University of Michigan Press Blog

'So Much Depends': 'Hog Butchers' Author John Marsh On the Emergence of Modern American Poetry

John Marsh is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University and the author of Hog Butchers, Begars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry, available this month from University of Michigan Press.

 

 

Let’s start with a quiz.  Fill in the blank:

        so much depends
        upon

                                 
                   

 

        glazed with rain
        water

        beside the white
        chickens

If you guessed “a red wheel / barrow,” congratulations, that class you took, that anthology on your shelf, or that Ph.D. you earned has not gone completely to waste.  Then again, William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” published in 1922, is hard to forget.  Indeed, it has come to epitomize the kind of new poetry written in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. 

In fact, most of the things we associate with modern poetry can be found in Williams’s poem.  It is written in free verse.  It has a structure—four stanzas with alternating three- and one-word length couplets—but the poem does not rhyme or follow a regular metrical pattern (like iambic pentameter).  Like a number of modern poems, too, it offers an image rather than an idea.  It shows rather than tells.  Although for some readers, I imagine, it could stand to tell a good deal more.  Williams does not say why “so much depends / upon” such an ordinary object, and we might be left wondering why this sentence counts as a poem at all.  That is to say, among other things, that the poem is difficult, out of the ordinary—another identifying marker of what we think of as modern poetry. 

The poem epitomizes modern poetry in another way, though, which is not quite so visible.  In 1933, Williams composed a brief note explaining the origins of the poem.  “The wheelbarrow in question,” he wrote, “stood outside the window of an old negro’s house on a back street in the suburb where I live.  It was pouring rain and there were white chickens walking about.  The sight impressed me somehow as about the most important, the most integral that it had ever been my pleasure to gaze upon.”  Later, in 1954, Williams recalled that the poem

sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall.  He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester.  […]  I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much.  In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by white chickens.  I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.   

If we take Williams at his word, then the origins of one of the most famous—if not the most famous—poem in modern American poetry lies in the poet’s encounter with a worker.  In all likelihood, too, given the opportunities available to an old Negro in the first half of the twentieth century, a worker living in or on the edge of poverty. 

In a new book, Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Bus Boys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern Poetry, I argue that this exchange between modern poet and the working poor characterizes many—and not just the most famous—modern American poems.  Indeed, most of the poets we think of when we think of modern American poetry—not just William Carlos Williams but T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, to name but the most prominent—experimented with writing poems about the poor and working class.  The book concludes that modern American poetry looks the way it does, and emerges when it does, because poets began to write about the violent strikes, the widespread poverty, and the other “labor problems” that roiled America in the first decades of the twentieth century. 

To be sure, each of the poets I treat had different things to say about workers and the poor and, in their poems, put these figures to different, occasionally even objectionable uses.  Williams, for example, as his 1933 introduction to “The Red Wheelbarrow” suggests, found an overlooked though rejuvenating integrity and importance in the working poor.  He also took pleasure in the aesthetics of their poverty.  By contrast, T.S. Eliot wandered through the slums of Boston and Paris and found in their inhabitants his symbol for what he saw as the mechanical, repetitive, and meaningless existence of modern life.  Edna St. Vincent Millay championed bohemian poverty by distinguishing it from the ordinary poverty of New York City circa 1920.  As these examples might suggest, the book explores how modern American poets as often as not failed to rise to the ethical challenges posed by widespread poverty and the nearly ubiquitous exploitation of workers.  Even Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes, poets who proclaimed their sympathy toward workers and the poor, occasionally lapse into attitudes or political stances that would not escape criticism. 

My larger point, though, is not to cast judgments but to recover the sorts of encounters buried in and behind “The Red Wheelbarrow” and countless other modern poems.  For so as long as this story of poets’ encounter with labor and poverty remains untold, our history of modern American poetry—its origins, its effects—will remain fundamentally incomplete.  As far as modern poetry goes, it turns out that so much does depend upon red wheelbarrows—and even more on those who pushed them. 

