Title:
Others: A Magazine of the New Verse
Date of Publication:
July 1915 – July 1919
Place(s) of Publication:
Grantwood, New Jersey (July 1915 – Dec. 1915)
New York, New York (Jan. 1916 – Apr. 1917)
Chicago, Illinois (June 1917 – Feb. 1918)
New York, New York (Dec. 1918 – July 1919)
Frequency of Publication:
Monthly: July 1915 – Sept. 1916
Irregular: Dec. 1916 – Feb. 1918 (six issues)
Monthly: Dec. 1918 – July 1919
Circulation:
Approx. 250 – 300 (Munson 35; Kreymborg “Early Impression” 12)
Publisher:
Alfred Kreymborg: Grantwood, New Jersey
Various locations and publishers, New York (Jan. 1916 – Apr. 1917).
Washington Square Bookshop, New York (Dec. 1918 – Jul. 1919)
Physical Description:
5″ x 7″; plain yellow cover, simple block print, no illustrations, logo, manifesto, editorial, or advertising; list of authors; poems. Size, format, and color consistent through run. Occasional editorials, reviews, plays, and art appear after first year.
April 1916 (2:4): advertising on inside covers.
May-June 1916 (2:5-6): editorial (editorials appear irregularly thereafter).
Jan. 1919 – Feb. 1919 (5:2-3): abstract cover design with motto; art cuts.
Mar. 1919 – Apr.-May 1919 (5:4-5): title and motto, no cover art.
July 1919 (5:6): title only, no art or motto.
Price:
15 cents per issue / $1.50 per year (July 1915 – Nov. 1918)
20 cents per issue / $2 per year (After Dec. 1918)
Editor(s):
Alfred Kreymborg
Associate Editor(s):
Unknown
Libraries with Original Issues:
University of Connecticut; University of Miami; Loyola University of Chicago; Colby College; Western Michigan University; University of Missouri, Columbia; Mississippi State University; Hamilton College; Skidmore College; SUNY Buffalo; Kent State University; Ohio State University; Oklahoma State University; University of Pittsburgh; Brown University; East Tennessee State University; University of Vermont; University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
Reprint Editions:
New York: Kraus Reprint Corp. 1967.
Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 2004. (Little Magazines. American 1910 – 1919) [Microform]
Others: A Magazine of the New Verse was founded by Alfred Kreymborg in 1915 in an effort to give poets freedom to experiment with new forms. Publishing free verse on topics ranging from sex to Ming vases to blackbirds, Others quickly acquired the reputation as the most radical and permissive venue for modern poetry. The uproar was aroused less by the content of the poems than by their formal liberties; as Kreymborg said of the public reaction to Mina Loy’s “Love Songs”: “To reduce eroticism to the sty was an outrage, and to do so without verbs, sentence structure, punctuation, even more offensive” (History 489). Thriving on the public outrage, Others secured a small yet intelligent and reactive audience.
Others’ contributors were more involved with the magazine than just publishing their work: many gathered weekly to discuss their writings, first at the Grantwood art colony in New Jersey and later in Greenwich Village, New York. At these gatherings the writers exchanged ideas, discussed modern art and literature, and explored new ways of writing. Others published a variety of new poems, opening its pages to all the latest “isms” without committing itself to any group or school. The magazine illustrates the diversity of modernist poetic practice, as well as the fashionable trends and formal innovations of the free verse movement in America. It helped launch the careers of major American poets such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Loy, situating them on equal footing with now forgotten figures such as Jeanne D’Orge, Orrick Johns, and Adolf Wolff.
Although Alfred Kreymborg published no distinct manifesto, the first extra-poetic commentary appears in the front material of November 1915 (1:5). Its inclusion suggests Kreymborg’s concurrence with the article about his magazine, written by J. B. Kerfoot for a recent issue of Life:
“‘OTHERS’ is the name of a new little monthly ‘magazine of new verse,’ published by Alfred Kreymborg at Grantwood, New Jersey ($1.50 per year). Three numbers have appeared at this writing–July, August and September. They are among the live things being done in American just now. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with this ‘new poetry’ that is called ‘revolutionary.’ Perhaps you’ve heard that it is queer and have let it go at that. Perhaps if you tried it you’d find that a side of you that has been sleeping would come awake again. It is worth the price of a Wednesday matinée to find out. By the way, the new poetry is revolutionary. It is the expression of a democracy of feeling rebelling against a aristocracy of form.”
