‘For December’: Comp. December 1928 at Réanville. The poem is an acrostic of ‘HENRY’.
‘1929’s Spring Poem’: Comp. March 1929 at Réanville.
‘The Boeuf Blues’: Comp. in Paris 1929 or 1930, dedicated in NC’s notes to Henry [Crowder]. This poem also appeared in Henry-Music as ‘Memory Blues’ (Réanville: The Hours Press, 1930).
‘The Chilean Sonnets’: Comp. 9 June 1940 in Concón, Pacifico, Chile. NC also notes that Mijito is ‘A Chileanism: My dear’.
‘Equatorial Way’: Comp. 1930 at Réanville, pub. Henry-Music (The Hours Press, December 1930) and The Crisis (New York, February 1931).
‘Southern Sheriff’: This poem first appeared in the Negro Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (1934), in the Poetry section subtitled ‘by White Poets’ which included poems by Alfred Kreymborg, Louis Zukofsky, and William Plomer, among others.
‘Rape’: NC’s papers include the following note. ‘London, June 1933, Published in one of my leaflets for Scottsboro Defense that summer. And in “The Afro-American”, October 7, 1933.’ ‘To Haywood Patterson in jail, framed up on the vicious “rape” lie, twice condemned to death, despite conclusive and maximum proof of his innocence – and to the eight other Scottsboro boys. June, 1933 (In the American Southern States, after Emancipation changed the Negro’s status from that of a white master’s valuable property to one of uttermost economic and social serfdom, the favourite charge brought against him is the lie of “raping white women”. It operates somewhat in the way I have written it here, which leads to an actual or a “legal” lynching.)’
‘At Dawn’: Comp. 9 June, 1940 at Concón, Pacifico, Chile.
‘June for Freedom – June for Italy’: Comp. June 11, 1944.
‘Réanville’: NC explains the origin of the poem: ‘Just returned to Paris, Hadley Mowrer (first wife of Ernest Hemingway and wife now of Paul Scott Mowrer, brother of Edgar Ansell Mowrer, specialist on Germany) says she is spending her days shaking out the curtains of the E. A. Mowrer flat in the Rue de l’Universite, uninhabited since the war began. She says it all smells of cheese. And I am in Normandy, in my once house. July 15, 1945.’ ‘Rue Jadin, Night, July 15, 1945, Paris’.
‘In the Studio’: Comp. 1923 in Eugene McCown’s Paris studio on the Rue Campagne Première, while he was painting her portrait.
‘In San Gimignano’: NC’s typescript of the poem notes that it was composed in the Hotel Flora, Frascati on the night of 31 January. She adds that she’s ‘remembering the day in San Gimignano at the beginning of December 1952’, giving the poem a probable composition date.
‘June for Italy – June For Freedom’: Comp. 11 June 1944. On NC’s typescript there is also a small map of southern Italy indicating the movement of an expanding military offensive. For Gawsworth see note to ‘The Poet to His Wars’, above.
‘Kikuyu’: Comp. November 1952 at Bordighera.
‘Jaime’: Comp. dawn, 3 February 1960 at Hotel Inglés, Valencia.
‘Late-Night Sonnet’: Comp. in bed on 5 November 1962 at Hotel Divan, Gourdon, Lot, France. According to NC ‘Mart’ is a reference to Chaucer’s name for war.
‘Letter’: Comp. 7 January 1965 (additional typescript is dated 9 January 1965). Cunard’s biographer, Lois Gordon, incorrectly refers to this as a ‘prose poem’. For a discussion of the poem and its dedicatee, refer to the Introduction.
‘Lincoln’: Comp. ‘in the United States, Summer 1932’, pub. The Daily Gleaner, Jamaica, 21 July 1932.
‘The Love Story’: Comp. date on typescript is given as 1919.
‘¿Me Oyes, Mijito?’: Comp. April 1940, Santiago, Chile.
