Lily Prize
from the Poetry Foundation, valued at $100,000, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the
profile notes that Ryan’s “triumph is all the sweeter given that Ryan, now approaching
retirement, recalls being denied admission to the poetry club at UCLA when she was a
student there because she was considered too much of an outsider. Today, the ‘outsider’ is
smiling broadly” (Lund). The “poetry club at UCLA” (a club about which there seems to
be no information available, suggesting it was a relatively informal association) becomes
another elite institution - in addition to academia and New York publishing - against which a rough-edged Ryan comes to be defined. The profile then repeats Gioia’s
observation by pointing out that “she has taught the same subject - remedial English - at
College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., for the past 33 years. She limits her classes to
Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. ‘I’ve tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy,’
she says, explaining that the simpler her routine, the more complex her thinking can be”
(Lund). This portrait reinforces the reader’s sense of Ryan as a humble, self-reliant ascetic, plugging away in a geographic (and educational) desert, and yet somehow making it big on her own terms. (In other words, it reinforces the American dream.) Such a summary also mitigates the damage that large financial awards from mainstream 186 institutions could do to the credibility of a poet, who tends to shed symbolic capital the closer the “daughter of a well-driller” drills to economic success (Bourdieu, RoA 141-42).
To her credit, Lund records the role that friends have played in Ryan’s life, as well as the influence of other writers, and language itself, on her work. She also mentions
Ryan’s resistance to “the first-person perspective,” and the fact that “Ryan rarely uses ‘I,’ because she finds it too intrusive” (Lund). Nevertheless, the profile’s ultimate goal is to celebrate the success of a quirky individual who has succeeded in spite of less-than- promising origins and circumstances. (Lund points out that Ryan is the daughter of a man who “was not just a dreamer but could ‘fail at anything,’ a man who sold Christmas trees, owned a chromium mine, and died while reading a get-rich-quick book” [Lund].) After recounting Ryan’s many achievements - such as acceptance “in some of the finest periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry” - the piece ends with calculated understatement:
Not bad for a woman who was once considered too independent to be
accepted by her college’s literary elites. Now, however, with her two
recent prizes, Ryan serves as an example for other unconventional writers.
“If there is a [literary] game of sorts, you can win by staying home and
doing the writing,” she says. “Good work can make its way in this
culture.” (Lund)
Although the article takes a shot at so-called “literary elites,” it implicitly recognizes the importance of certain “elites” - such as those editors of “some of the finest periodicals” - when it implies that Ryan’s success ultimately depends on having been accepted by these 187
“periodicals.” (Indeed, it is safe to say that the profile would not exist had Ryan not won
the Ruth Lilly Prize and the Guggenheim Fellowship in the spring of 2004 - had Ryan not
been embraced by “elites.”) Ryan herself undervalues the role that editors and prize-
granting bodies play when she notes that “Good work can make its way in this culture.”
In fact, it is the structure of the literary field that determines what is “Good” and how
unpublished work “make[s] its way.”
Since Gioia’s and Lund’s first substantial profiles of Ryan, her reputation as an
individualistic outsider has only ossified. David Kirby, in a New York Times review of
Ryan’s 2005 collection The Niagara River, calls Ryan a “contrarian.” Langdon Hammer,
writing for The American Scholar in 2008, touches on the social nature of Ryan’s poems,
but ultimately circles back to her distinct sensibility: “There is no T in them—Ryan is
concerned with what ‘we’ do and how ‘we’ think and speak, or what ‘you’ see and feel. If
her perspective is impersonal, it is also quirky and individual” (Hammer). Hammer repeats the points about her modest upbringing in “small towns in the Mojave Desert and
San Joaquin Valley,” her career teaching “basic English skills at the College of Marin
since 1971,” and her commitment to “living ‘very quietly”’ (Hammer). Also, as already noted, profiles in the New York Times and Slate, both of which marked Ryan’s appointment to the Poet Laureateship, took the titles “Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style,
Named Poet Laureate” and “The Outsider Artist: Assessing Kay Ryan, Our New Poet
Laureate,” respectively (Cohen, O’Rourke). The Times piece reminds one, again, that
Ryan was “rejected” by the UCLA poetry club (by now, a mythic institution) and elicits a new quote from Gioia, who expands on his earlier description of Ryan: she is “the 188
‘thoughtful, bemused, affectionate, deeply skeptical outsider’” (Cohen). It also reiterates what seem to be well-established talking points: her small town desert upbringing; her father’s failures; and the thirty years spent teaching “remedial English” (Cohen). The
Slate piece notes that “Ryan... has been described as an ‘outsider,’ largely because she has managed not to be drawn into the great peristalsis that digests most ‘creative writers’ in America today...” (O’Rourke). The “great peristalsis” metaphor suggests that while
“most ‘creative writers’” cannot resist the larger, cultural contractions that pull them into the academy, where they might find employment, Ryan is the singular, indigestible morsel.
Helen Vendler’s recent review of The Best o f It makes a substantial contribution to the mythology of Ryan. “From Antelope Valley Community College to the poet laureate’s chair from 2008 to 2010 - the story behind Kay Ryan’s late fame (she was bom in 1945) is a transfixingly unusual one in the arts,” argues Vendler. Her use of the word
“transfixingly” rings with unintentional irony; Ryan’s humble origins have been
“transfixing,” alright - at least partially because critics like Vendler keep writing about them, using such purple, alliterative phrases as “daughter of the desert” (Vendler).
Vendler goes on to reiterate, by rote, the basic facts: Ryan is the “daughter of a well- driller,” “was raised on the Mojave desert,” and “taught basic English courses at the
College of Marin.” It is not that these facts are untrue; it is that their continual regurgitation and re-inscription, by critics and journalists who appear to be transfixed by them, can have the effect of romanticizing the poet and reinforcing an identity that, however apparently individualistic, is finally a communal creation, the consensus of the 189 culture. Vendler later calls Ryan “self-made,” seemingly unaware of the role she, a renowned critic and professor with significant cultural capital, is playing in the making of
Ryan’s self, in the production of her image. But the critic’s mythologizing, although celebratory, is ultimately reductive. It implies that the person who is not like Ryan - who is not “self-made” - lacks agency.
As the pieces in the New York Times, Slate, and the New York Review o f Books demonstrate, periodicals with large circulations (or, in the case of Slate, Web traffic) that are not housed in universities - the kinds of reputation-making magazines which Lund identifies as “some of the finest” - have tended to fashion an image of Ryan, as an anti elite outcast, at the expense of universities; at the expense of creative writing programs and what one might call, more generally, the American academic world (of which Ryan’s teaching for community college is not counted a part). It may be that these magazines have taken their cue from Ryan herself. In a 2005 essay for Poetry, entitled “I Go to
AWP,” Ryan writes about a trip to AWP, an annual conference hosted by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Ryan begins the piece by confessing:
I have always understood myself to be a person who does not go to writers
conferences. It’s been a point of honor: the whole cooperative
workshopping thing, not for me. I have never taken a creative writing
class, I have never taught a creative writing class, and 1 have never gone,
and will never go, to anything like AWP, I have often said. (“AWP”)
Yet, Ryan goes on to note that her ability to play the role of the outsider enabled her to attend without really participating. “I was invited to attend as an outsider, and to write a 190 piece for Poetry,” she observes (“AWP”). “I could go but retain my alienation. This was so doable” (“AWP”). Anticipating - or perhaps inspiring - Slate's description of the academy as a “great peristalsis” that obliterates differences, Ryan describes “the great creative writing fungus,” of which individual teachers are “deadly white threads”
(“AWP”). She also likens the conference to Costco, which invites consumers to
Think big! Glut yourself! All this wouldn’t be going on if it weren’t a good
idea to heap your day up with it! And don’t worry; it’s all disposable! One
panel will wipe out all memory of the previous panel, just like with TV. It
would be wrong, unthrifty, to go back to your room and sit. (“AWP”)
Ryan’s narrator is a kind of gonzo journalist who tries her best to get into the spirit of the event - who even describes some of its participants as “sincere, helpful, useful people”
(“AWP”). Ultimately, however, the gonzo journalist does not fit in, even if she is happy to report that “the theoretical zealotry of the eighties is in major decline, and it’s getting to be OK for all sorts of good sense to reign again” (“AWP”). In other words, the anti academic outsider implies that the academic world has not been a place of “good sense” for decades.
Other writers, also constructing an identity for Ryan as outcast, echo her depiction of the university as a generally unseemly place. A 2010New York Times review of The
Best o f It - which identifies Ryan as “an unusual poet and an unusual person” - notes that although she “is now the 16th poet laureate of the United States... she mostly steers clear of the poetry world’s junketeering, its voluptuous horror of conferences and panels and
M.F.A. programs” (Gamer). (Gamer goes on to reiterate that Ryan “has taught the same 191 remedial English course, at the same community college in Marin County, Calif., for more than 30 years,” thus awarding points to the non-elite toiler.) A review of the same book in The New Yorker describes “I Go to AWP” as a “wonderfully impolite essay” and compares Ryan to the English poet Philip Larkin, “another sharp critic of creative-writing classes.... He was in the university world, but as a librarian he was not quite of it - just as
Ryan has been a professor not of creative writing but of remedial English, at a community college in Marin County” (Kirsch).
Critics and journalists often present Ryan as an outsider to the extent that her work attracts a non-academic audience that has been alienated by university-based poets. That said, their implicit belief in the value of general readers does not necessarily mark a great shift from the time when a poet like Williams could score symbolic points based on his disdain for a mass audience. If anything, these critics and journalists - writing for non- academic publications - implicitly construct the academic audience as something akin to the sort of mass audience which poets once scorned: a homogeneous, like-minded herd.
Perhaps, then, what the anti-commercial Williams and the anti-academic champions of
Ryan share is a general, humanist worry that poetry is compromising itself to the whims of a group (a mass audience, the academic world, etc.) when it should be expressing nothing more than the will of a single person - the poet. In Ryan’s first Poetry review,
Frisardi, having fired a shot off the bow of “Post-structural theory,” celebrates “human beings addressing other human beings” like a latter-day Wordsworth and, more specifically, the ease with which Ryan instructs the otherwise alienated reader: “One simply sits down to read and relax, and, before one realizes it, one has been told 192
something useful and important” (101). He also notes that “So original, so astute, so pleasurable are the poems in this book, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if they’re still being read long after current critical fashions are dated” (Frisardi 102). In Frisardi’s eyes, what makes Ryan’s poems remarkable is the fact that they are “pleasurable,” which, his review suggests, is not a quality much encouraged by “current critical fashions.” Ryan, by implication, is individual enough to resist these “fashions.”
Gioia, too, finds Ryan’s readability a point worth remarking on. He relates an anecdote in which, having read Ryan’s third collection for the first time, he “could... never quite bring [himself] to put Flamingo Watching away on the shelf. I kept picking the book up to read or reread a few more poems. Over the next year their depth of perception, joyful invention, and stylistic authority never failed to fascinate and delight me” (135). Ryan’s poetry, however, does not read like a pot-boiler or a page-tumer; according to Gioia, Ryan “challenges the reader in unusual ways. She is not obscure but sly, dense, elliptical, and suggestive. She plays with her readers - not maliciously or gratuitously but to rouse them from conventional response and expectation” (135). Ryan
- unlike the young Williams, who describes his Others-Qra peers as “destroyers, vulgarians, obscurantists to most who read” - is not malicious toward her audience
(Williams, Auto 148). Nor is she “obscure,” a word that - given Gioia’s critique of academia - sounds like a shot against the university-based poet or the deliberately difficult modernist.
Other critics also emphasize her readability while taking to task the rest of the poetry world - a vaguely defined entity - for its obscurantism and self-consciousness. An 193 unsigned piece in the Kirkus Reviews from October 2000 notes that her “metaphors work thanks to the consanguinity of the images, which Ryan selects with care, rather than plunking down a stream-of-consciousness gallimaufry and leaving it up to the reader to develop a taste for it” (“SU”). (The implication is that the Kirkus Reviews have been burdened with the task of having to “develop” a “taste” for other poets.) Laura Miller, writing for Salon, confesses “I’m not a regular reader of contemporary poetry - most of it seems either impenetrably cryptic, awash in navel-gazing bathos or just plain dull - but I eagerly snap up every new volume by Kay Ryan” (Miller). O’Rourke notes that
it’s hardly a surprise that the Library of Congress tapped her. Ryan rejects
the pained, stylized self-consciousness that characterizes so much
contemporary poetry. Where many poets today are engaged in issues and
questions that would be meaningful mainly to other practitioners of the art,
Ryan’s concerns about the nature of reality are relatively translatable to a
general audience. (O’Rourke)
Hammer also suggests that Ryan is a poet addressing something like “a general audience” when he notes that “she writes about common experiences and, in particular, verbal commonplaces, the store of proverb and cliche by which people daily make sense of the world (“Kay Ryan” 176). If anything, Hammer worries that Ryan, in her worst poems, is
“too-easily consumable” (183).
Even a recent attempt to resist the deification of Ryan as an outsider - by a seemingly progressive publication like Washington Blade, which identifies itself as
“America’s Leading Gay News Source” - cannot help but portray academia as being cut 194
off from the rest of American society (Main Page). Occasioned by Ryan’s winning of a
MacArthur “genius” award, prized at $500, 000, the Blade article celebrates Ryan, “an
openly lesbian poet” for bringing “poetry to people in all walks of life,” an overstatement
that has the effect of suggesting that Ryan’s work transcends “all” demographic lines
(Wolfe). More problematically, however, the article notes that the former Poet Laureate is
no Ivory Tower goddess in MFA Land. Though Ryan has a bachelor’s and
master’s in English from the University of California in Los Angeles, she
has taught remedial reading for more than three decades at the College of
Marin, a community college in Kentfield, Calif.... Yet while pushing
herself and her students toward excellence, Ryan has opened the door to
poetry for prisoners and others who can’t afford MFA programs or other
trappings of the “po biz.” (Wolfe)
Although one is grateful that the article does not transform Ryan into an ethereal being,
the characterization of creative writing programs as a part of the “Ivory Tower” and
“MFA Land” suggests that these programs are rather silly and exist at a remove from
some real world of “remedial reading” and “community college.” At the same time that
they exist in a kind of la-la land, they also resemble paradoxically a ‘“po biz,”’ which is to say a “poetry business” or “poetry industry,” and one that is too expensive for some to
“afford.” Once again, Ryan is reinscribed a working-class hero.
One of the chief ways in which magazines fashion an image of Ryan as an outsider is by comparing her to the famously reclusive Dickinson. As already noted, early reviewers of Ryan, before they became interested in her as an isolate, often compared her 195 work to that of other artists - Dickinson, yes, but also Hippocrates, Moore, Smith, and the
Brontes, among others. Dickinson’s name resounds in later reviews and articles by Yezzi,
Logan, Kirby, Hammer, O’Rourke, Gamer, Kirsch, and Vendler. Sometimes a critic will invoke Dickinson’s name for the purposes of comparison;128 in other instances, the critic will complicate the comparison and bring in other names with which we might associate
Ryan: Moore, A. R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Robert Frost, and Philip Larkin.129 Despite the fact that she ultimately embraces the Dickinson comparison, Vendler does offer a brief, feminist critique of the comparison: “Although [hers] is a poetry of brevity, Ryan must be tired of being placed, as she often is, in a putative female line-of-the-brief that goes from Emily Dickinson to Marianne Moore to Amy Clampitt” (Vendler).
Gioia, for his part, draws a comparison between two poets as much as two bodies of work:
Ryan’s style is zestfully contemporary, but there is something almost
eighteenth century about her sensibility. She is a moraliste in the
expansive and exemplary sense of the French philosophes - a theorist of
human conduct. In this way, as in several others, Ryan resembles Emily
Dickinson, who is surely the presiding genius loci of her poetry. Like
Dickinson, Ryan has found a way of exploring ideas without losing either
the musical impulse or imaginative intensity necessary to lyric poetry.
(“DKR” 137-38)
“Ryan resembles Emily Dickinson,” “Emily Dickinson... is surely the presidinggenius loci,” “Like Dickinson, Ryan has found a way” - Gioia’s constructions place an emphasis 196 on a shared sensibility. He goes further in the 2008 Times piece when he is quoted as saying (bizarrely) that Ryan, the newly appointed Poet Laureate, ‘“would certainly be part of the world if she could manage it.... She has certain reservations. That is what makes her like Dickinson in some ways’” (Cohen). Interestingly, Ryan’s Dickinsonian-like reclusivity - purely a construction of pieces like Gioia’s - becomes a provocative part of the story of her appointment to the very public role of Poet Laureate. (As already noted, the Poetry Foundation Web site points out that “Ryan’s surprising laureateship capped years of outsider-status in the poetry world” [“BKR”; emphasis added].)
At its worst, the Dickinson comparison makes a curiosity of Ryan and, as Vendler seems to hint, rankles with overt sexism. In a 2005 review, William Logan argues:
There are poets whose work is memorable because they have a peculiar
way of looking at the world, and often such poets are women. Emily
Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and contemporaries like
Anne Carson, Marie Ponsot, and Kay Ryan are poets devoted to the small,
slantwise idea, and of all things they love Blake’s grain of sand (or, in
Bishop’s lovely phrase, “My crumb/ my mansion”). These garden
ontologists are all shrinking violets (think how housebound Dickinson and
Moore were, and even Bishop); but a poet doesn’t have to be in the world
to be of it, and there are advantages to watching intently and keeping
mum—they are the virtues of predator as well as prey. 197
These poets often seem to have suffered some terrible wound; a
hidden pain shadows their stickery poems, sometimes so imperceptibly
that if you read quickly you miss it. (Logan)
Logan’s review essentializes female poets, whom, he argues, “have a peculiar way of looking at the world.” He then lumps Ryan into a lineage of women beholden to “small” ideas, such as Blake’s “grain of sand,” which derives from the first line of his poem,
“Auguries of Innocence.” (She is also linked subtly to the small, pitiful children in
Blake’s Songs o f Innocence, which works further to reduce the reader’s sense of Ryan as an accomplished adult.) Moreover, by aligning Ryan with the sort of “shrinking violets” who exhibit the tendencies of “prey” and “predator” (and conceal “some terrible wound” or “hidden pain”), Logan not only constructs Ryan as an outsider; like a taxonomist, he identifies a species of female poet that is a predatory, damaged outsider about whom one should be wary.
Kirby’s 2005 piece in theNew York Times also displays a sexist streak, he speculates that Ryan’s poem “On the Difficulty of Drawing Oneself Up” would “prompt perhaps the arching of a single eyebrow in approval on the part of modem American poetry’s mom, Emily Dickinson, hands-down champ at writing poems that are as compressed as Whitman’s are sprawling” (Kirby). Although Kirby is not incorrect in identifying Dickinson’s poems as “compressed,” his sexist description of the poet as
“modem American poetry’s mom” and his implicit reinforcement of a binary (female poems are “compressed,” male poems, “sprawling”) should cause the reader to “arch” an
“eyebrow” of her own.130 He also notes that, “like Dickinson’s, many of Ryan’s poems 198 read as if there were a kid in the middle, legs coiled, beside itself with glee and terror”
(Kirby). In doing so, Kirby echoes earlier critics who invest and at the same time reduce
Ryan - and, in Kirby’s case, Dickinson - with the faint praise of innocence. Moreover, beyond being sexist, these characterizations of Ryan as a child support the humanist narrative that locates Ryan outside o f experience and, more specifically, economic relations, which can be read as corrupting the innocent and converting them into adults.
Ryan’s own rejection of the Dickinson comparison, then, comes as a relief: one that restores the Amherst poet’s stature while bringing the contemporary poet back down to earth. Responding to the Paris Review's question, “Do you think you’re like Dickinson?”
Ryan responds, “That question is like asking, Do you think you’re much like God? That’s not interesting to me. It might be interesting for others, but I feel like it makes me do the work that other people ought to do. Besides, how would you like to be compared to
God?” (“KR” 52).
In some of my own recent writing for Poetry, I have called attention to the ways in which critics can fetishize a so-called outsider like Ryan. In a review of The Usable
Field (2008), by the American poet Jane Mead, I take issue with a blurb on the book’s back cover, which has the effect of romanticizing Mead: “Jane Mead’s our Emily
Dickinson, our most ambitious solitary” (Mead, UF). As I note,
The sheer fact that Mead has a book with blurbs - published in her lifetime
and supported by Guggenheim money - should cast doubt on her cred as a
recluse, at least of Dickinson’s kind (Dickinson, recall, published but ten
poems in her lifetime, all anonymously). Mead, of course, is only the latest 199
poet to be named the next Emily Dickinson. Anne Carson held the post,
briefly. Kay Ryan, too. (“GN” 556)
Dickinson and Carson, of course, are named in Logan’s review, as part of a lineage of melancholic misfits to which Ryan belongs. But the melancholic misfit is, as I suggest, very much a “post,” a role into which a poet is placed, not unlike that of Poet Laureate. It is a kind of brand identity, culturally constructed and imposed upon poets by the literary field in which they are positioned by capital. It is also created in part through an appeal to the community of poets who are perceived to be ideally suited to fill it - such as Carson,
Ryan, and now Mead. Promotion into the post of the “next Emily Dickinson,” however, is in fact a subtle demotion, since it subordinates the newer poet to the older. More problematically, the label doubles as sexist shorthand. Faced with a poet who is female and apparently independent (“solitary”) a critic can make quick work of her by merely evoking Dickinson who herself was, as Adrienne Rich observes, “reduced to quaintness or spinsterish oddity by many of her commentators” (Rich 21).
In another piece for Poetry, a 2010 mock-review written from the vantage point of a distant, socially networked future, I offer a parody of the typical biographical sketch of
Ryan (“PS” 370-71). Although Ryan began writing before “the days of social networking” and the Internet - and although she lived “far from centers of literary power”
- my misguided narrator of the future nevertheless reminds us that she was still situated within the literary field. He also suggests that her relationship with periodicals - or, put another way, her dialogic orientation toward a reader who preceded her - had a hand in shaping her work. Ryan, the narrator hints, lacks agency; it is the poems’s interactions 200
with editors that result in their publication, thus downplaying the idea that Ryan is an
authorial genius. (In the next section, I will explore these poems’s relationships with
periodicals in greater depth.) Ultimately, then, to claim that Ryan is a “self-made”
outsider, as Vendler has it, is to ape the very artists whom Ryan critiques in her poem
“Outsider Art”: those who “gouge and hatch / and glue on charms / till likable materials— / apple crates and canning funnels— / lose their rural ease” (20-4).
3. “I marvelled at how generally I was aided”: Ryan in the Magazines
A careful reading of Ryan’s recent interviews and prose (much of which has been published in Poetry) demonstrates that - far from the self-made outsider imagined in reviews or the mythic figure of magazine profiles - Ryan drew sustenance from teachers, friends, the writings of numerous others, as well as from an often-agonizing, but fruitful, long-distance relationship with literary periodicals. Indeed, the preface to one of her most high-profile interviews - given to the Paris Review, in August of 2008 - does much to trouble the branding of Ryan as rebel. Although the preface notes that Ryan “is often referred to as a poetry ‘outsider’ and underdog,” it goes on to conclude that “she is less an outsider than an iconoclast for whom success came slowly” (49, 50). Ryan sometimes identifies with underdogs, but she also downplays her individuality, often citing the influence of others over a long period of time. For example, she describes going to community college because she could not afford university (“A Lyrical Intellect”). “I thought I would get scholarships [at community college], and I did,” she notes. In addition to subsequent economic support, which enabled her to attend UCLA - where she 201 completed her B.A. and Master’s degrees, obtaining educational capital - community college also introduced her to
a great English teacher... Evelyn Foley. She was nearing retirement and
quite acerbic, completely unbending. She was extremely wry, impatient,
just delectable, and had this laugh, which was a little dry snort. She had a
lot of disdain - well earned, no doubt - for her students. She’d tell us
stories about stupid students from previous semesters. At the beginning of
the semester, she was telling us what we were going to be studying and she
said, I have included Emily Dickinson, but after the way the students
brutalized her last semester I don’t know if I’m going to even introduce
you to her. Naturally that was just catnip to me. I immediately got my
hands on the Johnson edition at the library, because I knew that anything
forbidden by this forbidding woman had to be wonderful. Just before
leaving for UCLA I had been having that horrid experience - 1 think many
kids must have it - where you feel like you can do anything, but you have
no idea what to do. So the Miss Foley influence [sic] nudged me to
become an English major. (“ALI”; “KR” 73)
Ryan’s anecdote establishes the concrete fact that Miss Foley introduced the poet to
Dickinson and “nudged [her] to become an English major.” The reminiscence also suggests that in the figure of Foley, Ryan found a model to follow. (The outsider, we are reminded, is not an essential identity but, rather, an identity that one adopts and performs.) Ryan hints at the roots of her own scepticism of creative writing programs and, 202 emphasizing the impact of educators, goes on to note that she “followed a professor who had shown a modicum of interest in me at UCLA” to the University of California, Irvine, where Ryan took up, but failed to finish, a doctoral degree (“KR” 83). While there, the budding poet took “a good course in William Carlos Williams,” who specializes in the short, demotic lyric, and served as an influence on Ryan131 (“ALI”).
Ryan’s descriptions of how she came to be a poet highlight the importance of a larger social and cultural apparatus. At her most meditative, however, she describes a
1976 biking trip on which she “went into a kind of altered state, where I felt undifferentiated from everything that was around me” (“ALI”). Ryan claims to have asked the universe, “Shall I write?” to which she received the answer, “Do you like it?”
(“ALI”). But she also received more “material” help, as well. Friends of hers pitched in to publish her first book. They were organized by Ryan’s long-time partner, the late Carol
Adair, who had already stepped in to play an active role in helping Ryan begin to publish in literary magazines (“ALI”). As Ryan notes in a radio interview given to the Library of
Congress and later published in the American Poetry Review,
Carol just took me in hand and said, “all right, we’re going to do this in an
orderly way. Tell me some magazines you’d like to be in. Okay. Tell me
the poems you think are worth sending out.” And she would put them in
groups, send them out, and she did it dispassionately, and she said, “if we
get in one magazine out of a hundred, that’s great....” I had no skills to get
across. So she could make that bridge for me, and it was essential. (“AI”) 203
When Ryan’s interviewer, appealing to a film metaphor, suggests that Adair is Ryan’s
“associate producer,” the poet responds enthusiastically, “Absolutely” (“AI”). It is worth noting the extent to which Ryan suggests that Adair constituted an “essential... bridge” with the rest of the world: between drafts of poems and their material embodiment in magazine form. Although some magazines would later construct Ryan as a loner with a supportive partner, Ryan’s career, as the Library of Congress interview suggests, is the product of collaboration. In fact, the very structure of the interview hints at another kind of collaboration - that of interviewer and interviewee. The interviewer in question, after all, one Grace Cavalieri, is responsible for the “associate producer” metaphor. And when
Ryan, speaking of Adair, says, “I can’t tell you how gratifying this is for her,” Cavalieri concludes, as if on Ryan’s behalf, “This is her victory as well.” More generally, Ryan tells the Paris Review: “Carol is the one who keeps all of the connections. I need somebody that connects me” (“KR” 71). Ryan’s “associate producer” helped to link the poet to larger social and cultural networks.
Adair also had an editorial impact on Ryan’s poetry. As Ryan observes, “My entire writing career has coincided with my life with Carol. Every one of my books is dedicated to her. Carol sees everything that I write before it goes out. And I value her opinion of it a great deal. If she says that it has a problem, I take it very seriously” (“KR”
77). Ryan’s own critical writing about Marianne Moore reflects an awareness of how even a small number of intimates - in Moore’s case, a couple of family members - can constitute something like an enriching community for a poet. Moore, her mother, and her brother, observes Ryan, 204
had endless animal names for one another - Badger, Bear, Mole, Fangs,
Ratty - and these names shifted loosely among them. Marianne was
always referred to as “he,” both in her mother’s letters to Warner and in
her own. She sometimes signed herself “your brother”.... She enjoys an
obvious satisfaction in the great lifelong “we” of herself and her mother in
the small Brooklyn apartment they shared, the two of them maintaining the
highest standards of grammar, wit, and moral character; attending poetry
readings and animal movies; remaking not only the dresses and coats that
Marianne’s rich friends were always passing along, but also Moore’s
poems which had to pass “under the maternal clippers[.]” (RL)
Ryan’s description of Moore’s family life suggests an ecosystem in which individual differences are blurred. Names that would otherwise delimit an identity “shifted loosely among” the family members. Words like “he” and “brother,” which would seem to fix a subject’s gender, are fluid in the Moore household. Indeed, Moore and her mother comprise an intersubjective ‘“we”’ in Moore’s letters; the “small” household brings porous selves into contact with one another. Unlike the passive backdrop imagined in liberal humanist ideology, against which discrete selves manoeuvre free of entanglements, Moore’s domestic sphere constitutes a specific linguistic and political environment, one that encourages “the highest standards of grammar, wit, and moral character.” It is a creative mill in which textiles (“the dresses and coats that Marianne’s rich friends were always passing along”) and texts (“Moore’s poems”) are a matter of collaboration. (In another piece on Moore, Ryan notes that Moore’s “mother would remain so intimately involved in her writing” (RP 170). As for Moore’s poetry, Ryan finds in it “a greasecutting [sic] alternative to the poetry of self-occupation” (RP 165).
She goes on to celebrate Moore’s “Humpty Dumpty”-like rejection of the notion of a coherent self: “For Marianne Moore it is an heroic crash - an acknowledgment that the processes of the mind do not roll on like a steamroller but operate by reversals and leaps, and that one must steadfastly withstand society’s tiresome insistence that one maintain a continuous shell. Marianne Moore’s poems break up; that’s all there is to it” (166).
