Photograph by George Sakkestad
Peter Cifelli reads the poetry of 19th-century schoolchildren in the living room of his Los Gatos home.
By Mary Ann Cook
Early American Poetry: Voices of New England Youth was published shortly before Christmas by Armadillo Press of Mountain View. It is a labor of love, indeed a nearly all-consuming passion, for its author, Los Gatan Peter Cifelli.
For 10 years now, Cifelli has collected, studied and researched the work of the youth of Colonial America and the early years of the 19th century. Those were the years when schoolgirls exchanged friendship poetry books and schoolgirl samplers were in full bloom, Cifelli says.
He is fascinated with what he has discovered about the poetry of the youth of this period. His source materials and particular specialty are the friendship poetry books that were a reigning form of communication for teenagers in those days and the samplers that schoolgirls were set to stitching.
Traces of the friendship poetry practice survive today in the autographing of school yearbooks, but, oh, with such a difference. And what a loss, Cifelli would say. In the period in which he has immersed himself, the lines penned in a friendship book conveyed all the finest strivings of art and life.
"The poems or couplets in a friendship book were tailored to represent the distinctive qualities of the recipient," Cifelli says. And original artwork was added as well, again to reflect the uniqueness of the person being addressed and honored.
An increased interest in early Americana has sprung up in recent years, the experts tell us. These days we are more appreciative than ever before of our folk arts and what they tell us about our past. Handmade artifacts of all kinds hold a high place in our esteem and in our museums. Folk art has taken on a more important role in the art world and in popular culture, as witness the revitalization of interest in quilts and quilt-making.
Cifelli's personal involvement has paralleled that movement. Part of this renewed enthusiasm, he says, "could be a yearning for a simpler, purer time." He thinks renewed interest in folk art may be a reaction to our high-tech age, in which so much is transient, impersonal and fleeting.
Early American Poetry applauds the youth of a young America. "Friendship books celebrated the time-honored virtues and the morality of an emerging nation. These examples contain "some of the keys that contributed to this nation's greatness," Cifelli says in his book.
The poems reflect the attitudes of the times and the artistic naiveté of their authors. It may have been a simpler time, but it certainly wasn't an easier time. We have only to look at the infant and childbirth mortality rates to confirm that.
But it was a time with a great emphasis on a fine hand. Without mechanical aids such as typewriters or computers, handwriting was crucial and prized. So beautiful are many of the offerings in friendship books that they look like calligraphy. The penmanship has become an art form.
Watercolors, pen and ink and pencil drawings enhance the pages, too. Many young people composed their own verses, although for those who felt daunted, there were well-known passages from famous men available. Quotations from John Adams, for one, were used.
Friendship books became so popular that eventually books of sayings and design stamps were printed, so that all one had to do was pick and paste. In short, as years went by, friendship books became more and more commercial. They also got smaller, the size of autograph books today. In early days, the books were standard book size. Printers began to include artwork on each page; different lithographs would head each page so that friends could leaf through to pick the one they prized the most to write on.
But the most heartfelt, the most cherished, of course, were those contributions in which both words and artwork were original with the writer. Herein lie the roots of early American poetry, Cifelli says. Beginnings that have been largely overlooked until now.
It's a calling "tailormade for me," the author says. "Combining as it does an interest in history, a fascination with early Americana and a love of children."
As a former teacher, he's always had a particular affinity for children, and has four of his own.
"Kids are precious," he says.
Cifelli taught at a preschool while he was a student at UC-Berkeley. His degree was in psychology, with a minor in early childhood education.
After graduation he taught in the primary grades at schools in San Jose and Santa Clara for six years. For 20 years, he has owned Innovative Plantscapes; he designs and maintains interior landscapes for industry, businesses and private residences.
That is his livelihood, but his heart is with the children of another century. He hopes that eventually he'll be able to spend more and more of his time researching, collecting, and writing about the poetic and artistic efforts of the youth of early America.
This 200-page book is double-faced, with a reproduction of the friendship book page or the sampler on the left and its message printed out on the right for easier reading.
This book covers New England exclusively. His next book will give offerings from the Middle Atlantic States. Though it is rare enough to find a friendship book in the Northeast, it is rarer still to find any surviving south of Virginia. Schools were evidently fewer in number and in pupils.
Of course, in those days there wasn't much but wilderness outside of the original 13 colonies. "That there could be a poetic voice in such a harsh land"--that is part of the fascination for Cifelli.
Dawn-to-dusk chores were crucial to everyday life, and that included children; merely staying alive required every effort. Not only did children not have movies, MTV or rock & roll, but they also didn't have penicillin, running water or central heating, Cifelli points out.
School primers were few and far between in early days; the classics and the Bible served instead.
