Who were the “Objectivists”?

In their simplest definition, the “Objectivists” were a group of thirty modernist writers gathered and presented by Louis Zukofsky in two explicitly-titled “Objectivist” publications: the February 1931 issue of Chicago’s Poetry magazine, and An “Objectivists” Anthology, published the following year in France. Beginning in the mid-1930s, many of the writers identified as “Objectivist” ceased writing poetry or faded into obscurity until the early 1960s, when several members of the group reemerged as active poets and enjoyed a surge of attention and retroactive identification as “Objectivists.”

Core “Objectivists”

The seven core “Objectivist” writers featured on this website: Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting and Lorine Niedecker, were connected through a shifting web of friendship and joint publication beginning in the mid-1920s and stretching into the early twenty-first century. All of these writers published important work after 1962, and of the seven, all but Lorine Niedecker appeared in both of the foundational “Objectivist” publications. I recognize that my decision to refer to Niedecker as an “Objectivist” poet despite her absence from the early “Objectivist” publishing ventures and group publications could be contested, so some justification for this decision may be helpful.¹Jenny Penberthy and other attentive readers of Niedecker’s poetry have long noted her intellectual and poetic independence, including surrealist tendencies, of which Zukofsky did not approve, in both her earliest and latest poetry. See Penberthy in How2 and both Ruth Jennison and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ contributions to Radical Vernacular (pp. 131-179). Niedecker became attracted to the group, and to Zukofsky in particular, after reading the February 1931 issue of Poetry in her local library. This encounter prompted Niedecker to write directly to Zukofsky sometime in mid-late 1931, and Niedecker’s first submission to Poetry magazine, dated November 5, 1931, mentions her having been encouraged to do so by Zukofsky.²That letter reads, in full: “Dear Miss Monroe, Mr. Zukofsky encourages me to send some of my poems to you to be considered for “Poetry”. Very truly yours, Lorine Niedecker.” Niedecker to Harriet Monroe in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Records 1895-1961, Box 18, Folder 2, University of Chicago Special Collections. Niedecker’s first letter to Zukofsky marked the commencement of an intense, lifelong friendship, developed through frequent correspondence for nearly 40 years.³Niedecker and Zukofsky conducted one of the deepest, most fruitful, and longest lasting epistolary friendships among writers of which I know. They destroyed much of their correspondence, but a significant portion of the surviving letters from Niedecker were collected and edited by Jenny Penberthy in Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931–1970, published in 1993 by Cambridge University Press. Fragments of Zukofsky’s side of the correspondence are held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Late in 1933, Niedecker traveled to New York City for an extended stay with Zukofsky, during which time she met Charles Reznikoff, George and Mary Oppen, and (probably) William Carlos Williams. In August 1934, Zukofsky wrote to T.C. Wilson, a young graduate student at the University of Michigan who was editing an issue of Bozart-Westminster along with Ezra Pound, indicating that he “[c]onsider[ed] it a grave error not to have included her in Objectivists Anthology, but she has travelled some since 1932.”⁴I am grateful to Jenny Penberthy for bringing this letter to my attention in September 2018. The rest of the letter is full of detailed, though qualified, praise for Niedecker, including the assertion that Niedecker was “the only woman in the U.S.A. as far as I know now writing poetry, with the exception of Marianne Moore – and promising more of a base to build on than Marianne. Suggest that you take something by her whether you like it or not, or whether E.P. [Ezra Pound] likes it or not — such exceptions should be made sometimes so as not to risk dogma.” Zukofsky’s letters to Wilson are held in the T.C. Wilson papers at Yale University. Later in life, Niedecker met both Carl Rakosi and Basil Bunting, who in particular had been a longtime admirer of her writing. While I would not go so far as Rakosi in describing Niedecker as the “most Objectivist of all of us,”⁵Quoted in Bird, 71 it is my view that Niedecker, by virtue of both her personal relationships with other members of the group and her poetic sensibilities, warrants inclusion among the core “Objectivists.” Two other writers, Robert McAlmon and Kenneth Rexroth, also appeared in both of the original “Objectivist” publications, but I have chosen to exclude them from my list of core “Objectivists,” and discuss the reasons for this decision at greater length below.

Speaking purely in terms of the lives of the core “Objectivists,” there are a number of biographical similarities. The group’s geographic center was New York City, and though all seven were never in the area at the same time, all core members either lived in the city or spent significant periods of time there between 1928 and 1935.⁶Apart from a stint at graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin during the 1930-1931 academic year and a trip to visit Pound and other artistic friends in Europe in the summer of 1933, Zukofsky spent the entirety of these years in New York City. Reznikoff lived in New York City for his entire life, apart from a year at journalism school in Missouri (the 1910-1911 academic year), a cross-country trip selling hats for his parents’ business and extended stay in Los Angeles from April-June of 1931, and a two year stint working in Hollywood for his friend Al Lewin (from March 1937 through June 1939). The Oppens arrived in New York City in 1928, living briefly in Greenwich Village before taking a room at the Madison Square Hotel (on the corner of Madison Avenue and 26th Street, near the north east corner of Madison Square Park) for the rest of the winter. They lived briefly with Zukofsky’s close friends Ted and Kate Hecht on Staten Island in the spring, before renting a small house in New Rochelle harbor, the city where George had been born. They returned to San Francisco at the end of the summer in 1929, and lived a rented house in Belvedere for a year before leaving for France in the summer of 1930 around the same time that Zukofsky left New York for Madison. The Oppens arrived in Le Havre, and stayed in France until early in 1933, when they left Paris to return to New York, taking an apartment in Brooklyn Heights near Zukofsky. The Oppens lived in New York from 1933 until the early 1940s, when they moved to Detroit. From 1913 until their deaths, Williams and his wife Flossie made their home some 25 miles northwest of Manhattan at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford, New Jersey, from which location Williams made frequent visits to the city. Carl Rakosi lived in New York City from 1924 to 1925 and again from 1935 to 1940. Bunting lived in New York City for the last half of 1930: he and his first wife, Marian Culver, were married on Long Island on July 9, 1930 and lived in Brooklyn Heights through January 1931, when Bunting’s six-month visa expired and the couple returned to Rapallo, Italy. Although Zukofsky was in Madison during most of Bunting’s time in New York City, Bunting met Williams, René Taupin, and others in Zukofsky’s circle, and met Zukofsky in person when Zukofsky returned to the city for the winter holidays. Niedecker came to New York City for the first time in late 1933, and over the next several years would spend several months in the city, living with Zukofsky during her sometimes lengthy visits. Four of the group were Jewish,⁷Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, and Rakosi four were the children of American immigrants,⁸Zukofsky’s parents immigrated from what is now Lithuania, Reznikoff’s parents immigrated from Russia, Rakosi was born in Germany and immigrated from Hungary when he was six years old, and Williams’ parents had immigrated from Puerto Rico, though his father had been born in England. and they were generally non-academic; apart from Zukofsky, none held graduate degrees connected to literature or university affiliations of any kind until the 1960s, when some members of the group began to be invited to fill artist-in-residence positions at various American universities.⁹Zukofsky earned a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in June 1924, writing his thesis on the writings of the historian Henry Adams. In February 1946, he began a teaching position as an English instructor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now operating as the New York University Tandon School of Engineering), where he taught until his retirement in May 1965. Reznikoff attended journalism school for a year at the University of Missouri and considered pursuing a Ph.D. in history before enrolling in law school, earning his LLB from New York University in 1915 and being admitted to the bar the following year. Reznikoff took a few postgraduate courses in law, but never earned an advanced degree. Oppen dropped out of Oregon State Agricultural College (now Oregon State University) after he was suspended and Mary was expelled from school for their relationship. Neither George or Mary earned university degrees. Williams attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he befriended classmates Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle [H.D.], graduating in 1906 and filling internships at two New York hospitals and pursuing advanced study in pediatrics in Leipzig, Germany. Rakosi attended the University of Chicago for a year before transferring to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1924 and a master’s degree in industrial psychology in 1925. Rakosi attended a wide range of graduate programs in the 1920s and 1930s, briefly enrolling in both the Ph.D. program in English literature and law school at the University of Texas at Austin and medical school at the University of Texas Medical Department in Galveston but leaving each program before earning a degree. After choosing a career as a social worker, Rakosi attended the Graduate School of Social Work at Tulane University in New Orleans and eventually earned his master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940. Between 1952 and 1954, he would complete course work in the Social Work Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota, but he never completed the doctorate. Bunting was enrolled at the London School of Economic from October 1919 to April 1923, but was very casual in his studies and left without earning a degree. Niedecker attended Beloit College from 1922-1924, but family financial pressures forced her to leave without completing her degree. With the exception of Williams and Reznikoff, all were of the same ‘generation,’ having been born between 1900 and 1908.¹⁰Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey on September 17, 1883, and Reznikoff was born in New York City on August 31, 1894. Of the five born after the turn of the century, Basil Bunting was the eldest and George Oppen the youngest, with Niedecker, Rakosi, and Zukofsky having being born during the eight month span from May 1903 and January 1904.¹¹Bunting was born on March 1, 1900 in Scotswood-on-Tyne, a western suburb of Newcastle, England; Niedecker was born on May 12, 1903 on Blackhawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin; Rakosi was born on November 6, 1903 in Berlin, Germany; Zukofsky was born on January 23, 1904 in New York City; Oppen was born on April 24, 1908 in New Rochelle, New York. Not surprisingly, considering his seniority relative to the rest of the group, Williams was also the first of the “Objectivists” to die, in 1963, just as many of the writers who had been published with him as “Objectivists” were beginning to reemerge to greater public notice.¹²William Carlos Williams died March 4, 1963, aged 79; Lorine Niedecker died December 31, 1970, aged 67; Charles Reznikoff died January 22, 1976, aged 81; Louis Zukofsky died May 12, 1978, aged 74; George Oppen died July 7, 1984, aged 76; Basil Bunting died April 17, 1985, aged 85; Carl Rakosi died June 25, 2004, aged 100. For comparison, Ezra Pound was born on October 30, 1885 in Hailey, Idaho and died on November 1, 1972 in Venice, Italy, aged 87. The last surviving “Objectivist” was Rakosi, who published his final volume of poetry in 1999, and continued sending new work in magazines and giving interviews until shortly before his death, aged 100, on June 25, 2004.

In addition to their shared publication efforts, the “Objectivists” were also loosely united by shared political and poetic affinities. In contradistinction to Pound, Eliot, and Cummings, three of the most prominent American modernist poets of the era, each of the “Objectivists” was leftist in their politics, with each generally expressing Marxist, socialist, or Progressive sympathies.¹³Oppen and Rakosi were both members of the Communist Party of the United States of America in New York City during the last half of the 1930s, but neither remained an active member of the party by the end of the decade. Zukofsky appears to have applied for membership in the Communist Party in 1925, when his close friend Whittaker Chambers began to ingratiate himself with the party’s New York leadership, but others recalled that his application was rejected, though the influence of Marxist ideas on Zukofsky remained prominent in his poetry and private letters through the late 1930s and is clear in his editorial decisions, both in regards to who he selected for inclusion in the “Objectivist” publications and afterward. In 1934 and 1935, Zukofsky  spent several months preparing A Worker’s Anthology (though never published, many of the poems he gathered for this manuscript made their way into his A Test of Poetry), joined the anti-fascist (and Communist-affiliated) League of American Writers and worked briefly as an unpaid poetry editor for the prominent Communist-affiliated literary magazine New Masses. He and Bunting both argued politics with the fascist-sympathizing Pound in their letters throughout the 30s, with Zukofsky taking up more Marxist-Leninist positions and Bunting more anarcho-socialist ones. In a July 1938 letter to Pound, Zukofsky wrote: “Can’t guess what Kulchah is about, but if you want to dedicate yr. book to a communist (me) and a British-conservative-antifascist-imperialist (Basil), I won’t sue you for libel and I suppose you know Basil. So dedicate” (Pound/Zukofsky, 195). Zukofsky’s multi-hybrid classification of Bunting is a good sign of the difficulty even his closest friends experienced in classifying his political views. Bunting attended a Quaker secondary school and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the first World War and for several years as a young adult was, like his father, a dues-paying Fabian Socialist. His mature political views, while largely uncategorizable, resemble something of a fusion between socialism and anarchism, though he was perhaps the most suspicious of ideology of the whole group, arguing strenuously for the separation of literature from both political and economic motives and ends. A flavor of his independent-mindedness comes through in a 1954 to Dorothy Pound: “our only hope for our children is to destroy uniformity, centralization, big states and big factories and give men a chance to vary and live without more interference than it is the nature of their neighbors to insist on” (quoted in Basil Bunting, 12). Williams’ politics might be best described as democratic populist, and Niedecker was sympathetic to both the strain of Progressivism led by Wisconsin politician Robert La Follette and Henry Wallace as well as the socialism of William Morris. For more on Niedecker’s politics, see: http://steelwagstaff.info/lorine-niedecker-and-the-99/. Reznikoff was the least overtly political of the group, though his writing is profoundly sympathetic to human suffering and what we would today refer to as social justice concerns. He did also work for seventeen years in an editorial capacity on the Labor Zionist journal Jewish Frontier alongside his more politically engaged wife Marie Syrkin, who was the daughter of Nahum and Bassnya Osnos, two prominent Socialist Zionists, as well as a close friend of the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Their poetics might be described as sympathetically heterogeneous, with Ezra Pound and the imagist tradition serving as important common touchstones for the group.

The Formation of the “Objectivist” Core

If there was in fact an “Objectivist” core, comprised of Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, Williams, Rakosi, Bunting and Niedecker, several questions must be answered. Chief among them: How did these seven writers come to know each other? What were the particular threads of connection and aesthetic principles which united them? How and why were these links forged, maintained, and, in some cases, dissolved?

Zukofsky, Williams, Reznikoff, and the Oppens could be said to form something like the group’s original and most durable nucleus, with their connections beginning to form in 1928 and each of them having frequent contact with each other in or near New York City over the next half dozen years.¹⁴Zukofsky spent the 1930-1931 academic year teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Oppens lived in California and France for significant periods in the early 1930s, and Reznikoff took a cross-country trip selling hats for his parents’ business followed by extended stay in Los Angeles from April-June of 1931, but apart from these exceptions, all lived within 20 miles of each other in the New York metro area from 1928 through 1935. Zukofsky and Williams met in April 1928 at the encouragement of Ezra Pound, and Zukofsky met the Oppens later that same year at a party hosted by their mutual friends, the designers Russel and Mary Wright. It’s unclear exactly where and when Zukofsky and Reznikoff met, but Seamus Cooney has plausibly suggested that they met in 1928 at one of the Menorah Journal dinners hosted by its editor Henry Hurwitz. The earliest reference I’ve found to him in Zukofsky’s correspondence are a December 9, 1929 from Ezra Pound praising some “Reznikof prose” that Zukofsky had sent him as being “very good.”¹⁵Pound/Zukofsky, 26. Zukofsky’s prior letter also referenced Reznikoff’s having a printing press, which got Pound quite excited. In subsequent letters, Zukofsky clarified the situation and informed Pound of an upcoming meeting with Reznikoff in which he intended to “talk business” regarding the use of Reznikoff’s press, which he operated from his basement of his sister’s home upstate.

Basil Bunting lived in New York for several months in 1930 and 1931, during which time he established friendships with both Williams and Zukofsky. On July 11, 1930, two days after his marriage to Marian Culver on Long Island, Bunting sent Zukofsky a postcard that read, simply: “Dear Mr Zukofsky – Ezra Pound says I ought to look you up. May I?” Zukofsky assented and the two men quickly became friends, with Zukofsky spending time with Bunting while back in New York City during the winter holidays from his teaching position in Wisconsin. Williams also references having supper with Robert McAlmon, Basil Bunting and his American wife Marian in a January 15, 1931 letter to Zukofsky.¹⁶The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 77. Bunting would continue to correspond with both Zukofsky and Williams for several years.¹⁷See The Poem of a Life, 73-74 and A Strong Song Tows Us, 162-168 for more detailed accounts of the origin of Bunting and Zukofsky’s friendship. The Oppens, who were in France while Bunting and his wife were in New York, did however visit Rapallo in 1932, where they met both Ezra Pound and the Buntings, and they met again with Pound in Paris shortly before their return to the United States early in 1933.¹⁸The Oppens had financed the publication by TO, Publishers of a book consisting of two of Pound’s prose works and met with Pound in a Parisian café to inform him that they were discontinuing the press for financial reasons and would not print his ABC of Economics, as he had hoped. For Mary Oppen’s later account of their relationship with Pound and Bunting during this time, see her Meaning a Life, pp. 131-137. Rakosi was initially connected with the group solely through correspondence with Zukofsky, as he was living in Texas during the early 1930s and did not move back to New York City until 1935, by which time the Oppens and Zukofsky had broken their friendship and the Objectivist Press had essentially ceased operating as a collective publishing venture. While Rakosi and Zukofsky enjoyed rich social relations between 1935 and 1940, when both men lived in New York City, Rakosi was already drifting away from poetry and towards a long professional career as a social worker.¹⁹Rakosi stopped reading and writing verse entirely towards the end of his time in New York City. Rakosi, who had changed his name to Callman Rawley for professional reasons, earned his master’s degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania and married Leah Jaffe in the spring of 1939. Following what he described as “a dreadful existential state, something grey and purposeless between living and dying, and so physical that for a while I was sure I was going to die” that came on when he realized that he was going to stop writing poetry, Rakosi took a job in Saint Louis in 1940 and “went on with my life as a social worker and therapist” (Autobiography in Contemporary Autobiography series, 208). For more on this period in Rakosi’s life, see http://theobjectivists.org/the-lives/carl-rakosi/. Niedecker began corresponding with Zukofsky shortly after reading the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry in her local library, and she first travelled to New York City late in 1933. Niedecker met Charles Reznikoff, the Oppens, and Williams while living with Zukofsky in New York City in the 30s, and both Rakosi and Bunting visited her at her home on Blackhawk Island in the late 1960s.²⁰Carl Rakosi visited Lorine Niedecker and her husband Al Millen at their home on Blackhawk Island in March 1970 while he was serving at the Writer-in-Residence at UW-Madison, writing that “moment I walked in her door, she was opposite of recluse: outgoing, of good cheer, very lively. Time flew. Delightful afternoon” (Carl Rakosi Papers, Mandeville Special Collections, UCSD, MSS 355, Box 4, Folder 4). Though Bunting and Niedecker did not meet in person until June 1967, when Bunting and his daughters visited Niedecker at her Blackhawk Island home, they had known each other through correspondence, and for a short time Bunting had explored the possibility of going into the carp-seining business with Niedecker’s father Henry. Niedecker wrote to Cid Corman on June 15, 1966: “Basil Bunting–yes, I came close to meeting him when he was in this country in the 30’s. Some mention at the time of his going into the fishing business (he had yeoman muscles LZ said and arrived in New York with a sextant) with my father on our lake and river but it was the depression and at that particular time my dad felt it best to ‘lay low’ so far as starting fresh with new equipment was concerned and a new partner – the market had dropped so low for our carp – and I believe BB merely lived a few weeks with Louie without engaging in any business. He’s probably a very fine person and I’ve always enjoyed his poetry” (Faranda, “Between Your House and Mine“: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960-1970, 88).

