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.

Now Showing: "Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon"

If you're in or around Oregon during the next couple of days, make it a goal to hie yourself over to Willamette University's Pelton Theater and catch a showing of Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon—an experimental, group-written and provocative play to which P&PC managed to score opening-night tickets on February 15, a date nicely timed to coincide with Susan B. Anthony's birthday as well as the date of the first woman to register to vote in Oregon, Anthony's friend and leading Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway. (The play's title, btw, comes from lyrics to Duniway's "Campaign Song," written around 1871.)

P&PC has been pretty close to this production for a long time now, serving as an unofficial dramaturge because the play started with—and incorporates in a bunch of very funky ways—a collection of poems and songs sourced from The New Northwest, a suffragist newspaper that was started and edited by Duniway, that regularly featured poetry (oftentimes on the front page), and that was published out of Portland from 1871-1887. (If you're a regular P&PC reader, you might remember our four-part "Remembering The New Northwest" series here, here, here, and here.)

So, here's the story. Back in January of 2012, seeking some way to motivate and bring back to public life part of this otherwise largely forgotten archive of suffragist poetry written in the Willamette Valley, which two different instantiations of a "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class helped to comb through and edit, P&PC met with director and WU Theatre professor Jon Cole, who was seeking material for the development of a devised script in conjunction with a scriptwriting class he was slated to teach. P&PC proposed starting with the New Northwest's poetry as a way of linking the show to statewide efforts to commemorate 2012 as the one hundredth anniversary of Oregon women's suffrage, but also as a way to experiment with how archival materials might be tied to the present day and made, well, less archival.

Cole agreed— with one caveat. Due to the nature of devised theater pieces, he explained, which are collaboratively written and oftentimes experimental in development and final product, he warned that the eventual script might not leave the original poems intact; they might be cut up, sampled, collaged, quoted, juxtaposed with other material, and the like. No worries, we responded: the age in which the poems were written was a great age of American scrapbooking where readers themselves cut out poems and articles from papers like the New Northwest and sampled, collaged, and juxtaposed them in albums. In fact, Duniway herself kept scrapbooks that are now in the Knight Library at the University of Oregon. How more appropriate a compositional model could one get? (Check out the show's awesome stage floor employing this scrapbook motif, designed by Chris Harris and lighted by Rachel Steck.)

So, during the Spring of 2012, P&PC's "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" class assembled about eighty pages of poetry published by the New Northwest—poems of various styles, lengths, and performance possibilities, and representing maybe ten different arguments being made at the time for why women should have the right to vote—and presented it all to Cole's scriptwriting class. We followed up with a couple of joint class workshops to explore the material and the dynamics of collaborative script development, one of which featured a skit juxtaposing a sincere performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" ("Oh, say can you see...") with a rapping, hip-hop Duniway response:

My name is Abigail—I go by AJD—
and I'm here to tell you all what it is I see.
I see the men on the floor but the ladies aren't here
'cause they all back at home in the "women’s sphere."
Come on people—it's Eighteen Seventy-One.
Is this really how we think the dance of democracy's done?
I wanna bust a move, but I can't break out.
What I need more than anything's an angel in the house!

Needless to say, that skit didn't make the final cut. But during the Summer and Fall of 2012, Cole and his cast of student and faculty collaborators put together an energetic, funky show in which impressionistic, sometimes dance-like scenes loosely based on points in Duniway's life are juxtaposed with projected interviews featuring current women students remembering their first time voting. The contrast between the two is pretty provocative. On one hand, you've got an idealistic, highly-interpretive narrative about the women's suffrage movement (idealistic because it omits many of the movement's complications and/or contradictions including the temperance movement [which Duniway supported] and the racism that divided many American suffragists). On the other hand, you've got what is presented, in documentary fashion, as the real responses of today's young women voters (all WU students). So, the imagined (almost fictional) past contrasts with the "real," video-recorded present; highly stylized interpretations of history are juxtaposed with actual voices; scenes bringing together dance, lots of sound and movement, dreamlike tableaux, and multi-media components are set against the rather austere format of the video interview.

