In addition to the cluster of friendships among the various “Objectivist” writers initiated in the mid- to late-1920s and cemented by regular correspondence, the core “Objectivists” were also connected by their longstanding mutual interest in one another’s poetry. Through a series of little magazines, cooperative book publishing ventures, and other schemes, these writers spent considerable time and effort reading, publishing, and reviewing one another’s work, with several members of the group sending each other their new publications for the rest of their lives, in some cases more than fifty years after their initial association.

While the first explicitly “Objectivist” poems as such appeared in the February 1931 issue of Poetry, most of the poets included in that group had already been publishing their writing for some time, usually in some of the era’s many little magazines. In fact, William Carlos Williams, the oldest member of the group by more than a decade, published his first collection, Poems, in 1909, just a year after George Oppen, the youngest core “Objectivist,” was born. Apart from Williams, who published poetry and prose more or less continuously from 1909 until his death in 1963, the remainder of the “Objectivists” had two distinct periods of intense publication activity (from 1928-1935, and from 1959-1978) interrupted by almost 25 years during which some members of the group wrote almost nothing and those who continued writing found it very difficult to have their work published.

While each of the authors featured on this site enjoyed their own rich individual publication history, explored in greater depth on separate pages for each individual writer, this page will detail several of the collaborative publication efforts that various of these “Objectivist” writers participated in during their first period of activity (1928-1935), with a special emphasis placed on the several little magazines, anthologies and publishing cooperatives the “Objectivists” appeared in, edited, published, and financed.

“Objectivist” Publications

The “OBJECTIVISTS” 1931 issue of Poetry magazine

The seeds of what would be published in February 1931 as the “OBJECTIVISTS” 1931 issue of Poetry magazine had their roots in Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound’s correspondence, which began in the summer of 1927 when Zukofsky sent Pound his “Poem Beginning ‘The'” for consideration in Pound’s newly established magazine The Exile. Pound’s favorable response to Zukofsky’s poem and, later to his critical writing (it helped that one of Zukofsky’s essays was an appreciative and perceptive review of Pound’s Cantos), initiated a lively correspondence which intensified and broadened over the next several years as Zukofsky formed his own developing relationships with others in Pound’s circle of American contacts. In December 1929, Zukofsky sent Pound an article he had written on the poetry of Charles Reznikoff (which would later become the “Sincerity and Objectification” essay included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry), few months later, Pound began mentioning Zukofsky’s promise as a critic to Harriet Monroe of Poetry, telling her in March 1930: “I think you miss things. Criterion and H[ound] & Horn both taking on Zukofsky. If you can’t liven up the verse; you cd. at least develop the critical section.”¹University of Chicago Special Collections. On September 26, 1930, Pound told Zukofsky he informed Zukofsky that he had recently gotten around to reading two of Zukofsky’s prose essays, including his piece on Reznikoff and told him “I don’t think either essay any use for Yourup = I think they both (after emendation) ought to appear in Poetry. & will write same to Harriet … today or tomorrow = and if you like will edit the mss when I get back to Rapallo.”²Pound/Zukofsky, 43-44. True to his word, he dashed off a quick letter to Monroe boosting Zukofsky’s critical acumen:

Before leavin’ home yesterday I recd. 2 essays by Zukofsky. You really ought to get his Reznikof [sic]. = He is one of the very few people making any advance in criticism. = he ought to appear regularly in ‘Poetry’ …  A prominent americ. homme de letters came to me last winter saying you had alienated every active poet in the U.S.—one ought not to be left undefended against such remarks. … Zuk has [a] definite critical gift that ought to be used. … You cd. get back into the ring if you wd. print a number containing [Zukofsky’s writing] … Must make one no. of Poet. different from another if you want to preserve life as distinct from mere continuity.³University of Chicago, Special Collections.

In the top left corner of Pound’s letter, Monroe added this brief summary of Pound’s letter: “Sug’d a Zukofsky number.” Shortly thereafter, Monroe took Pound up on his suggestion, writing to Zukofsky in October 13, 1930 and offering Zukofsky editorial control of an upcoming issue of her magazine. In her initial letter to Zukofsky, she emphasized some of her expectations for his editorial practice, telling him “I shall be disappointed, if you haven’t a ‘new group,’ as Ezra said.”⁴University of Chicago Special Collections.

[include some of the waffling and then some of confidence in his establishment of a group] At Pound’s urging, Zukofsky was given editorial power over a single issue of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, and, however awkwardly or unwillingly, used the issue to present “OBJECTIVISTS” 1931, which was published in February 1931. [more on the back story]

On October 14, 1930, shortly after getting the news that he’d be given an issue of Poetry to edit as he saw fit, Zukofsky wrote to his friend Rene Taupin telling him:

I need “book reviews” — I mean we can’t let her contribute any — and yours is the best I can get — So get busy. All material must be in by Dec. 20 — if you’re writing English verse send it on.

I’m afraid The Symposium has accepted the Am. Poetry 1920-1930, but they’re still trying to get me to emend a word here & there — they wanted, to begin with, to omit the Finale on Bill but I said all or nothing —

No compromises with
Louis [signature]

[as a postscript] My “new group” will probably include W.C.W. Rez. myself (maybe) E.E.Cs if I can get him, McAlmon, Geo. Oppen etc — maybe E.P. Know anybody else or can recommend anyone?⁵Taupin MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University.

Within a week, Zukofsky had already formulated the rough contours of the issue, telling Taupin in a letter dated October 20:

Of course, I’ll select — or I’d be truly “couvert.” What I meant was that she’d print what I accept. Like all powerful men, I wanted an assurance of power.

We’ll say:
poetry: “Wms – “Alphabet of the Leaves” / Chas Reznikoff / Geo. Oppen / Rob’t McAlmon / L.Z. (A VII) / Maybe E.P. maybe Cummings / Maybe a half dozen people Pound knows of – / Maybe a half dozen lines by some of my friends
prose: My Rez: Sincerity & Object. which Pound has offered to cut — it will be interesting to see what he does to it / Mr. Yourself – André Salmon / maybe 2 lines by E.P — may ½ word by W.C.W. maybe a punctuation mark by E.E.C.⁶Taupin MSS, Lilly Library, Indiana University

While much has been made over Zukofsky’s reticence to be the standard-bearer of a movement and hemming and hawing over whether he had the “new group” Monroe was expecting, these very early letters to Taupin make visible how quickly Zukofsky had already formed a sense of the issue’s core contributors. Before he received the first of many advisory letters from Pound, Zukofsky already seemed confident that he wanted his issue to contain poetry Williams, Reznikoff, Oppen, McAlmon, and Zukofsky, plus work by Pound and Cummings if he could get it, along with a handful of contributions from people “Pound knows of” and work by “some of my friends.” This is more or less exactly what the issue ended up including, with Carl Rakosi, Howard Weeks, Basil Bunting, Norman Macleod, Emanuel Carnevali, Parker Tyler, Charles Henri Ford and Samuel Putnam comprising the former group and Joyce Hopkins/Irving Kaplan, Ted Hecht, Whittaker Chambers, Henry Zolinsky, Jesse Loewenthal, Martha Champion, and Taupin himself constituting the latter.

Of the four remaining writers to appear in the “Objectivists” issue, three of them: Kenneth Rexroth, Harry Roskolenko, and Richard Johns, were known to Zukofsky through their publication alongside him in Blues, the magazine Charles Henri Ford and Kathleen Tankersley Young had founded to continue the work of Pound’s The Exile. The only exception to this configuration was John Brooks Wheelwright, whose work Zukofsky had presumably read in Hound & Horn, and whose interest in Henry Adams, socialism, and revitalizing traditional forms likely all sounded sympathetic chords in Zukofsky.

This point is made explicit in a later letter from Zukofsky to Monroe, in which he reassured her

I shall probably—in fact, most certainly,—have more of a group than I thought. The contributions I have already—McAlmon, Rakosi, T.S. Hecht, Oppen, Williams, my own—tho never talked over by us together, go together. The Rakosi I received yesterday is excellent – the man has genius (I say that rarely) and he says he stopped writing five years ago—a curious case.⁷University of Chicago Special Collections.

These letters also help establish Zukofsky’s editorial independence from his mentor and benefactor. Pound’s editorial advice, crucially, didn’t begin to arrive until later in October. On October 24, Pound wrote to announce he had received the news from Monroe and to offer Zukofsky the beginning of what would be a torrential stream of advice as Zukofsky’s self-appointed “venerabilis parens”:

Wonners will neuHH cease. I have just recd. nooz from Harriet that she is puttin you at the wheel for the Spring cruise. … At any rate since it was a letter from donal mckenzie that smoked me up into writing Harriet that awoke in her nobl booZUMM the fire of enthusiasm that led her to let you aboard

I // wd. appreciate it if you wd. invite mckenzie to do one of the prose articles and state his convictions as forcibly as possibl . . . .

after which I see no reason why you shdnt. add a editorial note saying why you disagree.

Poetry has never had enUFF disagreement INSIDE its own wall.

need hardly to say that I am ready to be of anny assistance as I can. I do NOT think it wd. be well to insert my point of view. I shd. like you to consider mckenzie’s point of view and your own.

IF there is anyone whom you want to include and cant get directly, I might be of use in raking them in, but I dont want to nominate any one.

I shldnt. be in any hurry. Take your time and you can produce something that will DATE and will stand against Des Imagistes. …

The thing is to get out something as good as Des Imagistes by any bloody means at yr. disposal. (also to learn by my errors).

mckenzie might provide the conviction and enthusiasm (which you somewhat lack) and leave you to provide the good sense

I shd. in general be inclined to neglect anything already on file with “Poetry” waiting to be printed, and INVITE contribution from the active sperrits who wdnt. normally send their stuff to E. Erie St.

I can not GODDDDDAMMMMIT find mckenzie’s LIST of just men but am asking him to send it to you.

It mentioned <I think> McAlmon, Johns that edits Paganny, you, norman macleod at j’en oublie, several I did not know but all whom I cd. verify by ref/ to current periodicals seemed good.

(he also mentioned Dunning, not knowing that Cheever was ten years older than I am and already dead (in physical sense).

I cant see that you need be catholic or inclusive; / detach whatever seems to be the DRIVE / or driving force or expression of same . . . .

I shd. try to get a fairly homogenius number; emphasis on the progress made since 1912; concentrated drive, not attempt to show the extreme diversity; though it cd. be mentioned in yr. crit.

This also wd. make it a murkn number; excluding the so different English; … if you cover yourself with glory an’ honour, H.M. might even let Basil try his hand at showin what Briton can do. … or still also prejektin in to the future; Basil cd. crit. your number after the act, that wd. prob. be the best; you do yr. american damndest and then call in the furrin critic to spew forth his gall and tell what the Britons wd. LIKE to do that you aint done.

… thet wummun she nevuh trusted me lak she trusts you!!!⁸Pound/Zukofsky, 45-47.

[more from these letters]

Responding to Pound’s advice in a letter dated November 6, 1930, Zukofsky expressed clear reservations about the homogeneity of the writers he had gathered, emphasizing his own belief in particularities:

Seems to me I have no group but people who write or at least try to show signs of doing it … The only progress made since 1912—is or are several good poems, i.e. the only progress possible—& criteria are in your prose works. Don’t know (my issue) will have anything to do with homogeneity (damn it) but with examples of good writing.⁹Pound/Zukofsky, 65.

Later in the same letter, however, he would also insist:

I’ll have as good a “movement” as that of the premiers imagistes—point is Wm. C. W. of today is not what he was in 1913, neither are you if you’re willing to contribute—if I’m going to show what’s going on today, you’ll have to. The older generation is not the older generation if it’s alive & up—Can’t see why you shd. appear in the H[ound] & H[orn] alive with 3 Cantos & not show that you are the (younger) generation in “Poetry.” What’s age to do with verbal manifestation, what’s history to do with it … I want to show the poetry that’s being written today—whether the poets are of masturbating age or the fathers of families don’t matter. … Most of the men I choose will not be people who have been in touch with you. Satisfied?¹⁰Pound/Zukofsky, 67.

Apart from Zukofsky’s insistence on individuation and his illuminating choice of gendered collective noun (i.e. “most of the men I choose will not be people who have been in touch with you”), what’s most striking about this passage is his insistence that his issue would be concerned with the “poetry that’s being written today,” and his emphasis not on ages or generations but on poetry as something like a timeless or durable “verbal manifestation.” It’s not so much that Zukofsky didn’t understand the strategies of movement building and generations that Pound was insisting on as that he disagreed with them. This seems clearly understood by both men, and is a large part of why Pound wanted to pair Zukofsky with the more bombastic McKenzie (since he would “provide the conviction and enthusiasm (which you [meaning Zukofsky] somewhat lack)” and told Monroe that “[m]y only fear is that Mr. Zukofsky will be just too Goddam prewdent.”¹¹The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, 307.

Though Zukofsky stuck to his principles and largely presented the group in his own way, Pound’s insights were largely accurate. Following the issue’s appearance in February, the responses began to roll in, and nearly all of them were negative, ranging from hostility at one extreme to baffled confusion at the other. ¹²A January 16, 1931 letter from Zukofsky to Poetry magazine’s associate editor Morton Zabel begins “I gather from your letter that the Feb. issue is being attacked already. Who are the “attackers”—or should I not ask the question? No, it isn’t all objectification — perhaps very little of it is — but I think it is sincerity as defined in the editorial. Some objects, however, are tenuous — McAlmon’s poem, for instance, — for the sake of certain accents of speech a slow projectile gathering acceleration as it comes home?” (Letter to Zabel in University of Chicago Special Collections). The March 1931 issue of Poetry included “The Arrogance of Youth,” Monroe’s editorial response to Zukofsky’s issue expressing her dismay at Zukofsky’s summary dismissal of nearly all of the poetry published (in Poetry and elsewhere) over the previous few decades.¹³Monroe’s editorial can be read online at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=59518. In her editorial, Monroe also noted the strictness of what she termed Zukofsky’s “barbed-wire entanglements,” before ending on a more catholic, conciliatory note, offering a “glad hand to the iconoclasts” and stating that while Poetry “will try, in the future as in the past, to keep its head and its sanity,” she can “at least cheer … Zukofsky and his February friends … on. They may be headed for a short life, but it should certainly be a merry one.”¹⁴Poetry (March 1931), 333. Just as tellingly, citing difficulties that had arisen in the production of the issue as a result of Zukofsky’s distance from Chicago (he was less than 150 miles away in Madison), Monroe expressed reservations in a letter to Basil Bunting about their proceeding with plans to give Bunting editorial control of a British poetry issue to be organized along similar lines.¹⁵Pound had hoped that Zukofsky’s issue might be an ‘American’ issue, and he hoped to persuade Monroe to follow it up by allowing Basil Bunting to edit an ‘English’ issue, and René Taupin to edit a ‘French’ issue. While Monroe never again gave full editorial control of an entire issue of Poetry to anyone Pound had recommended, the February 1932 issue of Poetry was something of a compromise. Promoted as an “English Number,” it featured Bunting’s “English Poetry Today,” a review of contemporary verse in England that began with the claim that “There is no poetry in England, none with any relation to the life of the country, or of any considerable section of it,” and went on to savage  just about everyone then publishing in Britain, with T.S. Eliot coming in for particular abuse (264). The poetry included also bore the mark of Bunting and Pound’s editorial preferences, as it included Bunting’s satirical poem “Fearful Symmetry” as well as work by Ford Madox Ford, J. J. Adams, and Joseph Gordon Macleod, all of whom Pound had previously praised.

In the April issue Monroe included an edited selection of letters from readers along with a reply from Zukofsky. Many readers seemed to be genuinely confused by Zukofsky’s prose statements. Stanley Burnshaw, then working as an advertising manager for the Hecht Company, wrote in to ask: “Is Objectivist poetry a programmed movement (such as the Imagists instituted), or is it a rationalization undertaken by writers of similar subjective predilections and tendencies[?] … Is there a copy of the program of the Objectivist group available?”¹⁶53. In his reply to Burnshaw, Zukofsky emphasized the fundamental individuality of the serious writer: “Interpretation differs between individuals and sometimes there are schools of poetry; i.e., there is agreement among individuals. But linguistic usage and the context of related words naturally influence an etiquette of interpretation (common to individuals, and, it has been said, “for an age”–though all kinds of people live in an “age”)” before both dodging and dismissing Burnshaw’s question, claiming: “To those interested in programmed movements “Objectivist” poetry will be a ‘programmed movement.’ The editor was not a pivot, the contributors did not rationalize about him together; out of appreciation for their sincerity of craft and occasional objectification he wrote the program of the February issue of Poetry” and brusquely recommending Burnshaw reread the other prose statements in the issue¹⁷56. In a letter to Morton Zabel written on February 19, 1931, Zukofsky detailed the responses he had sent to Burnshaw and Horace Gregory, telling him “One can’t give too much time to these things—let what’s clear speak for itself” and provided detailed responses to Zabel’s apparent criticism of McAlmon’s work (University of Chicago Special Collections).

About the only praise for the issue came from Ezra Pound, who sent a postcard claiming “this is a number I can show to my Friends. If you can do another eleven as lively you will put the mag. on its feet,” though Monroe tempered his enthusiasm with her deflating riposte: “Alas, we fear that would put it on its uppers!”¹⁸To be “on one’s uppers” was an idiomatic expression meaning to be impoverished (“uppers” was a slang term for shoes). The full exchange of correspondence published by Monroe in the April 1931 issue can be found online on the Poetry Foundation’s website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=38&issue=1&page=65.

An “Objectivists” Anthology

Shortly after the appearance of his “OBJECTIVISTS” 1931 issue of Poetry, had Zukofsky begun to work on selecting and editing a larger collection of work to be published as an “Objectivists” anthology. Zukofsky appears to have believed, based on his correspondence with Ezra Pound, that the finished anthology would be published by Samuel Putnam, the Paris-based publisher of the magazine The New Review.¹⁹Zukofsky had written to Pound in April 1931: “O yes—try & persuade Putnam to come across with an “Objectivists” anthology ed. by me—and a volume of my woiks—I need prestige (Pound/Zukofsky, 97). The May-June-July 1931 issue of The New Review, which had been titled “The New Objectivism,” had included two sections of Zukofsky’s “A” as well as a lengthy editorial entitled “Black Arrow” in which Putnam praised the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry and described Zukofsky as “the best, the most important critic that I am able to think of in America.”²⁰See New Review, 1: 2 (May-June-July 1931), 71-89. In October 1931, Zukofsky finished his edits for the anthology and sent a manuscript to Putnam, and the fourth issue of The New Review (published in Winter 1931-1932) included an announcement for An “Objectivist Anthology” to be edited by Zukofsky and published in Spring 1932 [shown at right].

An announcement of forthcoming publications from The New Review Editions published in the Winter 1931-1932 issue of The New Review. The first title listed is Zukofsky’s An “Objectivist Anthology.” Putnam ultimately did not publish the book, which was brought out instead by To, Publishers.

Unfortunately for Zukofsky, he had done the work entirely on speculation, without securing either a contract or payment for the anthology from Putnam, and late in 1931, Putnam began to ghost Zukofsky, leaving his letters unanswered. As the months ticked by without further word from Putnam, Zukofsky became increasingly anxious that Putnam would not publish the anthology. In February 1932, Zukofsky’s worst fears were confirmed when he received Putnam’s rejection.²¹According to Tom Sharp, Zukofsky wrote to Pound on 15 March 1932 chastising himself for sacrificing his money, time, and energy without a serious promise of publication, and announced that “he would no longer submit work unsolicited or without pay, especially for editors like Putnam,” though there would be several more cruel lessons for Zukofsky to learn about the poetry and publishing “biz” in the years to come. In May 1932, Pound informed Zukofsky that his association with The New Review had been ended: “Sam Puttenheim is drunk half the time/ over works the other two thirds / worries I shd/ think about his health (which is the worst known to man) the remaining fifth/ His last issue New Rev. inexcusable on any other base/ass. Sorry!///he’za sympathetic kuss/ Have said faretheewell to his orgum.”²²Pound/Zukofsky, 126. After his publishing plans with Putnam collapsed, Zukofsky persuaded the Oppens to bring out the anthology, and in August 1932 the Oppen’s oversaw its printing in Dijon, France as To, Publishers’ final publication.

An “Objectivists” Anthology was divided into three sections: lyric (section 1), epic (section 2), and collaborations (section 3) and contained work by 15 contributors, eight of whom also had also appeared in the “Objectivists” 1931 issue of Poetry.²³The eight authors included in both publications were: Bunting, Rakosi, Reznikoff, Oppen, Williams, Zukofsky, Robert McAlmon, and Kenneth Rexroth. The six writers who appeared in the anthology but not in Poetry were Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, both well-known enough not to need an introduction here; Mary Butts (1890-1937), a English modernist writer who was well-known to Ezra Pound who had previously been married to the poet and publisher John Rodker; Frances Fletcher, a teacher and graduate of Vassar College who had published two slim volumes of poetry in 1925 and 1926; Forrest Anderson, a San Francisco native who had published poems in Blues, Pagany, Tambour, and transition; and R.B.N. Warriston, an acquaintance of Zukofsky’s who lived in White Plains, New York. The anthology also included a collaboration between Zukofsky and Jerry Reisman, his friend and former student at Stuyvesant High School. More detailed biographies of each of these contributors is available in The Lives section of this site.

As with the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry, Zukofsky’s anthology failed to make the impact he had hoped for. He told Zabel in September 1932

I sent out about 30 “Objectivists” Anthology for review, and not a murmur, not even a cardiac murmur in reply, or an announcement or anything. I hope at least that “poetry” will not let the book go stillborn. You received your copy at “Poetry”‘s office? What do you think of it?²⁴University of Chicago Special Collections.

Zabel’s reply indicated that they had not received their copy, which led to Zukofsky sending two additional review copies to the magazine in January, suggesting to Harriet Monroe that perhaps it might be assigned to Marianne Moore. Instead, the anthology was assigned to Morris Schappes, who wrote a hostile review which appeared in the March 1933 issue and to which Zukofsky’s reply was printed in May 1933.²⁵See https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=59581.

Book Publishing Efforts, Real and Imagined

In addition to their involvement in a network of little magazines published during the era (discussed below), several members of this loose alliance were also united in a number of schemes to form and operate a press which would issue book-length collections. Two of these proposed publishing schemes, To, Publishers and The Objectivist Press, succeeded in issuing books by various “Objectivist”-affiliated writers in the years immediately following the appearance of the February 1931 issue of Poetry.

To, Publishers

Upon his twenty-first birthday in April 1929, George Oppen had come into a small inheritance from his deceased mother’s estate. It was with this money as the necessary starting capital that the Oppens founded, with Louis Zukofsky, To, Publishers in late 1931, though the idea for the press appears to have been discussed and agreed upon well before this time. The name appears to have been Zukofsky’s idea, and is certainly of a kind with his famous preference for “little words” (like “The,” “A”, W.E., etc.).²⁶Zukofsky wrote in “For My Son When He Can Read”: “The poet wonders why so many today have raised up the word ‘myth,’ finding the lack of so-called ‘myths’ in our time a crisis the poet must overcome or die from, as it were, having become too radioactive, when instead a case can be made out for the poet giving some of his life to the use of the words the and a:  both of which are weighted with as much epos and historical destiny as one man can perhaps resolve. Those who do not believe this are too sure that the little words mean nothing among so many other words” (Prepositions, 10). Zukofsky glossed the firm’s name in a letter to Morton Zabel:

Strange to say we wanted a name to sink into the public mind & To promises to be as good as any. Let alone direction, if one wants to be cordial — the dative of the noun To (the name of our business) means to To or for To. I’ve heard allegiance is necessary in business. Mm … if I were only Mussolini.²⁷University of Chicago Special Collections

In light of his later interest in acronyms for publishing ventures (Writers Extant or W.E. Publishers), another possible reading of the company’s name is as an acronym for The Objectivists, though I have not found any documentary evidence that makes this intention explicit.

In the summer of 1930, Zukofsky travelled to Berkeley, California where he spent a few weeks staying with his Columbia friend Irving Kaplan. Sometime after Zukofsky left the Bay Area to take up his teaching position in Wisconsin, the Oppens left San Francisco for France.²⁸The historical record is somewhat confused on this point. Mary Oppen seems to suggest in her memoirs that they left for Europe in 1929 or 1930, but the ship manifest detailing the Oppen’s return to the United States in June 1933 indicates that their passports were issued in March 1931. After their arrival in Le Havre, the Oppens purchased a horse cart and spent some months traveling across the French countryside, stopping in Paris, Marseilles, and Cannes before settling in Le Beausset, a small village in the south of France near Toulon. The Oppens established To late in 1931, paying Zukofsky $100 a month to act as the firm’s managing editor from New York City.²⁹This money helped soften the blow of giving up his teaching position in Madison, for which Zukofsky had been paid $1000 during the 1930-1931 academic year and which he had been offered a renewal the following year. On October 15, 1931, Zukofsky wrote to Pound: “Geo Oppen is planning a publishing firm—To, Publishers, and I’m the edtr. We’ll probably begin with Bill’s collected prose—or at least—Bill’s been spoken to” (Qtd. in Pound/Zukofsky, 101).

On December 10, 1931, Zukofsky shared To’s publishing plans with Ezra Pound, indicating that they expected to print a book every two months, and providing this list for their first year’s publications:

1. Bill Walrus [William Carlos Williams].
2. E[zra].P[ound]. Section I.
3. If Oppen agrees—Tozzi/Buntn.³⁰Pound had suggested in a letter the previous month that Bunting might translate the Italian poet Federigo Tozzi’s novel Tre croci (written in 1918 and published in just before his death of influenza and pneumonia in 1920). Bunting never produced this translation.
   only objection: we may have to pay Tozzi—is he alive?—& we cdn’t afford to pay both Bunting & Tozzi—But you write Oppen & see what he says. No, I don’t think we propose to be purely amurikun. In fact, we expect you to be on lookout for foreign material and make suggestions all the time.
4. Possibly L[ouis].Z[ukofsky].
5. Reznikoff. (probably)
6. E.P. (2nd section).

Bob McA—cd. be taken care of the second year. We don’t want the same homocide squad allee time. By that time he shd. be rejected by everyone else & (have) polished off his Politics of Existence³¹This McAlmon book was never finished and remained unpublished at his death in 1956. A undated draft of the manuscript with a 1952 letter explaining the project of the novel can be found among his papers in Yale’s Beinecke Library. which has fine things in it—what I’ve seen—but needs to be cut (& I mean cut). Not just circumcised.³²Pound/Zukofsky, 117

On December 28, 1931, Zukofsky sent a letter to Morton Zabel in Chicago on To Publishers’ letterhead, telling Zabel the firm’s name was to be pronounced “like the preposition. The noun wd. indicate the dative,” and explaining that it was a

new publishing venture: Geo. Oppen, publisher, L.Z. editor. Books to printed in France, brochure, 50¢ each. At least six a year. Present list:

1. Wm. C. Wms – A Novelette & other Prose
2. Section I – Ezra’s Prolegomena (Collected Prose)
3. (Probably) Bunting’s Translation of Tre Croce by Tozzi
4. (If I’m convinced) something by L.Z
5. (Probably) Reznikoff – My Country ‘Tis of Thee
6. E.P. Section II Collected Prose (there’ll be about six of these E.P.’s – & ultimate folio)

7,8, etc Rakosi, Rexroth etc etc³³University of Chicago Special Collections.

Sometime in late 1931 or early 1932, Oppen also sent Pound a letter from Le Beausset describing To, Publishers as

A new press, printing in France. Publishes chiefly brochures to sell for 8 Francs. Its program for the year includes: Prolegomena (collected prose) of Ezra Pound (to be published as a series); A Novelette and Other Prose, by William Carlos Williams; a novel by Charles Reznikoff; poems by Louis Zukofsky. and a translation of³⁴Ezra Pound Papers, Beinecke (Yale), YCAL MSS 43, Box 38, Folder 1613

As their proposed list of publications makes clear, To, Publishers was nothing if not an “Objectivist” publishing venture: funded and operated from France by the Oppens, it employed Zukofsky as the managing editor, and in addition to An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology published (or planned to publish) work by Williams, Pound, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, Bunting, Rakosi, and Rexroth.

As was the case with so many other depression-era publication schemes, To’s ambitions far exceeded their actual capabilities. In February 1932, the Oppens oversaw the publication William Carlos Williams’ A Novelette and Other Prose, which was followed in June 1932 by Ezra Pound’s Prolegomena 1: How to Read, Followed by The Spirit of Romance, Part 1, both of which were produced as paperbacks (in pamphlet form) by a print shop in Toulon. The press was immediately beset by a number of problems, however, including a number of difficulties in the production and import processes. Some of these difficulties can be seen in a series of letters Zukofsky sent to Morton Daubel. On January 26, 1932, Zukofsky sent a postcard noting that the price of the publications had been raised to 75¢, to accommodate both a 25% customs duty and increased production costs, and he followed this note up in March of that year by writing

The books haven’t arrived from France yet. The French printer doesn’t read English, & Oppen has had to read proof at least seven times, so far. Incidentally, please do not mention Oppen’s (the owner’s) and my (the editor’s) name in your extenso notes of To in Poetry. Thanks for the trouble.³⁵University of Chicago Special Collections

According to Mary Oppen:

When we shipped the books of To Publishers from France to Louis in New York, he found that he could only get the books by paying a duty. Customs declared them to be magazines, not books, but a loophole existed—if we wrapped them in bundles of twenty-five or less they could come in duty-free. This entailed numerous trips by us and by Louis to the Post Office. … neither of us [meaning George & Mary] understood anything of business, and neither did Louis. It is perhaps surprising that we actually did get books printed. Financially we had taken on too big a burden; we could not support ourselves, Louis, and the printing and publishing of the books unless at least a small amount of money came back to us. And no money came back to us.³⁶Meaning a Life, 131.

