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12 pages, 253 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Muriel Rukeyser’s “Campaign” and the Spectacular Documentary Poetics of the Whistle Stop Tour

by Michael Anthony Smith

Humanities 2022, 11(6), 157; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060157 - 09 Dec 2022

Viewed by 1365

Abstract

This article examines how documentary poetics—particularly as employed by Muriel Rukeyser—use a montage of images to form a visual landscape. This visual landscape is wielded effectively by politicians during the Whistle Stop Tour electioneering. In Rukeyser’s “Campaign”, one section in her long-form poetic [...] Read more.

This article examines how documentary poetics—particularly as employed by Muriel Rukeyser—use a montage of images to form a visual landscape. This visual landscape is wielded effectively by politicians during the Whistle Stop Tour electioneering. In Rukeyser’s “Campaign”, one section in her long-form poetic biography of Wendell Willkie, entitled One Life, she describes the journey of the 1940 Republican presidential candidate as he campaigns from the observation car of a train. The visual landscape created by the Whistle Stop Tour and described through documentary poetics contains Willkie, his audience, and the train itself. It is a unified spectacle, one that contains the rider, the reader, and the onlooker. Rukeyser’s documentary poetry and sensory-rich verse delimit the observation car as the mechanism through which this spectacle forms. The documentary poetics genre is one aptly suited for the description of the landscape through this railcar—a high velocity railspace that relays information by montage, which is to say, through a filmic collage of information assembled into a readable layout of the perceived world. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Poetry and Visual Culture)

14 pages, 3908 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Lonely Woman Icon, Niedecker, and Mid-20th-Century Advertising

by Elizabeth Savage

Humanities 2022, 11(5), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050118 - 13 Sep 2022

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Abstract

Popular advertising of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s depicting single women presents an especially useful reference point for Lorine Niedecker’s poems. Attendant to the development of romantic and social promises extended by these ads is the woeful character of the lonely and excluded [...] Read more.

Popular advertising of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s depicting single women presents an especially useful reference point for Lorine Niedecker’s poems. Attendant to the development of romantic and social promises extended by these ads is the woeful character of the lonely and excluded woman. Notably, the danger of becoming a social outcast is not securely tied to an age demographic; although romantic intimacy promising or concluding in marriage stands as the primary goal of all purchasing conduct, the time of vulnerability to rejection is surprisingly extended—from early adolescence when social reputation is established to prime matrimonial age and reaching into years after marriage. A woman’s relationships with friends, suitors, and even children remain threatened by supposed lapses in self-awareness that guidance found in advertising can restore. While the use of sex to sell has long been recognized as a major part of advertising history, the complementary fear (of not having sex, of sexual and social rejection, and consequent despair) underlying these strategies is usually thought about as a fairly recent (and effective) advertising method. In ways that expose the images of women under construction in the social mindset, Niedecker’s poems call upon advertising’s thumbnail images and characters to inspect the rigid public attitude advertising was cultivating, an attitude male critics perpetuated in constructing American literary history. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Poetry and Visual Culture)

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44 pages, 16758 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Portraits of Working Women: Lola Ridge’s “The Ghetto” and the Visual Record

by Linda Arbaugh Kinnahan

Humanities 2022, 11(5), 117; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050117 - 12 Sep 2022

Viewed by 2054

Abstract

This essay focuses on Lola Ridge’s long poem “The Ghetto” in relation to the gendered imagery and visual construction of the modern laborer emerging across early twentieth-century print media. Perpetuating gendered notions of the modern worker as predominately masculine, late nineteenth- and early [...] Read more.

This essay focuses on Lola Ridge’s long poem “The Ghetto” in relation to the gendered imagery and visual construction of the modern laborer emerging across early twentieth-century print media. Perpetuating gendered notions of the modern worker as predominately masculine, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual representations of the laborer typically feature manly, virile figures, often in resistance to capitalism and inevitably eliding the industrial woman laborer. Ridge’s “The Ghetto” alternatively locates modern labor in the female industrial worker. The essay considers the poem’s splicing of collective and individual portraits of immigrant working women, developing a visual rhetoric that asserts women’s agency amidst modernity’s changing forms of work, insisting upon their visibility as workers, activists, and feminists. Consideration of several visual print genres includes women’s labor publications; social and industrial documentary photography; and periodical illustrations from The Masses. In visually representing women workers, these sources of visual media contextualize Ridge’s approach in “The Ghetto” and social attitudes toward gender and labor persisting in the century’s early years. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Poetry and Visual Culture)

