Alfred
Kreymborg (USA)
1883-1966
Alfred
Kreymborg was born in 1883 in New York City, the son of a cigar-store owner.
The last of five children, Alfred was educated in public schools on the east
side of Manhattan. By the age of ten Kreymborg had become a master chess player
and by teenage was competing in state tournaments, ultimately tieing the world
champion José Capablanca. He also played the mandolin and, upon graduation and
a series of clerical jobs, he found position as a salesman for a maker of music
rolls for player pianos. Learning to play the piano, he became interested in
the classics, and desired to compose. However, without formal training, he
could not compose a symphony, and determined to write a symphony in words
instead.
“The Symphony of Love” was written when he
was eighteen, and over the next years Kreymborg wrote numerous fictions and
prose poems. In 1905 Guido Bruno published Kreymborg’s first literary work, Edna:
The Girl of the Street, a fictional account of an experience with a
prostitute. The publisher was taken to court on charges of obscenity, and the
book gained the attention of figures such as Bernard Shaw and Frank Norris;
ultimately, Bruno was acquitted.
During the following decade, Kreymborg
wrote another short novel, Erna Bitek, and continued to write poetry, meeting
several of the village “Bohemians” and, through the artist Marsden Hartley,
coming into contact with the art work through the group connected with Alfred
Stieglitz’s “291” galley. In 1913 he gained acquaintance with several figures
of that group, including Charles Demuth, Edward Steichen, and Man Ray, as well
as the brothers Albert and Charles Boni, who were about to launch a new
publishing house from their Washington Square Book Shop. Ray suggested to
Kreymborg that the two of them begin their own journal in order to introduce
several of their friends to a wide audience.
Financed by the Bonis, Glebe was first
published in September 1913, including figures such as James Joyce, H.D.,
Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos
Williams.
Meanwhile, Kreymborg published his first
book of poetry, Love and Life, and Other Studies in 1908, and,
experimenting with new techniques, published two poetic sequences, “Mushrooms”
and “To My Mother” in the Bruno Chap Books in 1915. The following year, John
Marshall published both sequences as Mushrooms: A Book of Free Forms in
hardback. Moreover, with the financial assistance of Walter Arensberg,
Kreymborg began a new literary magazine in 1915, Others, which caused a stir in
the literary world for its experimental writing. Meeting with the poets of the
pages, Kreymborg introduced numerous American and European writers to each
other, including William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Harriet Monroe, Carl
Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Sherwood Anderson.
Word of these literary activities spread,
luring writers such as Maxwell Bodenheim (who lived in Chicago) to New York.
In 1916, the Provincetown Players, at John Reed’s insistence, produced one of Kreymborg’s verse plays, Lima Beans. His second book of poetry, even more experimental in nature, was published as Blood of Things in 1920. His own Others Players, produced another of his plays, Manikin and Minikin which played on the same bill with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Jack’s House. The company soon disbanded, but Kreymborg published a collection of short plays, Plays for Poem-Mimes.
Others ceased publication in 1919,
but he brought out a third Others Anthology in 1920, the year when the
wealthy Princeton figure, Harold Loeb, invited him to edit Broom, a magazine of
arts published in Rome. In 1921, the Kreymborgs sailed to Europe. In Paris, he
met with Pound, Jean Cocteau, Constantin Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, and Gertrude
Stein. Richard McAlmon arranged for him to briefly meet James Joyce. In 1921,
the first issue of Broom appeared with various American and European authors.
But Kreymborg quit the journal after only four issues, arguing with Loeb over
to what extent of European authors should be featured. He and his wife toured
Italy, and Kreymborg returned to writing, this time composing various blank
narratives and experiments in the sonnet form.
The couple continued to travel throughout
Europe throughout the 1920s, and by the latter half of the decade, Kreymborg
had published two more volumes of poetry, The Lost Sail (1928) and Manhattan
Men (1929), as well as a history of American poetry running from the
colonial times to Hart Crane. With Paul Rosefeld, Van Wyck Brooks, and Lewis
Mumford, he began a series of five anthologies, The American Caravan, which was
highly influential for poets through the next few decades.
The stock market crash of 1929 and a
series of poems titled “The Economic Muse” reveal Kreymborg’s growing
persuasion that the poet had to speak out politically on contemporary issues.
For much the rest of his life, Kreymborg did so, in works such as the radio
play The Planets and his patriotic and pacifist poem series “Arms and
the Armageddon,” published in his Selected Poems of 1945. His last work
of poetry, No More War, and Other Poems, was published in 1950.
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Love
and Life, and Other Studies (New York: Grafton Press, 1908); Mushrooms: A Book
of Free Forms (New York: John Marshall, 1916); Blood of Things: A Second
Book of Free Forms (New York: N. L. Brown, 1920); Less Lovely (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923); Scarlet and Mellow (New York: Boni &
Liveright, 1926); The Lost Sail, A Cape Cod Diary (New York:
Coward-McCann, 1928); Manhattan Men (Poems and Epitaphs) (New York,
Coward-McCann, 1929); The Selected Poems, 1912-1944 (New York: Dutton,
1945); Man and Shadow: An Allegory (New York: Dutton, 1946); No More
War, and Other Poems (New York: Bookman Associates, 1950)
To
M. L.
Purple
iris in the green bowl:
You
ought to be brown.
