Episode 004
Rachel Williamson on Why You Don't Have to Move to New York, and all Things Alice Corbin Henderson
Alice Corbin Henderson did not want to leave Chicago. The mid-west born and raised poet and editor had everything that she needed right there in the city. She was in with the hot and happening poets of the day, she was the co-editor of the most popular and influential of the city’s poetry magazines, and she was receiving considerable acclaim as a rising poet herself. When her husband told her that he was moving the family to Sante Fe, she felt that her world was ending.
Yet, it didn’t end, even if it did almost kill her. She moved to New Mexico in 1916, and found something there she never could have imagined, a muse. Her entire worldview shifted, gazing upon the vistas of pueblos and cacti, and she quickly became one of the most prominent advocates for Midwest poetry and indigenous midwestern culture. The move proved not to be a career ender, but a catalyst for her most prolific and meaningful era as an artist.
Henderson kept editing her Chicago based periodical remotely, and her newfound midwestern influence would come to heavily shape national poetry taste. This change made her grapple with her own relationship with place, with the notion that real art only happened in cities, and that real poets were an urban commodity. Living out in New Mexico, she found a true appreciation for the rural, for the small-town, for the outskirts of American civilization. She realized that her move had forever changed not only her poetic sensibilities, but her outlook on life.
Rachel Williamson is a graduate student here at UNCW, and her thesis is dedicated to Alice Corbin Henderson’s career and poetry. In her own writing, she analyzes the changes that Henderson underwent, and considers the widespread effects that her writing had on American poetry. In doing so, she asks us all to consider the effect that place has on our day to day lives. She encourages us to wonder, is true art only made in the cities? What is the value of a life on the outskirts? For a small coastal town with its own vibrant community of poets, songwriters, and artists, I feel that Wilmington is exactly the kind of city that needs to hear a message like Henderson’s. A message of hope, of creation, of finding peace and community right there, right where you already are.
