Features

Dropping the Baroness in the middle

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Dada dressing, German Arts, and poetry today

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]

Barbara Guest: The art of poetry

Barbara Guest, June 6, 1998, at friend June Felter's house, Berkeley, in front of Felter's painting. Photo by June Felter.

As part of of Jacket2’s publication of Barbara Guest’s 1995 LINEbreak interview, we are publishing two of Guest’s early poems, “Escape” and “The Inhabitants (each available as a scan of the original typsescripts and as an

Poetry in 1960, a symposium

The materials published in this feature are led by my introduction to a symposium on the poetry and poetics of 1960. The introduction you'll read here is more or less just as I spoke it a few months ago at the Writers House in Philadelphia. Since then, Gordon Faylor and I have gathered somewhat revised versions of the presentations made that evening. We then solicited responses from various others and we are happy to present these also as part of our 1960 feature, along with several other images and documents. I have been obsessively tracking 1960 doings and writings — reading, watching (film and TV), researching, interviewing, cross-referencing, following apparently meaningless leads; some of these have been posted to my blog “1960.” Needless to say, then, I was delighted to have 1960-obsessed company for a night in December 2010 — and then, further, throughout the following weeks and months as I worked with the original presenters and added respondents.