We are pleased to publish Robert Zaller’s summary of Stanley Burnshaw’s life and work to mark the occasion of PennSound’s acquisition of two recordings of Burnshaw — one a talk, the other a 1963 reading. Zaller is a poet, critic, historian and activist, and serves as the executor of the Burnshaw Estate. Years ago I interviewed Burnshaw with Harvey Teres and spoke with him about his affiliation with radical writers in the 1930s and his encounter (by way of a negative review of Ideas of Order) with Wallace Stevens; we add my note (and a link to the PDF of the interview transcript) to this little Burnshaw feature.
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Summer (1924). Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
The Little Review magazine published Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s poetry during the height of a dialectic phase in little magazine culture when conversations about the nature of literature and “the literary” were ubiquitous. In particular, readers contested the value of Dada poetry and “the Baroness” became coterminous with what some considered the worst of this experimental movement. In January 1922, for example, Harriet Monroe wrote in Poetry that “the Little Review […] is headed straight for Dada; but we could forgive even that if it would drop Else von Freytag-Loringhoven on the way.”[1]
