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May232005

Elizabeth Hoffman: That's no lady, that's my poet

Filed under: In Memoriam   Tagged: ,

I liked this Times obit of the 83-year old Hoffman, who championed good poetry during a time when lady editors were quite a bit more hampered by lady-ness than they are now:


Elizabeth McFarland Hoffman, who as poetry editor of Ladies' Home Journal sandwiched the work of W. H. Auden, Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath in between "Is Your Marriage a Masquerade?" and "Bing Crosby's Kitchen for His Bride," died last Thursday in Philadelphia.
...
While Ms. Hoffman was at Ladies' Home Journal, from 1948 to 1962, the magazine published at least a half-dozen poems in each monthly issue. Major 20th-century writers whose verse appeared there included Marianne Moore, John Ciardi, Mark Van Doren, Randall Jarrell, Maxine Kumin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walter de la Mare, Galway Kinnell, Maxwell Anderson and John Updike.

Ms. Hoffman's own poems, published under her maiden name, also appeared in the magazine. She left Ladies' Home Journal in 1962, after its new owners stopped publishing poetry.

I had to go back and read that again myself: six poems per issue! No one does that anymore. What a loss for the women who read these magazines. The young Plath, and many more with literary gifts (Mary Cantwell comes to mind), would likely not have become distinguished writers if the women's magazines they worked for in the fifties hadn't been distinguished publishers of fiction and poetry themselves. Young women have always collected trivia about beauty secrets that take up considerable space in the brain (in which direction should eyebrow hair be tweezed? I know you know the answer, fellow trivia-gatherers), but at least they could turn to a good short story afterward. Not that there wasn't a bit of cognitive dissonance:

Usually set in a box in the middle of a page, the poems created some arresting juxtapositions. In the August 1950 issue, "Secrets," by Auden, follows an ad for Velveeta. In September 1956, "Where the Bodies Break," by Mr. Kinnell, shares a page with "How to Make 10 Tantalizing Butter Waffles With That Tender Melt-Away Texture."

Readers of the June 1953 issue, which featured "A Glass of Summer Daisies," by Jessamyn West, could, a page later, contemplate the question, "Did you wake up today with 'morning mouth'?"

Oh well, headlines and ad copy are a kind of poetry. Galway Kinnell has something of a tender melt-away texture, when you think about it.

The magazine had a history of such juxtapositions. Under Edward Bok, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who edited Ladies' Home Journal from 1889 to 1919, it published fiction by Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte and Rudyard Kipling alongside articles on childrearing, Jennifer Scanlon, the author of "Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture" (Routledge, 1995), said in a telephone interview yesterday.

There's lots not to be nostalgic about when it comes to the fifties, a statement so obvious I shouldn't have to say it. But we're still left with women's mags that have little to offer the mind (besides de-stressing and work-promotion advice, which are good but not what I mean). So don't read them, you say. Well, exactly.

Elizabeth Hoffman, 82, Editor for Ladies' Home Journal, Dies [NYT]

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