This image is the cover for the book Blindfold, Classics To Go

Blindfold, Classics To Go

Excerpt: “Ellen Sydney’s first garden in the Meadowburn’s new American home had made a fair beginning. She was at work one afternoon bending over the bed of sweet peas, hooking the baby tendrils to the wire mesh of the frame, with an occasional pat of the soft dark earth beneath—the earth which Bennet, the youngest of the family, had brought by the basketful from a distance, to enrich the yellow clay that filled in the property. School was just out and as she worked Bennet banged into the hall, threw down his books and rushed forth again with a shout to join his comrades up the street. They were building a “switch-back railway” from the second story rear window of a neighbour’s house. She could just glimpse the murderous rickety scaffolding of it through the small leaves of the alley poplars. Fastening up the last of the tendrils to the wire, Ellen heard Mrs. Osprey’s shrill voice calling from quite half a block away to one of the Osprey boys. She could not restrain a smile at the familiar summons. “Poor woman,” thought she, “they do worry her.” But she would no more have thought of pitying Mrs. Osprey actually, than of feeling sorry for Her Majesty Queen Alexandra, whom many years in Canada had taught her to believe next to the angels themselves. As she turned from the garden she heard a still more familiar voice and Potter Osprey came through the gate."

Orrick Johns

Orrick Glenday Johns (June 2, 1887 – July 8, 1946) was an American poet and playwright. He was one of the earliest modernist free-verse poets in Greenwich Village in 1913-1915 and associated with the artist's colony at Grantwood, New Jersey (sometimes referred to as Ridgefield), where Others: A Magazine of the New Verse was founded and published by Alfred Kreymborg in 1915. Johns's work "Olives," a series of fourteen small poems appeared in the first issue of July 1915. He is part of a coterie of poets and authors sometimes called the "Others" group who were contributors to the magazine or residents at the colony and included: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Man Ray, Skipwith Cannell, Lola Ridge, Marcel Duchamp, and Fenton Johnson (poet) (the only African American published in the magazine). Johns is also associated with poets like Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale. and the dramatist Zoe Akins.

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