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.

Absorbing Joyce Kilmer: From the Poetry & Pop Culture Mailbag

A few weeks back, P&PC received the following letter from Ernest Hilbert— Phila- delphia- based poet, blogger, and editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review—which pleased us to no end. It's not often that the office gets mail, let alone fan mail, let alone fan mail with photos, let alone fan mail about Joyce Kilmer with photos of the Joyce Kilmer Service Area in New Jersey (pictured here). Talk about making us feel special! Here's that letter and our response.

Hi P&PC,

I am up in Boston for a lecture and reading I gave last night. On the way up, we stopped at the Joyce Kilmer Rest Stop. I always intone "I do not think that I shall ever see / a poem as lovely as a tree" while swooping up the ramp. My wife said, "You should take a picture for Poetry & Popular Culture," and that is what we did. Yours is the only legitimate poetry blog around as far as I am concerned. All best,

Ernie

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Dear Ernie,

We're sorry it's taken so long for P&PC to reply to your letter, but your note drove us deep into the office archives in search of some items that might help return your kindness. Rest stops named after poets are not entirely unheard of and, in their own artificially-lit ways, ask us to pull off of the standard literary-critical interstate, grab a Snickers bar, and think seriously about what it would mean to measure poetry as Walt Whitman proposed in the Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass that it might be measured. "The proof of a poet," he wrote there, "is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it."

Take the "Hoosier Poet" James Whitcomb Riley, for example, who, if the P&PC office research team is not mistaken, has a rest stop named after him in Indiana. Riley has been left off of most maps of American poetry despite (or because of?) the way he's been absorbed by the rest of America. Did you know, for example, that Riley's 1885 poem "Little Orphant Annie" was not only made into a 1918 movie but then became the inspiration for naming Harold Gray's daily comic strip—itself the subject of more movies, plus radio and tv shows? Pursuing Whitman's standard of measurement, one might say that Riley was so absorbed by his country that he's nigh disappeared.

But what of your Joyce Kilmer (pictured in uniform here here)—the New Jersey poet of "Trees" who was 31 years old and considered the leading Catholic poet of his generation when he was killed at the Second Battle of the Marne in World War One? Like Riley, Kilmer is not remembered for being a strangely modern writer—Riley came after most of the Fireside poets and during the late 19th-century advertising boom, and Kilmer was included in all sorts of "modern" poetry anthologies—so much as the source of a small jingle or two, especially that 1913 ditty you yourself intone on the way to the rest stop that now bears Kilmer's name:

Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

There's not only a rest stop named after Kilmer, but schools, a forest, and even Camp Kilmer in New Jersey which, according to Wikipedia, was "activated" in 1942 and became the largest "processing center" for U.S. troops heading out to, and returning from, Europe during World War II. We here at P&PC find it especially despicable that, as the matchbook pictured to the left and above indicates," "Trees" was pressed into propagandistic service of these military activities. Here, via the arboreal imagery on the booklet's cover and the Kilmer poem printed inside, Camp Kilmer is not at all being presented as the site for massive military operations that it actually was, but as a sort of poetic summer camp instead.

Camp Kilmer's matchbook edition of "Trees" makes us think about the various complications of that 1855 Whitman quotation, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Not all Americans used "Trees" as deceptively as the U.S. military did, however, as the poem was printed over and over in newspapers, magazines, school textbooks, anthologies, and church booklets. It was cut out and saved in poetry scrapbooks, like the one pictured here; "Trees" is at the bottom of the middle column. (If, by the way, you look at this page up close, you'll see that the album is not made out of a commercially-issued blank book but was, curiously enough, put together on the "blank" pages of a braille book. Go figure, right?)

Back in the day, though, lots of poets wrote poems praising trees, and poems were frequently read at Arbor Day or tree- planting celebrations all around the U.S. In 1927, for example, graduating high school student and future director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop Paul Engle would himself pen "Dedication Poem Read at the Planting of the Cedar by the Class of 1927." (A copy of that poem is included in Engle's papers at the University of Iowa Special Collections, so you can check it out for yourself the next time you're in Iowa City.) And, if you take a closer look at the upper left-hand corner of the braille-scrapbook page (pictured here), you'll find yet another tree poem—this one a translation of a poem first written in Norwegian by 1903 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Apparently, the market for tree poems was so robust around the turn of the century that the U.S. began importing them! If you want to be even more convinced of this tree-poem phenomenon, check out all the verse in the 1896 "Annual Program for the Observance of Arbor Day in the schools of Rhode Island" which includes—you better believe it!—the very Bjornson poem collected in this scrapbook alongside Kilmer's "Trees."

If these examples suggest how "Trees" was part of an entire genre of leafy poems—not unlike Whitman's "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing," perhaps—that were fully and continually absorbed into U.S. culture, then the album page pictured here (taken from a different scrapbook altogether) indicates the singular importance of Kilmer's "Trees" to that genre. Take a look at the item pasted on the left-hand side of this scrapbook page, for instance, where the album's editor has placed an article about the "breath-takingly beautiful" royal poinciana tree. Not only does that article take its title from Kilmer's "Trees," but it then quotes the last two lines of the poem as the definitive word on metaphysical dendrology. "The royal poinciana," the author writes, "is so radiantly lovely and so flamingly vivid and gorgeous that one can scarcely bear to take one's eyes off it. The sight of this tree in its springtime robe brings to mind Joyce Kilmer's appreciative and immortal words: 'Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.'"

