![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Book Logging (Poetry)
I'm no longer trying to write notes on all of the books of poetry that I've read. I keep not recording any details and then having the books blur together so that I no longer remember which books were which. Even a few days after I finish a book of poetry, I likely won't remember much about it.
Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913 - Project Gutenberg. This is pretty much what the title says. The quality of the poems varies.
Bullett, Gerald. Mice & Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. 50 pages long. These weren't bad but also weren't spectacular.
Cohen, Leonard. Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs - This is an Everyman Library Pocket Poets book. It contains a selection of Cohen's work, both poems and song lyrics.
Coolidge, Susan. Verses - Project Gutenberg. Sometimes twee, always Christian. Comprehensible and old fashioned.
Crapsey, Adelaide. Verse - Project Gutenberg. This is a memorial volume with family publishing a woman's poetry after her early death in her mid-30s as a result of a prolonged illness (some things in the introduction make me suspect tuberculosis, but it's never stated outright). Some of the later poems reflect her anger and frustration at knowing that she was dying.
England, George Allan. Underneath the Bough - Project Gutenberg. I did not enjoy this book. A lot of the poetry was tritely morbid; some was just trite. There's also a fairly large serving of sexism. Some of it seemed to be translations done by England rather than original works by England which left me unsure as to whether other, unmarked works, were England's or were translations. A handful of the poems weren't in English at all.
Gibson, Andrea. Lord of the Butterflies.
Guest, Edgar A. The Passing Throng - Project Gutenberg.
Hale, Katharine. Morning in the West - Project Gutenberg. I didn't like these enough to try the other volumes PG has by her. Some of the poems were decent, but there's a lot of potentially offensive language regarding indiginous people and exoticization of their cultures.
Henshall, Jeannette Fraser. Rain and Roses - Project Gutenberg.
Hicks, Faylita. HoodWitch.
Inchfawn, Fay. The Verse-Book of a Homely Woman - Project Gutenberg. This was kind of Hallmark-y and not very good. It also wasn't really bad in any way that I could put my finger on.
Ingelow, Jean. The Poetical Works of Jean Ingelow v.1 - Project Gutenberg. Most of these poems are quite long, and a lot of them felt like awkward mashups with badly done joins. Ingelow was an Evangelical Christian, the oldest of a large family. She worked as an editor of an Evangelical periodical and published most of her poetry anonymously. She published children's books under her own name. Her poems have a very definite idea of what the proper behavior of good Christian women is, but I got the impression that she was more resigned to the role than certain that she was good at it. She was pretty clearly both a believer and quite aware of how precarious things could be for women in courting and marriage. A lot of the impressions I got from these poems are things that I couldn't explain in any concrete way. Other female poets from this era whose work I read wrote poems in which they spoke as male narrators expressing their adoration for some woman or another. It seems to have been a convention. I just kept wondering if I was seeing more than that in these works. I think it's an unanswerable question.
Jenkins, Marlin M. Capable Monsters - The poet uses Pokemon references and inspiration to structure poems about real world experiences. Possibly, it would have worked better for me if I knew anything at all about Pokemon.
Levy, Amy. A London Plane-Tree, and Other Verse; Levy, Amy. A Minor Poet - Project Gutenberg books. The quality of these poems varies quite a bit. The first book primarily offers short poems while the second contains mostly longer works. I got the impression that Levy preferred the city to the country and wondered if that made her a bad woman, poet, or person.
E.M. The Lathe of Morpheus - Project Gutenberg.
Ossoli, Margaret Fuller. Life Without and Life Within - Project Gutenberg. Poems start on p. 701. The essays before that, I left unread due to them being literary analysis of things I haven't read and don't expect to read. The poems include some translations of works by other people which I also skipped because I wasn't much enjoying the author's style.
Percy, Walter S. Muse and Mint - Project Gutenberg. Middling quality. Occasionally twee but not terrible.
