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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.
A.L.O.E. (aka Charlotte Maria Tucker). Hymns and Poems - Project Gutenberg. The religious poems felt like they worked better than rest of them did. That is, the religious stuff was rote but sincere. The rest was just meh.
Bartlett, Elizabeth. Behold this Dreamer; The House of Sleep; It Takes Practice Not to Die - Project Gutenberg. Bartlett's work is posted on PG under a Creative Commons license. Her literary executor (and son) reclaimed the copyright when the print volumes fell out of print and chose to put them on PG. They're much more recent than most of what I read on the site. I had ups and downs with the four books, but I generally enjoyed them.
Bartlett, Elizabeth. poems of yes and no - Project Gutenberg. I found the lack of punctuation and capitalization both confusing and engaging since it was hard for me to tell where the borders were between concepts. I ended up with overlapping readings.
Bodenheim, Maxwell. Advice: A Book of Poems; Against This Age; The Sardonic Arm - Project Gutenberg. The poet comes across as angry and as increasingly unwell as the books go on. Those aspects made me feel like the poems had an unpleasant texture and needed washing. I have no idea if he was abusing any substance beyond alcohol, but I wouldn't be surprised. Wikipedia indicates that he and his third wife were homeless and were murdered by a guy who had given them sleeping space for the night.
Call, F. O. Acanthus and Wild Grape - Project Gutenberg.
Coleman, Jamie Harris. Poems - Project Gutenberg. The poet was a Black woman who worked days and went to night school for high school. Very Christian. Mild protests (by present day standards) against racial injustice. Published 1918. I pulled this information from the intro to the book itself. Coleman doesn't have a Wikipedia article, and the only thing I found in terms of documentation for her was as part of an archive from a wealthy Kentucky family, here: https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/LIB/id/1952/
"Also included are the religious poems of Jamie Harris Coleman, an African-American woman whose husband worked for the Smiths. Correspondence concerning Smith's efforts to get the poems published are included."
Some of her poems seem to still be in use for inspirational blogs that need public domain poetry, and some language site called vocapp is using bits of her poetry for phrases to demonstrate word use in Polish-English dictionaries.
Colton, Arthur. Harps Hung up in Babylon - Project Gutenberg. I haven't tracked down anything solid on this author (nothing on Wikipedia for anyone of that name and rather too many people of the same name for Google more generally). I think the LC photograph about the guy named Arthur Colton who came up with a new pill making process is a different Arthur Colton (who seems to have lived in the Detroit area all his life). The Arthur Colton who wrote this would be this guy: https://www.bartleby.com/library/bios/1401.html
Who must have spent at least some time in New York in order to be 'librarian of the University Club, New York.' I don't think they're the same person. It's not impossible for them to be, but I don't think they are.
Crane, Nathalia. The Janitor's Boy - Project Gutenberg. Child poet. Some of the poems are pretty good; some aren't. I was worried, when I started looking for information on her, that she'd died young, but she lived into her 80s. Wikipedia doesn't offer much but her bibliography. She seems to have published actively between 1924 and 1942. Then there's a gap with a single additional publication in 1969. There's nothing there about her personal life. There's a mention that she became a professor of English at San Diego State College which makes me think there must be publications missing from that bibliography.
H.D. Heliodora, and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg.
Dimond, Mrs. Elizabeth. Christmas Offering - Project Gutenberg. Less than 30 pages. Sentimental poetry. Published originally in 1847 when she was in her 80s. I'm assuming a vanity project.
Doyle, Edward. Freedom, Truth and Beauty - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Many typos. Otherwise not very good. No Wikipedia article for the poet that I could find, but the forward indicates that the poet was blind and had become so as a teenager. The forward refers to him as 'the blind poet of Harlem.' PG has the 2nd revised edition with a date of 1921 which made me wonder about the Harlem Renaissance, but I think he was too early, born some time in the 1850s with the most recent mention I found at around 1910, and there's no indication I can find that he was Black. He had a cousin who was a mission priest in Argentina, and he edited something called The Up-Town Visitor about which I can find very little except that it existed and was in publication in the mid-1880s. How long before and how long after is unclear. The forward mentions him starting a local paper called the Advocate around 1882 ('twenty-three years ago' in an article published in 1905).
Gale, Zona. The Secret Way - Project Gutenberg.
Gordon, Adam Lindsay. Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Boring. Nineteenth century Australian poet.
