P&PC at MLA: Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism

P&PC is busy getting its parkas and long underwear out of storage in preparation for everyone's favorite-slash-least-favorite event of the year—the Modern Language Association's annual convention, being held at the end of this week (Thursday-Sunday) in balmy downtown Chicago where thermometers currently read a Windy-City-bracing negative nine degrees Fahrenheit. 

Things stand to warm up a little bit, though, especially on Saturday, January 11, when P&PC will be part of a panel titled "Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism," scheduled for 5:15-6:30 pm in the O'Hare conference room of the downtown Chicago Marriott. Unlike many conference activities, which require an official badge and paid-up elbow patches for entry, "Chicago's Poetry and the Making of Literary Modernism" is being made free and open to the public. Liesl Olson of Chicago's Newberry Library will be moderating and commenting, and the panel's speakers include Erin Kappeler and Sarah Ehlers, both of whom should be familiar voices to faithful P&PC readers. If you're in town, why not escape the cold and ice and stop on by? Here's a preview of what's in store.

The panel's first paper, Erin Kappeler's "Harriet Monroe's Museum," reconsiders the canonization of modern poetry by examining how Monroe's curatorial practices extended beyond the poetry she published to the readers Poetry addressed. In Poetry’s promotional materials, Monroe argued that the art form lacked an audience because it had no organized institutional support, but Poetry's editorial files tell a different story. In a series Monroe labeled her "museum" files, she singled out correspondence from lay readers and disgruntled would-be contributors not as evidence of poetry's missing audience but, rather, as evidence of the outmoded aesthetic paradigms Monroe intended Poetry to replace. The sheer volume and diversity of these letters show that, far from bringing poetry to readers who had been ignoring it, Monroe sought to discipline readers out of their promiscuous habits of consumption. This paper focuses especially on Monroe's gendered response to these "bad" readers to consider how modernist ideals of print circulation shaped the presentation of modernism to popular audiences in the 1910s and 1920s.

In "Set Vivid Against the Little Soft Cities: Outsourcing Chicago Modernism," Mike Chasar uses the relationship between Poetry magazine and poetic communities in Portland, Oregon, to argue that Poetry's early success depended upon the production of new verse around the country. Just as the railroads brought livestock to Chicago, so Poetry routed regional new verse movements through the city and used that verse to forward Chicago's profile as a modern center. Like a venture capitalist, Monroe visited Portland in 1926, establishing relationships with an active and coordinated modern poetry scene that was working out what modernism meant for the Pacific Northwest. Tracing circuits between Portland and Chicago, and following the new verse as it circulated far outside the sphere of Poetry in unexpected places such as church bulletins and funeral home brochures, Chasar argues that focusing on Poetry as a product of Chicago's modernism obscures how widespread the new verse movement was.

Building on Chasar's consideration of Chicago and Poetry's relationship to other geographic sites, Sarah Ehlers's "The Harriet Monroe Doctrine: Poetry's Interwar Internationalism" contextualizes changes in Poetry during the 1930s by looking at two significant archival sources: Monroe's unpublished letters and journals from the 1936 P.E.N Conference in Buenos Aries, and the collection of unpublished letters, tributes, and elegies sent to the Poetry office after Monroe's untimely death in South America. While at the conference, Monroe was consistently annoyed that conversations about poetry turned to "politics and split-hair metaphysics," and her responses to debates about poetry at the international writers conference provide insight into how she framed transnational literary histories of modern poetry in relation to U.S. cultural institutions. The events of the P.E.N. conference also reveal how discourses about the role of art amidst global political turmoil relate to how Poetry was conceived in Depression-era Chicago.

In "A Chicago Institution: The Harriet Monroe Collection and the Rise of the Modern Poetry Archive," Bart Brinkman compares Monroe's initial fundraising venture for Poetry to the formation of the Harriet Monroe Collection, willed to the University of Chicago upon Monroe's death in 1936. When Monroe initially sought funding for what would become Poetry, she pitched the magazine to potential donors as a Chicago cultural institution, not unlike a museum or an opera house. This institutionalization of Poetry would become more tangible upon Monroe's death. The Monroe Collection provides a detailed portrait of poetic modernism from the perspective of one of its key figures, housing thousands of rare books and magazines along with corrected proofs and strings of correspondences that illuminate authorial and editorial intention. Beyond having particular importance for investigating Poetry's role in modern poetry, the collection also illuminates the institutionalized collecting of modern poetry in the middle decades of the twentieth century more generally. 

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday!

P&PC Travelogue: The City of Big Shoulders

P&PC just got back from an exhaust- ing, whirlwind trip to Chicago where, in little more than forty-eight hours, we went to three festivals, two museums, one play, and plenty of local restaurants and watering holes while visiting with old friends and checking, in particular, to see if the Windy City's craft beer scene has done anything to displace Old Style from its privileged place in the quenching of the city's thirst (which it has, btw). But there was more than just beer and companionship brewing in the city of the big shoulders, that tool maker, that stacker of wheat, that player with railroads; there was poetry, too—and nearly everywhere we turned from the moment we stepped out of our bargain hotel room at the north side's Heart O' Chicago Motel, it seemed. Here is a little run-down of the popular—and the hopular—we got to taste.

