To the preacher life's a sermon,
To the joker it's a jest;
To the miser life is money,
To the loafer life is rest.

To the lawyer life's a trial,
To the poet life's a song;
To the doctor life's a patient
That needs treatment right along.

[...]
— “What is Life to You?”, The Baltimore Sun, #00045

All poems are people's poems, but the poems one is likely to read in school or in a literary magazine really are the poems of poets, written by people who have dedicated themselves to the craft and lifestyle of the poet, people struck by genius or those who hope to appear so.

For decades, Americans with no particular attachment to the poetic tradition chose to express themselves in verse. They did this because it elevated what they were saying (about, perhaps, a man killed in a mine, see #00003), but also because it was pleasant and euphonious. Sometimes they chose verse because it was fun and memorable for the reader. Sometimes they chose poetry because they were irritated by the poems they were expected to read in school and wanted to mock them (see #00040).

The mother who sings at the caroling party is not really considered a singer, though she sings. Likewise, the newspaperman who files eight lines of couplets to be published unsigned, or the young girl who writes a few stanzas for the Moravian Church Cook Book, (see #00012) are not necessarily conceived of as poets. In some literal sense they are poets. In another sense, they're simply doing what people have always found irresistible in important moments or in times of leisure: they've said what they wanted to say with a particular attention to its spoken rhythm and its prosody.

People's Poems explores poetry as an occasional, vernacular form of expression. Poetry, unlike architecture or oil painting or novel-writing, is a form which sits at-hand to anyone familiar with the mother tongue and some conventions of the art. It requires no capital nor extended retreat for composition. A clever person can compose it as quickly as he speaks. And, even so, the form separates itself from the speech of everyday life. A child's rhyming schoolyard taunt lodges itself in the ears of the schoolchildren in a way that a prosaic insult does not.

If such a thing as "vernacular poetry" is not a contradiction in terms, we hope here to record it such as it existed in English in North America. We focus on poets who were writing to their peers in community, people who were unlikely to have a thought at all about whether they might be celebrated as poets or anthologized. The rules are not strict, but at a first pass anyone with a Wikipedia page that calls them a poet is probably not going to be included, except, perhaps, if they wrote a particularly good comic poem.

I first thought to create something like this when I was skimming a 1970's issue of the American Bar Association Journal and found in it a "Poetry Corner", with poems full of bewildering temporal markers ("if only he would show he knows/ I am not an IBM component") and insular allusions ("with thirty years of writs of error coram nobis/ of res ipsa loquitur of the Thelusson Act,/ of the Rule in Dumpor's case of/ punctilious punctuation/ of girls fresh out of high school"). Here, "poetry" was something that could be attached to anything, to law, to cooking, to whatever else. Wallace Stevens shows us a poet who is also a lawyer; People's Poems is about understanding the lawyer (or student, or newspaperman, or congregant, or housewife) as poet.

There is really no way that this can be a representative survey. To start, the collection will represent what we've come across, our particular interests and investigations. Inevitably, it will heavily feature works available in late 1800's and 1900's printed materials, which are numerous and easy to browse and read. Additionally, we are picking from works we can legally reprint in full, which biases the collection towards works published before the early 1930's. As the project grows, I hope that we can patch any obvious holes and cure any blindspots.

In the meantime, enjoy the beauty, the pure-spiritedness, the wideness and weirdness of these poems.