As this brief chronology of their meeting demonstrates, and as I argue in greater detail elsewhere on this site, the “Objectivists” 1931 issue of Poetry might be more properly considered a mid-point rather than the beginning of the group’s affiliation, serving as a public unveiling more than anything else.²¹The best extant resource which makes an effort to empirically document the pre-1931 “Objectivist” associations is Tom Sharp’s doctoral dissertation, “Objectivists” 1927-1934: A critical history of the work and association of Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Ezra Pound, and George Oppen, which he completed at Stanford University in 1982, and which includes a wealth of well-documented research on the extant correspondence between members of the “Objectivist” nexus in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Sharp did not pursue a career in academia and his dissertation remained unpublished until 2015, when he published large portions of it, at my urging, on his own website: http://sharpgiving.com/Objectivists/index.html. See Chapters 1, 9, and 11 especially. While Poetry marked their initial presentation, the main core of “Objectivists” had already been developing their own affinity and publication network, at least since 1928. Their shared publication history is traced in much greater detail in the “The Work” section of this site, but here I will detail their personal and biographical connections.

Imagining a Network Graph

There can be no disputing that Louis Zukofsky was the group’s central figure, as both the inventor of the group’s name and the editor who selected the writers and work presented publicly as “Objectivist” and provided the critical framing for the group and their context. As the intellectual, editorial, and in many respects energetic center of the group, Zukofsky was thickly connected to all of the other “Objectivists,” both core and peripheral. What is frequently less appreciated, however, was the significant, though less visible, role played in the formation and coherence of the group by the better established modernist poets William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.

To draw a graph of the Objectivist network as it existed in the late 20s-early 30s, one might first begin by representing Pound and Williams as two loosely-bound sibling roots, noting that their relationship with each other had predated the formation of the Zukofsky-led group by more than twenty-five years.²²Pound, Williams, and Hilda Doolittle [H.D.] all met in Philadelphia in the early 1900s. Pound and Williams met in the fall of 1902, when both were enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where H.D.’s father was a professor of Astronomy. In 1903, Pound transferred to Hamilton College, but continued to see Williams during school breaks when he returned to his parents’ home in Wyncote, a Philadelphia suburb. In 1905, Pound returned to Penn to begin work on his master’s degree, and they resumed their friendship in earnest. Williams left Philadelphia in 1906 for a medical internship in New York City, and Pound took his ill-fated job teaching foreign languages at Wabash College in a small Indiana town in 1907 (he was fired in the spring of 1908 and left for Europe shortly thereafter). Pound dedicated his 1912 collection Ripostes to Williams and included Williams’ poem “Postlude” in his 1914 Des Imagistes anthology and his poems “In Harbor” and “The Wanderer” in his 1915 Catholic Anthology. He also wrote an introductory note to a selection of poems from Williams’ book The Tempers published in The Poetry Review in October 1912 and reviewed the book in The New Freewoman in December 1913. Though no letters from Williams to Pound written prior to 1921 have survived, they corresponded regularly for the next several decades, and a roughly thirty percent of their extant correspondence spanning more than fifty years of friendship can be found in Hugh Witemeyer’s Pound/Williams: The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Williams Carlos Williams, published by New Directions in 1996. The early years of their friendship are briefly summarized on pages 3-5 of that book. Emerging from Pound would be two thick edges connecting him as major influence upon both Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting. Pound and Zukofsky’s published correspondence makes for engrossing reading: Pound sought to cast Zukofsky as an admiring pupil and ersatz disciple/adopted son, with both men making early references to Zukofsky as “sonny” and Pound as “papa.” Zukofsky proved less tractable than Pound would have wished, however, and their relationship began to show serious signs of strain, especially following Zukofsky’s 1933 visit to Rapallo, which Pound and Williams had financed. Thinner lines might be drawn from Pound to Rakosi, who Pound published in 1928 in his magazine The Exile and in his Active Anthology, and to Oppen, who, thanks to Zukofsky’s mediation, published a volume of Pound’s critical prose, including How to Read, in 1932, was also included in Active Anthology, and for whose 1934 collection Discrete Series Pound wrote the preface. Fainter lines from Pound (indicating influence) might also be traced to both Reznikoff and Niedecker, both of whom admired and generally wrote in accordance with Pound’s imagist-era poetic prescriptions.

Williams was a far less domineering and dictatorial influence than Pound, though he served as an important American-based elder statesman and first-generation modernist figurehead for the group. Despite being Zukofsky’s elder by more than 20 years, Williams quickly came to respect Zukofsky as a superb editor and trust him as a valued poetic interlocutor, inviting him to edit the unpublished manuscript for what would become The Descent of Winter less than a month after their first meeting. In addition, Williams provided important linkages between Zukofsky and the peripheral “Objectivists” Robert McAlmon, Emanuel Carnevali, and Richard Johns. Williams also helped serve as a buffer and American counterweight to Pound, modeling a form of artistic independence from the often-aggressive Pound for the younger writers in the group. Williams also contributed to the development of the critical language Zukofsky used in presenting the group, suggesting for example in one of his earliest letters to the younger poet that Zukofsky’s poems had not “been objectivized in new or fresh observations.”²³The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 11. Williams also influenced or at least agreed with others in the group in his repeated emphases on the importance of making “contact” with what he called the “primitive and actual America,” with “holding firm to the vernacular,” and insisting that they “make of [their] words a new form: to invent, that is, an object consonant with [their] day.”²⁴The first two quotations come from an editorial “Comment” he published in the second issue of Contact in 1932 and the latter is taken from Williams description of objectivism in his 1951 Autobiography.

Perhaps even more importantly, Williams also used his own reputation and role as an occasional editorial advisor to provide Zukofsky and others in the group access to a succession of little magazines, like Johns’ Pagany and his own Contact, who sought the credibility that an association with Williams would provide their publications. He was similarly instrumental to the plans of both “Objectivist” book publishing endeavors, and his collaboration with Reznikoff, Zukofsky, and the Oppens in founding the Objectivist Press in September 1933 would necessitate the drawing of a thickly knotted bundle of connections between all of the principals. As detailed elsewhere on this site, the limited access to print enjoyed by Zukofsky and the other “Objectivists” from 1928 to 1935 would have been far more circumscribed were it not for their association with both Pound and Williams.

A network graph covering the five-year period from 1928 to 1933 would depict Bunting, Niedecker, and Rakosi as the most peripheral members of the group, in no small part because of their geographic distance. Apart from six months in New York City in late 1930-early 1931, Bunting spent these years in Europe, corresponding with just Pound, Zukofsky, and Williams from this group, though he did, thanks to facilitation from Zukofsky, develop an early admiration for Niedecker’s writing.²⁵In 1928, Bunting was living in London and writing musical criticism for The Outlook. The newspaper folded that year and Bunting had rejoined Pound at Rapallo by March 1929, and apart from his wedding and six month interlude/honeymoon in New York City, spent most of his time there until departing in late 1933 for the Canary Islands, where he lived until the middle of 1936. Before meeting Reznikoff, Williams, and the Oppens on her first trip to New York City in late fall 1933, Niedecker had been living in rural Wisconsin and had corresponded only with Zukofsky. Rakosi was teaching high school English and enrolled in medical school in Texas during these years; the first of his fellow “Objectivists” he met personally was Zukofsky, and that didn’t happen until after his move to New York City in 1935, at which time much of the group’s energy had already dissipated.

The Shadow of Ezra Pound

What such a visualization would immediately make apparent is the way in which the main arteries of the Objectivist nexus traverse not just through Zukofsky and Williams, but also through Ezra Pound. The roots of the “Objectivist” nexus were nearly all entangled in some way with the sprawling, colonizing (though frequently generous) ambitions of the Rapallo-based poet. While less immediately apparent than Zukofsky or even Williams, Pound’s efforts as a behind the scenes orchestrator, advisor, and would-be impresario were crucially significant in both providing the impetus for Zukofsky’s efforts to assemble and perpetuate this group as well as providing the platform for the invention of a “movement” in the first place. It was Pound who served as a locus (through letters) of ideas, encouragement, and not-infrequent provocation for Zukofsky, Bunting, and Williams, the three members of the group with whom he carried on regular correspondence throughout the 1920s and 1930s.²⁶Williams he knew from their days together at Penn, Bunting he had known for some time as a co-dweller at Rapallo, and Zukofsky had written him with admiration for both his prose statements and the poetic accomplishments of his early Cantos, the first sixteen of which had been published in Paris by Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press in 1925. Pound also corresponded with George Oppen during these years, though their correspondence was mainly confined to Oppen’s role as a publisher of Pound’s writing.

Despite his centrality to the formation of the “Objectivist” nexus, I have chosen not to include Pound as a core “Objectivist” here, for two reasons. First, there is no shortage of published material examining Pound’s life and career, and second, apart from his consenting to have two of his poems of questionable merit included in Zukofsky’s An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, Pound never gave any indication of voluntary affiliation with the label. Zukofsky had also wanted to include Pound in his issue of Poetry, ideally through the publication of a Canto, but Pound resisted Zukofsky’s several written entreaties. In the end, Zukofsky’s contributor notes indicate that he had planned to include a blank page in the issue as Pound’s contribution to the issue:

The editor also regrets the omission of a blank page representing Ezra Pound’s contribution to the issue—a page reserved for him as an indication of his belief that a country tolerating outrages like article 211 of the U. S. Penal Code, publishers’ “overhead,” and other impediments to literary life, “does not deserve to have any literature whatsoever.” Mr. Pound gave over to younger poets the space offered him.“²⁷Poetry 37:5 (February 1931), 295.

This is not to say that Pound somehow held Zukofsky in low-esteem. His regard for Zukofsky and his fellow “Objectivist” (and former secretary) Basil Bunting was perhaps made most apparent when he dedicated his 1938 book Guide to Kulchur “To Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting strugglers in the desert.” Zukofsky in turn had already publicly declared his position viz a viz the elder poet, dedicating An “Objectivists” Anthology to Pound and referring to him there as “still for the poets of our time / the / most important.”²⁸An “Objectivists” Anthology, 27. For his part, Bunting would offer his own moving assessment of Pound’s poetic accomplishment through his later short poem “On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos,” which begins “There are the Alps. What is there to say about them? / They don’t make sense” before this concluding stanza: “There they are, you will have to go a long way round /  if you want to avoid them. / It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps, /  fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!”²⁹The Poems of Basil Bunting, 117.

Pound’s writing on poetics were also important to the group, particularly the principles he had developed while promoting “Des Imagistes.” In a December 7, 1931 letter to Pound, Zukofsky confided that he viewed his then in-process long poem “A” as “following out of your don’ts almost to the letter,” referring to Pound’s well-known “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.”³⁰Pound/Zukofsky, 110-111. Similarly, Charles Reznikoff recalled in a 1969 interview with L.S. Dembo:

When I was twenty-one [c. 1915], I was particularly impressed by the new kind of poetry being written by Ezra Pound, H. D., and others, with sources in French free verse. It seemed to me just right, not cut to patterns, however cleverly, nor poured into ready molds—that sounds like an echo of Pound—but words and phrases flowing as the thought; to be read just like common speech—that sounds like Whitman—but for stopping at the end of each line: and this like a rest in music or a turn in the dance.³¹Contemporary Literature, Spring 1969, 194.

When asked about his recollections of his conversations with Oppen and Zukofsky regarding ‘objectivist technique,’ Reznikoff told Dembo:

We picked the name “Objectivist” because we had all read Poetry of Chicago and we agreed completely with all that Pound was saying. We didn’t really discuss the term itself; it seemed all right—pregnant. It could have meant any number of things. But the mere fact that we didn’t discuss its meaning doesn’t deprive it of its validity. … I think we all agreed that the term “objectivism,” as we understood Pound’s use of it, corresponded to the way we felt poetry should be written. And that included Williams, too. What we were reacting from was Tennyson. We were anti-Tennysonian. His kind of poetry didn’t represent the world we knew-the streets of New York or of East Rutherford or Paterson. It might have represented the idyllic countryside where Tennyson lived, I don’t doubt, or the world in which Swinburne lived–that semi-classical world. We recognized its validity; I’m sure we all felt how good were things like “the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces” or the beginning of “The Lotos-Eaters.” Some of it was magnificent, but it wasn’t us.³²Contemporary Literature, Spring 1969, 196-197.

In his interview with Dembo published in the same issue of Contemporary Literature, Rakosi prefaced his pointed criticism of Pound’s personal grandiosity and the epic tone adopted in the Cantos by stating that “I had better admit that I believe that Pound’s critical writing—particularly the famous “Don’ts” essay—is an absolute foundation stone of contemporary American writing.”³³”Carl Rakosi,” 180. In an unpublished note titled “The Objectivist Connection,” Rakosi had written “I had heeded Pound’s advice on writing. I had immediately recognized it as right and helpful and had incorporated it as my own working principle” (UCSD Special Collections, MSS 0355, Box 4, Folder 15). In an unpublished draft of his own autobiography as a writer, Rakosi wrote

You might say that Pound’s axioms on writing re-educated me and whatever I wrote after that, followed those axioms. They made such basic sense that they became my second nature. To all intents and purposes they were my principles and it became unthinkable for me to treat subject matter evasively or to use any word that did not (to use Pound’s expression) “contribute to its presentation.” Never, in other words, to be prolix or flaccid or unnecessarily abstract.”³⁴UCSD Special Collections, MSS 0355, Box 4, Folder 4.

Similarly, Pound and Williams were the first two authors the Oppens chose to publish under the To, Publishers imprint; Mary Oppen would tell Serge Fauchereau in a 1976 interview that “We understood the importance of Pound, and to us he was a tremendous figure.”³⁵Speaking with George Oppen, 132.

As important as Pound was as a poetic predecessor and influence on the “Objectivists,” he also played a much more direct role in the group’s formation as a publisher, facilitator, and erstwhile impresario. His short-lived magazine The Exile (four issues appeared in 1927 and 1928) might even be considered something of a proto-“Objectivist” publication,³⁶Tom Sharp has argued that the magazine was the group’s “first public meeting place” and that by “express[ing] many of the principles, especially about the importance of group activity, that Pound continued to impress upon them” it placed the “Objectivists” firmly within that “tradition in poetry for which Pound was the principal spokesman” (http://sharpgiving.com/Objectivists/sections/01.history.html). as it featured work by Zukofsky, Williams, Rakosi, McAlmon, and Howard Weeks, each of whom would later be featured in Zukofsky’s “Objectivist” issue of Poetry.³⁷Zukofsky’s first major publication, “Poem Beginning ‘The'” appeared in The Exile 3, and the fourth and final issue of The Exile included another dozen or so pages from Zukofsky. Williams’ “The Descent of Winter,” which Zukofsky had been instrumental in editing, was published in The Exile 4. Williams wrote to Pound on May 17, 1928: “Your spy Zukofsky has been going over my secret notes for you. At first I resented his wanting to penetrate- now listen! – but finally I sez to him, All right, go ahead. So he took my pile of stuff into the city and he works at it with remarkably clean and steady fingers (to your long distance credit be it said) and he ups and choses a batch of writin that yous is erbout ter git perty damn quick if it hits a quick ship – when it gets ready – which it aren’t quite yit. What I have to send you will be in the form of a journal, each bit as perfect in itself as may be. I am however leaving everything just as selected by Zukofsky. It may be later that I shall use the stuff differently.” (Pound/Williams, 82) Zukofsky and Williams had first met in April of that year, which means that Williams had known Zukofsky for less than 2 months at the time that he sent Pound this remarkable indication his editorial trust. Pound published four poems by Rakosi in The Exile 2 and his poem “Extracts from A Private Life” in The Exile 4. McAlmon’s short story “Truer than Most Accounts” appeared in The Exile 2 and an essay of his on Gertrude Stein was included in The Exile 4. Weeks’ poem “Stunt Piece” was published in The Exile 3 and was the only place his work had appeared before Zukofsky included him in his “Objectivist” issue of Poetry.

In addition to The Exile, Pound also included a number of “Objectivist” writers in two anthologies he edited in the early 1930s, featuring Williams, Zukofsky, Bunting, McAlmon, Eliot, Weeks, Tyler, and Carnevali in his 1932 Profile anthology and including work by Williams, Bunting, Zukofsky, Oppen, and Eliot in his 1933 Active Anthology. Pound also published a brief note in the “Books on Review” section of the February 21, 1933 issue of Contempo praising An “Objectivists” Anthology as “the first serious attempt since my first Imagiste collection to clean up the mess of contemporary poetry by means of an anthology, and ought to establish just as definite a date.”³⁸Contempo, III: 6 (February 21, 1933), 7.

Not only did Pound publish a number of these writers before and after they became associated with the label “Objectivist,” he was also instrumental in recommending that Zukofsky (and other of his disciples) join with other writers to publish and promote significant literature in the United States. In fact, Pound had first begun urging Zukofsky to “form a group” to continue the momentum and impulse of his magazine The Exile in his second ever letter to Zukofsky, sent in February 1928, writing: “Also any of your contemporaries with whom you care to associate. Somebody OUGHT to form a group in the U.S. to make use of the damn thing now that I have got in motion. Failing development of some such cluster I shall stop with No. 6 [of The Exile].”³⁹Pound/Zukofsky, 6.

In his very next letter to Zukofsky, Pound attempted to catalyze the formation of such a cluster by forwarding his old friend William Carlos Williams’ address to Zukofsky and suggesting that he introduce himself. Zukofsky did so almost immediately; the two writers first met in a NY restaurant April 1, 1928, where Zukofsky asked Williams to read his work, and volunteered his own services as an editor of Williams’ unpublished manuscripts. Both liked each other immediately and each quickly sent back to Pound separate reports on their budding friendship. Their growing bond would serve as the basis for what became the “Objectivist” cluster.

In August 1928, after receiving reports that Zukofsky and Williams had hit it off, Pound wrote Zukofsky another lengthy letter, urging him to

make an effort toward restarting some sort of life in N.Y.; sfar as I know there has been none in this sense since old Stieglitz organized (mainly foreign group) to start art. … I suggest you form some sort of gang to INSIST on interesting stuff (books) (1.) being pubd. promptly, and distributed properly. 2. simultaneous attacks in as many papers as poss. on abuses definitely damaging la vie intellectuelle. … there are now several enlightened members of yr. body impolitic [meaning the United States] that might learn the val. of group action.⁴⁰Pound/Zukofsky, 11.

Acting on Pound’s suggestions, Zukofsky contacted several more of the writers Pound had recommended to him, including Joseph [Joe] Vogel, an aspiring young writer and recent graduate from Hamilton College where, like Pound, he had studied Romance languages. Vogel responded to Zukofsky’s overtures by writing directly to Pound, and Pound sent Vogel his beliefs regarding “the science of GROUPS” in a November 21, 1928 letter, instructing him to share its contents with Zukofsky. His advice included the following recommendations:

[A]t the start you must find the 10% of matters that you agree on and the 10% plus value in each other’s work. [Second, he was not to expect a group to remain constant:] Take our groups in London. The group of 1909 had disappeared without the world being much the wiser. Perhaps a first group can only prepare the way for a group that will break through. The one or two determined characters will pass through 1st to 2nd or third groups. [Thirdly, there was] No use starting to crit. each other at start. Anyhow it requires more crit. faculty to discover the hidden 10% positive, than to fuss about 90% obvious imperfection. You talk about style, and mistrusting lit. socs. etc. Nacherly. Mistrust people who fuss about paint and finish before they consider girders and structure.” Fourth, “You ’all’ presumably want some sort of intelligent life not dependent on cash, and salesmanship. . . . Point of group is precisely to have somewhere to go when you don’t want to be bothered about salesmanship. (Paradox?? No.) … When you get five men who trust each other you are a long way to a start. If your stuff won’t hold the interest of the four or of someone in the four, it may not be ready to print.⁴¹The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 219-221. Here Vogel is named “James” instead of “Joseph”.

Vogel replied with some hesitation, prompting an exasperated outburst from Pound: “Dear Vogel: Yr. painfully evangelical epistle recd. if you are looking for people who agree with you!!!! How the hell many points of agreement do you suppose there were between Joyce, W. Lewis, Eliot and yrs. truly in 1917; or between Gaudier and Lewis in 1913; or between me and Yeats, etc.?,” and telling Vogel that if respected decent writing, writing which expressed a man’s ideas, he ought to exchange his with others who have “ideas of any kind (not borrowed clichés) that irritate you enough to make you think or take out your own ideas and look at ’em.”⁴²The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 222. More on Vogel/Pound correspondence in Paideuma 27:2-3 [Fall/Winter 1998], 197-225.

