The Norton Anthology of Lost D.C. Poetry

This volume is dedicated to:

WASHINGTON

The delicate blossoms of its femininity,

The tranquil grave of its noble planner,

The joyous canaille who bathe in its fountains,

The rays of sun that beat upon its coliseum,

The majestic spans of the Wilson drawbridge,

The motley detritus that strews its public spaces,

And the other urban jewels that have inspired poets of time immemorial.

Urbem virosque cantant!

Laugh, and the world laughs with you

Weep, and you weep alone

Those famous lines have echoed through the past century. They have been recorded in popular song and appropriated as the title for a 1925 film. To this day, they are known throughout the English-speaking world and inspire sly reformulations. The Daily Show offered one recent twist: “Laugh, and the world laughs with you…unless you’re not in on the joke, or you are the joke.”

Almanacs and encyclopedias will suggest that this timeless morsel was the brainchild of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who published the poem in the New York Sun in 1883. But those accounts ignore the claims of a great soldier and prominent Washingtonian, Col. John A. Joyce.

Joyce, a Confederate veteran and Kentucky transplant, claimed to have tossed the lines off extemporaneously to friends in a Louisville hotel bar more than a decade before they were printed under Wilcox’s name. Aided by his friend, children’s poet and noted prankster Eugene Field, Joyce spent decades promoting his claim. Though no written evidence ever materialized, Joyce took his claim to the grave—he had the lines carved on it.

Joyce’s story has a specious ring, but his copious literary output indicates he was no charlatan. The author, known for his flowing white mustache, was a key figure among Washington literati after settling here shortly after the Civil War, penning more than a dozen volumes of poetry and biography. At his death, the Washington Post hailed him as the “Poet of Washington.”

But Joyce is only one highlight of Washington’s rich poetic legacy; after all, Joyce and his literary descendants trod upon fertile ground, what with the quiet waters of the Potomac, monuments and grand architecture, the sedate verdure of Rock Creek Park, the vibrant legacy of Black Broadway, and a crackling political scene.

Some momentous names have waxed poetic about the District: Walt Whitman, that titan of 19th-century verse, came to Washington from New York during the Civil War in 1862 to search for a wounded brother. Like so many provincial senators who come to D.C. and don’t leave, Whitman ended up spending a decade here, first volunteering in the military hospitals and later working as a government clerk. He left only after a 1873 stroke forced him to move to New Jersey to live with his brother. In his wake, he left numbers of poems about D.C.—most famously, his “Drum-Taps” and his odes to Lincoln.

Since then, other famous poets have passed through D.C., leaving behind scattered verse. Robert Lowell wrote of the city’s plan, how “[t]he stiff spokes of this wheel/touch the sore spots of the earth.” Archibald MacLeish spoke truth to power from a congressional visitors’ gallery: “Have Gentlemen perhaps forgotten this?—/We write the histories.” Elizabeth Bishop offered a tranquil portrait of the Capitol: “Moving from left to left, the light/is heavy on the Dome, and coarse.” Then there are such D.C.-native poets as Reed Whittemore, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Ernest Kroll, whose lines “How shall you act the natural man in this/Invented city, neither Rome nor home?” from his “Washington, D.C.” are etched into Freedom Plaza, just across from the John A. Wilson Building.

But among that litany of Pulitzer Prize winners and other oft-anthologized poets, the John A. Joyces of the D.C. poetry scene are lost—the amateurs, the moonlighters, the dilettantes. The treasures of Washington verse that don’t survive in stone live on in tape-bound open-submission anthologies and thin, self-published volumes. There poems document everything from the essence of Washington femininity to the grandeur of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge to sunburns sustained at RFK Stadium.

The sacred guardian of these poems is the D.C. Public Library’s Washingtoniana Division, where a trove of verse sits idle, largely forgotten, save perhaps in the memories of grandchildren and the odd librarian. Those too recent to be considered lost are headed rapidly in that direction. It falls to this anthology to celebrate the poems and poets of the District that time threatens to abandon.

M.D.

