Al Filreis convened Lisa New, Jane Malcolm, and Sophia DuRose to talk about two well-known sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I Shall Forget You Presently” and “Love Is Not All.” “I Shall Forget You Presently” became widely available as one of the four sonnets presented at the end of the book A Few Figs from Thistles (first published in 1920). “Love Is Not All” of 1931 was in Millay’s collection of fifty-two sonnets, Fatal Interview. Both poems were performed by Millay in an undated recording we include on our Millay PennSound page.
Photos of Gail Scott (left) and Jane Malcolm (right) courtesy of the authors.
Note: The following conversation unfolded over a couple of warm, sunny months in Montreal. I was inspired to interview Gail on the occasion of her recent retirement from the Université de Montréal, where she taught creative writing for fourteen years and was a cherished colleague and mentor to me and many others.
Note: The following conversation unfolded over a couple of warm, sunny months in Montreal. I was inspired to interview Gail on the occasion of her recent retirement from the Université de Montréal, where she taught creative writing for fourteen years and was a cherished colleague and mentor to me and many others. One night, over a lovely dinner, Gail and I began talking about her dual role as Montreal writer and experimental novelist and about the many life experiences that accompanied her engagements with Quebec feminism, New Narrative, and Language poetry.
Tuscaloosa, AL - April 25, 2014 (University of Alalbama Press announcement) - Laura Riding's Contemporaries and Snobs (1928) was the first volume of essays to engage critically with high modernist poetics from the position of the outsider. For readers today, it offers a compelling account - by turns personal, by turns historical - of how the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry. Most importantly, Contemporaries and Snobs offers a counter-history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of modernism left (and leaves) behind. With Gertrude Stein as its figurehead, the book champions the noncanonical, the "barbaric," and the undertheorized.
Riding's nuanced defense of a poetics of the person in Contemporaries and Snobs represents a forgotten but essential first attempt to identify and foster what is now a well-defined poetic lineage that leads from Stein to the contemporary experimental avant-garde. In these essays, Riding takes her readers on a remarkably thorough tour through the critical scene of the 1920s. Among other influential treatises, she considers T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood and his editorial essays in The Criterion, Allen Tate's "Poetry and the Absolute," John Crowe Ransom's essays on the modernist poet Edgell Rickword's essays in The Calendar of Modern Letters, and Herbert Read's posthumous publication of T. E. Hulme's essays. All of this criticism, Riding notes, gave modern poets a sheen of seriousness and professionalism, but was it good for poetry? Her decisive answer is "no."
This new edition includes an introduction by Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm that makes legible the many connections between Contemporaries and Snobs and the critical debates and poetic experiments of the 1920s, as well as explanatory notes, a chronological bibliography of Riding's work, and an index of proper names.
Jane Malcolm: How would you characterize your involvement with Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Occupy movement? I've seen the footage you've taken as part of the crowd, and I imagine that as a New Yorker you must have especially strong feelings about it.
Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs, from University of Alabama Press
Discount offer on Riding, Mullen, Quatermain, Reading the Difficulties