Not only did Pound introduce Zukofsky to both Williams and Vogel (who would not be associated with the “Objectivists”), he also connected Zukofsky to several other of his acquaintances who would become members of the “Objectivist” group, including Charles Henri Ford, the young editor of Blues; Basil Bunting, whom William Butler Yeats famously described as “one of Ezra’s more savage disciples”;⁴³The Letters of W.B. Yeats, 759. Ed. Allan Wade (MacMillan, New York, 1954) Samuel Putnam, a Paris-based poet and translator who would later publish Zukofsky and other “Objectivists” in his magazine The New Review; and Howard Weeks and Carl Rakosi, both of whom he had published in The Exile.⁴⁴Pound first mentions Rakosi in a letter to Zukofsky filled with advice about assembling his guest edited issue of Poetry dated 25 October 1930, indicating that he “may be dead, I wish I cd. trace him” and passing along his last known address in Kenosha, Wisconsin (Pound/Zukofsky, 51). Pound was also indirectly responsible for Zukofsky’s meeting the Oppens, since the Oppen-Zukofsky friendship began with George Oppen’s chance discovery of the third issue of The Exile (which featured Zukofsky’s “Poem Beginning ‘The'”) while browsing the poetry section at the Gotham Book Mart shortly after his and Mary’s arrival in New York City in the late 1920s.⁴⁵Mary Wright, the wife of designer Russel Wright, introduced the Oppens to Louis Zukofsky at a party sometime in 1928. See Mary Oppen’s account of their meeting in Meaning a Life, 84-85.

Zukofsky also attempted to make recommendations of his friends and acquaintances in the “Objectivist” circle to Pound, though Pound generally preferred giving advice and making discoveries than receiving either. For example, Zukofsky sent Pound work by Oppen, Rakosi, Reznikoff, and Rexroth when Pound was assembling his Active Anthology in 1933, but of Zukofsky’s submissions Pound only included work by Rakosi (whom he had previously published in The Exile) and Oppen (who had published Pound) in the final selection. While Pound never became enthusiastic about the work of any of Zukofsky’s acquaintances, Zukofsky ‘discovered’ and introduced him to Reznikoff, Oppen, Niedecker, Rexroth, and Henry Zolinsky, among others.⁴⁶Pound and Zukofsky’s surviving letters from 1930 make several references to Reznikoff and Zukofsky’s “sincerity and objectification” essay on Reznikoff’s work. While Pound expressed vague praise for Reznikoff’s work, he would reject it for inclusion in his Active Anthology. Zukofsky made reference to his having sent Pound several unpublished Oppen poems in a letter dated June 18, 1930. This manuscript was recently been found in the Pound papers held at Yale by the scholar David Hobbs and published by New Directions as 21 Poems. See pp. 26-44 of Pound/Zukofsky for the letters Pound and Zukofsky exchanged during the period in question. Niedecker is first mentioned in the Pound/Zukofsky correspondence in February 1935, when Zukofsky writes “Glad you agreed with me as to the value of Lorine Niedecker’s work and are printing it in Westminster,” a reference to the Spring-Summer 1935 issue of Bozart-Westminster, which Pound edited with John Drummond and T.C. Wilson and included several poems and a dramatic scenario by Niedecker (Pound/Zukofsky, 161). This was a particularly strained time in the Pound/Zukofsky relationship, largely exacerbated by political differences over fascism and economic theory, and in his especially nasty response, Pound dismissed Niedecker’s work and insulted Zukofsky’s critical acumen.

Ultimately, the effect of Zukofsky’s relationship with Pound on the “Objectivists” was decidedly mixed. Pound initiated a number of important relationships for Zukofsky, using his prestige and relationship with prominent editors to help him gain access to prominent publications, including Poetry, Hound & Horn, and The New Review, but Pound’s difficulty and volatility meant that when things turned sour between Pound and these publications, Zukofsky was also impacted negatively by implication. While some contemporary attacks on Zukofsky may have been the result of personal jealousy or genuine aesthetic disagreement, a greater number of them appear to center on his relationship to Pound, who was suspect both for his bullying bravado and increasingly erratic political and economic views. Joseph Vogel, the writer that Pound had encouraged to form a group with Zukofsky in 1928, publicly denounced Pound in October 1929 in New Masses as “the dean of corpses that promenade in graveyards” and suggested that Pound had “tried to organize a group of writers in this country, but the only success—or harm—he achieved was the taking of a smaller Pound under his wings, namely Louis Zukofsky.”⁴⁷”Literary Graveyards,” 30. The editors of The Hound & Horn had similar views, with Yvor Winters writing to Lincoln Kirstein in 1932 that “[o]ur own generation, and the kids who are coming up, seem to be divided more or less clearly between those whose intellectual background is incomprehensible to the older men and who therefore remain largely meaningless to them, and those who imitate them feebly and flatter them in numerous ways (Zukofsky is the most shameless toady extant) and who are therefore praised by them.”⁴⁸The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, 195. Zukofsky’s relationship with Pound would even make him suspect to others of the “Objectivists,” particularly those who, like Vogel, became most active in Communist Party politics. In his review of Charles Reznikoff’s In Memoriam: 1933, published in New Masses in March 1935, Norman Macleod deplored the fact that “a man of Reznikoff’s caliber should be forced to descend to publication by the Objectivist Press, an outfit controlled so far as I can learn by that consummate ass and adulator of Herr Ezra Pound (Heil Hitler and may all his descendants descend), Louis Zukofsky.”⁴⁹”Pain Without Finish,” 23-24. Zukofsky bore most of these attacks in silence, preferring to let his work stand for itself, but his reputation was certainly damaged by his closeness to Pound, and their perceived closeness does appear to have impaired the ability of many of Zukofsky’s contemporaries to assess his accomplishments dispassionately.⁵⁰Williams and Zukofsky both contributed to Charles Norman’s 1948 pamphlet The Case of Ezra Pound, giving their views of their old friend as he was preparing to stand trial for treason. Zukofsky wrote: “I should prefer to say nothing now. But a preference for silence might be misinterpreted by even the closest friends. When he was here in 1939, I told him that I did not doubt his integrity had decided his political action, but I pointed to his head, indicating something had gone wrong. … He approached literature and music at that depth. His profound and intimate knowledge and practice of these things still leave that part of his mind entire. … He may be condemned or forgiven. Biographers of the future may find his character as charming a subject as that of Aaron Burr. It will matter very little against his finest work overshadowed in his lifetime by the hell of Belsen which he overlooked” (55-57).

Other “Objectivists”

In addition to Pound and the seven writers already described as core “Objectivists,” Zukofsky’s two “Objectivist” publications included more than twenty other writers, each of whom should also be considered part of what Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain have termed the “Objectivist nexus.”⁵¹In their edited collection The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, published in 1999 by the University of Alabama Press. Of these, Robert McAlmon and Kenneth Rexroth perhaps deserve special note, as they were the only other authors to appear in both foundational “Objectivist” publications, and each participated in abortive publication schemes involving other members of this group during the 1920s and 1930s. Recalling the network graph visualization imagined earlier ,I have chosen not to include them among the core largely because both writers remained on the fringes of the group. While Niedecker and Rakosi were similarly peripheral in the 1930s, their subsequent careers, particularly their activity in the 1960s, showed that they (and other members of the core group) thought of themselves as members of a network in ways that McAlmon and Rexroth did not. Neither McAlmon nor Rexroth ever developed deep connections with any but one other member of the group (Williams in McAlmon’s case and Zukofsky in Rexroth’s).

Writers Published in the “OBJECTIVISTS” 1931 issue of Poetry

As a group, the “Objectivists” were invented and publicly presented through the publication of the “OBJECTIVISTS” 1931 issue of Poetry magazine, a special “number” which the magazine’s regular editor, Harriet Monroe, had entirely given over to Louis Zukofsky at the urging of Ezra Pound.⁵²More detail about the editing of this issue of Poetry magazine can be found elsewhere on this site. With space given to him, Zukofsky set out an “Objectivist” program, advanced the critical principles of “sincerity” and “objectification” in a critical essay on the poetry of Charles Reznikoff, provided his own translation of a brief essay by his friend René Taupin on the poetry of André Salmon, and presented poetry and prose from more than twenty contributors. Biographical sketches for each of these original “Objectivists” are given below, in order of their appearance in the February 1931 issue of Poetry.

Carl Rakosi, Four Poems

Core “Objectivist.”

Louis Zukofsky, Seventh movement of “A”

Inventor of the term “Objectivist” and chief instigator of the group.

Howard and Virginia Weeks passport photo, 1922

Howard Weeks, “What Furred Creature“

Howard Percy Weeks was born on December 13, 1899 in Rochester, New York to Percy Benson Weeks, a varnish salesman, and F. Estelle “Stella” Bush. Weeks enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1918 and published his own writing regularly in The Michigan Chimes, a student magazine for which he served as humor writer. Weeks graduated in 1921 with a bachelor’s degree from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and married Virginia Morrison, the daughter of William Morrison and Ella Peppers, in Detroit on September 26, 1922.

The couple applied for a passport that same year to take a three-month honeymoon in Europe, stating their intention to depart from Montreal in late September and travel to England, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Like his older brother Albert, Weeks worked as a journalist. I’ve been unable to uncover much more about his life and career apart from the fact that he died of a streptococcus infection after an extended illness on June 10, 1928, nearly three years before the publication of the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry.⁵³His obituary appeared in the Michigan Free Press.

As a poet, Weeks had been “discovered” by Ezra Pound, who published his poem “Stunt Piece” in the third issue of The Exile, and thought enough of it to include it in his Profile anthology in 1932, writing: “By 1928 Mr Weeks found material for satire in Mr. Eliot’s imitators and detached the externals.”⁵⁴Profile, 111. In his essay on Small Magazines published in the November 1930 issue of The English Journal, Pound wrote: “I printed very little of Weeks because he seemed to me a man of great promise; one felt that his work was bound to be ever so much better in the course of the next few months. The few months were denied him.”⁵⁵See: http://library.brown.edu/cds/mjp/pdf/smallmagazines.pdf#page=13 Zukofsky wrote to Pound on November 6, 1930 with detailed responses to some of Pound’s inquiries about his editing of what would become the “OBJECTIVISTS” 1931 issue of Poetry. Near the end of that letter he asked Pound: “Never saw too much in Weeks either, but very little outside of Xile was printed—Have you any?”⁵⁶Pound/Zukofsky, 68. Pound presumably sent Zukofsky some of Weeks’ work, including “Furred Creature,” which Zukofsky included in Poetry. There is no evidence that Pound, Zukofsky, or anyone else in the “Objectivist” circle ever met Weeks in person, and only Pound appears to have corresponded with him before his death in 1928.

Robert McAlmon, “Fortuno Carraccioli“

Robert Menzies McAlmon was born in Clifton, Kansas on March 9, 1895, the youngest of ten children in a family headed by his father, John Alexander McAlmon, an Irish-born Princeton graduate and Presbyterian minister. McAlmon spent much of his childhood in Minnesota and Madison, South Dakota, and described much of his upbringing, including his close friendship with Gore Vidal’s father Eugene, in his fictionalized 1924 memoir Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period. At sixteen he left school to pursue a career as a journalist, working briefly as the editor of a small city paper before being dismissed when the owner discovered he had lied about his age. McAlmon then worked in advertising for the National Advertising Agency and briefly attended college before joining the Army Air Corps near the end of World War I. Following the war’s end, McAlmon enrolled at the University of Southern California and worked as a feature editor for the Rockwell Field Weekly Flight, an aviation newspaper published out of San Diego, but eventually left California and moved to New York City.

In 1920, shortly after arriving in New York City, McAlmon met William Carlos Williams at a party hosted by the avant-garde poet Lola Ridge. McAlmon and Williams quickly struck up a friendship and soon after became joint publishers of Contact, a cheaply-produced little magazine. Together, they published four issues of Contact between December 1920 and the summer of 1921.⁵⁷Williams published a fifth and final issue of Contact with Monroe Wheeler in June 1923, and revived the title of the magazine for a second run in 1932. In February 1921, McAlmon entered into marriage of convenience with Bryher (Annie Winifred Glover), H.D.’s lover and the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, one of the wealthiest men in Britain. Following their marriage, McAlmon and Bryher moved to London (which McAlmon hated) and then to Paris, where McAlmon used his father-in-law’s wealth to found the Contact Publishing Company and publish important modernist writing under the Contact Editions imprint, including books by his wife Bryher (Annie Ellerman), Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Williams and himself.⁵⁸For a good description of Bryher/Ellerman’s and McAlmon’s relationship, see Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940, especially pp. 357-362.

Photograph of Robert McAlmon included with his passport renewal application in 1924.

McAlmon’s first book, a collection of poems entitled Explorations, was published in 1921 by Harriet Shaw Weaver’s The Egoist Press. McAlmon followed Explorations with several more books published by his own Contact Publishing Company throughout the 1920s. These included the short story collections A Hasty Bunch (1922) and A Companion Volume (1923); two loosely-autobiographical, largely plotless prose works: Post-Adolescence (1923) and Village (1924); Distinguished Air: Grim Fairy Tales (1925), a collection of stories dealing with the 1920s gay subculture in Berlin; and the poetry collections The Portrait of a Generation (1926) and North America, Continent of Conjecture (1929).

McAlmon and Bryher divorced in 1927 and Contact Editions ceased publishing new work in 1929. McAlmon shuttled between Europe and the United States for much of the 1930s, including a longish stint spent in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He published three books in the decade, including the story collection The Indefinite Huntress and Other Stories (1932) with the Black Sun Press in Paris, the poetry collection Not Alone Lost (1937) with James Laughlin’s New Directions Press and Being Geniuses Together (1938), his memoir of the years he spent in Paris among artists and expatriates, published in London by Secker and Warburg. McAlmon was living in France when the Germans occupied Paris, but managed to depart Nazi-occupied France (via Portugal) for the United States in 1940. Following his return to the United States, McAlmon worked for several years for his family’s medical supply company and moved around the southwestern United States, battling alcoholism. He died in Palm Springs, California on February 2, 1956, leaving behind a handful of unpublished manuscripts.

Following his death, the University of Nebraska English professor Robert Knoll authored a brief study of McAlmon’s life and work, Robert McAlmon: Expatriate Publisher and Writer (1959), which included a forward by William Carlos Williams, and shortly thereafter edited McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A Self Portrait (1962), which was largely comprised of McAlmon’s autobiographical writing. In 1963, more sexually explicit versions of some of the stories included in Distinguished Air were published by Belmont Books in New York under the title There Was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings, and in 1968, Kay Boyle revived and revised McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, interspersing her own reminiscences as interchapters between lightly edited versions of McAlmon’s original work. This new edition of Being Geniuses Together was published to some acclaim by Doubleday.

In 1975, Sanford Smoller published a biography of McAlmon, entitled Adrift Among Geniuses, with Pennsylvania State University Press, and in 2007, the University of Illinois Press published The Nightghouls of Paris, a previously unpublished work of thinly veiled autobiographical fiction which Smoller had edited from a surviving manuscript. Many of McAlmon’s papers are now held by Yale University’s Beinecke Library.

Joyce Hopkins, “University: Old-Time“

“Joyce Hopkins,” was a fictional pseudonym invented by Zukofsky, probably intended as a literary in-joke combining the names of James Joyce and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Zukofsky fashioned the one-line poem “University: Old-Time” from a line in a letter describing the efforts of his friend Irving Kaplan’s wife Dorothy to help elderly citizens in Napa, California apply for state pensions.⁵⁹Zukofsky offers a gloss on the poem in a December 14, 1931 letter to Ezra Pound: “Jerce ‘opkins, again? That’s funny!! Napa—a kind of weed growing in Napa, Calif. I don’t know why Persephone’s husband, romanized, shdn’t be on the west coast now. I don’t know that Napa has a university, but it might as well have. The literal meaning of this famous epigram was the bare statement in a letter of Roger Kaigh [a pseudonym for Kaplan] to Mr. L.Z—D. (Dorothy his spouse, who was dispensing pensions to old folk) is in Napa trailing the sterilized. I added the title & lower-cased napa—which word you can find in Webster’s international. I looked it up after I myself <had> begun to doubt the meaning of the poem. The allegorical meaning is that L.Z. in Wisconsin was Pluto in hell following a lot of emasculated peripatetics (tho’ it is even doubtful these walked or were ever unemasculated). The anagogical meaning is that even evil (Dis) implies redemption” (Pound/Zukofsky, 120-121). Kaplan is probably the same person referred to in several of Zukofsky’s letters at Roger Kaigh and at several points in early movements of “A” as Kay.

Irving Kaplan was born in Dziatlava, Poland on September 23, 1900, and emigrated to New York City with his parents while a young child. He became a U.S. citizen when his father Morris Kaplan was naturalized in 1910 or 1911, and attended public schools in New York City before enrolling at the City College of New York for a year. After a year at City College, Kaplan transferred to Columbia University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1923 and befriended Zukofsky, Whittaker Chambers, Meyer Schapiro, and other classmates. Kaplan did some graduate work at Columbia and attended Fordham Law School in 1928 and 1929, but left without completing a law degree.

On September 6, 1928, Kaplan married Dorothy Herbst in Manhattan, and the couple lived at 221 Linden Boulevard, near Prospect Park in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Kaplan worked as an accountant. In the fall of 1929 the Kaplans moved to Berkeley, California, where Dorothy enrolled in graduate school at the University of California and Irving worked as an economist for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Zukofsky visited the Kaplans in Berkeley during the summer of 1930, and wrote large portions of the sixth and seventh movements of “A” from the attic of their home at 1110 Miller Avenue before taking up his teaching position that Fall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In the spring of 1932, Zukofsky and Jerry Reisman traveled to Berkeley to visit the Kaplans again, and Reisman remembered Kaplan as a frequent visitor to Zukofsky’s apartment in New York City in the early-mid 1930s.⁶⁰For more on Roger Kaigh/Irving Kaplan, see Andrew Crozier’s “Paper Bunting” in Sagetrieb 14:3 (Winter 1995), 45-75. The Kaplans left California in July 1935 for Washington D.C., where Irving worked as a statistician and administrator for a number of federal government agencies, including the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Works Administration and the Office of Production Management (also known as the War Production Board). From late 1935 until the summer of 1938, he worked in Philadelphia under the direction of Harold Weintraub as the Associate Director of the National Research Project on Reemployment Opportunities and Recent Changes in Industrial Techniques of the Works Progress Administration. In 1937, as Whittaker Chambers began to plan his defection from the Soviet underground, Kaplan helped his old college friend and fellow Communist find a job with the WPA.⁶¹Chambers testified before HUAC in 1948 that while beginning to look for government work, he had been referred to Kaplan, his old college friend, and spent an evening with him in Philadelphia, and that within a matter of days Kaplan had arranged a position for Chambers with the federal government. Chambers began work as a “Report Editor” on the National Research Project in October 1937 and was furloughed in February 1938, following which time he found literary translation work through his old college friend Meyer Schapiro.

In 1938, Kaplan left the WPA and returned to Washington D.C. to take a job in the Justice Department working for the Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold in connection with the Temporary National Economic Committee. In February 1940, Kaplan took a position as an economist with the Federal Works Administration, and remained there until 1942, when he transferred to the Office of Production Management.⁶²The 1940 census lists the Kaplans as living at 5315 Edmunds Place in Washington, D.C. and records Kaplan as making $5400 a year as an economist for the Federal Works Administration. From July through December 1945, Kaplan worked for the finance department of the United States military government in Germany, serving in an important capacity as the economic advisor on liberated areas. From 1948 to 1952 Kaplan again worked under David Weintraub, spending these years as an economic officer for the United Nations.

