History of Oregon Literature/Chapter 37
CHAPTER 37
Contemporary Poets
There is no profession on earth which requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry; . . . How difficult and delicate a task even the mere mechanism' of verse is may be conjectured from the failure of those who have attempted poetry late in life.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Oregon now has many poets, but, as has been pointed
out, it waited much longer than most lovely lands for
the coming of poetry.
The “most vile, thicke and stinking fogges” of Parson Fletcher are our literary heritage from Drake—better than poetry but not to be called by that name in an accurate summary. Not quite 200 years later Captain James Cook sighted the Oregon Coast. “Captain Cook’s discoveries,” said Dr. Andrew Kippis, “among other effects, have opened up new scenes for a poetical fancy to range in, and presented new images to the selection of genius and taste.” For instance, one of the scientific observers was given a most lovely welcome by the Polynesian chiefs, who “brought beautiful maidens to stand before him, disrobe, and, in this Evelike state, chastely to embrace him and retire”. Among those who wrote poetry in one way or another about Captain Cook were M. l'Abbe Lisle, Miss Hannah Moore, Miss Anna Seward, “a Mr. Fitzgerald of Gray's Inn”, and the gentle William Cowper. But the “new scenes” and “new images” did not include Oregon, which was poetically no better off after Cook than it had been after Drake.
Captain Barkley came along in 1787 with his 18-year-old wife. Mrs. Barkley wrote well enough in prose to keep a diary of the voyage, but she attempted no verse. Soon afterwards appeared John Meares. He was no poet—his idea was to take 29 Chinamen, to pick up quite haphazardly 29 Kanaka wives for them in the Sandwich Islands and then to establish them at Nootka Sound to start a settlement. Then came Captain George Vancouver and his lieutenant, William R. Broughton. Their utter failure to contribute any poetry to the Oregon Country is indicated by the terminology they bestowed upon something like 75 mountains, rivers, capes, bays and sounds—such names as River Mannings for the Willamette, and Hood for a peak whose incorruptible whiteness was that of the new Jerusalem and whose summit gave frostbite to the unsandaled feet of the angels.
Captain Gray was from Boston, which ought to have meant that poetry was to have a beginning at last. Apparently, however, there was none of that commodity at the wharves for export when the Columbia sailed in 1790.
So it was that up to 1800 the Muse did not reach Oregon by sea, either as a supercargo or a stowaway. Was she waiting to accompany the daring Overlanders?
As has been mentioned, the Lewis and Clark expedition equipped nearly every fourth man with a notebook. With the encouragement of the President who sent them, the two leaders, Patrick Gass and six others kept journals, so that diarying was a routine of nine of the 40-odd in the party, though not one of the nine had the accomplishment of verse. Patrick Gass, in fact, was considered tedious by a critic in the London Quarterly Review, who cited this example: "The day and hour are carefully noted when Captain Lewis issued a glass of whiskey to all the crew; and when ‘Captain Clark gave the sick a dose of Rush's pills, to see what effect they would have’.”
Did poetry come to the Columbia with Dr. McLoughlin and find a special hospitality in the “stately halls” of Fort Vancouver? His numerous adherents in all their polemics about him have hardly claimed that.
Then, how and when did this winsome goddess, so very much present now, make her elusive entry into the country? With Ewing Young coming up through the southern wilderness with his precious two-volume Shakespeare? On the May Dacre with hymn books in her arms? At the campfires of two beaver trappers—Osborne Russel composing the stanzas of “The Hunter's Farewell” and James Clyman writing the first Mt. Hood poem on the inside of the front cover of his notebook? In Anna Maria Pittman Lee's bare little private room at Willamette Mission while she wrote her goodby verses to Jason Lee?
Perhaps the coming of this goddess “of more than mortal purity” cannot be traced because she has been here all the time, a gracious and indigenous presence, reaching out her white fingers and touching a chosen few of a darker race—on the memaloose islands; through the high passes and by the sounding water falls; in the valleys of the Rogue, the Grand Ronde, the Willamette; all along “the big salmon water” until it met the ocean in a tumultuous embrace; on the windy headland of Cape Blanco, where Oregon stretches farthest towards the sunset, comes closest to the crimson bars of evening.
It cannot be definitely said whether she was here before Drake and Cook in inspiration of songs that have perished with perished memories or whether she came in some mysterious way about a century ago. It is for you to decide whether she dwells in Oregon now and whether she has reached out her white fingers and touched the following poets.
1
LULU PIPER AIKEN
Mrs. Lulu Piper Aiken lives at Ontario and is the wife of George Aiken, publisher of the Ontario Argus. She was graduated from Macalester College, a Presbyterian school in St. Paul, Minnesota. After her marriage in 1912 she lived for four years in the state of Washington and has since made her home at Ontario, in the smiling land between the desert and the Snake. She has contributed articles, poems and juvenile stories to the magazines, and since the fall of 1933 has conducted a well-known literary column in the Argus. It is called “The Old and the New” and is devoted to Oregon poets and their work.
Night Flight
While through the night's dark cover
There comes a pulsing note that sings—
The birds are passing over.
With long and rhythmic sweep
Of pinions; till the long night wanes
They fly the starry deep.
They beat in speeding darts;
And oh, the matchless gallantry,
The tiny, fearless hearts!
Upon their chartless flight,
And cry the ecstasy they bring
Unto the wistful night.
2
ELEANOR ALLEN
Eleanor Allen is a granddaughter of George A. Waggoner, who has been discussed in this book in the chapter "Five Personal Essayists". Born in Oregon, she lived in Washington, D.C., from the age of four till the age of fifteen, attending private schools there. After her return to Oregon she spent a year, from 1919 to 1920, at Oregon State College. She is familiar to radio audiences, since many of her lyrics have been set to music by well-known composers and presented from various broadcasting stations. Several of her plays have also been given over the radio. For a while she was music critic for Music and Musicians, a Seattle magazine. She is the author of several juvenile serials and has contributed more than 500 poems to American magazines. Seeds of Earth, a book of poems, was published in 1933.