Washington, D.C.

February 2005

Paul Boswell

The image of a librarian poet, jotting down lines between the stacks and forever overshadowed by the books he shelves, is a romantic one. Paul Boswell, who worked nearly 50 years in the Library of Congress as an expert in British government documents, might well have had his verse die with him. A few months before his 1995 death, however, Seven Locks Press published No Anchovies on the Moon: Three Score and Ten Washington Pictures and Poems, which collected decades’ worth of his poems and pen-and-ink drawings. When it was published, his son, Post sports columnist Tom Boswell, wrote that his father had risen regularly at 3 a.m. to write his poetry and sketch his drawings. We can only speculate it was those wee hours of the morning that inspired his musings on an uneven sunburn and his metaphor—half cracker, half Samuel Taylor Coleridge—for our fragile, fragmented city.

WASHINGTON

City shaped like the larger half

Of a broken Saltine cracker

The size of Xanadu.

City where statues of Neptune

And Abraham Lincoln

Sit forever staring toward each other

From opposite ends of the Mall.

City that has erected

A five-hundred-foot stone

Memorializing the Father of his Country.

At Night, flood-lighted from below,

The ghostly shadows of fifty flags

Faintly flicker the shaft,

While the pyramid on top, unlighted, disappears,

Leaving the lambent obelisk flat on top.

City where at night near Union Station

The velvety train whistles

Sound like the chords of a pipe organ.

City most alabaster of “thine alabaster cities,”

And most black.

City where Ladybird Johnson’s cherry trees

Do more, one week a year,

To beautify the city parks

Than any dozen Presidents of the United States

The rest of the year.

City whose most-frequented monument

Is half-way under ground, a polished trench,

Where survivors see themselves

Reflected in black walls

Through a white curtain of the chiseled names

Of fifty-thousand dead.

My City, ’tis of thee,

Of thee, I sing.

SUNBURN AT R.F.K.

My upper lip

Where my nose cast a shadow, stayed white—

As did the north side of my face

And the top of my neck

Where my chin served as a parasol.

But my collar bone,

South cheek below the shade of my hat

And the right half of my chin

Were red as cooked lobster.

On the beach you turn and cook yourself evenly,

But in the bleachers you are locked into one position,

Like a truck driver who sunburns one elbow.

The piebald red and white record

Of this afternoon in the sun

Will still be inscribed on my face a week from now—

By which time I will have forgotten

That the score was

Oilers twenty-nine,

Redskins twenty-seven.

Col. John A. Joyce

It’s not hard to conceive that a sentiment such as “Weep, and you weep alone” could emanate from the mind of an aging, alienated bureaucrat. By 1885, Joyce was just that; post-bellum, the Ireland native had settled into a job with the Internal Revenue Service. Yet quiet desperation was hardly a common theme in his poetry. Rather, he generally favored a Housmanesque amalgam of light rhyming verse and substantial topics, which ranged from his old Kentucky home to the trappings of society life, as in “The Washington Girl,” from his Complete Poems of 1900.

Joyce apparently had a boundless appetite for poetic language, as the preface to Complete Poems attests: “These rocks of rhyme and pebbles of poetry I throw into the world of thought, trusting that they may macadamize the highway of life with confidence, love and beauty; and as they have sprung spontaneously from my impulsive heart during the past forty years, I leave the Brain Babies to the justice and mercy of mankind.”

Nor could his grave in Oak Hill Cemetery (whose monument features the epitaph “Poet. Soldier. Philosopher.”) accommodate his poetic gifts: Shortly after his 1915 death, the Post reported that Joyce’s will, submitted for probate, was written in verse: “To my daughters, Libbie and Florence,/In equal proportions to share,/I give all my cash and property,/When my spirit is soaring in air./And appoint Mr. James J. Lampton/To execute this, my last will,/When I rest ’neath the bloomy flowers/In lot 444 on Oak Hill.”

THE WASHINGTON GIRL.

I ’m a Washington Girl,

And I live in a whirl

Of beauty and banter and ease ;

With a love for mankind,

And a magical mind,

I study to praise and to please.

