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| Harry Kemp circa 1920 in a suit two sizes too small.... |
In
the visual arts stuff variously labeled
folk art, outsider art, and primitive art has become a hot
commodity, as any addict of Antiques Road Show can tell
you. Collectors pay big prices,
galleries and museums host hot shows, and serious critics and academics review and analyze.
Alas
it is very different in the literary world,
especially with poetry. There are at any time hundreds of thousands
of folks in this country committing
poetry who have no academic training,
no association with established schools
of poetry, no publication in highly regarded literary journals or little
magazines. Yet they write any way
and seek public attention any way they can get it. In the old days they deluged the columns of local newspapers that were grateful for free space fillers and maybe hopeful of a few extra copies sold to be
given to the writer’s friends or relatives.
Some self-published collections,
which despite the success of Walt
Whitman and others, were generally dismissed and vanity projects. Once in a
great while some of these books would catch on with the public and the poets would
go on to some success—think of the Hoosier
poet James Whitcomb Riley or Vachel Lindsay’s Poems to be Traded for Bread—but their reputation with the literary
establishment would be tainted by their origin.
In
more modern times, they pay entrance
fees for mostly bogus poetry contests and pay through the nose for copies
of anthologies including their work
and made up of submissions by anyone who could lick a stamp and seal an
envelope. These days they post to
any of dozens of poetry web pages,
or in their own blogs and web pages.
That would include the proprietor of this pop stand.
Admittedly
the vast majority of all of this feverish
work is not very good. In fact, much
is downright painful. But the law of averages tells us that there must be native genius among the dross. In fact, exceptional poets and poetry can
be found. But they will seldom get
recognized unless they also follow more traditional academic and literary paths.
C’est
la vie.
All
of this yammering prologue is by way of introducing Harry Kemp, a poet who with great self-promotion went out of his way to portray himself as an
outsider and naïve scribbler. In that guise he defied expectations and became
quite popular with the public. His books sold briskly and like Robert Service—although very different
from him—became a favorite of the demographic usually most averse to verse—adolescent
boys.
Before
his death, Kemp had faded back into obscurity
and is virtually forgotten today.
That obscurity is largely due to that self-created image. But Kemp was in fact a polished and
accomplished poet who was associated with many of the leading figures of the avant
garde over a long period of time and thus a member of a “school” and
even got his necessary academic ticket
punched albeit at a Midwestern
university and not an Ivy League
bastion. If he hadn’t tried so hard to
obscure all of that, he might be better remembered today.
Kemp
was born December 15, 1883 in Youngstown,
Ohio, the only son of a candy maker. He was raised mostly by a grandmother and was
evidently restless. At age 17 he left
home and made his way to the east coast where
he shipped out as a merchant seaman in 1900 after a few short years at sea he
took off across America, riding the
rails as a hobo. Thus he came by the experience on which
he built a persona honestly.
He
ceased his travels long enough to attend the University of Kansas. Although
he did not graduate, he stayed long enough to pick up an interest in poetry and
refine his skills. While still in Lawrence, he began to have success in
selling poems to newspaper and national magazines. His early poems were formal and traditional,
but showed great technical master and a willingness to undertake unusual
subject matter.
After
leaving school, he came to Greenwich Village
in New York City, even then the epicenter of avant garde artists, intellectuals, and radicals, all of whom were soon his companions, comrades, mentors,
and peers. Supporting himself at odd jobs and by sales of verse to
magazines, he was able to publish his first collection, The Cry of Youth and a
long poem The Farmer’s Wife in 1914.
Kemp would still strike out on rambles,
but returned to the village.
If
the West Coast writer and Socialist Jack London had been an
inspiration for his early adventures at
sea and on rail, in the village he fell under the spell of Eugene O’Neill, who had also gone to
see. Both were associated with the Provincetown Players and Kemp was cast as one of the
seamen in O’Neill’s first play, Bound East for Cardiff. He began to spend summers with the troop at Provincetown on Cape
Cod which would eventually become his year round home.
Amongst
the places Kemp visited on his rambles, and sometimes stayed at for a while,
were various utopian communities he
came across beginning with Upton
Sinclair’s Helicon Home Colony in Englewood,
New Jersey in 1906 or ’07, when it
burned down. The two would remain close
until Kemp, a strapping six-footer with blonde hair and a notorious ladies man, had an affair with Sinclair’s
first wife Mett Fuller resulting in their
divorce in 1911, and lending a touch to titillating scandal to Kemp’s name.
