Take Your Medicine, Hold the Sugar

Here is another piece "defending" the poetry of Wallace Gould--this time by everyone's favorite Poet of House Calls, Billy Williams.  Note that The Little Review editor, Margaret Anderson, once again appends a note of antagonism saying,

Disagreeing with most of Dr. Williams's article, as with Marsden Hartley's last month, I shall try to carry forward this discussion in the September number; not that I wish to use Wallace Gould's poetry as a special point of debate, but that I am interested in "putting over" certain abstractions about art which most people in this country seem to look upon as unintelligible.

A Maker
by William Carlos Williams

It never fails to anger me when I have read ten paragraphs of hair-splitting argument in this or that modern paper of literary pretensions to come to the end and find it is a book boost. The trick seems to be to air a number of more or less pleasant fancies and then to refer casually at the end to a new book by Mr. Soandso.

I have a definite and constant determination to set up in his place the man whom I find to be a poet and to revile and beat down endemic critics such as the Louis Untermeyrs who leave their pock marks wherever they are given an inch of entry and who are opposed to my excellences. What if I do not succeed? What if I am wrong in my judgments? To the full of my power I intend to maintain my fight as long as I live. This is no time to quibble over nice merits or demerits.

Wallace Gould is an exquisite performer upon his instrument. By his instrument I mean his Maine. I have said my say against "the chance lovely singers" who pipe up and do conventional ditties in Wyoming or Texas or Delaware or Nebraska, taking in the ready scenery of the place, and whose poetry is judged to be excellent by the "connoisseurs" because it is so charming. Wallace Gould is not one of these. Yes, he sticks to what he sees, what he knows, but the quiet scorn of his music has set him free. He is free in form, since any other freedom for an artist does not exist, free to turn his emotion into the use he sees fit to put it to without a thread to bind it upon some sterile track.

If he is lovely in his portrayal of a landscape, always a pure Maine landscape, one had better be on his guard for that pigment is in the hands of a master. If you dare to praise him for his loveliness you will find out that he has perhaps turned you around in the dark and soon you are out of the house by the back way. The artist throughout everything is conscious and working at his images with unerring leisure and often with horrid intention. This is the thing that no tissue paper critic can stand. That an artist should be a man of power; that he should use a catbird to proclaim the death of the whole world; that he should be such a mean fellow as to befool the poor critic who has been trying so hard to explain things—

I am not writing of a book, though book there must be when a publisher shall have emerged; I am writing of certain manuscripts of Gould's which I had the good fortune to hold in my hands and read through and more especially to poems published in Others and the Little Review.

An artist of immaculate craft Gould is. But I have another reason for praising him. It is because he has stuck to what he knows for his songs. No artist cares a damn where a man comes from or how he comes by the knowledge of perceptive values he uses in his work. But to me there is an overwhelming satisfaction in feeling that a man can be a poet under any circumstances and that this has not removed him from his world but has fastened him upon it with such a deadly grip that he has transformed it in spite of itself.

It is for the poet to announce that no condition can change him, that be he American, Russian Chinese, Jew he is poet first, last and always. But one way of announcing this is to take anything, take the land at your feet and use it. It is as good material as another. It is no better but it is as good. In fact the material
is nothing. But to prove it is nothing one must no depend on special circumstance, one must use it.

It might one day become imperative for a man to write of some environment foreign to his own provided the use of his own had grown to be a fetish; but Gould's heroic battle, his determination to use nothing but his Maine, at least in the poems I speak of, gives me an additional sense of joy in his mastery.

Poetry is made by the hands of the poet out of nothing. This must be continually proclaimed. Not only must the assertion be made to a possible public but there must be a proclamation by the poet to himself which is far more important. Then for God's sake let us proclaim to ourselves that it isn't made out of the brains of Frenchmen, Englishmen or dead Greeks. Poetry is as fully at home in the woodsy brain of Wallace Gould as in another man's living in Teheran. I for one am inspired to feel the presence of so capable an artist north of me, a man full of quietness and love and bitterness and infinite bravery and pointed scorn for the world of jackasses.

I have nowhere said that Gould is a great poet. I wish I could find the material for making such an assertion. I don't know the man's range. I only begin to feel the depth of his intensity, but that he is a splendid artist I declare now as well as I am able.
(The Little Review, Vol. 6, No. 4. August, 1919)

Damned Appreciation

So, if you write, you might on occasion want some notice of this work.  Well, let's slot this little tidbit into the category of "be careful what you wish for."  Once again we are indebted to The Modernist Journals Project for their endlessly fascinating archives.  Thank you Brown University and University of Tulsa!

City Point, Vinalhaven

1937–1938,

The Little Review, in 1919, published an essay by Marsden Hartley (a painter and sometime poet, living much of his life in Maine, but a somewhat tenuous member of the Kreymborg-Williams gang in Greenwich--WCW mentions his book of essays, Adventures in the Arts, in Spring and All) in appreciation of his friend, the poet Wallace Gould (and movie-house pianist), whom Hartley calls "The Poet of Maine."  