Gurney, Ivor. Severn & Somme; War Embers - Project Gutenberg. WWI poetry. There's grief and horror shadowing even the poems that aren't obviously about the war.
Hartmann, Sadakichi. My Rubaiyat - Project Gutenberg. Only just managed to finish. The author's forward seriously put me off because he asserted that the work would last through the ages; he came across as arrogant. I'm also not convinced that he succeeded in what he claimed to be trying to do. The content and wording was very much in the US tradition, but the poet talked about wanting to emulate Chinese and Japanese forms.
The Haunted Hour - Project Gutenberg. Edited by Margaret Widdemer. Poems about ghosts and hauntings and death. Quality varies wildly. Includes some traditional ballads like "The Wife of Usher's Well." Those aiming at humor should be skipped because they're cringe-worthy.
Hughes, Richard. Gipsy-Night, and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. The author's forward states that the poems are a reaction against specific assertions by Robert Graves regarding what poems are supposed to be. Hughes seems to have specifically set out to write poems about hunger, poverty, homelessness, etc. Not all of them succeed, and he uses the G-word multiple times.
Jones, Edward Smyth. The Sylvan Cabin: A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse - Project Gutenberg. DNF. These were purest treacle. Sticky sweet and hard to get through.
Marks, Jeannette. Willow Pollen - Project Gutenberg. Another poet whose biography is more fascinating than her poetry. She had a 48 year relationship with another woman. Marks' Wikipedia page avoids calling it sexual, but her partner's page indicates that their contemporaries assumed it was. Marks' partner, Emma Woolley, was President of Mount Holyoke for 36 years and created a professorial position for Marks. Woolley's page mentions 'currents of resentment' about 'favoritism.'
McGee, Perry Honce. My Valued Ruby: Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Google coughed up damn all about this poet apart from links to booksellers and a single mention of his name in a scanned newspaper on a registration required site (him giving a reading at a church a few years after the publication of this book). Looking at the photographs at the beginning of the book, I think the author was a young black man dedicating the book to his mother (the titular Ruby), but I could be wrong. She might be his wife or his aunt or some other relation. There's no publisher listed, so I think this might have been a vanity publication.
McGirt, James E. For Your Sweet Sake - Project Gutenberg. Partial read. Many of the poems were in phonetic dialect which I have difficulty reading. The rest were very formal. I'd be kind of fascinated if some Black scholar looked at the poems in dialect because I find myself wondering if McGirt was trying to write something that sounded like the voices of people he knew or if he was dealing with white editors who had expectations and applied pressure, financial or otherwise. No reason it couldn't be both. Or something else entirely. I'm not qualified to guess. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/mcgirt-james-ephraim
Meredith, George. Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth - Project Gutenberg.
Meynell, Alice. The Poems of Alice Meynell - Project Gutenberg. This book continues a strong tradition of me finding the poets more interesting than their poetry. Meynell sounds fascinating. She was English, a Catholic, and a Sufferagist.
Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems (translated by Henry Hart Milman) - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I can't tell how much of my feeling that this was a bad translation came from it being nearly 200 years old (author's note with a date of July 1835) and how much from the author's wish to "give the narrative a more easy and trochaic flow..." There's a lot of phrasing that inverts normal English word order, and I can't tell if that's from the Sanskrit or just the translator's idea of how ancient poetry ought to sound in translation. There's some texture in it that I've encountered in old translations from Greek, Latin, and Old English, and I could see some English scholar modeling the structure and phrasing of his translation on those as more acceptable to his audience. It also may be that the phrasing is part of the original. I lack the language knowledge to tell.
Nicholson, Meredith. Short Flights - Project Gutenberg.
Noyes, Alfred. A Tale of Old Japan - Project Gutenberg. This is one long poem and not really great. I probably should have connected the poet to his best known work which is a long poem I hate.
Pessoa, Fernando. 35 Sonnets - Project Gutenberg. DNF.
Pound, Ezra. Lustra - Project Gutenberg. Arrogant. Negging. Some lovely turns of phrase, but I really wanted to spit in his coffee.
Procter, Adelaide Anne. Legends and Lyrics, part 2 - Project Gutenberg. Quietly desperate. Every good thing taken. Every bad thing beyond mitigation. Bleak. I feel zero desire to look for more of Procter's work.
Queen, Kadijah. Anodyne - Library book.
Riley, James Whitcombe. Armazindy - Project Gutenberg. Partial read. Deliberately skipped everything in phonetic dialect.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Poems from The Book of Hours (translated by Babette Deutsch) - Library book. I read this less than four hours ago and remember almost nothing.
