Philip Levine photo from the 1950 Wayne University Griffin yearbook (Credit: Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University)

In the evenings of 1942 on the outskirts of Detroit, a 14-year-old Philip Levine frequently wandered over to the undeveloped wooded areas nearby. There, in the small forest, he composed his first poems in the dark. “I never thought of these early compositions as poems. I thought of them as secret little speeches addressed to the moon when the moon was visible,” Levine told an audience in the Coolidge Auditorium on May 3.

In a lecture titled “My Lost Poets,” Levine, the 18th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, vividly and tenderly reminisced about his early days of poetry and the poets long forgotten who had a profound impact on his writing. The lecture marked the closing of the Poetry and Literature Center’s literary season for 2011-2012.

Levine said his solitary evening excursions to compose his thoughts would last some years. He found these literary endeavors thrilling because he discovered a voice within the self. “I had no idea it had been there. A voice that could speak of all the things I would never have dared share with anyone,” Levine said.

A high school literature teacher, the “marvelous Mrs. Piperno,” recognized Levine’s interest in poetry and encouraged it. She introduced Levine to the first poet that he admired—Wilfred Owen, one of the leading poets of World War I, who died in action on the Western Front.

In the spring of 1947, as a 19-year-old student at Wayne University in Detroit, Levine attended his first poetry reading. “I remember almost nothing of the event, except for one line of verse and one fact,” he said. The fact: The university library also included the Miles Modern Poetry Room, which held a significant collection of 20th-century poetry. The verse: “When in a mirror, love redeems my eyes,” which was the opening line in a poem recited by its author, Wayne University student Bernard Strempek.

Levine said, “Strempek was a tall, loose-limbed boy, who looked no older than 15. The poem’s recitation was in a voice the likes I never heard in all my wandering in Detroit—the high-tenor version of Cary Grant and a call to arms of a warrior . . . Bernard Strempek was overpoweringly serious about what he regarded as poetry.” Why that one line? Levine said, “I loved the music and movement of the line. I never attempted a mastery of rhythm; I was concerned with narrative and imagery.” Levine also was struck by Strempek’s “willingness to openly acknowledge his narcissism.”

A shy Levine didn’t say a word at that poetry reading, but the next afternoon he decided to visit the Miles Poetry Room. There he found Strempek, who was reading the poem “Abel” by Demetrios Capetanakis. Strempek looked up at Levine and said, “Listen to this, I’ve discovered a new master: ‘My brother Cain, the wounded.’ What an amazing opening. Why didn’t I think of that?” Levine read “Abel,” and from that day he became a fan of Capetanakis, whose poetry was published posthumously in 1947 in the book, Demetrios Capetanakis: A Greek Poet in England. The poet died from leukemia at age 32 in 1944.

Levine soon joined Strempek and other fledgling poets in monthly meetings at the Miles Poetry Room, where they read their own work and discussed poetry. In addition to Strempek, Levine befriended Ruby Teague and Ulysses Wardlaw.

During this time, Levine was obsessed with war poetry. In the Miles Poetry Room he discovered a 1945 volume by Alun Lewis titled Ha Ha Among the Trumpets: Poems in Transit. Lewis, a Welsh poet, chose to go to war only to discover that he did not belong there. He wrote personal and intimate poems of loss. From Lewis, Levine learned that there was “room for tenderness in great poetry.” In the Poetry Room Levine also discovered Keith Douglas, a war poet from England who died on the third day of the Normandy invasion.

In 1948, Teague presented Levine with a poem titled “Ring Song” by Naomi Replansky. She had seen the poem in a publication, thought Levine would like it, and typed it up for him. “I do not believe I understood the perfect justice that Ruby Teague, a gracious, rural Southern Baptist, should bring me the gift of a poem by Replansky, a New York Jewish leftist,” said Levine. He said Teague—despite her manners, genteel speech, and looks—turned out to be a warrior for human dignity, and Replansky, who was appalled by cruelty and greed, was her poet.