Hartley

At the end of the essay, the editor (and founder) of the journal, Margaret Anderson, appends this:

[I print this article as a good example of what passes for criticism in America.  Mr. Hartley has simply made up words about Wallace Gould.  Almost nothing that Gould has written justifies any of Mr. Hartley's praise.  Wallace Gould is a writer who has not yet learned to write....]

There's a bit more that mitigates this judgment re: Gould, but it is ridiculously rude in terms of Hartley!  Although, one might grant it a just assessment of Hartley's essay, this seems an intentionally cruel act intentionally done in public.  And then, and then, and then...she prints three of Gould's poems!

Here's one of the poems she printed, part of a series apparently--#30.

I should have struck you between the eyes,
peroxide trollop with the voice of a man --
Irish queen with the head of a tomcat,
I should have made you sprawl in the gutter.
Nevertheless, I salute you, as one salutes the great.
For you are a great and glorious queen.  Your wileness* is so
      resplendent
that to comprehend is to gaze at the sun.
Not pearls, but emeralds, are the tears you shed
over the man who tries to escape you
and whom all women should escape.
Your great voice bellows its ribald truths and hoarsely howls
      its bellicose lies.
Your mind is the source of massive inventions, lewd de-
      ductions, perverse conjectures, nauseating insinuations.
Your bosom is great.
Your hips are great.
Everything about you is great.
I should have struck you between the eyes,
to leave an hieroglyphic in the language that you love --
that you best understand.
if I had done this thing,
and you had sprawled in such a place
as that which England's virgin queen
once shunned as being unfit to tread,
you would have been more gracious than Elizabeth,
and I could have laughed at the man who spread his cloak.

*I don't know if this is a misprint or a misspelling...wiliness or vileness?

You can download or read online Gould's first book Children of the Sun (1917).

***

Margaret Anderson's The Little Review might be considered a leftward balance to Harriet Monroe's more conservative Chicago-based Poetry.  Though early on these two women seemed to have had a fierce "first to publish" rivalry.  

Of the The Little Review (again from the MJP):

During its first three years, The Little Review was largely an anarchist publication that battled on behalf of imagism and published such writers as Richard Aldington, Sherwood Anderson, Maxwell Bodenheim, Ben Hecht, and Amy Lowell. Under Pound's influence, the magazine experienced a fresh infusion of international experimentalism and added contributions by the likes of Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, W. C. Williams, and W. B. Yeats. But even among this talented field, The Little Review's most lasting (and boldest) achievement was its serialization of Joyce's Ulysses, in 23 installments, from 1918 to 1920—until the Society for the Suppression of Vice charged the magazine with obscenity and Anderson and Heap, losing the court trial, were forced to discontinue the novel amid the "Oxen of the Sun" episode.

Of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (MJP):

In 1911, Harriet Monroe persuaded a hundred Chicagoans to pledge $50 a year, for five years, to support a poetry magazine. With that guarantee, she founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912, and it is still going today. Its motto was a quotation from Walt Whitman that appeared on the back of almost every issue: "To have great poets there must be great audiences too." To that end Monroe not only published the best modern poetry she could find, but also used the pages of the magazine for debate and discussion about the forms and content of poetry proper for a modern age. She published poems by Ezra Pound, who became her foreign correspondent, and such other poets as Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Frost, Sandburg, Masters, Robinson, Lowell, Flint, Aldington, H. D., and many others, introducing new poets to the world and helping to revive an art many people thought had no place in modern culture. As she put it herself, "Somewhere I have read a quaint old myth of a goblin who, blowing the fog out of his face, started a tempest which went careering around the world. Now and then I feel like that goblin. Is it possible that less than four years ago poetry was 'the Cinderella of the arts'? Already a great wind is blowing her ashes away, and on the horizon are rolling dust-clouds which may conceal a coach and four—or is it an automobile?" (Poetry 8:3 140). It may have been a jet. In any case, we are all in her debt for blowing away the fog around poetry in 1912.

One will simply note that in 1920 several poems by Gould appeared in Poetry.  Here's one, "Diversion," from a series "In Maine."

SOMETHING is happening, at last,
now that the snowflakes are falling.
Something is happening.
It has been too long that nothing has happened.
The poor old year has been a bore.	5
She has been unkempt.
She has worn a faded calico dress too ragged for repair.
She has murmured of doom.
She has crooned of former profusions
of silk brocades,	10
rare perfumes,
or lovely lusts.
I come to the forests.
Even now the forests are green and black,
but within them,	15
instead of the tawn of the spills,
there is the white of the snowflakes.
I come to the fields.
Even now the fields are tawny,
but across them there are streaks of white—	20
the white of the snowflakes on the frozen brooks.
I look at the skies.
Even now the skies are gray,
but the gray of the skies is enlivened with streaming white—
the white of the snowflakes.	25
The snowflakes are falling,
to circle,
or wander,
or dart,
or float,	30
all like children at play—
like desperate children
awaiting the sound of the school bell.
Something is happening, at last,
now that the snowflakes are falling.

You can find Hartley's essay, "The Poet of Maine," at The Modernist Journals Project.