Here’s something to be thankful for this Holiday Season: the poetry of Alfred Watts has been rediscovered!
And it was really easy to do, thanks to that most brilliant of search engines: books.google.com. I googled "water-rats are tired," and I felt like Howard Carter viewing Tutankhamen's tomb for the first time when I saw the result:
It turns out that the January 1916 issue of “The Others” Magazine features not one, not two, but THREE whole poems by Alfred Watts! And what was once a fragment about water-rats has blossomed into a complete bad poem:
The Current
The white soul of the water
Dips — gnawing the tree-roots.
It is broken.
Across the implacable bronze-green scummed bark
And the glistening water-rats
Are tired.
Isn’t that amazingly awful? There are two other Watts poems in that "Question Nocturnal" and "In The Park: For Farouche, November, 1914." I plan on looking at this magazine in person, and reading the other two bad poems.
What's funny about “The Others,” besides its snooty name, is that it really was a cutting-edge periodical of New Jersey's WWI-era avant-garde community, which featured the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, and the artwork of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.
Stay tuned for more updates on the rediscovery of Alfred Watts!
Please, Sir, may we have some more?
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