Similarly, writing about the poet Stevie Smith’s “novelty-free life,” in an essay for the magazine Parnassus, Ryan emphasizes the way in which a deceptively quiet domestic life can mould the less-than rigid mind, enabling it to register more effectively the reverberations of the slightest of shocks:
A great celebrator of the “regular habits” which “sweeten simplicity,”
[Smith] says, “In the middle of every morning I leave the kitchen and have
a glass of sherry with Aunt. I can only say thatthis is glorious.” And
because of her life of regular habits, the rare interruption is almost
hallucinogenic. She reports seeing The Trojan Women on a friend’s
television in the 1960s. She is nearly undone with amusement at the hash it
makes of Euripides: “What an earthshaking joke this is. Yet, if my life was
not simple, if I looked at television all the time, I might have missed it.”
(“Notes” 326, 327)
It is hard not to read, in Ryan’s descriptions of the domestic lives of Moore and Smith, a subtle celebration of her own routine-driven lifestyle. But her descriptions do not serve to 206 romanticize the reclusive genius; rather, they hint at the ways in which a relatively private life is fed by the modest (but not insubstantial) forms of society among which it cannot help but find itself. For Ryan, as for Moore, the self is not “a continuous shell” that rebuffs, and acts on, its environment (RP 166). The self is acted upon. As Ryan tells the
Paris Review, gesturing toward a knickknack, “Do you see that toy bird there, that little plastic cardinal? It has a sensor and if you trip the beam it starts chirping. My brain is as quiet as that little cardinal until something trips it. I’m shockingly passive” (“KR” 72).
Passivity, as presented by Ryan, is not a negative phenomenon; it is not a failure to act, for example. But neither is it a self-sufficient action, like the Romantic poet’s act of recollection. Passivity is a socially situated activity that requires the actions of some other external force: some “glass of sherry” or “plastic cardinal.”
In addition to her education and immediate social environment, the process of writing for, and sending work out to, literary magazines left its imprint on Ryan’s poems.
In other words, the poems were not simply expressions o f an author; they were responses to a complex of potential readers made available by the larger cultural apparatus of the world of literary magazines and mediated by what she calls “the slow old mail” (“AWP”).
Indeed, in writing about the submission process, Ryan notes that she “liked the fact that there were no faces or voices; we were all disembodied, writer and editor alike”
(“AWP”). These abstract readers, the editors of magazines at which Ryan aimed her submissions, helped to shape her work even before they saw it. First, they forced her pre emptively to revise. “Sending work out did change my work,” she observes (“KR” 55).
“When I knew that the poems were going to be read by a stranger, I cleaned them up. And 207 when I got them back rejected, I could see them with a really cold eye” (55). These editors also slowed the poet down. The grinding nature of the submission process, which can take many months, if not years, forced Ryan to submit herself to a larger editorial process that usefully estranged the poet from her work and subtly downplayed the idea that authors have ultimate control over their creations. In “I Go to AWP,” she elaborates on the “Slow dealings” she had with magazines and how they chilled her “eye”:
By the time I’d get my poems back (usually all of them) they would look
new to me. I could see them in a new way, maybe like children getting off
the bus from their first day of school. They’d been somewhere where they
had to fend for themselves. You could get a new respect for them, and also
you could think to yourself, How could I have sent them off looking like
that? (“AWP”)
The poems look different to the poet because the poet who wrote them no longer exists; she has changed in the months between when the poems were submitted and returned. (In an interview, she notes, “my mind is a very compartmentalized mind: that person who writes the poems isn’t really available to me otherwise. When I read the poems, I’m reading a different Kay Ryan than the me I am the rest of the time” [“Cooling the
Surface”].) In other words, the poet does not exist outside of history, a transhistorical essence that expresses itself in the form of enduring works of genius. Ryan’s question to herself - “How could I have sent them off looking like that?” - suggests that a fixed self is a fiction. (It also situates her within a larger historical context that includes Anne
Bradstreet [1612-1672], whose poem, “The Author to Her Book,” personifies an 208 unpolished literary work as a child with needs.) Different drafts of a poem are the products of different selves situated in different historical moments. Indeed, in Ryan’s poem “Pentimenti,” which appeared in the March 2007 issue of Poetry, the speaker acknowledges the necessary difficulty of recognizing that a work of art is a palimpsest in which the evidence of earlier versions - a rubbed-out arm, say - can be detected:
That’s the hardest
part to bear, how
the decided-against
fattens one layer down,
free of the tests
applied to final choices.
In this painting,
for instance, see how
a third arm - long ago
repented by the artist -
is revealed.... (9-18)
Interestingly, this particular version of “Pentimenti” is itself an example of “the decided- against”; in The Best o f It, Ryan’s first career summation, the poem has a different ending.132 The earlier version in the March 2007 Poetry is not unlike the “third arm” mentioned in the poem: it is the product of another, earlier hand. The poet, of course, is also subject to the editing of others, which speaks to the collaborative nature of poetic discourse. She describes the process of Parnassus editor Herb Lebowitz, who edited an 209 essay by Ryan,133 as being “so fussy that it seemed like a grooming ritual from another hemisphere, important in ways that I couldn’t understand” (“AWP”). Her frank confession of a lack of understanding, though comical, reveals the modest poet to be not entirely in control of the process by which her writing comes to be produced. Parnassus itself is infamous for its rigorous editing process and, in particular, putting writers through their paces.134
The process of submitting work and even experiencing rejection also schooled the poet in marketing her work, reminding one again that poetry always already exists within a larger cultural and economic field. Discussing the origin of the title of her poem
“Outsider Art,” Ryan notes that “for a long time, this poem was called ‘Folk Art’ rather than ‘Outsider Art,’ and I couldn’t sell it. And when I changed the name to ‘Outsider
Art,’ snap! I got it taken immediately. Because, see, there’s something more attractive about the outsider. You see, very attractive right now. Outsider; sort of the misfit, you know” (“AI”). Given her own treatment as an outsider, Ryan’s comment is ironic; the poet is well aware of the symbolic capital that the idea carries.
Indeed, in an essay for Poetry entitled “The Double,” Ryan plays with the dichotomy of the insider and the outsider. She describes herself as “two people... first... the godlike writer of poems, serenely independent of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and, second... her cousin” (“TD”). These two seemingly discrete selves correspond to
Bourdieu’s inverse economy: the “godlike” poet reigns over the literary field while the
“cousin” belongs squarely to the economic field. (Moreover, Ryan’s reference to
“Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” - the motivators of human behaviour according to the psychologist Abraham Maslow135 - reminds us of her educated background and the many discourses in which her poetry operates, including psychology.) But before the essay is over, it will have blurred the boundaries of these fields. It begins by parodying the image of a “godlike” poet who finds herself “close to the empyrean springs... dipping her alabaster hand into the poetical waters...” (“TD”). The essay goes on to invoke something like Eliot’s conception of tradition when the “godlike” poet confesses that she wants to endear herself, through her writing, to “the great masters” who sit “at the long, long desk of the gods of literature - more like a trestle table, actually - so long that the gods (who are also eating, disputing, and whatnot as well as writing) fade away in the distance according to the laws of Renaissance perspective. I am at the table of the gods and I want them to like me” (“TD”). (Like the new work of art, which, upon introduction to the tradition, alters it, Ryan wants to create a space at the table for herself: “if what I write might jostle [the gods of literature] a little, if there were a tiny bit of scooting and shifting along the benches, this would be my thrill” [“TD”].) In the second part of the essay, however, Ryan meditates on her other, more practical self, the poet’s “cousin,” who is herself divided into two parts: a “higher” and “lower nature” (“TD”). The “higher nature” is “the steward of the poet’s work,” who “seeks good journals for the poems and good presses for the books, accepts reading dates and agrees to interviews, so that the poet might gain name recognition, by means of which the poet’s poems might reach an audience...” (“TD”). The “lower nature” is “a spotlight hog” who “needs to know the audience is out there, and the quickest way to feel it is through their laughter. Her only ambition is to hold the audience. I often see her as a betrayer of the poet, but she isn’t. 211
Secretly they are best friends” (“TD”). Ryan views the identity of the poet as complex and contradictory, made up of different selves, some of which are practical enough to acknowledge a connection to a marketplace from which the more high-minded self is exempted. (Ryan’s poem “Why We Must Struggle,” published in the December 1999
Poetry, echoes this conception of identity when it declares “how strange / it is that one sector / of the self can step in / for another in trouble” [9-12].) By calling attention to the secret friendship of these various selves, however, Ryan collapses the supposed rupture between the literary and economic fields. She reminds us that the activities of poets are determined, in part, by a cultural milieu in which journals and presses that are recognized as “good” can confer different kinds of capital on a writer and give her “name recognition.” Indeed, in an interview, Ryan observes that when “I was published in very small journals... I could write a letter and say, well, I’ve been in these journals, and get in slightly better journals” (“ALI”).
There is no precise way of measuring the impact of specific magazine publications by Ryan on her larger career. But it is not an exaggeration to assert thatPoetry magazine helped forge Ryan’s career. As already noted, Ryan describes her initial publication in
Poetry as her “first real success,” which prompted Copper Beech Press to get in touch with her, resulting in her first trade book. To borrow a phrase from Bourdieu, it is useful to imagine one of Ryan’s ‘“counterparts’ in other possible worlds”: the poet who is not accepted byPoetry (RoA 235). This counterpart is almost certainly not contacted by
Copper Beech Press, and her book appears later than it did in the real world and with potentially different content - if it appears at all. Indeed, it is likely that publication and 212 rejection, especially by prestigious journals and publishing houses, shape writers and their work. In Ryan’s case, early rejection gave her an identity to take comfort in. “I’ve gotten a lot of my subject matter from failure,” she notes. “I began to think of myself as a terrific underdog. There’s a certain security and exhilaration in that” (“KR” 55-6). But Ryan goes on to observe of this “underdog” self that, “For years, I thought that if a couple of magazines reliably wanted - 1 mean, truly had some sense that I was doing something interesting - and said, Send us more when you have it, that would be heaven. And that eventually happened to me. I was very lucky in that sense” (56). Acceptance by Poetry - and other magazines - helped Ryan realize that “heaven.” Describing where she and
Adair kept Ryan’s magazine publications, Ryan recalls that,
We set up in this very kitchen a little table and a bulletin board. And when
I got anything in a magazine, or got an acceptance letter, it went up on this
bulletin board. And on the table, there was a little, slowly filling rack of
little journals I was in. It was like a little shrine. And Carol said, “We’ve
got to make it important here. It’s got to exist here.” (“ALI”)
As she racked up publications, the magazines in which she appeared gave material shape to Ryan’s career.
They also gave her cultural capital, the importance of which should not be understated. Bourdieu calls attention to the ways in which an “ensemble” of intermediary figures - like “critics, writers of prefaces, dealers” - can play pivotal supporting roles in an artist’s career:
He contributes to “making” the value of the author he supports by the sole 213
fact of bringing him or her into a known and renowned existence, so that
the author is assured of publication (under his imprint, in his gallery or his
theatre, etc.) and offered as a guarantee all the symbolic capital the
merchant has accumulated. By this means, the author is drawn into the
cycle of consecration and is introduced into more and more select
company and into more and more rare and exotic places (for example, in
the case of a painter, group exhibitions, one-person exhibitions, prestigious
collections, museums). (RoA 167-8)
To Bourdieu’s list of figures I would add “magazine editor.” In Ryan’s case, Joseph Parisi
- the editor of Poetry at the time of her first appearance in 1984 - brings “her into a known and renowned existence” by publishing her in his magazine, a venue that can give her “symbolic capital” and introduce her “into more and more select company and into more and more rare and exotic places.” The appearance in Poetry attracted the attention of Copper Beech Press, a small press that published Ryan’s first trade book, Strangely
Marked Metal (1985). After failing to secure a large publisher, the self-proclaimed
“underdog” had initial worries about publishing with the small press again (“ALI”). As she tells an interviewer,
eventually, I published again with Copper Beech Press [Flamingo
Watching in 1994], I was very sorry to do so, because I was afraid exactly
the same thing would happen again. It just seemed like suicide.
But - that is not what happened. What happened was that George
Bradley, who was a Yale Younger Poet winner, he reviewed, he found my 214
book. I’m not sure how he found Flamingo Watching, but he did find it.
And he reviewed it for Yale. And he was also selecting poetry manuscripts
for Grove [Press], at that time. And he wrote me a letter, and he said,
“You’ve just published this book. But when you have another manuscript,
please send it.” And I sent him one in three days. (“ALI”)
Grove Press in New York went on to publish Elephant Rocks (1996) and all three of
Ryan’s subsequent books of poetry. Thus, the “first real success” of an appearance in
Poetry helped initiate Ryan into a chain of publishing events that - although it developed over the course of a decade, from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s - brought her into contact with progressively more prestigious publishing houses and people (such as winners of prizes from Yale). Moreover, although it is difficult - if not impossible - to identify the exact magazine appearances that helped a poet secure a particular prize, the sum of
Ryan’s appearances in Poetry would have factored into the Poetry Foundation’s awarding of the Ruth Lilly Prize in 2004. After a couple of publications in the mid-1980s, Ryan started to appear regularly in the magazine in 1999, with 48 poems and 7 essays in the last decade. (The magazine also published two articles about Ryan.)
Magazines, however, do not just confer capital and contribute to the creation of a career; Ryan reminds us of the potentially troubling way in which the meaning of a poem can be shaped by its appearance in a particular periodical at a particular historical moment. In 2001, Ryan sent the then-unpublished poem “Home to Roost” to a magazine in New York. The poem makes literal the title’s cliche and imagines ominously what would happen if “all” of the chickens “you let loose” came “home / to roost—all / the 215
same kind / at the same speed” (21, 15, 20-3). “[I]t was sitting on [the editor’s] desk in
the Village, Greenwich Village,” Ryan tells an interviewer,
within sight of the Twin Towers, on the occasion of 9/11, and when it is
thought about in relationship to that event, which was so cataclysmic that
it warped all language around it, everything was changed for a period of
time to seem to be commenting upon the event of 9/11. Suddenly this
poem seemed to be saying, “America, you have done a lot of things to
cause these chickens - these planes - to come home to roost.” And I think
that’s an argument that can be made, in fact. But it certainly wasn’t one I
wanted to be made right then. I had to call up as soon as the phones were
working, and say, please send that poem back. I had to. It was too cruel, at
that moment. (“AI”)
Although Ryan’s is an extreme example, her description of 9/11 as an “event... so cataclysmic that it warped all language around it” reminds us that the meaning of a work of art does not exist outside of history but, rather, is firmly entrenched within it. Once again, it is useful to imagine one of Ryan’s ‘“counterparts’”: the poet who does not withdraw “Home to Roost” and who allows its publication in what we might assume to be
The New Yorker, since the real-world Ryan had published over ten poems in the New
York-based magazine by 2001 (RoA 235). In this alternate universe, “Home to Roost” becomes, in Ryan’s words, “too cruel,” which is to say it becomes a provocative critique of American foreign policy. (It also becomes “too unpopular” and leads to severe attacks on Ryan’s patriotism.) In any event, the anecdote and, more generally, Ryan’s interviews 216 and prose remind us of the power of the context in which a poem appears. More generally, magazines provided Ryan with a space at which she could orient herself and in which she could publish and acquire cultural capital.
4. “I love introductions”: Dialogism in the Poems of Ryan
Ryan’s descriptions of the writing process and her poems also demonstrate a dialogic relationship with a larger culture. She tells an interviewer that she “loathed the idea of the poet. The posture, the pose of the poet...” (“A Lyrical Intellect”). When the interviewer, looking for clarity, wonders if this “pose” is that of “a romantic slob,” Ryan agrees: “Right, just the whole cloak, you know, the whole mantle. It was alien to me” (“A
Lyrical Intellect”). In her account of her trip to AWP, she sharpens this critique of the poet as an individual personality. Commiserating with “a longtime [sic] magazine editor not used to AWP and as ill at ease as I was,” Ryan notes that, “We both resented, but from opposite ends, personality homing in on the real question: the words on the page”
(“I Go to AWP”). In fact, in her early attempts at writing, she tried to remove autobiographical elements from the equation. Every morning, during a period in the
1970s, she shuffled a deck of Tarot cards and forced herself to write a poem in response to whatever the deck revealed (“Kay Ryan” 52). “The card might be Love,” Ryan told the
Paris Review, “or it might be Death. My game, or project, was to write as many poems as there were cards in the deck. But since I couldn’t control which cards came up, I’d write some over and over again and some I’d never see” (52). She also wrote poems in response to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! series, which “served as fodder for her eight- 217 year, self-imposed apprenticeship, during which she wrote ‘a gazillion’ poems...” (Fay
50). At a time when confessional poetry was at the fore, 1 Ryan’s experiments sought to wrest control of the writing of the poem away from the traditional conception of the author who, as Barthes notes, “is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after” (1468).
Ryan is not the “past” of her poetry; she is not the confessional poet who “places few barriers, if any between, his [sic] self and direct expression of that self, however painful that expression may prove” (Phillips 8).
One of the ways in which Ryan’s poetry demonstrates “the death of the author” is by calling attention to its dialogic relationship with the specific quotations of other writers. This practice was likely influenced, in part, by Marianne Moore’s tendency to write poems that respond to textual or actual bric-a-brac. “There is something so odd about [Moore’s] technique,” Ryan notes in an enthusiastic review of Moore’s poems (RP
173). “She commonly looks at something quite remote and static, such as a piece of silver or an illustration - it is an illustration that lies behind ‘Old Tiger,’ for example - and it explodes in a variety of alarming directions” (173). Moore’s poetry, Ryan suggests, is prompted by other, previous “texts”; as a result, it is always already locatedwithin a larger cultural context. Moore is neither the “past” nor origin of her poetry.
Ryan characterizes her own writing process in similarly un-romantic terms.
Instead of seeking out tranquil solitude - the fantasy of a non-social vacuum - in which the self, as Wordsworth argues, recollects emotions and creates poetry (661), Ryan, especially in her early poems, often pursues the company of other voices. When an 218 interviewer observes that, “I know that you’re in touch with everything that’s invisible, past voices, past authors,” Ryan responds, “I think that the invisible, that is most important to me, is the great writers of the past. They are my comfort and my solace, and my community, and my friends, in a very deep and abiding way” (“AI”). In the following excerpt from herParis Review interview, Ryan offers more details, filling in the community - a bedside library made up of different writers 1 “Xl - that not only keeps the poet company but also keeps her off-kilter and challenged:
One of the best ways to get started is to read something of thrilling quality.
I never read poetry or fiction, and anything that smacks of usefulness -
science or biography - is off-limits. Essentially, I read literary essays. I
like superarrogant [sic], high-level, brainy essays about aesthetics. I had a
Nabokov jag for a couple of years: hisLectures on Literature. Kundera has
two beautiful books of essays. There’s also Calvino’s Six Memos for the
Next Millennium. Herbert has that wonderful book Still Life with Bridal.
Brodsky is another one. And Benjamin. Hannah Arendt’s introduction to
Benjamin. I love introductions. It’s a category in itself. (“KR” 72)
Her “Nabokov jag/ora couple of years" suggests that she shares the sort of routine, habit-driven life with a few intimates that she admires in Moore and Smith (emphasis added). Moreover, although she may not intend the pun, Ryan’s line “I love introductions” proves that the poet, as a reader, enjoys making connections, though less with people than books. (She enjoys making the acquaintance of the language of others.)
Indeed, in an essay for the May 2006 issue of Poetry, “A Consideration of Poetry,” Ryan 219 hints at the rich atmosphere within which writing and reading necessarily takes place:
“We swarm to a vacuum. We warm a vacuum. That’s nonsense; vacuums can’t conduct heat. That’s funny” (158). Later, as Poet Laureate, Ryan would declare that “the public library is an absolutely essential thing to the six-year-old poet now, who is going to that library, and who’s finding there refuge and release, and an opening that really never closes” (“AI”; emphases added). Not unlike Harriet Monroe, Ryan acknowledges the importance of the open “refuge” to the budding poet.
But although all texts exist in dialogic relation to one another, Ryan’s poetry makes the relationship explicit by quoting from the bedside library that enables it. In a brief, humorous essay, written for the February 2007 issue of Poetry, Ryan critiques
“Valentine’s Day with its sentimental obligations” but celebrates “conversation hearts... pale chalky candies stamped either with expired slang or with sweet talk of under ten letters” (“Sweet Talk” 385). Her ultimate goal in the piece is to champion the uses of
“idle conversation” and to argue that the “heart... thrives, thrives, on the little accidental chemistries of play” (385). Not unlike this “heart,” a Ryan poem will often enter into
“idle conversation” or “little accidental chemistries of play” with another text by reprinting said text as an epigraph. Indeed, in the very next issue of Poetry, the editors published “Pentimenti,” which begins not with a first line but with a bit of found prose, attributed to the “Frick Museum”: ‘“Pentimenti of an earlier position of the arm may be seen’” (“Pentimenti”). The epigraph - salvaged, perhaps, from an exhibition’s catalogue - is like the curio that prompts a Marianne Moore poem. But the epigraph is not a self- contained origin, an Eden out of which Ryan’s poem emerges; it is not the source of a 220 discursive field. The epigraph, rather, is like Ryan’s poem: one text in a web of texts that includes works of visual art in which “an earlier position of the arm may be seen.” And those works of visual art have their earlier texts, too. It is as if the epigraph is but one of many pentimenti that, to borrow Ryan’s word, “fatten” the poem like layers of a palimpsest (“Pentimenti” 12).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Ryan poem with which “Pentimenti” is paired in the
March 2007 Poetry, “Train Track Figure,” presents a metaphor for a flickering text in flux. The poem invites us to
Imagine a
train-track figure
made of sliver
over sliver of
between-car
vision, each
slice too brief
to add detail
or deepen: that
could be a hat
if it’s a person
if it’s a person
if it’s a person.
Just the same 221
scant information
timed to supplant
the same scant
information. (1-18)
We are invited to picture a person obscured by a passing train, but all that we can register are “sliver[s]” of the person - “if it’s a person / if it’s a person / if it’s a person.” The word “sliver” suggests that our vision of the “person” being perceived is fragmented, and the use of repetition hints that the “person” might not even be a “person.” These
“sliverfs]” - “the same / scant information / timed to supplant / the same scant / information” - resemble cells in a film, flickering by but never fully embodying the referent. Or, put another way, they resemble pentimenti, which the passing train cannot quite rub out. The sheer proximity of “Train-Track Figure” to “Pentimenti,” in the March
2007 issue of Poetry, makes available the latter reading and demonstrates the dialogic nature of Ryan’s poems, which are never finally complete or closed-off or self-sufficient; they not only have conversations with other texts but among themselves as well. The interaction between these two poems also hints at the creative role that a magazine editor
- in this case, Christian Wiman - can play in unlocking latent meanings, especially since
Ryan did not elect to juxtapose the pair when she later came to reprint them in The Best of
It. More generally, the interaction reminds us that a text’s meanings depend in part on the specific, material context in which the text appears.138
Other Ryan poems in Poetry carry on conversations with earlier texts and, in so doing, critique a humanist ideology that celebrates authors as the discrete sources of their 2 2 2
expressions. “Blue China Doorknob,” from the April 2004 issue, begins with an epigraph
from Robert Lowell: “I was haunted by the image of a blue china doorknob. I never used the doorknob, or knew what it meant, yet somehow it started the current of images”
(“BCD”). Lowell’s poetry, famously associated with the confessional mode,139 often presents the illusion of a single, coherent voice disclosing its innermost secrets. In other words, it constructs an essential lyric “I” that is, to borrow Barthes’ language, “the past of his own [poem]” (Barthes 1468). Interestingly, however, Lowell’s sentences imply that the poet is in less control of language than he or she thinks; the “current of images” is not
“started” by the poet but, rather, the inexplicable “image of a blue china doorknob” that
“haunted” the poet. The poet, in other words, is not the original and controlling source of the “current of images.” Indeed, the poem that follows the epigraph suggests that poets
“may be” the products of their immediate environments:
Rooms may be
using us. We
may be the agents
of doorknobs’
purposes, obeying
imperatives china
dreams up or
pacing dimensions
determined by
cabinets. And if 223
we’re their instruments—
the valves of their
furious trumpets,
conscripted but
ignorant of it—
the strange, unaccountable
things we betray
were never our secrets
anyway. (“BCD” 1-19)
Unlike the typical Lowell poem, Ryan’s eschews the lyric “I” and favours the first-person plural: the more social “we.” In fact, as she points out in an interview, “I avoid the ‘I’ in my poems, almost completely. When I was first thinking about being a poet, I was very reluctant because I didn’t want the kind of exposure that many poets seemed to welcome.
I didn’t want the romantic posture. I didn’t want confession. I didn’t want to be Anne
Sexton” (“CS”). It is perhaps mildly ironic, if not troubling, that Ryan uses the first person in this passage as much as she does - though it is hardly surprising given the context, an interview. More important is the fact that “Blue China Doorknob” limits the free-range of the lyric ego, which one finds in poems by Lowell and Sexton. It suggests that physical space itself - in the form of “Rooms” and their contents - shapes the individual and that the individual, as a result, has no “secrets” to disclose; no interior meaning to express. The individual, fingered like “valves,” is the instrument of history in its most immediate and material manifestation: the physical space that surrounds the 224 individual and determines his or her own range of options. This space is not unlike that of
Bourdieu’s literary field, across which individuals are distributed according to the various forms of capital with which they have been invested.
“Carrying a Ladder,” which also appeared in the April 2004 issue of Poetry, again trades the lyric “I” for the more social “We” and concludes that “We are always / really carrying / a ladder, but it’s / invisible” (1-4). This invisible ladder causes “crashes,” and gives “the body... too much / swing or off- / center gravity” and “the mind, / a drunken capacity, / access to out-of-range / apples” (9, 11-14, 15-18). The two poems, in concert, demonstrate how material reality maps out a maze that both shapes and limits the self: a maze that cannot always be negotiated with a sober, rational mind because such a mind is, finally, an illusion. The poems, then, offer a subtle critique of the confessional mode and its underlying assumption that the self is coherent.
Another poem of Ryan’s that takes its cue from the words of another reinforces a characterization of the self that is incoherent, even fragmentary. “Rats’ Tails,” first published in the April 2005 Poetry, dedicates itself to Joseph Brodsky and prints a couple of his sentences as an epigraph: “All that’s left of him is rats’ tails. There’s a fate I could envy” (“RT”). Once again, Ryan’s poem, using the first person plural, begins by elaborating on the words of another poet:
Let’s say
some day
all that’s
left of him 225
is rats’ tails,
just scattered
bits of script:
a loose “e,”
an “s” or two,
a “g,” an almost-
“n.” If he had
hands he’d
rub them as
the test begins:
to see how little
will suggest
the rat again. (1-17)
Exploding Brodksy’s suggestive image - to borrow Ryan’s own description of Moore’s combustible writing process - the poem surveys the shrapnel of a self. The poem uses a metaphor, equating the scraps (“rats’ tails”) with “scattered / bits of script.” In other words, what remains of a self- especially one like Brodsky’s - are words, and one can only understand the “rat” through the signs that “suggest” but never fully embody it. The poem, however, is not pessimistic; “If he had / hands he’d / rub them,” it observes, reminding us that the poem itself is rubbing its hands together, playfully.
Some of the prose which Ryan has written for Poetry reinforces this sense that reality can only be accessed through provisional and fragmentary scraps, which never 226 fully cohere but which poets can engage in dialogue. In a short essay on the poet William
Bronk (1918-1999) - commissioned by Poetry for an “Enthusiasms” section in the March
2006 issue - Ryan celebrates Bronk’s “stark” poetry, in which, “If anything seems to work - such as cause and effect - it never adds up to anything.... [W]hatever reality is, it is something we only know in the negative—by being constantly wrong about it” (“WB”
494, 493-94). Rather than respond to Bronk’s writing with pessimism, however, Ryan finds it “bracing” and compares it to “the small brown bottle my grandmother carried in her purse and sniffed for the pick-me-up jolt” (493). Bronk’s work wakes her up and makes her a more critical reader. It also prompts and shapes her work. “If I say that
Bronk’s poems are like blocks of stone,” she writes,
similar, but each slightly different and fitted one to another, and if I say
that one experiences a strange exhilaration and release in the presence of
the stark monument they form, then I am echoing Bronk’s own description
of the stonework of Machu Picchu in “An Algebra Among Cats,” my
favorite essay in his remarkable book of essays,Vectors and Smoothable
Curves. (“WB” 494)
In “echoing Bronk’s own [language],” Ryan self-consciously demonstrates the social nature of poetic production. Bronk and Ryan rhyme like “blocks of stone” that are “each slightly different and fitted one to another.”
In another short essay, Ryan revels in the way that scraps of text can prompt the mind into a process of assemblage. Having been invited by Poetry to take a meditative walk and write about it, Ryan imagines herself on a country road, taking note of roadside trash: “Bits of things, fragments of color and print, broken shapes, fading pink receipts”
(“MC” 134). The very title of the essay, “Marin County, Sort of,” suggests a partial landscape,140 and as she surveys the “shards,” Ryan notes, “There are whole things too, but 1 don’t care about them” (“MC” 134). Although the essay presents a cheerful picture of “the mind effortlessly constructing the whole beer bottle around the little trapezoid” - a
“part of a Dos Equis label” - it also hints at the limits of the mind: “The whole thing seems so optimistic, as if the mind on its own believes that things are going to fit together” (135, 134, 135; emphasis added). Moreover, the essay shows how the roadside signs of the culture in which a poet finds herself, like the “current of images” in the
Lowell quote, can become a kind of instigator or even collaborator.
One of the most consistent ways by which Ryan’s writing demonstrates a dialogic relationship with a larger culture is through its use of cliches. As a 2004 profile of Ryan notes, “Her poems... start ‘the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.’ An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as ‘It’s always darkest before the dawn’ or ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ ‘I think, “What about those chickens?’” she says, ‘and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate cliches’” (Lund). Ryan’s first metaphor suggests that the pearl of a poem does not emerge from within the poet so much as from without, from some external “aggravation” in the greater world. Her second metaphor implies that the poet is less a creator of new, original language than an
Orwellian rehabilitator of old, malfunctioning lingo in which she is steeped: lingo that belongs to the culture and, through overuse, has fallen into disrepair; lingo that has 228
“become” what Ryan calls in “The Obsoletion of Language” from the May 2011 Poetry,
“a chewing / action of the jaws / and mouth..(7-9).
