Despite gaining a reputation as a housing reformer, Arthur C. Holden came to suspect his ideas, articulated in the Primer of Housing of 1927 and dozens of trade articles, were wasted on technocrats. Longing for a wider audience, he resolved to “translate thirty-five years of technical writing into verse”—no easy task, given that this technical writing had been largely devoted to the abstrusities of low-income-housing finance. But attempt it he did, to our enormous benefit: Published in 1965, Sonnets for My City is gloriously idiosyncratic and utterly delightful to read. That Holden burdened it with a clunky subtitle (“An Essay on the Kinship of Art & Finance as Factors in the Development of the City and the Molding of Man’s Environment”) only adds to the overall charm.
The book is organized into distinct “Parts” and the occasional “Interlude,” each featuring prose explications of such grand themes as “the meaning of credit flow.” These structuring elements provide the context for the hand-drawn cityscapes—and, of course, lots and lots of sonnets—each section contains. Among the two hundred poems proffered here are paeans to Penn Station, bromides against “speculative turnover,” and proto-wonkish calls for cooperative action by smaller property owners to alleviate the city’s housing woes. A sample entry: “Land owners are proprietors in trust/past labor’s fruit they hold for social good/though some twist rights to serve mere greed and lust/and play the market as a scalper would.”
OK, so it isn’t Frost. Indeed, at times Holden seems to settle for the mere Seussian. (“The banking system is a force for good/when credit spreads production as it should.”) But you just try to devise a poem that channels the qualia of zoning. And another on the splendiferous tonic of equity trusts. And until you do (and NYRA debuts its own poetry vertical), might I suggest a reading at the next launch party?