After visiting the Art Institute on Friday afternoon to take in the newly opened Roy Lich- tenstein retro- spective— the first in twenty years and a great combination of high and low that set the tone for our weekend perfectly—we made our way west on Randolph, first to Avec for some trendy snackies and a cocktail, and then to Haymarket Square, site of the 1886 massacre now marked by the bronze statue designed by Chicago artist Mary Brogger and pictured below. What drew us there was not entirely the labor and free speech history lesson but also the Haymarket Pub & Brewery, where we stepped in to sample, in an otherwise mostly underwhelming flight of beers, Haymarket's Hogbutcher Belgian I.P.A. The menu has this to say about the choice of names:

"To celebrate the life and work of the great Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, we named this Belgian I.P.A. after his most famous poem, which celebrated the hard working folks who made our city the greatest on Earth. It's brewed with warrior and chinook, and dry-hopped with warrior and cascades alongside only the finest Belgian ale yeast."

Like many of the beers we sampled, as temperatures outside rose into the 90s reminding us of one of the reasons why P&PC is now headquartered in Oregon, the Hogbutcher was summery, light, not very hoppy, and struck us as a gentle step up from a Hefeweizen—not exactly the ideal match for the "husky, brawling laughter of Youth" in Sandburg's poem, perhaps, but nevertheless a workable gateway beer for a city just getting its craft beer footing.

We found the best beer of the night (the Founders Double Trouble double I.P.A.) not at the Map Room or the Fountain- head but at Bangers & Lace craft beer and craft sausage joint in Wicker Park. Try it—you'll love it. And, to cap of the evening, we stopped by the Green Mill—the birthplace of the poetry slam—on the way home. We'd never been there before (can you believe it?) and we absolutely loved it; the super jazz, a beautiful bar, and an atmosphere oozing with the 1920s more than made up for the standard beer selection and sent us home to our room at the Heart O' Chicago content and resolved to drink a big glass of water, take two ibuprofen, and get up at the crack of dawn the next day.

On Saturday morning, we breakfasted on Swedish pancakes, eggs, and sausage at a little Swedish diner in Andersonville, took in some of Midsommarfest, and got pulled into the Swedish American Museum by our Swedish American traveling companion, the Iowa City Press-Citizen Opinion Editor, Jeff Charis-Carlson. There, we ran smack into "The Parting Words of a Swedish Emigrant" (pictured here) stuck to a post with little in the way of explanation:

I'm bound for young America,
Farewell old Scandinavia.
I've had my fill of cold and toil,
All for the love of mother soil.
You poets with your rocks and rills
Can stay and starve—on words, no frills.
Me, I've got a stomach 'neath my hide,
No bonds can keep me on this side.
There, out west a man breathes free,
While here one slaves, a tired bee.
Drunk with our nectar they've set us afright,
But opportunity has knocked, and we'll take our flight.

Knowing that we ourselves had a flight or two in store later in the day—when we would head to Delilah's for a Belgian beer tasting extravaganza—we grabbed a bottle of water and caught the El downtown for the Printer's Row Book Fair and Lit Fest where, among the 160 or so other exhibitors, the Poetry Foundation had its own tent (pictured here). Celebrating the one-hundredth year of Poetry magazine, the Foundation was giving away free copies of the magazine, pins in the shape of Poetry's winged horse logo, and other goodies like (P&PC geek alert) the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry.

Just opposite the Poetry Foundation tent was the "Arts & Poetry" stage where, right as we stepped in, poet Mark Doty (pictured to the left) was in the midst of wrapping up what was presumably a poetry reading by answering questions from a crowd of 30 or 40 people. You can't see it in this picture, but he had a packed suitcase propped behind the lectern and ready for his flight out of town; we were told by the emcee that he had come to the Fest on his own dime—just like P&PC. After all, who could pass up the chance to visit what Sandburg called this "city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning"—right?  Well, partly so. During the weekend we were there, eight people died and 46 were left wounded elsewhere in the city, continuing a bloody year that has seen Chicago homicides rise 50 percent over 2011 numbers. "Yes, it is true," Sandburg also wrote in his Hogbutcher poem, "I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again."

We met friends from the University of Illinois for dinner at D'Candela, a sweet Peruvian restaurant in Irving Park, saw "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind" at the Neo-Futurists theater on North Ashland, had a cold one at the Hopleaf just around the corner after that, and, fighting the sandman's inevitable approach, wrapped up the night with a warm and watery PBR at Carol's country-western bar. (Yes, by then it was about 3:30 am.) After happening on Mark Doty at the Lit Fest, though, we didn't see any more poetry the rest of the weekend—with the sole exception, perhaps, of the subtractive, scatalogical, semi-poetic graffiti (pictured here) defacing the Jim Beam-sponsored pool table sign-up chalkboard at Delilah's punk rock bar (where, if you recall our mentioning it two paragraphs earlier, we visited to do one-ounce tastings of Belgian beers earlier in the day). So, one might say, in just a matter of minutes we went from Doty to doo-doo. That's Chicago—singing, wicked, crooked, strong, cunning, and laughing.  Sandburg had it right. And that's exactly how we like it.