While some of the details in Mary Oppen’s recollections may have been warped slightly by the passage of time, the fundamentals appear accurate. The company’s financial viability was probably hindered some of Zukofsky’s personal limitations; while an undeniably gifted editor, he was, by his own admission, never a very skilled (or tremendously interested) marketer or salesman. He was described as being an “indifferent, sometimes negligent bookseller” when working at his brother Morris’ Greenwich Village bookstore in the late 1920s;³⁷After Whittaker Chambers was fired from his job at the New York Public Library in April 1927 when dozens of “missing” books were found in his coat locker, Zukofsky found him a job working with him at his brothers bookshop. Chambers’ biographer Sam Tanenhaus writes: “Chambers and Louis were supposed to help customers at noon, when the regular staff broke for lunch, but were indifferent, sometimes negligent booksellers, seldom stirring from their seats. Henry Zolinsky, a frequent visitor, once put them to a test, asking for a volume. When Chambers and Zukofsky assured him it was not to be found, Zolinsky walked over to the shelves and pulled down the book himself” (Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, 56-57). Pound wrote about hearing of others’ lack of confidence in his business sense as early as 1931;³⁸Barry Ahearn quotes a November 29, 1931 letter in which Pound informs Zukofsky that “[René] Taupin has filled Basil [Bunting] with firm belief in yr. utter incapacity to transact ANY business operation” (Pound/Zukofsky, 121). and sales records of each of the publishing ventures he was involved with did little to inspire confidence in his ability to arouse public interest. Whatever the precise reason, sales of To’s first volumes lagged far behind Zukofsky and the Oppens early hopes. In December 1931, when Zukofsky was finalize the financial arrangements surrounding To’s publication of How to Read, he had quoted a letter from Oppen which referenced their willingness to “pay twenty percent on copies sold over the number (about 3000) necessary to pay 100 dollars on a ten percent royalty. That comes to the same thing as my original suggestion to you, except that it gives us our clear (almost) profit on the copies sold from 1600 (which is necessary to break even) to 3000. Which profit we’ll probably have use for it we ever get it.”³⁹Pound/Zukofsky, 114-115. In May 1933, Zukofsky gave Pound a report on total sales of To’s three publications, a far cry from the 1600 copies Oppen had earlier asserted they would need just to “break even”:

Since you ask: Bruce Humphries have brought [sic] to date from To
25-W.C.W. [Williams’ A Novelette]
75 – H.T.R. [Pound’s How to Read]
71 – “Obj” [An “Objectivists” Anthology]

To’s total sales in U.S.A.:
150 – W.C.W. (Bill bought 50)
109- H.T.R.
130- Obj.

In Europe as far as I know
12-W.C.W.
28- H.T.R.
10-Obj.⁴⁰The Selected Letters of Louis Zukofsky, 102.

With dismal sales and the difficulties already described, the Oppens quickly realized that they were on pace to exhaust their limited capital. In August of 1932, George Oppen informed Zukofsky that he would be unable to continue operating the publishing company (or pay Zukofsky to act as its managing editor) beyond the end of the year, and that they would have to scrap nearly all of their remaining plans for publication. Zukofsky wrote to Pound on August 8, 1932: “Latest news from O[ppen]:—”Can’t continue To.” Which means my salary goes as well when the year is up—& will probably be reduced to $50 (if George can spare that much) a month, while it lasts. “The year is up”—may be this Sept. 1932—I’m not sure when my year started, since Buddy [George’s nickname] and I made no formal legal arrangements.”⁴¹Pound/Zukofsky, 132. Zukofsky’s salary was in fact reduced to $50 in August, and discontinued altogether after October 1932 (Zukofsky, Letters to Pound, 8 October 1932, Yale).

The publication of An “Objectivists” Anthology in August was the press’s final gasp, and once it was printed, from Dijon rather than Le Beausset, which the Oppens had already departed, the company’s was disbanded. To’s dissolution was confirmed in a letter from Zukofsky to Zabel on September 12, 1932:

N.Y. has become about as impossible as Madison was 2 years ago.

My “projects” — or maybe they’re not mine — don’t go. To has had to postpone publishing indefinitely. With postponement goes my salary. I don’t suppose you know of a job for me, but if you hear —⁴²University of Chicago Special Collections.

Writers Extant

Chastened but not wholly discouraged by the failure of To Publishers and the loss of his monthly editor’s salary, Zukofsky’s next scheme was a proposed writers’ union to be called Writers Extant with a publishing arm to be called W.E., Publishers. Early in 1933, Zukofsky circulated a detailed prospectus for the idea among several friends, including both Pound and Williams, asking for their feedback and support. In a letter to Ezra Pound, Zukofsky indicated that the editorial board would be comprised of Tibor Serly, René Taupin, and himself, and its members would include Reznikoff and Williams, and possibly Rexroth, McAlmon, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Wallace Stevens, and others.⁴³Qtd. in Sharp’s dissertation: http://sharpgiving.com/Objectivists/sections/22.history.html?visited=1#22history-51, Zukofsky, Letter to Pound, 17 April 1933, Yale and referenced in Pound/Zukofsky, 141-142. In early April 1933, Williams sent an initial reply, which was decidedly negative:

What the hell can I say about Writers Extant? I don’t see how it can be done. I think your prospectus is too complex. Where in hell is one to begin?

It’s all very well to name off twenty or more names of those you’d like to see members of such an organization but can you get them and can you keep them and can you manage them when you have them? I doubt it very much.

Personally I could at a pinch give up a couple of hundred dollars, but why? For two hundred dollars I could in all probability get my poems published and although that is a most selfish viewpoint yet it <is> one which must have weight with me since a sum of that sort is not easy for me to detach from my ordinary expenses. And unless I gave it I wouldn’t take a thing from the organization.

It is possible that we might get a book that would sell and so bring us in a profit. But don’t imagine for one minute that if some book were profitable it wouldn’t be taken away from us damned quick by the author or the firm to which he would sell out his rights.⁴⁴The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 154.

Williams’ next letter, sent on May 6, was more conciliatory:

Having thought (waited!) doubtfully with your “Writers Extant” in mind I have come to the conclusion that there’s no other way out of our difficulties. It is basically the only way for us to proceed. BUT I do not think we have as yet hit upon either the correct name for the venture nor upon the proper method or procedure.

You have made a start and the motion is not lost. We are all searching for the phraseology. Part of the next step and it may take some time to develop it, come what may, is for you to see the men involved, personally. It will not be until after that that a program can be put down on paper. When you have done this (supposing for the moment that you are the permanent secretary indicated in your project) and after you have seen certain theoretical scripts, including my White Mule. Then we can band together, publish one book, the best we can find, and then, with some solid ground under our feet and snarl in our voices we can begin. LAST will come what is written down as a contract – after we have had some experience. Everything else must be tentative up to that time.⁴⁵The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 155.

Along with that letter, Williams also included his own revised and severely abbreviated version of Zukofsky’s lengthy prospectus which he instructed him to show to Tibor Serly:

The Writers Publishers, Inc.

1. Membership in the group is limited to those writers who have in actual possession an available and complete book manuscript of high quality which is unacceptable to the usual publisher.

2. Manuscripts to be published by the group are to be selected (with advice) by a Director who shall be elected by a majority of the group members for the term of one year.

3. The business end of the group activities will be under the direction of a paid Secretary-Treasurer, under bond, who shall occupy the office indefinitely, or until removed by a two thirds vote of the existing membership at any time.

4. Initial funds are to be contributed by the charter members as may be agreed upon, to be added to later as the business of the group may prove profitable.

5. The first membership will be made up of a selected, voluntary group who by a majority vote, after the first requisite is satisfied, will add to their numbers from time to time.

6. Resignation from the group may take place at the discretion of the member by which he is absolved from further financial responsibility at the same time relinquishing any claim he has had upon the group’s resources.

7. Dissolution of the group as an organization will be conditional upon an equal distribution among the members of all funds and other rights enjoyed by the group under its incorporation.

8. Further additions to these rules will be made from time to time.⁴⁶The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 156-157.

Williams urged that any revision be kept to no more than “2 pages in all” and indicated that “a few paragraphs may be added: Reznikoff can take care of a proper arrangement of the items.”⁴⁷The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 156. Zukofsky forwarded Williams’ revisions to his prospectus to Pound within the week, urging Pound to take his own turn at revising them:

Continuin’ with organization—objection has been raised to “exclusiveness” of trade name. The Writers Publishers, Inc. has been suggested instead—& I enclose a copy of Bill’s “revision” of the prospectus. I don’t think he gets the real purpose of the original prospectus. But maybe you can do better in an idle moment. I mean tho his draft wd seem to be more business-like than mine he doesn’t see how he’s trapped himself again in the “highbrow licherary circle of viciousness.” Fer gord’s sakez, you don’t think I wrote all the detail of that prospectus—the Organization section especially—without for a moment having my tongue in my cheek! But the serious intent of the prospectus which makes it a thing not merely of this administration (an attempt to work with the dead), but at least a working chance that shd. fit in with the “new” economy when people begin to realize it—and they’ll have to—is in the prospectus, I mean L.Z.’s. No use backsliding, whatever the “difficulties ” of “style.” And if you’re afraid that “the idea is no good until L.Z. starts trying to write simple readable prose”—you write to letters to edtrs. now, you can write declarations in the future as of the Board of Writers Pubs. And L.Z. doesn’t intend to sit down to write 4 pg. Prospectii in the future. When the time comes he’ll find it more simple to use the technique of advertising, and say: Prof. So & So is still going to the stool, ethically. Messrs. Splinters and Plate persist in cutting the razor of morality.⁴⁸The Selected Letters of Louis Zukofsky, 98-100.

While Pound did not appear to have attempted a revision, the proposal remained very much on Williams’ mind, as he wrote Zukofsky twice more in May to express his concerns about their proposal. His first letter, dated May 24, 1933, read:

I’ve tormented my soul long enough over our Writer-Publisher proposal: I think it’s no go and we should give it up. As far as you personally are concerned I think it would be an excellent thing for you to get to see Pound this summer. I’ll be glad to contribute my bit to assist you as agreed with Serly. I’ll believe we’d all derive some benefit from it by clarifying our present more than a little muddled thinking. Go and take a look. In the fall we can appraise the situation again if we want to.

And don’t forget that with every advantage in their favor large publishing houses are going broke. While even such a venture as Angel Flores’ Dragon Press has cost its sponsor two or three thousand dollars which he’ll never see again. It can’t be done today. Pound said it over and over again in his letter. We’ve got to heed such evidence.

The only possible way out of our difficulties, aside from hoping against hope, would be to print a series of six books at our own expense and then give someone like Harcourt, Brace 15% to market them – as others have done before us. But could we find six saleable new books? I doubt it. And even if we could find them, where would the next six come from? No, I can’t see it.⁴⁹The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 158.

A week later, Williams wrote again:

It means this: I saw [Nathanael] West and <he> would have nothing to do with a self publishing venture. Quite correctly I think, he pointed out that no book should be self-published until it had been the rounds of all the commercial publishers. This would take a year. And if all of them turned it down you could be reasonably sure that it would not sell fifty copies under any circumstances. We should simply lose our money.

Besides, there are not twelve books in the country that would be available for our uses.

As for Josephine Herbst: she is about to become a successful author. Under those circumstances I refuse point blank to approach her. What for? To ask her for money? Never. To ask her for a script? Insane.

[Wallace] Stevens is under contract to Knopf.

It’s simply an impossible situation.⁵⁰The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 159.

And that is more or less where things stood when in June when the Oppens returned from France (they arrived in New York City on June 7) and Zukofsky left on his long-awaited tour of Europe. On this trip, financed largely by Pound, Williams, and others of Zukofsky’s friends, Zukofsky met with Tibor Serly (in Budapest), René Taupin (in Paris), and Pound and Bunting (at Rapallo). Following his return to New York City at the end of the summer, Zukofsky made another push, arranging a meeting to discuss the launch of a collaborative publishing venture.

The Objectivist Press

This meeting was held on September 24, 1933 at the Oppens’ Brooklyn apartment at 214 Columbia Heights, and was attended by Zukofsky, Williams, Reznikoff, and the Oppens. At this meeting, the group established an advisory board (consisting of Williams and Pound with Zukofsky to serve as the executive secretary), made a tentative publishing list, and drew up a plan to request subscriptions. A letter from Williams to Zukofsky dated October 2, 1933 included his synopsis of what they had discussed:

Writers-Publishers to be incorporated:

1. A possible list of subscribers to 1 book of poems to be circularized and approached by whatever means possible. The book to sell at $2 and to be the most saleable we can find.
2. This book to be published on the basis of whatever advance subscriptions are obtained.
3. The proceeds, if any, from this sale to be divided, 60% to the author, 40% to the group which 40% is to be used to publish book #2 and to pay the Executive Secretary who will be the sole officer of the group.
4. On this basis books are to be continued to be printed and sold as often and for as long a time as practicable.

Notes: When the first book is advertised it will be put forward as one of a series of four which will all be published and offered, separately, for subscription during the first year.

The original suggestion of E[zra].P[ound]. to be rewritten to conform to this plan.

As a feature of the plan distinguished (?) modernists of the day will write introductory pages to these books – their names (with consent) to be given out when the first notices appear: such names as Marion [sic] Moore, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, etc etc. This in effect will be a sponsoring Committee without putting too much of a burden on names.

Harriet Monroe and Poetry to be approached from the first with intent to get as much backing from that source as being the official (?) poetry organization in U.S.

Mr. Zukofsky be named to Executive-Secretary etc. etc. with power to keep records, see individuals, arrange for publishing, correct proofs ? ? ? select format, wrote letters, devise lists, compose advertising matter, push sales, etc, etc — God help him!⁵¹The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 165-166.

Williams also included his enthusiasm for the plan, telling Zukofsky that “That scheme as outlined has the earmarks of feasibility, the best yet! I am grateful to you for your vision and persistence, I’ll back you in every way possible. To begin with you may count on me for the first hundred toward my book. I’d pay it all but I decided long ago not to. And I’ll go after Marianne and Wallace Stevens at once.”⁵²The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 165.

Over the next few weeks, the group considered other names for their venture (including two of Williams’ suggestions: Writers-Publishers and Cooperative Publishers), ultimately settling on the singular form of The Objectivists Press.⁵³On October 23, 1933, Zukofsky had written to Pound asking him to join himself, Williams, and Reznikoff as a partner in The Objectivists Press (a spelling he also included in a follow-up query to Pound dated October 29), but by November they had dropped the plural and reverted to The Objectivist Press, which is the name under which all their subsequent books were published. They also adopted a simple statement of purpose, proposed by Reznikoff, which was printed on the books’ dust wrapper: “The Objectivist Press is an organization of writers who are publishing their own work and that of other writers whose work they think ought to be read.”

The press launched itself into existence in January 1934 through the publication of Williams’ Collected Poems 1921-1931, printed in an initial edition of 500 by J.J. Little and Ives Company, in New York, and was sold by subscription. As the first book issued by the Objectivist Press, the book’s dust jacket prominently featured the press’ name and address,⁵⁴10 West 36th Street, two blocks northeast of the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan. as well as praise from Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and René Taupin. Williams’ book, which featured a preface written by Wallace Stevens, was a modest success, both critically and commercially; it was reviewed by Charles Poore in the New York Times Book Review in February, and nearly sold out its initial edition at $2 a copy, netting the press a small profit.

The back cover of the dust jacket for George Oppen’s Discrete Series (1934), with publication information for The Objectivist Press.

The press also published Reznikoff’s Testimony (a prose work which featured an introduction by Kenneth Burke, Williams’ friend and former editor of The Dial) that same month, and followed the publication of these two books in January with two volumes of poetry in March: George Oppen’s Discrete Series (which included an introduction by Ezra Pound) and Reznikoff’s Jerusalem the Golden. The back cover of the dust jacket for Oppen’s book (shown at right) is particularly illuminating in regards to how The Objectivist Press presented itself: it included the press’ mission statement and advisory board, listed their three already accomplished publications and announced their plans to bring out “verse and prose by Basil Bunting, Tibor Serly, Carl Rakosi, René Taupin, Louis Zukofsky and others.”⁵⁵Williams shared his first year’s publication suggestions with Zukofsky in a letter written sometime late in 1933: “The names I’d suggest for the first year would be my own (not because I wish it so but because the general opinion seems to be that my book would be a good one to start with) the Zukofsky, Bunting, Rakosi. I believe we’ll have our hands full trying to get a book out every 3 months” (The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 166-167).

While the venture had begun with Zukofsky’s lofty ambitions and a lengthy list of works they intended to publish, the Objectivist Press did not prove to be long-lived, collapsing as a functional cooperative within a year. Fissures in the organization had appeared almost immediately, in fact, with Zukofsky writing privately to Pound of his exhaustion and the possibility of his leaving the press as early as April 12, 1934:

have been sick myself tho working on a C.W.A. [Civil Works Administration] job, now transferred to Dep’t of Pub. Welfare, N.Y.C.—6 hrs of continual insult to the intelligence, 2 hrs travel, 1 hr. “lunch.” 9 hrs a day, & then 1-3 hrs of the Obj. Press when I get home. Municipal salary $19 a week. Other salary $0. Which leaves very little time for writing, but I’ve done some. … May have to resign Sec’y of Obj. Press if burden of work continues, & the effort spent on the press does not repay in the way of enough sales allowing us to continue. It’s a ha-a-rd job, & besides there may be necessity for direct action in another field (in add. to poetry)—and aside from publishing—I’m afraid there is now only I’m holding back. You were right last summer about staying clear of becoming an office boy–besides peeple dun’t appreciate.⁵⁶Pound/Zukofsky, 156-157.

By the end of the year, the press had issued just one additional book after Oppen’s Discrete Series, Reznikoff’s In Memoriam: 1933 and was no longer operating as a functional collective. A number of things contributed to the press’ demise: Zukofsky and Oppen quarreled⁵⁷In Meaning a Life, Mary Oppen relates one version of the story: “Walking with Louis when Discrete Series was in manuscript, George was discussing it with him before showing it to anyone else. Louis turned and with a quizzical expression asked George, “Do you prefer your poetry to mine?” “Yes,” answered George, and the friendship was at a breaking point” (Meaning a Life, 145). This elliptical account leaves much unsaid, my own view of the split was that it was probably exacerbated by the fact the Oppen, who had money, was publishing his book of poems (and with an introduction from Pound), while Zukofsky, who did not have money, was not. “Do you prefer your poetry to mine?” may have been the Oppens recasting of a request by Zukofsky to underwrite the publication of his work and George’s refusal to do so. Elsewhere in her account, Mary Oppen tells other stories that indicate class-based stressors in the relationship between Zukofsky and her husband (208-209). and the Oppens traveled to Mexico in the summer of 1934, joining the Communist Party and devoting their energies to what Zukofsky referred to in the letter just cited as “direct action in another field” as organizers for the Workers Alliance soon after their return to the United States;⁵⁸In Meaning a Life, Mary Oppen dates their decision to join the party to Winter 1935, and the context of her statement lends itself better to the assumption that she meant January or February of that year rather November or December. Williams’ plan to develop an opera with Zukofsky’s friend Tibor Serly fell apart, damaging Williams’ friendship with Zukofsky; and Zukofsky resigned as the press’ secretary. The relationship between Williams, Zukofsky, and the Oppens appears to have been strained by late 1934; Zukofsky wrote to Pound in November 1934 asking about the possibility of Faber & Faber printing his poem “Mantis,” and again in February 1935 asking explicitly for help in getting his 55 Poems manuscript published in England:

You can, if it won’t hurt your own name, try and get me published with Faber & Faber. Serly off to Europe with my final arrangement and additions to 55 Poems–a most commendable typescript for you to look at. Time fucks it, and if I keep my MSS. in my drawer or my drawers, I might as well shut up altogether. … Pleased also with your choice of my work for the same ampholgy [the Spring-Summer issue of Westminster Magazine]. Enclosure should have probably gone into Westminster, if it reached you in time. No place now to print it in ‘Murka. Do you think Mr. Eliot would see it? And Random House continues to print beeyutiful volumes of shit by Spender and Auden.

If you consent, think it opportune etc, to try my 55 on Faber & Faber, you need not worry about an introduction—I don’t want it—you can write a blurb for the dust-proof jacket if it jets out of you.

Noo Yok at a standstill. Haven’t heart from Bill Willyums in moneths.⁵⁹Pound/Zukofsky, 160-161.

Further confirmation of the timing of the split can be found in a letter from Williams to Zukofsky in March 1935 which indicates both that Williams hadn’t heard from Zukofsky for roughly 6 months and that he had heard that Zukofsky and the Oppens had fallen out.⁶⁰See The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 212. Zukofsky’s inquiries with Pound about publication opportunities can probably be read as signs that the Objectivist Press had failed, since Zukofsky had clearly intended for the press he had worked so hard to establish and for which he was serving as the secretary to publish his own work.

The various schisms between Zukofsky, Williams, Pound, and the Oppens and their departures from or disillusionments with the press left Reznikoff alone among the collective’s founding members. Reznikoff, who had both trained as a lawyer and was the only member of the group to own, in the form of a hand-operated printing press, the literal means of production, also retained the copyright for the press. Following Reznikoff’s solo publication of his collection Separate Way under the imprint in 1936, the Objectivist Press imprint remained dormant until Louis and Celia requested its use from Reznikoff for their private publication of Louis’ A Test of Poetry in 1948.⁶¹See Mark Scroggins’ “The Objectivists and their Publications,” on Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas’ Z-Site.

The collapse of The Objectivist Press also led Williams to seek other publishers for his poetry; he turned first to Ronald Lane Latimer’s Alcestis Press, publishing his collections An Early Martyr and Other Poems and Adam & Eve & the City with Latimer in 1935 and 1936, before James Laughlin’s New Directions Press became his regular publisher starting with the publication of his Complete Collected Poems in 1938. Because he had lacked the capital to finance the publication of his 55 Poems through either To, Publishers or The Objectivist Press, Zukofsky’s manuscript was among the last of their proposed publications to appear in print, as it was not published until 1941, when the James. A Decker Press of Prairie City, Illinois, brought it out in a handsome hardcover edition.⁶²Decker’s press had previously volumes of poetry by several other contemporary poets, including Zukofsky’s friends and fellow “Objectivists” Norman Macleod, Charles Henri Ford, and Harry Roskolenko.

It is against this backdrop of frustration that we Zukofsky’s oft-quoted contributor’s note in the Spring 1934 Westminster magazine “disclaim[ing] leadership of any movement putatively literary or objectionist” appeared.⁶³”Notes on Contributors,” Westminster Magazine 23:1 (Spring 1934), 6. What is less-commonly observed is that this note accompanied the second of two installments from Zukofsky’s “The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire.” The first, published in the Winter 1933 issue, had included the following contributor’s note: “MR ZUKOFSKY is the leader of Objectivism in America; his work has appeared in the better American and European magazines.” It’s certainly plausible to see Zukofsky’s subsequent statement as emerging largely out of frustration at this gross biographical mischaracterization.

Rather than seeing this claim as evidence that he had never intended a group, a more plausible reading of Zukofsky’s disavowal would require giving more than usual attention to what Zukofsky intended by the words “movement,” “literary,” and “objectionist.” If we read the Objectivists’ concerns as primarily oriented towards reliable access to publication rather than the achievement of a particular aesthetic or political program, much of the apparent conflict in Zukofsky’s actions and this seemingly defensive statement can be resolved. When it came to the problem of publication, Zukofsky devoted a great deal of energy to trying to form and sustain two publishing collectives for which he had provided the central organizing force and served as editor. Yes, the “Objectivists” may well have begun as a contrivance conjured up to satisfy Harriet Monroe’s desire that Zukofsky present a “new group” in Poetry, but it is equally true that Zukofsky named and defined the group himself and further chose to perpetuate the “Objectivists” name for several years after their first appearance.

A May 11, 1935 letter to Pound is perhaps Zukofsky’s most explicit statement on what he took as the lessons of the failure of his publishing efforts:

But you needn‘t tell me that “All good books are Blocked by the present fahrty system”—why ‘n hell do you think I asked your aid? Between the New Masses crowd who can’t get the distinction that yr. poetry is one thing & yr. economics another, & yr. unwillingness to even look at my work to see what it says because I won’t embrace Social Credit, these last 3 years—I’ve not only lost whatever chance I might have had with commercial publishers, but have ostracized myself completely. I ain’t weeping about it—I‘m just seeing by my own lights. … I’ve sacrificed a good deal of my time with To, Objectivist Press, corresponding with 152 “poets” etc. to get up an issue of Poetry, an anthology etc., & the good things which resulted were their own cheque. However, I don’t care to do it again. I‘ve even stopped seeing “close friends” who’ve envied my station—to put an end to the bad taste of it all.⁶⁴The Selected Letters of Louis Zukofsky, 120.

While Zukofsky’s interest in collaborative publishing efforts and the organization of writers to achieve the aims of literature in the United States did not die with the collapse of the Objectivist Press, his efforts to conduct this organization under the group name “Objectivists” did.⁶⁵On January 22, 1935, the New Masses published a call to convene an American Writers’ Congress to address “all phases of a writer’s participation in the struggle against war, the preservation of civil liberties, and the destruction of fascist tendencies everywhere” (quoted in The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 215). The Congress, convened at New York City’s Mecca Temple from April 26-28, concluded with the establishment a League of American Writers and elected the novelist Waldo Frank to serve as its first chairman. Zukofsky invited both Williams and Pound to join him in supporting what he called an “united front of writers,” joining the League and participating in various of its activities over the next few years (quoted in The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 215). For more on Zukofsky’s involvement with the League of American Writers, see The Poem of a Life, 149, 169. Later in 1935, Zukofsky also appears to have relayed to Williams an invitation he had received to become a part of a group of “literary people of different countries” connected to Pound which would regularly exchange “technical, mostly prosodic, information, suggestions, etc,” which Williams was decidedly uninterested in (The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 218-219).  While the Zukofskys did revive the Objectivist Press (in name at least) to publish Louis’ The Test of Poetry in 1948 and corresponded for a short time thereafter using The Objectivist Press letterhead with their home address as its current location, they did not use the imprint again for any subsequent publications and it appears that both Williams and Zukofsky considered the term defunct by the early 1950s, when Williams published his retrospective look at the group in his Autobiography.

RMR Press

In the early 1930s, Kenneth Rexroth planned to found a press with his friends Milton Merlin and Joseph Rabinowitch. As they conceived it, the RMR Press (the initial letters of their last names) would publish a series of pamphlets and short books, with a special emphasis on poetry. Zukofsky, Pound, and Williams all wrote to Rexroth in support of the venture, offering selections of their own work for consideration and providing extensive lists of authors they felt might be interested in being included in the series. Zukofsky named Reznikoff, Oppen, Bunting, René Taupin, Whittaker Chambers, George Crosby, and Harry Roskolenko; Pound recommended Rexroth approach Wyndham Lewis, Man Ray, Hilaire Hiler, Robert McAlmon, and Ford Madox Ford. Pound and Zukofsky discussed Rexroth and his proposed publishing venture in several letters from 1931 and 1933, with Zukofsky telling Pound in a letter:

Rexroth—if the business end of him still bothers you—said some months ago that he had got a “very friendly letter” from you and that only an extended vacation in the Calif. rockies was preventin’ him from answerin you. Also it seems he has been quarrelsome with his patrons. I hope his scheme does go thru—since he was wantin’ to get out my essays & poems.⁶⁶Pound/Zukofsky, 107.

Carl Rakosi, in particular, appears to have believed that Rexroth would be shortly publishing a book of his poems, telling both Richard Johns and Harriet Monroe in the summer of 1931 that he was “planning to put out a book soon.”⁶⁷Pagany letters from Rakosi, U Delaware, and Poetry papers U Chicago. In August 1931, Zukofsky told Morton Zabel that “the Rakosi volume to be published probably by RMR, Los Angeles — a new venture in printing books cheaply in brochure form, Rexroth is connected with the firm. You might write him and mention particulars he sends in Poetry. Of course, I should like to do [i.e. review the book for Poetry] the Rakosi, if it appears.”⁶⁸Zabel Manuscripts, Special Collections, Indiana University. Unfortunately for Rakosi and others who may have had been making similar plans with Rexroth, the RMR Press never advanced beyond the planning stage, despite the several recommendations and clear expressions of interest by both Pound and Zukofsky.⁶⁹For more background on RMR, see Linda Hamalian’s A Life of Kenneth Rexroth, pp. 65, 75-76.

Other 1930s Anthologies

In addition to the explicitly “Objectivist” publications already described, three other anthologies published between 1932 and 1934 included work by several of the writers who had appeared in “Objectivist” publications. Two of these were edited by Ezra Pound, and one by Parker Tyler, each of whom had appeared one of the Zukofsky’s “Objectivist” publications.

Profile

In May 1932, Ezra Pound published Profile, a 142-page anthology printed privately in Milan by John Schweiler in an edition of 250 copies. The anthology included a prefatory note from Pound describing it as “A collection of poems which have stuck in my memory and which may possibly define their epoch, or at least rectify current ideas of it in respect to at least one contour,” as well as a very short introduction, “Spectacle,” in which Pound wrote: “I am making no claim to present the ‘hundred best poems’ but merely a set of poems that have ut supra remained in my memory. I have tried to omit repetitions, whether by the same author or a different one.”⁷⁰Profile, 10. The anthology itself offered a patchy historical narrative of the previous few decades in English-language poetry, beginning with Pound’s assertion that

This ‘anthology’ is merely the collection of poems that I happen to remember, that is, it is selected by a given chemical process. I don’t mean that I could quote these poems verbatim, but that they have had, each of them, during the last 30 years sufficient, individual character to stick in my head as entities.

The omission of certain writers before 1920 implies generally a direct censure or disapproval, that of writers since 1920 implies merely unfamiliarity or ignorance of their work.⁷¹Profile, 13.

Of the “Objectivists,” Pound’s old friend Williams is the best represented in the anthology, with four poems in total: “Hic Jacet,” dated about 1910, “Postlude,” dated 1912, and “Portrait of a Woman in Bed,” published in 1917, as well as “The Botticellian Trees,” which Zukofsky had included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry. Pound also included work by six other writers Zukofsky had presented as “Objectivists” the year previously: McAlmon’s 1924 poem “The Bullfight”; the third, fourth and fifth “movements” of Zukofsky’s “Poem Beginning ‘The'”; Howard Weeks’ “Stunt Piece”; sections 1 and 2 of Bunting’s “Villon”; Emanuel Carnevali’s “The Girls in Italy” and “Italian Farmer”; and Parker Tyler’s “Experience Without Succedent.”

In the anthology’s editorial content, Pound was spare with his prose commentary, but reserved much of his praise for Williams and Zukofsky. For example, following a brisk summary of the appearance and impact of Des Imagistes he noted that “Out of several hundreds of American writers, Williams still continues to develop,” and described two tendencies in “the individualist American verse” over the previous dozen years, one of which, “only recently apparent or effective … perhaps showed first in Carlos Williams’ prose The Great American Novel and later in his poetry … [in which] a new sort of unity has been achieved, and that the parts are more definitely of the entirety than they had been in earlier sorts of poem which could be taken piecemeal or in quotation.”⁷²Profile, 46, 127. Pound also indicated the overlap between his and Zukofsky’s editorial tastes via his provision of this list of “extant” writers: “Post war: Hemingway, McAlmon, Cummings. 1925 and after: Zukofsky, Dunning, Rakosi, Macleod, Bunting,”⁷³113. particularly when one notes that of the five writers listed in the last group, only Ralph Cheever Dunning, an expatriate poet from Detroit who died in Paris from a combination of tuberculosis and starvation in 1930, was not included among Zukofsky’s “Objectivists.”

