Description:

This book is an accident of the imagination. The poems were originally written within the pages of a tiny book I had ordered online to serve as my diary for 2007. What I needed was a blank or near-blank journal whose structure fit 2007, and this offering was from 1917, a year that met my requirements.

Once I had the book in hand, however, I realized that the four short lines allowed for each date would not serve me well as a diary. The book was primarily a place to note the birthdays of important people in one’s life, with an extract, facing each day’s entry, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Nevertheless, I spent 2007, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Longfellow, creating a poem for each day of the year, a poem based on or inspired by the bits of Longfellow’s verse that faced me each day. My goal was to use his archaic poetic diction, and the British spelling of the book, to create modern poems with a scent of the past. —Geof Huth