Sleeping Bear Dunes named America's 'most beautiful place;' UM Press author responds

George Weeks is author of Sleeping Bear: Yesterday and Today. He writes:

A national Web site survey by ABC-TV’s Good Morning America show recently declared Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore the “Most Beautiful Place in America.” Its nearly 100,000 votes edged out Cape Cod in Massachusetts and other places in California, Colorado, Arizona and elsewhere.

The story was later picked up by the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News. National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis said, “It’s great that a park… a little off the beaten track in northern Michigan, is being recognized for its exceptional beauty.”

Beyond the sweeping views of the dunes and Lake Michigan, much of the exceptional beauty of today stems from cultural attractions of yesterday. They include towering lighthouses, the Sleeping Bear Point Coast Guard Station Maritime Museum, designated shipwreck sites of Sleeping Bear and the Manitou Passage from the early Great Lakes maritime era, and the Glen Haven Historic Village that is on the National Register of Historic Places as a turn-of-the century company lumbering town by being perhaps the best preserved example of a frontier wooding station and steamboat stop on the Great Lakes—certainly on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.

In his preface to my book Sleeping Bear: Yesterday and Today, 1989-93 National Park Service Director James Ridenour said, “Sleeping Bear Dunes is truly one of the jewels of the National Park System.”

It’s a jewel for the natural beauty of today and for the attractions of yesterday.

Library Journal declares 'Faithful Unto Death' to be 'a good read... riveting'

Library Journal recently reviewed Becky Thacker's new novel, Faithful Unto Death, declaring is to be "a crime story with Midwestern gothic overtones, not unlike Truman Capote's In Cold Blood."

"Authentic atmosphere and a remarkable portrayal of brave children make for a good read... the courtroom scenes are riveting," reviewer Teresa Jacobsen continues.

The book traces the mysterious death of Anna Spencer Thacker in Benzonia, Mich., in 1894. Suicide, accident... or murder?

Faithful Unto Death is Thacker's first novel, and the University of Michigan Press is serializing the novel for free this summer for fans of its Facebook page.(Hurry, it's only posted through Labor Day week!)

UM Press author explains Congress' low approval ratings for Huffington Post, KPFK

David Jones, author of Americans, Congress, and Democratic Responsiveness: Public Evaluations of Congress and Electoral Consequences, was recently interviewed by the Huffington Post and KPFK in Los Angeles about the nation's growing dissatisfaction with its elected representatives. Here, he attempts to answer the question: What's the matter with Congress?

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this past week, Congress may now be the most unpopular it has ever been. Eighty-two percent of Americans say they disapprove of the job Congress is doing. Other recent polls reveal similarly poor ratings. In light of these dramatic findings it is natural to ask: what is the source of this displeasure, and why does it matter?
 
Traditionally, scholars have focused on two factors that influence public evaluations of Congress—the national economy and the legislative process—and certainly both of these factors have been at work recently. Americans do not like feeling that their standard of living is being threatened, but economic growth continues to be meager at best, dragging down evaluations of everyone in government. Americans also dislike the dithering and dickering that is endemic to the legislative process, and these are characteristics that were highlighted in news coverage of the debt ceiling debate over the past month.
 
A third influence, which has customarily been overlooked, is policy representativeness. As we demonstrate in our book Americans, Congress, and Democratic Responsiveness, Americans prefer Congress to pursue policies that more closely reflect their own policy inclinations. Whenever the policy direction of Congress—particularly the House of Representatives—seems out of step, public disapproval of Congress increases.

'Elly Peterson' author celebrates 40 years of the National Women's Political Caucus

Sara Fitzgerald is a former Washington Post reporter and author of Elly Peterson: "Mother" of the Moderates, a biography of one of the leading ladies in the Republican Party, who set the stage for a new generation of women in politics. She was a panelist recently at the 40th anniversary gathering of the National Women's Political Caucus.

Forty years ago this summer, 300 women gathered at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Washington to found the National Women’s Political Caucus.

In her memoir Getting Better All the Time, Liz Carpenter recalled, “It was a day that changed my life.” If she had not gotten so involved, she wrote, “I would have missed out on so much, so many friendships with remarkable women of all income levels, so much learning as we hammered at the doors of Congress and the legislatures, so much understanding of my own country and how the other great movements for fairness and equality took place.”

