modernism & domestic help

Bob Perelman and Kristen Gallagher on domestic help and modernism (audio): mp3 (3:34).

handbook of modern & contemporary American poetry

I have an essay in this forthcoming book, and am excited to keep such good company. I expect the book won't be out for another year. And I'm probably jumping the gun in posting the contents but I'll wait 'til someone tells me to take it down. You'll get the gist of what's in it, anyway. (Below at right: Cary Nelson.)

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The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry
Edited by Cary Nelson

1. A Century of Innovation: American Poetry from 1900 to the Present
Cary Nelson

2. Social Texts and Poetic Texts: Poetry and Cultural Studies
Rachel Blau DuPlessis

3. American Indian Poetry at the Dawn of Modernism
Robert Dale Parker

4. “Jeweled Bindings”: Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality
Melissa Girard

5. Hired Men and Hired Women: Modern American Poetry and the Labor Problem
John Marsh

6. Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore
Linda A. Kinnahan

7. Poetry and Rhetoric: Modernism and Beyond
Peter Nicholls

8. Cézanne’s Ideal of “Realization”: A Useful Analogy for the Spirit of Modernity in American Poetry
Charles Altieri

9. Stepping Out, Sitting In: Modern Poetry’s Counterpoint with Jazz and the Blues
Edward Brunner

10. Out With the Crowd: Modern American Poets Speaking to Mass Culture
Tim Newcomb

11. Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry
Scene, 1920-1960
Susan Rosenbaum

12. Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America
Mike Chasar

13. “With Ambush and Stratagem”: American Poetry in the Age of Pure War
Philip Metres

14. The Fight and the Fiddle in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry
Karen Jackson Ford

15. Asian American Poetry
Josephine Park

16. “The Pardon of Speech”: The Psychoanalysis of Modern American Poetry
Walter Kalaidjian

17. American Poetry, Prayer, and the News
Jahan Ramazani

18. The Tranquilized Fifties: Forms of Dissent in Postwar American Poetry
Michael Thurston

19. The End of the End of Poetic Ideology, 1960
Al Filreis

20. Fieldwork in New American Poetry: From Cosmology to Discourse
Lytle Shaw

21. “Do our chains offend you?”: The Poetry of American Political Prisoners
Mark W. Van Wienen

22. Disability Poetics
Michael Davidson

23. Green Reading: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Environmental Criticism
Lynn Keller

24. Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry
Timothy Yu

25. “Internationally Known”: The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop
James Smethurst

26. Minding Machines / Machining Minds: Writing (at) the Human-Machine Interface
Adalaide Morris

modernist pedagogy at the end of the lecture

This essay on modernist poetry at the end of the lecture is now available through the Selected Works site. Many thanks to Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh for commissioning it and for fabulous editorial and other advice along the way. Thanks also to Julia Bloch, whose class session on the sounds of Amiri Baraka was inspirational. Also to Ira Winston, John MacDermott, the late Jack Abercrombie, Chris Mustazza and Mark Lindsay who have pushed me toward using digital media and computing in my teaching and who on occasion permitted me to push them. RIP, Jack!

facing left

A few years ago John Serio was asked to edit the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens and expressed the hope that I'd summarize what I'd learned over the years about Stevens' response to the radical-left poetics of the 1930s, so I wrote a short paper (10 pages in print) and it appeared in that very good volume. Today I uploaded a PDF copy to my "Selected Works" site: here's the essay.

H.D.'s desk

Lately I've been reading the blog of the Beinecke Library, called "Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities." I took special note of a recent gift made to the Beinecke: H.D.'s writing desk. Its provenance seems significant, but no one knows for sure. H.D. biographer Barbara Guest: "Said to be Christina Rosetti’s, it may originally have belonged to Empress Eugenie, who spent several years in exile in England. Bryher bought the desk for H. D. at the estate sale of Violet Hunt” (Herself Defined, 56). In the photo of the desk, in its new place in New Haven, we see a portrait H.D.'s friend and literary executor (and longtime Yale English faculty member) Norman Holmes Pearson.

