Odell Francis — Smoking Flax and Other Poems
Odell Francis moved between song, radio, newspaper columns, poetry clubs, editorial work, and the small office where secretarial labor financed her writing. A dramatic soprano in the Los Angeles Poetry and Music Club by 1930, she was publishing verse by 1933, winning club prizes, teaching prosody, and helping Dion O’Donnol run the magazine Path of Beauty before Wagon & Star issued Smoking Flax in 1941. Her poems can be witty about desire, marriage, and the roles assigned to women, then turn sharply toward machinery, aerial bombing, militarism, and Shanghai under assault. Their music is often delicate; their endings are not. This edition resets all forty-three poems in Smoking Flax and eleven newspaper poems not collected there. It follows the book’s order and stanza structure, rejoins narrow-page hanging wraps, records four earlier newspaper appearances without duplicating their texts, and preserves mistaken printed bylines in the publication notes. The surviving evidence probably identifies the poet as Frances Odell Francis, but her birth, family, education, spouse, death, and later life remain unproved.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Francis, Odell. “Tranquillity.” Los Angeles Times, 22 Jan. 1933, p. 78. Printed as O’Dell Francis.
———. Fifteen located poem appearances in the Los Angeles Times, Daily News, and West Los Angeles Independent, 1933–40.
———. [Manuscript Service and Correspondence Course in Verse Writing]. Advertised in Inglewood, California, 1940; materials unlocated.
———. Smoking Flax. Wagon & Star, 1941. First printing. 43 poems.
———. Smoking Flax and Other Poems. The Text-Tech Papers, 2026.
O’Donnol, Dion, and Odell Francis, comps. “Bright Mosaic.” Weekly poetry feature, West Los Angeles Independent, at least June 17 and 24, 1938.
O’Donnol, Dion, and Odell Francis, editors. Path of Beauty: The International Poetry Paper, vol. 2, no. 5, Nov. 1938.
O’Donnol, Dion, Odell Francis, and Eugene Phillips, comps. Winged Cargoes. 1938. Complete imprint and text not yet located.