By the end of that hot weekend in July 1971, the caucus had committed itself to diversity—and that included Republican women.

Betty Friedan tried to recruit Elly Peterson to attend the founding meeting, but Peterson declined. Friedan wanted Peterson involved, she wrote a few years later, because she “had been the most powerful woman in the Republican party—its traditionally powerless lady vice-chairman.” Peterson, she said, was among the “politically oriented women who hadn’t been interested in women’s rights before,” who “were ready now to organize such a caucus.”

Recently the NWPC gathered at another Washington hotel to celebrate its 40th anniversary. There were workshops on campaign skills, and rousing speeches from feminist leaders such as Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood. But for me the high point was the Saturday luncheon, when four women who had been present at the first gathering shared their memories of it.

Michigan poet and UM Press author Philip Levine named U.S. poet laureate

Philip Levine, a native Michigander, Detroit poet and author of several University of Michigan Press books, has been named poet laureate of the United States.

"How can I put it? It’s like winning the Pulitzer," he told The New York Times. "If you take it too seriously, you’re an idiot. But if you look at the names of the other poets who have won it, most of them are damn good."

Levine is the author of several collections of essays on poetry for the UM Press as part of its celebrated Poets on Poetry series, including Don't Ask, So Ask, and the memoir The Bread of Time. UM Press also published On the Poetry of Philip Levine, the first critical collection to focus on his work, edited by Christopher Buckley as part of the Press series Under Discussion.

He was chosen as Poet Laureate by James Billington, the Librarian of Congress. Born in Detroit, many of his most popular poems concern the travails of the working class in that city. He is the author of some 20 poetry collections, including The Simple Truth, his fifteenth collection, which won a Pulitzer Prize. The title poem from that collection is widely quoted online:

Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

UM Press offers new way for people with print disabilities to read its books

The University of Michigan Press (UM Press), long a provider of books in audio and other alternative formats, has signed a new agreement with Bookshare, a global leader in providing copyrighted, digital accessible books to people with print disabilities. The agreement will increase the number of formats UM Press makes available to the millions of Americans who have print disabilities and give even more people the opportunity to read UM Press books.

Under the agreement, UM Press titles will be included in the Bookshare library. Bookshare will convert electronic versions of UM Press books into digital text (for use with text-to-speech) as well as digital braille. These formats can be used for large print and digital audio. The titles are provided free of charge and the university will receive no revenues.

“We’ve always had a commitment at the Press to making our books accessible to as many readers as possible,” said Karen Hill, Associate Director and Digital Manager. “With this agreement, more than fifty Press titles are available immediately in easy, accessible formats as part of a Bookshare subscription, with many more to come.”

“UM Press titles will increase the academic and scholarly content available in Bookshare,” said Betsy Beaumon, Vice President and General Manager of the Literacy Program at Benetech, the nonprofit organization that operates Bookshare. “With the growth of academic content, more and more qualified college and graduate students are finding the books they need for their studies in Bookshare.”

Angela C. Pao's 'No Safe Spaces' and Kate Davy's 'Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers' to be honored at theater conference

Two new books from The University of Michigan Press will be honored by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education on August 11 at their conference in Chicago.     

Angela C. Pao’s No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater will receive the ATHE Outstanding Book Award for 2011. The book explores the subject of non-traditional casting prac tices and innovative conceptions of dramatic character in light of theories of cultural identity.  The study is organized around various forms of theatrical performance, including classical tragedy, Shakespeare, modern domestic drama, African-American drama, twentieth-century anti-realist theater, and Broadway musicals. Angela C. Pao is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.    

Kate Davy’s Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Theatre Café received an Honorable Mention for Outstanding Book from ATHE. Davy’s book provides the first  critical history of this downtown New York venue that nurtured some of the most important avant-garde theater troupes and performance artists of the 1980s and ‘90s. Theater scholar Kate Davy is Provost at the University of Michigan, Dearborn.