Reading Profile as “a critical narrative” in which Pound “attempted to show by excerpt what had occurred during the past quarter of a century,”⁷⁴The prefatory “Note” included in his Active Anthology, 5. He described it in similar terms in Contempo, writing that the anthology was “a narrative of what has happened to verse during the past twenty-five years. the most ready conclusion to hand is that he considered Zukofsky’s “Objectivist” publications, alongside of his own magazine The Exile, as the source of the most significant developments in modern poetry since 1925. Pound made this approval explicit on the anthology’s final page by referring the reader in search of further information to “Zukofsky’s notes in ‘Symposium’ for Jan. and ‘Poetry’ for Feb. 1931” as well as the “Objectivist number of Poetry … and Mr. Zukofsky’s Objectivist Anthology, announced for publication.”⁷⁵Profile, 142.

Active Anthology

The dust jacket cover of the Active Anthology, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1933 by Faber & Faber.

On October 12, 1933, Ezra Pound published Active Anthology with the London-based publishing firm Faber & Faber, where T.S. Eliot served as a literary advisor. In an explanatory note preceding the table of contents, Pound noted that

My anthology Profile was a critical narrative, that is I attempted to show by excerpt what had occurred during the past quarter of a century. In this volume I am presenting an assortment of writers, mostly ill known in England, in whose verse a development appears or in some case we may say “still appears” to be taking place, in contradistinction to authors in whose work no such activity has occurred or seems likely to proceed any further.

In the volume’s preface Pound announced that he would be “confining [his] selection to poems Britain has not accepted and in the main that the British literary bureaucracy does NOT want to have printed in England” and claimed that:

the unwelcome and disparate authors whom I have gathered in this volume have mostly accepted certain criteria which duller wits have avoided. They have mostly, if not accepted, at any rate faced the demands, and considered the works, made and noted in my “How to Read”. That in itself is not a certificate of creative ability, but it does imply a freedom from certain forms of gross error and from certain kinds of bungling which will indubitably consign many other contemporary writings to the ash-bin. …

I have not attempted to represent all of the new poets, I am leaving the youngest, possibly some of the brightest, to someone else or to future effort, not so much from malice or objection to perfect justice, as from inability to do everything all at once.

There are probably fifty very bright poems that are not here assembled. … Someone more in touch with the younger Americans ought to issue an anthology or a special number of some periodical, selected with criteria, either his or mine.

The assertion implicit in this volume is that after ten or twenty years of serious effort you can consider a writer uninteresting, but the charges of flightiness or dilettantism are less likely to be valid.⁷⁶”Praefatio,” 23-24.

Pound repeated many of these points in a brief “Notes on Particular Details” at the end of the anthology, writing

I do not in the least doubt that quite a number, say 20 or 30 poets between the ages of 20 and 40 have written better poems that some of those here included. But in a fair proportion of the cases where I have considered inviting an author and then refrained from doing so, I have very strong doubts as to that author’s capacity to progress or develop any further.

I expect or at least hope that the work of the included writers will interest me more in ten years’ time than it does now in 1933.⁷⁷Active Anthology, 253

Pound’s list of eleven authors for the anthology included a strong “Objectivist” core; he included William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, and George Oppen among its contributors.⁷⁸In addition to these four core “Objectivists,” Active Anthology also featured writing by Louis Aragon (translated by E. E. Cummings), E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, D. G. Bridson, T. S. Eliot, and Pound himself. Pound had assembled the anthology fairly quickly, sending Zukofsky a carbon copy of a call for submissions in late February. In the letter which accompanied it, Pound told the younger poet:

I take it this is a chance to print all of THE and all of A. that is ready /

also send suggestions/ re other of yrs/ the chewing gum poem, and items of interest.
//
also has Rakoski anything new/ or have you any snug gestions

Oppen meritus causa?? couple of short poems??
lemme know if there are?

Basil [Bunting] seems to think Reznikoff is some good??? any piece d’evidence?

Can you help ole Bill Walrnss [Williams] to sort hiz self out.⁷⁹Pound/Zukofsky, 143.

Zukofsky complied, sending Pound work by Williams, Reznikoff, Rakosi, and Rexroth for consideration. Pound’s next letter to Zukofsky, sent in April 1933, expresses enthusiasm for Williams, Zukofsky and Oppen’s work

The Bill W[illia]ms/ is damn good. Shall prob. omit Footnote/ Ball Game / and Portrait of Lady ( the latter simply because the subject is less interestin’ than a lot of Bill’s other work.) I want another 15 Pages of him.

Your best stuuf is “The” and parts of A. …

Young Oppen has sent in stuff/ think three of ’em good enough to include.”⁸⁰Pound/Zukofsky, 144

but lays out several reservations regarding Reznikoff, Rakosi and Rexroth:

The Reznikoff will appear to the Brit. reader a mere immitation [sic] of me, and they will howl that I am merely printin my followers.

It is I think just as good as parts of Lustra (1915, 1916) neither better nor worse. Very cleanly done but no advance in methodology. ((in most of it.))

Possibly by pickin’ out the Hebe element we can get something that will arouse interest. Remember an anth. like this has got to AROUSE interest without AT ANY POINT terminating ANY of the interest it arouses.

Its the sample of next weeks film, not the giving away of the end of the story.

The title of the Anth. is “The Active Element”. If I omit H.D. how am I to put in most of the Reznikoff you have sent.

my thesis bein that the ART of writing is (is still now continuously developing

… So far        Rakosi weak. Rexroth and the rest unsatisfactory.⁸¹Pound/Zukofsky, 144.

In keeping with his tendency to simultaneously promote and criticize out of either side of mouth, Pound used his final editorial statement to draw attention to the group and sound a note of caution, stating that “a whole school or shoal of young American writers seems to me to have lost contact with language as language. … In particular Mr Zukofsky’s Objectivists seem prone to this error, just as Mr Eliot’s followers tend toward neo-Gongorism,” later wondering aloud

How far is a writer justified in ‘mathematical’ rather than linguistic use of language? … I think the good poem ought probably to include that dimension without destroying the feel of actual speech. In this sense Zukofsky’s earlier poem is better than his later, though you cannot expect a writer to develop all his merits simultaneously and pari passu. I know of no case where an author has developed at all without at least temporarily sacrificing one or several of his initial merits.⁸²Active Anthology, 254-255.

Modern Things

In 1934, New York City’s The Galleon Press published Modern Things, a 92-page anthology edited by the poet Parker Tyler. In his introduction to the anthology, Tyler stated that his intention was to

present an elect body of work, composed by those moderns who have worked successfully in literary styles for a number of years to the accompaniment of ever-growing critical and general recognition, together with those younger moderns who, not yet intrenched in the libraries with volumes of their own or with anthology reputations, and while not, consistently, so typical of thoroughly individuated styles, have had successes definitely meriting critical attention. These poems have been collected with applied reference to the unity of a continuous contemporary literary impulse, operating through related and developing modes of writing. If any work pertinent to this process has been omitted, the omission is either casual or, where certain fakeries are involved, deliberate.⁸³”Introduction,” 5.

In the anthology, Tyler included his own work as well as writing by sixteen other writers, six of whom had been published in the previous two years as “Objectivists”: Eliot, Pound, Williams, Charles Henri Ford, Rakosi and Zukofsky.⁸⁴The full list of contributors to the anthology is as follows: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Harold Rosenberg, H.R. Hays, Paul Eaton Reeve, Joseph Rocco, Lionel Abel, Charles Henri Ford, Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky, Raymond Larsson, and Parker Tyler. Of the “Objectivists,” Tyler included Eliot’s “Triumphal March”; excerpts from Pound’s “Canto XXXIV”; seven of Williams’ poems: “St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils,” “Tree and Sky,” “Flowers by the Sea,” “Simplex Sigilum Veri:,” “Wedded are the River and the Sky,” “The Death of See,” and “The Locust Tree in Flower”; Charles Henri Ford’s “Roots,” “Voyage,” “Syllabus,” and “Commission”; Rakosi’s “The Beasts” and “The Wedding”; Zukofsky’s “Tibor Serly” and “Madison, Wis., Remembering the Bloom of Monticello (1931)”; and his own “Hollywood Dream Suite,” “Address to My Mother,” “Sleep Mood,” and “To Raskolnikoff.” In describing tendencies he observed among the poets selected for inclusion in the anthology, Tyler wrote:

the techniques of symbolism, imagism and Rimbaudian hallucination have determined the effect on the purely technical side, while Corbière-Laforguian irony and Pound’s theory of poetry as history have determined it largely on the more emotional and ideational side. For instance Wallace Stevens has an elegant form suggestive of both Laforgue and Valéry, Mallarmé’s disciple and various poets, such as Marianne Moore and Louis Zukofsky, have types of contemporary documentation influenced by Mr. Pound’s notion of the complementariness of historic facts, or what might be called the solution of the past in the present. In this way, tradition has been emphasized rather than slurred in modern poetry.⁸⁵Ibid, 8.

By way of explanation of his inclusion of Rakosi and Zukofsky, Tyler wrote:

Carl Rakosi, who has the excellence of a sterling pupil. He has been influenced largely by Pound and Williams and forms an inescapable similarity to Louis Zukofsky, than whom, however, he is less variable; his good workmanship and confidence of carriage always command attention, and his poems often seem to be fresh and whole results, despite the tendency toward fragmentariness.

Louis Zukofsky, who brings a gracile metric and a swift apprehension to his subjects; he is as philosophical as an experimenter can be, and when he observes a certain precautious depth is always rewarding. His “note” is usually in exact musical place. …

It is apparent, in my opinion, … that Mr. Rakosi and Mr. Zukofsky are passionate masters of their apprenticeship.⁸⁶Ibid, 11-12.

Little Magazines

The little magazine is something I have always fostered; for without it, I myself would have been early silenced. To me it is one magazine, not several. It is a continuous magazine, the only one I know with an absolute freedom of editorial policy and a succession of proprietorships that follows a democratic rule. There is absolutely no dominating policy permitting anyone to dictate anything. When it is in any way successful it is because it fills a need in someone’s mind to keep going. When it dies, someone else takes it up in some other part of the country – quite by accident – out of a desire to get the writing down on paper. I have wanted to see established some central or sectional agency which would recognize, and where possible, support little magazines. I was wrong. It must be a person who does it, a person, a fallible person, subject to devotions and accidents.

— William Carlos Williams⁸⁷In The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 266.

The value of fugitive periodicals “of small circulation” is ultimately measured by the work they have brought to press. The names of certain authors over a space of years, or over, let us say, the past score years, have been associated with impractical publication. Carlos Williams has communicated with his readers almost exclusively via the reviews I have mentioned or by others even less public. …

The last twenty years have seen the principle of the free magazine or the impractical or fugitive magazine definitely established. It has attained its recognized right to exist by reason of work performed.

The work of writers who have emerged in or via such magazines outweighs in permanent value the work of the writers who have not emerged in this manner. The history of contemporary letters has, to a very manifest extent, been written in such magazines. The commercial magazines have been content and are still more than content to take derivative products ten or twenty years after the germ has appeared in the free magazines. There is nothing new about this.

Work is acceptable to the public when its underlying ideas have been accepted. The heavier the “overhead” in a publishing business the less that business can afford to deal in experiment. This purely sordid and eminently practical consideration will obviously affect all magazines save those that are either subsidized (as chemical research is subsidized) or else very cheaply produced (as the penniless inventor produces in his barn or his attic).

Literature evolves via a mixture of these two methods.

— Ezra Pound⁸⁸I”Small Magazines, “The English Journal 19.9 (November 1930): 689-704.

Besides their appearance in various anthologies and their abortive book publishing ventures, Zukofsky and the other “Objectivists” operated or published their work together in a series of little magazines between 1928 and 1935. If, as I’ve already argued, Zukofsky’s invention and subsequent promotion of the group should be understood as a strategy oriented primarily around publishing concerns (chiefly, how could various members of the group consistently see that their work was printed), no attempt to understand the historical formation of the “Objectivists” can succeed without a deeper understanding of the landscape (and economics) of literary publishing in the preceding decade, especially the significant role played by Anglophone little magazines.

The emergence of the “Objectivists” coincided with the trough of the Great Depression, an economic event which produced a precipitous decline in literary publishing, especially of poetry. Al Filreis has noted that while American publishers had recorded sales of 214 million new books (and corresponding profits of $42 million) in 1929, by 1933 that number had been almost halved, with sales falling to just 111 million. Poetry publishing was hit especially hard, with the number of new poetry titles issued in the United States decreasing more than 20% in 1932 alone.⁸⁹Modernism from Right to Left, 114. As depression-era economics contracted a book publishing market for poetry which had already shown profound disinterest in their work, not only did Zukofsky and his fellow “Objectivists” attempt to print and distribute books through the several publishing schemes previously described, they also participated vigorously in the longtime staple of the avant-garde, the little magazine.

Though the circulation of these magazines tended to be fairly modest, little magazines had been crucial in the promulgation of both modernism and avant-garde or experimental American literature at least since the 1910s.⁹⁰Harriet Monroe founded Poetry in 1912 with Ezra Pound as foreign editor, to cite just one very well-known example, with the magazine playing an important role beginning the next year in promoting what later came to be known as imagism. These aspirational, combustible, and often short-lived publications were particularly important in the emergence and formation of a group of writers like the ‘Objectivists,’ many of whom were little-known writers who not only lacked the means needed to reliably print their own work but whose aesthetic sensibilities (and ethnic/religious identities) frequently placed them squarely outside the mainstream of their age.

Pound and Williams, the group’s eldest affiliates, had been active in reading, contributing to, and occasionally editing little magazines since as early as 1909, when Pound made his first appearance in Ford Madox Ford’s English Review, and both men continued actively engaging with little magazines on both sides of the Atlantic well into the 1930s.

Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman have offered a thorough account of Pound’s shifting but frequently intense involvement with various literary magazines through the first several decades of his career, noting that Pound was involved in various capacities with ten separate magazines in England and the United States between 1909-1923, that during 1912-1920 (his prime years in London), Pound averaged around one magazine publication per week, and that he had averaged more than 91 magazine publications a year during the four year stretch from 1917-1920.⁹¹Modernism in the Magazines, 4-8. Scholes and Wulfman observed that while Pound’s anti-Semitism and support for fascism “have not endeared him to many people,” they also argue that

the Pound of the first three decades of the twentieth century was a different figure: a brilliant and indefatigable supporter of other writers and artists, a talented and learned poet, and a literary and cultural critic of enormous energy and biting wit. … Quite simply he had more to do with our present understanding of modernism than any other individual. He was a pioneer of comparative literary studies, of cultural studies, and of periodical studies … However one may rank his creative achievement as a poet, one much put him at the very top as an impresario and propagandist for the view of modernism that prevailed in the English-speaking world.⁹²Modernism in the Magazines, viii.

While Scholes and Wulfman’s close attention to Pound’s involvement with literary magazines wanes after 1923, Pound continued to be deeply interested in the quality of literature available to readers in both England and the United States, and continued to make suggestions, interventions, and attempts at editorial colonization well into the 1930s. Leonard Greenbaum provides a more balanced and less laudatory view of Pound’s combustible and often predatory relationship to little magazines in his The Hound & Horn: The History of a Literary Quarterly, noting that in addition to his involvement with Hound & Horn, Pound served as an editor or foreign correspondent for at least nine other little magazines between 1912 and 1935.⁹³Namely, Poetry (from 1912-1917), The New Freewoman (1913), The Egoist (1914), Blast (1914), The Little Review (from 1917-1921), Two Worlds (from 1925-1927), his own magazine The Exile (published between 1927- 1928), The New Review (from 1931-1932), and Westminster Magazine (1935). See pages 96-124 especially. Williams’ involvement with little magazines is similarly legendary, if somewhat less volatile.

Intense involvement with little magazines was not merely confined to Pound and Williams. A careful study of the “Objectivists” and their pre-February 1931 publishing history offers abundant evidence of the importance of little magazines to each of the group’s core members, just as even the most cursory perusal of their correspondence indicates that frustration about reliable access to publication (especially in the United States) was among their chief literary concerns. In fact, the members of “new group” Zukofsky presented as “Objectivists” in February 1931 would have been known to American readers (if at all) almost exclusively by their prior appearance in little magazines. Of the roughly two dozen writers Zukofsky included in his issue of Poetry, only Williams and Reznikoff had previously published volumes of any of their work in the United States.⁹⁴While Williams was certainly the best-known writer included in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry, the list of books he had published in the United States was limited to his self-published 1909 collection Poems (which he later regarded as embarrassing juvenilia), his 1917 collection Al Que Quiere!, his 1920 hybrid work Kora in Hell: Improvisations, and his 1921 collection Sour Grapes (all published by Four Seas in Boston), and his prose works In the American Grain (published by Albert and Charles Boni in 1925) and Voyage to Pagany (published by the Macaulay Company in 1928). Robert McAlmon had published several books by this time (mostly through Contact Editions, a publishing company which he owned and operated), but all had been printed in Europe. McAlmon’s Contact Editions had also published Carnevali’s A Hurried Man from Paris in 1925. Basil Bunting had published a private edition of his collection Redimiculum Matellarum from Milan in 1930, but this collection would have been obscure even to the most assiduous collector of poetry in the United States. Even these two exceptions can be a little misleading, however, since Williams’ most recent volume of poetry had appeared in 1923, meaning that for almost a decade all of Williams’ new poetry had appeared exclusively in little magazines.⁹⁵His hybrid work Spring and All (published by McAlmon’s Paris-based Contact Editions) and his chapbook Go Go (published by Monroe Wheeler’s Manikin Press in New York City) were both issued in 1923. Similarly, Reznikoff’s largely self-published poetry was little known outside of a very small circle in New York City. The only two volumes of Reznikoff’s poetry that had not been self-published had been issued more than a decade previously, neither of which had attracted much notice.⁹⁶Poems, a slim collection, had been issued in 1920 by the Samuel Roth Bookshop, and Uriel Acosta: A Play and a Fourth Group of Verse, had been published by the Cooper Press in 1921. A prose work by Reznikoff, By the Waters of Manhattan, was published by Charles Boni in 1930. Reznikoff had also self-published three volumes of poetry, three collections of drama, and an additional prose work, each of which had been typeset and printed by hand on a small printing press which he owned.

During the mid to late 1920s and early 1930s, the years during which the “Objectivist” nexus was first formed, Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky each enjoyed fluctuating editorial affiliations with a number of little magazines, many of which served as overt and sometimes covert vehicles for the development and promotion of the “Objectivists” both singly and as a group. In fact, nearly all of the “Objectivists” were either close friends of Zukofsky or had recently been published with Zukofsky in Pound’s The Exile, Charles Henri Ford’s Blues, Richard Johns’ Pagany, or Norman Macleod’s magazines The Morada and Front.

A few surviving letters from the era help to document the contours of interest for various members of the group when it comes to the then-extant little magazines. One particularly interesting document, entitled “Publications in English,” was sent by George Oppen to Ezra Pound, probably either late in 1931 or early in 1932. “Publications in English” comprises 3 typed pages which give Oppen’s brief survey and description of several contemporary little magazines, including Blues, which “[p]ublishes excellent work … [m]any would wish, however, that there should be indicated some distinction between the work of Williams and work still relying for distinction chiefly on ‘modernity’,” Pagany, which “publishes work by the group of authors also represented in Blues, (tho they can be classified as a group only by a similarity in degree of merit), but maintains that standard more consistently,” The New Review, which “contains the best of available work … [and is] less inhibited in explaining itself to the “general public” than are most magazines of its class,” Hound and Horn, which was “ordinarily described as scholarly. Certainly can be relied on for an intelligent and informed attitude,” American Mercury, edited by H.L. Mencken, who “is said to have a large following among college students, and is probably in accord with the most intelligent to be found in any number. It would not be accurate to say that the magazine is devoted to advertising, but it is probably felt that the justification of its existence is indicated by the price it is able to charge for space,” Poetry, described as a “fairly conservative publication. Nevertheless often of interest,” and Contempo, a “magazine concerned with liberal or radical political theses” which had “praised or declared allegiance to William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Burke, Benjamin de Casseres, and Eugene O’Neil[l].”⁹⁷This document, owned by Yale’s Beinecke Library, can be accessed online: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/4300755.

Similarly, a letter Zukofsky sent to Ezra Pound on February 5, 1931, provides another glimpse into the little magazines Zukofsky was most aware of at the time of the “Objectivists” creation. Commenting on Pound’s recent suggestion in Norman Macleod’s magazine The Morada that American writers organize their own publishing cooperative,⁹⁸”The intellectual business of the next thirty years may have to be done by pamphlet. The greatest material obstacle to mental life in America is publishers’ overhead. The American publisher expects to keep up palatial offices on Fifth Ave and to support fat family and forty employees on proceeds of a few books. European publishers often issue their stuff from one room or from the print shop. Difference of being able to print for 25 cents WHEN a few hundred people are ready, or of waiting till five thousand are ready to pay three dollars. The net result is that America is twenty years behind Europe in every branch of thought save those expressed, often quite able, by our dear friend Henry Ford.” (“mike and other phenomena”, 46)

Zukofsky advised Pound:

why not begin with your suggestion in Morada 5 and organize a writer’s syndicat (membership rules up to you) You can get 100 writers to contribute $5—or you can get 50 writers to contribute $5 and 10 to contribute $10 and use that to pay for your first or first two volumes. You can, or should be able to, get free advertising (or credit) from Hound & Horn, Symposium, Blues, Pagany, Morada, Front, The New Review, Criterion, etc. That should give you the 300 or 400 or 500 subscribers you want. There are also the subscription lists (?) of these magazines to circularize. Breathes there a pote with putt so dead he wd. spent more than 10¢ for breakfast even if [he] had the $5 I suggest he “give away” to his syndicat?⁹⁹Pound/Zukofsky, 91.

More than anything, what these letters demonstrate is the degree to which Zukofsky, Oppen, and others in the group were aware of and actively engaging with a range of short-lived but sometimes quite vibrant literary magazines as part of their operational understanding of the state of contemporary poetry. It is through these under-examined little magazines, in fact, that the “Objectivists” coalesced and took shape, beginning as early as the late 1920s. In what follows, I’ll provide brief sketches of several of these little magazines and detail their relationship to Zukofsky and other members of the “Objectivist” group.

The Dial

Years in operation: 1916-1929
Editors: Scofield Thayer [1920-1926], Gilbert Seldes [1921-1923], Kenneth Burke [1923], Alyse Gregory [1923-1925], Marianne Moore [1925-1929]
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky

While The Dial never functioned as an “Objectivist” outlet per se, it was significant as the preeminent American little magazine devoted to literature in the years just prior to the formation of the “Objectivists.” In addition, it had also provided, at various points in the 1920s, a hospitable forum for writing by both Pound and Williams, and was the second paying publication to publish Zukofsky’s poetry.¹⁰⁰The first was Poetry, which had published his sonnet “Of Dying Beauty” in the January 1924 issue: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=16224.

Publishing History

The Dial¹⁰¹Named after Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous transcendentalist magazine of the mid-19th century. was founded as a political literary fortnightly in Chicago in 1880 by Civil War veteran Francis F. Browne, who published it continuously until his death in 1913. His heirs sold the magazine a few years later to Martyn Johnson, who announced himself as the magazine’s new publisher in July 1916. Following his purchase of the magazine, Johnson quickly began work on two tasks: the installation of a new editorial staff and the relocation of the magazine’s headquarters to New York City. After his first choice for editor, George Bernard Donlin, was forced to leave the magazine to pursue treatment for his tuberculosis, Johnson hired the former New York Post reporter Harold Stearns to serve as associate editor, and Stearns persuaded Clarence Britten to leave his teaching post at the University of Wisconsin to serve as the magazine’s assistant editor. By the spring of 1918, Johnson had recruited Scofield Thayer, a Harvard graduate and son of a wealthy wool merchant in Worcester, Massachusetts, to act as the magazine’s financial backer and had relocated the magazine to an editorial office at 152 West Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village, where it would be housed until it ceased publication in 1929. Johnson and Thayer had a series of disagreements over the board’s editorial policy. These came to a head late in 1919, when Thayer joined forces with Dr. James Sibley Watson, a fellow Harvard graduate and the grandson of two of the founders of the Western Union Telegraph Company, to buy the magazine outright from Johnson.

Following Watson and Thayer’s purchase of the magazine, all of The Dial‘s previous editorial staff departed, save Clarence Britten, who remained on staff to aid in the transition to new ownership. Watson became the magazine’s publisher, Scofield Thayer became its editor, and Stewart Mitchell was hired as managing editor. Watson and Thayer also reorganized the magazine as a monthly publication and began to place a greater emphasis on its coverage of literature and the arts. In February 1920, Gilbert Seldes was added as the second associate editor, with Britten leaving the magazine before the publication of the April 1920 issue. Mitchell resigned as managing editor by the end of the year, following which Seldes became managing editor. Shortly after The Dial‘s reorganization, Thayer also hired Ezra Pound as a foreign advisor, proposing in March 1920 that Pound be paid $750 a year to act as an agent in finding suitable work.¹⁰²Not long previously Pound had left The Little Review, where he had served for more than two years as their “London editor.” Pound continued working in this capacity until April 1923, when Thayer informed him he was no longer wanted.[documentation needed] In addition, Thayer worked assiduously not only to attract contributions from well-known writers, but also recruited a series of European correspondents who sent regular letters with updates on developments in arts and literature from their various locales; The Dial’s list of foreign correspondents included Ezra Pound, John Eglington, T.S. Eliot (who had been Scofield Thayer’s schoolmate at both Milton Academy and at Harvard), Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Thomas Mann.¹⁰³Pound’s first “Paris Letter” appeared in the October 1920 issue; Eglington’s first “Dublin Letter” appeared in the March 1921 issue; Eliot’s first “London Letter” appeared in the April 1921 issue; Hofmannsthal’s first “Vienna Letter” appeared in the August 1922 issue; and Mann’s first “German Letter” appeared in the December 1922 issue.

In July 1921, shortly after Seldes’ appointment as managing editor, Thayer left New York City for Europe, settling in Vienna and submitting to psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud by the end of that year. For the next two years, Thayer was both significantly engaged with the publication of The Dial and active in European literary and cultural circles, meeting a number of significant continental writers and amassing a significant collection of modern art. In January 1923, Seldes took an extended trip to Europe where he worked with Thayer on assembling Living Art, a book containing reproductions of artworks in Thayer’s collection, and writing his own book The Seven Lively Arts. Upon Seldes’ departure, Kenneth Burke began serving as de facto managing editor of the magazine, with significant assistance from Sophie Wittenberg. Thayer returned to New York City in July 1923 and initiated a weekly series of “Dial dinners” at the end of that year. Unfortunately, Thayer’s mental health began to deteriorate, and he shuttled between New York, Bermuda, and Europe through much of 1924.

Seldes did not return from Europe until September 1923, and despite Burke’s pleading, he never resumed his managing editor duties. When a burned-out Burke temporarily departed the magazine in late 1923, The Dial was functionally without a managing editor until January 1924, when Seldes was officially replaced as managing editor by Thayer’s close friend Alyse Gregory, who retained Whittenberg and Burke as assistants. Early in 1925, however, Gregory informed Thayer that she would shortly be returning to England with her husband, the novelist Llewelyn Powys, and would be thereafter unable to continue her duties with The Dial. Thayer moved quickly to recruit Marianne Moore as Gregory’s replacement; by late April 1925, Moore had agreed to leave her job at the New York Public Library and Thayer announced her appointment as the magazine’s new acting editor in the May 1925 issue.¹⁰⁴Sophie Wittenberg also left the magazine at this time and was replaced as an assistant by Thayer’s cousin Ellen Thayer.

Soon after Moore’s editorial appointment, Thayer left New York City for Europe again, and effectively ceased fulfilling any editorial duties for the magazine. The Dial announced Thayer’s resignation as editor of the magazine in June 1926 (though it continued to list him as an “advisor”), and Moore’s promotion to full editor in January 1927, but Thayer’s involvement in the day-to-day affairs had been minimal since early in 1926.¹⁰⁵In February 1926, while living in Germany, Thayer suffered a severe mental breakdown, and was institutionalized for several months following his return to the United States. No known extant correspondence to any of his previous literary or artistic contacts from Thayer exists after February 1926, and Thayer spend much of the rest of his life in and out of sanatoria and accompanied by caretakers and guardians. Moore carried on editing The Dial for three more years, but without Thayer’s subsidy, the magazine eventually suspended publication after issuing its July 1929 issue.¹⁰⁶This thumbnail sketch relies heavily on both Nicolas Joost’s Schofield Thayer and the Dial: An Illustrated History, especially pp. 3-20, 30, 74-113 and the overview to Schofield Thayer’s papers, held by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

While The Dial enjoyed a fairly large circulation for a literary review, it had always been operated at a fairly steep deficit, and the magazine’s inability to increase its subscription or advertising revenues and heavy reliance on subsidy from its wealthy owners were to prove its downfall later in the 1920s.¹⁰⁷Nicholas Joost estimates that the magazine had a circulation of roughly 10,000 in 1920, and that while printing costs were around $750 per issue, the magazine’s running deficit was $4,000-5,000 per month. Thayer wrote to Ezra Pound in September 1920 that their current deficit was about “$84,000 annually” and that they would need to increase circulation tenfold to ever clear expenses. The magazine’s business manager would later estimate the cash deficit for 1920 at around $100,000, offset by cash receipts of just $24,000. By 1922, they had nearly doubled cash receipts (to $45,000) but cash deficits had only been cut to $65,000, with some 85% of this total going to editorial and manufacturing costs. Sales from newsstands averaged about 3,500 per issue in 1920, climbing to just over 4,500 by November 1922 and reaching a high-water mark of 6,261 with the December 1922 issue (which contained Eliot’s The Waste Land). Typical monthly sales figures ranged between 4,000-5,000, and revenues from these sales can be estimated using the published sales price: 35 cents a copy for first several four months of 1920, 40 cents per copy from May-December of 1920, and then 50 cents per copy from January 1921 until its final issue in July 1929. Subscriptions, which had numbered just under 3,000 in 1920, had risen to 7,440 by February 1923. The print run appears to have peaked with the January 1923 issue, of which 18,000 copies were printed. While “The Waste Land” had been an enormous success, nothing else the magazine was to print would have quite an impact on sales or the international literary world. For more details on the finances and circulation of the magazine, see Schofield Thayer and the Dial, 20, 30, 40-42, and Alan Golding’s “The Dial, The Little Review, and the Dialogics of Modernism” in Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, especially note 10 on page 70). During its heyday in the 1920s, however, The Dial published a broad range of important literary and artistic work from a broad base of transatlantic contributors, and through its generous rates for accepted work, did much to subsidize the production of modernist visual and literary art through the 1920s. In particular, The Dial was notable for its annual award, announced in June 1921 and first given in January 1922, of two thousand dollars to “acknowledge the service to letters of some one of those who have, during the twelvemonth, contributed to its pages,” as well as the generous regular rates it offered to its contributors: it paid two cents per word for prose in English, twenty dollars per page of verse, and twenty-five dollars per picture for the right to reproduce a picture or object which had not been previously exhibited, all of which were considerably higher rates than those on offer from most other comparable literary reviews of the time.¹⁰⁸Schofield Thayer and the Dial: An Illustrated History, 52, 59-61.

