P&PC in Beantown

P&PC is thrilled to be heading to Boston tomorrow for a busy four days at Framingham State University and the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference. The trip to Framingham has a particularly sentimental edge, as we return to the city of our birth—Dad C. was stationed there in the Army—to deliver "From Baraka to Rihanna: Legacies of the Black Arts Movement" as part of Framingham State University's "Stasis & Change" lecture series. After that, on Thursday, we head downtown to serve as chair for the panel "Feeling Revolutionary/Revolutionary Feeling: Sentiment and Affect in Feminist Poetry," which features three of our favorite scholars in the world: Melissa Girard, Linda Kinnahan, and Dee Morris. Then, on Friday, we deliver a paper alongside Donal Harris and Loren Glass as part of the panel "After the Program Era." (Check out the whole MSA program here.)

It's all a wonderful convergence of P&PC networks. You know Girard from her P&PC posts here, here, and here. You know Glass from his P&PC post here. The Morris effect is everywhere in our world, as she chaired our dissertation back in the day at the University of Iowa. Kinnahan is editor of A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry forthcoming from Cambridge and including an article on popular women's poetry by P&PC staff members. The Framingham visit is being coordinated by longtime P&PC friend but not-yet-contributor Bart Brinkman, and on Saturday we get to spend the day with Heidi Bean, our dear friend and co-editor of Poetry after Cultural Studies. Were it not for the fact that, living on the West Coast most of the time, we don't get to see these people in person very often, we might be a little nauseated by all the good (if not revolutionary) feeling. (Um, yeah, did we mention that we also have social plans with P&PC contributors Marsha Bryant and Erin Kappeler?) But after living in the cold and unforgiving Library of Congress archives for the past three or four months, we're going to give in and enjoy it. Why don't you come join us?

"Why Women's Poetry Now?": P&PC at the 2014 Modernist Studies Association Conference in Pittsburgh

P&PC spent November 6-9 at the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference, held this year in Pittsburgh and hosted in all of its Iron City glory by Duquesne University with the co-sponsorship of the University of Pittsburgh. We had a chance to catch up with P&PC favorites like Marsha Bryant, Melissa Girard, and Erin Kappeler. We went to the exquisite Andy Warhol Museum where, among other things, we discovered Warhol's rhyming alphabet book ("A was a lady who went shopping at Sacks / ... C was her coat styled well front and back") as well as Warhol's childhood fondness for Ogden Nash. And we presented with Bryant, Steve Evans, Elisabeth Frost, Jeanne Heuving, and Lisa Sewell as part of a roundtable panel discussion titled "Why Women's Poetry Now?" Since most of you weren't able to join us in The 'Burgh, we thought you might like to hear the "position paper" we gave as part of that panel—the 5-7-minute talk that each invited panel member was asked to deliver as fodder for a larger discussion between panelists and audience members. Here, then, is the two cents that we had to add:

I’ve been thinking and writing about a trio of modern women poets that most people here today probably do not recognize: Anne Campbell, Evelyn Ryan, and Ethel Romig Fuller. All were amazingly prolific. All had huge audiences. All had careers writing poetry. All made money with poetry. And all to some extent suggest some answers to “Why women’s poetry now?”

Anne Campbell published a poem a day in the Detroit News for twenty-five years straight, serving as that newspaper’s answer to the Detroit Free Press poet Edgar Guest, who published a poem a day in the Free Press for thirty years. Campbell was born on a Michigan farm in 1888 and married a guy who also wrote for the News. She wrote from home in order to be near her children, and over the course of her career published more than 7,000 poems, at one point making $10,000 per year—well over $100,000 when adjusted for inflation—from her national syndication and speaking engagements. She was probably the most successful and well-known woman newspaper poet in the United States.

The subject of Terry Ryan’s memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, Evelyn Ryan may have been the most successful freelance advertising poetry writer, like, ever. Enduring an abusive alcoholic husband who spent the lion’s share of his paycheck on booze, Evelyn was a high school valedictorian. She wrote at her ironing board and made beaucoup bucks by entering and winning jingle-writing contests. She won a Triumph sports car, a jukebox, coffeemakers, frying pans, a deep freeze, refrigerator, washer, dryer, blenders, toasters, radios, roller skates, basketballs, footballs, a bicycle, sleeping bags, blankets, televisions, shoes, tools, and a shopping spree that netted $400 worth of groceries (the equivalent of about $5,000 today). When the landlord didn’t renew the lease on the house the family was renting, Evelyn won $5,000 that allowed them to purchase a home. And when the bank later threatened to repossess that house because her husband failed to keep up with payments on a second mortgage he took out without her knowledge, she won another contest—writing the fifth line of a limerick advertising Dr. Pepper—that awarded nearly $3,500 plus a new Mustang and a trip to Switzerland, both of which she sold in order to keep the house.