Phillips, Carl. Pale Colors in a Tall Field - These read as more exhausted than the poems in other collections by the poet that I have previously read. I still quite liked them.
Rand, Theodore H. At Minas Basin and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. I'm still stumbling over this title because I keep expect something more Tolkienish than 'Basin' after 'Minas.' Maybe it's a weird hybrid name that mixes in Hobbit prosaicness? I mean, Google informs me that it's a specific inlet in the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, but... It's not a short book but has a lot of blank pages. The first third is mostly nature poems.
Ridge, Lola. Sun-Up and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. A lot of these poems were a stew of nightmare images and hallucinations. As far as I could tell, it was horrors filtered through the point of view of a small child who didn't understand what was happening. (I'm pretty sure there's a sexual assault at one point, but the poem doesn't spell it out.) Some bits are 1st person and others 2nd or 3rd. The shifting point of view adds to the disorientation by shifting the distance between the narrator and the reader and the events/images in the poems.
Rollins, Alice Wellington. The Ring of Amethyst - Project Gutenberg.
Sandburg, Carl. Selected Poems - This was an Everyman Library Pocket Poets book. Some of these poems, I liked a lot.
Smith, Effie. Rosemary and Pansies - Project Gutenberg. Heavily Christian with a strong (but subtle) thread of having faith in the world to come because otherwise this world is horrifying and unfair. Very short book (approximately 50 pages).
Stockett, M. Letitia. The Hoofs of Pegasus - Project Gutenberg. Somewhat twee.
Turner, Lewis McKenzie. Quartz from the Uplands - Project Gutenberg. This is a single poem and not book length. I'd be surprised if it's even 5000 words long. The title page says, 'Published by the Anti-Pessimist Society 1905,' but I would not call this optimistic. I read it as angry and as viewing industry as destructive to human dignity, human righteousness, etc. Better that everyone go back to farming and independence.
Untermeyer, Louis. Challenges - Project Gutenberg. I knew Untermeyer primarily for the anthologies of poetry he edited because he edited one that was a favorite during my adolescence. I memorized a lot of those poems when I had nothing else to fill my time. I found reading his work intriguing because of that. I don't remember much about the poems in this book at this point, but I didn't hate them or find them overwhelmingly trite. I think I remember a number of them being very socialist and unionist.
Started but not finished:
Cautley, George Spencer. A Century of Emblems - Project Gutenberg. I got about 25% of the way through this before I gave up. I just couldn't fight through any more.
Foley, James W. Boys and Girls - Project Gutenberg. Saccharine and trite. Focused on childhood.
Garnett, R.B. The Twentieth Century Epic - Project Gutenberg. Awkward and pretentious sounding.
Holland, J.G. Kathrina - Read about half. Paternal suicide, maternal suicide. Despair. Rejection of God. Love for/of a Good Woman (tm). Asshole poet saved. I gave up on reading because it was too damned long and because the poet needed to be punched for elitism. Repeatedly.
Lindsay, Vachel. Going-to-the-Sun - Project Gutenberg. Illustrated book of poetry about hiking through Glacier Park. The forward says that it's a response to the book published by Lindsay's companion on that trip, Stephen Graham. Lindsay says that the poems are mostly excuses for the illustrations. I found the illustrations difficult to parse and the poems repetitive. DNF at p.53 (about halfway through).
Queyras, Sina. My Ariel - Reading this required familiarity with Sylvia Plath, her works, and her contemporaries that I don't have. I could infer a lot, and I recognized names, but I don't think that, as a whole, this book makes sense without that context. Individual poems would probably be fine, but the cumulative effect was that of listening to comedy full of pop culture references for a place one's only vaguely heard of. I tried to push on for the very idiosyncratic reason that, of all the letters of the alphabet, Q is the one least represented in my poetry snippet documents. I wanted enough snippets to justify separate documents for Q and R.