But like the roadside scavenger of her essay “Marin County, Sort of,” Ryan is not pessimistic about language’s tendency to lapse into cliche; as she tells the Paris Review,
“I often find myself thinking in cliches. I’ll urge myself on with various bromides and chasten myself with others. When I want to write they’re one way to start thinking...”
(“KR” 60; emphasis added). The poet’s thinking, Ryan suggests, does not exist prior to language but, rather, is prompted by and constituted in language - even, apparently, exhausted instances of language, which she finds “beautiful” and which often serve as a title that works like a “little door” (“ALI”). “I start thinking, well, what would that really mean?” Ryan observes when faced with cliches (“ALI”). “So they just turn into a little door. They’re a convenience, partly; they’re a little door into thinking.... Kundera said that we’re - well, I’m misquoting, but he said that we’re not as smart as our work. And that’s absolutely true. So we have to find some door into our work” (“ALI”). In echoing the words of another - the novelist Milan Kundera - and in suggesting that poets are “not as smart as [their] work,” Ryan subordinates the poet to her “work” and, more generally, words. In fact, an inventory of titles of Ryan poems that first appeared in Poetry suggests a poet who finds value in cliches and, more generally, has an interest in language: “The
Fabric of Life” (June 2000), “Home to Roost” (May 2003), “The Best of It” (April 2004),
“Tar Babies” (April 2005), “On the Difficulty of Drawing Oneself Up” (April 2005),
“The Late Worm” (January 2008), “Cut Out for It” (January 2008), and “Crocodile
Tears” (September 2008). As Langdon Hammer argues, “Ryan’s true subject is the 229 language she uses, and everyone uses. Her perspective is oddangled [sic], fanciful, and eccentric. Yet she writes about common experiences and, in particular, verbal commonplaces, the store of proverb and cliche by which people daily make sense of the world” (“KR” 176).
But it is not simply that the cliche functions, as Ryan suggests, like “a little door” that leads into the poem. And it is not just that the cliche provides, as Hammer observes, a
“subject” matter for her self-reflexive poetry. I would argue that every cliche is surrounded by something like Bourdieu’s “space of possibles,” which contains unrealized meanings that a well-placed poet like Ryan can perceive and make material ( RoA 235).
As Bourdieu insists,
the heritage accumulated by collective work presents itself to each agent as
a space of possibles, that is, as an ensemble of probable constraints which
are the condition and the counterpart of a set of possible uses. Those who
think in simple alternatives need to be reminded that in these matters
absolute freedom, exalted by the defenders of creative spontaneity,
belongs only to the naive and the ignorant. It is one and the same thing to
enter into a field of cultural production... and to discover the finite
universe of freedom under constraints and objective potentialities which it
offers... stylistic or thematic possibilities to exploitf.]{RoA 235)
A cliche, I would argue, carries with it a “heritage accumulated by collective work” that presents itself to the writer (or “agent”) who possesses the forms of capital necessary for participation in the literary field. Indeed, what makes a particular utterance a cliche is the 230
“collective work” of the specific culture that continues to use it. Although the saying
“The early bird catcheth the worm” was first set down by John Ray in the seventeenth century, Ray is less an author than a historian, recording the language of his culture
(Bohn 88); and those members of the culture who continue to activate the saying in their writing resemble Barthes’ “scriptor” (Barthes 1468). (The scriptor does not create original work so much as weave together pre-existing strands of language [Barthes 1468].)
Indeed, some variation on “the early bird catcheth the worm” often appears in texts that perpetuate a capitalistic ideology, one that encourages early rising and hard work.141
But the title of Ryan’s poem “The Late Worm,” which first appeared in the
January 2008 issue of Poetry, is not simply a response to the implied cliche “the early bird catcheth the worm.” If Ray’s bromide is like “a little door” into the poem, it is a
“door” that the centuries-old saying has always made available to the well-placed poet.
The phrase “Late Worm” is just that: a “late meaning,” one that has been latent for centuries and squirming within range of the phrase “the early bird.” More specifically, the phrase “Late Worm” is what Bourdieu might call one of the “structural lacunae which appear to wait for and call for fiilfilment, like potential directions of development, possible avenues of research” (RoA 235). The poem itself pursues one of those “possible avenues of research,” a dark road that falls within the shadow of “the early bird”:
The worms
which had been
thick are thin
upon the ground 231
now that it’s gotten
later. They stick
against the path,
their pink chapped
and their inching
labored. It’s a
matter of moisture
isn’t it? Time, a
measure of wet,
shrinking, the
drier you get. (1-15)
Although the poem does not directly reference the now-absent “early bird,” this predator has had an ominous impact, thinning out the worms. The poem can be read as a subtle critique of a capitalist ideology that insists on an early and aggressive approach to individual profit. Indeed, the individual “early bird” is left unnamed; the poem dwells instead on an aging, drying, and dying community of worms. Moreover, while capitalism’s invocation of the “early bird” can be said to constitute an attempt to get ahead of, or even outside of, “Time,” the action of Ryan’s poem sets up within “Time,” within materialist history, where entities age and change.
“The Fabric of Life,” from the June 2000 issue of Poetry, also pursues an alternate line of meaning, this one proposed by the often-used expression. The metaphor implies that life is a vivid weave of different strands, but one that ultimately hangs together, 232 reinforcing a sense of existence as being stable and meaningful. Ryan’s poem, however, tugs at the cliche until it “snaps”:
It is very stretchy.
We know that, even if
many details remain
sketchy. It is complexly
woven. That much too
has pretty well been
proven. We are loath
to continue our lessons
which consist of slaps
as sharp and dispersed
as bee stings from
a smashed nest
when any strand snaps—
hurts working far past
the locus of rupture,
attacking threads
far beyond anything
we would have said
connects. (1-19) 233
Once again, a pluralistic “We” replaces the lyric “I.” Moreover, the knowledge that this speaker is able to possess is limited. It “know[s]” that “The Fabric of Life” is ambiguous:
“stretchy,” “sketchy,” and “complexly woven” - but that’s all that “has pretty well been / proven,” and even then, the knowledge that has been “proven” is qualified by “pretty well” (emphasis added). To continue to tease at “the fabric of life” is to risk snapping a
“strand” and learning a painful “lesson” about the fragility of life.
Another poem that speaks to the instability of structures is “On the Difficulty of
Drawing Oneself Up,” from the April 2005 issue of Poetry. The familiar phrase “Drawing
Oneself Up” suggests that the self has the potential to be self-determining - that it can close itself off to external forces and obey its own internal imperatives. The text recalls a familiar injunction of liberal humanism, which commands the downtrodden to shake off their poverty and pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Ryan, however, pursues another line of meaning and suggests that it is “difficult” to draw “Oneself Up” and that the individual cannot quite sustain itself:
One does not stack.
It would be like
a mouse on the back
of a mouse
on a mouse’s back.
Courses of mice,
layers of shivers
and whiskers, 234
a wobbling tower
mouse-wide,
with nothing more
than a mouse inside. (1-12)
Once again, Ryan’s poem is following one of the “possible avenues of research” that lie latent in a familiar, pre-existing expression. And because of its appearance alongside the previously discussed “Rats’ Tails,” the reader is encouraged to read “On the Difficulty of
Drawing Oneself Up” as a parody of the seemingly rational language of scientific experimentation; indeed, the poem is a kind of laboratory in which lab mice serve as fodder for inquiry.142 But what the laboratory reveals is the wobbliness of the ideology on which “One” - an individual - is built. “One” who tries to draw “Oneself Up” discovers that he or she is “nothing more / than a mouse inside” a shaky structure.
When not explicitly dialogic - when not engaging with an epigraph or cliche -
Ryan’s poems nevertheless pose a challenge to the seemingly rational and monologic voice of poetry that seeks to construct a stable lyric “I” and reflects a liberal humanist ideology. It is not just that her poems tend to reject this construction; they also emphasize that the mind behind it is not coherent and self-determining but, rather, fragmented and lacking control. The poem “Herring” from the December 1999 issue of Poetry suggests that the mind is not exactly the singular and self-contained “shred of platinum,” the
“catalyst” that synthesizes a plurality of materials, as described in T. S. Eliot’s 1919 essay
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1095). In the opening lines of “Herring,” Ryan 235
equates thoughts with small, oily fish, thus positing a plurality of activity with which the mind has to cope:
A thousand
tiny silver
thoughtlets
play in the mind,
untarnished
as herring. (1-6)
The mind is less the perfect space that synthesizes (as Eliot has it) than a spawning ground (a ground of “play” or playground) for “A thousand / tiny silver / thoughtlets....”
The poem goes on to note how these “thoughtlets... shutter / like blinds, / then sliver, / then utterly / vanish” (7-11). The “thoughtlets” can block the mind (“like blinds”) or, just as easily, “sliver” and “vanish.” Unlike the mind that Eliot terms a “finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” (1095), the mind in “Herring” has a harder time getting a grip on its materials, which are slippery and constantly disappearing. (These materials are also more lively and social than the substances, “oxygen” and “sulphur dioxide,” on which Eliot’s anecdote depends. [1095]) As in the already discussed “Train Track Figure,” which also deploys a similar motif, “Herring” suggests that it is difficult for the mind to perceive, and to think in, much more than partial “slivers.” Indeed, the poem does not end with the coherence of a synthesis of “slivers”; it ends with a question: “Is it unkind / to hope / some will / eat others, / is it uncaring?” (12-6) In stating a desire for “some” of the 236
“thoughtlets” to dominate and “eat [the] others,” the poem expresses a “hope” that the churning waters of the mind, through which many things flicker, can achieve some clarity, even a hierarchy. But its final question mark refuses closure.
A suite of poems from the January 2002 number of Poetry goes even further in troubling the capacities of the individual mind to exercise reason and express itself with clarity. The first poem in the suite states that “Tenderness and rot / share a border”
(“Tenderness and Rot” 1-2). But the poem hints that the border is porous: “rot is an / aggressive neighbor / whose iridescence / keeps creeping over” (1-2, 3-6). The next lines of the poem, however, insist that “No lessons / can be drawn / from this...” (7-9). The poem ends with a call for selves to stay engaged with one another, to “stay sweet / and loving” (14-16). Echoing this image of warmth, the second poem in the suite, “Stardust,” speaks to the difficulty of being “something metal” (13), a smooth and rational receptacle for intangible inspiration - the sort of chilly self that Eliot imagines. The poem begins by noting that “Stardust is / the hardest thing / to hold out for” (emphasis added) and goes on to argue that you must somehow
make of yourself
a perfect plane—
something still
upon which
something settles—
something like
sugar grains 237
on something
metal, but with
none of the chill.... (1-3, 4-14)
The very indeterminacy of Ryan’s language suggests the difficulty of finding a reliable language to describe the self. Her nouns are purposefully vague (“something still”).
Moreover, her imperfect simile - “something like / sugar grains / on something / metal, but with / none of the chill” - refutes the cool precision of the sort of scientific discourse in which Eliot engages. The poem ends with the line “It’s hard to explain,” a recurring point in Ryan’s poems (15).
Indeed, the next poem in the January 2002 suite, “Post-construction,” begins with a rhetorical question that seems to celebrate the ability of the rational individual, a
“builder,” to recognize a wobbly “structure”:
Who knows better
than the builder
not to trust
a structure, where
it’s off kilter,
how too few
verticals bear
too much roof? (1 -8)
The next few lines, however, imply that the “builder” cannot always make sense of a structure that, according to his or her knowledge, ought to fail: “And still it / may stand, 238 proof / against craft. ..” (9-11; emphasis added). The next poem, “Expectations,” emphasizes the way in which the world can confound the self s rational predictions. In fact, it opens by filling a riverbed with “Expectations”: “We expect rain / to animate this / creek: these rocks / to harbor gurbles...” (1-4). But after describing various images of natural activity, resulting from the motion of the “creek,” the poem empties out the riverbed and thwarts a thirst for closure: “The bed is ready / but no rain yet” (11-12).
Again and again, Ryan’s poems challenge the ability of the individual to stand outside his or her immediate historical moment and social environment, exercise reason, and determine his or her own destiny. In “The Niagara River,” from the July 2003 Poetry,
Ryan describes a dinner party that is somehow set on, and being borne along by, the
Niagara River but also oblivious to its destination, Niagara Falls, which is left unnamed.
The poem ends with a collective speaker - again, a “We” instead of an “I” - insisting that
We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means. (13-8)
The repetition of the speakers emphasizes a futile command of one fact: they are on the
Niagara River and bound for certain destruction. But the meaning of their journey - its teleological shape - is beyond them. At the end of “Almost Without a Surface,” from 239
April 2004, Ryan’s collective speaker attempts to parse and isolate its individual parts, which are hardly discrete:
But we are each
that, while we live,
however much
we resist: almost
without surface, barely
contained,
but crazy
as clouds compounding
each other, refusing
to rain. (15-24)
Individual selves are “barely / contained” and, anyway, irrational or “crazy.” They are as porous and unstable as storm systems. Similarly, in Ryan’s poem “Houdini,” published in
November of the same year, the magician becomes a proxy for the porous, unstable self.
His stunts - for example, his attempts to free himself from impossible situations - consist of an
incomprehensible
exchange between
the man and metal
during which the 240
chains were not
so much broken
as he and they
blended.... (5-12)
The poem goes on to note, however, that the attempt “to / extract himself... was the hardest / part to get right / routinely: breaking / back into the / same Houdini” (14-5, 16-
20). The essence of Houdini, the poem suggests, is unstable; the man changes with every trick.
It is not just that Ryan’s poems make material a dialogic engagement with other texts and, more generally, language itself, thus subverting the idea of the utterance as a self-contained expression of a self-determining, rational person; the poems, as a body of work, also exist in relation to the editorial mission of Poetry and the larger ambitions of the Poetry Foundation. (Certainly Ryan’s essays are the products, in part, of assignments
- take a walk, go to a conference - which make the magazine a kind of instigator, if not collaborator. But then, as already noted, Williams’s autobiography grew out of a series of prose pieces that Poetry commissioned.) Ryan’s poems support the Foundation’s agenda of aiming “to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience” (Poetry Foundation, 16). In a 2007 interview, after identifying, with some reluctance, an editorial interest in “a poem that’s hopeful and full of life,” the magazine’s current editor Wiman points to Ryan as one of “two poets who immediately come to mind” and who “have incredible formal capacity, great technical virtuosity”
(Wiman). (The other poet mentioned is Richard Wilbur.) Wiman, however, does 241
acknowledge that there is “a real undertow of tragedy and sadness” in Ryan’s poems: “If
all you feel is that buoyancy, then you’re probably not getting a great poem. I think you
need both” (Wiman). Ryan, Wiman hints, is something like a complete poet, and one who
occupies a range of tones from “sadness” to “buoyancy.” Later in the interview, the editor
affirms
What I believe, and what we believe at the Poetry Foundation, is that there
are a whole lot of Americans who are perfectly capable of reading serious
poetry, complicated poetry, and what’s happened is that there’s been a
breakdown between the poetry that gets written and the people who read it.
Our argument is that there has to be some way of healing this rift.
(Wiman)
It is hard not to think of Ryan’s work, referenced earlier by Wiman, as an example of what he means by the sort of “good poems” that might “help” “heal” the “rift.”
In addition to achieving a range of tones, Ryan’s poems incorporate several strategies that would seem to orient them at a large (if somewhat vaguely defined) audience - Wiman’s “whole lot of Americans who are perfectly capable of reading serious poetry, complicated poetry.” Although her challenge to a rational, unitary, and self-determining identity is one that is shared by many self-consciously avant-garde poets, her poetry differs from language poetry - one of “the dominant postmodern modes” - in that it does not aim to make the reader more critical by preventing her from becoming absorbed by the text (Hoover xxxv). Ryan’s poems, though self-reflexive, employ “everyday” diction and syntax; their arguments unfold in a linear way and avoid fragmentation. (If anything, it is the arguments - for instance, that Houdini must have
“blended” with his “chains,” that we are “barely / contained” - that are unconventional
[“Houdini” 12, 9; “AWS” 19-20].) Moreover, her use of what Ryan calls “recombinant rhyme” - internal rhyme that does not follow a regular pattern - works to tie the poem together while also surprising and even delighting the reader (“KR” 15). Unlike those poets who are a part of the recent Flarf school - in which poems are put together by way of Google search - she does not create collages of repurposed language that require a somewhat initiated reader (although Poetry's 2009 introduction to Flarf143 helps to initiate that reader, as did the magazine’s early twentieth-century introductions to Imagism and rhythm144). But Ryan does engage in dialogue with the pre-existing phrases and cliches of others. In short, her challenging poems construct and address an intelligent, non-academic reader - which makes her an ideal poet for a magazine that is working to expand poetry’s audience without speaking down to it. As Wiman affirms, “We [at Poetry and the Poetry
Foundation] believe that if we put good poems in front of people, they’ll want to read them. Some people interpret that as dumbing down poetry, that you have to put bad poems in front of people for them to read them. We just don’t feel that way” (Wiman).
5. Conclusion
Those reviewers, critics, and journalists who celebrate Ryan as an individualistic outsider to academia ignore the ways in which their own texts contribute to constructing this image of the poet. They also ignore the ways in which Ryan’s prose and interviews reveal a canny awareness of the social and literary fields in which the poet is situated and 243 the subtly collaborative nature of poetic production. Of course, Ryan, by the standards of the contemporary poetry world, is hardly the most obviously collaborative of poets. As noted, she is no champion of creative writing programs. But a brief sentence at the end of her essay “I Go to AWP” brings to mind Harriet Monroe’s belief in the importance of nurturing poets: “Simone Weil,” writes Ryan, “abominated all mediocrity and would have recommended vaporizing all of its creators but for the fact that the mediocre grows in the same soil as the great and therefore kill one, kill the other” (“AWP”). Ryan’s championing of libraries, as Poet Laureate, demonstrates a commitment to nurturing the next generation of American poets, as she was nurtured by her cultural context and, in particular, magazines like Poetry.
Perhaps more significantly, however, her dialogic poems contribute to an important and ongoing contemporary critique of the humanist tradition. These poems muffle the loudspeaker with which liberal humanism supplies lyric poetry. They swap the lyric “I” for the more pluralistic “We,” and they emerge from (even as they open a dialogue with) the words of others: cliches, scraps of text, and other curios. Ryan’s poems avoid easy conclusions and more often than not ask “hard” questions. They prove that the pillar of the self is a wobbly one and that reason has its limits. In “Thin,” from the April
2005 issue of Poetry, Ryan describes the thinness of knowledge and offers her most explicitly anti-Romantic image of the weight of one individual’s knowledge: “A bird’s / worth of weight / or one bird-weight / of Wordsworth” (8-11). Although Ryan’s own poems can look thin in appearance, they conceal depths by reminding us that the idea of the rational, self-contained individual is itself rather thin. And far from self-contained works of art, they support the magazine that has supported them by anticipating communication with a large audience. 245
Chapter Four
“My aftermath”: Making a Neglected Master
In April 2004, Poetry magazine published a four-line poem entitled “Here” by a relatively obscure American poet, Samuel Menashe. This publication represented
Menashe’s first appearance in the magazine, a remarkable event given that the poet was
seventy-nine years-old and had been writing poetry for more than fifty years. (Menashe had largely steered clear of the academy - where a majority of American poets make a reputation for themselves.145) Even more remarkable, however, were the events that followed. Shortly after appearing in Poetry, the Poetry Foundation, which publishes the magazine, created the $50,000 Neglected Masters Award to honour the aging poet. (Since it was founded, only one other poet has received the award: the English poet Anne
Stevenson [b. 1933], in 2007.) Subsequently, the magazine continued to feature new poems by Menashe, and the Foundation arranged to produce a volume of Menashe’s work, edited by the well-regarded scholar and Oxford Poetry Professor Christopher
Ricks, as a part of the Library of America’s prestigious American Poets Project.146 The resulting book, New and Selected Poems [2005], will be kept in print on a permanent basis, in accordance with the Library of America’s mandate (Library of America,
“History and Mission”).
In theory, then, Menashe’s work should never disappear. It has been hauled out of oblivion and presented to a larger audience than it has ever enjoyed. 246
The naming of Menashe as a “Neglected Master” was a newsworthy event, covered by many publications.147 It was also not without its critics. Writing on 19 March
2006, the New York Times poetry columnist David Orr praises Menashe’s work, but also takes issue with the “left-handed compliment” of an award that labels a poet “Neglected
Master.” Orr calls attention to what he feels to be a problematic and pervasive
“assumption” in American culture: “the awards system is the appropriate and inescapable measure of artistic worth” (“ANM”). There is no getting around the fact that a poet benefits from being “duly sanctioned by the prize system, an Oxford professor of poetry and [sic] two organizations with lots of money” (“ANM”). As the Times columnist observes toward the end of his piece, not without a note of melancholy, “Sadly or not...
[w]ith the fading of transcendent ideals in certain areas of American life comes the inevitable fading of the dream of unsullied, undying art - and the nostalgic desire for prizes that remind us of that dream, if nothing else” (“ANM”). Orr is aware of his culture’s nostalgia for a time when poets appeared to transcend the need for cultural capital (that can be conferred on them by an “Oxford professor” like Ricks) or economic capital (that can be supplied by “two organizations with lots of money” like the Library of
America and the Poetry Foundation) (“ANM”). Contemporary American poets, the critic suggests, cannot escape their material conditions and produce “unsullied” poetry in some sort of pure vacuum, disconnected from economic forces. The literary field, to borrow from Bourdieu, always overlaps with the economic.
Nevertheless, Orr’s language implies that nostalgia for the idea of an “unsullied, undying art” is not necessarily a bad thing. This notion, after all, can be thought of as a 247
“dream,” as though it were a positive - if impossible - goal worth striving for. Moreover,
Orr’s characterizations of the money that enriches the cultural institutions that have enabled Menashe - by providing the poet with prestige, financial support, and an unprecedented audience - have the whiff of distaste. In Orr’s words, these are
“organizations with lots of money,” “institutions that have plenty of old-fashioned capital to go along with the cultural kind: the Library of America (recipient of grants from, well, everybody) and the Poetry Foundation (which has $100 million from Eli Lilly in its coffers)” (Orr, “ANM”). The idiomatic and slightly sardonic phrases “lots of money,”
“plenty of old-fashioned capital,” and “coffers” hint at indecorous amounts of economic capital, from which poetry (and poets) ought to be shielded. Also, the deliberate pause in his description of the Library of America - the “recipient of grants from, well, everybody” - lends a note of world-weariness and even cynicism (emphasis added). It encourages the reader to view the Library of America as a slightly unprincipled public figure, accepting donations from, well, all comers and comers.
Yet, Orr’s subtle aversion to the taint of money is ironic; in a 2007 piece for the
New York Times, he defends the Poetry Foundation against a New Yorker article by the journalist Dana Goodyear, which portrayed the Foundation - formed when Ruth Lilly donated approximately $200,000,000 toPoetry in 2002 - as an unseemly, commercial enterprise. 148 Goodyear’s piece suggests that the Poetry Foundation’s mandate is, for the most part, at odds with founding editor Harriet Monroe’s original vision for Poetry.
According to Goodyear, Monroe “was motivated by distaste for the mainstream” and her magazine constituted “an emblem of high modernism” (Goodyear). But Goodyear’s 248 account - echoing other narratives that view Poetry merely as a vehicle for the “new,” aimed at a coterie149 - obscures a complex history. As I argue in Chapter One, Monroe always conceived of Poetry as a magazine that would address an audience both literate enough to appreciate new forms of poetry but also large enough to sustain financially the magazine and its contributors.150 In fact, at her most optimistic, Monroe imagined a readership of “millions” (“FC” 281). At her most practical, she canvassed Chicago businesspeople to fund and stabilize her periodical, enabling it to persist and even assume the character of an institution.151 As her editorials for Poetry demonstrate, Monroe did not accept that poets are ethereal beings who can do without readers and money.152 Neither does the present-day Poetry Foundation, which has used Ruth Lilly’s donation to help realize Monroe’s vision, positioning itself as “an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience” (Poetry
Foundation 16).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Menashe himself recognized the importance of a mandate that works to support poets. When asked in a 2005 interview if “there are merits to obscurity” - the implication being that neglect is desirable since it can result in such recompense as a Neglected Masters Award - the recent prizewinner’s reply was automatic and emphatic: “NO! No, no, no, no, no! You want your work to be read.
Obscurity means you’re not read” (“ISM”). Indeed, prior to the Poetry Foundation’s intervention, Menashe’s literary career was in far shabbier shape than that of the subject of my second chapter, who, recalling the injustice of a young poet failing to receive his 249
due, once declared, “I swear never to be successful” 153 (.Auto 267). (William Carlos
Williams was 68 when he made this pronouncement and had recently won the National
Book Award.) Menashe, at the age of 78, was searching for a publisher and “had three manuscripts out” (Menashe, “ISM”). (His first contributor’s note in the April 2004 Poetry
rings with the auctioneer’s desperate optimism: “His new manuscript is available to an
interested publisher” [Poetry Foundation, “Contributors” 62].) In fact, before receiving the attention of Poetry, the poet only acknowledged the seemingly unconditional embrace
of one other periodical. As he notes in an interview,154 “I never felt, until [Stephen]
Spender started to publish me in Encounter [1953-1991], that I had a place where the door wasn’t slammed in front of me immediately” (TI). Until Spender left the magazine in June 1967,155 Menashe’s experience of being published by Encounter was “like having a gallery. I knew that I could send a poem and it would get read” (TI). Later, Menashe repeats the metaphor, noting that, “It was the first time I had security. It was like having a gallery. I had an outlet for my work” (TI). Menashe’s metaphor forEncounter - a
“gallery” that does not “slam” its “door” - echoes uncannily Monroe’s description of
Poetry as a stable “magazine-gallery” with an Open Door policy (Monroe, “TaN” 142).
Although Monroe did not live long enough to witness her magazine’s “discovery” of
Menashe - an act tinged with irony since Menashe, like Columbus’s America, already existed, even if he was soon to be reshaped irrevocably - he represents the sort of raw,
American resource she hoped to help: a poet in search of a “refuge” (“OD” 62).
Employing theoretical frameworks provided by Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jerome McGann, this chapter argues that Poetry magazine and Samuel Menashe have helped to realize positions for one another in the contemporary American literary field; while Poetry has created a space for Menashe and his poems, Menashe has enabled
Poetry to construct itself as a refuge for the neglected, thus fulfilling a significant part of its founder’s vision. In the first part of the chapter, I explore some of the possible reasons for Menashe’s initial marginalization. Again, using Bourdieu’s theory of the structure of the literary field, I demonstrate that Menashe’s lack of social and cultural capital has hindered his ability to find a reliable publisher and audience for his work. My principal texts for analysis include the very limited body of scholarship on Menashe, mostly consisting of reviews,156 as well as interviews that I conducted with the poet in 2008 and
2009. In the second part of the chapter, I examine Menashe’s poems about the writing life, which, I argue, avoid romanticizing the figure of the marginalized poet and call attention to the material conditions and costs of artistic production. In the third part of the chapter, I extend my analysis of the existing scholarship on Menashe and, more specifically, consider how critics and journalists have struggled for thirty years to locate
Menashe and his poems in the literary field by fashioning different and even contradictory identities and meanings for the poet and his work. Menashe’s poems are difficult to classify, I suggest, and, as a result, their creator has been relegated to the margins of the contemporary American poetry world (which is largely perceived to be divided between those who work in a humanist, confessional mode and those who favour a more self-reflexively experimental mode). Although Menashe’s work rejects poetry as a vehicle for self-expression and focuses attention on the materiality of language, its dialogue with the Hebraic religious tradition discourages critics from locating it within 251
avant-garde traditions, which tend to be wholly secular. Finally, in the fourth part of the
chapter, I analyze the ways in whichPoetry magazine, bolstered by Lilly’s bequest, has
imagined a seemingly paradoxical identity for the poet as a “Neglected Master” and, in
doing so, constructed an identity for itself as a cultural institution working to compensate poets and connect them to a readership. Poems, interviews, and articles published in
Poetry will be considered, with special attention to their textuality.
1. “Outside the walls”: Menashe in the Gaps of the Literary Field
In his essay “Giving the Day Its Due” (2000), one of Samuel Menashe’s few works of prose, the poet describes the lack of control he had in the composition of his first line of poetry:
I never expected to meet a poet, let alone become one. Poets were dead
immortals, some of whose poems I knew by heart.... One night in
February 1949,1 woke up in the middle of the night and there was the first
line of a poem, entirely unforeseen. Had someone told me when I went to
bed that night that this would happen, I would not have believed it. It was
not that I did not “give myself permission” to be a poet - to use a phrase
now prevalent. I just did not aspire to that exalted state. Moreover, how
can one decide to be a poet? (“GDD” xv)
At first glance, Menashe’s anecdote suggests that poetry is the “entirely unforeseen” product of something like divine inspiration, which comes to one when least expected.
The anecdote echoes the Old English story of Caedmon, the inarticulate farmhand who is 252 visited in the middle of the night by an angelic figure and given the gifts of a poet. To be a poet, Menashe implies, is to be thrust into an “exalted state.” But Menashe also complicates this theory with the ambiguous and paradoxical claim that, “Poets were dead immortals...” (xv; emphasis added). Poets, as Menashe understood them, were individuals who existed beyond the material world (“immortals”), but also somehow remained trapped within it (“dead”). His anecdote also implies that the idea of poets as
“immortals” was a “dead” one in 1949. But whether one reads it as an endorsement of divine inspiration or a subtle critique of the same - or both - the anecdote emphasizes above all that poets are not self-determining individuals: “how can one decide to be a poet?” Menashe asks. When I interviewed Menashe during a period of months, from 15
July 2008 to 29 March 2009,1 found him to be a gracious poet who acknowledged the role that certain key figures, texts, and magazines played in helping to shape him and his career. I also discerned the poet to be a savvy critic; although he did not adopt the theoretical language of Bourdieu, Menashe instinctively understood the importance of social and cultural capital in the literary field - for him, the British and American poetry worlds of the late twentieth century - and knew how a lack of capital can leave a poet marginalized.
