The prose poems appearing in this little book have been written by me for the Curtis Companies during the past few years, and, judging from the many letters I have received from lumber dealers all over the country, they took kindly to the little effusions; and often these correspondents have asked me where and when I had experience in the lumber business.
I have had no experience in that line, except as a customer at the lumber yards. I have bought a lot of boards and such things in my time, and when I was buying them, or waiting for my change, I looked around. Anybody who looks around, and who doesn’t wear blinders, observes many things in the course of a lifetime.
I have always been interested in the things around me and close to me. I have an insatiable curiosity; I want to know all the facts about anything I am interested in. When I go to a lumber yard to buy the materials for a cupboard or a coffin, I ask a million questions. I want to know where the boards grew, and who harvested them, and how they were prepared for the consumer, and all about them; and, as a rule, lumber men know their own trade, and can give any reasonable amount of information. I have been asking questions all my days; and, having a good memory, very few facts get away from me.
And so I am prepared to write a rhyme about anything at an hour’s notice. If I am to write about a steam engine, or a whale, or the north pole, I usually do it without consulting any books; at various times I have questioned people about steam engines, and whales, and north poles, and the things they told me are on file in my memory.
So with these poems. They have been suggested by things I have heard lumber men say, perhaps day before yesterday, perhaps twenty years ago.
There are many people who will tell you I am not a poet, and I am not going to quarrel with them about it. The true poet, in the estimation of the highbrows, is one who can so befuddle a subject with words that an ordinary citizen can’t tell what he is driving at. I have never had an ambition to be that kind of a poet. Really, I can be as cryptic as any of them, and can write things that would give you a sick headache, trying to understand them; but few people enjoy sick headaches.
I have never been interested in Greek gods or Lethean rivers, or things remote, either in time or distance. Most of my life I have been associated with people who worked hard for a living, and I have done all kinds of manual labor myself. It is with such people, and such varieties of labor, that my verses deal.
The lumber yard on the corner is of more enduring interest to me than the Field of the Cloth of Gold, on which sundry kings played to the gallery long ago. Every time the lumberman sells a wagonload of his goods he is contributing to the general welfare, as well as to his own; and this fact seems more important to me than any story treating of the doings of Ulysses or any other fabled gent. So I write of lumber and let the gods slide.
