Dispatch from the Archives is a regular column about work previously published in Southwest Review. The magazine is the third-longest-running literary quarterly in the United States, and its archives date back to 1915. This edition looks at a poem from Karle Wilson Baker (published under the pen name Charlotte Wilson) and a letter from the editor in volume 1, number 1.
Every fall, the monarchs surprise me. One or two flashes of wings in August. And then a flurry of orange all at once.
Growing up here in Dallas, I always associated the butterflies with the start of the school year. Those weightless bodies floating above the soccer field, impossible to catch. Their migration pattern, even more impossible. They travel south from all across North America, funneling down through Texas, crossing into Mexico for the winter—sometimes flying more than a hundred miles in a single day. And despite their transience, they feel so tied to place. A monarch: just a wink of home catching sunlight through a pair of wings.
I come to literature for the same feeling. A flash of recognition that someone, somewhere, has wanted to belong. Or has questioned belonging. Or has simply had a meaningful experience in a place; has moved on. When I consider the magazine archives here at Southwest Review, I often feel overwhelmed by all those experiences collected on the shelves. Where to start? How to pick a story or poem to consider?
I was asking myself these questions when I came to the page to write this column (because, well, I had a deadline). And it was the nature of that time pressure, that overwhelm, which led me to realize I had never gone all the way back to the first issue. We don’t even have a physical copy of the June 1915 issue in the office. I dug up two particularly bright items in the digital version of our inaugural issue—originally published as The Texas Review.
The first item is the sheer number of women in that issue. Out of eleven contributors, four were women. One woman, let alone four women, in a magazine published in 1915? Before these women had the right to vote? Impossible! I jumped straight into their contributions, and one poem imprinted itself upon me. As poems tend to do.
Karle Wilson Baker was a historic Texas poet you’ve probably never heard of. She originally published as Charlotte Wilson so readers wouldn’t confuse Karle for a man’s name. She lived and wrote in Nacogdoches, Texas, and in the years following her publication in The Texas Review, she went on to become the first female named as a fellow and president of the Texas Institute of Letters. This poem later appeared in Wilson’s collection Dreamers on Horseback, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (ultimately losing out to some guy named Robert Frost). The poem in this book is a longer version than below, and it builds out an argument around writing and artmaking. But I much prefer it in this 1915 form—distilled. A poet reaching up to snatch a little heaven as it falls to the ground. Here is her poem in the issue:
POET’S SONG.
Dropp’d feathers from the Wings of God
My little songs and snatches are,
So light He does not heed them fall,
As He goes by, from star to star.
Dropp’d feathers from the Wings of God
I find and braid them in my hair.
Men heed them not, they only make
My soul unto herself more fair.
I immediately printed this poem, thumbtacked it to the wall in the SwR office, copied down another version for home. There’s something both final and fleeting about this poem. While it’s formally sure of itself, it’s also clear that poems happen to this poet. I tend to feel this way about my own writing process—that poems arrive to me from something outside myself. A single note. A flash of light. A wing’s flutter. A thought falling right in front of me, that I’d be lucky to catch. In the way you might catch a glimpse, catch a feeling.
Especially as a contemporary reader, I’m so struck by the gendered nature of the second stanza. The poet clearly delineates between men and women; the soul could have been identified as “itself,” and yet the poem argues that the artistic, divine self (the “soul unto herself”) is tied to an experience as a woman. That her beauty is derived not from a male’s gaze, but from poetic self-worth. And for how delightful this poem is—with its feathers and its star-jumping god—that landing point feels incredibly (at the risk of sounding too academic) badass.
I was ready to spend an entire essay on this one poem, but another piece in this issue also caught my attention: “On Reeking of the Soil” appears at the end of the issue. It’s a letter from the editor detailing the mission (or the un-mission, as he might say) of the magazine. Seeing this title so close to Wilson’s poem had me thinking about the heaven-earth connections most of us writers brood over.
The letter from the editor outlines a primary goal, “to speak with [the world] in its finer and quieter moments.” He cautions against misunderstanding “reeking of the soil” as a romanticized term that could be confused “by literary experts who never knew the soil.” Rather than “studying softly, or sniffing at life,” the magazine would attempt to discover the reek of lived experiences, to highlight the unusual or strange, to dig into the grit. And where else to find it than a place like Texas: where the “East of Texas is like Mississippi and Ohio and Middle France; the South is like Louisiana and Trieste; Austin is violet and open like Greece; and the West reminds always of Mexico and North Africa.” The magazine, then, might dream of reeking of the whole world.
I like to think Southwest Review shares that same mission today. It’s both an expansive and a humble goal. One grounded in an experience of place. A desire to tether overly romantic thoughts to the soil itself. I think of Baker’s poem, the humility in the argument that her writing process is derived from the divine, alongside the surety that her soul-worth is enmeshed in her experience as a woman. Gravity might suggest that any offering from above lands, eventually, on the ground. And I guess it’s up to us whether or not we pick it up.
Hannah Smith is a poet from Dallas. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.
Illustration: Jonas Kalmbach
