Alfred Kreymborg Research Articles

A Probable Source for “The Silver Plough-Boy”

A Probable Source for “The Silver Plough-Boy” Sidney Feshbach WHEN THE SECOND EDITION of Harmonium appeared in 1931, Wallace Stevens not only added fourteen poems, he also decided to delete three: “The Silver Plough-Boy,” “Exposition of the Contents of a Cab,” and “Architecture” (Cook 29).1 Thus, “The Silver Plough-Boy” disappeared from view for the rest of Stevens’s lifetime; it was not included in The Collected Poems . We still need to turn to J. M. Edelstein’s descriptive bibliography to trace its publication history to Alfred Kreymborg’s magazine Others, where it first appeared, together with “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” in August of 1915 (Edelstein 195). The poem was subsequently republished in the annual anthology of Others that Kreymborg collected in 1916, as part of a set of nine poems, four of which Stevens chose never to include in any of his later books (Edelstein 148).2 Here is the text: The Silver Plough-Boy A black figure dances in a black field.It seizes a sheet, from the ground, from a bush, as if spread there by some wash-woman for the night.It wraps the sheet around its body, until the black figure is silver.It dances down a furrow, in the early light, back of a crazy plough, the green blades following.How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black figure slips from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the sheet falls to the ground! (CPP 42) In February and March of 1914, Harley Granville-Barker, a famous London playwright, actor, and director and producer of plays, staged a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was radically different from conventional Victorian performances in its handling of text, scenery, costume, and music. Details of this unique production appear to be reflected in “The Silver Plough-Boy.” Stevens probably attended a performance, possibly accompanied by his Harvard friend Walter Arensberg, who was strongly committed to the Baconian theory of Shakespeare’s authorship. These are some of the facts that we may assemble about the production: [End Page 97] Harley Granville-Barker created in February 1914, his famous, startling A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Savoy Theatre. A year later [c. February to March 1915] it was brought to New York. Among its innovations, which included simplified, suggestive scenery and stylized costumes . . . Granville-Barker did away with [the music of Felix] Mendelssohn. . . . Old English folk songs and dances were used, provided by Cecil Sharp. . . . Titania’s call for “a roundel and a fairy song” was answered by a round; it then led into two folk melodies which Sharp selected to fit the lullaby itself. . . . An arrangement of several folk dance tunes was used for the final dance of the fairies—Granville-Barker’s famous golden fairies, gilded from head to foot in bizarre costumes with hair of metal shavings, rope beards, scimitars, and wire head-pieces. In the last scene, they weaved in and out among seven silver pillars set against a black and silver sky. (Williams 65–66) The woodland setting, like most of the other scenes, was created entirely through draperies. . . . [T]he dances were based on English folk dances. Somewhat contrarily, the fairies . . . were painted gold and moved slowly and artificially. (Chaudhuri 16) Click for larger view View full resolution Oberon (Dennis Neilson-Terry) and Titania (Christine Silver) in Granville-Barker’s production, Savoy Theatre, 1914. Reproduced in Shakespeare 17. [End Page 98] The moment captured shows Oberon standing to the left and Titania prone to the right. She seems to be wrapped in a silver sheet. “The Silver Plough-Boy” begins with a description that could be taken to describe, in part, the scene on stage: “A black figure dances in a black field.” Stevens has changed Oberon into another performer, costumed in black, who “dances” before the black and silver drapery woodland; he performs with folk music. The replacement of Oberon with a single figure in black has drawn the scene in the poem into an expression of the single figure. Thus, both “The Silver Plough-Boy” and, at the least, the name of the title figure in “Peter Quince at the Clavier...

미국 현대극 실험의 청사진: 인간 마네킹의 자유시 대화극 Lima Beans

Alfred Kreymborg was a bohemian intellectual in Greenwich Village, New York City, at the beginning of the 20th century. He experimented with a poetic experiment called ‘free-verse dialogue’ that was not bound by the traditional set-form poetry writing, which developed into an experiment on prose poem, and ultimately the writing of Lima Beans (1919). This one-act play has a simple plot depicting the daily life of a newlywed couple on their second week of marriage. The stage experiment requites more attention than the plot or story development in the play. Lima Beans is a short play piece that combines a new playwriting technique of ‘free-verse dialogue’ and a theatrical experiment called ‘a play with puppets.’ In the play, a couple of human mannequins dismantle traditional language and poetic practices while uttering fragments of words in staccato fashion. Their action and movement are jerky, wooden, and exaggerated. The stage set is surrounded by the black and white and cubist pastiche of geometric pattern, which reproduces a fanciful but abstract middle-class home. The whole picture woven with the setting, characters, and language of this play presents a blueprint for the new trends, non-realistic theatrical experiment, that would be attempted by the Provincetown Players, especially starting with Eugene O’Neill.