Kaplan’s employment at the United Nations ended precipitously in 1952, however, when he has summoned to testify before HUAC after being the subject of accusations of subversive Communist activity levelled against him by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers.⁶³Bentley accused him of being a member of the Silvermaster spy group and paying dues to the Perlo group. More context for Bentley’s accusations can be found in “The Shameful Years,” a HUAC report issued in December 1951. Kaplan’s testimony before HUAC in 1952 can be read here. Following his appearance before HUAC, which concluded with Congressman Donald Jackson stating that he was “personally convinced that [Kaplan] was a Communist and that he undoubtedly is a Communist today,” Kaplan was fired from his position at the United Nations and screened out of government employment.

Kaplan appears to have remained concerned with the United States’ relationship with the U.S.S.R. and other Communist states throughout the intervening decade, however, writing a letter to President Johnson objecting to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam in May 1964 and forwarding it to Senator Wayne Morse, praising Morse for his “valiant work on the issue involved … pressing our Government toward a policy of peace and reason.”⁶⁴This letter was one of several letters opposed to U.S. involvement in South Vietnam which Morse submitted to the Congressional Record in 1964 and can be read in full at https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1964-pt9/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1964-pt9-10.pdf#page=40. About Kaplan’s later years I have been able to discover little, other than that the Social Security records list him as having died on July 17, 1988, aged 87.

Charles Reznikoff, “A Group of Verse“

Core “Objectivist.”

Norman Macleod, “Song for the Turquoise People“

Norman Wicklund Macleod was born in Salem, Oregon in 1906. While an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in the late 1920s, Macleod founded a series of increasingly ambitious little magazines, including Jackass (1928), Palo Verde (1928-1929), The Morada (1929-1930), and Front (1930-1931), the latter two of which displayed Macleod’s growing interest in international literature and radical left-wing politics, and which published featured work by Pound, Zukofsky, and several other “Objectivists.”

Front ceased publication after its fourth issue, when Macleod moved to Los Angeles to attend graduate school the University of Southern California from 1931-1932. Before finishing his degree, Macleod moved to New York City, where he worked as a reader and circulation assistant for the publisher Harper & Brothers from 1932-1934. During his time in New York, Macleod befriended Zukofsky and Williams and even received Williams’ approval to take over editing the second run of Contact following Williams’ resignation in 1933, but the magazine folded before publishing any further issues.⁶⁵See The Correspondence of WIlliams Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 146.

Macleod and Williams remained friends for several years, with Williams including a “Poem for Norman Macleod” in his 1935 collection An Early Martyr and Other Poems.⁶⁶The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1, 401. In 1934, Macleod briefly left New York to attend the University of Oklahoma, but was back in New York City by 1935, when he married Vivienne Koch, a literary scholar who published an early critical study of Williams Carlos Williams’ poetry. With Koch’s encouragement, Macleod made a final attempt at graduate school, this time earning a master’s degree in English from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1936.

In 1939, Macleod helped William Kolodney found the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association (now called the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y), where he worked until 1942. In March of that year, Macleod appeared with Zukofsky and two other poets on a panel about democracy and the poet’s responsibility during wartime at the Poetry Center,⁶⁷According to Barry Ahearn, Macleod and Zukofsky were joined by Robert Goffin and Sheamus O’Sheal in addressing the questions “What has American poetry contributed to the democratic tradition? What is the American poet’s responsibility in the present war?” (The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 300-301). and later that year Macleod left the Poetry Center to take a teaching job at the University of Maryland (where he edited the Maryland Quarterly from 1942-1944). In 1944, Macleod returned to New York, taking a teaching position at Briarcliff College (where he edited the Briarcliff Quarterly from 1944-1947). In October 1946, Macleod published a special William Carlos Williams issue of Briarcliff Quarterly and included Williams’s “Choral: The Pink Church,” a poem which had been set to music by Celia Zukofsky.

In 1946, Macleod and Koch divorced, and shortly thereafter Macleod left New York City again, embarking on a varied and peripatetic teaching career, holding positions over the next two decades at Lehigh University, Savannah State College (now Savannah State University), San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University), and the University of Baghdad. Macleod accepted a position at Pembroke State University (now the University of North Carolina at Pembroke) in 1967, founded Pembroke magazine in 1969, and later directed the university’s Creative Writing program. In 1973, he received the Horace Gregory Award (a national award created in 1969 to honor emeritus faculty members for their social contributions to arts, letters and research) for his work as a poet, an editor, and a teacher, and he retired from both teaching and editing Pembroke in 1979, six years before his death in Greenville, North Carolina on June 5, 1985.

Macleod published several collections of poetry, including Horizons of Death (1934), Thanksgiving Before November (1936), We Thank You All the Time (1941), A Man in Midpassage (1947), Pure as Nowhere (1962), Selected Poems (1975), and The Distance: New and Selected Poems, 1928–1977 (1977). Macleod’s published prose works include two novels: You Get What You Ask For (1939) and The Bitter Roots (1941), and the autobiography I Never Lost Anything in Istanbul (1978). Macleod’s papers are now held by Yale University, the University of Delaware, and the University of New Mexico.⁶⁸Yale has letters from Williams and Zukofsky, plus letters from Marty Rosenblum and Tom Sharp.

Kenneth Rexroth, “Last Page of a Manuscript“

Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana on December 22, 1905, and recounted many of his early life experiences in his raucous 1966 memoir An Autobiographical Novel. Rexroth published his first poems in Charles Henri Ford’s little magazine Blues, where he appeared alongside Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky, as well as fellow “Objectivists” Carl Rakosi, Norman Macleod, Harry Roskolenko, and Richard Johns. His first wife Andrée Dutcher, a talented artist, even designed the cover of Blues 7.

In November 1930, Zukofsky wrote to Rexroth (who was then living in San Francisco) to solicit work for the upcoming issue of Poetry he was editing, explaining that he had read his poetry in Blues. Rexroth replied at length, and he and Zukofsky struck up an extended, intellectually intense correspondence.⁶⁹For those interested to better understand the nature of Rexroth and Zukofsky’s relationship, significant portions of their correspondence have been published. Mark Scroggins presents two long letters from Rexroth to Zukofsky in the early 1930s detailing his philosophical and poetic stances and his disagreements with Zukofsky’s positions in a special Rexroth centenary issue of the Chicago Review in 2006: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25742335, and several long letters from Zukofsky to Rexroth can be found in the edition of Zukofsky’s selected letters edited by Barry Ahearn and published on Z-Site: http://www.z-site.net/selected-letters-of-louis-zukofsky/ (see pp. 46-62; 64-72; 138-144; 186-200). Zukofsky subsequently included work by Rexroth in both the “OBJECTIVISTS” 1931 issue of Poetry and in An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, where to the bafflement of Rakosi and others in the group Rexroth was given nearly 40 pages, making him second only to Zukofsky in total page count among writers included in the anthology.⁷⁰This includes the entirety of Rexroth’s “Prolegomena to a Theodicy,” which occupied a full 25 pages. In the same anthology, Zukofsky published a four page “revision” of Rexroth’s “Prolegomena,” as a “collaboration,” along with his editorial note that “the suggestion was that Part A of Prolegomena to a Theodicy, as well as the entire poem, would be improved by printing Part A a. above” and Rexroth’s protestation that “I have read this over once more. I cannot allow it to be printed with my signature. You can append a note that it has been abridged by L.Z., if you wish, or print it entire or don’t print it at all. It simply makes no sense to me at all” (An “Objectivists” Anthology, 192). Despite the intensity of their correspondence, Rexroth and Zukofsky did not meet in person until 1957, when Zukofsky spent the summer teaching in San Francisco.⁷¹That same year, Rexroth praised Zukofsky as “one of the most important poets of my generation” in his review of Zukofsky’s recently published collection Some Time.

Though Rexroth knew others of the “Objectivists,” his relationships with other members of the group were never good. At Zukofsky’s urging, Rexroth and his then wife Andrée met George and Mary Oppen in San Francisco shortly before the Oppens left for France in 1930, but the couples did not get along well and their contact was limited to a few social engagements.⁷²In Meaning a Life, Mary Oppen wrote: “As our year in Belvedere drew to a close and we were preparing to take ship for France, Kenneth Rexroth paid us visit. He had recently come from Chicago, and he probably looked us up because he was in correspondence with Louis; it was but a brief encounter” (106). For a time in the early 1930s, Rakosi appeared to believe that Rexroth’s mooted RMR Press would publish a collection of his poems, but nothing ever came of this, and the two men had a superficial acquaintance in later years.⁷³For a good account of Rexroth’s association with Zukofsky, Oppen, and Rakosi in the 1930s, see A Life of Kenneth Rexroth, 70-76. For his part, Williams was impressed with Rexroth’s 1944 book The Phoenix and the Tortoise, but did not like his earlier “Objectivist”-period writing.⁷⁴After reading Rexroth’s The Phoenix and the Tortoise, Williams would write to James Laughlin in November 1944: “Rexroth (King Red) has finally emerged into something very firm and perceptive—hard to say how good he is now (and how bad I found him formerly) It takes everything a man has to be a good artist and then he only succeeds by luck sometimes. … [T]here is—as there must be—a genius of the American language. I mean not a human genius but an abstract of the language we speak which must be realized by everyone before we can have a literature. … Rexroth is a step in the right direction, not fully as yet realized, he is too bitter, not exalted enough by discoveries of method as the artist must be, the line, the turn of phrase etc etc … But he is good” (Williams / Laughlin, 104). As interest in the “Objectivists” began to grow in the 1960s, Rexroth contributed to a number of false rumors about his former acquaintances, telling several people that Rakosi had been a secret Stalinist agent and privately accusing George Oppen of having being a hit man for the Communist Party, neither of which was even remotely true. While he deigned to describe Oppen as “a remarkable poet” in one interview, he also seems to have pursued an affair with George’s wealthy and well-connected sister June Oppen Degnan.⁷⁵See A Life of Kenneth Rexroth, 138-141, 389, 408.

Rexroth’s relationship to the core “Objectivists” in the late 1920s and early 1930s was largely peripheral and was accomplished primarily through Zukofsky, about whom Rexroth would later claim: “Almost all of the people that Zukofsky picked as Objectivists, didn’t agree with him, didn’t write like him or like one another, and didn’t want to be called Objectivists.”⁷⁶American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, 111. However sincere this criticism may have been, it didn’t stop Rexroth from insisting on his own centrality at the 1973 National Poetry Conference dedicated to the “Objectivists” in Allendale, Michigan. According to his biographer Linda Hamalian:

Suffering from a bad back and in a vile mood, Rexroth had shown up a day late. He stormed into the conference dining room and cried, “They can’t do this to me.” Without saying hello, he walked to by the table where Mary and George Oppen, Robert Duncan, Leah and Carl Rakosi were sitting. He was irritated that he had been given a bunk in student quarters, like everyone else.”⁷⁷A Life of Kenneth Rexroth, 389.

Despite his peripheral relationship to the “Objectivists,” Rexroth was undeniably a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and conducted a long and eventful career as a poet and translator on the West Coast before his death in Montecito, California on June 6, 1982. Rexroth was a prolific author of both poetry and prose, and several of his books remain in print, including a number of translations and edited collections. The Bureau of Public Secrets (operated by Ken Knabb) maintains a useful guide to many of Rexroth’s published writings, though the site is not easy on the eyes. Linda Hamalian published her biography, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth, in 1991, and Copper Canyon Press published The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, edited by Sam Hamill and Bradford Morrow, in 2002. Many of Rexroth’s papers are located in Los Angeles, split between collections at USC and UCLA.

S. Theodore Hecht, “Table for Christmas“

Samuel Theodore [Ted] Hecht was born July 11, 1895 in Austria, and emigrated to the United States as a young child. Hecht attended Columbia University, where he served on the editorial board of the student literary magazine The Morningside with Zukofsky and Whittaker Chambers, and became a close lifelong friend of Zukofsky’s. After graduation, he married Katherine [Kate] (born in 1897 or 1898) and worked as a high school English teacher in the New York City area. In addition to his poem in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry, Hecht also published short fiction in Richard Johns’ magazine Pagany.⁷⁸His story “Mamie’s Papa” appeared in the Summer 1930 issue. Two other stories, “Henry Convalescing” and “Winter Stories” were announced for future publication in Pagany in 1932 and 1933, though neither ever appeared in the magazine. The manuscript for “Henry Convalescing” is held among the Pagany papers at the University of Delaware.

Zukofsky refers to Hecht in a letter to Ezra Pound dated August 12, 1928: “As I have already intimated Bill [William Carlos Williams] thinks he wants a group, but probably doesn’t. I myself think more than five “real lives” would be too much. At least, for me, one is enough. I’d like Cummings—so would Bill (he had him out once). Both shy, they wd. take long to thaw. Marianne [Moore], yes, but would she? I’ll ask Bill. Add myself—and you have four—three arrived, and one to keep in touch with the younger generation, I mean, such people as I know—Whittaker Chambers, T.S. Hecht, Henry Zolinsky (whose stuff you recently rejected), John Gassner and maybe one or two others.”⁷⁹Pound/Zukofsky, 16. Zukofsky also mentioned his friendship with the Hechts in several letters to René Taupin, telling him in November 1930 that he “heard also Ted Hecht wrote you — go see him, if you want to — I hope you’ll like each other. You know, of course, what close friends Kate, Ted & I are — so close that I feel like a fish saying we are.”⁸⁰Letter from Louis Zukofsky to René Taupin, November 7, 1930, Taupin MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University.

The Hechts had two sons, Joseph (born June 27, 1926, died of scarlet fever in a US Naval Hospital on May 4, 1945) and Jaime (born April 23, 1929, died April 19, 2006). In Meaning a Life, Mary Oppen recalls being introduced to the Hechts by Zukofsky shortly before Jaime’s birth:

We went once with Louis to visit his friends Kate and Ted and their two-year-old-son Joe, who played Bach for himself on a little wind-up phonograph. Kate, a heavy matriarchal woman, was huge with her second child, soon to be born [Jamie was born on April 23, 1929]; Ted was teaching in a Staten Island high school, and they were living in a non-Jewish neighborhood near Ted’s school … Kate and Ted clung to Louis, who was precursor for them in areas where they still felt strange and isolated. George and I may have been their first experience of a couple with no experience of the ghetto. Kate behaved as though she was jealous of Louis’ friendship with us; she was afraid, perhaps, that she would be abandoned by Louis, who indeed found them to be a heavy responsibility … Next day Kate phoned me and said, “Mary, would you and George consider moving in with us, and would you take care of Joey when I go to the hospital?” …

We were puzzled that Kate chose us—why us? She had not appeared to be at all comfortable with us in her house. George would have to commute to work, but I was tired of city streets, and it was nearly spring. We decided to say yes, so I called Kate and told her, “We’ll move in; we’ll share expenses until you have the baby.”

The baby was delayed, and we were well acquainted but still strange to each other by the time Kate went to the hospital. … [Ted] dismissed us as soon as he returned from the hospital, “Another boy!” The baby was born and he, Ted, needed us no longer, but Kate wasn’t yet home and we were eating supper, Ted was very high with the birth of one more son. He began telling me in great detail how to accomplish each act of housework within the house that I had been doing, apparently satisfactorily, with Kate’s approval. Ted was busily demonstrating how to dispose of garbage, wrapping it in newspaper, tying it with string. Somehow he had forgotten that it was Kate who had carried and given birth to the baby, also satisfactorily. Ted was filled with his own importance, his son, his sons! Males, like him! He became round and puffed with his own role—George and I were not audience enough. I was annoyed and wished to bring him back to some simplicity and awareness that he still needed me; that Kate was not yet home from the hospital and that I was going to be there with the first-born tomorrow when Ted went to work. I stood before him and not being able to break through his talk walked up to him and began unbuttoning his jacket, his vest, symbolically to strip him of his unbearable masculine take-over of the roles of two women on whom he was dependent.

Kate came home after ten days in the hospital, and the next day we left. “We want to be alone now with our new baby and Joe,” she said.⁸¹Meaning a Life, 91-93.

Zukofsky also introduced the Hechts to Bill and Flossie Williams, and the two couples became friends, a relationship that was strengthened when the Hechts moved from Paterson, New Jersey to a home on 52 Wheaton Place in Rutherford, around half a mile from the Williams’ family home at 9 Ridge Road. Williams and Zukofsky’s letters to each other contain several references to their ongoing mutual friendship with the Hechts, the last of which is dated 1955. Ted Hecht died in April 1972.

George Oppen, “1930’s“

Core “Objectivist.”

Harry Roskolenkier, “Supper in an Alms-House“

Harry Roskolenko was born in New York City on September 21, 1907 to Jewish immigrant parents from the Ukraine. His parents had had eight children in the Ukraine, none of who survived to adulthood, and six more in the United States, of which Harry was the second youngest.⁸²The opening lines of Roskolenko’s memoir When I Was Last on Cherry Street are stunningly direct: “Of the fourteen children we might have been, the first eight were born in the Ukraine and the next six on the Lower East Side of New York. I was to be the thirteenth. My little Russian brothers and sisters all died in the Ukraine from various infantile diseases, but New York was healthier. It killed only one of us, and that by more mechanical means. My oldest sister, Esther, died at the age of sixteen when a truck ran her down on Lafayette Street on her birthday. We celebrated in the funeral parlor and before a hole in the ground” (1).

In his memoir When I Was Last on Cherry Street Roskolenko vividly describes a lively though often violent and sometimes brutal childhood spent near his family’s home, a crowded tenement building at 362 Cherry Street in the city’s Lower East Side. Roskolenko’s father worked in a slaughterhouse until he nearly lost his leg to frostbite after being accidentally locked overnight in a freezer, and his mother, who ran a small newspaper stand, lost her right arm in an accident with an ice truck when Roskolenko was a child. Largely self-educated, Roskolenko had worked in a factory by age ten and ran away from home following a violent quarrel with his father shortly after his bar mitzvah.

By age fourteen, Roskolenko had worked briefly in a country store in the Catskills, as a sailor on a coal barge, and by sixteen he had joined the merchant marine, losing his virginity to a prostitute in Tampico, Mexico and making voyages to England, Germany, France by the time he was sixteen. In 1924, Roskolenko returned to New York City, working a series of part-time jobs and taking high school courses at night. In 1926, he again joined the merchant marine taking a position on a ship which made regular service between New York and the German ports of Hamburg and Bremen, on which assignments he spent several months in Hamburg.

In October 1927, Roskolenko returned to New York and made peace with his father, whom he had not seen spoken with since running away seven years earlier, visiting him at the family’s new home in the Bronx. Roskolenko accumulated a small fund of savings from a brief but lucrative stint as a bootlegger and lived cheaply, frequently spending his days reading in the New York Public Library and his evenings in Greenwich Village with Marxist radicals and other would-be poets, including Herman Spector, a fellow Marxist poet who had published work in Pound’s The Exile and was a contributing editor to New Masses. Roskolenko recalled that

it was through Spector’s intervention that I had my first poem published. I suspected that I was one proletarian he could accept. I had, by then, done everything with my hands; and now, the whirl of the imagination had jacked me up—to whirl with other revolutionary poets. Specter, one day at the library, took a poem from my pocket, wrote a note, mailed an envelope, and soon my first poem, “Head Over an Orange,” appeared in a magazine called Blues, edited by two southern gentlemen, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. I was in the great companionship of experimentalists … and soon other poems, with Spector’s few flattering impulsive letters, were to appear in Pagany, an esthetic organ … and then came the revolutionary periodical. … Finally, Louis Zukofsky, the founder of Objectivism, printed me in a special issue of Poetry magazine—and he called me an Objectivist. But I objected to being in any school. I objected to almost everything else too. It was time to talk revolution. The Public Library on Fifth Avenue had done its work.⁸³When I Was Last on Cherry Street, 110.