Meant to provoke discussion (and even anger), the play doesn't resolve the relation- ship between these two ways of engaging and recording history—neither of which is or can be a completely "accurate" representation of women's voting history in the U.S.—but leaves them there as points of comparison. The telling of all history, it implies, is a political endeavor insofar it is always-already interpretive: some things are included, some are left out, some embellished, some selectively remembered, some quoted, some taken out of context, and very little of it, no matter how ambitious, can be representative of all voters' experiences—an irony made all the more inflammatory by the play's subject matter of voting, a political activity in which everyone's voice is supposed to "count."

So what of the eighty pages of poetry that our "Poetry of the Pacific Northwest" provided? Not a lot of it remained, as Cole had promised, but it was certainly there, especially if you knew what you were looking for as P&PC did. Sometimes, the text of a poem was projected onto the screens set up on two sides of the 360-degree stage. One poem ("Woman vs. Horse") was turned into a folk song. The actors sang a suffragist song. In a great scene dramatizing the emotional content of "The Perplexed Housekeeper" (written by Mrs. F.D. Gage and published in the New Northwest on June 2, 1871), the actor—overwhelmed by domestic burdens symbolized by an ever-growing duffel bag repeatedly thrust at her—"recited" the entirety of the poem via a series of moans, groans, mumbles, and other vocal expressions decipherable only because the poem's words were on screen in the background.

Then, in a move that P&PC did not even remotely anticipate but absolutely loved, the opening and closing scenes—both first-person accounts of students' responses to voting for the first time—took the form of contemporary, spoken-word or slam poetry. In these two moments, the play's fairly well-policed divide between the imagined, stylistically presented past and the "documentary" interviews with present-day women voters broke down. What linked the play's women voters, as a result, was not just a history of voting rights as a form of political expression, but a history of voting rights as a history of poetic expression, as well, as the voices of forgotten Willamette Valley women from the 1870s joined with the voices of Willamette Valley women in 2013. How better to motivate and make meaningful a 150 year-old archive of poetry than that?

We hope you get a chance to see the play soon. Brightly Dawning Day: Celebrating the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in Oregon only runs until February 23, so get your tickets today!

Remembering The New Northwest, Part IV: "Paddy's New Idea"

About two years ago, P&PC ran a three-part series, "Remembering The New Northwest," that spent some time thinking about the poetry published in the suffragist newspaper started in 1871 by Oregon women's rights leader Abigail Scott Duniway. (That's Duniway with a copy of her paper pictured here.) Now digitized, The New Northwest ran poetry—some political, some not so overtly political, some written by Willamette Valley poets, and some sourced from other papers across the United States—in nearly every issue, frequently printing it not as filler between articles but as prominent page-one news (cf. "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower").

Although many people today think of the history of Pacific Northwest poetry more in relation to writers from the second half of the twentieth century like William Stafford, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, and others, the region's poetic tradition goes back much earlier—back, at least, to when Duniway's weekly began offering a way for disparate (and oftentimes anonymous) Northwest voices to find a community of people reading and writing under the paper's motto "Free Speech, Free Press, Free People."

The year 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in Oregon—a centennial being commemorated statewide in events chronicled, sponsored, or otherwise linked to the Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote 1912-2012 project. And so, in helping to mark this anniversary, P&PC has directed its current crop of interns to dip back into the poetic archives of The New Northwest. In 2010, we showcased "The Perplexed Housekeeper" and "Don't Quarrel About the Farm," and we argued that Samuel Simpson's once popular and now much maligned nature poem "The Beautiful Willamette" got converted into a suffragist poem by virtue of its appearance in Duniway's paper.

