Back to The New Northwest: Suffragist Poetry in the Gold Man Review

Regular P&PC readers will remember our ongoing interest in the poetry published in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in The New Northwest—a weekly suffragist newspaper published out of Portland by Abigail Scott Duniway, a leading voice in the fight for Oregon women's suffrage. Between 2010 and 2012, we did a four part series on this poetry, which oftentimes appeared on the paper's front page, which was frequently written by Willamette Valley writers long before folks like William Stafford put Oregon on the national poetry map, and which was sometimes sourced or cut-and-pasted from other newspapers around the country (a common practice in an age when poets and their publishers didn't seem to care about regulating the circulation of verse via copyright laws). Then, in 2012 and 2013, we collated a set of these poems for use in the development of Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon, an original and experimental script produced at Willamette University earlier this year in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage.

Now Salem's start-up literary magazine, the Gold Man Review, has joined in the fun, reprinting a portfolio of seven suffragist poems from The New Northwest in its second issue—the one with the snazzy cover pictured above, which puns on the design characteristics of mass market women's magazines to transform the Gold Man pioneer who currently tops the state's capitol building into a Gold Woman pioneer. Themed around the "pioneer spirit," the issue joins the work of nineteenth-century poets with over twenty-five pieces by people writing in Oregon today, and it's also got a long interview with P&PC about The New Northwest, the history of women's suffrage in Oregon, the situation of American poetry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the poems P&PC selected for reprinting in Gold Man with the assistance of students in a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class we taught last Spring.

When you get a chance, pick up a copy of Gold Man Review for yourself. In the meantime, we're giving you a small taste of our interview here—a portion that we think displays some of the best of what an interdisciplinary liberal arts college can offer students: experience working with and using archives, in-class study, cross-departmental collaboration, research into the historical forms and genres of poetry, and engagement with social and community endeavors. We here at P&PC don't talk about the pedagogical possibilities of popular poetry all that frequently, but here's an example of what we do when we're not running the office and bringing you your weekly fix.

Gold Man Review: Why did you and your class decide to pick these poems [for republication in Gold Man Review]?

Mike Chasar: In addition to studying the poems, the most recent instantiation of my "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class also partnered with an experimental scriptwriting class in the Theatre Department that wanted to create a play about the history and legacy of women's suffrage in Oregon as one way to mark and commemorate 2012 as the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage. (See Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote 1912-2012 for other such events.) As part of the experimental nature of the script, the Theatre class thought it would be cool to start with a bunch of poems from The New Northwest, using them as raw material to collage, break up, or interlace through the script in funky and innovative ways. It can sometimes be difficult to figure out what to "do" with archival materials other than, well, archive them and study them; so we thought it would be interesting to motivate them in another way, too—toward the creation of a new piece of art.

So, our first goal was to select poems to present to that class, and toward that end we had two main priorities: 1) select poems that surveyed the different types of arguments being made at the time for extending the vote to women; and 2) select poems with varying poetic strategies, rhetorical components, and performance possibilities. We thought the former would gesture to some of the political complexities of that historical moment that get lost in a debate framed simply as "for" or "against" women’s suffrage. (As with the debate about healthcare today, people aren't just for or against it, but have different reasons for being for or against it, or partly for it and partly against it—you get the idea.) And we thought the latter would shine a light on the diversity of styles and poetic techniques of popular verse, which oftentimes gets characterized as entirely "sentimental" and generally homogenous in style, format, rhetoric, etc.; in actuality, the poetry is pretty diverse—song lyrics, persona poems, narrative poems, lyric poems, satire, dialect, etc.—so we wanted to honor that aspect of the writing.

I made the selections for Gold Man keeping these two elements in mind as well, so that we have inspir- ational song lyrics ("Campaign Song"), two very different dramatic monologues that make different arguments about women and the vote ("The Perplexed Housekeeper" and "'Siah’s Vote"), a serious narrative with children as main characters ("Reasons"), a humorous narrative ("Wife Versus Horse"), a romance ("Katie Lee and Willie Grey"), and a lyrical extended metaphor ("My Ship").

