News and Additions

Sunday, April 4th - April is National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month in the U.S. and Canada (although Great Britain celebrates it in October) so we will continue to emphasize what is going on in the poetry collection. March 21st is actually the UNESCO World Poetry Day.

The month starts out with significant additions to our collection of poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar is one of those poets whose conciseness and clarity of style often makes poetry seem effortless. As is always the case, it takes great effort to be both succinct and memorable. In his short life (he died from Tuberculosis at age 33) he generated a fairly large body of work covering a wide range of topics.

Dunbar wrote both short and long works whose language is quite readable today. You’ll find him far easier to read and appreciate than many poets of his time. Dunbar wrote books and essays as well as poems, including novels with depth and arguments on political, economic, and racial issues. Dunbar could write biting satire – like Theology for instance,

And he could also write poems that would easily be mistaken for other noted American or European authors – a good example is Sunset, which ends with:

He could also write a very smooth song lyric, and many of his songs, both in and out of dialect, are still effective today even without the musical setting. Here is the first stanza from Discovered:

Writing in dialect, by the way, is not easy to do – particularly in English, where our options for annotation are limited. In his many works written in dialect, Dunbar captures regional accents, personalities, and emotions as well as anyone.

About 40 new works by Dunbar have been added, mostly in bookshelf editions of Lyrics of Lowly Life (http://theotherpages.org/poems/books/dunbar/dunbar06.html) and Lyrics of the Hearthside (http://theotherpages.org/poems/books/dunbar/dunbar05.html). Dunbar’s works were initially self published, then after some success, published in several ‘overlapping’ volumes. This makes updating the author index a little messy. The dates cited may not always be the earliest publishing dates, but they are the editions from which the Poets’ Corner text was taken.

--Steve

Changing the Subject (not yet...)

After re-formatting the main author index files, I’ve moved on to the Subject Index, created years ago by Jon Lachelt. Unfortunately, while there are 13 author index files, there are 54 subject indexes. I’ve completed two initial examples, on Life and People. Let me know if you like the changes. Recommendations on additional selections are appreciated.

--Steve

Running the Tables

In case any of you are NOT watching the NCAA and NIT basketball tournaments or out enjoying the start of spring in the northern hemisphere, you may have noticed that stage one of the collection's major overhaul is complete - all of the main author index files have been converted to a single, consistent format. I hope everyone likes green.

There are several parallel efforts, including link-backs from Wikipedia and some added Faces of the Poets added to the indexes. I have also added new works from Joseph Addison, Lascelles Abercrombie and William Blake. Blake's index entry has also been re-done. Several new poets (new to the collection, at least) were also added. These include Scottish doctor John Armstrong, and Scottish songwriter John Skinner and English War poet Edmund Blunden. This is a good mix of styles and longer and shorter works.

The added songs by Blake cover a wide range in tones, and Fair Eleanor is a suprisingly graphic horror story. Armstrong's Epistle to a Young Critic is a bit thick with its references to recognized classics as well as to his contemporaries, but has some good quotable lines, and some searing criticisms. Skinner's Reel of Tullochgorum was a favorite of his friend Robert Burns (they corresponded in verse) and is played by musicians to the present day.

Blunden is a little reminiscent of Muriel Stuart in his themes, particularly in his poem Forefathers
...
These were men of pith and thew,
   Whom the city never called;
Scarce could read or hold a quill,
   Built the barn, the forge, the mill.

On the green they watched their sons
   Playing till too dark to see,
As their fathers watched them once,
   As my father once watched me;
...

Unrecorded, unrenowned,
   Men from whom my ways begin,
Here I know you by your ground
   But I know you not within--
All is mist, and there survives
   Not a moment of your lives.

Like the bee that now is blown
   Honey-heavy on my hand,
From the toppling tansy-throne
   In the green tempestuous land,--
I'm in clover now, nor know
   Who made honey long ago.

and Reunion in Wartime, which ends with:

Wednesday, March 4th, 2008 - Higher than the Dow right Now

In case you haven't noticed, the 'poem tally' has been creeping upwards toward 7,000. New poems have been added by Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry Van Dyke, Jean Ingelow, and Robert Ernest Vernède, among others. There are also some major experiments with the main Author indicies. Take a look at I-J, U-V, and Y-Z for a taste of what's in store. I'm also adding in some new portraits and making a note of pointers from Wikipedia to specific poets.

For a sample from the new additions, try one of Van Dyke's Inscriptions, or Ingelow's Loss and Waste.