Of the four poetry pals, only Levine evolved into a prolific and award-winning poet. Strempek, who published one volume of poetry, died at age 32 in an auto wreck. Levine said that Teague was driven by the need to help others, and that “she left for the wilderness of Latin America and vanished.” He also said that Wardlaw’s pursuit of poetry was “silenced by the vagaries of life.” Levine said, “Back then, I did not know just how much I needed them, or how much they had already given me. I needed not only their encouragement, their criticism, their intelligence and dedication and their soulfulness—for these were powerfully soulful people—I needed their fellowship in our ancient discipline, their belief that we would share in the singular glory of poetry. Where would I have been without that belief?”

About the other writers, Levine said, “Where would I have been without Capetanakis and his strange vision of our origins, without Alun Lewis and the songs he hurled in death’s face, without Replansky and her righteous indignation . . . without the calm and surgical poems of Keith Douglas, without the dreams of all my lost and forgotten poets?”

Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry Philip Levine, at his Inaugural Reading on October 17th, 2011.

Philip Levine concluded the Library’s literary season last night with a lecture to a packed audience in the Coolidge Auditorium. Levine’s talk, “My Forgotten Poets,” was a self-effacing tribute to the poets who influenced his life and writing during his formative years.

Although Levine’s term as Poet Laureate officially ended yesterday, this afternoon at 3 p.m. he returns to the Library one final time for a special, live video conference with ten sites—five high schools, four public libraries, and one retirement community—located around the country. The program, titled “Behind the Scenes with the Poet Laureate,” will feature Levine reading and discussing three of his poems: “Our Valley,” “The Simple Truth,” and “What Work Is.” This will be followed by a live question and answer session with participating institutions.

One of the most exciting aspects of the video conference is that it will be streamed live on the Web, giving anyone with an Internet connection the opportunity to watch Philip Levine interact with a diverse group of students, poetry lovers, and lifelong learners. To view the event live, simply follow this link on Friday, at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.

This is the second time a U.S. Poet Laureate has participated in a video conference at the Library of Congress. On April 1, 2010, Kay Ryan led a video conference on the writing process with students from four community colleges in celebration of Community College Poetry Day. The video conference was part of Ryan’s national poetry project Poetry for the Mind’s Joy.

Complete List of Participating Sites

• Ada Community Library, Star Branch – Star, Idaho
• Brawley Union High School – Brawley, California
• Capstone Village, U. Of Alabama – Tuscaloosa, Alabama
• Southwest High School – El Centro, California
• Fox Chapel High School – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Moanalua High School – Honolulu, Hawaii
• Potsdam Public Library – Potsdam, New York
• Alpena County George N. Fletcher Library – Alpena, Michigan
• Whitmore Public Library – Salt Lake City, Utah
• Winder Barrow High School – Winder, Georgia

This event is sponsored by the Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress, with technical support from the Internet2 K20 Initiative; MAGPI, the Mid-Atlantic Gigapop in Philadelphia for Internet2; and the Digital Reference Section of the Library of Congress.

Poster for "The Raven: The Love Story of Edgar Allan Poe," by George Hazelton (1908)

A further testament to the death grip of all things Poe on popular culture is that no English-language poet, with the exception of Shakespeare, has been depicted in television and cinema more often than Poe. Searching the Internet Movie Database reveals that The Raven is approximately the 54th movie or television show to feature the character of Poe, which itself pales in comparison to the 250 or so films and television programs in which Poe is credited as a writer.

The first film to feature Poe as a character is D.W. Griffith’s 1909 Edgar Allen [sic] Poe. The seven-minute production revolves around the appearance of a raven (at the 02:09 mark) to the cash-strapped Poe on a bust above the bed of his ill wife Virginia Clemm, which inspires him to write “The Raven.” After several attempts to sell the poem to different publishers, he finds one who accepts it. With the money he earns from the sale, Poe buys a blanket and other goods for his wife, only to find, upon his return, that she has died. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore Web site notes of the film:

Although it was a failure as biography, it was happily successful at the box office and inspired a number of other silent films, including the The Raven (1912, American Eclair Company) and The Avenging Conscience (1914, another Griffith production). Poe continued to appear in the talkies, including The Man with a Cloak (1951, with Joseph Cotten as Poe) and The Torture Garden (1966).