As a young man, Menashe acquired significant educational capital in New York
City and overseas. He attended Townsend Harris Hall, which he calls “the best non paying high school in New York,” and which is considered an esteemed institution157
(Menashe, TI). Later, as a student in biochemistry, he attended Queen’s College, and then served in World War Two (TI; “GDD” xvi). Through the G.I. Bill,158 which enabled 253 soldiers, postwar, to get a formal education Menashe completed a creative dissertation at the Sorbonne in 1950 (“GDD” xvi). (As if foreshadowing the academy’s future indifference to Menashe’s poetry, his project, about the local nature of culture, entitled
“Un essai sur Vexperience poetique [etude introspective] ,” was controversial and met with resistance from one of the committee members at the defence [TI]. Ultimately, however, Menashe passed.) Menashe also gained educational capital from his parents. He describes his mother and father as “literate Europeans” who received “a classical education in Russia” (TI). “I’ve said my parents were so far up the slope I only had to take a small step,” notes Menashe generously (TI). “They weren’t philistine clods, and I was the young poet. Nonsense. My father insisted that I had to be a misfit [laughter].”
Menashe’s image of a “slope” suggests the ancient Greek mountain Parnassus. But whereas Parnassus is associated with the mythical muses who inspire poets, Menashe presents himself as scaling his mountain with the concrete help of smart, caring parents.
As the speaker notes in Menashe’s poem “Family Silver,”
That spoon fell out
Of my mother’s mouth
Before I was bom
But I was endowed
With a tuning fork[.] (“FS” 1-5)
Although the speaker’s parents no longer possess significant quantities of economical capital - the silver “spoon” has fallen “out” - they still have banked enough educational capital to “endow” their son “With a tuning fork,” which will help make him a poet or, at 254
least, equip him with an ear for poetry. (Menashe describes himself as “well read for my
age” at the time of his enlistment in the U.S. army [“GDD” xvi].) In some ways, then, these immigrant parents - whose social and economic status has diminished, leaving them with a certain cultural advantage, owing to their education - can be likened to “those whose uncertain and contradictory social identity predisposes them in some way to
occupy the contradictory position of dominated among the dominants” (Bourdieu, RoA
227). Artists, Bourdieu reminds us, tend to be recruited from this category, which includes the ‘“poor relations’ of the great bourgeois dynasties” and “aristocrats ruined or in decline” (RoA 227). Menashe might be thought of as a culturally advantaged ‘“poor relation’” of a family “in decline.”
In other words, unlike William Carlos Williams, who constructs his father as a kind of middlebrow reader,159 Menashe does not represent his parents as being, in his words, “philistine clods” against whom an archetypal “young poet” heroically and necessarily rebels. His parents, he hints, were all but poets themselves. Indeed, Menashe prints their words in two of his poems. At the start of “The Bare Tree,” an elegiac sequence for his mother, Menashe includes the prose note, “My mother once said to me,
‘When one sees the tree in leaf, one thinks the beauty of the tree is in its leaves, and then one sees the bare trees’” (“BT”). The lines of Menashe that follow constitute a response to the words of a mother whose “mouth is dead” (5). “In Memoriam” also responds to the words of another: the poet’s dying, bedridden father. “You had your say,” the poem begins, addressing the patriarch,
Said what you saw 255
That day I stood by
Your bed to draw you
Out of your silence[.] (“IM” 1-5)
A prose note, this one appended to the end of the poem, explains that, “When my father was dying he said, ‘I feel receded into the distance.... All of my life my spirit has been in a race with my body and now my spirit has overtaken my body’” (“IM”). When I asked
Menashe why he felt it necessary to add these notes, he, focusing on the addendum for
“In Memoriam,” observed, “My father died at 64. Near the end, I tried to get him to talk.
And he said the lines I’ve quoted. And I said, Dad, if I read that in a book, I would be overwhelmed. I certainly felt that he has a right; these are his words” (TI).
Menashe’s poems differ greatly from Williams’s lurid “The Last Words of My
English Grandmother,” in which an able-bodied male caregiver crosses the threshold of yet another one of the feminized “gulfs and grottoes”160 that will come to provide fodder for poetry: a dying grandmother’s bedroom(Auto 288). Smelling a poem, the caregiver accounts ruthlessly for the “dirty plates” and a “rank, dishevelled bed” (1,4). Worse, he describes the woman, suffering from what seems to be a form of dementia, in almost- animalistic terms:
Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food[.] (5-8) 256
The snoring, crying grandmother satisfies an ideological agenda: to a poet casting about for a distinctly “American” poetry, she presents as a readymade symbol of an England gone mad. It comes as no surprise that, in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, she is unable to identify the trees, which she labels “fuzzy looking things out there” (38); she is no poet, and the American speaker of an earlier, more iconic Williams poem, “Spring and
All,” is better equipped to catalogue with precision the flora that lines the “road to the contagious hospital”: the “reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff of bushes and small trees” (1,9-11).
Menashe’s inclusion of his parents’s words, however, is not simply a respectful gesture that shares the mantle of poet with others; it reminds the reader of the social nature of poetic production and, more specifically, the dialogic nature of an utterance like
“In Memoriam,” which is always already in the position of responding to and anticipating the utterances of others.161 More generally, the mere fact of the poem’s existence reminds us that death is not simply a private event, but a public one that occasions dialogue -
Menashe’s speaker “draw[s]” the father “Out of... silence” - and poetry.
Although his education and upbringing helped to give Menashe access to the literary field, his often-vexed publishing history suggests that it is difficult to find purchase there - i.e. a secure position in the form of a sympathetic publisher, reliable literary magazine, or large audience - when one lacks durable social or cultural ties. For example, after completing his doctorate, Menashe’s dissertation supervisor connected him with the renowned art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996), who taught at Columbia
University in New York (Menashe, TI). As Menashe notes, “[Schapiro] called me and 257
asked my permission to show [my dissertation] to a publisher. I couldn’t believe it, it was
like a scene in a movie; the big heavy door was opening. The publisher told him if it had been written by the famous poet Stephen Spender, it would’ve been publishable. But
since it was written by an unknown.. (TI). Menashe trailed off. The door was closed, and the dissertation, left in limbo, unpublished. Discussing Menashe’s near-success, the critic Nicholas Bims observes that the poet’s “magical chain of unfolding connections stopped.... This ultimate, depressing affirmation of the authority of what Stanley Fish calls ‘interpretive communities’ over what we are able to read pretty much ended any high-stakes networking for Menashe on [the American] side of the Atlantic” (Bims, ‘“I am where I go’”). I would add that Menashe’s problem was not just that he was at the mercy of a larger community that constructs and shapes reading habits; like many young writers, he also lacked the sort of social and cultural capital that comes attached to the name of an older, already “famous poet” like Spender, and that works in what Bims
(unintentionally echoing Bourdieu) suggests is a “magical” way to get books published.
Indeed, when recognized by social agents (like Schapiro’s unnamed publisher), the symbolic capital associated with the name of a known quantity (Spender) functions “like a veritable magical property” and “exercises a sort of action from a distance, without physical contact” (Bourdieu, PR 102). As Menashe would go on to tell me in a resigned tone of voice, “If you make a name for yourself when you’re young, you can coast on that name. All of my life, I’ve had the opposite experience” (Menashe, TI).
In other words, although Menashe, following his dissertation defence, was linked to what Bims terms a “magical chain of unfolding connection” (or what one might think 258 of as a social or cultural network), the “chain” had its limits. Meanwhile, other networks that would eventually support American poets, like the creative writing industry, were still in their infancy and were not as accessible as they would later become. Reflecting on the years just following World War II, Menashe notes:
There were no workshops. When I came back from the war, I heard
something about Iowa, and that was the one. But now the country is
covered with poetry workshops.... There’s a whole network. They teach in
each other’s colleges. In my day - I love the expression - there was Iowa.
I never thought to apply. I heard about it as one would hear of a remote
mountain peak, enshrouded by mist. It was a mystical place. (TI)
Interestingly, Menashe’s informal comparison of the state of creative writing programs in the fifties - “my day” - to their present and more pervasive manifestations reminds us that such programs were not always ubiquitous. The sole example that crossed Menashe’s radar after World War II - the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the first major American creative
1 ft) writing program - is characterized as an object of rumour and desire: “a remote mountain peak, enshrouded by mist.” Of course, it is worth noting that the creative writing field is a historical phenomenon from which American poets do not benefit equally.
It is worth noting, however, that the Iowa Workshop was not entirely inaccessible for Menashe. It was merely a “remote” possibility, or what Bourdieu would call one of the “objective potentialities” lurking in the literary field, that present themselves to the well-placed poet (RoA 272). In fact, as McGurl notes, the earliest creative writing 259 programs in the 1940s “were made up of recently returned veterans studying on the G. 1.
Bill” (61). But as Bims points out, Menashe’s choice to complete a doctorate at the
Sorbonne in Paris kept the poet out of the loop and put him at odds with most of his
American peers:
Although of an age with the poets profiled by Richard Howard in his 1969
book Alone With America, Menashe did not follow their nearly consensus
trajectory - spending the 1950s in a university environment and adhering
to an erudite conformity, then, in the 1960s, following this up, either
fulfilling or rebelling against their earlier gestures, by a so-called
breakthrough into cultural radicalism and “open form.” Menashe went
through none of this; characteristically, he used his GI Bill money, not at
Harvard or Columbia, but at the Sorbonne. There is something refreshingly
unexpected in Menashe’s life, philosophy and outlook, a quality which
makes him a genuinely individual presence in the world of American
poetry. (Bims, “IG”)
Bims celebrates Menashe’s decision to avoid the “trajectory” of his peers as a sign of
“genuine” individuality, thus reflecting a liberal humanist ideology in which people are thought to be self-determining. (The choice of Paris over the States is a “characteristic” one.) Yet, the G. I. Bill helped enable Menashe to attend the Sorbonne. Moreover, as
Bourdieu argues, “each agent [in the literary field] makes his own future - thereby helping to make the future of the field - by realizing the objective potentialities which are determined in the relation between his powers and the possibles objectively inscribed in 260 the field” (RoA 272). In other words, the panoply of potential paths a poet may take and be celebrated for are always already provisionally mapped out for him or her. So, too, are the consequences of the poet’s choices: the resulting body of work and, more broadly, career. As a result, and to conduct a brief thought experiment suggested by Bourdieu, it is merely a matter of imagining one of Menashe’s ‘“counterparts’ in other possible worlds”
- a Menashe who attends a creative writing program on the G.I. Bill and becomes a professor - to comprehend how he might have come to share a sensibility, or what
Bourdieu calls a “habitus,” with many of his contemporaries (RoA 235). For example, had
Menashe conformed to the “university environment” of the 1950s, he might have come to
“rebel” against his “earlier gestures,” like Robert Lowell, who famously swapped a traditional style, influenced by Milton, for free verse confessionalism, with the publication of Life Studies (1959).
As it stands, however, Menashe remained on the outside of academia - yet was not unaffected by it. Discussing his then-unfashionable poetry, Menashe observes, “When the Beat poets ‘made the scene,’ I heard the pious platitude that it was good for poetry, but it was not good for my poetry. If confessional poetry was to the fore, I had nothing to offer its devotees” (“GDD” xvi-xvii). In addition, Menashe did not accrue much of the social and cultural capital that can be exchanged for material benefits in the academic world. Describing his isolation from other poets - and the apartment in which he lived for fifty years - Menashe tells Derek Mahon, using a simile he would often repeat,163 “‘In my hovel, I live outside the walls - the stronghold - of poet professors who, like the abbots of medieval monasteries, exchange visits, reading at each other’s colleges, where they 261 mould students in their own image’” (Mahon 163). Menashe’s description of the power and inaccessibility of the walled-in university might seem extreme; but as McGurl points out, in the postwar era “poetry... (as a paying profession at least) has been all but entirely absorbed by institutions of higher education...” (29). When poets concentrate in the academy, those who do not, like Menashe, are left at a disadvantage - economically, as
McGurl suggests, but culturally and socially, as well. Several academics, of course, did help enable Menashe: Kathleen Raine and Hugh Kenner.164 But these would seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule or, more precisely, that prove the power of academia in determining the course of American poetry. Menashe’s respective interactions with Raine and Kenner were brief, tenuous, and separated by decades; but each encounter gave him access to publishers. One is left to ponder the publications that Menashe might have accumulated had he spent a lifetime in the university, cultivating connections. Kenner’s introduction to Pound was made possible by the University of Toronto professor,
Marshall McLuhan, who knew Pound because of Wyndham Lewis, whom McLuhan had befriended during his largely unhappy days in Toronto during World War II.165 But then even these facts, which demonstrate the importance of community, appear here because of a social interaction: the information was informally disclosed by Kenner to one of the supervisors of my dissertation, Professor Lesley J. Higgins, at an academic conference, the sort of space to which a non-academic, like Menashe, would have little-to-no access.
Other extra-literary factors, outside of the academy, have likely contributed to
Menashe’s obscurity, including his lack of involvement in the world of periodicals.
Aheam suggests that the fact that Menashe has never served at a “literary magazine from 262
which he can exert influence or solicit favors” has helped to marginalize him (307). To
expand on Aheam’s point by reading it through the lens of Bourdieu, I would add that a
stable editorial position at a “literary magazine” constitutes a fixed position in the literary
field where one can create a name for oneself. The more “recognized” the magazine, the
more cultural capital one accrues.
In addition, several critics argue that Menashe’s failure to adhere to an easily
marketable Jewish identity left him at odds with mid-century American publishing.
Writing in 1970, and noting that “the expression or exploitation of Jewishness... has been
for many years, a boom-industry in American writing, not least in Menashe’s own city of
New York,” Davie concludes:
far from helping him, that American-Jewish boom is the worst obstacle in
his way. So long as [Philip Roth’s novel]Portnoy’s Complaint stays in the
best-seller lists, and the words “Jewish Momma” are good for a wink and a
smirk at any cocktail-party, what hope is there of fair-minded
consideration for poems in which the principal human relationship
celebrated (with straightforward grief and devotion) is that of the Jewish
poet with his dead mother? And the cleavage goes deeper; whereas the
theme or the assumption of successful Jewish-American fiction is the
alienation of the Jewish American in American life, Menashe sees no
alienation beyond that of the original diaspora, and contrives to be thankful
for it[.] (“The Poetry” 108) 263
Davie hints at a paradox: one of Menashe’s “principal” subjects - “his dead mother” - may have seemed too stereotypically “Jewish” by New York publishers in the 1960s and
70s, and the poet’s lack of “alienation,” as not “Jewish” enough. (At the very least,
Menashe’s work slips between categories.166) Comparing Menashe to those Objectivist poets who were Jewish, Bims also speaks to Menashe’s conspicuous lack of “alienation,” noting that
the terms on which Jewish writers of Menashe’s generation were admitted
fully to the American mainstream excluded many talented Jewish writers
of that era who did not happen to fit the scenario.... Menashe’s kind of
poetry - compact, ascetic, lucid, descriptive - is reminiscent of Objectivist
poets such as Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl
Rakosi, who were all Jewish, though the delight in the world evident in
Menashe’s poetry could not be more different in affect. (Bims, “IG”).
In a study of ten American Jewish poets - one that does not mention Menashe - Gary
Pacemick is more specific, characterizing the work of a certain kind of Jewish American poet who came to be embraced in the 1960s. According to Pacemick, following the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s books Howl (1956) and Kaddish (1961),
Poems were to embody personal visions, which would sanctify the poet’s
life and hopefully the reader’s as well. Along with these Romantic
tendencies, came more open and tolerant attitudes towards poets who had
been struggling in near-oblivion... including such notable Jewish poets as
Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, David 264
Ignatow, and Muriel Rukeyser, among others. In 1958 Karl Shapiro
published an entire volume of poems on the Jewish theme called Poems o f
a Jew, and in 1961, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, including the monumental
title poem, was published[.] (5)
It is likely that the “delight” to be found in Menashe’s work, as well as his aversion to
“Romantic tendencies” and his lack of focus on “Jewish theme[s],” prevented him from fitting a Jewish identity that, at the time, was often constructed in terms of “alienation” and “personal vision.”167 This left the poet at what Davie calls a “linguistic and cultural crossroads; and unless the reader knows down which of four roads the poet is facing
(English, French, American, Jewish), he cannot be sure what expectations to bring to the poem nor even, sometimes, whether to trust his ears that he has heard aright” (“The
Poetry” 108). Indeed, as Bims notes “if his name were not attached to the poems, people might not know they were by a Jew (or, for that matter, even by an American, perhaps why he is so much more popular in England)” (“IG”).
What has been the material result of Menashe’s marginalization in the American literary field? Although he published seven volumes of poetry throughout his lifetime,
Menashe’s “publishing history has been peculiarly unsettled,” with “each [volume] under a different imprint” (Mahon 161). (In fact, Menashe was published twice by Gollancz.
Nevertheless, the volumes of Menashe’s that appeared after Mahon’s observation, in
1994, were once again brought out by different publishers.) Menashe has nearly always had to secure a new publisher for his books. His oeuvre has also received very little in the way of critical commentary. Surveying what existed in 1996, when Menashe was in his 265 seventies, Aheam notes, “The MLA Bibliography doesn’t even know he exists. With the exception of short essays by Donald Davie and Derek Mahon, the critical record concerning Menashe consists of reviews, in which he has been briefly praised by such figures as Austin Clarke, P. N. Furbank, Stephen Spender, and Hugh Kenner” (Aheam
294). In terms of prizes and other honours, Bims records that despite Menashe’s minor successes, “He has not received the fellowships, grants, and awards he should have, other than an award in the late 1950s from the Longview Foundation (for the one war story he wrote, not his poetry) and... he is asked to give readings all too seldom...” (Bims, “IG”).
More generally, Bims notes that Menashe “was, and is, not at all a part of the official poetry establishment in New York” (“HWA”). Tellingly, Menashe has “never been invited” to read at the 92nd Street Y, for example, a prestigious venue for poetry readings in New York (Menashe, TI).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some critics have fashioned an image of Menashe as an individualistic outsider, as if to compensate for his lack of success. Carrying forward
Menashe’s monastery imagery, Mahon notes that “Menashe in his ‘hovel,’ though unconfrontational [sic], opposes a tiny light to the vast orthodoxy, confident in the knowledge of a unique vocation...” (Mahon 163). Clive James extends the religious conceit by comparing Menashe’s postwar life to that of an impoverished “monk”:
When [Menashe] finally went home to New York, he disappeared into a
fifth-floor walk-up whose poverty has to be seen to be believed. The
Bloodaxe edition [of New and Selected Poems] has an accompanying
DVD that shows him in situ, reading his poems aloud. His voice is 266
wonderfully rich, but everything around him spells poverty. Obviously this
monk-like self-denial is part of his dedication, although you might say that
he sacrificed his purity when he let a camera through the door. (460)
James romanticizes the “monk-like” Menashe to such an extent that he worries, as an
anthropologist might, about the outside world sullying the poet’s “purity.” (To be fair,
James notes that he “is very glad... that [Menashe’s] privacy was invaded” [James 460].)
Many other critics, however, view Menashe’s marginalization in economic, as
opposed to religious, terms. Quoting the novelist and critic William Gaddis, Bims notes
that “success” is “overrated” and then concludes: “Better, imaginatively speaking, to be a
poet [like Menashe] on the margins than a self-satisfied grandee” (Bims, “IG”). Writing
for Poetry, Danielle Chapman echoes Bims by stressing Menashe’s status as a non
professional: “Menashe’s earnest assumption of the title ‘poet’ has made him something
of an anachronism in our professional age” (Chapman; emphasis added). Orr identifies
Menashe as a kind of innocent with less-than-savvy business sense, who “appears to have
done almost everything wrong. He didn’t teach creative writing, didn’t ally himself with
his more sociable peers, didn’t serve on many committees and didn’t finagle his way into
many anthologies. He appears mostly to have just... written poetry” (“ANM”). According to Mahon, Menashe was never “playing the game” (Mahon). Judy Valente characterizes
the New York poet as a fringe character who has barely survived the city’s trials: “For 50 years, New York poet Samuel Menashe toiled away at his art in relative obscurity. He
lived in a Greenwich Village walk-up with a bathtub in the kitchen, and eked out a living as French tutor” (Valente). Dana Gioia further emphasizes Menashe’s non-bourgeois 267 credentials when he points out that the poet “has lived a bohemian life in an age of academic institutionalism” (“SM” 239). It is difficult to know what Gioia means by
“bohemian”; as Virginia Nicholson observes, the term is fluid and
everybody has a mental pigeonhole [Bohemia] into which the imaginary
Bohemian more or less fits. For many this takes shape as a garret, the
refuge of the lonely genius. For others it is a tavern where gypsy-clad
people drink and dance. Some conjure up with distaste the Parisian zinc
cluttered with untalented phoneys - dirty, poor and smelly, (xvi)
Perhaps the rent-controlled nature of Menashe’s apartment, which he sometimes called a
“hovel,” qualifies the place as a kind of Bohemia, especially in a city like New York, where real estate is not easily come by (TI). To be sure, “bohemian,” as Gioia uses it, suggests at the very least someone who has run counter to currents. In one essay, Bims goes so far as to deploy a militaristic metaphor, describing “Menashe’s poetic task” as
“more the trench fighting of the First World War than the mobile engagements of the later great conflagration [World War II]” (“HWA”).
Menashe, then, is depicted in various ways: as an opponent of an almost-religious
“orthodoxy”; as an underdog on the “margins” of a capitalistic society; as a non professional outsider to “academic institutionalism”; as a soldier in the “trench[es]” of the poetry world. Many of these characterizations tend to demonstrate Bourdieu’s theory of an “inverse economy”: they invest Menashe with symbolic capital to the extent that the poet can be typified as an underdog and his work can be demonstrated to have failed to be successful economically (RoA 141; emphasis added). Or, as Kurt Brown puts it - aligning 268
Menashe with other cult poets who seem to be continually “rediscovered,” like Weldon
Kees - “Some poets become famous almost for the mere fact of having been neglected...” (Brown). According to many critics, Menashe’s inability to achieve success is, ironically enough, what makes him worthy of it late in life, a belief that would also seem to underpin the bestowing of the title “Neglected Master” and its implicitly delayed cash remuneration.
But Menashe does not fit the image of the anti-institutional rebel snugly; he served the American government dutifully in World War II, completed a doctorate at the
Sorbonne, and, though precariously employed as a tutor, worked for a number of years, earning a living. More importantly, the poet himself does not go out of his way to romanticize his existence outside of the university and the rest of the literary world; that is, he does not use his lack of success to imagine himself as an individualistic outsider, unsullied by economic relations. When I asked Menashe if he is “attracted in any way to the image of Blake as a kind of outsider” - the work of the Romantic poet William Blake
(1757-1827) being a touchstone for Menashe - the poet was emphatic: “No, I would love to have been an insider” (TI). Mahon describes Menashe as living “in an ascetic bachelor apartment,” but when I asked Menashe if his poem “Survival” - about a tree “Cut down” to the stump - was “a commentary on [his] life,” Menashe said yes, but quickly noted that, “I didn’t make a commitment to the ascetic life. It’s not to be romanticized. No, I didn’t know when to move into a middle-class apartment” (Mahon; “Survival” 5;
Menashe, TI). Although William Carlos Williams, as discussed in Chapter Two, would
“sneak away” from his middle-class life in New York on weekends, “to join the [ Others] 269 gang” and play at being ‘“rebels,”’ the doctor-poet always had the ability - read: luxury -
| / O to return to a middleclass life (Auto 136). Menashe, on the other hand, did not merely dabble in the life of the poet on the fringes. Insofar as the identity of a poet is always a role that one plays, Menashe’s has been a far more complete performance than Williams’s
- and it has come, as the poet himself suggests, at a material cost. Bims, for his part, hints at the anti-romantic and performative nature of Menashe’s sense of self. “Menashe has no romanticism about writing,” Bims argues (“IG”). “The scribe is not necessarily himself, but anyone who writes. Writing is an act... full of fakery and self-justification, and, certainly, without visible reward” (“IG”).
In interviews, Menashe also avoids idealizing the fiction of the self-determining poet by pointing out the limited, but not insubstantial, ways in which the literary field has realized positions for him to occupy. Indeed, although he existed outside of the academic world, where American poets of the late twentieth century have tended to concentrate, publication did not entirely elude him. As Menashe notes, “you might have all the signs of being the romantic image of the neglected poet but I don’t fulfill them because I was published and I did live until old age” (Menashe, TI). His first book came about in 1960, when Menashe got in touch with the Blake scholar Kathleen Raine (TI). Interestingly,
Raine told him that “she had no power in London,” thus underscoring the importance of one’s position in the literary field (TI); nevertheless, she referred him to the British publisher Victor Gollancz, who “normally published little or no poetry at all” (Davie,
“TPSM” 107). Gollancz, however, was a secular Jew who, though he had often championed Jewish causes, was a non-orthodox thinker.169 As a result, Menashe might 270 have struck the publisher as a kindred spirit, a writer who did not capitulate to rigid
conceptions of Jewish identity. In any event, thanks in part to Raine, Gollancz brought
out Menashe’s first book, The Many Named Beloved (1961). Using a metaphor of
conception, Menashe emphasizes Raine’s almost maternal nurturing of his career: “Just as
one might never have been conceived, I might never have had a book without Kathleen
Raine. It began there” (Menashe, TI). Menashe, then, was not self-made; the Blake
scholar helped to “conceive” the poet and penned the introduction for his first book.
Despite this early success in England, however, Menashe reminded me that it is difficult to secure a publisher in the United States without the support of a well-placed figure like
Raine: “People thought an American publisher would be waiting at the pier for me. I had to peddle my poems for ten years before I found a small publisher in America [October
House]. And my final training happened there. I’ll tell people... my gratitude for what happened in England” (TI).
Hugh Kenner also helped to secure a publisher for Menashe. Kenner originally discovered the poet while working on a 1981 review of Donald Davie’s The Poet in the
Imaginary Museum, which features on essay on Menashe (TI). Taken with the poetry, he devoted much of the piece to it (TI). Later, “[Kenner] was giving a lecture and I introduced myself,” Menashe recalled (TI). “He said to his wife, ‘This is the man that
Davie discovered in England.’ And I said, T’m all covered up again.’” The author of The
Pound Era, however, leveraged his influence and connected the newly-buried poet to the
National Poetry Foundation at the University of Maine, which was once primarily “a center for Pound scholarship” (National). The Foundation brought out Menashe’s 271
Collected Poems in 1986 - and dragged the poet back into the light, if only briefly. This precarious chain of events - precarious because, to conjure a counterfactual, Kenner could have chosen not to focus his review on Menashe, and Menashe could have easily missed the lecture - proves all the more precarious when one realizes that Menashe was a fervent critic of Ezra Pound.170
Even if Menashe, after his brief successes, tended to find himself “all covered up again,” he was not terribly pessimistic. He records that his “good fortune in England and
Ireland seems miraculous to me” (“GDD” xvii). In other words, he does not depict himself as a pitiable loner but, rather, highlights by example, and with gratitude, the importance of a larger literary field in shaping careers, even if the field is sometimes little more than a network of loose ends. “With gaps and nothing given to me easily, I’ve still had an ongoing so-called career,” Menashe told me (TI), “A career sometimes careening.” He would have laughed at this point.
2. At the Window Sill: The Importance of Space
Menashe’s self-reflexive poems about the writing life - many of which are set in his apartment - also tend to avoid mythologizing the figure of the poet. Instead, they often expose the material conditions and costs of writing. Although there is little substantial scholarship on his poetry and no sustained studies on its metapoetic aspects, several critics have called attention to the way in which Menashe’s poems trouble the quest for literary immortality. For example, Barry Aheam notes that Menashe’s poem “A
Bronze Head,” in which aspiring poets are compared to “thoroughbreds” racing on a 272
“track,” emphasizes the physicality of the living poet seeking the reward of immortality and the tenuousness of the reward itself (Menashe, “ABH” 7, 11; Aheam 302). Indeed, to receive the prize, Aheam suggests, is to be a part of a “pantheon” or canon that is always under siege (302). “The craving for literary fame, in short,” concludes Aheam, “becomes in some respect a craving for death and for an inhuman status” (302). Aheam might have pointed out that “A Bronze Head” alludes to the Yeats poem of the same title, from which
Menashe borrows the conceit of life as a race: Yeats’s speaker - faced with a bronze bust of the feminist and actress Maude Gonne - decides that “even at the starting-post, all sleek and new, / 1 saw the wildness in her” (11, 15-6). But although Yeats’s speaker has always detected a transhistorical trace of the “superhuman” in Gonne, Menashe’s speaker, confronted with a different bronze head, is somewhat more sceptical. The head, as he sees it, becomes a slightly comical prop, a lawn ornament that is literally down to earth:
He’s in his garden now
Sticking his neck out
Of a flower bed,
A head without shoulders[.] (1-4)
“We are not statues yet,” Menashe’s speaker continues (5). “Nor about to become /
Immortals” (6-7). Another critic, Danielle Chapman, describes how Menashe’s “At a
Standstill” relegates “the poet’s ambition for immortality... to the humble surroundings of the prototypical bohemian flat - with its kitchen too small for a table, but just big enough for a bathtub” (325). In addition, her analysis of Menashe’s “Morning” argues that the poem “speaks movingly to the intimate sorrows of the artist” (325). Although these readings bring much-needed attention to one of Menashe’s
recurring concerns - the poet’s struggle to write the poems themselves - they tend to
imply that the poet, as presented by Menashe, is purely archetypal or, as Chapman has it,
“prototypical.” For example, Aheam draws on Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of
influence, which dehistoricizes poetic struggle and reduces it to an Oedipal, patrilineal
contest between poets and their father-like precursors (Aheam 300). (According to
Aheam, poets “have the burden of past glories to emulate and surpass” [300].) Chapman,
for her part, goes so far as to suggest that Menashe’s poems float “in a timeless sort of
space” (324). Clive James is more accurate when he notes that, “All Menashe’s [sic]
poems give the sense of having been constructed out of the basic stuff of memory, a hard
substratum where what once happened has been so deeply pondered that all individual
feeling has been squeezed out and only universal feeling is left” (459; emphasis added).