Sea Anemone at Cannon Beach
From Seeds of Earth, 1933
As delicate as flowers, yet more strange
Than other blooms that grow from breathing earth—
A swirl of green with sensitive, tipped flange.
And fringe the edge with waving finger tips.
They move with languid rhythm in the tides,
And close about sea life with velvet lips.
3
VERNE BRIGHT
Born in Missouri, Verne Bright lost both his parents when he was a small boy, and as an orphaned youth knocked about the country earning a precarious living. He came to Oregon at the age of 18 and was taken into the home of Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Barker, with whom he has since lived, much of the time in Washington County near Beaverton. He was graduated from the Brownsville High School, and from Pacific University in 1925. He spent two years in the Philippines and with the American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia. For two years he worked in a newspaper office and for one year taught English in Pacific University. His first poem, a narrative of Oregon Indian mythology, was written while he was still in high school and was published in the Oregon Teachers' Monthly. Since then he has had more than 1,000 poems published in numerous poetry and general magazines of America and Great Britain, and has been included in 30 anthologies. He is a member of the Poetry Society of Great Britain.
The Schoolhouse
Ashes of old wisdom brought to flame:
The tender budded dreams that slowly came
To glowing flower and fruit; the silver chime
Of children's laughter like the cries of birds;
The fugitive swift feet; the furtive crush
Of hand in hand; the premonitory hush
When eyes met eyes . . . and first-love's whispered words.
Eats at the heart of stone, and stars are lost
In the encumbering imminence of frost,
And death grins from the shadow his pale lust—
A boy and girl who found brief glory here
One golden autumn down a golden year.
4
DEAN COLLINS
Dean Collins—without exact date, but in the late 80's—was born in Dallas. His father was a pioneer of 1846, his mother of 1853. He began writing verses at the age of five "and regrets to say that some of them have been preserved, but he will never tell where or by whom." After graduating from the Dallas public schools he took an A.B. and an A.M. at Dallas College—which folded up a few years later. He took another A.B. and another A.M. at the University of Oregon in 1910 and 1911, after an interlude of two years as editor of the Polk County Observer, where he began writing newspaper verse. At the University of Oregon he was editor of the Oregon Monthly, to which he contributed a college story, "The Revival of Learning", which is still remembered by many alumni. He left Eugene in 1911 to become a reporter on the Oregonian, and soon after wards began a column in that paper called "Gleams Through the Mist", in which Nescius Nitts of Punkindorf Station frequently appeared. In 1917 he took up motion picture publicity but returned to newspaper work in 1919 as columnist on the Portland Telegram. For a year he was a publicity man at Hollywood, but came back to the Telegram in 1921 and continued with it, again as columnist and as dramatic critic, until it merged with the News. He then joined and has since been with the radio department of the Oregon Journal, handling programs over KOIN and writing for the paper a daily column of verse and comment.
The bulk of his literary production includes columns of verse written for the Polk County Observer, Oregonian, Telegram, Oregon Voter, Portland Spectator and the Oregon Journal, which, at 22 inches to the column, Mr. Collins estimates would have attained a length since 1910 that would be equal to the distance from Mt. Tabor to the entrance of Washington Park. He wrote the satirical Bedtime Stories which were published in the first volumes of the Hoot Owl Classics in 1927 and 1928. He is author of the pageant Where Rolls the Oregon, presented by the Rose Festival in 1927; the American Legion satirical revue in 1928; a published one-act play, The Edge of the Law; and the Civic Theater productions of Alice in Wonderland and A Christmas Carol in 1933 and 1934. In 1931 he organized and edited The Loop, an Oregon Journal serial story in an Oregon setting by 13 Oregon writers. In 1933 he wrote The Cheddar Box, a history of the cheese industry of Tillamook County, and in 1934 edited More Power to You, both published by the Oregon Journal and the latter a book on the Bonneville Dam compiled by Fred Lockley and Marshall Dana. Since 1932 he has been instructor in radio writing and one-act playwriting in the school of the Portland Civic Theater.
Ballad of Colombo
“One from Colombo's crew.”
The torches flared, and the door crashed back,
As the sailor swaggered through.
“Back! Give place!” the stranger cried.
“Mine be the favored seat;
For ne'er before have you ope'd your door
To a man of Colombo's fleet.
Pedro and Juan and I,
Who slit the throat of a wandering monk;
And we waited our turn to die.
We waited, and heard in the corridor
The sound of the gaoler's feet.
In the ships of Colombo's fleet.'
Over an unknown sea
Than to squirm and swing in a hempen string
Under the gallows tree.'
Grim was the voyage of the fated fleet
O'er an ocean silent and drear;
Sullen and black about our track
Hovered the demons of Fear.
Under an unknown sky,
Till in the very heavens themselves
The star groups hung awry.
No sound, no sight, save the heaving sea,
Under the moonlit fog,
And under our prow the wavelets lapped
And lapped, like a thirsty dog.
And each in his sullen breast,
Cursed the dreamer, whose fantasy
Dragged us forth on the quest.
'Better to swing in a hempen string
Under the gallows tree,'
We snarled, 'than rot in our rotting ships,
Lost in a waste of sea.'
Out of the distance hurled,
Where pour the floods of the seven seas
Over the brim of the world.
'Back, O Admiral, back!' we cried,
'Ere the last hope be gone,'
Swift as a blow came the answer: 'No!
Colombo will still sail on.'
To slay Colombo, who drove us on
Over the madman’s sea.
I crouched behind him there in the prow,
But my dagger hand was faint,
For the moon was white on his upturned face—
Ah, God, 'twas the face of a saint.
How the commander’s will
Balked death, balked mutiny, laughed at fear,
And lashed us onward still;
Lashed us onward, till in the west
Under a midnight sky,
We saw the gleam of a floating fire
And knew that the land was nigh.