In
1920 Kemp published the collection that made his reputation, Chanteys
and Ballads: Sea-Chanteys, Tramp-Ballads and Other Ballads and Poems. His style was fresh and conversational and he
had colorful stories to tell. Taking to
the lecture platform like Vachel
Lindsay, Kemp began to promote himself as the Vagabond Poet, the Villon of
America, the Hobo Poet, and the Tramp Poet.
This
reputation was cemented two years later when Tramping on Life: An
Autobiographical Narrative —thought to be “enhanced”—was published. There were a slew of hobo memoirs published
in the years after World War I and
well into the Depression years—think
of Boxcar
Bertha and Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, a late entry in the
genre—but Kemp’s entertaining book was among the most popular, as was his 1926
follow-up More Miles: An Autobiographical Novel.
Tramping on Life was successful enough
to finance Kemp’s early ‘20’s sojourn to Paris
to hobnob with the expatriate crowd there.
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| Harry Kemp's shack in the Provincetown dunes. |
By
the late ‘20’s Kemp made Provincetown his home base permanently, although he
continued to travel. He built a little
shack out in the dunes of Cape Cod.
Hardly a hermit, he
encouraged visits by the summer people who
flocked to the Cape in season, regaled them with stories, and was always willing
to sell them volumes of his verse.
Over
the years he published several more volumes of poetry, although none ever had
the success of Chanteys and Ballads, as
well as a collection of short plays and
a novel, Mabel Tarner, An American Primitive in 1936.
During
the World War II years Kemp
abandoned his radicalism and
self-proclaim anarchism and turned
much more conservative. He adopted Christianity, a path followed almost simultaneously with the IWW poet, artist, and editor Ralph Chaplain. In 1946 he
published The Poet’s Life of Christ in
which he described Jesus as a divine hobo and the super tramp. All of this alienated Kemp from most of
his former circle of writers and artists.
He
published two more books of poetry, Provincetown Tideways in 1948 and Poet
of the Dunes in 1952. which he mostly peddled in Provincetown in his
adopted role of local color character.
He
died in obscurity on August 15, 1960
in Provincetown at the age 76. He is
locally recalled there by a street, Harry
Kemp Way. Tourists can still
purchase copies of his books about the Cape and the Dunes at local souvenir shops.
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| Portrait of Harry Kemp in middle age by S. Edmund Oppenheim. |
A Poet’s Room
(Greenwich Village 1912)
I have a table,
cot and chair
And nothing
more. The walls are bare
Yet I confess
that in my room
Lie Syrian rugs
rich from the loom,
Stand statues
poised on flying toe,
Hang tapestries
with folk a-flow
As the wind
takes them to and fro,
And workman
fancy has inlaid
My walls with
ivory and jade.
Though opening
on a New York street
Full of cries
and hurrying feet
My window is a
faery space
That gives on
each imagined place;
Old ruins lost
in a desert peace;
The broken fanes
and shrines of Greece;
Aegean islands
fringed with foam;
The everlasting
tops of Rome;
Troy flowing red
with skyward flame,
And every spot
of hallowed fame.
Outside my
window I can see
The sweet blue
lake of Galilee,
And Carmel’s
purple-regioned height
And Sinai
clothed with stars and night.
But this is told
in confidence,
So not a word
when you go hence,
For if my
landlord once but knew
My attic fetched
so large a view,
The churl would
never rest content
Till he had
raised the monthly rent.
—Harry Kemp
I’ve Decked the
Tops
I’ve decked the
tops of flying cars
That leaped
across the night;
The long and
level coaches skimmed
Low, like a
swallow's flight.
Close to the
sleet-bit blinds I’ve clung
Rocking on and
on;
All night I’ve
crouched in empty cars
That rode into
the dawn,
Seeing the
ravelled edge of life
In jails, on
rolling freights
And learning
rough and ready ways
From rough and
ready mates.
—Harry Kemp
At Sea I Learned
The Weather
At sea I learned
the weather,
At sea I learned
to know
That waves raged
not forever,
Winds did not
ever blow.
I learned that, ‘mid
the thunder,
Was nothing
might avail
But lying to and
riding
The storm with
scanted sail,
Knowing that
calm would follow
Filled full of
golden light
Though hail and
thunder deafened
The watches of
the night.
And, now today I’m
sailing
The changing
seas no more,
But tied up to a
woman
And snug and
safe ashore,
With pipe and ‘baccy
handy
And Sal still
loving me -
I tell you that
I’m thankful
For things I
learned at sea!
—Harry Kemp
