'I Read the Wild Wallpaper of My Heart'

Meade Harwell, Gordon H. Felton, M.J.A. McGittigan, Jess H. Cloud, Byron Vazakas, Ellis Foote, Myron H. Broomell, Celeste Turner Wright. 

Who are these strangers? What brings them together? They recall a walk in the cemetery, reading on the stones the names of people we have never known. All once were poets, unknown to this reader. All were published in volume thirteen, issue three (1943) of the New Mexico Quarterly, a journal that ceased publication in 1968. To write anything and share it publicly is to court oblivion.

 

The quarterly’s poetry editor was Alan Swallow who in 1940 had founded Alan Swallow Press in Denver, where he championed Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis and other members of the Stanford School. In this issue of the Quarterly, Swallow groups some of the poems together and titles them collectively “Eight Experimental Poems.” In a footnote he writes:

 

“My taste is toward the traditional devices in poetry, for the facts, demonstrated so brilliantly by Mr. Yvor Winters in his books of criticism, that certain philosophies associated with ‘experimentalism’ actually hamper a poet in his development, and that ‘experimental’ techniques are fewer and less resourceful for the poet than the traditional techniques. But there are not enough great poems, even if all were to come this way, written in America in a year to fill the poetry section of this magazine; and I hope, for editorial purposes, to give an ear to new developments which seem to have some character behind them.”

 

The centerpiece of Swallow’s selection is five pages of poems by J.V. Cunningham (1911-85). Winters would later describe his former student as “the most consistently distinguished poet writing in English today, and one of the finest in the language.” In January 1942, Cunningham had published his first collection, The Helmsman. The first of his poems in the Quarterly is titled “On the Cover of My First Book”:

 

“This garish and red cover made me start.

I who amused myself with quietness

Am here discovered. In this flowery dress

I read the wild wallpaper of my heart.”

 

In a note to the poem in his edition of The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (1997), Timothy Steele writes, “The book is beautiful but it was not what Cunningham expected.” The volume is bound in “cream colored wall paper with a flower pattern in magenta and cerise.” According to Steele’s notes, Cunningham never republished most of the poems in the New Mexico Quarterly. A few he revised and included in later volumes.

 

Also in the issue is a poem titled “Bookplate” by another student of Winters’ at Stanford, Ann Stafford:

 

“Time sets a term

To what is wrought,

Except to thought

If it be firm.

 

“Much we preserve

For interest’s sake,

But thoughts we take

As they deserve.

 

“This is my book.

I hope to find

Thought here confined

When I shall look.”

 

The Quarterly also includes a short story by Weldon Kees, “The Sign.”