Jessie Dismorr - Promenades & Other Verse

Jessie Dismorr - Promenades & Other Verse

Forgotten Poets #21 / forgottenpoets.substack.com

'Promenades & Other Verse' [94 pages] brings together, for the first time, a generous selection of English poet Jessie Dismorr's uncollected poems and restored illustrations and drawings from the 1910s. Dismorr was one of the earliest abstract artists in England, exhibited alongside the Fauvists, later joined Wyndham Lewis' Vorticist movement, and was published in the underground journals Blast (1915), and The Little Review (edited by Margaret Anderson, 1919). Dismorr's poetry is uncompromisingly avant-garde, as fresh today as it was 100 years ago. John Rodker wrote of her work; ""As far as I am concerned, Miss Dismorr is one of the most important contributors to The Little Review today and four lines of her work outweigh the effusions of most others of your staff."

. . . . . . . . .

-: The Enemy: -

The microbe that inhabits my body makes

me sick; but it is he that pushes me to impossible

and exasperated feats of skill. He drinks my strength,

then pushes me to unwilling exploration.

. . . . . . . . .

-: Landscapes: -

The immense gray sky, wheeling towards me

and on to me, against it I have-what resource?

In the swarthy limbs of the trees that march over me

as I lie pallid, holding to the earth, what danger!

Nevertheless a creature thus drugged and bound

by immortality, am I not already destroyed

by the rigorous onrush of time?

. . . . . . . . .

-: S-D-: -

Having pricked the polished surfaces of

life and defaced them and having dammed

in thin close limits of expediency the perilous tides

of affection she now for sole occupation

cherishes a little pure flame,

thin as a mist without heat.

. . . . . . . . .

The Forgotten Poets Newsletter presents: new collections of out-of-print and obscure poetry, with a focus on compressed & fragmented 'free' and 'new' verse from the late-1800s & early-1900s, & the early history of English-language tanka & haiku. Verses are carefully selected & spaciously laid-out, adorned with illustrations & ornaments from the books & magazines they originally appeared in.