Our Third New Poet

Maxwell Bodenheim was born in Natchez, Mississippi, twenty-two years ago, was educated in the Memphis, Tennessee, schools, served three years in the U. S. regular army, and is at present studying law and art in Chicago. He has written poetry for six years without having had a single poem accepted—in fact, he has had exactly three hundred and seventeen rejection slips from the astute editors of American magazines. He addresses to them the following poem:

His first acceptance came from Miss Harriet Monroe, who prints five of his poems in the August issue of Poetry. “My creed,” says Mr. Bodenheim “(if I can be said to have one), is this: Most of the things which men call beautiful are ugly to me, and some of the things they call ugly are beautiful. Men and deeds are subjects for prose, not poetry. I am not concerned with life, but with that which lies behind life. I am an intense admirer of Ezra Pound’s,” he always adds; “I worship him.”

Sade Iverson, Unknown

We wish the mysterious poet who sent us The Milliner—which we liked profoundly and printed in our last issue—would come in to see us. The poem arrived one day in April with a modest little note: “Something about your magazine—perhaps the essential actuality of it—has moved me to make ‘the simple confession’ which I enclose. Print it if it is good enough; throw it in the waste basket if it is not.” But though we have tried various investigations we have not been able to find out who this remarkable Sade Iverson is. She was the first person to send us a congratulatory letter about The Little Review. In it she warned us that restraint is better than expression; but The Milliner will stand as a stronger refutation of that advice than anything we can say. We want very much to know Sade Iverson. After reading her poem Mr. Bodenheim wrote the following:

“Blast”

The typical gamin, the street-urchin with his tongue in his cheek, crying in an infinitely wise childish treble that the world is an exciting place after all, and that even if you are so burned out that you can’t taste your gin straight any more you can still put pepper in it,—this street-urchin has at last invaded the quarterlies. We have known him already in the dailies, the weeklies, the monthlies, the bound volume; but up to now the quarterlies have seemed dignified and safe. But the last bulwark of conservatism has fallen; the march of progress is unchecked!

Blast is the name of the new magazine, published in London by John Lane. Let us take it as it comes. The cover—after you have seen the cover you know all—is of a peculiar brilliancy, something between magenta and lavender, about the color of an acute sick-headache. Running slantingly across both the front and the back is the single word BLAST in solid black-faced type three inches high. That is all, but it is enough.

Inside there is much food for thought. At least one feels sure there must be much food for thought, if only one could come near enough to understanding it to think about it.

First there are twelve pages of what seem to be the rare-bit dream of a type-setter, but which on closer inspection prove to be a table of curses, much like the old table which has now been cut from the Anglican prayer-book. “BLAST” they say “CURSE! DAMN”—“England, France, Humor, Sport, years 1837 to 1900, Rotten Menagerie, castor-oil.” “CURSE” also “those who will hang over this manifesto with SILLY CANINES exposed.” After these twelve pages come half the number of blessings, again from the prayer-book. “BLESS” they say “England, all ports, the Hairdresser, Humor, France, and castor-oil.”

Then comes the Manifesto. No woman of the olden times found without a shift could be more shamed than a new cult today found without a Manifesto. This one begins: “Beyond action and reaction we would establish ourselves.” It proceeds with jaunty violence to settle the artistic problems of the world. Nonetheless there is much wisdom in the Manifesto. But you must read it for yourselves to understand it. This announcement is signed with eleven names, of which the best-known in this country are probably Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis (the editor), Richard Aldington, and Gaudier Brzeska.

A group of poems by Ezra Pound follows. After the mental indigestion of the first few pages we cannot be too grateful to Mr. Pound for putting English words together in such a manner that they at least make sentences. More than that, they make in places excellent satire. Then follows a long prose play (at least we should guess it to be prose) by Wyndham Lewis, called The Enemy of the Stars. Seven-tenths of it consists of stage directions. Here is a sample:

The plot unfortunately escaped our perusal, hiding itself in verbiage. But undoubtedly there is one.

The number also contains the beginning of a serial story by Richard Aldington, a remarkably vivid short story by Rebecca West called The Indissolubility of Matrimony, and Vortices by the editor. The whole is copiously sown with Cubist drawings which must be seen to be appreciated.

So the quarterly street-urchin makes his bow on the literary stage. How much of his singular make-up will prove to be juvenile spleen and how much genuine integrity only time can tell. In the meanwhile his tongue is in his cheek.—E. T.

The Stigma of Knowing It All

One of the most exasperating things that can happen to a thinking person is to be told this: “You would be much more forceful if you weren’t so sure you knew it all.” How much time we all waste in vague, unthoughtful generalizations of this sort! The only person who really thinks he “knows it all” is that misguided soul who is always asking for advice, always giving advice, and eternally ignoring both that which he gives and which he receives. He is as muddled as a clear pool that has been stirred up with a stick; but the ripples convince him that the stirring-up has touched many shores. The person to whom the stigma of “knowing it all” is most often attached is he who believes that he knows something about himself and very little about anybody else. He is that person who takes care of his own problems with a certain ardor, with a sense of keen clearness, like the shining of a star through his deep, unmuddled pool. He has realized Arnold’s Self-Dependence. But the muddled ones can never forgive him for that joy with which the stars perform their shining; nor can they ever understand the stupor of helplessness which descends upon him when he is asked to direct some one else’s shining. Therefore, they argue, he is self-sufficient; and the adjective is a curse. Some one has said, quite untruly, that people never know the important things about themselves. But the only thing in the world a man can really know is himself; and it is his chief business to push self-knowledge beyond its obvious boundaries to those reaches where even change becomes a comprehended element. The gist of the whole matter is this: People who know themselves are the only ones with whom we are wholly protected from that stupid and offensive practice of dictatorship; also, they are the only ones capable of receiving counsel with intelligence.