This posting appeared on my other blog on 16 January 2012. Its purpose here is to collect all the previous Gutenberg postings here before moving on.
One of the new offerings through Gutenberg is a very short sequence of poems by Samuel E. Kiser. I confess right now that I'd never heard of him before, but he seems to have been around Chicago in the 1920s and 30s.
When I started reading the anthology (there may be a better word for it; I'm not sure), I immediately thought of the great populist poet of Australia, C J Dennis, with The Sentimental Bloke.
They seem to me to be on the same wavelength, but for their respective cultures. I'm really not sure if the latter is exportable, especially to North America, because of the street slang (almost a dialect!), but there's no problem with Kiser coming back this way. I'd say that Kiser predates Dennis, but not by all that much.
It's downloadable from Gutenberg and readable on any computer with the programs Kindle and/or Calibre. There's a plain text version, but you'd be crazy not to get the illustrated one. The cartoonist is the Pulitzer Prize winner John Tinney McCutcheon, so Kiser isn't a nobody.
Here's how it starts, just to whet your appetite. If you're a C J Dennis fan, you'll enjoy it. By the way, you can download The Sentimental Bloke, or read it online here. Sadly, the great illustrations in the hard copy versions of it are not in the Gutenberg edition. They ought to be. Happily, that's no problem with Kiser's poems.
One of the new offerings through Gutenberg is a very short sequence of poems by Samuel E. Kiser. I confess right now that I'd never heard of him before, but he seems to have been around Chicago in the 1920s and 30s.
They seem to me to be on the same wavelength, but for their respective cultures. I'm really not sure if the latter is exportable, especially to North America, because of the street slang (almost a dialect!), but there's no problem with Kiser coming back this way. I'd say that Kiser predates Dennis, but not by all that much.
It's downloadable from Gutenberg and readable on any computer with the programs Kindle and/or Calibre. There's a plain text version, but you'd be crazy not to get the illustrated one. The cartoonist is the Pulitzer Prize winner John Tinney McCutcheon, so Kiser isn't a nobody.
Here's how it starts, just to whet your appetite. If you're a C J Dennis fan, you'll enjoy it. By the way, you can download The Sentimental Bloke, or read it online here. Sadly, the great illustrations in the hard copy versions of it are not in the Gutenberg edition. They ought to be. Happily, that's no problem with Kiser's poems.
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