The essays printed here represent a variety
of contemporary responses to the work of Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948),
and address in very direct and pragmatic ways the work of resuscitating
and locating modernist women’s careers. While Taggard found T.
S. Eliot’s version of modernism misanthropic and hopeless, her own
version of modernist poetics traversed a difficult field between
Marxism and experimentation. Much of Taggard’s poetry might best
be described as “social vision verse” with a generous sampling of
private, emotionally wrought lyric in between. But several of the
essays here attest to the fact that it is not only impossible but
rarely useful to categorize Taggard’s attempts as either public
and political or private lyric. Both impulses in Taggard’s poetry
moved together to produce a strong body of work that is worth reexamining
in light of the changing definitions of modernism and the scope
of thought on public political poetry today. Through some fortunate
act of serendipity rather than through some extra-ordinary precision
of my editorship, the writers here speak to each other in startlingly
compatible and companionable ways. Two essays, one by Nancy Berke,
and the other by myself, are close readings of individual poems.
Our readings form a larger conversation about the ways in which
feminist ideas sought a place in Taggard’s poetry at a time when
class concerns may have seemed more urgent to Taggard and to the
American left in general. Catherine Daly and Alison Van Nyhuis
contribute essays that attend to the forms in which we meet Taggard’s
work today. Daly extends her review of placing out-of-print public
domain texts on the web that she began with a discussion of Lola
Ridge’s poems in issue 8 of How2. She describes the insights
that take place when one scans, edits, and prepares a work of poetry
for the web. Daly also contributes two reviews of early books by
Taggard that underscore Taggard’s interest in global connections.
Van Nyhuis’s essay discusses the ways in which Taggard’s interest
in both public and private utterance has created a puzzle for anthology
editors, but Van Nyhuis suggests it’s a challenge that should be
met to give credence to a poet’s own constructed narrative of his
or her work.