‘Mosley 1943’: Comp. 25 November 1943, Half-Moon Street, London.
‘Myself’: Comp. August 1919, Turks Croft, Sussex.
‘And an Afternoon’: Comp. according to NC’s notes ‘In a Lyons near the Strand, London, 5 March 1942.’
‘April, 1942’: Comp. April 1942, Queen Street, London.
‘Saturday Night in “The Golden Lion”’: Comp. October 1942, London. Nina Hamnett (1890–1956) was a Welsh artist and writer. his poem appears to be part of the sequence ‘Nights’.
‘October–November Night in “The Coach & Horses”’: Comp. London 1942. This poem also appears to be part of the sequence ‘Nights’.
‘Of a Glass Stopper Found in the Sea at Collioure s. w. France, in 1951’: Comp. end of July 1961, Lamothe, France. Valentine Ackland (1906–1969) was an English poet and the partner of Sylvia Townsend-Warner.
‘Pisces Pulled Plough’: Comp. 26–28 February 1953 in Frascati, Italy.
‘“Come, Liberating Wine!”’: Comp. 4 January at Café Bellver, Hotel Cannes, and 5 Jan 1960 in Palma, Spain.
‘Oath – History Repeats’: Comp. 3 February 1960 in Valencia, Spain.
‘By Their Faces Shall Ye Known Them’: Comp. 26 February in Palma, Spain.
‘From Prison’: Comp. 14 March 1960 in Valencia, Spain.
‘You’: Comp. January 1941, Maraval, Trinidad.
Further Reading
Works by Nancy Cunard
Outlaws (London: Elkin Matthews, 1921)
Sublunary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923)
Parallax (London: Hogarth Press, 1925)
Poems Two 1925 (London: Aquila Press, 1930)
Relève into Maquis (Derby: Grasshopper Press, 1944)
Man–Ship–Tank–Gun–Plane. A Poem (London, n. p., 1944)
Poems of Nancy Cunard: From the Bodleian Library, ed. John Lucas (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2005)
Henry-Music, ed. Nancy Cunard (Paris: The Hours Press, 1930)
Black Man and White Ladyship, An Anniversary (London: The Utopia Press, 1931)
Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (London: Wishart & Co., 1934)
Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War, ed. Nancy Cunard (London: Left Review, 1937)
The White Man’s Duty: An Analysis of the Colonial Question, with George Padmore (London: W. H. Allen, 1942)
Poems for France: Written by British Poets on France Since the War (London: La France Libre, 1944), published in French as Poèmes à la France (Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1944)
Nous Gens D’Espagne (Perpignan: Imprimerie Labau, 1949)
Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954)
G.M.: Memories of George Moore (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956)
These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, 1928–1931, ed. Hugh Ford (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969)
Thoughts About Ronald Firbank, foreword by Miriam J. Benkovitz (New York: Albondocani Press, 1971)
Essays on Race and Empire, ed. Maureen Moynagh (Ormskirk: Broadview, 2002)
Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol, ed. Pablo Neruda and Nancy Cunard (Réanville: The Hours Press, 1937), republished in Spanish as Los poetas del mundo defienden al pueblo español (Seville: Renacimiento, 2002/2010)
Selected Works about Nancy Cunard
Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (London: Wildwood House, 1981)
David Ayers, ‘The Waste Land, Nancy Cunard and Mina Loy’, in Modernism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
Anthony Barnett, Listening for Henry Crowder: A Monograph on His Almost Lost Music (Lewes: Allardyce & Barnett, 2007)
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986)
Anne Chisholm, Nancy Cunard: A Biography (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979)
Henry Crowder, As Wonderful as All That?: Henry Crowder’s Memoir of His Affair with Nancy Cunard 1928–1935 (Navarro, California: Wild Trees Press, 1987)
James Donald, Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics, and Modernist Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
Jane Dowson, Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910–1939: Resisting Femininity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002)
Daphne Winifred Fielding, Emerald and Nancy: Lady Cunard and her Daughter (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968)
Su
san Stanford Friedman, ‘Nancy Cunard’, in Bonnie Kime-Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
Hugh Ford, ed., Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel, 1896–1965. (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Co., 1968)
Lois Gordon, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)
Maroula Joannou, ‘Nancy Cunard’s English Journey’, in Feminist Review, 78, 2004
Jane Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003)
Maureen Moynagh, ‘Cunard Lines: Political Tourism and its Texts’, New Formations 34 (Summer, 1998), pp. 70–90
Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Laura Winkiel, Modernism, Race and Manifestos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Laura Winkiel, ‘Nancy Cunard’s Negro and the Transnational Politics of Race’, Modernism/Modernity, vol. 13.3, 2006
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the assistance and support staff at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin Libraries. In particular, I am indebted to the wisdom, guidance, and patience of Richard Watson and his team. Additional research libraries (and their excellent staff) that accommodated my visits and requests include Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Room, and King’s College (Cambridge).