Although McTeigue’s The Raven apparently shares nothing in common with Poe’s poem other than its title, many other films and television shows—not to mention works of literature—have adapted or parodied the poem since its 1845 publication. My favorite  television adaptation of the poem easily is from the “Treehouse of Horror” episode from the second season (1990) of The Simpsons. James Earl Jones expertly narrates “The Raven,” while Homer is cast as the addled protagonist.

In a previous post I mentioned that one of my favorite literary parodies of “The Raven” is a Civil War poem titled “The Craven” that mocks General George McClellan. From the Catbird Seat will make it a point, come fall, to explore in more detail the many and varied literary parodies of “The Raven.” Until then, McTeigue’s The Raven will help ensure that Poe’s presence continues to be felt at movie theaters for . . . evermore.

Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry Philip Levine, at his Inaugural Reading on October 17th, 2011.

Less than two weeks from today, the Coolidge Auditorium will fill with people eager to see our 18^th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, Philip Levine, close out the Library’s spring season. The Poet Laureate will follow up his hugely successful opening reading last October with a talk entitled “Forgotten Poets of My Youth.” I will surely be sitting on the side, as proud as ever of our Laureate and of poetry.

In my career, I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of poets. Many have been as generous and humble as they are lauded—with honors of all kinds. I have even gotten to work with several Poets Laureate, who continue to be great ambassadors of the art long after their tenure at the Library. But to be there from the moment the Librarian makes the call, and to be the Poet Laureate’s point person (or loyal lieutenant, as I have called myself) throughout his term—that has been an amazing experience.

The person I shared this experience with is truly amazing as well. Our current Poet Laureate is as engaging, as forthright, and as honest as any poet I have ever met. The latter point is especially important—he is both honest with others, but also with himself and in his poems. He is seriously funny, too (for instance, I have his opening remarks from the October event pinned to my bulletin board—he titled them “Laureate BS”), and balances his critical acumen with a huge generosity. “Call me Phil” is the kind of thing he says when meeting someone for the first time. He and his lovely wife Fran are the kind of people who hug you, and you hug right back.

On the evening of May 3^rd, Phil’s generosity will be in full force. He will talk about a time long ago when he was just starting out, and about poets he discovered who have largely been forgotten by history. His work that night will be to show how these poets gave him something invaluable, something worth remembering and sharing. Hundreds of others will join me to reflect upon why we turn to poems in the first place, and what they can truly offer us. Phil will stand as part of a great line of Consultants and Poets Laureate, who used their time in the position to inspire so many others around the country. At the same time, I will be watching a man who has become a dear friend and who has changed my life in ways I will continue to realize for years to come.

First paragraphs of "The New York Times" editorial on poetry about the Titanic

Many newspaper editors, finding their desks flooded with amateur poetry about the Titanic, observed superciliously that the quality of poems received was, to use a charitable term, lacking. Indeed, the editors of The New York Times felt the situation dire enough to remind its readers in an April 30, 1912, editorial, “Only Poets Should Write Verse,” that “to write about the Titanic a poem worth printing requires that the author should have something more than paper, pencil, and a strong feeling that the disaster was a terrible one.”

The editors of Current Literature, while acknowledging the  “crudeness” of much of the verse to cross its desk, more charitably noted that the poems nevertheless possessed “the redeeming quality of sincerity, of deep feeling.”

An example of the “deep feeling” communicated in much Titanic verse is Mary Moffat Cunningham’s “The Band that Played Till the Ship Went Down,” published in the May 14, 1912, issue of The Logan Republican (Utah). The introduction to the poem notes that it was performed the previous day as a memorial to the Titanic band, and that the recitation “brought tears to the eyes of many in the audience.” Here are the concluding lines of the poem, spoken by the bandleader, Wallace Hartley:

God of the dark, God of the sea,
Through night to light we come to Thee!
Well, boys! We’ve played our best,
Now leave to God the rest.
We die like men when the ship goes down!

In addition to publishing original poetry submissions, U.S. newspapers reprinted some of the best-known poems on the tragedy published in Britain, such as Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain—Lines on the Loss of the Titanic” [source], and articles included frequent references to meetings, programs, and events at which poems about the Titanic were recited.