Chicago

Splendid day in Chicago yesterday. Began it with another run along Lake Michigan. Then down to Hyde Park early to record an episode (for later release) of PoemTalk. Don Share (senior editor of Poetry), Judith Goldman (on the U of C faculty, in the Society of Fellows) and David Pavelich (modern poetry bibliography in Special Collections at U of C) - poets all three - joined me to talk about a pair of poems: H.D.'s "Sea Poppies" and Jennifer Scappettone's "Vase Poppies." (I've written a little about this pairing earlier here.) A very good session. I begin to realize that a keen choice of poem (or poems, as in this special case) enables the conversation almost automatically (that is, with little effort needed on my part as moderator). During an hour or so between PoemTalk and the Modern Poetry Symposium sponsored by Special Collections, I met up with Brandon Fogel, a former student of mine at Penn and now, with Judith, a faculty member of the Society of Fellows. Brandon's field is philosophy and physics (not just the idea of physics in some squishy history of science sense, but real hard-sci physics). As an undergrad at Penn he majored in English and physics, the only student to do so in my 25 years at the university. Unsurprisingly, the gang already surrounding me knew Brandon, so it was a confab. Then to the conference.

Garin Cycholl gave a wonderful paper on the poet Sterling Plumpp and jazz geography; I don't know much about Plumpp so I was being well schooled. Stephanie Anderson, a doctoral student here at U of C, then gave a talk on Chicago magazine, which Alice Notley edited during her several years here in Chicago in the early 70s (and also a bit afterward--when she and Ted Berrigan were in Europe). Paired with the Notley paper was Nancy Kuhl's on Margaret Anderson and The Little Review. Both these papers made use of fabulous rare materials. Nancy is the curator of poetry collections at the Yale American literature collection at the Beinecke. (I'd corresponded with her in recent years about the various manuscripts I used to research and write Counter-Revolution of the Word but had not met her until yesterday.) Nancy is also a fine poet, as witness The Wife of the Left Hand, a copy of which she gave me yesterday.

The Alice Notley/Margaret Anderson pairing - thank you, David Pavelich - was inspired, suggesting all kinds of things about the terms "editing" and (versus) "curating"; raising questions about young avant-garde women who find themselves at the center of a writing scene ("enabling," etc.). Notley very consciously sought to do all this without much help from Berrigan, and after she gave birth (fall '72?) he guest-edited one issue of Chicago--producing a very different choice of poets. Stephanie suggested that Notley meant to show this difference to their friends and colleagues, to prove, in a sense, that the other issues bore no trace of Ted's hand.

Don Share (he of the equanimous disposition and wonderfully sure, calm voice--a "radio voice," as they used to say) and I gave a pair of papers on the editorship of Henry Rago at Poetry: 1955 (when he took over from the zig-zaggy Karl Shapiro) to 1969 (when Rago suddenly died of a heart attack, not long after an apparently final retirement). My take, in short, is that 1955-1960 is a mixed record for Rago and Poetry at best, and that in 1960 or so Rago caught some fire. Don didn't disagree with my division of the Rago years into two, and he was nicely able to elaborate on all sorts of particular matters of editorship. During the discussion afterward, we began to talk about the special burden - given its special legacy of modernism - facing any editor of Poetry, and got close to a full-out conversation about the situation of Poetry today...when time ran out. But the topic had been raised (what do the failures of Rago's first four or five years teach us?) and it was very good.

After just a few minutes with Nancy Kuhl I remembered that I read (at the Regenstein, in fact; in the Poetry archives) about Lee Anderson's recordings of modern poets--recalled that Anderson (in the late 50s?) was preparing to give these recordings to Yale. Nancy of course knew about the Anderson recordings. There they are, still at Yale. Might it be possible for us at PennSound to collaborate with our pals at Yale to make available some of these recordings? You can be sure we'll be on the train to New Haven soon to discuss.

On the drive from Hyde Park to Chinatown for dinner last night, we passed by Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House. The horizontal flat stone thing looks so utterly natural in its urban prairie setting. I was a little shocked by this. I can usually see architecture in photographs and get it sufficiently; but Robie House needs to be seen as it is, just there, on a residential corner in this sweet little university town on the flat south end of its broad-shouldered city.

modernist democracy

Turns out that WCW's "no ideas but in things" is a localist's advocacy of direct representation. (There! That's a political reading.)

nuanced commie critic

Stanley Burnshaw, who died at 99 years of age just a few years ago, reviewed Wallace Stevens's Ideas of Order critically in the communist New Masses in 1935. Although Stanley left his association with the Party fairly early (he'd never been a member, so far as I know--and he was always skeptical of aesthetic "lines"), and was very active as a translator and anthologist, and later as a senior editor at Henry Holt, the poetry world forgot about him as he developed his literary portfolio and sensibility. They seemed to prefer Burnshaw, frozen in Depression time, as the angry young lefty, hurling Marxist critique at the insular modernist. But Stanley was right there, all along, to be found and talked to. I came to know him in the 80s and eventually spent many hours at his apartment, with Harvey Teres (then at Princeton, writing a book about Partisan Review). We recorded the interview, then excerpted it and, with Stanley, edited it. Then published it in the Wallace Stevens Journal in 1989. I've been digging around my old things, as readers of this blog will have noted, and found the interview. Made a PDF of it and here it is.

modernist pedagogy

I have a long essay on modernist pedagogy coming out in a new book edited by Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh. The book is Teaching Modernist Poetry and is being published soon by Palgrave Macmillan. You can pre-order here.

