After several weeks of looking around for a good way to generate a static website, I think I found a package I can live with. Called weblorg, it allows me to create static pages and blog posts in Emacs Org mode, and configure a few template files using the templatel language to control styling, then auto-generate HTML from them. This allows me to concentrate on just writing the content, without worrying about all the little details of formatting and such. I also like that it's entirely written in Emacs lisp and doesn't depend on external libraries, and the generated HTML doesn't require Javascript.

Using this, I was able to take my poems in text files, and with a simple Emacs keyboard macro, convert them into Org files with the appropriate annotations to mark the title, author, and date, and quote the poem text itself so that it doesn't get reflowed in the HTML output. So after a few hours, I have a website!

Next steps are to get it working in Gemini and Gopher. ;)