Ethel Romig Fuller began writing poetry at age thirty-eight when her two children were in their teens, renting office space in downtown Portland where she wrote every day. She made her first $10 (the equivalent of $130 today) selling a poem to Garden Magazine in 1924, and in the next five to six years published fifteen poems in Poetry magazine and many others in places like Out West Magazine, Life, College Humor, Good Housekeeping, Wee Wisdom, the American Mercury, the New York Times and other newspapers. Her New Verse poem “Proof?” was so widely reprinted after its 1927 appearance in Sunset magazine that the New York Times called it “the most quoted poem in contemporary English literature.”

The most successful woman newspaper poet. The most successful advertising poet. The author of the most quoted poem in contemporary English literature. These are only thumbnail sketches, yes, but they are compelling nonetheless. When we look at them from the perspective of gender, we see a number of things:

• We see how gender affected access to authorship—when in their lives women came to write poetry, how they trained to do it, and the conditions under which they wrote. Those factors affected what poems they wrote and why. 

• When we orient via women authors like these (Campbell, Ryan, and Fuller rather than, say, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens), we see a very broad and different history of modern poetry: a history where poets made money from their writing, where audiences were large, where poetry was not a culturally marginalized genre, and where women were major players. 

• We see how publication opportunities and the needs of those publications, their reward systems, and their audiences affected the types of verse women wrote. 

• We see different economic factors affecting what got written and how. By writing for popular spheres, women could acquire a degree of financial independence or autonomy perhaps unavailable to them otherwise. Writing for the little magazines or publishing books was a privileged endeavor that not all people had; when we focus on the little magazine or the book in our scholarship, we are to no small extent replicating and reinforcing class and gender hierarchies of the era we study. 

• That said, we also see, as with Fuller, that poets were writing for both literary and popular spheres and thus how the lines dividing those spheres were more porous than we tend to think. In the case of Fuller—had I time to go into it—we would see how the New Verse was written for and circulated in little magazines like Poetry but also newspapers and mass market magazines like Sunset. We would see how the New Verse was not solely or even primarily the invention or province of the literary, and we would see how women writing for popular venues extended the reach of the New Verse and how the New Verse thus owes some of its legacy to popular culture. 

• We gain a more complex understanding of periodization—not one based on the features of poetry itself but on media, social conditions, market conditions, and so on. All these women wrote before the Cold War and are “modern” poets not by virtue of a shared aesthetic but by virtue of conditions external to their writing: how a woman could come to and train for poetry; what media were available to her; what motivational and reward systems were in place, and so on. 

If we better understand the gender-related conditions affecting poetry, we may be less likely to write off certain poetry as “bad” or uninteresting and may instead start employing or developing more diverse critical models for reading and assessing it. Those models will challenge many assumptions currently in place—how culturally marginalized poetry was, how economically viable it was, what the character of “modern” verse is, and whether a “close reading” is the only or even best endpoint of poetry scholarship. And those models will in turn open us up to unstudied authors, archives, media, and modes of writing, not to mention an expanded ethics of poetry scholarship, all of which has the potential to substantially reshape arguments about what poetry is and what it makes and has made happen.

The Spectacle of Everyday Reading (and Coupon Codes) at the Modernist Studies Association

From October 18-21, P&PC participated in the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference, this year held at the airport-like Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and appropriately structured around the theme of "Modernism & Spectacle." Surrounded by everything we love, hate, love to hate, and hate to love about the Entertainment Capital of the World, P&PC presented on one panel ("Beyond Modernist Periodization"), chaired another panel ("Spectacular Language and Projected Verse"), hobnobbed with new and old friends and colleagues, and even got a chance to visit the center of Vegas home-brew activity, Aces & Ales. As you might assume from our lack of posting activity over the past two weeks, we've been trying to recover ever since. No, we didn't get a Mike Tyson tattoo on our face, nor did we meet up with Zach Galifianakis, nor did much happen that had to stay in Vegas. But the city's crush of bikini-clad dancers, artificial light and smell, slot machine chimes, overpriced everything, and lots of sloshed, overweight people staggering by on the sidewalks wearing balloon hats and fake grass skirts put us in a bit of a funk from which we're just beginning to emerge.