Other essays in the volume include Peter Nicholls' "The Elusive Allusion: Poetry as Exegesis," Carol Sweeney's "Race, Modernism and Institutions," and Charles Bernstein's "Wreading, Writing, Wresponding."

new review

New review to be published soon in Modernism/modernity. Earlier here I posted a draft of the review and got a response from the editors. I enjoyed that exchange.

to put it simple

If you want to find a cogent explanation of the difference between late modernism and postmodernism, don't by any means go to TudorDaily.info. The site announces that it's "a place to ask questions about Learning and Teaching." Someone, presumably a student somewhere grappling with a paper assignment, posted this question: "What are the differences between Late Modernism and Post-Modernism?" And here is the response: "To put it simple, late modernism is the easiest form of modernism and post-modernism is a more fine sort of painting."

modernist lab

The Modernism Lab at Yale provides links and source materials and chronologies for the study of the early years of modernism. It seems to be set up to support a growing cluster of courses on modernism at Yale. It's not clear yet how much of interest and use it'll be to others, but at least there are a number of links to the full texts of modernist works of that period, and good (if so far partial) chronologies.

modernist power couple

I'm listening to a 2-hour recording made of Kenneth Irby reading at the Ear Inn in New York, in May of 1984. At the time he was obsessed with the relatively unknown poetry of Mary Butts. And he began his reading by talking about Butts' writing career, and life, and by reading several of her poems.

Along the way Irby mentions that Butts was married to John Rodker. I hadn't known that. I've long been fascinated by Rodker. In the 80s, when I first started visiting archives and collecting odd bits of modernist literary history, I ran into Rodker's legacy. I believe I read his papers at the University of Maryland, but I could be wrong about that. Or maybe at the Ransom Center at UT Austen, which is where a smallish archive of his papers is housed today. Rodker was a correspondent of many modernist poets, including Wallace Stevens; he published some early Stevens. But no Rodker-Stevens letters are at Texas. I do see correspondences with Theodore Draper and Jessica (Decca) Mitford, which makes me think, on a hunch, that he had a radical/leftist phase, perhaps in the 40s. He was a good friend of Doris Lessing.

In 1919 he started the Ovid Press. It lasted about a year. In the 20s he was in Paris helping Joyce with a second edition of Ulysses. He got into occult publishing and, much later, into publishing pornography. A Collected Poems was published in 1930.

John Rodker and Stevens shared the pages of the October 1919 issue of Poetry. Rodker's poem "The Searchlight" is there, along with a dozen or so of Stevens' famous Harmonium poems.

For a while Rodker was a go-between for Stevens and painting. At one point Rodker, in Paris, was trying to get Stevens to buy a painting by Wyndham Lewis. Stevens never bought a Lewis, but did say this in a letter: "Fancy the swank of Wyndham Lewis."

Ken Irby's interest in the unknown poems of Mary Butts seems warranted - judging from the few poems I've read and, now, thanks to Irby, have heard read aloud. If I ever get the time I'd like to explore the aesthetic cross-influence of Butts and Rodker. This was the time of the formation of Anglo-American modernism in poetry and these two people were important but now almost indiscernible influences.

I haven't read the biography of Butts written by Nathalie Blondel, but that would certainly be a good next step.

Later, Danny Snelson affirms my interest in Rodker, thus: "I've also had a long-time fascination for the man. He was also the center piece, really the only recurring character, in Pound's short-lived Exile journal, wch published an incredible Rodker novel in pieces. Really fascinated by his work I was just reading the Ovid edition of Mauberley, wch is just fabulous. It wld be great to get hands on some of the occult / pornographic publications. Also the Imago editions of Freud. Totally wonderful trajectory!"

the '20s were in again

When the legacy of The Dial got clinched.

four's a pair

Gertrude Stein, "Readings" (1921)

Kisses can kiss us
A duck a hen and fishes, followed by wishes.
Happy little pair.

