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The Poet of Provincetown Remembered |
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The Poet of P'town Remembered
Can you name the poet who wrote these lines?
Close to the sleet-bit blinds we clung,
Rocking on and on.
All night I’ve crouched in empty cars
That rode into the dawn.
Many Americans could name the author when, in 1928, the Ladies Home Journal ran a contest called “Can you name this poet?” and included these lines. Harry Kemp, Provincetown’s poet of the dunes, wrote them. Kemp’s autobiography, “Tramping on Life,” published in 1922, was a best seller at the time, and he had been hailed as the next Walt Whitman by Upton Sinclair. Today Harry Kemp is mainly remembered in Provincetown.
“Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book,” wrote Harry Kemp in his autobiography. He may have been thinking of the book he found when he was browsing in a used bookstore at the age of 18. It would change the course of his life. “He picked up a beat-up volume of Keats’ collected works; upon reading it, he underwent a ‘conversion to poetry’ as real to him as the religious conversion described by St. Augustine or Jonathan Edwards, or so he would later claim. ‘Keats set me afire with the vision of poetry,’” writes William Brevda in his biography of Harry Kemp, “The Last Bohemian.” From this time on, Harry Kemp dedicated his life to poetry and determined he would be a poet.
Harry Kemp survived through the kindness of friends, by selling an occasional poem to a magazine, and by staging self-promotional events that he called “the art of spectacularisms.” He had learned early in life that by calling attention to himself through some stunt or wild costume he could attract an audience for his message. He first gained notoriety when he hopped a freight car to Kansas University hoping to enroll. He became known as the “Tramp poet” when a newspaper writer picked up the colorful story. Soon news of the “Studious Hobo” and headlines like “Kansas enrolls Box-car Student” were running in newspapers throughout Kansas. William Brevda writes, “... it was Kemp’s own sense of the dramatic possibilities of life and his tendency to dramatize every situation he found himself in, coupled with considerable charm and an ability to appear sincere (because he really was sincere) even in the most calculated of acts that enabled him finally to throw off the anonymity he was so sure he did not deserve. Kemp had a love of the spectacular and was beginning to learn the methods of what he called the ‘Big Bass Drum.’”
In 1912 he headed to Greenwich Village in New York City hoping to become famous. He met and became a part of the group that would later become the Provincetown Players. Brevda continues, “There his half-congenital, half-practiced nonconformity brought him accolades rather than opprobrium; Kemp became the quintessential bohemian in the new bohemia of 1912–17.”
Beginning in 1916, he spent summers in Provincetown. But it wasn’t until 1927 or 1928 that he moved to the dunes near Peaked Hill. He would live there during the summer for the next 30 years, returning each winter to New York. The dunes would inspire some of his best poems.
Harry Kemp was well known around Provincetown for his “spectacularisms.” He often took out ads in the Provincetown Advocate to publicize stunts like his annual “Farewell to spring.” He would emerge from the dunes on the last day of spring, June 21, “Leading, as Spring, on a chain of flowers GLORIA, of Greenwich Village,” one announcement read. The two would be met by the Town Crier and parade to the front of Town Hall where at 12:30 he would read his poem Ode to Reluctant Spring. William Brevda describes one parade. “Garbed also in a flowing black poet’s cloak, Harry paraded around Provincetown and was heralded by the town crier who wore a Pilgrim’s costume. The town crier, Amos Kubick, recited the following rhyme (obviously written by Kemp) to the gathered throngs, or at any rate, to the occasional curious passerby:
‘Hear Ye! Hear Ye! All good citizens of Provincetown,
I bring our Poet of Provincetown
To walk beside me up and down–
Ringing my bell; come, be a buyer
Of Harry’s book; and he will write
In it, to add to your delight.’”
When his publisher turned down his manuscripts, Kemp started his own publishing company, The Provincetown Publishers, consisting of a post office box and the printing press of the Provincetown Advocate, the local newspaper. Booklets of his poems and writing sold for about a dollar each. Most were autographed by Harry with a seagull’s feather.
Beginning around 1953 Harry Kemp began to spend winters as well as summers in Provincetown. He was 70 years old and not in good health. He had diabetes and frequently drank too much. He lived in an apartment at Francis Flats, next door to John Francis’s real estate office in the East End of town. John Francis Jr. did not charge him rent, and he had a patron, Hudson Walker, who sent him monthly checks. When John Francis Jr. died and Harry was evicted, his friend Sunny Tasha took him in and built him a cottage. Harry Kemp was 76. He never returned to his dune shack and died a few months later on Aug. 8, 1960. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered on the dunes in Provincetown and in Greenwich Village.
[Laurel Guadazno is curator of education for the Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum.]
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May 4th, 2006