I think we can just start typing up new paragraphs in this area, and it will mostly look just peachy keen. Don't forget to reset the "width" attribute on the table containing this verbiage once you have enough content to amount to something.

I'm going to set this page up as a sort of index to all the poems I eventually put on the web site. I'm still not sure exactly what approach to use — probably some sort of blurb introducing the poem and its author, and a link to the poem itself. I'm also not sure about the right font to use for poems. For now I'll go with "basic" text, and use <i> and </i> tags to force an italic type face.

Enough cogitation! Let us begin.

The Kobuk Maiden was written by my mother, Charlotte Kruger Bryant, sometime ca. 1943. I found the poem among her personal effects about 20 years after her death in 1961. I never got a chance to discuss it with her, but I'm fairly certain that she wrote it before she met my father in 1944, and while she was working at the El Nathan Children's Home in Valdez, Alaska. From the rhythm and the internal rhymes she was almost certainly channeling Robert W. Service.

I wrote Pride of Place in late July, 1978. I had recently resigned my actuaral position at Western Preferred Life Insurance Company, and I was taking a brief leave of absence from the work-a-day world to visit old friends and be sure my head was on straight. I believe it was.