By far, for us, the most memorable part of this year's MSA was the first release of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, which Columbia University Press featured at its book table, which will hit warehouses in a week or two, and which P&PC got to hold for the very first time. It's beautiful—and it sold! Indeed, perhaps due to some shameless promotion on the part of this blog and its associates, it was Columbia's best-selling conference title; when we left for the airport, only one copy remained on the book table, and we've got our fingers crossed that that one went as well. Maybe Everyday Reading wasn't dressed up in a balloon hat or a fake grass skirt—can you imagine the gents on the book cover at Treasure Island or the Luxor?—but it found its own little place in the desert that we won't soon forget.

We're hoping that Everyday Reading might find a place with you, too. It found a happy home with SUNY Buffalo graduate student Margaret Konkol (pictured here), who got a copy and a personalized inscription for a consumer-friendly conference discount. And even if you weren't at MSA, P&PC has made sure that you can get a hefty discount if you order right from Columbia University Press as well. That's right: if you use the coupon code EVECHA, Columbia will—as a courtesy to P&PC readers and friends—give you a 30%-off discount. That brings the cost of Everyday Reading to under $20, or to just about the cost of printing four boarding passes ($5 each) at the Flamingo Hotel. We're not going to say that the opportunity to get out of Vegas isn't worth it—we were more than ready to go. But what's going to stick with you longer: the breakfast buffet at the Westin ($22.96), six coffees from Java Detour ($3.23 each), two rolls of quarters and an hour sitting at the slots, or the 302 pages of Everyday Reading? Hold on for a moment—is P&PC making a spectacle of itself? I guess maybe we learned something from Vegas after all.

Rethinking Poetic Innovation at the Modernist Studies Association Conference

Earlier this month, P&PC had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Modernist Studies Association's annual conference held this year at the Hyatt Regency in the nearly post-apocalyptic downtown of Buffalo, NY. Themed around "The Structures of Innovation," there were your fairly predictable panels ("make it new," right?) on Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, DADA artwork, avant-garde little magazines, and the Paris and New York art and literary scenes. There was also a "roundtable" discussion, organized by Marsha Bryant and Alan Golding, that focused on the subject of "Rethinking Poetic Innovation" and had at least one person buzzing afterwards.

MSA roundtables are a pretty fun format in which, rather than droning on in sequence with extensive prepared remarks, five or six invited speakers offer short position papers then open the floor for discussion with each other and the event's attendees. Imagine our pleasure and surprise when, this past spring, Bryant approached and entered into negotiations with the P&PC home office about P&PC's participation! Now imagine our lone P&PC representative sitting in front of an audience of seventy-five modernists (including keynote speaker Michael Davidson, Lynn Keller, Jed Rasula, and Dee Morris) and among the roundtable's cast of Bryant, Golding, Bob Perelman, Steven Yao, Elizabeth Frost, and Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux—all tenured profs, all well published, some of whom certain members of the P&PC home office staff started reading in graduate school lo these many years ago. Hands somewhat a-tremble, our stomach feeling more like a Kurt Schwitters collage (example presented above) than the proverbial nest of butterflies, but bolstered by the presence of a younger, up-and-coming, somewhat iconoclastic generation of modernist scholars including Meredith Martin and Bartholomew Brinkman, here's the perspective on "Rethinking Poetic Innovation" that P&PC offered. (N.B. If you're a regular P&PC reader, well, bless you; the following is nothing you haven't heard from our offices before. We're posting it not for your benefit but for those at the conference—get this—who admitted to having never before heard the name of Edgar Guest.)

In the late nineteenth and early twentietth centuries, Americans regularly assembled and maintained poetry scrapbooks—personal verse anthologies that edited together poems cut out of newspapers, magazines, church bulletins, advertisements, greeting cards, and other print sources, oftentimes sampling in news articles, pictures, photographs, die cuts, or other items. Well known writers like Anne Sexton, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore kept such albums. Over the past six or eight years, I have assembled and studied an archive of 150 or so poetry scrapbooks produced by ordinary or less celebrated readers. The photocopy I’ve distributed here today (pictured above) is a page spread from one of those albums—a 230 page-long, 300-poem collection kept in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Doris Ashley, an unmarried sawyer’s daughter in her early 20s who was living just south of Boston.

