Robert Kroetsch 1927–2011

From Robert Archambeau and others we learned a few weeks ago that Robert Kroetsch, the great Canadian author, was killed in a car wreck in his native Alberta, just a few days short of his 84th birthday. This sent us back to our Special Canadian Issue of Sagetrieb, guest edited by George Bowering and Ken Norris, which included Kroetsch’s “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem.” The essay is fluid and notational, divided like a day into 24 brief sections (an homage perhaps to Zukofsky, whose example, though uncited, is well-summed in Kroetsch’s third possibility: not the short long poem or book-long poem, but the life-long poem). Reprinted from Open Letter, originally presented at the MLA in 1980, the essay is focused on the 1970s, ranging widely across that decade to consider work by some twenty poets. Less an argument than a series of inferences and suggestions, it is in some ways a sketch for a workshop, informed, it seems, by Kroetsch’s poetic practice and pedagogy as well as by his critical intuitions.

Photo by Pearl Pirie (Pesbo) by way of Flickr

Archambeau’s Samizdat Blog has a lovely tribute to Kroetsch that pays particular attention to the poetry,  (link). Sandra Martin  has a broader overview of Kroetsch’s career in the Globe and Mail (link). There she writes, “Although Kroetsch walked on two legs, he had four literary pillars: fiction, criticism, teaching and poetry.” The last three, at any rate, are well represented in his essay on the long poem.

Some sample sentences:

The long poem, by its very length, allows the exploration of the failure of system and grid. The poem of that failure is a long poem.

•

Homer wrote poems without stanzas. We threaten to write stanzas (fragments, pieces, journals, ‘takes,’ cantos even) that cannot become the poem.

•

The paradox becomes this now: that art does not quite narrate, while life, possibly, does.

•

My own continuing poem is called, somewhat to my dismay, Field Notes.

When the poem finally appeared under the revised title Completed Field Notes (1989), Kroetsch’s dismay was apparently matched by that of his readers. As Archambeau reports (he was a student at the time at the university where Kroetsch was a presence), “I remember the arguments in the student pub about whether that word, ‘completed,’ represented a transcendence or a betrayal of Kroetsch’s project.” Reading Fred Wah‘s introduction to the 2000 reprint (link), one can see why the arguments were had. “Kroetsch’s poem,” writes Wah, “attempts to avoid design, to occupy a position of unresolved tension.” And then, noting “our desire … to make meaning from the fragments, to see pattern and connection,” he adds:

If our reading is not [to be] directed by the need for completion, we must syncretize dissonance, seemingly unconnected particles ‘going nowhere,’ in order, by chance, to intersect with a present moment that leads, perhaps, somewhere. And that present moment, given the phenomenological status of Kroetsch’s poetics, seems to be the action of writing itself.

And here is a poem from that book, showing Kroetsch-the-novelist to advantage. It comes from the middle section, “Advice to My Friends,” and speaks directly to the desire cited by Wah:

Sounding the Name

In this poem my mother is not dead.
The phone does not ring that October
morning of my fourteenth year.
The anonymous voice on the phone

does not say, Call Arthur to the phone.
Our hired man, a neighbour’s son, quiet,
unpretentious, a man from the river hills
near our farm, does not turn from the phone,

he does not say, seeming to stress the time,
Your mother died at ten o’clock. My sister and I
do not look at each other, do not smile,
assuring each other (forever) that words are
pretenders.

In this poem my mother is not dead,
she is in the kitchen, finishing the October
canning. I am helping in the kitchen

I wash the cucumbers. My mother asks me
to go pick some dill. The ducks are migrating.
I forget to close the garden gate.

Typos and Abbrevs.

Steven Fama left a comment yesterday that I thought to bring front and center. He’s referring here to the Larry Eigner text on the cover of Sagetrieb 18.1 and also to my transcription of it (both are reproduced in the previous post):

to what degree should we, in reading the typescript (or transcription thereof), add to Eigner’s shorthand and (more importantly) correct his typos?

In the first set of lines in the pictured text, I want to read “from” for “frm” and correct “weiting” to “writing.” And similarly near the bottom, I read “people” for “pple,” “glimpsed” for “glimsed” and “emphasis” for “emphasos.” And yet there’s the puzzling “unreacjanle”

There are maybe three dozen odd (not in the dictionary” words in The Coillected. for many, the endnote for the particular poem indicates that the word is intentional, based on margin notes by Eigner or other matters.

