others

• The radical, insurgent little magazine Others provided a venue for the most boldly experimental modernist poetry. Others was published by the group of avant-garde artists in New York with the same name and formed after the outbreak of World War I. Poet Alfred Kreymborg and artist Man Ray founded the group, centered an artist colony called Grantwood, just outside Ridgefield, New Jersey. Through the group, American writers and artists came into contact and found collaboration with emigré artists who had fled from World War I in Europe.
• Reducing editorial interference to a minimum, Others granted poets more artistic liberties than its rival, Poetry Magazine, permitted. Others denied allegiances to any literary schools, social causes, or political movements, seeking to establish a "pure" space for poetry. In spite of its claims to aesthetic purity, the little magazine was called "a haven for the wildest orgies of proud spirited youth," and the poetry it published was deemed "queer" and even "pornographic." The social and moral uproar was aroused less by the sexual subject matter of the poetry than by its formal improprieties; as Alfred Kreymborg, Others' founder and editor, said of the public reaction to Mina Loy's notorious 'Love Songs': "To reduce eroticism to the sty was an outrage, and to do so without verbs, sentence structure, punctuation, even more offensive." Others evinces the diversity of modernism, linking anarchist, communist, and socialist writers such as Lola Ridge, Adolf Wolff, and Carl Sandburg to avant-garde artists such as Man Ray, Mina Loy, and Marsden Hartley, and to popular poets such as Sherwood Anderson, Louise Bogan, Vachel Lindsay, and even Robert Frost. Others returns us to the chaos of early modernism, when it was difficult to distinguish the greats from the fakes - the January 1917 issue featured 'The Spectric School', an elaborate literary hoax that fooled even the most discerning readers. Others embeds individual genius in the context of forgotten influences and innovators, taking us back to a time when Jeanne D'Orge shared with H.D. a penchant not only for pseudonyms, but also for stylistic brevity and passionate intensity, and when Orrick John's Olives mirrored Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons in its formal structure, linguistic playfulness, and erotic intimations.
• TEXT CREDITS
  'Housing Modernism : A Study of Little Magazines', by Suzanne Churchill [website closed].

• DESCRIPTION
  • Subtitle A Magazine of the New Verse.
  • 1, N° 1 (July 1915) - 5, N° (July 1919).
  • Edited by Alfred Kreymborg. Printed at the Liberty Print Shop, New York.
  • Special Issues:
    • 3, N° 5 (January 1917) The Spectric School
  • 21.5 x 14 cm.

• CONTRIBUTORS
• William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, Djuna Barnes, Man Ray, Skipwith Cannell, Lola Ridge, Adolf Wolff, Marsden Hartley, Marcel Duchamp and others.

• FACSIMILES/REPRINTS
• printed
  • Reprinted by Kraus Reprint (New York 1967).
  • [anthology] Others - An Anthology of the New Verse / edited by Alfred Kreymborg (Alfred A. Knopf : New York 1916).

• SECONDARY LITERATURE
• Suzanne W. Churchill
  The Little Magazine 'Others' and the Renovation of American Poetry (Ashgate Publishing : Aldershot 2006).
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