The Rope

The Rope

The Definitive Editor: Alfred Kreymborg and the Others Magazine-Anthology Duo

This article examines two intrinsically linked periodical publications: Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (1915–1919) and Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (1916–1920) both edited by Alfred Kreymborg. To date, scholarship on the publications has focused either on the magazine or, to a lesser extent, on the anthology, but never on the dynamic between the two publications. The article begins by considering the way both publications challenged the boundaries of medial form in an effort to better characterize the respective functions of the magazine and the anthology in the Others dynamic. It demonstrates how the anthology, an annual publication, allowed Kreymborg to reclaim editorial agency over the Others brand, facilitating a secondary round of editing of the magazine's contents. By creating a secondary selection of poems increasingly collated by guest editors, Kreymborg was able to further shape the representation of the duo. The restoration of the Others anthology to the history of the Others project sheds new light on key contributors and resultantly requires us to further nuance our understanding of the Others magazine as a largely inclusive project. In uncovering the role the Others anthology played in the Others dynamic, this article ultimately underscores the need to include the serially published modernist anthology in our understanding of the diverse and interrelated modernist media ecology.

Poets and Puppets: Interarts Collaboration in Alfred Kreymborg’s Lima Beans

This article focuses on a little-explored case of modernist collaboration situated at the crossroads between different arts: the performance of Alfred Kreymborg’s play Lima Beans, produced by the Provincetown Players in December 1916, in which poets Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams played the two leading parts, together with poet and artist William Zorach, who also designed the sets. The play’s novel aesthetics breaks with the principles of the realist dramas typical of the time and favored even by more experimental groups like the Provincetown Players. First, the article examines how the play creates a distancing effect towards the deliberately mundane story of a married couple, using incongruous elements like the proto-absurdist nonsense of the dialogues, the abstract, Futurist sets, and the groundbreaking acting techniques inspired by puppet theater. Second, it specifically focuses on the blurring of the boundaries between the different arts—drama, poetry, and dance among others—in this play, whose dialogues were conceived as free verse. Finally, it delves into the intertextual and intermedial dialogues between the play and Loy’s and Williams’s poems published in the little magazine Others, edited by Kreymborg.

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism by Eric B. White

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism by Eric B. White Paul R. Cappucci Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism. Eric B. White. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. xii + 270 pp. $112 (cloth). There are moments when you read a critical study that you know it’s something special, that it will garner a prominent place in literary scholarship for years to come. Eric White’s Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism published by Edinburgh University Press is just such a book. White’s engaging monograph examines the transatlantic movement of little magazines produced throughout the modernist period and expertly chronicles the dynamic collaborations that formed and reformed the avant-garde in multiple locations. [End Page 84] Based upon extensive archival research, that includes unpublished manuscripts and magazine issues, White’s monograph combines multiple, critical approaches to reveal the complex interconnections forged amid a transatlantic avant-garde community. It offers a revisionary examination of the ways literary modernists considered specific locales in the cultivation of experimental writing and national identity. Through his approach, White examines how William Carlos Williams, Alfred Kreymborg, Jean Toomer, and others participated in the transatlantic construction of American literary modernism. He posits, as noted in his prologue, “a version of localist modernism that configures the aesthetic expressions of avant-garde modernists as responses to specific regions and cultural moments. However, it locates the development of those responses within rather than outside of the transatlantic discourse networks of the early twentieth century” (4). White frames his book in terms of “locational” and “localist” formations of modernism, key distinctions in the field of transatlantic studies, and his study divides into six chapters that offer extensive, insightful analysis of the multiple iterations of little magazines, as well as the key figures involved in their production. He starts with an examination of Alfred Kreymborg’s Others: A Magazine of the New Verse and argues that this magazine “laid the textual groundwork for the localist avant-garde to take root in” (15). Chapter 2 then turns from a locational to localist analysis of the little magazine world by focusing upon geographic places, as well as “private” work completed behind the scenes. Drawing upon recent archival research, White’s third chapter examines the permutations from a “locational poetics” to the emergence of “localist modernism” (16). The next chapter then offers an analysis of “the New Science of Advertising” with a fascinating look at how American localist writers “confronted the problem of place in the light of new economic and political realities.” In Chapter 5 White considers later developments, specifically the emergence of “alternative modernisms,” and offers a compelling exploration of the ways African American modernists participated in the transnational aesthetic, examining Broom, Secession, and S4N, as well as Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, Survey Graphic, and Fire!! White’s analysis reveals how these later publications offer “unique articulations of a locational praxis which successfully undertook an aestheticised form of cultural critique,” as well as “new possibilities for approaching modernist problems of place” (17). Of special note is White’s breakdown of Jean Toomer’s modernist poetics as the formulation of a “new” American language rooted in the fusion of identities and geographic spaces. As part of this exploration, White considers the influence of uananimisme, a “transatlantic vogue” that “drew on ancient folk cultures to synergize urban environments” (149). White’s book fittingly concludes with an [End Page 85] examination of the ways “cultural localism” reemerged during the late modernist period. It focuses particular attention on 1924, Blues, Pagany: A Native Quarterly, as well as the revival of Contact. This “new localism,” as White incisively points out, “mediated a cultural transition in American modernism from imagist to objectivist poetics, where issues of race, class, and gender inequality in the inhabited world were brought into increasing contact with the written word” (17–18). From White’s study, William Carlos Williams stands out as one of the pivotal figures in this transatlantic movement. White threads Williams’s participation in numerous little magazine iterations throughout various chapters. With his contribution as the Associate Editor of Others, Williams promotes, what White perceptively describes as, “a new Franciscan order” for the...