Now, for the fourth installment of "Remembering The New Northwest," we bring you Stephen Maybell's problematic suffragist poem "Paddy's New Idea," which ran in late January or early February of 1872. (Due to some haphazard records kept by a former P&PC office member, as well as several missing issues in the otherwise spectacular digitized run, we are unable to pinpoint the exact publication date at this time.) Maybell was a regular contributor to the paper, and, we think, one of its most consistently interesting if troublesome voices. Here—in an Irish dialect, in two voices, and referring to the Democratic Party's post-Civil War New Departure political platform as well as to the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870—is "Paddy's New Idea":

PADDY:

"Och! Biddy, did ye hear the news,
How politics has got the blues,
Turned upside down and inside out?
Bedad, one don’t know what he's 'bout
When he goes votin'."

"Shure once 'twas plain Democrisy;
Now 'New Departure' troubles ye.
With Ku Klux Klan and Loyal Laygers,
We're no better than the others
Whin we go votin'."

"Shure things ain't things at all of late;
The Pope and Boney's bald pate;
And, faix, I heard Mullroony say
The Chinese'id take Amerikay
By beatin' us a votin'."

"Shure, Chinese, nagurs and the Injun
All can vote without infringin',
For the new 'mendment gives, 'tis clare,
To everything with skin and hair
The power to go votin'."

BIDDY:

"Spite of all the clergy's prachin',
Spite of all old fogy teachin',
I always knew a woman's head
Held brains, no matter what they said –
Aye, brains enough for votin'."

"Oh, Paddy, darlint, whin wid me
It's then you are sobriety;
It only is when ye're away
Ye go upon the bastely sprae,
Dead blind drunk wid votin'."

"It's brains ye may have in your head,
And wit and all that may be said;
Though kin intelligence vote right
Whin that intelligence is tight?
Whisky doin' the votin'?"

"Last election whiskey won it;
Ye's all drunk upon it;
Your polls were held at whiskey mills,
Your candidates run whiskey stills,
And whisky did the votin'."

"Now, had the ladies been adjacent
Ye'd tried and been a little dacent.
Would it not be the nation’s gains
Were whiskey less and more were brains
To do Columbia’s votin'?"

"So, Paddy, whin we can do so,
We'll arm in arm together go
To cast our vote in freedom's pride,
And say who shall tax our fire-side,
FREE MEN AND FREE WOMEN!"

PADDY:

"Shure, Biddy, this caps all the bother
For maid, wife, sister, mother;
Say, if kind to pagan misters,
Why not kind also to sisters
And let them go votin'?"

"This is liberty's dominion,
The boasted land of free opinion,
And if free men are but true men,
Why not make you a free woman
And let you go, too, to votin'?"

While the dialect-facilitated rhyme of the words "adjacent" and "dacent" is totally pleasing, "Paddy's New Idea" is never- theless a puzzling and complex poem—especially as it depicts the nature of the "lightbulb moment" when Paddy makes the right decision to support women's suffrage but makes that decision for the wrong reasons.

As the slurs in Paddy's catalog of ethnic others ("Chinese, nagurs and the Injun") suggest, the poem serves to remind us that not all progressive political agendas go hand in hand. That much we know and have known, not only generally but specifically in relation to the movement for women's suffrage, which was stressed from the inside by racist rhetoric, agendas, and policies that distinguished between, and divided, white women and women of color.

What "Paddy's New Idea" offers in addition to this, however, is a demonstra- tion of how, at least from the vantage point of history, a progressive political stance can be founded upon a logic that is not, in fact, progressive. That is, while Paddy comes to see the light (that women should vote) in the final two stanzas of the poem, he not only doesn't acknowledge the legitimacy of Biddy's arguments about how women have "brains enough for votin'" and could help reform the drunken culture of voting in the Northwest, but he makes his decision on the basis of a nativist and racist political logic that fears, and seeks to curtail, the new voting power of Chinese, African American, and American Indian men named in stanzas three and four. For Paddy, enfranchising women has less to do with women's rights than with finding a way to come up with extra votes to counter and overwhelm newly enfranchised social groups whom he perceives as threatening to "take Amerikay / By beatin' us a votin'." A similar argument for women's suffrage was used in the American south, where suffragists appealed to white southern men by claiming that larger numbers of white women going to the polls would work to keep black men from gaining power.