For other odd words, however, there apparently is no information. The poem of course is what it is; the question is what should we as readers do — how far to insert, given Eigner’s habit of typing in shorthand and not always accurately (for the record, I am a worse typist).

(I have a particular poem I am thinking about, and will probably write about, once I write about two or three other Eigner-things, that presents this question front and center, I think. I’m not at home, so I can’t give the poem #, but it sticks out pretty obviously, and is in Volume IV. )

These are good questions! And I can’t wait to see his list of neologisms, not to mention his reading of a poem that uses one. As to an answer…

I wd hate to be responsible for dealing with Eigner’s typos and abbreviations in the absence of his advice.

In my experience with the prose — and Eigner was more cavalier with prose than poetry — the abbreviations were time-saving devices not meant to be retained … except with conventional abbrevs. like “wd” and the like.

But Eigner liked inventions too, and sometimes he considered the abbreviations (or typos) to be such. And he was open to suggestions. For instance, with “Blurb for Disabled Calligraphy” (in Areas Lights Heights: Writings 1954-1989), I suggested we keep his typo “mirrr” for “mirror,” and Eigner, after giving it due consideration, agreed. Of course, if I was editing the piece on my own, I’d supply the missing “o,” no question.

Another, somewhat different example that comes to mind is the poem “What Next (To Do?),” also in Areas Lights Heights. Here, Eigner mistakenly typed “philosophy” as “philosophyl.” I loved the suggestion of chlorophyll in this, and Eigner did too when I pointed it out, so he added the additional “l” to make the word “philosophyll.” In this instance, the typo was not so much preserved as used as the basis for a further revision. Needless to say, this sort of revision can only be made by an author.

Intermediate version of Eigner's "Rambling (in) Life," showing Eigner's additions to the editor's typescript. Click on image for a larger view.

By and large, Eigner loved editing as collaboration, in the sense that he loved the relationship as much as he did the project. He was lonely! And I did think retrospectively that this gave me an undue influence, which makes me squirm a little in memory. (Maybe “mirrr” really should be “mirror”? Maybe “philosophyll” should be “philosophy”?) On the other hand, the most basic way my editing prodded Eigner to rethink his work makes me glad I got involved: I would give him neatly double-spaced typescripts of his typescripts to proofread, and Eigner would then add new writing at the end of the page, even when the text was a decade old. I enabled a revision process he couldn’t or at least wouldn’t have undertaken on his own, since his own typescripts left little or no white space to work with, and retyping would have been a horrible chore.

But all this is dancing around Fama’s question about corrections. My “diplomatic transcription” (an exact copy of the text — spelling, revision, spacing, line endings) is the right choice, perhaps, when the transcript appears alongside the original … when the goal is to aid in the reading of the original. But when the transcript is the only version available?

As it happens, I’ve been reading Emerson’s journals this past week, comparing the different ways a single passage was presented in the Riverside Edition edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes and then in the Harvard Edition edited by Ronald A. Bosco and Glen M. Johnson and then in the new Library of America Edition edited by Lawrence Rosenwald. Each of these editions served a unique purpose.

The Riverside Edition, coming a generation after the philosopher’s death, was proposed as an opening up of Emerson’s inner life, and it came with occasionally extensive narrative bridges. For instance, the spare entry for July 24, 1872, “House burned,” is followed in the Riverside Edition with five pages of biographical information. The Harvard Edition is scholarly, with a full apparatus. It gives us the entirety of Emerson’s “pocket diaries,” lists of readings and appointments and to-do lists and the like. (The Riverside Edition very nicely uses these to compile lists of authors or books quoted or mentioned for each year.) The Library of America Edition makes a reading version of the Harvard text, no longer identifying notebook name or manuscript page, no longer recording all the vagaries of the manuscript.

