While researching Poems by First Ladies: The First-Ever Anthology, I tried to find poetry by Jill Biden. As I explained in an appendix, she is outspoken about her love of poetry, she has a master’s in English, and she has had students write poems in college writing classes. Even her biographer and her press secretary could not confirm my hunch that she has written poetry. The latter did not find any “public poetry,” and her attempt to “see if there’s…
Uncorroborated Documents! Research Adventure! Potential Edith Wilson Poems from the Library of Congress
Posted on January 13, 2026Poems by First Ladies: The First-Ever Anthology includes a humorous limerick poem by Edith Wilson. After I learned that the Edith Bolling Galt Wilson Papers contain additional poems, I pilgrimaged to the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division. I found no shortage of poems, but despite my sleuthing, I could not confidently conclude that Edith authored any of them.…
Poems by Presidents Fillmore, Cleveland, and Clinton
Posted on January 1, 2026Poems by Presidents features selections by eleven presidents and discusses verse by four others. While researching the sequel, Poems by First Ladies, I discovered poems by three more presidents: Millard Fillmore, Grover Cleveland, and William J. Clinton. This brings the total number of presidential poets to eighteen! Millard Fillmore According to Robert J. Scarry’s Millard Fillmore, the Hallmark Company acquired a valentine from 1850 at an antique store in 1956. The valentine is in Millard Fillmore’s handwriting and…
Dolley Madison’s and Louisa Adams’s Poems Inspired by “The Wants of Man”
Posted on December 28, 2025In Poems by Presidents, John Quincy Adams is the star poet and “The Wants of Man” is his magnum opus. In Poems by First Ladies, the first two First Ladies featured both have poems inspired by “The Wants of Man.” Dolley Madison penned “Lines Addressed to President Adams, on Reading His Beautiful Poem on the Wants of Man” to celebrate the wisdom and beauty of “The Wants of Man”: Your wants, dear Sir, will seem but small, When they’re compared with…
Limericks about There Once Was a Limerick Anthology
Posted on March 11, 2025One of the most touching reactions I’ve ever witnessed as an author and editor is that There Once Was a Limerick Anthology has inspired readers to write limericks about the book! Since the anthology was published by Dover Publications in 2022, people I’ve never met have shared their original limericks in emails to Dover and me as well as in online reviews. I genuinely adore limericks; this wasn’t just a one-off project. Having readers get in on the fun has…
Jimmy Carter, Presidential Poet
Posted on December 29, 2024President Jimmy Carter passed away today at 100. In 1995, he became the first president to publish a collection of poems in his lifetime: Always a Reckoning and Other Poems. Aside from John Quincy Adams’s epic poem, it is the only poetry book published by a living president. I intended to feature multiple selections by Carter in Poems by Presidents: The First-Ever Anthology, which was published by Dover Publications last year. That wasn’t feasible due to practical obstacles, but I…
Carolyn Wells in the Spotlight
Posted on May 18, 2024In February, Post Hill Press published Rebecca Rego Barry’s The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells. It’s framed as “part biography” of author Carolyn Wells and “part sleuthing narrative” to discover and celebrate her legacy, despite far-flung documents and practical obstacles. Given the pivotal role that she has played in two of my anthologies, I elatedly devoured Wells’ first-ever biography. * * * In 2022, Dover Publications published my first poetry anthology, There Once Was a Limerick Anthology. Wells is tied with…
Leap Day: Poems for a Quadrennial Occasion
Posted on February 29, 2024Happy Leap Day! This day only comes once every four years, so let’s make the most of it, in verse! I’ve blogged about my emailing pen pal Eric Jonas, especially how I’ve sent him limericks and poems about air guitar. On New Year’s Day ’16, Eric said, “Since this year is a leap year, we have an extra day to cram in even more emailing ….” This led to many emails on Leap Day! On February 29 that year, I sent him…
From Punk to Presidents: Incongruity
Posted on February 19, 2024After seven books, there’s a glaring incongruity in my oeuvre! How can someone who wrote three books about punk praise presidents? My new book, Poems by Presidents: The First-Ever Anthology, showcases presidents’ verse. I don’t offer uniformly positive depictions of presidents in the chapter introductions, criticizing Warren G. Harding’s adultery and the poor quality of James Madison’s selections. But for the most part, I offer sanitized overviews of presidents’ biographies, with a general audience in mind. Anthologizing presidents’ poems inherently…
John Quincy Adams’s “Hymn for the Twenty-Second of December”
Posted on December 22, 2023In Poems by Presidents: The First-Ever Anthology, published by Dover Publications last week, John Quincy Adams is the indisputable star, in terms of both quality and quantity—he penned about 350 poems, more than seven times as many extant poems as any other president. In a book collecting his poems shortly after his death in 1848, the publisher’s note boasted that Adams’s hymns were “among the finest devotional lyrics in our language.” One even bears today’s date, “Hymn for the Twenty-Second…