HISTORY OF POETRY IN THE PAPER TAKES A FEW TWISTS

April is National Poetry Month. In the Union-tribune’s Arts+culture section, you will frequently find poems written by our readers.

However, publishers of this paper haven’t always been supportive of poetical aspirations. For many years in the late 1800s and early 1900s, The San Diego Union and Daily Bee, as it was then called, refused to publish original verse. Occasionally, the paper would remind readers of this rule.

From The San Diego Union and Daily Bee, Saturday April 4, 1908:

POETICAL CONTRIBUTIONS.

From time to time the Union is the recipient of contributions in verse. Some have merit, but none of them is published in the paper. For the benefit of persons who may not be acquainted with reason why all such contributions are declined, it may be stated that for many years it has been the rule of the paper not to publish original poetry. That rule is still in force. It sometimes bars out verses that have genuine merit, but on the whole the rule has been found to be a good one.

Then in 1910, columnist Edwin H. Clough, writing under the nom de plumb of “Yorick,” smashed the paper’s poetry prohibition. In his literary and satirical

Sunday column titled, “On the Margin,” Yorick quoted poetry and sometimes poked fun at public figures in rhyme.

In 1914, after learning that a San Francisco newspaper was offering a $25 prize for the best poem, he issued a call to “Unleash the Bards of San Diego.” When Clough died in 1923, the Union published pages of poems written by readers in a memorial tribute to the writer.

From The San Diego Union and Daily Bee, Sunday, July 5, 1914:

ON THE MARGIN BY YORICK

Unleash the Bards of San Diego As a mere matter of sectional or local pride, I hope that our San Diego poets will get busy. We don’t want the world to think that all the bards are in the bleak and blustering North country.

It is characteristic that San Francisco should boast of its minstrel citizenship, of its population of popular bards and bardlets; but there are others — there are more poets to the block in Los Angeles than in other equal acreage anywhere in the universe; and my own mail proves to me that poetry is the ruling passion in San Diego. All that is needed to evoke the San Diego muse in vastly tuneful quantity is provocation — our poets are violets for modesty as they are lilies of the valley for quality and purity.

Let the San Diego Ad Club or Chamber of Commerce or the Real Estate Dealer’s Association offer prizes for “the best,” and see what will happen. I tremble to think of it. The San Diegan who isn’t a poet is a False Pretense. The newcomer who doesn’t develop into a poet under the inspiration of his environment is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils — the irresistible inspiration of our opaline sea, our amethstine sky, our cobalt distances, our purple peaks, our silver strand, our brown-bosomed hills, our sunsets of crimson and gold, our summer morning mists that like gray-hooded nuns glide back into the twilight of their shadowed cloisters, and our autumn afternoon haze that fringes our horizon like the lace on a lovely woman’s petticoat.

Inspiration for poetry in San Diego! Why, there’s nothing else; it’s in the very air we breathe; it comes to us on the wind of the desert and it whispers to us in the soft sweet zephyrs of the sundown sea; it’s the very essence of our glorious climate. Under its influence San Diegans ought to write the best poetry in California, which is the best all-round poetry in the world. All that is required to bring it into full bloom is a prize contest. Emulation is the brother of Effort.

A few prizes for “the best” that the poets of San Diego could produce would rouse the muse from her slumber amid the rasping of then thousand gifted pens and the thunder of ten thousand tuneful typewriters fraught with Miltonic potentialities and reeking with rimes to beat the band from Chaucer to Bloodgood. But would it be desirable?