In addition to the generic diversity— all are also part of a culture of poetry that lent itself to oral delivery or performance—the poems also make a pretty wide variety of arguments for how and why women should get the vote: "The Perplexed Housekeeper" suggests that women are already excellent multi-taskers and won't be burdened with the additional responsibilities of voting; "'Siah’s Vote" argues that women already participate in voting via the advice they give to their menfolk; "Campaign Song" says women will help clean up a corrupted culture of voting, but also makes the problematic claim that "John Chinaman" can now do the work once done by women and thus free women up for public life; and "The Ship" shows us a character abandoned and forlorn because what must be the "ship of state" mentioned in Duniway's poem never comes for her. That's just a quick overview, but you get the idea: poets are using different poetic strategies to make different types of arguments about the political enfranchisement or disenfranchisement of women.

P&PC Anecdote: "The Heart of the Apple"

Two years ago, P&PC offered continuing, if sporadic, coverage of a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class that was being taught in the English Department at Willamette University—a class that field tripped to the annual Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, and that delved into microfilm archives to read and study poetry that was published in The New Northwest, a Portland-based, suffragist newspaper edited in the latter part of the nineteenth century by Oregon women's rights leader Abigail Scott Duniway. Another instantiation of that class is being offered this semester, and a P&PC representative will drop in from time to time to see what's up, especially since the archival work in The New Northwest is so timely this year, what with 2012 marking the centennial of women's suffrage in Oregon and all. Our sources tell us that there are interesting interdisciplinary activities afoot this semester, and we will bring coverage of those activities as we get it.

For the moment, however, we wanted to share a brief and humorous exchange that occurred in "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" regarding the funky piece of advertising pictured here—a 5x7-inch poetry postcard issued around 1914 by the Commercial Bank & Trust Company (billed as "The Bank that Helps the Man Who Helps Himself") of Wenatchee, Washington. It's got a blank back side and a poem on front by Viola Adella Gill who was married to Major Edwin S. Gill and died August 28, 1922, in Chambers Prairie, Washington, just outside of Olympia. (Wenatchee, btw, is about 140 miles due East of Seattle.)

Having just read Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse's introduction to Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture, the class—which had already read work investigating the relationship between literature and region by the 12 Southerners, Mary Austin, Eric Sundquist, June Howard, and Richard Brodhead—was especially attuned to Fetterley and Pryse's notions that (a) regionalism is a discursive phenomenon and not a natural, geographic one, and (b) since regionalist writing is alert to the power relationships of place, the best of such writing is also concerned with the ways that those place-based power relationships affect gender roles and identities, especially in the nineteenth century when the "separate spheres" ideology located men and women in particular places that were presumed to be most natural for them (women in the home, men in public). It was no surprise, then, when the class keyed in on the phrase "each in its place, united" that is the penultimate line of Davis's "The Heart of the Apple":

There's music in the laughter
Of a child like this above;
There's health, content, and plenty,
In the valley that we love;
The apples catch the gorgeous tints
Of Autumn's evening skies,
The people's hearts are kind and true
Warm greetings in their eyes.
Schools and churches are close at hand,
To uplift mind and soul,
Each in its place, united,
Helps to form a Perfect Whole.

The poem, one student quickly and rightly remarked, naturalizes the notion that people have an organic relationship with—and even become an expression of—the land. The "Heart of the Apple" in the poem's title, for example, mirrors the "kind and true" hearts of the people in line 7, as the soil in the "valley that we love" is imagined to produce human beings and fruit that, in the abstract at least, have similar anatomies. And the expression "each in its place," another student observed, recalls the "separate spheres" rhetoric of the nineteenth century—men do things in certain places, women do things in certain other places (as satirized in the cartoon here)—while applying that rhetoric to commercial ends as well, as money, the advertisement argues, belongs in its place too: in the vaults at the Commercial Bank & Trust Company. Not a bad analysis, right?

So here comes the punchline of this anecdote, at least as reported by our P&PC johnny-on-the-spot:

Professor: If each thing has "its place," then what do we make of the baby's face being located in the middle of the apple—seemingly out of place from where we'd normally see it?

Student #1: Actually, the logic of the overlap works perfectly, suggesting that we raise our children just as we raise our produce. In the "Perfect Whole," they do occupy the same "place" conceptually speaking.

Professor: What are the implications of a logic that imagines the raising of human children to be the same type of activity as the cultivation of apples?

[Dramatic pause]

Student #2 [wittily]: We get to eat the children once they're ripe!

That's the news from "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest," where Jonathan Swift is looking on, where all the students are above average, all the professors are good looking, and all the children are, well, the apples of our eyes.