Mary Barnard, American Imagist

Chronology

xv Chronology 1905 Samuel Barnard meets Bertha Lee Hoard in Greenfield, Indiana. 1907 Samuel and Bertha marry in Walton, Kentucky. They travel west on a one-way homesteader’s ticket, arriving in Portland, Oregon, during the Panic of 1907, in November. 1908 Samuel Barnard finds work with the Pittock and Leadbetter Lumber Company at a mill in Vancouver, across the Columbia River from Portland. The Barnards move into a local rooming house. 1909 Mary Ethel Barnard born in Vancouver, Washington, December 6. 1914 Samuel Barnard forced to leave Vancouver after a fire burns the mill down. He takes a job as manager at a sawmill in Buxton, Oregon. Mary Barnard begins school in nearby Hillsboro. A savage attack on Barnard’s maternal grandmother, who lives with the Barnards, by a local youth with an axe greatly shakes up the family. 1918 Samuel Barnard opens the Barnard Lumber Company in Vancouver; the family returns to Washington. 1926 Mary Barnard attempts translations at high school in Vancouver. Studies Greek dramatists. 1928 Enrolls at Reed College, a liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Excels at Greek. Studies literature and creative writing under Lloyd Reynolds, who introduces her to the work of the modernist poets and who later assists with the publication of A Few Poems. Joins GawdAwful poetry group, led by Reed professor Victor Chittick. xvi / Chronology 1932 Graduates from Reed with a BA degree. Returns to Vancouver and forms a study club, where she teaches a course on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Reads “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist” and Glenn Hughes’s Imagism and the Imagists. 1933 Sends six poems and a request for guidance to Ezra Pound in Rapallo, having looked up his address in the Who’s Who in the Vancouver Public Library. Receives a quick reply; extensive correspondence ensues, lasting until Pound’s death in 1972. 1934 Reluctantly starts social work job with the Emergency Relief Administration, for whom she works intermittently for three years. Begins correspondence with Marianne Moore, who encourages her to send poems to Poetry, and with William Carlos Williams. 1935 Comes to national attention when “Shoreline” is published in Poetry in February by editor Morton Zabel. Zabel prints more poems in the April issue. Barnard is awarded Poetry’s distinguished Levinson Prize in November. 1936 Using Levinson prize money, Barnard follows Pound’s advice and travels to New York, going first by train to New Orleans, calling on relatives in California on the way, then taking the SS Dixie up the East Coast. Arrives in New York on April 9. Pound’s introductions lead to meetings with William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Robert Fitzgerald, T. C. Wilson, Harriet Monroe, and Florence Codman of Arrow Press. Codman introduces Barnard to James Laughlin, who later publishes her early work, and Muriel Rukeyser, who assists with an invitation to Yaddo, the writer’s colony in upstate New York. In the summer, Barnard takes up a fellowship at Yaddo. Meets Malcolm Cowley, Babette Deutsch, David Greenhood, and New York composer Edwin Gerschefski, who sets her poem “Lai” to music. Returns to Vancouver, funds exhausted, in the autumn. 1938 Takes up a second summer fellowship at Yaddo. Returns to New York in August, where she resolves to settle. In an effort to make ends meet, stays with various friends and holds down a range of temporary jobs, including work as a babysitter, a short stint sending out catalogues for New Directions, and assistance with Hanson Duval’s bibliography of Aldous Huxley. Fails to get a sales job at Macy’s owing to her modernist tastes. “They could see I wouldn’t be the kind to insist on customers’ taking Gone with the Wind, when they Chronology / xvii were looking for [Williams’s] White Mule,” she tells her parents in a letter of October 11. 1939 Meets Ford Madox Ford in January and Ezra Pound in New York in May. Spends two months in the summer in the nearby countryside at Lake Schoolhouse with the painter Edna Gluck, a long-term friend. Works on an operetta and a play (“a satiric, feminist, anti-war piece,” she tells her parents in a letter of July 20). After Pound’s intervention, takes up position as first ever Curator of the Poetry Collection, Lockwood Memorial Library, University of Buffalo, New York. Establishes the William Carlos Williams archive. Reviews detective stories in spare time and begins...