As Ezra Pound noted, “Poetry is news that stays news.” The
National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition, “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets,” is a celebration of the
American poet that is currently making exciting news. We recently spoke with
exhibition curator David C. Ward.
Q: Our readers will
recognize you from your previous work—“Walt
Whitman: a kosmos,” “Hide/Seek:
Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” and “One Life: The Mask of Lincoln.”
Can you tell our reading audience a little about why you wanted to
curate this exhibition?
DW: I started getting interested in poetry, both as a
scholar and as a writer, in the late 1980s. As I worked on poetry and American
culture—I was moving in a more American Studies-ish direction: I was becoming
more interested in the interrelationships of art, literature, and history.
It
just seemed a natural fit for NPG to do an exhibition that would recognize the
role of poets in the creation of American culture—as well, of course, to
measure their contributions to poetry itself as an art form.
And in terms of
the art of portrayal, the link between poets and artists has always been close,
so an exhibition on poets would be an index to the evolution of modernist
American art, particularly modernist photography; photographs make up the bulk
of the images in “Poetic Likeness.”
Q: You are a widely
published poet [Ward’s work has been published in many journals, and his
collection, Internal Difference, was
published in 2011 (Manchester, England: Lintott/Carcanet)]. How did you employ
your criteria for poetry—that is, what you consider to be influential work—in picking
the works for your show? Or did you?
DW: Well, I’m not really widely published as a poet! But I
have a pretty good understanding of the history of poetry, the
interrelationships between poets as the art form evolved, and the relationship
between poetic writing and modernism.
The major question in thinking about “Poetic
Likeness” was to come up with a time frame that would be coherent and
interesting. For logistical reasons, the exhibition is based on our permanent
collection. By far the strongest part of that collection when it comes to
poetry is the modern era: roughly 1900 to the mid-1970s. We do have some earlier
American poets, and I guess I could have done a “forerunner” room that included
Joel Barlow or the poets in the Victorian era, which culminated with
Longfellow. I just decided it made for a cleaner exhibition if it homed in on
the modern era.
Conversely, I didn’t want to get too far beyond the 1970s into
contemporary poets, because I think the cultural climate changes dramatically
after the mid-1970s. Contemporary portraits would make up another exhibition
entirely.
Q: Did you include a
couple of poets you had second guesses about? That is, did you have any last
minute epiphanies, or wake up in the middle of the night and say, “HD!
I must have an imagist and she's
the one—?”
DW: Not really. I was constrained by who we have in the
collection. I recognize that there are poets who are missing, and I expect to
get e-mails from people whose favorite poet isn’t represented. I did debate
whether I should start with Longfellow or not, but I thought that would skew
the show toward what came before by contrasting Longfellow with Whitman.
I
admire Longfellow for his professionalism and the way that he competed, if
that’s the word, with his English contemporaries—he did put American poetry on
the map. But he is fundamentally a Victorian. So I started with Whitman who, as
Pound wrote, “broke the new wood,” creating a poetry on which subsequent
writers would build.
Q: You use “modern” in the title of your
exhibition. How do you link Walt Whitman with all that is modern?
DW: I think Whitman is the key figure in American literature—well,
maybe along with Emerson—and in Leaves of
Grass he alters the cultural landscape by almost literally including the
landscape of nineteenth-century America: he breaks with the genteel tradition
and brings the street into the parlor.
With Whitman (right) we hear, refracted
poetically, the language of actual Americans—the voice of the street—and see
the turbulent society of which he was a part. He opens everything up. And he
creates a particular style of poetry—free verse—that breaks the constraints of
formal poetry based on iambic pentameter and other “rules.” He kicks down the
door, as he himself puts it.
So his influence is incalculably liberating. But
it takes Ezra Pound to mold and fashion all the raw, sometimes incoherent
writings of Whitman into a sophisticated, modern poetry that was responsible to
the art itself and on which an American poetic tradition could be built.
Q: Ezra Pound
was widely disliked after World War II, but his poetry has no
small amount of sway over poets and students these many decades beyond his
death. Was your choice to put him in this show a “no-brainer,” or did
Pound's politics enter the curatorial process?
DW: No, to paraphrase one of Donald Rumsfeld’s “rules,” you
do history with the history you have: we are not in the business at the
Portrait Gallery of just validating people we agree with. So putting Pound in—indeed
giving him a formative position—was, as you say, a “no brainer.” Pound’s career
is tremendously interesting and important, regardless of how we view his
evolving political career and his activities in World War II.
For those who
don’t know the story: Pound (right), who spent most of his life overseas, lived in
Italy during World War II, and he made a series of inflammatory broadcasts in
favor of the Fascist cause during the war.
Pound was imprisoned after the war,
effectively as a war criminal, and he ran a real risk of being tried for
treason and even executed, as other wartime propagandists, Lord Haw-Haw and
Tokyo Rose, were.
I don’t think there was any real appetite for putting Pound
on trial, and instead he was declared mentally unstable and incarcerated in St.
Elizabeths for most of the 1950s. I don’t know if he was insane, but he
certainly was broken by being imprisoned.
But what needs to be remembered is
not how he ended his career but how he began it: not only as a great poet in
his own right but as someone who had tremendous influence in creating the first
generation of modern American poets. He was a very generous supporter of poets
who differed widely in temperament and style, from Hilda Doolittle to Robert
Frost. He famously edited T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land, probably the greatest modern poem, and Eliot dedicated it to
him as il miglior fabbro: the better
maker.
So I think we have to recognize that even as we are clear-eyed about his
faults. I think Americans tend to be a bit sentimental about history: they
think that people have to be “good guys,” when history itself tells us that
personal character frequently has nothing to do with achievement! But that’s
another story . . .
Q: What projects are
you working on now?
DW: Short term, i.e., for the life of “Poetic Likeness,” I
am working on programming. In particular I want to organize a reading by major
American poets to take place at the NPG sometime in April—National Poetry
Month!—just before the exhibition closes. And there will be other, smaller
poetic events. So watch this space.
Also, I have another very interesting poetry project which
is that I coedited, with our curator Frank Goodyear: a small book called Lines in Long Array, which is part of
the Smithsonian’s programming about the Civil War. What Frank and I did was to
commission twelve contemporary poets to write about the war in any way that
they chose to do so. We then paired those poems with twelve poems from the war
years themselves, including work by Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman.
Plus we included modern photographic landscapes by the artist Sally Mann that
are set off against photographs from the war by Alexander Gardner.
It’s a
really nice book, and the poems we commissioned turned out wonderfully well.
Really looking forward to seeing it through print— it should be out by the fall
of 2013.
Walt Whitman / G.
Frank E. Pearsall / Albumen silver print, 1872 / National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Feinberg
Ezra Loomis Pound /
Alvin Langdon Coburn / Collotype print, 1913 / National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution
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