Shores, Robert J. Gay Gods and Merry Mortals - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Attempt to be funny while retelling Greco-Roman myths. With a huge dollop of sexism. I expect there were other isms waiting to assault the unwary.
Smith, Clark Ashton. Ebony and Crystal - Project Gutenberg. I'd call it purple prose, but it's mostly not prose. Some of the poems made me wonder what the poet was on when he wrote.
Sterling, George. The House of Orchids and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. Overwrought with some very memorable imagery. I went down a rabbit hole on this poet because his Wikipedia article irritated me with a mention that he was suspected of (and might actually have) poisoning his ex-wife that didn't mention her name. For reasons I don't understand, there's a website that's trying to post all of Sterling's works. I read the poems there, too, and read some of the attached articles (which all seem to be contemporary to Sterling's life). My impression is that the guy was one of those people who knows everybody and who is assumed to be more talented than he actually is. He had a big house in a great location and money enough to feed people.
http://www.george-sterling.org/poems/
Story-Telling Ballads (ed. by Frances Jenkins Olcott) - Project Gutenberg. Skimmed some poems because they were written in phonetic dialect. Read others. Some good, some bad. Why does every collection of ballads need a version of "Sir Patrick Spens"?
Venable, William H. Saga of the Oak - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I cackled over the first two stanzas of the first poem. I'm quite sure I wasn't supposed to, but... "Doomsday craves my vitals now," is not a line I can take seriously. I didn't want to push further into the book for fear of eroding that perfect bit of pretentiousness. Venable was a Quaker from a family of Quaker Abolitionists. As far as I can tell, his professional life focused on teaching and, eventually, on educational reform.
Wheelock, John Hall. The Black Panther - Project Gutenberg.
Widdemer, Margaret. A Tree with a Bird in It - Project Gutenberg. Parodies of other poets. I snickered at a couple of them because they were very clearly in the style of whoever it was. PG doesn't currently have any other collections of Widdemer's poetry but has some of her fiction.
Williams, William Carlos. Al Que Quiere! - Project Gutenberg. 1917.
A.L.O.E. (aka Charlotte Maria Tucker). Hymns and Poems - Project Gutenberg. The religious poems felt like they worked better than rest of them did. That is, the religious stuff was rote but sincere. The rest was just meh.
Bartlett, Elizabeth. Behold this Dreamer; The House of Sleep; It Takes Practice Not to Die - Project Gutenberg. Bartlett's work is posted on PG under a Creative Commons license. Her literary executor (and son) reclaimed the copyright when the print volumes fell out of print and chose to put them on PG. They're much more recent than most of what I read on the site. I had ups and downs with the four books, but I generally enjoyed them.
Bartlett, Elizabeth. poems of yes and no - Project Gutenberg. I found the lack of punctuation and capitalization both confusing and engaging since it was hard for me to tell where the borders were between concepts. I ended up with overlapping readings.
Bodenheim, Maxwell. Advice: A Book of Poems; Against This Age; The Sardonic Arm - Project Gutenberg. The poet comes across as angry and as increasingly unwell as the books go on. Those aspects made me feel like the poems had an unpleasant texture and needed washing. I have no idea if he was abusing any substance beyond alcohol, but I wouldn't be surprised. Wikipedia indicates that he and his third wife were homeless and were murdered by a guy who had given them sleeping space for the night.
Call, F. O. Acanthus and Wild Grape - Project Gutenberg.
Coleman, Jamie Harris. Poems - Project Gutenberg. The poet was a Black woman who worked days and went to night school for high school. Very Christian. Mild protests (by present day standards) against racial injustice. Published 1918. I pulled this information from the intro to the book itself. Coleman doesn't have a Wikipedia article, and the only thing I found in terms of documentation for her was as part of an archive from a wealthy Kentucky family, here: https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/LIB/id/1952/
"Also included are the religious poems of Jamie Harris Coleman, an African-American woman whose husband worked for the Smiths. Correspondence concerning Smith's efforts to get the poems published are included."
Some of her poems seem to still be in use for inspirational blogs that need public domain poetry, and some language site called vocapp is using bits of her poetry for phrases to demonstrate word use in Polish-English dictionaries.