Without the enthusiastic support of Michael Schmidt at Carcanet this book – and the reprinted works of other important modernists – would not have been possible. I am fortunate to have been awarded an AHRC/BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker award, which has provided a platform for sharing Nancy Cunard’s work and incredible life with a wider audience. I am also indebted to the University of Liverpool for providing me with the time to complete this volume.
One of the great joys of this project has been meeting those with passionate knowledge of either Cunard or her many contexts. My thanks to Maroula Joannou, Jane Dowson, Kathy Mezei, Tory Young, the late Jane Marcus and, not least, Anthony Barnett, whose encyclopedic work on Henry Crowder deserves the highest praise. A dedicated group of Cunardians became known to me as I was working on this edition. I have benefited from being in touch with Adam Ghanii, Rachel Farebrother, and Jenny Greenshields, and I hope to carry on those conversations about their own remarkable research.
My thanks to Stuart Rawlinson for his invaluable assistance in transcribing these poems from various sources and for his sharp, academic eye. And to James Byrne, as always, for his invaluable advice and support.
About the Author
NANCY CUNARD was a poet, publisher, journalist and political activist. Born on 10 March 1896 in Nevill Holt, Leicestershire, Nancy was the great-granddaughter of shipping magnate Sir Samuel Cunard and the only child of Sir Bache and Lady Maud (Emerald) Cunard. Raised amid wealth and privilege, she began writing poetry during World War I and later authored two poetry collections, Outlaws (1921) and Sublunary (1923), as well as numerous chapbooks. As founder and editor of the Hours Press in La Chapelle-Réanville, France, Cunard was responsible for the appearance of major works by Modern writers including Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, and George Moore. In the 1930s she embarked on a life-long advocacy of political and social movements. During the Spanish Civil War and World War II, Cunard enlisted in the moral cause against Fascism and anti-imperialism, producing pamphlets in support of resistance movements and writing eye-witness reports for newspapers in the UK and the US. Following a relationship with the African American Jazz musician Henry Crowder, Cunard was essentially disinherited by her mother and spent the final decades of her life tirelessly advocating for her two great passions, poetry and social justice. Following a period of physical and mental breakdown, on 16 March 1965 she died alone in an open ward of the Hôpital Cochin, Paris.
SANDEEP PARMAR is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She is the author of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (2011) and Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman (2014), a critical study of the modernist writer Mina Loy’s literary archive. She has authored two books of poetry, The Marble Orchard (2012) and Eidolon (2015).
Copyright
Despite the publisher’s efforts to digitally reproduce the print edition, formatting may be affected by the e-reader and its font settings.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by CARCANET PRESS Ltd
Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester, M2 7AQ
This e-book edition first published in 2017.
Poems by Nancy Cunard © the Estate of Nancy Cunard, 2016
Selection, introduction, and editorial matter © Sandeep Parmar, 2016
The right of Sandeep Parmar be identified as the editor of this work and the author of its introduction and notes has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved.
This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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