Notes for a Novel | The Selected Poems of Frieda Fligelman

Published: December 7, 2008

With the publication of Notes for a Novel: The Selected Poems of Frieda Fligelman, Drumlummon Institute of Helena brings into print the poetic works of, in co-editor Rick Newby’s words, “one of the most remarkable unknown poets of the early modern West,” Montana writer and thinker Frieda Fligelman.

Edited by Alexandra Swaney and Newby, the collection showcases a generous selection of Fligelman’s “passionate, witty, and often heartbreaking” poems. Notes for a Novel also includes three essays on Fligelman’s exceptional life and work.

It is the second volume in the Drumlummon Montana Literary Masters Series; the first volume was Food of Gods and Starvelings: The Selected Poems of Grace Stone Coates (2007).

Scholar Harriet Rochlin, author of the forthcoming study, A Mixed Chorus: Jewish Women in the American West, 1849–1924, writes in her foreword: “Notes for a Novel bears witness to a western Jewish woman who thought deeply and felt passionately; to the strands of cultural and intellectual electricity in small towns throughout the American West; and to world travelers who find in their natal nests the happiness they’d failed to find elsewhere.”

Born and raised in Helena, Fligelman published only a handful of poems during her lifetime, but at her death she left behind a manuscript of 1,200 poems. Educated at Columbia and in Paris during the 1920s, she was a suffragist, translator, world traveler, advocate for human rights, and founder of the discipline of sociolinguistics.

In his essay on Fligelman, Arnie Malina, founder of Helena’s Myrna Loy Center for the Performing and Media Arts, writes that Frieda’s “greatest strength as a poet is her ability to project a witty and resilient personality, a strong, singular voice that responds anew to adversity and joy. Her poems exhibit the Fligelman persona in many forms: the critic of civilization, the woman, the isolated individual alone in a room. She sought immortality; in her poetry, she is alive.”

Co-editor Alexandra Swaney, musician, writer and anthropologist, is recently retired as folklife director for the Montana Arts Council. Rick Newby has edited many books, including The New Montana Story: An Anthology (2003) and The Rocky Mountain Region, Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures (2004).

The books sells for $15.95 softcover; visit www.drumlummon.org.