We think there's even more at work in "Paddy's New Idea" than this, however —an extra-extra dimension to how Paddy instrumentalizes the women's suffrage movement to accomplish something other than the enfranchisement of women. In fact, that added dimension is suggested all over the poem, right there in the Irish dialect that should remind us how, in the nineteenth-century U.S., the Irish weren't necessarily considered "white" but racially other; that is, many Americans—perhaps cued in part by the drunken stereotype that Biddy evokes in her part of the poem—would would have been inclined to include "Irish" alongside "Chinese, nagurs and the Injun" in Paddy's catalog from stanza four. In her famous essay "The Yellow Wallpaper and the Politics of Color in America," for example, Susan Lanser traces in part how the adjective "yellow" referred in daily discourse not solely to peoples of Asian heritage but to a range of ethnicities and races including the Irish. Consider also the cartoon pictured here (taken from from the mainstream periodical Harper's Weekly), which depicts the Irish (on the left) as more similar to the "Negro" (on the right), with the "Anglo Teutonic" in the middle.

The "whitening" of the Irish is thus a fascinating and complex history that includes, but is hardly limited to, the color of skin, and we here at P&PC think that "Paddy's New Idea" gives us one of the many plot points in that history. For if Maybell's character of Paddy sees women's suffrage as a way to counter the voting power of newly enfranchised people of color, he also finds in its occasion for nativist performance a way to distinguish himself from other people of color and thus affiliate himself with whiteness. That is, in this "lightbulb" moment wherein he embraces one progressive political agenda (women's suffrage) only to simultaneously embrace—and recruit Biddy for—an unprogressive political agenda (the project of white supremacy), Paddy demonstrates solidarity with white America and thus works to whiten the Irish in the process. In a sense, then, we can do worse than to read Paddy's moment of political "enlightenment" as a moment of political "en-whitenment" as well.

We are left, therefore, at the end of "Paddy's New Idea," to wonder what, exactly, the singular "new idea" of the poem's title refers to. That women should have the right to vote? That voting women are a viable political weapon to leverage against the votes of people of color? Or that Paddy can use this occasion to demonstrate, and even establish solidarity with, white America? We here at P&PC are going on record to say that Paddy's Machiavellian new idea is not any one of the above, but that he can do all three at once.

Remembering The New Northwest, Part III: Samuel L. Simpson's "The Beautiful Willamette"

Poor Samuel Leonidas Simpson (1845-1899). He was six months old when his family moved from Missouri to the Willamette Valley via the Oregon Trail. His mother reportedly taught him the alphabet by drawing letters in the fireplace ashes. Despite having minimal schooling, he earned a law degree from Willamette University in 1867 and was admitted to the Oregon Bar, but—according to the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest—his law practice failed and he took to newspapers, poetry, and drink; one biographer called him "the most drunken poet, and the most poetical drunkard that ever made the Muses smile or weep." In 1868, a year after completing his law degree, he published "The Beautiful Willamette" in the State Rights Democrat of Albany, Oregon. Forty years later, the Democrat would call that verse "the finest poem ever written in this state."

The "sweet singer of Oregon's beauty" hasn't fared so well in more recent accounts, however, as striving Oregon poets, hot on the trail of modernist literary credibility in the early 20th century, made Simpson a sort of whipping boy for what they thought the region's earlier poetry lacked. James Stevens and H.L. Davis wrote off 19th-century Oregon poetry en toto as nothing but an "avalanche of tripe"; three-quarters of a century later, the University of Washington's John Findlay has pretty much agreed, using Simpson's "The Beautiful Willamette" as the quintessentially bad starting point for the region's literary history. From that beginning, Findlay argues, Pacific Northwest poetry had nowhere to go but up, and, in his estimation, it's done nothing but improve ever since. (See Findlay's essay "Something in the Soil: Literature and Regional Identity in the 20th-Century Pacific Northwest" in the Fall 2006 issue of the Pacific Northwest Quarterly.) We suppose, though, that "Beautiful Willamette" fans don't really have that much to complain about. Unlike other popular poets, at least Simpson made it onto the map, even if his position there is only to signify the dark ages of Oregonian verse that are necessary in the staging of a modernist Renaissance .

