No words, or almost none. As if the sun each day said nothing splendidly.
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 both the original anthology and the later work of James Weil, as both poet and publisher. It will include works by some of his favorite writers and closest associates— Lorine Niedecker, Theodore Enslin, Cid Corman, Simon Perchik, William Bronk and others—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.