POETS Day! Harriet Monroe

It’s late at night because Trump made it so. I write this part last and now I want sleep. I didn’t expect him to go on so long. Maybe you can use that. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Tell the boss you were up late watching tv as a civic duty because democracy dies in darkness? If you watched it, grab an afternoon nap. If not, pretend you did and go to a bar or something fun. The speech ended around eleven thirty or so Central, in case you’re asked.

If you live in California, I don’t think this works as a POETS Day hooky excuse. You guys are so far behind the RNC was still pre-empting Judge Judy and the like. Sorry. Tell them your probiotics are out of alignment or something. That might work.

Enjoy the weekend.

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I’m a fan of James May. Top Gear, obviously, but his other stuff too: James May’s Toy Stories, James May’s Man Lab, James May: Our Man In… I’ve got the cookbook from James May: Oh Cook! He’s impish and once got fired from a magazine for a naughty acrostic.

Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure is my favorite. He and wine writer Oz Clarke tour France in search of a decent bottle for under €12 ($20 or so at the time.) There’s a scene where James hates a particular white made by a winemaker friend of Oz’s and is told to say something nice or nothing at all. James offered, and this “compliment” is in common use around my house, “Well, it might not stain your shirt.” More common around here is “might stain your shirt” for grudging approval, and thus have the British enriched my domestic cant.

At one point Oz wants to visit a brewery. In the lead up, May gets ahold of a home brew kit, makes his own batch of beer and otherwise tries to familiar himself with the basics before discussing processes and decisions with someone who brews on a grander scale. Later, when the professional notes that James seems to know a thing or two, he responds “I too, am a brewer.” And thus, an argument was born.

I say he’s right to call himself a brewer. A friend of mine doesn’t think you can call yourself any work or hobby related title unless you have a year or so experience. I think once you’ve been hired as a receptionist, you are a receptionist and can call yourself that. There’s no warrant that you’re a good receptionist. But you are a receptionist. I worked as a sommelier for seven years without a certification. I will go on about the certification racket in that field when given the chance, but all of that is beside the point. If someone is unqualified for the position they are hired for and occupy, that means they are a bad example and no credit to the craft, but still an example. A poor football coach is still a football coach. Appoint an illiterate editor of a publishing house and you have the worst person conceivable as editor, but he or she is an editor. A clueless electrician is dead, so that may seem an exception, but if there’s a headline describing his terminal incident, it will show not. My friend and I have this discussion far too often.

Last week, POETS Day was about Judith Wright, and I mentioned how surprised I was that Poetry Foundation, the organization that puts out Poetry magazine, didn’t have a biography page for her, as they do for most notable poets. They’re an incredible resource so her absence was odd. A search brought up winners of the Judith Wright Award, but not the woman herself. The post found its way to the screen of someone who works for Poetry Foundation and/or Poetry and he sent me a nice email. Wright wasn’t excluded intentionally (I never thought she was) and they’d be putting a page up for her soon. Just an oversight to be corrected. He liked the three poems of hers that I featured in my post and, this is noteworthy, asked me if I had suggestions for other poems to link to.

A man named Harold Monro founded Poetry Review. Because of his existence as a contemporary and competitor, I harbor a haunted feeling that I’ve misspelled Harriet Monroe’s name even though there’s no reason for me to doubt, so ubiquitous is her stamp on the age I’m most enamored of. She founded Poetry, fully with the attending but usually dropped, :A Magazine of Verse, in 1912 and did so much to shape modern tastes.

When Ezra Pound came across a new poet, like James Joyce, or an established regional poet in search of a larger audience, like Robert Frost, he wrote to Monroe at the Chicago offices of Poetry. He was employed by her as a foreign correspondent for Poetry and part of his job – and she had others doing the same – was to find poems for publication, much as I was recently asked by Poetry/Poetry Foundation to do. To be clear, someone asked to do a job, despite qualifications, has every right to say they are a practitioner of that job. What I’m getting at is that no one will think ill of you for using phrases like, “It’s guys like Ben and Ezra Pound who got poets like H.D. published.” You don’t have to point out that I’m not like Pound when it comes to fascism, maintaining sanity, or wearing green velvet suits with blue glass buttons, but I’d appreciate it if you did but key is that first you say the other thing.

In 1912 Monroe wrote “The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine–may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut.” She travelled extensively and looked for influences outside of the familiar and wrote amusingly in the introduction to New Poetry: An Anthology (1920) about what could have been if Chaucer, whom she credits with setting the English course, had preferred Saxon rather than continental poetics. There was no settled direction then and while she’s not dismissive of traditional English verse, she’s an advocate of exploration, suggesting that change is natural and the new is really just a step in the development of what came before.