Here—before we move on to the 1871 convergence of Simpson's verse and Abigail Scott Duniway's poetry-lovin' suffragist newspaper The New Northwest—is "The Beautiful Willamette":

The Beautiful Willamette

From the Cascades’ frozen gorges,
Leaping like a child at play,
Winding, widening through the valley,
Bright Willamette glides away;
Onward ever,
Lovely river,
Softly calling to the sea;
Time that scars us,
Maims and mars us,
Leaves no track or trench on thee.

Spring’s green witchery is weaving
Braid and border for thy side;
Grace forever haunts thy journey,
Beauty dimples on thy tide;
Through the purple gates of morning
Now thy roseate ripples dance,
Golden, then, when day's departing
On thy waters trails his lance.
Waltzing, flashing,
Tinkling, splashing,
Limpid, volatile, and free—
Always hurried
To be buried
In the bitter, moon-mad sea.

In thy crystal deeps, inverted
Swings a picture of the sky,
Like those wavering hopes of Aidenn,
Dimly in our dreams that lie;
Clouded often, drowned in turmoil,
Faint and lovely, far away—
Wreathing sunshine on the morrow,
Breathing fragrance round to-day.
Love would wander
Here and ponder.
Hither poetry would dream;
Life’s old questions,
Sad suggestions,
"Whence and whither?" throng thy stream.

On the roaring wastes of ocean
Soon thy scattered waves shall toss;
‘Mid the surge’s rhythmic thunder
Shall thy silver tongues be lost.
Oh! Thy glimmering rush of gladness
Mocks this turbid life of mine!
Racing to the wild Forever
Down the sloping paths of Time!
Onward ever,
Lovely river,
Softly calling to the sea;
Time that scars us,
Maims and mars us,
Leaves no track or trench on thee.

So, okay, the description of the Willamette river as "Waltzing, flashing, / Tinkling, splashing, / Limpid, volatile, and free" didn't exactly make the P&PC interns jump for joy when they read it for the first time either. But then they thought a bit more about what it might have meant for readers who encountered it in the pages of The New Northwest on Friday, July 14, 1871. Simpson wasn't a total stranger to The New Northwest; in fact, despite his reputation as a drinker (Duniway's paper was part of the temperance as well as women's suffragist movement), another poem of his, "The Fate of Mississip'," had appeared in the paper just a few weeks before.

For Findlay, "The Beautiful Willamette" was popular because it represents a 19th-century aesthetic that valued poetry for being "good thoughts happily expressed in faultless rhyme and meter." But we here at P&PC can't shake the language in Simpson's first stanza about Time which "scars us, / maims and mars us." Nor can we ignore the fact that the speaker's dreams, in stanza three, are "drowned in turmoil." Ditto "turbid life of mine" in stanza four. Like, how does all that add up to a happy expression of the human condition? Well, it's doesn't, and the speaker of "The Beautiful Willamette" envies the river because (supposedly) the river isn't subject to the scars, maims, and mars of Time's passing as human beings are. For critics like Findlay, Simpson's poem may appear to be a naively waltzing, tinkling, splashing, and limpid set piece of genteel America, but for us, the poem's scars, maims, mars, turmoil and turbidity loom large. We think the tinkling, splashing waters of "The Beautiful Willamette" run much, much deeper than Findlay would like to think.

As the poem's second stanza indicates, those waters also run "free"—a major keyword for The New Northwest and its readers. Could the "freedom" from the scars, maims, and mars of Time in "The Beautiful Willamette" thus be read as a specific type of freedom—the freedom for women to vote, own property, and hold public office? In other words, do the poem's drowned dreams and turbid life read as a conversation about the fight for women's rights?