So what about Eigner? For a scholarly edition, of course, everything should be recorded, so that even if correction is made, the original can still be reconstructed. But a reading edition? Of the poems? My gut feeling is that some editorial intervention is needed. Eigner’s mind and writing have an elegance that shouldn’t be sacrificed in the name of a too-faithful transcription. The editor’s task, I should think, is to reveal the elegance of Eigner’s occasional idiosyncrasy, which requires that idiosyncrasy be distinguished from inelegance (i.e., error). Except … that acceptance of error is part of Eigner’s elegance, his adherence to thinking as a moment-to-moment engagement with language and the world. So … does that mean that error needs to be distinguished from error? Yeah, I think so. Which means, alas, that the editor, following Eigner, is apt to make errors every step of the way. A thankless task!

Click on image for a larger view.

How easy it would for correction to get out of hand! I’m glad I didn’t have to make such decisions on my own — that I had Eigner to consult. But in bringing my decisions to Eigner, my policy, I guess, was that changes should be minimal: obvious typos needed to be fixed, but abbreviations I tried to leave as is. This then left a short or long list of puzzling words that may or may not have been typos and may or may not have been inventions, which I myself preferred to leave as is. Eigner, I found, was more inclined to normalize. With “Eureka,” for instance (see the text to the right), which Eigner and I never got around to editing, I suspect he would have seen “weiting” as an error for “writing.” But is it, in a text where “weight” and “meaning” are treated as synonyms? Perhaps “weiting” is writing that weighs meaning. And what about those typos that may be abbreviations, like “wrds” for “words” or “mch” for “much”? And what about the beauty of Eigner’s process, which the errors and corrections seem to be a part of? I mean, if writing is “rliza- / tion” and “assay, assessment,” shouldn’t we see that realizing take place, or fail to take place, as Eigner assesses his own wording, as he adds the “ings” above “thns” or fails to realize “no” by typing “np”?

It’s a puzzle, all right.

(That’s a quote, I think, from Eigner.)

Missing Larry

Michael Davidson‘s keynote address at the NPF’s 2000 summer conference on North American Poetry in the 1960s, “Missing Larry,” was first published in Sagetrieb 18.1, and later as part of his 2008 book Concerto for the Left Hand. The essay is also available online, courtesy the Museum of American Poetics (link).

“Missing Larry” has become a central document for readers of Eigner’s work — and an important contribution to the field of disability studies. The essay deals in part with Eigner’s still-unpublished fascicle Dance, put together in response to Charles Olson’s Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul. The Dance poems include a long one written in response to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (see vol. 4 of Eigner’s Collected Poems, pg. 1612). Writes Davidson:

Eigner thought of titling his series “Gyre / (scope) / loop the / loop,” as if to condense the metaphors of stability (gyroscope), perception (“scope”), historical cyclicity (Yeats’ gyres) and vertiginous movement (“loop the / loop”) in one figure. It is an ideogram that merges Eigner’s primary concerns with perception and place, but sets them against the backdrop of historical vertigo, the rightward shifting margin marking the stumbling movement of movements under duress.

The Shoah poem largely concerns a boy — now a man — who returns with Lanzmann to the river in Poland where he was once forced to sing while running with chains around his ankles. Notes Davidson:

The incredulous testimony of survival (“I can’t believe I’m here”) is measured against an act of physical awkwardness that resembles a dance of death, not unlike the coffle songs and shuffle dances developed by black slaves in the antebellum South.

And he adds:

Such powerful mergings of physical grace with carceral control turns “Dance” into a personal signature for Eigner’s proprioceptive position.

◊

The Sagetrieb issue with Davidson’s essay features an Eigner typescript on the cover, an otherwise-unpublished fragment that may have been the beginning of a prose note … or perhaps a poem. A diplomatic transcript appeared on the issue’s first page. Click on the images below for larger views:

The issue is still available for sale. Click on the Ordering tab above for more information.

News from Acton

If there’s a poetry prize that makes me feel warm and fuzzy, it’s the Robert Creeley Award, given each year since 2002 in Acton, Massachusetts. This is the town — it was West Acton, actually — where Creeley spent much of his youth. Some background on the prize is given at the website for the Robert Creeley Foundation:

Acton rediscovered Creeley’s connection to the town through his chance meeting with Acton resident and poet Robert Clawson in late 2000. On April 11, 2001, Creeley returned to Acton to read to and interact with students in the Acton Boxborough Regional High School. Acton officially proclaimed this day to be “Robert Creeley Day,” and thus began the annual awarding of the “Robert Creeley Award.” Each year, the award winning poet reads to a community audience and a student audience.

