Draft:Laurence Scott

Laurence Scott
Born	Laurence Herbert Scott November 17, 1933 Detroit, Michigan
Died	June 13, 2005
Education	University of Michigan Harvard University

Laurence Scott (17 November 1933 – 13 June 2005) was an American illustrator and printer known for his creative collaborations with modernist and postwar poets.

Early life and Education

Laurence Herbert Scott was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1933. He was raised in Ann Arbor and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1955. He earned an MA from Harvard University in 1957 and continued to pursue further research in Slavic studies.^[1]

Academic career

At Harvard, Scott served as a teaching fellow in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature and later lectured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A polygot, Scott fluently spoke eight languages including Czech, Polish and Russian. He was involved in the New Poets' Theater and translated poems for their literary journal Fire Exit.^[2]

Scott published the first English-language translation of Morphology of the Folktale making Vladimir Propp's structuralist analysis of Russian folktales accessible to an American scholarly audience.^[3]

Publisher

During his time at Harvard, Scott founded the Lowell-Adams House Printers, a small student-led press that specialized in publishing limited-edition broadsides of poetry. Each sheet was paired with an illustration or engraving submitted by a student, and was individually signed by both the poet and illustrator. The press issued broadsheets of poems by W. H. Auden, Noël Coward, Jack Kerouac, James Merrill, Howard Nemerov, I. A. Richards, Adrienne Rich, John Updike and Edmund Wilson.

Scott personally illustrated and printed the work of his close friend James Merrill ("1939: An American Woman Explores the Estate of Friends Who Have Fled France") and Marianne Moore ("W. S. Landor").

The Lowell-Adams House Printers ran small booklets and pamphlets by C. S. Lewis, William Saroyan and Oscar Wilde.

Through the Harvard-based Ibex Press, Scott published limited-edition poetry collections by W. H. Auden, Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg.

In the mid-1960s, Scott collaborated his Harvard friend and writer Guy Davenport on several small press projects. Together they printed an unpublished letter from sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, written from the trenches of WWI, to John Cournos under the title Ezra’s Bowmen of Shu which included a short introduction written by Davenport and a nude male study drawn by Gaudier-Brzeska. Scott and Davenport co-published the first print run of Ezra Pound’s Canto CX in 1965.^[4] Under the imprint As Sextant Press, the edition of ran 118 copies, of which 80 were gift to Pound in celebration of his eightieth birthday.^[5]

Visual Art

Shortly before entering his senior year of high school, Scott's artistic talents were recognized by Robert Richmond, the director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts at the University of Michigan. Richmond urged Scott to contact Ezra Pound for artisic mentorship. Scott sent an illustration that he had designed for a local magazine to the modernist poet. Pound replied, initiating a correspondence that continued through Scott’s high school and university years. During this period, Pound offered literary and philosophical guidance, influencing Scott’s intellectual and artitic development.^[6] Scott designed the frontispiece portrait of Ezra Laurence which accompanied the first printing of Canto CX.

In collaboration with artists Peggy Bacon and Helene Fesenmaier, Scott produced a series of animal engravings for a commemorative volume honoring Marianne Moore on the occasion of her seventy seventh birthday.^[7]

Scott regularly provided spot illustrations for The New Yorker and The New Republic.^[8]

Activism

Scott was an active figure in the Boston queer community and a participant in the 1973 protest of the American Psychiatric Association, which contributed to the removal of homosexuality from the DSM.

With Harry 'Kitty' Kevorkian and Gerald Naylor, Scott founded one of the first pro-feminist gay organizations in the US. ^[9] The Male Liberation Collective, later renamed the Basic Education Project to distance itself from the heterosexual-identified men's rights movement, focused on the distrubution of feminist and anti-sexist literature, the provision of consciousness-raising sessions and community support for politically disintested and closeted gay men.^[10]

Through Scott's friendship with Abby Rockefeller, the Male Liberation Collective was unoffically affiliated with Cell 16, the first radical feminist organization in the Boston area. Both groups developed early community self-defense initiatives, offering karate classes to empower gay men and women who faced the threat of street violence.^[11]. Scott maintained friendship with Betsy Warrior and Jayne West, two of the founding members of Cell 16.

Scott served as the Michigan and Canadian representive to Abby Rockefeller's Clivus Multrum company —a manufacturer of waterless composting toilet systems—and publicly promoted sustainable waste management practices aligned with the company’s environmental mission.^[12]

References

1. Burns, Edward M., ed. (2018). Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner. Vol. 1. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint. p. 56. ISBN 9781619021815.
2. Onopa, Jan (1968), "My Hands", Fire Exit: The Magazine of the New Poet's Theatre, 1 (2), Boston, MA: William Corbett: 17, ISSN 0430-5868
3. Bronner, Simon J. (1986). American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. p. 113-114. ISBN 0700603069.
4. Furlani, Andre (2007). "Guy Davenport and the Archival Imagination". New England Review. 28 (1): 61. JSTOR 40244922.
5. Gallup, Daniel (1972). "Corrections and Additions to the Pound Bibliography". Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. 1 (1): 116. JSTOR 24725530.
6. Marshall, Todd (1999). "'Ten Cats. Your Score: Verrrrry Good': An Ezra Pound Correspondence Course". Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. 28 (1): 133–148. JSTOR 24726873.
7. Tambimuttu, ed. (1964). Festschrift for Marianne Moore's Seventy Seventh Birthday. New York: Tambimuttu & Mass.
8. Dirda, Michael (10 October 2018). "Review: The most intellectually exhilarating work of the year". The Washington Post.
9. Retzloff, Tim (21 February 2002). "Harry Kevorkian, Ann Arbor gay and labor activist, dies at 54" (PDF). Between the Lines. No. 28. p. 10.
10. "who what when where". The Gay Liberator. No. 28. July 1973. p. 10.
11. Echols, Alice (1989). Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 158. ISBN 0816617872.
12. Myers, Jane (14 August 1977). "The newest status symbol in town". Ann Arbor News.

Further Reading

Propp, Vladimir (1968). Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Scott, Laurence. Austin: University of Texas Press.