Inscription by Edwin Drew to President Taft; front page of "The Chief Incidents of the 'Titanic' Wreck Treated in Verse"

The earliest book-length collection of poetry about the Titanic in the Library’s collections was written by the English elocutionist Edwin Drew. The Library’s copy of this May 1912 collection, titled The Chief Incidents of the “Titanic” Wreck Treated in Verse; Together with the Lessons of the Disaster, was originally sent by Drew to the White House, and bears an inscription to President Taft dated September 12, 1912.  The book—which it is unclear if Taft received or read—was transferred to the Library in March 1913.

Although Drew notes in his introduction that he claims “no poetic power in these verses,” he believes that clear, comprehensible poetry such as his is “generally more treasured by ‘the masses’ than sonnets that may be immortal, but are for ‘the few.’”

The 27 poems in the collection capture the entire arc of the Titanic’s voyage and aftermath, from “The ‘Titanic’s’ Departure,” which notes the “vast admiring” that took place upon the ship’s completion and departure on her maiden voyage, to “A Wedding” involving one of the ship’s survivors, described as a “sequel for a smile / . . . after endless lists of death.”

The collection also includes several poems honoring the heroic efforts of individuals, such as “John Phillips, The Wireless Operator, on Duty to the Last”:

Photograph and poem about John Phillips, pp. 16-17 of "The Chief Incidents of the 'Titanic' Wreck Treated in Verse"

While Drew’s poetry will not echo in the halls of the literary pantheon, his heartfelt efforts, along with those of thousands of others who penned verses about the wreck, demonstrate the important role of poetry in capturing and sharing the emotions, opinions, and thoughts of the public in times of trouble.

For those of you interested in reading more poetry written in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic’s sinking, Titanica: The Disaster of the Century in Poetry, Song, and Prose (W. W. Norton & Co, 1998) includes more than a dozen examples. Other notable poems published in 1912 are cited in Eugene L. Rasor’s The Titanic: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press, 2001), pp. 113-116. The Library’s copy of one of the best-known poems about the Titanic, Horace Greeley’s The Wreck of the Titanic; A Poem (1913), can be read online through the Internet Archive.

Finally, From the Catbird Seat is only one of several Library blogs with a post highlighting the centennial of the Titanic disaster, and I encourage you to look at them all. At the time of this posting, the Library of Congress Blog discusses a number of online Library resources related to the Titanic; In The Muse discusses Titanic-related sheet music in our collections; Picture This features a photograph and tale of two initially unidentified French children who survived the shipwreck; In Custodia Legis examines the regulations and requirements that applied to the safety equipment on board the ship; and Teaching with the Library of Congress explores how primary sources about the Titanic can be used to help students analyze the tragedy.

UPDATE: Inside Adams, the Library’s blog about science, business, and technology, has been updated with a post about the night sky during the Titanic’s voyage.

Reed Whittemore, twice Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, died on Friday in Kensington, MD. He was 92. You can read his obituary here and here, but we would like to add a few words about the poet.

Whittemore said of the consultancy, “The job is such a rare and special one in the library world and the federal bureaucracy, as well as within the world of poetry, that it is a job of opportunity, a catbird seat.” That final phrase stuck—William McGuire appropriated it for his 1988 book Poetry’s Catbird Seat, and we borrowed it again for the name of this blog. But Whittemore’s remark is memorable not just for one pithy description. The statement illustrates a keen understanding of the multiple public commitments a poet laureate must make—to the Library that houses the office, to the nation, and to the art—as well as a willingness to pour his or her energies into all of them.

Whittemore began his public commitment to poetry at a young age, showing a special dedication to literary publishing. As an undergraduate, he co-founded the literary magazine Furioso and published such Modernist luminaries as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and Wallace Stevens. He also started a literary magazine at Carlton College while he taught there and served as literary editor of The New Republic. As Consultant Whittemore started the Association of Literary Magazines of America, which was replaced by the current-day Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, to provide funding to hundreds of other “little” magazines and help buoy the careers of countless poets.