Exorcism

<i>Exorcism</i>

Collecting as modernist practice

In this highly original study, Jeremy Braddock focuses on collective forms of modernist expression-the art collection, the anthology, and the archive-and their importance in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States. Using extensive archival research, Braddock's study synthetically examines the overlooked practices of major American art collectors and literary editors: Albert Barnes, Alain Locke, Duncan Phillips, Alfred Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Katherine Dreier, and Carl Van Vechten. He reveals the way collections were devised as both models for modernism's future institutionalization and culturally productive objects and aesthetic forms in themselves. Rather than anchoring his study in the familiar figures of the individual poet, artist, and work, Braddock gives us an entirely new account of how modernism was made, one centered on the figure of the collector and the practice of collecting. Collecting as Modernist Practice demonstrates that modernism's cultural identity was secured not so much through the selection of a canon of significant works as by the development of new practices that shaped the social meaning of art. Braddock has us revisit the contested terrain of modernist culture prior to the dominance of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the university curriculum so that we might consider modernisms that could have been. Offering the most systematic review to date of the Barnes Foundation, an intellectual genealogy and analysis of The New Negro anthology, and studies of a wide range of hitherto ignored anthologies and archives, Braddock convincingly shows how artistic and literary collections helped define the modernist movement in the United States.

A Spanish View of Modernist Poetry in American Periodicals (1925)

A Spanish View of Modernist Poetry in American Periodicals (1925)

“Allow Intelligence to Survive”: Life’s Language in Williams and Tzara

“Allow Intelligence to Survive”: Life’s Language in Williams and Tzara Paul Jaussen In Mexico, since we are talking about Mexico, there is no art: things are made for use. And the world is in perpetual exaltation. —ANTONIN ARTAUD (11) There is a famous passage in William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography in which he recollects his visit to the Armory Show of 1913. Encountering Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” Williams says, “I laughed out loud when I first saw it, happily, with relief” (A 134). Writing several decades after the fact, he claims that the piece “is too hackneyed for [him] to remember anything clearly about it now,” a slight on Duchamp, perhaps (who himself had sufficiently slighted Williams at a party for the latter to bear a grudge), but the statement is also a revelation that the need for an effectively lasting or “timeless” piece of art was absent during the period of Williams’s early work (A 134). The time was now, a now of experiment, of change, of warfare and industrialization, a time accelerating into the future yet unable to completely negotiate the past. And yet a time of laughter and forgetting, when breaking into the world involved breaking from its orders and languages. Williams’s laughter can be read as not simply pleasure, but, as he says, “relief,” what Henry Sayre describes as “release,” the sense of unleashed opportunity that America inherited from the fractured and alienated Europe, the chance to make a new aesthetic practice all its own (16). New York in the years following the Armory Show was the place for that art of release and mirth, and Williams, despite the constraints of a medical practice and a young family, could not keep himself away. This was an era of the small magazines and the French immigrants (most famously Francis Picabia and Duchamp), of salons and parties, all fueled by the compelling need to create something new, not for the museums, but for the world in which they lived, the conflicted everyday [End Page 17] places and spaces that were dominated by the technology of the modern and the logic of warfare.1 Williams, in the thick of it, attended the gatherings and met the artists, aided Alfred Kreymborg in the publication of the journal Others, founded the magazine Contact in 1920, and, through it all, never stopped writing (Dijkstra 22, 109). As Sayre argues, this context of avant-garde energy is crucial for our understanding of the books Williams produced at this time, particularly Spring and All and Kora in Hell: Improvisations (Sayre 17). These works are far from formally autonomous high modernism, nor are they the expansive historical and philosophical vision of what would become Paterson; instead, they are texts that reveal American avant-garde at its conflicted nascent stages, coming from an author who resisted “both Europe and America” in an effort to create newness in his time and place (Tashijan 91). It is the radical commitment to the value of that new, its work as a source of energy in the world, that comes to the forefront of Spring and All and Kora in Hell. This energy went by many names in Williams’s texts, but consistently he refers to it as “life”—an eruptive force which outlasts the constraints of language and culture that always attempt to channel or block it. Life is the energy put into play by its correlative faculty, the imagination, without which, Williams is very clear, thinking disappears. In other words, the newness of life is a fundamental and essential ingredient for all human activities, such as language and science, even as those edifices tend to cover over it and deny its significance. Williams’s poetic goal at the time of these early writings is to make life happen, to restore it to sensibility and allow the imagination to move. Life’s importance is not unique to Williams, however; it springs forth as well in the manifestos of Tristan Tzara. A number of critics have read Dada as the avantgarde movement closest to the early Williams, and, as Peter Schmidt writes, although it is unknown whether or not Williams ever read Tzara’s...

