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up early, the arcadian dingbat, calico too
 

      We were up early the next morning and the crayfisherman was up early too. He was puttering around in a shabby old rowboat, when Jim built our fire for breakfast. While I was cooking he joined Jim and took him over to show him the house-boat. Later I learned how the conversation ran. Jerking his thumb over his shoulder in my direction, the crayfisherman said :
      “I had a piece of calico myself once.”

ex Marguerite Wilkinson, The Dingbat of Arcady (1922) : 77
Columbia U copy/scan (via google books) : link
LoC copy/scan (one of several via hathitrust) : link
 

1. Marguerite Wilkinson (1883-1928), poet, anthologist, poetry critic; later, swimmer and aspiring aerialist
   wikipedia : link
2. the following, from a memorial essay by Harriet Monroe in Poetry 31:6 (March 1928) —

   It is told of her that, suffering a nervous breakdown last summer, she decided that the cause was moral, not physical, that somehow she had unworthily lost connection with God. She resolved to restore her spiritual tone by a course of self-discipline which would prove her faith by eliminating fear; and to that end she took every day a morning swim in the ocean at Coney Island and an afternoon flight at Curtiss Field.
         Her aviation history reveals almost incredible daring, considering that she was a mere woman no longer young, who had walked for over forty years with her feet on the ground. She contracted to write an advertising booklet on aviation in exchange for ten hours of instruction in the air, and before her death she had completed her course under the tutelage of Bill Winston, who had taught Lindbergh at Brooks Field, and Roger Williams, another venturesome expert. These two men took her through every conceivable kind of stunt, including wingovers, loop-the-loop, barrel-roll, tail-spin and side-slip — this with a woman who had reproached herself for being a physical coward!
         She did not live to write the book, but she would tell her friends about certain episodes. One day her “ship” flew high over fleecy clouds and, glancing down, she saw the round rainbow — a complete circle lying flat on a cloud with the shadow of her plane in the middle, like a giant dragon-fly alighting there.

   source (at poetryfoundation.org) : link
   same (via google books) : link

3. and some further context, from The Oakland Tribune 108:29 (29 January 1928)
   via California Digital Newspaper Collection : link

   MARGUERITE WILKINSON, poet and Californian by adoption. Her death silences one of the strong new voices in contemporary poetry.
   By Laura Bell Everett

         ...At the beginning of the World War Mrs. Wilkinson wrote a play, “The Passing of Mars.” When the war was over the healing thoughts of the out-of-door found expression in the familiar account of the idyllic wandering of Professor and Mrs. Wilkinson and their travels by water in the boat of their own building, “the Dingbat.” Seldom has more restful refreshing impression of vacationing been transferred to paper than in “The Dingbat of Arcady.” As the scene described are those of California and Oregon, the book has an especial appeal to those who know the Pacific Slope.
         The Wilkinsons made their home in New York when Professor J. G, Wilkinson gave up his position in the science department of the San Diego Teachers’ College for a similar position in New York. In carrying out a physician’s prescription that she swim daily, Mrs. Wilkinson came to her death off Coney Island, probably from heart failure, as the water at that point was not deep.
         Mrs. Wilkinson’s mother, Mrs. Nathan Kellogg Bigelow, is with her daughter, Miss Natalie Bigelow, violinist and teacher of music in the School for the Blind at Berkeley.

4. Marguerite Wilkinson correspondence
   Middlebury College Special Collections & Archives
   CollectionIdentifier : C-5 : link

   “The majority of the letters in this collection are responses from contemporary American poets to Marguerite Wilkinson’s requests for permission to use their works in her anthology, New Voices, originally published in 1919. Much of the correspondence is of a business-like nature; however, there are several instances of heated exchanges between Wilkinson and her correspondents on the inclusion (or exclusion) of particular poems or poets (e.g. Ezra Pound and Maxwell Bodenheim) as well as her interpretation of the poems...”

   one of three items, Middlebury College : link

5. more at Northwestern
   Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections
   Marguerite Wilkinson Collection : MS191 : link
    

1 September 2024