{"id":1215,"date":"2018-01-19T07:57:06","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T07:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1215"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:50:56","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:50:56","slug":"bartholomew-brinkman-poetic-modernism-in-the-culture-of-mass-print","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2018\/01\/19\/bartholomew-brinkman-poetic-modernism-in-the-culture-of-mass-print\/","title":{"rendered":"Bartholomew Brinkman. Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Bartholomew Brinkman. Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print<\/h1>\n\n
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Editor<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Bartholomew Brinkman. Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print<\/em><\/a>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. ix, 272p., ill. ISBN 9781421421346. US $50.00.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bartholomew Brinkman\u2019s surprising, skillfully argued Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print<\/em> is about collecting and collectors. It is about the ways \u2013 both mundane and extraordinary \u2013 poems are produced, encountered, consumed, and archived. Brinkman sketches a \u201ccontinuum of collecting practices\u201d from the careful conservation of the book collector (who craves unifying systems and narratives) to the seemingly haphazard accumulations of the scrapbooker (whose interest is less in \u201ccompletion\u201d than in the pleasures of contrast and juxtaposition) (5).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The introduction\u2019s work of defining and historicizing book collecting and scrapbooking is dense, and Brinkman spares no detail, but the care he takes pays off as he moves into the body of the book, a mostly chronological study of various sites of poetry collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book has five chapters and a coda. Chapter 1 studies the cultural influence of the anthology, looking at Francis Turner Palgrave\u2019s precedent setting Golden Treasury<\/em> (1861). Brinkman traces the influence of Palgrave\u2019s editorial practice and his belief in \u201cobjective poetic value\u201d on the canon-shaping anthologies of the New Critics and eventually the modern poetry archive, the subject of the book\u2019s final chapter. In Chapter 2, on periodicals, Brinkman contrasts Harriet Monroe\u2019s curatorial use of white space in Poetry Magazine <\/em>\u2013 which allowed poems to be savored as singular works of art \u2013 with the chaotic assemblages of popular magazines like Life <\/em>that placed poems right in the middle of everything, creating an embedded discourse in the play of disparate but adjacent texts. This, he argues, \u201cencouraged radical intertextuality,\u201d giving poems \u201csocial purchase\u201d (94). This kind of radical intertextuality characterizes Marianne Moore\u2019s personal scrapbooks, the focus of Chapter 4, \u201cScrapping Modernism: Marianne Moore and the Making of the Modern Collage Poem.\u201d This is the chapter that pulled the book together for me. Brinkman\u2019s useful phrase, \u201cscrappy poetics,\u201d allows him to argue for a reading of Moore\u2019s entire oeuvre<\/em>, from the scrapbooks that predate her poetry through long poems such as \u201cAn Octopus\u201d and \u201cMarriage,\u201d as a poetics of collage that deliberately embraces feminine artistic practice. Moore\u2019s collage aesthetic, often regarded as her entre into masculine avant-gardism and the high modernist poetic canon, becomes an unapologetically feminine practice in Brinkman\u2019s telling. Recasting Moore as a scrapbooker and insisting on \u201cthe scrapbooker [as] an active participant in reshaping and re-presenting mass print culture,\u201d Brinkman opens up new ways of considering the long collage poems of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams (108). He suggests, for example, that we read The Waste Land <\/em>as \u201ca violent assemblage of texts\u201d not unlike \u201cMoore\u2019s own conflation of poems and other textual materials in her scrapbooks . . . [and her] yoking together of quotations in her collage poems\u201d (138).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chapters 4 and 5 neatly turn back from the exuberant, plastic juxtapositions of the scrapbooker to two of the formal institutions most responsible for codifying and calcifying our modern poetry canon: (1) selected and collected poems; and (2) the modern poetry archive. Brinkman\u2019s close reading of Eliot\u2019s editorial decisions in assembling the selected poems of Pound, Moore, and Kipling, and his argument that we should pay attention to the role of New Critics in building the archives we rely on as scholars of poetry bring the book full circle, back to Palgrave\u2019s \u201cobjective anthology\u201d and the ideological ramifications of selection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This meticulously researched and exhaustively argued book is a fascinating print-culture approach to modern poetry that will be of interest to scholars of modernist poetry, canon formation, periodical studies, book history, and archival studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melissa Bradshaw
Loyola University Chicago<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bartholomew Brinkman. Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. ix, 272p., ill. ISBN 9781421421346. US $50.00. Bartholomew Brinkman\u2019s surprising, skillfully argued Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print is about collecting and collectors. It is about the ways \u2013 both mundane and extraordinary \u2013 poems are produced, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1897,1947,1948,1950,1952],"class_list":["post-1215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-20th-century","tag-periodicals-news","tag-poetry","tag-print-culture","tag-provenance-collecting"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1215"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5736,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions\/5736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}