Writing the lost generation: expatriate autobiography and American modernism

Members of the Lost American writers and artists who lived in Paris during the 1920s, continue to occupy an important place in our literary history. Rebelling against increased commercialism and the ebb of cosmopolitan society in early twentieth-century America, they rejected the culture of what Ernest Hemingway called a place of 'broad lawns and narrow minds.'Much of what we know about these iconic literary figures comes from their own published letters and essays, revealing how adroitly they developed their own reputations by controlling the reception of their work. Surprisingly the literary world has paid less attention to their autobiographies.In Writing the Lost Generation, Craig Monk unlocks a series of neglected texts while reinvigorating our reading of more familiar ones. Well-known autobiographies by Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein are joined here by works from a variety of lesser-known - but still important - expatriate American writers, including Sylvia Beach, Alfred Kreymborg, Samuel Putnam, and Harold Stearns. By bringing together the self-reflective works of the Lost Generation and probing the ways the writers portrayed themselves, Monk provides an exciting and comprehensive overview of modernist expatriates from the United States.

&lt;i&gt;The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity&lt;/i&gt; (review)

The Provincetown Players and Culture of Modernity. Brenda Murphy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xix. + 282 pp. $85.00 (cloth). In late Fall of 1916, young physician and aspiring poet William Carlos Williams, married four years earlier and now establishing himself in a busy medical practice in Rutherford, New Jersey, traveled by train several times a week to MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village where, as an amateur actor, he was in rehearsals as one of three performers (the Husband) in poet and editor Alfred Kreymborg's short verse play, Lima Beans. The other actors in this Provincetown Players' inaugural New York production were writer Mina Loy (the Wife) and sculptor William Zorach (the Huckster). Kreymborg's work, subtitled A Scherzo Play in One Act, was scheduled to be on a bill that included Before Breakfast, by young Eugene O'Neill, and Two Sons, by Neith Boyce. Zorach designed minimalist set, which cost $2.50. In a passage in Williams's Autobiography, partially quoted by Brenda Murphy in her comprehensive new book, The Provincetown Players and Culture of Modernity, Williams recalls that experience was tough, but termed three performances (Murphy incorrectly quotes Williams as saying there were five) in December a qualified success (A 138-39). Kreymborg, according to Murphy, was more enthusiastic, remembering with pleasure a December 1 opening night with wild applause and sixteen curtain (Provincetown Players 108). Murphy calls Lima Beans an epithalamium, a kind of bridal song or parable about marital forbearance (1 09-1 0), and it is that, although helter-skelter free verse debate about whether string beans or lima beans should be served to Husband for dinner is in truth only a modest dramatic exercise. Nonetheless, Williams, hopeful about establishment of a new kind of drama, wrote that perhaps here lay (A 1 38). Murphy's book chronicles in thorough and sometimes complicated detail history and pivotal role that Provincetown Players had in shaping not only future of experimental American theatre in early part of twentieth century, but also importance of Players in helping to create what Murphy terms a self-conscious modernist (xv). Among other things, that aesthetic celebrated what Murphy calls non-representational art, including fragmentation of narrative trajectory, the abstraction of some characters into types or symbolic figures, and the theatrical equivalent of 'stream of consciousness' in fiction (xvi). Of course, playwright who would become most closely associated with Provincetown Players, Eugene O'Neill, practiced this aesthetic in many of his plays. But in very early years, many of poets and artists associated with Kreymborg's journal Others were also drawn to this unofficial movement, including Williams, Maxwell Bodenheim, Wallace Stevens, Djuna Barnes and later Edna St. Vincent Millay. And echoes of that aesthetic survived for decades in fringes of American theatre, most strikingly in Julian Beck's and Judith Malina's Living Theatre in late 1 950s and beyond. It is interesting to note that Williams's own unorthodox verse play, Many Loves, was produced by Living Theatre in New York in 1 959, and ran intermittently in repertory over next three years. As Murphy writes, origins of Provincetown Players were anything but auspicious. In July of 1915, a group of writers, artists, activists and hangers-on, drawn together while summering in Provincetown, at very tip of Cape Cod, decided to mount a single evening of theatre on veranda of home of Boyce and her journalist/anarchist friend Hutchins Hapgood. Two short plays were chosen: Constancy, by Boyce, and Suppressed Desires, co-authored by Susan Glaspell, already gaining a reputation as a writer of fiction, and professor and Utopian George (Jig) Cram Cook. …

