It’s 1914. A single mother is listening to her 4-year-old talk to her imaginary playmate. Has this always happened? Did children in pharaonic Egypt or ancient Ur exercise their fresh language skills and nascent social skills with such fancies while being buckled into their camel child-seats? There was no Mesopotamian Facebook — the only way we’d know this would be if someone wrote it down. No such accounts survive.

This mother was a professor of English at Smith College, associated with artists: visual artists, writers, musicians. She wrote poetry, and I’ve read she knew Robert Frost and Walter De La Mare. She chose, as an artist might do, as a mother might do, to write down some of the things that her child was saying.

At some later point, the daughter was asked if she knew what her mother was doing. “No, she was always scribbling” the daughter replied, she made nothing of it. Eventually, her mother revealed that she was writing down what the child was saying as poetry. What the child invented and spoke — at first to her imaginary friend, and now to her mother — was transcribed by the mother into lines and stanzas. The mother’s name was Grace Conkling, her child/poet was Hilda Conkling.

Short, compressed, Modernist free-verse was becoming a thing in America. Ezra Pound’s first Imagist anthology and Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems  were published in 1914. Edgar Lee Masters’ The Spoon River Anthology was released on New Years Day in 1915. The child’s mother was savvy enough to know that a few lines with fresh, direct imagery could be a poem even without strict meter or rhyme.

Over the next few years the mother and child produced poetry this way: the child speaking it, the mother writing it down. Some of the poems were sent to magazines by the mother, and they were published.*  In 1920, a book-length volume of the poetry, Poems of a Little Girl,  was published. It was successful enough that two other Hilda Conkling collections soon followed. Amy Lowell wrote a preface to the first Conkling book. I read this week that Louis Untermeyer called Hilda “the most gifted of all” child geniuses. Rimbaud, dead for 30 years, couldn’t complain. When the editors of our pair of 1922/1923 poetry anthologies for kids made their choices, they included four of Hilda Conkling’s poems, an unusually high number. Only Wordsworth and De La Mare had five selections in the volume that included Conkling — Shakespeare or Robert Louis Stevenson only warranted 3 each.

As I revealed earlier this month, Conkling’s poems are the only Modernist poetry in the Girls and Boys Book of Verse.**   That may somewhat account for that level of representation. The first two sentences in that book’s foreword say:

“Because real lovers of poetry know that time and place are of little importance, the poems in this book are brought together with no sense of the period in which they were written. From “The Song of Solomon” to Hilda Conkling’s “Spring Song” they are here because they are beautiful, with a beauty that neither years nor events can change.”

So, Conkling is there to represent the here and now, a representative not only for being the most recently published, but because she still hadn’t reached the age of 12 when those words were written — she wasn’t just content for an audience of boys or girls, she was still a young girl, plausibly a future as much as a present.

Verse for children? I’m children, and a Modernist too!

.

Those who’ve been reading along this month know that since our anthologists decided to produce a gendered pair of books, The Girls Book of Verse  and The Boys Book of Verse,  I’m asking readers here this National Poetry Month to guess which book included the poem of this little girl. Answer below.

Hilda Conkling is now largely forgotten. When one looks at the published poems today, they still have their charms. When I’ve tired of reading so much derivative and rote late 19^th century poetry and those 20^th century poets who didn’t even try to “make it new” Conkling’s poems can be refreshingly free of the dead hand of influence or fears of being scored on exacting verse-craft. There are still effective lines in many of them. Unpretentious but striking images pop out. Professor/mother Grace Conkling was adamant that she didn’t edit the poems, that as their process developed she would read the transcribed poems to Hilda and that she would always obey Hilda’s corrections of anything she got wrong. What’s unsaid is how much selection or excision Grace did, what poems never were transcribed as unremarkable or if any lines were never transferred from scribbled notes to manuscript. Young Hilda Conkling wouldn’t be the first artist whose work was magnified by a sharp blue pencil and a shortening scissor wielded by a skilled editor.

Somewhere around the time the Hilda Conkling books were published, mother Grace, perhaps wanting Hilda to try her wings as a now literate adolescent, suggested that Hilda start writing down her poems herself. This seemed to break the spell. Some of Hilda’s published poems show a clear desire to not only emulate her mother, but to please her in doing so, so a motivation might have been stilled. Another factor: Grace may not have realized that like a “cold reader” charlatan can fake mind reading by picking up subtle clues from someone as they try to construct a convincing tale of reading the thoughts of a mark, that the very act of being the transcriptionist and first audience for Hilda’s poems might be part of their authorship.***

As far as anyone knows, Hilda stopped creating poems just as she became a teenager. If there were any later-life discarded drafts from adult revisiting of her childhood inspirations, they are unknown. She lived with her mother Grace until Grace died, and made her living working in bookstores in Boston, two things indicating that Hilda could have continued to connect with literary culture if she’d wanted to. Hilda’s story, her poetry, once held as so remarkable, became a literary curiosity that only attracts folks like me who want to think about art and Modernism thoroughly.****

.

I haven’t read anyone claiming that Hilda wrote her poems because she remembered past lives, because she was an “old soul” — but then or now, that sort of woo thing might have come up. Today, as I was finishing this post, days after completing the musical arrangement I used for her poem “Hills”  that you can hear below, I wondered how to explain the musical choices I made for that original music. The music is sorta-kinda South Asian, based slightly on my appreciation for those World Pacific Ravi Shankar LPs that entranced me as a young man and the Indian physicians I worked with in New York in the 70s. Specifically though, it’s more at the cod-raga experiments that many Western folk/rock musicians took to in the 60s. I always liked that stuff, and it’s more approachable with my musicianship than the real thing. Was something  asking me to musically express a reincarnation theory?

To hear my musical performance of the 8-year-old Hilda Conkling’s poem “Hills”  use the graphical audio player below. No player manifesting? The skepticism of your way of reading this post may be blocking the ectoplasm! Knocking on this highlighted spirit-table link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*Poetry Magazine  published Conkling’s poems alongside a great many of the formative Modernist poets. But she also appeared in Good Housekeeping.

**As a fan of early Modernist poetry, I tell myself that I could have easily found a dozen or more suitable Modernist poems published before 1922 to include in their books.

***I’m also reminded of the curious case of acclaimed poet James Merrill and his partner David Jackson using a Ouija board in the creation of poems in the 1970s.

****I think of the work of New York School poet Kenneth Koch, who in the 1970’s started teaching poetry and creative writing to grade school children by reading them Modernist poetry (including poems that our 1920s anthologist overlooked) and then prompting them to create their own poems. A short web search revealed nothing so far, but the brief phenomenon of Hilda Conkling might easily have come up alongside Koch’s teaching ideas.

I have some hopes of finding the energy and audacity to write about a new attempt this year by a contemporary poet to inspire children to write poetry, but only time will tell on that one. Girls or boys book of verse for this poem of genderless camel-hills bearing the world on their backs? Girls.