It’s an interesting document, as Ashley puts four “modern” poems, including the now iconic poems by Pound (“In a Station of the Metro,” located at the bottom of the second page) and H.D. (“Oread,” located in the middle of the first page), in conversation with two popular poems and a news report on H.L. Mencken’s late-life marriage to Sara Haardt (a published writer who, in the 1910s, was a prominent voice lobbying the Alabama state legislature to ratify the nineteenth Amendment). The juxtapositions are compelling and represent a vernacular cut and paste analogue to, if not precedent for, modernist practices of bricolage or collage, as Ashley reads across or through a highbrow-lowbrow divide and very compellingly pairs up the Pound and H.D. poems, which are frequently combined in our histories of modern poetry but which her original source book, Louis Untermeyer’s 1925 edition of Modern American Poetry, did not print together.

If Ashley recognizes the shared poetics of “In a Station” and “Oread,” she is not limited by them. In fact, what most connects the six poems here is the image of the tree—the pear tree in Millay’s poem, the pines in “Oread,” the maple tree in Anne Campbell’s poem, the “wet, black bough” in “In a Station,” and the rain of Stanton’s “A Rain Song” that waters them all. This arboreal conceit extends thematically to the newspaper article—the seasons, gardens, plants, and flowers offer an appropriate landscape in which to read about Haardt’s latish marriage (she was 31); astonishingly, this conceit extends sonically, as well, as the “wet, black bough” of Pound’s poem echoes the subtitle of the Mencken article: “Noted American Bachelor Finally Bows to Cupid.” (Note: Ashley, an aspiring writer, would, like Haardt, remain unmarried until her late 20s, and P&PC reads this page spread, in part, as an articulation of how and why Ashley justified remaining single as a life choice that was more deliberate than prevailing images of spinsterhood would suggest.)

There is certainly more to discuss about this page spread, including the alternative map through the poetry of modern America that it and other such anthologies suggest, as well as its place in the history what Kenneth Goldsmith is calling uncreative writing. (Food for thought: can we call Ezra Pound [pictured here] a “popular poet” when he appears in a scrapbook alongside poems by popular poets Stanton and Campbell? Campbell, by the way, was a poet for the Detroit News who reportedly made $10,000 per year off of the daily publication and syndication of her poetry in the 1920s and 1930s.) I’m presenting these pages here, however, to help forward four ideas that might help us to rethink poetic innovation. Those ideas are as follows:

1. Future work on poetic innovation needs to include more study and theory of innovative reading as well as innovative writing.

2. Innovative reading and writing are not limited to experts in literary spheres but happen within popular culture as well—including, as I’ve argued elsewhere in relation to the old Burma-Shave billboard poems, the commercial marketplace. Innovation is not inherently oppositional and is regularly articulated to, and expressed in terms of, the market. In fact, the very claim to “innovation” itself, in artistic and commercial spheres alike, as well as their overlap, is a form of capital worth studying further.

3. Although Ashley’s scrapbook doesn’t suggest it directly, poetic innovation within popular and mass culture likely intersected with, and affected, the work of “literary” poets more regularly than we think—not just in terms of raw materials, but form, precedent, and logic as well. When we use the French word collage to describe modernist literary practices, for example, we disguise modernism's roots in popular practice and overlook the fact that Pound, H.D., Moore, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot and others were born in, learned to read in, and were educated in an America where scrapbooking was a primary form of reading and thinking and where the word collage did not yet exist.

4. What we call “literary” poetry also affected innovation within mass and popular culture. That is, not only did popular culture provide modernist writers with resources for their art, but, as we see in the case of Doris Ashley, modernist writers provided uncredentialed readers with raw materials for thinking and creating as well.

Thanks for listening.

Note: if you're interested in these and related issues, keep your eyes out for the P&PC-endorsed book-length study Poetry & Popular Culture in Modern America, due out from Columbia University Press in the Fall of 2012.

Report from Victoria

Twice—twice!—at this year's Modernist Studies Association conference in Victoria, British Columbia, P&PC heard people with no official connection to this blog sincerely and with no apparent malicious intent drop the name of the "people's poet" Edgar Guest. Sure, folks dropped it casually and quietly, as if they were testing the waters to see whether it really would disturb the universe if the author of A Heap O' Livin and Just Folks were mentioned in the same breath as Mina Loy and Ezra Pound and the politics of modernist salons. P&PC is happy to report that the universe is in stable condition.