Photo by Matthew Modoono

This year’s winner, announced in September, is Gary Snyder, and last week he gave his reading. There’s a newspaper story on the event at wickedlocal.com, with a YouTube video attached and five photos by Matthew Modoono — including the one to the right, which shows Penelope Creeley and Snyder embracing. From the story:

Underneath a large photo of her husband in a moment of mirth, Penelope Creeley — Robert Creeley’s wife of more than 30 years, and a member of the Robert Creeley Foundation — introduced poet Gary Snyder, Pulitzer prize winner and the 10th annual recipient of the Robert Creeley Award.

In an emotional greeting punctuated by applause, she invited audience members to pay their respects at Creeley’s grave at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. “He’d be delighted by the company,” she said.

Snyder’s association with the NPF has been much more attenuated than I would have expected given his Poundian imprint, but several fine essays on his work have appeared in Sagetrieb. Here’s an excerpt from Tom Lavazzi’s “Pattern of Flux: Sex, Buddhism, and Ecology in Gary Snyder’s Poetry,” from 1989:

Ontologically, Snyder’s poetry presents patterns and figures of flux. … In “Night,” the sleeping lovers lying with “Twined legs” and “hair all tangled together” unconsciously mimic what Wilhelm Reich called “orgonomic functional thinking …  frozen motion”: form as movement, which was often expressed, for Reich, in the “basic form” of the “sexual embrace.” In the poem, this interlocked state is only temporary; the sun is soon “hitting the shades”; a record has been left “soundlessly spinning,” suggesting that beneath any formalized musical expression, is the essential mandala rhythm of movement and change, combinations and recombinations, like legs crossed and recrossed as lovers turn in sleep. The music stops, but the movement, the rhythm, continues. The voice of the poem, which slips out of the individual consciousness of the sleeping poet-lover, holds both images in mind — the intertwined bodies and the spinning record — and threads through the whole scene and series of events (the night of lovemaking, the house left in disarray, the first strands of morning light), pushing toward a larger synthesis: the knowledge that we are only temporary gatherings of energy (the sex/love continuum is only one of its manifestations) and that at every moment we are part of a larger entity that flows through us and that we ultimately flow back into.

Award for a Sagetrieb Author

We are very happy to learn — belatedly — that Danette DiMarco won the 2009 President’s Award for Scholarly Achievement at her home institution, Slippery Rock University. The announcement notes her scholarly focus on Victorian and 20th-century feminist authors, adding that she has also published pedagogical work on the teaching of writing to first-year students (link). We are especially happy to see her work for the NPF singled out.

“‘Misfortune’s Monsters / The Human … Race’: Mina Loy’s American Lineage and an Urban Poetry of Economic Deprivation” appeared in a special issue of Sagetrieb devoted to women poets of the 1950s (Sagetrieb 19.3). As DiMarco notes, Loy spent many years living near the Bowery and was often consumed with money problems of her own. The four poems central to the essay’s argument — “On Third Avenue,” “Chiffon Velours,” “Hot Cross Bum,” and “Lady Laura in Bohemia” — are sharply observed and sharp in their address. DiMarco situates these poems in a lineage of critique that includes the work of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (DiMarco pays particular attention to Denise Duhamel, Janice Erlbaum, and Maggie Estep). Here is an excerpt; the quotes come from John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958):

Historically, sociologists and economists have two basic labels to describe the poor: case or insular poverty. Galbraith states that case poverty “is commonly and properly related to some characteristic of the individuals so afflicted.” It is due to “some quality peculiar to the individual or family involved” and assumes that the afflicted have not “mastered” their “environment.” Galbraith argues that people have assigned the term case poverty to describe those whose “sufferings” are the result of “deficiencies, including the moral shortcomings.” …

Unlike case poverty, insular poverty “manifests itself as an ‘island’ of poverty” where those involved “have been frustrated by some factor common to their environment.” Those suffering from case poverty often live amidst wealth while those experiencing insular poverty live among many of similar cast. … Although case and insular poverty are seemingly distinct, at least as Galbraith defines them, the separation is less real than one might like to think. In fact, when regions experience poverty because of environmental factors, the characterization of the population as disabled is often not long to follow. The group’s monstrous experience becomes naturalized as a necessary component or characteristic of that group.