In the summer of 1928, Roskolenko and a friend hitchhiked across the country, meeting other poets and radicals in the western United States. Roskolenko was a committed Trotskyite, and wrote that he “was told by their leaders to join the official Communist Party, to bore from within as their secret agent; to spread, quietly and subtly, Leon Trotsky’s opposition to Stalin’s policies on world-wide political and economic questions.”⁸⁴When I Was Last on Cherry Street, 125. Roskolenko writes that upon his return to New York City, he duly joined the Communist Party of America, co-founded a proletarian theater company, and got a job working for the city as a drawbridge operator. After a failed attempt to form a Drawbridge Workers Union, he was fired from his job and shortly thereafter officially expelled from the Communist Party for his criticism of Stalin, though he remained active in the tiny Communist League of America and contributed to their irregularly produced Trotskyite newspaper The Militant.

It’s unclear to what degree Roskolenko and Zukofsky knew each other personally at the time of Roskolenko’s appearance in Poetry, but the men had similar family backgrounds and political inclinations, and Zukofsky certainly was familiar with Roskolenko’s previously published work in both Blues and the New Masses. In a December 12, 1930 letter to Ezra Pound, Zukofsky wrote:

Anyway, I’ll have to launch the issue with what I’ve got. Mike [Gold, editor of the New Masses] shd. be pleased with my redemption of Comrade Roskolenkier—& you sld. see what I had to do to wade thru the stuff & then come out after putting it together (???) with—dignity. I mean certain lines in one poem naturally belong in another—signed L.Z.—But what will happen if I stop running my correspondence courses? If I redeem another “poet” after Sat. Nov. 13, I’ll shoot myself.”⁸⁵Pound/Zukofsky, 82.

Roskolenko also published poems in both the Spring and Summer 1932 issues of Richard Johns’ magazine Pagany.⁸⁶His contributor’s note to Pagany read: “Harry Roskolenkier is twenty-four years of age; has been a sailor and an oiler on drawbridges. His work has appeared in Blues, The Left, Poetry, Nativity, Revolutionary Anthology of 1931, etc.” (Pagany 3:2 (Spring 1932), 152).

In 1930, Roskolenko met and began a romantic relationship with Friede Rothe, a young Russian-born pianist who later became well-known as a musical journalist and publicist. After several years of poverty and insecurity, Roskolenko landed a job as a researcher with the Writers’ Project of the Works Project Administration in 1935, which allowed him and Friede to rented a small two-room apartment on Morton Street. Roskolenko described his work as “research[ing], tongue in cheek and pencil in hand, and writ[ing] at the 42nd Street Library for twenty-three dollars a week … work[ing] on, among other things, a maritime history of New York, a labor history, and a skiing guide” for a project which he described as “more of a Leftist five-ring circus than a fertile field for thought about research and writing. The communists, who were in the vast majority, had flooded the project with half-authors who had published only in their minds.”⁸⁷When Last I Saw Cherry Street, 150-152.

In 1938, Roskolenko published his first collection of poetry, Sequence of Violence, which included an introduction by the urban historian Lewis Mumford. William Carlos Williams wrote a brief, damning review of Roskolenko’s book, though he did not publish it in his lifetime.⁸⁸Williams’ review is included in Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, 101-102. The final paragraph reads: “I can see what Roskolenko is at. I don’t think he has succeeded. Yet, in spite of all that, that the book will never be read, that it doesn’t get anywhere, that there isn’t a well-made poem in it, that his words are as flat, often as the debacle he holds up to our disdain—the book is so bad, that by its very depravity it is impressive. It is senseless.”

Roskolenko’s father died in 1939, and Roskolenko went to Prairie City, Illinois to assist James Decker in preparing The Exiles’ Anthology, an anthology of modern British and American poetry which he had edited with Helen Neville, for publication.⁸⁹The book appeared in 1940. John Wheelwright, a fellow Trotskyite who had also been published in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry, had initially worked on the project, but withdrew before publication after a dispute with Roskolenko. In their introduction, the editors wrote: “Poetry and War, bastard twins, appear in this anthology as the Janus-faced hallucinations of contemporary political and aesthetic activity. This anthology has no set literary formula, nor do the editors wish to establish a new sound, sigh and feel school of poetical but psychic penetration.” Upon his return from Illinois in late 1939, Friede told him that she was leaving him for another man, and Roskolenko’s violent reaction definitively ended their relationship (and nearly cost Friede her life).

In 1941, Roskolenko published a second collection of poems, I Went Into the Country, with the Press of James A. Decker.⁹⁰Decker also published books by several other former “Objectivists” in the 1940s, including the first books for both Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker first books. For a complete list of the press’s publications, see http://www.wiu.edu/libraries/archives/deckerPressBibliography.php. In 1940 he succeeded in being registered as a conscientious objector with the Army draft board, but wrote a letter giving up his status and stating his willingness to be drafted into the United States Navy on June 21, 1941, the day before Germany attacked the Soviet Union. After some suspicious questioning regarding the coincidental timing of his letter, Roskolenko was accepted for military service and eventually received a commission as a second officer with the Army Transport Service. During the war he was stationed in New Guinea and Australia, where he became active in the literary scene, befriending Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins, a prominent Australian modernist poetry journal, and others in the Angry Penguins orbit. Harris assisted Roskolenko in publishing two volumes of his own poetry, A Second Summary (1944), and Notes from a Journey (1947), illustrated by Sidney Nolan.

Roskolenko also edited, with Elizabeth Lambert, a special Australian issue of the American poetry quarterly Voices (Summer 1944), which included some poems by the now infamous Ern Malley, a fictional persona invented by two Australian servicemen poets to lampoon what they viewed as the idiocy and lax standards of modernist poetry and of Max Harris, in particular. Upon his return to the United States after the war, Roskolenko wrote a “Letter from America” feature for Angry Penguins magazine and solicited contributions from American writers he knew (including Kenneth Rexroth).

In 1948, Roskolenko married the Chinese-American writer Diana Chang and after Chang’s graduation from Barnard University in 1949, traveled with her to Paris, where she studied French symbolist poetry at the Sorbonne on a Fulbright. They returned to New York in September 1950, and had one child before divorcing in 1955.⁹¹Chang is considered the first published Chinese-American novelist, and conducted a long and illustrious career, including a stint as a creative writing professor at Barnard College, her alma mater. Some of her correspondence and joint writing projects with Roskolenko are part of his papers at Syracuse University, and a larger collection of her material from the 1950s onward are held at Stony Brook University. In 1950, Roskolenko published Paris Poems, a limited-edition chapbook with lithographs by the Chinese-French painter Zao Wou-ki.

From the 1950s onward, Roskolenko made his living almost entirely from his writing, publishing erotica and other hack work under an array of pseudonyms and contributing frequently under his own name to well-known intellectual magazines, including the New York Times Book Review, New Republic and Partisan Review. In 1952, he published Baedeker of a Bachelor: The Exotic Adventures and Bizarre Adventures of a Carefree Man; in 1958, he published Poet on a Scooter, an account of his traveling the world, largely aboard a Vespa scooter; and in 1962, he published White Man, Go!, an account of his travels across the African continent. In 1968, he published a novel, Lan-Lan, about a mixed-race love affair set in Cambodia. Roskolenko also published three well-regarded autobiographical works: When I Was Last on Cherry Street (1965), of which Sanford Sternlicht wrote “As a warts-and-all portrait of an intelligent and talented Jewish American man’s life in the first half of the twentieth century, When I Was Last on Cherry Street is unparalleled”; The Terrorized (1967), which primarily treated his post-war international adventures; and The Time That Was Then (1971), which consists of fifteen autobiographical essays largely dealing with his Lower East Side childhood.

In 1969, Roskolenko returned to Australia again, and published American Civilization, a slim collection of poetry complete with illustrations by the well-known Australian artists Jack Olsen, Clifton Pugh, and Albert Tucker in Melbourne in 1970.  Roskolenko died in New York City on July 17, 1980. His papers are held at Syracuse University, Yale’s Beinecke Library, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas.⁹²For more on Roskolenko’s life, see his autobiographical trilogy and Sanford Sternlicht’s The Tenement Saga: The Lower East Side and Early Jewish American Writers (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 150-154.

Whittaker Chambers, “October 21st, 1926“

Jay Vivian “Whittaker” Chambers was born on April 1, 1901 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Jay Chambers, a graphic artist for the New York World, and Laha Whittaker, a former provincial actress and waitress. His parents moved to Brooklyn shortly after his birth, eventually settling in Lynbrook, on Long Island, New York, where Chambers and his younger brother Richard (Ricky) spent largely unhappy childhoods. In July 1919, a few months after his eighteenth birthday, Chambers defied his mother’s wishes that he enroll in a prestigious university and left home with Anthony Muller, a friend who had been stationed abroad during the recently concluded First World War. Muller and Chambers had loosely discussed travelling to Mexico, and spent a few months doing manual labor in Washington and looking unsuccessfully for work in New Orleans. After depleting his savings, Chambers wired home for money and returned to the family home in November 1919, at which time his father got him a job in the mailroom at the advertising agency where he worked as an art director.

In 1920, Chambers decided to enroll at college, spending a few miserable days at Williams College in Massachusetts (his mother’s choice) before transferring to Columbia University. At Columbia, he reinvented himself as Whittaker Chambers, adopting his mother’s maiden name in place of the undesirably effete Vivian. Though he himself was then a Bible-reading Hoover-supporting Christian, many of Chambers’ closest friends at Columbia were Jewish (unsurprising, as Jews in those years comprised some 20% of the total student population. At NYU, the number was closer to 50%, and at City College, around 80%). Chambers’ classmates and friends at Columbia included Mortimer Adler, Jacques Barzun, Clifton Fadiman, John Gassner, Irving Kaplan, Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Trilling, and Louis Zukofsky. Chambers’ freshman composition instructor was Mark Van Doren, remembered today as one of Columbia’s finest teachers, and Van Doren praised and encouraged Chambers’ literary efforts and was a major influence on Chambers’ burgeoning desire to become a poet.

Interested in developing his literary abilities, Chambers joined the staff of Varsity, an undergraduate magazine, and published a loosely autobiographical short story “The Damn Fool” in the March 1922 issue of The Morningside, the recently revived student literary magazine. At the end of his sophomore year, Chambers was elected The Morningside‘s editor-in-chief for the following year, and he oversaw the publication of the highly controversial “profanist” issue of The Morningside, published in October 1922. The issue included “A Play for Puppets” by “John Kelly” (an invented name Chambers used to conceal his identity), a short play which was dedicated to the Antichrist and featured lewd banter and a reluctantly resurrected Jesus. The backlash against the story and the “Profanist” issue was instant and severe, with the student committee on publications demanding Chambers’ immediate resignation and threatening to suspend the magazine were it again to publish any content similar to “A Play for Puppets.”

Chambers resigned his position, withdrew from courses, and left the university in January 1923. He spent the next several months drifting between his family home in Lynbrook and his friendships with other college-age writers in the city, before embarking on a three-month trip to Europe with his friends Meyer Schapiro and Henry Zolinsky in June 1923. Upon his return to New York, Chambers found a job working evenings in the newspaper room at the New York Public Library and rented an apartment with Henry Bang, a fellow Columbia dropout, near City College in uptown Manhattan.

In the summer of 1924, their apartment caught fire and Chambers and Bang moved to a tent pitched on Long Island’s Atlantic Beach, where they were frequently joined by college friends, including Louis Zukofsky and Henry Zolinsky.⁹³Chambers describes the joys of the summer in his short play “On the Beach,” published as “Julian Fichtner” in January 1926 in the CCNY student magazine Lavender. Zukofsky also refers to experiences from this summer in his poetry. Encouraged by the married woman he was having an affair with, Chambers also applied for readmission at Columbia, enrolling in classes in the Fall term, the same time that his younger brother Ricky enrolled at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.

Chambers’ didn’t last long in his second stint at Columbia, however, dropping out again at the year’s end, followed shortly by his younger brother, who returned to their family home and began his descent into an alcohol-fueled depression. The elder Chambers had also grown increasingly attracted to radical leftist politics during this time, joining the Workers Party of America (a legal front for the Communist Party) in New York City in February 1925 under the mentorship of longtime radical Sam Krieger.

In the summer of 1925, Chambers left his job at the library and hitchhiked around the American West for a month, joining the IWW while in Seattle and writing poetry. In the summer of 1926 he made a similar trip, this time traveling by automobile with the younger brother of his former roommate Henry Bang. He also had some of his first post-college literary successes, with his old mentor Mark Van Doren publishing two of his poems in The Nation, where he was the literary editor. ⁹⁴Chambers’ “Quag-Hole” appeared in December 1925, and his “Lothrop, Montana” was published in June 1926.

In the evening of September 8, 1926, a few weeks before his twenty-third birthday, Chambers’ brother Ricky committed suicide by gas in his apartment, leaving behind a young wife. Chambers’ poem “October 21, 1926” is an elegy for Ricky, who Zukofsky would also memorialize in two of his early important poems: “A”-3 and “Poem Beginning ‘The’.”

In April 1927, dozens of books that had been surreptitiously removed from the NYPL and Columbia University library were discovered in Chambers’ work locker and home apartment. Chambers was subsequently fired from his job at the NYPL and barred permanently from enrollment at Columbia. According to Chambers’ biographer, Zukofsky found Chambers a job working at his brother Morris’ bookshop in 1927, though Chambers and Zukofsky were “indifferent, sometimes negligent booksellers.”⁹⁵Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, 56. Chambers did not remain in the job for long, returning to his family home in the late 1920s, where he provided shelter to a rotating cast of Communist acquaintances, including, for a time, Henry Zolinsky and his family.

On April 15, 1931, Chambers married his fellow Communist Esther Shemitz; the couple had a daughter, Ellen, on October 17, 1933, and a son, John, on August 18, 1936. While Chambers enjoyed some literary accomplishments during his Communist-affiliated years in the late 1920s and early 1930s, working as an editor at the Daily Worker and New Masses magazine, he became much better known later in the decade for political reasons.

In 1932, Chambers was recruited as a Soviet agent by J. Peters [Sándor Goldberger], resigning his position at New Masses and becoming a member of a Communist cell. Chambers rose quickly through the ranks and ran a ring of Communist sympathizers and Soviet spies in Washington D.C. which included several prominent U.S government official before defecting in 1938. Chambers joined TIME magazine in 1938, where he worked as a senior editor for several years, before rising to national prominence in the late 1940s for his testimony before HUAC and as a government witness in the Alger Hiss perjury trial.

Chambers is best known today for his public role as an anti-communist and for his two memoirs: Witness, published to great acclaim by Random House in 1952 and Cold Friday, published posthumously in 1964.Chambers, who had long suffered from angina, died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961. His life is discussed at greater length in Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (published in 1978, revised edition in 1997, third edition in 2013), and Sam Tanenhaus’ well-researched biography, published in 1998.⁹⁶For more on Soviet espionage in this period, see Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era.

Henry Zolinsky, “Horatio“

Henry Saul Zolinsky was born on August 19, 1903 in Manhattan, to Edward Nathan Zolinsky, a Jewish immigrant from Germany, and Rosie Geisch. Prior to his inclusion in the “Objectivists” issue, Zolinsky had already made two previous appearances in Poetry: he had two short poems in the December 1921 issue as well as two sonnets in the December 1923 issue (published under the name Henry Saul). His contributor note for in the December 1921 issue had read: “Mr. Henry Saul Zolinsky, who, although only seventeen, has already been newsboy, bell-boy, office-boy, electrician, shoe-salesman and ad-solicitor; and who hopes to become a student again some day and finish his interrupted course at college.”⁹⁷See https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=19&issue=3&page=59.

In the early 1920s, Zolinsky was a student at the City College of New York, where he edited the student literary magazine Lavender and became close friends with a number of other literary minded students, including Whittaker Chambers and Louis Zukofsky, then both at Columbia. In June 1923, Zolinsky traveled to Europe with Meyer Schapiro (another mutual friend of Zukofsky’s) and Whittaker Chambers.

I know very little of what Zolinsky did for the next several years, but on April 13, 1929, Zolinsky married Mary Elizabeth Nolan, and their daughter Nancy, was born later that year. In October 1929, Zolinsky was arrested, along with Julius Moss and the publisher Samuel Roth, after Roth’s Golden Hind Press offices were raided by John Saxton Sumner, who headed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a state censorship body charged with investigating and recommending obscenity cases to federal and state prosecutors.⁹⁸Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940, 370. The 1930 census records the Zolinsky family as living with Whittaker Chambers in the Chambers’ family home in Lynbrook, during which time Chambers’ biographer suggests Zolinsky was searching for work as a French teacher. According to the 1940 census, Zolinsky was working as a public school teacher and living at 20 Monroe Street in New York City.

In 1941, the Zolinksy’s changed their name to Zolan, and Henry Zolan taught English and sponsored a high school chess club during the 1950s at what was then Seward Park High School on 350 Grand Street in New York City’s Lower East Side.⁹⁹See Alex Levy’s recollections of Mr. Zolan on his personal website: https://perma.cc/K7LK-URSA. Mary died in September 1979 and Henry Zolan died on May 2, 2001 in Laguna Hills, California.¹⁰⁰The Zolans are buried in the Bennett Valley Cemetery in Santa Rosa, California.

Basil Bunting, “The Word“

Core “Objectivist.”

Jesse Loewenthal, “Match“

Jesse Loewenthal was born in the Bronx, New York in 1902 to Louis Loewenthal and Fanny Haas, Jewish immigrant parents from Berlin and Vienna, respectively. Loewenthal earned a degree in English from City College of New York and was linguistically gifted: capable of speaking German, Yiddish, Spanish, French, Italian, and some Arabic, he was also trained in the classics and could read both Latin and Ancient Greek.

Loewenthal and Zukofsky could have met through their network of mutual friends at any point in the 1920s, but if they were not already acquainted, they certainly encountered each other in the late 1920s at Stuyvesant High School, New York City’s preeminent public high school, where Loewenthal taught English and Zukofsky was a substitute instructor. Zukofsky references Jesse in a couple of letters to Taupin in April 1931; the context of these references seem to indicate that Zukofsky, Taupin, Loewenthal and Ted Hecht, who also taught high school English, were all friendly with each other by that time.

In 1937, while traveling to Cuba for health reasons, Loewenthal met the Cuban artist Carmen Herrera via a letter of introduction from Herrera’s step-brother Addison, the head of NBC radio’s Latin American department in New York City. Herrera’s father, Antonio Herrera y Neito, had been an officer in the Cuban army during their war for independence from Spain and was the founder and executive editor of El Mundo, Cuba’s first post-independence newspaper. Her mother, Carmela Nieto de Herrera, was an author and philanthropist who, before marrying Carmen’s father in 1913, had previously been married to the American banker John Steward Durland, with whom she had several children. Antonio Herrera died in 1917, leaving Carmela with their combined family of seven children, of which the two-year-old Carmen was the youngest.

Following their introduction in Havana in 1937, Loewenthal and Herrera carried on a two-year distance courtship, with Loewenthal returning to Cuba in the summers and over the holidays whenever he was able. The couple married at Herrera’s family home in Havana on July 10, 1939, following which Loewenthal and Herrera honeymooned in Mexico, spending time in Mexico City, Acapulco, and Monterrey before returning to New York City, where they lived in a series of apartments near Manhattan’s Union Square Park.

