About the project

I was reading two poets at the time. Actually more than two. But for this story, I was reading two poets. I happened to notice in the biography of one of the poets, that she had died on my birthday. I then checked the biography of the other poet, and she too had died on my birthday. The same day. July the 6th. Uncanny. They were worlds apart sequentially and geographically, but still connected.

So then I wondered, naturally, if all poets throughout all time die on the same day—that day being my birthday. The answer to this question is no. Poets die on many different days of the calendar year. I did some searching by occupation. Confirmed it. In the end, I located just eighteen poets that shared the July 6th date of death. A reasonable number and an unusual collection of bedfellows.

I built reading lists for each author that focus on their books of poetry. I sorted through comprehensive bibliographies to cull verse from prose. The resulting reading lists were compiled by evoking Best Effort in consultation with the following sources: American National Biography Online (Oxford University Press); Biography Reference Bank (EBSCOhost); Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale, 1981—); John Arthur Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); W. T. H. Jackson, George Stade, and Jacques Barzun, eds., European Writers: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance (New York: Scribner, 1983–1991); Walter Conrad Klein, Johann Conrad Beissel: Mystic and Martinet, 1690–1768 (Philadelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 1942); Literature Resource Center (Gale); Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press); Jack Salzman, Cornel West, and David L. Smith, eds., Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996); Polly Smith, “Inventory of the Scharmel Iris Papers, 1911–1964,” The Newberry Library, last modified 2008, http://mms.newberry.org/html/Iris.html; Carlos A. Solé and Maria Isabel Abreu, eds., Latin American Writers (New York: Scribner, 1989); and “WorldCat,” OCLC, http://www.worldcat.org.

This website brings the poet-saints of July 6 together to form an experimental poetry library based on affinities.

—Project Editor