We believe so—and a look at the issue of The New Northwest in which "The Beautiful Willamette" appeared in fact backs us up. In that very same issue of Duniway's 4-page paper, Frances H. McDougal has published a re-written version of the song "America" that she has re-titled "Song of Freedom: Written for the Fourth of July, 1871." That the poem equates "freedom" in the U.S. with the universal right to vote is clear. Here is McDougal's poem

Freedom, to thee we sing;
Then let our glad notes ring
O’er land and sea,
Till all our Yankee boys
Leave their rude sport and noise,
To learn the higher joys
Of liberty.

Freedom is ours of right,
Her honor and her might
To us belong.
In all this lovely land
The Mind and Working Hand
Shall swell with triumph grand
Our yearly song.

Freedom to live and grow,
Freedom to think and know,
Our Fathers won:
Then let us claim their dower
By manhood’s noblest power,
And build the loftiest tower
Beneath the sun,

Sacred to Human Right,
The honor and thy might,
Majestic Man!—
Whence our great light shall flow
And set the world aglow
With truth it yet must know
By grace or ban

Out from the present spring
Eagles of bolder wing;
All freedom human
That through the ages pined,
At length restored, refined,
Endowed with heart and mind,
Is crowned by woman.

So shall each rolling year
Bring light more fine and clear,
With nobler law.
Quick, with true human fire,
O, may our souls aspire,
Forever high and higher!—
“Excelsior!”

When we read "The Beautiful Willamette" next to "Song of Freedom" today, the two poems can't but speak to each other, as the swelling, growing, flowing, rolling current of McDougal's freedom—which flows "out from the present spring"—finds an appropriate metaphor in the very river that Simpson writes about, and as the "freedom" that Simpson mentions in turn finds its specific referent in the struggle for women's rights. Strike that last part. Simpson's "freedom" doesn't exactly find its specific referent in the women's movement; rather, it is given a specific referent by editor Duniway, who rearticulates the popular verse of Oregon's "sweet singer" to the cause of women's suffrage. That is, while "The Beautiful Willamette" didn't necessarily start out its circulation history as a suffragist poem, by 1871 it had in fact become one.

So, in the end, the problems with Findlay's approach to Simpson are several. In pre- suming that all 19th- century "genteel" poetry fits into a single aesthetic category (lyric poetry with "good thoughts happily expressed"), he misses the actual ability of the poem to signify ambivalently; that is, he only sees that type of poem because he believes that's the only type of poem to see. Furthermore, in isolating that lyric poem from its print and historical contexts, he prevents us from seeing what else "The Beautiful Willamette" might have been. And in dissing "The Beautiful Willamette," Simpson is also pretty much dissing the ways that poetry contributed to progressive social causes like women's suffrage. We here at the P&PC office realize that he—and many other critics like him—needs to oversimplify the popular and the genteel so that the 20th-century "literary" poetry he champions looks better in comparison. But where's the triumph in that?

Remembering The New Northwest, Part II: Don't Quarrel About the Farm

In this Part Two of "Remem- bering The New Northwest," the Poetry & Popular Culture office presents another poem from the weekly, Portland-based, suffragist newspaper edited by mother, wife, teacher, dressmaker, and writer Abigail Scott Duniway between 1871 and 1887. If "The Perplexed Housekeeper" (presented last week) catalogs the uncompensated daily work activities of a 19th-century housewife and thus provides support for her critique of the institution of marriage, then today's poem, "Don't Quarrel about the Farm," takes on another aspect of women's economic vulnearability—the subject of women's property rights (or lack thereof).