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29 pages, 6235 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Visionary Architects: Barbara Guest, Frederick Kiesler, and the Surrealist Poetics of the Galaxy

by Susan Rosenbaum

Humanities 2022, 11(5), 113; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050113 - 05 Sep 2022

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Abstract

In this essay I demonstrate how Barbara Guest’s experiments in visual poetry were influenced by Frederick Kiesler’s architectural designs: both artists, inspired by Surrealist poetics, sought to build visionary structures that took shape on the page but moved beyond it. Following Kiesler’s 1965 [...] Read more.

In this essay I demonstrate how Barbara Guest’s experiments in visual poetry were influenced by Frederick Kiesler’s architectural designs: both artists, inspired by Surrealist poetics, sought to build visionary structures that took shape on the page but moved beyond it. Following Kiesler’s 1965 death, Guest published a poem in 1968 inspired by Kiesler’s “Galaxy” structures, titled “Homage”, and included a shortened version in Durer in the Window (2003). Kiesler composed a number of works under the name “Galaxies”, all of which shared an interest in merging architecture with other art forms, including sculpture, mobiles, drawing, and painting. In “Homage”, Guest was less interested in describing Kiesler’s “Galaxies” than in building a commensurate architecture of the page, dependent on the spatial arrangement of lines and stanzas, the visual impact of white space, and the reader’s imaginative navigation of both. Putting Kiesler’s “Galaxies” and Guest’s “Homage” in dialogue illuminates a model of inter-arts reception as co-creation or what Kiesler called “Correalism” that depends on the spatial dimensions of the poetic imagination. Both works can be understood as open, mobile, “museums without walls” that anticipate the future by inviting dynamic collaboration and future transformation. Finally, I argue that the relationship between these works models the kind of affiliation important to experimental women artists and poets such as Guest, affiliations that helped form an En Dehors Garde “in the shadow” of the avant-garde. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Poetry and Visual Culture)

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17 pages, 4373 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Exalting Negro Womanhood: Black Women Poets and Harlem Renaissance Magazines

by Deborah M. Mix

Humanities 2022, 11(4), 101; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11040101 - 17 Aug 2022

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Abstract

New Negro magazines such as The Messenger, Opportunity, and The Crisis regularly featured photographs and short descriptions of Black women designed to highlight their role as both moral centers and aspirational figures. These images tended to imply that the ideal New [...] Read more.

New Negro magazines such as The Messenger, Opportunity, and The Crisis regularly featured photographs and short descriptions of Black women designed to highlight their role as both moral centers and aspirational figures. These images tended to imply that the ideal New Negro woman would challenge racist stereotypes of Black women not only through her behavior but also through her looks. For instance, a feature in the January 1924 issue of The Messenger called “Exalting Negro Womanhood” seeks to counter the overrepresentation of “[t]he buffoon, the clown, the criminal Negro” in white media with portraits of Black “achievement, culture, refinement, beauty, genius, and talent”. But of the twenty women featured in the centerfold of photographs, all are light skinned. Importantly, however, Black women poets of the era, including Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Gladys May Casely-Hayford, Anita Scott Coleman, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Helene Johnson, Anne Spencer, and Octavia B. Wynbush, provide a counter to this coding of light skin as desirable through poems that emphasize the beauty of dark-skinned bodies. This essay places their poetry alongside the visuals of the New Negro movement and the larger white supremacist culture of the 1920s. In poems such as Bennett’s “To a Dark Girl”, Grimké’s “The Black Hand”, Johnson’s “Poem”, and Spencer’s “Lady, Lady”, an emphasis on beautiful and powerful Blackness provides a steady counterpoint to the prevailing color standards surrounding Black female beauty and respectability. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Poetry and Visual Culture)

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28 pages, 6603 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“The Whole Ensemble”: Gwendolyn Bennett, Josephine Baker, and Interartistic Exchange in Black American Modernism

by Suzanne W. Churchill

Humanities 2022, 11(4), 74; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11040074 - 21 Jun 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5254

Abstract

Since her debut in Paris in 1925 and meteoric rise to stardom, views of Josephine Baker have been dominated by the white artists and audiences who constructed her as an exotic “Other”. This article revisits the phenomenon of “La Bakaire” from the perspective [...] Read more.

