by Brett Rutherford
Barbara A. Holland died in 1988. For most of the years between 1973 and her death, I was her principal book publisher (under the imprints of The Poet’s Press, Grim Reaper Books, and B. Rutherford Books). During the intervening years, I have kept most of her chapbooks and books available, some in print and some on-line.
After 31 years in the keeping of the McAllister family in Philadelphia, the poet’s notebooks and papers were transferred to The Poet’s Press in 2019. The objective was to find an archive that will maintain the Barbara Holland Papers, whether in physical form, or in digital form. The present volume is the ninth and final product of this project.
The intent of this volume is to present the critical articles about Holland published in her lifetime, in the same volume with all the poems which are cited or quoted in those articles. This yields an ideal single-volume resource about the poet and her work for students, scholars, and poetry lovers.
The new material in this volume is a collection of memoirs and poems about Barbara A. Holland, gathered over the years since her death. Most of these have been housed on The Poet’s Press website.
The trove of Holland’s typed manuscripts included five book-length poetry manuscripts which, although containing some familiar “warhorses,” were largely made up of poems no one had seen outside of their appearance in obscure magazines. These separate manuscripts were edited and published in 2019-2020 as:
Medusa: The Lost First Chapbook
Out of Avernus: The Exiled Sorceress & The Fallen Priestess
The Secret Agent
The Shipping on The Styx
The Songs of Light and Darkness (in Shipping on the Styx)
For another volume, The Beckoning Eye (2019), I turned to approximately 200 printed magazines containing Holland’s poems from the 1970s-1980s. While a few of these poems are familiar from the poet’s later collections, most had never seen print since their magazine appearance. Since no manuscripts survive for most of those poems, they were presented as printed by their respective magazines, with silent corrections of obvious typographical errors. Holland published, by her own account, in more than 1,000 small press and literary journals, making her one of the nation’s most prolific published poets, so this modest collection of “unknowns” was only a sampler of her magazine publications.
Finally, the large compendium After Hours in Bohemia included newly-found magazine poems, the remaining unique poems from typed manuscripts, completions of poems from hand-written notebooks, and poems from a posthumous chapbook. The editing and completion of the notebook poems brought the number of extant Holland poems to over 800.
Two additional books in this series did not come from the Barbara A. Holland papers, but from The Poet’s Press’s own archives. Returning to books I published in the 1970s and 1980s, I prepared two new volumes that represent Holland’s own selection of her works from 1980, 1983, and 1986. Selected Poems. Volume 1 reprints a 1980 book that was ambitiously titled Collected Poems, Volume 1, adding to it poems she selected in 1983 for another collection (Running Backwards) issued by Warthog Press.
For the record, that volume also incorporated all the poems from her chapbooks, A Game of Scraps; Penny Arcana; Melusine Discovered; On This High Hill; Lens, Light and Sound, and You Could Die Laughing; plus an unpublished chapbook, East From Here.
The inclusions from the 1983 Running Backwards also folded into Selected Poems, Volume 1, items which had earlier appeared in Poet’s Press chapbooks, Burrs, In the Shadows, and Autumn Numbers.
Selected Poems, Volume 2 consists of all of Holland’s poems that revolve around the imagery and concepts of the paintings of Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte. This had been published as Crises of Rejuvenation in two volumes in 1974-1975, and then reissued in 1986 as a single volume. This new version, with annotations and illustrations, is the definitive version of the large Magritte cycle. (To further clarify the bibliography, a twice-printed chapbook titled Autumn Wizard consisted of excerpts from the Magritte cycle, a teaser for the two-volume edition.)
Thus it will be seen that Selected Poems is Holland’s own choice of her important poems, a necessary starting point for her readers. The Holland papers — from magazine publications, type manuscripts, and hand-written notebooks — did not include all or even most of these poems, and she had no “master set” of her works. They are literally “everything else.” The overlaps with the “warhorses,” her most-read and most-known poems, is that she used those repeatedly, in her book manuscripts and proposals.
I have been asked why I have devoted a year of my time to this project, issuing books that few will ever read, the more so since so many of Holland’s contemporaries are gone. I know only a handful of people who remember Barbara Holland.
It comes to this: in 1975, I took Barbara out to lunch at a Thai restaurant at the edge of Chinatown. We were celebrating her 50th birthday; I was 28 years old. I told Barbara that afternoon, “I will keep your work alive.”
It was a promise, and I have kept it.
Grateful acknowledgment is made here to the still-living critics whose essays are included with their permission: Claudia Dikinis, Ivan Argüelles, Stephen-Paul Martin, Robert Kramer, and Michael Redmond, and to Matthew Paris for his memoir.
— Brett Rutherford
Pittsburgh, PA.
July 21, 2020
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