Modernist power couple

John Rodker, Mary Butts

Al Filreis

I'm listening to a 2-hour recording made of Kenneth Irby reading at the Ear Inn in New York, in Ma'm listening to a 2-hour recording made of Kenneth Irby reading at the Ear Inn in New York, in May of 1984. At the time he was obsessed with the relatively unknown poetry of Mary Butts. And he began his reading by talking about Butts' writing career, and life, and by reading several of her poems.

Along the way Irby mentions that Butts was married to John Rodker. I hadn't known that. I've long been fascinated by Rodker. In the 80s, when I first started visiting archives and collecting odd bits of modernist literary history, I ran into Rodker's legacy. I believe I read his papers at the University of Maryland, but I could be wrong about that. Or maybe at the Ransom Center at UT Austen, which is where a smallish archive of his papers is housed today. Rodker was a correspondent of many modernist poets, including Wallace Stevens; he published some early Stevens. But no Rodker-Stevens letters are at Texas. I do see correspondences with Theodore Draper and Jessica (Decca) Mitford, which makes me think, on a hunch, that he had a radical/leftist phase, perhaps in the 40s. He was a good friend of Doris Lessing.

In 1919 he started the Ovid Press. It lasted about a year. In the 20s he was in Paris helping Joyce with a second edition of Ulysses. He got into occult publishing and, much later, into publishing pornography. A Collected Poems was published in 1930.

John Rodker and Stevens shared the pages of the October 1919 issue of Poetry. Rodker's poem "The Searchlight" is there, along with a dozen or so of Stevens' famous Harmonium poems.

For a while Rodker was a go-between for Stevens and painting. At one point Rodker, in Paris, was trying to get Stevens to buy a painting by Wyndham Lewis. Stevens never bought a Lewis, but did say this in a letter: "Fancy the swank of Wyndham Lewis."

Ken Irby's interest in the unknown poems of Mary Butts seems warranted - judging from the few poems I've read and, now, thanks to Irby, have heard read aloud. If I ever get the time I'd like to explore the aesthetic cross-influence of Butts and Rodker. This was the time of the formation of Anglo-American modernism in poetry and these two people were important but now almost indiscernible influences.

I haven't read the biography of Butts written by Nathalie Blondel, but that would certainly be a good next step.

Later, Danny Snelson affirms my interest in Rodker, thus: "I've also had a long-time fascination for the man. He was also the center piece, really the only recurring character, in Pound's short-lived Exile journal, wch published an incredible Rodker novel in pieces. Really fascinated by his work I was just reading the Ovid edition of Mauberley, wch is just fabulous. It wld be great to get hands on some of the occult / pornographic publications. Also the Imago editions of Freud. Totally wonderful trajectory!"

March 20, 2011

TAGS:

< previous post next post >

RSS feed | subscribe by email

DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.