Bowing our heads in shame,
Kneel on the turf of the new-found world
And honor Colombo's name.
Hither mine host, and fill the cups!
Up to the roof be whirled
A shout, my men, for a king of men:
Colombo—who found a world.”
5
HOWARD McKINLEY CORNING
Howard McKinley Corning was born on October 23, 1896, on a farm near Lincoln, Nebraska. At the age of three the family moved to Ohio, where his schooling was somewhat limited by ill-health. In 1919 the family again moved, this time to Oregon, spending a few months at Salem and later settling in Portland. In that city, in a residence near Mount Tabor, he has lived most of the time since. All of his best known poetry was written there, with Mt. Hood visible to the east and the city below to the west. In addition to his writing, which has grown to include the short story, critical articles and book reviews, he has done some teaching and research work for the Portland Center of the State System of Higher Education. He is a florist by profession. His poetry is widely and steadily published in a large number of magazines and has been included in eight anthologies and compilations. Two volumes of his verse have been published: These People, 1926; and The Mountain in the Sky, 1930. In addition to the selection given below, "Joaquin Miller Crosses the Mountains", a poem that has attracted much attention, is included in the chapter "Oregon Authors About Each Other".
Pruning Vines
From The Mountain in the Sky, 1930
The inattentive earth, I take my shears
And prune away the too-audacious years.
It's grapes I want and not mere leafy show.
I trim the trailing year's growth to a span,
With only laterals intact for crop;
A snip or two and I know where to stop
To bring a harvest where my hooks began.
Half into dead ends for the cloying mold,
Where growth takes profit as the shears take hold,
Cutting the heart a little ... as I cut mine.
But since it's grapes I want, I understand
How to rebuke the heart to fill the hand.
6
MARY CAROLYN DAVIES
Mary Carolyn Davies learned the Oregon range country while teaching school on Crooked River in Crook County and the Oregon coast country while living at Rockaway. She was born in Sprague, Washington, but received her education in the public schools in and near Portland and was graduated from Washington High School. She attended the University of California for a year, in 1911 and 1912, until she received two poetry prizes and left for Greenwich Village, New York. The poetry prize money dwindled so rapidly on the way that she arrived in the city where she was to seek her for tune with exactly $4.85. She was able, however, to earn her living expenses by writing newspaper verse and short stories, and for a while critics associated her in promise with Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1 919 she was adopted as a member of the Blackfeet Indian Tribe and given the name Pawtuxie—Pinewoman. In 1920 she was president of the Women's Press Club of Oregon and in 1924 was first president of the Northwest Poetry Society. She has contributed short stories and poems to numerous magazines, has written several one-act plays and is the author of the following books: The Drums in Our Street, war poems, 1918; The Slave with Two Faces, an allegory in one act, 1918; Youth Riding, lyrics, 1919; A Little Freckled Person, child verse, 1919; The Husband Test, 1921; Outdoors and Us, child verse, 1922; The Skyline Trail, western verse, 1924; Picture, Verse and Song, 1925; Penny Show, 1927; Red Kites and Wooden Crosses, 1929.
SAGE-BRUSH
From The Skyline Trail, 1924
And I remember riding out with you—
Sage-brush, sage-brush, violet and purple,
Gray under noon sun, and silver under dew.
Riding to the rim-rock, climbing up a trail,
Riding when the sunset is pricking out the river;
Far from ranch or bunk-house, or any friendly hail.
Creaking leather, clinking spurs, range sky blue,
Startled rabbits flashing across the trail before us—
Would sudden scent of sage-brush mean anything to you?
7
LELAND DAVIS
Born in Texas in 1895, Leland Davies spent his boyhood in the Southwest and in Old Mexico. From the age of 17 to the age of 21 he was a magazine agent in Central Texas. Since then, at one time or another, he has been a salesman, soda-jerker, restaurant counterman, sailor, barge captain, hospital attendant and radio announcer. He has picked up his education with very little help from schools. In 1915 he went to New York City and lived for eight years as a Greenwich Villager. He came to Portland in 1923 and for eight years has been with Radio Station KWJJ as announcer and advertising representative. Poetry, the Nation, the American Mercury have been among the magazines that have printed his verse; and six anthologies, among them Braithwaite's and Edwin Markham's, have included it.
On Being Noticed by an Oregon Humming Bird
Brightest of living things!
A tinted intelligence,
Flame poised on whirring wings.
For an instant looked at me;
Then—instantly—flashed on,
Dissembling that flattery!
8
ANTHONY EUWER
Anthony Euwer, artist, lecturer and poet, formerly of Hood River but for several years of Portland, is author of Woodrow Wilson's favorite limerick:
Others are handsomer far;
But my face—I don't mind it
Because I'm behind it;
It's the folks in the front that I jar.
He was born in Alleghany, Pennsylvania, on February n, 1877. He received his education in Shadyside Academy in Pittsburgh, at Princeton University, and at the Art Students' League, New York. He lectured in America and England, and wrote and illustrated for newspapers, syndicates, and several national magazines, including Harper's, Scribner's, Life, Collier's and Leslie's. For one Sunday newspaper alone he made over 200 full-page drawings and wrote 16,000 lines of verse. He was an entertainer with the American Expeditionary Forces in France in 1918 and 1919. After the War he was connected with three radio stations on the Pacific Coast — KJR in Seattle, KHJ in Los Angeles, and KOAC, the station of the State System of Higher Education, at Corvallis. He is the author of seven books of verse: Rickety Rimes and Rigmarole, 1902; Christopher Cricket on Cats, 1907; Rhymes of Our Valley, Hood River verses, 1916; The Limeratomy, "a limerick anatomy", 1917; Wings and Other War Rhymes, 1918; By Scarlet Torch and Blade, 1923;
The Friendly Firs, 1931. A Dry Mooly In Strawberry Time
From Rhymes of Our Valley, 1916
Acre on acre and row on row;
Picture a meadow all carpeted over
With clover, just bobbing and beautiful clover;
Picture a pedigreed Alderny beast
Browsing all day on the honey-topped feast;
Picture a mother who's willing to bake
Short-cake that only a mother can make—
Then answer me true if it isn’t a crime
To have a dry mooly in strawberry time.