Colton, Arthur. Harps Hung up in Babylon - Project Gutenberg. I haven't tracked down anything solid on this author (nothing on Wikipedia for anyone of that name and rather too many people of the same name for Google more generally). I think the LC photograph about the guy named Arthur Colton who came up with a new pill making process is a different Arthur Colton (who seems to have lived in the Detroit area all his life). The Arthur Colton who wrote this would be this guy: https://www.bartleby.com/library/bios/1401.html
Who must have spent at least some time in New York in order to be 'librarian of the University Club, New York.' I don't think they're the same person. It's not impossible for them to be, but I don't think they are.
Crane, Nathalia. The Janitor's Boy - Project Gutenberg. Child poet. Some of the poems are pretty good; some aren't. I was worried, when I started looking for information on her, that she'd died young, but she lived into her 80s. Wikipedia doesn't offer much but her bibliography. She seems to have published actively between 1924 and 1942. Then there's a gap with a single additional publication in 1969. There's nothing there about her personal life. There's a mention that she became a professor of English at San Diego State College which makes me think there must be publications missing from that bibliography.
H.D. Heliodora, and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg.
Dimond, Mrs. Elizabeth. Christmas Offering - Project Gutenberg. Less than 30 pages. Sentimental poetry. Published originally in 1847 when she was in her 80s. I'm assuming a vanity project.
Doyle, Edward. Freedom, Truth and Beauty - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Many typos. Otherwise not very good. No Wikipedia article for the poet that I could find, but the forward indicates that the poet was blind and had become so as a teenager. The forward refers to him as 'the blind poet of Harlem.' PG has the 2nd revised edition with a date of 1921 which made me wonder about the Harlem Renaissance, but I think he was too early, born some time in the 1850s with the most recent mention I found at around 1910, and there's no indication I can find that he was Black. He had a cousin who was a mission priest in Argentina, and he edited something called The Up-Town Visitor about which I can find very little except that it existed and was in publication in the mid-1880s. How long before and how long after is unclear. The forward mentions him starting a local paper called the Advocate around 1882 ('twenty-three years ago' in an article published in 1905).
Gale, Zona. The Secret Way - Project Gutenberg.
Gordon, Adam Lindsay. Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Boring. Nineteenth century Australian poet.
Gurney, Ivor. Severn & Somme; War Embers - Project Gutenberg. WWI poetry. There's grief and horror shadowing even the poems that aren't obviously about the war.
Hartmann, Sadakichi. My Rubaiyat - Project Gutenberg. Only just managed to finish. The author's forward seriously put me off because he asserted that the work would last through the ages; he came across as arrogant. I'm also not convinced that he succeeded in what he claimed to be trying to do. The content and wording was very much in the US tradition, but the poet talked about wanting to emulate Chinese and Japanese forms.
The Haunted Hour - Project Gutenberg. Edited by Margaret Widdemer. Poems about ghosts and hauntings and death. Quality varies wildly. Includes some traditional ballads like "The Wife of Usher's Well." Those aiming at humor should be skipped because they're cringe-worthy.
Hughes, Richard. Gipsy-Night, and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. The author's forward states that the poems are a reaction against specific assertions by Robert Graves regarding what poems are supposed to be. Hughes seems to have specifically set out to write poems about hunger, poverty, homelessness, etc. Not all of them succeed, and he uses the G-word multiple times.
Jones, Edward Smyth. The Sylvan Cabin: A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse - Project Gutenberg. DNF. These were purest treacle. Sticky sweet and hard to get through.
Marks, Jeannette. Willow Pollen - Project Gutenberg. Another poet whose biography is more fascinating than her poetry. She had a 48 year relationship with another woman. Marks' Wikipedia page avoids calling it sexual, but her partner's page indicates that their contemporaries assumed it was. Marks' partner, Emma Woolley, was President of Mount Holyoke for 36 years and created a professorial position for Marks. Woolley's page mentions 'currents of resentment' about 'favoritism.'
McGee, Perry Honce. My Valued Ruby: Poems - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Google coughed up damn all about this poet apart from links to booksellers and a single mention of his name in a scanned newspaper on a registration required site (him giving a reading at a church a few years after the publication of this book). Looking at the photographs at the beginning of the book, I think the author was a young black man dedicating the book to his mother (the titular Ruby), but I could be wrong. She might be his wife or his aunt or some other relation. There's no publisher listed, so I think this might have been a vanity publication.