Connection to the “Objectivists”

As far as the “Objectivists” are concerned, the magazine’s strongest connections were with Pound and Williams, each of whom appeared frequently in the magazine during the years that Pound served as foreign correspondent and again when Marianne Moore was its editor. Both men were also chosen as recipients of the Dial’s lucrative annual award, with Williams receiving it in 1926 and Pound in 1927. While Williams frequently bad-mouthed the magazine in letters to Pound, Zukofsky, and his friend Kenneth Burke (who worked for The Dial), his feelings about the publication were not so negative as to lead him to stop sending them new work for publication (they were the best paying game in town, after all). Marianne Moore also published four poems by Louis Zukofsky in the December 1928 issue; these were among Zukofsky’s earliest publications.¹⁰⁹The poems were “tam cari capitis”; “Song Theme”; “Someone said, ‘earth’”; and “The silence of the good”. Apart from his appearance earlier that year in two issues of Pound’s The Exile, Zukofsky’s only previous publication in a national magazine had been his sonnet “Of Dying Beauty,” which had appeared in the January 1924 issue of Poetry.

The Little Review

Years in operation: 1914-1926; 1929 [one issue]
Editors: Margaret Anderson [1914-1923], Jane Heap [1916-1929]
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Carl Rakosi

Publishing History

Often mentioned in the same breath with The Dial in histories of influential American Modernist magazines, The Little Review was a monthly literary magazine founded in Chicago in March 1914 by Margaret Anderson, who had previously worked as a book reviewer and critic for a number of publications, including The Dial. In its earliest issues, the magazine championed the anarchism of Emma Goldman and evinced strong sympathies for both feminist issues and Imagist-inflected poetry. In 1916, Anderson met the artist Jane Heap, and the two women became lovers and literary collaborators, with Anderson inviting Heap to become a co-editor of the magazine. Anderson and Heap briefly moved the magazine to the San Francisco Bay Area before relocating to Greenwich Village in 1917, the same year they enlisted Ezra Pound to serve as the magazine’s “London editor.”¹¹⁰Pound’s affiliation with the magazine was announced in the April 1917 issue and he published an editorial explaining his decision to join The Little Review in the following month. Pound remained the magazine’s “London editor” until 1919. His name was absent from the editorial page of the May 1919 issue and the June 1919 issue contained only the cryptic note “Ezra Pound has abdicated and gone to Persia. John Rodker is now the London Editor of the Little Review.” Pound returned to the editorial staff of the magazine in 1921 at the invitation of Margaret Anderson (by which time he was living in Paris and serving as the foreign correspondent for Scofield Thayer’s The Dial). His name is featured in the “Administration” section of the magazine’s front matter along with Anderson, Francis Picabia and jh [Jane Heap] beginning with the Autumn 1921 issue, and remained there until he left the magazine for good in the spring of 1923. For more on Pound and Anderson’s relationship, see Pound/The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson: The Little Review Correspondence, published in 1989 by New Directions. Heap and Anderson continuing publishing the magazine as a monthly until the conclusion of their sixth volume, when financial strains prompted them to begin publishing the magazine first as a bi-monthly (starting in May 1920) and quickly thereafter as a quarterly (starting in September 1920).

While the magazine never had anything approaching the financial clout or circulation numbers enjoyed by The Dial,¹¹¹The Little Review did not pay its contributors, for example, and estimates of its circulation have generally ranged between 1,000-2,000. The Little Review nonetheless did enjoy a reputation as a bold and daring publication, earned by its willingness to discover and publish significant modernist and avant-garde visual art and writing from an impressive range of international contributors.¹¹²See Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review Anthology, published in 1953, for a good cross-section of work published by the magazine during its heyday. The Little Review, to a much greater extent than The Dial, also reveled in its avant-gardism, cheekily describing itself in the Spring 1922 issue, for example, as “AN ADVANCING POINT TOWARD WHICH THE ‘ADVANCE GUARD’ IS ALWAYS ADVANCING.”¹¹³See https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1299781611562504.pdf#page=63. The remark is unattributed, but should probably be ascribed to one or more of the listed editorial staff, which at this point consisted of Anderson, Heap, and Pound. Anderson and Heap also gained some measure of infamy (and respect) both for championing the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Dadaist poetry and for serializing James Joyce’s Ulysses.¹¹⁴Anderson and Heap published 23 installations of Joyce’s work, beginning with their March 1918 issue and ending with their September-December 1920 issue. Three of the issues containing installments from Joyce’s work were seized by the United States Post Office and burned as obscene, but it was Joyce’s “Nausicaa” chapter which appeared in the July-August 1920 issue which directly precipitated the obscenity suit. This latter decision ultimately led to a high-profile obscenity case in February 1921 which Anderson and Heap lost (they were fined $100 and ordered to cease publishing installments of Ulysses).¹¹⁵Shortly after the trial concluded, Anderson published her own an account of the trial, “‘Ulysses’ in Court,” in the January-March 1921 issue of The Little Review and discussed the case at some length in her 1930 autobiography, My Thirty Years’ War. For later scholarly discussions of the obscenity trial, see Holly Baggett’s “The Trials of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap.” A Living of Words: American Women in Print Culture. Ed. Susan Albertine. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995 (169-188) and Marisa Anne Pagnattaro’s “Carving A Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard And Ulysses,” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 47.2 (2001): 217-240.

In 1923, Anderson turned over most of the magazine’s editorial duties to Heap and moved to France, where she became, at Heap’s urging, a student at G.I. Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at a château just south of Paris. In January 1924, Heap opened The Little Review Gallery, a gallery dedicated to modern art, in New York City, operating it at first from the magazine’s offices before moving it into its own space on 5th Avenue (now home to the Parsons School of Design) in late 1925, and to a Midtown address near Bryant Park in 1927, where it survived just a few months before it closing permanently. Late in 1925, Heap moved to France to study more closely with Gurdjieff, and following the publication of the Autumn 1926 issue of The Little Review, Anderson and Heap suspended publication of the magazine until May 1929, when they published a final issue of the magazine from Paris which included over 50 responses to a questionnaire designed by Heap.

Connection to the “Objectivists”

While its importance as a vehicle for significant modernist artistic expression is well established, The Little Review‘s relationship to the “Objectivists” is far subtler, being comprised of a deep but fairly early connection to both Pound and Williams and the publication of three poems by Rakosi in 1925. Between 1917 and 1920, The Little Review frequently published work by both Williams and Pound, who served as the magazine’s foreign editor for much of this time.¹¹⁶Williams’ first appearance in the magazine came with the October 1917 issue, which featured three of his “Improvisations.” He appeared in another eleven issues between 1917 and the May-June 1920 issue, which carried his story “Danse Pseudomacabre.” His relationship with the magazine was much reduced after Jane Heap took over primary editorial duties, though he did publish a notable letter in the Autumn 1922 issue praising the magazine’s Spring 1922 issue, which had featured the work of the French painter Francis Picabia, whom Williams admired. The Little Review‘s other connection to the “Objectivists” was as the organ which provided Carl Rakosi with his first “major” literary publication. In 1925, at the recommendation of his friend, the novelist Margery Latimer, Rakosi called upon Jane Heap at her Greenwich Village office/apartment and presented her with a sheaf of his own writing. To his surprise (and elation), Heap agreed on first sight to publish his poetry in The Little Review, and three of Rakosi’s poems: “Sittingroom by Patinka,” “The January of a Gnat,” and “Flora and the Ogre,” appeared in the Spring 1925 issue.¹¹⁷Rakosi, then a young and totally unknown poet who had just moved to the city, would later describe this success as one of the great moments of his life. See his biography on this site for more details. As with The Dial, The Little Review should be seen as an immediate predecessor to the “Objectivists.” Both of these magazines were publications that the younger poets in the group followed closely, but to which the younger poets in the group were not quite ready to publish in themselves by the time that each magazine folded. The disappearance of these two major modernist publications, did however, open up the field for a number of new little magazines which sought to assume many of their duties, including both Lincoln Kirstein’s highbrow Harvard-affiliated The Hound & Horn and several of the smaller publications founded by various writers who would later be included by Zukofsky among the Objectivists (like Ford, Johns, and Macleod).

The Hound & Horn

Years in operation: 1927-1934
Editors: Lincoln Kirstein [1927-1934], Varian Fry [1927-1929], R.P. Blackmur [1928-1929], Bernard Bandler [1928-1934]
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, Norman Macleod, John Wheelwright

Publishing History

The Hound & Horn was founded in 1927 by Harvard undergraduates Lincoln Kirstein and Varian Fry. Initially published as a magazine for the Harvard undergraduate community (it had been subtitled “A Harvard Miscellany”),¹¹⁸There was a Harvard undergraduate literary magazine then extant (the Harvard Advocate), but Kirstein and Fry both felt that the current editorial staff was uninterested in admitting them to their clubbish circle. They initially appear to have sought to establish their breakaway publication on the model provided by The Harvard Monthly, which had been published at Harvard between 1885 and 1917 and which had been edited by and published contributions from several Harvard undergraduates who later went on to achieve various measures of literary success. the magazine took its title from the concluding couplet of Ezra Pound’s 1908 poem “The White Stag”: ”Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting / Bid the world’s hounds come to horn!” From the magazine’s inception, Kirstein and Fry were clear about their intentions to use the magazine to break from nineteenth-century aesthetic influences and more fully embrace the spirit of literary modernism on the Harvard campus.¹¹⁹In the first issue, Fry published an “Announcement” which concluded by asserting that “THE HOUND & HORN takes as its point of departure what is at once a valediction and a call to action. … [I]t bids farewell to land whose long familiar contours have ceased to stir creative thought: it bids farewell — and sounds the hunting horn.” Fry would further clarify his editorial intentions, writing in a 1934 letter that he wrote to “hail the new and glittering world they [Joyce, Eliot, Stein, Picasso and Stravinsky] and their influences were creating, and to bid farewell to the stodgy in the nineteenth century and its heavy hand on the twentieth” (Quoted in Leonard Greenbaum’s The Hound & Horn: The History of a Literary Quarterly, 26-27).

In the summer of 1928, the magazine added two new editors, Bernard Bandler, a close friend of Kirstein’s who later went on to a significant career in psychiatry, and R.P. Blackmur, a  cultured autodidact who ran a Cambridge bookshop and later went on to an illustrious career as a critic, poet, and English professor at Princeton University. Of the two founding editors, Kirstein had grander ambitions for the magazine, seeking to model the magazine on T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion, and hoping to occupy some of the cultural space that had previous been filled by The Dial, which ceased publication in the summer of 1929.¹²⁰In his foreword to The Hound & Horn Letters, Kirstein wrote that “The Criterion, later the Dial, were models of what magazines might be; both seemed so elevated and comprehensive in their spectra that, at the start, The Hound & Horn aimed to have been modestly enough, a mere “Harvard Miscellany.” But we printed a trial issue and secretly hoped that somehow it would please Eliot [the issue had included a two-part critical essay on Eliot by R.P. Blackmur and a bibliography of Eliot’s published work by Varian Fry]. … Eliot seemed to me, at the time, the most important authority in the world for anything and everything that could occupy me” (xvi). Like Kirstein, Bandler and Blackmur both wanted The Hound & Horn to expand into an international literary periodical, an opportunity which seemed particularly ripe with the recent failure of The Dial. Disagreement over this issue, along with Bandler’s editorial enthusiasm for the Humanism movement, became a major source of tension with Fry, who quit the magazine late in 1929. Fry’s departure was followed a short time later by Blackmur’s resignation as an editor, for reasons unclear, though he continued to be a regular contributor to the magazine.

Having emerged victorious in his conflict with Fry, Kirstein pushed ahead with his plan to establish The Hound & Horn as the American equivalent of Eliot’s The Criterion and position it as the cultural successor to The Dial. While the Hound & Horn did not pay contributors as handsomely as had The Dial, its rates were far more generous than most other little magazines, which helped it to attract intelligent criticism and modernist-inflected literature during the darkest years of the Great Depression.¹²¹For more on Hound & Horn‘s relationship to The Dial, see Greenbaum’s The Hound and Horn, 40-44. Regarding payment for contributors, The Dial had paid $20 / page for poetry and $10 / page for prose. In a 1929 letter to Ezra Pound, R.P. Blackmur indicated that the Hound & Horn provided rates of $7.50 / page for poetry and $3.50 for prose. While much reduced from the rates offered by The Dial in its heyday, this was still considerably more than that offered by other prominent modernist little magazines. For example, Eugene Jolas’ transition had paid contributors just 50 cents / page, while Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review did not pay contributors at all (The Hound & Horn Letters, 25). Following Kirstein’s graduation from Harvard in 1930, he and Bandler moved the magazine’s editorial offices to Manhattan, where it operated until  ceasing publication in 1934. In October 1931, the magazine added A. Hyatt Mayor to the editorial staff, and early in 1932 added Allen Tate and Yvor Winters as regional contributing editors (with Tate serving as “southern editor” and Winters as “western editor”).¹²²For a thorough history of the magazine, see Leonard Greenbaum’s The Hound & Horn: The History of a Literary Quarterly (Mouton, 1966) and Mitzi Berger Hamovitch’s The Hound & Horn Letters (University of Georgia Press, 1982).

Heavily subsidized by Lincoln Kirstein (or, to be more accurate, by Kirstein’s father, Louis, the chairman of Filene’s, a prominent Boston-based department store chain),¹²³Greenbaum indicates that the magazine’s financial records show that it the magazine’s circulation fluctuated between 1,500 and 4,000 and that the magazine operated at a loss of roughly $10,000 annually–a sum that would be roughly equivalent to $140,000-$180,000 in 2017 terms. See Greenbaum’s “The Hound & Horn Archive,” The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 39, No. 3 (January 1965), 145. the magazine ceased publication following the publication of the Summer 1934 issue, when Kirstein withdrew his patronage in order to devote his energies and resources towards the foundation of the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine. Kirstein would later recall:

I abandoned the magazine after seven years, not entirely because my interests had altered and I was otherwise magnetized (by the ballet). The real reason I did not fight to continue Hound & Horn … was that I didn’t give a damn for politico-philosophical tendencies which I felt were devouring the magazine’s space, and I was neither equipped to deal nor interested in dealing with them. I felt inadequate, and still do, with those delighted by ratiocination, with energies that mentate as sport.¹²⁴The Hound & Horn Letters, xi-xii.

Connection to the “Objectivists”

The relationship of the “Objectivists” to The Hound & Horn was accomplished primarily through Ezra Pound and, to a lesser extent, through Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams. Following the discontinuation of his own magazine The Exile in 1928 and The Dial in 1929, Pound was in search of other outlets through which to exert his influence on American artistic and literary culture.¹²⁵Pound had served as The Dial‘s “foreign advisor” and editor from 1920-1923 and had work published in four of the magazine’s first six issues. After one his typical spats with the editor, he resumed more friendly relations when Marianne Moore assumed editorship of the magazine in 1925. Pound received the magazine’s Dial Award (which included a $2000 prize) in 1927, and published work in each of the magazine’s final three issues. Responding to a letter from R.P. Blackmur soliciting a recent Canto for the magazine in 1929, Pound first asked about the magazine’s willingness “to do what The Dial and Criterion won’t” and then appears to have proposed forming an “overt alliance” with the magazine, offering to serve as the magazine’s foreign editor.¹²⁶Quoted language appears in letters from Blackmur to Pound, dated 20 May and 2 October 1929, which appear to quote previous messages from Pound (The Hound & Horn Letters, 25-27). Blackmur responded to Pound’s overtures in October 1929 with a mixture of enthusiasm and qualified caution, declining his offer of an overt alliance but reemphasizing his interest in publishing new Cantos and suggesting that the magazine would “take everything you send us (especially poems and stories), do our best to agree with you, and publish so much as we can of it. … This would amount to your gracing us as Contributing Editor.”¹²⁷The Hound & Horn Letters, 27.

Shortly after receiving Blackmur’s offer, Pound sent along three poems from Basil Bunting, urging the editors to “give this precedence in time over other mss. I have sent on” and publish all three poems together in the magazine. To Pound’s annoyance, Blackmur and Kirstein declined to publish Bunting, though they did gratefully accept and publish three of Pound’s Cantos (XXVIII–XXX) in their April-June 1930 issue, and included excerpts from Pound’s correspondence in several subsequent issues. Following Blackmur’s departure as managing editor, Pound began directing his recommendations and editorial judgment toward Kirstein, repeatedly urging Kirstein to publish several writers he felt enthusiastic about, including Bunting, McAlmon, and Zukofsky. While Kirstein and Bandler ignored most of Pound’s recommendations, Hound & Horn did publish Zukofsky’s lengthy critical essay on notable Harvard man Henry Adams, his poem “Aubade, 1925,” and his review of William Carlos Williams’ involvement with Pagany in the January–March 1931 issue.¹²⁸Zukofsky’s essay on Adams was serialized in three parts, the first of which appeared in the April–June 1930 issue. Pound was pleased with this, singling it out as worthy of note in a review of “Small Magazines” he published in the November 1930 issue of English Journal: “At the present moment there are a number of free reviews in activity. Of these The Hound and Horn appears to me the most solid. It has taken over the heritage of whatever was active in the Dial. It has got rid of nearly all the Dial‘s dead wood and rubbish. This purgation may endanger its safety. The advance in critical writing which I have mentioned seems to me apparent in Zukofsky’s essay on Henry Adams, serialized in Hound and Horn, and in Hyatt Mayor’s criticism of painting” (792). Zukofsky had also submitted a review of Pound’s Cantos to Hound & Horn sometime in 1930, but Bandler rejected it for publication as being “only a partial review,” since, in his view, while Zukofsky had “elucidated Pound and interpreted him” he had “seen him completely from within” and had not “attempted to estimate him from without” (The Hound & Horn Letters, 144-145).

Pound also suggested, in March 1931, that Kirstein form a personal acquaintance with both Williams and Zukofsky, though Kirstein does not appear to have followed up on this suggestion.¹²⁹ “as to local scene / I shd/ advise you to dig out ole Bill Williams// not necessary to AGREE. I shd/ also advise you to put up with being irritated by Zuk” (The Hound & Horn Letters, 60). A short time later, Pound angrily terminated his relationship with Hound & Horn, ostensibly over Kirstein’s failure to publish Olga Rudge’s translation of Jean Cocteau’s “Mystère Laïc,” writing in July 1931:

It only remains for me to express sincere regret for the time wasted by me in correspondence with H & H and say that taken as a whole our relations have been thoroughly unsatisfactory to me. I wish I had never heard of yr / magazine and I think you a god damn fool not to have printed the M.L. both for its integral quality and for its value proportionally to what you do print.¹³⁰The Hound & Horn Letters, 63. Pound’s relationship with Hound & Horn was probably doomed as soon as Blackmur left the magazine as an editor, since none of the subsequent editors seemed to value his editorial opinions very much. The relationship between Pound and Hound & Horn already seemed to be faltering by November 1930, when Bernard Bandler wrote to Pound rejecting his essay “Terra Italica,” and continued to deteriorate over a series of letters exchanged through Pound’s final angry outburst in July 1931. For more on the collapse of Pound’s relationship with Hound & Horn, see Greenbaum’s Hound & Horn 109-124, Michael Flaherty’s “Hound & Horn (1927-1934),” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines and The Hound & Horn Letters, 36-37, 43, 58-59, 62-64, 80.

After Pound’s burning of his bridge to the magazine’s publisher, Hound & Horn was an even less hospitable place for Zukofsky and others in Pound’s circle to seek publication, particularly since Kirstein’s associates and editorial advisors Dudley Fitts, A. Hyatt Mayor, and Yvor Winters already held strongly negative views of both Zukofsky and Bunting.¹³¹In April 1931, Fitts wrote to Kirstein that “I read Zuk. once, with extreme distaste … I didn’t get the Gug[genhiem Fellowship]. Ransom did; and that’s grand—apparently he needed it. Glad somebody like Zuk. or Bunting didn’t.” (The Hound & Horn Letters 79). On October 25, 1931, Mayor wrote to Kirstein that “Pound refuses to do anything for H. J. number. He suggests that when we have finished commemorating the illustrious dead, we might make a memorial number for him. He does, however, suggest that we get Zukofsky to make extracts from Pound’s long notes on H J in Instigations. A poor idea, I think, because Zukofsky is, to my thinking, rotten. However, what about Foster Damon’s [a prominent Harvard graduate then teaching at Brown University] doing something about these notes of Pound’s?” (The Hound & Horn Letters 96-97). Winters wrote to Kirstein in 1932 that “Our 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” (The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, 195). The Hound and Horn published Yvor Winters’ negative review of An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology in the January-March 1933 issue in which he dismissed Zukofsky and his group as “sensory impressionists of the usual sort” who entirely lacked “rational intelligence,” as well as a contentious exchange between Basil Bunting and Yvor Winters on the subject of Winters’ review in the next issue, which ended with Winters challenging Bunting to fight him.¹³²See the correspondence section of the April-June 1933 issue of Hound & Horn. Winters’ response: “Mr. Bunting appears to offer me some kind of challenge. I shall be glad to encounter him at his own weapons—any kind of prose or verse—or, if he will come to California, with or without gloves, Queensbury rules” (The Hound & Horn 6:3, 323). A letter from Zukofsky to Kirstein giving his side of the dispute with Winters can be found in The Selected Letters of Louis Zukofsky, 82-84.

In July 1931, Kirstein sent Zukofsky the manuscript of some Rakosi’s poems, asking for Zukofsky’s opinion regarding publication. Thanks largely to Zukofsky’s positive recommendation and offer to provide detailed criticism of Rakosi’s work, The Hound & Horn published Rakosi’s sequence “A Journey Away” in their Winter 1931 issue, but they would never print Rakosi again and ignored Zukofsky’s suggestion to solicit work by Kenneth Rexroth.¹³³See The Selected Letters of Louis Zukofsky, 78-80. Zukofsky’s relationship with Kirstein appears to have remained intact through early September, when he told Pound:

Mr. Kirstein will probably use the enclosed poem [“Her Soil’s Birth”]. Doesn’t know—probably—I stole it from [seventeenth century English poet Edmund] Waller, but thinks my Helen Kane-Jefferson poem [“Madison, Wis., remembering the bloom of Monticello (1931)”] takes off from Mauberly! Oyoi—and then he wants me to read half the poems of half a nation & advise him & will probably take my advice?!¹³⁴Pound/Zukofsky, 98-99.

Unsurprisingly, considering the level of misunderstanding apparent in exchanges like this, Zukofsky would soon have his own falling out with the editors. It appears that on at least two occasions, Kirstein accepted a manuscript of Zukofsky’s for publication and then later withdrew the offer of publication after further consultation with other editors. The second time this occurred it was in relation to a heated exchange of letters between Yvor Winter and Zukofsky regarding René Taupin’s L’Influence du symbolism francais sur la poesie Americaine. These letters, which had reached the proof stage, were ultimately pulled from publication in the magazine, along with poems which Zukofsky had submitted a few months previously. Zukofsky suspected that Winters may have had some hand in the letters being withdrawn from publication, and wrote Kirstein asking for an explanation and the return of his manuscripts, if the decision not to publish was in fact final.¹³⁵See The Selected Letters of Louis Zukofsky, 82-84. Kirstein returned the manuscripts, effectively ending Zukofsky’s relationship with the magazine; by December Zukofsky told Pound that his relations with Hound and Horn were “definitely broken.”¹³⁶Pound/Zukofsky, 108.

Recalling his and his magazine’s association with Pound, Kirstein would later write: “We printed nearly everything he sent us, but finally, in spite of his lovely poems and his marvelous letters, we couldn’t face the attendant coterie of lame duck discoveries he was always capriciously harboring, and we were relieved to let him be obscene about us other ‘little’ magazines.”¹³⁷Quoted in Greenbaum, The Hound & Horn, 104. It’s difficult to draw any other conclusion from a phrase like “lame duck discoveries” than that Kirstein and the other editors of Hound & Horn ultimately had little but contempt for writers like Zukofsky, Bunting, McAlmon, and Rakosi.

The only other writers affiliated with the “Objectivists” to have published in The Hound & Horn were William Carlos Williams, Norman Macleod and the Harvard-educated and prominent Bostonian John Brooks Wheelwright.¹³⁸Williams’ poem “Rain” appeared in the October–December 1929 issue and whose “In a ‘Sconset Bus,” appeared in the July–September 1932 issue, Three brief items of correspondence between Williams and Kirstein are included in The Hound & Horn Letters, pp. 138-140. Macleod published a poem in the Winter 1931 issue. Wheelwright published regularly in Hound & Horn, beginning with its very first issue (which contained his prose work “North Atlantic Passage.” He also published a number of poetry review, poems, and prose on both poetry and architecture in the magazine.

The Exile

Years in operation: 1927-1928
Editor: Ezra Pound
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, Robert McAlmon, Howard Weeks

Ezra Pound’s short-lived magazine The Exile, which consisted of just four issues published in 1927 and 1928, might properly be considered the first proto-“Objectivist” publication.¹³⁹Tom Sharp has argued not only that The Exile was the group’s “first public meeting place,” but that the publication of work by some many writers later identified as “Objectivists” in the magazine establishes the group firmly within the Poundian poetic tradition and “expresses many of the principles, especially about the importance of group activity, that Pound continued to impress upon them” (http://sharpgiving.com/Objectivists/sections/01.history.html). A look at the writers published in the final three issues of Pound’s magazine shows a significant overlap with Zukofsky’s later editorial selections for his “Objectivists” issue of Poetry, with Pound publishing work by Zukofsky, Rakosi, Williams, Robert McAlmon, and Howard Weeks.¹⁴⁰Zukofsky’s “Poem Beginning ‘The'” appeared in The Exile 3, the same issue in which Weeks poem “Stunt Piece” appeared. Pound published four poems by Rakosi and a McAlmon short story in The Exile 2, and Rakosi’s “Extracts from A Private Life” in The Exile 4, which also contained Williams’ “The Descent of Winter,” several poems by Zukofsky, and an essay on Gertrude Stein by McAlmon. The Exile represented Pound’s first (and only) attempt to edit and publish his own magazine, and its failure demonstrated some of his limitations as an editor and publisher. While Pound was justly proud of his ability to identify significant voices early in their career and recommend them to more established publications, he also appears to have been temperamentally unsuited to the kinds of careful, patient, politic work needed to edit a longstanding, catholic literary journal, at which someone like Harriet Monroe, for example, excelled.¹⁴¹For a balanced appraisal of Monroe’s considerable skills as an editor and publisher as against the self-serving accounts Pound and his acolytes have tended to promote, see John Timberman Newcomb’s excellent “Poetry‘s Opening Door: Harriet Monroe and American Modernism” in Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, 85-103.

Publishing History

Pound issued the first issue of The Exile in the Spring of 1927, from Dijon, France, where it was printed by Maurice Darantière.¹⁴²Dariantière had handled many of Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions books and was the printer Sylvia Beach turned to when she had been unable to find a printer in Britain or the United States willing to issue James Joyce’s Ulysses. Pound had hoped that the magazine might be readily imported into England and the United States and made arrangements for the first issue of the magazine to be sold by authorized agents in New York, Paris, and London. To his great exasperation, Pound found that importing a publication printed abroad to the United States met with all kinds of expensive bureaucratic difficulties. Consequently, beginning with the second issue, published in Autumn 1927, The Exile was published by the Chicago-based Pascal Covici.¹⁴³Covici had published Pound’s Antheil and The Treatise on Harmony in 1927, and was at that time closely connected with Samuel Putnam, a translator and poet then living in Paris who helped broker Covici’s taking on publication of The Exile. Covici would later move to New York City and form a publishing firm with Donald Friede, who had been vice-president of Boni-Liveright. Covici-Friede were best known for limited editions of literary works, but they published some commercial fiction during the Depression. Covici formed a significant and long-lasting friendship and publishing relationship with John Steinbeck, and when Covici-Friede went bankrupt in 1938, Covici moved to Viking Press, and brought Steinbeck along with him. Covici died in 1964. A longer explanation of this change in site of publication would appear in the third issue, but the second issue did include the following acerbic single page “Note re 1st Number” from Pound:

Extract of Mr. Price’s account of the New York Customs House.

“An assistant customs appraiser grabbed my arm the other day and said, ‘Say, the fellow that wrote that stuff in your magazine must be a narcotic fiend! Nobody has thoughts like those except under the influence of drugs! We don’t want stuff like that here—we’re going to have to defend our women and children against the Bolsheviks pretty soon!!’ ”

In fact, the behavior of a customs department plus the state of our copyright laws are such that but for Mr. Covici undertaking to print this second issue, the editors would have desisted.

Why the United States has a copyright law designed chiefly to encourage theft, I am unable to say.

As to Mr. Coolidge’s economic policy, I have one further suggestion—namely, that he can completely eliminate the cost of lunatic asylums by dressing the present inmates in customs uniforms and placing them in ports and along the frontiers. This will dispense with the present employees entirely and the public will be just as well served.¹⁴⁴Ezra Pound, “Note re 1st Number”, The Exile, Volume 2 (Autumn 1927): 120.

The second issue also featured a changed and reduced list of authorized agents, which now comprised just the Gotham Book Mart in New York City and Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co. in London (there was no Paris agent), giving some indication of Pound’s intended (Anglophone) audience. The issue itself contained editorial material by Pound as well as a long selection from John Rodker’s poem “Adolphe 1920,” poems by R.C. Dunning, and Carl Rakosi, a short prose selection from Joe Gould’s legendary Oral History, and longer prose pieces from Robert McAlmon and Stella Breen. Breen’s story, “My Five Husbands,” was the only piece of writing by a woman included in all four issues of Pound’s journal. Even by the standards of the time, this is stunningly poor representation, and reflects poorly on Pound’s catholicity of taste, though similar accusations could also be leveled against Zukofsky: just three of the more than 30 writers he published as “Objectivists” were women (Mary Butts, Frances Fletcher, and Martha Champion).¹⁴⁵George Oppen’s judgement on gender matters as they relate to Pound seems particularly fitting; among the scraps of paper Oppen had pinned to the walls of his writing space in his last years was this “Note to Pound in Heaven”: “Only one mistake, Ezra! / You should have talked / to women” (Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, 235).

The third issue of The Exile was published in Spring 1928, and contained the longest and most varied list of contributors. The issue began with poems by William Butler Yeats (four sections each from the poems “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Blood and the Moon”), Zukofsky’s “Poem Beginning ‘The’,” a portion of Pound’s own “Canto XXIII,” and the conclusion of Rodker’s “Adolphe 1920.” Pound also gave space in the issue to prose and poems by R. C. Dunning, poetry by Clifford Gessler, Howard Weeks, and Herman Spector, prose pieces from Payson Loomis and Morley Callaghan, and a smattering of Pound’s editorial pronouncements on various topics, most of which touch on his contempt and despair for the American cultural and political scene, with a few jabs at various European nations included for good measure. The issue also contained a single page “Desideria” from the editor:

Quite simply: I want a new civilization. We have the basis for a new poetry, and for a new music. The government of our country is hopelessly low-brow, there are certain crass stupidities in administration that it is up to the literate members of the public to eradictae [sic]. … I say “new” civilization, I don’t know that I care about its being so very different from the best that has been, but it must be as good as the best that has been.¹⁴⁶108.

Pound also gave greater context to the issues and difficulties he had encountered in trying to import the first issue and the reasoning behind his decision to move publication to Chicago and the delays in publication the magazine has suffered, writing:

The first issue of The Exile printed in Dijon was strictly my own affair. Mr. [John] Price assured me that America cd. absorb 300 copies.¹⁴⁷John Price was a New York newspaperman that Pound had partnered with in publishing and importing the magazine. See The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, 113-115. The Port of Noo York assured Mr. Price that magazines were not dutiable. On that understanding I had no need of anyone’s cooperation.

The Port of New York saw Exile, found that it was dated “Spring 1927” instead of “April 1927” and proclaimed that Exile was not a magazine but a “book”. Thereby illustrating the nature of the bureaucratic mindersatz.

The tax imposed on “books” at the American frontier as result of our governing powers, ever desirous of maintaining the present state of national stupidity, wd. effectively preclude the possibility of my printing Exile in my own front yard and shipping it to the scattered intelligentzia of Texas, Albany and the outlying gehennae. I mean save at greater expense than it is worth.

Hence the delays in the appearance of subsequent numbers. For any enjoyment the present issue affords the famished reader, the said reader may thank Mr. Covici.¹⁴⁸”Interaction,” 109.

Pound published a fourth and final issue of The Exile in Autumn 1928.¹⁴⁹Covici had informed Pound by September both that he was planning to form a partnership with Donald Friede and move their operations to New York City and that Pound’s magazine had been too unprofitable for him to continue publishing it. This issue included some 30 pages of assorted political and social commentary by Pound; William Carlos Williams’ “The Descent of Winter,” a lengthy mix of prose and poetry from Williams’ private journals that Zukofsky had been instrumental in editing;¹⁵⁰Williams 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, 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. a brief review of Gertrude Stein’s work by Robert McAlmon; more than a dozen pages of prose and poetry by Zukofsky; poetry by Carl Rakosi; excerpts from recent correspondence Pound had had with Samuel Putnam; short works by John Cournos, Falkoff (translated by Mark Kliorin), and Benjamin Péret, and “Data,” an article in which Pound attempted to “set down a few dates, and give a list of the periodicals where the struggle took place. Sic: [places where] Contemporary americo-english non-commercial literature struggled into being,” provided a bibliography of his own work as well as that of Williams and McAlmon, and offered a rambling catalogue of various of his other enthusiasms, including the violin playing of his mistress, Olga Rudge.¹⁵¹104. It really is a pity that Pound didn’t have access to a micro-blogging platform and a large social media marketing budget. He would have loved it.

Reflecting on The Exile in 1930, Pound summarized its accomplishment thusly: “In Exile I managed to publish [John Rodker’s] Adolphe and a little work by McAlmon, W. C. Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and one poem by Howard Weeks.” ¹⁵²”Small Magazines,” The English Journal, 19.9 (November 1930): 701.

Blues

Years in operation: 1929-1930 [9 issues]
Editors: Charles Henri Ford [1929-1930], Kathleen Tankersley Young [1929], Parker Tyler [1930]
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi, Kenneth Rexroth, Norman Macleod, Harry Roskolenko [Roskolenkier], Richard Johns, Parker Tyler, Charles Henri Ford

Shortly after The Exile printed its last issue in late 1928, the twenty-one year old Charles Henri Ford and the African-American poet Kathleen Tankersley Young published the first issue of their magazine Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms from Ford’s apartment in Columbus, Mississippi. Ford and Young had first met at the Carnegie public library in San Antonio, Texas in early 1928 after Young had written Ford telling him that the legendary Greenwich Village publisher Lew Ney had recommended that she seek him out. Ford was an aspiring poet who had been stung by Harriet Monroe’s rejection of several of his submissions in 1927, and with direct support from Young, and encouragement from both Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, whom he had corresponded with for a few months, Ford he borrowed a small amount of money to launch a new magazine. Young disliked Ford’s choice of name for the magazine, encouraging on several occasions to reconsider the title (she suggested calling it The Modern Review, The Modernist, or Moderns instead), but Ford stuck with Blues, publishing its first issue in February 1929.

Ford and Young launched Blues as a monthly publication dedicated almost exclusively to “new” poetry; individual copies sold for 35 cents and an annual subscription cost $3.00. It appears that Pound initially saw the magazine as a potential continuation of his work with The Exile, telling his father Homer in January 1929: “C. H. Ford is starting a local show, with [Herman] Spector, Bill Wms. and Vogel, and printing Zuk. Let’s see what they can do,” and writing to Joseph Vogel, who Ford had recruited to serve as contributing editor, “I shd. be inclined not to make an effort to bring out another Xile until one has seen whether Blues can do the job. Or do you consider this excessive on my part? I don’t see that there is room or need for two mags doing experimental stuff … at present moment. … Seems to me a chance for the best thing since The Little Review and certainly the best thing done in America without European help.”¹⁵³The first quotation from Ezra Pound to His Parents, 618 and the second in Selected Letters: 1907-1941, 223.

On February 1, 1928 Pound also sent Ford a lengthy letter of advice for the young editor, which echoed much of what he had written to Zukofsky and Vogel regarding the problems of American copyright law and the obstacles erected to the publication of literature, and emphasized the value of group action:

Every generation or group must write its own literary program. The way to do it is by circular letter to your ten chief allies. Find out the two or three points you agree on (if any) and issue them as program. … As you don’t live in same town with yr. start contribs, you can not have fortnightly meeting and rag each other. Best substitute is to use circular letters. For example write something (or use this note of mine), add your comments, send it on to Vogel, have him show it to Spector, and then send it to Bill Wms. each adding his blasts or blesses or comment of whatever-damn natr. Etc. When it has gone the rounds, you can send it back here.¹⁵⁴Selected Letters: 1907-1941, 223-224.

In addition to Joseph Vogel, Ford and Young had also recruited William Carlos Williams to appear on the magazine’s masthead as a contributing editor (along with Herman Spector, Oliver Jenkins, Jacques Le Clercq, and Eugene Jolas). Williams was similarly enthusiastic about the magazine’s prospects, writing to Zukofsky in late 1928:

There is hope! A brand <new>, gritty clean magazine is about to see the light of day in Mississippi. I am to be a contributing editor. An outlet at last. I want your poem beginning “A” for it if The Dial isn’t large enough. They are to pay (I think) well. I’ll let you know more when I know more but it sounds hopeful – as I have said. It is to be called BLUES: An anthology of American writing. I want to guard myself concerning the pay part of it, however, since I am not too certain about that though it looks good.¹⁵⁵The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 24.

Publication History and Connection to the “Objectivists”

Ford and Young placed an announcement for Blues in the famous “Revolution of the Word” double issue of transition describing their magazine thusly:

BLUES is a magazine of a more complete revolt against the cliché and commonplace welcoming poetry and prose radical in form subject or treatment.

BLUES is a haven for the unorthodox in america and for those writers living abroad who though writing in english have decided that america and american environment are not hospitable to creative work.

BLUES is a cooperative experiment and cannot at present pay for contributions but the magazine will be given wide distribution among critics writers and those interested in modern literature in europe and the states.¹⁵⁶transition 16-17 (1929), n.pag.

The inside cover of the first issue also listed a number of future contributors and indicated that forthcoming issues would also contain work by

others who are disgusted with literature as it is at present presented in these United States. By subscribing to Blues you will show your interest and willingness to help in the plan of the editors to revitalize and introduce new rhythms in creative writing. There is only one class of literature more intellectually depressing than the sentimental, the trite, the expected. The reference is made to that most deadening of mental incubuses—the strained, the forced, the far-fetched. Blues, by the exclusion of both classes from its pages, will wage a bitter war against them, and will provide an organ of experimentation for the generation sans illusions.

The first issue of Blues contained just under 30 pages of poetry from a dozen contributors, including Louis Zukofsky, Parker Tyler, and Norman Macleod. While the editors had announced that Blues was intended to serve as “a haven for the unorthodox in America and for those writers living abroad who, though writing in English, have decided that America and American environment are not hospitable to creative work,” all of the contributors to the first issue were then living in the United States, with eight of the twelve then living in New York City. The list of book stores where Blues could be obtained was more geographically diffuse, however, with over 30 shops listed in more 20 cities across the United States.¹⁵⁷The list included 7 stores in New York City; 6 in Chicago; 2 in Detroit, and one each in in Aberdeen, Washington; Atlanta; Baltimore; Boston; Cleveland; Columbus, Mississippi; Denver; Hollywood, California; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; New Orleans; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Portland, Oregon; Princeton, New Jersey; Salt Lake City; San Francisco; Santa Fe; and Washington, D. C.

The second issue (March 1929) carried a brief “program” from Pound, a manifesto from Williams about the role and direction of a new little magazine devoted to poetry in America, and three more poems by Zukofsky. At the end of the contributors note to the second issue, the editors also announced “An Expatriate Number of Blues is planned for the near future, containing poems and stories by those writers living abroad who, though writing in English, have decided that America and American environment are not hospitable to creative work.”¹⁵⁸”Notes,” 52. This expatriate issue would appear in July 1929.

The third issue (April 1929) included three short poems by Norman Macleod as well as Kenneth Rexroth’s first ever published poem and the fourth issue (May 1929) contained Williams’s prose statement “A Note on the Art of Poetry,” two additional Macleod poems, and four poems by Zukofsky. In place of the advertisements for other magazines that had previously been included on the back cover of the first three issues, the fourth issue included an advertisement for Blues itself, proclaiming

AT LAST IN AMERICA …

A MAGAZINE THAT DARES …

BLUES …
has given a haven to the unorthodox in the states who are fighting to retain the hierarchy of pure spirit against the insane horde that is suffocating in mass-economics …

BLUES …
will continue to print the work of the most vital writers in this country and in europe, and will be a rallying-ground for the younger writers doing experimental work who are paralyzed by the presbyterian attitude of the current magazines which, with few exceptions, are out to make a success, to become “anthologized,” to do the right thing under safe conditions and to strangle whatever living force the real creator may have …

The fifth issue (June 1929) included poetry by Parker Tyler, Kenneth Rexroth, and Harry Roskolenkier and announced the long awaited “expatriate number” to be printed on July 15 as “an important representation of the creative writing being done by americans living in europe.” The July expatriate number was the editors’ most ambitious undertaking to date, with new work by a host of significant American modernist writers living in Europe: Gertrude Stein, H.D., Kay Boyle, Eugene Jolas, Walter Lowenfels, Harry Crosby, Leigh Hoffman, Harold Salemson, and Laurence Vail.

The announcement, published in the sixth issue of Blues that the magazine would be switching to a quarterly format with its next issue.

The editors, who had been experiencing financial problems, also announced in the sixth issue that they would be switching to a quarterly publication schedule, and tried to put a defiant spin on this decision, proclaiming it as part of “a greater war against stupidity and standardization.” The also announced that their next issue, “greatly enlarged in scope and content” would be issued in Fall 1929 with several new regular features and would sell for 75 cents a copy.

This change in format was accompanied by the magazine’s first major aesthetic overhaul, complete with a new cover design by Andrée Dutcher Rexroth (Kenneth’s wife) which reflected Ford’s interest in internationalizing his audience following the publication of his “expatriate” issue, listing the sales price on the cover of the issue in three different currencies (“75 cents—20 francs—3 shillings”) for the first time. The issue also featured the first change to the editorial masthead since the magazine was founded: Parker Tyler was listed as an associate editor and Joseph Vogel was dropped from the list of contributing editors.¹⁵⁹In the October 1929 issue of New Masses, Vogel wrote a vicious takedown of Blues, claiming that the magazine “has persistently avoided life and human beings. The work in it has been metaphysical, treating with petty emotions, describing souls of lousy poets” and suggested that “it is time that young writers dissociate themselves from all these abstractions, as many have long ago done from Pound, the dean of corpses that promenade in graveyards” (“Literary Graveyards,” New Masses (October 1929): 30. The issue itself opened with a faux advertisement for the issue by William Carlos Williams in which Williams playfully subverted the invitation so often extended by expatriates in France to their compatriots remaining in the United States:

We live, gentle reader, in a world very much gone to pot, the thought of it tortured, the acts of it blind, the flight from it impossible.

What to do?

Either retreat, swallowing whole, as complete as it is the Summa Theologica, the philosophy dependent therefrom and the poetry pinned thereto and go to rest with John Donne in that tight little island of dreams where all past wealth is garnered; or face the barren waves— …

We now boldly assert that saving the retreat there is no other way for writing in the present state of the world than that which BLUES has fostered.

“You MUST come over.”¹⁶⁰”introduction to a collection of modern writings,” 3.

The issue also included poetry by Williams, Parker Tyler, Kenneth Rexroth, Norman Macleod, Charles Henri Ford, and new contributors Richard Johns and Forrest Anderson, whose appearance in Blues marked his first ever publication anywhere. The issue also included various letters from correspondents in Europe and across the United States, with Harold Salemson (the editor of Tambour magazine) supplying a “Paris Letter,” Parker Tyler writing some New York Notes, “Augustus Tiberius” writing a letter from San Diego, and Kenneth Rexroth providing a “Letter from San Francisco.”

Shortly after this issue appeared, the stock market crashed, on October 24, 1929 (known popularly as “Black Thursday”), and the United States began to descend into what would come to be known as the Great Depression. In November, William Carlos Williams wrote to Ford:

under the economic pressure we all suffer, a quarterly is inescapable, forced on us, therefore better face to the facts, and so better all around.

Blues is after all you. You must bear it yourself and make it go, no help to that, though help you must have.

There are four or five new quarterlies and what not. Some good, some (probably) bad. Each will be at its best a person, as I see it.¹⁶¹Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, 110.

Prior to the publication of the eighth issue in Spring 1930, Ford moved Blues from his home in rural Mississippi to an apartment at 11 Macdougal Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Greenwich Village was an attractive new home to Ford for several reasons. First, it was where Kathleen Tankersley Young and Parker Tyler, his closest editorial associates, had been based, and both writers had long encouraged him to join him in the city. Second, the bohemian reputation and sexual permissiveness of the village was a strong attractor for the openly gay Ford, who stifled under the provincial and inhibiting restraints of the American south.¹⁶²The historian George Chauncey has written that during this period Greenwich Village “hosted the best-known gay enclave in both the city and the nation – and the first to take shape in a predominantly middle-class (albeit bohemian) milieu” (Gay New York, 227). For an intimate personal account of Ford’s years in Greenwich Village, see Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s 1933 novel The Young and Evil. For a more academic summary of this period in the history of Blues, see Alexander Howard’s “Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms and the Belated Renovation of Modernism” in The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Volume 5, Number 2, 2014, especially pp. 188-190. Finally, Young, Tyler, and Ford had already established a strong relationship with Lew Ney, a prominent local figure known colloquially as the “Mayor of Greenwich Village,” who became the magazine’s patron and publisher upon Ford’s move to the city. Ney, born Luther Emanuel Widen, was already publishing the little magazines Parnassus (“A Wee Poetry Magazine”) and Bohemia (“A Magazine of Good Fellowship”) Ney and Ford operated Blues from an address at 12 E 15th Street, on the edge of Union Square Park, and less than half a mile from the Gramercy Park address to which Richard Johns would relocate Pagany later in 1930.

The eighth issue of Blues featured another reshuffling of the editorial board, with Tankersley Young being listed as a contributing instead of associate editor, Oliver Jenkins being dropped from the list of contributing editors, and Lew Ney being added to the masthead as the magazine’s publisher. The issue itself featured four poems by Zukofsky, two by Williams, and one each by Parker Tyler, Forrest Anderson, and Charles Henri Ford. A ninth and final issue of Blues was published in Fall 1930. This issue makes no mention of Lew Ney and credited a greatly reduced editorial board, listing just Ford and Tyler as editor and associate editor, respectively, and William Carlos Williams and Eugene Jolas as “advisory editors.” The ninth issue touted a cover article entitled “Can the Poet Change the World?” by Gottfried Benn and Johannes R. Becker, as well as poetry by Williams, Zukofsky, Ford, Tyler, and Forrest Anderson, and Williams’ prose statement “Caviar and Bread Again: A Warning to the New Writer.” In this warning, Williams’ criticized Blues harshly, arguing that too much modern writing attended to experimental techniques but neglected substance:

There is one major phase of modern poetry on which both critics arid their begetters have gone astray. That is substance. So riled have the former been over the modern radical changes in technique that as far as any substance can be distilled out of what they have had to say such substance is thoroughly negligible. …

It is he, the poet, whose function it is, when the race has gone astray, to lead it— to destruction perhaps, but in any case, to lead it.

This he will not do by mere blather but by a magnificent organization of those materials his age has placed before him for his employment.

At the same time he usually invents a technique. Or he seems to do so. But really it is that he has been the fortunate one who has gathered all the threads together that have been spun for many centuries before him and woven them into his design.

What I am driving at is some kind of an estimate of what is going on today, some kind of estimate of the worth of modern poetry before condemning it for the lack of substance which strikes one in such a magazine as Blues.

The older poetry is worn out for us along with all new work which follows the older line. No amount of re-inflation after Eliot’s sorry fashion can help it. At most we can admire Eliot’s distinguished use of sentences and words and the tenor of his mind, but as for substance—he is for us a cipher. We must invent, we must create out of the blankness about us, and we must do this by the use of new constructions.

And for this we cannot wait until—until—until Gabriel blow his horn. We must do it now— today. We must have the vessel ready when the gin is mixed. We’ve got to experiment with technique long before the final summative artist arrives and makes it necessary for men to begin inventing all over again.

On the poet devolves the most vital function of society: to recreate it— the collective world— in time of stress, in a new mode, fresh in every part, and so set the world working or dancing or murdering each other again, as it may be.

Instead of that— Lord, how serious it sounds!—let’s play tiddlywinks with the syllables. And why not? It doesn’t cost anything except the waste of a lot of otherwise no-good time. And yet we moderns expect people actually to read us—even to buy our magazines and pay for them with money. . . .

Experiment we must have, but it seems to me that a number of the younger writers has forgotten that writing doesn’t mean just inventing new ways to say “So’s your Old Man.” I swear I myself can’t make out for the life of me what many of them are talking about, and I have a will to understand them that they will not find in many another.

If you like Gertrude Stein, study her for her substance; she has it, no matter what the idle may say. The same for Ezra Pound, for James Joyce. It is substance that makes their work important. Technique is a part of it— new technique; technique is itself substance, as all artists must know; but it is the substance under that, forming that, giving it its reason for existence which must be the final answer and source of reliance.

We must listen to no blank-minded critic, without understanding, when it comes to what we shall do and how we shall do it; but we must realize that it is a world to which we are definitely articulating— or to which we might be, were we all able enough.¹⁶³”Caviar and Bread Again,” 46-47.

This stunning attack on Blues and its contributors was caveated in the magazine’s back matter with this from the editors: “Blues asked Dr. Williams for an interior criticism; the result is published on the part of the editors with the disregard for personal feelings which they have striven to make a principle.”¹⁶⁴”Notes on Contributors,” 52. If Benn and Becker’s cover article was intended to open a conversation about the role of the artist, Williams’ reflections seem like a more fitting conclusion to a conversation, a brutal and slightly cranky summation of the efforts of an experimental magazine which had given voice to a number of young modernist poets. Williams’ critique of the magazine might also serve as a kind of last word for and on Blues, as well, since Ford and Ney could not make the magazine a viable concern, despite their best efforts, and Blues suspended publication of the magazine after this ninth issue appeared in Fall 1930. Ford and Tyler apparently planned to publish a tenth issue of the magazine in 1931 from Paris featuring work by Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and others, but this issue never appeared.¹⁶⁵In 1989, however, Ford took over editorship of an issue of Michael Andre’s magazine Unmuzzled OX, presenting it as the tenth and final issue of Blues. In the January 1931 issue of The Sewanee Review, Ford and Tyler published “What Happens to a Radical Literary Magazine,” a brief postmortem apologia of their magazine.

Even as their influence in Blues began to wane and the magazine folded, Williams and Zukofsky had already identified in Richard Johns’ Pagany another possible vehicle for spreading both their work and some of their ideas about the role and function of writing. A quick glance at the contributor list for both Blues and Zukofsky’s “Objectivists” issue of poetry is quite telling. Of the 23 individual contributors Zukofsky published in the February 1931 issue of Poetry, nearly half had been previously published in Blues. Furthermore, Ford and Tyler, the magazine’s editors, were chosen as Zukofsky’s interlocutors in the “symposium” section of his issue, signaling the magazine’s relative influence and importance in the nucleation of those writers Zukofsky chose to present as “Objectivists.”

Pagany

Years in operation: 1930-1933 [12 issues]
Editor: Richard Johns
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting, Robert McAlmon, Kenneth Rexroth, Norman Macleod, Charles Henri Ford, R B N Warriston, Parker Tyler, Richard Johns, Emanuel Carnevali, Forrest Anderson, Mary Butts, Frances Fletcher, Harry Roskolenko [Roskolenkier]

If Blues had been, in some form, a continuation of Pound’s The Exile and an important proto-“Objectivist” publication, Pagany was perhaps even more significant in the formation and consolidation of the group, with fourteen of the writers included in the “Objectivists” 1931 issue and all but George Oppen, T. S. Eliot, and Jerry Reisman of the poets included in An “Objectivists” Anthology appearing in Pagany during its three year, twelve-issue run.

In April 1929, just before The Dial suspended publication and not long after Charles Henri Ford had launched his Blues, Richard Johns, the 24 year old son of prominent Boston attorney Benjamin Newhall Johnson, wrote to William Carlos Williams declaring his intention to establish a new quarterly magazine. Johns’ own literary credentials were meager: he had not graduated from either high school or college (though he had attended Classical High School in his hometown of Lynn and taken courses in poetry and literary theory at Columbia) and had at that time only published a very small number of his own poems, and those in little-known magazines. Johns was, however, the son of a wealthy man. He was also ambitious enough to attempt to recruit Williams’ aid in launching his publishing venture.

In his introductory letter, Johns informed that his magazine would be published from Boston and dedicated to presenting the work of writers born in the United States, including those then living abroad. He also told Williams of his desire to name the magazine Pagany, in tribute to Williams’ recently published novel A Voyage to Pagany, invited Williams to serve as its associate editor, and asked him to contribute both a manifesto and “a good bit of your work” for the magazine. ¹⁶⁶Quoted in Pagany: Toward a Native Quarterly, 3. Williams responded on July 1, 1929 (the same month that Ford published his expatriate number of Blues), telling Johns

Nothing would please me more than a quarterly such as you suggest; there is no project more difficulty. I have seen enough of magazines which fail after the first four or five numbers. Any new magazine with which I would be associated must be in a position to continued for at least two years, come what may. This costs time and a large sum of money I am afraid.

Such a magazine, being a quarterly, must needs be of a good size, say a hundred and eighty pages. It had better not be published in Boston but in New York. You see what I mean.

But nothing – to revert – would please me more. It is only that I doubt seriously anyone’s ability to swing such a thing in the U.S. unless he be himself wealthy and abler minded and more literary minded and phenomenally generous and enlightened of spirit more than any one I have ever seen on earth – that I hesitate.

You may be this person. If so the millennium is at hand.

Yes, I have what may be walled ideals though they are curiously unlike anything that used to be called that. I have a vivid perception of something that might be done in the U.S. with literature as material. I should be instantly raised into heaven could I be sure that I would have a quarterly at my disposal that I could make the fulcrum by using which I would, in the course of the next ten years, pry things so loose here that we could breathe again in an enlightened air and not in this sink of stupidity and ignorance where we live now ‘saved’ by science and philosophy.

Thus you see I take you seriously but so much do I pant for what you offer that I am doubly dubious of anyone’s ability to make good. Yet what you envision IS the future – or rather the present if anyone could have the ability to put it across. I’d back it and it would be the center of every literary interest after a patient murderous ascent extending over several years of effort. I’d expect to give it my life – in short.¹⁶⁷Williams to Johns, July 1, 1929. Pagany Archives, University of Delaware Special Collections.

While Johns’ reply to this extraordinary missive does not appear to have survived, Williams’ next letter, dated July 12, extends his more qualified support:

Yes, I am with you but I’d like best not to have any official editorial status–unless you prefer otherwise. I can’t see that my name would help you. Besides, I am now american representative for a french quarterly and Blues has my name on its stationary – meaning nothing. Yet, if you want my name you may use it.

I think I begin to see what you are at, “A Native Quarterly” gives me the hint. … You believe then that we must built up from what we have before we shall be able to do more. In this you are opposed to Blues which is in your mind, perhaps, just a loose end. In a measure I agree with you that this is so. You would perhaps begin low, fasten to the native shale or sandstone or what have you. Splendid, I say – but full of danger. Yet the work must be done. Perhaps things like Blues can never make headway until that underground work has first been done. … The Dial, it strikes me is precisely what you do not want to imitate.

You want a basis for an advance, do you? And you accept the proposition that the basis is always that which is native. You want to consolidate your position and not fly of and think to reach an end before that end is defined. …

My suggestion is that I write for each quarterly a few pages, five to twenty, in which I shall be permitted to develop a theme, slowly and steadily, the native theme and its implications. In addition you may occasionally accept a poem, or a prose bit now and again. But the pages I write will be signed and published on my own responsibility, not that of the magazine. You could then attack me in the same issue as you may care to. Is that what you want? …

Le’s [sic] see more of your mind relative to the undertaking. Then I’ll write the manifesto, yes I will, after which you may open the screen door and point to the exit if you wish to without in the least offending …

[as a postscript] But I’m for you and I like your deliberation. I’ll do everything I can to further your project which may be important if it can be organized on some basis of decency (not moral)

Write freely of yourself, please; I am still in the stage of trying to formulate exactly what you may have in mind.¹⁶⁸Williams to Johns, July 12, 1929. Pagany Archives, University of Delaware Special Collections.

Johns explained more of his intentions and sent Williams some manuscripts he had received and was reviewing for publication. Williams replied at the end of August that he had reviewed the manuscripts and felt that they “justif[y] you in your attempt. I wish you luck and I’ll do all I can to help.”¹⁶⁹Williams to Johns, August 30, 1929. Pagany Archives, University of Delaware Special Collections. In October, after having reviewed another batch of manuscripts, Williams confessed to Johns: “I am beginning to grow enthusiastic about this venture of yours. I had no idea there was so much really new writing going on about me.”¹⁷⁰October 24, 1929. University of Delaware Special Collections. In November, Williams also sent along a crude hand-drawn sketch of a possible cover for the magazine, which Johns adopted almost exactly as sketched by Williams for the magazine’s eventual design.

Publication History

The cover of the first issue of Richard Johns’ Pagany: A Native Quarterly, published in January 1930.

Having secured both Williams’ approval and a fifteen hundred dollar loan from his father to subsidize the first year of publication, Johns pushed forward with his plans, printing a thousand copies of the first issue of Pagany: A Native Quarterly in January 1930. Like each of the subsequent issues, the first issue of the magazine was printed in black on a brightly colored cover stock (in this case, orange), and prominently featured the magazine’s visual mark (a stylized tree growing within a fenced enclosure) designed by Johns’ friend Virginia Lee Burton, and a complete list of the magazine’s contributors, with each contributor’s name printed in the same size type.

In the announcement which inaugurated the magazine’s first issue, Johns offered the following explanation of the title:

Pagus is a broad term, meaning any sort of collection of peoples from the smallest district or village to the country as an inclusive whole. Taking America as pagus, any one of us as the paganus, the inhabitant, and our conceptions, our agreements and disagreements, our ideas, ideals, whatever we have to articulate is pagany, our expression.¹⁷¹A Return to Pagany, 50.

Throughout its twelve issue run, Johns made only a handful of exceptions to Pagany‘s “Americans only” publication policy.¹⁷²He printed the prominent English modernist Mary Butts, the French poet and graphic artist Georges Hugnet (through the intervention of Gertrude Stein), Olga Rudge’s translation of Jean Cocteau’s “Mystère Laïc” (after Hound & Horn had failed to publish it in a timely enough fashion for Pound), and Basil Bunting’s loose translation of a Horatian ode, “A Cracked Record,” though one could argue that this was not strictly an exception to his rule, as Bunting had submitted the poem while living in New York. In gathering contributors to his new magazine, Johns was also aided and encouraged by a number of other avant-garde publishers and editors, most notably Johns’ hometown friend Sherry Mangan, who had edited the recently defunct magazine Larus;¹⁷³Both Mangan and Johns lived in Lynn, Massachusetts and both were the sons of prominent Boston-area professionals with Harvard pedigrees. Mangan’s father, John Joseph Mangan, had earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and had established a children’s clinic in Lynn, and was also an accomplished historian, having written a history of Lynn and a massive biography/psychological portrait of the Dutch humanist theologian Desiderius Erasmus. The younger Mangan had printed a poem by Johns in the final issue of Larus, and the relationship between the two men was amicable enough that they arranged for Larus‘ unfulfilled subscriptions to be absorbed by Pagany. Blues editor Charles Henri Ford;¹⁷⁴Ford included advertisements announcing the founding of Pagany in several issue of Blues and should be credited with connecting Johns to several writers he had published, including Kenneth Rexroth, Erskine Caldwell, Noman Macleod, Parker Tyler, Kathleen Tankersley Young, and Forrest Anderson. Gorham Munson, who had edited the expatriate journal Secession from 1922-1924 and would later found the Social Credit journal New Democracy;¹⁷⁵In July 1929, Munson replied to Johns’ query about his experiences with Secession by sending the names and addresses for eleven potential contributors to the magazine, including Kenneth Burke, Jean Toomer, and Hart Crane. See Pagany: Toward a Native Quarterly, 14-15. and Ezra Pound, each of whom encouraged their literary acquaintances and former contributors to consider sending their new work to Pagany.

Connection to the “Objectivists”

While neither Johns nor Pagany could ever said to have acted as the mouthpiece for a single group or movement, “Objectivist” writers had ready access to the magazine and appeared in nearly every issue. Though Williams had declined Johns’ offer to appear on the magazine’s masthead as an associate editor, the first page of the first issue of the magazine did include a brief manifesto he had written, and throughout the magazine’s run Williams solicited and reviewed contributions from many of his friends and acquaintances, offered occasional editorial suggestions and publishing advice, and regularly contributed his own writing (most notably, his novel White Mule, which was written for and serialized by Pagany). While Williams interests and editorial suggestions to Johns seemed largely concerned with the short fiction Johns was publishing (he had especial praise for Mary Butts), Williams also put Zukofsky and several others in touch with Johns early enough to have their work included in the first issue.¹⁷⁶Zukofsky’s first letter to Johns, indicating that Williams “has suggested that I get in touch with you,” was dated November 7, 1929. University of Delaware Special Collections, MS 110, Box 10, Folder 260

The editorial influence of Williams and Zukofsky can clearly be seen from the very first issue of Pagany; the January 1930 issue included poetry by Zukofsky, Rexroth and McAlmon, as well as Williams’ manifesto and a short critical essay on the work of Gertrude Stein. In Williams’ brief manifesto he suggested that “the scientific age is drawing to a close” and that amidst a proliferation of “bizarre derivations,” the mind needed a place to search “for that with which to rehabilitate our thought and our lives.” His proposal was greater fidelity “[t]o the word, a meaning hardly distinguishable from that of place, in whose great, virtuous and at present little realized potency we hereby manifest our belief,”¹⁷⁷Quoted in Pagany: Toward A Native Quarterly, 50. an idea which he further developed in his essay on the writing of Gertrude Stein published later in the same issue.¹⁷⁸Here, Williams wrote: “How in a democracy, such as the United States, can writing, which has to compete with excellence elsewhere and in other times, remain in the field and be at once objective (true to fact) intellectually searching, subtle and instinct with powerful additions to our lives? It is impossible, without invention of some sort, for the very good reason that observation about us engenders the very opposite of what we seek: triviality, crassness, and intellectual bankruptcy. And yet what we do see can in no way be excluded. Satire and flight are two possibilities but Miss Stein has chosen otherwise. But if one remain in a place and reject satire, what then? To be democratic, local (in the sense of being attached with integrity to actual experience) Stein, or any other artist, must for subtlety ascend to a plane of almost abstract design to keep alive. To writing, then, as an art in itself. Yet what actually impinges on the senses must be rendered as it appears, by use of which, only, and under which, untouched, the significance has to be disclosed. It is one of the major problems of the artist. “Melanctha” is a thrilling clinical record of the life of a colored woman in the present day United States, told with directness and truth. It is without question one of the best bits of characterization produced in America. It is universally admired. This is where Stein began. But for Stein to tell a story of that sort, even with the utmost genius, was not enough under the conditions in which we live, since by the very nature of its composition such a story does violence to the larger scene which would be portrayed. … The more carefully the drawing is made, the greater the genius involved and the greater the interest that attaches, therefore, to the character as an individual, the more exceptional that character becomes in the mind of the reader and the less typical of the scene. … Truly, the world is full of emotion — more or less — but it is caught in bewilderment to a far more important degree. And the purpose of art, so far as it has any, is not at least to copy that, but lies in the resolution of difficulties to its own comprehensive organization of materials. And by so doing, in this case, rather than by copying, it takes its place as most human. To deal with Melanctha, with characters of whomever it may be, the modern Dickens, is not therefore human. To write like that is not, in the artist, to be human at all, since nothing is resolved, nothing is done to resolve the bewilderment which makes of emotion an inanity. That, is to overlook the gross instigation and with all subtlety to examine the object minutely for “the truth” — which if there is anything more commonly practised or more stupid, I have yet to come upon it. To be most useful to humanity, or to anything else for that matter, an art, writing, must stay art, not seeking to be science, philosophy, history, the humanities, or anything else it has been made to carry in the past.” (Quoted in Pagany: Toward A Native Quarterly, 58-59.)

Immediately after reading the first issue of Pagany, Zukofsky wrote to Johns, sharing his praise for the format and subject matter of Pagany and submitting an additional seven poems for consideration for future issues, three of which were selected for the second issue of Pagany.¹⁷⁹In a letter dated January 8, 1930, Zukofsky wrote: “The format seems to me excellent: quite the proper thickness, and the matter being honest – to say the least – what else is there to say.” University of Delaware Special Collections, MS 110, Box 10, Folder 260. In addition to Zukofsky’s poems, the second issue (April-June 1930) contained Williams’ brief story “Four Bottles of Beer.” Williams, who wrote Johns with his private criticism of each of the early issues, wrote of this issue:

It’s awfully hard to know what to say to you. You’ve a hell of a hard row to hoe. People like Parker Tyler and the Blues people generally seem to have a legitimate kick when they see you presenting an unorganized front to the world. They would want you to be extreme-left or nothing. And they are right – from their viewpoint. Tyler wrote me a hot letter last week asking me if I was the one responsible for the acceptance of so much bad stuff by Pagany. I replied, in self defence, that I had nothing to do whatever to do with the issue in question save that I had previously passed on a few of the things which were included. I agreed with him that several bits were especially poor, the Evelyn Scott poem for instance but that I could not agree with him that you are “a faker”.

What further I said to him is what I say to you now: that Pagany is and must be a miscellany, a true, even a realistic picture of the rather shabby spectacle America still makes from the writers viewpoint. … It’s a time just now – as you know – of Symposiums, of Hound & Horn meticulousness and of a searching generally for an intelligent viewpoint in those things which concern us. The successes in this quest have been slight. Pagany seems not to be taking any stand at all. Well, it is better than some of the stands that have been taken.

… Norman Macleod, not so good. Vogel, only moderately good this time, but always interesting. As you know I highly prize whatever Louis Zukofsky does. I think his poem the best in the issue if not the best – oh well.¹⁸⁰Williams to Johns, May 1, 1930. University of Delaware Special Collections.

In subsequent letters Williams promoted the work of his friends McAlmon and Carnevali and told Johns in early June that “Louis Zukofsky has a swell essay on the American phase of the modernists in poetry, what they have said and done. It is rather prejudiced in my favor but it is good. Why not write asking him to let you see it?¹⁸¹Williams to Johns, June 5, 1930. University of Delaware Special Collections. Although Zukofsky sent Johns some of his critical writing, Pagany never included any of Zukofsky’s prose.

After the second issue of Pagany appeared, Zukofsky also began sending more of his work as well as that of other friends and acquaintances. On April 15, 1930, Zukofsky informed Johns shortly thereafter that he had recently seen Charles Reznikoff and hoped to have some of his work to share with Johns soon; by mid-July 1930, Johns had reviewed and accepted these submissions.¹⁸²Zukofsky wrote to Johns on July 19, 1930, telling him “I am glad you are keeping the Reznikoff poems,” sharing Reznikoff’s Bronx address and encouraging him Johns to get in touch with him directly. In October 1930, Zukofsky asked Johns to write a letter in support of his Guggenheim Fellowship application, and in early November, Zukofsky informed Johns that he would be editing an issue of Poetry magazine and asked to see any of Johns’ own work he wanted considered for inclusion therein. Johns duly complied and Zukofsky replied on November 17, indicating his interest in Johns’ poem “The Sphinx” and asking for his assent to some editorial pruning. Johns and Zukofsky exchanged several additional letters before a final version of “The Sphinx” satisfied both the author and its editor, with this poem eventually being included in the February 1931 issue of Poetry. “The Sphinx” was dedicated to Williams and depicts the older poet happily building and destroying sand sculptures on a beach vacation with his family.¹⁸³The events described in Johns’ poem took place at Good Harbor Beach during an eight day vacation the Williams family had taken with Johns and his girlfriend Eleanor to East Gloucester, Massachusetts in late summer 1930. Williams describes the trip briefly in a September 9, 1930 letter to Zukofsky included in The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 70, and Johns also described the episode in a brief prose story, “Figure,” which he published in the April-June 1931 issue of Pagany.

Johns was also instrumental in encouraging Williams to work in earnest on White Mule, his first attempt at pure fiction. The first chapter of the novel appeared in the third issue of Pagany (July-September 1930), and Johns printed future chapters of the book in serial form as quickly as Williams was able to produce them, ceasing only when the magazine folded. Apart from the first chapter of White Mule and a short story by McAlmon, the third issue also included poems published by Williams’ friend Emanuel Carnevali. The fourth issue of the magazine (October-December 1930) included another poem from Carnevali; two short Williams poems: “Flowers by the Sea” and “Sea-Trout and Butterfish”; Zukofsky’s “For a Thing By Bach”; and Charles Reznikoff’s poem “The English in Virginia, April 1607.”

Late in 1930, Johns decided to relocate Pagany from the one-room apartment he had occupied in Boston to a new apartment/office at 9 Gramercy Park in Manhattan; he had completed this move by December 1930. Johns’ relocation to New York City gave him access to an expanded circle of writers and literary figures, including both Williams and (following his return to New York City after his brief stint at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) Zukofsky. Sometime late in 1930, Zukofsky also forwarded some of Rakosi’s work to Johns, just as he had done with Reznikoff, and Zukofsky and Johns met for the first time in person when Zukofsky returned to New York City from Madison during the winter break.¹⁸⁴Zukofsky references their meeting in a February 1931 letter to Pound, stating that Johns was “very quiet when I saw him in N.Y. this Xmas—said he wd. do at least a second year of Pagany” (Pound/Zukofsky, 92). In a letter dated December 31, 1930, Zukofsky expressed his pleasure at Johns’ accepting some of Rakosi’s work and gave Johns postal addresses for both Rakosi (Callman Rawley) and Kenneth Rexroth.¹⁸⁵Rexroth was apparently a regular visitor to Johns’ office at Gramercy Park during the short time Rexroth was in New York City, where Rexroth frequently helped Johns arrange type and otherwise assist in production and pre-publication work (A Return to Pagany, 275-278). Sometime early in 1931 Johns had hosted a dinner party for Basil Bunting at Lou and Bill Chapman’s home in Bethel, Connecticut, which Williams and possibly Zukofsky attended.

After learning from Zukofsky that Johns had accepted some of his poems for publication, Rakosi wrote Johns almost immediately, offering newer revisions and asking to see a copy of the magazine. In his very next letter, undated but almost certainly written in early 1931, Rakosi asked Johns about the magazine’s price and expressed a desire to see back numbers of the magazine, in particular any previous “numbers in which the work of Pound, Williams, Reznikoff, and Zukofsky have appeared.”¹⁸⁶Undated letter to Richard Johns. Archive of Pagany, 1925-1970 (Box 8, Folder 188), University of Delaware Library Special Collections. Rakosi’s request here is particularly interesting since it gives a very clear indication that Rakosi at least had some sense of his involvement with something like a group prior to the appearance of the “OBJECTIVISTS” 1931 issue of Poetry, and had formed this affinity despite being located in Texas, hundreds of miles from the other writers listed.

The first issue of the second volume (published in January 1931) included another installment of Williams’ White Mule, a poem by McAlmon and four from Zukofsky, and a rambling review and critique of Pagany‘s first year by Ezra Pound. Rakosi made his first appearance in Pagany in the April-June 1931 number, which included three of his poems along with Reznikoff’s “A Group of Verse,” Zukofsky’s “Blue Light,” a poem by Howard Weeks, and another installment of Williams White Mule. In addition to sending Johns his own work, Zukofsky continued sending Johns manuscripts by others of his acquaintances, forwarding work by R. B. N. Warriston to Johns in March and Frances Fletcher in September. In June 1931, Zukofsky returned to New York City following a year in Madison, Wisconsin and expressed his eagerness to meet again with Johns in person and in September 1931 he asked Johns to send along any of his own work and any work by previously unpublished authors he wished to have considered for inclusion in the “Objectivists” anthology Zukofsky was then preparing.

The July-September 1931 issue of Pagany included three of Pound’s Cantos, four poems by Norman Macleod, Basil Bunting’s “A Cracked Record,” Rakosi’s “The Founding of New Hampshire,” and a further chapter of White Mule. Pagany‘s fourth and final 1931 issue continued to display heavy “Objectivist” sympathies, as it contained a new chapter from Williams’ White Mule, a story by McAlmon, two poems by Norman MacLeod, single poems by Zukofsky and Carnevali, and three new poems by Carl Rakosi. The January-March 1932 issue of Pagany featured six poems by Norman Macleod, three from Carl Rakosi, another White Mule chapter, and a new story from McAlmon. By the end of the year, however, Williams and Zukofsky had once again found another venue that they felt would be even more hospitable for their work, as Williams had begun to plan the resumption of his own magazine, called Contact.

By late 1931, Johns appears to have gotten wind of Williams plans, as Williams wrote to him on November 24, admitting:

Who in hell told you I was editing a quarterly? I am. No competition with you tho’ but a more or less special case. I’m at your service as long as you shall want me. … You talked as tho’ you felt that I had been holding something out on you. S a lot of crap to talk that way. You you [sic] self told me you didn’t want a thing of mine other than White Mule so long as that was issuing. Hell, I can’t close myself down that way. Not that I have any original work in the first issue of this new bleat; I haven’t. But it gives me paper. What a damn fool I am to have taken it up. We’ll see how you like it.¹⁸⁷Williams to Johns, November 24, 1931. University of Delaware Special Collections.

Williams’ sensitivity to what likely felt to Johns like a potentially competitive move can also be seen in another letter he sent in early January, 1932:

I wish I could sit down and finish White Mule. I have never enjoyed writing anything more. But since you are willing to go on taking the bits as they come I’m not going to rush it. It is a real pleasure to me that you are pleased because I am writing it for you.

The last Pagany shows the results of your experience in publication during the last two years, it is uniformly excellent reading from beginning to end. I have read the last issue particularly carefully inasmuch as I want all the help I can get in making up Contact. The only result of my cogitations so far has been an appreciation of your work. But C. will not have the general reading appeal that you have sought. In the first place I will not be able to use so much material and in the second I want to bear down more than you have cared on the significance of the word, as material. One feature of C. will be my own Comments. Perhaps this is sheer vanity. I dunno. But it is my purpose for all that and the thing that has made me want to take the trouble to go on – and to give up the time. I want to speak of Pagany (sooner or later) as the result of effective good taste in selecting material the hide bound minds of present day publishers have muffed. But Contact, rightly or wrongly, is more narrowly aimed. Perhaps that will be what’s the matter with it. Anyhow it is half printed and will be out by the end of the month – as it looks now.¹⁸⁸Williams to Johns, January 6, 1932. University of Delaware Special Collections.[/ref]

Whatever his reassurances meant to Johns, the reemergence of a Williams-edited Contact and the emergence of their collaborative book publishing ventures combined to siphon off most of Johns’ “Objectivist” contributors. Apart from regular installments of Williams’ White Mule, the only work from “Objectivist” writers to appear in the final three 1932 issues of Pagany was the first section of Zukofsky’s “A,” which Johns included in the July-September issue, a handful of poems by Norman Macleod and a single poem by Harry Roskolenko.¹⁸⁹Zukofsky had been discussing the possibility of publishing selections from “A” as early as October 1930, when he first mentioned the project to Johns in a letter.

Williams’ withdrawal from offering active editorial advice on poetry submissions also coincided with the death of Johns’ father (and benefactor) Benjamin Johnson in February 1932. The disposition of his father’s estate dramatically reduced Johns’ source of financial support and contributed significantly to the demise of Pagany. While Johns’ magazine did publish fiction and poetry by an extraordinary array of significant American writers, like many of the little mags of its era, Pagany had never been a commercial success. In part, Johns was hampered by poor timing. Black Tuesday (October 29, 1929) took place just as Johns was finalizing his first issue, and resulted in the immediate loss of all his major advertisers (more than half a dozen prominent Boston businesses had taken out paying ads in the first issue). Johns paid contributors fairly generous sums: $3 / page for prose and a minimum of $3 for a half-page poem, but the loss of advertising revenue when combined with the usual lack of subscribers and dwindling sales from bookshops meant that Johns was never able to make Pagany a profitable enterprise, no matter its literary quality. In the face of increasing debts and diminished prospects of continued subsidy from family funds, Johns ceased publication of Pagany following the belated appearance 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. Johns later moved to Cuttingsville, Vermont and devoted himself to photography and horticulture. In 1969, Johns collaborated with Stephen Halpert to produce A Return to Pagany, which includes a wealth of documentary information related to the magazine. The full archives for the magazine, including extensive correspondence between Johns, Williams, and Zukofsky are held in the University of Delaware’s Special Collections.

Pagany provided an important and congenial outlet for the work of Zukofsky and other “Objectivists.” When it came to the poetry he published in Pagany from 1930 through early 1932, Johns’ editorial decisions were clearly influenced by the views of Williams and Zukofsky, and the community fostered by Pagany may have also had some influence on the editorial choices Zukofsky made when selecting the contributors he included in his issue of Poetry; no other little magazine had a greater overlap of contributors as did Pagany.

This relationship, however, has been largely neglected and poorly described in the scholarly literature to date. For example, in her “Barbed-Wire Entanglements: The “New American Poetry,” 1930-1932,” Marjorie Perloff sought to explore what she called Zukofsky’s “‘Objectivist’ experiment” through a closer examination of Johns’ magazine. While Perloff’s effort is notable in the degree of attention it pays to understanding Zukofsky and the other “Objectivists” in relation to a little magazine of the era, she gets a number of important facts wrong, claiming for example that “In his capacity as informal poetry advisor, moreover, Zukofsky evidently persuaded Johns to publish poems by his “Objectivist” friends Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and Basil Bunting, by Kenneth Rexroth and Yvor Winters, Mary Butts and Mina Loy.”¹⁹⁰”Barbed-Wire Entanglements: The ‘New American Poetry,’ 1930-1932,” Modernism/Modernity 2:1 (January 1995), 148. This essay was also included in Perloff’s 2004 book, Poetry On and Off the Page, published by the University of Alabama Press. Firstly, Johns never printed any work by Oppen; nor did Zukofsky (or anyone else) ever publish or describe Loy as an “Objectivist.” More glaringly, it is strange indeed to imagine as plausible the suggestion that Mary Butts and Yvor Winters’ appearance in Pagany might be attributable to Zukofsky’s editorial persuasion; in the first place, both Butts and Winters had work included in the inaugural issue of Pagany, well before Zukofsky’s editorial influence on Johns had been established, and in the second place, Winters and Zukofsky were not on friendly terms, with the two men engaging in a vicious public spat in the pages of The Hound & Horn just a few years later.¹⁹¹Johns’ letters to Zukofsky do not appear to have survived, but the correspondence from Zukofsky to Johns contained in the Pagany archive, which Perloff concedes in a footnote that she did not herself consult, includes only a single, brief handwritten note from Zukofsky to Johns written prior to the publication of the first issue of Pagany. Furthermore, Zukofsky wrote to Johns in September 1931 asking Johns for Mary Butts and Mina Loy’s addresses, hardly something he would have done had he been sending their work on to Johns.

Apart from questions of editorial influence, there is no disputing that Johns was a significant figure both personally and creatively for Williams in the early 1930s. Johns’ encouragement and the outlet provided by Pagany were largely responsible for Williams trying his hand at fiction, and Johns’ magazine provided the initial platform for Williams’ novel White Mule, and can thus be seen as indirectly responsible for the novel’s two sequels: In the Money (1940) and The Build-Up (1952). Williams admitted as much himself in a gracious letter he wrote to Johns in June 1937 just after New Directions had published White Mule in full:

These are orders for you not to buy White Mule. As you may know it was released by Laughlin June 10 and has received a very good break from the reviewers, so much so that it looks like a winner. If it turns out to be a big success I want you to realize that I realize the important part you have played in the matter from the first. Without your early appreciation and most generous backing it might never have been written. Your critical acumen in suggesting that I leave out another complicating element in the story is also appreciated by me. Therefore, Mr. Richard Johns, it will give me the greatest pleasure in the world to send to you (as soon as I get it) the first presentation copy of the book outside of my immediate family–and good luck to you. In just a few days you’ll have the book. It’s well made. I wish I could present it in person.¹⁹²Quoted in A Return to Pagany, 512.

Contact

Years in operation: 1920-1921, 1923 [first run, 5 issues]; 1932 [second run, 3 issues]
Editors: William Carlos Williams, Robert McAlmon [1920-1921], Monroe Wheeler [1923], Nathanael West [1932]
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Robert McAlmon, Parker Tyler

In 1920, shortly after the then 25 year old Robert McAlmon had arrived in New York City, he met the then 37 year old William Carlos Williams at a party hosted by the anarchist poet Lola Ridge. The two men quickly became friends, and before long, joint publishers of a little magazine, which they called Contact. Between December 1920 and the summer of 1921, when McAlmon left for Paris, McAlmon and Williams published four issues of Contact, and in June 1923, Williams published the fifth and final issue of Contact‘s first run with assistance from Monroe Wheeler.¹⁹³The initial run of Contact can be read here: (pdf). For most of its first run, Contact was a homely, homespun affair with a quite limited range. While its circulation never rose above 200 copies, Contact did provide an early outlet for Williams to develop and air his idiosyncratic views about the possibilities for a modern American literature rooted both in vernacular speech and a distinctly American locality.

In February 1921, McAlmon entered into a marriage of convenience with Bryher (Annie Winifred Glover), the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, one of the wealthiest men in Britain.¹⁹⁴Bryher proposed to McAlmon on Valentine’s Day (during tea at a New York City hotel), and they married later the same day at the New York City Hall. McAlmon described their marriage in a letter to Williams as “legal only, unromantic, and strictly an agreement. Bryher could not travel and be away from home, unmarried. It was difficult being in Greece and other wilder places without a man. She thought I understood her mind, as I do somewhat and faced me with the proposition. Some other things I shan’t mention I knew without realizing” (The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 219). This last sentence appears to be an allusion to Bryher’s lesbianism; she had been involved for some time in a romantic relationship with H.D. Involving herself in a traditional heterosexual marriage, Bryher felt, would protect both her and H.D. from unwanted accusations of impropriety or worse. 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 the Contact Editions imprint, publishing work by a range of significant modernist writers, including his wife Bryher (Annie Ellerman), Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Williams and himself.¹⁹⁵For 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.

Following closely on the heels of Zukofsky’s “Objectivists” issue of Poetry, Williams was persuaded, late in 1931, to resurrect Contact as a quarterly magazine (subtitled “An American Quarterly Review”). The impetus (and funding) for the magazine’s revival was provided by Sally and Martin Kamin and David Moss, ambitious but inexperienced publishers who earlier in the year had also resuscitated McAlmon’s Contact Editions imprint to publish Nathanael [“Pep”] West’s novel The Dream Life of Balso Snell in New York City. Williams was listed as the magazine’s editor, and while both Robert McAlmon and Nathanael West were listed as “associate editors” on the masthead, McAlmon was not involved in the actual editing and publishing of the second run of the magazine, though he did contribute writing.

Though Williams’ involvement with the magazine had been accompanied by a surge of excitement, he began to express doubts about his involvement almost immediately, confessing to Zukofsky just a week after he had relayed details about the planned contents of the magazine’s first issue in November 1931 that “Were it not for Reznikoff’s thing [The prose piece published in the first two issues as “My Country Tis of Thee”] I’d quit the Kamin quarterly at once, as is I’m holding on only long enough to see if I can put over the first issue. Maybe I won’t even last as long as that. The more I think of it the more certain I become that it’s the wrong lead for me.”¹⁹⁶The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 111. Williams’ ambivalence is made even more plain in another letter written a few days later in which he equivocated: “And perhaps after all I am going on with Contact – I dunno for sure yet. It’s like the weather,” before ultimately writing “yes, I’m going on with it.” by hand between the two sentences.¹⁹⁷The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 113.

By December 1931, Williams was once again working on preparing the final set of manuscripts, ultimately cutting Reznikoff’s original “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” manuscript in half, within a plan to print the second part in a subsequent issue. After several printing delays, the first issue of Contact‘s second run appeared in February 1932.

The cover of the first issue of the second run of William Carlos Williams’ Contact: An American Quarterly Review , published in February 1932.

Like Pagany, Contact carried very little criticism and primarily printed poetry and short stories, announcing on the editorial page of the first issue its intention to “attempt to cut a trail through the American jungle without the use of a European compass.” Of the work included in this issue, Williams was most enthusiastic about Charles Reznikoff’s “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” a long prose account derived from old legal records which Zukofsky had recommended to him,¹⁹⁸See his letters to Zukofsky in The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 105-111. but the issue also featured McAlmon’s story “It’s All Very Complicated,” and two poems by Zukofsky (“Ferry” and “Madison, Wis. Remembering the Bloom of Monticello”), and Parker Tyler’s “Idiot of Love.” In addition to this work by his “Objectivist” peers, Williams also published three of his own prose pieces in the issue: an editorial (“Comment”), a remembrance of African-American women he had known (“The Colored Girls of Passenack — Old and New”) and a brief account of small magazines (“The Advance Guard Magazine”).

Williams’ “Comment,” which led off the magazine, offered a pugnacious and misanthropic defense of non-instrumental writing, anticipating his later, more famous declaration in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” that “It is difficult / to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there,” by first asking “what in the world is writing good for anyway?” and then asserting that “the underlying significance of all writing which is the writing itself.”¹⁹⁹”Comment,” 7

Put to its full use writing has nothing to convey, either pungently or crassly; it is neither stream-of-consciousness or bare-bitter-truth, has nothing to do with truth but is true or not as the case may be, a pleasure of the imagination. But the moment we are cheated by an impost, “literature” among the rest, we sense it and our pleasure falls.

You might say: People are in distress the world over, writing will not relieve them (or make them worse’ off). Why not take the money there is for a magazine like this and give it away—as food—to the bums, for instance living in packing cases over near the East River these winter nights?

But what makes you think money has any value?  there’s food enough rotting now in the world, even within sight of the place where these men’ are hanging out, to feed them every day in the year. Money has nothing to do with it. Bad writing has though: it’s the same sort of stupidity.

What in the world good are we any of us anyhow—except hypothetically, a pure question of the imagination? What difference would it make if any or all of us die tomorrow? It would be a blessed relief if most of us did, promptly, and left the rest room—There’s no sense in slobbering at the mouth over humanity and writing that way: We die every day, cheated—and with written promises of great good in our hands. To plead, a social cause, to split a theory, to cry out at the evil which we all partake of—gladly; that’s not writing.

The words themselves must stand and fall as men. A writer has no use for theories or propaganda, he has use for but one thing; the word that is possessing him at the moment he writes. Into that focus he must pour all he feels and has to say, as a writer, regardless of anything that may come of it. By word after word his meaning will then have been made clear.

A magazine without opinions or criteria other than words moulded by the impacts of experience (not for the depths of experience they speak of but the fulfillment of experience which they are) such a magazine would be timely to a period such as this. It can never be a question of its being read by a million or by anybody, in fact. Value for value our minds are justified when we can place over against those who are enjoying or failing beside us, words—that cannot be eaten or made into cloth or built into a roof to shelter them, but which have-been nevertheless subject to the same rigors which they suffer and the same joys which they were born out of their mothers’ bellies ‘to share.

Good writing stands by humanity in its joys and sorrows because under all it is—and just because it is—so many words.²⁰⁰”Comment,” 8-9.

It’s a curious way to start a new magazine in the depths of the Great Depression, and Williams’ defiant unwillingness to encourage ideological propaganda is heightened by the opening lines of the poem which immediately followed his “Comment,” e. e. cummings’: “let’s start a magazine / to hell with literature / we want something redblooded // lousy with pure / reeking with stark / and fearlessly obscene // but really clean / get what I mean / let’s not spoil it / let’s make it serious // something authentic and delirious / you know something genuine like a mark / in a toilet.”²⁰¹”Four Poems,” 10.

Williams’ essay on “The Advance Guard Magazine” is also of particular interest, both because it immediately preceded the first installment of David Moss’ very detailed bibliography of little magazines published in American since 1900 and because gave a brief account of Williams’ perception of the history of little magazines over the past two decades. After summarizing the rise and fall of several magazines, Williams concluded:

In all, the “small magazine” must, in its many phases, be taken as one expression. It represents the originality of our generation thoroughly free of an economic burden. Technically many excellent services to writing have been accomplished. Nothing could be more useful to the present day writer, the alert critic than to read and re-read the actual work produced by those who have made the “small magazine’’ during the past thirty years.²⁰²”The Advance Guard Magazine,” Contact 2.1 (February 1932), 89-90.

Williams had been displeased at several points with printing delays leading up to the magazine’s appearance, and was unhappy with the final product once the magazine was printed, writing to Zukofsky in mid-March 1932: “Yes Contact is out – down and out in so far as I am concerned: the first issue is the cheapest sort of a subterfuge for good faith in carrying out an agreement.” Zukofsky’s response to the issue echoed this disappointment: “Lowenthal brought his copy of Contact around the other day to show me. Moskowitz & Kaminsky’s job sure looks poor. They space my first poem wrong, & there are misprints in both,” but tempers his concern somewhat by continuing to enquire about the possibility of publication in future issues: “What about the second issue? All made up? Or could you use the preface to An “Objectivists” Anthology I once read to you in Grey’s restaurant? Or Movements 1, 5, and 6, or any one of em, of “A”? Or is Number 2 not coming out?” In response to Zukofsky’s query about whether there would even be a second issue, Williams replied “I don’t think I’ll use anything of yours in the next issue – if there is one. But if the second, or next, issue shows any kind of improvement over number 1 then– I’ll use your new Cantos of A in the third // At present I am holding back the material for no 2 until I have some assurance that I shall not be disgraced again.”²⁰³To read the full exchange in context, see The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 124-126.

Williams continued to express ambivalence about his editorial involvement in letters to Zukofsky, but told him in early June 1932 that while he “var[ied] from disgust to confidence … the damned thing seems to have a root.”²⁰⁴The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 129. The root had taken strong enough hold in Williams that a second issue of Contact (dated May 1932 on its title page) was published in late June. This issue featured another McAlmon story, entitled “Mexican Interval,” two poems and an editorial comment from Williams, and the second part of Reznikoff’s “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee,” complete with set of nineteenth century illustrations featuring depictions of “Oratorical and Poetical Gestures” and “Simple Bodily Pain,” “Love,” “Gratitude,” and “Simple Laughter” which Williams had inserted into the text.²⁰⁵He wrote to Zukofsky on July 4, 1932: “You’ll see that we’ve taken liberties with Reznikoff’s contribution. If you should hear from him I’d like to know what he says. And I’d appreciate your own reaction. The cuts are from a book of about the time the incidents in his collect occurred and do set off his findings rather nicely – in my opinion. If he wants to use the cuts in his book as it will later appear I’ll be glad to let him have them. I hope at least that he will not take exception to what I have done.” A few weeks later Zukofsky replied indicating that while he hadn’t seen Reznikoff, he “seemed pleased in a letter.” (The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 131-132). Williams’ editorial comment was brief but direct, calling for an approach to poetry that bore a number of similarities to what Zukofsky had called for in his “Objectivist” prose statements in Poetry:

In only one thing have we grounds for belief: the multiple object of our life itself.

When we are forced by a fact (a Boston, a Chicago even—provided we avoid sentimentality) it can save us from insanity, even though we do no more than photograph.

Eye to eye with some of the figure of our country and epoch, truthfully—avoiding science and philosophy—relying on our well-schooled sense, we can at least begin to pick up the essentials of a meaning.

This primitive and actual America—must sober us. From it revealing aspects of what might be an understanding may be seized for the building of our projects.

There is nothing to help us but ourselves. If we cannot find virtue in the object of our lives, then for us there is none anywhere. We won’t solve or discover by using “profound” (and borrowed) symbolism. Reveal the object. By that we touch authentically the profundity of its attachments—if we are able. But able or otherwise there is no other way for us.

But always, at this point, some black idiot cries out, “Regionalism”! Good God, is there no intelligence left on earth. Shall we never differentiate the regional in letters from the objective immediacy of our hand to mouth, eye to brain existence?

Take verse: Certainly by inversion and cliche, bad observation and pig-headedness, we can somehow make verse looks something “like” the classic. Without violence to our language, we cannot imitate those models and have what we do, anything but imitation.

But clinging first to the vernacular, we simply cannot turn out slick, clipped verses today and have them include anything of the breadth, depth, scope that we feel and know to be our lives. It is impossible; no mold has as yet been made to receive that much.

We can only, holding firm to the vernacular, seek that difficult form which cannot be an imitation, but is the new of our imperative requisites.

Writing is our craft calling for unending exertions. It needs an eye, a mind, the clean drive of inspiration—but work, work, work. Language is our concern. In revealing the character of an object, it must adapt itself to the truth of our senses. Cliches must disappear; the simple, profound difficulties of our art then become clear to us. It is to represent what is before us that dead stylisms disappear. Hard down on it—laboring to catch the structure of the thing, language must be moulded.

By this we are able to learn from the thing itself the ways of its own most profound implications, as all artists, everywhere, must be doing.²⁰⁶”Comment,” 109-110.

Though Williams was more pleased with the printing of this second issue, he recognized that the magazine’s production costs exceeded what it could realistically hope to recoup in sales, and remained frustrated with the editorial duties, writing to Zukofsky in late July that he was “next to hopeless about Contact. a dull chore – not enough good work or too much. I can’t tell which: a quarterly can’t be just amusing, must be weighted – if to be excused.” Williams confided in his next letter to Zukofsky that “I have gently told Kamin that after this year there will be no Contact (in all probability) for little Willie.”²⁰⁷The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 133, 135.

Williams was serious about his discontent, and contributed to just one more issue of the magazine, resigning as an editor late in 1932. The third and final issue (October 1932) contained McAlmon’s poem “Farewell to Alamos,” two poems each by Carl Rakosi (published under the joint title “African Theme, Needlework, Etc.”) and Louis Zukofsky (“Song 9” and “Song 10”), Williams’ story “For Bill Bird,” and a brief editorial comment by Williams responding to T. S. Eliot’s recent appointment at Harvard:

There is a heresy, regarding the general character of poetry, which has become widely prevalent today and may shortly become more so through academic fostering: it is, that poetry increases in virtue as it is removed from contact with a vulgar world.

I cannot swallow the half-alive poetry which knows nothing of totality.

It is one of the reasons to welcome communism. Never may it be said, has there ever been great poetry that was not born out of a communist intelligence. … It is also one with the imagination. It will not down nor speak its piece to please, not even to please “communism”.

Nothing is beyond poetry. It is the one solid element on which our lives can rely, the “word” of so many disguises, including as it does man’s full consciousness, high and low, in living objectivity.

It is, in its rare major form, a world in fact come to an arrest of self realization: that eternity of the present which most stumble over in seeking …

Before anything else it is the denial of postponement. If poetry fails it fails at the moment since it has not been able enough to grasp the full significance of its day. And every school which seeks to seclude itself and build up a glamour of scholarship or whatever it may be, a mist, that is, behind which to hide, does so in order to impose itself rather shabbily on whatever intelligence it seeks most to please.²⁰⁸”Comment,” 131-132.

It appears from Williams’ and Zukofsky’s correspondence that there were initially plans to bring out a fourth issue of Contact (to complete the series) under the editorship of a “‘group’ – proletarian in feeling,” for which Zukofsky had submitted two poems each by himself and by Oppen.²⁰⁹Williams’ wrote to Zukofsky on December 15, 1932: “Nope! I’m out, completely out – so am returning the poems herewith. The one about the sink is the best to my taste and an excellent composition, perhaps you’d care to send it to “Contact #4″ directly,” and returned Oppen’s submission courtesy of Zukofsky in February 1933. In the same letter, he told Zukofsky that he had declined James Leippert’s offer to serve as associate editor of his planned magazine The Lion and Crown, telling Zukofsky: “No sir, not twice in the same trap.” See The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, 145-146. The mooted fourth issue never appeared, however, and Contact folded following the resignation of Williams and West, its other principal editor, who left New York to pursue a screenwriting career in Los Angeles.²¹⁰Scans of much of the second run of Contact can be viewed here: (pdf). For more on McAlmon and Williams’ involvement with Contact, see Paul Mariani’s William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, pp. 174-186 (the first run), and pp. 319-339 (the second run).

The New Review

Years in operation: 1931-1932 [6 issues]
Editor: Samuel Putnam
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, Norman Macleod, Parker Tyler, Forrest Anderson, Emanuel Carnevali

Samuel Putnam was a journalist and literary translator who had moved to Paris from Chicago with his wife and young son in 1927 and established himself in the literary and artistic scene among the many expatriates then gathered in Montparnasse on Paris’ famed left bank. While reviewing art and literature for Chicago’s Evening Post earlier in the decade Putnam had begun a correspondence with Ezra Pound, and the two men met and continued their correspondence following Putnam’s move to Paris.²¹¹In his memoirs, written while Pound was preparing to stand trial for treason, Putnam wrote “my most vivid personal impression of Ezra will perhaps remain that of his broad-seeming shoulders filling the doorway of my Montparnasse apartment, his Byronic shirt, his fawn-colored beard,” and noted that “upon meeting Ezra in person, I was rather agreeably surprised. He was not at all the contentious individual I was prepared to encounter, but gentle-mannered, pleasant, not in the least snobbish, and seemingly always eager to oblige, to render any service that he could. … His bellicoseness, so far as I could observe, showed rather in his correspondence than in personal contact. He impressed me as being extremely democratic as far as social position went; if he was in any way an aristocrat or a snob, it was with respect to artistic ability and achievement; all he asked of anyone, writer, editor, bookseller, or whoever it might be, was intelligence, competence, integrity, a sincere devotion to the arts (Paris Was Our Mistress, 141, 149). It was Putnam, in fact, who helped Pound find an American publisher, in the form of Putnam’s employer Pascal Covici, for Pound’s magazine The Exile after the first issue had proven exceptionally difficult to import to the United States, and Pound included a brief letter from Putnam in the fourth and final issue of The Exile in 1928.²¹²In Putnam’s memoirs, he writes: “Our acquaintance had begun by correspondence some years before, while I was still in Chicago. Like Mencken, Aldington, and others, Pound had been attracted by my battles in print with the local intelligentsia. When the late Keith Preston had attacked Aldington’s poems, for example, I had come to the defense of the British Imagist, who had written me a letter of appreciation; and it was some of the things I had said about Miss Monroe’s Poetry that led Pound to start sending me his “Harriet bitched me” letters. He had launched his magazine, the Exile, from Rapallo, but was having a hard time making a go of it; and so I suggested to him and to Pascal Covici that the latter take over the publication and put it out from Chicago, which was done. From Pound’s study in Rapallo to that loft in South Wabash Avenue was quite a span, but this was typical of the kind of thing that was taking place in the Anglo-American literary world of that period” (Paris Was Our Mistress, 140-141).

Editorial page of the first issue of The New Review, published January 1931.

In January 1931, shortly after leaving an editorial position with Edward Titus’ magazine This Quarter, Putnam established his own bi-monthly magazine, The New Review. In its inaugural issue, Putnam announced the magazine as “An international notebook for the arts, published from Paris,” and included an editorial statement on the inside of its front cover announcing that the magazine would be

the organ of no school or movement. It has, however, a very definite program, and a trend which will become apparent as the successive numbers appear. Its purpose is an international reportage for the arts, the higher journalism of ideas. Its character will, therefore, be largely critical, but in something more than the book-reviewer’s sense of the term. The editors believe that there is a need for such a magazine at the present moment; they believe it may prove of value to the creator.

THE NEW REVIEW will devote particular attention to the modern arts, such as photography, the cinema, sound and talking films, phonograph records, radio, etc.

The first issue listed Ezra Pound, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Richard Thoma as associate editors and named two contributing editors: George Antheil, for music, and George Reavey, for Russia. It was likely Pound’s affiliation with this new publication that empowered him to decisively cut off relations with Kirstein and The Hound & Horn as and when he did, since he appears to have believed that Putnam and The New Review would prove more a tractable outlet for his editorial judgment. Although the first issue included “After Election,” an assortment of Pound’s thoughts on a variety of critical and political questions, Pound’s influence on Putnam’s magazine was more readily apparent in the magazine’s second issue. The second issue The second issue (May-June-July 1931) added a Latin subtitle to the magazine “Semper Africa Nova Aliquid Apportat” (Africa always brings some fresh news or Africa always produces something novel)²¹³For the history of this phrase see https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0021853701008118. and listed three new contributing editors: Hilaire Hiler (for painting), Alfred Perles (for Germany and Austria), and Harold J. Salemson, a fellow expatriate who had recently discontinued his own little magazine entitled Tambour. The issue itself was titled “The New Objectivism” and included poetry and prose by Zukofsky, a poem by Donal McKenzie, criticism by Pound, brief prose by Hilaire Hiler and George Antheil, and an intriguing essay in which Putnam surveyed recent trends in European literature and argued that

What is needed, what is being sought, is DIRECTION. … But we are in for it; it has been forced upon us: that after-War breakup and breakdown, that dissociation of the personality which has been so widely remarked. There are certain escapes. There is the escape through the body … which at least affords the illusion of unity: athletics, Plaisir des sports. There are the mystic and the Christian escapes. …

But man still wants reality; it is his deepest instinct. … Man, however, is never absolutely free of his age; he never can absolutely go against it. He therefore turns to the external object to seek reality there. This is what has been happening in Germany, although it is pretty well over now. For the neue Sachlichkeit … is really a carryover from the nineteenth-century machine and the slavery it inflicted upon the world …

The object, nevertheless, is not so easily to be got around. … The future is an alternative one, and there is still the possibility of choice. There are those who are beginning to choose.²¹⁴”Black Arrow,” 75-77.

Putnam proceeded immediately from this observation to a discussion of Zukofsky, who he called “the best, the most important critic that I am able to think of in America,” and Zukofsky’s “Program” in the “Objectivists” issue of Poetry, before concluding:

We are entering upon a new Moyen Age. Our present period corresponds roughly to the last days of the Roman Empire, immediately preceding the barbaric invasions. Our art very much resembles the art of that period … [George Reavey] believes the trend of the next decade is to be in the direction of Black Magic. Something of the sort does seem to be coming out of the Surréaliste mêlée in France. …

Black magic consists essentially in dabbling in illusion and so is a childish pastime. The Word is a symbol, at bottom an arbitrary illusion (no one has ever denied it), and is, accordingly, adapted to this species of magic. White Magic, on the other hand, far more terrifying to the mature mind, consists in drawing aside the veil of Reality, in revealing what the Greeks called the sacra of life, it consists in conferring a sacramental significance upon the object, which is more satanic than ant Word, revolutionized or not, could ever be. …

We, some of us, are hereby choosing the Magic of the Object.²¹⁵81-82.

Putnam’s suggestion that “some of us” are choosing the “Magic of the Object” was immediately followed by two movements (“A”-3 and “A”-4) from Zukofsky’s ongoing long poem, which seems to indicate that he intended to include Zukofsky’s poetry in his characterization. In addition to work from others of Putnam’s literary acquaintances across Europe, this issue also included “Imagism,” Zukofsky’s review of René Taupin’s L’Influence du Symbolisme Français sur le Poésie American (de 1910 à 1920), which had been the occasion of Zukofsky’s heated war of words with Yvor Winters, and which featured his approving quotation of Taupin’s characterization of the Imagists:

It is more accurate not to consider Imagism a doctrine, or even a school of poetry, but the gathering of certain poets who, for several weeks rather than several months, found themselves in accord on a few important points, and wished to prescribe their ideas on how to rescue poetry from the germs of decadence which for long a period had been enervating it.²¹⁶”Imagisme,” 160.

The editorial influence of Pound (and perhaps even Zukofsky) is further made evident by what the back matter of the second issue announced for future publication. Works listed included: “An Evening in Greenwich Village,” a short story by Charles Reznikoff, poems by Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford, two stories by Robert McAlmon, prose by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, and “poems and prose” by Basil Bunting. Not all of what was promised would appear in subsequent issues, but this list does help to establish a certain editorial disposition at a particular moment in time.

The third issue (published as August-September-October 1931) contained further changes to the editorial masthead, listing three more contributing editors: Maurice Weir (for theatre), Emanuel Carnevali (for Italy), and Peter Neagoe. This issue had a rather smaller “Objectivist” presence, containing poems by Forrest Anderson and Putnam, a review by Emanuel Carnevali and further editorial remarks by Pound published under the title “Fungus, Twilight or Dry Rot.” In his memoirs, Putnam recounted a story that may explain some part of this issue’s divergence from previous trends:

[T]here was that summer of 1931 when, having to return to New York on a flying trip to see my publishers, I trustingly left the New Review in the hands of Henry Miller and Alfred Perles. This was a perilous thing to do in Montparnasse. Possessed of a deep grudge against a number of persons whose work I was publishing and who were associated with the magazine, and against Pound and Farrell in particular, Perles and Miller at once began plotting to steal the forthcoming issue (No. 3) and fill it with obscenities composed by themselves. This, they figured, would put an end to the thing once and for all. Fortunately, my wife discovered the mess just as it was about to go to the printer and, salvaging what she could, managed to get out some kind of number. That issue was a rather sorry jubilee, but in spite of everything, it contained a number of noteworthy items … When I came back to Paris there were no hard feelings over the matter. It was all “pour le sport.“²¹⁷Paris Was Our Mistress, 232.

The third issue repeated several of the announcements for future publication that had appeared in previous issues, including two short stories (“The Sailor’s Son” and “The Knife of the Times”) by Williams, poems and prose by Norman Macleod, Bunting’s “Some Limitations of English,” McAlmon’s story “The Highly Prized Pajamas,” Reznikoff’s “An Evening in Greenwich Village,” Pound’s “Terra Italica,” and poems by Tyler and Ford. Perhaps as a way of explaining why the issue had not contained much of what had been announced in the previous publication, this was followed by the admission “The editors of THE NEW REVIEW have found by experience that it is impossible to be precise as to the number in which a contribution will appear. A magazine, if it is to be an organic thing, must be permitted a certain freedom in shaping its own growth.” The issue also included notices for several books to be published by New Review Editions, including Americans Abroad: 1918-1931 an anthology of post-war writing by Americans living in Europe which Peter Neagoe had edited and which was to be published in the Fall 1931.²¹⁸Neagoe’s anthology did eventually appear, but not until 1932, when it was published by Carolus Verhulst’s Servire Press in the Hague. The well a notice for the two planned volumes of a pan-European anthology of recent literature which Putnam had edited, to be called The European Caravan: The New Spirit in European Literature and which were loosely modeled on the popular annual The American Caravan anthologies of the late 1920s.²¹⁹The first volume, treating France, England, Ireland, and Spain, was published in the last half of 1931 by Brewer, Warren, and Putnam, a publishing firm based in New York City. The second volume, which was to include Germany, Austria, Russian, and Italy, was planned for the winter of 1932, but did not appear.

The fourth issue of The New Review had been billed as a “special machine number” to include “16 full-page reproductions of photographs of machines with letter-press by Ezra Pound” and articles by Putnam, Walter Lowenfels, Hilaire Hiler, John Xceron, and the Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti. That issue appeared on November 1, 1931 and did in fact include much of what had been promised, though Lowenfels and Putnam’s prose did not appear in the issue. The price of a single issue had increased from 60 cents to one dollar, but changes to the editorial page in this issue were minor: Neagoe was elevated to the status of co-editor and Bodenheim, Weir, and Perles were dropped altogether. Regarding work by “Objectivists,” the issue included McAlmon’s story “The Highly Prized Pajamas,” poetry by Forrest Anderson (“More Hominem”) and Basil Bunting (“A Cracked Record”), and Pound’s “Terra Italica,” an extended review of recent Italian pamphlets that presented some of Pound’s views on ancient pagan mystery cults. The back matter included an announcement for the next issue, to be called “Young America: An Examination of Conscience” and indicated that it would include a series of letters exchanged between Rexroth and Zukofsky (“This is a thorough-going examen de conscience, of a sort that seldom if ever happens in America; throwing light upon many of the problems of the Young, in poetry  (“Objectivism”, etc.) life and art. A document for the literary historian.”; Robert McAlmon’s “The American Critic”; Forrest Anderson’s “American Letter”; Williams’ “The Knife of the Times”; Norman Macleod’s “Communication for C.S.” and poetry by Carl Rakosi. It also announced for future publication extracts from Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Totius Theologiae and Rexroth’s long poem “Prolegomena To a Theodicy” and a planned “Italian Critical Number” (which was to be the sixth and final issue of The New Review published). The back cover also included a list of forthcoming “paper-backs at a price the cultured reader can afford” from The New Review Editions, the first of which was Zukofsky’s An “Objectivists” Anthology, announced for publication in Spring 1932.

The fifth issue of The New Review was not published until April 1932. It featured a significantly changed cover design and an even more reduced editorial page, with Pound as the sole “advisory editor” and the contributing editors comprising just Antheil, Hiler, Reavey, and the newly added Thomas McGreevy. The magazine listed an editorial representative in New York for the first time: Miss Fanya Foss. The issue also featured an “Editorial Statement for the Second Year,” which stated

THE NEW REVIEW has had, from the start, a very definite program. …

THE NEW REVIEW has been criticized in the past, upon more than one occasion, for not being this thing or that which it never had any intention or desire of being, its critics having forgotten or chosen to ignore its professed purpose, namely, that of functioning:

1. as a notebook of the arts;
2. as an international notebook.

We quote from our original ‘Editorial Statement’: ‘Its purpose is an international reportage for the arts, the higher journalism of ideas’; and we found it necessary further to clarify this with: ‘Its character will, therefore, be largely reportorial and critical, such creative work as is published being chiefly for the exemplification of various tendencies‘.

… [W]e shall continue to give the picture, but it will no longer be quite the same picture; there will be, henceforth, more of arrangement and composition. If our first four numbers are, as we hope, a document for the state of literature in 1931, we believe that our Numbers 5 to 8 will be a document, likewise, for 1932,—but a document of a different sort.

In the meantime, we reaffirm our adherence to the contemporary and documentary arts, especially photography and the cinema.

The issue did include extracts, translated by Putnam, from Aquinas on “Scripture and Metaphor” and “God and the Physical Eye”; lengthy extracts from a December 30, 1930 letter from Kenneth Rexroth to Zukofsky (with a note that they were to be continued); Ford’s poem “It is Begun”; and Macleod’s prose poem “Communication for C. S”; and lengthy reviews of Pound’s recently published How To Read by Ford Madox Ford and Thomas McGreevy. The issue was also notable for its violation of sexual taboos: it published Kay Boyle’s poem “In Defense of Homosexuality” along with a letter by Ezra Pound in 1928 and Nancy Cunard’s exploration of interracial relationships “Black Man and White Ladyship.” After this issue was published, Pound wrote to Putnam to sever his relationship with the magazine.²²⁰Putnam recalled in his memoir: “Upon the appearance of the number, I received a brief note from him which read: ‘Dear Sam, April issue received. I presume it is time you removed my name from your list of editorial supports. At any rate please do so.’ … I saw little of him after this, but we did have a final lunch together in Paris just before I returned to the States, in 1933. (Paris Was Our Mistress, 157). In May 1932, Pound wrote to Zukofsky: “Sam Puttenheim is drunk half the time/ over works the other two thirds … His last issue New Rev. inexcusable on any other base/ass. Sorry!///he’za sympathetic kuss/ Have said faretheewell to his orgum” (Pound/Zukofsky, 126).

With Pound having left the magazine, and with the magazine having failed to establish itself commercially, Putnam published a sixth and final issue of The New Review in June 15. This issue the “Italy: Critical and Creative” number promised earlier, and included stories and poetry by a number of Italian contributers along with Putnam’s own “Italian Notes and Portraits.” While Putnam’s magazine had published an impressive array of international modernists and aimed for genuine catholicity, it does not appear that the market was interested or prepared to support his efforts, either with the magazine or New Review editions, and the magazine folded without having published several of the works announced for future publication, including work by Rakosi and Reznikoff, as well as Zukofsky’s An “Objectivists” Anthology, which was published instead by To, Publishers in August 1932.

While Putnam had begun on fairly good terms with Pound, like most of the editors who had interacted with the opinionated poet, he ended up with a negative overall impression of the man. In his memoirs, Putnam described Pound as a “cracker-barrel philosopher” who, whatever his considerable skills as an original poet, had

retained, in his attitude toward society and the affairs of the world, a provincial small-town outlook. …As we grew better acquainted, particularly in connection with the editing of the magazine, I began to discover how much of the American small-towner there was in him: there was the same stubbornness or “contrariness,” the same “cantankerousness,” the same “bossiness,” the same “touchiness” that are to be met with in literally millions of his back-country compatriots²²¹Paris Was Our Mistress, 141, 150. In his memoirs, Putnam further wrote: “Since Ezra had already moved on to Italy, I did not meet him in person until some while after my arrival in Paris; but I had had a chance to form all sorts of impressions of him from the comments of his friends and acquaintances. Among those who knew him well I do not believe there was one who was not fully and amusedly aware of his foibles, his vulnerable points, and even his more serious faults; but this did not interfere in the slightest with their appreciation of Pound the poet, whom they respected a good deal more highly than they did Pound the prose writer or Pound the critic—for the critic, frequently, they had no respect at all, especially as regarded his choices of protégés.” (Paris Was Our Mistress, 141).

Putnam also complained:

For Pound there were whole vast sectors of world literature that simply did not exist. … In the field of contemporary literature his taste was equally limited. All he could see, practically, was Ezra Pound and a handful of old friends and disciples: among Americans, Zukofsky, McAlmon, William Carlos Williams. … At Ezra’s instigation, a literary journal known as L’Indice was founded in the vicinity of Rapallo, and in its columns (in Italian, of course) he would hold forth at great length on such writers as Robert McAlmon, Louis Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi and the American “Objectives” (long forgotten now), John Rodker, and one or two others; the impression conveyed was, as usual, that these were the worth-while representatives of contemporary literature in English, the only ones in fact that were worth bothering about. At one time he inserted a notice in Il Mare of Genoa inviting Italian writers to submit work for translation into English, “provided they think they can stand the acid test of such criticism as that of Zukofsky, Eliot, and W. C. Williams.” It was a strange kind of shadow-boxing in which he indulged during this last phase of migrations; for the Italians, it is safe to say, simply did not know what he was driving at, as he himself would have put it, and if they had depended upon his orientations they would have formed a bizarre conception indeed of our modern American writing scene.

From all this it should be evident that Ezra had taken what was for him the easiest way out. He had in a manner of speaking walled himself off from the world while preserving all his rancors and continuing his long-distance sparring.²²²Paris Was Our Mistress, 143-144, 147.

Whatever the initial enthusiasm Putnam may have had for Pound, Zukofsky and the other “Objectives,” his later recollections clearly indicated that his interest in these writers did not survive the deterioration of his relationship with Pound. In this he appears to be similar to Lincoln Kirstein, the editor of Hound & Horn.

Little Magazines of the Radical Left

Between 1929 and 1934, Zukofsky and other “Objectivists” also published together in an array of short-lived radical magazines, many of which were edited from college towns across the United States by young, leftist college students. These magazines included Jackass, Palo Verde, The Morada, and Front (all edited by Norman Macleod); Nativity (edited from Columbus, Ohio by Boris J. Israel); The Left (published in Davenport, Iowa by a small group of young radicals); and Contempo (published from Chapel Hill, North Carolina by Milton Abernethy and Anthony Buttitta). Other prominent leftist magazines in the era included Jack Conroy’s The Rebel Poet (1931-1932) and The Anvil (1933-1935), Dynamo (1934-1935), edited by a group of writers that included Herman Spector, Joseph Vogel, and Sol Funaroff, and the longer lived and better known New Masses and The Partisan Review. Except for New Masses, these latter publications did not have as strong connections to Zukofsky and the other “Objectivists.”

New Masses

Years in operation: 1926-1948 [as a monthly publication through September 1933; as a weekly publication from January 1934 thereafter]
Editors: Several. As a monthly magazine, its most prominent editors were Joseph Freeman, Hugo Gellert, Michael Gold and Walt Carmon. Whittaker Chambers served on the editorial board from May 1932 through September 1933.
“Objectivists” published: Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Carl Rakosi, Norman Macleod, Whittaker Chambers, Charles Henri Ford, Emanuel Carnevali, Parker Tyler

Because New Masses already has an excellent publicly available online reference home on the Marxists Internet Archive, I will not devote much attention to its editorial and publication history here.²²³Readers interested in New Masses can refer to the index, scans, and introductory material published at https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/. Although the list of “Objectivists” who published in New Masses appears extensive, the connection between the publication and members of this group was not as strong as it appears on first glance. Norman Macleod and Whittaker Chambers both served on the magazine’s editorial staff during the early 1930s and both published regularly in the magazine as a result, but none of the other “Objectivists” enjoyed warm relationships with the magazine’s editors. Of the remaining seven writers to publish work in New Masses, only Williams and Pound appeared in more than a single issue, and neither of them did so on particularly good terms.

Williams was the first to appear in the magazine, with his story “The Five Dollar Guy” (the titular reference to a local oil company executive who had become notorious for propositioning working-class housewives) appearing in the magazine’s first issue in May 1926. Unfortunately for Williams, he had forgotten to change the name of the oil company in his story, and was promptly served with an expensive libel suit which he settled at considerable personal expense.²²⁴Williams’ out-of-pocket costs were partially defrayed by his receipt of The Dial‘s annual award for 1926, worth $2000, awarded to him by Marianne Moore, the magazine’s then editor. Angered that the story had appeared without the editors having noticed or given him an opportunity to fix what proved to be a very expensive mistake, Williams’ next publication in the magazine didn’t occur until January 1929, when Gold published his two line poem “Question and Answer.” Following the magazine’s publication of an exchange of letters between Mike Gold and Ezra Pound in October 1930, Williams dashed off a brief letter of support to Gold which also expressed his own ambivalence about communism.²²⁵Include quotation here. Gold subsequently printed the letter in December 1930 under the mocking heading “Poor Doc, Nobody Wants his Life or His Verses,” which decisively ended Williams’ relationship to the magazine.

Pound’s relationship with the magazine began positively enough, with a letter to the editors appearing in December 1926 indicating that Pound had read several early issues of the magazine “with great care” and that “for the first time in years I have even gone so far as to think of making a trip to America,” but deteriorated rather predictably thereafter. Letters from Pound were published in the March 1927, June 1928, and October 1930 issues, at which time Gold challenged Pound to set forward his views on the virtues of fascism clearly so that he might win converts in the United States. Pound’s made no further appearances in New Masses, though he published a short prose piece “mike and other phenomena,” in the December 1930 issue of Norman Macleod’s magazine The Morada that partially responded to Gold’s challenge.

Like Williams and Pound, Zukofsky’s relationship with New Masses was a fraught one. Despite his political sympathies, He appears to have begun with something resembling contempt for their aesthetic narrowness (apart from his friend Whittaker Chambers), writing to Pound in April 1931:

Naturally, to them, even to the blank [Abraham] Magill [editor of The Daily Worker], I’m the sediment of the bourgeoise—tho I don’t think they’ve ever read me. I shall, however, have the satisfaction of setting several proletarians on their writing asses—Roskolenkier—etc if they profit by my lessons. But I’m afraid they need continual tutoring.—I suppose I ed. drop in on Macleod & the rest of the New Asses—when I’m in N.Y. but they’ll probably fire me out because my name has occasionally been associated with E.P. & W.C.W. and that lump Kewmangs (comme dit my German-translator-friend-Chambers). … Whitt—I should say—wd. be a better man to have at the plenum of the Int Bur. of Rev. Lit than Micky Gold. O well—²²⁶Pound/Zukofsky, 96.

Zukofsky was aware that his friendship with anticommunists made him suspect to the magazine and he affected, at least in his letters to Pound, a tone of disinterestedness, though in later public defenses of his ideas from attacks by the Communist left, he was careful to insist upon his Marxist bona fides, going so far as to tell Morton Zabel in regard to Morris Schappes negative review of An “Objectivists” Anthology in Poetry that “this controversy already started has very serious implications … Another misprint like “Kaufsky’s” for Kautsky’s, in your May number, and the argument will involve considerable risk for [me].”²²⁷Letter from Louis Zukofsky to Morton Zabel, April 27, 1933. University of Chicago Special Collections. Zukofsky’s lone appearance in New Masses didn’t occur until October 8, 1935, when the weekly magazine carried his brief review of Lewis Carroll’s The Russian Journal, though Zukofsky’s biographer Mark Scroggins indicates that Zukofsky was working as an unpaid poetry editor for New Masses by the end of 1935, after the Objectivist Press had broken up.²²⁸Scroggins does not indicate how long Zukofsky remained in this capacity, but suggests that his only “discovery” was the poetry of Robert Allison Evans, an unemployed mining engineer from Pennsylvania (Poem of a Life, 148).

Of the remaining writers, Carl Rakosi’s poem “Vitagraph” appeared in the August 1926 issue, and the December 1926 issue contained Emanuel Carnevali’s “Serenade.” The October 1929 issue featured a splenetic letter from Joseph Vogel denouncing Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, transition, and Blues, where he had formerly served as a contributing editor.²²⁹In his letter, Vogel wrote “Ezra, it seems, is as incapable of good influence as the Church. Recently he 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. Others of the group, including Spector, Moore, Gould, myself, somehow didn’t grab the rope. … Soon after a young writer experiences a setback from standard magazines … the next step is to try the smaller magazines. To get his work published, let us say in Blues, he must drop commas, sense, and adopt freakishness. Therein lies the harm, because Blues, for instance, has persistently avoided life and human beings. The work in it has been metaphysical, treating with petty emotions, describing souls of lousy poets, including Jolas with his Oh, my soul! and Ah, America! There is a use for experimental writing when it serves experimental purpose. Experimental writing by Americans saw its full development years ago, and yet transition and Blues continue with experimentalism that is old, that repeats, that becomes weaker and weaker, that serves little purpose … Since these magazines have already become unmanageable in the hands of metaphysicians who run away from any form of life that may threaten a boot in the rear, it is time that young writers disassociate themselves from all these abstractions, as many have long ago done from Pound, the dean of corpses that promenade in graveyards” (“Literary Graveyards,” 30). The November 1929 issue included a brief letter from Parker Tyler responding to Vogel’s letter, marking his only appearance in New Masses, and Charles Henri Ford, Blues’ other principal editor, made his lone appearance in the magazine in February 1930 with the publication of his short poem “Mississippi Farmer.”

