Buried twice

Genevieve Taggard, an American poet active from the 1920s to the 1940s, received accolades current poets in the US might sell their souls for. She published poems and essays in major magazines and taught at prestigious universities. She penned a dozen collections, a respected biography of Emily Dickinson, lyrics for Aaron Copland and a pamphlet for Random House’s Poetry Quartos series, alongside Robert Frost and other luminaries. She was admired by Ernest Hemingway, who called her “a good poet” with a “very good heart”. Yet among my most widely read peers in both the UK and the US, her name rang few bells.

Cue the Recovered Books project at Boiler House Press. To Test the Joy: Selected poetry and prose is a handsome rescue effort featuring dapper essays by the editor, Anne Hammond, arranged around Taggard’s poetry, reviews, fiction and memoir pieces. In a captivating introduction Terese Svoboda advances the theory that Taggard was “twice neglected” as a woman and as a radical (specifically a member of the Communist Party). She quotes the feminist author Louise Bernikow, who wrote in 1974 that Taggard lies among “the buried history within the buried history of American poetry”. At the start of the Cold War Taggard was red-baited by a colleague at Sarah Lawrence, the stress of which may have contributed to her death at the age of fifty-three. Her reputation, presumably, was finished thanks to her political leanings and her gender. Or that is one narrative promoted to explain her neglected status.

The elephant in the room is that Taggard was, in the main, not a good poet. As styles evolved in the twentieth century, her work – often cliché-ridden, conventionally rhymed and reliant on antiquated syntactical contortionism, especially in earlier poems – did not age well. Though formalism has been considered by many to be anti-radical since the twentieth century, Hammond and Svoboda take pains to justify the progressiveness of Taggard’s traditional verse. Hammond ponders the radical attributes of the poem “Lark”, written in Mallorca with Guggenheim funding (and set to music by Copland): “[She] has gone back to the very origins of the lyric, to the beginning of western poetry … employing the original hymn-like and declarative form of poetry for her modern revolutionary expression”. But the poem itself (“O, lark alert, O, lark alive / O lovely, lovely changing arrow-lark, / Sprung like an arrow from the bow of dark”) is derivatively Romantic and unrevolutionary. Her political poems are generally disappointing; some are patronizing, even if well-meaning. “Ode in a Time of Crisis” (1940), which voices outrage about US immigration policy, was singled out by Marjorie Perloff as one of the worst poems in the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry.

All that being said, Taggard does have some good poems. When Edmund Wilson declared “With Child” (1921) the best poem he’d read on childbirth, I expect he was sincere: it captures deftly the oddness of playing corporeal host to another (“In the dark, / Defiant even now, it tugs and moans / To be untangled from these mother’s bones”). Though her lyric poems improve over time – the arc of her development is made visible by this selection – Taggard may have been more gifted in dramatic modes. “Monologue for Mothers (Aside)” (1929) is wild and surprising; “Long View” (1938), which has dialogic and fragmentary qualities, is similarly energetic. It is unfortunate, however, that a few of her stronger poems are not included, among them “The Geraniums”, which appears on Tony Hoagland’s list of “Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America”.

Taggard’s prose turns out to be the star of this selection. Though there are no excerpts from her biography of Emily Dickinson, there is a review of Dickinson’s Complete Poems. Taggard observes that “her verse, which is to our whang-bang school poor technique, accomplishes the most miraculous sound-flutings”. “Whang-bang” is illustrative of the playful and idiosyncratic turns of phrase that often surface in her prose. Her memoir reflections about growing up in Hawaii, and her time in Mallorca, display a gift not only for animating place, but also for collapsing time: “Then we heard the first bar of song and saw that a boy was cutting palmetto far off to the left, singing as he bent with his sharp knife. He hacked and sang a wild minor phrase … Today those boys are being bullied by Italian fascists” (“Mallorcan Memory”, 1939). Her early short story about abortion, “Engaged” (1924), must have been shocking for its directness. Taggard possessed both fearlessness and originality as a writer, despite the restrained quality of many of her poems.

Alfred Kreymborg, reviewing Taggard’s Collected Poems (1938), made an uncomfortable but potentially valid point about the risks of writing political poetry that neither lands nor lasts: “The polemic tone is timely rather than timeless”. Of course Kreymborg, who surpassed Taggard’s literary output threefold, and appeared in the Poetry Quartos set with the stars of the day, is now less well known than Taggard.

Being forgotten is a more likely fate for poets than being remembered. Genevieve Taggard, with this sympathetic and substantial reissue of her work, might be considered among the lucky ones.

Kathryn Maris’s most recent poetry collection is The House with Only an Attic and a Basement, 2018

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