Flecked
with three or four
dizzy
yellow midges.
And
not quite so stately—
dance
a moment, purple iris.
Now
you
and the green bowl
are
more like her.
(from
Mushrooms, 1916)
Broom
Tiny
boy,
staring
at me
with
eyes like toy balloons:
That
broom is much bigger than you.
Put
it down.
You
wont?
Then
don’t put it down.
(from
Mushrooms, 1916)
Hen
Being / from Zoology
Being
cooped in a crate,
cooped
in a crate,
as
one is cooped in crates
on
West South Water Street
of
the filthy, stinking Chicago River—
being
cooped in a crate
with
more hens than a crate can hold,
is
not an existence
even
for hens,
but
it gives one a sense of safety,
monotony,
warmth and interest
I
don’t deplore.
What
I deplore
is
this being yanked by the neck,
yanked
by the neck,
yanked
by the neck,
and
being flung,
crammed
and damned
by
a common, filthy, stinking
West
South Water Street poultryman
of
the filthy, stinking Chicago River,
from
one crate to another
one
crate to another,
one
crate to another.
It’s
enough to make
an
old hen squawk,
and
I’m an old hen, if you please,
a
roosterless, eggless, chickenless hen!
There’s
ever the hope in a hen like me
that
the next crate
will
be one’s last,
so
that this being slammed
from
one crate to another,
one
crate to another,
one
crate to another,
will
reach a cadence.
I’m
an old hen, if you please,
a
roosterless, eggless, chickenless,
and
I can endure
filthy,
stinking West South water Street
of
the filthy, stinking Chicago River
of
the filthy, stinking Loop of Chicago, Illinois,
but
wring my neck ere my time
if
I don’t squawk for all hens
when
I affirm that this
one
crate to another,
one
crate to another,
one
crate to another,
is
no lop forward
but
a hop backward from
being
cooped in a crate.
Being
cooped in a crate,
a
hen might find something to scratch,
though
it’s only one’s neighbor,
and
one is sans claws,
sans
even a feather,
to
scratch her with!
Oh,
Poultry Man,
you
are truly
the
God of hens!
(from
Blood of Things,
1920)
Coins
I.
Copper
Some
bodies chase pennies,
and
live penny lives,
by
hoarding three pennies,
in
fear of just two;
then
hoarding two pennies,
in
fear of just one;
then
hoarding one penny,
in
fear of the zero,
as
round in its emptiness,
perfectly
round,
as
bodies are all
which
chase pennies.
II.
Silver
Whether
winds chase the clouds,
or
clouds chase the winds;
whether
shadows the grasses,
or
grasses the shadows;
which
part of the circle
starts
chasing the rest’s
unimportant;
important
that
bodies chase bodies
with
undulating,
mystic
caresses
of
unseen wings:
wings
brushing wings.
III.
Gold
Something
flipped somebody
into
the air, and he fell,
head
over tail over head over tail,
a
moth blind with stars,
clutching
light, clutching dark:
here—where—
hand
of man, feet of bug:
fail
not to turn him, if
you
would have both of him,
undermost,
equal to, if not
as
cleanly as uppermost:
see?
(from
Blood of Things, 1920)
Eyes
/ from Physiology
We
are not his eyes.
We
do not see.
We
do not see grain,
we
see people;
we
do not see people,
we
see people gathering grain;
we
do not see people gathering grain,
we
see people loading freight cars;
we
do not see people loading freight cars,
we
see freight cars en route;
we
do not see cars,
we
see endless eels,
eels
of white tape;
we
do not see tape,
we
see figures;
we
do not see figures—
gold
is what we see.
We
are his eyes.
We
tell him,
buy
wheat at par!
(from
Blood of Things, 1920)
Heliotrope
“O,
ah, ee….
I
want a man with leopard’s eyes and the neck of
a,
neck of a swan,
I
could hang him to the hottest, saddest tree in Hell,
and
dance to the, dance to the tune of his writhing legs!
O,
ah, ee…
I’d
crawl up beside him through the bark turn to, bark
turn
to thistles and thorns,
and
strange me with his wild, wild beard till my dead
body
be his dead body, and his dead body be, his
dead
body be….”
The
lady wears the mildest of blue eyes.
Receives
every Friday at five.
Sips
tea as you or I sip tea….
But
her cheek bones are high,
after
the Polish fashion,
and
of late,
she
has been reading
Przybyszewski,
bound
in heliotrope.
(from
Blood of Things, 1920)
To
Whitman
Monster!
You
would take me,
tiny
me,
in
your huge paws
and
scrunch me?
Child!
I
can take you,
tiny
you,
between
my thumbs
and
love you.
Come
on!
(from
Blood of Things, 1920)
1 comment:
Thanks for these! I think they contrast appreciably with WCW's Kreymborg whose "idea of poetry is a transforming music that has much to do with tawdry things" (Preface to Kora in Hell).
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