But poetry was a part of daily living. Families read poetry aloud around the hearth, much as we gather in front of the TV. The friendship books Cifelli collects "open a window to a simpler, purer, more disciplined time," he says.
Examples of another little-examined folk art from youth--needlework samplers--are also displayed in Early American Poetry. These samplers were produced chiefly by girls 8-10 years old, but some were as young as 6 or as old as 12.
In those days, Cifelli says, needlework was as important for girls as penmanship--perhaps more important--because it was a necessary skill for housewives. By the time they were of marriageable age, if girls weren't expert seamstresses, their families were destined to be unclothed, ill-clothed and unlinened.
So girls were set to work with needle and thread to learn and reinforce their ABCs and numbers, while boys toiled with paper and quill pen. "Needlework samplers were as individual as a thumb print or signature," Cifelli says.
Artwork was often part of the project. Teachers may have contributed the ideas, or the more imaginative students may have created the verses or stitched designs of their own making. The cross-stitched sayings were invariably well-known exhortations to do well and honorably.
Samplers were something of a graduation seal, too, much like a diploma. "Wealthier families would frame the evidence of their female children's accomplishments," Cifelli says.
The contributions of individual teachers are only now being acknowledged and appreciated, he adds. "It's only in the past 15 years that much research has been done on the teacher's influence. Now we're learning that their marks have been there all along, and samplers can be more accurately dated and placed geographically by the telltale signs of a particular teacher.
"Having been a teacher I feel some poetic justification in that," he says with a grin.
The whole sampler spectrum, from such young practitioners, is a folk art form only now being recognized and appreciated. And that's part of the excitement and fascination that Cifelli feels, being on the ground floor of the study of a naive art form.
His research is groundbreaking because very little has been written about samplers from such young seamstresses, and few collectors throughout the U.S. have that specialty. Even smaller are the numbers of friendship poetry book collectors. He doesn't know the number, but he estimates there may be only a handful throughout the country.
To acquire such a unique collection, networking is all-important. Antique collectors and dealers, usually from New England, call him with their finds in the field. "They know what I'm looking for," Cifelli says.
His first friendship poetry-book acquisition was from an antique auction in New Hampshire. A dealer had alerted him to the fact that it would be available so he flew out to take a look. He's especially thrilled to get anything from Providence, R. I., because that's where his forebears are from.
Cifelli takes pride in selling samplers to historical museums in the towns where they originated, at no financial gain for himself. He's sold samplers at his original purchase price to museums in Norwalk, Conn.; Cambridge, Mass.; and Winchester, N. H.
With his wife, Cathy, he's at work on a children's book about early American heroes. Aimed at pre-school and primary grade children, it focuses on lesser-known heroes such as Johnny Appleseed and Betsy Ross, although Ben and George will be aboard, too.
Cathy will do the illustrations. That book will be ready to roll in 1997, along with the second in the sampler/friendship poetry book series, the Voices of Mid-Atlantic Poets.
As for this century's children, the Cifelli clan consists of Peter, 19, at UC-Irvine; Angela, 17, at Monterey Peninsula College; Christina, 8, who has just finished her first piece of needlework, much to the delight of her father; and Justin, 6. Both the younger two attend St. Andrew's School in Saratoga.
Cifelli recently gave a presentation at a senior center and was so enthusiastically received that he would like to reach out to other groups and schools, too. So that may be another new area of concentration.
"I'm not interested in Walt Whitman or Emerson or Emily Dickinson. They're already well-known. I'm fascinated by those who came before them. Their naiveté, their innocence is their appeal. And it's exciting to go where few have gone before, to celebrate what other collectors may have overlooked, to appreciate what has gone unsung." Until he came along.
Untitled
Be hush'd my dark spirit! for wisdom condemns
When the faint and the feeble deplore:
Be strong as the rock of the ocean that stems
A thousand wild waves on the shore--
Thro' the perils of chance, and the scowl of disdain
May thy font be unaltered, thy courage elate!
Ah! ever the name I have worshipped in vain
Shall awake not the sigh of remembrance again!
To bear, is to conquer our fate.
Mr. Wm. L. Peckham
Providence, Rhode Island
March 18, 1827
Untitled
May bright religion's beams
Still guard thee on thy way
Through life's inconstant scene
To realms of endless day.
May all your years be spent in bliss
May all your plans succeed
Be but as happy as I wish
And you'll be blest indeed.
Mary C Doane
Feb. 26, 1827
'The Eye'
A beautiful eye makes silence eloquent,
a kind eye makes contradiction an assent,
an enraged eye makes beauty deformed.
The eye speaks a language in which
there can be no deceit, nor can a skillful
observer be imposed upon by looks, even
among politicians or courtiers.
Mary Willard
Providence Rhode Island
(c. 1830)
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, January 8, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved .