I came across the short list for the 1953 National Book Award for poetry &, a little like the 1957 Evergreen Review that I was looking at on Thursday, I find that it’s intriguing for what it tells me about poetry as a social phenomenon. It’s a lesson in the shifting nature of literary attention.

 

Awards, almost by definition, aren’t a good representation of the literary scene. What they register is not necessarily who’s doing good work, but rather the relative social power of different forces within the terrain, as filtered – always & only as filtered – through the specific & local politics of a given award body. The Pulitzer gathers its reputation not from the quality of its choices – which for poetry over the years have been more laughable than not – but from the simple fact that, by giving prizes to newspapers in other categories, Pulitzers get regularly reported by newspapers. The more recent National Book Critics Circle Awards demonstrates principally that book critics look to those publishers who advertise, which invariably means the trade publishers, even if somewhere above 90 percent of all poetry is published exclusively by small presses. So looking to the short list of 50 years ago is not the same as looking to the poetry of that time as it is the forces at play within what Charles Bernstein so loving calls Official Verse Culture (OVC)

 

In 1953, Archibald MacLeish won the National Book Award for poetry – he also won the Pulitzer & Bollingen that year, all for his Collected Poems 1917-1952. Five decades hence, it’s arguable as to whether MacLeish is read seriously by poets any more or merely by the professional class of scholars of modernism. MacLeish, of all the U.S. poets of the 20^th century, was the furthest from being an outsider. But he also strikes me as having been an okay poet & relatively a nice guy – if your child was to bring home a beaux who was a poet, you’d probably be happier if it was a MacLeish than an Olson, Pound, or Spicer. MacLeish, variously an editor at Fortune, Librarian of Congress and State Department official, is remembered at least as well for his friendships with the major modernists – helping Pound to get released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, for example – as he is for his poetry.

 

MacLeish’s circumstance isn’t necessarily so unusual. Of the 12 finalists for the award that year, only two strike me as being read by a substantial number of poets today:* Kenneth Rexroth & W.S. Merwin. Not necessarily by the same poets, but by poets nonetheless. For writers however marginally integrated into OVC, the news is not good – the chances are overwhelming that in 50 years very few poets will be reading your work. And, remember, this is the case for those fortunate enough to make the NBA short list. OVCers who fall outside of that inner circle of benediction can anticipate an even harder time finding audiences in the future.

 

But the nature of this integration is what strikes me as most visible from the short list. MacLeish & Merwin can both be said to fall fully inside that framework, defined for the moment as connections to New York trade publishers, major university presses, academic appointments & this reinforcing mechanism of the “award circuit” itself. Of the twelve poets on the short list, only five can be truly said to fit within that framework. In addition to MacLeish & Merwin, there were Stanley Burnshaw, something of a maverick among the New Critics in that he was active on the left; Peter Viereck, poet, historian, longtime UMass Amherst professor & already in the 950s something of a professional conservative intellectual; and Robert Silliman Hillyer**, the sonneteer who actively campaigned to have Pound’s works quashed after World War 2. Merwin, it’s worth noting, started out as a scion of the New England Brahmin formalists & would, a decade later, become one of several – Robert Bly, James Wright, Adrienne Rich were others – who dramatically transformed their poetry away from the cramped verse they had inherited.*** Merwin’s 1952 debut volume, A Mask for Janus, a Yale Younger Poets volume selected by Auden, is decidedly pre-transformation.

 

Rexroth very pointedly was never part of that world. In the light of this short list, I see him as one of four examples of “regional” verse that were being called out in 1953 to acknowledge just this phenomenon. In addition to the western Rexroth, Book Award nominees included two Appalachian regionalists, Byron Herbert Reece of Georgia & Jesse Stuart of Kentucky, and Colorado’s Thomas Hornsby Ferril, the somewhat unacknowledged founder of cowboy poetry. Reece, who committed suicide later in the 1950s, has become something of a folk figure in his native state where one of the access trails to the Appalachian Trail has been named for him.

 

This leaves three other writers, two of whom seem so distinct that it would be foolhardy to put them into a list such as regionalists, the third being more mysterious. The first of these is Ridgeley Torrence, a one-time New York City librarian who became known as a writer of plays portraying African-American life. Torrence’s work fits into a tradition of whites focusing on black culture that would include Stein’s Three Lives, Carl Van Vechten, and Dubose & Dorothy Heyward, the creators of Porgy and Bess. The husband of ghost story writer Olivia Howard Dunbar, Torrence died in 1950 and was being considered posthumously for the award.