We remember Whittemore as a great supporter of the art, and more simply as a great poet. Michael Collier, professor of English at the University of Maryland (where Whittemore finished his career as a teacher), writes:

As a member of that remarkable generation of post WWII poets, Reed Whittemore stands out for his sly, satirical provocations. His poems beguile readers with a disarming directness and plain-spokenness that call to mind E. B. White and Mark Twain, and like these great American humorists Reed sniffed out political, social, and intellectual bombast and arrogance wherever he found it, which was just about everywhere. He was playful with his erudition, which was considerable, and deeply modest, almost shy. As I think about the vast landscape of contemporary American poetry, there is really no one like him, and yet he’s exactly the kind of poet we need—clear-eyed, accessible, complicatedly optimistic, and fierce.

With that same optimism and clarity and vision, Reed Whittemore looked out from the catbird seat and saw opportunity. The view here is just a little dimmer now that he’s gone.

Philip Levine won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1995 for his work "The Simple Truth." Photo courtesy of Frances Levine.

What do you like the most about being the U.S. Poet Laureate?

I’ve met so many interesting people I might never have met otherwise. Many of them have stuck in my mind, and I hope will remain for the rest of the trip.

How do you spend your time?

Largely I spend my days as I’ve spent them since I retired from teaching. I’m
an early riser and the mornings are my writing time.

In Fresno as well as Brooklyn, I go into a small room by myself in the hope that the right words will come. I have various ways of getting the process going, but they don’t always work. The hardest part is the waiting, but I’ve learned patience.

Around noon I have lunch with my wife, a small lunch, and if I’ve been working on a poem, I get back to it. If not, I answer my mail or read. I read both poetry and prose for many hours each day. At 3 p.m., I usually go to my gym, nothing fancy, and get my exercise. My cardiologist and my retinologist insist on this, and I’ve made it a habit.

So you do continue to write poetry?

Yes. I write – often badly, sometimes well – because that’s what I do.

What is your inspiration when you write?

My inspiration is our glorious bastard language. And my memory. And frequently the writing of others. Williams, Machado, Wyatt, Keats, Chaucer, Stevens, Whitman, Zbigniew Herbert, Edward Thomas and Cesare Pavese are some of the poets I go back to again and again.

What is the most interesting thing that happened to you this year since you became the U.S. poet laureate?

First, I’d have to say, was a visit to Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. I didn’t know there were still little groups of people coming to college to learn how to make our society more equitable and democratic.

I’d thought of Georgetown as the home of basketball, the place where John Thompson and his son raised great centers like Ewing, Mutombo and Mourning.

It is much more, for the place has a powerful social conscience, and the folks there take their ethical and civic duties very seriously. This may be one side of Christian faith that we need more of, the side committed to hope, charity and humility – when those virtues are harnessed to intelligence, energy and willpower, you get something astonishing.

I went away asking myself if I were doing enough to enrich my community and help my fellow citizens. I was humbled.

Along these lines, I was deeply moved by those I met when I read for the AFLCIO. I expected 12 retired secretaries in a large closet assigned to endure me and not report back, but President Richard Trumka has turned their headquarters into a house that welcomes artists of every shape. I had a marvelous audience made up of the counterparts of the people – imagined and real – who inhabit my poems.

I also loved visiting a writers group in Harlem, a “rainbow coalition” of sixth graders who were totally serious about pursuing lives as writers. They inspired me – as did their teachers, who were taking time from their own lives to foster the group – and I hope I inspired them.

In Ottawa, Canada, I was treated like a true poet and met a Mexican poet I will never forget: Pura López-Colomé. Marvelous person and poet. I also met a poet I’d been corresponding with for 14 years, the Canadian poet Tim Bolling, a man much younger than I but someone who came to poetry much as I did from a working-class background and a poet who’s been able to place those experiences in his poetry.

You first began composing poems when you were 14. What brought you to poetry?

It was almost magical. At age 14, I lived with my mother and my two brothers, one older and the other my twin. The four of us could make noise – I was as bad as the others. And when my grandfather, who lived nearby, came over, it got louder.

For some peace, I would go out into the undeveloped blocks near our house, and once within the little forest, commune with the universe, and soon I was speaking to someone or something I was sure was listening. (Of course I was the only one listening, so it was a good preparation for the many years ahead when no one read my work.)

I did my best to polish these talks or poems that took their cadences from the King James Version of the Bible and the Southern preachers I heard on the radio. I was trying to do Whitman without reading Whitman, whom I’d never heard of.