The key words here, italicized, are “give the s e n s ebecause of their extreme
compression, Menashe’s poems only appear to gesture toward the “universal,” when, in
fact, they exercise a “memory” and bear traces of their specific social, cultural, and historical context. Indeed, in the foreword to Menashe’s Collected Poems , Donald Davie makes a passing reference to the fact that “the scene of Menashe’s poems is nearly always that of cold-water apartments in old and run-down districts of Manhattan” (Foreword 8).
To extend Davie’s observation, I would argue that the materiality of these spaces - and the one space in which Menashe lived for more than fifty years in the Soho district of
New York City - needs to be emphasized when reading his apartment poems. As
Menashe states, “My poems came out of the life I lived” (TI). I do not want to suggest, 274 however, that the poems are merely confessional; as will be shown later, Menashe rejects this mode. Nor do I want to imply that this self is “timeless.” The identity of the speaker in many of Menashe’s poems is bound up in the specific places the speaker occupies.
Far from being simply “timeless” or “prototypical,” physical space in Menashe’s work often displays the deforming tread of history. In the untitled poem that begins
“These stone steps,” the speaker documents the wear and tear that has warped the stairs leading up to his apartment:
These stone steps
bevelled by feet
endear the dead
to me as I climb
them every night[.] (“Tss” 1-5)
History, symbolized by the “feet” of “the dead,” has left its footprint on the speaker’s turf.
Interestingly, however, the “bevelled” “stone” is not an occasion for pessimism. It does not bother the speaker to be reminded nightly of those who paved the way for him; he feels at home - literally and figuratively - in history: the history of the building and its larger city, but also the very concept of history itself. In our phone conversation about
“These stone steps,” Menashe said of his apartment, “I’ve lived here almost half the lifetime, so there’s a lot of dead here” (Menashe, TI).
The four-line poem “Here” takes the reader inside the apartment where, as in
“These stone steps,” she finds clues that suggest the presence of history:
Ghost I house 275
In this old flat—
Your outpost—
My aftermath. (“Here” 1-4)
Of course, “flat” can be read as a metaphor for the speaker’s body near the end of life: the body is an “outpost” from which the soul will soon venture forth. But even if one reads the “Ghost” as the speaker’s soul, the speaker’s choice to address it in the second person (“Your”) and to refer to his or her body in the first person suggests an estrangement from the soul. The speaker’s “aftermath” - a word that echoes “afterlife” - is one and the same thing as his or her body. Or, put another way, the speaker’s afterlife is his or her body: the afterlife is rather more material than one might think. (Indeed, although Menashe declares himself a believer in “all the attributes of God,” he posits that
“there is no afterlife” [TI].) The dashes - characteristic of much of his work - conjure the spectre of Dickinson, who ends her own description of the afterlife in “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (1896) with a dash pointing nowhere: “And Finished knowing - then (20).
Menashe’s “Forever and a Day” suggests a similarly inauspicious end for its speaker, who would seem to be reflecting on some road kill:
No more than that
Dead cat shall I
Escape the corpse
I kept in shape
For the day off
Immortals take[.] (“FD” 1-6) 276
The expression “forever and a day” was first used by Shakespeare in As You Like It.
Orlando describes the length of time he will love a “girl” as “For ever and a day,” to
which savvy Rosalind responds, “Say a day without the ‘ever’” (4.1.116-17). By calling
into question Orlando’s rhetoric, Rosalind dismisses the idea of immortal love. And by
making literal Orlando’s words - by wondering what the “day” after “Forever” actually
entails - Menashe’s poem dismisses the idea of immortality; it suggests instead that we
are all “Immortals” until we take our “day o ff’ and, re-entering history, become
“corpse[s].” As a result, when read in relation to Menashe’s larger body of work, a poem
like “Forever and a Day” encourages the reader to view the “Ghost” in “Here” metaphorically; the speaker’s apartment is an “outpost” for a spirit, but the spirit is the accretion of all that has come before.
History personified is also present in “The Host,” a poem in which there are so many “dead,” the speaker’s home is crowded:
I am haunted
Out of my house
Gaunt, dispossessed
By the homeless dead[.] (“TH” 1-4)
The “homeless dead” may also allude to dead soldiers in Menashe’s untitled war poem that begins, “All my friends are homeless” (“A f’ 1). Certainly, “The Host” hints at the almost-physical pressure that history places on its survivors. The “ghosts,” the speaker observes, “Have bled me white / No marrow is left / In the bone they bite” (“TH” 6-8).
Like vampires, they have all but turned the speaker into a ghost himself. The past feeds 277 on the present, an almost-parasitic relationship reflected in the assonance of “haunted” and “Gaunt.”
Similar to “These stone steps,” the five-line poem “In My Digs” emphasizes the physical effects of history. Indeed, it models, by way of dirty still life, how the past builds up on the present like a crust:
Caked in a glass
That is clear
Yesterday’s dregs
Tell me the past
Happened here[.] (“IMD” 1-5)
The use of the word “clear,” here, rings with irony; although a glass is transparent and, therefore, would seem to be the ideal medium for carrying meaning, the signs are “dregs,” and their meaning vague - and almost comically so, given the emphatic use of alliteration: “the past / Happened here.” Also, the echoing assonance of “glass,” “past,” and “Happened” reinforces the point that the signs of the past continue to chime in the present.
Other poems, however, indicate how the material form of an apartment - and even space itself - can write upon, and shape, people. Foucault describes such an environment as the “space in which we are living, by which we are drawn outside ourselves, in which, as a matter of fact, the erosion of our life, our time, and our history takes place, this space that eats and scrapes away at us...” (“Different Spaces” 177-8). “The Niche,” which 278
Menashe calls his “signature poem,” is but four lines long, thereby demonstrating the very scraping it describes:
The niche narrows
Hones one thin
Until his bones
Disclose him[.] (1-4)
The “niche” can be read as a metaphor for the physical demands of life, which can wear down the subject of the poem - a man. But the poem’s ending would seem to be unclear: the man’s “bones / Disclose him,” which might mean that the “bones” release his essence, but which also might mean that the man is his bones, “honed” by their environment.
(“Disclose” also puns on “dis-clothes”; time ruthlessly disrobes the man, relieving him of his very skin.) Considering the poem ambiguous, Orr notes that, “The idea that the self is unveiled by a process of reduction is balanced by the suggestion that the ‘niche’ itself - one’s lot in life, one’s choices as an artist - may be creating the kind of self that can be so revealed. Or to put it another way: Is it the man that’s found in the niche, or the niche that makes the man?” (“ANM”). The latter reading may be the more appropriate one, especially since, according to the poem, it is the “niche” that acts on “one,” winnowing possibilities and presenting the “choices” that can be made. Moreover, Menashe’s disbelief in an “afterlife” encourages an analysis that emphasizes the materiality of the speaker.
This “niche” that crowds the self also appears in Menashe’s “At a Standstill,” a poem that inspects the contours of a small flat: 279
That statue, that cast
Of my solitude
Has found its niche
In this kitchen
Where I do not eat
Where the bathtub stands
Upon cat feet—
I did not advance
I cannot retreatf.] (“AS” 1-9)
The metaphor - the self is a “statue,” a cast / Of my solitude” - would seem to suggest
that the speaker is stable. But the poem does not simply celebrate stability as some sign of
steely self-determination; it does not mimic the confessional poem, in which the
capacities of the self tend to be affirmed. The speaker in “At a Standstill,” like his
“bathtub,” has been displaced. The speaker “do[esj not eat” in the kitchen, and is at the
mercy of his surroundings. Moreover, the use of anaphora - “Where I do not eat / Where
the bathtub stands / Upon cat feet” - sets up a comparison between the speaker and bathtub: the apartment dweller is reduced to furniture, and a piece of furniture, in turn,
infused with living characteristics. (The two entities blend: we are the space we occupy;
we are where we eat.) Interestingly, the final image of being unable to “advance” or
“retreat” recalls that of an immobilized soldier; when read in the shadow of Menashe’s war poems, the poem’s tableau of stasis starts to darken, resembling a kind of trench warfare. But the speaker is neither ultimately pessimistic nor optimistic; resigned, he 280 makes peace with his “niche” - his position in the apartment and, more symbolically, in history. He has come to terms with the jarring displacements that have reduced him to the status of an object in an urban and occasionally violent world. Indeed, the allusive “cat feet” seem to have scurried out of Carl Sandburg’s influential171 “Fog,” an optimistic paean to city life.172
When I asked Menashe how World War II shaped his sense of time, he responded,
“There’s only the day. I had no foresight. That’s why I’m still living with the bathtub in the kitchen” (TI), which echoes an earlier observation of his, from his essay “Giving the
Day Its Due”:
Of course, as a survivor of an infantry company, I was marked by death for
life when I was nineteen. In the first years after the war, I thought each day
was the last day. I was amazed by the aplomb of those who spoke of what
they would do next summer. Later, each day was the only day. Usually, I
could give the day its due, live in the present, but I had no foresight for a
future. Perhaps it is why I am still in the flat to which I moved when I was
thirty-one years old[.] (“GDD” xvii)
When I followed up on my question by noting that Menashe’s sense of time seemed to have been different before the war, he noted, “I don’t remember myself before the war. I might not have been a poet without the war” (TI). As his obituary in The Guardian concludes: “Like all of us, Samuel understood that he was the sum of his experiences, the ones which inspired and the ones which haunted” (Moran). The war amputated
Menashe’s sense of the future, leaving behind poetry like “At a Standstill.” 281
Other apartment poems by Menashe imply the impact of space on acreative self.
The speaker of “On the Level,” for example, wonders how best to arrange the decor in his makeshift writing studio of a home:
Does this desk, level
With the window sill,
Uphold my level best
Or is the bed better
For dreams that distill
Words to the letter[.] (“On the Level” 46)
As in “At a Standstill,” the speaker sees himself as a self among, and jostled by, objects - in this case, a “window sill” and “bed.” But he also goes further, hinting at the way in which different poetic texts may be the distillations of their specific environments.
Menashe’s repetition of “level” affirms that an orderly writing space of flush lines and right angles - a “desk, level / With the window sill” - will repeat itself in the writer, bringing out his “level best.” (The very title of the poem, “On the Level,” suggests a normative state - of truthfulness or, at least, clarity - to which one should aspire.) A
“bed,” however, may be “better” for less disciplined acts like dreaming. (Indeed, beds, in
Menashe’s poems, are usually sites wherein individuals have little control.173) As if anticipating Kay Ryan’s “Blue China Doorknobs” - which suspects that “Rooms may be / using us” (1-2)174 - Menashe’s poem opposes what Foucault terms “medieval space”: space in which objects passively assume their natural positions in a hierarchy (“Different
Spaces” 176). “On the Level” reminds the reader that, as the French theorist has it, “We 282
do not live in a void that would be tinged with shimmering colors, we live inside an
ensemble of relations that define emplacements” (176).
Menashe’s poetry also ranges beyond his apartment to consider other “set[s] of
relations” playing out in other window sills. In “Windows: Old Widow,” Menashe
catalogues the following contents:
There is a pillow
On the window sill -
Her elbow room -
In the twin window
Enclosed by a grill
Plants in pots bloom
On the window sill[.] (“WOW” 1-7)
The image of a “twin window / Enclosed by a grill” might suggest that the old woman is
trapped - in her apartment and, symbolically, the prison cell of domestic life. But the poem is not entirely pessimistic about the niches that enclose people. Like “At a
Standstill” - in which anaphora encourages us to compare the “statue”-like speaker to a
life-like “bathtub” with “cat feet” - “Windows: Old Widow” uses repetition to create a positive connection: it repeats the line “On the window sill” to imply that the old woman, leaning on a “pillow / On the window sill,” is like the potted “Plants” that “bloom / On the window sill.” In other words, far from being a prisoner of circumstance, the widow
“bloom[s]” in her niche. Moreover, the rhyme between “elbow room” (a form of space) and “pots bloom” (a form of growth) helps to emphasize that life is always situated in 283 what Bakhtin calls “a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment”
{Discourse 1202). (Williams’s “The Hard Core of Beauty,” on the other hand, in which
“plum trees” sprout from “worn-out auto-tire / casings,” grasps for divinity when it asks rhetorically, “for what purpose [this scene] / but the glory of the Godhead” [28, 30-1,
32].) As the colon in the title of Menashe’s poem suggests, it is impossible to separate
“Old Widow[s]” from their “Windows.”
In addition to apartments, Menashe’s poems historicize other spaces. “Still Life,” based on a stele that Menashe glimpsed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (TI), describes an image of life crackling in the confines of a work of art:
Where she sits
With apples
On her lap
Kindling snaps
Into flame
What happens
Fits the frame[.] (“SL” 1-7)
The title “Still Life” is ironic; as Menashe notes, describing the action of the poem, “In the flux of life, there is torrent. The flux is not still. And a work of art, in a sense, gives it a limit, a boundary which you don’t have in life itself. It’s contained” (TI). (The title is also ironic given the source of the poem’s inspiration: a stele as opposed to the still life of a painting.) The poem, then, does not merely represent a static scene; it contains and embodies an action unfolding in time, a process emphasized by the present tense verb 284
“snaps” and the internal rhyme of “lap,” “snaps,” and “happens.” Moreover, the poem, as a work of ekphrasis, exists in dialogic relation to the stele, which, Menashe notes,
“kindled that perception in me, in a way” (TI). As the poem reminds the reader, who exists beyond its limits, everything that “happens” does so within its specific “frame”: a work of art has its physical context, as do the moments in which it is perceived - or read.
In the first stanza of “Landmark,” the speaker takes an active role in helping to historicize a physical site that is slipping into oblivion:
I look up to see
Your windows, the house
Standing on this street
Like an old tombstone
Whose dates disappear
I still name you here[.] (“Landmark” 1 -6)
The particular placement of “Landmark” - at the end of a series of elegies to Menashe’s mother in his New and Selected Poems - encourages one to read the “you” as a specific person, the speaker’s mother, and “the house / Standing on this street” as a specific place, her home. Menashe’s simile, however - the “house” as “an old tombstone / Whose dates disappear” - demonstrates how a definite, historically-situated place like a home can
“disappear” from history, and how a place, rubbed clean of its personal resonances, can become available to the public. The speaker’s act of naming, then, does not merely represent the logocentric desire of an Adam to fix an identity; it embodies a desire to record the fact of a life. (The emphatic rhyme, “disappear” / “here,” affirms this desire; 285 the words deliberately work at cross-purposes, the firm noun “here” opposing the vaporous verb “disappear.”)
“Diner” embodies a similar desire. Occasioned by the closing of Homer’s, a New
York restaurant that Menashe and his friends often frequented, the speaker begins by observing, “Ghosts haunt their old haunts / But where will these ghosts go / Now that
Homer’s closed” (“Diner” 1-3). As in other poems by Menashe, the “ghosts” symbolize the past itself; the loss of a diner threatens to erase an entire history. But as the poem continues, it suggests that the loss of a diner also represents the loss of a social space for those who are themselves “almost” history:
And as for us
Who are almost ghosts
Where can we eat
With a garden view
And a bell tower
Across the street—
No place like H omer’s[.] (“Diner” 4-10)
The allusion to the cliche “no place like home” implies that for some the diner was a home that nourished, and reminds one of the importance of social spaces in individual lives. In fact, Menashe’s poem would not exist without Homer’s; the loss of the actual diner occasioned “Diner.” (As the poet notes, “When Homer’s closed, I was at a loss.
Some friend for whom it was a club said why don’t you write a poem about Homer’s?” 286
[TI].) Unlike Odysseus, however - the hero returning home in Homer’s Odyssey -
Menashe’s speaker remains adrift at the end, without even the full-stop of a period.
The untitled poem that begins “All my friends are homeless” is another text about the dangers of homelessness - as experienced by modem, rather than Homeric, soldiers
(“A f ’ 1). The speaker laments that
They do not even have tents
Were I to seek a safe place
I would run nights lost
Ice pelting my face.... (“A f’ 2-5)
In its second verse paragraph, however, the poem puts the reader in the position of the speaker’s “homeless” “friends” and commands the reader to “Lie down below the trees /
Be your own guest / Give yourself up...” (“A f ’ 10-12). Because the reader is without a home - a stable social space - the reader must arrange lodgings of his or her own and “Be
[his or her] own guest.” But this is an ironic injunction: to “Lie down below trees” and be exposed to the elements is hardly to have found a home. And to “Give yourself up,” in the context of this poem, is not to surrender oneself into the comfort of custody. The poem concludes with a command and an ominous prediction: “Take your time at noon / The planes will drone by soon” (“A f’ 14-5). The internal rhyme of “noon” and “soon” - divided by the dissonant off-rhyme of “drone” - sharpens the mechanized hum of overhead planes that may bring death with them. To be out of doors is to risk obliteration.
Menashe’s poems do not just signal the importance of the material conditions in which poems are produced and lives are lived. They also tally the costs of writing and 287 living, which, as practices that take place in time and space, exact a toll on the historically- and socially-situated poet. In the humorous “Heat Wave,” the speaker surveys the “Scrap paper” that surrounds him and discovers “Enough ink spilled / In rough drafts / To float the raft” (3-6). Although the poem exaggerates the amount of “ink” the speaker has used, it nevertheless reminds the reader that poesis is the product of physical labour, of putting pen to paper: a stationary act, awash in stationery. The first section of “Curriculum Vitae,” on the other hand, calls attention to the speaker’s lack of access to labour:
Scribe out of work
At a loss for words
Not his to begin with,
The man life passed by
Stands at the window
Biding his time[.] (“CV” 42)
The poem suggests that the “Scribe” lacks the ability to express himself; he is “At a loss for words” and these “words” are “Not his to begin with.” Language, in other words, is a social medium that precedes the self. As Bims notes of this poem, “the poet cannot, in a grandiose, Romantic manner, purport to ‘create’ language. Menashe presents a world view denuded of any false claims to aesthetic self-sufficiency” (“HWA”). But the poem, though resigned, refuses fatalism. Although it would seem that “life” acts on the “Scribe” by “pass[ing]” him “by,” he is not without the ability to make a choice; his ability to
“Bid[e] his time” balances life’s ability to “pass[]” him “by,” a point emphasized by the 288 internal rhyme. Like Bourdieu’s artist, Menashe’s “Scribe” is not entirely passive. He must wait to see what his “window” of opportunity presents to him.
Menashe’s poems remind one that, because the poet does not transcend “life,” his actions always already exist in a kind of material economy: a kind of “window” frame.
Put another way, the decision to take one action in the literary field - a decision anticipated by the field and presented as a choice - comes at the expense of taking another. (“Biding” one’s “time” at a “window” can also be rephrased as the act of spending one’s “time.”) “Morning” describes the seemingly lonely life of a person who, because he is devoted to poetry, can be devoted to little else:
I wake and the sky
Is there intact
The paper is white
The ink is black
My charmed life
Harms no one—
No wife, no son[.] (“Morning” 45)
The poem begins with a subject-verb construction that suggests the speaker is in control of his life: “I wake....” The speaker surveys his surroundings, which have not changed -
“the sky / Is there, intact” - and thus have a feeling of permanence, nor have his possessions - his “paper” and “ink” - been tampered with. There are no scrawled-upon notes about missing plums to be found - notes like Williams’s “This Is Just to Say,” which would indicate the presence of others. But, unlike the speaker in Williams’s 289
“Danse Russe,” Menashe’s speaker does not ultimately celebrate the illusion of his independence from family, society, and, more generally, his physical environment. On waking, he finds that the “sky” is always already there: unavoidable, and yet also outside of the poet’s realm of influence: “intact.” The word “charmed” takes on an ironic and slightly bitter edge, especially given that it half-rhymes with the word “Harms”: his
“charmed life / Harms no one,” but only because it is, in a sense, anything but “charmed.”
It lacks the family that it could not make room for; the family that, by its very absence, enables the speaker to “wake” in the morning to nothing but the constants of his “paper” and “ink.” It can be argued that the person who is harmed by this relationship is the speaker himself; he has traded a “wife” and “son” for the writing life. The opening, “I wake,” also recalls one of Hopkins’s “terrible” sonnets: “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” in which a speaker “wake[s]” to darkness and describes his “cries” to God as
“dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away” (1, 7-8). The allusion casts a shadow over Menashe’s secular poem, not to mention its stationery - the “ink” and
“paper” - which, though brightly enumerated, will result in nothing more than “dead letters”: failed attempts to communicate with an Other (not God, as in the Hopkins poem, but an equally elusive family that might give a life meaning). Hopkins came up many times in my talks with Menashe. He calls his an “idolatry love of Hopkins” (TI).
The poem also reiterates the unsettling point that the individual is never truly alone, and that space is always already infused with the ghost of history or, in the case of
“Morning,” what we might call the “absent presence” of a family that influences a life by virtue of not being there. In “Autobiography,” for example, the self-critical speaker 290
laments that a familial line that begins with his mother - “the mother / Of an only son” -
is going to end with him (“Auto” 4-5). Because he “never became / Anyone’s father,” he is
Still only a son
As an old man—
What I have not done
Made me who I am. (“Auto” 6-7, 8-11)
The lines “Still only a son / As an old man” suggest that the speaker “Still” exists in an immature state. The conclusion, however, is not entirely regretful; as in the poem “Cargo”
- in which the speaker notes that “Old wounds leave good hollows” and “I am made whole by my scars” - “Autobiography” makes peace with the belief that the self is shaped irrevocably by previous actions. As Menashe’s poems suggest, over and over, the person who occupies the fringes of society - its small, crowded niches - should not be idealized.
The wind tunnel of history swirls around the self like a ghost.
3. “The niche narrows”: Locating Menashe
“Upon my return from France,” Menashe notes, “I looked into little and literary magazines, but I found nothing in them that corresponded to what I was doing” (“GDD” xvi). “Although a few poems were accepted - the first [“Someone Walked Over my
Grave”] byThe Yale Review - I could not find a publisher for a book” (“GDD” xvi). It is ironic that Menashe’s concise poems, many of which are set in small urban spaces, have had a hard time finding their place in the literary field. Lack of social and cultural capital, as discussed in the first part of the chapter, has played a role. Menashe, however, observes that his poetry itself has contributed to his obscurity: “By thekind of poetry I write and not being a part of the establishment, I’ve paid a price for that, I guess”
(Valente; emphasis added). Many of his critics agree, though there is no consensus as to the reasons why the poetry has marginalized Menashe. Some suggest that the extreme concision of Menashe’s work, for better or worse, leaves the poet out of step with that of other American poets in the late twentieth century, whose work is more sprawling.175
Some argue that its extreme concision disqualifies the work from sustained critical attention. At least one critic suggests that this concision not only warrants sustained attention but, in fact, demands too much of it, resulting in lengthy exegeses that can eclipse the suggestive poems that inspired them. As Brown notes, “It is often difficult to distinguish Menashe’s brilliance from that of his critics.... [T]here is a vast difference between the expansive, generous allusiveness of The Waste Land and the pressurized complexity of much of Menashe’s work. This is the poem as microchip, as Rubik’s Cube”
(44). Menashe himself identifies a critical divide: “Those who approve of my poems call them economical or concise; the others dismiss them as slight” (“GDD” xvi). Menashe’s wry comment implicitly calls attention to how the seemingly objective “fact” of a poet writing short poems can be constructed in various ways by critics, whose critical language can help the poet (by labelling his or her poems “economical”) but also harm the poet (by labelling the poems “slight”).
Critics are also undecided as to the themes and concerns of Menashe’s poems.
Although it is not unusual for commentators to quarrel about the focus of a poet’s work, 292 there can be a striking amount of distance between Menashe’s. Spender states emphatically that, “Samuel Menashe is a poet of entirely Jewish consciousness” (“PSM” xxi). Gioia, on the other hand, backs away from describing Menashe purely in Jewish terms and argues, more generally, that “Menashe is essentially a religious poet, though one without an orthodox creed” (“Samuel Menashe” 239). Reductive words like
“entirely” and “essentially” do not just confine Menashe to one identity; they also essentialize that identity, suggesting that he cannot help but write poems that have a
Jewish or religious focus. (Troublingly, although Davie has described Menashe’s work as existing “at a linguistic and cultural crossroads,” he also notes in a later piece that
Menashe’s “Jewishness” is “sealed into his physiognomy” [Davie, “TPSM” 108;
Foreword 8].) Although his work is sometimes situated in a Hebraic tradition and demonstrates a faith in a larger, transcendent power, Menashe describes himself as
“agnostic” (TI).
Other critics downplay the religious elements of Menashe’s work dramatically, and focus on the self-reflexive nature of the poetry, its interest in language itself. P. N.
Furbank contends that,
Menashe is imbued with the “modernist” principle that a poem’s function
- and indeed the function of any work of art - is not to describe but to be.
Menashe stakes everything on, and places all his faith in, language. A
favorite device in his poems is to explore the double entendre of common
and banal phrases, with the implication that the subtle things he has to say
were always there, lurking in the grain of ordinary language. (149) 293
In associating Menashe with ‘“modernists’” whose project “is not to describe” a referent
in transparent language but, rather, to “explore” language itself, Furbank locates Menashe in a more secular and materialist tradition, one that intersects with the practices of those who identify themselves, or are identified as, avant-garde. His reading also aligns
Menashe with a poet like Kay Ryan who, as I argue in Chapter Three, is prompted into language by the unrealized meanings embedded in the “space of possibles” surrounding cliches177 (Bourdieu, RoA 235). Although Bims considers the religious themes in
Menashe’s work, he also emphasizes the self-reflexive nature of the poetry. Indeed, he goes even further than Furbank by suggesting that Menashe’s pared-down poetry, at times, is akin to visual poetry, which can make readers alert to the status of language as a
“physical” medium, as well as their own status as “physical” beings:
The concrete presence of the words on the page, the way not just the
meaning of the words but the number of syllables and letters they have,
matters to the reader’s experience can [sic] indicate a kind of analogy to
the body. As we see how the physical location of words on a page matter,
we become more aware of the consequences of the physical presence of
our own bodies. (Bims, “HWA”)
Bims’s language seems to echo that of experimental poet-theorists like Charles Bernstein
(1950-), one of the founders of the language poetry movement. (In an influential essay,
“Writing and Method,”178 Bernstein describes how the “text formally involves the process of response/interpretation and in so doing makes the reader aware of herself or himself as producer as well as consumer of meaning. It calls the reader to action, questioning, self- 294 examination” [233].) I do not want to suggest that Bims is locating Menashe in the avant- garde per se - the language poets aim to draw attention to the materiality of language as opposed to the material body of the poet - but Menashe’s work, as Bims suggests, is not merely descriptive, but, rather, engages with the very texture of language, thus calling the reader (who might otherwise relax into reverie) to greater awareness than, perhaps, a poem that makes more conventional use of language. More recently, steering clear of an emphasis on the religious in his introduction to Menashe’s New and Selected Poems,
Christopher Ricks observes that, when reading Menashe, it is appropriate to focus attention on individual letters: “When attending to Menashe’s poems, Davie found himself descending the scale of units, from verse-line to word to foot to syllable” (xxxi).
“Why not then to the very letter?” Ricks demands: “For Menashe has something of
Lucretius’s cosmic comic pleasure in the thought that the atoms that constitute all that is physical are also the letters that constitute all that is verbal” (xxxi).
To be sure, critics are correct to acknowledge the vividly material nature of
Menashe’s language. His use of repetition and internal rhyme in “Windows: Old Widow”
- to cite but one of many examples - can have the effect of nearly emptying the poem’s words of their meaning, leaving little more than sound itself. (The word “window” occurs three times, with an additional “win” hidden in the word “twin” as well as several instances of “in” [2, 4, 6, 7]. Liquid consonance also pours through the poem, to such an extent that the letter “1” seems to separate from its words, like insoluble matter: “pillow,”
“sill,” “elbow,” “Enclosed,” “grill,” “bloom,” and, again, “sill” [1, 2, 3, 5, 7].) Other texts incorporate conspicuous line-breaks and page layouts, approaching the status of visual 295 poetry. “Moon Night” tapers and bulges like an hour glass, recalling George Herbert’s
“The Altar” and “Easter Wings” (1633). “Dusk,” on the other hand, enacts the very ascension of sound it records:
night
into
earth
from
rise
Voices[.] (1-6)
Because the poem needs to be read in reverse order, one’s initial reading is sure to be an estranging experience since the words, as one’s eyes move down the page, do not cohere to make grammatical sense. They assert themselves first and foremost as a streak of discrete words.
The status of the individual self in the poet’s poems is also cause for disagreement among critics. Mahon, who argues that Menashe “belongs to no American tradition, but rather to the European Romantic and existentialist tradition,” cites Menashe’s war poem
“Winter” as evidence of the poet’s Romanticism:
I am entrenched
Against the snow,
Visor lowered
To blunt its blow 296
I am where I go[.] (Mahon 163; “Winter” 9)
Mahon is not precise about what he means by the “European Romantic and existentialist tradition,” but he does suggest that for Menashe, the “imagination” represents the ‘“ first emanation of divinity,’ as Yeats said of Blake” (163). Chapman also detects a discrete self that precedes Menashe’s poems, which, she suggests, imply that “the existence of a poet is a prerequisite to a poem, and that this implies some confluence of talent, circumstance, and character” (328). But she also hints that this self is physical and perhaps even provisional: “Menashe’s portrayal of his self-as-poet is vulnerable, though never sentimental or narcissistic”; “In most of Menashe’s poems, there is a deeply grounded sense of humor about the self. Often it returns us to the bodily condition with a sort of droll pathos” (Chapman 325, 326; emphasis added). Indeed, Mahon’s example of
Menashe’s Romanticism - the poem “Winter” - can just as easily suggest that identity is not fixed and that the self is always already in a state of process. According to Bims,
Menashe’s poem has “implications in, say, classical or medieval philosophy” and suggests that
being is dynamism; to exist is to act, to be purposively in motion. This
could either mean that merely to “be,” what Wallace Stevens might term
of mere being, is impossible, or, conversely, that what we think of as
“mere” contemplative being is in fact agency. Thus the individual being
where it is he goes, as opposed to having himself defined by opposition to
the environment, is like a frozen river having its ice dissolve in spring and
flowing onto the adjoining woodlands. (“IG”) 297
I would go further and suggest that the self, as represented in “Winter,” is not unlike
Bakhtin’s grotesque body, “a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body” (RHW
317). Also, when read in the context of Menashe’s other war poems - with which
“Winter” is grouped in New and Selected Poems - Menashe’s use of the verb
“entrenched” emphasizes the physical nature of the self by alluding to the war-time trenches in which the boundaries of soldiers’s bodies are threatened. Menashe’s three-line poem “Beachhead” hints at how war reshapes the body: “The tide ebbs / From a helmet /
Wet sand embeds” (“Beachhead” 1-3). The title - “Beachhead” - is darkly ironic; the
“tide” that “ebbs” can be read as water, but blood as well.
