Others: a magazine of the new verse (Grantwood, N.J., New York, 1915-1919). Special Collections Rare Books 3598.68905. Art editor William Zorach. Full searchable text at Modernist Journals: https://modjourn.org/journal/others/ Its motto: “The old expressions are with us always, and there are always others.”
“Others: A Magazine of the New Verse was an American literary magazine founded by Alfred Kreymborg in July 1915 with financing from Walter Conrad Arensberg. The magazine ran until July, 1919. It was based in New York City and published poetry and other writing, as well as visual art. While the magazine never had more than 300 subscribers, it helped launch the careers of several important American modernist poets. Contributors included: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Man Ray, Skipwith Cannell, Lola Ridge, Marcel Duchamp, and Fenton Johnson (poet) (the only African American published in the magazine).” –Suzanne W. Churchill, Modernist Journals https://modjourn.org
On a Sunday in April 1916, Floss Williams threw a party for her husband, William Carlos Williams, and his friends at their home in Rutherford, New Jersey. By all accounts guests began arriving in the morning, continuing throughout the day and into the night. Mrs. Williams fed them all day and night, with the help of several women who accompanied the men.
“In New York Williams was just another figure, another artist among artists, whose particular comings and goings were hardly noticed. But when the village descended on Rutherford, that was another story. As happened, for example, in April 1916, when Williams decided to throw a big bash for the Others crowd. It was still early spring, as the two photographs of the crowd taken that Sunday—one of the men and the other of the women—show. Alanson Hartpence was there, and Alfred Kreymborg in hat and wild bow tie, and of course Williams with Mother Kitty… There were others not in the photographs who showed up during that morning and afternoon and evening as the party got under way and the Williamses wined and dined the crowd into the next morning. Williams remembered Skip Cannell jumping half drunkenly onto the running board of his car as he drove over to Ed’s house to get some more ice.”–Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (2016).
The well-known photograph [above] of the men who wrote for Others magazine are:
Front row left to right: Alanson Hartpence, Alfred Kreymborg, William Carlos Williams, Skip Cannell. Back row: Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, Walter Arensberg, Man Ray, Robert Alden Sanborn, Maxwell Bodenheim.
But who are the women in the other photograph? Did any of them write or publish in Others, even in Helen Hoyt’s “Woman’s Number”? See the anthology Others: A Magazine of the New Verse in 1916 or take a look in the individual issues, you can read full-text here: https://modjourn.org/journal/others/
This week’s project:
Who were the women of the Others group and which woman appears as a character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms?
Mail your answer to jmellby@princeton.edu
In case it is helpful, a second photograph of some of the ladies turns up in “Further Conversations With Flossie,” William Carlos Williams Newsletter 3, no. 1 (1977): 1-7. www.jstor.org/stable/24564477
