The New Age, June 12, 1913

My favorite part of this issue was the unsigned list of instructions for writing modern poetry, which I can't resist copying here:

MODERN POETRY.

HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WOULD WRITE IT.

1. The theme should be as sordid and revolting as can be conjured up in the imagination of the writer.

2. Poetic expression need not be sought. Lines of poetry here and there may be lashed together by masses of commonplace language, Vulgar and slangy expressions. Realism will thus be “ attained.”

3. The writer should never miss an opportunity of inserting an oath or profanity, thereby avoiding a fatal insipidity; especially for the sake of rhyme or of botching up a halting metre. It is well to bear in mind that the writer need not hold himself responsible for the utterances of his creations.

4. The rules of metrical composition need not be observed. Whatever the metre chosen, the verses may lack or be in excess of the prescribed number of feet for such metre, according to the pleasure of the author. Any tag will do for a rhyme. Prepositions and conjunctions are now allowed to be quite perfect rhymes, and, for the sake of rhythm, the back of a sentence may be broken in whatever place the poet chooses.

5. In the old term “ poetic licence,” the significance of the latter word may be extended to include all phases of its meaning.

This issue has several frontal attacks on modern poetry--there's another attack on Yeats, with Pater and Wilde thrown in for special scrutiny.  Frost's "A Boy's Will" is called "idle rubbish" in the reviews section.  They even print a letter attacking their correspondent, Richard Aldington--accusing him of rudeness.  The New Age thrives on controversy, and it's always fun to find things like this. 

Is there any chance Eliot read the instructions for modern poetry and decided to attempt to follow all of them?  I'm being facetious, but I like reading The Waste Land through these rules.  I'll make a lesson out of it someday: it's good to emphasize that modernism emerged against massive resistance, and even sometimes-allies could be enemies.  This is close to Ann Ardis' thesis in Modernism and Cultural Conflict.  Which is more a note for me than for you.  Oh public notebook. 

The New Age June 5 1913

A quick report from this issue:

The New Age is covering catastrophes and atrocities these days: the Balkan wars, the Irish famine (a retrospective piece), wage slavery in England, a scandal in the Gilbert Islands, and of course faint rumblings of the impending WWI.  Oh, and graduate school reform. 

Turning to that topic, Ezra Pound concludes his three-part series with a few delightful observations.  First, I love this one: "Some triple-X idiot of an editor has boomed a bad poem and called it worthy of Shelley.  As if Shelley the revolutionist Republican, propagandist, writer of canzoni, would, were he alive in 1913, be content with the same mannerisms of expression that suited him in the year of grace 1813."  Readers should notice why this particularly delights me.  At least, it inspires me to work.  Other parts of his article aren't so great, but I thought it would be worth recording that artist-hipsters have been around for at least the last century--Pound complains about how artists are vegetarians and simple-lifers, rather than master craftsmen (emphasis, perhaps, on craftsMEN). 

This, though, is most precious: "Not only must the artist be able 'to look any damn man in the face and tell him to go to hell,' but he must be able to do this quietly, seriously, without needless bravura or bombast."  That goes out to my old bandmates at the University of Maine.

My favorite part of this issue, though, was the short satirical piece "Futurism in Food" by Lionel de Fonseka.  You may notice that his Wikipedia page has been updated by some other MJP-head, judging by the links attached.  It's the account of a visit to the Post-Impressionist Restaurant and then Moderno, the Futurist restaurant.  It's especially hilarious because many of the goofiest things about Moderno have come to pass in the foodie movement: "We believe that every emotion can be rendered gastronomically, and there are immense possibilities in food as a medium of expression.  What is art, after all, but conscious expression?"  My favorite part was at the end, though, when they are feeling cynical, and so are fed caramel.  I'll leave the punchline to the story itself, and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a laugh at the Futurists (as all good Futurists do). 

Because the perfect connection between the two pieces above is too perfect to resist: the advertisement on the last page of this issue is for a restaurant offering "a simple-life, pure-food, non-flesh luncheon."  Enjoy. 




 

The New Age, May 29 1913

The gem of this issue is Ezra Pound's continuing piece on the state of the American system of higher education.  He calls for what sounds a lot like an MFA program to be established in New York City, and it sounds really great.  The biggest difference being that one's tenure in the program would be based on artistic performance--I haven't heard of anyone being expelled from an MFA for writing bad poetry.  But then, what is bad poetry?  E.P. calls (predictably) for originality and knowledge of contemporary art to be the primary qualifications for entrance into the "super college" of 100 multimedia artists.  Also intriguing is the idea of having great artists brought in to "abuse the bad work of the fellows of the college, or to commend it on such rare occasions that any of it seemed worthy of commendation."  So, the art college isn't just about quality, after all.  There's a paradox between wanting artists to feel more comfortable (with a salary) and wanting them to be under pressure to produce good work.  At the end, he writes that this is not "a passing fancy of the hour."  The Ezuversity in embryo? 