Friday, February 27th, 2009 - Rats and The Wall

While browsing through the 1920 edition of the "Granite Monthly", I ran across some poems by Albert Annett, a historian and sometimes poet. One of them, Anarchism (http://theotherpages.org/poems/part2/annett01.html) struck me as dramatic, pointed, and undeniably relevant, nearly 90 years later.

In particular, the last four lines seemed to sum up the current worldwide financial crisis and all of its collateral damage more succinctly than anything I've seen in today's mass media or among all the ranting talking heads of our day:

     Where happiness had dwelt, were devastation, woe and death,
     And these few words were written of the fall:
     While watchman slept
     Rats undermined the wall.

Annett's metaphor is a simple and powerful, and could apply to several different worries of our day or of his. Annett wrote in a post-war era where physical acts of anarchism (terrorism in today's lexicon) were widely reported in the papers, and where the rich and powerful of Europe and America looked on the recent Russian Revolution with fear and apprehension. I haven't read enough by Annett to know his 'politics' well enough to infer which 'flood' Annett intended as the primary target for his metaphor. There were waves of immigration, of socialist and communist politics, loosening of moral stigmas as the U.S. moved from the war era into the 'Roaring 20's", and of course the same kinds of corruption and profiteering that come to light in every era.

Who knows? Annett may have simply been a baeball fan upset about the 'Black Sox' scandal.

Regardless of Annett's target, the poem is still highly charged and highly effective in our day. Feel free to forward this to the local bank regulator, sports commissioner, or government watchdog agency of your choice.....

--Steve

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 - Harold Vinal

I didn't know much about Harold Vinal, though looking through our collection and looking through the Web it seems as if he did quite a bit. He was a publisher, editing and publishing many books of poetry, and edited Voices: A Magazine of Verse for over 40 years. I was surprised to find how many authors I know (and books I own) were published by Harold Vinal.

As a publisher (and a poet), Vinal was somewhat of a traditionalist. Most of the mentions you see of him online comment on an incident with e.e. cummings. After receiving a rejection from Vinal, cummings retaliated by including a poem in his book No.5, titled "Poem, or Beauty hurts Mr. Vinal", suggesting Vinal's judgement was fit only for editing the advertising jingles that were becoming omnipresent on the radio at the time.

Vinal does not seem to have embraced many 'Modern' trends in poetry that were becoming common in the time period. His own poems tended towards conventional subjects and simple forms and rhyme schemes. I've found Vinal's poems appearing in regional journals around 1920 and noted that he published his first book of poetry, White April, (http://theotherpages.org/poems/books/vinal/vinal01.html) in 1922.

In short, Vinal was no cummings. However, like many poetry magazine editors of his period, Vindal did help give voice to many aspiring writers - including Langston Hughes, who Vinal also tapped to edit an anthology of African-American verse. He served as secretary and later president of the Poetry Society of America, and was anthologized inseveral collections.

Vinal's poems are readable enough, but generally not outstanding. I added them to Poet's Corner mainly to recognize how difficult it is sometimes for an editor to be himself good at creating the art form he helps shape. Hopefully that's not too esoteric a point. This adds 43 works that are new to the collection. Among them are quite a few sonnets and shorter works, including Persephone, for which I chose Rossetti's exquisite painting for the book cover. It is Rossetti, a poet as well as a painter, whose self-portrait appears at the top of this page.

--Steve

Thursday, February 19th, 2009 - The Words to Vivaldi's Seasonal Music

One of the comments my friend and co-editor Bob Blair often used to make in his editorials years ago was that certain poets who were widely published and read, and veritable celebities in their day, often faded into obscurity. Being stylish, someone also once said, simply means that you are more likely to go out of style. This has been true among authors and artists, musicians and playwrights, political (and economic) theorists, and, of course, poets. I was listening to Alex Trebek quizzing his daily panel of Jeopardy contestants the other day, when he gave a clue about a baroque composer whose 'seasonal' music was published with a set of accompanying poems written by the composer. Vivaldi was an easy guess (The Four Seasons - Le Quattro Stagioni) for the musician, but I didn't know about the poems - so of course I had to look them up.

A Venetian, Antonio Vivaldi was a priest, composer, and a virtuoso on violin. He seems to have been an exceptionally prolific composer, with 46 operas, over 500 concertos, 73 sonatas and a variety of sacred music. In the early part of the 18th century his works were very well known, and much anticipated. The Four Seasons, written around 1723 and published as the first four violin sonatas from "The Contest Between Harmony and Invention" (1925). His career included performances before the Pope and for the royalty of continental Europe, who also commissioned him to compose a variety of special compositions.