Any thoughts on how poetry should be taught in the early school years, in high school and in college?

The reading of poetry and the writing of poetry should be taught together. Poetry must not be crammed down anyone’s throat. There will always be people who don’t care for it; let them not care for it.

With your students, focus attention on the words themselves and the shape and music they make. The teacher must be able to read the poem both properly and clearly aloud and not be afraid of it; the teacher should illuminate – through the reading – the quality of the language and the patterns the language takes.

Let the learners go from there. Never try to teach poems that have no interest for you; what you will communicate is your lack of care.

What is the current state of poetry?

Poetry is very healthy today. Like Manhattan, it seems to be bursting with overpopulation and too few homes for so many. We poets come in all sizes and shapes, and the variety of what we produce is amazing.

Yes, there are schools of poetry that no doubt have contempt for other schools: The Language poets and the New Formalists pretty much define the great range of these schools or camps, and the rest of us are somewhere in between, often utterly on our own. This is better than having a single style and a czar.

The situation invites a great deal of bad work, but then bad poems have always outnumbered good poems by at least 100-to-1. We do lack giants – think of 1946 when I began seriously writing and reading my contemporaries, including Eliot, Pound, Frost, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Rexroth, Bishop, all of them active and publishing. It meant the world to me when I published in Poetry in the same issues with Williams and Stevens.

Actually, a new generation of giants may be just breaking into print.

Do you think the Internet and social media have any effect on poetry?

I love what the Internet can do. I remember typing in a mysterious line from a poem by Henry Reed, a line he quoted, and right away I found it in Rimbaud. That led me – just as in a library – to poems by Henry Reed I’d never seen before.

The ’net means also I can travel without books and find much of what I need almost anywhere. We also have these online literary publications like Blackbird that are as good as anything in print.

I can nose through the 100 years of Poetry and the old issues of Kayak I foolishly gave away.

April is poetry month. Any suggestions on how people can celebrate it?

For me, every month is poetry month. For those who aren’t poets, perhaps the best way to celebrate the month might be to find a poet from your city or – if your town has no poet – the poet from the town you’d like to be in and just discover what’s there.

Chicago Cubs infielders Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance

Here are two quick questions to consider on Major League Baseball’s Opening Day:

1) What is your favorite baseball poem?
2) What is your favorite baseball poem—other than “Casey at the Bat”?

Most people can easily answer the first question, but are stymied by the second question because, in all likelihood, they’re unable to name a baseball poem—any baseball poem—besides “Casey at the Bat.”

One baseball poem that deserves to be known as much as Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat,” if only for the influence it may have had on baseball history, is “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon.” The poem, written by Franklin Pierce Adams for his “Always In Good Humor” column in New York’s The Evening Mail, was published in the July 12, 1910 issue of the paper under the title “That Double Play Again.” Pierce’s poem immortalized the fearsome Chicago Cubs double play combination of shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance, who had flashed enough leather against Adams’s New York Giants to make him lament in verse:

These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,*
Making a Giant hit into a double–
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

The poem was an immediate hit with Adams’s fellow sportswriters and readers, some of whom wrote their own verses paying homage to the trio (and parodying Adams’s poem in the process). The article “The Champion Double-Play Trio of 1910” from the September 5, 1910, issue of The Spokane Press, available through the Library’s Chronicling America Web site**, includes several additional stanzas about the “three knights of the double-play.”

"The Champion Double-Play Trio of 1910"

Tinker, Evers, and Chance helped lead the Cubs to four National League pennants (1906-8, 1910) and two World Series wins (1907-8), and were simultaneously inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1946. Many baseball historians and fans believe that Adams’s poem, as much the players’ on-field accomplishments, helped them secure a spot among baseball’s all-time greats, and as such “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” is a poem every baseball fan should know.

*The word gonfalon refers to a flag or pennant.
**See the online guide Baseball Resources at the Library of Congress to learn about additional baseball resources available at the Library.

In almost every instance, the poems in question were published by an amateur, or vanity press, poetry publisher. These for-profit publishers, which have been extremely active since the 1980s, accept nearly every poem submitted to their contests for publication, and make money by encouraging winning poets to purchase copies of the anthologies in which their poems appear.