I ’m a Washington Girl,

With an auburn curl,

And the light from the flash of my eyes

Is as true as the stars

That sparkle round Mars,

And as bright as the tropical skies.

I ’m a Washington Girl,

And I live in a whirl

Where the palms and the roses entwine,

And one twist of my fan

Can call any man

To laugh and to love o’er the wine!

Wendell Phillips Stafford

Joyce staked a claim to the title “Poet of Washington,” leaving Wendell Phillips Stafford to become known as merely the “poet laureate of the District Court.” Judge Stafford, a Vermont native, sat on the D.C.’s highest court for a quarter-century, publishing his poems in four books, as well as in newspapers and magazines throughout his career; this work sat alongside such legal tomes as his Handbook of Equity. The poems collected here were printed in his final volume, Glimpses in and About Washington, which he self-published in 1950 at age 90.

Also well-known as a public speaker, Stafford regularly spoke at the dedications of Washington landmarks and published a book of speeches in addition to his poetry. His poetry reflects his oratorical gifts, such as in “The City Planner An Unmarked Grave,” a valediction worthy of Mark Antony. His classical influences also show in “In Rock Creek Park A New Path,” in which he stakes his claim as Washington’s Theocritus by penning a pastoral glimpse at the District’s beloved swath of wilderness. The poem also serves as a valuable document for naturalists, documenting a rare District bear sighting.

THE CITY PLANNER

AN UNMARKED GRAVE

1907*

A romantic youth he came

From the sunny shores of France,

Shared with us the blame and fame,

Took with us the fearsome chance.

Not a field his soul could daunt—

Gallant Captain Charles L’Enfant.

When the Land, her freedom won,

Turned, her city here to build,

By his brain that warp was spun

Which the weft of years has filled.

Avenue and circle chaunt

“Bravo! bravo! Charles L’Enfant”.

What if nothing mark the spot,

Name, memorial or date?

Such omissions matter not:

There the city stands in state.

Should your tomb a trophy vaunt?

There behold it, Charles L’Enfant!

* His ashes now rest in the National Cemetery at Arlington.

IN ROCK CREEK PARK A NEW PATH

Strange little path in the woodland green

Where do you tell me you run?

Do you plunge to the depth of the cold ravine

Or climb to the hill and the sun?

Do you run straight on with arrowy speed

Or loiter and sideward turn?

Are your banks beset by thorn and weed

Or fringed with flower and fern?

Would vine and flint with sharp distress

Waylay and snare and prod,

Or would only cool, soft mosses press

In hollow of foot unshod?

It may be, you dread the downward rush

Of the owl on his errand grim.

It may be you hear the hidden thrush

Repeating his vesper hymn.

Perhaps you are drawn by the creek in his flowing

As a child may be led by the hand,

In and out of the shadow going

All in a turbulent land.

It may be, you lose yourself at last,

Or end in a hollow tree

Where a bear might break his winter fast

With the sack and spoil of the bee.

Or it may be, you leave the woodland behind

And come to the city again,

To the noisy haunts of humankind

And the trodden trails of men.

Be coy of your secret: ’tis nothing to me!

Wherever I will you shall run.

A short-sighted trader indeed I should be

To part with so many for one.

Paul DePackh

Like Joyce and Whitman, many Washington poets through the years have written their verse at night, serving as government cogs by day in order to make a living. Paul DePackh was a member of the Federal Poets of Washington, D.C., a still-active circle of poets formed in the ’40s. The Federal Poets’ first anthology, 1948’s Poetry from the Potomac, included this didactic villanelle, a call to pens for bureaucratic bards.

It must be noted, however, that DePackh’s exhortation to “bring ditties profligate” would not have served Whitman well. When his boss at the Department of the Interior learned that Whitman was the author of the sensually charged (and some say homoerotic) Leaves of Grass, he fired the poet.

YE POETS OF THE GOVERNMENT

Ye poets of the Government,

Amid your duties variegate,