"Don't Quarrel about the Farm" struck the P&PC office as notable for a couple of reasons: 1) it uses a story with a happy ending to lobby for reforms in the area of women's property rights (other such poems rely on tragedy or worst-case scenarios to make their arguments, as many family disputes weren't resolved as amicably as this one); and 2) the speaker is a persuasive, articulate daughter/sister who wins her brothers' assent, in the process demonstrating that emotion and intellect are not incompatible in the 19th-century woman and prospective voter. It's precisely this mixture, in fact—an emotional, charitable, and rational calm in the face of people driven primarily by their own personal economic interests—that The New Northwest and other suffragist papers claimed that women would bring to the polls and public discourse if granted their right to vote. Today, of course, we recognize the limitations of that essentialist claim. Nevertheless, the rhetorical clinic that Sis puts on for her brothers in "Don't Quarrel about the Farm" is a pretty stunning one. Enjoy.

Don't Quarrel about the Farm
—Anonymous

"No, brothers, don't fall out 'bout it, or quarrel here today,
Be civil toward each other, and listen to what I say:
You know as well as I do that it's wrong this way to speak,
And if you have disputes to make—why, make them in a week.

"Just wait at least, till father's cold, just put it off—pray do,
And what is yours no doubt you'll get; but wait a day or two.
Have more respect for mother, for she's old and weak and ill,
And don't take foul advantage, just because there is no will.

"Now Freddie, you're the oldest! You should good example show;
For what's the good of quarreling, I'd really like to know?
The money's in the bank—there is no reason to complain
Or the paltry share that's in the home from mother try to gain?

"I'm poorer than the poorest one, yet she shall have my part;
I'll work and toil 'mong strangers with a merry, cheerful heart,
If I only live to know that she can call this place her own;
I'd gladly give her all my share that she may have a home.

"I don't know much about the law, for I never went to school.
And you know more about the ways that's followed as a rule;
I think they'll sell the place right out, and and share it so I’m told.
And that would throw out mother, boys, and leave her in the cold.

"Now I can't see how this is right; she earned as much as he;
She paid, I'm sure, those last three notes endorsed by Squire Lee,
And father often told us so. Besides, he always said
He hoped that she would suffer naught when he was with the dead.

"And that's one reason why, I think, he left no will behind—
Because his boys were rich and therefore would be kind:
He did not wish to give offence by willing all to her,
But thought we here, with one accord, would give and not demur.

"Now I know I'm not a scholar, boys; few things I understand;
I don't know much about real estate, or the price of farming land;
Yet this I know, ten acres with a house and barn and ware,
Will not bring much to nine of us, not counting mother's share.

"I'd like any little part of it—a great deal with it too
For I never had the chance to earn that father gave to you;
No! I always had to stay at home and work the livelong day.
And for it got but board and clothes—that's more than you can say!

"And if I am the youngest one with not a cent ahead,
I’ll give my share to mother now! and go and earn my bread;
And you needn't think because I plead that I just want a home;
No! No! I’ll leave—though hard 'twill be for her to live alone.

"This living 'round with the married sons ain't what it's thought to be!
And mother's old, near sixty years, and not as strong as we;
Besides, she ought to have a home—her own—to live in no one's way,
And be protected from harsh words you all might some times say.

"Then let us give the home to her—come, who will follow me?
I give my share to mother, now! My hand is up, you see!
You're losing but a paltry—a little mite of land—
Whoever's willing, as I am, can raise his own right hand!"

And not a hand remained in place, but up they went as one,
And brothers looked and marveled, and wondered how 'twas done!
All quarrel ceased, the brothers knelt, and found themselves in prayer
For Sis with mother, and the home; and peace came to them there!

Remembering The New Northwest: The Perplexed Housekeeper

May 5 of this year will be the 139th Anniversary of the first edition of The New Northwest—the weekly suffragist and reform-oriented newspaper edited out of Portland, Oregon, for 16 years (1871-1887) by former teacher and dressmaker Abigail Scott Duniway. Over that time and under the motto "Free Speech, Free Press, Free People," The New Northwest published all sorts of news, editorials, advertisements, and entertainment, most of which was related in one way or another to the fight for national and international women's suffrage. Via that four-page weekly, Duniway (pictured here) became the region's most prominent voice advocating for women's rights, and so, when Susan B. Anthony came to the area in 1871, it was Duniway who played host and travel companion. And in 1912, when Oregon became the 7th state in the U.S. to pass a women's suffrage amendment, she was the first woman to register to vote in Multnomah County.

While it's not surprising to learn that The New Northwest published poetry, it is surprising to see just how prominent a place poetry occupied in the paper, as nearly every single issue had a poem or two prominently displayed on the front or back pages. In fact, it is the growing opinion of the Poetry & Popular Culture Office that Duniway's paper should occupy a significant place in the literary, as well as the political, history of the Pacific Northwest, as it provided a regular venue for home-grown or locally-sourced poetic talents—some overtly political, some made political by virtue of their situation in the paper—and published them alongside nationally-known writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, and Bret Harte, thus making early Portland into a crossroads of poetic activity and establishing the Rose City as the region's poetic, if not legislative, center. Long before Woody Guthrie came to the Columbia River basin to write songs promoting the Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams, and long before folks like Theodore Roethke, William Stafford, David Wagoner, and Richard Hugo moved here to teach in university-based creative writing M.F.A. programs, Duniway and The New Northwest provided a vehicle for the region's poets to connect and make their work public.

As of this posting, though—despite the paper's importance to the history and culture of the region, and despite the financial backing that's got to be there in the locally-head- quartered pockets of Nike, Adidas, and Columbia Sportswear (employees, corporations, and foundations alike)—The New Northwest does not yet exist in an easily accessible, searchable, digitalized form. Instead, it's on these wacky, poor-quality, old-school strips of plastic that the librarian calls "microfilm," and so it's difficult and frustrating to access and at times very difficult to read. The filmic reproductions are sooooooooo bad that they won't even print out with much legibility.

These challenges have not prevented six intrepid undergraduate students in a Poetry of the Pacific Northwest course being offered at Willamette University this semester from braving the archive, however. (This is the same group of students who, earlier in the semester, attended the Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon.) Kali Boehle-Silva, Isabella Guida, John McKenzie, Gunnar Paulsen, Jonathan Shivers, and Sarah Spring have been unearthing this poetry, some of which will be showcased here over the next couple of weeks. We begin with this tasty treat from week five (June 2, 1871) of The New Northwest (note the pun on "rights" in line two and the break in meter in the poem's penultimate line):

The Perplexed Housekeeper
by Mrs. F. D. Gage

I wish I had a dozen pair
Of hands this very minute;
I’d soon put all these things to rights—
The very deuce is in it.

Here’s a big washing to be done,
One pair of hands to do it—
Sheets, shirts and stockings, coats and pants—
How will I e'er get through it?

Dinner to get for six or more,
No loaf left o’er from Sunday,
And baby cross as he can live—
He’s always so on Monday.

And there’s the cream, ‘tis getting sour,
And must forthwith be churning,
And here’s Bob wants a button on—
Which way shall I be turning?

“Tis time the meat was in the pot,
The bread was worked for baking,
The clothes were taken from the boil—
Oh dear! the baby’s waking!

Oh dear! if P—— comes home,
And finds things in this bother,
He’ll just begin and tell me all
About his tidy mother.

How nice her kitchen used to be,
Her dinner always ready
Exactly when the dinner bell rung—
Hush, hush, dear little Freddy,

And then will come some hasty word,
Right out before I’m thinking—
They say that hasty words from wives
Set sober men to drinking.

Now isn’t that a great idea,
That men should take to sinning,
Because a weary, half-sick wife
Can’t always smile so winning?

When I was young I used to earn
My living without trouble;
Had clothes and pocket money too,
And hours of leisure double.

I never dreamed of such a fate,
When I, a lass! was courted—
Wife, mother, nurse, seamstress, cook, housekeeper, chambermaid, laundress, dairywoman and scrub generally doing the work of six.
For the sake of being supported.