The March 1916 issue (2:3) added subscription information opposite the title page, along with the statement: “OTHERS makes its appeal to every person who is interested in poetry, and especially in the work of young Americans.” The motto, “The old expressions are with us always, and there are always others,” was first published in December 1918 (5:1) and appeared on the cover of the next four issues.
Alfred Kreymborg (Dec. 10, 1883 – Aug. 14, 1966)
Editor: July 1915 – July 1919
Alfred Kreymborg grew up in a working class family in New York City. While living in Greenwich Village, he became interested in modern art, photography, and writing. He founded The Glebe in 1913, which was “one of the first periodicals to sponsor experimental writing” (Hoffman 46). With a donation of $276 from Walter Conrad Arensberg, Kreymborg went on to found Others, a magazine dedicated to experimental poetry. Editor of Broom and American Caravan and contributor to little magazines well into the 1950s, Kreymborg achieved popular acclaim touring America with his puppet plays (1920-1) and a radio play he produced (1938). When he died in 1966 he had published forty books and served as president of the Poetry Society of America and as judge for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Conrad Aiken
“Meretrix: Ironic”
Djuna Barnes
Passion Play
Maxwell Bodenheim
“An Old Negro Asleep”
“Talk”
“Factory-Girl”
H. D.
“Pear Tree”
“Evening”
Jeanne D’Orge
The Meat Press
The Microscope
T. S. Eliot
“Portrait of a Lady”
Helen Hoyt
“Homage”
“Escape”
“For You a Transient Joy”
Fenton Johnson
“Tired”
“Aunt Jane Allen”
“The Drunkard”
Alfred Kreymborg
“Variations”
“To W.C.W.M.D.”
“New York”
Vachel Lindsay
“The Daniel Jazz”
Amy Lowell
“Trees”
“Chinoiseries”
Mina Loy
“Songs to Joannes”
Marianne Moore
“Critics and Connoisseurs”
“Poetry”
Ezra Pound
“The Tea Shop”
“From the Chinese”
Man Ray
Three Dimensions
Carl Sandburg
“Becker”
“Others”
Wallace Stevens
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
William Carlos Williams
“Pastoral”
“Tract”
“The Young Housewife”
Bochner, Jay. “Others.” American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century. Ed. Edward E. Chielens. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. 231-236.
Churchill, Suzanne W. The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Aldershot, England, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006.
——– . “Making Space for Others: A History of a Modernist Little Magazine.” Journal of Modern Literature 22.1 (Fall 1998): 47-67.
——– . “Williams and the Poetics of Ending Others.” Sagetrieb. 18: 2 & 3. Also in William Carlos Williams and the Language of Poetry. Ed. Burton Hatlen and Demetres Tryphonopoulos. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2002.
Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. 34-51.
Kreymborg, Alfred. “An Early Impression of Wallace Stevens.” Trinity Review 8 (1954): 12.
——– . Ed. Others: An Anthology of the New Verse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1916.
——– . Ed. Others: An Anthology of the New Verse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917.
——– . Ed. Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse. New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1920.
——– . Troubadour: An American Autobiography. New York: Sagamore Press Inc., 1957. First published in New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925.
Munson, Gorham. The Awakening Twenties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985. 35.
Murphy, Russell. “Alfred Kreymborg.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 54: American Poets, 1880-1945. 3rd Series. Ann Arbor, MI: Gale Research Co., 1987. 192-201.
Newcomb, John Timberman. “Others, Poetry, and Wallace Stevens: Little Magazines as Agents of Reputation.” Essays in Literature 16.2 (Fall 1989): 256-270.
“Others” compiled by Emily Smith (Class of ’06) and Suzanne W. Churchill (Professor of English, Davidson College)