The Soul of Spain With McAlmon and Bird the Publishers
The Soul of Spain With McAlmon and Bird the Publishers
Original Text
Complete Poems, ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis, rev. edn. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992): 70. PS 3515 E37A17 1992 Robarts Library.
2Does it rain in Spain?
3Oh yes my dear on the contrary and there are no bull fights.
4The dancers dance in long white pants
6Come Uncle, let's go home.
7Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is.
8Come let us fart in the home.
9There is no art in a fart.
10Still a fart may not be artless.
11Let us fart an artless fart in the home.
12Democracy.
13Democracy.
15Go democracy.
16Go
17Go
18Go
19Bill's father would never knowingly sit down at table with a Democrat.
20Now Bill says democracy must go.
21Go on democracy.
22Democracy is the shit.
23Relativity is the shit.
24Dictators are the shit.
30This is not a complete list.
32But Ezra is nice.
33Come let us build a monument to Ezra.
34Good a very nice monument.
35You did that nicely
36Can you do another?
37Let me try and do one.
38Let us all try and do one.
39Let the little girl over there on the corner try and do one.
40Come on little girl.
41Do one for Ezra.
42Good.
43You have all been successful children.
44Now let us clean the mess up.
46We have done a monument to Ezra.
47A monument is a monument.
48After all it is the spirit of the thing that counts.
Notes
1] Robert McAlmon was owner of Contact Publishing, which brought out Hemingway's Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923; Audre Hanneman, Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967]: 5); and Bird was William Bird, whose Three Mountains Press brought out In our Time in 1924 (Hanneman, 6). Back to Line
5] yence: have sex with. Back to Line
14] Bill: Gerogiannis identifies him as Hemingway's friendin Chicago, Bill Smith (144). Back to Line
25] Menken: Gerogiannis identifies him as the reformer S. Stanwood Menken (144) but Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956), the American journalist and critic, co-editor of The Smart Set1914-1923, and publisher of iconoclastic writers, may also have been intended because Hemingway "ironically dedicated The Torrents of Spring to both of these men `in admiration'" (144). Back to Line
26] Waldo Frank: Waldo David Frank (1889-1967), American Jewish critic and popular novelist, whose early works include Virgin Spain (1926; which Hemingway panned in Death in the Afternoon), The Unwelcome Man (1917), about an unloved child, Rahab (1922), about a religious woman's fall into prostitution, and City Block (1922), about race relations in the southern United States. Back to Line
27] The Broom: possibly The Broom, an international magazine of the arts edited by Harold A. Loeb and published in Rome Nov. 1921-Jan. 1924 (AP 4. B766 Robarts Library; L-10/166 Fisher Rare Book Library). Back to Line
28] Dada: orderless, nihilistic movement in art and literature founded in Zurich about 1916 and associated with Tristan Tzara. Back to Line
29] Dempsey: Jack Dempsey, American boxer in the 1920s, former world heavyweight champion. Back to Line
31] Ezra: Ezra Pound, expatriot American poet. Back to Line
45] The Dial: a literary journal, 86 numbers, Chicago 1881-1918, and New York, 1918-July 1929. It published T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" first in America, a special issue on Proust after his death in 1922, and relatively little by or on Pound. See AP 2 D48 Robarts Library. Back to Line
Publication Start Year
1924
Publication Notes
Part I, Querschnitt 4.iv (Autumn 1924): 229-30. Cf. Parts II-V, Querschnitt 4.v (November 1924): 278.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
RPO 1999.
Rhyme