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 contain…
