Walter Conrad Arensberg — Collected Poems

Walter Conrad Arensberg began as a polished Symbolist poet and ended his brief publishing career by treating language like a readymade: stretched across pages, fragmented into mathematical propositions, and stripped of ordinary sense. Between those points lie Poems (1914), Idols (1916), translations from French, German, and Italian, wartime sonnets, and seven radical works printed in Rogue, The Blind Man, 391, and TNT. His literary experiment belonged to the same life that made his New York apartment a center of American Dada and his Hollywood house an unparalleled private museum of Duchamp, modern European art, pre-Columbian objects, and Renaissance books. This edition restores the full poetic record in chronological order and places the late typographic works beside facsimiles of their first appearances.