Stanley Preston Kimmel — Collected Poems

Stanley Preston Kimmel began as a musician and USC law student, publishing youthful lyrics and two poem dramas in Los Angeles in 1916. Then the First World War broke the style open. He drove ambulances near Verdun, survived the torpedoing of the SS Antilles, and turned bodies, rain, refugees, prisoners, ruined villages, and military machinery into the stripped poems of Souvenirs. Between those worlds came the more formally ambitious Improvisations, full of classical figures, urban night, music, and experiments in sequence. Kimmel later moved through China, Paris, Chicago, Washington, coalfield drama, journalism, and Civil War history, befriending writers from Carl Sandburg to Ezra Pound. This edition gathers the complete poetry in the project’s three available original collections, including the 1916 fantasies and poem dramas, while recording later missing books for future recovery.