In opposition to Mahon’s reading, then, one can understand Menashe’s poetry as sometimes challenging the Romantic idea of the self-determining individual who authors his or her own destiny. For example, the first section of “At Cross Purposes,” a suite of five poems, asks:
Is this writing mine
Whose name is this
Did I underline
What I was to miss? (“ACP” 1-4)
The poem echoes Menashe’s aforementioned “Curriculum Vitae,” which describes a poet
“At a loss for words / Not his to begin with” (“CV” 2-3). Poets do not own the words they wield, the text suggests; words, rather, are a social medium. In fact, when I noted that the first section of “At Cross Purposes” “almost puts me in mind of Barthes’s “The Death of 298 the Author,” and that “it seems to suggest that the identity of the author is not just tenuous, but finally unimportant, irrelevant,” Menashe responded, “Of course, I’m not a confessional poet, whereas in confessional poetry the author is constantly trumpeted”
(TI). (He noted, too, that “I never am concerned with originality” and, pointing to his poem “Nightfall,” which describes “night” as a “text / Which days divide,” declared that
“I don’t really believe in free will. That current of the subconscious has carried me. I never decided anything. The days interrupt the endless flux of the subconscious” [TI].)
The poem “Anonymous” constitutes another example of a text that challenges the idea that selves can be present and transparently available to one another. The final lines observe that
We live lies
And grow old
Self disguised—
Who are you
I talk to? (“Anonymous” 4-8)
The poem implies that identity is performed; when I suggested this to Menashe, he told me, “We live lies, we live illusions, really. People speak of the narrative of their lives.
But also the sense of a definite identity. One saw a table, oak, strong. But now we know that the solid table is just a field of atoms bombing each other endlessly” (TI). In
Menashe’s poems, the self is not a stable presence and does not necessarily express itself with absolute clarity. Indeed, the poem “Story Teller” insists that the writer “lies a lot, / 299
So to speak,” which suggests, among other things, that one must “lie” in order “to speak”
(“S ip ’ g_9) “Language, words always fall short,” Menashe observes (Menashe, TI).
Although Menashe is not an easy poet to categorize (one of the few points about which his commentators agree), some of his critics risk dehistoricizing him. Looking at
Menashe’s work in 1970, Davie argues that Menashe’s “chance of appealing to another publisher must be remote.... One trouble is that his poems are as far from being traditional as they are from being in the fashion, or in any of the several fashions that have come and gone, whether in British or American poetry, over the last 25 or for that matter 100 years” (“TPSM” 107). Menashe’s poems, Davie notes, are neither “in the fashion” of 1970 or, for that matter, “traditional.” This suggestion, however, has the effect of implying that the poems exist outside of time and are the products of an individual unconfmed by history. Aheam also celebrates an “individual” achievement when he notes that, in his observance of “a poetic unaffiliated with recognizable schools of poetry,”
Menashe “seems to have paid the price for being rigorously individual” (308). More recently, however, Brown does a better job of contextualizing Menashe by describing some of the schools in which Menashe’s poetry does not fit, and noting how his poetry
“must have seemed somewhat peculiar and awkward to a generation just discovering the deep image, South American magical realism, ‘found’ poetry, ‘concrete’ poetry, ‘naked’ poetry, and so on.... How must Menashe’s poetry have struck the Beats, the Black
Mountain Poets, the Confessionalists, and those of the New York School?” (Brown).
Menashe himself identifies “the Beat poets” and “confessional poetry” as two phenomena that were much discussed in the 1960s and 70s, but which had no room for his work. As 300
Brown concludes, “Poets like [Menashe]... exist in a twilit historical space, a limbo between renown and oblivion.” Brown effectively historicizes Menashe, who occupies a
“historical space,” however darkly lit.
Bourdieu’s theory of the structure of the literary field, however, provides an especially productive vocabulary through which to view Menashe’s “twilit” situation. As poets take positions in the literary field that were previously unoccupied and then cluster around these positions, a constellation of points flicker into being, representing different schools and styles: Beat, confessional, Black Mountain, etc. Menashe’s poems, I would argue, do not sit easily on any of these points, but, rather, slip between them, in the “space of possibles” (Bourdieu, RoA 235). For example, although his texts, at times, approach the status of visual poetry or call attention to the materiality of language, their allusion to the Hebraic and Christian traditions can put them at odds with more secular and politically progressiveavant-garde movements like language poetry, which emerged in the 1970s.179 On the other hand, Menashe’s resistance to humanist modes that celebrate the lyric “I,” like the confessional school, left him out of yet another prominent loop.
None of this is to suggest that Menashe exists outside of his historical moment or cultural environment; it is merely to suggest that Menashe’s poems have tended to occupy a
“niche,” but a historical one, a gap anticipated by the structure of the contemporary
American literary field. And when one takes into account the poet’s lack of social and cultural capital, it is not hard to grasp why Menashe’s poetry was lost in space prior to
Poetry magazine’s intervention. Ironically, though, this was not even the first time that a magazine had saved the day by hauling the poet out of oblivion, which is to say 301
publishing his work and awarding the poet money (economic capital) and prestige
(cultural capital). Indeed, in 1955, Menashe wrote a short story about an experience in
World War II entitled, “Well Everyone Must Die and Today Was the 11th of December,”
which was published in the Berkeley Review. “It was the last issue,” Menashe tells me,
“and it got me an award from the Longview Foundation. The judges were very important
- Louise Bogan, Saul Bellow. It was a three hundred dollar award. They didn’t know where to find me. For months. They saw a poem of mine in a magazine and found me”
(TI).
4. “Wake up late,” Out of the Wilderness: Menashe andPoetry
In December 1916, Poetry published an unsigned “Our Contemporaries” column that was almost certainly written by Monroe180 and seems to anticipate the example of a
lost poet like Menashe, one who is isolated and requires support. Responding to a recent
Atlantic article by Samuel McChord Crothers, in which Crothers celebrates the poet as an anti-social figure, 181 the unsigned column asks,
Did Dante “love the wilderness” - the spiritual isolation - to which
contemporaries condemned him? did Heine? Bums? Blake? Is there any
proof, or indeed any probability, that the art of these great men was
improved by such isolation? - an isolation which was indeed, in each case,
far from complete, as each one had his few sympathetic admirers. 302
And those Hebrew prophets... they may have gone into the
wilderness, but did they stay there? They came back hot-footed to shout to
the crowd and quarrel with the prophets of Baal. (“OC” 160-61)
Rereading this passage, which I quoted in my first chapter,182 it is tempting to view
Menashe, prior to his first publication in the April 2004 issue of Poetry, as one of
Monroe’s Blake-like figures or “Hebrew prophets,” on the verge of returning from “an isolation which was... far from complete.” Menashe, after all, was not just a poet in the
Blakean or Hebraic tradition; he “had his few sympathetic admirers,” including, as already noted, critics like Kathleen Raine, Donald Davie, and Stephen Spender, among others. But by 2004, many of these “sympathetic admirers” were no longer alive, and
Menashe lacked a publisher and a magazine on which he could rely. Indeed, when
Spender resigned from Encounter - a “place where the door wasn’t slammed in front of
[Menashe] immediately” - Menashe, in his words, “lost [his] gallery” (Menashe, TI). By
2004, then, the socially- and culturally-situated poet existed in what Monroe would call a
“wilderness” and what Menashe’s poetry calls a “niche,” ‘“ outside the walls’” of the university and its networks of support (Mahon 163). In other words, he represented a model example of the sort of wandering poet that Monroe had once hoped to help: a figure in need of what she calls a “magazine-gallery,” a space in the form of a reliable, paying magazine devoted to poetry (Monroe, “Then and Now” 142).
He also represented a useful poet for a reinvigorated, post-Ruth Lilly incarnation of Poetry magazine to support. In publishing Menashe, after all, the magazine could argue that it is fulfilling, in part, the Poetry Foundation’s mandate “to discover and celebrate the 303
best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience” (Poetry Foundation,
“About”). Like Ryan’s poems,183 Menashe’s address a large, if somewhat hard to define,
audience. Although Brown suggests that, when it comes to drawing readers, the
“expansive, generous allusiveness” of a poem like The Waste Land is superior to the
“pressurized complexity of much of Menashe’s work,” I would argue that The Waste
Land is hardly “generous” and requires an initiated readership that shares Eliot’s classical
education and erudition (44). Concise poems like Menashe’s untitled “A pot poured out /
Fulfills its spout” can certainly elicit scholarly commentary - Ricks spends a page on this deceptively simple poem’s carefully constructed sounds - but the poem’s uncomplicated diction makes it relatively available to most who are literate (Ricks, “Introduction” xxx- xxxi). The poems unfold in a linear way; although many of them (like those devoted to his apartment) address specific moments and places, many others are so concise they seem unencumbered by context, like the following untitled piece: “Between bare boughs /
One star decrees / Winter clarity” (“Between bare boughs” 1-3). Menashe’s subject matter is so vast that critics like Gioia can concentrate on the religious themes, while others, like Ricks, can choose to ignore such themes altogether. In short, in “discovering” or, rather, “rediscovering” Menashe, Poetry magazine did not just create an identity for
Menashe as a cult figure who has been rescued from neglect; it “rediscovered” itself as a kind of refuge or gallery space that would welcome poets who can address a large audience.
This process began with the very first appearance, in the April 2004 issue, of a
Menashe poem - the already-discussed “Here”: 304
Ghost I house
In this old flat—
Your outpost—
My aftermath. (“Here” 1-4)
Maintaining the spatial metaphor, Menashe notes that “Here” “opened up the door for me at the Poetry Foundation” (TI). The poem appears at the end of the first section of the issue, one that has been devoted historically to poems. (The section that follows the poems, “Comment,” has usually focused on works of prose, such as reviews, essays, and letters.) A cursory reader of the April number could very easily pass over Menashe’s concise poem, which might seem like an insignificant afterthought, given that it is buried at the very back of the poetry section. But as Jerome McGann reminds scholars,
We must turn our attention to much more than the formal and linguistic
features of poems or other imaginative fictions. We must attend to textual
materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in “poetry”:
to typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual
phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to “poetry” or the “text
as such.” (13)
Indeed, the material context that surrounds and constitutes Menashe’s “Here,” in the April
2004 issue, should be considered inseparable from the poem itself, as it plays a role in making meaning for the poem and fashioning an identity for Menashe.
For example, before the reader even reaches “Here,” on page 36, she has already been encouraged to regard the poem as something of an event, by a conspicuous 305 paratextual element on the cover of the issue: a headline that declares: “Samuel Menashe:
Alive and Kicking.” The headline assumes - or, one might say, constructs - a very particular kind of reader: one who has heard of Menashe but, for whatever reason, thought him dead. Thus, the person who has not heard of Menashe is subtly excluded by the headline, though not necessarily to damaging effect. The headline’s slangy language, after all, echoes that of a tabloid aimed at a large audience, embuing Menashe with an aura of lurid mystique. It also suggests that, in the minds of both sets of readers (the initiated, who are being addressed, and the uninitiated, whose interest is being piqued), the man named “Samuel Menashe” has not exactly existed - until now. The headline is an act of creation as much as defibrillation, bringing the poet to life and investing him with symbolic capital. In other words, it works to construct an identity for the poet as an important figure who has been neglected. It encourages the reader to anticipate a poem that will be worth her attention.
Another important element of the material context of “Here” - one that shapes the meaning of the poem, in particular - is the poem’s placement relative to other texts in the
April 2004 number. Menashe himself calls attention to the importance of a poem’s immediate context in his discussion of “The Living End,” which appeared in the 28
September 1998 issue of The New Yorker. As Menashe notes,
that was one of six poems Alice Quinn [former Poetry Editor] accepted for
The New Yorker, and she put them in “The Talk of the Town,” except for
“The Living End,” which was [listed] in the table of contents. In other
words, the other poems, people might happen upon them. This one 306
appeared in the middle of an article on the scandal of Lewinski and
Clinton. People thought I’d written it about the scandal, but I didn’t.
(Menashe, TI)
Although an appearance in The New Yorker can provide a poet with significant cultural capital,184 by being relegated to “The Talk of the Town” - a section of the magazine devoted to news, local colour, and gossip - Menashe’s poems lose symbolic capital.
Readers, after all, are encouraged to read the poems, by their position, as topical or light verse. They are not “real” poems, those that are implicitly categorized as such by virtue of being mentioned in the table of contents. (Interestingly, even the meanings of these “real” poems - like “The Living End” - are not insulated against the articles in which they find themselves embedded; they, too, are shaped by their surroundings.) But much like T. S.
Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” from the June 1915 issue of Poetry,
“Here” takes on the aura of an event by virtue of its position at the very end of the April
2004 poetry section. The title itself - “Here” - calls further attention to the poem’s position: “Here” is something to consider, in a published space reserved for poetry worth noticing. It is also a marker at which the reader can pause, before the prose section, which lacks the pride of place the poetry occupies. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the prose is followed by letters, and the letters, by advertisements - a sequence that suggests a subtle but steady devolution in prestige of genre.)
Space is also an important paratextual element that shapes the meaning of the poem. Other short poems in the April 2004 number - including a handful by Kay Ryan - tend to be clustered together on the same page.185 But because the editors only accepted 307 one by Menashe (at least on this first occasion), there were no other poems of his to group with “Here.” As a result, a stark expanse of space follows Menashe’s four-line poem, flooding the rest of the page and working on several levels. In terms of design, the emptiness singles out “Here” from other short poems in the issue, which are grouped together, thus investing a seemingly slight poem with importance. The expanse also draws attention to the poem’s subject matter by making material the “Ghost” that the speaker “house[s] / In [his] old flat” (“Here” 1-2). The nearly blank page reminds one of the importance of space as a subject matter in Menashe’s poems. And the space itself suggests that “Here” is weighty enough to figuratively “fill” the page.
The final paratextual element that bears scrutiny is Menashe’s biographical note, printed at the back of the issue: “SAMUEL MENASHE* is the author of The Niche
Narrows (Talisman House, 2000). His work appears in the New Yorker, the Times
Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. His new manuscript is available to an interested publisher” (“Contributors” 62). The asterisk marks the first appearance of a poet in Poetry and implies that this is an event. In other words, it signals the cultural capital that comes with a publication in the magazine. (So, too, do the references to Menashe’s appearances in The New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement.) The asterisk is especially remarkable given the headline on the cover, which implies that Menashe is an older poet who is still “Alive and Kicking.” But even more conspicuous is the comment, “His new manuscript is available to an interested publisher,” which suggests that this elderly poet, with publications in prominent venues like The New Yorker and the TLS, is nevertheless at loose ends (a problem that the magazine and the Poetry Foundation will come to address when they create the Neglected Masters Award and arrange for the publication of
Menashe’s New and Selected Poems with the Library of America). Menashe’s note, of
course, is not as colourful as those given to Vachel Lindsay in the early years of Poetry, which describe Lindsay as a “vagabond poet” on a “tramping crusade” (“Notes,” January
1913; “Notes” 151). But the paratext differs from the eighteen other, more conventional
examples in the April issue, which tend to list the titles of recent and forthcoming publications - but nothing that has not been published or, at least, accepted by a press.
(Given the success of her own career, Ryan’s own blurb can afford to affect a veneer of cool restraint: “Kay Ryan is the author of six books of poetry. She lives in northern
California” [“Contributors” 62].) Menashe’s earnest appeal suggests a travesty: here is a poet who has appeared in major magazines - who has even had at least one book of his own - but who is forced to advertise his availability to an “interested publisher.” It also suggests thatPoetry itself thinks that Menashe deserves to find a publisher.
Following the publication of “Here,” Poetry published Danielle Chapman’s review of Menashe’s book The Niche Narrows in August 2004, which further shored up
Menashe’s identity. The mere fact of the review is worth comment; The Niche Narrows was published in 2000, four years before Chapman’s piece. (Of the ten other books considered in the August 2004 issue by two other reviewers, eight were published in
2003, and two in 2004.) The review, then, salvages a book that would seem to be no longer timely, thus supporting the Poetry Foundation’s mandate to “discover” work and deliver it to “the largest possible audience” (Poetry Foundation, “About”). More 309 importantly, though, the review creates a portrait of a poet who would seem to be out of step with his time and in need of support. Menashe, Chapman writes, is
something of an anachronism in our professional age. While his
contemporaries have garnered the fellowships, prizes, and university jobs
that represent success in American poetic culture, poetry has been for him
an independent, and ultimately isolating, venture. At almost eighty years
old, and with only a fraction of his work in print, he is practically
unrecognized, except as a sort of eccentric cult figure, the last West
Village bohemian. The poetry, however, rises above this kitschy
reputation. (Chapman 324)
Although Chapman is quick to suggest that Menashe’s work “rises above [any] kitschy reputation,” her review nevertheless helps to imagine Menashe as a kind of non professional outsider in a “professional age” who has avoided the conventional path to
“success.” In other words, Chapman invests Menashe with the symbolic capital of the artist who resists an economic or commercial position (Bourdieu, RoA 141-42). Her review also suggests that the outsider - “At almost eighty years old, and with only a fraction of his work in print” - exists in a precarious state. Her review, then, can be read as a timely intervention.
In the very next issue of Poetry, the editors printed three new poems by the poet, further creating a space for Menashe’s work and an identity for the poet as a neglected master near the end of his life. “Rue” offers a response to Dylan Thomas’s villanelle “Do
Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”: 310
For what I did
And did not do
And do without
In my old age
Rue, not rage
Against that night
We go into,
Sets me straight
On what to do
Before I die—
Sit in the shade,
Look at the sky[.] (“Rue” 1-12)
In the famous refrain of Thomas’s villanelle, prompted by the process of his father’s
dying, a speaker urges an addressee to resist the end of his life aggressively, symbolized
by fading light: “Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of
the light” (Thomas 18-9). The spondee, “Rage, rage,” repeated four times in the
villanelle, violently disrupts the line’s iambic pentameter and suggests that one should not be complacent but, rather, should try to assert control over a process that one cannot
finally master. Menashe’s poem, however, rejects the implicitly masculine violence of the speaker’s call to “Rage, rage,” and suggests a more reflective approach: “Rue” or regret.
By alluding consciously to Thomas’s poem, the new work constitutes a dialogic response to a pre-existing utterance. (As Menashe has noted, “I never am concerned with 311 originality” [TI].) Furthermore, whereas Thomas’s speaker “rage[s] against the dying of the light,” Menashe’s speaker makes do with a lack of light - with “shade.” Indeed, given the recent review of Menashe’s work in Poetry, the reader is encouraged to read the speaker’s place “in the shade” as symbolizing the poet’s marginal position. (At the same time, however, the editors’ decision to publish “Rue” implicitly suggests they believe that
Menashe, however marginal, is a master on par with Thomas - or, at least, a poet capable of offering a response to one of the best-known poems of the twentieth century; a response somewhat legitimized by the appearance of the response in the pages of Poetry.)
Another poem in the September issue, “The Stars Are,” emphasizes the shade- dwelling poet’s lack of command within his surroundings. The first verse paragraph offers a catalogue of natural bodies that are indifferent to the poet:
The stars are
Although I do not sing
About them—
The sky and the trees
Are indifferent
To whom they please
The rose is unmoved
By my nose
And the garland in your hair
Although your eyes be lakes, dies.... (“TSA” 1-10) 312
The first line - “The stars are” - would seem to be enjambed and awaiting an adjective to describe its noun (“stars”), or another noun to complete a metaphor; but the next line suggests that the first is self-sufficient, an endstopped unit of sense. In other words, the speaker resists describing the stars, either through an adjective or the terms of something else; they just “are.” Moreover, the speaker does “not sing / About them....” He goes on to point out the “indifference” of “The sky and the trees” to those “they please” - presumably, the consumers of poems, who aestheticize such bodies, reducing them to objects of consumption. (The “rose,” too, does not care about human attention.) The natural world, however, is not merely “indifferent” to those who would “sing / About” it and, by extension, idealize it; that is, it is not merely a passive backdrop. The natural world rebukes such song by demonstrating its considerable materiality. For example, in the final line of the first verse paragraph, the “eyes” of some beloved are compared to
“lakes,” which is to say the “lakes” are colonized and assigned human attributes. But the comparison is slightly archaic in construction - “your eyes be lakes” - and, therefore, ironic. And “the garland” - the sort of sprig that decorates a beloved’s “hair” - ultimately
“dies” at the end of the first verse paragraph.
The natural world, as Menashe presents it, is not a realm that requires idealization.
Indeed, the next and shorter verse paragraph offers the prospective poet advice as to how to sing in the face of nature:
Why sigh for a star
Better bay at the moon
Better bay at the moon... 313
Oh moon, moon, moon[.] (“TSA” 11-14)
The poet should not “sigh for a star,” which suggests a calm and civilized approach to singing. The poet, rather, should “bay at the moon” like a wolf. In other words, Menashe does not place the poet on a pedestal; he reminds us that the poet is a physical being and, more specifically, an animal that exists at night and out of the light. His use of repetition amplifies the poet’s non-human howl - though it is not an aggressive howl, like the raging of Thomas’s speaker in the face of fading light; Menashe’s baying is rather more celebratory. “In that poem, I refuse the image of the Romantic poet,” Menashe asserted
(TI). When I noted that the poem does not exploit nature, Menashe agreed: “Certainly I am saying that in this poem” (TI). But his respect for nature can be discovered in other texts. For example, on an audio recording for the Poetry Foundation, Menashe steps outside of his apartment and notes, “I have nothing to add to this day.... An old friend of mine, we’re admiring the sunset, and she says, ‘You should make a poem out of it.’ I said,
‘No! The sunset is enough’” (Botein). In another anecdote, Menashe describes how he once went “completely on automatic” when he saw a sparrow hopping in Central Park: “I saw a sparrow cleaning himself in a puddle, and before I knew it, I was hopping with that sparrow” (Menashe, TI). The self in Menashe’s work does not endeavour or presume to stand outside of nature and master it.
A third contribution to the September issue, “Heat Wave,” also emphasizes the poet’s lack of self-determination. Given that the other poems are self-reflexive, one can conclude that the site of “Heat Wave” is very likely the interior space of a poet’s apartment. And the space is not a passive backdrop but, rather, active, even 314 claustrophobic. Indeed, one of the features of the space - a bed - is imagined as a ship whose sails have collapsed around a male figure:
Sheets entangle him
Naked on his bed
Like a toppled mast
Slack sails bedeck
At sea, no ballast
For that even keel
He cannot keep—
No steering wheel
As he falls asleep[.] (“HW” 1-9)
The figure is “Naked” and compared to “a toppled mast,” “bedeck[ed]” with “Slack sails,” an image that symbolizes detumescence and likely even impotence. The “Sheets,” after all, act upon the figure, “entangl[ing] him.” (The title suggests that the speaker, in addition to waves, is at the mercy of the elements: a “Heat Wave.”) Moreover, the figure cannot control the bed-ship: “He cannot keep” an “even keel” and he lacks a “steering wheel.” In the final line, the figure succumbs to the natural force of sleep. The poet does not determine his course; he is buoyed along by his choppy context.
In 2004, Menashe’s identity as a formerly neglected poet near the end of his life was reinforced in dramatic fashion. Having been alerted to his situation by his first, April
2004 appearance in Poetry, the Poetry Foundation created the Neglected Masters Award, which consists of $50,000 and a book with the Library of America. In other words, 315 because of the award, the previously precarious position suddenly became formalized in the American poetry world. The magazine, meanwhile, continued to publish Menashe’s late poems, some of which persist in reflecting on the poet as a material being at the mercy of larger, socially and culturally situated forces. In June 2005, the magazine published several new poems including one about parentage, “Descent.” After describing his father in the first verse paragraph, the speaker concludes, “I take after him,” a line that is isolated on its own (“Descent” 4). The third verse paragraph then locates the speaker in relation to his mother:
Clouds crowd the sky
Around me as I run
Downhill on a high—
I am my mother’s son
Bom long ago
In the storm’s eye[.] (“Descent” 5-10)
The image of the speaker running “Downhill on a high” recalls Menashe’s own aforementioned description of the Pamassus-like hill on which his classically educated parents were situated: “I’ve said my parents were so far up the slope I only had to take a small step” (TI). The speaker, this poem suggests, is not self-made; he is a product of his parents’ stormy friction, a relationship embodied by the very structure of the poem, which positions a lone line between two more substantial verse paragraphs: one about the father, the other, the mother. (Interestingly, the sky against which the poem’s action is set does 316
not offer an especially expansive backdrop against which the speaker’s self can range:
“Clouds crowd the sky.”)
“Captain, Captive,” another poem from the June 2005 issue of Poetry, can be read
as a companion piece to “Heat Wave.” The self is presented as a “Captain,” but one who
is not in control. In fact, the self is “Captive
Of your fate
Fast asleep
On the bed you made
Dream away
Wake up late[.] (“CC” 1-5)
Although the poem suggests that the speaker had some hand in determining his “fate” by
making the bed on which he succumbs to sleep, when read in the context of Menashe’s
larger body of work, the poem can be understood less a celebration of self-determination than an acknowledgment of the limited set of choices that a particular social and cultural context - like the literary field - makes available to a particular agent, like Menashe: choices that, once made, hold the agent “Captive.” It is tempting to read the self in
“Captain, Captive” as Menashe himself, who, in 2005, is only just beginning to “Wake up
late” to a life that has been held “Captive.” (The newly acquired fame may also be holding the poet “Captive.”)
The very late poem “Biographer,” from the 2008 issue ofPoetry, reminds us that the identities of poets like Menashe are ultimately a construction of others, including 317 those biographers who survive and write books - or those critics who survive and write dissertation chapters - about their subjects:
Authorized, booked
By my steadfast prose
The dead I ghost write
Shed shadows that shine
With hindsight, hearsay—
The last word is mine[.] (“Biographer” 1-6)
By breaking the verb “ghostwrite” into two words, the poem inverts a traditional relationship and suggests that biographers “ghost” or haunt the “dead.” Indeed, the line
“The dead I ghost write” could mean: “The dead [that] I[,] ghost[,] write”: the speaker is a ghost writing about ghosts, which is to say the speaker is somewhat indistinguishable from his vaporous subject matter. (There is no objective position from which to observe the world; people blend into the objects of their attention.) Unsurprisingly, then, the poem goes on to suggest that making sense of the “dead” is a murky, fraught task since they
“Shed shadows that shine / With hindsight, hearsay.” The biographer concludes that “The last word is mine,” reinforcing the idea that poets, far from being isolated, exist within a larger literary field in which they acquire their meaning. Menashe, however, is not pessimistic about this. Nor does he romanticize the poet as a figure independent from the sort of commercial apparatus that results in reviews and biographies. When I asked him what he made of critics, he noted that, “One is grateful to get someone to pay attention to one’s work. In show business, they say it’s better to get a bad review than no review at 318 all. It’s true. If you don’t get a review, people don’t know the book exists” (TI). You might as well be a ghost, he did not quite say.
5. Conclusion
Thanks to Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation, cultural institutions external to the poet, many readers now know that a body of work that has been difficult to classify exists. The Library of America book is now in its second printing, with more than
9,000 copies in print, making his work available to a large readership. In addition, the
Poetry Foundation has devoted space to Menashe online. It has created a substantial Web page that features a photograph, brief biography, and bibliography: http://www.poetrvfoundation.org/bio/samuel-menashe. The page archives thirty-nine poems by Menashe, two articles, an interview, several audio recordings of his poems, and an audio portrait of Menashe produced by Emily Botein, who visited and recorded the poet. All of these materials are free to access and a click away. Menashe’s Web page constitutes another relatively permanent space that will house the poet’s work and recorded voice for years to come. The interventions of the magazine and the Foundation led Menashe himself to affirm that, “Everything has changed. My work is secured in a way that was totally unimaginable to me at this time last year.Unimaginable" (“ISM”).
These words are especially poignant given that Menashe passed away in August of 2011.
The magazine and Foundation, however, have not simply created a secure gallery for the poet’s work; they have invested him with the symbolic capital of the hermetic outsider: a figure who is created and maintained by the literary field, even if he or she 319 appears to exist outside of economic relations. Ironically enough, Menashe certainly received late rewards for his ascetic existence. Bims points to the Neglected Masters
Award and “lavish dinner in Chicago” as signs of Menashe’s improving “fortunes”
(“HWA”). “Now,” as Valente wrote in NPR in 2006, “invitations to give readings flow in, and [Samuel Menashe is] the toast of the New York literary parties where he once was snubbed.” On the occasion of his death, Menashe received profiles in prominent publications like the New York Times, the Guardian, the Economist, and the Irish Times, among others. Bourdieu’s inverse economy would seem to apply to Menashe: the poet received success late in life to the extent that he had done without it earlier.
