Donald L. Emblen — There Are Sea Gulls on Our Lawn and Later Poems
Donald L. Emblen made poetry part of daily life. He carried notebooks, wrote almost every day, handed poems to friends when an occasion called for one, printed chapbooks and broadsides on a press in his garage, and taught generations of Santa Rosa Junior College students to treat writing as patient craft. His first collection, There Are Sea Gulls on Our Lawn, follows the beaches, piers, coves, streets, birds, fish, bathers, and small houses of postwar San Diego with a reporter’s eye and a naturalist’s curiosity. The complete 1947 book—forty-six poems, including the three texts isolated in the earlier project PDF—is restored here from the original edition rather than copied from that derivative selection. Six later witnesses extend the record from a 1971 campus paper through Notes from Travels, Under the Oaks II, and a 2011 William Stafford memorial. Together they show the continuity between the young shore poet and the teacher, traveler, translator, printer, and Sonoma County poet laureate he became.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Emblen, Donald L. There Are Sea Gulls on Our Lawn. Linoleum-block illustrations by Betty Jane Emblen. North Shores Publishing Company, 1947. Original edition unpaginated; title sometimes modernized as There Are Seagulls on Our Lawn.
———. The Crow Tree [also cataloged as The Crow Tree, and Other Oregon Poems]. Grundtvig Press / Projection Press, 1949. Imprint relationship unresolved.
———. Twenty-five Best Poems. Gordon Dixon, 1964. Bibliographic lead from Books and Authors of San Diego; copy not examined.
———. Twenty Poems. Gordon Dixon Press, 1965. Copy not examined.
———. Peter Mark Roget: The Word and the Man. Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970.
———. Notes from Travels. Engdahl Typography, 1986.
———, translator. Werner Aspenström. 1987. Full publication details require verification.
———, translator. Two poems by Werner Aspenström. Scandinavian Review, vol. 77, 1989, p. 90.
———. At Home on the Clackamas. Broadside. Clamshell Press, 1990.
———. Sources of Wonder: On Hearing the Sonoma County Chorus Sing Bruckner. Broadside. Clamshell Press, 1991.
———. The American Chorus Arrives in Prague. Broadside. Clamshell Press, 1992.
———. William Stafford American Poet 1914–1993. Broadside. Clamshell Press, 1993.
———. Under the Oaks II. Santa Rosa Junior College, 1995.
———. Want List and Other Poems About Aging. Running Wolf Press, 2000. Block prints by Linda Emblen.
———. By the Dozen: Sixty Short Poems. Clamshell Press, early 2000s. First edition of 200 copies followed by a second printing.
———. Day Under the Oaks III. Santa Rosa Junior College, circa 2004.
———. Under the Oaks: Selected Poems of Place 1960–1980. Publication details unresolved.
———. Admiral Arnold Solkov. Broadside, undated. University of Arizona Poetry Center holding.
———. The Reader’s Rejoinder. 250 monthly issues; final issue published posthumously. Archive not located.
———, co-founder and editor. Loon: A Journal of Poetry. Begun 1973; run and issue details require verification.
Emblen, Donald L., and Betty J. Emblen. The Palomino Boy. Illustrated by Lynd Ward. Viking Press, 1948. 189 pp.
Emblen, Donald L., as Bart Reynolds. Paisano. 1957. Genre and publisher require catalog verification; title and pseudonym confirmed by Contemporary Authors.
Emblen, Donald L., and Donald Hall. A Writer’s Reader. Little, Brown, 1976; repeatedly revised through at least a ninth edition.
Emblen, Donald L., and Arnold Solkov, editors. Before and After: The Shape and Shaping of Prose. Random House, 1986.