Bryher - Episode (1920)

Forgotten Poems #52: Pride Month Specials!

—: Episode :—

 
	If I bring my loneliness
	    To your arms,—
		This is not love.
	If I bend my head,
    Heavy with life, to meet your strength, forgive me,—
   (Would you hold me for a moment without speaking)
		This is not love.
	It is rest.
	    A truth in dream,
	To slip aside our solitude at meeting,
	    It is an hour we give to one another,—
			Not love.
 

Winifred Bryher (1894-1983)
P: The North American Review (1920), Poetry (1920+), Transition (1927); translations, novels, articles, reviews, etc.

“Winifred Bryher is a young poet, critic and novelist who has contributed appreciative articles on American poets, especially the Imagists, to the London Saturday Review and other papers... Bryher and [her partner] Hilda Doolittle crossed the ocean in September, and will spend the winter in Santa Barbara.” (Poetry, 1920) Lived in Paris in the 1920s, and was well-known in Gertrude Stein's expatriate circle; friends with writers James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway, the publisher Sylvia Beach, and the photographer Berenice Abbot, et al.

Pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman; from a wealthy family who made their money in the shipping business. Gave financial support to struggling writers like James Joyce, Edith Sitwell, and Dada poet and artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, helped fund Sylvia Beach's bookstore Shakespeare & Company, and co-founded the film magazine Close Up, with Hilda Doolittle and Kenneth Macpherson.

Published a critical appreciation of fellow queer poet Amy Lowell's work (1918), who reciprocated by writing the preface for Bryher's novel; “No better study of the growth of an artist's mind has been written, I think: it is all here, all the helps and hindrances. Whether as novel or fact, the book is a true record of a talent gradually breaking into flower, of a life slowly growing into congnizance of itself, and of that which it was created absolutely to do.” (Amy Lowell, 1920)

 
              Gravitas: For Bryher
                  by Dick Whyte

       our bodies bent
       before the fall,

       sun-curved
       and weightless—

       eventually
       every horizon

       folded
       into flesh

 

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