Poetry and the small record

THE VERSE BELOW THE SUMMIT, AT TRUE SIZE

The shape of it. Below Thorpe — the whole of Mishawaka's claim on American poetry, and she is entered whole above — the verse record of the city is a small one, and this section prints it as a class rather than padding it into names the catalogs do not carry. The state bibliography, Indiana Authors and Their Books, keeps the keeping roster for Indiana letters at class level; for Mishawaka it adds no second poet of standing to Thorpe, and no shelf of local pamphlet verse was reached that the record would let this section enumerate rather than gesture at. What stands documented is the culture of occasional verse the whole build keeps meeting: the centennial and sesquicentennial programs with their commissioned poems and pageants (Culture owns them), the school magazines of Mishawaka High and Marian and Bethel with their student verse (Schools owns them), and the newspapers' own columns of local poetry across a century and a half (Newspapers owns them). A city whose one poet wrote the century's most-recited American ballad before she was seventeen has its poetry record, entire: a summit, and a documented culture of verse-making beneath it that never produced a second name the record keeps. Printed at that size, as the record gives it.

Sources:

1. Indiana Authors and Their Books (the state bibliography) — the keeping roster, at class level, as the South Bend file of this record also uses it.
2. Culture, Schools and Newspapers (this record) — the anniversary programs, the school magazines and the newspaper verse columns, each in its own house.