Also in Pound-related news (circa 1913): Orage reviews a translation of Japanese NO (sic) plays, by Dr. Marie Stopes, a badass writer, translator, poet, women's rights activist, and paleobotanist.  The book is available here.   Pound's translations of the Noh plays (from Ernst Fenollosa's notebooks) are favorites of mine--I'm going to try to find a play he translated in Stopes and compare it to his version.  A quick hop to JSTOR led to this tantalizing tidbit in an article by Roy E. Teele in Contemporary Literature: "Stopes wrote to friends of [Pound's] delight in the materials he had found in Ernst Fenollosa's manuscripts" (346).  I'm going to do some follow-up work, will report anything cool I find.  The New Age's thesis about the plays would have piqued Pound's interest: that the reason the plays seem odd is because they have a subtle, aristocratic morality: "unless you're on the level of the author, you miss everything--as you deserve to do."  Sound familiar? 

Of a more personal interest, right next to the NO plays is a review of a Maeterlinck play about Mary Magdalene.  A negative review.  It points readers to the source: Mead's translation of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.  This intrigues me, because Mead's translation was mostly off the radar until the Nag Hammadi codex sparked interest in all things Gnostic.  I've been curious for a long time about H.D.'s sources for the gnostic elements in Trilogy, especially the ways her poem seems to quote lines that were only dug out of the desert years after the poem was finished.  Maybe Mead has the answers--and the close proximity to Pound gives a logical path-of-influence.

I love reading this way, but I worry that a Poundian proper would be able to point to all my little discoveries having been made before...

The New Age complains about all the other little magazines that are coming out... ha.  They run down The New Freewoman before it has even printed its first issue!  I'll look forward to that issue, coming out in two weeks 100 years ago.  I'm also really glad it's starting during the summer-of-exam-reading, and thankful for my advisors who have allowed me to make this project part of my PhD exam list. 

Lastly, at least The New Age has the decency to print the feminist counter-attacks to their misogyny.  Very reasonable, very angry letters to the editor--and they seem more on the right side of history.  This actually ties back to Stopes a little, because there was a whiff of misogyny in the review of her book.  J. M. Kennedy writes a passionate rebuttal of the idea that women-intellectuals are somehow subpar. 

Poetry May 1913

The May issue of Poetry's poetry is a poem--one poem, "The Death of Aggripina" by John Neihardt.  It seems like warmed-over Gibbon in verse to me (I'm reading too much New Age, I'm getting snarky). 

The essays are far more interesting.  A digest:

Harriet Monroe's essay "Tradition" seems to really capture the ambivalent stance of Poetry.  She rejects form as a basis for poetry, but locates it in "spiritual motive."  It's capital-arr Romanticism.  There's something almost Italian Futurist about it, tempered with a drop of Thoreau: "If he must inherit also forms and rules--better the free foot in the wilderness, better the upward flight of danger in a monoplane!"

Then, and this blows my mind, she pits the traditionalists against the modernists, which sort of blows up my thesis of her conciliatory approach: "It is in no desire to appease our critics, but to open a free road to one of our strongest poets, that we present this month Mr. Neihardt's essay in poetic tragedy on the old Roman theme.  There may be value in contrast; between April and May the issue is sharply drawn."

She follows this by declaring that John Masefield is in danger of losing himself to his popularity, pointing out that she's published both rave reviews and scathing attacks (Alice Corbin Henderson's attack is later in the issue). 

Speaking of Alice Corbin Henderson, she contributes a short piece about poetic rhythm, which is nice.  I can see it being teachable as a counterpoint to the normative iamb...

Last but not least, Uncle Ez.  He begins his review of Frost's A Boy's Will (his first book!) with the grand proclamation: "There is another personality in the realm of verse, another American..."  I'm writing a poem that quotes part of this review, but more on that in the "realm of verse."

 Not the most interesting issue, but it's following up on some really epic ones.  I like, though, the small note that says Poetry would like to buy back some of its first issues, at 25 cents each.  That's a sign of success, right?