McGirt, James E. For Your Sweet Sake - Project Gutenberg. Partial read. Many of the poems were in phonetic dialect which I have difficulty reading. The rest were very formal. I'd be kind of fascinated if some Black scholar looked at the poems in dialect because I find myself wondering if McGirt was trying to write something that sounded like the voices of people he knew or if he was dealing with white editors who had expectations and applied pressure, financial or otherwise. No reason it couldn't be both. Or something else entirely. I'm not qualified to guess. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/mcgirt-james-ephraim
Meredith, George. Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth - Project Gutenberg.
Meynell, Alice. The Poems of Alice Meynell - Project Gutenberg. This book continues a strong tradition of me finding the poets more interesting than their poetry. Meynell sounds fascinating. She was English, a Catholic, and a Sufferagist.
Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems (translated by Henry Hart Milman) - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I can't tell how much of my feeling that this was a bad translation came from it being nearly 200 years old (author's note with a date of July 1835) and how much from the author's wish to "give the narrative a more easy and trochaic flow..." There's a lot of phrasing that inverts normal English word order, and I can't tell if that's from the Sanskrit or just the translator's idea of how ancient poetry ought to sound in translation. There's some texture in it that I've encountered in old translations from Greek, Latin, and Old English, and I could see some English scholar modeling the structure and phrasing of his translation on those as more acceptable to his audience. It also may be that the phrasing is part of the original. I lack the language knowledge to tell.
Nicholson, Meredith. Short Flights - Project Gutenberg.
Noyes, Alfred. A Tale of Old Japan - Project Gutenberg. This is one long poem and not really great. I probably should have connected the poet to his best known work which is a long poem I hate.
Pessoa, Fernando. 35 Sonnets - Project Gutenberg. DNF.
Pound, Ezra. Lustra - Project Gutenberg. Arrogant. Negging. Some lovely turns of phrase, but I really wanted to spit in his coffee.
Procter, Adelaide Anne. Legends and Lyrics, part 2 - Project Gutenberg. Quietly desperate. Every good thing taken. Every bad thing beyond mitigation. Bleak. I feel zero desire to look for more of Procter's work.
Queen, Kadijah. Anodyne - Library book.
Riley, James Whitcombe. Armazindy - Project Gutenberg. Partial read. Deliberately skipped everything in phonetic dialect.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Poems from The Book of Hours (translated by Babette Deutsch) - Library book. I read this less than four hours ago and remember almost nothing.
Shores, Robert J. Gay Gods and Merry Mortals - Project Gutenberg. DNF. Attempt to be funny while retelling Greco-Roman myths. With a huge dollop of sexism. I expect there were other isms waiting to assault the unwary.
Smith, Clark Ashton. Ebony and Crystal - Project Gutenberg. I'd call it purple prose, but it's mostly not prose. Some of the poems made me wonder what the poet was on when he wrote.
Sterling, George. The House of Orchids and Other Poems - Project Gutenberg. Overwrought with some very memorable imagery. I went down a rabbit hole on this poet because his Wikipedia article irritated me with a mention that he was suspected of (and might actually have) poisoning his ex-wife that didn't mention her name. For reasons I don't understand, there's a website that's trying to post all of Sterling's works. I read the poems there, too, and read some of the attached articles (which all seem to be contemporary to Sterling's life). My impression is that the guy was one of those people who knows everybody and who is assumed to be more talented than he actually is. He had a big house in a great location and money enough to feed people.
http://www.george-sterling.org/poems/
Story-Telling Ballads (ed. by Frances Jenkins Olcott) - Project Gutenberg. Skimmed some poems because they were written in phonetic dialect. Read others. Some good, some bad. Why does every collection of ballads need a version of "Sir Patrick Spens"?
Venable, William H. Saga of the Oak - Project Gutenberg. DNF. I cackled over the first two stanzas of the first poem. I'm quite sure I wasn't supposed to, but... "Doomsday craves my vitals now," is not a line I can take seriously. I didn't want to push further into the book for fear of eroding that perfect bit of pretentiousness. Venable was a Quaker from a family of Quaker Abolitionists. As far as I can tell, his professional life focused on teaching and, eventually, on educational reform.
Wheelock, John Hall. The Black Panther - Project Gutenberg.
Widdemer, Margaret. A Tree with a Bird in It - Project Gutenberg. Parodies of other poets. I snickered at a couple of them because they were very clearly in the style of whoever it was. PG doesn't currently have any other collections of Widdemer's poetry but has some of her fiction.
Williams, William Carlos. Al Que Quiere! - Project Gutenberg. 1917.