Over the next decade, Loewenthal taught at Stuyvesant and Herrera developed her technique as an abstract painter, occasionally traveling to Cuba for family and art reasons. While in New York, the couple enjoyed a rich social life which included Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Loewenthal’s college friend and painter Barnett Newman and his wife Annalee Greenhouse, the dancer and jazz critic Roger Pryor Dodge and his wife Ann, and the Colombian artist Rafael Umaña and his wife, the dancer Helen McGehee.

Between 1948 and 1954, Loewenthal took an extended sabbatical from his position at Stuyvesant and the couple moved to Paris, where Herrera’s brother John was the Consul General for Cuba. For most of their time in France, the couple lived in an apartment on rue Campagne-Première in Montparnasse, on Paris’ famed Rive Gauche, and spent large portions of their summers in a prominent artist’s commune in Alba-la-Romaine which had been promoted by the painter André Lhote in 1948 in the newspaper Combat. While living in Paris, Herrera exhibited her paintings on a number of occasions at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and the couple befriended several prominent members of the Parisian art and literary scene, including the playwright Jean Genet.

In 1954, the couple returned to New York City, where Jesse resumed teaching English at Stuyvesant. In 1960, following Castro’s revolution in Cuba, Herrera ceased receiving rent payments on property in Cuba inherited from her mother, and Herrera imported and sold many of the family’s remaining belongings. Her brother Antonio was arrested as a political prisoner in November of that year and sentenced to a twenty-year prison term, before being released in 1963. In the early 1960s, Loewenthal and Herrera became active in helping refugees leave Cuba and publicizing Cuban abuses of civil liberties and the use of imprisonment as a means of punishing political dissent.

In 1967, the couple moved to an apartment on East 19th Street in the Flatiron district of Manhattan (where Herrera still lives and works today, at age 103). In November 1970, Herrera applied for U.S. citizenship and was naturalized on August 2, 1971. In the early 1970s, Loewenthal retired from his teaching position at Stuyvesant after more than 45 years teaching English there. His teaching manner was described in his colleague Frank McCourt’s memoir Teacher Man:

My students were patient, but I could tell from the looks they exchanged, and the traffic in notes passing back and forth, that I was in a grammar wilderness. At Stuyvesant they had to know grammar for their classes in Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Latin.

Roger [Goodman, then head of the English department at Stuyvesant] understood. He said, Maybe diagramming is not your strong point. He said some people just don’t have it. R’lene Dahlberg [Edward Dahlberg’s wife] had it. Joe Curran certainly had it. After all, he was a graduate of Boston Latin, a school two and a half centuries older than Stuyvesant and, he claimed, more prestigious. Teaching at Stuyvesant for him was a step down in the world. He could diagram in Greek and Latin and probably French and German. That’s the kind of training you get at Boston Latin. Jesse Lowenthal had it, too, but of course he would. He was the oldest teacher in the department with his elegant three-piece suit, the gold watch chain looping across his waistcoat front, his gold-rimmed spectacles, his old-world manners, his scholarship, Jesse who did not want to retire but, when he did, planned to spend his days studying Greek and drifting into the next life with Homer on his lips. It pleased Roger to know he had in his department a solid core of teachers who could be relied on to diagram at a moment’s notice.

Roger said it was sad Joe Curran had such a drinking problem. Otherwise he could have entertained Jesse with miles of Homer from memory and, if Jesse was up to it, Virgil and Horace, and the one Joe favored out of his own great anger, Juvenal himself.

In the teachers’ cafeteria Joe told me, Read your Juvenal so you’ll understand what’s going on in this miserable fookin’ country.

Roger said it was sad about Jesse. Here he is in his twilight years with Christ only knows how many years of teaching under his belt. He doesn’t have the same energy for five classes a day. He asked to have his load reduced to four but no, oh no, the principal says no, the superintendent says no, all the way up the bureaucracy they say no, and Jesse says good-bye. Hello Homer. Hello Ithaca. Hello Troy. That’s Jesse. We’re going to lose a great teacher and, boy, could he diagram. What he did with a sentence and a piece of chalk would stun you. Beautiful.¹⁰¹Teacher Man, 186-187.

In 1996, Loewenthal’s health began to decline, and Herrera stopped painting to care for him until his death in New York City on December 11, 2000, aged 98. In 2005, a large respective show dedicated to Herrera’s work was mounted in a prominent New York gallery, and its success encouraged Herrera to begin paining again in 2006. In the intervening years, Herrera has enjoyed increasing international acclaim.

As a result of Herrera’s deserved but belated recognition, Loewenthal is now best known not for his own teaching or writing, but as Herrera’s long-time spouse.¹⁰²In a feature article published in English newspaper The Telegraph in 2010, Herrera is quoted as saying: “Jesse was a saint and I’m thinking back and I never even thanked him for all he did for me. He was the only one I ever spoke to about my paintings. He understood what I was doing and he was always supportive. I made him move to neighbourhoods that were cheap and sometimes dangerous so I could have room to paint. We had a very good life, actually. We became closer and closer and by the end we were one person. We could think without talking. He died right here in this room with me holding his hand. Lately I miss him a lot.” In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press partnered to publish Dana Miller’s Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight, a beautiful and thoroughly researched career retrospective full of autobiographical detail and rich visual material related to Herrera (and to a lesser extent, Loewenthal).

Emanuel Carnevali’s translations of Arthur Rimbaud, “Wakes—III” and “To One Reason“

Emanuel Carnevali was born on December 4, 1897 in Florence, Italy to Tullio Carnevali, an accountant, and Matilde Piano. Carnevali’s parents separated soon after his birth and he lived with his mother until her death in 1908 (she was a morphine addict). Carnevali was then sent to live with his father and attended a series of technical schools in Turin, Venice and Bologna. Carnevali did not get along well with his father, and emigrated, alone, to the United States shortly after his sixteenth birthday, leaving from Genoa in March 1914.

After arriving in the United States, Carnevali took an assortment of odd jobs in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and gradually taught himself English, telling Harriet Monroe in September 1917 that he had “learned English by continuous reading: have not owned an english grammar up to a few months ago.”¹⁰³Poetry Magazine Collection, University of Chicago Special Collections. About a year after arriving in New York, he began writing (in Italian), and started writing and publishing poetry in English in 1917. In 1917, Carnevali married Emilia Valenza, a fellow Italian immigrant, who worked to support the couple while he wrote. As an aspiring poet, Carnevali joined the city’s literary avant garde and befriended writers like Alfred Kreymborg (the editor of Others), Lola Ridge, Max Eastman (editor of The Liberator), Babette Deutsch, and Waldo Frank. Like Robert McAlmon, Carnevali met William Carlos Williams at a gathering held at Lola Ridge’s home, and the two men became friends, with Williams admiring the young Italian’s energy, fearlessness, and independence. Around this time Carnevali also began to publish poems regularly in Poetry magazine, making his first appearance in the March 1918 issue with six poems collected under the combined title “The Splendid Commonplace.” The contributor notes to that issue quote him as writing: “I want to become an American poet because I have, in my mind, rejected Italian standards of good literature. I do not like Carducci, still less d’Annunzio. … Of American authors I have read, pretty well, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Harte, London, Oppenheim, and Wald Frank. I believe in free verse. I try not to imitate.”¹⁰⁴https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=11&issue=6&page=57

In 1919, Harriet Monroe came to New York City and invited Carnevali to move to Chicago and join her as an associate editor of Poetry magazine, a position which Carnevali held for six months. While living in Chicago, Carnevali fell victim to the global epidemic of sleeping sickness (encephalitis lethargica), a neurological condition which caused him to shake uncontrollably and would afflict him for the rest of his life.

After unsuccessfully pursuing various cures in the midwestern United States, Carnevali left the United States and returned to Bazzano, Italy, a small town just west of Bologna. He would spend most of the next two decades in poverty and in poor health, moving between various hospitals and poorhouses, often reliant on the generosity of former literary friends (including Kay Boyle, Robert McAlmon, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound).

Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press published Carnevali’s collection A Hurried Man from Paris in 1925 (the same year Bird published Pound’s Draft of XVI Cantos). While this was the only volume of his poetry to appear during his lifetime, Carnevali continued writing and publishing poetry in English and carried on an active correspondence with Williams, Boyle, Pound and others.

Following his death (by suffocation) on January 11, 1942, a handful of English-language volumes by Carnevali have been published, including an autobiography (edited by Kay Boyle and published in 1967); Fireflies, a small letter press edition of seven poems published in 1970); and Furnished Rooms, a sloppily edited collection of work published in 2006 which is mainly comprised by poems which first appeared in A Hurried Man. Three works by Carnevali have also been published posthumously in Italian: an Italian edition of his autobiography, edited by Maria Pia Carnevali and Luigi Ballerini and published in 1978, Voglio disturbare l’America (a collection of letters), published in 1981, and Diario Bazzanese, published in 1994. For a good overview of Carnevali’s life and work, see Alan Davies’ review “To Call Them by Their Dead Name” in Jacket.

John Wheelwright, “Slow Curtain“

John Brooks Wheelwright was born on September 9, 1897, the youngest of three children in a classic Boston Brahmin household. His father, Edmund March (Ned) Wheelwright, was a prominent Boston architect and a descendent of the Reverend John Wheelwright, Anne Hutchison’s brother-in-law and a leading Antinomian in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the 1630s. His mother, Elizabeth (Bessie) Brooks, was a scion of the Medford Brookses, one of Boston’s oldest and wealthiest families, and though deaf from a childhood accident, was a formidable and sometimes terrifying matriarch.

In 1910, while in the midst of supervising the construction of a multimillion dollar bridge he had had designed in Hartford, Connecticut, Ned Wheelwright suffered a nervous breakdown, and was subsequently institutionalized and treated for melancholia. Ned never recovered from his depression, committing suicide in August 1912 in the sanitorium to which he had been discreetly admitted two years previously. The loss of his father exerted a large impact on John, who was then attending an Anglican preparatory school in Rhode Island, including a renunciation of his family’s Unitarianism and a mystical religious conversion to Anglicanism. The impress of his father’s death can also been seen in these moving lines from his sonnet “Father”: “Come home. Wire a wire of warning without words. / Come home and talk to me again, my first friend.”¹⁰⁵Collected Poems of John Wheelwright, 78.

Despite earning generally poor grades at his preparatory school, Wheelwright was active in social and literary endeavors, and his family connections ensured his admission to Harvard College. Wheelwright enrolled at Harvard in the Fall of 1916, but was an indifferent student, earning poor grades and withdrawing from school in June 1920. While he would petition for readmission and made a final attempt to complete his degree in the Fall, in November of that year he was “required to withdraw” by the administrative board after a series of rules infractions.¹⁰⁶Wald writes that Wheelwright was warned not to miss any more class sessions after being caught publicly copying a classmates chemistry notebook as a form of protest to the endemic culture of discreet cheating. When he missed a subsequent chemistry class, his note of excuse to the dean attributed his absence to: “Acute nausia [sic] because ‘Way Down East’ [a silent film directed by D.W. Griffith and starring Lilian Gish] excited me. I was sick one hour” (quoted in The Revolutionary Imagination, 48).

Though Wheelwright left Harvard without a degree, he was active in literary circles during his time in Cambridge, contributing to the Harvard Lampoon, which his father had helped found, serving as the literary editor of the student magazine The Advocate, and joining the Harvard Poetry Society. In 1923, Wheelwright’s poetry was included in Eight More Harvard Poets, a sequel to the 1917 anthology which had featured E.E. Cummings, S. Foster Damon, John Dos Passos, Robert Hillyer, R.S. Mitchell, William Norris, Dudley Poore, and Cuthbert Wright. The title page of the 1923 anthology listed Hillyer and Damon (who later married Wheelwright’s older sister Louise) as the volume’s editors, but in point of fact Wheelwright himself had done most of the editorial work, including writing the volume’s introduction (under the pseudonym ‘Dorian Abbot’).

In 1924, Wheelwright printed his poem “North Atlantic Passage” privately in Florence, Italy. In that poem, Wheelwright wrestled with the problem of the relationship between “the One and the Many,” or of the individual and the mass of humanity, much as George Oppen, another disaffected and socially engaged child of privilege, would do in his 1968 poem “Of Being Numerous.” Wheelwright also published his 1920s poetry in some of the little magazines of the day, including Hound & Horn, which printed his poem “Forty Days” in the January-March 1929 issue, where Zukofsky likely encountered it.

Through much of the 1930s Wheelwright lived with his mother at the family home at 415 Beacon Street, and pursued a range of political, literary, and artistic interests, writing reviews and contributing frequently to Poetry, The New Republic, and Lincoln Kirstein’s Hound & Horn. Wheelwright’s poem “Come over and help us” was chosen for inclusion in the 1931 edition of Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld’s annual poetry anthology American Caravan, and Wheelwright spent several years writing a series of poems dealing with his interpretation of the Biblical apostle Thomas.

Early in 1932, Wheelwright formalized his long developing political commitment, officially joining the Socialist party of Massachusetts, and published a letter to the editor in the July 13, 1932 issue of the New Republic describing “the radical labor movement” as the “most important single influence for the progress of humankind today.”¹⁰⁷238. For the rest of his life, Wheelwright remained active in left-wing politics, frequently attending and speaking at labor demonstrations and other political events, and continuing to develop his own idiosyncratic blend of political and religious convictions. These convictions included a distrust of Stalin and the mainstream Communist party (which he never joined) along with a deep respect for Trotsky, whom he described as the “world’s incomparable revolutionary.”¹⁰⁸Quoted in The Revolutionary Imagination, 160.

Wheelwright also continued to publish his own and others’ socialist poetry through the 1930s, editing a pamphlet series called “Poems for a Dime,” which featured his Brechtian verse-play Masque with Clowns in 1936, and his “Two Tongues in a Tower” was included in Horace Gregory’s May 1936 “Special Poets Number” of Poetry magazine which Gregory, himself a Communist, had dedicated to class-conscious leftist poetry. Wheelwright was also connected in the late 1930s to Harry Roskolenko, a fellow Trotskyite and poet who had appeared in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry, helping Roskolenko and Helen Neville establish their Exile’s Press. While Wheelwright withdrew from the publishing venture after a disagreement with Roskolenko before the publication of their proposed The Exile’s Anthology, Roskolenko did include work by Wheelwright in the anthology, which The Exile’s Press published in conjunction with the Press of James A. Decker in 1940.

Between 1933 and his death in 1940, Wheelwright published three collections of his own poetry, all with Bruce Humphries in Boston: Rock and shell: Poems, 1923-1933 (1933); Mirrors of Venus: A Novel in Sonnets, 1914-1938 (1938), and Political Self-Portrait (1940). Wheelwright was struck by a car and killed on September 13, 1940. New Directions posthumously published his Selected Poems the following year in their poet of the month series, and published in 1983 a collected edition of his poems, edited by Alvin Rosenfeld. In his 1983 book The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan, Alan Wald offers an outstanding survey to Wheelwright’s life and work, neatly summarizing Wheelwright as “a modernist poet, architectural historian, heterodox Anglican, and highly unconventional Boston Brahmin who devoted the last eight years of his life to revolutionary socialism.”¹⁰⁹The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan, 36-37. A very good short biographical introduction, also written by Wald, can be found online at MAPS.

Richard Johns, “The Sphinx“

Richard Johns was born Richard Vernon Johnson on October 29, 1904, to Benjamin Newhall Johnson, a prominent Boston lawyer, and Virginia Vernon Newhall. While he received a classical education grounded in the liberal arts, Johns never graduated from high school, leaving in his late teens to pursue a career as a writer. By the late 1920s, however, Johns had only managed to publish a small number of his own poems and stories in little-known magazines.

In 1929, Johns decided, with the encouragement of his friend Sherry Mangan, who had recently suspended the publication of his own magazine, larus: the Celestial Visitor, to found Pagany, a quarterly literary magazine named in tribute to William Carlos Williams’ recently published novel A Voyage to Pagany. Williams offered encouragement and submitted work to the young, unproven editor, and the first issue of Pagany appeared in January 1930. In the summer of 1930, Johns and a girlfriend joined the Williams family for a week-long vacation to East Gloucester, Massachusetts, an experience which formed the basis of Johns’ poem “The Sphinx.”

By the end of Pagany‘s first year, the magazine had published poetry by Williams, McAlmon, Zukofsky, and Reznikoff, and Johns had moved his offices from Boston to an apartment/office in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park. Johns and Zukofsky met for the first time in person during the Christmas holidays in 1930 when Zukofsky returned to New York City from Madison, and the two men continued to correspond for the next few years, with Zukofsky regularly submitting his own work and recommending the work of others to Johns.

In February 1932, Johns’ father died, dramatically reducing Johns’ income and effectively killing Pagany, which Johns suspended following the publication of the magazine’s twelfth issue in February 1933. In 1934, Johns married Veronica Parker, with whom he collaborated on a series of mystery novels. The couple later moved to Cuttingsville, Vermont, where Johns devoted himself to horticulture and photography.

In 1969, Johns collaborated with Stephen Halpert to produce A Return to Pagany, a retrospective anthology which encapsulated Johns’ work on the magazine and printed a variety of documentary material from the period. The full archives for Pagany, including extensive correspondence between Johns, Williams, Zukofsky, and letters from almost all of the other “Objectivists” (including Forrest Anderson, Basil Bunting, Mary Butts, Emanuel Carnevali, Frances Fletcher, Charles Henri Ford, Norman Macleod, Lorine Niedecker, Ezra Pound, Samuel Putnam, Carl Rakosi (Callman Rawley), Kenneth Rexroth, Harry Roskolenko, Parker Tyler, R. B. N. Warriston, and John Wheelwright) are held by the University of Delaware’s Special Collections. Johns died on June 17, 1970.

Martha Champion, “Poem“

Martha Lee Champion was born in Los Angeles in 1910 to Earl Malcolm Champion, the superintendent of the Southern California Hardwood and Manufacturing Company, and Vera Belle Barber. Champion was a student and friend of Zukofsky’s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he served as a graduate instructor for the 1930-1931 academic year. Champion earned an Honors degree in Greek from the University of Wisconsin in 1933 and went on to study anthropology and linguistics under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University from 1933-1935, investigating peyote songs among the Comanche, Navajo, and Fox people in the western United States as part of her field work. Her poem “After Meleager” was included in Ann Winslow (Verna Elizabeth Grubb)’s 1935 anthology Trial Balances, where it was paired with work by Wallace Stevens.

Photograph of Martha Champion Randle, published with her obituary in The American Anthropologist in 1966.

On November 13, 1935, Champion married Louis Huot, a journalist who had been born in 1906 in Duluth, Minnesota. That same year, the couple moved to Paris, where Huot served as the European representative of Press Wireless, a news transmission corporation with headquarters in Chicago, and wrote for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. While in France, Martha published an article on peyote songs in Eugène and Maria Jolas’ magazine transition.

Following the outbreak of the war, Champion left France in 1940 and returned to the United States, and Huot was reassigned to a position in London before joined the United States Army as an intelligence officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In 1945, Huot published Guns for Tito, an account of his entrepreneurial efforts to organize a shipment of weapons from southern Italy to the future Yugoslavian dictator and his Partisan army in the fall of 1943. Huot rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, ultimately serving as the head of the newly organized Psychological Warfare Division of the U.S. 3rd Army, then led by General George Patton.

After returning to the United States in 1940, Champion taught anthropology at the University of Southern California and Los Angeles State College and conducted fieldwork among the Iroquois people on Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada, passing her Ph.D. examinations in the department of anthropology at Columbia in 1946 and publishing an article on “Mohawk words of acculturation” in the International Journal of American Linguistics in 1948.¹¹⁰See https://doi.org/10.1086/463996.

Sometime between 1948 and 1952 Champion and Huot divorced and Champion remarried, this time to E.P. Randle, a Canadian military officer who had served as the Indian superintendent of the Six Nations of the Grand River near Brantford, Ontario. Champion and Randle had two children together. Champion earned a master’s degree in classical languages from USC in 1958 and subsequently taught Latin in secondary schools in Canada and the United States until her death on July 3, 1965 in London, Ontario.¹¹¹The anthropologist Richard Slobodin wrote an obituary for Randle in a 1966 issue of American Anthropologist: https://perma.cc/UE7T-UT3X.

William Carlos Williams, “The Botticellian Trees“

Core “Objectivist.”

Parker Tyler, “Hymn”  and Charles Henri Ford, “Left Instantly Designs” in “Symposium”

Charles Henri Ford was born February 10, 1908 in Brookhaven, Mississippi to Charles Lloyd Ford (1871-1949) and Gertrude Cato (1886-1956), managers of a string of hotels across the southern United States. Charles’ younger sister, Ruth Ford, would go on to become a well-known fashion model and Hollywood actress.

In 1927, Ford published his first poem in The New Yorker, and published additional work in the next few years he published poetry in other small magazines, including Norman Macleod’s Palo Verde. In 1928, Ford met the African-American poet Kathleen Tankersley Young in San Antonio at the recommendation of the Greenwich Village publisher Lew Ney, and in February 1929, Ford and Young launched their own magazine Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms, intending it to serve in part as a successor to Pound’s The Exile, which had discontinued publication late in 1928.

For the seventh issue of Blues, Ford added the New York-based poet Parker Tyler to the editorial masthead as an additional associate editor. Prior to the publication of Blues 8 in early 1930, Ford moved to Greenwich Village and took on Lew Ney as the magazine’s publisher and patron. Ford and Tyler stopped publishing Blues after its ninth issue later that year, and began work on The Young and the Evil, a loosely-veiled autobiographical novel written in alternating chapters depicting the lives of Karel (based on Parker Tyler) and Julian (based on Charles Henri Ford) two unabashedly gay men living in Greenwich Village in the early 1930s.

The manuscript had already been rejected by several American and English publishers by April 1931, when Ford sailed to France and joined Gertrude Stein’s salon. Stein liked both Ford and his writing, and passed his novel on to her powerful literary agent William A. Bradley, who arranged for the book to be published by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press in Paris in August 1933 with admiring blurbs from Stein and Djuna Barnes. Because of its frank description of homosexuality, however, the book was banned or suppressed in both the United States and Britain, and did not appear in an American edition until 1975 and in England until 1989.

While in Europe, Ford developed an intimate relationship with the writer Djuna Barnes, traveling with her to Vienna in late 1931 and inviting her to join him in the summer of 1932 while he was in Tangier visiting the writer Paul Bowles. Barnes did so, and Ford typed a portion of Barnes’ important lesbian novel Nightwood during their time together in Morocco. Upon their return to Paris from Morocco, Barnes introduced Ford to the Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and the two men began an increasingly intimate relationship, though not without incurring considerable fallout from within their bohemian circle.¹¹²According to Karen Rood, Tchelitchew had been in a relationship with the American musician Allen Tanner for several years, and was both beloved by Edith Sitwell and disliked by Gertrude Stein. When Ford and Tchelitchew coupled, both Sitwell and Stein ejected the pair from their circles. While Sitwell eventually warmed to Ford and returned the pair to her good graces, Stein never forgave either man. Ford and Tchelitchew spent time in both England and Spain in 1934 before returning to the United States, where for the next two decades they split time between New York City, Weston, Connecticut, and Derby Hill, Tchelitchew’s summer home near Pawlet, Vermont (though they continued to make regular trips to Europe in peacetime years).

Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Ford continued to publish poetry in a series of mostly European little magazines, including the transition, Harold Salemson’s Tambour, Samuel Putnam’s The New Review, and Norman Macleod’s Front; he also had four poems included in Americans Abroad, Peter Neagoe’s 1932 anthology of expatriate writing. After returning to the United States in 1934, Ford published two poetry collections that decade: A Pamphlet of Sonnets (1936), published by Caravel Press and The Garden of Disorder (1938), published with James Laughlin’s New Directions publishing company. Though Ford had a sustained interest in surrealism that differentiated him stylistically from the “Objectivists,” William Carlos Williams wrote in his introduction to The Garden of Disorder that the effect of Ford’s “particularly hard, dreamlike poetry … is to revive the senses and force them to re-see, re-hear, re-taste, re-smell, and generally re-value all that it was believed had been seen, heard, smelled, and generally valued. By this means poetry has always in the past put a finger upon reality,” offering some insight as to why Williams, Zukofsky and other “Objectivists”, with their emphasis on sensual intelligence, might have valued or been interested in Ford’s work.¹¹³Williams, “The Tortuous Straightness of Charles Henri Ford,” introduction to The Garden of Disorder and Other Poems.

In 1940, Ford published ABCs, a 26-quatrain abecedarian with the Press of James A. Decker; Robert Lowry and James Flora’s Little Man Press published his collection The Overturned Lake the following year. In 1940, Ford also began editing and publishing an arts periodical which he called View, initially describing it as a “newspaper for poets.” In April 1942, Ford altered the magazine’s format to allow for the reproduction of artwork, and continued the publish View at great cost and with contributions from a dizzying range of international contributors until Fall 1947, when Ford cut his mounting losses and suspend the magazine. Between 1945 and 1946, Ford also published four books under the View Editions imprint: including Eduoard Roditi’s translations of André Breton’s poetry, a collection of poems by Edith Sitwell, his own collection Poems for Painters and a collection of stories A Night with Jupiter & Other Fantastic Stories, which Ford selected and edited. In 1947, Ford published his long poem “The Half-Thoughts, the Distances of Pain” as a pamphlet, and New Directions brought out a selected volume, Sleep in a Nest of Flame in 1949. His 1972 collection, Flag of Ecstasy, published by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press, also included a number of previously uncollected poems Ford had written for little magazines in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1952, Ford and Tchelitchew moved to Italy, where Ford became increasingly involved with the visual arts, especially painting and photography; Ford’s biographer Karen Rood suggests that “by 1954 he had virtually abandoned written poetry.”¹¹⁴DLB, Volume 48, edited by Peter Quartermain, 204. Ford held the first exhibition of his photographs in London in 1955 and staged the first one-man show of his artwork in Paris in 1956. Tchelitchew died in Rome in 1957, and Ford continued making and exhibiting his art in Paris for until 1962, when he returned to New York City and became involved with many of the pop artists and avant-garde filmmakers then working in the city. In 1966, Ford published a large-format limited edition of Spare Parts a collage-inspired artist’s book, which he had published by Vassily Papachrysanthou in Athens, Greece. In 1968, Ford published Silver Flower Coo another collage-inspired, though less lavishly produced, book of what he called “paste-up poems.” He also made two films, Poem Posters, a short documentary detailing the staging of one of his art exhibitions, and Johnny Minotaur, a sexually adventurous feature film, which he shot in Crete in 1969 and premiered in New York in 1971, and staged a series of art and photographic exhibitions in New York City over the next decade.

In 1972, Ford traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal, a place which would exert a profound influence on his art and writing. While in Nepal, Ford formed a long-lasting and significant relationship with Indra Tamang, a local teenager that he initially hired as a household assistant but who eventually became a member of his household as well as a frequent artistic collaborator.¹¹⁵Tamang received a fair amount of attention from New York tabloids as the “Tibetan butler” who served as the caretaker for Charles and his sister Ruth in their final years and then inherited their multimillion dollar estate upon Ruth’s death in 2009. His experiences in Nepal also provided much of the impetus for his long-poem “Om Krishna,” published in three volumes between 1972 and 1982, as well as two Handshakes from Heaven collections, published with photographs by Tamang and collages by Reepak Shakya.

In 1986, Ford published the poetry collection, Emblems of Arachne and in 1989, he published a special tenth issue of Blues, nearly sixty years after the ninth issued had appeared. In 1990, City Lights Books published his Out of the Labyrinth: Selected Poems. In 1992, Ford published View: Parade of the Avant-garde, an anthology of work that had he had published between 1940-1947 in View magazine, and he published Water From a Bucket: a Diary, 1948-1957 in 2001.

Ford died aged 94, in New York City on September 27, 2002, and is buried in Brookhaven, Mississippi, next to his parents and sister Ruth. In 2017, Bloomsbury published the Australian scholar Alexander Howard’s Charles Henri Ford: Between Modernism and Postmodernism, a study of Ford’s life and work. The bulk of Ford’s papers are held by Yale’s Beinecke library, the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas and by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Samuel Putnam, “The Horses of Her Hair” in “Symposium”

Erle Samuel Putnam was born on October 10, 1888 in Rossville, Illinois, a small town about 120 miles south of Chicago, to George B. Putnam, who descended from English immigrants to the Virginia colonies in the 1640s, and Edith Cook. As a young child, Putnam showed an early interest in languages, travel, and global culture that far outstripped what was on offer in his small prairie hometown. After graduating from high school in Rossville, Putnam left home to attend the University of Chicago, where he recalled reading George Bernard Shaw’s play “The Devil’s Disciple” with noted literature professor Percy Holmes Boynton, studying Marx’ Das Kapital in the original German with a Russian graduate student, and taking courses from Robert Morss Lovett, who would later prove to be a formative influence in shaping the poetic aspirations of a young Carl Rakosi.

Putnam left school before earning a degree, sharing a room in the Grant Park Hotel with Daniel Reed, then a young actor just developing his one-man play based on Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. He was, at this time, pursuing his own career as a journalist, and eventually became a full-time reporter for the Chicago Evening Post, writing art and literary criticism under the direction of C. J. Bulliet, the editor of the paper’s art magazine, and Llewellyn Jones, the paper’s literary editor.

In 1922, Harold Auer came to Chicago from Detroit to start the literary review Youth. Putnam became its editor, and published writing by Emanuel Carnevali, Ben Hecht, Oscar Williams, and Mark Turbyfill, among others, during its short run. In his memoir Paris Was Our Mistress, Putnam wrote that Youth “died from lack of funds and its place was taken by Prairie. This time the moving spirit was Samuel Pessin of Milwaukee, later to be known as Lawrence Drake, the novelist. … Once more I found myself an editor, and once again it was not for long.”¹¹⁶Paris Was Our Mistress, 40. In 1925, Putnam married Riva Lillian Sampson, who had been born on November 29, 1893 to Michael and Toby Sampson, Lithuanian Jews who had immigrated to Chicago from Manchester, England. In 1926, Putnam, who had gained some notoriety for his opinionated reviews for the Evening Post, was asked by the prominent Baltimore-based journalist H.L. Mencken to write a takedown piece on the literary scene in Chicago for Mencken’s popular magazine The American Mercury. According to Putnam:

When my article finally appeared in the August 1926 Mercury, it bore the starting caption: “Chicago: An Obituary.” The effect was instantaneous and bordered on riot. I was assailed by columnists and literary organizations all over town. … In short, it looked as if I had been started on a career as a “debunker,” a role which, soberly, I did not fancy. … It was about this time that Henry Blake Fuller came walking into the editorial room of the Evening Post one afternoon [and advised him]: Go to Paris, young man, go to Paris. You may have to come back as I did, but at least …¹¹⁷Paris Was Our Mistress, 46-47.

Despite their having an infant son as this time, the Putnams had mulling over making the voyage to Europe for some time.¹¹⁸Their son, Hilary Whitehall Putnam, was born on July 31, 1926. He would go on to become a prominent analytic philosopher, retiring as an emeritus professor at Harvard University in 2000, and dying in March 2016. By early 1927, Putnam had also begun publishing literary translations, and these had brought him to the attention of the Chicago-based publisher Pascal Covici, who commissioned him to translate the 16th century Italian writer Pietro Aretino and J.K. Huysmans’ 1882 novella À vau-l’eau. The income Putnam received for these translations allowed him to give up his job writing for the Evening Post, and when Covici learned that Putnam was working on a translation of Rabelais but “needed to spend some time in France for study and research,” Putnam relates that Covici told him: “Go home, tell your wife to pack up the baby and a few other things, and start looking up boat schedules. … Never mind how. I’ll see that you don’t starve.”¹¹⁹Paris Was Our Mistress, 48. With Covici’s assurances, the Putnams boarded a ship to France, where “with an eight-months-old son and a spirit lamp for preparing the baby’s formula … we were to go from country to country, nine of them in all, living in cheap pensions and traveling third class.”¹²⁰Paris Was Our Mistress, 48

For most of the next several years until their return to New York in May 1933, the Putnams made their home in Paris, living on the left bank and involving themselves in the literary and artistic communities active in Montparnasse, which featured no small number of expatriate Americans.¹²¹Putnam would write in his memoirs: “[I]t was Paris that was our home. It was to Paris that, sooner or later, we never failed to return” (Paris Was Our Mistress, 48). In Paris, Putnam continued his work as a translator, publishing his translation of Rabelais in 1929 and working as the European representative for Covici-Friede, the publishing house founded in New York in 1928, by Pascal Covici and Donald Friede, previously of the Boni & Liveright house. It was Putnam who helped Pound find, in Covici, an American publisher and distributor for his magazine The Exile after custom troubles had plagued first issue, which Pound had printed in Dijon, France.

While in Paris, Putnam also became involved with the little magazine This Quarter after it came under the control of the American expatriate writer, bookshop owner, and publisher Edward Titus in 1929. Titus had married the wealthy cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubenstein in 1909 and founded the bookshop At the Sign of the Black Manikin in Paris in 1924. He also founded the Black Manikin Press in 1926, and the press published more than two dozen titles before it folded in 1932, along with This Quarter, Titus’ magazine. Putnam had previously worked with Titus as the translator of the sensational memoirs of the French model and artist Alice Prin (Kiki de Montparnasse), which Titus had published under the Black Manikin Press imprint in 1930. Putnam and his wealthy patron did not agree on much regarding their editorial tastes, and while Putnam was proud of his having occasioned the publication of James Farrell’s first “Young Lonigan” stories, Putnam and Titus parted company by the Fall of 1930.

Putnam left This Quarter to start a magazine of his own, the New Review, with Ezra Pound as his associate editor. He was also involved, through much of 1930 and 1931 in compiling and editing work to be included in European Caravan, an ambitious “critical anthology of the new spirit in European literature,” the first volume of which was published in New York in 1931 and devoted nearly 600 pages to recent developments in France, Spain, England, and Ireland. Planned future volumes to other literary developments elsewhere in Europe were never published.

Putnam’s relationship with Pound on the New Review lasted just a few issues, and the magazine folded in 1932 after publishing just five issues, with financial pressures making publication somewhat irregular. While publishing the New Review, the Putnams moved to the small French village of Mirmande, where an artist’s colony had been set up, largely at the instigation of the French painter André Lhote.¹²²Mirmande was also home during this time several other notable figures: the art critic Pierre Courthion; the American painter Lewis Stone and his wife Caroline; Putnam’s co-publisher of the New Review (for its final two issues) Peter Neagoe, and his wife Ann; and Afro-Caribbean writer Eric Walrond. It was just 35 kilometers north east of Alba-la-Romaine, a similar colony which included Jesse Loewenthal and Carmen Herrera during the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Of their time at Mirmande, Putnam recalled:

My own house … was a pre-Renaissance structure some centuries old; and as I settled down in it, I thought that here at last was my pied-a-terre; here was where I would sink my roots. In a place like this, far from America and its skyscrapers, far from Montparnasse, one could really think things out, keep his clarity and his balance, milk his goats of an evening, and be at peace. … My semi-medieval retreat, my “isolation,” was as false as the man-made “ruins” about me. … it was no longer so easy to make a living, if one had to earn his way as I did. We nevertheless stayed on for a year or so, until one day a New York publisher cabled me asking if I could translate a certain book in a month’s time. The fee was five hundred dollars, and something told me that this was the last job I would be having; so I accepted it. It was the hardest month’s work I ever did in my life. The moment the five hundred dollars was cabled me, I left half of it with my family and took the remaining two hundred and fifty dollars and started for New York via Paris, with one last night in the Quarter of which I remember absolutely nothing except that everybody I ever knew, it seemed, was there. … I was feeling decidedly tearful, in a self-pitying mood, but New York soon cured me of that. I had expected to find “hard times”; I had been back in these summer of 1931 and things were bad enough then; but I was wholly unprepared for what I found now: writers all around me, and some of the best of them (including one or two of America’s well-known poets) on home relief, starving, organizing, demonstrating. Jobs were unheard-of things, publishers had cut their lists to the bone, and nobody wanted the services of a translator. Fortunately, I had my newspaper experience to fall back upon, and through the kind offices of my friend George Britt of the World-Telegram, who procured me a temporary place on the rewrite desk, and of J. G. Grey, literary editor of the Sun, who gave me book reviews to do, I contrived to hold on until I had succeeded in persuading another friend, publicity agent for a steamship line, to advance me homeward passage for my wife and child. In this manner I managed to get us all back once more on American soil.¹²³Paris Was Our Mistress, 251.

Immigration card issued to Riva Putnam for her 1946 trip to Brazil.

Immigration card issued to Samuel Putnam for his 1946 trip to Brazil.

Following their return to the United States in 1933, the Putnams moved around the eastern United States before settling in Philadelphia in 1936, which they would make their home for most of the next decade, except for two years Putnam spent receiving treatment for tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York, which concluded with the surgical collapse of one of his lungs. Putnam, who had been largely apolitical up to this point in his life, also joined the Communist Party around this time, contributing frequently to leftist magazines like the Partisan Review, the New Masses, and The Daily Worker through the end of the Second World War, when he became disillusioned by Stalinist purges and quit the party in 1945 and focused his energies on his growing interest in Latin American and Spanish literature.

During their years in Philadelphia, Putnam continued to work on literary translations, with the University of Chicago Press publishing his translation of Euclides da Cunha’s enormous novel Os Sertões in 1944 as Rebellion in the Backlands and Viking Press publishing his very highly regarded translation of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote in 1949 after more than a dozen years of labor. In May 1946, while living in Gary, Indiana, the Putnam’s received temporary immigration cards to visit Brazil, returning to the United States by ship from Buenos Aires in October 1946. In 1947, they left their home at 3225 Powelton Avenue in Philadelphia and moved to the nearby countryside. In June 1948, Putnam published Marvelous Journey, a survey of four centuries of Brazilian literature, with A. A. Knopf. Putnam died January 15, 1950 in Lambertville, New Jersey and was buried in Rossville, Illinois. Riva died December 27, 1979 in Arlington/Middlesex, Massachusetts. Putnam’s papers are now held by Southern Illinois University in Carbondale: https://archives.lib.siu.edu/?p=collections/findingaid&id=2089&q=&rootcontentid=24917 and his correspondence from the New Review is at Princeton University: https://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/C0111.

Rene Taupin, “3 Poems by Andre Salmon” (prose, translated from the French by Louis Zukofsky)

René Taupin was born in France in 1905 and moved to the United States in the 1920s, where he took a teaching position as a professor of literature at Columbia University, publishing L’Influence du symbolism francais sur la poesie Americaine (de 1910 a 1920) (The Influence of French Symbolism on American Poetry (from 1910 to 1920) in 1929. An English translation of the book by William Pratt and Anne Rich was published by AMS Press in 1985.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s Taupin and Zukofsky were very close friends, and Zukofsky corresponded intensely with Taupin throughout his year at Madison, with Zukofsky’s planned issue of Poetry magazine and their coordination of separate Guggenheim Foundation grant applications frequent topics of discussion in their letters. While neither of their Guggenheim applications proved successful that year, Zukofsky had enlisted Taupin’s help in paring down and arranging a large manuscript of Zukofsky’s short poems to include with his application. In a letter dated August 23, 1930, Zukofsky told Taupin he was sending 161 poems and asked him to “please select no more than 50” and to “tear them out of their clasps, clips, groups, and arrange them in any order that he deems most fitting for consumption. … Repeat: Clip these 50 together in delectable order as would make a ‘smooth’ volume.”¹²⁴Zukofsky to Taupin, August 23, 1930, Taupin MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University.

