The Writings of Emilie Glen 3 - Poems from Magazines

NEW EXPANDED EDITION WITH 267 POEMS!
THE WRITINGS OF EMILIE GLEN 3: POEMS FROM MAGAZINES

Glen Book cover art

For more than four decades, New York City poet Emilie Glen produced a torrent of poetry, widely published in little magazines all over the world, and in a series of books and chapbooks that went through numerous reprints. Yet when the poet died in 1995, all that remained of her papers were several shopping bags full of manuscripts, chapbooks, and tear sheets of already-published works. From this legacy, Brett Rutherford has assembled all the presently-available poems of this prolific New York poet. This third volume, in its first printing, presented the 193 recovered poems that appeared in magazines and newspapers, but were not included in Glen’s many chapbooks. None of these poems existed in manuscript. Now, because more long-unavailable little magazines can be found online and in academic databases, 74 more poems have been located, adding to the treasure trove of this important collection. Two portraits of the poet have come to light, and they are included as well.

Open anywhere, and the Emilie Glen we know from the first volume is still here in spades: poet, actress, pianist, bird-watcher, cat-lover, nature rhapsodist, the woman of Manhattan with a piercing eye for character and image. She is the city, the street, the windows, the bridges and tunnels, the parks and fountains, the desperate dreamers on the doorsteps. This volume also includes the full text of an out-of-print chapbook from 1963 titled Laughing Lute and Other Poems.

This is the 314th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2024. 316 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback, $16.95. ISBN 9798320159003. CLICK HERE to order from Amazon.

Because the works are here in the order discovered, the book's randomness invites at-random reading. Open anywhere, and the Emilie we know from the first volume is still here in spades: poet, actress, pianist, bird-watcher, cat-lover, nature rhapsodist, the woman of Manhattan with a piercing eye for character and image. She is the city, the street, the windows, the bridges and tunnels, the parks and fountains, the desperate dreamers on the doorsteps.

The journals that originally published these poems include The Prairie Schooner, Southwest Review, Chat Noir Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Quartet, Snowy Egret, Coe Review, The Georgia Review, Midwest Quarterly, Coffee House Review, Green's Magazine, Poetry Venture, Lynx, Encore, Cats Magazine, Imprints, Etchings, Limbo, Manifold, Loon, Free Lance, Lake Superior Review, Massachussets Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Poet Lore. Other poems in the book are from tear-sheets from unidentified publications.

The editor located eleven poems originally published in ETC: A Review of General Semantics, and they are published here as a group since there is a thematic connection to some of the key ideas in semantics. These poems play on the paradoxes and ironies of how things come to be named, how we are manipuated by names such as "Acme" and "Atlas" and suggestions of royalty, and how journalism molds its own reality of what is "news" and what is not.

This volume also includes the full text of an out-of-print chapbook from 1963 titled Laughing Lute and Other Poems. This complements the chapbook-based text from Volume 1 of this series.

FROM THE FOREWORD BY BRETT RUTHERFORD

Emilie submitted her poems to newspapers and magazines all over the world. I recall seeing publications from India and other far-flung countries featuring her work. Back when some newspapers still solicited and even paid for “filler” poetry, she sent short poems — just as free in form if not in theme as her poems submitted to magazines — and had many accepted. Her avid bird-watching and her love for cats also led to publication in magazines devoted to those topics. Emilie said, “Being published is what matters,” and she was happy to have readers in faraway lands and in these publishing niche markets.

Many editors published Emilie repeatedly, and her work was so widespread in the 1960s and 1970s that she seemed almost a cottageindustry of the narrative or short topical poem. The few specimens of early poems I found among scrap books show an early penchant for denser word-play, which thinned out as her style matured. The child-like, questioning persona is consistent, as is the desire to inhabit and justify a wide variety of characters. She has the fiction-writer’s knack of picking one incident that gets to the heart of someone she is sketching, as when she writes about an aged Village poet named Cicero. We know little of him except that he carried around a dog-eared edition of Dante, but the heart of him is this:

Cicero who stood as a boy
In front of Our Lady of Pompeii
Asking the women to help overthrow Mussolini
By throwing their jewels into the collection plate

I have not attempted to organize the poems in this book by theme. Instead they are here in the order I found them in Emilie’s papers. Reading this book is akin to leafing through all the old magazines in which her poems appear — look, here is another by Emilie Glen, and another, and another.

This is how readers experienced Emilie Glen, a source of delight and surprise, and how editors experienced her. I hasten to add that everything Emilie submitted, with few exceptions was “over the transom.” Editors did not choose her because she was someone it was profitable to know. They did not publish her because doing so enhanced their academic C.V. They published her because they liked her work, plain and simple.

* * *

THIS DOOR DOES NOT OPEN

There’s a door    this door
  Hole through to darkness
    Where the knob was
This door in the basement
  Of the Fine Arts tower.
Stone buildings the red of sunsets
   Ground to pigment
  Moat-like river below.
There’s a door in the basement
  Of sculpture studios.
On this door the sign read
THIS DOOR DOES NOT OPEN.
We’re no Pandoras to force the door
Not even curious.

Years of students passing the dingy door
With the dark hole where the knob was
No time for a door that does not open
But now I no longer climb
  To the Fine Arts tower.
Now I am descending to the seacoast city
Going from gallery to gallery
With my portfolio of paintings,
I see that grimed sign
  Down corridors of doors:
  THIS DOOR DOES NOT OPEN
  THIS DOOR DOES NOT OPEN
  DOES NOT OPEN
And turn away
For I know what I would find:
Frayed mops   battered buckets
  stubbed brooms
Old sunsets ground to pigment