Tongues "loosened in the melting pot": The Poets of Others and the Lower East Side

Tongues “loosened in the melting pot”:The Poets of Others and the Lower East Side Cristanne Miller (bio) While in most studies of modernism and "race" the focus has been on the significance of African and African American arts, language, and music to Euro-American writers, in New York City modernist poets also turned in their ongoing constructions of the modern to affiliation with the huge population of immigrant Jews living on the Lower East Side, a population perceived at the turn of the twentieth century as racially alien in the U.S. Ill at ease with dominant American culture, poets saw themselves as similarly "alien," and as similarly attempting to establish new kinds of communities, foreign both to their (generally middle-class) upbringing and to contemporary consumerist culture. Some critics of modernity condemned exactly this quality of foreignness in their work. As Michael North reports, literature and art departing from traditional forms was branded with epithets of disease and miscegenation or "mongrelism": "The United States is invaded by aliens, thousands of whom constitute so many acute perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperiling the republic of art in the same way," art critic Royal Cortissoz writes.1 Some poets shared their sense of doom: from London, T. S. Eliot described New York as "invaded by foreign races"; poet and fiction writer Ben Hecht puns on "lice" and "life" to identify a dense population of immigrant Jews on Chicago's Halsted Street with disease; and Dada poet Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven writes a diatribe against William Carlos Williams, associating him with "Jews" as "unsettled since aye," "parasites upon soil foreign," [End Page 455] "forever pariah of races," "only lost soul in void—jew—American possesses—with mere selfish desires . . . mismated happily to peculiar distinct jewish tactlessness . . ."2 For the most part, however, poets living in Greenwich Village (as the Baroness did but Eliot and Hecht did not) saw the immigrant Jewish population thronging the adjoining neighborhoods as representing an admirable cosmopolitanism, social and intellectual progressivism, and general willingness to experiment with the "new." This essay explores modernist response to the Jewish diaspora both through a focus on New York's Lower East Side and through the little magazine of poetry that had the closest ties to the city and that embraced a local poetics in ways distinct from some of the strains of international modernism—namely, Others, edited by Alfred Kreymborg from 1915 through 1919. While Kreymborg and his coeditors did not set out to embrace a particular social agenda, it is hardly coincidental that the contributors to Others celebrate a linguistic and cultural mixing echoing the popular idiom of America as melting pot and affiliated with the figure of the immigrant. Deliberately in the poetry of contributors Lola Ridge, Mina Loy, and Marianne Moore, and ironically through the parody of the Spectra poets' intended hoax, Others represents the hybrid position of the immigrant and Jew as vitally associated with that of the new poet. As has been amply and accurately demonstrated, Euromodernism was profoundly anti-Semitic, and anti-Semitism appears in much of the writing of New York poets as well.3 Adam McKible has even persuasively linked the Little Review's at times open anti-Semitism to its move from Chicago to New York in 1916—where it remained until its demise in 1929.4 Several features, however, distinguish the Little Review's aesthetics and politics from those of Others and explain their differing responses to the local milieu of the Lower East Side. The Little Review prided itself on its internationalism, understood as placelessness or "exile"; as McKible argues, its community of writers "became consciously modernist by disassociating themselves from their local sites of literary production, which had the consequence of transforming them into a wandering 'tribe' of self-hating 'Jews'"—"Jews" in quotation marks insofar as the trope of eternal exile was based on the stereotyped figure of the Jew (SPM, 79, 81). References to Jews in the Little Review were typically unplaced, presenting "the Jew as a tropological figure" or "a point of intellectual identification, physical repulsion, and potential self-loathing...