Of pouring out cream in a golden stream,
Dripping and trickling and splashing down
Over a crust of the richest brown,
Into the drooly and mottled flood
Of short-cake and sugar and strawberry blood.
In perfect condition except for one wheel;
Picture a motor-boat built for the race
Dry-docked on Sahara's unlimited space;
Picture yourself gotten up in your best
And nowhere to go to once you were dressed;
Picture a hammock, soft breezes, a moon,
And no sighing mortal with whom you could spoon;
Picture ad lib—and the worst is sublime
Beside a dry mooly in strawberry time.
Of pouring out cream in a golden stream,
Dripping and trickling and splashing down
Over a crust of the richest brown,
Into the drooly and mottled flood
Of short-cake and sugar and strawberry blood.
9
ETHEL ROMIG FULLER
Mrs. Ethel Romig Fuller was born in Big Rapids, Michigan, but has lived in Portland since 1906. She was educated in the Michigan State Normal School and in the Portland Extension Center of the State System of Higher Education. Her facility and naturalness with metrical forms would indicate the traditional “lisping in numbers”, but she has been seriously writing verse for only about a dozen years. During that period she has become one of the most widely quoted of contemporary American poets. She has preeminently the gift of glorifying the common things of life. She has contributed verse to a large number of publications in America and England and is the author of two books of poems: White Peaks and Green, 1928; and Kitchen Sonnets (and Lyrics of Domesticity), 1931. She is poetry editor of the Oregonian, has written many prose articles, and is a frequent lecturer on literary topics to clubs and study groups and over the radio. She is the wife of Charles E. Fuller, a Portland insurance man.
Swamp Bedtime
From Kitchen Sonnets, 1931
At the dusky end of a new spring day?
Over and over this plaintive cheep,
Can't go to sleep! Can't go to sleep!
The daddy bullfrogs in their green, green coats?
Spank 'em! Spank 'em! The old frogs say
At the dusky end of a new spring day.
10
FRANCES GILL
Frances Gill was born in Portland in 1884 of a prominent pioneer Oregon family and, with the exception of the years away for college, has always made Portland her home. She received her education in the old Portland High School and the University of California, where she was graduated in 1910. Later she studied in creative writing courses with Mrs. Mable Holmes Parsons in the Portland Center of the State System of Higher Education. For 16 years she has been instructor of English in Lincoln High School, Portland, and now teaches the dramatic literature and senior English courses. She finds her chief recreation outside of the classroom in her music and her poetry, both of them rating in her opinion as “master-joys”. She writes her poetry from the point of view of the child, believing that in this way she secures greater simplicity and freshness of expression. She is the author of two books of child verse—The Little Days, 1917; and Windy Leaf, 1925. In 1930 she contributed a series of sonnets, with the general title “Outside”, to Poetry, Chicago. Her latest book is prose and a work of history: Chloe Dusts Her Mantel: A Pioneer Woman's Idyl, 1935, the story of the life of her pioneer grandmother.
Trilliums
From Windy Leaf, 1924
Of all the springtime flowers.
She follows pussy-willow,
And grows in sheltered bowers;
Beneath old logs, and under trees,
Wherever there is shade.
And every place she shows her face,
A little star is made.
11
GRACE E. HALL
In 1894, Mrs. Grace E. Hall came to Oregon from Illinois and since then has spent much of her leisure time writing verse. For 12 years she was staff poet of the Oregonian. She says of her poetry: “I have written as a means of communicating my thoughts about life in general to those who may be interested as I am in every phase of everyday living. I have not studied poetic forms, but people; not technique, but life.” In addition to the large quantity of her news paper verse, she is the author of two volumes of poetry: Homespun, 1922; and Patchwork, 1924.
Pussywillows
From Patchwork, 1924
A narrow path for two—
When pussywillows in the swale
And sometimes in your crinkly hair
I'd twist a furry bough;
The spring is here, but I can't bear
The pussywillows—now.
12
HAZEL HALL
Hazel Hall was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1886. and came as a young girl with her parents to Portland, where she lived until she died on May 11, 1924. Because of scarlet fever and an injury from a fall, she was never able to walk after the age of 12. For several years she did needle-work to earn a living, but at length came additional frustration to this courageous invalid in failing eyesight. It was then that the writing of verses, which had been a succor to her spirit in her shut-in life, was turned to practical account, with poetry checks from magazines taking the place of wages from sewing. Her first accepted poem was published in the Boston Transcript in 1916. Later her market broadened to include such select magazines as Century, Harper's, Literary Review, Yale Review, Outlook, Bookman and the New Republic. Her books of poems consist of two volumes published while she was living and one volume published after her death—Curtains, 1921; Walkers, 1923; and Cry of Time, 1928. "Three Girls", given below, was selected by Braithvvaite as one of the five best poems of 1920.
Three Girls
From Walkers, 1923
Two of them go in the fluttery way
Of girls, with all that girlhood buys;
But one goes with a dream in her eyes.
Whose hair is learning scorn of curls,
But the eyes of one are like wide doors
Opening out on misted shores.
On to the end of life's short way;
Two will have what Jiving buys,
And one will have the dream in her eyes.
And fitly dust will welcome dust; But dust has nothing to do with one— She dies as soon as her dream is done.
13
ELEANOR HANSEN
Eleanor Hansen's verse has appeared in various magazines and in such anthologies as Northwest Verse and Harper's Best College Verse for 1931. She was born in Portland. She received her bachelor of arts degree from Pacific University in 1931 and her master of arts degree from the University of Oregon in 1935. From 1931 to 1935 she was an instructor in Corvallis High School and is now a mem ber of the English staff of the Girls' Polytechnic High School in Portland.