The New Age, May 26 1913

Oh, New Age, bottomless well.  As usual, there's so much in this issue that I can hardly begin to catalog it all. I'll just be looking at a pair of columns from this one, "Present Day Criticism" and "Views and Reviews," back to back and by the same author [update: "PDC" was by Hastings all along. RTB 5/20/15].  Check it out:

“The recent judgment given against the woefully fallen Theosophical Society will in all probability paralyse the tentacles of this particular octopus, though its dying spasms may be even more malignantly directed than those of the suffragettes. But in our opinion the influence over the feeble-minded of quacks like Messrs. Yeats, Carpenter, and Tagore, is scarcely less pernicious than the more audacious and despotic humbug of Mrs. Besant and Mr. Leadbeater” (88).

This selection, from the column “Present-Day Criticism,” is a microcosm of the larger article.  The first half is a scathing attack on occult mysticism, particularly what we might now refer to as “New Age” mysticism, and in fact The New Age started more as that sort of New Age than the guild socialist New Age of 1913 (or so I recall from my research last quarter, I don’t have the books on hand but would be happy to find specifics for any interested party).  Orage used to be a young light of the theosophical movement, which he does not mention here (he writes under a pseudonym, “R. H. C.”).  His thesis is simple: all the books being published on Eastern mysticism miss the point of the actual texts.  We readers are advised to “go to the source” where there will be “nothing… mysterious,” simple messages like “Know Thyself.” 

Paired across the page, as if to prove the point, is one of Hastings’ translations of the Mahabharata.  The title is, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”  Point proven?  Naturally I think that the quick abstraction from poem to paraphrase is too violent, and also misses “the point.”  The Mahabharata passage is relevant in 2013, for one: it is a meditation on capital punishment. 

Some of the people he attacks are old friends, old enemies—but the anger directed at Yeats and Tagore pricks my 21^st century ears. 

Tagore and Yeats are both being touted over in Poetry, as reported earlier.  I wonder if Orage is aware of that part of their publicity: he doesn’t name Poetry, and probably didn’t need it (part of the story is about receiving an invitation to a Tagore reading), but I am still curious. 

On that reading Orage declined to attend:  I was thinking about this article last night at a poetry reading here in Seattle, a reading that left me mostly cold (with significant exceptions).  Here’s why Orage didn’t go to the Tagore reading:

“I myself received an invitation, but my ears, among other things, would not permit me to accept it. They told me, truly enough, that they were not yet to be trusted to judge in matters of literature. Without a good deal more training than mere education provides, our ears are much less reliable as critics of style than our eyes. Abracadabra may be made to sound well… I have heard Mr. Yeats chant a “poem” in the voice of an oracle delivering the Sibylline … and when I came afterwards to read the lines myself, the imposition on my ears was exposed. Until, then,

I can read with my ears as well as with my eyes they shall mew their inexperience in private practice.”

Well folks, there you have it.  I am curious whether readings were in fact as much a new phenomenon as R.H.C. seems to consider them.  Still, it’s fascinating how Yeats and Tagore, poets who rank among the most eminent of the 20^th century, are so cursorily deflated as performance pieces, even linked to advertising techniques.  My teacher, the late Herb Blau, told us that Yeats was the finest poet of the century.  Orage says Yeats is a charlatan.

Which, as an H.D. scholar, is something I have to constantly confront.  What is the value of personal lyrical mysticism in a modern age?  I’ll let that question shade my future posts.

Also of note in the issue: Pound continues his suggestions for improving graduate education with a two-pronged approach.  Grad students should be sure to be making positive contributions to knowledge, and their expertise should be collected in databases that the media can access whenever experts on particular poets are needed.  That’s the problem!  We need the media to do its part… ha.

Plenty of other good stuff, but I should stop. Will someone please pay me to recreate Richard Aldington’s “Letters from Italy” column?

hough:

The New Age, May 15 1913

Missing a few issues of The New Age has clearly had its price.  Trying to catch up with the 100-year-old contemporary issues after a few months hiatus faces me with serial articles by Aldington and Pound, of which I've missed large sections.  Alas.  Perhaps I'll squeeze in some retrospection soon. 

This week, The New Age is against the vote for women to the extent that its "Notes of the Week" are pretty painful this week.  The kinds of logic deployed are not unfamiliar. 