The Morada and Front: Norman Macleod’s Magazines

While an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, the poet Norman Macleod founded Jackass, a monthly “magazine of the Southwest,” which published its first issue in January 1928. After a second issue appeared in February, Macleod, who was working at this time as a custodian in the Petrified Forest National Monument in Holbrook, Arizona, changed the name and format of the magazine, releasing the next issue in May 1928 as a quarterly entitled Palo Verde. Advertisements for Palo Verde appeared in the first three issues of Charles Henri Ford’s Blues, where it was described as “radical Southwestern poetry magazine” and solicited “radical contributions from preference and a desire to foster all revolutionary esthetic tecnics.” Macleod published four issues of Palo Verde, and was assisted by the New York-based radical poet Herman Spector, who served as a contributing editor on the magazine. Macleod would later credit Spector (and Parker Tyler) for helping him develop his own poetic sensibilities, stating later that “I was writing very conventional, rather poor, imitative verse at the time. It was Herman Spector and also Parker Tyler who wrote me advising me to climb out of that rut and so it was they who first influenced me in the direction of experiment and in trying to find my own voice and new forms—or at least to say what I was trying to say in language that was not distorted by restrictive English metrical patterns.”²³⁰Quoted in Bastard in the Ragged Suit, 9.

Palo Verde did not survive 1929, but Macleod, who had received special acknowledgement from Charles Henri Ford for his role in forming an “invaluable advisory board in the launching of Blues,” already had plans to found a third magazine. The “Expatriate” number of Blues (February-July 1929) carried an advertisement announcing the launch of a new magazine edited by Macleod that Autumn to be entitled Brogan. According to the ad in Blues, Brogan would be “an attempt to develop a literature of affirmation,” which was to be “experimental and radical in content and technic” and would feature Harold Salemson and Charles Henri Ford as contributing editors.²³¹Salemson was also a contributor to that issue of Blues. His contributor note read: “Harold J. Salemson, born in Chicago in 1910 and educated in France and America, now lives in Paris where he edits Tambour, a French-English review. He has contributed in English to transition, Poetry and The Modern Quarterly; in French to La Revue Européenne, Europe, Monde, Le Mercure de France and Anthologie.” By the time that Autumn had rolled around, Macleod did in fact have a new magazine, though it appeared under the title The Morada instead of Brogan.

The Morada

Years in operation: 1929-1930 [5 issues]
Editor: Norman Macleod, Donal McKenzie [European editor, issue 5]
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Robert McAlmon, Kenneth Rexroth, Richard Johns, Norman Macleod, Forrest Anderson, Charles Henri Ford

In Autumn 1929, Macleod launched The Morada, a quarterly magazine published by the Ward Anderson Printing Company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Macleod was attending school at the University of New Mexico. The first issue listed William Flynn, C. V. Wicker and Donal McKenzie as members of the magazine’s editorial board; Sydney Hunt (London), Harold Salemson (Paris), Ralph Cheyney (Chicago), and Walter Barber (New York) as correspondents; and Benjamin Musser, Joseph Vogel, Joseph Kalar, Harry Crosby, Herman Spector, Catherine Stuart, George W. St. Clair, Charles Henri Ford, and Dean B. Lyman Jr. as contributing editors. The inaugural issue included work from 23 contributors, including Ezra Pound and a handful of writers, such as Ford, Rexroth, Salemson, and Harry Crosby, who had also been recently published in Blues; the majority of its other contributors were writers who also contributed to New Masses, the radical magazine for whom Macleod worked as a contributing editor. The second issue of Morada (Winter 1929) was designated as a “Harry Crosby Number,” and appeared just a few weeks after Crosby’s sensational murder-suicide in New York City. Crosby was dropped from the list of contributing editors and Charles Yale Harrison was added. This issue included work from roughly two dozen contributors, including poetry by Macleod, Ford, and Richard Johns, whose own magazine Pagany would soon be publishing its first issue with poems by Ford, Tyler, Macleod and others included therein. The third issue of The Morada (Spring 1930) included poems by Johns and Macleod, and excerpts from a letter by Pound.

After printing four issues of The Morada, Macleod became involved in the founding of the multi-lingual and politically radical literary magazine Front. Macleod’s work on Front and increasing involvement in international revolutionary politics contributed to a dramatic overhaul of Morada at this time as well. The fifth and final issue of Morada, published in December 1930 (the same month that the first issue of Front appeared) was significantly changed: now announcing itself as The Tri-lingual Morada, the magazine contained work in English, German, and French, and solicited future submissions at an editorial address near Lago di Garda, Italy. The magazine’s editorial board had also been substantially reorganized: Donal McKenzie was now listed the magazine’s “european & expatriate” editor (the Italian address was his); Norman Macleod as its American editor, and Joseph Kalar, Georges Linze, Fernand Jonan, Eugene Jolas, Frantisek Halas, Richard Johns, Sonja Prins, Ralph Cheyney, and Solon R. Barber as contributing editors. The issue included McAlmon’s short story “New York Harbour,” commentary by Ezra Pound, and poems by Macleod (in both English and German), Zukofsky, Johns, Forrest Anderson, and Samuel Putnam.²³²A PDF scan of the first three and fifth issue of The Morada can be viewed here.

While the Spring 1931 issue of The Left included an announcement for a sixth issue of Morada to include poetry, prose and art by ten named contributors, no further issues of the magazine were printed. Macleod had moved to New York City in January 1931 to take a position working as an editorial assistant for Walt Carmon, then the managing editor of New Masses, the best known Marxist journal of its era. Carmon left on vacation soon after Macleod’s arrival, leaving Macleod to select most of the material included in the March 1931 issue; among his selections were Whittaker Chambers’ famous short story “Can You Hear Their Voices?” In addition to his work for New Masses, Macleod had begun to funnel much of his editorial energy into Front.

Front

Years in operation: 1930-1931 [4 issues]
Editor: Norman Macleod
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, Robert McAlmon, Richard Johns, Norman Macleod, Charles Henri Ford

Front was published in December 1930, shortly before Macleod’s move to New York City. Front was an ambitious, multilingual magazine funded by the Soviet organization FOSP (Federatsiya organizatsiy sovetskikh pisateley or the Federation of Organizations of Soviet Writers) which printed work by a wide range of Communist or communist-sympathizing writers.²³³For more on FOSP, see Amanda Metcalf’s “The Founding of the Federation of Soviet Writers: The Forgotten Factor in Soviet Literature of the Late Twenties” in The Slavonic and East European Review 65.4 (October 1987), 609-616. The magazine itself was published on a bi-monthly schedule from The Hague in the Netherlands, and had editors listed for the United States (Macleod), Europe (Sonja Prins), and the U.S.S.R. (FOSP) in its first issue, and additional editors for “Hispano-America” (Xavier Abril) and Japan (Masaki Ikeda) by the time the fourth issue was published in June 1931. Despite its brief run, it printed work by Paul Bowles, Kay Boyle, Basil Bunting, Jon Dos Passos, Dudley Fitts, Charles Henri Ford, Richard Johns, Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, Sherry Mangan, Ezra Pound, Harold Salemson, Herman Spector, Joseph Vogel, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky.

The first issue contained a short credo from Ezra Pound, poetry and prose by Macleod, and poems by Ford and Zukofsky. The second issue (published in February 1931) contained an open letter from Ezra Pound to the Russian playwright Sergei Tretyakov, McAlmon’s story “Green Grow the Grasses,” and poetry by Ford, Macleod and Williams. The third issue (published in April 1931) included a Basil Bunting’s “Directory of Current English Authors,” a translation of an article he had recently published in Italian in L’Indice; and the fourth issue (published in June 1931) contained Zukofsky’s review of Pound’s XXX Cantos, part of Pound’s “Canto XVII,” and more poetry by Macleod.

Nativity

Years in operation: 1930-1931
Editor: Boris J. Israel
“Objectivists” published: Louis Zukofsky, Norman Macleod, Harry Roskolenko, Charles Henri Ford

Late in 1930, Boris J. Israel, then an undergraduate at Ohio State University, published the first issue of his little magazine Nativity: An American Quarterly. Nativity appeared to owe much to Pagany, which had begun publishing earlier that year, William Carlos Williams’ calls for the development of a vernacular American literature, and Ezra Pound (the magazine’s editorial content were published as a series of what Israel called “Prose Cantos”). In its first issue, which claimed to present “vital literature of the new america,” Israel announced

Hope is no longer needed. Hope, we mean, for America. America needs action. America is. America needs work. America is great. America needs advance and advance is inevitable.

America has never had an american literature. There have been literary productions but literary productions are seldom literature. Major literature, we mean. There have even been literary creations. And destructions. But these have been isolated.

… But there are others. An american literature there surely is. Most of it hasn’t yet been written. Most of the writers have not been born. But the literature is there and is more than waiting. It is pounding on the bottom of the sod, crying to break thru, like a young volcano. … It is pounding factory windows until they shake, roaring down elevated speedways, backfiring from airplane exhausts, starving in backalleys ready to tighten the hunger belt and fight on, it is everywhere about you. It is everywhere where America is, which, of course, excludes penthouse apartments, glasstop desks, golf courses, and other expressions of the sickly bourgeois imitation of a dead aristocracy.

Not it is nineteen thirty. We are at the beginning.

… This is the expression of the belief that the extended pregnancy is approaching a consummation.²³⁴”Prose Cantos,” 1-2.

In addition to this high-flown, proletarian-sympathizing rhetoric, the first issue included poetry by Macleod, Harry Roskolenkier, and Charles Henri Ford, and an announcement for Johns’ magazine Pagany.²³⁵”Historical Reconsideration”; “The Scorpion of Majesty”; and “Cut off the Gas,” respectively.

Israel published a second issue of Nativity in the Spring of 1931, noting that this issue was to be considered a single issue even though it was “inclusive of two quarters (spring and summer 1931).” The second issue included a small editorial note indicating the magazine was edited by Israel “with the assistance of a group of Associates, including Alexander Godin, Harry Roskolenkier, Norman Macleod, A[lbert]. E[dward]. Clements, Mary Hadley Lewis.” The second issue included several more of Israel’s “Prose Cantos” in which he exhibited his decidedly leftward political drift; two brief book reviews of recently published books by Leonara Speyer and Kathleen Tankersley Young by Zukofsky (printed as Prose Cantos XX and XXI); and poems by Macleod, Roskolenkier, and Zukofsky.²³⁶These were, respectively: “Oil!”; “Effigy”; and “N. Y. 1927.” The back matter included announcements for five other little magazines: Hesperian (published from San Francisco by James Hart), Pagany, Front, New Masses, and a newly launched magazine to be entitled The Left. While a third issue of Nativity had been promised to appear for the Fall of 1931, it was never produced. Israel would leave school shortly after Nativity ceased publication, joining the Communist Party and working as a party organizer and journalist for New Masses.

Nativity

Years in operation: 1931
Editors: Jay Du Von, Marvin Klein, George Redfield
“Objectivists” published: Louis Zukofsky, Norman Macleod, Harry Roskolenko, Charles Henri Ford

Although Nativity printed only two issues, it included an ad in the second issue announcing the forthcoming appearance, on March 1, of the first issue of The Left: A Quarterly Review, a new magazine out of Davenport, Iowa. The announcement stated that the magazine would publish “revolutionary & experimental criticism, poetry, cinema, prose, and art” and listed among its contributors several writers associated who had been associated with Zukofsky and his “Objectivist” group including Boris Israel, Norman Macleod, Harry Roskolenkier, Harold Salemson, and Joseph Vogel. The first issue of The Left featured a striking cover including stills from the Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko’s 1930 film Zemlya (translated as Soil or Earth) and described itself on its title page as “a quarterly review of radical & experimental art.” This issue was edited by a group of five young Marxists led by George Redfield, Marvin Klein and Jay Du Von, and listed an additional seven associate editors, including Norman Macleod and Donal McKenzie.²³⁷Du Von would later go on to direct the Federal Writers’ Project in Iowa and Illinois during the mid-1930s. In addition to Redfield, Klein, and Du Von, the other two editors were R. C. Lorenz, and W. K. Jordan. The magazine’s other associate editors were V. F. Calverton, John Herrmann, Joseph Kalar, Herbert Klein, and Seymour Stein. The front matter also included an announcement for the next issue and a notice that “The LEFT calls on the literary, artistic and political LEFT front for support and material. We want and need your subscription, your suggestions and criticisms.” The issue itself included a critical department, a cinema department, and poems from several contributors, including two short poems by Zukofsky published as “Poems (1927),” Norman Macleod’s “Not Steel Alone,” “Winter in Chicago,” and “Imperialistic Creed,” Roskolenkier’s “In a Hospital,” and short prose with radical political messages by Roskolenkier and Israel. The back matter for the issue included announcements for a number of other little magazines, including Nativity, The Front, a never published sixth issue of The Morada, The New Review, and New Masses.

The second issue of The Left was published later in 1931 as a combined Summer & Autumn issue, with Howard D. Lester’s photograph “Manpower” printed as a wrap-around cover.²³⁸Lester was a member of the executive board of the Workers’ Film and Photo League. The editorial page indicated a few minor changes, but the principals remained consistent from the first issue.²³⁹In the place of associate editors, the magazine listed several “contributing editors.” V. F. Calverton was dropped from the list that had appeared in the first issue, R. C. Lorenz and Herbert Klein were listed as contributing editors rather than full editors for this issue, and Bob Brown, Jack Conroy, and Jan Wittenber (the secretary of Chicago’s John Reed Club) were added. Katherine Parker was also listed as the magazine’s business manager. The front matter also included an “IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT” indicating that while the first number had been “met with enthusiastic recognition” and orders from all over the world, the magazine had faced a number of financial difficulties that negatively impacted their plans for the second issue and imperiled its future existence. The editors suggested the “THE LEFT is the only quarterly review in America publishing the work of those young writers who are creating an American proletarian literature” and suggested a number of ways that readers and sympathizers could help financially. The issue included Norman Macleod’s “Cotton Pickers in Alabama” and “Design in Cotton Fabric,” Horace Gregory’s poem “New York, Cassandra,” and Donal McKenzie’s essay “T(h)inker Pound and Other Italian Legends,” which responded to a recent article criticizing Pound by Mike Gold in New Masses and Pound’s reply in a recent issue of The Morada.²⁴⁰McKenzie praised Pound’s poetic accomplishment and criticized his economic and political intelligence: “As a student of language and its complex synthesis with idea, his work ranks with that of James Joyce. What he wishes to give to poetry is the ‘ability (comparatively lost since the time of Dante) of saying several things at once.’ This is important, and, incidentally, parallels the thought processes demanded of a good scientist … This kind of thinking is scarce and certainly more modern than the innovations of Miss Stein who is the exemplary victim of une idée fixée [sic]. … In his Thirty Cantos he has given us a pragmatic explanation of the means and function of poetry since Homer. These accomplishments however should not authorize Pound’s ratiocinations on an America which he has not been able to study at first hand in a decade—nor should it excuse his lax perception of crass tyranny in Italy. … Pound is an incurable Romantic Liberal, toasting his toes at the better Fascisti fires, and trying to rationalize about a system of which he really enjoys the fruits. He is just one of God’s sensitive noblemen enthralled by the brute strength of a mad idol. He is in love with the rotten splendor of the middle ages. He is a troubadour singing the glory of a new feudal system” (48, 52). In addition, the correspondence section included several opinionated responses from writers as diverse as Arthur Davison Ficke, Paul Bowles, Charles Henri Ford, Murray Godwin, and Samuel Putnam.²⁴¹Ficke, Bowles, and Ford all wrote in opposition to the editorial policies of The Left, with Ford claiming that “the next number of blues will, in more than one way, announce its separation from any writer or group of writers now living in america. the prospect of the prairies blossoming with any number of identical wheat heads does not appeal to us at all. we have no quarrel with the way bread is grown and made but literature is another matter. so blues may move out politely before you have time to call in the landlady with her smell and her broom and her numerical whine, and her fondness for rolling art out of dough” (92). As this letter indicates, Ford had planned to bring out a tenth issue of Blues from Paris, even as late as 1931 when this letter was written, but the issue was never published. The letter from Putnam, who had just begun publishing his The New Review from Paris in January of that year, is far more encouraging: “The Left sounds like something. I am particularly interested in your war on “melodramatic despair.” The trend of young France, and to a great extent of young Europe, since the War has been toward a juvenile and callow defeatism. Witness the Surrealists, who pretend to be Revolutionists. … You have no idea how shallow and superficial it all is unless you are close up to the scene over here. … My best to you. Let’s fight for something, try to evolve something out of the environing Chaos” (92). The issue also contained announcements for a handful of other little magazines, including Hound & Horn, Pagany, Contempo, New Masses, and Jack Conroy’s The Rebel Poet.

The editors planned a third issue which was to include Louis Aragon’s “The Red Front,” but no further issues of the magazine appeared, and its unpaid editors eventually moved on to other literary and political pursuits. Aragon’s propaganda poem was not printed in the United States until 1933, when the editors of Contempo published E. E. Cummings’ translation in their February 1 issue.²⁴²Cummings’ translation of his friend’s “Le Front Rouge” first appeared in 1931 in the inaugural issue of Literature of the World Revolution (an English language periodical published in Moscow by the International Union of Revolutionary Writers which changed its name to Soviet Literature in 1946). After its appearance in Contempo magazine, the editors published Cummings’ translation as a separate pamphlet in an edition of 200.

Contempo

Years in operation: 1931-1934
Editors: Milton Abernethy [1931-1934], Anthony Buttitta [1931-1932], Mina Abernethy [1932-1934]
“Objectivists” published: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Rakosi?, Bunting?, Robert McAlmon, Frances Fletcher, Forrest Anderson

In January 1931, Milton Abernethy met Anthony Buttitta in an English course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill taught by the playwright Paul Eliot Green. Abernethy, then a 20 year old undergraduate and member of the Communist party, was at UNC largely because he had been too radical and outspoken for his peers at North Carolina State College.²⁴³While at NCSC, Abernethy contributed several articles to Wautagan, a student journal, which were critical of school practices and policies. In the last of these, “The Game of Cheating at North Carolina State College is Not Equal to Any Other Sport,” Abernethy accused his fellow students of endemic academic dishonesty, which led to the student council voting to expel him for “disservice to the school.” Abernethy appealed his expulsion and won the case, but transferred shortly thereafter to UNC-Chapel Hill. See Jim Vickers’ “A Week or Three Days in Chapel Hill: Faulkner, Contempo, and Their Contemporaries,” in The North Carolina Literary Review 1:1 (Summer 1992): 17-29. Buttitta, born in Monroe, Louisiana to Sicilian immigrant parents, was seeking a master’s degree in English literature and had previously published plays and stories while an undergraduate at Louisiana State Normal College and the University of Texas. Within a few months, the two literary-minded young men had recruited three of their classmates, Shirley Carter, Phil Liskin, and Vincent Garoffolo, and founded both a little magazine which they called Contempo: A Review of Books and Personalities, and The Intimate Bookshop, a book store which they briefly operated out of Abernethy’s dorm room before moving to a storefront in Chapel Hill.²⁴⁴In an early issue of Contempo, Abernethy wrote an advertisement for the store: “Not many people know of the existence of such an agency as The Intimate Bookshop. [It is] a place where one can read without cost and buy with regular discount any book from The Death of the Gods to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a place one goes for a quiet hour or so to browse about books that seem to stick his imagination, feel the intimate and personal touch of writers that lived to live, literature move before him as a vital and dynamic force rather than as a support for the dust of the ages.” The Intimate Bookshop long outlasted Contempo, and was operated by Milton and Minna Abernethy at 205-207 Franklin Street in Chapel Hill from 1933 until 1950, when anti-communist sentiment community induced the Abernethys to sell the store to Paul and Isabel Smith and move to New York City, where Milton eventually became a successful stockbroker (oh the irony!). In 1955, the Smiths moved the bookshop to a building which had previously housed the Berman Department Store at 119 Franklin Street, and sold the business in 1964 or 1965 to Walter and Brenda Kuralt, who opened an additional eight franchises throughout North Carolina. The last surviving Intimate Bookshop, on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, closed in the late 1990s. See https://perma.cc/7CPD-8S7E. By August 1931, all three of Abernethy and Buttitta’s classmates had left the magazine, leaving Abernethy and Buttitta as the magazine’s sole editors.

The first issue of Contempo was published in May 1931 and featured an editorial describing the publication as a review of “ideas and personalities of some significance that demand immediate comment.” [Combining literature and a progressive political slant (while avoiding the championship of “any particular group or definite order” Contempo featured poetry, fiction, and literary and social criticism by a variety of writers, including Kay Boyle, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.] Contempo was issued 18 times a year (roughly every three weeks) and cost ten cents per issue, with annual subscriptions available for $1. As a publication, Contempo had the appearance of a newspaper, with issues typically consisting of four pages and some mixture of poetry, editorial comment, reviews, and other prose. The editors frequently published special-topic issues with guest editors and quickly gained a reputation for the journal’s willingness to publish avant garde poetry as well as engage with progressive political issues. It devoted two issues, for example, to the Scottsboro Boys case, famously publishing Langston Hughes’ “Christ in Alabama” on the cover of their December 1, 1931 issue, in between editorials by Hughes and Lincoln Steffens, the well-known socialist muckraking journalist.

[In mid 1933, Buttitta and Abernethy, Contempo‘s remaining editors, quarreled and parted ways. Abernethy and his wife Mina continued to edit Contempo until February, 1934, when it ceased publication, apparently for lack of funds.]

Connection to the “Objectivists”

Contempo published poetry or criticism by Pound, Rakosi, Reznikoff, Williams, Zukofsky, Bunting, and McAlmon. The Oppens admired the magazine, with George describing it in a letter to Ezra Pound as “a magazine concerned with liberal or radical political theses” and noting that a recent issue had been devoted to the Scottsboro case and had featured poetry by Countee Cullen and “other negro writers.” ²⁴⁵In “Publications in English,” Undated letter to Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound Papers, 1868-1976 (Box 38, Folder 1613). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT.

James G. Leippert’s Magazines 

James G. Leippert, also known as J. Ronald Lane Latimer and a host of other pseudonyms during his brief but significant publishing career, was an eccentric character who published a series of ephemeral little magazines in the early 1930s before founding The Alcestis Press, which published handsome limited editions of poetry by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others between 1935 and 1937.²⁴⁶Eccentric is perhaps too charitable. Allen Tate recalled him as a “fly-by-night opportunist” and one of his closest friends and longtime collaborator Willard Maas described him privately as a “psychopathic worm” (qtd. in Al Filreis’ Modernism from Right to Left, 115). For a brief biographic account of Leippert’s life, see Ruth Graham’s “Mystery Man” article for the Poetry Foundation, which draws heavily on Al Filreis’ research.

Leippert’s first attempt at publishing poetry came with his founding of the monthly magazine The new broom and Morningside, which he launched in January 1932 while still an undergraduate at Columbia University. Leippert described the magazine to potential contributors as a successor to both Broom, an international quarterly magazine which had been published from Italy and edited by Harold Loeb and a rotating cast of associate editors and Morningside, the longtime undergraduate literary journal at Columbia University. Leippert was an enormous enthusiast of T. S. Eliot’s and wrote to him soliciting work for publication in his new magazine, though Eliot politely declined his overtures. The new broom and Morningside failed after its fourth issue (published in April 1932), and was quickly succeeded by The Lion and Crown.

The Lion and Crown

Years in operation: 1932-1933 [2 issues]
Editor: James Leippert
“Objectivists” published: Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, Forrest Anderson, Jesse Loewenthal, Frances Fletcher, Norman Macleod, Jerry Reisman

Early in 1932, as he was planning the launch of The Lion and Crown, Leippert wrote to William Carlos Williams, inviting him to serve as associate editor. Williams quickly declined Leippert’s offer, no doubt thinking of his recent experiences with Pagany and Contact. He did, however, recommend that Leippert contact his friend Louis Zukofsky, and Zukofsky greatly assisted Leippert with assembling the first issue of this new magazine. Zukofsky’s assistance was so great that it warranted his being the subject of a special acknowledgement printed inside the first issue: “The editors of The Lion & Crown wish to thank Mr. Louis Zukofsky for his interest, and to dedicate to him whatever of the publication is theirs to dedicate.”²⁴⁷Quoted in Pound/Zukofsky, 135.

The inaugural issue of The Lion & Crown, published in Fall 1932, shows clear evidence of Zukofsky’s editorial influence, as it featured writing by Reznikoff, Rakosi, and Bunting, contributions from peripheral “Objectivists” Frances Fletcher, Forrest Anderson, and Jesse Loewenthal, and a review of Williams’ A Novelette and Other Prose (which had been published by To, Publishers) by Zukofsky’s friend Jerry Reisman. The contents page also included a list of contributors which would appear in future issues, a list of 13 authors which contained a healthy number of “Objectivists,” including Williams, Reznikoff, Rakosi, Oppen, and Frances Fletcher.

Leippert only managed to publish one additional issue of the magazine (printed in early 1933), though it did include two poems each by Oppen and Norman Macleod.²⁴⁸Other notable contributors to the issue included Gertrude Stein (“Basket”), Erskine Caldwell (“Crown-Fire”), and Jose Garcia Villa. Leippert also appears to have been planning an entire special issue devoted solely to William Carlos Williams and possibly another issue dedicated to Zukofsky, but neither issue ever materialized.²⁴⁹See vague references to a special critical number of Leippert’s magazine in Pound/Zukofsky pp. 145, 147 and Basil Bunting to Leippert, September 26, 1932 in the Ronald Lane Latimer papers at the University of Chicago Library. Pound and Zukofsky discussed Leippert’s seeming interest in publishing work by Zukofsky and other “Objectivists” in a series of letters exchanged between August 1932 and early 1933,²⁵⁰See Pound/Zukofsky, pp. 134-135, 145, 147. but by May 1933, Zukofsky seems to have lost any confidence he may have had in Leippert, telling Pound:

Will write Leippert again, & if he doesn’t answer to hell with him. I don’t think he has an asset. Think, in fact, he’s a quack & quacks are quickly uncovered these days … He’s off on a magazine proposition now—wants to get the [James Branch] Cabells, [Robert] Nathans, etc. to join him. They won’t if we’re goin’ to be anywhere near ’em. They won’t anyway.²⁵¹The Selected Letters of Louis Zukofsky, 102.

Alcestis

The magazine proposition Zukofsky described Leippert as being “off on” was a poetry quarterly for which Leippert first began soliciting contributions in November 1933. Initially planned to appear under the name Flambeau, and later, Tendency: A Magazine of Integral Form, the first issue of Leippert’s third little magazine in as many years was eventually published in October 1934 as Alcestis. Alcestis survived a bit longer than Leippert’s previous efforts, publishing work by William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, and a host of other then-prominent poets, but it too suspended operations within a year of its founding, with the fourth and final issue, a “revolutionary number” edited by the poet Willard Maas, appearing in July 1935.²⁵²See Al Filreis’ Modernism from Right to Left, pp. 118-128.

The failure of the magazine Alcestis was followed by Leippert’s establishment of a publishing press, also called Alcestis. Between 1935 and 1937, Leippert’s Alcestis Press issued nine very attractive volumes of modern poetry, fine printed on rag paper, including Wallace Stevens’ Ideas of Order and Owl’s Clover, and William Carlos Williams’ An Early Martyr and Adam & Eve & the City, and it is conceivable that Leippert may have become Williams’ regular publisher had not James Laughlin emerged when he did.²⁵³The full list of books published under The Alcestis Press imprimatur also included Allen Tate’s The Mediterranean and Other Poems, Robert Penn Warren’s first volume of poetry, Thirty-Six Poems, John Peale Bishop’s Minute Particulars, Willard Maas’ Fire Testament and Ruch Lechlitner’s Tomorrow’s Phoenix. According to Al Filreis, Leippert had also sought to publish what would have been Elizabeth Bishop’s first book of poems, made a serious offer to publish new cantos and a collected poems by Ezra Pound which Pound ultimately refused, and nearly published a book by H.D. See Modernism from Right to Left, 121.

The Westminster Review

1935: Pound is involved. They publish Zukofsky, Williams, Niedecker, and others. See especially the Spring-Summer 1935 issue, edited by Pound, John Drummond, and T.C. Wilson. [more needed here]

The Long Silence and Gradual Return to Poetry

After spending most of the 1940s and 1950s in near total silence, both intentional and due to an inability to find regular publishers for their work, many of the “Objectivists” saw a surge of publishing activity in the 1960s. Williams, the only member of the group to have published his writing continuously through the 1940s and 1950s, died in March of 1963, preventing him from seeing this upsurge in publication during the later part of the decade, but his Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems was published in 1962 and the five finished sections of Paterson first appeared as a single volume in 1963. The decade also saw major works published by Oppen, Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Bunting, Rakosi, and Niedecker.

Oppen published The Materials in 1962, This in Which in 1965, and Of Being Numerous in 1968, all with New Directions. Of Being Numerous won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1969. Reznikoff published By the Waters of Manhattan: Selected Verse in 1962 and Testimony, the United States, 1885-1890, the first volume of his long series of documentary poetry taken from the American legal record, in 1965, both with New Directions. After Testimony failed to sell well, New Directions dropped Reznikoff, and he returned to printing his work privately, self-publishing By the Well of Living and Seeing, and the Fifth Book of the Maccabbees in 1969 before John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press began publishing his work in 1974. Zukofsky published four books with small presses between 1962 and 1964; editions containing the two halves of All, his collected short poems, were published in the United States and England between 1965 and 1967; his “A” 1-12 was published in London in 1966 and by Doubleday in New York in 1967; and both “A” 13-21 and his and Celia’s translations of Catullus were published in both London and New York in 1969. Bunting published Loquitur and his First Book of Odes with Stuart and Deidre Montgomery’s London-based Fulcrum Press in 1965, and his autobiographical long poem “Briggflatts” appeared to great acclaim, first in Poetry magazine in January 1966, and later that year in book form from Fulcrum. Fulcrum also published the first edition of his Collected Poems in 1968. Rakosi published Amulet, his first book in more than 25 years, with New Directions in 1967. Niedecker published My Friend Tree in 1961, but this was a small book with very limited distribution. In 1968, however, Niedecker published both her collection North Central with Stuart and Deidre Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press and her T & G: The Collected Poems (1936-1966) through Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Society.

This “return” to publication can be traced back as early as 1956, when Jonathan Williams published Zukofsky’s collection Some Time, though it probably owes as much if not more to the Oppens’ return to the United States from Mexico in 1959 and George’s resumption of writing and publishing poems in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Oppen published his first post-silence poems, fittingly, in Poetry magazine (the January 1960 issue contained five poems, his first publications in more than 25 years) and in 1962 large editions of both his collection The Materials and Charles Reznikoff’s By the Waters of Manhattan were published by New Directions in partnership with George’s sister June Degnan Oppen, the publisher of The San Francisco Review. Following their various returns to print in the 1960s, each of the core “Objectivists” continued to write and publish poetry until their deaths. Their individual publication histories are treated in greater detail on the site on child pages for each writer.