The manuscript appears to have been lost in the post for some time, but Taupin eventually received it and complied with the request, returning a typed and reordered selection of Zukofsky’s short poems sometime in late October or early November. On November 7, Zukofsky wrote Taupin exuberantly:

Only one copy of the short poems & The? Have you one carbon or two? Keep one, of course. And please send me bill (may have to keep you waiting, but send it, anyway). Typographical errors of course, but splendid I suppose as these things go — And as for your arrangement, it’s simply marvelous: the uniform calibre of the stuff in each section! The first section is an arrangement of extraordinary judgment. How you could see a tendency is beyond me, but to relate all that formal stuff so that it all seems one is, well—genius. The stuff gains 1000% by your arrangement. Uncanny also how you grouped poems of an autobiographical nature without really knowing anything about the facts. Did a woman’s intuition help you? Well, it’s grand—that’s all!!”¹²⁵Zukofsky to Taupin, November 7, 1930, Taupin MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University.

Zukofsky included his own translation of Taupin’s essay on the “nominalistic poetry” of the French poet André Salmon in the prose section of the “OBJECTIVISTS” issue of Poetry.

After Zukofsky and Salmon received the disappointing news early in 1931 that their Guggenheim applications had each been unsuccessful, they began planning further writing and translating collaborations, the most fruitful of which eventually became Taupin’s book The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire/Le Style Apollinaire.¹²⁶Of this project, Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas has written: “LZ appears to have worked on this book during the latter part of 1931, after returning to NYC from his short academic year at the University of Wisconsin, and finished it on 16 April 1932. Two of the three parts of the work were published in The Westminster Magazine 22.4 (Winter 1933) and 23.1 (Spring 1934)—excluding “Part II—Le Poète Ressuscité,” which consists entirely of quotations from throughout Apollinaire’s works. René Taupin’s French translation of the complete work was published as Le Style Apollinaire (Paris: Les Presses Modernes, 1934), but apparently soon after most of the copies were destroyed in a warehouse fire” (http://www.z-site.net/notes-to-prose/the-writing-of-gauillaume-apollinairele-style-apollinaire-1934/).

Taupin briefly left New York City to take a teaching position at Haverford College, before returning later in the 1930s to fill a position at Hunter College, where he was appointed chair of the Department of Romance Languages in 1954. In 1968, Taupin retired and moved with his wife Sidonia to Paris, where Taupin died on February 13, 1981.

Almost Contributors

In the magazine’s small print, Zukofsky also included the following editorial note:

A poem by Horace Gregory, arriving too late to be included this month, will appear in a later issue. The editor regrets the delay; also the limitation of page-space which prevent his presenting contributions by Helene Margaret, Herman Spector, John W. Gassner, William Lubov, B.J. Israel, Chrystie Streeter, Sherry Mangan, Donal McKenzie, and Jerry Reisman. The editor also regrets the omission of a blank page representing Ezra Pound’s contribution to this issue—a page reserved for him as an indication of his belief that a country tolerating outrages like article 211 of the U.S. Penal Code, publishers’ “overhead,” and other impediments to literary life, “does not deserve to have any literature whatsoever.” Mr. Pound gave over to younger poets the space offered him.

Gregory’s poem, “A Tombstone with Cherubim,” appeared in the March 1931 issue. Gregory (1898-1982) had attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he married the Ukrainian-born poet Marya Zaturenska and was a peripheral member of the circle which included Carl Rakosi, Kenneth Fearing, Margery Latimer, and Leon Serabian Herald. Gregory went on to be a prominent literary critic and longtime English professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

Spector (1905-1959) was a prominent left-wing poet and radical activist then living in New York City. He was a friend of Pound’s and Roskolenko’s poetic mentor. Much of his writing was collected in Bastard in the Ragged Suit, published in 1977 by Synergistic Press.

Gassner (1903-1967) was a Hungarian-born friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia, and later went on to be a prominent historian of the dramatic arts. His papers, like Zukofsky’s, are now held by the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

I have not been able to discover any firm biographical detail on William Lubov. The surname Lubov resembles the Russian noun любо́вь (meaning love or affection), which is sometimes transliterated Lyubov, Ljubov, or Lubow.

Boris J. Israel (1910-1943) was born on February 8, 1910 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania to Theodore Israel, a clothing merchant, and Rhea Kobecher, both of whom were Jewish immigrants from Poland. Israel grew up in New York City, and attended Ohio State University, where he founded the short-lived literary magazine Nativity in 1930.¹²⁷The 1930 census shows the Israel family as living at 337 Beach 69th Street in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens. Israel left school after two years and joined the Communist Party in 1932, working as a journalist for the Federated Press and New Masses and party organizer. He was involved in investigating racial terror and mining labor disputes in Harlan, Kentucky, where he was shot in the leg, and later travelled to Memphis on behalf of the International Labor Defense after six white police officers murdered an unarmed African-American in the city, but was arrested, charged with sedition, and essentially run out of town. ¹²⁸See Michael Honey’s Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Labor in Memphis, 56. https://books.google.com/books?id=rdkM1m6MZLgC&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=%22boris+israel%22+ohio+state&source=bl&ots=J2tyZJ9hun&sig=NoFPiO922fbNs_X17CFFD-TwEtU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwih942Q2MfaAhVDwYMKHegWCnAQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=%22boris%20israel%22%20ohio%20state&f=false + https://books.google.com/books?id=bHc44CrYKccC&pg=PA203&lpg=PA203&dq=%22Boris+Israel%22+writer&source=bl&ots=ez8vfDTO_W&sig=PjSO1t9FaF1QKkU1gZcBttylX0Y&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjP8NC3ssfaAhUB4IMKHcjaDB0Q6AEIRDAH#v=onepage&q=%22Boris%20Israel%22%20writer&f=false In 1937, Israel was back in New York City, living at a Gramercy Park address from which he received a passport for foreign travel under the name Blaine Owen. In May 1937, he left for Spain to fight with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. While in Spain, he served as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was later reported missing in action. He survived the war, however, returning to New York City (as Blaine Owen) in February 1939, and subsequently moving to Los Angeles, where the 1940 census records him as living with his widowed mother. Israel died in Los Angeles on December 12, 1943.¹²⁹The 1940 census shows him as living with his widowed mother Rhea at 210 South Fuller Street in Los Angeles: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GRZ1-Q1S?i=32&cc=1810731. Owen, Blaine. (Israel, Boris; Caldwell, Peter; Latimer, Mallory, Jim),  b. February 8, 1910, McKeesport, Pennsylvania; College 2 years; ROTC 2 years; Married, Journalist, CP 1932, member org. dept.; received passport# 424314 on May 25, 1937 which listed his address as 131 East 18^th Street, NYC; Sailed May 29, 1937 aboard the Britannic; Served with the XV BDE, MacKenzie-Papineau BN in training.  To Lincoln-Washington BN, Secretary Co. 1.  Served at Quinto and Belchite, Lincoln-Washington BN, rank Soldado, reported MIA Retreats with note “al hosp. enfermo cerca Barcelona.” http://www.alba-valb.org/volunteers/blaine-owen.(his passport’s address was 131 East 18th St NYC)

Chrystie Streeter was a pun slipped in by Zukofsky, who was born and raised at 97 Chrystie Street on New York City’s Lower East Side, just a few blocks from what is now the site of Manhattan’s Tenement Museum.

Mangan (1904-1961) was a Harvard-educated friend of Richard Johns who had previously published his own magazine larus, and who published poetry and criticism in a number of “Objectivist”-affiliated little magazines. He was the subject, along with John Wheelwright, of Alan Wald’s excellent 1983 book The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan. His papers are held at Harvard, Syracuse, and Kent State.

McKenzie was the European editor of both the fifth issue of Norman Macleod’s Morada and his subsequent Front. In the lead-up to the publication of the issue Pound had made several unheeded suggestions to Monroe that she “temper” Zukofsky’s editorial control over the issue by pairing him with McKenzie.

Reisman was a student of Zukofsky’s at Stuyvesant High School and is treated at greater length in the section on An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, to which he contributed, as a collaborator with Zukofsky.

Writers Published in An “Objectivists” Anthology

An “Objectivists” Anthology contained work by 15 writers, eight of whom had also been included in the ‘Objectivists’ 1931 issue of Poetry the year before. The most notable inclusions to the anthology were T.S. Eliot, whose poem “Marina” Zukofsky particularly admired, and Ezra Pound, who refused Zukofsky’s requests to contribute a Canto but did give Zukofsky two short lyrics, one of which, “Gentle Jheezus sleek and wild,” reads as both aggressively racist and anti-Semitic. In addition to some 200 pages of poetry, the anthology included “Recencies in Poetry,” a talk Zukofsky had given at the Gotham Book Mart in August 1931 to clarify his editorial statements in the February 1931 issue of Poetry as its preface, and reprinted Zukofsky’s “Program ‘Objectivists’ 1931” from Poetry as the book’s appendix.¹³⁰The full table of contents of the anthology can be found at Z-Site: http://www.z-site.net/biblio-research/the-objectivists-and-their-publications/.

Louis Zukofsky

Also included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry.

Basil Bunting

Also included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry.

Mary Butts

Mary Francis Butts (1890-1937) was an English modernist writer who was well-known to Ezra Pound and had previously been married to the poet and publisher John Rodker. Butts was born on December 13, 1890 in Poole, a large seaport in Dorset on the southern coast of England, the oldest of two children born to Frederick John Butts, a military office, and Mary Jane Briggs.

Following her father’s death in 1905, Butts was sent to boarding school, and her mother remarried in 1907. From 1909 to 1912 Butts studied at London’s Westfield College but left before taking a degree, completing her undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics in 1914. In 1916, she began keeping a diary, which she would maintain more or less continuously until her death in 1937, more than 20 years later.

In May 1918, Butts left a lesbian relationship to marry the pacifist poet John Rodker, and helped Rodker found his Ovid Press in 1919. The press lasted less than year, but published poetry by the American expatriates T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as well as drawings by Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Rodker succeeded Pound as the foreign editor of The Little Review in 1920. In November 1920, Butts gave birth to their daughter, Camilla Elizabeth, and the couple spent parts of the early 1920s living among other writers and artists in Paris. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, Butts began an affair with the Scottish artist Cecil Maitland, and appears to have developed a drug addiction while on an extended stay at Aleister Crowley’s utopian Abbey of Thelema on Sicily. In 1927, Butts and Rodker divorced, and Butts married Gabriel Aitken in 1930.

Butts published fiction regularly throughout the 1920s, with stories frequently appearing in prominent literary magazines like The Little Review and The Dial. In 1923, Chapman & Hall printed her short story collection Speed the Plough and other stories in London, which was followed by her novel Ashe of Rings, printed in Maurice Darantière in Dijon as a joint project by Robert McAlmon’s Contact editions and Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press (it was printed in the United States by Albert & Charles Boni in 1926, and a revised English edition was printed by Wishart & Company in London in 1933); Armed with Madness (published in 1928 by Albert & Charles Boni in the United States and Wishart & Company in England); Imaginary Letters, published with line drawings by Jean Cocteau in Paris in 1928 by Edward Titus, the proprietor of the bookshop At The Sign of the Black Manikin. In 1932, she published four new books, Death of Felicity Taverner, a novel published by Wishart & Company in London; Several Occasions, a new collection of stories and Warning to Hikers a short pamphlet (also published by Wishart); the short prose essay Traps for Unbelievers published by Desmond Harmsworth in London. She then wrote two historical novels about significant figures from antiquity which were published by William Heinemann in London: The Macedonian, a study of Alexander the Great (1933), and Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (1935). She was working on an unfinished novel based on the life of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate at the time of her death, in 1937, after a surgery to repair a perforated gastric ulcer.

Shortly after Butts’ death, a memoir of her childhood, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns was published by Metheun and Company in London, and Brendin Publishing Company brought out a final collection of her stories, entitled Last Stories in 1938. Over the past few decades, much of Butts’ oeuvre has been brought back into print in England and the United States, culminating with the publication of her journals, edited and annotated by Nathalie Blondel, by Yale University Press in 2008, and the 2014 publication of Mary Butts: The Complete Stories edited by Bruce McPherson. Good resources on Butts’ life and work include A Sacred Quest: the Life and Writings of Mary Butts (edited by Christopher Wagstaff and published in 1995) and Nathalie Blondel’s 1998 biography Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life, both of which were published by McPherson and Company. Butts’ papers are now held by Yale’s Beinecke Library.

Frances Fletcher

Frances Sarah Fletcher was born in Bridport, Vermont on May 20, 1894 to James H. Fletcher, a merchant, and Anna Bells. Fletcher graduated from Vassar College in 1914, after which time she worked as a teacher and translator for the banking industry.

Fletcher published two slim volumes of poetry in Philadelphia in the mid 1920s: The Banquet and Other Poems (1925) and A Boat of Glass (1926) and began corresponding with Zukofsky sometime before the end of 1931, probably after reading the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry. Zukofsky submitted her short story “Being Exclusive” to Williams for consideration for Contact, and while Williams told Zukofsky in a January 22, 1932 letter that he was keeping it for the magazine, it did not appear in any of Contact‘s three issues. In May 1934, Fletcher was living in Chatham, Virginia, where a local newspaper noted that a literary society held a farewell meeting in honor of her impending move to Staunton, a town 120 miles north near Shenandoah National Park.

In 1935, Fletcher married Spahr Hourlland, a construction engineer for a retail department store who had served as a Captain in the United States Army during the First World War, and changed her name to Frances Hourlland. By 1940, the couple had moved to Los Angeles. Spahr died on October 22, 1954 in Sacramento, California.

Following her husband’s death, Frances returned to Holliston, Massachusetts, near Boston, where she lived until her own death in February 1978. Some of Fletcher’s work was published under the pseudonym Anne Woodbridge. Many of her papers are now held by Bowdoin College, including letters from Marianne Moore which span nearly thirty years (1939-1968).

Robert McAlmon

Also included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry.

George Oppen

Also included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry.

Ezra Pound

So well-known as to need no introduction here.

Carl Rakosi

Also included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry.

Kenneth Rexroth

Also included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry.

Charles Reznikoff

Also included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry.

William Carlos Williams

Also included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry.

Forrest Anderson

Forrest Clayton Anderson was born on August 9, 1903. About his early life or college experiences, I have been unable to discover much, but it appears that Anderson published his first poem, “S2,” in the Fall 1929 issue of Charles Henri Ford’s magazine Blues. Anderson would go on to publish work in each of the magazine’s final three issues, where they appeared along with work from other “Objectivists” Rexroth, Williams, and Zukofsky. Between 1929 and 1931, Anderson and Richard Johns corresponded frequently, and Anderson published work during those years in Johns’ magazine Pagany, Samuel Putnam’s The New Review, and Eugene and Maria Jolas’ transition.¹³¹Anderson’s “Sonnet” appeared in the inaugural issue of Pagany alongside work by Mary Butts, McAlmon, Rexroth, Williams, and Zukofsky. Anderson’s “Hotel for Sailors” appears in the third issue of Pagany along with work by Zukofsky, Reznikoff, McAlmon, and Emanuel Carnevali, and two poems by Anderson were featured in the Autumn 1931 issue along with work by Butts, Carnevali, McAlmon, Rakosi, Williams, and Zukofsky. Anderson had work published in two issues of The New Review: the third issue included his poem “Esthetic for Sunday Afternoon” and the fourth issue contained his poem “More Hominem” as well as a notice that his “American Letter” (presumably correspondence) would appear in the fifth issue, though nothing under Anderson’s byline ultimately appeared in the magazine’s final issue.

Following his appearance in the “Objectivist” anthology, Anderson’s trail becomes more difficult to follow. It appears that signed on to the U.S. Naval vessel Benjamin H. Brewster while it was in port in New York City in December 1944, and later settled in San Francisco, where he developed a reputation as a “sailor-poet,” publishing sea-themed poetry in the fourth issue of George Leite’s important Berkeley-based literary magazine Circle in 1944, several issues of ONE: The Homosexual Magazine, the first openly gay or lesbian national publication in the United States, between 1954 and 1962, and in two issues (1960 and 1966) of the little magazine Poetry Score, published out of Carmel, California.

Over the course of his lifetime, Anderson published several collections of poetry, many of which deal with marine or homoerotic themes; these included: Sea Pieces and Other Poems (1935),¹³²Sea Pieces received a brief review in the April 1936 issue of Poetry from Howard Nutt, who described the collection as twenty years behind its time and indebted to the work of E. E. Cummings and Hart Crane. Further Sea Pieces (1945), Circumnavigation of the Halo of a World (1951), In the Forests of Hell and of Heaven (a long prose poem in nine sequences published in 1958), Toward Other Shores (1961), and Portlights (1972). Anderson’s poetry was included in Stephen Coote’s Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983). Anderson died on April 16, 1977 in Josephine, Oregon. A collection of his publications along with some letters are now held at the University of Idaho.

T.S. Eliot

So well-known as to need no introduction here. Zukofsky included his poem “Marina.”

R.B.N. Warriston

Apart from the fact that he lived in the early 1930s in White Plains, New York, I’ve been able to discover little tangible evidence about Warriston. In addition to his inclusion in An “Objectivists” Anthology, Warriston published work in the early 1930s in both Pagany and Poetry.¹³³His poem “Sea Gulls” appeared in the Summer 1931 issue of Pagany along with work by Rakosi, Reznikoff, McAlmon, Zukofsky, Williams, and Howard Weeks, and his “Herald-Tribune Acme” in the Winter 1932 issue next to work by McAlmon, Rakosi, and Frances Fletcher. His poem “Sanctuary” appeared in the July 1933 issue of Poetry.

Because Warriston is such an unusual surname in the United States, I consider it plausible that Warriston was a pseudonym for someone Zukofsky knew. One intriguing possibility might be someone connected with Gilbert Seldes, the former editor of The Dial, as the 1930 census lists the Seldes household employing a Finnish servant named Mildred Wariston, the only time I could find that surname appearing in the entire census for that year. As far as I can tell from Seldes’ biography, he was living on Madison Avenue during these years, not upstate New York, and I have no other evidence to suggest that he or someone known to him was the author of Warriston’s poems.

Jerry Reisman

Samuel Jerome Reisman was born on December 9, 1913 in New York City. He met Zukofsky in 1929, while he was a student and Zukofsky was a substitute teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York City and is included in An “Objectivists” Anthology as a collaborator with Zukofsky on a short poem. Reisman went on to study physics at the City College of New York in the early 1930s and later worked as an electrical engineer for an aviation firm. He advised Zukofsky on the mathematical portions of Zukofsky’s “A”-8 and “A”-9 and collaborated with Zukofsky on several writing projects, including a never-produced cinematic treatment of James Joyce’s Ulysses that was encouraged at various moments in the early 1930s by both Ezra Pound and Joyce himself.

In September 1936, Reisman and Zukofsky visited Niedecker on Blackhawk Island, and Reisman wrote a detailed account of his friendship with Niedecker and his view of Zukofsky and Niedecker’s relationship in 1991.¹³⁴”Lorine: Some Memories of a Friend,” in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, pp. 35-47. At the conclusion of World War II, Reisman founded Techlit Consultants, a technical writing firm, and employed Zukofsky from March 1946 until January 1947, when Reisman ended his friendship with Zukofsky.¹³⁵See The Poem of a Life, pp. 181-189, 225, 473-475 for Mark Scroggins’ view of the Zukofsky-Reisman friendship, and “On Some Conversations with Celia Zukofsky,” in Sagetrieb 10, no. 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 139-150, for Reisman’s account of his relationship with Louis and Celia. Reisman died on January 1, 2000 in Saratoga, California.