Although Loy does not use “case” or “insular” to characterize the poor, her work reveals an understanding of the inner workings of both concepts. It is this effort to ever render the poor as monstrous that some of Loy’s later poems address. Her poems expose how stereotypes of the poor are reliant upon containment; in addition, her poems show that ideological boundaries must be maintained in order to perpetuate specific capitalist system.

It’s a great essay; DiMarco’s recognition is richly deserved.

Bob Brown

Source: Connexions

Frederick Moody and Craig Saper have put a scanned facsimile and transcription of Bob Brown’s Words online on Connexions. Words was published by Hours Press in 1931 in a very limited run of 150 copies. Saper has also brought out Words in a paper version published by Rice University Press.

We learned about this development from Al Filreis, who shares his excitement on his frequently updated blog.

A few years ago, Sagetrieb published an article on Bob Brown by Craig Dworkin, “‘Seeing Words Machinewise’: Technology and Visual Prosody” (Sagetrieb 18.1).

Dworkin begins his article with an epigraph from Brown:

Writing has been bottled up in books since the start. It is time to pull out the stopper.

The article focuses on one of the ways that Brown tried to pull out that stopper— a “reading machine” allowing poets to collaborate in the creation of texts, called “readies.” The readies, Dworkin explains, “are a relatively rare moment of visually based writing aimed at ‘carrying the word to the eye,‘” as Brown saw it. The results were eventually gathered in an anthology, Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (1931).

While the readies “reflect the male modernists’ often literal phallocentrism and its exceedingly bizarre physiological equation of sperm and spinal fluid,” Dworkin’s overall interest in them is to return attention to their “formally progressive presentation…which still seems remarkable today.” It would seem from their reprint of Brown’s Words that Moody and Saper concur with Dworkin.

Clearly a Winner

Last week came the wonderful news that Rae Armantrout won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, for Versed, her fourth volume with Wesleyan and her tenth overall. You can read the announcement on Critical Mass, blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors (link), and see a video of Armantrout reading from the book on the website of the National Book Foundation, which administers the similar-sounding National Book Award (link). Armantrout was a finalist for the latter prize, along with Ann Lauterbach, who — like Armantrout — was a featured reader at our recent seventies conference (the winner, Keith Waldrop, was a featured reader at our earlier sixties conference).

Armantrout’s award sent me back to her 1992 essay “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity,” now part of her Collected Prose, first published in Sagetrieb. The essay was a sequel to her earlier “Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?” (published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in 1978). The earlier essay was posed as an answer to the title question. The later one flipped the script by using the title to proliferate questions. That proliferation — and the questing intelligence behind it — is very much a part of Armantrout’s appeal. Even when the questions are leading, the invitation to think is welcome.

Here are some of the last sentences of the Sagetrieb essay — a statement of poetics in Socratic form:

What is the meaning of clarity? Is something clear when you understand it or when it looms up, startling you? Is readability equivalent to clarity? What is the relation of readability to convention? How might conventions of legibility enforce social codes? Does so-called experimental writing seek a new view of the self? Would such a view be liberating? Might experimental writing and feminism be natural allies? I think questions are most useful when left open. I will merely assert that there is more than one model of clarity.

It’s nice to see another model of clarity get official recognition!

The Borderline Pamphlet

Recently, the Beinecke Library at Yale purchased a copy of the short film Monkeys’ Moon (1929), making it available for viewing on their website (link here). Richard Deming — who read in the UMaine New Writing Series Fall 2008 — has written a brief article about the film for Artforum (.pdf here).

Monkeys’ Moon was produced by the circle around H.D., a group associated with the cinema journal Close Up and film company POOL Productions. The key personnel were H.D., Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), and Kenneth Macpherson, but other creative participants included Oswell Blakeston, René Crevel, Dorothy Richardson, Paul Robeson, Hanns Sachs, and Gertrude Stein.

