Joseph Joel Keith — Collected Poems
Joseph Joel Keith was a Los Angeles poet of astonishing persistence: a Pennsylvania immigrant’s son who published thirteen books, ran the Los Angeles branch of P.E.N., edited the Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards, and kept writing through war, urban poverty, civil-rights crisis, and his late encounter with Hawai‘i. His poems are compact acts of moral attention, returning to children, workers, widows, racial violence, damaged veterans, animals, and the stubborn life of roots and leaves. This edition brings together every book and verified uncollected periodical poem recoverable from the project’s original scans, separates minor revisions into variorum notes, and retains substantively reconceived poems as independent versions. The Blue Stairway (1948), verified in library and archival records but not yet recovered in a usable copy, is represented by its own section so that the gap remains visible rather than disappearing from Keith’s bibliography.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Bibliography
Keith, Joseph Joel, and Helen Frazee-Bower. Inner Pilgrim. Press of James A. Decker, 1939.
Keith, Joseph Joel. The Proud People: Poems of War and Poems of Peace. The Wings Press, 1943.
———. The Long Nights. Murray & Gee, 1944.
———. The Hearth Lit. Dierkes Press, 1946.
———. Always the Need: A Story in Verse. Dierkes Press, 1948.
———. The Blue Stairway. American Weave Press, 1948.
———. Durable Fire. Decker Press, 1949.
———. The Stubborn Root. University of Nebraska Press, 1952.
———. Two Laughters. Golden Quill Press, 1958.
———. And Then Derision. Goosetree Press, 1964.
———. Across the Dark. Windfall Press, 1964.
———. Backdrops. Olivant Press, 1966.
———. Aloha, Polynesia: Hawaiian Poems. Manyland Books, 1967.