Pound has an essay in this issue raising familiar anxieties about graduate education, the third in a series titled "America, Chances and Remedies."  There was an especially weird moment when he castigates professors who are "passionately devoted, let us say, to literature, or more likely, each one of them devoted to some period, about which he knows more definite facts than any artist who lived in it!" (58).  A 100-year-old magazine article just called me out for studying it!  Perhaps that is overdramatic.  Really, what he seems to be saying is that artists should be invited into the academy to provide context for scholarly work.  I think that's happened to some extent, with the flowering of institutional creative writing.  Personally, I've studied under many artists and poet-scholars in my time in school, always to my great benefit, and often because of the conversations they were having with their all-scholarly peers.  Pound's a step ahead of an easy answer, though: "If fee were given, it would provide for the serious artist some means of support, other than that of overproduction and hurried production."  Sounds familiar to me.  Any of my friends pursuing MFAs want to comment on that?  And how about this issue coming fast on the heels of Contemporania in Poetry? 

Good gutting of The Blue Review, I'd wager it's by Hastings.  Interestingly, she includes John Middleton Murry in her scorn, but exempts Katherine Mansfield. 

There's also an article about Italy by Aldington, part of a series and a couple short stories by Beatrice Hastings under other names.  The story under the pseudonym "Alice Morning" would have been perfect for a paper that I have, alas, already turned in, on fashion and modernism.  The one under "T.K.L." is a great bash at scandalmongers. 

Poetry, April 1913

This is another epic issue of Poetry, with poems from Pound, Harriet Monroe herself, and Yeats.

 Pound’s Contemporania are the stars here.  I mistyped “starts,” a meaningful slip?  I’ll just note a few observations that might be useful.  First, I think that I learned something about the publication history of these poems from Cyrena Pondrom’s awesome essay “H.D. and the Origins of Imagism” from a 1985 issue of Paideuma, a journal currently run by dear friends (I worked there for a year).  If I remember correctly, Pound had sent poems to Poetry but demanded them held back so that Aldington and H.D. would be published first, before sending new poems in a more Imagiste style.  What strikes me most about this sequence, on reading it again, is perhaps how the poems define themselves.  They define their audience and their reception, and are out to provoke as well as enshrine themselves.  This isn’t exactly unprecedented, (“So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”) but what might be novel is that some of these poems aren’t about much else than their own quality.  This reminds me of a moment in Barrett Watten’s Plasma: “If it’s a good idea, it results in a permanent change.”  That whole stanza from Plasma could be about the Imagists…

I want to zoom in on two particular lines from the first poems: “I beg you, my friendly critics/ Do not set about to procure me an audience” (1).  Could this be referring to the apologia from March’s issue of Poetry?  I have a feeling that this poem is in dialog with Poetry itself—and The New Age as well, with its preoccupation with procurers.  Procurers show up again in “Pax Saturni,” and I wonder whether or not Pound is positioning himself against Beatrice Hastings and her denial of forced prostitution here.  Maybe?

Which leads me to make a note about how this project has developed: it is more of a public notebook than anything else.  I’m not really reviewing the little reviews in any sense beyond re-viewing.  I may hold back some things I’m thinking, or I might type them up, but I’m sure my thoughts are not complete.   

Yeats’ poem is thrown into biographical relief by the comment in the “Notes” section of the issue: “Mr. Yeats' poem is especially significant because of its rare autobiographical mood. It is seldom that this poet speaks of his attitude toward his art, or the world's attitude toward him.”  That seems like a good gloss to me—the poem is a combination of Yeats meditating on his dead acquaintances (and Maude Gonne, of course) and an ancient Irish legend.  I’m struck by how this poem is a foreshadowing of “Easter, 1916,” published three years earlier.  All changed, all changed utterly.  A terrible presentiment… I’m not enough of a Yeatsian to know exactly what’s going on here, I might try to figure it out. 

Lastly, Harriet Monroe puts her money on modernism in the essay at the end of the issue, “The New Beauty.”  She cuts her ties with Victorian and Elizabethan verse styles, in favor of a new beauty that that goes beyond questions of “subject, nor yet of form.”  Modernism is instead located in the power of vision—odd to juxtapose that next to Contemporania.  Yeats and H.D. might agree, though.  Monroe also pretty much admits to printing subpar poetry in order to encourage young authors.  See the apologia for Pound, in the previous issue.  Lastly, on a postcolonial note, she ends with fulsome praise for Rabindranath Tagore: “But this Hindoo shows us how provincial we are; England and America are little recently annexed corners of the ancient earth, and their poets should peer out over sea-walls and race-walls and pride-walls, and learn their own littleness and the bigness of the world.”  This follows on the reviews by Pound.  I’m not sure what to do with that, but I do think it is cool.