First National Poetry Festival: A Report

While the First National Poetry Festival convened in Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, one of the hardier survivors of the Renaissance of 1910 (its founder and first editor Harriet Monroe died in 1936; its present editor is the poet Henry Rago), and to inaugurate an annual Oktoberfest, sponsored by the Republic, of recitations and critical scrutiny, Ezra Pound dozed under his editor’s eyeshade on the Via MacKay in Rapallo; William Carlos Williams sat in the morning sun among his Demuths, Sheelers, and Audubons at 9 Ridge Road, Rutherford, N.J., T. S. Eliot was at his desk in Russell Square; Marianne Moore was painting water-colors in Greece. At the last minute Robert Penn Warren fell ill in Connecticut and Robert Lowell and John Hall Wheelock sent their regrets. Archibald MacLeish, Conrad Aiken, and Arthur Freeman budged not from Cambridge. Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Carl Sandburg, Richmond Lattimore, and W. H. Auden moved in courses which did not transverse the Library of Congress, where one could hear a confused high-school girl saying to the battalion of poetic genius before her, “But, I mean, you’re all college professors!”

The festival raged for three days, mornings, afternoons, and evenings. There were some heady moments, some beautiful fights, and in among the heavyweight talk some fine exchanges among masters of words, as when Muriel Rukeyser, embattled in a plea for volcanic spontaneity as the unfettered condition of poetry, brought J. V. Cunningham to his feet to say, “Madame, you are an eloquent and warm-blooded woman. I am a cold-blooded reductionist. Let us leave it at that.” Whereupon Sir Herbert Read announced that form was shape, and that shape was economy. Cunningham rose again. “Sir Herbert,” he said, “my meditations on form began in profound disagreement with you and I have had no occasion to change my mind.”

GD

About the Author

Guy Davenport

While the First National Poetry Festival convened in Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, one of the hardier survivors of the Renaissance of 1910 (its founder and first editor Harriet Monroe died in 1936; its present editor is the poet Henry Rago), and to inaugurate an annual Oktoberfest, sponsored by the Republic, of recitations and critical scrutiny, Ezra Pound dozed under his editor’s eyeshade on the Via MacKay in Rapallo; William Carlos Williams sat in the morning sun among his Demuths, Sheelers, and Audubons at 9 Ridge Road, Rutherford, N.J., T. S. Eliot was at his desk in Russell Square; Marianne Moore was painting water-colors in Greece. At the last minute Robert Penn Warren fell ill in Connecticut and Robert Lowell and John Hall Wheelock sent their regrets. Archibald MacLeish, Conrad Aiken, and Arthur Freeman budged not from Cambridge. Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Carl Sandburg, Richmond Lattimore, and W. H. Auden moved in courses which did not transverse the Library of Congress, where one could hear a confused high-school girl saying to the battalion of poetic genius before her, “But, I mean, you’re all college professors!”

The festival raged for three days, mornings, afternoons, and evenings. There were some heady moments, some beautiful fights, and in among the heavyweight talk some fine exchanges among masters of words, as when Muriel Rukeyser, embattled in a plea for volcanic spontaneity as the unfettered condition of poetry, brought J. V. Cunningham to his feet to say, “Madame, you are an eloquent and warm-blooded woman. I am a cold-blooded reductionist. Let us leave it at that.” Whereupon Sir Herbert Read announced that form was shape, and that shape was economy. Cunningham rose again. “Sir Herbert,” he said, “my meditations on form began in profound disagreement with you and I have had no occasion to change my mind.”