Wilkins, Mary E. Once Upon a Time and Other Child-Verses - Project Gutenberg. I made it less than 10% of the way into this book. The poetry was just bad.
Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913 - Project Gutenberg. This is pretty much what the title says. The quality of the poems varies.
Bullett, Gerald. Mice & Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. 50 pages long. These weren't bad but also weren't spectacular.
Cohen, Leonard. Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs - This is an Everyman Library Pocket Poets book. It contains a selection of Cohen's work, both poems and song lyrics.
Coolidge, Susan. Verses - Project Gutenberg. Sometimes twee, always Christian. Comprehensible and old fashioned.
Crapsey, Adelaide. Verse - Project Gutenberg. This is a memorial volume with family publishing a woman's poetry after her early death in her mid-30s as a result of a prolonged illness (some things in the introduction make me suspect tuberculosis, but it's never stated outright). Some of the later poems reflect her anger and frustration at knowing that she was dying.
England, George Allan. Underneath the Bough - Project Gutenberg. I did not enjoy this book. A lot of the poetry was tritely morbid; some was just trite. There's also a fairly large serving of sexism. Some of it seemed to be translations done by England rather than original works by England which left me unsure as to whether other, unmarked works, were England's or were translations. A handful of the poems weren't in English at all.
Gibson, Andrea. Lord of the Butterflies.
Guest, Edgar A. The Passing Throng - Project Gutenberg.
Hale, Katharine. Morning in the West - Project Gutenberg. I didn't like these enough to try the other volumes PG has by her. Some of the poems were decent, but there's a lot of potentially offensive language regarding indiginous people and exoticization of their cultures.
Henshall, Jeannette Fraser. Rain and Roses - Project Gutenberg.
Hicks, Faylita. HoodWitch.
Inchfawn, Fay. The Verse-Book of a Homely Woman - Project Gutenberg. This was kind of Hallmark-y and not very good. It also wasn't really bad in any way that I could put my finger on.
Ingelow, Jean. The Poetical Works of Jean Ingelow v.1 - Project Gutenberg. Most of these poems are quite long, and a lot of them felt like awkward mashups with badly done joins. Ingelow was an Evangelical Christian, the oldest of a large family. She worked as an editor of an Evangelical periodical and published most of her poetry anonymously. She published children's books under her own name. Her poems have a very definite idea of what the proper behavior of good Christian women is, but I got the impression that she was more resigned to the role than certain that she was good at it. She was pretty clearly both a believer and quite aware of how precarious things could be for women in courting and marriage. A lot of the impressions I got from these poems are things that I couldn't explain in any concrete way. Other female poets from this era whose work I read wrote poems in which they spoke as male narrators expressing their adoration for some woman or another. It seems to have been a convention. I just kept wondering if I was seeing more than that in these works. I think it's an unanswerable question.
Jenkins, Marlin M. Capable Monsters - The poet uses Pokemon references and inspiration to structure poems about real world experiences. Possibly, it would have worked better for me if I knew anything at all about Pokemon.
Levy, Amy. A London Plane-Tree, and Other Verse; Levy, Amy. A Minor Poet - Project Gutenberg books. The quality of these poems varies quite a bit. The first book primarily offers short poems while the second contains mostly longer works. I got the impression that Levy preferred the city to the country and wondered if that made her a bad woman, poet, or person.
E.M. The Lathe of Morpheus - Project Gutenberg.
Ossoli, Margaret Fuller. Life Without and Life Within - Project Gutenberg. Poems start on p. 701. The essays before that, I left unread due to them being literary analysis of things I haven't read and don't expect to read. The poems include some translations of works by other people which I also skipped because I wasn't much enjoying the author's style.
Percy, Walter S. Muse and Mint - Project Gutenberg. Middling quality. Occasionally twee but not terrible.
Phillips, Carl. Pale Colors in a Tall Field - These read as more exhausted than the poems in other collections by the poet that I have previously read. I still quite liked them.
