I have been going through the material submitted for "The Poet's Pack" and find that I have selected seventy-five poems by twenty-nine authors. By counting, say, twenty-four lines to the full page, this will make a book of about ninety pages. It could easily make one hundred pages.
How does this tally with your idea?
I think it would be a good idea to have brief personal sketches, as you suggest. May I leave this to you, or shall I attend to it?
It has hurt me a good deal to leave out some well-meaning versifiers; and here and there I have stretched a point in favor of certain poems, though I have been careful not to stretch too much.
I have found a few bully things. Starret is perhaps the strongest of the bunch. I wonder how old he is. If he hasn't reached thirty, what a moose he can be! My judgment is based more on the fuel of the man's personality than upon any poem of his I have seen, though I like all I have seen. He can see and he knows the values of words in a wonderful way. I hope this doesn't sound "patronizing". Certainly I'm not eager to appear an ass. I'm simply trying to say that he gets across to me, and that I admire him.
I'll send the material on soon. Doubtless there will be some more editing in galley proofs. I may want to add or omit a poem here and there, though I promise that there won't be much of this. Wouldn't it be a good idea to arrange the poems by authors, the order to be determined alphabetically?
If you want a slightly larger book, say so, and I can find enough material to swell it a bit. If it seems too large now, I can easily shrink it.
Jno. Neihardt
Rihani's Sonnet on the Sonnet is bully, isn't it?