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I adore this little poem. It's got a lot of Stein it it - and by that I suppose I mean that it's teachable in an introduction to Stein overall. Back in '99 or so I recorded a short improvised reading of the poem with Shawn Walker and have now converted it to mp3 and added it to the English 88 intro to modernism pages.

ut pictura poesis descends a staircase

Here's X. J. Kennedy's "Nude Descending a Staircase," published in 1959 or 1960. From the title we know that Kennedy was in some sense at least rewriting or reworking the image of Duchamp's great early modern kinetic-cubist painting of the same name. I could go on and on about this poem as a 1950s-style poetical quietism. I won't here. Maybe what one can say on this score will be obvious. Whereas in the Duchamp the subject position is everywhere at once (we are seeing the nude from all angles - she moves and thus our rendering of her must be dynamic), here we are watching her from below - down the stairs. (In porn-ish pics I believe this is called "upskirt." Google that word and watch out.) From that vantage "we" watch her thighs rub together and although there's "the swinging air" the image is static. We've seen her, spied her. rendered her. Her descent is likened (it is not itself but something like it) and then, in the final line of the poem, the motion is not motion, but has a definitive end. Her motions are collected into a shape, a metered and rhymed who-has-zoomed-who unmistakable shape. This poem about a painting about constant mimesis-defying movement ironizes that kind of movement.

Here you go:

Nude Descending a Staircase

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to her parts go by.

One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

visiting the kiss on V-Day

On Valentine's Day, Jane and I paid a visit to the great Arensberg rooms at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and stood for a long while in front of Brancusi's "The Kiss" (1908). If you glance at it, it seems (by this point) a cliche. But that tiredness is of our own making. Stay with it long enough and its revolutionary qualities come back at you. They did for us indeed. I took this photo with my iPhone (the lowest-quality aspect of that otherwise beautiful device), so forgive me.

two favorite characters

The Times City Room has a blog and the January 2 entry was a piece about the recent donation of the books and papers of the famed bookstore, the Gotham Book Mart, to the special collections department of Penn's Van Pelt Library. Actually, a donor paid the bookstore a sum for its contents, whereupon the donor anonymously donated them to Penn. Penn announced this major acquisition back in mid-December, but now the City Room blog takes a broader look at this once-important literary watering hole and the context of its demise. And they run a great photo of some denizens, including writers who have long interested me, such as Horace Gregory and his wife Marya Zaturenska. Below is that photo. Here I want to point out two characters I find especially fascinating. One is Jose Garcia Villa, a Flipino-American poet who did some writing but also some editing in the modernist milieu. Some time ago I had something to say about his experiment with poems in which all words were separated by commas; see "why,can't,traditional,meter,be,an,effect,too?" Garcia Villa is the slight dark-haired fellow standing under the man on the ladder (who happens to be W. H. Auden). Another favorite of mine is the fellow sitting cross-legged on the floor: Charles Henri Ford, a novelist, poet, editor, photographer, collage artist and driving force behind the surrealist magazine View. He was born in Mississippi and I'm guessing he picked up the handle "Henri" in Paris. He had escaped to France pretty early, and ran his first periodical there, titled Blues and subtitled "A Bisexual Bimonthly." Returned to NYC in '34 and lived there with his long-time partner, the quasi-exiled neo-romantic painter Pavel Tchelitchew. My favorite Ford story: he typed Djuna Barnes' novel Nightwood for her, while visiting Morocco in 1932 at the suggestion of Paul Bowles.

imagists on the web

Up at MIT Nick Montfort--embodying the perfect mixture of engineering and literary backgrounds--has his students do some serious web work in (I'm almost tempted to say) the old-fashioned put-it-up-on-the-web mode. One student project has been to make Des Imagistes of 1912, Ezra Pound's gathering of imagists, available for the first time ever on the web. They've done a beautiful job of it. And even the URL - www.desimagistes.com - is elegant. There it is. Gotta love that typeface, 1912's version of mod. "This website uses a font stack of 'Futura, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif.' Futura was designed between 1924 and 1926 by Paul Renner, and while Renner was not associated with the Bauhaus school of design, Futura is frequently used in connection with Bauhaus-related topics. The Bauhaus school was founded two years after Des Imagistes' publication, and its aesthetics harmonize well with the nature of imagistic poetry."

wide circulation

Our 12th PoemTalk show is being released this week. Here it is. You've not heard PoemTalk yet? Well, it's 25 minutes of talk about a single poem. Tightly focused talk at moments, but mostly rather loose. Which is why I say "a close, but not too close, reading of a poem." Some poems are left largely unsaid by us by the end, but for some few poems we're really able, it seems, to cover the ground. I think we cover most of the ground this time, talking about Ezra Pound's broadly satiric - and wonderfully performative - early poem, "Cantico del Sole." Give a listen and let me know (afilreis [at] writing [dot] upenn [dot] edu) what you think. The thought of what America would be like if PoemTalk had a wide circulation. (I don't flatter myself.)