The magazine and Foundation, however, did not just invest Menashe with the prestige of the “Neglected”; they anointed him a “Master” - the crucial second word of the award, which implicitly admits Menashe to the sort of canon of which poems like “A
Bronze Head” are skeptical. (An unintentional irony: the volume put out by the Library of
America includes a section of prose about Menashe which includes an epigraph from Ben
Jonson and snippets of assessments by Donald Davie and Stephen Spender; the section’s title, “The Poets on Samuel Menashe,” suggests that Menashe is being sized up by and admitted to a pantheon.) One should remember, however, that the magazine and
Foundation could name Menashe a “Master” only because, once upon a time, other poets the magazine took a chance on - poets like Pound, H. D., and Williams, who were not yet canonized - paved the way for Menashe’s brand of concise, crystalline poetry and the magazine’s present-day activities. (And none of this is to say that Menashe is an Imagist; 320 he was not a contemporary of the Imagists, and his work sometimes embraces end- rhymes and religious themes, which Imagism tended to avoid.)
By canonizing Menashe, then, the magazine re-canonizes the poets it once supported and, by extension, re-canonizes itself as an arbiter of literary history. That a minimalist like Menashe can be called a “Master” represents a triumph for a periodical that once had to insist on the worth of a generation of minimalists. The subtle celebration of itself through Menashe, then, is not dissimilar to the current magazine’s appropriation of Pound’s phrase “make it new” - once used to help brand and summarize the modernist movement - for subscription renewal flyers (“Canto LIII” 265). Such an appropriation may be considered tacky, but then Monroe herself was not averse to making pleas for I 0£ readers to subscribe. The editor, like her present-day heirs - understood that art cannot be purified of economics.
Menashe himself tends to avoid romanticizing the poet’s life and, as I have demonstrated, often observes the importance of one’s connections in the literary field. He calls attention to the influence of his parents and, in his poems about his apartment, shows how the past “ghosts” and “hones” the seemingly discrete individual, who is never truly alone. His late poems, a number of which were published in Poetry, further debunk the myth of the poet who exists outside of history.
Most importantly, Menashe has helped to “hone,” however indirectly and slightly, the identity of Poetry and the Foundation. He has enabled them to help realize Monroe’s vision for a magazine that offers poets a metaphorical refuge, a pay cheque, and access to a larger audience. To create an award for Menashe and to arrange for his work to be 321 published in relatively permanent form - through book and Web site - is to formalize a stable position for a poet who has often had difficulty securing a publisher. It is to realize a space - if only a niche - for poetry. 322
Conclusion
The cover of the January 2012 issue of Poetry kicks off the magazine’s 100th year
in grand style: the words “100 YEARS,” in large capitals, occupy nearly half of it, dwarfing the title. Moreover, a pegasus, Poetry's early logo, soars over the “100 years.”
The magazine, these images suggest, has survived a century. It has also - although the images do not exactly suggest this - avoided the fate of the ephemeral little magazines with which Poetry once was lumped: oblivion.
It is the less conspicuous last page of the issue, however, that connects the present-day periodical with another metaphor and, in so doing, founding editor Harriet
Monroe’s original aspirations. The reader is confronted with a reproduction of a yellowed piece of paper, an “Invitation” to subscribe from January 1928, which reads, in part:
POETRY, A MAGAZINE OF VERSE is not a magazine in the ordinary
sense; it is an Art Gallery, where the poet hangs up his poems. You do not
have to go to the gallery - it comes to you; admission fee, twenty-five
cents a copy to each exhibit.
Attend these monthly poetry gatherings. Come and see what the
jury has picked out. Come to enjoy, come to criticize. For poets need, as
much as they need galleries in which to hang their work, spectators. Be
one. Subscribe. (Poetry Foundation, “Invitation.”)
By reproducing this document, the current editors reinstate - and reinforce - Monroe’s conception of Poetry as a “magazine-gallery,” an institution into which one might stroll 323
(“TaN” 142). They also suggest, however indirectly, that poets, through their very “need”
of sustainable spaces and strolling “spectators,” are historically and socially situated
figures and that poetry, as Monroe notes, “is not a miracle of direct creation, but a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public” (“MM” 27). In its 100th year, Poetry remains cognizant of its founder’s materialist vision.
Of course, when Monroe described Poetry as a “magazine-gallery” with an Open
Door policy, she did so in figurative terms. She could not have known that nearly a century later, the publishers of Poetry would open the actual doors of a real building, one designed “to help the Poetry Foundation carry out its mission of discovering and celebrating the best poetry and putting it before the largest possible audience” (Poetry
Foundation, “A Home for Poetry”). Located at 61 West Superior Street in Chicago, the building houses the magazine’s editorial staff and features a performance space, a library dedicated to poetry, and a garden open to the public (“A Home for Poetry”). As the
Foundation web site notes, the building “fulfills a century-old vision of Poetry magazine founder Harriet Monroe. Writing her first editorial in 1912, Monroe imagined that ultimately the magazine would help poets pursue their art, increase public interest in poetry, and raise poetry’s profile in society” (“A Home for Poetry”).
The building - like Monroe’s dream of compensating poets and enlarging their audience - has not been without controversy. Protesters from the so-called Croatan Poetic
Cell (CPC), a group of poets who occupy a warehouse in Chicago, were asked to leave this home for Poetry after they unfurled banners in the Foundation library, during a recent free reading (Axelrod). “WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF EMILY DICKINSON 324
HAD BEEN PRESCRIBED PROZAC?” blared one banner in capital letters, alluding to the source of Ruth Lilly’s historic fortune (Axelrod). The CPC, at least as described by
Jeremy Axelrod inSalon, would seem to resemble Kreymborg’s Others group: poets challenging a status quo and seeking alternative spaces in which to carry out their activities. (Such poets tend to be wary of the sort of success that supports stability;
Williams certainly bristled when Others sought to expand its operations and develop a
“club house, stock company, and bookstore” [Churchill 101].) As Axelrod notes, the
CPC’s goals “reflect a common (and romantic) notion that wealth is at odds with artistic authenticity. Nor is it new to fume that poets in particular grow dull amid the trappings of capitalism” (Axelrod).
Although the attempt to occupy the Poetry Foundation’s building - and thus rebel against the money that has funded it - is not a “new” gesture as rebellions go, the
Foundation’s building arguably embodies a vision that, if not exactly “new,” has never before found material expression on such a large scale: it constitutes a permanent institutional space devoted solely to American poetry. In other words - the words of
Bourdieu - the Poetry Foundation’s building, like Monroe’s magazine, occupies a hitherto unrealized position in the American literary field. Understanding the legacy of
Poetry, then, requires a revisionist approach. Poetry, as I suggested in the first chapter, should not be grouped with other little magazines of the early twentieth century but, rather, should be understood as a periodical-in-progress, a magazine that has always worked to expand the audience for poetry and is now entering the next, energized phase of its activities. 325
There are limits, of course, to Poetry's ambitions to expand its audience. Just who exactly constitutes the “largest possible audience” for poetry? Economic capital positions readers, after all, locating them at particular points in the literary field and organizing them into specific subcommunities that share a habitus or sensibility. (In short, money can help predispose certain clusters of people to having the time and space in which to hold feelings and opinions about such things as literary magazines.) Much has changed in our understanding of the literary field since the days when Monroe imagined the somewhat mythical Whitmanian masses her magazine would serve; and there continues to be much work for scholars to do. For example, the website of the Poetry Foundation, which has become a central site for discourse about poetry on the Internet as well as an educational tool, constitutes an entity unto itself, and, like its print incarnation of Poetry, is worthy of future study. Given that the Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, which is to say an organization with a commitment to the public good, it is worth asking: how is the public good defined? Are there poetries that do not readily serve the
Foundation’s mandate?
But what has not changed much, as Axelrod suggests, is the perception that money and art are incompatible, as well as the role that money plays in discourses about art. In the past, Poetry could be counted on to serve as a bank for symbolic and cultural capital. In other words, when a poet like Williams recoiled from what he perceived to be the magazine’s supposedly ‘“commercial”’ and mainstream nature, he could pocket the symbolic coinage of the outsider - even as he published in the magazine and secured the prestige associated with appearing in a prominent venue (HMPR 177). (The greater the 326
money with which a strawman is stuffed, the greater the artist who applies a torch to it.)
In recent years, since the $200,000,000 donation, Poetry can now be said to enjoy the
funds of something like an actual bank, ensuring that those who protest against it in
conspicuous fashion - like the CPC, Williams’s twenty-first-century heirs - will not only
find themselves the subjects of news stories in magazines like Salon-, they will, like the doctor-poet from Rutherford, find for themselves an identity, one defined in the negative, in opposition to wealth and, more generally, the economic pole - but one that still depends on its polar opposite.
Nevertheless, when asked if “there [is] a downside to having all that money,” current Poetry editor Christian Wiman focuses on the positive:
Well, the upside is that the magazine gets so much more attention, and
consequently our poets get so much more attention. I frequently have
poets, even the most famous poets in the country, write me to say they’ve
never gotten as many responses as they get fromPoetry magazine, even
when they publish in huge places. We’re getting people’s work in front of
many, many more people. The downside? There’s a bit of a glare of
publicity that can get sort of exhausting, at least for the editor, and every
decision gets scrutinized. Although maybe that’s not really a downside.
(Wiman)
Increased funds have led to increased circulation and exposure. They have also enabled the sort of activities that have buttressed the careers of contemporary poets like Kay Ryan and Samuel Menashe: they have paid for poems, funded awards, and provided the Poetry 327
Foundation web site with the infrastructure and capacity to maintain web pages for Ryan
and Menashe, which archive poems, articles, and audio recordings, among other texts.
On an arguably more significant level, Poetry has served as an important context
that has shaped identities for Ryan, Menashe, and many more poets. And the dialogic work of these poets has, in turn, shaped the magazine. To be sure, no magazine is a passive vessel for conveying texts, andPoetry is not unique in this regard. But its large profile and coffers mark it as an especially noteworthy example of the periodical as
something-other-than-periodical: the periodical as cultural site; as dialogic space. As a result, and moving forward, Poetry can provide scholars of the American literary magazine with a model for thinking about the material nature of other publications.
Poetry can make it new, all over again. 328
Notes
1 Guided by its new agenda, Poetry has tripled its subscriptions “from 10,000 (already an impressive number) to 30,000” (Spiegelman).
The phrase “make it new” served as the title for Pound’s 1934 prose collection Make It
New. In Canto LIII of his long poem The Cantos (1972), the quote “MAKE IT NEW” is attributed to Emperor Tching Tang, who writes it “on his bathtub” (7491-92). (Canto LIII first appeared in book form in Cantos LII-LXXI [1940].) In 1953, the Pound supporter and
KKK member John Kasper (1929-1998) founded a bookshop in Greenwich Village called
Make It New, which displayed Pound’s work in the window (Hickman 128-29). The phrase has come to be claimed by present-dayPoetry, the magazine prints it on subscription flyers.
3 Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich argue that the typical audience for the little magazine is “a limited group, generally not more than a thousand persons” (2). Although Monroe, in her circular, differentiates Poetry from the “ordinary magazine” that “must minister to a large public little interested in poetry,” she goes on to promise that Poetry “shall pay contributors. The rate will... increase as the receipts increase, for this magazine is not intended as a money-maker, but as a public-spirited effort to gather together and enlarge the poet’s public and increase his earnings. [...] In order that this effort may be recognized as just and necessary, and may develop for this art a responsive public, we ask the poets to send us their best verse” (emphasis added). The motto which Monroe printed 329
on the back of the circular and later issues of the magazine derives from Whitman: “to have great poets there must be great audiences too.. (qtd. in A Poet's Life: 257).
4 Little magazines rarely pay contributors in money. As Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich note,
“editors generally caution contributors to banish all thought of remuneration, to be satisfied with payment ‘in fame, not specie.’ When there is money for contributors, promises of payment are made triumphantly, always as though such payment is to be made in spite of, rather than because of, the bourgeois system of values” (2).
5 For a concise account of the debate, which unfolded in the pages of Poetry between
1914 and 1915, see Ellen Williams 160-64.
6 The word “radical” is now typically associated with what Marjorie Perloff calls the
“poetry ofradical artifice ” - poetry by John Cage (1912-1992) and John Ashbery (b.
1927), which rejects a “perfectly lucid” syntax and calls attention to its materiality (xii, xi). n For Monroe, the poetry is that of the Victorian periods; for Barr, that of the modernist and, presumably, postmodernist periods.
In a recent interview, Wiman notes: “What I believe, and what we believe at the Poetry
Foundation, is that there are a whole lot of Americans who are perfectly capable of reading serious poetry, complicated poetry, and what’s happened is that there’s been a breakdown between the poetry that gets written and the people who read it. Our argument is that there has to be some way of healing this rift” (Wiman).
9 Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) defines symbolic capital as “an ordinary property (physical strength, wealth, warlike valor, etc.) which, perceived by social agents endowed with the 330
categories of perception and appreciation permitting them to perceive, know and recognize it, becomes symbolically efficient, like a veritable magical power: a property which, because it responds to socially constituted ‘collective expectations’ and beliefs, exercises a sort of action from a distance, without physical contact” (Practical Reason
102).
10 The Web site’s “About” page emphasizes newness by drawing attention to a number of
“firsts”: “Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Harriet Monroe’s ‘Open Door’ policy, set forth in Volume I of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry's mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T. S.
Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H. D., William Carlos Williams,
Carl Sandburg, and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented— often for the first time—works by virtually every significant poet of the 20th century”
(16; emphasis added). The longer “History” page makes a brief mention of Monroe’s desire (and struggle) to provide “the rare chance for poets to be paid for their work,” but, for the most part, the Poetry Foundation celebrates Monroe for founding the magazine and for the “Open Door” policy which helped to shape the “modem” (read: new) content of the magazine and ensure the magazine would be a venue for “significant” American poets (6).
11 Hamilton suggests that Pound was the driving force behind Poetry's mission to publish new poetry and that “Miss Monroe’s own taste seemed, if anything, to be soggily 331
traditional” (49). Reed Whittemore offers a more socially-minded critique of Monroe when he argues that Poetry, under Monroe, evaded the “responsibilities” of the little magazine and, in doing so, “vastly diminished its force as an instrument for a more vital and intelligent culture” (Cahill 93).
12 Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich view Monroe’s ability to occupy a middleground as a sign of scrappy confidence. Monroe, they argue, “was distinctly not one to be swept from her feet by literary innovation, nor on the other hand was she one to look at experimenters with suspicious pedantry or condescension. Objectivists, proletarians, and Victorians might hurl their cries of opprobrium at her, and she would weather their attacks, confident of her judgment. Indubitably there were few persons in the America of 1912 better qualified to lead the fight for a new poetry” (39). Daniel Cahill more modestly defends
Monroe’s mixed record of achievement by suggesting that “she was ‘catholic’ in her poetic judgment in that she tried to balance the demands of many diverse strains and voices in modem poetry” (92). Focusing on the editor’s historical context, Robin G.
Schulze attempts to explain the contradictions in Monroe - whom Schulze calls “a strangely unmodem champion of the modernist verse she worked so hard to bring to the unsuspecting American public” - by suggesting that these contradictions “clearly expressed a cultural dilemma common to her time,” in which American poets felt tom by both a “mystical attachment to nature” and the “scientific age” in which they lived (50,
51).
13 Williams titles her 1977 book-length study of Monroe, Harriet Monroe and the Poetry
Renaissance, even though the term “renaissance” suggests the rebirth of a classical, 332
European tradition - a tradition in which Monroe, who worked to present new American poetries to an American readership, had little interest. More confusingly, Williams, on the very first page of the study, uses the term “revolution,” which has a different, more violent meaning than “renaissance” (3).
14 Ann Massa, exploring the reasons for Monroe’s success, briefly suggests that the
Chicago Renaissance may have played a role, but ultimately argues that the “[m]ost important” reason “was Harriet Monroe herself: her temperament and her experience, her status and her image” (51; emphasis added). On the other hand, Kenny J. Williams, in his study of the relationship between Monroe and her contemporary William Stanley
Braithwaite - editor of the rival, less-remembered, Boston-based Poetry Journal - describes how Monroe “had access to the so-called best families in Chicago,” grew up in
“genteel poverty and ‘cultured’ surroundings,” and “had the good fortune to live in a city congenial to the work of women before such support became a popular feminist issue”
(517, 518, 519). See Schulze for an account of how Monroe’s historical context made the editor a “woman on the cusp between two centuries.. .well positioned to witness the turn toward scientific management that defined her times” (51).
15 See Laurel Brake’s Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the
Nineteenth Century (1994).
16 See n. 3. i ~j See Morrison, who explores how a number of periodicals - including English Review,
Poetry and Drama, the Freewoman, the Egoist, the Little Review, and the Masses - 333
pursued a public, if only a mythic one, and shared an “assumption that art must have a public function” (6).
I 8 As Whittemore notes, “[i]n the Yale files there are letters to WCW from the editors of well over a hundred little magazines and in few cases was WCW’s connection with them perfunctory” (Poet from Jersey 238). It is difficult to know exactly what Whittemore means by “perfunctory,” but certainly Williams edited - or was involved with editing - a number of magazines including Others and two iterations of Contact. In addition to his editorial work on behalf of these publications, Williams was also a frequent and passionate contributor to little magazines. See Leibowitz, who notes that Williams
“credited poetry magazines with saving his career from disappearing into a black hole of neglect and wilful misunderstanding” (1).
19 See Morris, who explores how Williams used his fiction to construct an identity for himself as a poet. See also Francis, who explores Williams’ relationship with advertising.
20 In Hamilton’s account, for example, Monroe is “Miss Monroe,” responsible for allowing “[fjulsome ladies... to get away with their ‘eres’ and ‘yonders’...” (51).
According to Hamilton, Monroe’s “genteel” response to the suicide of two sisters serving in France during World War One suggests that “[s]he was more comfortable printing cosy poignancies from the girls who had been left behind” (58). Monroe, Hamilton implies, is too supportive of what he perceives to be the excesses of poetesses. Hugh Kenner is far more directly sexist when he describes how Monroe “shifted from haunch to haunch” as she contemplated publishing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (132). But even
Cahill’s biography, which is relatively supportive of Monroe, does not quarrel with “one 334
former associate editor” who noted that “ Poetry printed far too many love lyrics from the pens of middle-aged unmarried ladies during the 1930’s” (92; sic).
9 I Some of the studies that I will focus on include Daniel J. Cahill’s biography, Harriet
Monroe (1973), Ellen Williams’ account of Poetry's early years,Harriet Monroe and the
Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years o f Poetry, 1912-22 (1977), and Ian Hamilton’s
The Little Magazines: A Study o f Six Editors (1976), which includes an analysis of
Poetry. I will also consider how other studies of little magazines in general have constructed Poetry as a little magazine, aimed at a coterie devoted to the new. These include: Frederick J. Hoffman’s The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography (1947);
Reed Whittemore’s Little Magazines (1963); Elliott Anderson’s The Little Magazine in
America: A Modern Documentary History (1978); Mark S. Morrison’s The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905-1920 (2001); and
Suzanne W. Churchill’s The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation o f Modern
American Poetry (2006).
22 See n. 3.
23 Seen. 17.
24 Before 2002, thirteen of Ryan’s poem appeared in the magazine in eighteen years, going back to 1984. In the past eight years, however, 54 texts (including poems and essays) have appeared, and she has been awarded the prestigious Ruth Lilly Prize, worth
$ 100,000.
25 Menashe’s New and Selected Poems went into a second printing in 2008. 335
•yc Although she tends to emphasize Monroe’s entrepreneurial side, see Massa for a detailed account of the events leading up to the Exposition, at which Monroe’s poem,
“Columbian Ode,” was recited by 5,000 people at once (51-63).
77 Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich’s study continues to be endorsed and “remains the most useful reference on modernist little magazines” (Churchill 8).
28 See n. 20.
29 Founded in 1894, the American Academy in Rome is a “school for American artists in
Europe” (Valentine 1). From 1894 to 1897, it was called the American School of
Architecture in Rome (210). For more on the Academy, which still exists, see Lucia and
Alan Valentine’s The American Academy in Rome 1894-1969 (1973).
30 The Dial was a Chicago-based magazine that ran intermittently from 1840 to 1929.
31 In the January 1915 column “Our Contemporaries,” Henderson praises Braithwaite’s
“valiant attempt” to make sense of poetry in American magazines, but also questions “his standards of selection” (194). The March 1915 instalment begins with a note of mock- exclamation: “Boston is discovering Imagism!” (299). Although the target of this particular column’s relatively gentle sarcasm turns out to be the Houghton-Mifflin
Company - which was based in Boston and scheduled to publish Amy Lowell’s anthologySome Imagist Poets (1915) - the initial reference to Boston would have been understood to be an allusion to Braithwaite, whose Bostonian citizenship is often raised in attacks byPoetry. The September 1915 column characterizes Braithwaite’s Poetry
Journal as “the Bostonian invader” (315). The December 1915 column praises
Braithwaite’s “joining of the procession” - his belated embrace of free verse - with the 336
condescending enthusiasm one reserves for a child: “Good for Boston!” (156, 158). In
January 1917, Monroe responds to Braithwaite’s charge that ‘“the influence of POETRY has waned’”: “If POETRY’S influence has ‘waned,’ we may still rejoice that it seems to retain full power over Mr. Braithwaite himself...” (“OC: Sir Oracle” 211). Noting that
Braithwaite has finally included mention of Poetry in his annual survey, Monroe goes on to describe Braithwaite as a “Boston dictator” with poor judgment (212-13). She concludes the column by asserting that Braithwaite has not asked Poetry or the relevant poets for “permission” to reprint “eight poems copyrighted by[Poetry]” thus attempting to exercise power over the Bostonian (214).
32 In an earlier editorial entitled “The Future of the Magazine” (1916), Monroe seems aware of the provisional nature of Poetry's power when she suggests that readers play a role in its maintenance: “Do YOU wish POETRY to continue? Will YOU be partners with us in the effort to extend its life and increase its power?” (35).
33 Ellen Williams describes Braithwaite as a “conspicuous exception to the rule that no one important in literary journalism before 1912 had any interest in poetry” (HMPR 7; emphasis added). Although Williams notes that Braithwaite was late to “recognizing” the
“new” American poetry, she characterizes Monroe as having “intruded on Braithwaite’s domain in 1911” (8).
34 Interestingly, Conrad Aiken submitted Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Poetry and Drama in 1914. Monro rejected the poem and called it “absolutely insane”
(qtd. in Gordon: 68). 337
35 For a comprehensive account of Monro, see Dominic Hibberd’s Harold Monro: Poet of the New Age (2001).
36 Kenny J. Williams draws biographical parallels between Monroe and Braithwaite, both of whom became journalists and poets, publishing their works in many of the same venues: “ Scribner’s, Century, Atlantic Monthly, Forum, and other journals with similar circulations” (517-19). More generally, other critics have suggested how Monroe’s social context contributed to her success, although none have applied Bourdieu’s framework.
Cahill touches on Monroe’s education and the important influence of her brother-in-law,
John Wellborn Root (18-26). Schulze traces how Monroe’s historical context shaped the development of, and contradictions within, her philosophical thinking. Although Massa emphasizes Monroe’s agency as an entrepreneur, she places Monroe “at the centre of
[American] cultural life. [Monroe] was part of the Critic and Century circles in New York in the 1880s and 1890s; part of Robert Louis Stevenson’s circle; Bernard Berenson’s;
Louis Sullivan’s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s. In Chicago she had been well known since
1892, when, at the opening ceremonies of Dedication Day at the Chicago World’s Fair, extracts from her ‘Columbian Ode’ were performed. Parts of it were recited by Sarah
Cowell Le Moyne, a popular elocutionist; parts of it had been set to music by the Boston composer George Chadwick, later Director of the New England Conservatory; massed choirs and the Chicago Symphony were marshalled under the baton of the eminent
Theodore Thomas” (52).
37 For a discussion of the periodical’s funding, see Chapter One, 70-1. 338
38 Cahill notes that “[s]uch journals as existed were not eager to print poetry; and, if they did, the editors demanded a close echo of [American poet] James Whitcomb Riley’s
‘unabashed sentimentality’” (39).
39 See Cahill, who considers how economic transformations in Chicago led to a “booming cultural scene” (30-1). See also Massa, who describes Chicago as “a hotbed of reform activity. A hub for the country’s identity crisis, Chicago became a living laboratory for experiments in the Progressive scientific control of the American society” (51).
40 See A Poet's Life 240-42.
41 See n. 14.
42 Anderson and Kinzie include Poetry in their anthology The Little Magazine in
America: A Modern Documentary History (1978), which, they write, “was conceived as a companion” to The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Other efforts to document little magazines continue to include Poetry as an example. The online resource
Little Magazines and Modernism: A Select Bibliography (1999-), maintained by Suzanne
W. Churchill, describes Poetry as “[o]ne of the more conservative little magazines in print” (Neumann and Muller). In the preface to the book that this Web site yielded - Little
Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (2007), edited by Churchill and Adam
McKible - Mark Morrisson lists Poetry among other “little magazines” (xv). Recently, however, critics have begun to move away from the term “little magazine.” Although
Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman describe Poetry as a “distinguished avant-garde little magazine,” they also suggest thatPoetry was something else because of the way the magazine’s use of advertising “connects Poetry to the world of popular periodicals” (36). 339
The online Modernist Journals Project (1995-) describes Poetry as a “magazine”
(“Digitized Journals”). The online Modernism Magazines Project utilizes the term
“modernist magazine” and has yielded the first of three proposed print volumes, The
Oxford Critical and Cultural History o f Modernist Magazines: Volume I: Britain and
Ireland 1880-1955 (2009).
43 Interestingly, Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich note that “[t]here are some exceptions, of course [to their definition of the little magazine]; this pattern will not fit every
[magazine]” (5). In their “General Introduction” to the first volume of The Oxford
Critical and Cultural History o f Modernist Magazines: Volume I: Britain and Ireland
1880-1955, editors Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker suggest that “many key magazines” that are thought of as “little magazines” do not fit the definition (15).
44 In Monroe’s second editorial, “The Open Door” (1912), she defends the “experimenters in verse” at which the “world... laughs” (63). In “The New Beauty” (1913), she describes a “new beauty which must inspire every artist worthy of the age he lives in” (22). In
“Give Him Room” (1915) she argues that Poetry “has frankly tried to... help bring the modem poet face to face with the modem world” (Monroe 1915 83). In “The Future of the Magazine” (1916), she more decisively asserts that “no informed person can fail to admit that the new movement, the new vitality, has been stimulated chiefly by this magazine [Poetry] and the currents of influence which have issued from it” (33).
45 Monroe observes that “[t]he poet who makes $200 a year through his art is fortunate”
(HMPR 15). 340
46 Although he does not address Monroe on race, see Kenny J. Williams, who suggests that Chicago’s relatively strong support of women in the arts had the effect of dulling
Monroe’s feminism (519).
47 As early as October 1912, in a letter to Monroe, Pound demonstrates both an interest and disinterest in paying poets. Acknowledging the economic reality of acquiring new work by established poets, Pound notes that he does “want money to get the best stuff from Paris...” (qtd. in APL: 263). Speaking like a salesperson, Pound confides that he wants “to be able to close with Yeats whenever he does a good thing [i.e. writes a good poem]. He writes so little verse now, and he won’t be bothered with magazines. But when he reads me a good thing I want to be able to say, ‘Here, you don’t want it—I’ll give you five or ten pounds for it’” (263). Yet Pound goes on to tell Monroe, “[i]f I can help you make Poetry the center of the best activity, that will mean more to me than ‘rates.’ And I do want a high standard kept” (263).
AO By “esthetic magazine,” Pound seems to mean a little magazine.
49 Hamilton suggests that Pound was largely responsible for Poetry's vision when he notes that, “[i]f, in her charitable enthusiasm, Miss Monroe had sometimes paused to wonder what she was going to put in her magazine, such worries were offset by one of the first replies her circular provoked [from Pound]” (45). The implication is that Monroe treated the contents of the early issues as an afterthought.
50 See A Poet’s Life 251-58 for a discussion of poets contacted by Monroe.
51 Ellen Williams calls attention to the “structural” problems facing American poets in the early twentieth century and observes that the “[American] literary world had no apparatus 341
for finding poets, and did not know what to do with them when they somehow emerged into notice” (6). Noting that Monroe did not believe that “poetry automatically won the audience it deserved,” Massa describes Monroe as “a practical champion who assumed that the product and the market existed; and who also diagnosed poetry’s dilemma not as an artistic one but as a question of organization and presentation” (68).
52 In an earlier editorial, Monroe refers to “a co-operating public” (“GHR” 82; emphasis added).
The Masses, which ran from 1911 to 1917, was a magazine devoted to socialist thought.
54 See also the June 1913 issue of Poetry, in which Monroe describes Lindsay as “[a] big breezy cheerful troubadour” despite “the modem world’s refusal to pay its poets a ‘living wage’” (“Incarnations” 103).
55 William Carlos Williams, writing to Monroe on March 1, 1916, states that “‘[m]y frank opinion is that “Poetry” pays too much for its verse and that it is too anxious to be inclusive’” (HMPR 178). Later critics like Reed Whittemore argue that Poetry evaded the supposed social “responsibilities” of the little magazine (Cahill 93-4).
56 On 2 July 1915, Monroe asserts Poetry’’ s interest in a range of poetries - including, presumably, poetries associated with the new - when, in a letter to Kreymborg, she states: liPoetry you know tries to publish the best we can get of ALL the different schools. We have printed a good deal of rather radical experiments and shall no doubt continue to do so, but I assume that “Others” stands exclusively for the radicals...” (qtd. in HMPR: 150).
In addition to publishing works of free verse such as T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. 342
Alfred Prufrock” (1915), and influential Imagist texts by Pound, H. D., Richard
Aldington, and Amy Lowell, among others, Poetry published more conventional work as well. For example, in the same issue as “Prufrock,” Monroe printed sonnets by Georgia
Wood Pangbom (1872-1955) and quatrains, in trochaic tetramater, with an abab rhyme scheme, by Bliss Carman (1861-1929). See Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance for a detailed account of the contents of the magazine’s early issues.
57 The editorials by Monroe that mention Shelley are “The Open Door” (1912), “A Word to Our Readers” (1914), and “Hard Times Indeed” (1917).
58 See “The Poet’s Bread and Butter” (1914) and “Announcement of Awards” (1914).
59 See n. 40.
60 The Monadnock, located at the intersection of Jackson and Dearborn streets, was built by Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root between 1885 and 1892.