With all of those operas under his belt, Vivaldi must have written more lyrics than you can shake a stick at (feel free to insert your own favorite equivalent euphemism here), but I can only find reference to one set of poems - the sonatas that describe, movement by movement, what scenes his violins are immitating in The Four Seasons. The suprising thing to me, is that, for as well known as Vivaldi has been for the last half century, and as well known and influential as he was in his own day, he was largely unknown for much of the intervening two centuries.

Sorry, the English tramnslations are literal, and a little stilted. I'll ask Nick to work on them if he gets tired of Chinese and wants to go back to Italian for a while.

--Steve

Monday, February 16th, 2009 - Updated Conversations

One of the long term goals I have, in addition to adding new works, is going back and updating many of the older files in the collection. Some of these go back to the 1994-1995 timeframe. Others are from the years on Geocities, and still others are in complex formats that seemed to make sense at the time, but are hard to maintain. A couple of recent updates are books of poems by Clough and Yeats that have been converted to Bookshelf II format. Both have conversational patterns - spoken in the case of some of Yeats pieces, namely Michael Robartes and the Dancer and An Image from a past Life. Clough's Amours de Voyage is a set of conversations in the form of written letters. Both poets are quite readable, though Amours is a significantly longer work. The format though, of Claude's letters, chops things up into interesting, voyeuristic chunks that move along fairly easily. The best known work among these two books is Yeats' apocalyptic The Second Coming, which has been highly anthologized, though A Prayer for My Daughter is also poignant. I was pleased to run across Sargeant's charcoal of a youthful Yeats. It makes a good cover image.

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 - Poems of The Brontë Sisters

Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë wrote novels and poetry in the middle of the 19th century. While their novels Agnes Grey, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre are well known, and met with significant publishing success, their poetry is less well known, as are the tragic deaths due to illness of Anne, Emily and their brother Branwell in less than a year's time. The initial volume of poetry was self-published in 1846 under pseudonyms with little success. After the deaths of her siblings in 1848-1849, Charlotte had the book re-published in 1850, with additional poems by Anne and Emily. Despite the fact that their books had made the sisters well known, the pseudonyms were retained. Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell has been added in its entirety, including Charlotte's comments about her sisters and their works. Ann was the most successful in her brief career as a published poet, though I have a preference for some of Emily's works. Choose for yourself.

This edition is based on gally from PG, re-structured into Poets' Corner's Bookshelf II format. The actual poets' names are used in place of the pseudonyms to minimize confusion for modern readers. Italicization should be correct - it is missing from the Wikipedia edition. This version also facilitates browsing, I think, moreso than the other avaialble formats. Nearly 80 of these poems are new to the PC collection.

--Steve

Thursday, December 4th, 2008 - Stuart, Centaurs, and Heliodore

I’ve just updated the index entry for Muriel Stuart, and added her book Cockpit of Idols. Fourteen of the poems are new to the collection. Stuart writes in a variety of forms, on subjects starting with the Great War, then moving on to "sexual politics", and religious and other themes before ending up with a sort of ubi sunt poem for Heliodore. The title poem has several parallels to Christ at Carnival, though the roles are reversed and the main character battles through fatalistic arrogance rather than reveling wanderlust. (The Centaur is a bit more rollicking than our usual content, by the way) This is a heavily edited text based on a very buggy source file from UCLA. Thanks to Ariadne for finding it.

--Steve

Friday, November 28th, 2008 - Senlin, Bread and Roses

I’ve just completed updating all of the files in the Conrad Aiken collection. These include Senlin, Discordants, Light and Snow, Turns and Movies, and Chiarascuro: Rose, among others. Aiken wrote in a variety of forms, and wrote beautifully crafted rhymed as well as blank verse.

--Steve

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 - The Princess Returns

Alfred Tennyson's The Princess has been re-done in Bookshelf II format, and most of the illustrations from the 1884 edition have been added in. The illustrations are clickable, to view larger format versions. Tennyson sub-titled this 'A Medley' - the story is told spontaneously in seven parts by seven different speakers, mostly college friends returned home and picnicking together on a weekend. Most of the poem is in blank verse, with well known songs at the ends of several of the sections.

--Steve

Sunday, November 16th, 2008 - More Morley

The online version of Christopher Morley's CHIMNEYSMOKE has been expanded with nine additional poems, updated, and converted to the new Bookshelf II format. I have also added back in some of the illustrations by Thomas Fogarty that somehow were lost. Click on any illustration to see a larger image.

--Steve