GRowN-UP
One day when I had passed beyond the stage Of childish dolls and toys I found a box Of trinkets I had hidden once; some rocks Shining with mica flakes; a yellow page Of Mother Goose; a toy canary’s cage. And, seated on the topmost attic stair, I paused a moment in the dusty air, Musing on this pathetic heritage. Today when I was cleaning out a drawer I found a poem I once wrote for you, A fragment of a letter torn in two, A crumbling petal from a withered flower, And l e t my swift brain for a moment pause I n gentle pity for the child I was.
14
ADA HASTINGS HEDGES
Mrs. Ada Hastings Hedges, author o f Desert Poems, published i n 1930, lived for eight years i n the Malheur County desert a t Juntura. “The desert region,” she says, “ fascinated me always, and still does. I found i t full o f mystery and beauty i n i t s own bleak fashion, with a certain collective consciousness, strangely haunting and baffling, a s a forest surely has a consciousness different from that o f a mountain or the sea. The bleak hills impressed me with their austerity and their strength. A critic accused me of having too little color in my desert, but I could give it only as I saw it. Recently, in a book by Dallas Lore Sharp, I came across this description: 'Not split by time and space, and free from all change, single, deep, indelible gray is the desert from Bend to Burns.' I was glad to find this re action long after my own had been put on paper." She was born in Nebraska but came as a small girl to Denver. She was graduated from the Colorado State Teachers College at Greeley. After a year of high school teaching she was married to Dr. William E. Hedges, a Chicago physician, and lived in that city until they moved to East ern Oregon. From 1923 to 1930 they lived in Portland, then for two years in Los Angeles, and since then again in Portland. Mrs. Hedges wrote her first poem, in Latin, at the age of 17, and had her first poem published in the Overland Monthly in 1912. From that time on she has written occasional verse, which has been published in American and English magazines, but for the past five years she has given most of her time to writing short stories. Several times she has renounced poetry with a gesture, but it won't stay renounced and always comes back.
Desert Spring From Desert Poems, 1930
Across the sunny slopes will soon be seen,
Close in the wake of winter's lingering chills,
A trailing mist of thin ephemeral green.
Through this transparency the hills will be
Unmoved and grim, in scorn of compromise
With spring's brief carnival, inscrutably
Disdaining all her garments of disguise.
In frosty dawns the desert larks will pour
Their reckless flood of song upon this wide
Indifference^ while under skies too clear
Old junipers, more weathered than before,
Grow wistful as they stand unglorified,
That May is but a shadow passing here.
15 BERT HUFFMAN
Bert Huffman has been called the poet laureate of Eastern Ore gon. He is the author of Song of the Oregon Pine and Other Poems, published by the press of the Pendleton East Oregonian in 1907, a book that is now very rare and that contains several poems of high merit. When Joaquin Miller was asked to write a poem for the dedication of the Sacajawea statue at the time of the Lewis and Clark Exposition, he told the committee that he could not do so well as Bert Huffman's poem on the subject. “The Lament of the Umatilla” first appeared in the Oregonian, and N. J. Levinson, Sunday editor, said that though the paper had been printing poems for 50 years this was the first original one that had been paid for. He was born in Summerville, Union County, in 1870, and began writing verse for the Union County papers at the age of 15. At 20 he married Ella Green, who was 16. For years there had been a bitter feud between their fathers, two stockmen of Eastern Oregon. The variety of his occupations in addition to poetry has been enumerated by Lula R. Lorenz in an article about him: “He is an editorial writer of recognized force and virility, is a locomotive engineer, has ridden the ranges of the west, has farmed, raised stock, operated sawmills, trailed horses across the plains, mountaineered and roughed it in every phase of western life. ” He was managing editor of the East Oregonian in Pendleton at the time his book was published, but in recent years has made his home in Alberta, Canada.
LAMENT of THE UMATILLA
From Song of the Oregon Pine and Other Poems, 1907
Spirit of the yesterday hovers near and croons— Brings my heart the hunting grounds of the long-lost Junes! Sings of years forgotten, chants of races dead— Weep, my wondering baby, for the Good Moons fled!
By the silvery river all your race has died— Sleep and dream, my baby, by its lisping tide! Comes no more the huntsman from the glorious chase— O'er yon templed mountains swarms the paler face!
Hark! I hear a whisper calling from the past— Hear the warrior's frenzied cry o n the tempest cast! Hush, my heart, and listen! Calling, calling still! Ah, 'tis but the moaning wind o'er the silent hill! Hark! The hurried hoofbeats o f the warrior band! Ah, my heart betrays me i n this empty land! Sleep and dream, my baby, by the tepee fire— Nothing for thy kindling hope, nothing to desire!
Broken, let thy young heart ache; crushed, thy spirit brood! What to thee the white man's ways, worse than solitude? By a dying watch fire crooning in the night— Let the vanquished tribesmen pass from human sight.
16
WALTER EVANS KIDD
Walter Evans Kidd was born in the Blue Mountains of Grant County. He received his education in the public schools of Antelope, at Washington High School in Portland, and at the University of Oregon, where he was graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1926 and with a master of arts degree in 1934. While a student at Eugene he won the Edison Marshall short story prize. From 1930 to 1933 he was instructor in English in the Roseburg High School. He has been a teacher in Portland since 1934 and is now on the English staff of Washington High School. His poetry has appeared in such publications as the American Mercury, Nation, Commonweal, Poetry and Frontier.
Calf Pasture Gate
Let down
Once before the other chores are yet begun,
Once after all are done
Except the milking chore,
The ground is trampled bare and brown
And pocked with muddy scars
By calves that pass into a pen
At sucking time and later out again.
The gate,
Barred roughly up in place,
Is so familiar in the scene
To calves inside their grazing space
And cows on field about
That they accept the fate
Of being, as they are, shut in or out.
