Others: A Magazine of the New Verse

Others: A Magazine of the New Verse was founded by Alfred Kreymborg in July 1915 with financing from Walter Conrad Arensberg. The magazine ran until July, 1919. It was based in New York City and published poetry and other writing, as well as visual art. While the magazine never had more than 300 subscribers, it helped launch the careers of several important American modernist poets. Contributors included: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Man Ray, Skipwith Cannell, Lola Ridge, Marcel Duchamp, and Fenton Johnson (poet) (the only African American published in the magazine).

Each copy of the magazine was sold for 20 cents. The purpose of Others was to create a space for unity among individuals who otherwise differ from the norms of society. Its motto proclaimed, “The old expressions are with us always, and there are always others”.Others was a site of free thinking and the disruption of standard sexual behaviours, where poets emerge together in the categories of “queerness”. It was also a space to proclaim a strong affiliation with the local community of the Lower East Side in New York that was identified with the mixed population of an excluded group of immigrants, such as Jews. Others’ poets wanted to show a positive image of Jewish immigration. This population can be seen as a representation of social and intellectual progressivism, and the experimentation of the “new”, instead of the stereotyped figure of the self-deprecating Jew; that was profoundly perpetuated by Euromodernism or poets from Little Review. Suzanne Churchill describes it as “a house for the most innovative free verse, and representative of new literature found dangerous and offensive”. It was considered ‘dangerous’ because critics of modernism viewed the intrusion of foreignness as a contamination to the traditional style of literature, while Others’ poets saw it as an innovation. Subsequently, the transformation of the American demographics simultaneously created a change in modern literature, which celebrated the merge with other cultures, or in other words the melting pot.

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Wikipedia