In 1930, POOL released the silent feature Borderline (65 minutes), directed by Macpherson and starring Robeson. The other actors included Robeson’s wife, Eslanda; H.D. (credited as Helga Doorn); and Gavin Arthur, a gay rights pioneer and grandson of U.S. President Chester A. Arthur. In conjunction with the film’s release H.D. wrote an essay on the production, published by Mercury Press in London. The pamphlet was reprinted by the NPF in 1987 as part of the first of several issues of Sagetrieb dedicated to H.D.  The issue — guest-edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis — is still available for sale ($8.95 plus shipping; ordering info here).The issue includes contributions by Anne Waldman, Beverly Dahlen, Robert Creeley, Bruce Boone, Fielding Dawson, Susan Stanford Friedman, Cassandra Laity, Eileen Gregory, Michael Boughn, S. Travis, and Burton Hatlen.

Monkeys’ Moon sent us back to the Borderline pamphlet, prompting the following thoughts from NPF editorial assistant Alison Fraser.

◊  ◊  ◊

The Borderline Pamphlet is an exploration of the artistic and intellectual possibilities of experimental cinema. The film’s title signifies the tension in polarity and the space that develops between polarized energies: the literal borderline location of the film’s town; visual polarity of black and white film; the borderline social status of its main characters, who are “not out of life, not in life.” But, most significantly to the Pamphlet, the director “Mr. Kenneth Macpherson is ‘borderline.’” It is only in this in-between position that he can create this art:

There is beauty, there has always been beauty. The problem in every art period is to present that beauty in a form allied to its environment and its time. …

Light flows over a face. That means nothing or little to you. There is a bronze forehead and the eye sockets are gouged out just this way; there is a concentration of shadow here, a plane of light there. You see a face, perhaps at most you see a pleasing portrait. You may even murmur “Gauguin.” You think, no doubt, that this is clever posing or perhaps delightful portraiture. You do not realize that that face has been moulded, modelled by an artist, that those lights have been arranged, re-arranged deliberately focussed. … Macpherson sculpts literally with light. He gouges, he reveals, he conceals.

In her 1931 poem “Red Roses for Bronze,” H.D. casts her speaker as a sculptor fashioning an image of her lover from “dark bronze.” Fantasizing on the completed project, the lover captured in bronze, H.D. writes that she might then

stroke at — something (stone, marble, intent, stable, materialized)
peace,
even magic sleep
might come again.

The same desire to approach the tangible is manifest in The Borderline Pamphlet even as the film itself defies capture by way of summary. The Borderline Pamphlet, written contemporaneously with “Red Roses for Bronze,” demonstrates H.D.’s struggle to establish a working context for film criticism, something she does primarily through the re-appropriation of visual art and musical terminology. She is self-aware of her approach, and its inherent difficulties:

It is unusual to weld the idea of bronze with movement, but a head is sculptured, gouged out in planes and focus of light and shadow and inset with eyes like those Mena period Egyptian heads with amber glass, yet that head moves.

Despite connecting Borderline to music and various facets of visual art, H.D. makes no outright attempt to connect it with poetry or her own poetics, although the latter is implied. The contrast between her poem and her pamphlet — even while both operate with the same material of bronze — is clear: in the poem, bronze is static, and all the better for the speaker who wishes encase her lover within it. In her analysis of the film, H.D. invokes bronze not simply as a remolding of its possibilities but as a complete revisualization of the abilities and laws of the medium.

Borderline is a dream and perhaps when we say that we have said everything.

In “Red Roses for Bronze,” the speaker hopes that with the completion of her art object, “magic sleep / might come again.” The ability of both art forms to initiate mental transmutation between life and art is one understood through the experience of sleep and dreams. This is illuminating for H.D.:

The film is the art of dream portrayal and perhaps when we say that we have achieved the definition, the synthesis toward which we have been striving. Film is art of another dimension, including not only all art but including all life. Art and life walk hand in hand, drama and music, epic song and lyric rhythm, dance and the matter of science here again, as in some elaborate “allegory” of the Florentines, take hands, twine in sisterly embrace before their one God, here electrically incarnated, LIGHT.

A conclusion, found near the beginning of The Borderline Pamphlet, argues for the subjectivity of beauty and the possibilities inherent in any art form. Though the specific example of H.D.’s pamphlet — that film should be considered a valuable art — is no longer necessary, the general thrust of her sentiments is:

There is no such thing as any fixed art standard. This is beautiful, this was beautiful, this may be beautiful. There is one beauty, it is the beauty of belief, of faith, of hope. And if that beauty is allied to sheer grit and technical efficiency, you get a new sort of art creation.