17
BEN HUR LAMPMAN
There are three literary Lampmans, well known in Oregon—Ben Hur, Rex and Herbert Sheldon. Ben Hur Lampman, poet whether he writes prose or verse, is brother to Rex, a popular columnist in Oregon several years ago, and is father to Herbert Sheldon, considered as a naturalist in the chapter on descriptive writers. All three, the son then aetat 5, made their first headquarters in Oregon at Gold Hill, in 1912, where Ben Hur Lampman published and edited the Gold Hill News and fished in the Rogue River for four years. In 1916 he came to Portland to join the news staff of the Oregonian. For several years he has been an editorial writer on that newspaper. He was born in Barron, Wisconsin, on August 12, 1886. He moved to North Dakota and, at the age of 19, established and began editing the Arena at Michigan City. The next year he married Lena McEwen Sheldon, who had come from New York to North Da kota to teach school. To her in 1926 he dedicated How Could I Be Forgetting?—“To Lena who is very patient with me, but holds that the kitchen is not the place to clean fish. ” In addition to this book of poems and editorial articles, he is the author of The Tramp Printer, a collection of prose sketches, 1934, and Here Comes Some body, a novel, 1935.
RECLAIMED
From How Could I Be Forgetting?, 1926, 1933
Up sprang the mallard from the green and golden sedges, The broider and the baldrick of a lone, lone land, To wheel above his marshes—where the shy brood fledges— When all the pretty plover folk were calling from the sand. I would you could have seen him, with the sun-glint on his winging, When morning smiled and woke the world a dozen years agone— And set the redwing blackbird braves to singing, singing, Singing A silver stave of happiness in welcome to the dawn. A breeze from over yonder walked among the lusty rushes, The green and golden garments of a
lone, lone lake, And little flecks of borrowed flame were on the muskrat's wake.
I would you could have known the breeze —the salt breath of its wooing —
When every blade and every wave was dancing in the sun,
And all the marshland merriment was suing, suing, suing
To hold the lease on happiness in morning just begun.
They stole his chosen province in the lone, lone land;
The wheat is green and growing and the plowshares sever
The beaches where the plover folk were calling from the sand.
To gain a rood of barley soil they set the waters flowing,
By gashes in the ancient ooze, to streams that seek the sea;
And, O, I know the laughing lake was very loth at going —
As one who loves her ministry and asks not to be free.
A breeze from over yonder—and the tall wheat billows—
I'll grant that it's a comely place—a tame, tame shire;
Yet I have seen the wind at play among the sedge and willows,
And I have seen the mallard's throat against a cloud on fire.
I would you could have seen him with the sun-glint on his splendor,
Before they lured his lake away to gain a rood of land,
When morning's magic on the marsh was tender, tender, tender—
And all the pretty plover folk were calling from the sand.
18
BORGHILD LEE
Mrs. Borghild Lee was born in Oslo, Norway, and came to America when 18 years old. She lived in Minnesota and North Dakota for ten years and moved to Oregon in 1924, making her home mostly in Portland. She has been able to give only her spare time to writing. Her poetry has been published in several magazines, including the American Mercury, the Nation and Literary Digest. She was poetry editor of the Outlander, a Portland literary magazine, during the time it was issued by a group of Oregon writers.
The Fisherman's Wife
When I heard his step at the door;
Never, never was I as happy
In all my life before.
Out in the cold and the rain—”
(Never the smell of wet clothes
Shall find me as happy again.)
I’m hungry as a bear!”
How I hurried to make the coffee,
(Little he knows how much I care!)
Soaked to the skin—We’ll get you dry!”
(Down in the sea, down in the ocean
Many stiff and staring lie.)
19
QUEENE B. LISTER
Caesar and Lizz: A River Front Ballad
These are only a few stanzas selected from the first part of the ballad, which in its entirety consists of 80 stanzas and 330 lines. When it was first printed in the Frontier in November, 1930, the author received a large number of letters about it.
But I didn't care —
Wen I looked at his eyes
I thought uv his hair.
Short curly rope—
An' it smelled uv tobacca
An' tar an' soap...
As the bark on trees.
An' the top uv his boots
Whut come up to his knees
Come mos' t' my waist—
That tall if yuh please!
T' my house-boat shack —
An' wen he'd go way
He'd al'us come back.
. . . Six feet-seven! . . .
He played a jew's harp
An' ... an' I loved him like heaven!
Sat there on his knee—
He sez, "Lizz, my gal—"
He sez that t' me,
An' long fer yer kisses,"
An' he gev me a ring!
So that I wuz his Missus! ...
Sloshed aginst the log floats,
An’ lights slipped a passin'
Green an’ red, on the boats—
In the shack, on us two—
An' I looked at his arms
With their stylish tattoo—
Whee! It seemed like, I felt like
I’d never be blue.
20
COURTLAND W. MATTHEWS
Two of Courtland Matthews' early and earnest ambitions were based on a capable arm, which finally failed him. He wanted to be a big league baseball pitcher and showed promise until he sprained his arm while throwing. The next year, at the age of 16, he began taking violin lessons, later sacrificing a year of schooling to give full time to them and still later going to Chicago to study with well-known teachers. But his bowing arm was his old throwing arm, and again it failed him. He was born in Illinois on December 14, 1897, the son of a country physician who was also well known in his day as a poet in the Middle West. After his father's death he came with his mother to Eugene and attended the Eugene High School three semesters between 1913 and 1916. In Chicago, in 1919 and 1920, after giving up his music, he attended high school for another year, then for two years worked as a clerk in that city. In 1922 he returned with his mother to Oregon, settling at Gardiner. For two summer seasons he was a forest officer in the Siuslaw National Forest, and in the winters clerked in the Gardiner Mill Company store. He has lived in Portland since 1924. From 1927 to 1932 he was associate editor of the Four L Lumber News and then for a little over a year was a social service worker. In May, 1935, he founded and began publishing the Northwest Literary Review. He has composed verse off and on since he was 11 years of age, but has never been a prolific writer. Most of his poems are colored by Western Oregon, especially by the Oregon woods. His two seasons in the forest service have entered into his writings more than any other experience.
