Lola Ridge's Pivotal Editorial Role at Broom

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-291
Author(s):  
Belinda Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Modern School ◽  
The Arts ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Privately Owned

Many scholars know lola ridge (1873–1941) as a passionate, irish-born american poet and activist whose poetry was of-ten tied to American subjects, employed various traditional and avant-garde styles, invited a diverse readership, and “expressed a fiery awareness of social injustice” (Kay Boyle [McAlmon 15]). Her time as magazine editor, however, continues to be overlooked. In 1912 Ridge founded the Ferrer Association's journal Modern School and edited its first issue (Avrich 166). The periodical started as a radical, politically based newsletter for parents but soon became less political, publishing artistic and literary work by students of the association's school. Between late 1918 and early 1919, Ridge oversaw, along with several other associate editors, three issues of the avant-garde poetry journal Others. Ridge also organized the Others Lecture Bureau, which toured parts of the Midwest and hosted several literary parties for magazine contributors and supporters (Churchill 58). Ridge's leading editorial role occurred from February 1922 to April 1923, when she served as the American literary editor of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts. Broom was an elaborate magazine praised by many, including William Carlos Williams, who exclaimed, “What a magazine that was! Too expensive for its time but superb to hold in the hand and to read” (187). Although publications that discuss Broom largely marginalize Ridge, the correspondence between her and Broom‘s expatriate editor and publisher, Harold Loeb, in files in Princeton's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections labeled “Broom Correspondence of Harold Loeb, 1920–1956,” shows that from the New York office Ridge orchestrated the magazine's recovery, making it one of the most widely circulated privately owned literary magazines of its time. She also created the magazine's standout “all-American” issue, which pushed against European influences and presented modernism as an American project in its own right. Ridge's pivotal role at Broom is noteworthy because the disagreements she had with Loeb highlight prescribed roles female editors encountered, polarize the modernist debates on both sides of the Atlantic, show her confronting one of modernism's well-known artists, and demonstrate how the fallout over the American issue irrevocably affected Broom‘s future.

Charles Olson and American Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Mark Rothko

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

Erin Espelie

2019 ◽  
pp. 275-294
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
University Of Colorado ◽  
Lanthanide Series ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Short Films ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

Artist/scientist Erin Espelie was trained at Cornell University as a biologist, but turned down opportunities to study biology at the graduate level at Harvard and MIT in order to explore the New York City theater scene, before finding her way into independent, “avant-garde” filmmaking, first exploring her interests in biology and the history of science in a series of short films, then producing the remarkable essay-film The Lanthanide Series (2014), which explores the importance of the “rare earths” (the elements with atomic numbers 57–71) for modern communication and informational technologies. The imagery for The Lanthanide Series was recorded, almost entirely, off the reflective surface of an iPad. In her work as a moving-image artist, Espelie combines poetry, science, environmental politics, and modern digital technologies within videos that defy traditional knowledge categories. She is currently editor in chief for Natural History magazine and a director of the NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Diasporic Dialogues in Mid-Century New York: Stefan Wolpe, George Russell, Hannah Arendt, and the Historiography of Displacement

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIGID COHEN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Boundary Crossing ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cultural Boundary ◽  
George Russell ◽  
Political Philosopher ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis article explores mid-century New York intellectual scenes mediated by the avant-garde émigré composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), with special emphasis on Wolpe's interactions with jazz composer George Russell (1923–2009) and political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75). Cross-disciplinary communities set the stage for these encounters: Wolpe and Russell met in the post-bop circles that clustered in Gil Evans's basement apartment, while Wolpe encountered Arendt at the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, the hotbed of Abstract Expressionism. Wolpe's exchanges with Arendt and Russell, long unacknowledged, may initially seem unrelated. Yet each figure shared a series of “cosmopolitan” commitments. They valued artistic communities as spaces for salutary acts of cultural boundary crossing, and they tended to see forms of self-representation in the arts as a way to respond to the dehumanizing political disasters of the century. Wolpe and Arendt focused on questions of human plurality in the wake of their forced displacements as German-Jewish émigrés, whereas Russell confronted dilemmas of difference as an African American migrant from southern Ohio in New York. Bringing together interpretive readings of music with interview- and archive-based research, this article works toward a historiography of aesthetic modernism that recognizes migration as formative rather than incidental to its community bonds, ethical aspirations, and creative projects.

Braxton, Anthony (1945--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dustin Garlitz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Alto Saxophone ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Mezzo Soprano ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Macarthur Foundation

Anthony Braxton, born 4 June 1945 in Chicago, Illinois, is an avant-garde jazz multi-instrumentalist and composer who performs and records primarily on saxophones. An active musician since the 1960s, Braxton was an early member of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians)—a Chicago-founded cooperative of African American avant-garde jazz musicians and composers. Braxton is a Professor of Music at Wesleyan University in Middleton, Connecticut, where he has taught since 1990. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1994 and was named a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2013. His compositions have been performed by large-scale orchestras at Lincoln Centre in New York City, as well as other renowned venues that have often been reserved for classical music. Braxton’s notable early albums include Three Compositions of New Jazz (1968), released on the Chicago-based Delmark record label that released the first albums of many AACM members in the mid—to late 1960s. Braxton’s double album For Alto, a solo recording, was released in 1970. Braxton has performed on many saxophones throughout his career, most notably the alto saxophone, but later soprano, sopranino, C-melody, F mezzo-soprano, baritone, bass, and contrabass saxophones. He has also performed on flute, the E-flat, B-flat, and contrabass clarinets, and the piano.

Carter

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schiff
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
Marc Blitzstein ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Depression Era

This book surveys the life and work of the great American composer Elliott Carter (1908–2012). It examines his formative, and often ambivalent, engagements with Charles Ives and other “ultra-modernists”, with the classicist ideas he encountered at Harvard and in his three years of study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; and with the populism developed by his friends Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein in Depression-era New York, and the unique synthesis of modernist idioms that he began to develop in the late 1940s. The book re-groups the central phase of Carter’s career, from the Cello Sonata to Syringa in terms of Carter’s synthesis of European and American modernist idioms, or “neo-modernism,” and his complex relation to the European avant-garde. It devotes particular attention to the large number of instrumental and vocal works of Carter’s last two decades, including his only opera, What Next?, and a final legacy project: seven works for voice and large ensemble to poems by the founding generation of American modern poetry: e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.

Multisensory Modalities and Modernist Translation

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Arts

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.

Readies for Bob Brown's Machine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown
Keyword(s):  
Text Messaging ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Viewing Screen ◽  
Writing Technology

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document