In 1965, poet and editor James L. Weil published Of Poem: An Anthology, a collection drawn from the pages of his magazine Elizabeth. Calling himself “an amateur collector of poems ‘of poem’,” he gathered what he described as “the prize pieces” of his six-year venture to revive “Modern Elizabethan and Metaphysical poetry” in America.
“The poems,” he wrote, “are loud”: they presume a listener, “often brashly, on the faith that someone is there.” Against the impersonal voice of the “poem addressed to The Editor,” these works insist on presence—on poem as a direct human act.
This site presents a new Of Poem: a selection drawn from the original anthology and from the later work of James L. Weil, as both poet and publisher. It includes poems by writers he published and admired—among them William Bronk and Lorine Niedecker—alongside a range of his own work across different periods.
The selection is necessarily partial, shaped by preference as much as by design. A featured poem appears here and changes daily.
Each fall I put down tons of Stuff and seed and Still come up with dandelions instead. I say I care for, not about the grass, but for all I do, I do I guess. Then there’s our doormat sprouting Merion as violently verdant as it can to say, for all I would about the grass, how coming or going green gets us.