Harriet Monroe
damaged Wallace Stevens' great
poem, "Sunday Morning":
text halved, and rearranged. Me---
submit to editors' whims?
Kyakuchuu
[jlc]
Author's Notes/Comments:
Harriet Monroe, the first and founding editor of Poetry (Chicago) agreed to print only four of the eight stanzas of Wallace Stevens' great poem, Sunday Morning. The four stanzas she accepted were then printed out of their original order, making the poem significantly different than Stevens' original. Unfortunately, at that time, Stevens poetic reputation was not yet great enough to insist on a correction. The original format appeared in the first collection he published, Harmonium (1923). Between July, 1994, when the Lord called me to poetry and June, 2001, when I first joined the internet, I published my poems in mostly in small magazines, at the tyranny of some rather objectionable editors. My first internet publisher, Albert Victor, founder and first editor of Starlite Cafe, did not even allow correction typos except under extreme circumstances. After a year or so of that, happy browsing brought me to Postpoems and to my present publisher, Jason Minton, a Gentleman among gentlemen, who has treated me with all the courtesy and kindness with which Alfred A. Knopf treated Wallace Stevens.