The Homestead
The vane leans broken, the gutters hang rust-taken;
Mixed with the silence is the monotone
Of falling water by the mute mill flowing.
Have hearts forgotten how the children played
Along the creek? How cattle, homeward lowing,
Long lingered at the ford to drink and wade?
Gnarled apple trees let fall the dwindling fruit,
Which transient rabbits munch undisconcerted;
From neighboring woods the black bear comes to loot
The berries. Hop-vines hide the crumbling shed,
And time the insatiable by change is fed.
21
ERNEST G. MOLL
Professor Ernest G. Moll was born in Australia, the son of a rancher, on August 25, 1900. At the age of 13 he entered Concordia College at Adelaide, where he completed the course preliminary to the study of theology, but was requested by the director of his college not to continue his efforts in that field. After spending some months in training with the Australian Militia, he returned to his father's ranch. In 1920 he came to America and entered Lawrence College, Wisconsin. He received his bachelor of arts degree there in 1922 and his master of arts degree the next year at Harvard. That summer he went to Europe as a hand on a cattle ship. From 1923 to 1925 he held the position of instructor in English in Colorado College at Colorado Springs. The next two years he spent at collecting and importing into America 3,000 live Australian birds. He has been on the faculty of the University of Oregon since 1928, as assistant professor and associate professor of English. He is the author of Sedge Fire, 1927; Native Moments and Other Poems, 1931; Campus Sonnets, 1934; The Appreciation of Poetry, 1933; and Blue Interval, poems on Crater Lake, 1935.
To An Entering College Freshman
From Campus Sonnets, 1934
In quiet valleys; deep in sheltering woods
Have found the shy fawn-lily and the hoods
Of purple orchids caverned secretly.
And you have heard the dusky bumble-bee
Drone a gold drowsy track through solitudes
So deep not even the boldest thought intrudes
His wistful shadow on that infinity.
What loveliness they send about the heart
Drawn from sweet wells where thought is laid asleep.
Child, you are wise already, and being so,
Why reach for knowledge that can but tear apart
Your blessedness, nor tell you why you weep!
Charles Oluf Olsen was born in Denmark on November 13, 1872, and came to America at the age of 16. “After drifting around looking the country over to find the best place to live in,” he settled in Oregon in 1899. His occupations have been those of blacksmith, cook, salesman and lumberjack before he began writing feature articles, verse and fiction for the newspapers and magazines. In 1922 he married Elizabeth Thompson, who is also well known as a writer of verse.
Inseparable from my ways,
You have been harbinger of peace,
Of rest, of comfort, all my days.
Or lifted by the wind, or blown
Low and slowly under rain,
Bore ministry to me, alone.
My last camp where I chance to fare—
It's woodsmoke rising in the dusk,
Will be my paean and my prayer.
23
MABLE HOLMES PARSONS
Poet, short story writer, critic and teacher, Mrs. Mable Holmes Parsons has been professor of English in the University of Oregon since 1912, during most of those years in full-time assignment to the Portland Extension Center, where she has had an opportunity beyond that of any other teacher in the state to train creative writers in verse and prose. She was born n Saginaw, Michigan, and was graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor of arts degree in 1904 and a master of arts degree in 1906. She began contributing verse to national magazines while still a student, and later for several years followed journalistic work as music and drama editor and as a columnist and feature writer. Her other work has included 18 years as a professional soprano, a short time with a professional stock company, a half year as a social worker in Chicago and a short while on the editorial staff of a Chicago trade magazine. She came with her husband and daughter to Oregon in 1910, lived for two years at Medford where she was city librarian, and since then, with the exception of a year of study and travel abroad, has taught university courses in writing and in literature. The manuscripts of others have left her only a limited amount of time for manuscripts of her own, but a good poem or short story by a student gives her the vicarious productive thrill which accounts for the beneficence of great teachers and great editors. She is a contributor of verse, short stories, articles and reviews to magazines and newspapers and is author of Pastels and Silhouettes, a book of poems, 1921.
The Road Is an Old Man
Early when I rose
To follow—follow—follow
The road where it goes
Over, under, over
The hills that face the sea,
To follow—follow—follow
The road that beckoned me . . .
The winds have bent his back;
He wavers and he wanders
And makes a winding track.
Sometimes he stopped beside
A quiet, quitting hollow,
And then again he raised his eyes
And beckoned me to follow . . .
This road until a day
I hastened and I passed him . . .
I did not nod or say
A word to him, and somehow—
Though strange it seem to be—
Oh, once I followed, followed him,
But now he follows me . . .
24
LAURENCE PRATT
Laurence Pratt, the third from the last of 12 children, was born in Kansas. Coming west, he has worked at many occupations—as a paper boy, elevator boy, trucker, laundryman, groceryman, gas meter reader, printer, department store and office clerk, music teacher, orchestra man, high school teacher and college professor. He was graduated from Reed College in 1918 and received his master's degree at the University of Washington in 1927. For a year after leaving Reed College he was principal of the Camas High School in Washington and for the next four years was a clerk in the purchasing department in the Crown Willamette Paper Company at Camas—where he secured the background for his book of poems, A Saga of a Paper Mill, 1935. From 1923 to 1928 he was professor of English in Pacific University and since 1929 has been teacher of English in Jefferson High School in Portland. For two years he was president of the Northwest Poetry Society and for a year was associate editor of Muse and Mirror, a poetry magazine published in Seattle. His poetry has appeared in 25 magazines and newspapers and in eight anthologies.
Head Logger
From A Saga of a Paper Mill, 1935
when I was mixin’ it with heavyweights
and mashin' mugs. I drew some handsome gates
and put the crimps in "Dempsey" Jones's plays.
