Robert McAlmon

Robert McAlmon Poems

Robert McAlmon Biography

Robert Menzies McAlmon (March 9, 1895 – February 2, 1956) was an American author, poet and publisher. McAlmon was born in Clifton, Kansas, the youngest of ten children of an itinerant Presbyterian minister. He died in Desert Hot Springs, California at the age of 60. McAlmon was admitted to the University of Minnesota in 1916, but only spent one semester there before enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps in 1918. At the conclusion of World War I, he returned to university (1917–1920), this time at the University of Southern California. He attended classes intermittently until 1920, when he moved to Chicago and then New York City, where he worked as a nude model at art school. Once in New York, he collaborated with William Carlos Williams on the Contact Review, which did not last for long, but published poetry by Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, H. D., Hilda Doolittle, Kay Boyle and Marsden Hartley. The next year, he moved to Paris after marrying the wealthy and lesbian English writer Annie Winifred Ellerman, better known as Bryher. McAlmon typed and edited the handwritten manuscript of Ulysses by James Joyce, with whom he had a friendship. McAlmon became a prolific writer after the move, with many of his stories and poems based on his experiences as a youth in South Dakota.)

The Best Poem Of Robert McAlmon

Burial

Geometry is a perfect religion,
Axiom after axiom:
One proves a way into infinity
And logic makes obeisance at command.

Outside of the triangle, cubes, and polystructures
There is restless pummeling, pounding and taunting.
The end is diffused into channels
Every step into eternity—and steps are endless.

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