Since her debut in Paris in 1925 and meteoric rise to stardom, views of Josephine Baker have been dominated by the white artists and audiences who constructed her as an exotic “Other”. This article revisits the phenomenon of “La Bakaire” from the perspective of a Black female artist who witnessed her performance first-hand and participated in the same Jazz Age projects of fashioning New Negro womanhood and formulating Black Deco aesthetics. When Gwendolyn Bennett saw Baker perform, she recognized her as a familiar model of selfhood, fellow artist, and member of a diasporic Black cultural community. In her article “Let’s Go: In Gay Paree”, July 1926 Opportunity cover, and “Ebony Flute” column, she utilizes call and response patterns to transform racialized sexual objectification into collective affirmation of Black female beauty and artistry. The picture that emerges from Bennett’s art and writing is one of communal practices and interartistic expression, in which Baker joins a host of now-forgotten chorus girls, vaudeville actors, jazz singers, musicians, visual artists, and writers participating in a modern renaissance of Black expressive culture. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Poetry and Visual Culture)

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20 pages, 5670 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Thirteen Tactics for Teaching Poetry as Architecture

by Marsha Bryant and Charlie Hailey

Humanities 2022, 11(1), 19; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11010019 - 19 Jan 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 6711

Abstract

What if encounters between modernist poetry and architecture exceed inspiration, imagery, and allusions? These two modes of making have crossed boundaries for over a century, from Walt Whitman’s ecstatic stanzas on Manhattan skyscrapers to architect John Hejduk’s poetry of memory and place. Buildings [...] Read more.

What if encounters between modernist poetry and architecture exceed inspiration, imagery, and allusions? These two modes of making have crossed boundaries for over a century, from Walt Whitman’s ecstatic stanzas on Manhattan skyscrapers to architect John Hejduk’s poetry of memory and place. Buildings become materials for poetry, and poems become material for building. When a literary critic and an architect build on overlaps they have discovered in syllabi for American Poetry and Architecture Studio courses, their teaching collaboration becomes a sustainable maker-space for student work—and for the Humanities more generally. We found that linking a literature survey to an architectural design studio brings materiality and resourcefulness to working with poems and that interacting with the Humanities demonstrates praxis (theory + practice) from the perspective of architectural pedagogy. Our classes also engaged each other through The Repurpose Project, a community space that promotes reuse and diverts waste from the local landfill. The profusion of readily available materials at Repurpose afforded students with a rich sampling of architectural textures and languages, opening new possibilities for thinking and making. In an academic climate that groups literary studies and architecture as “not-STEM,” we designed sustainable and resilient pedagogies that go beyond problem solving. Finding the same quality of renewable resourcefulness in Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” we offer 13 tactics for teaching poetry as architecture. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Poetry and Visual Culture)

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23 pages, 13604 KiB

Open AccessEssay

“Children of the Mantled-Birth”: Georgia Douglas Johnson, Photography in The Crisis, and the Politics of Black Childhood

by John Hadlock

Humanities 2022, 11(4), 89; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11040089 - 14 Jul 2022

Viewed by 3149

Abstract

This essay examines Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetic depictions of Black motherhood and childhood in the annual “Children’s Numbers” of The Crisis that appeared from 1912 to 1934. Visually and discursively, the run of “Children’s Numbers” stages the modern crucible of educating Black children [...] Read more.

This essay examines Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetic depictions of Black motherhood and childhood in the annual “Children’s Numbers” of The Crisis that appeared from 1912 to 1934. Visually and discursively, the run of “Children’s Numbers” stages the modern crucible of educating Black children on the realities of racism and contends with racialized notions of childhood innocence. This essay considers how Johnson’s poems respond to such ideas of education and innocence in W.E.B. Du Bois’ editorials on childhood and the photographs of Black children that appeared in these issues. Focusing primarily on Johnson’s motherhood poems that appeared in the “Children’s Numbers” and the striking photographs of children that accompanied these poems, this essay asserts that Johnson’s poems disrupt racialized notions of childhood innocence, intervene in discourses on Black education, and challenge the representational politics of the “Children’s Numbers” by centering the epistemological perspective of Black motherhood. Furthermore, this essay argues for the benefits of reading Johnson’s motherhood poems in relation to her erotic poetry, demonstrating that Johnson’s poetry of Black motherhood addresses the sexual politics of the Black bourgeoisie at the turn of the century and creates a space for the expression of Black female sexuality. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Poetry and Visual Culture)

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