The Lying Game: Others and the Great Spectra Hoax of 1917

For all its high seriousness and insistence on authenticity, modernism was full of mischief: in 1910 Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and her cohorts dressed up in turbans and dark makeup and passed themselves off as the court of the Emperor of Abyssynia, duping British naval officers into giving them a tour of the flag ship H.M.S. Dreadnought; in 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted an inverted urinal to the Armory Show, signed R. Mutt; Arthur Cravan vanished in 1918, no one sure whether his disappearance was a murder, an accidental drowning, a suicide, or the ultimate Dada performance art; the brief but brilliant career of Ern Malley, Australia's 'national poet,' was fabricated by two obscure poets in 1944.1 The prevalence of such high jinks suggests that, far from sharing Marlowe's ethical sympathies in Heart of Darkness ("You know I hate, detest, can't bear a lie"), modernism loves a lie, reveling, like Felix Volkbein in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, in "splendid and reeking falsification."2 One of the most successful modernist hoaxes used little magazines to disseminate their specious poetic products, choosing Others: A Magazine of the New Verse as a primary venue. Established in 1915 by Alfred Kreymborg, Others had earned a reputation for extremism by publishing daring and experimental poets such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. The magazine had featured the work of Imagists and Futurists and dedicated special issues to dance poems by the Choric School, a Spanish-American Number, and a Woman's Number. Upholding its mission to publish "the new verse," Others devoted its entire January 1917 issue to the latest innovation: the Spectric School. Like the many competing "isms" of the day, Spectrism had a manifesto. Spectra poems by Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan had appeared in Forum and the New Republic, as well as in Poetry, the Little Review, and Reedy's Mirror, and the [End Page 23] poets issued a volume of Spectra in 1916. The school acquired acolytes around the country, and the Wisconsin Literary Magazine even published a parody of the parody, introducing the Ultra-Violet school.3 The Spectric School earned critical acclaim from respected critics and poets: E. L. Masters praised them for getting "to the core of things."4 Much to the shock of its enthusiasts, however, Spectrism proved to be merely a masquerade—a hoax concocted by conservative poets, Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke, to expose the pretensions of modernist poets and audiences alike, especially the Others extremists. What Bynner and Ficke did not anticipate was that the hoax would also uncover something "Other" within themselves: as Bynner complained after the hoax was revealed, "The worst of it is that I can't get rid of Emmanuel Morgan! . . . I don't know where he leaves off and I begin. He's a boomerang!"5 The lesson to be extracted from this comical chapter in modernist literary history is not that the masquerade exposes an underlying essential or true self, but rather that identity emerges through the kinds of dialogues and performances that little magazines enabled. Although many scholars have delighted in retelling the story of the Spectra Hoax, none have considered the importance of little magazines in facilitating it.6 The Spectra Hoax offers a fascinating case study of identity politics in early modernism, demonstrating how gender, sexuality, class, and nation contribute to the dialogical formation of personal identity. Little magazines created a forum for these dialogues, enabling modern identities to be articulated, undercut, and reformulated. In other words, these journals provided an invaluable stage for performing modern identities. Little magazines were essential venues for modernist identity performances, not only because they were more permissive and open to experiment, but also because the journals were themselves performance spaces, more similar to theaters than books. Little magazines are...