Rand, Theodore H. At Minas Basin and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. I'm still stumbling over this title because I keep expect something more Tolkienish than 'Basin' after 'Minas.' Maybe it's a weird hybrid name that mixes in Hobbit prosaicness? I mean, Google informs me that it's a specific inlet in the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, but... It's not a short book but has a lot of blank pages. The first third is mostly nature poems.
Ridge, Lola. Sun-Up and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. A lot of these poems were a stew of nightmare images and hallucinations. As far as I could tell, it was horrors filtered through the point of view of a small child who didn't understand what was happening. (I'm pretty sure there's a sexual assault at one point, but the poem doesn't spell it out.) Some bits are 1st person and others 2nd or 3rd. The shifting point of view adds to the disorientation by shifting the distance between the narrator and the reader and the events/images in the poems.
Rollins, Alice Wellington. The Ring of Amethyst - Project Gutenberg.
Sandburg, Carl. Selected Poems - This was an Everyman Library Pocket Poets book. Some of these poems, I liked a lot.
Smith, Effie. Rosemary and Pansies - Project Gutenberg. Heavily Christian with a strong (but subtle) thread of having faith in the world to come because otherwise this world is horrifying and unfair. Very short book (approximately 50 pages).
Stockett, M. Letitia. The Hoofs of Pegasus - Project Gutenberg. Somewhat twee.
Turner, Lewis McKenzie. Quartz from the Uplands - Project Gutenberg. This is a single poem and not book length. I'd be surprised if it's even 5000 words long. The title page says, 'Published by the Anti-Pessimist Society 1905,' but I would not call this optimistic. I read it as angry and as viewing industry as destructive to human dignity, human righteousness, etc. Better that everyone go back to farming and independence.
Untermeyer, Louis. Challenges - Project Gutenberg. I knew Untermeyer primarily for the anthologies of poetry he edited because he edited one that was a favorite during my adolescence. I memorized a lot of those poems when I had nothing else to fill my time. I found reading his work intriguing because of that. I don't remember much about the poems in this book at this point, but I didn't hate them or find them overwhelmingly trite. I think I remember a number of them being very socialist and unionist.
Started but not finished:
Cautley, George Spencer. A Century of Emblems - Project Gutenberg. I got about 25% of the way through this before I gave up. I just couldn't fight through any more.
Foley, James W. Boys and Girls - Project Gutenberg. Saccharine and trite. Focused on childhood.
Garnett, R.B. The Twentieth Century Epic - Project Gutenberg. Awkward and pretentious sounding.
Holland, J.G. Kathrina - Read about half. Paternal suicide, maternal suicide. Despair. Rejection of God. Love for/of a Good Woman (tm). Asshole poet saved. I gave up on reading because it was too damned long and because the poet needed to be punched for elitism. Repeatedly.
Lindsay, Vachel. Going-to-the-Sun - Project Gutenberg. Illustrated book of poetry about hiking through Glacier Park. The forward says that it's a response to the book published by Lindsay's companion on that trip, Stephen Graham. Lindsay says that the poems are mostly excuses for the illustrations. I found the illustrations difficult to parse and the poems repetitive. DNF at p.53 (about halfway through).
Queyras, Sina. My Ariel - Reading this required familiarity with Sylvia Plath, her works, and her contemporaries that I don't have. I could infer a lot, and I recognized names, but I don't think that, as a whole, this book makes sense without that context. Individual poems would probably be fine, but the cumulative effect was that of listening to comedy full of pop culture references for a place one's only vaguely heard of. I tried to push on for the very idiosyncratic reason that, of all the letters of the alphabet, Q is the one least represented in my poetry snippet documents. I wanted enough snippets to justify separate documents for Q and R.
Wilkins, Mary E. Once Upon a Time and Other Child-Verses - Project Gutenberg. I made it less than 10% of the way into this book. The poetry was just bad.