 

Like Merwin, Naomi Replansky was nominated for her first book. She was also the only woman among the twelve nominees. Replansky continues her work as a poet to this day, although she apparently went over thirty years between her first volume, Ring Song, and her next volume. A correspondent in the 1950s with poets such as George Oppen and an out-of-the-closet lesbian during the starkly homophobic postwar years, she’s an important (if somewhat secret) figure in the history of women’s writing. Interestingly – and perhaps ironically – Replansky’s poem “Housing Shortage,” taken from Ring Song, turns up on all manner of “inspirational poetry” websites, many of which seem blithely unaware of its dimension as a poem about the personal politics of the closet:

 

I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
I tried to step carefully
And to think softly
And to breathe shallowly
In my portion of air
And to disturb no one

Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it.
I take to myself more and more, and I take nothing
That I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds,
All over and invading; I clutter this place
With all the apparatus of living
You stumble over it daily.

And then my lungs take their fill.
And then you gasp for air.

Excuse me for living,
But, since I am living,
Given inches, I take yards,
Given yards, dream of miles,
And a landscape, unbounded
And vast in abandon.

You too dreaming the same.

 

I don’t know enough about Replansky’s poetry to understand why it’s not been more widely published or read. Or perhaps it is, but by a community about which I know far too little.

 

Replansky, however, is hardly as mysterious as Ernest Kroll, nominated in 1953 for Cape Horn and Other Poems. Kroll had published at least one chapbook before this volume from Dutton, followed in 1955 by Pauses of the Eye, from the same press. Although Kroll continues to show up in tables of contents into the 1980s, mostly with a form he called the “fraxiom,” or fractured axiom, “the aim being to cause the reader to believe that two things, contradictory or complementary, have been said in almost the same time it takes to say one.” While there were some chapbooks of fraxioms (fraxia?) and one volume in an edition of 300 copies from the University of Nebraska Press in 1973, Kroll’s works appear to be entirely out of print & prove almost as hard to find on the web as Ridgeley Torrence’s. I’m unable to find out anything about the author, although I suspect he may have been part of 1953’s “regionalist” phenomena as far as the Book Award nominating committee might have been concerned.

 

I recall Andrew Schelling telling me once that he thought it was okay that poets “disappeared” over time, that it was all part of the composting of literary influences that results in a constant regeneration. I, as readers of this blog & my other work must know, feel much more ambivalent about that. I wonder, for example, how the regionalism of 1953 leads to – if it does – the regionalisms of today, such as Afrilachian poetry. I also wonder if the school of quietude doesn’t need to get off its collective butt and think about creating real institutions & traditions that would enable its writers to develop the kinds of lasting influences & reciprocity that characterize the post-avant scene’s heritage. For while the poets of quietude may get a disproportionate share of all the institutional awards for poetry, their work nonetheless seems largely destined to dissolve rapidly over time.

 

Some links to the poets on the short list for the 1953 National Book Award:

 

§         Stanley Burnshaw

§         Thomas Ferril

§         Robert Hillyer

§         Ernest Kroll

§         Archibald MacLeish

§         W. S. Merwin

§         Byron Reece

§         Naomi Replansky

§         Kenneth Rexroth

§         Jesse Stuart

§         Ridgeley Torrence

§         Peter Viereck

 

* Your chances were just as good if you were nominated in the fiction category, as were both May Sarton and William Carlos Williams.

 

** If Hillyer is a relative – most Sillimans in the U.S. can be traced back to the arrival of two brothers in Connecticut around 1680 – it’s a legal, rather than genetic connection. My paternal grandfather, born a McMahon, was renamed Silliman after being adopted.

 

***This 1960s revolt within the school of quietude has generally been lost amid the many other more flamboyant rebellions & transformations of that decade, but it is certainly worth studying in its own right. One question that might be answered by such an investigation is whether or not John Berryman’s Dream Songs & Sylvia Plath’s Ariel should be viewed as part of that rebellion, or as the liveliest elements of the tradition that remained.