Morals, Manners, and "Marriage": Marianne Moore's Art of Conversation

Contemporary accounts indicate that in addition to her other skills, Marianne Moore was a formidable talker. It also seems that she could be encouraged, or dared, to display this talent. Two anecdotes suggest her ability and her friends' reactions to it. Elizabeth Bishop relates the first: A friend has told me of attending a for writers and at which she introduced a painter to Marianne by saying, Moore has the most vocabulary of anyone I know. Marianne showed signs of pleasure at this, and within a minute offhandedly accurately used in a sentence a word I no longer remember that means an addiction, in animals, to licking the luminous numbers off the dials of clocks and watches. (153) Miss Moore's interesting acquaintance with a surprising range of information is the subject of the second anecdote, told by Alfred Kreymborg: Never having found [Moore] at a loss on any subject whatsoever, I wanted to give myself the pleasure of at least once hearing her stumped about something [so] I invited her to a ball game at the Polo Grounds.... The L was jammed... Marianne was totally oblivious to the discomfiture anyone else would have felt and, in answer to a question of mine, paraded whole of perfectly marshaled ideas into long of balanced periods which no lurching... or pushing... disturbed.... Well, I got her safely to her seat and sat down beside her.... I... touched her arm and, indicating a man in the pitcher's box winding up with the movement Matty's so famous for... I quickly turned to her with: Do you happen to know the gentleman who threw that strike? I've never seen him before, she admitted, but I take it it must be Mr. Mathewson. I could only gasp, Why? I've read his instructive book on the art of pitching ... and it's a pleasure . . . to note how unerringly his execution supports his theories. (qtd. in Molesworth 164) These anecdotes show the double edge of Moore's conversational brilliance. If at Bishop's party for writers and artists it nets Moore the flattering recognition of her peers, in Kreymborg's story it functions more aggressively: her battalions of ideas and columns of periods sound like the talk of someone who is out of her element in no mood to surrender to unfamiliarity. The nature of what is at stake in Moore's facility with verbal thrust and parry is the subject of To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity: Attack is more piquant than concord, when You tell me frankly that you would like to feel My beneath your I'm all abroad; I can put my weapon up, and Bow you out. Gesticulation--it is half the language. Let unsheathed gesticulation be the steel Your courtesy must meet, Since in your hearing words are mute, which to my senses Are a shout. (Observations 52) Here Moore puts her conversational weapon up after realizing that her boorish antagonist is fighting with much cruder tools. Encountering his naked belligerence in the form of a wish to feel her flesh beneath [his] feet, [1] she resorts to mute gesture as the only dignified response. Her triumph in this encounter is twofold. On the one hand, she has shown her opponent the door and kept her self-possession. On the other, she has emphasized the keenness of her verbal sword by declining to use it against an unworthy foe. In this way she excludes her attacker not only from her own company also, implicitly, from the company of all people skillful, tactful, and alert enough to engage in real conversation. [2] Thus the poem articulates what the anecdotes suggest: for Moore conversation is as much a mixture of elan, defiance, and aggression as it is a socially cohesive practice. This side of Moore's interest in conversation tends to get lost when critics focus on the contemporary resonances of the term and thereby obscure the tensions that it reveals when Moore uses it in regard to poetr y. …

Form, Function, and Creative Tension in Cane: Jean Toomer and the Need for the Avant-Garde

In The Negro Novel in America, the book that may have initiated the resurrection of Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) and the renewed interest in Toomer himself, Robert Bone writes that Toomer: belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style. Since stylistic innovation requires great technical dexterity, Toomer displays a concern for technique which is fully two decades in advance of the period. (81) While it may be an exaggeration to say that Toomer was twenty years ahead of his time, Bone's statement does point out one of the striking aspects of Cane: the book's form established Toomer well in the avantgarde of his time. Indeed, the form of Cane has caused some problems with critics. It certainly is not genre-specific. It is a collection of character sketches, stories, poems, and putative drama. Before the publication of Cane by Boni and Liveright, some of the pieces were printed separately in small literary magazines, and nowadays separate pieces are widely anthologized. However, Toomer was careful in his preparation of the complete book and was not happy with its being broken up for anthologies after its publication. Yet, while Bone discusses Cane in his critique of the Negro novel, the individual pieces seem in both genre and narrative too disparate to make up a unified novel in any traditional sense. Rather, the unity of the work springs from its stylistic experimentation and thematic consistency. Cane is wide-ranging in its formal experiments: fragmented and elliptical sentences; repetitions; surrealistic imagery (Her mind is a pink meshbag filled with baby toes [24]); oxymoron (The full moon sank upward into the deep purple of the cloud-bank [31]); personification (the walls are sleeping singers [50], Ghost of a yell slipped through the flames and out the great door of the factory [35]); stream of consciousness; musical variety from spirituals to jazz to variations on blues lines (Aint much difference between blue an [107]); black dialect; and sustained symbols like the mysterious and magical use of dusk. All of these add up to a fascinating and exciting variety, capturing the moods of black people in the rural South and the urban North. Like a Charles Mingus jazz piece, Cane holds great variety in a small space, as for instance in these contrasting passages: The air is heavy with fresh tobacco smoke. It makes her sick. She wants to turn back. She goes up the steps. As if she were mounting to some great height, her head spins. She is violently dizzy. Blackness rushes to her eyes. And then she finds that she is in a large room. Barlo is before her. (24) Here the staccato, simple sentences build tension as Esther moves steadily towards her doomed black fantasy personified in the black superman, Barlo. Yet just four pages further on at the beginning of Blood-Burning Moon, Toomer writes this contrasting periodic sentence: Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came. (28) It is formal aspects like these and the entire mixture of prose and poetry that lead Charles Larson to call Cane: sui generis - unique piece of writing in American literature as well as in the entire scope of Third World writing....Cane is one of the most innovative works of 20th-century American fiction - a landmark in American literature, foreshadowing the soon-to-follow experimental works of John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. The experimental novel in America begins not with those writers but with Jean Toomer's Cane. (31, 32) Two major forces were working on Toomer as he composed Cane. One force was immediate: his circle of literary friends and acquaintances, Hart Crane, Alfred Kreymborg, Paul Rosenfeld, Gorham Munson, Lola Ridge - an editor of Broom magazine - and Waldo Frank - his mentor (Kerman and Eldridge 100-10). …