More from that introduction:

“The new poetry strives for a concrete and immediate realization of life; it would discard the theory, the abstraction, the remoteness, found in all classics not of the first order. It is less vague, less verbose, less eloquent, than most poetry of the Victorian period and much work of earlier periods. It has set before itself an ideal of absolute simplicity and sincerity— an ideal which implies an individual, unstereotyped diction; and an individual, unstereotyped rhythm. Thus inspired, it becomes intensive rather than diffuse. It looks out more eagerly than in; it becomes objective. The term “exteriority” has been applied to it, but this is incomplete. In presenting the concrete object or the concrete environment, whether these be beautiful or ugly, it seeks to give more precisely the emotion arising from them, and thus widens immeasurably the scope of the art.”

New Poetry: An Anthology, is a free download at Project Gutenberg. If you like early twentieth century poetry, it’s got big names and small. Good stuff.

She included a few of her own poems in the book. This is my favorite. I like its vibrance and the rhythm is strong, original.

The Wonder of It
Harriet Monroe (1860-1936)

How wild, how witch-like weird that life should be!
That the insensate rock dared dream of me,
And take to bursting out and burgeoning— Oh, long ago— yo ho!—
And wearing green! How stark and strange a thing
That life should be!

Oh, mystic mad, a rigadoon of glee,
That dust should rise, and leap alive, and flee
A-foot, a-wing, and shake the deeps with cries—
Oh, far away— yo-hay!
What moony masque, what arrogant disguise
That life should be!

She published the Imagiste’s do’s and don’ts in 1913: direct treatment of the thing, no superfluities, a music phrase. If I’m not wrong, the influence of those guidelines show in “The Wonder of It.”

This next poem was first published in 1922. It’s a completely different style. I and III are wonderful vignettes but II is superb. No one does it as well as Langston Hughes, but she captures a man in supposed vice and connects him to something old and elusive.

On the Train

I
THE lady in front of me in the car,
With little red coils close over her ears,
Is talking with her friend;
And the circle of ostrich foam around her hat,
Curving over like a wave,
Trembles with her little windy words.
What she is saying, I wonder,
That her feathers should tremble
And the soft fur of her coat should slip down over her shoulders?
Has her string of pearls been stolen,
Or maybe her husband?

II
He is drunk, that man —
Drunk as a lord, a lord of the bibulous past.            sic
He shouts wittily from his end of the car to the man in the corner;
He bows to me with chivalrous apologies.
He philosophizes, plays with the wisdom of the ages,
Flings off his rags,
Displays his naked soul —
Athletic, beautiful, grotesque.
In the good time coming,
When men drink no more,
Shall we ever see a nude soul dancing
Stript and free
In the temple of his god?

III
She comes smiling into the car
With iridescent bubbles of children.
She blooms in the close plush seats
Like a narcissus in a bowl of stones.
She croons to a baby in her lap —
The trees come swinging by to listen,
And the electric lights in the ceiling are stars.

Finally, a poem about the old meeting the new. She celebrates both in poetry so this scene and what’s behind it shouldn’t be all that mysterious. It’s hard to overestimate her importance to modern American and English poetry. Selected letters of this poet and that poet of a certain time are bound to include letters to her, letters where the poet is pleading his case as did Hart Crane, or letters where an editor is breaking down strengths and weaknesses of poets whose work is proposed, as did Pound. It was her recognition that was sought, her understanding necessary to vindication, her imprimatur for inclusion among the fraternity of poets. It’s a remarkable and well documented career.

The Meeting

The ox-team and the automobile
Stood face to face on the long red road,
The long red road was narrow
At the turn of the hill,
And below was the sun-dancing river
Afoam over the rocks.

The mild-mannered beasts stood par, chewing their cud.
The stubble-bearded man from the mountains,
Rustier than his wagon,
Unmoving eyed the proud chauffeur.
The little ragged girl,
With sun-bleached hair,
Sitting on a hard, yellow-powdrey bag,
Looked across at the smart motor hats of the ladies,
And their chiffon scarfs
That the light breeze fingered.
The proud chauffeur blew his horn,
But nothing moved-
Except the foaming, sun-dancing river down below.

Then he jerked his head,
And turned the wheel,
And slowly, carefully,
The automobile moved back over the long red road.

And the mild-mannered beasts lifted their feet,
And the stubble-bearded man flipped his rein,
Ad the ragged little girl looked ahead up the hill,
And the ox-team lumbered and limped over the long red road.