What surprised P&PC more than all this Eddie Guest name-dropping, however, was the complete silence in regard to Robert Service (1874-1958)—the "Bard of the Yukon" and author of such classics as "The Cremation of Sam McGee" and "The Shooting of Dan McGrew." Known as "the Canadian Kipling," Service is perhaps as much an illustration of "Modernist Networks" (the conference theme) as anyone else: he was born in Scotland, moved to Canada at age 21, worked as an ambulance driver and war correspondent during World War I, married a Parisian in France, and fled Europe for the U.S. with the outbreak of World War II. Wouldn't it have been interesting to put his poems about the Boer War ("The March of the Dead") and World War I (Rhymes of a Red Cross Man) into a modernist context and see what happens? Especially for a conference taking place in Canada?

In fact, the only mention of Service we encoun- tered during our three-day stay in B.C. was as we were doing our standard poetry-related research at the local pub and came across this ad for Service Scottish Ale (pictured at the top above) which is locally brewed by the Phillips Brewing Company of Victoria. The poster defines "service" in chiefly economic terms that make us uncomfortable—we'd like to think one could be celebrated for services of a less capitalist nature, for example—but given that the M.S.A. failed to offer much in the way of an alternative, we'll side, at least for the moment with Phillips. Join us for a drink?

MSA 2010: The Networks of Modernism

Later this week, P&PC carpools up I-5 and ferries over the Salish Sea to Victoria, British Columbia, in order to attend the 12th annual Modernist Studies Association conference. This year, the conference is organized around the special theme "The Networks of Modernism," and you can catch P&PC live and in action on Friday morning from 8:30-10 a.m. as part of the panel "Modernist Patronage: Corporate and Academic Evolutions." Here's a preview of that throw-down:

Modernist Patronage: Corporate and Academic Evolutions

Modernism witnessed a revival of traditional literary patronage, but it also saw the development of other patronage systems, ranging from the new network of Carnegie Libraries to women's social clubs and local Rotary clubs. This panel examines corporate and academic evolutions of patronage which created new markets and audiences for modernist creative work, from poetry to photography. These three presentations disclose relationships that were sometimes fraught, but that ultimately benefited both artist and "patron." Further, these presentations trace the development of relationships providing models for later patronage of the arts. All three also demonstrate how modernist work sometimes evolved both in content and style partly due to interactions between author/artist and patron.

Mike Chasar ("From Vagabond to Visiting Poet: Vachel Lindsay and the Prehistory of the Program Era") focuses on the financial and institutional patronage of poets by American universities which culminated after World War 2 in what Mark McGurl has called "The Program Era." Modernism saw the invention of the Writer-in-Residence position, the development of a nationwide university-to-university reading circuit, and the invention of the "Visiting Poet." With assistance from Baylor University English professor A. Joseph Armstrong, the poet Vachel Lindsay began visiting schools in the South and West that other modern poets didn't believe would support their work. Lindsay thus established a circuit that Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg and others would follow, simultaneously dislodging New England as the center of American arts and letters. Lindsay also pioneered a rhetorical justification allowing iconoclastic poets to cultivate relationships with the conservative world of academia without becoming sellouts.

Brenda Helt ("The Making and Managing of American Modernists: Norman Holmes Pearson and the Yale Collection of American Literature") examines the role of Yale professor Norman Holmes Pearson, who used his personal connections with authors like H. D., Bryher, Pound, and Stein to acquire major collections of their work for Yale. Reciprocally, Pearson used his authoritative position to further interest in and obtain publishers for the work of these modernists, securing their reputations for posterity and enabling some of their best work. Based in part on Pearson’s unpublished letters, Helt’s presentation focuses primarily on Pearson’s role as academic patron of H.D. and Pound. Pearson worked tirelessly as H.D.’s tactful editor, as well as her literary advisor and (unpaid) agent, roles that significantly affected the quantity and quality of her late work. Pound’s WW 2 politics and consequential incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s garnered many enemies, but Pearson promoted Pound’s work apart from his political involvements, helping to prevent it from being “disappeared.”

Donal Harris ("On Company Time: Agee in the Office") examines corporate patronage, exploring how Time, Inc. underwrote a vast amount of poetry, literature, photography, and film by bringing novelists and poets into the journalistic fold. He argues that “Time-style”—the idiosyncratic syntactical form that articles in the eponymous journal took—can also describe the process of systematizing how a stable of experimental artists produced their texts. By recasting “Time-style” in terms of modernist patronage, Harris foregrounds the professionalization of certain protocols of modernist aesthetics under the auspices of mass-market journalism. Harris grounds this larger argument in a reading of James Agee's famously strained relationship with Time, Inc. and the publishing history of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, initially an article for Fortune.