The Library of Congress has become a locus of questions about vanity press poetry publishers—receiving upwards of two-hundred inquiries per year—because many people mistakenly believe that the Library itself publishes and sells these anthologies. This misconception occurs for a number of reasons. First, the names of some amateur poetry publishers are quite similar to the Library of Congress. One of the largest amateur poetry publishers in the 1990s and 2000s was the National Library of Poetry, whose name is frequently confused with the Library of Congress, or, as many people refer to us, the “National Library of Congress.” Second, many of these publishers send emails and letters to winning poets that link their anthologies with the Library of Congress. Their correspondence sometimes notes that the anthologies will be submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, or that the anthologies will be assigned a “number” by the Library of Congress. People often take this to mean that the Library of Congress will add the book to its permanent collections, or will assign it an ISBN number. The National Library of Poetry, in fact, printed ISBNs on its anthologies” copyright pages in such a way that people might assume the numbers were issued by or associated with the Library of Congress:

Copyright page of the National Library of Poetry anthology East of Sunrise.

In practice, the Library rarely adds these books to its collections, and is not responsible for assigning ISBNs to books. Rather, what will usually happen is that the anthology will be registered with the Copyright Office and receive a copyright registration number.

To help people find poems they’ve had published by amateur poetry publishers, the Library has created an online guide to amateur poetry anthologies. The guide discusses the standard practices of these publishers, includes entries on dozens of active and inactive publishers, and offers tips on how to locate the anthologies through libraries and bookstores. If you’re looking for a poem that you, a family member, or a friend submitted to a contest or had published in a poetry anthology, please take a look at the guide and see if it helps with your search. Of course, we are happy to assist you directly as well: simply email your question to our Ask a Librarian service and we’ll do all we can to help you find your poem.

LC copy of Come Away!

You never know when you’ll change someone’s life.

Laura Hulse at 78, courtesy Hulse family

In third grade, I spent an afternoon visiting Great Aunt Mill’s friend Laura Hulse, a real poet with the most books I’d ever seen outside a library! Miss Hulse gave me tea and cookies, patiently listened to me reciting the poems I’d written, and talked to me about being a writer. When I left, she gave me two children’s books, which I read over and over again. One of them was Margaret Cabell Self’s 1948 Come Away!, about a misfit boy, his invisible leprechaun friend, and a horse. The other was Carroll Trowbridge Cooney’s 1942 A Green Field for Courage, about an imaginative boy and his toy soldiers.

One attraction of Come Away! (besides the fact that leprechaun friends are handy to keep around) was its epigraph: Yeats’ “The Stolen Child,” with the refrain “Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” It was the first poem I ever fell in love with (twist my arm and I can still recite it for you).

Years later, after my grandmother died, I found her copy—marked “To Gladys, With Love”—of Random Rhymes, the book of poetry that Miss Hulse finally published at 90. It made me realize that the whole visit was a setup: my grandmother knew of my dreams of being a writer, and arranged an inspirational encounter through her sister.

Laura Hulse by Judith Hulse Phakos

I never saw Miss Hulse again, but that magical visit, her kindness, and my grandmother’s plotting with Aunt Mill set me on the path to bibliophilia and the Library. The biographical afterword to Random Rhymes describes Miss Hulse’s house perfectly: “Bookcases were constantly being built. . . . Then, if you are visiting, a book is offered, always one you want.” It’s a wonderful model to live by.

Somewhere along the line, in the course of our many moves, my mother tossed Come Away! and A Green Field for Courage. They long ago went out of print, and in those pre-online days I never could find a copy. One of the first things I did when I joined the Library of Congress staff was to look them up in the catalog. I suspect no one had checked out Come Away! or A Green Field for Courage in the past half-century. But there they were, a piece of childhood, preserved in the Library’s storage modules for all these years. I even passed an otherwise forgotten book along to a new generation: my toy-soldier-obsessed son Jeffrey wrote a book report about A Green Field for Courage.

Contrary to popular expectation, the Library doesn’t have all the books ever published—but we do have an astounding number of them. Who needs invisible leprechauns or tempting fairies when you’re around all the books and poetry you could possibly want?