The Tale of a Made-Up Poet

When you have as long a history as Columbia University's Philolexian Society (207 years and counting), you're bound to attract some memorable characters. One such august personage was Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), an American poet and a 1908 graduate of Columbia College, who is now chiefly remembered as the author of "I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree."

Call Kilmer maudlin, but he was continuing what Western poetry had done for at least 2,500 years: expressing awe at forces greater than man. "Poems are made by fools like me / But only God can make a tree." But as Kilmer was writing these lines, waves of contemporary poets were doing away with past pretensions - rhyme, meter, exhalted subjects. More and more, poets wrote prose-like pieces about mundane surroundings and interior feelings, rather than lyrical, outward praise.

Every November, the Philolexian Society hosts a "Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest," and every year the society's Avatar, Thomas Vinciguerra (seen here in a picture by Ms. Campbell), recites a story of how around 1915 Joyce Kilmer decided to have some fun at the expense of the modernist poets.

Kilmer and his poet-novelist friend Margaret Widdemer (1884-1978) submitted awful free verse poems under the pen name "Alfred Watts." Alfred was Kilmer's first name, which he hated, and Watts had almost become the middle name of Widdemer, as she was a relation of poet Isaac Watts of "How Doth The Little Bumblebee" fame.

The duo submitted a group of snooty avant-garde poets that Watts was a reclusive poet who refused to leave his garret, who churned out dyspepic poetry about a cruel world. The story goes that the bohemians ate it up.

In Widdemer's autobiography, "Golden Friends I Had" (1964), she remembered two fragments of Watts's poetry, which read like a lame-brained Sappho.

the opening line:

"Eyes like little green apples / In an apple-blossom face -"

and a closing line: "- and the water-rats are tired."

Prominent avant-garde publishers - Harriet Monroe, W.S. Braithwaite, etc. - started t0 publish Alfred Watts poems in magazines and anthologies. The bohemians wanted to meet Watts, but the submissions stressed that Watts "only lived for his art" and could not stand visitors. The two jokesters kept on cranking out bad free verse poetry, until, as Widdemer writes, she admitted one day to Kilmer: "A terrible thing has happened to me. I don't know what to do. I can't write anything but Alfred Watts poetry!"

Kilmer admitted to Widdemer that he also suffered an Alfred Watts writing mania. So they decided to kill their fictional character, and as Widdemer writes, "the tragedy of [Watts] being found starved to death in his garret by a visiting classmate from Kankakee, Kansas, seemed regrettable but reasonable."

Then cracked an ignoble heart. Today, the Philolexian Society holds a "Bad Poetry Contest" in Kilmer's name, not only as an acknowledgement of the late poet's dubious legacy, but also to remember Kilmer as a trickster who was unafraid to use parody to make a statement about art.

But how much of Widdemer's story is true? Can Alfred Watts's poems still be found? Are they really as bad as they are reputed to be? Only time (and more blog entries) can tell....