So, we've come a long way from that New Jersey rest stop, Ernie, but we hope it's been worth the ride and that we've convinced you that a school of criticism taking Whitman as its source is not only a viable, but also a valuable, way of tracking how our literary heritage speaks through our culture—just as Kilmer spoke through you between Interchanges 8 and 9 on the New Jersey Turnpike. Make sure your lights are on, and drive safely.

Yours,

The Only Legitimate Poetry Blog Around

"Thankful for What?": A Scrapbook for Thanksgiving 2008

Between the Civil War and World War II, Americans were fanatical scrapbookers, cutting and pasting their way through all of print culture—magazines, newspapers, trade cards, advertisements, greeting cards, playbills, almanacs, broadsides, booklets, brochures and the like—and archiving any and all material of interest or even potential interest. Families sat down to scrapbook together. Louisa May Alcott said she read "with a pair of scissors in my hand," and her literary brothers and sisters kept pace: Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Jack London, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Amy Lowell, Lillian Hellman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Sandburg, Carl Van Vechten, and Vachel Lindsay all kept scrapbooks of various sizes, stripes and sophistication.

Of course, less celebrated Americans kept scrapbooks as well, and one of the more surprising things to learn about American scrapbooking is that it very often included poetry. Not just included, but centered around, focused on, and devoted itself to good, bad and ugly verse of all kinds. Americans sometimes maintained these personal anthologies for years, sometimes from generation to generation, sometimes working in concert with other scrapbookers. The resulting albums are fascinating artifacts from America's literary past.

Over the past several years, I've managed to collect about 100 such poetry scrapbooks, some of which are beautiful, some of which are falling apart, some of which are 200 or 300 pages long, and some of which I've been able to post online for your viewing pleasure at Poetry Scrapbooks: An Online Archive. As Thanksgiving approaches, however, I thought I'd shine an autumnal light on one poetry scrapbook in particular, a veritable cornucopia of clippings which was likely assembled during the Depression or World War II and which contains the page pictured to to the left and the two pages which follow. (Just click on the images for larger, more readable versions.)

This scrapbook takes the months of the year as its organizing rubric, perhaps borrowing that structure from the farmer's almanacs that had been a regular part of American life since the 1800s. (Think of the almanac in Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Sestina," for example.) It begins with poems about Valentine's Day, then features a page spread on March which is followed by poems about April and a short illustrated narrative in verse titled "An Easter Eggs-ploit." The section on Thanksgiving consists of seven illustrated poems spread out over the space of the three pages seen here.

Even taken out of context, these pages display many of the hallmarks of poetry scrapbooks more broadly speaking. For starters, the material included here crosses literary "brow" lines, ranging from apparently trite or sentimental popular verse to "A Tribute to the Pilgrims," written by then-Poet Laureate of England, John Masefield. Also, poems that appear to be unpolitical or not at all socially engaged oftentimes acquire a degree of social engagement by virtue of their relation to other poems: the piece by Masefield, for example—in which the settling of New England is described as "the sowing of the seed from which the crop of modern America has grown"—pulls the surrrounding poems about farming and nature (such as "Harvest Time," "Sumac," and "Flight South") into a larger discourse about U.S. history and identity. Lastly, as with many scrapbooks put together during the Depression, certain financially-oriented figures of speech such as

Flowers and sunrises, stars and rainbows,
Health and strength and friendship's ties,
Join in balancing life's budget,
For that Roll Call in the skies.

invite particular speculation about how inspirational or sentimental poetry functioned during times of economic crisis to both help people process the nature of that crisis and identify value systems other than capital by which they could orient their lives.

Scrapbooking is undoubtedly a nineteenth- and twentieth-century version of commonplace book-keeping—a literary activity in which people hand-copied passages from books into their own personal journals or ledgers. Over the years, the word "commonplace" has changed in meaning, going from a term that suggested a particular, even extraordinary value to a term that now usually means "ordinary" or even "trivial." At times, the popular verse in poetry scrapbooks—and especially Depression-era poetry scrapbooks—uncannily performs this etymological history in reverse: seizing on the ordinary and promoting it as extraordinary. The poem "Thankful for What?," for example, is a litany of thanks "just for little things" and concludes:

[Let me be thankful] For little friendly days that slip away,
With only meals and bed and work and play,
A rocking-chair and kindly firelight—
For little things let me be glad tonight.

In a sense, this poem asks for the power to be thankful for the commonplaces in life, not just in literature—for the valuable parts of living that have become, like their literary antecedents, ordinary or trivial over time. That is, in a sense, this poem wishes to extend the literacy practice of commonplacing or scrapbooking into a sort of philosophy of living in which the apparent scraps of life have unanticipated or unrecognized value. That's not a bad thing to think about this November 27 as we teeter on the edge of another depression and wonder where, oh where, the next bailout will come from.