Earlier this Spring I had an idea for a Parlando Project feature for this year’s National Poetry Month. It was based on something I read in the blog “My Life 100 Years Ago,*”  as blogger Mary Grace McGeehan turned some of her attention to children’s literature. As those interests crossed over for her, I learned there were a paired set of poetry anthologies from a century ago, one first published in 1922, The Girl’s Book of Verse, and the other the following year, The Boy’s Book of Verse.

A reason I’m drawn to poetry is that poets often examine and see things many others would miss. I read of those two titles and was intrigued. Lots of things to examine. One, the books are gendered — unsurprisingly, they only saw to market two volumes then — and being published in the early 1920s they might say a lot about how the anthologists viewed childhood and gender roles at the time that Modernism was starting to become a substantial part of literature in America. And for those targeted boys and girls (and their parents) the world was changing in areas well beyond poetry, music, and the arts. Adult women had just been given the right to vote, and there was increasing belief in expanding women’s roles. Fathers had in some cases returned from America’s first extra-continental wars.**

And there was another reason, I had recently come to see appealing elements in some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry aimed at children as I revisited it. It’s long been a cultural commonplace that Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll are children’s books with layers of understanding, not just fantastical adventures. And in our present culture a great deal of our marketplace is taken up by young-adult books and genres that often have roots in youthful reading: Fantasy and Speculative Fiction for example.

So, what if we step back a century and see what’s there? I found a number of interesting poems in the two books, and my plan was to step up the posting tempo of this blog to at least double time. There’d be writing on what I observed in the books, and the Parlando Project’s combining of literary poetry with original music in various ways and styles would top that off. I started stockpiling some compositions, even recorded initial tracks for a couple. I was realistically readying myself for more activity here than usual to celebrate NPM 2024.

I didn’t know this would be the poster for this year when I started out. Seems appropriate for my plan.

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Great plan.

Great plan, meet life.

I’d already figured what would be the first two pieces of this series. Monday I was going to complete recording the music I had set for the first one. My old-man energy didn’t hold out, and mid-morning recording expectations turned more into an early afternoon plan. Monday afternoon, I grabbed my music to go record, and..

The music stayed on the table. More family distress came home. I haven’t found a way to write about this that feels appropriate to me — and I’ve felt so blessed the past eight years of this Project to have so much time to do the extensive work it entails that I don’t want to be disproportionate in measuring my little change of plans this week against the reasons for distress. Today’s concluding summary: this is an introduction of my original intent, and a public statement that I still have hope for some variation of the plan still coming off for this April Poetry Month here.

My appreciated long-time readers will know to wait — and new visitors: there’s a lot here for those interested in poetry and the various ways it can be combined with music. You might want to search for a poem or poet and see if we’ve already presented it. Over 700 pieces, there’s a lot here — but it’s all over but the footnotes today — and those footnotes are something else this blog picked up from Mary Grace.

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*Her blog started out with a pledge to only read material from 1918, but it has transitioned to an occasional look through stuff that was contemporary a century ago. Lots of considerations of what women in this dynamic time were presented with, often through magazines of the day. This stuff fascinates me. It’s the mundane and commercial mirror to the era when a lot of the poetry I’ve presented was created.

**How about other historically significant issues in this last decade that called itself The Twenties? Social inequality was certainly on some adults’ minds then, but that generally goes unreflected in these middle-class oriented poetry anthologies. I may take a second scan, but the issues of America’s racial caste system are largely ignored, though there is a bizarre Longfellow poem I hope to at least mention in the series (even if I might never figure out how I could perform it). Another thing to think about as we consider these century-old books: the children’s audience here would be inside that Greatest Generation who experienced the Great Depression, the global rise of nationalistic fascism, and eventually an even greater world war and its aftermath. Is there anything here in these poetry books which the authors suggested their mothers should be handing them that helped them through that?