absent magazine

No one has done more to push the avant-garde poetry scene than Babs de Genlis.  De Genlis, the granddaughter of Cosimo de Genlis of the Yale Department of Anthropology, had been schooled in ivy-league poetry seminars from the tender age of fifteen, and by seventeen she had published her first book of poems in the form of a letterpress folio, entitled, “Under Falling Leaf.”  She was a frequent guest of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and briefly enjoyed a career as a fairly prominent critic and literary magazine editor.

Babs became radically alienated from the poetry scene in later life.  She left the avant garde poetry world as another set of women joined it.  These women came from an extremely different circumstance from Babs herself: some had already made their fortunes in fashion; others had no experience of undergraduate college.  To the rising caste of women poets, poetry seminars offered the opportunity transform themselves into new roles as promulgators of aesthetic delight, roles doubtless felt suitable for a clever woman who had always felt herself to be different from those around her. As de Genlis described them in a contemporary publication, “Protected through their exclusive and impenetrable understanding, they would enter the second half of their lives, secure in their unassailably feminine packaging as wives, housewives, mothers, and artists.”  Babs rejected this rising generation of writers entirely, unable to see how it was that the rules of poetry and deep living which had taken her entire life to master could be so freely handed over to new creatures, or indeed how it was possible for them to imbibe in a few short years the arcane arts to which generations of de Genlises had uniquely entitled her.  Indeed, her training had set her on a course utterly unlike those of the new poets.  She had learned to read upon Pound’s ABC’s of Poetry and had lost her virginity to Robert Lowell’s cousin.  With the rising and democratic generation of poets she had little if anything in common.

This rejection of the contemporary poetry community prompted a flight of identity that transformed de Genlis’ own writing.  Waking not so much to despair as to apathy every morning, she lost the scent of that finer engagement which had kept her enthralled with poetry from the beginning.  Her diaries and letters from the period document how she lost the finesse, the delicateness, the jouissance associated with the beaux arts.  Indeed, as she expressed it, this “art of scrutinizing the commonplace” in which she had been “weaned, born, bequeathed, since infancy,” had trained her to be a disciplined observer of human beings, and what she watched offended her more and more.

She left with the offices of Absent Magazine the concluding traces of her life as a poet, which include a diary of her brief experience as a guest of the biosphere 2 project, where she lived for three months as a visiting artist; a series of poems in progress in the form of shopping list in preparation for post-industrial collapse; correspondence with an Israeli kibbutz about the possibility of joining them on permanent retreat, a rough sketch of designs for a space colony of aesthetes and intellectuals, together with a manifesto on modern poetry, printed, for the first time, here.

Babs de Genlis disappeared from the literary scene altogether under mysterious circumstances.  She abandoned public writing altogether, except for the occasional radical political tract, most often published under a pseudonym.  Based upon the fruitless attempts from this office to contact her with regard to edits for the manifesto, we feel certain that she can no longer be contacted under the same identity, and probable that she left the country.  We can neither substantiate nor deny the assertion, founded on basis of literary rumor, that she thereafter became an intelligence agent under some foreign government, turning her talents at collecting and assorting human facts to the purposes of a grander and international game.