But fellows, I was brought up on the bays
and in the woods near Tillamook —and fate's
recalled me, drawn me to my rightful mates,
the hemlock rafts, the woods and waterways.
The wind is fresh out where the logs are tied;
the river's like a springy, swishy mat.
My punch that used to knock the heavies out
now takes the forest champions for a ride.
I swing a wicked peavey, spit for spat,
and challenge hemlock giants to a bout.
25
EDWIN T. REED
Edwin T. Reed is editor of publications at Oregon State College. He was born in River Falls, Wisconsin, on September 15, 1872, and was class poet of his high school graduating class in 1891. At the University of Minnesota, where he was graduated in 1895, he was literary editor of the Minnesota Magazine and author of the senior class play, Olympia Up to Date, printed and produced by the class at the Metropolitan Opera House in Minneapolis. He attended Harvard University from 1895 to 1896, taking work with such well-known English professors as Barrett Wendell and G. L. Kittredge. He was a reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune and associate editor of the River Falls Journal before taking up teaching as a profession. He was superintendent of schools at Rushford and Cloquet in Minnesota from 1898 to 1902 and head of the English department of Minnesota State Teachers College at Moorhead from 1902 to 1912, coming that year to Corvallis to join the faculty of Oregon State College. He is the author of a large number of bulletins, including Uses of Literary Masterpieces in the Study of History, The Trail Blazers, Occupations for the Agriculturally Trained, and A Liberal and Practical Education. From 1921 to 1928 he was associate editor
of American Educational Digest, later the School Executives' Magazine, and from 1927 to 1928 was associate editor of Oregon, The State Magazine. He has contributed to numerous periodicals and is the author of three books of verse: Inland Windfalls, 1898; Lyrics, 1900; and The Open Hearth, Oregon and western poems, 1927. He has about 100 additional Oregon poems which he is grouping for publication under the general title The Promised Land. From The Open Hearth, 1927
Dear land of cedars singing
And somber marching pines,
Of rhythmic surges swinging
From far horizon lines,
How well has beauty crowned you
From peak to snowy peak,
And wound white arms around you
Where winds and waves are bleak.
Beautiful Oregon.
Wonderland of wilderness and lea;
The heavens above you
Have set their hearts upon
The glory of your mountains and your sea.
O faithful pioneers,
Was still your inspiration
Through all your questing years,
As through these snowy mountains
You pressed your lonely way
And drank the wayside fountains
That flow for us today.
'Mid Jackson's purpling vines,
Or in the golden valley
Where Hood's white water shines;
Who does not joy to measure
The wealth Wallowa knows
Or view the varied treasure
Where old Willamette flows.
And blossoming white glade,
Of sounding ocean beaches
And glens of golden shade;
I hear your voices calling,
Like thunder through the foam,
The voice of love enthralling
To win the sailor home.
Beautiful Oregon,
Wonderland of wilderness and lea.
The heavens above you
Have set their hearts upon
The glory of your mountains and your sea.
26
PAUL E. TRACY
Paul E. Tracy of Baker County is a plumber by trade. He spent his boyhood in Southern Idaho, attended the College of Idaho at Caldwell, and has been a fanner—"dry land and damp"—a lineman and a soldier. He is married and has one son. Dr. H. G. Merriam, editor of Frontier and Midland, who has published several of his poems since 1928, says of him: "His sense of values is independent and discriminating. Literature means to him life and not escape from life." If he keeps on, sustaining his quality and increasing his too slender output, there is a specal place for him in Oregon literature as the comprehensive interpreter of all the country between the Cascades and the Snake. When, with continuing inclusion of the aspects of that region, he has added enough poems of equal merit to "Horsemeat", "Circuit Rider", "Horned Toad" and "Westerners", he will have the first volume to give a full poetic description of Eastern Oregon, not merely its desert, its cattle ranges, its Indans or its round-up.
"Wild Horses"
First 19 lines of the poem called "Horsemeat"
They nibble at noon. They browse in the twilight.
Even in the darkness they rattle the balsam-root leaves.
They eat the dry grass until thirst sets them trotting
In dusty strings miles and miles to water. They trot . . .
Tireless as watch springs. All summer these horses,
With hoofs polished by sand and lava, are grinding dry grasses.
In winter they paw for it in the snow;
They do not stand and whinny for sugar.
Momentarily untroubled by gnats, dozing in Eastern Oregon.
Some sleep on their feet. Others are listening . . . watching.
Some lift scraggy manes and watch a shadowy coyote.
They are an unlovely lot who greet the sun in gray wastes.
They are survivors of Conquistadore herds;
Poor relations to the Clydesdale-Percheron aristocracy—
An untamed, unroached, tick-ridden herd.
At night they nod under the nearby stars, subject
To similar cosmic draughts and silences.
27
OTHER PROMINENT WRITERS OF VERSE
Mrs. Harriet Markham Gill was born at Prineville. Her father, a Southerner, operated a horse ranch rather than a cattle ranch on Crooked River. She was educated at The Dalles and spent many years in Eastern Oregon, but now lives near Vancouver, Washington. She is the author of Highways of Oregon, 1932.
Mrs. Frances Holstrom is an Oregon housewife who lived for several years on a farm in Coos County. She is now a resident of Coquille. Her poetry has won wide recognition and has appeared in the American Mercury, Forum and other national magazines.
Gertrude Robison Ross, a Salem poet, was a promising writer of verse about a decade ago, but in recent years she has stopped writing. Her work was published in such magazines as the Nation and Good Housekeeping, and one of her poems, "I Was Made for This and That", was included in Strong's Oxford Anthology, and Braithwaite's Anthology for 1923.
Margaret Skavlan, of Eugene, is a graduate of the school of journalism of the University of Oregon. She was a reporter on the Eugene Guard and later for a few years on the Oregonian. Her verse, published in several magazines, was gaining considerable recognition when about two years ago her newspaper work and her writing were interrupted by an illness which has since continued.
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