Rediscovering Our Sources: The Poetry of Mina Loy

Although British by birth, Mina Loy (1882-1966) has been considered an American modernist poet since her arrival in New York in 1916.1 One of the European expatriates from World War I, she shared the glamour and notoriety accompanying this group's pursuit of artistic and personal freedom, and her exceptional beauty, cerebral disposition, and cosmopolitan background distinguished her among the artists surrounding avant garde impresarios Alfred Stieglitz, Walter Conrad Arensberg, and Alfred Kreymborg. This milieu provided a sympathetic audience for her daringly innovative poetry, and to its writers' experiments in word, line, and image she contributed her firsthand knowledge of European modernism. The American little magazines were her publishers. Even before she arrived in the States her poems (and experimental plays) had appeared in Camera Work, The Trend, The International, Rogue, and Others, and in the late 1910s she moved with the experimentalists to The Little Review and The Dial.

Lowell's Puns

T OWELL'S ADDI=ION to word play is well known. He frequently em]_ ployed both types of punning: that in which a single word is used in a way suggesting two or more meanings, and that in which two or more words of the same sound but with different meanings ('homophones' to the linguist) are used with a humorous effect. Despite the fact, however, that puns constitute a large bulk of the wit and humor upon which his critics invariably comment, no special study has been made of them. Louis Untermeyer, for instance, in discussing 'A Fable for Critics,' merely remarks, 'The puns are alternately brilliant and atrocious.' And Alfred Kreymborg simply states, 'Not even our prince of punsters, Louis Untermeyer, can compete with Lowell.' It seems of interest to study Lowell's use of the pun; and the best way to do that is to let him speak for himself.

American Speech in Radio Poetry

THE SPOKEN word has always been an instrument of entertainment, persuasion, inspiration, and even combat. Because of the incredible growth of radio this instrument has become one of the most formidable forces in the world today. It is small wonder, therefore, that poets are turning to the radio. Traditionally, the spoken word is the very core of poetry, and broadcasting presents this word to an audience of millions. Nor is it at all strange that radio is beginning to welcome the poets. The compression and the allusive power of poetry are needed. 'Radio, whose greatest single commodity is time,' Norman Corwin points out, 'can least afford to waste any.'l And poetry does not waste time. At first the poets were content to read their verses over the air, but the radio, 'the theatre of the ear,' needed more dramatic material. In 1936 the British Broadcasting Corporation produced D. G. Bridson's 'The March of the 45, ' the first poetry play written specifically for the radio. In 1937 the Columbia Broadcasting System presented Archibald MacLeish's 'The Fall of the City.' Other poetry plays designed to fit into the broadcasting pattern followed soon after. Among the radio poets today can be listed Norman Corwin, Archibald MacLeish, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alfred Kreymborg, Stephen Vincent Benet, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, John LaTouche, A. M. Sullivan, Eve Merriam, Ruth Lechlitner, Norman Rosten, Carl Sandburg, and Maxwell Anderson. While poets like Sandburg found the radio a natural medium for their verse, others were forced to change their style, for radio poetry must at all times be clear and simple. It is controlled by the heterogeneity of the audience and the physical limitations of the ear, which cannot dart back to clear up difficult points. Radio poetry, therefore, presents its ideas in simple, everyday words, repeating frequently so that even the inattentive listener finally catches the import of the lines. Two striking examples of the lucidity of verse for the air can be found in the work of Eve Merriam in the United States and Louis MacNeice