61 See n. 56.
62 For more on The Yellow Book, see Katherine Lyon Mix’sA Study in Yellow: The
Yellow Book and Its Contributors (1960).
63 See n. 3.
64 Poetry, in its early years, defines a volume as six issues. In recent years, the typical volume of Poetry has fluctuated between five and six issues.
65 See Massa for a discussion of Monroe as an entrepreneur.
66 See Chapter One, 41-2.
Perhaps because Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich affirm that the “only certainty about [little magazines] is the probability of their early collapse,” they are forced to argue thatPoetry 343
had a symbolic end, ten years into its existence (5). More specifically, they suggest that
“[i]f it is the role of the little magazine to initiate, to act as the advance guard for a new movement, then it may be argued that Poetry had served its function, that the natural cycle of the magazine had been completed when the Chicago group moved East” ( LMHB
41-2). But Poetry did not “collapse.” As a result, it slips free of their definition of the little magazine as well as Churchill’s, which states that “little magazines are ephemeral operations” (9; emphasis added).
There is a brief mention of Wyndham Lewis and Pound’s BLAST in Monroe’s autobiography, which draws attention to the magazine’s violent use of typography, its
“thick black capitals” (APL 355). But Lewis is not mentioned without reference to Pound and was never published by Poetry.
69 The iconic image of Uncle Sam, based on that of Lord Kitchener, was created by James
Montgomery Flagg and first appeared on the cover of the magazineLeslie’s Illustrated
Weekly Newspaper on 16 July 1916 (Capozzola 3).
70 Monroe also refers to “an ever-increasing public” in a May 1915 editorial (“Praise from
Mr. Colum” 93).
71 Around the same time, Henderson describes “a living audience” (“Mr. Masefield’s
Lecture” 303).
72 See n. 5. ■71 No census was taken in Chicago in 1915, but the population in 1910 was 2,185,283
(Jeter 21). 344
74 Ford handed over the editing of the English Review to Austin Harrison in 1910
(Morrison 51). n c Although it does not look at Poetry, for more information on how certain magazines in the early twentieth century pursued a large audience, see Morrison, The Public Face o f
Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905-1920 (2001).
76 See Poetry 9.5 (Feb. 1917): 251-56.
77 In opposition to Poetry's Whitmanian and ‘pro-audience’ cover motto, the motto of The
Little Magazine is “‘Making No Compromise With the Public Taste’” (Churchill 9).
78 See also “Notes” in the June and July 1913 issues of Poetry.
79 For a more modest account of Poetry's success, see HMPR 84-7.
80 For specific numbers on Poetry's circulation, see HMPR 296.
81 For specific numbers on Poetry's finances, see HMPR 295. See also Hoffman et al. 43-
4.
82 See Abbott 89-90.
83 Williams, reflecting a sexist tendency of the time, genders the “essential ‘I.’”
84 Near the end of her essay, “Early William Carlos Williams - ‘Bad Keats?”’ (2008),
Irene Hsiao “plac[es] Williams among the Romantics” and, more importantly, provides a useful summary of a number of others who do so as well, including Wallace Stevens,
Yvor Winters, James E. Breslin, and J. Hillis Miller (Hsiao 221-22). In his article,
“Keats’s Influence on William Carlos Williams” (1977), Stuart Peterfreund - who is not cited by Hsiao, curiously - declares that Williams is “a quintessentially American poet, to be sure, but a quintessentially Romantic one as well” (12). 345
85 Calling attention to a dichotomy between thinking and feeling, Hsiao argues that
“Williams defines his immature productions by the incongruence of'style' and
'thoughts,' the problem of cramming loose-limbed, outspoken American ideas into the waistcoat of a passionate English poet [Keats] who died young" (195). In this formulation, "'style' can be understood to refer to something like thinking (a seemingly rational process of reigning in feeling by following the patterns - "the waistcoat" - of another) and "thoughts" can be understood to refer to something like feeling. (Hsiao is quoting Williams’ Autobiography, whose definition of "thoughts" -
"Whitmanesque... a sort of purgation and confessional, to clear my head and my heart from turgid obsessions” - suggests that “thoughts” are intermingled with, and somewhat equivalent to, the heart’s emotions [qtd. in Hsiao: 195].) Williams himself reflects a
Romantic ideology when he describes the relationship between feeling and thinking in his own creative process: “If the emotions do not control the poem, what in Heaven’s name does? The answer is the mind, which drives and selects among them as though they were a pack of trained hounds” (“Preface” ix). “[E]motions” precede the “mind,” which then orders them in Wordsworthian fashion (Wordsworth 661).
86 For a brief discussion of other scholarly explorations of Williams’s politics regarding the individual, see Frail 1-2.
87 See the introduction and fourth chapter of Sean Francis’s dissertation “‘When All Is
Become Billboards’: Modem American Poetry and ‘Promotion’, 1855-1960” (1999).
88Reed Whittemore’s biography of Williams,Poet from Jersey (1975), features a brief discussion of Williams’s involvement with Camera Work and Others (108-130). In his 346
article, “Williams and Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms” (1989), Steven C. Tracy considers Williams’s relationship with the poetry magazine Blues: A Magazine o f New
Rhythms. “William Carlos Williams: The Poetics of Ending,” the fourth chapter of
Suzanne W. Churchill’s The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation o f Modern
American Poetry (2006), offers insight into Williams’s work with Others. Michael
Rozendal’s article “Forms of Need: William Carlos Williams in the Radical Thirties Little
Journals” (2007) looks at Williams’s fiction in the context of magazines of the 1930s. QQ Ellen Williams offers some information on the relationship in her history Harriet
Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years Poetry, of 1911-22 (1977).
90 Little Magazines and Modernism: A Select Bibliography (2009) cites these two magazines as Contact and Contact: An American Quarterly Review, respectively
(Churchill, LMM).
91 See Chapter One, 49-52.
92 See Chapter One, 55-7.
93 As Whittemore notes, “[e]ven up to 1930 almost all [of Williams’s] published work first appeared in magazines (numbering by then about thirty) that were Pound-edited or
Pound-nudged. The two exceptions were his own Contact, which only made his Pound dependency seem greater since Contact was a flop, and Broom” (P/7210).
94 See Chapter One 35-40.
95 In his essay, “A Beginning on the Short Story (Notes),” Williams’s discussion of the value of the short story reflects an almost-Joycean conception of the epiphany: “[the short story” seems to me to be a good medium for nailing down a single conviction. 347
Emotionally.... It isn’t a snippet from the newspaper. It isn’t realism. It is, as in all forms of art, taking the materials of every day (or otherwise) and using them to raise the consciousness of our lives to higher aesthetic and moral levels by the use of the art”
(295). Later in the essay, Williams suggests that writers follow Joyce’s model for the short story (which moves toward an epiphany): “You may, economically, try devices - varied devices - for making the word count toward a particular effect. I’d say write a story - as Joyce did” (305; emphasis added). Marion W. Cumpiano argues that Joyce’s
“daring freedom from traditional English literary usage” was especially influential on
Williams’s use of language. For more on Joyce’s influence, see Cumpiano’s article, “The
Impact of James Joyce on William Carlos Williams: An Uneasy Ambivalence” (1989). A kind of epiphany is also an important feature in Williams’s poems, although this
“epiphany” is better understood in terms of Pound’s definition of the image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Pound, “A
Few” 200). Nevertheless, although iconic Imagistic poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “Poem” enact moments of distilled awareness, they also resist simultaneously the idea of transcendent truth by calling attention to their materiality. The wheelbarrow shaped stanzas in the former emphasize the poem’s status as a thing. The abrupt enjambments in the latter make material the subject matter: a “cat” in the process of stepping “down // into the pit of / the empty / flowerpot” (1,9-12). (As the speaker of “A
Sort of a Song” declares: “No ideas / but in things” [9-10].) For more on the relationship of Williams’s work to transcendence, however, see Ron Callan’s William Carlos
Williams and Transcendentalism: Fitting the Crab in a Box(1992). 348
96 For more on the grotesque body, seeRabelais and His World (1968).
97 The motif of being “saved” or “rescued” recurs elsewhere in the Autobiography, emphasizing the extent to which Williams depended on others. He notes that in the early
1920s, “McAlmon in Paris along with Bill Bird and his Three Mountains Press came to my rescue with books printed abroad: Spring and All, a book of poems, and The Great
American Novel...'" (237; emphasis added). Later, focusing on the 1940s, he observes that
“[w]hen [James] Laughlin ran out of paper for a new book, I was fortunate in finding two young men, Harry Duncan and Paul Williams, associates of the Cummington Press, to rescue me once more. I had a script of twenty or thirty poems” (306; emphasis added).
QO Williams published 27 poems, two prose pieces, and one play during the brief run of
Others.
99 For an account that calls into question “modernism’s insistence on the autonomy of the art work, its obsessive hostility to mass culture, its radical separation from the culture of everyday life, and its programmatic distance from political, economic, and social concerns,” see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and
Postmodernism (1986) vii.
100 See Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841).
101 For a more detailed account of the ways in which Others, in general, sought (and ultimately and inevitably failed) to achieve autonomy from its larger social sphere, see
Churchill 42-4.
102 As Herbert Howarth notes, Eliot, in editing the Criterion, “hoped to encourage a more ascetic and disciplined orientation, and, as the cultural setting for that severer life, to 349
fortify and extend through the English-speaking peoples of the world the two- thousand- year-old Attic-Roman-West European tradition” (97-8). For more on the Criterion, see
Howarth’s “T. S. Eliot’s Criterion: The Editor and his Contributors” (1959).
103 McAlmon critiques Eliot’s Eurocentric elitism in the second issue of Contact when he calls Eliot “a victim of the culture via ideas regime, more insistently the autocrat of the
English mind than it is of the American” (“Modem Artiques” 9). McAlmon also alludes to Eliot in his poem “Surf of the Dead Sea,” published in the third issue of Contact. The first part of the poem, “Apotheosis to Extinction,” focuses on a figure who “much admired LaForgue” and notes “what atrocities his intellect / Committed with its eternal rapes of his / Emotional chastities” (1, 17-19). Williams critiques Monroe for not discerning in the letters of painter Rex Slinkard (1887-1918) an “untrained enthusiasm stabbing emptiness and achieving—what might have been expected” (“Yours, O Youth”
15). In the first issue of the second iteration of Contact, dated February 1932, Williams argues against criticism that “turned too easily professorial or to a ‘system’ in the manner of Mr. Eliot with his apparently well informed but rather hasty Criterion [sic]” (“The
Advance” 88).
104 See Chapter One, 49-54.
105 In “Manifesto 2,” for the first issue of Blast (1914), Lewis declares war on women and youth when he states, “OH BLAST FRANCE” and “SENTIMENTAL GALLIC GUSH” and “Complacent young man” (“Manifesto 2” 13).
106 The Papyrus became The Phoenix in 1914, which ran until 1916. 350
107 For accounts of Williams’s complicated relationships with socialism and Marxism, see
Frail 32-33 and Poet from Jersey 239-65.
108 See Chapter Two, 159-64.
109 Williams would come to embrace something like Monroe’s Open Door policy when, years later in the early 1950s, he tells the editors ofA. D. magazine “don’t get narrow in your editing. Give every writer your full attention. You have to measure life by elastic standards; otherwise we never can get along together and understand each other. We must draw nearer, not be forced apart” (“EMW” 34).
110 For more on how male modernists use olfactory images to objectify the Other and associate women in particular with a corrupt urban environment, see Higgins 201-3.
111 For a comprehensive discussion of Williams’s “Townspeople Poems,” see Frail 109-
22.
112 See Chapter One, 50-4.
113 Later, in an editorial for Poetry published in October 1928, Monroe implies that
Williams is an elitist by including him in a list of poets who “seem as scornful of the profanum vulgus as any aristocrat of the Augustan age, as profoundly convinced that great art must rise above all contact with the common people.... Once more we have ‘the doctrine of the folding-in, the closure, the esoteric - the aristocratic conception of The
Poet, the ancient spirit of caste’” (“Looking” 35).
114 See Chapter One, 49-52.
115 For an opposing view, see Farland, who insists that Williams shows how “rural
America [is] inextricably tied to multicultural concerns, the product - then and now - of 351
demographic changes.(Farland 918). Farland goes on to argue that “The Farmer” constitutes “a retort to the conception of the farmer as mechanical and unreasoning”
(920).
116 For more on his criticism of creative writing programs, see Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry
Matter?” from his book Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture
(1992, 2002).
117 Because it is produced outside of official institutions, the dissemination of outsider art has required special efforts. For example, Cardinal notes that, “The fascinating richness and power of works of art produced by mad people has to date been made publicly available in only a limited way. The majority of works dealing with art produced by asylum inmates have been written by practising psychiatrists: most of these are concerned with the purely medical aspects of the material and are highly technical. There is however a growing interest in these ‘forbidden’ products on the part of non-specialists...”
(Cardinal 16; emphasis added). Cardinal goes on to call attention to the efforts of Jean
Dubuffet - “an ardent collector of what he calls ‘art brut’” or outsider art - who founded the Foyer de l’Art Brut, a “‘small’ institute in Paris,” which was closed (as a result of financial instability) and later reopened as the Compagnie de l’Art (24). In terms of reception, discussing art naif, a category that encompasses work done by those who have
“received no formal training in art,” Cardinal observes that “the cultural machinery has reacted to this odd quirk of creativity, and has undertaken to assimilate it and give it cultural status” through “second-class prizes” (35). 352
118 For accounts of how Dickinson was engaged specifically with her culture and society, see Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat: The Friendship o f Emily Dickinson and Thomas
Wentworth Higginson (2008) and Lyndall Gordon’s Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily
Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (2010).
119 For a comprehensive history of creative writing programs in the United States, see
Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise o f Creative Writing
(2009).
120 McGurl notes that it is “difficult to reconcile... our persistently romantic conceptions of creativity” with “the programmatic aspect of the [American creative writing] program”
(287). In addition, he calls attention to the anxiety surrounding the institutionalization of art by identifying “the true and deepest irony of the creative writing program... condensed in the very idea of systematic creativity which the proximity of ‘creative’ and
‘program’ in the term ‘creative writing program’ brings to mind” (McGurl 71-2). For more on the anxiety surrounding the interplay between creativity and institutionally, see also Mayers 88-94. For a more general critique of the professionalization of the academy, see Harold Fromm’s Academic Capitalism and Literary Value (1991).
121 McGurl points out that, “Discussion of the writer’s relation to the university has instead largely been confined to the domain of literary journalism, and to the question of whether the rise of the writing program has been good or bad for American writing.
Whether couched in populist or elitist terms, the suspicion running throughout these discussions is that there may be something inherently wrong with artistic activity being, as critics ominously say,institutionalized’'’ (24). Criticism of the creative writing program 353
is not just a phenomenon that occurs outside of the academy; it also occurs within the context of the program itself. Mayers defines “craft criticism” as “engaged theorizing about creative production - theorizing that arises from and is responsive to the social, political, economic, and institutional contexts for creative writing.... In effect, craft criticism is a practice that takes place largely within the professional discourses of creative writing” (46-7).
122 See Chapter Two, 106-8.
For an account of how Emerson’s praise of Leaves o f Grass helped the book achieve an audience and Whitman’s strategic publication of the praise, without Emerson’s approval, see Kaplan 203-12.
124 For example, Ryan’s poem “Turtle” (which focuses on the difficult life of the turtle and begins, “Who would be a turtle who could help it?” [1]) reaffirms Moore’s fascination with creatures that often retreat into their armour, such as the snail (in the poem “To a Snail”) and the pangolin (in “The Pangolin”). Like Ryan’s “Persiflage”
(which is about “Garden serpents / small as shoe laces... found in / side lots,” who are mocked by “birds” [1-4, 10]), Moore’s poem “The Wood-Weasel” celebrates animals at which people laugh, like the skunk. For more on animals in Moore’s poetry - and how her cultural milieu cultivated an interest in the natural world - see Robyn G. Schulze’s
“Marianne Moore’s ‘Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish’ and the Poetry of the Natural World’”
(1998).
Stenstrom devotes 67 out of 143 words (47%) to quotations by Ryan; Anonymous, 63 out of 163 (39%); Millard, 32 out of 144 (22%); and McGuiness, 81 out of 329 (25%). 354
126 Seen. 1.
127 For examples of Williams’s disdain for a mass or large audience of readers, including the middlebrow, see Chapter Two, 94, 117-18, 119, 125, 129, 131, 135-36, and 143.
128 See Yezzi, Rev. 103-4; Logan; Kirby; Hammer 2008; and Gamer.
129 An unsigned review in Publishers Weekly (24 July 2000) notes that Ryan’s “casual manner and nods to the wisdom tradition might endear her to fans of A. R. Ammons or link her distantly to Emily Dickinson. But her tight structures, odd rhymes and ethical judgments place her more firmly in the tradition of Marianne Moore and, latterly, Amy
Clampitt” (“Say Uncle” 82). O’Rourke observes that “Ryan is an American pragmatist, making her more like Robert Frost (about whom she’s written enthusiastically) than
Dickinson.” Kirsch insists that “the comparison [to Dickinson] does not really capture
Ryan’s style and personality, and she sometimes seems to be consciously repudiating it, as in the poem ‘Hope.’ Hope, to Dickinson, is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul; to Ryan, it is merely ‘the almost-twin / of making-do, / the isotope / of going on.’
The chemical vocabulary dissents from Dickinson’s romantic imagery, just as Ryan’s wry pessimism keeps its distance from Dickinson’s metaphysical despair. Often, in fact, the poet Ryan sounds most like is Philip Larkin: she, too, aspires to be one o f‘The Less
Deceived’ [sic] - the title of Larkin’s second book.” Vendler observes that “Ryan’s better critics, while naturally mentioning other women poets, have also seen affinities with such male poets as A. R. Ammons, whose volumes Briefings and The Really Short Poems certainly put him among the aphorists of verse.” 355
130 For a better and more positive representation of the “compressed” nature of
Dickinson’s poems - and one that might be applied productively to Ryan’s work - see
Phyllis Webb’s essay “On the Line,” in which she describes Dickinson’s dashes as
“subversive. Female. Hiding yourself—Emily—no, compressing yourself, even singing yourself—tinily—with compacted passion—a violent storm—” (22).
131 Citing the influence of Williams, Ryan notes, “I would say that there’s something I love very much in poetry and now that I’m thinking about this I would even connect it to
William Carlos Williams, who has a very narrow line. I never thought of myself as having copied his line consciously, but one of the many things I admire in Williams, and a thing that I love about poetry and aspire to have in my poetry, is a terrific sense of lightness. I can’t stand the pounding, drumming, assaulting, kind of poetry. I just love the unemphasized casualness in Williams” (“Cooling the Surface”).
132 The version of “Pentimenti” in the March 2007 Poetry ends: “In this painting, / for instance, see how / a third arm - long ago / repented by the artist - / is revealed, giving / the painting an odd / asymmetric contemporary / kind of India-Indian appeal” (15-22). In the later version, it ends: “In this painting, / for instance, see how / a third arm - / long ago repented / by the artist - / is revealed, / working a flap / into the surface / through which / who knows what / exiled cat or / extra child / might steal” (15-27).
133 See “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks” (1998).
134 See Yezzi, Interview. 356
135 For a useful account of Maslow’s ideas about human motivation, see “Human
Motivation,” the second chapter of Richard J. Lowry’s A. H. Maslow: An Intellectual
Portrait (1973).
1 3A Robert Phillips calls the rise of the confessional poet “a major development in
American literature in the second half of the twentieth century.. (xi). For more on the movement, see his book-length study The Confessional Poets and, in particular, the
Introduction xi-xvi and Chapter One, “Confessional Mode in Modem American Poetry”
1-17.
137 For Ryan, a typical day of reading and writing takes place in bed (“Kay Ryan” 59). I See Bomstein, who, borrowing from Jerome McGann, notes that the ‘“bibliographic code’” of a text, including “features of page layout” and “book or periodical design” offers “important supplements to the ‘linguistic code’ (or words)” (1).
139 See Phillips, who describes Lowell as the “spiritual father of the family” of confessional poets (7).
140 Interestingly, the Poetry Foundation Web site, where the essay is available electronically, adds the subtitle “Life, shard-to-shard,” reinforcing the theme of partiality
(“Marin County, Sort of: Life, shard-to-shard”).
141 A similar bromide, Benjamin Franklin’s “ early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” will also tend to appear in such texts (Franklin 221).
142 As already noted, the seemingly useful and rational language that one finds in “science or biography... is off-limits” to Ryan when she is firing up her brain in the morning
(“Kay Ryan” 72). See Chapter Three, 217-19. 357
143 See “Flarf & Conceptual Writing,” a portfolio of poems edited by Kenneth Goldsmith in the July/August 2009 issue of Poetry.
144 See Chapter One, 83-6.
145 See Chapter Three, 170-76.
146 “Prestigious,” of course, is a subjective term. But until Anne Stevenson was named the second Neglected Master, Menashe was the only living poet to be published in the series, which includes volumes devoted to canonical poets and lyricists like Walt Whitman,
Edgar Allan Poe, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Cole Porter, and Gwendolyn
Brooks, among others.
147 Stories about Menashe appeared in publications such as the New York Times (Orr),
Boston Review (Brown), NPR Books (Valente), and a number of blogs.
148 See Orr’s article “Annals of Poetry” (2007).
149 Studies that have presented Poetry as a little magazine aimed at a coterie devoted to the “new” include Frederick J. Hoffman’s The Little Magazine: A History and
Bibliography (1947); Reed Whittemore’s Little Magazines (1963); Elliott Anderson’s The
Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History (1978); Mark S. Morrison’s
The Public Face o f Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905-1920
(2001); and Suzanne W. Churchill’s The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of
Modern American Poetry (2006).
150 See Chapter One, 42-7.
151 See Chapter One, 70-2.
152 See Chapter One, 49-52. 358
153 See Chapter Two, 119.
154 Between 15 July 2008 and 29 March 2009,1 interviewed Menashe by phone, usually once a week for an hour or two.
155 Menashe notes that the “last issue [Spender edited] was December 1965, and the last poem that appeared in Encounter was ‘The Niche Narrows.’ I lost my gallery” (TI).
Spender’s name, however, was on the masthead as late as June 1967. And the last poem of Menashe’s to appear seems to have been “Lament” in the July 1964 issue.
156 In terms of substantial scholarly articles, Bims has published two essays about
Menashe, and Aheam and Davie, one each. Most of the rest of the writing on Menashe can be classified as review work or journalism.
157 See Eileen Lebow, The Bright Boys: A History o f Townsend Harris High School
(2000).
158 The G. I. Bill, or Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, “offered college funding to hundreds of thousands of veterans of World War II and subsequent military conflicts”
(McGurl 282).
159 See Chapter Two, 117-18.
160 For a discussion of how Williams, as a poet, capitalized on the spaces he, as a doctor, was able to enter, see Chapter Two, 106-10.
161 See Chapter One, 50-2.
162 For more on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, see McGurl.
163 Menashe also uses the simile of the college as monastery or cloister several times in our interview (TI). 359
164 See Chapter Four, 269-71.
165 For more on Lewis’s time in Toronto, see the chapter entitled, “The Last European,” in
Kenner’s The Pound Era, 496-505.
166 See Chapter Four, 290-301.
167 Julian Levinson considers how the “visionary literary tradition identified with [post-
Romantic] figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman... has provided
Jews with new ways of understanding themselves as Jews” (3). See his study, Exiles on
Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture (2008).
168 See Chapter Two, 122-23.
169 Sheila Hodges notes that Gollancz was an “instinctive, lifelong rebel against anything that hampered freedom of thought and the dissemination of liberal ideas. While still a boy he had revolted against the narrow Jewish orthodoxy of his parents and the conservatism of his middle-class background, becoming first a liberal and then a ‘Judaeo-Christian radical,’ as he put it” (15). Edwards also points to Gollancz’s refusal to think in narrow terms. For example, although he hated Nazism and was an ardent supporter of Jewish causes - as early as 1933, he published a book that made a case against burgeoning Nazi atrocities - Gollancz was also “fearful of stirring up anti-German feeling,” having witnessed “how Germany’s post-war sufferings had created the conditions in which Hitler could flourish” (Edwards 218-9). More generally, Edwards notes Gollancz’s uneasiness with those who would impose a fixed identity upon him: “When his people were in torment, he put his whole soul into trying to help them, then began to resent their attempts to embrace him as one of them” (467). 360
170 Menashe was critical of Pound on several public occasions. At a “quiet requiem” for
Pound, held by the Academy of American Poets and featuring “warm reminiscences” by a panel including James Laughlin, Robert Lowell, and others, Menashe called out, “Why didn’t this panel consider the anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound?” (Lask; TI). The cry was reported by Thomas Lask in the New York Times on 6 January 1973, but left unattributed:
“Only once did a jarring note intrude when, toward the end of the Thursday memorial, a voice from the hall demanded that the panel discuss the poet’s anti-Semitism” (Lask).
Lask told Menashe later that he knew Menashe’s name, but wanted to protect him by not publishing it in the Times (TI). Nevertheless, given the prestige of those in attendance - the Jewish protester found himself seated next to the publisher Robert Giroux, who knew
Menashe, having “rejected” his work (TI) - Menashe may still have done harm to himself, forfeiting social capital for the sake of airing an unfashionable point about
Pound. (I write “unfashionable” because Kenner’s celebratory study, The Pound Era, had appeared two years before the requiem, preparing the way for Pound apologists.) In addition, Menashe’s poem “‘Make It New’” offers a wry critique of the iconic modernist’s obsession with novelty. The expression that provides the title of the poem comes wreathed in quotation marks, comfortably resigned to the fact that it belongs to someone else - Pound - and also acknowledging the dialogic nature of poetic production: a subtle blow struck against a narrow and aggressive insistence on innovation. Moreover, the first two lines of the poem - “Scrap old texts, / Draw the line” - parody a desire to break with the past. “I made it against Pound!” declared Menashe, passionately (TI).
“Pound broadcast from Italy. Pound was very concerned with money and the Jews. He 361
broadcast from Italy, predicting that if we landed in Italy, the beaches would be red with
American blood. He was a traitor [emphasis his]. And quickly, they put the robe of poet around his shoulders and saved him, and even the head of the insane asylum at St.
Elizabeth’s said that the psychiatrist knew he was not insane” (TI).
171 “Fog” influenced Eliot’s less optimistic poem about city life, “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock.”
1 79 “Fog” reads in full: “The fog comes / on little cat feet. // It sits looking / over harbor and city / on silent haunches / and then moves on” (1-6).
173 “Heat Wave” and “Captain, Captive” are two poems by Menashe in which a bedridden speaker lacks the capacity to determine his course. See Chapter Four, 63-4, 65-6. The more religious “Hallelujah” also suggests that individuals are not self-determining but, however, affirms that a divine force is at work while people sleep. “The Oracle,” on the other hand, imagines an especially humbled self, lying “in bed / Intersected / At the mouth,” by compass points (5-7).
174 See Chapter Three, 222-24.
175 In her brief foreword to Menashe’s first volume, The Many Named Beloved, Kathleen
Raine calls attention to the bloated excesses of English poetry of the early 1960s - the context in which The Many Named Beloved first appeared: “Quality in a quantitative age may easily pass unnoticed; and poetry has become as rare as verse is common. Because
[Menashe’s] poems are minute they might be passed over...” (9). Similarly, a review in
The Prairie Schooner (1971/1972) suggests that Menashe’s concision presents a model worth following preciselybecause it is so out of step with the work of his peers: ‘Wo 362
Jerusalem but This (October House) is a volume of succinct, pregnant, and subtly humorous utterances that might well be studied by many serious and verbose young poets writing now” (W. W. 368). Mahon notes that Menashe “was and remains artistically and spiritually at odds with an American orthodoxy which prescribes expansiveness, democracy and free verse. Menashe, in person, is no stranger to expansiveness, and would consider himself a proper democratic American in most respects; but his art is rather one of concentration and crysallisation...” (Mahon 161; emphases added). Gioia argues emphatically that “the major cause of [Menashe’s] obscurity, I suspect, is strictly literary. Menashe has devoted his entire poetic career to perfecting the short poem - not the conventional short poem of 20-40 lines beloved of magazine editors, but the very short poem. As anyone surveying his The Niche Narrows: New and Selected Poems
(2000) will discover, few of his poems are longer than 10 lines” (Gioia, “SM” 239).
176 Reviewing Menashe’s volume No Jerusalem But This (1971) for Poetry in 1973,
Jascha Kessler argues that, “Menashe risks, too often, vanishing altogether even as he speaks. His brevity however is his own; it means something, no matter how limited; and it’s worth the brief time it takes to peruse him, though not, perhaps, more. Is that a sign of grace? Maybe” (Kessler 295; emphasis added). Writing in 1988, Bedient describes the texts condescendingly as “small poems [that] huddle like doubting immigrants on the
Ellis Island of the upper left-hand comer of each page of his Collected Poems, lonely and privately dignified.... Unfortunately a good many of the poems do not justify the unusual attention that so carefully hoarded and ordered a handful of words seem to demand: they are merely picayune” (143). 363
,77 See Chapter Three, 228-34.
178 “Writing and Method” is quoted in the introduction to Paul Hoover’s Postmodern
American Poetry: A Norton Anthology1994) ( (Hoover, Introduction xxxvi).
179 See Hoover, Introduction to Postmodern American Poetry xxxv-xxxix.
180 See Chapter One, 50-1. | Q 1 Crothers notes that, ‘“A poet does not need other poets to bear him company.... He
sets his face toward the wilderness which he loves, and is content with the inspiration which may come’” (“OC” 160).
182 See Chapter One, 51.
1 ST For a discussion of how Ryan’s poems work to address a large audience, see Chapter
Three, 240-42. I Decades before the first of the six accepted by Quinn was published, Menashe made two appearances in 25 September 1965 (“Sheen”) and The New Yorker, in 7 March 1970
(“Winter”).
I o c Since the April 2005 issue, the magazine has taken to printing one poem per page, no matter how short the text.
186 See Chapter One, 70-4. 364
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